Tide King

by Jen Michalski

  The War Department wished to inform them, Johnson’s parents, that the death of Private E-2 Calvin Ernest Johnson had been a mistake. While a telegram went out to Bowling Green, Ohio, to correct the Army’s error, Johnson was loaded on a litter in a military ambulance, driven to a train station near Hampstead, England, and then, assuring them he could find his way just fine, he boarded the special hospital car of his own volition. The red tag that he had removed from his chest and attached to his wrist was correct this time as far as Johnson could tell. He was alive and headed for Camp Upton, Long Island, New York. It was mid-April, 1945.

  The soldiers at Camp Upton Convalescent Hospital were not severely injured—broken bones, second- and third-degree burns, a pysch consult for “psychoneurotic disorders.” One tried to avoid the latter. Nobody wanted to go home branded as someone who couldn’t cope, when so many others had. At least, if they hadn’t, they weren’t saying.

  The days were long. He read detective paperbacks to a corporal who’d been burned at Cisterna. The man lay on his stomach sixteen hours a day before he was turned over to have his dressings changed. He bowled with a private who’d taken shrapnel in his eye at Salerno. He swam laps alone in the pool in the evening, the lights of the pool giving it an unearthly sheen, feeling his right leg, then his left, slice through the chlorinated water. He opened his eyes underneath because when he closed them for extended periods he saw men disemboweled, crushed, burnt like the turkey his mother had left too long in the oven a few Thanksgivings ago. He lay in bed, smoking cigarettes, watching the big hand, then the little hand, make its rotation on the ward clock. The cinderblock walls shone smooth with painted seafoam; sometimes after falling asleep from exhaustion, then waking up with the sweats, his hands clenching the bed sheets, he stood up and pressed his cheek against the cool wall. He wrote letters to his parents, commenting mostly on the food, some of the other soldiers on the ward, a pretty nurse or two.

  But he felt like a mistake; a healthy, shiftless mistake sleeping in a clean, firm bed. A mistake that drank hot coffee and ate scrambled eggs and not cold canned rations. The others didn’t ask him about his wounds, or lack thereof. They looked at him with a knowing glance; in private, perhaps, they speculated: shell shock, suicide attempt. The more generous, maybe, pegged him with infection, influenza.

  “We’re rubbing down your rough edges before we send you back,” the nurse from the counseling service explained as she took his blood pressure, listened to his heart. The staff doctors administered the same psychiatric tests they administered to him before the war. He passed. They gave him sodium pentothal and put him under hypnosis, but the same dream, image, whatever it was, waited for him, like a movie that ran on a continuous reel. Polensky was in front of him. It was cold as it had ever been and almost impossible to fathom how cold. Snow gusts swirled through the trees, along with an occasional storm of hot splinters, pine needles, shrapnel from the Germans shelling them. Suddenly, the air was sucked away before returning and knocking him off his feet, slamming him onto his back. His ears rung. The sky vibrated above him. He tried to sit up, numb, but could not. He felt his body, his chest and stomach, then he moved his fingers down to his legs. First his right, and then his left. His blood ran cold as he realized there was fabric, wet and sticky, but no leg. He tried to sit up again. Polensky leaned over him. He could see the faded blue of Stanley’s eyes, the whites around them as they widened. Stanley fumbled in his helmet. Johnson tried to tell him what a fool he was—do you want to get shelled in the head, you idiot?—but he put it back on. He then stuffed something dry and fibrous in Johnson’s mouth, taking his hands and moving Johnson’s jaws up and down to simulate chewing. It hit the back of Johnson’s throat, choking him. Someone new then appeared in front of him, a medic. He pinned something on Johnson’s collar.

  The Army psychologist looked at him. He had the same tired lines of the sergeant back at the Graves Registration Service. There was little he probably had not heard, and their directives were similar at all levels—to send men back to the front. For the psych unit, that is, those soldiers whose war existed in their minds, it had taken the form of calling them cowards, soft. But Johnson was not soft—he had landed in Algeria as part of Operation Torch, Operation Husky in Sicily, Normandy, Germany. He had been in almost two years of continuous combat.

  “I dreamed that I got shelled in the Hürtgen, that I lost my leg,” Johnson explained. “I remember being in so much pain. And then I wake up, months later, in a pile of soldiers. And they tell me I was tagged as death by amputation. Does that make any sense to you, doc, seeing as I have two perfectly good legs here?”

