“Awful bad week,” he repeated. “I know you don’t believe it now, but it doesn’t always hurt this way.”
She nodded and turned to step down closer to the water’s edge. “I know you wouldn’t say that if you didn’t know it was true. But you still have your mother and brother and sister. Sometimes it seems I’m about to lose everything and everybody I’ve ever cared about.”
He winced. “I know it does.”
She kept walking.
“Bertie?”
She stopped and turned, looking up at him.
“I’ve done a lot of things wrong,” he said at last, scrambling over some rocks to her side. “I shouldn’t’ve been so hard on you this week. Seems like everything I say turns to—”
“You did fine,” she said gently. “I know you’ve had a lot on your mind, too. I know you thought a lot of Dad. You’re just trying to keep me safe and find out what happened at the same time. That’s a hard job. I know all that.”
He waited for a but. It didn’t come, and he just stood there for several seconds looking down at her stupidly. “That’s right. I’m glad you understand.”
She held a hand up. “I understand that just fine.”
Oh, no, here came the but.
“What I don’t understand is why you didn’t tell me about your leg.”
He sighed. “What is it you want to know about it?”
She looked down at the cane, which he leaned on heavily. “Why didn’t you tell me before I had to see it for myself?”
“I didn’t want you to worry.”
She frowned up at him, eyes narrowing. She could see through him better than anyone he’d ever known.
“I kept thinking it’d get better,” he said, not able to meet her eyes. “Didn’t want to worry anybody.”
“You didn’t want to worry anybody? Why did you stop answering my letters, then? You don’t think I was plenty worried about that?”
He grimaced and looked out across the rippling water. “At first, I just thought I’d heal and it’d be fine, so I didn’t say anything about it in my letters. Didn’t want to sound like a whiner.”
“And so when you didn’t heal? Why didn’t you tell me then?”
He still didn’t look back at her. “You know me too well, Bertie. You’d’ve known something was wrong if I’d tried to write to you then. Besides, a lot of the time I was hurting too bad to do much but lay there and wish I was dead.”
“You gonna tell me about it now?”
“Not much to tell.”
“You got shot?”
“Got shelled.”
“From what I hear, a shelling could blow a man’s leg clear off. Or his head. Or make mincemeat of his whole body.”
“It didn’t. Just sliced through muscle and bone.”
“When did it happen?”
He sighed. “Last of March. Medic couldn’t get to me for a few hours, because of the battle, and it was daylight. Then they couldn’t get me to a hospital because we were still under attack.”
“It’s a special blessing that your leg was saved.”
He gritted his teeth. He didn’t want to hear about blessings right now. “Guessed you’d say something like that.”
“You’re alive, Red. After everything I’ve read about the war, your very life’s a special blessing. At least it is for me.”
He looked at her then. When she was like this she could talk a stubborn mule into plowing the moon. “I don’t see it that way,” he said. “You don’t have any idea where I’ve been or what I’ve done, so don’t go talking to me like you know all about it.”
She frowned at him. “Now you do sound like a whiner, and I know better. Red Meyer’s never been one to complain about the hard things that had happened in his life, the things he’d had to do without after his father died.”
“Red Meyer’s always been healthy before.”
“You’re walking,” she said. “Even if it is with a cane.”
He shrugged. “They say penicillin’s a miracle drug.”
“I’m sure they’re right, but just because they’ve treated you with their miracle doesn’t mean God’s other miracles are worthless now.”
He nodded.
“So you’ll let me use comfrey on that leg?” she asked. “I overheard Gerald say he’s going fishing this afternoon. I know his favorite fishing hole is down on the river, just below the comfrey I need to collect.”
“No.”
“I’d be perfectly safe if he’s there, too.”
Red groaned and turned away. “Bertie, don’t start this.”
He heard her step up beside him, and he moved away. “I didn’t come down here for company. I came down to do some thinking. Alone. You need to go back to the church.” Without looking at her, he limped along the river’s edge, leaving her behind.
Bertie watched Red’s retreating back, feeling grief threaten to overwhelm her again. But she wasn’t going in that direction this time. Instead, she allowed her loss to fuel a quick spurt of anger.
“Don’t you dare treat me like this!” she called after him. When his steps slowed at the sound of her words, she caught up with him. “I’m only wanting to help you, and you’re treating me like a pesky puppy.”
“You don’t know anything about this, Bertie, so just simmer down.”
“Well, I should know about it.” She risked his anger by stepping in front of him. “You don’t think I’ve earned just a little more respect from you? I’ve been true to you for three years. With all those pages of letters I wrote to you, I could’ve written a dozen books.”
He blinked at her, swallowed, nodded. “Maybe more.” He didn’t look mad.
“But I wanted to write to you. You’re the one I’ve put all my hopes in, the one I’ve waited for.”
“I didn’t ask you to.” It amazed her that such a harsh statement could be spoken with such gentleness.
“You said that to me this morning, too. I’m tired of hearing it.” She heard a quiver in her voice, and that tiny sign of weakness made her mad all over again. “Something’s bothering you that you haven’t told anybody, because I know you better than this. You don’t mope, and you’re not the cranky type. Not the way you’ve been since I got back.”
