The man who came back from the dead, they called him at church. The man with nine lives, they called him at the drug store. At the gas station, they called him lucky. Calvin smiled, laughed, let his back get slapped by his father, his cheek pinched by the wrinkled ladies who smelled like rose water, let himself get roped into football games when the kids at the playground called after him, begged for a game of catch.
“Can you believe it?” His father laughed to his friends. “It’s like God gave us our life back.”
His mother touched Johnson’s shoulder, lightly. She had been touching him more since he returned. He wondered whether she thought he was real, whether she’d go to grab his arm and her fingers would sink into it like sand.
“Leave it to the government to make a clerical error.” His father rocked on his heels like a proud father. “Worst month of our life because some paper jockey got the wrong man.”
They called him heroic, brave, honorable. He always knew the men who said these things to him had not served. The men who served said nothing. He’d see them at the movie theater, sitting next to their girls, their wives. They stared in their popcorn sacks as if they’d lost a tooth in it. At the dance hall, their hands would hold their girls close, but their eyes would be far away. He held girls close as well, mindful of their gravity. Without them, he would certainly float away.
When they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Johnson’s father came through the door of the house, late edition of the newspaper in his hand.
“You know what this means, boy?” He slapped Johnson on the back. “We won, we won it all!”
He wondered about the other men in his platoon, Polensky, Abraham, mostly Polensky. Did he go back to Baltimore, or was he an occupier? He’d have to write the platoon. He waited in the line, filled out forms, talked with a few of the other soldiers returning, had no equipment to return. He listened to occupational counselors, who stressed on him the decorum of the GI, one’s presentation at the employment office, job interviews. The need to take advantage of civilian goodwill toward vets, turn it into a good-paying job. Find a girl, pick up a hobby. Return to a normal he had yet to know.
“Maybe I should go to school.” He put down his fork one night at dinner.
“What would you study?” His mother scraped her plate by the sink, shaking her head. She dried her hands and returned the table, straightening her dress, a simple cut that she had sewn from some old satin curtains. Materials were still in short supply; she made him two ties from the same curtains, embroidering a duck on one and a deer on the other. Animals he didn’t think he’d ever have the heart to shoot again. He’d worn the ties to church in her presence but carried his old tie from high school in his truck in case of an interview for the postal service, for a job administering civil service exams, an electrician’s apprentice.
“Architecture,” he answered, dabbing his lips so she couldn’t see his face.
“Architecture,” his father laughed. His nose was thick, his eyes wide and steady on either side, like Johnson. Slow and deliberating. Dumb to some. Like his son, he had been a pupil of the physical field in high school, not the academic one. He’d served in the first World War and still had the shrapnel in his shoulder to prove it.
“Yes, architecture.” He stood and put his dish in the sink.
He’d been captivated by the architecture the corporal at Camp Upton, who’d been drafted out of Princeton, had described to him. He talked about buildings, the arch of stone and metal girders. Vertical space. The only way to move—up. Johnson imagined rebuilding churches, houses, storefronts, in London, Salerno, Berlin. He imagined making structures that could withstand all manner of bombing and blitzing. A city of clean lines that paid homage to the past but looked forward to the future. And even if his ability matched more of card houses than cathedrals, he knew he did not ever want to draw a gun again. He wouldn’t have to tell his father, he figured, for a semester, at the very least.
Johnson enrolled at Bowling Green State for one class. His mother spent the evening starching and ironing his one white shirt while he sat at the kitchen table, writing his name in the clean, unmolested notebooks. CALVIN JOHNSON. Before the war, he had assumed he would take over the farm. But the war had made him bigger and everything else in his life a little smaller. He hoped his greed for the big world was not bigger than his ability. He had held a rifle. He had shot men and thrown grenades and looked into the unmoving faces of his battalion mates in the sand of Normandy and the snow of Germany and he had been left for dead. He could surely become an architect.
