The day after Lafe’s funeral, we went back to cutting ditch bank.
It was a Tuesday, so we was already behind because of the burial, and Daddy said there wasn’t any sense in wasting good weather. It was still warm enough to be enjoyed by them that could, not yet hog-killing time by any means, even though Thanksgiving was near-bout on us.
Lex was working in the lumber yard, so it was me and Daddy and the Lockamys, five of us out there. We had cleared past their house and was headed for the corner, down where we put in the strawberry patches in 1956. Nobody give much thought to the cemetery, maybe because we had come to it the day before from the Ammon Road, going through East Geddie from the church. But when we walked along the branch, headed north to the spot where we had quit working on Friday, we could see the colors up on the little ridge. Everything else in the country is just shades of brown and gray in November, so the flowers by the new-dug grave—the tombstone wouldn’t be there for a week or so—caught your eye right off. We all knew, without anybody saying anything, that we’d be working right by it all day, headed up to the Rock of Ages. If we cut two hundred yards, we’d be there, working right by the cemetery on the little rising looking out over the Blue Sandhills, by dark.
Daddy was old by then. He’d passed seventy-eight in April and wouldn’t plow another row after he fell working on the roof Momma told him to let somebody else do, the week before Christmas. He looked at the graveyard and said, without looking at anybody—surely not at me—“I reckon we’d be better off cutting the crop ditch today.”
So we went back in the other direction and spent the next five days bush-axing the crop ditch through to the near fields. By the time we was ready to pick back up on Lock’s Branch toward the graveyard, Daddy told me at breakfast to just go on without him.
He never talked to me about it, and I never talked to him, after I had told him how sorry I was, how I wished it was me instead, the day it happened. Maybe he didn’t blame me, but he sure didn’t forgive me, either. We just didn’t look at each other much anymore, and we tried not to be alone with each other. Lafe looked just like him, and even though Lex was the oldest and Gruff was going to be the richest, I always thought, even before, that Daddy felt like Lafe would be the one to make him proud.
Lafe was bright as a dollar, and smart. Around here, you might ought to know, smart don’t mean you’re a genius; it means you work like a mule, even without nobody telling you to. It comes in right handy on a farm. I was smart, but nobody much back then ever accused me of being extra bright. Lafe was both. Things was booming after the war, and Daddy was hoping to be able to send him to the Presbyterian Academy over in Pineland, on the other side of Cool Spring, in another year, maybe even see a lawyer in the family before he died.
In May of 1927, when Daddy was going fast after he had his big stroke, I’d sit by the bed holding his hand when Momma needed a rest, and sometimes he’d try to talk. He pretty much still had his right mind, but the stroke had messed him up so he couldn’t make himself understood, and that would aggravate him so bad he’d cry sometimes.
One morning, about ten o’clock, I was holding his hand and he seemed like he was sleeping, when all of a sudden, he opened his eyes wide and looked right at me, and it seemed like he hadn’t looked at me in years. I was struck by how much his bright blue eyes had faded, to where they didn’t hardly have any more color in them than the veins in his hands.
“Afe?” he croaked out.
“No, Daddy,” I told him. “It’s me, Littlejohn.”
I reckon I could of lied and told him that Lafe would be back directly, just to go on back to sleep, but his mind seemed so good up to that point that I felt like he must of just woke up from a dream and was confused.
“Daddy,” I told him, “Lafe ain’t here. Lafe died five years ago. In the hunting accident.”
Daddy got this look on his face like he was just learning about it for the first time, and I could see his eyes tearing up.
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” I told him. “I couldn’t help it. I’m sorry.”
He closed his eyes, and pretty soon he was sleeping again, or seemed like he was. He was dead six days later, and he never said anything to me again, one way or the other. We put him on the hill next to Lafe and the rest.
The days after Lafe died seemed about a year long each, with the whole thing coming back to me about every five minutes. But somehow, the days became weeks, the weeks months, the months years. I have heard of folks grieving theirselves to death, but I reckon you have to be old to do that. Young folks got too much working against death.
I would go out every morning, Monday through Saturday, to work. I found enough barn work and house repairs to get me through until it was time to plant the tobacco beds, and then farming took over until the next harvest.
Instead of coming back to the house for dinner at noon, I would take some sausage and biscuits or a piece of cheese or a sweet potato and some corn bread out with me and just eat in the field, under the big old oak by the property line if I was working in the near fields, under the sycamores and sweet gums if I was down in the swamp. I’d pump a jug full of water from our pump or the Lockamys’ and leave it in the shade. I’d tell Momma not to wait supper for me, and most days I’d manage to get there later and eat by myself, out on the porch in the summertime after everybody else had finished, in the dining room after the rest was through in the winter. It wasn’t a good time for talking to people, and we all just kind of kept our distance. Momma never come out there when I was eating by myself in the near fields, where she could see me from the back porch, and asked me to come up and eat with the rest of them, although Lex, bless his heart, did try and get me to from time to time.
