The Bold Frontier (31 page)

Like an animal in a trap, Bodie scanned the room, turned and went racing down the staircase. He breathed hard. His chest hurt. He felt a sick cold in his stomach like he’d never known before. Hearing his heavy tread, Maebelle came out of the parlor. Before she could speak, he threw her against the wall and held her. Words caught in her throat when she saw his face.

“Where is it?” he yelled. “Where’s my Navy?” His voice went keening up on a shrill note. “Tell me where it is, Maebelle, or I’ll kill you!”

“George, George … Lord, I don’t know,” she protested, frightened, writhing under his hands.

He hit her, slamming her head against the wall, turning her face toward the top of the stairs. She choked. The fingers of one hand twitched feebly against the wall, the nails pecking a signal on the wallpaper.

“Emma …,” she said.

She sagged as he released her. He cleared the stairs in threes to where the round-eyed, curious little girl stood at the landing in her nightdress, shuffling slowly forward as if to find the commotion, and holding the Navy in one hand, upside-down, by the grip, while her other finger ran along the barrel, feeling the metal. Bodie tore it away from her and struck her across the face with the barrel.

Then he turned, lunging down the stairs again, muttering and cursing and smiling, past Maebelle. She watched him with a look of madness creeping across her face.

At the top of the staircase, the girl Emma, as if accustomed to such treatment, picked herself up and started down, dragging the leather holster she had picked up near the baseboard. She came down a step at a time, the welt on her cheek angry red but her eyes still childish and round…

Bodie peered through the curtains.

He could see Wyman and his deputy in the center of the street, waiting, their shotguns shiny in the starlight. He had never wanted to kill any men so badly before.

He snatched the door open, slipped through, and flattened his back against the wall, the Navy rising with its old, smooth feel, and a hot red laugh on his lips as he squeezed.

Wyman stepped forward, feet planted wide, and the shotgun flowered red in the night.

Then the deputy fired. Bodie felt a murderous weight against his chest.

The Navy clattered on the plank sidewalk, unfired.

Bodie fell across the hitchrack, his stomach warm and bleeding, the shape of Wyman coming toward him but growing dimmer each second. Bodie felt for the Navy as he slipped to a prone position, and one short shriek of betrayal came tearing off his lips.

Wyman pushed back his hat and cradled the shotgun in the crook of his arm.

Across the street window blinds flew up, and then the windows themselves, clattering.

Maebelle stuck her head out the front door.

Lu came down the stairs, crying and hugging a shabby dressing gown to her breasts, bumping the girl Emma.

With round, curious eyes, Emma righted herself, drawn by the sound of the shots.

She started down more rapidly, one step at a time, toward the voices there on the wintry porch, and as she hurried, first the holster slipped from her fingers and then the bright shells from the other tiny, white, curious hand. They fell, and Emma worked her way purposefully down to the next step, leaving the playthings forgotten on the garish, somewhat faded carpet.

“W
ILLI, SOMEONE’S OUT THERE
,” his wife whispered, in German. “Willi?”

“Nah, nobody,” he said, half awake in the dark of the cramped bedroom. “Go back to sleep.” He grumbled it, in English, because he resented her clinging to the old ways; he was an American, born and bred.

He pounded the starched bolster to make a better nook for his head. With his back to Elsa he heard her tense raspy breathing, and then he heard their oldest daughter, Annemarie, sixteen, and subject to nervous spells, ask something of her sister Trudi in a high anxious voice.

And then he heard the front gate squeak.

“There, there,” Elsa said, pummeling his shoulder, to be sure he was awake and responsive. Willi rolled onto his back with a groan, a sudden dryness coating the inside of his mouth. He heard them, definitely, in the dark outside the open window. Several men; boots grinding on his carefully raked gravel walk.

“Must be somebody got the wrong house,” he whispered.

“Wrong house? That many? You know why they’re here. Do something, Willi.”

He was a peaceful man. What he wanted to do was stay in bed. Of course he couldn’t, and for more reasons than the immediate one. When Elsa urged him to do something, a familiar thought flashed into his head. A thought mingling defiance and family loyalty.
My father didn’t run. I must not run, ever. …

For years after the great Civil War, when the reputation of the Eleventh Corps was still clouded, his father had insisted, in long harangues in the native tongue, that it was calumny; that only a few of the troops scornfully called Dutchmen by their fellows had run when Stonewall struck his surprise hammer-blow at the Union flank at Chancellorsville.
“They were brave men. They bled like others. The majority did not run. I did not run!”