He grunted and closed his eyes. “You don’t know me now.”
“So you keep reminding me, and that’s just ridiculous. A fella doesn’t change the core of who he has been all his life. Maybe your outlook on life is changed, but who you are inside won’t change. Not your character. Not the person God made you to be.”
He shook his head. “You can’t even guess, Bertie.”
“Yes, I can. Up until a few weeks ago, I got letters from you all the time. You weren’t afraid to tell me what was going through your mind. So something happened just before the end of things over in Italy.” She gestured to his leg. “Something more than that. Don’t shut me out like this, Red. It isn’t fair to me.”
He looked down at the cane in his hand, then turned and gazed toward the edge of the forest across the river.
For the longest moment, all was silent except for the bird-song echoing from the trees, and the sigh of the wind through the leaves.
“You’re right,” he said at last. “It isn’t fair to you.” He looked down at her and laid a hand on her shoulder, and all the love she’d ever seen in his eyes or read from his letters was suddenly, amazingly, plain on his face. “You need to understand why everything’s changed, and then you need to let it go.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Before Bertie could respond to the touch of Red’s hand, he pulled away, as if he’d done something wrong.
“A week before I got hit,” he said, “our scouting team was captured by the German Army.” The soft, matter-of-fact voice contradicted the shock of the message.
Bertie felt the jolt of his words all the way to her toes. She swallowed and didn’t say anything, not wanting to break his momentum now that she had him talking.
He gav
e her a brief glance, then looked away again. “I haven’t told anybody about this.”
“You can tell me.”
“I’d appreciate it if you…” he paused, then shook his head. “No, that ain’t right. I can’t dump bad news on you and then expect you to keep it bottled up. I did that to Ma.”
“Red, I won’t say anything to anyone unless you want me to.” She reached out and touched his arm, and felt the hard muscles underneath the sleeve of his suit coat. Her Red. “Just tell me. I want so much to understand.”
He hesitated. “I will, but you’ve gotta promise me one thing.”
“You name it.”
“Don’t go giving me a sermon about how I should get over this and move on with my life. I don’t want a pep talk.”
“I promise.”
“And don’t go trying to remind me about the great blessing of life.”
She flinched at that. “Okay. I guess it was pretty stupid of me to try to tell you about blessings when you’re suffering so with your leg. I know how I felt yesterday when Mrs. Fisher sidled up to me and whispered about how happy I must be that Dad’s now with the Lord.”
His brows lowered. “She said that?”
“Yep, she did. I’m sorry, Red. I for sure won’t do that to you again.”
A bare nod as he looked toward the sky, jaw muscles working. She could see from the strain in his expression that he was suddenly reliving something awful.
She almost told him to forget it, that it wasn’t any of her business, and it wasn’t worth making him go through it all over again, but she needed to know. She felt, after everything, that it most certainly was her business. Maybe her very most important business right now.
“One of our captors was this young kid,” he said at last, turning to stare back up the bank in the direction of the church, though the church wasn’t visible from where they stood. “Looked to be fifteen, sixteen, mouthy and mean, always beating up on us, pulling ugly tricks on us, then laughing.” Red took a deep breath. “Always stirring up trouble.”
Bertie swallowed hard. She wanted to ask how long they’d been captured, just exactly how mean this soldier was, how they were rescued, she wanted all the details quickly. She pressed her lips together and squeezed his arm, wanting so badly to wrap her arms around him that it became a physical need.
But she knew he needed her not to. He was a grown man who didn’t want mothering. He’d already made that clear enough this morning.
He looked down at her, as if memorizing the features of her face, then he looked away again. “Kid’s name was Fritz. Blond hair, dark, snapping eyes, never took guff off anybody, even though he had to’ve been the youngest in his squad.”
He closed his eyes. “He could’ve been a Moennig, Bertie. Could’ve been a bratty little brother of yours. He looked so much like you and Lloyd when we were growing up.”
The thought stung her. She still had relatives in Germany, of course. But just because he’d looked like her didn’t mean they had a blood bond.
“I decided to see if I could talk to him,” Red said. “I know a little German I picked up from Pa’s side of the family, and I tried a word or two on him.”
“What did he do?”
“Laughed at me, mostly. Made fun of me to his buddies. I kept trying, anyway, for those few days they held us.” Red looked down at his leg, then turned and walked along the rough track beside the river.
Bertie held on to his arm and walked beside him.
“He released us all one night.”
She stumbled on a rock, and felt Red’s arm tense beneath her hand, steadying her. “The bully released you?”
Red nodded, not breaking his stride. “Came to us while we were sleeping, untied our bonds, and kicked us awake. Just like that.”
“But why?”
His steps slowed. He sighed, shook his head. “I never knew.”
“He didn’t say anything?”
“He didn’t know our language, as far as I could tell.” Again, that shake of the head. “At first, we were afraid it was a trap. We were sure he was just releasing us so they’d have a good reason to shoot us while we were on the run, though the Germans never needed an excuse to kill their prisoners. They just killed them.”