What was I thinking about all that time? I could not exactly tell you. Sometimes, I felt like I was talking to Lafe. I know that Rennie would kid me about talking to myself, but it was just that Lafe seemed like he was closer out there in the fields, and sometimes he seemed near-bout alive. In the August heat, I’ve seen him standing in the shade over by the pin oaks at the edge of the woods, I’ll tell you that. I sure didn’t tell anybody about it back then, though. I didn’t hate myself quite enough to want a one-way ticket to the crazy house at Dix Hill.
The main thing, though, was that, by working hard, I could feel like I was worth something. That always had been my way. Back when most folks thought I was retarded and never would be good for anything, I’d try to make up for not being able to read by outworking everybody on the farm. If I kept at it, kept that ditch bank so clean you could eat out of it, kept the weeds out of the tobacco and corn, got the whole place looking better than it ever had, maybe everybody would forget someday that I’d killed my own brother. Maybe I’d forget, too.
Church was the hardest part. It was the only place where I had to be around a whole bunch of people that knew what I had done, or what they thought I had done, and wasn’t family. But not going to church would of made things even worse than they was. So, every blessed Sunday, I would go sing in the choir, then walk back home instead of waiting for the buggy, because Momma and Daddy would want to gab for a while after the sermon, and I didn’t have nothing to say to nobody.
I thought about running away but I just couldn’t make myself do it. In spite of Lafe, in spite of the silences and the cemetery and everything, this was the only home I had, and I couldn’t bear to leave it. It wasn’t just Momma and Daddy and them. It was the place itself. I would of been plumb happy never to leave the farm. Don’t feel much different now. It always amazes me that Georgia could just pick up and move somewhere different every two or three years after college, how she never seems to care if she ever sees this place again. It never was like that with me.
One time, about 1925, Gruff tried to get me to come down to Atlanta with him. He was already managing a store down there and said it might be good for me to get away from home. I’m sure nobody would of cared all that much, but this is the only place I ever felt comfortable. Maybe if I had been able to read and write, it would of felt different, but I don’t think so.
There was days, back then, when I wouldn’t say a word to a living soul. I could get up at 5:30, before Momma, cook my own fatback and eggs and biscuits, make a couple of extra biscuits and add some sausage or a sweet potato for dinner, fill up the jug with water, go hitch up old Susie and be in the fields by 6:30. Lex would come out a little bit later with the other mule, Moses, and we’d work all day, Lex going back to the house for dinner and me eating under the shade.
I don’t mean to make out like the years from 1922 until 1942 was one long row I plowed. There was times when we’d all get together and talk and laugh some, like before. There was days when it would rain, or days in the winter when not one thing needed doing. It’s just that, after a while, there wasn’t much need on my part for company. I talked to Lafe’s ghost or whatever you want to call it a lot more than I talked to the living.
Neither Lex nor Connie ever did marry. It wasn’t all that peculiar a thing back then, not marrying. Miss Hattie Draughon and her two sisters, Miss Corrinne and Miss Jessie, didn’t any of them marry, just stayed at their daddy’s big house, after their momma died, taking care of each other until none of them could get about and they all had to be sent to the nursing home up on the Mingo Road.
I think it was harder, back then, on the older ones than the younger ones. Lex knew pretty much that he would be taking over the farm some day, so he always was expected to pay more attention to it than Gruff or Lafe when they were boys. He wasn’t a bad-looking man when he was young, although he was more bashful than us younger ones, and I reckon we used to tease him a lot. It’s funny, but I don’t think Lex had a date until he was way past grown, and even then, he would keep it to himself. He’d just go off at night, after we got the car in 1928. Later, when we had to put the car up on blocks because we couldn’t afford to run it, he’d walk somewhere or other at night. Nobody would of thought of locking their doors back then, and nobody really knew when Lex come back, but he did wake me up coming in as late as three A.M. some nights.
Connie wasn’t as pretty as Century, who had Momma’s yellow hair and soft, pretty face. Momma looked like a angel when she was young. I can see that now looking at her pictures. Makes me wonder what she saw in a old, one-legged Civil War veteran like Daddy.
Connie had sharper features, like Lex, a nose like a hawk’s, and she was too skinny. I see girls now trying to get as thin as they can, and I remember how, when we was young, a man wanted a wife with some meat on her bones. If you got too skinny back then, they’d ship you off to the TB sanatorium.
