3

The waiting was the hard part. The war was over. In Europe for months. In the Pacific for weeks. Over and finished. Yet here he was still in Germany with his gun slung over his shoulder, as natural and necessary as the boots on his feet. Still far from Rosey Corner. Far from Kate.

Jay Tanner sat on a pile of rubble that used to be a building. Maybe a house where people lived and were happy before war stole all that was normal from them.

Normal. After three years of killing, could there even be normal anymore? He wanted normal. The German citizens in this town wanted normal. The townspeople even now were trying to recapture normal by going about their business while they kept wary eyes on the soldiers.

From up on his post, he watched the people on the street, his camera in his hands, but he didn’t lift it to look through the viewfinder. He only had a couple more shots left. A sick tremble went through him at the memory of the images captured on that film.

He pulled in a long breath and forced his thoughts away from the horror of the death camps. Instead, he fastened his eyes on an old man coming up the road toward him. The man stopped now and again to dig in the debris with his cane. He bent slowly and picked up something to drop down in the gunnysack he carried. Three women came out of a house that had escaped the shelling and walked past the old man. Their words of greeting drifted back to Jay. He still didn’t know what the words meant, but they no longer sounded so strange.

The women moved on down the road with purpose in their steps. Perhaps to find food for their families. Here and there, children scrambled over the ruins of the buildings with no thought of how the town had looked before the bombs and mortar rounds smashed their country into submission.

Some of the younger ones wouldn’t remember a time when there weren’t bombs. A time when people didn’t disappear in the night never to be seen again. Some of the last-stand soldiers in Berlin had looked almost as young as the kids playing in the street now. One terrified boy admitted to being barely fourteen. Fourteen. Jay’s gun was pointed at the boy’s chest when he gave his age. Relief swept through Jay yet again that he had held his fire. Shooting a child soldier would have done nothing except add one more nightmare to those already crowding his memories.

The old German shuffled a little nearer and slid his eyes over Jay as though he were no more interesting than a lamppost. The man didn’t speak or smile, but he didn’t shake his cane and curse Jay either. Jay wondered if the old man and the women walking down the road might not be as relieved as Jay to have the conflict over.

The townspeople here didn’t look all that different from the folks back in Rosey Corner. Yet, the death camps were in their very backyards. They had to know their Jewish neighbors were disappearing. But then, they also knew those who went against the Nazis were taken out in the city square and shot. Or so one of the older German soldiers told Jay’s sergeant after he eagerly surrendered to the Allied forces. He never wanted war. He never wanted Hitler, but uttering those words brought death to one’s door.

Whether they knew what was happening during the war or not, the German people were being made to face the truth now. In the cities closest to the death camps, the citizens were forced to watch movie reels of what the Allied soldiers found when they liberated the camps. Images the same as Jay had taken for the Army. The sight of those starving men and women and the bodies pitched aside like so much refuse were burned into his memory. Some things once seen could never be forgotten.

“And you shouldn’t forget them,” his sergeant had told him. Sarge believed in God. He prayed. He told Jay that a man needed to keep in touch with his Lord.

Some of the men in the unit made fun of Sarge, but not Jay. He’d found the Lord in the Army and had been glad to have him marching alongside him ever since. The doubters said he was crazy to believe that. They liked to point out how this or that soldier had bought the farm with a Bible in his pocket and a prayer on his lips. Jay let their doubts slide off him. It was war. People died. But the death camps were different. Seeing that had Jay doubting everything.

The night before, Jay had given up on sleeping and gone outside to find Sergeant Crane leaned against the building with his Bible open in his lap.

Jay dropped down on the ground beside him. “Can you see to read?”

“Don’t need to see to know what’s there.” Sarge smoothed down the Bible page.

“Do you think all the answers are there?”

Sarge glanced over at him. “What answers you looking for?”

Jay hesitated, worried Sarge wouldn’t like his question.

“Spit it out, Tanner.”

It seemed like a command, so Jay asked the question circling in his head. “Why did God allow evil like that? Like those camps.”

“Man always wants to know why.” Sarge scrubbed his hand across his day-old beard. “But evil’s been in the world since Adam and Eve were thrown out of the garden. It’s the way things are.”

“He could stop it.” Jay looked up at the stars, bright in the dark night. The same stars Kate might be looking at back home in Rosey Corner. What would she tell him about God and this? Then he knew he would never share the grisly scenes of the death camps with Kate. No need shoving those horrors into her mind. But Sarge had seen it too. He knew.

“He did,” Sarge said after a long minute.

“He did what?” Jay looked over at him, but now Sarge was staring up at the night sky.

