Peter was silent for a few seconds before I heard him sniff. When he spoke again his voice was thick and controlled. “He doesn’t understand you. He wasn’t always disappointed. He had high hopes for you to follow in his footsteps, like Henry and Aaron. When you turned out to be different, more like your mother’s family, he was disappointed.”
There was a long pause while neither of us spoke. I knew he was right. How he knew, I had no idea, but he was right. Dad changed when I started showing less of an interest in the farm and more of an interest in reading and studying and filling my head with what he considered worthless information. The change had been subtle, so subtle that I had hardly noticed, like growth, slow, almost imperceptible, but taking place nonetheless. But once full-grown, I couldn’t help but notice.
At last, Peter sniffed again and said, “He blames it on himself.”
“Blames what on himself?”
“He thinks it’s his fault that you turned out different, that in some way he failed you and didn’t rear you properly. He thinks he cheated you.”
There was another pause in the conversation. I could see the logic in Peter’s words but the reality of them was unlikely. Dad never showed even a glimmer of self-blame for my disinterest in manual labor.
In the middle of my thoughts, Peter spoke again. “Believe it or not, he’s more disappointed in himself than he is in you. He blames the fact that he’s disappointed in you on his own weakness as a father.”
My throat tightened and a knot the size of a grapefruit lodged behind my Adam’s apple making it impossible to swallow. Tears blurred my eyes and my nose began to run. Peter was right again. I didn’t know how, but I knew he was. Love for my dad swelled in my chest. All these years he’d been beating himself up because he’d blamed our differences on himself. I wanted to find him and hug him, tell him I loved him and that he hadn’t failed me and had no need to be disappointed in himself or me. We were just different, but love can build bridges between differences. I wanted to be a little boy again and sit in my dad’s lap, feel his thick arms around me, smell the farm on his clothes and the sweat in his hair. I had to find them. I had to save them if I could.
I was ready to die trying.
Sensing my remorse, Peter rolled to his side and placed a hand on my chest. It was a gesture of friendship and support, nothing more. A deep trenchant heat spread throughout my chest, warming not only my physical body—skin, muscle, bone, organs—but my soul as well. “He loves you, Billy, and he knows you’re on the way. Tomorrow . . . please, please trust. No matter what happens you have to trust.”
I managed to swallow past the grapefruit and squeeze out two words: “I will.”
31
That night my sleep was steadied by the gentle pitter-patter of rain on the lean-to, like a woman’s slender fingers drumming, drumming, punctuated by the occasional distant rumble of thunder. I dipped in and out of sleep much like a duck dives for fish, remains submerged for a time, then resurfaces, only to dip below the water line again and repeat the process. My body was fatigued from the physical exertion of the day, the emotional exertion of my face-to-face with Momma Bear, and a lack of food. My body’s supply of energy was nearly exhausted. I’d hoped that a good night’s sleep would prove profitable in replenishing some of those stores. Whether it did or not, I do not know, but when I awoke in the morning I felt unnaturally refreshed.
The first thing I noticed upon waking was that it was still raining. The light from the morning sun was muted by an overcast sky, which I couldn’t see from under the lean-to but knew well enough to recognize. Slightly larger than mist and steady as a thousand ticking clocks all out of sync, rain drops fell from the heavens and played a disjointed rhythm on the leafy ground.
The second thing I noticed was that Peter was gone.
Initially, I did not think it strange that my new friend was not under the cover of the lean-to. He may have stepped out into the liquid atmosphere for any number of reasons, the primary one being the reason I was about to: the water I filled my belly with last night had worked its way from my bloodstream to my kidneys to my bladder. And my bladder now begged to be rid of it.