There was a fella come to work in Geddie about the time Daddy died, and he started coming around, like a stray dog. His name was Homer Guinn, and he was one of the sons of this trashy Guinn woman that lived down south of here on the Ammon Road. Nobody knew who half of her young-uns’ daddies was, and no two of them seemed to have had the same one. But this one, Homer, a boy with slick black hair and a complexion dark enough to suggest the worst, seemed to take a liking to Connie, who already was past being give up for an old maid. And the funny thing was, even though Connie always seemed like she was content to cook and keep house right where she was born, she took a shine to Homer. He started going to the Geddie Presbyterian Church and sitting with her, and they’d spend evenings on the old glider we used to have on the front porch, just talking away. He’d leave about 9:30 and walk back to his momma’s.
It all come to an end one day that June. I had walked in from the swamp and unhitched Susie, and I was coming up from the barn. It was near-bout dark, but there was enough light left to see two people standing out by the carhouse we’d built for the Ford. As I got closer, I could see it was Lex and Connie. Lex had a tobacco stick in his hand that he’d picked up off the ground. Connie had the butcher knife.
“I am going to cut you up like a hog!” she screamed at him. She was as mad as a wet settin’ hen.
“No, you ain’t, Connie,” Lex said, and I could tell he was a little nervous. I was about fifty feet away, and she probably knew I was there, but she was just wild. I hadn’t seen her lose her temper since she got grown.
“I did it for you, honey,” he said as he backed up into the bean rows, being real careful not to trip. “He wasn’t no good. I marked them chickens because they been disappearing for weeks. I never said nothing about it because I knew you wouldn’t believe me, so I had to get proof.”
“You just want me to stay here all my sorry life and cook and wait on you all. And I won’t do it. I won’t do it! I’d rather cut you up and go to jail with him.”
What had happened was that Homer Guinn had been slipping by the chicken coop on the way home and walking off with Momma’s white leg’orns, one at a time. Finally, Lex had put little bands on their legs, not like the usual ones, but smaller, hard to see. When he had counted the night before and come up one short, he sent the sheriff over to Miss Guinn’s, where they found the chicken amongst hers out in the yard. They didn’t keep Homer in jail for long, but Lex let him know he’d be shot if he come sniffing around here again.
Connie cut a shine about it, told Lex she’d wait and catch him when he was sleeping and kill him then, and she didn’t go to church for a good six months afterward. Sometimes, Lex looked more tired than usual out in the fields, like maybe he wasn’t sleeping good. Connie got over it, though, and she stayed right here for her whole life, waiting on me and Lex and Momma until I got married and moved out, and then Momma died. Then it was just her and Lex. She died in 1968, when she was near-bout seventy-three years old, six days after Lex passed away. It was the only six days of her adult life, I reckon, that she didn’t have nobody to wait on. That’s probably what killed her.
After Daddy died, I felt more responsible than before toward my family. Other than working, I’d go to church on Sunday and Wednesday night and maybe go down to the store in East Geddie on Saturday afternoon as it got a little easier to be with people. About the only gambling I ever did was over Coca-Colas. I love Coca-Cola; Momma said it was my one vice. But I had this special trick, where I could take one of them seven-ounce bottles like they used to have, that really had some kick to them, and drain one in a single swallow. If they could get anybody that didn’t come around the store that much, or somebody that was new in town, they’d get me to bet him I could drink the Coke in one gulp. I remember one time Jack Tatum, who was a farmer just down the road from here, said, “Littlejohn, it’s a good thing you don’t drink liquor. You’d be a drunk.”
And then, of course, there was Rose.
Rennie’s momma had her last baby when I was eleven, in 1917. She was this little Indian girl that used to bring us water when we was all working down in the swamp. She wasn’t as dark as her brothers and older sister, had kind of a orangish color to her, skin that stayed right tan in the dead of winter and hair that was reddish-blond and curly, but not kinky. She took after the rest of her family so little that lots of people figured she must not of been Amos’s, but if he ever thought so, he didn’t let on, and he seemed like he was crazier about Rose than any of the rest.
Up past the Rock of Ages another hundred yards or so, into McDaniel property, there used to be a pond, not more than thirty feet across, where us boys would run for a quick swim at dinnertime in the summer. I wouldn’t no more do something like that now than I would walk into a fire, with all the cottonmouths and pilot snakes around here, but back in them days, we’d take all our clothes off and jump right in. Some of us, me included, never even learned how to swim, but the pond, it was just a low place where Lock’s Branch run out, and it wasn’t no more than five feet deep in the middle. Just deep enough to cool off in. They filled it in more than twenty years ago when they cut down all the trees there and started to planting soybeans.
