Blood, Dreams, and Olive Drab (Pride & Promise) Read online

  They stepped outside the shadows of the café and into the purple light of twilight that reached way to the rotary. The sun had replaced the foggy smoke that was now drifting towards the far ocean.

  "Henry," the young lost soldier began, stopping her, placing his hand flatly across his own chest. She looked at him rather strangely at first. Then he repeated. "Henry," he said, patting himself on the sternum.

  "Oh," she caught on. She pointed at him and said, "Hen-ree." She stuttered through his name. "Henry," a small grin warmed his face. Then he pointed to her.

  "Marie," she said eloquently. Her word seemed to flow like birds on the breezes. Her mouth moved slightly as she barely opened her thin smooth lips.

  "Marie," Henry jumped. His excitement was infectious to her. She giggled and spun slightly like a giddy schoolgirl.

  They strolled down to the canal, stepping lightly over the crushed stones and around the tattered walls. The shore was clustered with chunks of rock that resembled boulders that had fallen from their perches and rolled violently down the side of a mountain. The mossy green that had formed on their bellies were torn and shredded like thick tapestries. All the pieces lay together as if they were the heaping aftermath of an avalanche. Henry and Marie did not speak much on their twilight stroll. They were both happy to have kind pleasant company

  Occasionally Marie would stumble or misstep on the rocky bank and Henry would catch her by the arm. She looked up at him with an affectionate gratitude, like a subtle glance on a first date. As they drifted along the canal, their hands touched often, and Marie finally let her hand nestle into Henry’s palm.

  They walked hand and hand down the tumultuous path. She fell once more. Henry caught her and momentarily stumbled himself and now they were face to face. Henry stared into her soft velvet eyes and could feel his heart in his throat. The warmth of her eyes was intoxicating. He could sense the heaviness of her breath and felt a slight tremble in her body. He closed his eyes and tilted his head, leaning into her lovely face.

  But she shrugged free of his loose grip and tromped off back up the canal, leaving him with his eyes closed and lips puckered for the entire world to see. He let his eyes open slightly, peeking out from under his left eyelid. He saw her gone from his arms, traipsing back up the broken bank.

  "Cof-fee!" she shouted. He could barely see her face in the timid light of the quickly falling sun.

  "Coffee!" he grinned and waved.

  "Cof-fee!" she repeated and ran off into the night, skipping and hopping over the crumbled stones.

  Henry looked up and saw a row of singed houses and knew he couldn’t be far from the morgue. Reluctantly, he turned up the alleyway and strode up the incline of the gentle hill. His steps quickened and he held his chin up high for the first time in days. He actually let his lungs expand with a full breath.

  Even now, he knew he would sleep well tonight.

  5

  Henry could feel the balls of his feet screaming as he stood stationary for hours on end. It felt as if his feet were bolted to the floor and lined with lead. Occasionally he shifted his weight from side to side and it felt as if he was growing roots like the sturdy beech trees of the forest. He could feel the creaking in his knees and ankles like the moaning of the timbers in a stiff cold wind. With each rip of the zipper, he lost a little bit of himself. Sometimes it was the tearing of his soul or he could feel his heart skipping. Mostly, it was the ticking in his drifting mind. The outside corner of his eye twitched, and it often got bad enough that his cheek started to crinkle and made the corners of his lip spasm.

  He tried desperately to think of other things, anything to help him escape the mind-numbing hell. He tried to imagine his home and the soft glades of Ohio.

  .....

  He could see his father struggling in the fields with the old plow and the dull calm faces of the mules as they tried to pull the plow out of a rut. His father’s broad shoulders tugged at the plow as the muscles across his wide back popped and curved across his chiseled torso. He would stop for a second to catch his breath, running a handkerchief across his oily, drenched forehead. The noonday sun beat down on his thin hair and bright pink scalp. He trudged on through the labor, battling the sun and the world.

  Henry often pictured his mother’s soft face. She had sad lonely eyes even when she was smiling. Henry would look deeply into her face and study her eyes when she wasn’t paying attention. Her eyes were brown, but they were darker. They were deep and full of regret. They never twinkled. They were dull and heavy like the murky streams after a deluge of spring rain, but unlike Mama's eyes, the streams would eventually lighten.

