Eddie's Bastard

by William Kowalski

  “Guten nacht, boy,” said Fatti.

  “Guten nacht, Fatti,” I said, and I fell asleep again, this time free of nightmares.

  The next day was Sunday. Working on Sundays was absolutely forbidden, not by Fatti and Mutti but by the mysterious and all-powerful Gott; so after the milking, which Gott didn’t seem to mind, the entire family dressed in their best clothes and went to church. Ordinarily the Shumachers conveyed themselves to the Lutheran chapel in a convoy consisting of two pickup trucks and a sedan, but today was different. During breakfast, Fatti verbally commandeered one of the pickups. He and I, he announced mysteriously, were not going to church, but somewhere else, somewhere secret; it was personal business, and nobody was to ask me about it afterward. Adam, who after only a few days on the farm already couldn’t bear to be separated from me, would come also.

  Mutti looked worried. A day of worship missed was an open invitation to the devil, she said; though she didn’t continue this thought out loud, I could tell she feared that Fatti was putting my mortal soul in danger for some fool reason that had popped into his head out of nowhere. Gott would not like it one bit if I wasn’t in church that morning. I didn’t volunteer that I’d never been to church in my life. This information would have shocked Mutti beyond speech. There was no telling what strenuous exorcism would have to be performed over me to set me right again, but whatever it would be, I knew it would be awful, and I wanted to avoid it.

  This was the closest they ever came to having an argument in my presence. Mutti shot Fatti a look over the table that was loaded with unspoken admonitions, speeches, and protests; Fatti, normally not at all despotic in his nominal role as head of the family, nearly wilted under her steady gaze, and appeared to be caving in. I was intensely excited, but I said nothing that might jeopardize his position. I had no idea where he intended to take me, but I wanted to go very much.

  The battle between them raged all through breakfast without another word being spoken. The Shumacher children watched this with great interest; this was how major issues in the family were decided, not with arguments but through some kind of marital telepathy between their parents. First Mutti folded her hands and rested her chin on them, staring at Fatti without blinking. Fatti busied himself with tucking his napkin into his shirt, taking an extraordinarily long time to do it. He smoothed out any possible wrinkles and made sure it was symmetrically aligned over his buttons. Then he picked up his fork and looked at Mutti with his eyebrows raised, the picture of husbandly innocence. Mutti rolled her eyes and began eating. But after one bite she put her fork down and looked at him again, this time with her arms folded. Fatti raised his hands in a hopeless gesture, as if to say he was obeying some higher law that could not be ignored; though he wouldn’t say it, or perhaps even dare think it, the implication was that this law superseded even Mutti’s authority, and therefore must be very great indeed. In fact, it could come only from Gott himself. There was even a hint that Gott had perhaps bypassed Mutti on this issue and gone straight to Fatti. It was not unheard of. It had happened before. But if Mutti was going to put her stamp on it, some hard evidence would have to be presented that this was the case.

  Fatti put a forkful of pancake in his mouth and, chewing it mightily, put his elbows on the table and looked at her, secure suddenly in his decision. Mutti’s shoulders slumped and her head went to one side. She wouldn’t look at him for several moments. Then she sighed heavily, picked up her fork again, and began eating. The argument was over; Fatti had won, although it was clear he would pay a heavy price later. All the children, who had been watching with bated breath, breathed out the tension that had been mounting inside them and began to eat.

  “You’re not taking him to the circus, are you?” said Marky miserably, and the entire table exploded into mad laughter. Marky winced. It was explained to me later that when a county fair had been held in Eden a year ago, Marky had had a broken leg and couldn’t go, and for a Shumacher child to miss a yearly fair—which they called “the circus”—was only slightly less heartbreaking than the death of a loved one.

  Fatti steered the pickup into the driveway of a tiny house and turned off the engine. He didn’t immediately move to get out; instead he appeared to be thinking hard about how best to proceed. His giant knuckles rapped out a tattoo on the steering wheel as he watched the house carefully.

  “Yah,” he said suddenly. “Okay. She has seen us.”

  “Who?” I said, alarmed.