I bet I hadn’t been down there in five years or more when, one day in the summer of 1933 when it must of been 100 degrees out and we was working in the swamp, I got this craving to go down there and get wet all over. Rennie and his brothers had gone to the house for dinner, and I was sitting by the sweet gum at the edge of the branch, not a breath of air. You could smell the crops burning.
I followed the branch past the graveyard and on into the thicket where the pond was. I took off my overalls and brogans, my socks and brown work shirt and underwear and jumped right in. I was twenty-seven then, and had thought myself a man for some time, but that water felt so good that I was splashing around like a young-un at the beach.
I never saw Rose until she jumped in right behind me. Scared me to death. I didn’t know whether it was a bear or a dog or maybe a gator. I jumped and turned around, ready to fight for my life, and here was this Indian girl, who was practically a baby last time I took notice of her, buck naked and all filled out, right in front of me.
She reached down between my legs, where no woman had reached before.
“If you want me,” she said, “you can have me.” Plain as that.
And so I did have her, right there in the sand and swamp grass along the edge of our own private play pool. Because Rose didn’t have no brothers or sisters anywhere near her age or any friends within a mile, she had pretty much had the pond to herself for the last few years, after the rest of us thought we was too old for such foolishness. She said later that she had never seen another soul there until she followed me down that July day in 1933.
Maybe it’s like this with all men. I don’t know, because I come from a generation where you won’t supposed to kiss and tell. But every woman I have ever been with has known more than me, has led me down that path, starting with sweet Rose. If you had looked at it from outside, not knowing everything, you’d of said, here’s this cradle robber taking advantage of this poor little sixteen-year-old Indian girl. He ought to be horsewhipped.
But Rose taught me everything. I was her plaything, not the other way around. I don’t know where a girl that age learned such things, but after I got over the shock of sharing myself with another human being after being locked up inside myself for years and years, I was just glad that she had.
Nobody ever talked about anybody being a virgin back then. Everybody just took it for granted that you was, especially if you was a woman but probably if you was a man, too, and there wasn’t all this stuff like them Playboy and Penthouse magazines and X-rated movies to keep people’s minds on sex all the time like there is now. People didn’t seem to think about it that much, and it probably wasn’t all that strange for a old bachelor of twenty-seven like me never to have done it. At least, that’s the way it seems to me, looking back.
The hardest thing to do was to keep it quiet. I would go all the way to Lennon’s Drug Store in Port Campbell, where I didn’t know anybody, to buy rubbers, and then I’d hide them behind a timber in the back of the little workshop me and Lex built behind the carhouse, stopping by to pick up one every time I planned to meet Rose down at the pond.
In warm weather, we’d get together whenever we could. We had this message system. If I was working by myself in the swamp or knew Rennie and his brothers was going to be way off at the other end of the farm where we wouldn’t be together at dinner, I’d put this red bandanna around my neck that Rose could see all the way up to her folks’ yard. Then, if she could get away, between housework and fixing dinner for the men, she’d tell her momma she was going for a walk. When she got a ways from the house, headed for the pond, she would do the only thing that ever made me remember that she was a Indian. She’d give a mourning-dove call. That was my signal. When I heard the mourning dove, I knew it was time to tie up the mule and head for Rose’s pond.
In cold weather, we had another plan. There was a old slave cabin, now long since tore down, back farther in the McDaniel woods, where we could be alone and warm. Sometimes we’d both slip out at night, with her giving a owl hoot as the okay signal, and go do it in the tobacco barn farthest from the house.
We went on like this for five years, and, to my knowledge, didn’t nobody ever find out. Lex might of been puzzled that I’d volunteer to work in the swamp, where the air was so heavy and still, so far away from the house, but he was glad for me to do it. And Rose had got so wild and independent as she growed older that her folks, who was getting on in years, just about give up and let her go where she pleased, no questions asked.
It all ended in 1938, one bright blue October morning at the slave cabin. The first frost was barely off the ground. I was supposed to be clearing some of the thorns out of the graveyard and took a chance that nobody would notice that I’d gone into McDaniel’s woods. Rose was waiting for me, and she didn’t beat around the bush.
“Johnny,” she said—that was what she always called me—“I’m going to have a baby.”
I started to declare that I’d been careful, when she stopped me.
“Don’t worry,” she said, “it ain’t yours.”
I knew that Rose would leave from home sometimes for a week or more, and I didn’t fool myself that I was her only lover. But it was a shock to hear that she was carrying another man’s child. She said she was two months gone, that her momma and daddy didn’t know nothing about it yet. She said she was aiming to marry Gentry Locklear, who she saw now and then, and move in with his people. She didn’t love Gentry near as much as she did me, she said.