“Aalen?” a voice called from the yard. Annemarie heard it and began to cry hysterically; her younger sister calmly comforted her. “Aalen, you got company out here.”

Willi bit down on his lower lip. He was almost certain he knew the voice. It belonged to the lout who swamped floors for his biggest customer. So some of the best people in town condoned this. The realization was depressing.

Elsa clutched his arm. He shook her off. He swung his legs out of bed, stood, and tightened the drawstring of his homemade flannel sleeping drawers. He crept barefoot to the window and knelt there.

The bedroom was located on the north side of the house. The window opened on the yard. He saw shadow figures in the yard, against the distant twinkle of lanterns on the oil derricks. Three, four—no, five men. He saw a gun barrel gleam.

“What do you want with me?” he called. “Don’t come around here bothering my family at night.”

“We’ll come anytime we please, you goddamn traitor,” another man said, the voice issuing from the blackness under the broad brim of his hat. “You better pack up your brood and haul out. President Wilson declared war day before yesterday, your kind ain’t welcome around here any more.”

Willi grabbed the sill with both hands and leaned out, and the starlight fell pale on his broad brow and fair hair. He was forty-two, lean from constant hard work, with bright blue eyes and a striking mustache and goatee on an otherwise unremarkable face.

“You get out of here and leave us alone. I’m a good American.
Mein vater
—” In his nervous excitement he erred into German but quickly corrected. “—he fought for the liberty of this land not six months after he stepped off the boat. He was one of the first recruits in Blenker’s Eighth New York. He campaigned with General Fremont in western Virginia. He was with fighting Joe Hooker, and General Sigel, in the Army of the Potomac …”

“Who the fuck cares about any of that?” the first voice, the familiar one, interrupted. Willi pointed angrily.

“I know you, Moss Eames. I know you.”

His customer’s swamper, biggest of the shadow-figures, told him to do something filthy. Willi heard the others talking, joshing—and then he heard liquid slosh in a container. Someone was spilling liquid all over the neat picket fence he’d built by hand. They were pouring kerosene on his fence, and his bougainvillea. “Damn you, stop,” he shouted, dimly aware of Annemarie wailing in her bedroom. Then came the spurt of a match.

Willi watched it sail in a low arc and ignite the bougainvillea with a noisy explosion. Elsa burrowed in bed and covered her head. Annemarie shrieked like a mad person, and he heard Trudi—”Oh, papa, I can’t stop her”—and then the other, younger ones in their rooms, calling out, frightened …

My father did not run. I will not run. …
Willi bruised his shins getting out the window. A rock in the lawn gouged his bare sole. He charged them with fists up, cursing them—German again. Moss Eames pushed down a part of the fence and ran and the others followed, scattering to the nearby alleys because some lights were already being turned on by alarmed neighbors.

Bare-chested and sweating, Willi watched his precious vines blaze, and the flames leaping along the fence. In the distance, the bell of the Planet Volunteer Fire Brigade began to ring, but they would be too late. He dashed back into the house. He ignored Elsa, who was asking questions, because Annemarie, big and buxom as a grown woman, was wailing like a lost infant, clutching to the bosom of her nightdress her little volume of Goethe, as though it had some holy power to save her. Willi cradled his poor unnerved daughter in his arms and soothed her with wordless syllables while the other five children crowded around, wide-eyed. He heard the fire engine horses approach at the gallop, and smelled the burning fence. He had not run, but it struck him that standing fast had done little good.

In fact, none.

No one had appetite for breakfast, and usually breakfast in the household of Wilhelm Karl Aalen was a gastronomic event—in quantity if not quality.

This morning the quantity was there, but no heartiness. Elsa looked wan as she served him his usual plate of crisply fried mush, hard fried eggs, homemade wurst, fried potatoes, biscuits, and a tall stein of dark beer. This morning, the pleasures of a solid nourishing breakfast were worlds away from Willi’s thoughts.