  His mother’s hands were gray and wrinkled like old fruit. Her skin was pulled tight over the bulbous knots of her knuckles and her hands didn’t even look like hands anymore. The soft roundness had rearranged and looked like lumps of malformed clay. Her heart was good and pure, which was surprising for the life she had suffered through.

  Henry thought most about his brothers. There were sixteen children in his family, fourteen boys and two girls. Those girls knew more about fishing, trapping, and baseball than any other ten boys put together. You might as well have said there were sixteen boys in that clan--until it came time to dating--and then every brother’s chest protruded a little farther, and they suddenly took a real notice of those girls. Boys know what other boys think about, is what Henry figured.

  His favorite time of the day was nighttime, just before everyone went to sleep and also, daytime just before the first real light. He was a soft sleeper and never slept much anyways. In a family of that size you didn’t just share rooms, you shared beds, clothes, shoes . . . just about everything but personalities.

  He would lie in bed at night, hearing people giggling and cussing and the sound of bare feet slapping off the cool hardwood floors as they snuck down the hallway like mice. Soon, the whispering would fall away and the twisting in the beds would stop and the only noise was the occasional snort, or snoring, and the low rhythmic sounds of heavy breathing.

  Henry would fill his lungs with the midnight air and stare at the ceiling. If the clouds didn’t hide the moon, a pale stream of light would lie flat across the tall ceiling, and he would flop onto his stomach and stare out the window. In the green months the trees often swayed gently in the breeze. In the white months blankets covered the rolling hills and snow stuck to the sides of the trees and was plastered to the barren web of branches. He would count stars until his eyelids got too heavy to hold open, and then he floated off to sleep.

  He used to dream about pretty girls and late nights, about slow trickling brooks of water which took your breath away on hot day as you stepped with bare feet into the soft flowing currents. He dreamed of his mother’s eyes smiling and his father’s back not being sore at the end of the day. They never came true, as most dreams don’t, but it doesn’t stop you from dreaming.

  A dream is just another world where everything is just fine. Just fine.

  6

  With his drifting mind, a good bit of the time Henry could escape from the horrors of his war-drowned days, but as with everything, he was always dragged back in. Sometimes it was the crashing of shells on a nearby hillside or the bridges of the canals. Often it was something as simple as scratching his nose. He would forget that his hands were terribly stained with blood, and when he scratched his nose, a drop of the blood would settle into his nasal passage. Then he would smell the pungent evilness of the blood and it would crash him back into his real life. His hands would begin to shudder and quake with anxiety.

  Sergeant Welky was, of course, no help. He was always drunk. Sloshed beyond recall, Welky was. He staggered through the morgue, stumbling past chairs, around buckets, and over the mounds of white sheets which were spotted with globs of red. He sang bad tunes and hummed through the words that he had drunkenly forgotten.

  He smoked cigars and when he ran out of those, he lit up as many cigarettes as he could find. He was right-handed. Henry never wa
tched him write, throw a baseball, or hold a fork, but he knew he was right-handed from the hard-chaffed inner parts of his index and middle fingers of his right hand. They were yellow and crusted with dried hard skin. It was where he always held his cigarettes. They would burn down to the nub, often just burning to his fingers. He was soused enough that it hardly bothered him. He cackled about it and lit up another. Henry wasn’t sure he even saw the sergeant take a drag off the cigarettes, but there were hundreds of butts scattered around the floor.

  One of Welky’s favorite tricks that he most grandly got a kick out of was to pull his arm way up into his sleeve, hiding it against his skin inside his shirt. He would find a severed arm, putting it in the hole of his shirt sleeve, and go out onto the stoop. It was the only time he smiled and it was a bitter mischievous glare.

  He would talk politely to the passing townspeople and try to get them to shake his hand. Of course, eventually after an hour or so of his efforts, someone would grip the hand of the lifeless cold arm. Their faces were stricken with a cloudy morose look, blank and sorrowful. They had no compassion for the foolish cruel American, but pity dawned on their faces.

