Sometimes they would roll into a town or village so hard on the heels of the armor and infantry that they encountered people uninstructed on the difference between liberation and surrender. An old man in a clock tower with a deer rifle, say, or five murderous Boy Scouts sharing a burp gun, or the last joker in town with a death’s-head on his hatband, insisting with tedious punctilio on standing them to a round of pointless slaughter. Lives and time would be lost trying to clarify the matter.
“This is bullshit,” said Diddens.
He was talking about the arrow in his left foot. It was a fine piece of pine and goose feathers. A second arrow had lodged with a thunk in a window box several feet wide of my grandfather, just before he dragged Diddens to cover behind a pile of rubble in the main thoroughfare of Vellinghausen. It had taken Diddens a minute to get past incredulity.
“I mean, what kind of thing is that?” Diddens was squatting on his right haunch with his left leg stuck out in front of him. He was an Alabaman, a chemist who had worked in Dow’s pesticides division before the war. He was not prone to hysteria, but the arrow had him a little keyed up. “A fucking arrow?”
“At least it makes a change from bullets,” my grandfather said.
“Fuck you, it’s not sticking out of your foot!”
“You have a point.”
“This is bullshit!” Diddens said again. This time he yelled it, but his cry had nothing to resound against and it failed to carry. Vellinghausen had undergone a week of shelling by both sides, followed by a pitched two-day tank battle before the Germans conceded the town for good to elements of the 8th Armored Division. Almost all the buildings were badly damaged. Most of the main street of Vellinghausen was gray sky.
“Calm yourself,” my grandfather said. He understood that from Diddens’s point of view, it seemed absurd to have come across France and four hundred miles into Germany without being touched by artillery or small-arms fire only to be shot with an arrow. On the other hand, there was a venerable school of thought that taught when a conquering army showed up in your hometown at the head of a trail of death and destruction, you were supposed to do what you could to make conquest expensive, using whatever came to hand. That type of behavior was the stuff of poems and heroes. In the past three months my grandfather had seen poetry and heroism of this nature cost the lives of several Germans, three first-rate jeep drivers, two radiomen, and Lieutenant Alvin P. Aughenbaugh, Ph.D. This Diddens was Aughenbaugh’s replacement, and he was all right, but I don’t think my grandfather ever recovered from the loss of Aughenbaugh. He would not tell me the circumstances of his friend’s death other than to say that it came in the back of a jeep while my grandfather was trying to keep him upright and talking until they could find an aid station.
“Did it hit bone?” my grandfather asked Diddens.
“I— ” The question seemed to give Diddens something to focus on. He gritted his teeth and studied his heavy boot. He was moving his foot around inside it. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Can you put weight on it?”
Diddens put a hand on my grandfather’s shoulder and raised himself off the ground. He drew in his left leg and lowered himself onto the left foot. He gasped. “Uh. No.” He stuck his foot back out. This time he just sat down flat on the cobblestones, as if now were any kind of time to take a rest. “Ah, jeez. It really hurts. I think the point must be coming out of the bottom. Is it coming out of the bottom? Can you see?”
My grandfather frowned. They were already behind schedule. Vellinghausen was not even supposed to be a stop on their route. They were supposed to be following the 3rd Armored Division, but a map failure, a moonless night, and unexpected panzer movement south of Lippstadt had entangled them with the 8th. Forward regiments of the 3rd were already a day or more ahead of them, headed for Paderborn. A day or more closer to Nordhausen.
My grandfather reached for the gun at his hip. At the same time he bent over and grabbed hold of the shaft in Diddens’s foot. He jerked the arrow backward. It slid loose with a moist pop. The head emerged streaked with purple from the hole it had made going into the boot, just to the left of the laces.
Diddens let out a yawp of outrage and shock. “What?” he said.