But he still sat in the family pickup in the parking lot, watching the young men with pressed slacks and quick steps enter the arts building. Their faces were smooth, their smiles as light as their consciences. The girls were lithe and graceful, and he could not imagine going to the drug store to socialize, drink egg creams. Not when his hands felt too awkward and his tongue too big and his left leg not quite his. They probably thought he was a chump, a stupid farm boy who couldn’t get a college deferment to keep out of the war. And he wanted to knock all their blocks off. Why had he thought this a good idea? He drew his books toward him, so important to him the night before, now seeming like cheap imitations.
Maybe he just wouldn’t go. He could drive across town, to where Eva Darson lived. She had written him during the war; he’d responded once or twice. But Europe had opened his eyes, the women, the cities, the culture, and he thought he was better than her. No, it wasn’t that. It was just that he was young, and there was a lot to see before having to settle on the known. But maybe he was no better, deserved no more, than Eva Darson. She would be wearing the slip that he liked and would put lots of lime in his gin to conceal the fact she could only afford the cheap stuff, and they’d sit on her couch that had been clawed to shit by her cat and make out a little, maybe more. She would be grateful. Maybe it was all they deserved.
He imagined the slightly smug smile that stretched his father’s lips rubbery, the touch of relief in his mother’s, the wrinkle in her forehead unfurling, as he returned that night, no longer a student. He got out of the truck and walked to the humanities building.
The classroom for Introduction to British Literature smelled like chalk; the fluorescent lights scrutinized every pimple and discoloration on the student’s faces. He spotted a seat in the back and kept his head down, aware of his size, his age, and awkwardness. He felt the desk scrape his knees as he watched the professor, a man in his sixties with neat silver hair clipped close to his skull. His brown wool suit jacket stretched across his waist; he looked like he’d made it through the rationing okay. He thought of the pot roast his mother had made with the few scraps of chuck she’d gotten from the market. Where she had gotten that extra dollar, he didn’t know. But cooked with carrots, potatoes, and barley from their own farm, it was a godsend, a rich fur that nestled in his stomach like a bunny rabbit in a hutch.
“Welcome, ladies and gentleman, to Introduction to British Literature.” The man wrote on the blackboard in light, quick strokes. “I’m Professor Shillings. This is an introductory requirement for bachelor degree programs at Bowling State. If you feel you are in the wrong class, please leave now and do not interrupt us by your departure later.”
She was in the third row, to Calvin’s right. Her long, dark hair was exotic to him, at least in Ohio, where bloodlines ran brown and blonde. She wore a light blue sweater that hugged her shoulders and elbows lovingly. He watched her milky arm rise, her hand flick through her hair.
He opened his notebook and began to take notes, afraid to look at her again. His fear, his embarrassment was slowly replaced by anger. He had dug out foxholes until his fingers bled and he’d huddled aside fucking Stanley Polensky in them. He’d shat, had diarrhea in the same holes while Stanley laughed until it was his turn to shit, too. He knew more about Stanley’s bowel movements than his father’s. And he was supposed to take this know-it-all professor in English class seriously.
“I’m going to ask a question, and I need a volunteer.” Professor Shillings raised his head, his forehead wormy, and scanned the class. His gaze settled on Cal. “How about you, young man?”
“Tell me the question first.” Cal gripped his pencil in his fist. “And then I’ll let you know whether I’ll volunteer.”
“Hmm.” Professor Shillings frowned, then smiled. Boys snickered, letting their crossed legs unfurl. The girl with the dark hair looked back at him, and he froze. “Things don’t work quite this way here in my class, Mr….”
“Johnson. You wanted a volunteer. I didn’t volunteer.”
“Very well, Mr. Johnson. I choose you to answer my question. What do you think all literature, through the centuries, has in common?”
“I don’t know.” He felt the veins in his neck inflate, an area in the back of his head boil.
“Is that your answer, Mr. Johnson?” Professor Shilling raised his fist to his mouth, coughed. He leaned over his podium and examined his fingernails.