I got to my knees, stretched my arms overhead, then behind my back, and brushed the ground off my shoulders and sleeves of my jacket. Standing to a crouch, I then exited the lean-to and felt the cool rain tickle my head and face. It was a chilly morning, not cold enough to invoke a shiver, but cool enough to make the rain feel like icy droplets on my skin. Looking up and past the blanket of leaves I found the overcast sky that I had imagined. The high layer of stratus clouds were so gray and textured that they reminded me of the corrugated steel atop the chicken coop on our farm. I now knew how the chickens felt when they awoke in the morning expecting to find a sunny, blue sky and instead looked up at a ceiling as cold and dreary as death.
Death. I didn’t want to think of that word and promised myself I would not entertain the thought any more until Dad and Pop and Henry were safe at home and the Nazis were properly disposed of.
The air was thick with the musty aroma of wet dirt and decomposing leaves.
Wiping the rain from my face, I found a tree and quickly took care of business, all the while keeping a lookout for Peter.
When he did not show and when my hair was sufficiently plastered to my skull, I returned to the lean-to and checked where he had been laying. The place was empty save for one object: the pillbox. My breath caught in my throat and I immediately knew I was alone. Peter was gone and not coming back. Whether he was taken or had abandoned me of his own free will, I couldn’t know, but I did know my rescuer, my guide, and my friend was gone. A sudden surge of panic gripped my chest and squeezed like a vice. I looked around hoping this was all a misunderstanding, imagining Peter’s familiar form sauntering out of the woods, soaked hair stuck to his head, a bright smile stretched across his face. Maybe my feeling of aloneness was just that, a feeling, unbidden, unwanted, and unwarranted. A trick of my imagination; my phobia getting the best of me.
But something told me it was real, that my feeling was more than sentiment, it was a knowing. Once again, I was alone in the woods, lost, without food or water or direction, with only a single purpose but no way to act upon it.
I was helpless.
I wanted to call out for Peter. Maybe he was still nearby, close enough to hear my plea and rescue me yet again. But reason told me that the Nazis might be close, too, closer than I knew and may hear my call as well. If I had one advantage left, one bullet left in my gun, it was the element of surprise. No doubt the Nazis knew I would follow them, try to track them down, but they didn’t know when I would find them (or even if I would find them) and from what direction I’d be coming. If I could surprise them, somehow catch them at a low point, in the middle of the night or while they were preoccupied with some other task, I might have a fighting chance.
Restraining my urge to panic and scream for help, I sat down to think, to plan, to formulate. Thus far, my planning had gotten me nowhere. Henry and I had planned and failed to find Pop. We’d planned and failed to rescue Dad and the others. Henry had, in fact, been taken captive. I’d planned and failed to rescue Henry, and had, in fact, gotten myself captured. Then, I didn’t listen to Peter and planned to go back to the house and rescue my loved ones, only to fail again by finding the house empty. I didn’t have a very good track record when it came to planning and formulating.
With this past history in mind, I tried to think like Peter. What would Peter do were he in my shoes? One word echoed through my mind, like the sound from a splashing stone bouncing its way up the walls of our well: Trust. He’d said it enough, hadn’t he? His final words to me the previous night were about trust. Tomorrow . . . please, please trust. No matter what happens you have to trust. He seemed intent on me trusting and understanding that everything would ride on my ability to trust God fully.
At once another thought hit me: Peter must have known I would find myself in this predicament. He must
have been preparing me for it.
He had abandoned me. Left me to find and take on the Nazis by myself.
Fingering the pillbox, caressing the words—so foreign and yet so intimately personal—I tried to make sense out of what the morning had delivered. I opened the box and extracted the scraps of paper. There were ten, maybe twelve in all. Slivers of paper no more than one inch by one-half inch in size, folded in halves and quarters. The last time I looked at them, the small writing on each piece was in some kind of code, indecipherable to someone whose eyes were not trained in code-cracking, not accustomed to picking up the subtle patterns and consistencies of an airtight secret language.
But when I unfolded one of the scraps this time it was as if scales of ignorance had fallen from my eyes, and I could see clearly. Written on the paper in plain English were words I could both read and understand. I turned it over to make sure the code wasn’t on the other side. Blank. Pulling the other pieces from the box, I opened each one and found the same alteration. Not a single one of them contained a bit of code. Either Peter had switched scraps of paper when I wasn’t looking or I was witness to a true miracle.
