Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel (5 page)

Grandfather glanced up and saw me looking through the doorway. Something happened in that moment that I will never forget. Grandfather’s eyes once again were filled with a warmth that few associated with the man who locked John Wesley Hardin in jail. The lawmen at his table were killers. Grandfather was not. “Go upstairs and check on your mother, will you, Weldon?” he said.

I read later about the ambush in Louisiana. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were blown apart with automatic weapons fire. Later, their friend Raymond would die with courage and dignity in the electric chair at Huntsville. His girlfriend, Mary, would go to prison. None of them was struck by the bullet I fired into their automobile.

It rained that summer, and I caught a catfish in the river that was as reddish-brown as the water I took it from. I slipped the hook out of its mouth and replaced it in the current and watched it drop away, out of sight, an event that was probably of little importance to anyone except the catfish and me.

Chapter

2

W
HEN I WAS
a newly commissioned second lieutenant in the United States Army, about to embark for England in the spring of 1944, I purchased a leather-bound notebook in a stationery store not far from the campus of Columbia University. I suspect I thought I might take on the role of a modern Ishmael, and my notebook would become the keyhole through which others would witness the greatest event in human history.

I was vain, certainly, and like most young men of that era, at least those from the heartland, unable to reconcile my vanity and eagerness with my shyness around girls and my discomfort among people who were educated at eastern universities. Maybe my notebook would give me an understanding of myself, I thought, opening the door of the stationery store, within sight of the plazas and green lawns and monarchical buildings of the university where I hoped one day to attend graduate school. Maybe writing in a notebook about things most people could not imagine would make me captain of my soul. I saw myself in a trench, my back against the dirt wall, writing in my notebook while artillery shells whistled out of the heavens and exploded in no-man’s-land. All my fantasy lacked was a recording of “Little Bessie” playing in the background.

Like all young men about to go to war, I did not want to hear talk about the grand illusion. If war was so bad, why did those who served in one never indicate that they regretted having done so? Think of the images conjured up by mention of the horns blowing along the road to Roncevaux. Which lays greater claim on the human heart,
The Song of Roland
or cloistering oneself inside inertia and ennui while the world is being set alight?

My generational vanity was not of an arrogant kind. I didn’t mean that at all. Our vanity had its origins not only in our youth but in our collective innocence. We told ourselves we had prevailed during the Great Depression because we had kept faith with Jeffersonian democracy and had not given ourselves over to the Reds or the American equivalent of fascism. The truth about us was a little more humble in nature: We were born and raised in a transitional era; we were the last Americans who would remember a nation that was more agrarian than industrial, with more dirt roads than paved highways. We would also be the last generation to believe in the moral solvency of the Republic.

This is not meant to be a dour evaluation of what we were or the era when we lived. In many ways, it was a grand time to be around. The cultural anchors of the continent were Hollywood on one end and Ebbets Field on the other. The literary staple of almost every middle-income American home was
The Saturday Evening Post,
which contained the short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner and John O’Hara. A cherry Coke at the drugstore cost a dime, the music was a nickel, and the dance floor was free. For most of us, each sunrise was like a pink rose opening on the earth’s rim. Perhaps we created a myth and became acolytes in the service of our own creation; but if that was the case, the entire world was envious of us all the same.

Little of what I recorded in my notebook could be considered memorable or historically insightful, even after Normandy, where we waded ashore in the second wave, the surf a frothy red from the initial assault. War is always a dirty and unglamorous business. Most of it has to do with head colds and body odor and crab lice and trench foot and sleeping in the rain and sometimes throwing your own feces out of a foxhole with your e-tool. But I never hated the army or dwelled on the unnecessary cruelties of my fellow man (Sherman tank crews knocking down farmhouses just for fun). Many of the Southerners in my regiment could hardly read and write. The Northerners believed a factory job in a unionized plant was the fulfillment of the American dream. I admired them and thought most of them were far braver and more resourceful than I. If I had to go off to war with anyone, I could not have picked a better bunch. They were always better than they thought they were, no matter how bad it got, and never realized how extraordinarily courageous and resilient they were.