“Well, I suppose I wouldn’t have to take the class if I knew.” His pencil snapped, one half of it rolling to the floor. He trapped it under his foot, his church shoes. They weren’t as smart as the shiny, soft leather loafers that tapped, slid on the floor around him.
“Mr. Johnson, if that is your attitude, I suspect you won’t do very well in my class. And that you may as well save yourself the embarrassment of dropping out later by leaving now.”
“My attitude is that if you’re going to try and make me look like a fool, I’m not going to let you. I’m no fool, and I’m here to learn.” He sat up in his chair. “I’m here to learn what all literature, through the centuries, has in common, sir.”
“Veteran?” Shilling raised his eyebrows slightly, and then nodded. “How about someone else? You in the second row.”
Johnson stole glances at Professor Shilling when he thought he wasn’t looking. He copied Professor Shilling’s words into his notebook and he avoided his sweeping gaze when he asked questions. After class, he let everyone file out before he walked to the front of the classroom.
“Sir, I apologize for my behavior this evening.” Johnson stared at his hands, grasping his books. “I don’t want special treatment. I served, and I want my education so I can get a job. I follow orders well, so if you tell us what we need to know, I’ll work real hard to get it right.”
“I appreciate your candor, Mr. Johnson.” Shillings snapped the locks of his briefcase shut. Cal could see the top of Professor Shilling’s balding head, oily crown. He stepped back. “But this isn’t the Army. You may have taken orders there, but in university you cultivate independent, critical thinking. And our opinions, your thoughts, are much more important, much more interesting to me than rote—er, following orders.”
“Well, I haven’t done too much thinking about literature, Professor Shilling, but I’ll give it my best shot. I promise.”
“Well, that’s all I ask, Mr. Johnson.” Professor Shilling smiled slightly and turned. “Now, if you’ll excuse me.”
Shilling put on his hat and nodded before walking out the door. Johnson looked around the classroom for a moment before following, not wanting to leave. The walls of these buildings harbored great secrets, he surmised. Why men fought wars. What they did once they were over.
“I hear he’s a bit of a rat.”
The girl from the third row stood a few feet away in the empty hallway, her books pressed against her chest. Her eyes, wide and brown, smiled at him.
“He seems all right.” Johnson kicked at the linoleum. “A little stuffy, maybe.”
“I’m Kate.” Her hand, small and delicate, raised, her fingers slightly outstretched.
“Calvin Johnson.” He took it. He could not remember the last time he’d held something so delicate. Maybe the hatchlings on the farm. Soft furred, chirpy hearts. He removed his hand quickly, not understanding the danger he felt. She was not holding a grenade, a revolver. They walked side by side by the classrooms, opening and expelling their students. Their chatter swirled between them; his neck felt hot.
“Are you a freshman?” She seemed unperturbed by the commotion.
“Yeah, kind of. I mean, I’m not from high school. The Army.”
She nodded as well. A pause stretched into awkwardness. “Well, I’m sure my father is waiting. I just felt bad…Shilling giving you a hard time like that.” They stood at the entrance. Johnson spotted a man near the parking lot, hands in his wool trousers, his sports jacket open casually. He sized up Johnson with a disinterested nod as Johnson quickly closed his jacket over his tie with the duck. “I’ll see you around, Calvin.”
“Sure.” He nodded, and he watched her legs move away from him, her hand in her hair, the way it splayed over her back. As they moved together toward the car, a green Ford, new off the lot, it seemed, she turned her head toward him and waved.
“How was class?” His mother sat on the edge of the glider while he scraped the last of the glazed apple off his plate.
“Good. Pie’s perfect.” He leaned over and kissed her. “Everything’s perfect.”
They looked at the moon, the same moon he’d seen in Africa, Normandy, Germany. The moon that betrayed them, their movements. The moon that hid the sun. That night, it was just the moon, maybe a little more.