I could of married her. I know she’d of gone along with it. I could say it might of killed Momma and them, but looking back now, it was pure lack of guts that kept me from marrying that wild, beautiful girl. If it’d been my baby, then I might of said to hell with what people say and married her anyhow. We could of had a pretty good life together, I think. But I was right sure that baby wasn’t mine, since we’d been real careful, and I couldn’t stand the snickers, didn’t think I ever could go back to Dawson Autry’s store again on a Saturday afternoon. I was a coward.
Rose and Gentry, who was about Rose’s age and a Lumbee like her, did get married, and seven months later, she give birth to this little baby that was lighter-skinned than her even. And you know what she named him? Johnny. Not John. Johnny Little Locklear. I saw her one time when the baby was little, walking down High Street in Port Campbell with her husband by her side. She didn’t speak, just looked down at the baby as we passed on the street, looked up at me and winked. Rose never come home much after she got married, and her momma and daddy didn’t live much longer. Johnny lived around Port Campbell until he joined the Army. He got killed in Vietnam, left a wife and three young-uns at home.
If I ever had a son, his name was Johnny Little Locklear.
When the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor, I was thirty-five years old, a bachelor that worked hard six days a week, sang bass in the choir on Sunday and saw Belva Culbreth on Sunday nights. Belva was a widow who went to Geddie Presbyterian, too. After Rose, she was a cold bucket of water, but it looked like everybody expected us to get married, an idea I found no pleasure in.
Lex was the eldest son, and forty-six years old to boot. No way he was going into the Army. I probably could of missed World War II myself, but I didn’t want to. If me and Belva had got married, it might of carried some weight, and if they’d come to understand that I couldn’t read and couldn’t even write my own name real well, that would of done it. But that’s not the way it happened.
It would be unfair to Belva to say that I preferred Hitler to her, the way some hateful, spiteful people in our church said I did. What it come down to was duty. Granddaddy had lost his money and Daddy his leg in the Civil War, and Gruff had went overseas in the First World War. I felt like I ought to go. There wasn’t any feeling of volunteering for certain death. It was more a feeling of excitement. The only thing I would miss, I knew, was this old farm.
When I went before the selective board in Port Campbell, I already had got some coaching from a couple of boys that hung around the store and couldn’t read much better than I could but still managed to get in the Army. I knew what to expect. The biggest problem was my name. For years, I had just signed it L. J. McCain, making such a mess of my last name that folks couldn’t tell if I’d spelt it wrong or not. I was still a heavy favorite to get Littlejohn wrong.
So when they asked me my name, I told them L. J. McCain, which was what I had put on the census last time.
They wanted to know what L.J. stood for. I told them it didn’t stand for nothing, just L.J. Period. It wasn’t totally unheard of. There was people back then that didn’t have a name except initials. And the only place my whole name was registered the way it was supposed to be spelt was in the family Bible at Momma’s. So, they bought it. They must of known I couldn’t read, the mess I made of stuff, but I was a big, healthy farmer, and the U.S. Army wasn’t being too picky in early 1942, I don’t reckon.
I left in April for basic training, where they give me dogtags reading “L (only) J (only) McCain.” For four years, I was either “McCain” or “Eljay.”
Why they sent me to cook school, I don’t know. I reckon they figured that at my age I’d be a better cook than a fighter, although it seemed to me like I was in better shape than them twenty-year-old city boys that was always complaining about the food.
For me and a lot of other farm boys just out of the Depression, we never ate so good. No more poke salad, no more pork three times a day if you were lucky.
I spent the rest of 1942 and 1943 and part of 1944 in parts of the United States that might as well of been a foreign country to me. We guarded Italian and German prisoners in Texas, helped civilian workers process sugar at a factory in Cairo, Illinois, did desert training in Arizona. It seemed like we never was going to see any fighting. Finally, though, we got our turn. I can remember walking down streets in Brooklyn, New York, waiting to ship out, and the houses would have signs out front: NO DOGS OR SERVICEMEN. There wasn’t a day I didn’t feel a little homesick. I could always get away back into some dark corner of myself and get by wherever I was, though. I would carry on conversations in my mind with Lafe, and that helped a lot.
We sailed for Marseilles, France, which everybody on the ship pronounced “Marcells.” France was a filthy place. Women going to the bathroom right alongside the road, everything dirty and nasty. Georgia tells me it’s a beautiful country now, that she’d live there if she could figure a way to make a living. I must of just caught it at a bad time.
It was the only chance I’d ever had to meet people from all over. My best friend was a crazy Polack from Toledo, Ohio, named Lewandowski. Edward Joseph Lewandowski. Me and him was together from basic on, and old Lewandowski saved me more than once. I wasn’t a bad cook, considering what we had to work with, but I couldn’t read much better than when I walked out on Miss Hattie’s class in 1917. So Ski would read the ingredients to me. He usually didn’t have to do it but once, and because I tended to go more on taste than measurements, him and me was able to improve on a lot of the stuff. He helped me through cook school, and we was together all through the war.