I settled in for the duration and wrote in my notebook more as a reminder of the city where I had bought it than as a process of self-discovery. I’d return to New York, I told myself. I’d have lunch with a beautiful girl in an outdoor café, under an awning, on a cool afternoon in spring, perhaps by a park blooming with flowers. I’d take her dancing, maybe in a ballroom where Tommy Dorsey and his orchestra were playing. And in the morning, I would attend classes at Columbia University, armed with the confidence that I, like Stephen Crane, had faced the Great Death and hence never had to speak of it again. Little did I know that the next few decades of my life would be altered as a result of events that began in an innocuous fashion at the bottom of a hill in the Ardennes Forest, at a time when we believed the Third Reich was done and the lights were about to go on again all over the world.

I
N THE FADING
grayness of the day, at the bottom of my foxhole, I opened my notebook on my knee and began writing. My field jacket felt as stiff and cold as canvas in subfreezing weather. I heard a pistol flare pop overhead, but inside the gloom it seemed to give off neither heat nor light and, like most day-to-day events in the army, seemed to signify absolutely nothing.

The fog in the trees is ghostly,
I wrote,
so dense and smokelike and pervasive I cannot see more than thirty yards into the forest. The majority of trees are fir and larch and spruce. In the soil, where there are no snowdrifts, I can see stones that are smooth and elongated like loaves of bread, the kind used to make Roman roads or build a peasant’s cottage. Around me are apple and pear and plum and nut trees that are not indigenous to this forest, and I wonder if an early-medieval farmer and his wife and children swinked in the fields close by, living out their lives to ensure the well-being of the man who lived in a castle atop a hill not far away.

The evening is so quiet I can hear a bough bend and the snow sifting through the branches to the ground. There are rumors that Waffen SS made a probe on our perimeter, within one thousand yards of us. I don’t believe the rumor. SS initiatives are usually accompanied by a large panzer presence. Major Fincher agrees with me. Unfortunately, Major Fincher is widely regarded as a dangerous idiot. At Kasserine Pass he ordered an entire regiment to dig slit trenches instead of foxholes. Tiger tanks overran their position and turned in half circles on top of the trenches and ground sixty men into pulp with their tracks.

Our regiment is made up of National Guardsmen, draftees, and regular army. The officers and enlisted men get along fine. It’s a good outfit. Except for Major Fincher. Someone said the German army has been trying to find him for years in order to award him the Iron Cross. When the joke was reported to Fincher, a corporal had to explain its meaning.

I didn’t get to complete my entry. Sergeant Hershel Pine stuck his head over the pile of frozen snow and dirt by the edge of my foxhole and stared down at me. His narrow face was red with windburn, his whiskers reddish-blond on his cheeks, his helmet fitted down tightly on the scarf tied over his ears. “We got a problem, Lieutenant,” he said.

“What is it?” I replied, placing my pencil between the pages of my notebook, closing the cover.

He slid down into the hole. His breath was fogging, his field jacket flecked with ice crystals. He was carrying a Thompson, three magazines taped together, one of them inserted in the frame. Before he spoke, he rubbed his nose with his mitten to clear the mucus frozen in his nostrils. His mitten was cut away from his trigger finger. “Steinberg is coming unglued,” he said.

“About what?”

“Waffen SS don’t take Jewish or wounded prisoners.”

“Send him to me.”

“I say use him on point or get him out of here, sir.”

“On point?” I said.

“If somebody’s got to step on an antipersonnel mine, I say better deadweight than a good soldier, sir.”

“Steinberg
is
a good soldier, Sergeant.”

He was crouched down on one knee. He dropped his eyes. I knew what was coming. I didn’t hold it against him, but I didn’t want to hear it, either. It was the curse of his kind, in this case a man who was raised on a cotton farm in one of the Red River parishes of central Louisiana, an area notable only for the fact that a mass execution of Negro soldiers by the White League took place there during Reconstruction. “I say better one of them than one of us, Lieutenant,” he said.

“Who are ‘them’?”

“I don’t think you want to hear what I have to say.”

“I’m very interested in what you have to say. Take the crackers out of your mouth, Sergeant.”

“They own the banks. They’re the ones who lent Hitler the money to finance his war machine, sir. Actually, the Krupp family are Jews, aren’t they?”