From the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, he read about the great kings of England, Henry and Richard and Edward. He read slowly at the kitchen table, sometimes aloud to his mother when she wasn’t listening to the radio. In the living room she sat on the couch nodding, her mending resting between her hands, a baby of brown and blue threads, mostly his father’s shirts and sometimes his uniforms from the force. Sometimes she lay her head back, eyes closed, and he could not tell whether she was listening, and sometimes he’d change his voice to differentiate between the characters and his mother laughed, a half sigh and half giggle.
He read Beowulf and understood the horror and beauty of the battles in a way he had not in high school. He could not wait to read The Iliad and The Odyssey again. And maybe his mother would listen and they would have something else since the war that they could share.
“Worried about class, Calvin?” his mother asked one morning, serving him waffles. He had spent most of the night in the bathroom, bathed in a cold sweat, his heart humming in his ears. It had been something practically undetectable, unthreatening to civilian life—an unusual sound outside, a foot snapping a twig. Or so he had thought. After he’d checked the barn and the surrounding ground, he sat on the porch smoking a cigarette. In the corner of his eye, he’d see a shadow move, but when he turned to focus, it was no longer there. It reminded him of nights on foxhole duty, trying to detect a shadow, an outline, in blackness, back in the months before the snows. Was it one of their men, a Kraut? Should he risk shooting into the night, giving away their position? He smoked another cigarette on the porch, and the shadows were everywhere—in the corn, by the barn, behind the truck. There were hundreds of men swarming like silent wasps, a swirl of lost souls, but when he ran out into the middle of the yard, daring them to take a first shot, no one fired. He ground out his cigarette and went back inside to the bathroom. His balance felt off; he thought he might vomit. His father almost stepped on him at five-fifteen, when he stumbled in for his shower.
“I’ve got a paper to write,” he answered, cutting the waffles along the squares. He tried to keep the syrup contained within the spaces, but the knife was dull and his precision clumsy and many of them bled onto the plate. “About war in early English Literature.”
“You were never much of a writer,” his mother said, joining him at the table, patting his hand. She put her hand on his shoulder as if in apology for the truth. She’d never diminished him or his accomplishments in his life (if you’d concentrated more on sacks, you would have been starting at Ohio State was a scrap of wisdom his father liked to hurl at him on the weekends, when they listened to the games on the radio), and he was hurt that she’d start now. But perhaps she thought it was cruel to be kind, lest he muddle too far along and drop out, become bitter.
“I’ll figure it out,” he answered. His plan was a bit disingenuous. Each class he had sat a seat closer to Kate, and although she said hello to him and smiled, he didn’t know how to approach her under any premise, except perhaps to appeal to her greater intelligence, which she displayed modestly when Dr. Schillings called on her. Once or twice, Johnson had raised his hand, in response to questions so easy some didn’t even bother, but he wanted Dr. Shillings to know his intentions, to acknowledge his earnestness and motivation. Still, he was carrying a C minus and needed a good term paper grade to ensure his passing the class.
“Have you written your term paper yet?” Johnson asked Kate when she lingered in the hall one night after class, tying a shoelace, retying. It could not have been for him, he was sure, but he was more than happy to take advantage of her delay.
“Oh,” she sprang up quickly. He felt the breeze her body generated on his neck, and he felt his cheeks coloring. He coughed, fist to his face. “Hi, Calvin.”
“Hi. Did you, uh, finish your term paper?”
“I’m sorry.” She blushed also. “I’m almost finished. How about you?”
“I haven’t.” He scratched the back of his head. “I mean, I’ve got some ideas…but I’m not much of a writer. I was wondering if you wanted to read what I had…I could buy you an egg cream or a hamburger or something.”
“Well.” Kate smiled. He could draw the line of her face in one stroke, so smooth and gradual the curve from chin to cheek to eye. “I suppose my parents won’t mind a study date.”
“Oh, I don’t want to make anybody mad.” His shoulders tightened, feet jumpy. He scanned the entrance ahead of them.
“No, no.” She shook her head. “It’s perfectly fine. Why don’t you meet me tomorrow at seven?”
“Okay, great,” he answered. As relief filled him, it drained quicker out his chest. He’d written not a word of his term paper.