My grandfather stood up and came out from behind the heap of plaster chunks, roof tiles, and plaster dust that had been hiding them. He raised the gun and swept the street with his eyes, thinking about angles and sight-lines. He noted without lingering on them a black and orange cat, a bicycle that concussion had twisted around a hitching post to symbolize infinity. Behind the rubble pile Diddens clutched his foot and diverted his thoughts from the pain by describing in Alabaman detail the unnatural use that my grandfather had made of my great-grandmother. Up the street on the right, a bakery occupied the ground floor of a stucco townhouse painted the color of lemon custard. The houses this side of it had paid off the tank gunners’ luck with jackpots of rubble like the one they had taken cover behind. My grandfather traveled his gaze up the pale stucco to the third story. Its paired windows seemed to be at about the limit of the effective range of an archer.
“What are you doing?” Diddens said. “Get down, are you fucking nuts?”
My grandfather knew he was taking chances. In general it was best, for example, not to try to remove a sharp object from a puncture wound because it might be acting to plug the hole it had made in some major vein or artery. But there were no major veins or arteries, as far as my grandfather knew, in the human foot. As for stepping into the middle of the street when you knew somebody out there was trying to kill you with a bow and arrow, he had decided to test a personal theory that since the arrow had gone into Diddens’s foot and not his head or his throat, the archer must not be much of a marksman.
“No,” my grandfather said. “Just in a hurry.”
In the ruins of Köln he and Aughenbaugh had interviewed a captured Wehrmacht truck driver—irrespective of what it said on their bills of lading, all truck drivers carried information—who reported having hauled a shipment of machine parts in mid-March to a group of “professors” at Nordhausen. One of the professors he claimed to have seen there was a thickset young blond whom the driver described as clearly the man in charge.
As it happened, my grandfather, along with all the other hunters in the unit, was recently issued a detailed inventory of thousands of leading Nazi “professors.” It was code-named the Black List and was said to have been compiled from a German original found by a Polish janitor at Bonn University, half-flushed down a toilet in the mayhem of the German retreat from that city. My grandfather’s orders were to track down the scientists, technicians, and engineers whose names appeared on the Black List and capture them before the Russians could. At the top of the Black List was the name of a physicist said to be the inventive mind behind the V-2 rocket, one of which had come close to killing my grandfather and Aughenbaugh that night in London. According to the limited intelligence the Allies had on him, this rocket man was a beefy blond fellow.
My grandfather had never wanted anything more than he wanted to be the man who brought in this Wernher von Braun. Or maybe at that point—he told me—what he wanted more than anything was to see one of von Braun’s rockets. That desire was, at the moment, the only certainty he possessed, apart from a strong intuition that one of the Russian hunters traveling west from Poland behind the fast-moving Red Army would never sit around crying because he had an arrow in his foot.
Something whispered in my grandfather’s left ear, and just behind him a mallet struck a block of wood. The flower box, planted only with mud and ash, had taken another hit. The time had come to test his hypothesis about the archer’s marksmanship. So far the man was shooting one for three.
The fourth arrow hummed in low and whistling and clattered against the cobblestone street about fifteen feet in front of my grandfather. It skittered along, struck some jut in the cobbles, and bounced. Its vector was deformed by the impact, and it shot up at an eighty-degree angle to the street. It tumbled interestingly through the air toward my grandfather, end over end and moving slightly to the left of him. He reached out as it came cartwheeling and managed to snatch it as it went by.
* * *
It was not that my grandfather felt no fear.
“I was afraid the whole time,” he told me. “From the minute I got there. Even when no one was shooting at me or trying to drop a bomb on my head. But whenever they did shoot at me, what happened was, it made me angry, too.”
“And the anger trumped.”
“It was, you know, it flooded over me.”
“Yeah.”
“It just washed everything else away. That was the time . . . In my whole life, that was the time I got some use out of it. When somebody was shooting at me.” He twisted his mouth. “But I didn’t know until that day it worked with arrows, too.”
