I visited Siegfried the next morning, and by then I knew what day it was. It was October the 24th, 1917.
After I had thanked damn near everybody I could think of to thank. After I had given myself time to regain my sense of balance and of reason. Even then, when I came to Bridge Street and the camp gates, intending to walk across the road to the gaol that we’d built for just such an eventuality, even then I wasn’t sure just what to do with him.
I knew that if we put him on a train to Fort Oglethorpe like the others that he’d escape before he ever got to the Georgia line. I knew that if we tried to keep him behind bars for long, that he’d either win over his guards or, even worse, Roy would find him. To release him or kill him, who knew? I did know that somehow he was mine—thing of glittering darkness though he was—and that somehow I had to figure out how to dispose of him.
As Gehagen let me out through the gate of Camp A, I suddenly turned on him. “Foster,” I called out directly into his shocked face.
“I ain’t Foster,” he said, shrinking from me.
“No, you’re Andy. But don’t you have a brother named Foster?”
“Yeah,” he said sullenly. “He’s the deaf ’un.”
“Didn’t we give him a job?”
“Yeah, but it won’t the smartest thing you ever done. He’s stone deaf I tell you.”
“Where’s his station?”
“Up by the kitchen and the barn where he can’t get in no trouble. He can’t take on no important job like me.” The man actually swelled as he patted his chest.
“Is he on duty today? Up by the kitchen?”
Andy Gehagen nodded.
I patted him on the back as he let me out the gate. “You do have an important task here, Andy. Guardian of the Gate.”
“Damn right. And don’t you forget it, neither.”
“Don’t worry.”
* * *
THAT MORNING, CAP’N John had posted two guards at the gaol, one to warn off the other Germans, curious beyond curious to know who we’d jailed and why. Inside, there was one lone man, playing solitaire on a rough-hewn table. I told him to lock me in the cell with Siegfried and to go fetch Foster Gehagen. “Bring him back here with you,” I said. “And note his station because you’re going to keep it for the rest of the day.”
“Foster’s kinda deaf, boss.”
“He’s more than kind of deaf,” I said kindly back to him, for he’d meant what he’d said kindly. “That’s why he’s perfect for this job.”
“You be all right in there with that man? He’s been singing and talking most of the night.”
I pulled the long, heavy hunting knife out of my coat pocket to show him, the knife that had very nearly been stabbed into my stomach rather than Ruser’s mattress.
“You aim to cut him with that?” He was clearly intrigued by the idea.
“No, but I aim to be right here when you get back, ready to be let out again.”
* * *
THERE WAS A chair for me inside the cell: an old patched up dining room chair from the Mountain Park. There was also enough sunlight through the barred window to show me his form resting on the cot. Siegfried was lying down, but he sat up in his bunk as soon as he heard the bolt being drawn on the door. Sat up and leaned back against the wall when I came in. I don’t know why I thought I would catch him off guard by visiting him in his cell. Certainly, I had never seen him speechless before and he wasn’t speechless then.
“Stephen, my brother, it is such a joy to see you. I cannot believe that you have allowed them to keep me in this place, but now that you see what it is here, I am certain that you will—”
I held up my hand to silence him. “I’m the one who put you here, Siegfried.”
“Oh, but there has been a mistake then. And you’ve come to set it right. By what rights, dear Stephen, would you choose to do such a thing? I am certain that the Hague Convention forbids the use of solitude to …” I held up my hand again for silence, but this time he chose to ignore me. “To punish poor unfortunate prisoners, men who—”
I picked up the metal chamber pot that sat beside the door and flung it at him. Unfortunately, it was empty, but it still made an impressive CLANG when it hit the wall beside his head, crumpled slightly and fell onto the cot beside him.
“The Hague Convention does expressly forbid solitary confinement except for punishments of an extreme nature. And you, Siegfried, you qualify. By the rights invested in me by this …” And I leaned forward to hold up the hunting knife that had almost done me in. “I was waiting in Commodore Ruser’s room when your two assassins came to kill him, one of whom named you as their leader. By the contraband letters in your mattress. For the life of me I can’t figure out why I don’t just turn you back out and let Ruser have you.”
“He would kill me.”
“Exactly,” I said quietly.
I could hear sounds from the outer room, the return of my two guards, one of whom would be able to hear us if we continued to shout at each other.