At home, he sat at the table, crumpled pages surrounding him. In Beowulf nature is violent and death is uncontrollable. Beowulf is a warrior, like I was. Once you enter a world where nothing makes sense, it is hard to leave it. He smoked a cigarette on the back steps. Many people think Beowulf and everyone had what was coming to them because they were pagans, but a hell of a lot of Christians lost their lives for God and Uncle Sam in Europe and the Pacific. He heated the leftover coffee in a pot on the stove. I think Kate is a woman I will fall in love with.
He awoke because his mother was frying eggs. Sleeping on the hard table had stiffened his neck. He sat up and pulled his work to his chest. His balled-up notes were gone, and he wondered whether his mother had uncurled them carefully and read them in an attempt to gauge his academic prowess, whether she’d seen the one about Kate.
“You’d better wash your face.” She touched his back, betraying no thoughts. She had not asked him about the war. He wished she would. “The eggs are almost done and you need to milk Tawny.”
He dragged himself up to the bathroom and plugged the sink to shave. He had pinched a nerve in his arm by falling asleep on it, and the razor in his right hand moved crazily across his face, catching its edge and cutting his skin. He dropped the razor in the water and put a finger on his cheek where a cut had bubbled with blood, shaving the rest of his face with his left hand. He stuck a wad of toilet paper the size of a quarter on the wound and hoped he wouldn’t still be wearing it that night like some high school kid.
He wore his high school tie and the short-sleeved button-down he’d worn at graduation years ago, even though his time in the Army had filled his muscles out and the seams cut his biceps when he bent his arms. He’d spent a half hour after dinner sweeping the dirt off the floor mats of the truck, taping the rip in the seat, and wiping the dashboard and windows until they gleamed. He sprayed a little bit of his mother’s White Shoulders in the cab until he thought maybe Kate would think he had another girl, and then he drove through town with all the windows open, airing it out.
As he waited for Kate outside the steps of the school—she took a second summer class—Introduction to Calculus—he glanced at himself in the rearview mirror. The first thing he noticed was that the cut on his face was gone. Not even the faintest of red lines remained on his lower cheek. He opened the driver’s door so that the interior light would come on. His skin was free of blemish. Perhaps he had not cut himself as badly as he thought. Perhaps he needed more sleep. From the corner of his eye, he saw Kate’s form on the stairs, and without thinking about it any further, he hopped from the truck and hurried up the walk.
“Well.” Kate leaned over, a strand of her hair brushing the top of his hand. “Shall I take a look at that paper of yours?”
At the end of a long, double-horseshoe counter at the drug store, Johnson watched her eyes move back and forth over what he had compiled, hastily, that morning after breakfast. He followed the line of her shoulder next to his down to her side and hip, afraid and transfixed by her proximity. Her perfume layered the air along with the grease of twelve-cent hamburgers and percolating coffee, the steady beat of the jukebox. She was not like Eva, and for that he was thankful. She had a confidence that did not announce itself from her lips; it emanated in the way she sat, the way she moved and turned his typewritten sheets with her fingers, slowly, with interest.
“I like this line, Calvin—Like Henry in Henry V, once you enter a world where nothing makes sense it is hard to leave it. But I think you need to follow it up with an example, maybe from your own experience.” She tapped her pencil against her cheek. He liked that she was able to compliment his work but also criticize it, unlike the girls in high school, who repeated his opinions like parrots, who smiled at him bashfully and sat with their hands in their laps, shoulders turned inward.
She did not look away when he caught her looking at him, her dark eyes soft smudges of charcoal. She blinked in a manner less seductive and more puzzled. “So what’s Europe like? How come you never talk about it?”
“I don’t know. I guess no one has ever asked,” he answered, stirring his coffee, even though he took it black. Everyone was afraid to ask, as if he would have a nervous breakdown in front of them. “Well, the churches in Italy are beautiful. Even the ones that were destroyed. And the mountains in Africa. Even the snow in Germany, as cold as it was. Of course, Paris. Sometime it’s strange sleeping in a bed, night after night, when for months at a time, you slept outside on the ground and, in a strange way, you owned the world. Or the world owned you.”