He fiddled with his fork, pushing a piece of mush back and forth on his plate; back and forth. Elsa shooed the children out—Annemarie’s hair was still uncombed and tangly, and she had a vague glassy look in her bright blue eyes. She was a disturbed young woman; very fragile. He could get no useful advice from the family doctor, and he feared for Annemarie’s later life.

Elsa sat with her cup of coffee untouched. She clasped her hands, rubbing them together, a papery sound. Willi flung her a look.

“Say it.” His English was fine; no trace of accent.

“You know why they came, Willi. It’s bound to get worse. Day before yesterday, at the market, I heard people discussing the feeling about Germans. Margaret Polhaus told me she and Heinz will put their house up for sale this week.”

“Elsa,” he said, straining for patience, “let me explain something. I am American, you are American— this is April, 1917, and not the dark ages. The United States Congress declared war on Germany and Kaiser Bill, not other Americans. Planet is our home. Nobody is going to push us out. Nobody is going to make me ashamed of what I am.”

“But feeling is running so high—”

And so it was, all over the country. It was blind emotion, and cruel. Over in Bakersfield, Heini Holstmann’s little dachshund, Fritzi, had been stolen out of Heini’s side yard by four small boys. The dog was repeatedly cut with pocket knives, then tied to a tree with wire, doused with kerosene, and burned to death.

“My
feeling is running high,” Willi exclaimed, hitting a fist on the table so hard his plate danced. “My father fought almost four years with the Union Army. He fought despite being spat on and joked about as a Dutchman. He fought even though he could speak only a few words of English. He fought to deliver his new homeland from the evil of slavery and the damn wicked Southerners—he survived the revolution of 1848, and he took words like
liberty
and
democracy
very seriously. So did his comrades. They were proud of their uniform.
‘I fights mit Sigelí!’
It was a proud statement …”

But there was less pride when O. O. Howard took over the Eleventh Corps after Sigel fell ill. Less pride when Jackson made his surprise thrust, and certain men of the so-called German Corps hacked the straps of their knapsacks in two so they could unburden themselves and run faster. Flying Dutchmen, the public called them.

“
But I did not run!
” his father insisted forever afterward. It imposed a special burden, which Willi felt with increasing heaviness this morning.

He saw Elsa’s worried, drawn expression. He cupped his hand over hers, patting and squeezing. “Please understand my feelings. Over two hundred thousand from the homeland fought for the Union. My papa took a wound that nearly claimed his life. That must not be forgotten. I won’t allow it to be forgotten. If we pay no attention—go about our business—refuse to be intimidated—we’ll be all right.”

“But Willi …”

“No,” he said, doggedly. “No more discussion. Please see if you can do something about Annemarie’s state. I’m going to get dressed and go down to the brewery as usual.”

The small town of Planet, California, lay in the low hills along the Kern River on the eastern edge of the San Joaquin Valley. In just a few years it had become the center of a thriving region of oil fields. The roughnecks who worked on the rigs were a noisy, rowdy lot, but generally not threatening; at least not to the settled citizens who lived on several residential streets on Planef’s west side. Here Willi Aalen and his family lived.

It was a half mile walk to the downtown from his heavily-mortgaged house with its gingerbread porch. He walked to work every morning, straight along to Kern Avenue, and thence around the corner a half block on B Street to the Planet Brewery, home of Planet Beer (“Best in the Universe”). This morning the sun was up in a cloudless sky, the air warm and typically dry. Willi could almost imagine that Moss Eames and the others had not come in the night; had not burned his picket fence and killed his bougainvillea. Of course there was evidence of the war on a number of porches along his route. Flags had been hung out in iron brackets; and when he reached Kern Avenue, he saw that many of the small shops displayed similar signs of patriotism. The entire second floor veranda of the Planet House was swagged with bunting.

Still, reminders of the newly declared war didn’t trouble him so much in the sunshine. As a German-American—a hyphenate, the politicians and the papers called them—he believed steadfastly in his own good citizenship. He wasn’t one of those men of dubious honor who had promoted neutrality openly—or secretly, like the rich Milwaukee brewers whose clandestine funding of pro-German “peace” groups had caused a scandal and made German-Americans hated all the more.