“Stop it. He used us and a few million others to stop it.”

“And a few million died before we got it done.”

“They did.” Sarge turned his head toward Jay, his eyes glittering in the dark. “So they most certainly did.” Then he breathed out a sigh and looked down. “Nothing I’ve found in my Bible says life here is meant to be easy. It’s the next life where easy is the assignment. We did what had to be done down here.”

That didn’t exactly answer Jay’s question, but he didn’t ask more. Silence had fallen over them as they stared out into the night.

Now here in the broad daylight while keeping watch over the conquered town, he let his thoughts slide to Kate. His beautiful Kate. They’d gotten married in a rush with only a couple of months together before he boarded the ship for Europe. That was over three years ago. A lifetime in more ways than one. There’d been letters. Hers were full of love and happenings at home. His were stilted and short in comparison, but he couldn’t write about where he was or what he was doing. Even with the fighting over, there were things he couldn’t write. Things too horrible to put into words.

Jay glanced at the sun and stood up. He needed to get back to his unit. His sudden movement startled the old man. Jay waved to let him know he had no need to worry, but the man just kept staring at him. Without conscious thought, Jay pulled up his camera to take the old German’s picture with the ruins of his town behind him.

As Jay turned the knob to advance the film, the man muttered something and started picking through the rubble again.

Jay dropped the camera into its case, brushed his black hair back from his forehead, and settled his helmet on his head again. The thing was hot, but a man had to protect his head.

He used to think a man had to protect his heart. That was before Kate and Rosey Corner. Before the Lord had finally got his attention. That could be because of Kate too. Kate with her sure faith nourished by the enduring faith of those around her. Aunt Hattie who could pray down miracles. Kate’s mother who gently held them all together with her love and prayers. Mike preaching the gospel with never a trace of doubt. Lorena Birdsong’s innocent trust. He smiled thinking about how he’d nicknamed Lorena “Birdie” when she first told him her name.

Birdie wrote him almost as often as Kate. Letters full of hometown news. She’d written when Poe, Graham’s old dog, died. Some of the ink was smudged by her tears. Jay had touched those spots while tears welled up in his own eyes.

Wars could do funny things to a man. Harden him so much he didn’t feel anything when guns started firing and men beside him fell. Then a letter came about an old dog dying and tears stabbed his eyes. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel sorrow for the men who fell, but a soldier had to keep marching. Keep firing. Defend his square of ground and push forward into the next square.

Sometimes nothing but dumb luck kept one man on his feet and sent another on to his eternal reward. Like poor Artie Bixler. Jay ran his fingers over the camera case that bounced against his chest as he headed back to camp. Artie, the unit’s photographer, switched places with Jay on a German street because he wanted a better angle on his shot. Two minutes later, a sniper’s bullet hit Artie in the head. He fell, cradling the camera, even as he died. So Jay had picked up Artie’s camera and taken his place, seeing the war through the lens of the camera.

That was war. A matter of inches. A man stepped on a mine or didn’t. He was in the way of shrapnel or dived into a foxhole before it hit. Many times Jay had been next door to death, but here he was, still breathing as he walked through the rubble of Germany with his mind on home.

Home. After his mother died when he was a kid, no place had felt like home until he got to Rosey Corner and met Kate Merritt. Kate Tanner now.

It seemed like a lifetime ago he’d kissed her goodbye and climbed the gangplank to go to war. In a matter of weeks, he would climb another gangplank to leave war behind. He could hardly wait. But under the eagerness to be back in Kate’s arms, to have the welcome of her family at Rosey Corner, was a quiver of worry. He loved Kate. She loved him. But what did either of them know about being married? About being a family and raising kids? Kate wanted kids. She’d been disappointed she didn’t get in the family way before he went overseas.

Her little sister had beat her on that. Tori had a baby eight months after her husband shipped out. Then Sammy had checked out for good in a Japanese prison camp.

The poor kid. Barely nineteen. So young it hurt to look at him. Like dozens of others Jay had met since then. Boys holding the fate of the world in their hands. Kids flying bombers. Jumping out of airplanes behind enemy lines. Charging pillboxes. Starving in prison camps. Dying to win the war.

Now the war was won. Those like Jay who’d made it through just had to wait for a spot on a ship to take them home. Home. Jay looked out past the buildings to the trees on the horizon that had survived the bombs. Trees much like those in Rosey Corner. Could that place possibly be as beautiful as he remembered? Soon now he’d walk back up that road. Kate would hold on to his arm. Birdie would run out for a hug. Mrs. Merritt would bake him a brown sugar pie. Maybe it could all be as good as he remembered.