“I like that.” She rested her chin on her hands. “My brother Stephen and I used to play soldiers when we were younger. We both fantasized about it a lot, going to war, the noble sacrifice, seeing the world. Of course, it had a very Homer-esque quality to it.”
“You wouldn’t want to go to war, believe me.”
“Why?” She cocked an eyebrow toward him, tilting her head slightly and smiling. “You don’t think girls are tough enough? You’re not one of those boys, are you?”
“It’s not that.” He shook his head, his cheeks flushed. She could have told him then that women had two heads, and he would have agreed with her. “I mean, plenty of women served honorably as nurses and stuff. It’s just…when it’s happening to you, the horror of it becomes unreal. You get used to…terrible things. And then when you come home, safe from it, you can’t believe you ever thought anything you saw or did was okay. I don’t think anybody should have to live like that.” He closed his eyes, struggling to explain the emptiness that filled him with such weight. He may have lived, but he’d left something behind. His heart, his sense of wonder. His future. He wondered if he needed to go back to the Hürtgen forest to get it.
“Calvin?”
“I’m sorry.” He opened his eyes. “Sometimes it’s still hard to talk about. There’s a lot…I haven’t told anyone”
“Will you tell me?” She touched the straw of her egg cream to her lips, and it was more of a command than a question. She was like Eva, more than he’d thought. She was fearless. But was she persecuted? She drank from the glass, opaque with milk and sweetness, her eyes trained on him like a bird dog.
“Maybe another night…I promise. So what about the paper?” He changed the subject, although he was unable to concentrate. A vein pulsed on his head. He knew, at that point, that he would not finish school, do anything. His world was inside him, what had happened to him in the war, what would happen to him. It consumed him.
“Well, I think you should concentrate on the violence aspect of Beowulf, maybe, instead of Henry.” She dabbed the wet ring from her glass on the Formica countertop with her napkin. “Both Grendel and Beowulf were violent, but one was heralded a hero and one was feared. But a lot of pain and suffering, as you mention here, was caused by both, and will continue, because someone is always avenging someone.”
“Sounds like you’ve got a great idea for your paper,” Johnson smiled.
“I already finished my paper. On King Cnut.” She turned her head, taking in the soda fountain around them.
“Who was he?”
“The king of Denmark, England, and Norway, during the 9th century. He was pagan but converted to Christianity and was a great statesman. In fact, his subjects believed he could do anything, even turn back the tides. So one day at Westminster he kneeled before the Thames and ordered the tides to turn away.”
“Did they?”
“I guess you’ll have to read it and find out.” She finished the last of her float and blotted her lips. “You’d better get home to get this written, huh?”
“Can I ask you a question?”
“I’m a horrible typist, so please don’t ask me to type it for you.”
“No, no—it’s just…you’re not like any other girls I know. I know that sounds like a line, but it’s the truth. Do you want to go out with me? On a real date?”
“Oh…I think I should be getting home.” She grabbed for her purse, a sudden, stilted motion, and it fell to the floor, her compact and lipstick clattering and rolling away from them, along with his hopes.
He crouched, his fingers straining for her things. On that first date that would never happen, he would have told her the things she wanted to know. He would have told her that, since the war, the world moved by him on a screen, like those AFO reels civilians watched at home of troop movements, of minor setbacks, or high-stakes advances, of the inevitable sacrifice otherwise known as casualty. The theater was dark and he was alone and there was nothing to do but watch the story of the war over and over, his death and rebirth, until the doors of the lobby had opened, and Kate stood, a dark silhouette, beckoning him into the light of the lobby.
“I’m sorry I was so forward.” He stood by the passenger side of the truck, hands in his pockets, as she clutched her purse. “I really do appreciate your help with the assignment. I’ll uh, see you in class, then.”