  Once, while trying to pull his trick, a rummy stumbled down the narrow street. He was wobbling from one side of the street to the other, leaning on the walls for guidance. His fat face was covered with a thin gritty beard. When he walked up to Sergeant Welky, he blinked a few times to be able to see him. He squinted his eyes and saw Welky turned sideways.

  Welky was already laughing fiendishly. The old sad-faced rummy grabbed the cold dead hand and shook it boldly. Then the arm slipped from Welky’s sleeve. Welky screamed with a blood-curdling yell that scraped up the sides of the buildings. The rummy held the arm in his hand and then looked up at Welky. He gasped and fell to the ground, clutching his chest, which made Welky roar with laughter.

  The two small men from across the street saw what happened and rushed to the old man who was sprawled out on the cobbles. The arm lay beside him. The gruesome gray and green skin stood out sharply against the yellow sunlight that broke across the stones. Quickly, the two men helped the old man to his feet and rushed him down the street towards the hospital. They glared at Welky the entire time they hustled the old man down the street with his ragdoll arms draped over their shoulders. Welky shook his head and sneered at them like he would anyone else.

  Henry’s mind was starting to fill with pain, so he tried to find his way out of consciousness, but his life was a vicious circle. He took a fairly clean cloth, dipping it into a water bucket. He rubbed it over his face, clearing the drop of blood from his nose. Because the cloth had been used to wipe up a few piles of burnt wood chips, instead of the smell of dried blood, it was sawdust that he smelled, which was a drastic improvement, to be sure.

  .....

  "A little tender loving care," Henry’s father used to say. He wasn’t a tall man, but his arms were thick and his broad shoulders swept down into his wide back and ended like a bowl at his waist. His real name was Klaus, but to sound more American he changed it to Clem.

  He thought he was a regular American. Clem Schott was his name. He was as American as strudel, but he cheered for the Cleveland Indians. He made himself love apple pie even though he thought apples were just houses for worms--and he learned to hate Germany. It was his homeland. He still had many relatives there, but "I never liked them anyways, that’s why I’m here," Clem always said, especially to those at the feed mill, grocery store, and bank, where they questioned him every time he went in there. They just wanted to make sure he hadn’t turned into a Kraut lover.

  "We’re just looking out for you and yours, Clem," they would tell him with sly distrusting glints in their eyes.

  7

  In the old days Henry could remember waking early in the morning even before the rooster

  .....

  He lay looking at the ceiling, and in the hazy purple light of the morning when the sky was a foggy melee of paleness, he could hear his father already clicking around downstairs in the kitchen. They would all sit around the table in the morning with the bacon sizzling in the skillet. Mother sliced off more pieces of bacon fat and then she put them long ways in the skillet. She would pour the eggs into the same skillet and just let them all cook together. It smelled like home. The smell stayed in your clothes most of the day and just made you that much more hungry.

  "We need some tender loving care for the fence over near where the creek breaks out over the pasture," Clem would say. He tried to lose his thick German accent but he just made it worse. He was still rough around the edges and his English was often harsh. He buttered his bread and poured gravy over his bread, eggs, and bacon. That man would have gravy over gravy if he ever found a way. He loved gravy. He put it on onion sandwiches, corn, and potatoes. Everything he put in his mouth, except his pipe, he put gravy on.

  Henry thought about the creek his father had mentioned and he started to imagine the farm. The hills were motionless but they looked like waves across the plains, dipping and curving over each other. The trees lined the pastures and just on this side of the trees was a creek that meandered along the borders. Large boulders sat at the edge of the creek, just where Daddy had talked about, jutting up from the ground like mighty lion paws clasped over each other. The wind, the water, and the world had smoothed them over enough so that you could sit on them and be fairly comfortable. You could even lie down, and when the branches of the towering trees drifted in either direction, you could watch the stars winking at night.