He’d cash my paycheck for me and help me in sending money home and, more important, in writing letters. The ones he sent Momma and them, and to Century and her family, he didn’t mess with, but he did get me in some trouble with Belva, who already thought I’d invented World War II just to get away from her. I had told Ski enough about her, I reckon, that he knew there wasn’t much between us. So one day in France on our way to Germany, he wrote some things to Belva that I don’t reckon she’d ever read before. I never found out all of it, but it was enough so that she sent me a Dear John letter right quick. All things considered, I reckon I owe Ski for that one.
I’d cover for him, trying to pay him back for looking after me. If he had a date with some French girl, which he usually did despite being married, I would finish cleaning up for him and get everything ready for breakfast. A few times, I must confess, I went with him. One time, I kept Ski from a court-martial by hitting a water tower with a rock just as the lieutenant was about to catch him sleeping on guard duty.
I see these old Army movies where everybody becomes friends for life after they met in the war. Well, I haven’t seen but one of my Army buddies since we all mustered out in January of 1946. The last time I saw Ski, he was fixing to get in a fight with some guy we didn’t even know in Louisville, Kentucky, over something Ski had said about the fella’s girlfriend. I just walked away, headed for the bus station, and by two A.M. I was on a Greyhound headed for Port Campbell. He wrote me two times, and another guy in my unit, guy named Barrera from Providence, Rhode Island, stopped by and looked me up in 1948 on the way to Florida. But Ski knew I couldn’t write and didn’t hardly expect a letter in return, and Barrera—I can’t even remember his first name anymore—didn’t have a whole lot in common with me, once the war was over.
We was luckier than most, didn’t have to be right on the front lines pushing through France. Something happened toward the end, though, and maybe it affected us so much because we had let down our guard and wasn’t braced for death no more. We were assigned to a mobile hospital unit, like what you see on the M*A*S*H TV show, and while we didn’t risk our lives every day, we saw a awful lot of blood and gore. Most of us wasn’t prepared for all we saw on the way to Germany, and more than one orderly or cook tried to get sent where he could meet the horror head-on instead of having it brought to him in bits and pieces. I think the farm boys, who had got their hands dirty a little more, maybe helped birth a calf or two, had it a little easier, but there was days nobody much felt like eating.
But as the fall of 1944 turned into winter, we could tell, just by how we was moving into the rising sun, that we was pushing them back toward the Rhine. Our casualties seemed like they was getting smaller and smaller, and we’d be taking that mess tent down and setting it up again so fast we didn’t hardly even have time to make the meals. We was picking ’em up and settin’ ’em down, as Lex used to say.
A feeling come over us that we just might beat the Germans, and we suffered more from the cold and damp than we did from incoming fire. Even the cooks had to carry M-ls, and be ready to use them, but when we crossed the Rhine and didn’t meet a whole lot of Krauts where I was, we thought we must be home free. It was hard not to think about being back home, something a lot of us hadn’t let ourselves do for a while.
Years after the war, when I could do it, I looked up the places we were at, because I didn’t have any idea where we were at the time, just that we’d crossed the Rhine and was moving farther into Germany every day.
I had bought a cheap camera in France. Most of us had one, and the old pictures are still in the cedar chest at home. I looked at them the other day, and a lot of memories come back.
There was one of these three German girls, kind of heavy-set but good-looking, pulling this little tiny cart with wheels about two feet high. They was running away from the front, and maybe they didn’t have a house to go back to, but they didn’t seem real blue about it. There was pictures of long, flat fields, might of been back home in North Carolina. They grew lots of cabbage there, and we must of cooked a ton of it, none of which I ate, I can assure you. There’s one picture of Lewandowski, Barrera and some guy from South Dakota—I can’t even remember his name—all standing in one of them fields, all with walking sticks we’d bought from some peddler, looking like they was really something. Us and the Russians got to that part of Germany about the same time, and somewhere on the other side of Frankfurt, we started running into them. They had women with them, which we couldn’t believe, although it was hard to tell that some of them was women.
The German towns that hadn’t been tore up were pretty, and you could tell they really knew how to build. There was these great big square three-story brick houses with shutters and flowers in every window, so pretty you’d near-bout forget you was in a war and this was the enemy.
We took prisoners, of course. Earlier, most of them had been shipped back to places like Texas. They seemed like good enough boys, healthy-looking, athletic types that didn’t seem a whole lot different from us. The ones over here wasn’t much different, either. I don’t recall anybody much talking about the Germans the way they did about the Japs. Fellas I knew back home would talk about them like they was the devil when they got back from the Pacific. We knew the Germans was the enemy, but we didn’t despise them. Not until right at the end.