“Goodnight, Calvin.” She moved toward him. “I’m sorry I…it’s just that…the thing is…well, I think you’re the most interesting boy I’ve ever met.”
Before he could react, she placed her lips on his. He could feel things in his heart, moving around slippery in his mouth, marbles of love and desire and marriage, marbles that had never risen above his pants with Eva, along with other lumps that he swallowed as she rested her head on his shoulder and they breathed the small space of air between them until there was no air left. Love was hunger, was suffocation. But also soft quiet, the rise of her chest on his, the weight of her head on his shoulder. Her head came up and they kissed again, Johnson holding her face in his hands so she could not slip away.
Spears of fall began to poke at the bubble of summer—a few unseasonably cool mornings in August while Calvin planted the broccoli, cauliflower, and radishes in the field; a sweater draped on his mother’s shoulders as she knitted on the glider; his father’s gun parts gleaming on the table as he cleaned and assembled them for goose season. In class, he sat in his usual seat behind and to the left of Kate and wrote short-answer essays on The Odyssey on his final exam. When he finished, he stayed at his seat, watching the slow wave of Kate’s hair cascade down her back as she looked to the ceiling, turned her pencil on her cheek and then moved it feverishly across the bluebook. When she closed it and stood, he did too, and followed her up to Professor Shillings, who held up his palm to Johnson as he turned to follow Kate.
“I’ll be reading with great interest.” Professor Shillings raised an eyebrow as he took Johnson’s bluebook. “Maybe we’ll see you for the fall semester, Mr. Johnson?”
“I haven’t registered yet,” he answered. “I liked your class, sir. Thanks for the opportunity to take it.”
Kate waited for him in the hall.
“How about an egg cream?” He smiled at her. He looked forward to talking about their schedules for the fall, kissing in his truck in the parking lot behind the bowling alley. She had grounded him. He didn’t feel essential to himself, even alive in a normal sense, but he felt tethered to Kate, her gravity keeping his moon rotating, surviving its long trip around the galaxy.
“When were you going to tell me that you were going to New York?” They sat in the truck behind the bowling alley. He lit a cigarette and stared at the tip of the neon bowling pin that cleared the roof and poked at the sky.
“I’m sorry, Calvin. I wanted to from the beginning, that night at the drug store, even. But I wanted to spend time with you. I’ve always wanted to go to New York University. I just stayed close to home during the war so my parents wouldn’t worry. I think they were hoping I’d be engaged or married by now to someone at Bowling Green and ready to pop out a baby.”
“What if I asked you not to go?” He turned and put his hands on her shoulders, his eyes locked on hers, and he tried to burn his feelings into her irises, her corneas, so even if she left, she’d see him, a shadow that stretched over her.
“I’d say you were asking a lot of me.”
“But I thought there was something between us…” he groped for words. She had erased his entire vocabulary, and new words had yet to form. “A connection. The way we talk…you’re scared of what you’re feeling.”
“Maybe. I don’t know.” She dropped her head, searching for her own. “But I know I want to go to New York and I want to study art history and work in a museum and I’ve always wanted these things and you just can’t sweep into my life, Calvin, and expect me to change everything.”
“I’m not asking you to change anything. I want to be a part of your life, Kate. I’ll come to New York. I’ll find a job, anything.”
“Calvin, you need to find your own place.” She smoothed the collar on his shirt. “I don’t want you to follow me. You started going to school before you knew me. You wanted to be an architect, remember? And rebuild all those beautiful churches? I don’t want to be the person who makes you stop that.”
“If I rebuild anything, it’s going to be with my hands. I’m too dumb to be an architect.” He turned from her. “I’m sorry, Kate. You’re a smart girl, and I hope you’ll do something with your studies and not just wind up getting married to some rich guy.”
“Calvin, you’re going to do great things with your life.” Kate smiled. “And I’m going to see you do them. It’s just that, right now, I need to go to school.”
“I understand, Kate. You don’t have to apologize.”
“You will write me, won’t you? I should love to get letters from you. And I will write you back, I promise.”