“Lose the rhetoric, and lose it now. Are we clear about that?”

“Yes, sir,” he replied. He didn’t look up. His eyelashes were as long as a girl’s, his cheeks as bright as apples under his whiskers. I could hear him breathing, trying to hide his anger and distrust of those he would call people of privilege.

“What do your folks do on Christmas Day, Pine?”

His eyes met mine, uncertain. “Pick pecans out on the gallery.”

“What else?”

“My mother usually bakes a fruitcake, and my daddy fixes a big bowl of eggnog and puts red whiskey in it, not moonshine. Me and my little brother and a colored man who works for us go squirrel hunting. The weather is almost always mild on Christmas.”

“That sounds like a fine way to spend the occasion,” I said.

“I need to tell you something, sir.”

“Go ahead.”

“Last night on patrol, Steinberg got the heebie-jeebies when we ran into a listening post. He could have got us knocked off. It’s the second time it’s happened.”

“I’ll talk to him.”

“Sir, there’s something else I need to say.”

I waited.

“I can smell money. That’s the honest-to-God truth, sir. I can smell old coins buried in the ground. I can smell oil and gas before the drill punches into a pay sand. You ever see a well come in? The pipes sweat all over just before the drilling floor starts to vibrate.”

“I’m not sure what you’re telling me.”

“I got a second gift, Lieutenant. I sweat when a situation is about to hit the fan. Maybe Steinberg has a right to be worried. I think the Krauts might try to bust through right where we’re at. I’ve been sweating inside my shirt for two days, sir.”

His eyes were red along the rims, the bone structure of his face as lean and pointed as an ax. He was breathing through his nose, his nostrils white with cold, waiting for me to speak, clearly wondering if he had said too much. “Sir, I’m not crazy. I don’t go to fortune-tellers or anything like that. I just know things. A nigra midwife delivered me. She was a voodoo woman from New Orleans. She said I was touched. She meant I had a gift. Nigras got a sense sometimes.”

“Maybe you’re right and we’re going to have Krauts in our lap before dawn,” I said. “Whatever happens, we’ll do our job. I don’t want to hear any more about Steinberg or clairvoyance or somebody sweating inside his clothes. Now get back to your position.”

A
HALF HOUR LATER,
as the last gaseous, silvery remnant of sun died on the horizon, I heard the sound of small arms popping on our flank. From a great distance, the sound was like fat raindrops dropping on lily pads. It grew in intensity until the sporadic popping became an uninterrupted, self-sustaining roar, followed by the coughing of a fifty-caliber machine gun down the line, the tracers streaking like bits of neon into the winter darkness.

I climbed out of my foxhole just as I heard the creaking of tank treads, then tree trunks snapping, their snow-laden boughs slapping against the forest floor. The visual and auditory effect of a King Tiger tank’s intrusion into an area defended by light infantry is difficult to describe. Its weight was almost seventy tons. Its Porsche engine could generate speeds of over thirty miles an hour. Its 88mm cannon could hit and destroy a Sherman tank at twelve hundred yards. Bazooka rounds and even the French 75mm often ricocheted off its sloped sides. Forty yards out, beyond a knoll, I saw giant trees crashing to the ground. Then the King Tiger topped the knoll, its front end jutting into the air, not unlike a horse rearing in a corral. I could feel the earth shake under my feet when the full weight of the tank slammed down on the incline, grinding boulders into gravel. For a moment I saw the head and shoulders of the tank commander sticking out of the cupola, its sides painted with the Iron Cross. He was wearing a black cap and a black jacket and had a face that was as one-dimensional and expressionless as bread dough in a pie pan. He sank down into the turret and pulled the hatch shut as the two MG-34 machine guns mounted beneath the cupola began firing.

The Tiger in front of me was one of many. The forest was being denuded. The trees were dropping so fast they didn’t have adequate space to fall, colliding perpendicularly like kitchen matches tumbling out of a spilled box. I saw our BAR man firing at the viewing slit on a Tiger, then a spray of 7.92 rounds danced across his field jacket. He dropped his weapon and began walking into the trees, one hand pressed to his chest, as though he had heartburn. He fell to his hands and knees, his back shaking each time he coughed, chaining the snow with red flowers.