It was early April when we got to a little village several days into Germany. I took pictures of some of the road crossings so maybe somebody back home would be able to tell me where I’d been, and from that I know we was in an area that they later put behind the Iron Curtain, not that any of us that was there would likely ever want to go back to such a place, even if it wasn’t.
The town itself, which wasn’t no bigger than Geddie, might of been a picture postcard. Outside town, there was a camp with several rows of buildings. It had barbed wire around it, so we figured the Germans had used it to hold their own prisoners of war. It wasn’t all that different from some places I’d helped guard in Texas.
The smell got to us first. We were used to the stink of death, and we’d dug our share of graves. This, though, was the rot and corruption of a dead dog left along the highway several days, but it was many times worse. We put rags over our noses as we got closer to the concrete buildings. We thought we must of happened on dead men from a battle the Germans had lost, where they’d had to leave their bodies behind in the hurry to get away.
We weren’t the first Americans there, and they said that before the day was over, even Ike showed up because he couldn’t believe what he’d been told. We met some other American boys coming away from the buildings, and a few of them was crying, something you didn’t see much of by this time. But, like I said, our guard was down. We thought we’d seen it all already.
“I want to kill somebody!” this one GI shouted out. “I want to kill Germans till my goddamn M-1 melts!”
Some of them just had their jaws set real hard, and some just had a stare that might of been focused on something fifty miles off. One boy fell out and started puking on the ground.
We come around a corner and, up ahead, against the side of one of the concrete buildings, we saw a window with wreaths on either side of it, and I remember thinking how funny it was that somebody hadn’t took down their Christmas decorations yet. Under the wreaths and the window was a pile, about four feet high and eight feet wide, that looked for the world like a cord of firewood. But the stink would of told a dead man that this wasn’t wood. It was bodies, and such bodies as none of us had ever seen before.
There must of been fifty in that one stack, more bodies than you would of thought it was possible to put in such a small pile. But these poor souls wasn’t even human anymore. Most of them must of weighed less than eighty pounds, with arms you could put your forefinger and thumb around, and legs not much bigger. We found out later that the Germans had killed them all in the last forty-eight hours, just so they wouldn’t live to see freedom. They were mostly Jews. One of them, piled on the top of the stack, had his head throwed back and looked out over the top of the blankets our medics had put over everything. His eyes was open, looking out at us upside down, like, “Why didn’t you all get here sooner?” He was just a skeleton. His stomach was just a hole between his ribs that didn’t seem to have no bottom, and he had thick black hair hanging down from the top of his skull. Most of them had been shot to death, but they would of starved anyway in a couple more days.
The saddest thing, though, were the ones still living, who looked like the dead ones, except they somehow were able to move and breathe and even talk, in German or Hebrew or something else I didn’t understand. As soon as we saw them, everybody wanted to feed them, because they looked like they might fall over dead in about five minutes. Before anybody could tell us anything different, we was giving them our tins of food and our chocolate and anything else we had.
One Jew, he might of been twenty-five or sixty, just eat up with lice, ate three Hershey bars, then fell over on the ground holding his stomach and whining like a poisoned dog. Then a couple more in other parts of what was the prison yard did the same thing. And then the medics come around, calling us shitheads and telling us this food was too rich for their systems, that they couldn’t digest it. Those poor souls, that had been tortured and beat and starved by the Germans for months and years, some of them was done in by chocolate bars.
We thought that maybe this death camp by this peaceful little town was the worst the Germans had to offer, that maybe this was where they sent spies or traitors or something. Then, not many miles from there, we was part of the cleanup at Buchenwald, and we saw that the first little camp was just a preview of the full-scale hell. The Germans had moved most of the Jews out just before we got there, but there was these stacks everywhere with fifty to a hundred bodies in them, and the smell was too much to be believed.
There was a chaplain with us, a Jewish fella, rabbi I reckon. He must of seen something moving in one of them piles, because he goes over and almost throws himself on all the stink and rot, and out of these bodies comes a little boy not more than ten years old. I reckon the Germans had give him up for dead. The rabbi, who had been with us all the way through France and Germany, is laughing and crying all at the same time, just overcome like the rest of us. And the little boy doesn’t do anything, doesn’t laugh or cry or even blink, just looks at us with the biggest, deadest eyes you ever saw. I wonder what happened to him, how he could of lived a life after all that.
It was somewhere around there that they caught the two SS guards. I remember it was the same day I took the picture of Lewandowski and two other boys in our company standing in front of a sign that said WEIMAR and BAD BERKA, which was two towns right nearby. Lewandowski is sitting there in a squat like a hind catcher, resting on the sign, cigarette in his mouth, a match and matchbox in his hands, like he can’t wait for the picture to be took so he can smoke another Lucky. That’s the way I remember him.