“Sure, okay.” He shrugged. He would go to New York. He would find her and woo her. He did not know what else to do.
“Oh, wait.” Her hands went to her neck, and when they came together in front of her, they held a medal of Saint Christopher on the chain. “I want you to have this.”
He took the medal and turned it over.
“Si en San Cristóbal confías, de accidente no morirás,” he read the inscription. “What does that mean?”
“It means if you trust St. Christopher, you won’t die in an accident,” she answered. “I want you to be safe in your travels. For when we cross paths again.”
“You really think we’re going to cross paths again?”
“Of course,” she smiled. “I’m just going to school. We’re not banished from each other forever, two wandering souls. You have to give it back then.”
“Why?”
“It was my brother Stephen’s,” she explained. “He died.”
“When?”
“About a year before you came home. Of leukemia. For months, I dreamed that I would die so I could go visit him. I talked to him in those dreams, and I believed for a long time that those conversations were real.”
“What made you stop dreaming?” Calvin pulled a cigarette out of the Pall Malls on the dashboard and pushed the cellophane pack toward her.
“Well, it wasn’t real…that kind of stuff,” she shrugged as helither cigarette, then his own. “I mean, when people are dead, they’re dead.”
“You don’t believe in miracles, or ghosts, or eternal life?”
“I don’t even believe in God, necessarily,” she answered, exhaling. “Although that is strictly between you and me. My parents thought that sending me to boarding school would teach me how to knit a doily and drink tea and think thoughts becoming to a lady. And they would never have agreed to let me study in New York if they thought I didn’t think those things.”
“So why are they paying for you to study in New York?”
“Because I told them I’d join the circus,” she laughed. “I guess I’ve always been a little fragile since Stephen passed away, and I know they want to keep me happy, lest I break down and be hospitalized and become some spinster. Plus, I kind of hinted to them I’d absolutely settle down when I was finished. That I just wanted to be cultured, a good wife. Ohio is terribly isolated, you know, and I could find a good family to marry into in New York rather than stay here and risk being some backwards rube.”
“Well, you’re a pretty girl; I’m sure you won’t have any trouble.”
“Oh, geez, you probably think I’ve flipped my wig.” Kate touched his arm. “I never tell anyone things like this, honestly. I just knew…you’d understand. I’ve always known. That first night in class, you felt so out of place, and I’ve felt that way so much in my life. Not that I show it…but I completely understood how, to you, everything here after the war feels kind of phony.”
“Do you really? Do you really understand anything about the war, about what happened to me?” He turned to face her. He let the chain slide from his hand onto the seat between them before scooping it up. “Now, I’m sorry, Kate—I didn’t mean it like that. Sometimes I’m a little touchy about what happened…in Germany.”
“Take me home, okay?” She stared through the windshield as the streets put distance between what they were before, what they were to become.
“Kate, please write.” At her house, he grabbed her arm before she climbed from the truck. “I want you to understand me. And I want to understand you.”
She picked up the chain between them and studied it before affixing it to Calvin’s neck.
“I’ll see you in a few months. I promise. Write me back.” She kissed him and leapt out, heading toward the light of the porch before he could respond.
He did not know if he could wait those few months. He needed something, something that would tie things up, make him feel complete again. He wrote Stanley Polensky a letter at his Baltimore address, and when he did not hear from him he wrote to Green, from their unit. Green thought that Polensky had gone to Montana with some of the others to get jobs at the National Park Service. He remembered the Pole talking about it during the war. He had loved the big ponderosa pines out in the Hürtgen, the smell and look of them, even as Johnson could never imagine them again without thinking of diarrhea, of blood, of bone-hurting cold. But Polensky saw the good in everything, and now that Kate had taken what was left of his heart, Johnson needed a little bit of that goodness. He also needed to tell Stanley a few things—first, that he was his friend and brother. That he would die for him. And that only he would understand the strange tale of the Hürtgen forest. Maybe he, man of medallions and lamps, would know what it all meant, if anyone could.