  “Frau Weiler,” he said, “who is the lady we’re visiting now. Okay. Listen. Whatever she does, don’t be scared. She’s a nice lady and she won’t hurt you. Don’t say anything unless she talks to you first. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, not at all sure what it meant, and we got out of the truck and walked toward the house.

  The front door opened before we could knock. There before us stood a wizened old woman, only slightly taller than I was, stooped with age and heavily wrinkled. She wore a long black dress with a black shawl over her shoulders, and on her head was a white lace bonnet tied under her chin. Adam got behind me and wrapped himself around my leg. I nearly did the same to Fatti, but he had removed his hat and was speaking to the woman in low, respectful tones, not in English but in German, and I didn’t dare move. The old lady nodded as he spoke, and when he finished speaking she opened the door and stepped aside to let us in.

  The interior of the house was lit with two kerosene lamps, which did little to penetrate the darkness. I could see dimly that it was only a two- or three-room house, sparsely furnished. It smelled of some strange smoke that I didn’t recognize. There were no photographs on the wall and no mirrors; nor, it appeared, was there any sort of electrical appliance. The old woman pointed to a long bench against one wall. The three of us sat down on it. Fatti got up again to drag a straight-backed wooden chair over. Frau Weiler sat in it, facing us, and fixed me with her eyes.

  I was transfixed. Frau Weiler’s eyes, unlike the rest of her, burned with fierce youth. They were a clear gray, her pupils twinkling like sunlight on the Lake in summertime; and though the rest of her was grim and fearsome, and her close-set lips did not alter in the slightest, her eyes were laughing, not at me but at something much bigger than I, than she, than all of us combined. It was not a mocking laugh. It was a laugh of joy, of recognition. I looked into these eyes and began to feel as though the old lady was communicating something to me. Then she looked at Adam, who was still clinging to me, and her eyes changed, softened somewhat. She looked as if she might shed a tear or two. Tiny Adam looked back at her, unafraid; slowly his grip on my coat loosened, and he leaned back against the bench, put his head on my shoulder, and, incredibly, began snoring.

  The old woman spoke to Fatti now—her voice, though scratched like an overplayed record, was strong like her eyes—and he got up again and retrieved a small high table, which he set next to her. The table had a single drawer in it, and from this Frau Weiler produced a candle, some matches, and a small tin, which had once held throat lozenges. This she opened with reverence and set upon the table. From it she produced a sort of green stick that looked vaguely plantlike. She lit the candle with the matches and held the green stick to the flame. It began to smolder and give off a pungent odor. She held it under her nose, wafting it back and forth for several minutes, breathing in the smoke. Gradually the cloud grew and encompassed me, and I couldn’t help but inhale it; it was nothing like cigarette smoke, but infinitely more pleasant, almost flavorful. I began to relax a bit more. I’d never smelled this kind of smoke before, but many years later, when I smelled it again, I would flash back instantly to that Sunday morning in the old Mennonite witch’s house. It was the smell of marijuana.

  The old lady fixed me with her eyes again, and this time I looked into her eyes and saw many things there, things that seemed familiar, but that I hadn’t known I knew. I don’t know what they were now; they weren’t objects, or images, but more amorphous kinds of things: feelings, perhaps, or moods, or ideas. Everyt
hing made perfect sense at that moment; I’ve never felt the need to sort it all out in a logical way. We continued to look at each other for some time.

  “Tell me your first name,” she commanded me suddenly, in unaccented American English. “Nothing else. Just your name.”

  I told her.

  Instantly she began speaking in German again, addressing herself to Fatti but still looking at me. Her voice was low now, singsong, and sent me into a kind of trance. The pitch and volume of her voice remained constant and she went on for a long time, just talking, and instead of growing uncomfortable or bored, I listened and let her words come into me. I was aware of everything, but my attention seemed to focus of its own accord on some little pinpoint of consciousness somewhere indefinable. I watched this little pinpoint as it grew into a larger thing, slowly taking me over. I surrendered to it, and it was warm and good.