Anyhow, on that same day, they caught some Germans trying to get some of the prisoners that was still alive out of the area. Nobody was in a real good mood. We had been coming across horror after horror until we thought horror was all we would ever be able to see again. Men, women, children, all either starved or tortured to death or just shot when they wouldn’t die.
These two German SS men, probably like sergeants, was apparently trying to march a group of Jews farther east when they got cut off. Some of the prisoners told us things they had done, and all the great roaring rage that had filled us for the past few days exploded. The officers didn’t try to do anything about it, either. These were great big fellas, huge muscles, one of them had a tattoo on his arm with foreign words on it. They looked scared. Several GIs made them get down on their knees, with their hands tied behind their backs, and then they let the prisoners, them that was strong enough, beat them to death with any kind of clubs they could find. It took a long time, because there wasn’t many prisoners that could still lift and swing a stick. Some, even after what they had been through, wouldn’t have any part of it. I reckon they couldn’t believe it could be happening. Finally, some of the soldiers finished them off and we threw their bodies in a pit. And nobody ever said anything to any of us about it, one way or the other.
By May, the Germans had surrendered, and by June we was heading back west, toward a ship to carry us to the Pacific to fight the Japs. We left from Le Havre, France, on the General Henry Taylor. We heard about the bombs in Japan while we was still in the Atlantic. Not too long after we had went through the Panama Canal, while we was wondering how much longer the Japs could hang on, the captain came over the bullhorn and said, “Watch the shadow of this ship … as it turns toward New York.”
It took until early ’46 to get out and head home, and in some ways the last few months was the longest, just waiting and counting the days. I saw boys go AWOL and get in big trouble that had followed every order all the way across Europe.
Not me, though. I wanted to get home too bad to mess it up now. It’s queer to me now to hear Georgia talk about how warm and friendly the European people are. She goes on vacation over there every chance she gets, and she can’t get enough of it. To me, it was a place where God didn’t live. Oh, I know God is everywhere, but maybe sometimes, in some places, He leaves for a while just to see what happens while He’s gone, or maybe to test folks like He did Job. There must of been all kinds of people of France and Germany and England that looked up in a sky full of bombs and hopelessness and asked, “My God, why have you forsaken me?”
There was times, on that long trip into Germany, and especially after we knew what the Nazis had done, when it passed through me like a knife that the devil might be winning, that the whole world might be lost. It chilled me so that my bones ached all the way down to my elbows, and I would take out my Bible that I couldn’t read, just to hold it.
There was a church, what they would call a cathedral, I reckon, somewhere in Germany that had been bombed all to pieces, I don’t know whether by them or by us. There was a chapel there that still had a little catwalk standing along the back, even though the room and most of the insides had been blown away. I climbed up on the catwalk with my camera, aiming to take a picture looking down into the sanctuary. At the back, farthest from me, was a statue of Christ on the cross, must of been twenty feet high, between two long, high windows that had had stained glass in them before the bombs fell. The statue wasn’t touched by any of the bombing around it, except that Jesus’ head was gone. While I looked at it, on that cold early spring day, with the wind a-howling, a cloud passed over the sun and threw everything into deep shade, and it seemed like I could hear the devil laughing in that wind. I got down from there real fast, holding on to my Bible in my shirt pocket like it might keep Satan away.
After Buchenwald, whenever we would go into another German town, I would look at the people, just sit on a wall and stare at them for hours on end when I was off duty, trying to see what was different, what might of made them do something like they did to the Jews. And nothing I saw was much different from what you might of seen if you had sat on a bench at Dawson Autry’s store in East Geddie, assuming East Geddie had just been captured by a foreign army. They was just people. They didn’t have fangs or six fingers. They didn’t slap their wives and children around so as I could see. They had dogs and cats, they raised gardens, they went to church on Sunday.
What it finally brought me to was slaves. I got to thinking about stories I’d heard about Aunt Mallie, how Granddaddy had took her away from most of her children, without ever thinking a thing about it, and how them and all the colored people had been chained up and shipped over from Africa, about drawings I had seen of colored families being sold separate at the slave auction in Port Campbell. And I wondered if Satan couldn’t live in a place, cheek by jowl with good Christian folks, without them ever realizing he was there until it was too late.
I had known the power of Jesus, even after Lafe died, even when I was being tormented and teased because I wasn’t able to learn how to read. It took Germany in 1945 to show me the power of the devil, though, and even when we was sailing out of Le Havre, I had the feeling that he might rise up out of the ground over Europe any time God turned His back for a minute. It was one of the great reliefs of my life to see the whole damned place disappear from my sight.