My discovery revealed that on each sliver of paper, written in very small script, was a passage of Scripture.
On one: The God of my rock; in him will I trust: he is my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my high tower, and my refuge, my saviour; thou savest me from violence. Which I knew came from one of the books of Samuel.
On another a stanza of a psalm: O Lord my God, in thee do I put my trust: save me from all them that persecute me, and deliver me.
And on another: Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him: but I will maintain mine own ways before him. From the book of Job.
On and on they went, all talking about trusting the Lord, until I came to the last one, the twelfth slip: O my God, I trust in thee: let me not be ashamed, let not mine enemies triumph over me. Which I knew to be Psalm 25:2. I had memorized the verse in the second grade.
The words brought comfort to me, warmed my soul and brought repair to my frayed nerves. They were like salve on a wound or a bowl of Mom’s chili on a frigid winter day. On the slips of paper, twelve scraps with hand-scrawled words, I found the Word of God just as alive and potent as anything in any leather-bound Bible.
Peter had left me with one last exhortation, a final embrace. I doubted I would ever see him again, I assumed he had wandered off in search of an opportunity to gain some level of anonymity in the American public life and blend with the people that were once his enemies in hopes of starting a new life and regarding them as neighbors. I couldn’t be angry with him. He’d saved my life on more than one occasion and this was no longer his battle. It never was. He was a savior of sorts, but even saviors (mortal ones, that is) have limitations.
Now, I would have to rely on my Savior, my Shepherd, to guide me.
Help me to trust you, I prayed, replacing the scraps of paper in the pillbox. I want to trust. I do trust. I dropped the box in my pocket.
Almost immediately I felt a need to arise and set out in search of my loved ones. And when I stood and ventured out from under the shelter of the lean-to the need became a pull. It was as if my body was the negative pole of a magnet and my kin were positive poles. Northeast. I had to head northeast. But with the sky shielded by clouds, I had no way to position the sun. I was turned around on Bear Mountain and didn’t know north from south or east or west.
Suddenly, the pull came again, and I could only assume it was coming from the northeast.
Like an asteroid caught in the earth’s gravitational pull, I headed northeast, on a collision course with fate. Or providence.
32
Sometimes when it rains, the heavens seem to filter the moisture through the clouds, like Mom sifts baking flour, and the droplets are miniscule and many. At other times great drops rain from the sky, God’s version of carpet-bombing the earth. And at other times the rain is so heavy and thick it’s as if the clouds are sacks of water and some heavenly being, maybe an angel or maybe God Himself, splits them with a butcher knife and the contents just fall to the earth.
As I ran through the woods, dodging trees, feeling like an ant evading great blades of grass, great droplets of water fell from the sky and clattered all around me. The rain had picked up and came in waves, like curtains of water extending from the gray firmament above me to the hard-packed soil of the earth beneath my feet. Occasionally it would lighten to a steady downpour only to gain momentum and once again pummel me with tiny water bombs.
My clothes were soaked, adding another ten pounds to my thin frame and causing my lungs, which felt like they were laden with sharp stones, to put in more overtime than they were prepared for.
Drawn northeast by the undetectable force that drew me on, I had to stop every twenty minutes or so and let the lactic acid bleed from my muscles. They were sponges at the saturation point and needed time to drain.
After a short rest and bout of rubbing my legs and calming my diaphragm I would be off again running northeastward, always north and east. The longer I ran and the closer I got to wherever it was the pull was taking me the more the intensity of the strange magnetism increased to the point that I think I would have been hard-pressed and possibly unable to reverse or change my direction even if I had wanted to. I was obligated, compelled, duty-bound to follow the draw that pulled me forward.
Without a watch I would have been lost in a timeless warp because the overcast sky and thick rain subdued the sunlight to an even melancholy hue throughout the day. At one time I thought it to be around ten o’clock in the morning but when I looked at my watch it read nearly two in the afternoon. Time was racing faster than my legs.