  The next thing I was aware of was that we were back in the pickup truck. I came back to myself in gradual stages. Adam was still sleeping against me, as if we hadn’t moved or been moved but had suddenly materialized in the pickup from the bench in the little house. Fatti was relaxed, driving carefully on the still-slippery roads, occasionally laughing a little at some private joke. Nothing more was said about Frau Weiler for the rest of the day, and in accordance with Fatti’s instructions, no one asked me where we had been or what had taken place. I spent the rest of the day in dreamtime, watching the family go through their Sunday routine. Occasionally the memory of Frau Weiler’s eyes came back to me.

  That night as I lay in bed, Fatti came into the room again to take me to the bathroom. I hadn’t yet gone to sleep; I wasn’t restless, just quietly looking up into the blackness beyond the thick rafters of the ceiling. The Shumacher house was even older than the farmhouse I shared with Grandpa, and in the ancient timbers one could still see the adze marks of the men who had hewn the beams out of living trees. It was the same in the barn, where I played among the hay bales. There were old messages carved into some of the beams, graffiti so old that they were no longer considered vandalism but history: WILHELM SHUMACHER SLEPT HERE, 1898. ELLA LOVES GERHARDT. EDEN ÜBER ALLES.

  “That old lady told me something about you,” said Fatti.

  I’d been waiting all day for him to interpret what had happened.

  “She says that dream is old. You too are old. Other things happened to you, in other times. Another body too. That girl you dream of—she was you. Or you were her.”

  I said nothing, digesting this. Fatti was staring out the window at the moonlit pastureland. It was a clear night and there were no streetlights to interfere with the stars. The Big Dipper hung low over the horizon, its handle pointing the way north, to the lake and to whatever lay beyond it.

  “I go to see her sometimes,” said Fatti. “Not too much. Every few years. When I have a question. When I was a young man, I went to her to ask her what should I do. I wanted to go to sea, you know. Be a sailor, like my Great-Uncle Wilhelm. But I also loved Mutti, before she was Mutti. I wanted to marry her, but I knew I couldn’t do both things. If I went away to sea she would marry some other guy. So I went to Frau Weiler. She said, ‘Amos, you do what your heart says.’ She looked at me like she looked at you—strong, with those eyes. Even then she was old. That was almost thirty years ago. She don’t give answers, that old lady. She just tells you the question another way, so you understand it. But she knows everything. All she needs is your name, and she knows you.”

  “What did she tell you?”

  “That you are old, much older than seven. And you have been here before, like the rest of us. And that you are here again to find something.”

  “What do you mean, I’ve been here before?”

  “We always come back,” he said. “We come in groups.”

  “Who?”

  “Souls.”

  Fatti turned away from the window and looked at me carefully. “Does your grandfather tell you stories?”

  “All the time.”

  “Which ones?”

  I shrugged. “About the war, when he was on an island. And about my dad. And about his dad. And Willie Mann.”

  “What about Willie Mann?”

  “Just stories. He was in the Civil War.”

  “Yah. I know. Everyone knows about Willie Mann,” said Fatti.

  “They do?”

  “Yah. It’s a popular story.”

  “Which one?”

  “How he found the money,” said Fatti.

  “Found the money?” I’d never heard this story before. “You mean how he got rich?”

  “Yah. You don’t know that story?”

  “No. Tell it.”

  Fatti shook his head. “Not right,” he said sadly. “I wish I could, but I can’t.”

  “How come?”

  “Frau Weiler said not to,” he said simply. “Your grandfather knows it. He didn’t tell you yet?”

  “No.”

  “Then there must be a reason for that,” Fatti said firmly. “I am not your blood, and it’s not right for me to interfere with his wishes. He’ll tell you when he is ready to tell you.”

  “Is it a secret?”

  “No. It’s not a secret. Everyone knows it. So I don’t know why you don’t know it. But there must be a reason, or he would have told you. It has something to do with this dream you are having every night.”

  “Does Mutti know it?”

  “Yah.”

  “Does Amos Junior know it?”

  “Yah.”

  “Do Elsa and Hildy know it?”

  “Stop it, boy. Don’t ask any of them. Ask your grandfather. He’ll tell you.”