“Dear Stephen,” Siegfried’s tone was soothing, almost hypnotic. “I only wanted to remind my German brothers that they are men. Hans Ruser is a tired, old man, a relic from another age. This is a young man’s century and a young man’s war. And certainly, I never dreamed you would manage to get into harm’s way. Someone as valuable, as …”
As his voice droned quietly, inevitably on, it suddenly occurred to me exactly what Siegfried Sonnach was. A serpent. He was a copperhead just after it has shed last year’s skin, and the sun gleaming off its new head and body with an eerie golden beauty. And like a copperhead in spring, you know full well you should kill it for it has a head swollen with poison. You should cut off that head, but its beauty is hypnotic.
“If I had any sense at all, Siegfried,” I interrupted the spinning, winding flow of his voice. “If I had any sense, I would kill you tonight and bury you under the Mountain Park. I have a feeling the world would be a much safer place, especially for me.”
He did pause for a moment. “Oh, but my brother. There are two reasons why you cannot simply cut my throat. First, I know you and you do not have the necessary evil. Your outside is hard, but you will not kill me unless I force you to, and after today, I will be careful not to force you.”
“Assuming you’re right. Assuming I’m soft in the middle, what’s the second reason?”
“If something were to happen to me, the High Sheriff of this place will come to find me. He will come to make certain that I was not abused or, how do you say, done away with.”
“I saw the letter he wrote you,” I replied.
“Letter?”
“Stuffed into the crack in your door frame. He was giving you permission to do away with me.”
He studied me carefully to see just how much I might know. To see just how far he could trust my ignorance.
“Here’s what you don’t know, Herr Sonnach,” I said in the face of his questioning stare. “I’ve known Roy Robbins since he was six years old. He is a nocturnal creature, doing his business after dark in the back roads of this county. He would never even bother to dig up your body, let alone investigate your death. He only cares about what he’s paid to care about and the next woman he can find to prey on.”
“He is sworn to—”
“Don’t even say it! You are a fool, Siegfried. You are the only person alive who could tie him to what you just tried to do. And as of this morning, you are caught in a thick web. Roy will come for you sooner or later, and whatever he does to you will be worse than Hans Ruser could even imagine.” I stood to go. “Why should I even bother to protect you?”
“Because,” he said, with a curious, twisting smile. “Because he hates you more than he hates me.”
I turned to look back at him, even with my hand on the door.
“Because you shot his brother dead many years ago. He only wants to use me; he wants to destroy you.”
“He tell you that?”
“Not in just these words, no. He has not so many words. But everything he does says it. I think, dear Stephen, that you and I had better protect each other. And besides, to protect me is to do your duty, and you always do your duty, I think.” He shrugged. “Just like me.”
I rattled the door, the signal that I wanted to be let out. “You better hope you’re right,” I said to him. “For your own sake, you better hope you’re right.”
I left Foster Gehagen in charge of the gaol. Wrote out on a piece of paper just how I wanted him to treat Siegfried. He could eat, he could exercise, but under no circumstances did I want him talking to anyone. His talking was as dangerous a thing as I could imagine, its own kind of weapon.
* * *
WHEN THE SLEEPY guard let me out of the gate, I hesitated. Walked halfway across Bridge Street toward the Camp A gatehouse, the gate that would take me back to the Mountain Park, and perhaps, to rest.
When I stopped in the middle of the road, I experienced a sudden rush, an overwhelming sense of what I had felt so often as a child and young man. Simply, it was the pull of the long road. I felt that I could walk fifty yards to the skeleton of Robert Snyder’s half-finished bridge, cross the thin ribbon of steel girders and onto the Turnpike. Then north or south, simply turn suddenly and instinctively one way or the other and be gone by morning. Disappear completely out of the lives of the Germans and of the people in Hot Springs whose destinies were knitted into mine. Perhaps leaving a torn place in the fabric of their lives, perhaps not.
I could catch a ride in an old mule-drawn market cart and be in Knoxville in a day. Nashville, Jackson, New Orleans. Be on a ship to South America in a week, where the birds were such that I had never seen nor could imagine.
I, who had never even seen the ocean, felt the pull of the tide.
I stood in the middle of the high crown of that twisty, worn gravel strip we called a street, and the dirty road seemed to rush past me like waist-deep, muddy water, fast, pulling me uncontrollably in its current, away and away.
And it felt like a choice: between life known and unknown, seen and unseen. My stomach ached and my heart swelled in my chest, so that I thought it must surely choke me.