Though I lacked food, my stomach did not protest or grumble. Anxiety and unease had filled it, suffocating any pangs of hunger.
After a short burst of the will to ascend a steep slope, I fell to my seat on a fallen sycamore and nursed my throbbing legs. My pulse thumped in my ears, and my lungs sucked at the cool air. The rain had nearly stopped, only an occasional stray droplet splattered here and there. I looked at my watch and noticed it was a little past six—supper time back home. The sky was still the color of slate with the apparent weightiness of a slate roof. If the sun had been trying to break through all day it had tried in vain.
Five minutes later, my lungs emptied of the rocks, my spongy quadriceps sufficiently drained, I stood to resume my journey. I didn’t know how much farther I had to go, and the muted light of day would soon be waning. If I didn’t reach my destination by nightfall I’d have to find someplace to spend the night. I’d try to build a lean-to like Peter’s though I knew mine would be a shack compared to his mansion.
At first, when I heard the scream I thought it was an animal, a peacock or bobcat. I stopped and listened, holding my breath and freezing my muscles. There, again. It was no animal. The scream of a peacock and the screech of a bobcat both have a decidedly female quality to them. What I heard was deeper and more masculine. My heart stammered and my palms immediately took to sweating. I was close. The sound was distant but within hearing range which meant not too far away. Probably no more than three-quarters of a mile. Northeast.
I took off running, stopping periodically to listen for the scream and each time was rewarded with an answer. My mind ran with all sorts of torture methods that could induce that kind of scream from a grown man. And each time I pictured Dad or Pop or Henry as the recipient of the torture. And each time I pushed the thought from my head and pressed onward a little harder.
Within minutes the screams sounded like they were just out of sight. I stopped and listened. Each bout was preceded by a firm, yet wet sounding thump, and followed by laughter and echoes of the pain-filled bawls.
Bent at the waist, I scurried from tree to tree, using the natural cover of the woods and the weakening light to my advantage. Since the leaves were wet my footfalls were soundless.
The closer I crept the clearer the sounds of tort
ure became. German discussion. Wet, heavy thud. Howls of pain. Laughter. Mockery. More German, angry, filled with bloodlust.
Dashing behind a particularly thick oak, I peered out from behind it and caught sight of the scene as it played out. A man, stripped naked to the waist, dangled by his hands from a low-hanging tree limb. His feet were no more than twelve to eighteen inches off the ground. His torso was grotesquely swollen and mottled with large patches of red and blue. With his arms suspended above his head as they were, his disjointed and fractured ribs were clearly evident. The four Germans encircled him like a pack of wolves, hungry carnivores toying with their prey before going in for the kill.
The big one, the grizzly leader, held a large stick the size and width of a baseball bat in his hands. With a grunt, he took a sweeping swing and landed it squarely along the man’s flank, cracking ribs like toothpicks. The sound was sickening. It reminded me of the time I dropped a watermelon from the barn loft. The man’s body twitched and a howl of agony escaped his beaten lungs. This brought on a round of guffaws from the Nazis as they slapped each other on the back and mocked the man’s pain.
I wanted to rush them all, tear the stick from Grizzly’s hands and beat them into oblivion. I wanted to be like Elijah and call down fire from heaven or witness God’s judgmental power as the earth opened and swallowed them whole. But all I could do was watch. To rush them would be to rush to my death. Tears burned behind my eyes and blurred my vision of the man. It had to be Henry. He was too small to be Dad and too young to be Pop. I could hardly stand the sight of my brother being violated like that. My knees suddenly weakened, and I collapsed silently to the ground. My mouth dropped open in a mute scream. My hands trembled.
The beating went on for another minute or so before the Nazi leader finally stopped and approached Henry. He said something I couldn’t understand in German, put the end of the stick under Henry’s chin and lifted his head. Henry’s head lolled back and for the first time I got a clear look at his face.
Fear Mountain Page 16