  “Okay,” I said, resigned.

  “You want to pee now?”

  “Yah,” I said. I was beginning to talk like a Shumacher. I got up and peed and then went back to sleep, and when I dreamed again that night I was free of the nightmare. I dreamed instead of Adam. In my dream, he could talk, and he wasn’t afraid of anything. We played in the woods together, and there were no soldiers in green uniforms and pointed hats to chase us; and I wasn’t a girl who had lived here long ago and whose soul had come back to find something, but myself, Billy Mann, son of fighter pilot Eddie, grandson of Grandpa, great-great-grandson of Willie Mann, the most famous man in Erie County.

  Three more weeks passed and Christmas drew near. I’d spoken several times with Grandpa on the telephone. His voice was strong and healthy now, and when I talked to him a great homesickness welled up in me. I wanted to ask him about how Willie Mann found the money, but whenever I talked to him I cried and forgot to ask. But I knew I’d be seeing him again soon because he was almost better; and we would live together in the old farmhouse like we always had, and he would continue to tell me stories. And after Christmas I was to go to school.

  I was still opposed to the idea of schooling, but I had held several lengthy conversations on the subject with Marky, who told me that school was not at all bad if you kept your mouth shut and were polite to everyone, most of all to the teacher. He dwelt particularly on the charms of a certain girl who sat in front of him. I lost interest after she came up in the conversation—I even walked away in the middle of it, and I believe Marky kept on talking about her to himself for several minutes anyway—but I was somewhat reassured about the whole business.

  I was engaged in teaching Adam how to talk again. His vocal cords were returning to normal, and he was able to say a few words before he had to stop. I hadn’t told him I was leaving. I knew he would want to come with me, but I’d overheard Fatti and Mutti talking one day and I knew they were going to try to adopt him. After that, they would stop taking in other children. Trevor had soured them somewhat. The twenty-year-long parade of strange children marching through their home was coming to an end. Adam was too fragile to withstand a child like Trevor, should another one happen along. They’d decided to adopt him because Adam’s real father had shown up a week earlier.

  He was white trash all over, a real Simpsonesque k
ind of guy; I could tell that from the moment he got out of his car, a brown Trans Am with an orange ball on the antenna. He was drunk and smelled like sour beer. I was playing out in the yard. Adam, for once, was not stuck to my side. He was in the house with the girls. It was a lucky thing, too, or things might have gone much worse than they did.

  “Hey, you kid,” said the man, “where’s Adam?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. He was a small man, but he looked dangerous. Behind me I heard the front door slam. I didn’t turn around. I was afraid to take my eyes off him. He was that sneaky-looking.

  “You’re lying,” said the man. “You lie like a rug.” He advanced toward me. I stepped backward and fell down.

  “Aw,” he said, “kiddo fall down and go boom?”

  “Shut up, you fag,” I said, using the word I’d learned from Trevor. I got up again.

  “What did you say?” He came toward me faster.

  “Fatti!” I screamed. “Amos Junior!”

  The man hesitated. “Aw, don’t do that,” he said. “I just want to get my kid.”

  The front door opened again and I heard the welcome sound of heavy male footsteps on the porch. It was not Fatti, but Amos Junior. Even though he was smaller than his father, he was easily half again as large as this smelly little man.

  “Hello,” said Amos Junior politely. “You have to leave. Now. No discussion.” This was somewhat of a routine for the Shumacher family. From time to time the unruly parent or parents of one of their temporary children would appear and demand them back. The Shumachers had established a drill they followed: either Amos Junior or Fatti was around the house at all times, just in case someone showed up, and they politely but firmly escorted the parent from the property while one of the women called the police.

  “I got rights to my kid,” said the man. He had a nose like a rat, and his voice was whiny now that he was dealing with someone larger than himself.

  “Actually, you don’t,” said Amos Junior. He was still trying to be polite, but it was becoming an effort. He’d grown very fond of Adam himself, even though the boy was still afraid of him. “You lost your rights to him when you grabbed him by the neck and pinned him to the wall. Don’t you think so? Am I right?”