“But he let you go.”
Red disengaged from Bertie’s grasp, fumbled with the cane, and bent over and picked up a flat rock. He drew back with his right hand and skipped the rock across the smooth surface of the moving water. It skipped six times, if Bertie was counting right. His rock-skipping skills were getting awkward.
“I’m pretty sure that runty soldier saved all of us,” Red said, bending over to pick up another flat rock. “I’d understood a few words that passed between the men the day before, though I’m so rusty with my German I only knew a little. From what words I caught, it sounded like they were planning to kill us soon.”
“That’s why you thought the release was a trick,” Bertie said. “But why did he—”
“I don’t know. Our team talked about it later, as we made our way back to camp. We couldn’t come up with any reasons, ’ceptin’ it was a miracle from God.” He looked down at her. “Yes, there you go, I said it. I believe it was a miracle. Some answers to all those prayers you were prayin’. We were so glad to get out of there with our lives, we didn’t hang around and ask questions.” He paused and closed his eyes. “Didn’t even take the time to thank him.”
“Word never reached us back home that you were a prisoner of war,” Bertie said.
“We weren’t missing long enough. We went right back to work when the next battle broke out.” He tossed the rock into the water, not even trying to skip it this time—as if the act of sinking that rock into the river was satisfying enough.
She waited for him to continue. Yes, it would’ve been a horrible experience to go through, wondering if he was going to be killed by his captors at any moment, but he’d lived through three years of that kind of threat.
“Four days after we reached our company, fresh battle broke out,” he said. “I think the Germans knew time was gettin’ short, so they decided to kill all they could while they had a chance.”
“That’s when your leg was hit?”
He stopped, leaning heavily on the cane. Splashes from ripples along the river’s edge filled the silence. “I got caught in a foxhole, separated from the rest of my team. Two men had been there before me, and didn’t make it out. They were dead at the far end of the hole. I heard footsteps coming toward me, and I saw a German helmet peering over the edge of the hole.” His eyes closed. He swallowed, as if words had suddenly caught in his throat. “I shot him. Got him straight-on in the chest, killed him just like that.” Red snapped his fingers.
Bertie waited, holding her breath.
“He fell into the mud beside me without a single cry. Face-first into that thick mud.” Red looked at her, his blue eyes filmed with moisture, his face filled with horror. “It was the kid who’d saved our lives.”
She felt the shock of his words through her whole body, felt a shadow of the pain he must be feeling. Instinctively, she reached for him, but he backed away, as if he was afraid of her touch, her comfort.
But at the moment, she felt as if she was the one who needed comforting. Just seeing what Red had gone through cut her deeply.
“When no one else followed him into the foxhole, I went to him and turned him over. There were those blue eyes, staring without life into the sky, looking like he could’ve been a brother of yours. I couldn’t stay there, Bertie. Not facing what I’d done.”
“Red, it was war. You did what you had to do, what you were taught to do.”
He cast her a sharp glance.
“Sorry,” she said, glimpsing the raw memory of that moment in his eyes. She knew she would always see it there. Nothing she could say or do would help him heal that wound. Only God could do that, and she’d promised not to preach.
“Anyway, you’re right. That’s when I got hit. There’ve been
times I wished the shrapnel had found a more deadly place to lodge.”
“But it didn’t, and you can’t go wishing your life away. Did you ever think, even though Fritz let you go, he would’ve shot you then?”
He gave her another sharp glance.
She couldn’t hold his gaze, nor her tongue. “I said I wouldn’t preach, and I won’t, but I didn’t promise to keep my mouth shut completely.”
He continued to watch her. She grimaced.
“Don’t know how I’m going to live with this,” he said, looking away at last. “I for sure don’t expect anybody else to put up with me while I try to find a way through it. I’ve heard stories of men in the first war who were shellshocked and never came out of it. I couldn’t put anybody through what they put their families through. Especially not my Bertie.”
Those words—my Bertie—felt to her like a physical caress.
“We’ve already had this fight,” she said gently. “I’m not changing my mind.”
“You don’t have a choice.” He turned from her then, and walked along the riverside, shoulders squared, back stiff.
“You’re right,” she called after him. “I don’t have a choice. My heart already belongs to you.” She didn’t follow him, but watched him go. She wasn’t finished with him, and whether he liked it or not, she’d developed a little more perseverance about waiting since he went off to war. She could be patient.
Chapter Thirty-Four
The last thing Red wanted to do was mingle with a bunch of people after reliving that harsh memory to Bertie, but after a long, silent talk with himself, he returned to the church grounds. He could talk to people while he ate his ma’s ham and beans and Bertie’s dishpan cookies, discussed the crops and the price of cattle and hogs with Herbert Morrow and Homer Jarvis.
Homer Jarvis, he discovered, thought Earl Krueger had been the culprit in the recent livestock rustling, because he’d needed the money the stock brought at the sale barn to make his yearly mortgage payment, which had been overdue for a month.
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