Littlejohn Read online

  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 someth
ing 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.

  CHAPTER NINE

  August 1

  Growing up around Daddy and Uncle Lex and Aunt Connie and Grandma, without any brothers or sisters, made me feel like the Chosen Child at times, with four people so much older lavishing so much praise and attention on me all the time. Mo
m was a lot younger and didn’t put up with as much as Daddy and the rest did.

  But it also made me a little uneasy. Who’s going to take care of all these people? I’d think to my eight-year-old self. I was already intelligent enough to know that Daddy and Lex and Connie were going to take care of Grandma until she died, and that they’d done the same for Granddaddy, who died long before I was born, and that it had always been that way. I’d envy Uncle Gruff and Aunt Century for somehow escaping. Which is how I came to view our farm and East Geddie—as a place from which to escape.

  It made Daddy and Mom feel bad, I know, when I’d tell them, during high school and college years, that there was nothing on earth that could make me stay in East Geddie.

  “It’s not you,” I’d say once in a while when they seemed especially cut to the quick. “It’s just this place.”

  Which was only partly true, in retrospect. It would not have been a wonderful life, coming back to East Geddie to run a farm and live among people who knew everything about me and my parents and probably my grandparents. I went back to my twenty-year high school reunion, which they held at a Holiday Inn twenty miles from the old school, for some reason. It was “dry,” which didn’t seem to bother anyone else. I wished that I’d brought a fifth. The worst thing was that these people, who all grew up together, seem to visit each other about as often as if they lived in separate states. There were people there who live five miles apart who seemed to be catching up on five years of news. One of the few pleasant things I could imagine about a return to East Geddie was the fantasy of getting back together with my oldest friends, after we’d raised our families and had our careers—sort of like one of those sitcom reprises where all the characters from a fifties or sixties show come back as adults under some trumped-up premise and pick up where they left off. But I don’t believe it happens that way in real life. Not in East Geddie, anyhow.