  Just as Henry started to lose himself in the quiet mercy of his memories, life reached up and stabbed his thoughts. Not very far from that bend in the creek was Elmer’s tree. At least that’s what it had come to be known as. Elmer, even as a little tike, was as smart as they came. He could write like the dickens and read better than Clem could. Clem didn’t harbor any sore feelings about that and his buttons almost popped off his shirts when Elmer read to him. Elmer read slow and made funny voices when he read out loud. When he read the paper and a lawyer was speaking, he lowered his voice and cocked back his head regally. When a woman was speaking, he raised his voice and often twirled around as if he had on a long ball gown. He was a dilly.

  Under that large overgrown maple tree is where Elmer enjoyed kicking off his shoes to sit and read. He would cross his legs and tilt his head back and get lost with Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, and he actually thought he was on the shores of the mighty Mississip. He would get a long thin piece of grass and let it just hang from his lower lip. There are people in this world that when you gaze upon them, you can’t help but smile, and that was little Elmer Schott.

  Henry saw the tree. He could see the fat full leaves of summer turning over and waiting for a drink from the sky. The grass around the tree which was shaded partially by the canopy of limbs was a slight bit greener than the crusty yellow grass of the fields--the kind of dry grass that crunches under your feet like paper as you walk across it. In the spot where Elmer used to sit and read was a large chunk of granite. It had been wrenched from the base of a small mountain a few hills away from the farm. It sat majestic, but simple, like

  Elmer always did. It was irregular in shape and dark gray like a thundercloud, except where father had chiseled a few words on it. When you stood over it, you could read it plainly.

  Here Lies Elmer Schott

  Youngest Child of the Schott Family

  1924-1932

  He Died As He Lived, Having Fun

  May God Love You As We Do

  Eternally

  Father took a hammer and chisel, marking those words across the heavy stone. The letters were a lighter gray than the face of the flat stone. I watched Father lovingly carve those words into the surface, and with every strike of the hammer onto the flat top of the chisel, another tear fell from his eyes.

  By the time he was finished, the once dry rough face of the stone was splattered with tears. It looked like the roof when it first starts to rain. When the sunlight sees
it way through the leaves and shines down on that piece of granite, the mica that Daddy uncovered when he chiseled the letters shined like the sparkle that used to be in Elmer’s eyes.

  .....

  I never told anyone I thought that, Henry revealed to himself. It would just be too sad.

  8

  Henry looked into the mirror where a jagged crack was fractured across the glass. He ran the teeth of his black comb under the running water of the bathroom faucet and combed back his hair.

  "Where you goin’, slick?" Sergeant Welky belched. He sloshed against the door frame and leered at Henry. He was drunker than normal. His wandering eye twitched as it looked out the side of his head. Welky hated anything that made people happy, especially Henry.

  "Nowhere," Henry said modestly.

  "Country has a date," Welky sneered. "Isn’t that cute." Henry just nodded plainly. "I tell you what you do!" Welky’s face broke into an evil treacherous grin. "You get a lot of gin in her. These foreign girls love the gin. Get a cheap bottle. They don’t care, they’ll drink anything." Welky stopped momentarily and belched and his face scrunched-up as he tasted the acid from his stomach in his mouth. "Then, when she’s good and drunk, just start playing with her knee." Welky ran his stubby fingers up and down the door frame, mimicking the action.

  "Shut up!" Henry blasted. "Can’t you be civil about anything?"

  "What?" Welky blurted. "It works. Eh, kid, you’re worthless. Go ahead and be your goody-two-shoes self. See where it gets you. Nowhere! That’s where!" Welky turned and rammed his shoulder into the door frame, bouncing off it as he staggered back into the morgue. Henry could hear the sagging moan of his cot as Welky flopped onto it.

  "Jesus," Henry shook his head in disgust. He looked back into the mirror and continued to comb his hair, but now he noticed a darkness brooding in his eyes. Henry’s subconscious started to awake, and it devolved back into the dark remnants of the night before and the restlessness that haunted his night. Images darted like sharks across his mind: a piece of a foot, a torn arm, waves of blood slowly, methodically washed onto the almost apocalyptic shore that was smeared with pieces of bodies. Henry blinked furiously, but his mind was warped by the visions of gore.