* * *
He caught the arrow in midflight and turned to the yellow house, looking up. Swagger in the angle of his head, taunting the archer, a red needle of Philadelphia climbing inside him. He saw a flicker of white in one of the third-story windows: a shirtfront. A brown sleeve. A pink hand. A gaping mouth. A man leaned out of the window, propped at the hip against the window ledge, half-bracketed with a dark brown bow. Something loose and careless in the way he was hanging himself out the window suggested that he was not much older than my grandfather. He dangled an arrow like a long cigarette between the fingers of one hand. He nocked the arrow and shifted himself a little. My grandfather raised the gun and then, to satisfy the strange code duello of Vellinghausen, they fired off their respective shots.
A sharp hammer, or maybe a pickax, took a sudden whack at my grandfather’s helmet, front and center. The archer sagged and let go of the bow. It dropped and hit the street with a twang. The archer listed and hung balanced on the window ledge for what felt to my grandfather like a very long time, as if making up his mind whether to go after the bow. Then he tumbled from the window and hit the cobblestones with a doubled sound: a drum crack, a carpet beater smacking against wool.
My grandfather holstered his gun and took off his helmet. It looked like the prop from a movie comedy, some kind of farce in which GIs fought Indians. He turned the helmet upside down. The arrow had pierced to a depth of not quite an inch. Later he would find a dot of dried blood beaded at the center of his forehead.
He yanked out the arrow and put the helmet back on his head. He walked up the street to the bow and picked it up, then turned to the young man. My grandfather guessed he might be about Ray’s age. He lay twisted into a swastika under the bakery window. His skull leaked blood at the back where it had smacked against the stone street. He wore dark suit trousers, a dark tie, and a shirt with a tab collar and pearl snaps. There was nothing about his clothing or face to suggest that he was the kind of man who would try to kill you with a bow and some arrows.
My grandfather was about to kneel beside the young man to see if he was dead when he heard from behind a long, soft exhalation that might have been despondent, angry, or both. There was no time to draw the pistol, so he raised the bow and fitted the nock of the arrow he’d caught to its string. He was ready to let fly. He had never shot an arrow, but he was willing to try. He had managed okay, after all, with a canoe.
It was an old priest in a cassock that reached almost to the tops of his pointed shoes. White dust patterned the black cassock in big splotches like continents or the spots on a cow. He was standing by the white bicycle that the shock wave of a bursting shell had wrapped around a pole, mourning its loss. He reached out to run his spider hand along the tubes of its frame. He might have been bidding it farewell or trying to puzzle out the geometry of its torsion. He did not seem aware that in principle he was within arrowshot of an American soldier.
“Good morning, Father,” my grandfather said, lowering the bow.
The white-haired priest looked up. His mouth fell open. He took note of the bow and arrow, and his eyes went a little dull with understanding. He closed his mouth. His gaze traveled the street until it found the body of the archer. “Is he dead?” the priest said.
“I don’t know. I think so.”
The priest approached the body. He moved quickly for a man of his age and with a doctor’s officiousness. Screwing up his face, he worked himself into a crouch alongside the body and laid a ruddy hand on the archer’s chest. He lowered his head to the archer’s until his left ear nearly brushed the archer’s lips.
My grandfather heard a scrape behind him. Diddens limped up the street, his left foot printing the paving stones with roses. “He dead?” Diddens said.
There was a first aid kit back in the jeep with the driver, who had completed his medic’s training. Unless of course the driver had been killed by an arrow, or a blunderbuss, or some retired merchant seaman with a blowgun.
The archer opened his eyes, two pannikins of water stained with two blue droplets of gouache.
“Apparently not,” my grandfather said.
The archer’s face was aimed at the sky, but he fixed his pale eyes on the old priest’s head, the pink pate, the milkweed-tuft hair. This gave the archer a downcast or shy expression. The old priest’s ear was angled to catch the sentences emerging from the archer’s lips in softly popping bubbles of blood. The words were spoken too low for my grandfather to hear and, in any case, seemed to be in the local dialect, which gave my grandfather difficulties. The old priest nodded, said something, nodded again. He folded the archer’s hands between the bones of his own, clasped them, and began to speak. It was not a reply, or not a direct one, at any rate.