And I knew, I knew what heart sickness had so invaded my chest, what kept me anchored there against the pull of the current. It was simple enough; I loved her. She had seen and felt the core of me, run her hands through the inside of me. She had tasted on my tongue the grief of my own dead child, had breathed in my sleeping breath all my hatred and fear. And still she didn’t look away. Still her mind sought mine through the aperture of her eyes.
And knowing all she knew of me, she still loved. Though the words still tied up her tongue, she loved me. Free to flee, she stood still. Smiling even.
And I loved her. In light and sleepless dark, I would need the knowledge and knowing of her. Simply to keep on living.
Even with the ghost of her husband still to be dealt with, hovering fat and rich in the beyond of her mind. Even poised on the far side of some prison wire, half with me and half gone from me. Even so, I knew that if she remained just within and just beyond my reach for ten or fifty or a hundred years, I couldn’t choose to stop loving her. There are connections beyond choice.
WHEN I VISITED with the Commodore that afternoon in his New Heidelburg chalet, I refused his offer of tea and served him instead apple brandy, made by my friends the Ramseys. There was a sturdy little blaze in his meticulously constructed brick stove, and from a pot on top Ruser served King James a bowl of something that looked like mush but smelled like bacon. Whatever it was, the King happily lapped it up.
After we had sipped our brandy appreciatively for a few minutes, he said evenly, “So two are gone and one remains.”
I nodded. “Two gone to Fort Oglethorpe, not gone from this world.”
He chuckled. “I never thought you capable of executing them. You should have let me take care of that…. But then perhaps you are saving young Sonnach for something especially gruesome.”
It was my turn to laugh. “No, no. I’m saving Herr Sonnach because I don’t yet know what to do with him. He is the dangerous one, I think.”
Ruser nodded, sipping his brandy. And as he bent his face appreciatively over his cup, I could see etched there all his seventy-plus years. The long journey that must have been his life, staring into a thousand moons and a thousand suns.
“What is that ribbon, Commodore?” I asked, seeking for his sake to change the subject. “The ribbon in your lapel?”
He touched with his forefinger the faded ribbon I referred to, mostly gray now, descended from the black and white it must once have been. He always seemed to wear it, so I thought it signified something he was proud of.
“It is, you might say, the order of the Fatherland. It is an honor, with it came a medal for distinguished …”
“Service?” I guessed.
“No,” he smiled. “We Germans assume service. It is for bravery. The medal is an iron cross, like the infamous ones in your war posters.”
“How did you earn it?” I asked, hoping still to take him far away from his cold mountain prison, if only in his memory.
“When I was a young man, Stephen, I was in the Imperial Navy. This is a secret that I am telling you because I have never admitted it to your authorities. A young officer struggling to find his advancement. And during our war with France in 1871 I saved a man from drowning. Simply because I was there blockaded in port and I could swim. It could have been any man.” He shrugged. “The sea makes no distinction between one and another, and I did not know until I had brought him up to the boat that he was my enemy, my opponent in the service, another young officer who also happened to be a prince of the royal family.”
“But you were brave, nonetheless,” I insisted, “whoever he was.”
Ruser laughed, enjoying the brandy and the story. “If he had just been a fool then I would not have my ribbon, but he was a prince as well as a fool. And so I am rewarded.” Again he paused, seeming to reflect as he sipped, and again I was struck by his age, his frailty even. “I wear it still, Stephen, to remind me that in those few moments, I found myself truly to be a man. No matter who he was, I was the man I wanted to be.”
We sipped our brandy in quiet for a few more minutes, the stove’s warmth comfortable around us. He was savoring his memories, it seemed to me, this fine, imperial old man, who the world would call a prisoner, or worse, a Hun. King James was curled by the glowing stove, content as well, and courting sleep.
“If we lock the gates, Commodore, perhaps we may yet keep the war at bay.”
He smiled. “I wish it were so,” he said. “But I think we both know differently. War is what men do when they are afraid. War is what we do to mask the fear. And even here, in your little mountain valley, inside the beautiful village you have allowed us to build, even here there is fear.”
“But—”
“My men fear your mountain people, the ones who stare through the wire with empty, hollow eyes. Your mountain people fear my men with our marching and singing. Even here, the fear is lurking, is it not?”
“Yes,” I said. As it was all there was to say.