The old priest spoke the requisite Latin and drew a hasty cross with his fingertips curled at his chest. He reached into a slit in his cassock. His hand moved around inside the dusty fabric. He wore the universal expression of a man searching his pants pocket for something that must be there. When his hand reemerged, he was holding a small brown medicine bottle with a black cap. His right hand shook as he worked to get the bottle unstoppered.
In the gray and cold of that place, the smell that came from the little bottle alarmed my grandfather. It was overripe as fruit and acrid as summer. It made the heart leap. It smelled the way the word sacrament sounded.
The bottle shook as the priest dripped a dime of golden liquid into his left palm. Now the left hand started to shake. The oil trembled. It found a crease in his pink palm that drained it all down the side of his hand. It drizzled down onto and stained the dying man’s white shirt.
“Shit,” said the old priest. Aughenbaugh would have been scandalized. “Idiot.”
The priest smeared a thumbprint of oil onto the dying man’s forehead. The archer made a sound of animal contentment.
As a young man, my grandfather seems to have had no higher regard for religion than he displayed in the days when I knew him. I have his old black hardback copy of The Magic Mountain, his favorite novel. Across its front flyleaf in block capitals, under his name and the date (March 11, 1938), as though announcing to the world some kind of solemn verdict or choice, my grandfather printed the word HUMANISM. By the spring of ’45 he had lost that all-caps certainty about his choice of worldview. Cold, hunger, darkness and blood, and the random assignment of death as the coefficient to victory and defeat alike had conspired to bankrupt his humanism. The only choice that seemed to remain, seven years after he inscribed his copy of The Magic Mountain, was a choice between faith and numbness.
At close range, he had been exposed to the horror of the human body’s fragility, its liability to burst open, to be ripped in two, to deliver up its pulp through a split in the outer peel. He had suffered bombardment, gun barrage, loneliness, foolish commanders, and a two-month case of the GIs. He had lost Aughenbaugh. He had killed a boy who was shooting at him with a burp gun. Apart from the fact that he was, as a result, still alive, that was one person more than he ever wanted to kill again. Along the way he had captured or had a hand in the capture of men of science—one who had taught chemistry at Princeton before the war, another whose medical research had been funded by a Rockefeller—in laboratories and proving grounds dedicated to the cultivation of fatal toxins and missile-borne plagues.
In the face of all that, my grandfather had come down on the side of numbness. Even when Aughenbaugh had died in the back of that jeep, blood soaking his cardigan, calling for his sister, Beatie, in a voice of boyish plaintiveness, my grandfather had permitted himself to shed only a few tears. Now, watching the old priest comfort the dying man in low, musical Latin, my grandfather felt some inner tether come unlashed. His cheeks burned. His eyes stung. For the first and only time in his life, he felt the beauty that inhered in the idea of Jesus Christ, in the message of comfort that had managed to survive, reasonably intact, despite having been so thoroughly corrupted and profaned over the past two thousand years by Christians.
Relief spread across the face of the dying man. He closed his downcast eyes. The old priest looked up at my grandfather without apparent reproach or emotion of any kind. He tried to get up from the paving stones beside the corpse but did not seem to have the required flexibility. My grandfather offered his hand and hoisted the old priest to his feet. The priest studied my grandfather’s face for a moment, his jowls powdered with plaster dust, his expression unreadable but not unfriendly. He reached again into the slit of his cassock, felt around. My grandfather took a step away, thinking this time the priest might be reaching for a gun. He reached back to put a hand on Diddens’s chest, ready to shove the Alabaman to safety.
The old priest’s hand reemerged from the slit in the cassock holding a white handkerchief, ironed flat with crisp corners. He passed it to my grandfather. The fresh linen smelled of lavender.
“I’m sorry,” said my grandfather. He meant to apologize for spoiling the handkerchief, but it came out sounding like regret for the body at their feet. That was all right with my grandfather.
The priest looked at the damp bit of linen and then searched my grandfather’s face. “Keep it,” he said.
“What was he saying, Father?” Diddens’s German was more correct but less fluid than my grandfather’s. He pointed to the dead man. “What was he telling you?”
The old priest glanced over his shoulder at the body of the archer. “What was there to say?” he said.