  “It’s possible that that, while you were moving in and out of consciousness, that you heard other conversations on the battlefield.” The doctor rustled through his papers. The walls of the room also were foam green, as was much of the hospital, a soothing color, some said. It made Johnson think of fatigues, light happy ones—baby fatigues. They had all gone in as babies, he thought, and they left with lines on their faces, eyes that could only see the past, and yet not make any sense of it, to the detriment of the future.

  “So…” Johnson pressed.

  “Well,” the doctor coughed. “Say someone else was hurt nearby. Someone else lost their leg. The other soldiers are shouting that Scotty Private has gotten his leg blown off, needs a medic. And the medic that is treating you, that will attend to Scotty Private shortly, accidently writes ‘leg amputation’ on your EMT tag.”

  Johnson nodded, looking at his hands. Every day he looked at his leg, trying to find something different about it. A stray hair, a scar. He tried to remember the moles on his leg before, whether they had changed positions.

  “Does that make sense to you, Calvin?” The doctor tapped his pencil on his papers.

  He supposed it had to be true. How else to explain he was alive? There were no such things as witch doctors, metalanthium lamps. He watched the doctor scribble a few notes in his chart.

  “Let’s say you were in a coma.” The doctor said. “And that you have recovered. Do you have any questions?”

  Johnson shook his head. He was prepared to go back and, if he was to come back here, actually have a real injury. But then Germany surrendered to the Allied Forces the last week of April. Instead of being shipped back to the First Infantry Division, he was sent home on furlough to await reassignment to the Pacific.

  1807

  She dreamed of dirt. It was the longest dream, all of dirt, the feeling of worms around her, the footfalls of birds above her, sticking their beaks in the ground and wrenching the worms from her. She hoped, in her hysteria, that the birds would wrench her from the ground. Her heart leaked cold all over her chest, and then it stopped, clenching like a fist and turning into itself. It began to pulse warm, and she could feel her toes and her fingers. When a worm crawled near her eye and was plucked from the dirt by a bird, she could see light through the hole it left behind. Her eyes moved to where she thought her hands would be, and she spread her fingers, feeling the cool, muddy earth around them. She moved them back and forth, a little at first, and then in wider arcs as the ground around them collapsed and the ground around her legs as well and suddenly she was able to sit up. She opened her eyes, expecting Matka to be beside her on the straw bed, her lalka under her armpit. But she was on the ground outside the bone house.

  She wondered whether Matka had gone to town. There was so much she did not remember between going to sleep and waking up. She wondered whether she had a fever, whether Matka had buried her to quell her temperature. Perhaps she had needed more ingredients for a tincture and would be gone only a little while. Ela vaguely remembered soldiers, rabbits, Bolek. Her mouth was dry, coated with a chalky, flaky substance. She drew it out with her finger but could not quite identify it. She stood up in the hole and was surprised to find not one lalka beside her but two. The second had blonde hair and blue eyes. She shook them carefully free of dirt and then found her way through the woods to wash herself
.

  By the creek, she laid her dress on an exposed rock, splashing water on it and rubbing. She dipped her naked body in the water, cool and clear and lifting the dirt off her, little cloudy rings spreading into the creek like the haze of her dreams. One stain, a reddish whorl on her chest, did not wash away. It was round and scarred, just over her heart. She knew it was not something she’d had before, and she wondered whether her heart had been stolen. She pressed her fingers in her ears and held her breath. Her heart beat in her veins, as always. She traced the depression in her skin.

  “Matka?” She called into the trees. Branches stood erect. They seemed to ignore her. Even the birds were quiet. She strained to hear leaves under feet, her mother’s hum, the splash of water against the sides of the well bucket. “Matka?”

  But she was all alone. She wrung out the dress to dry and sat on the bank, letting the sun warm her skin.

  At the front of the bone house, a skeleton of bones, clean, white in a rust-dirt blanket, lay near the hill’s edge. She approached it slowly, feeling her throat close, her heart hum dully against her chest. Inside the skeleton’s hand was a flower, white with a root, curled over from the bend of the fingers. A flower. She put it in the pocket of her dress and then lay her hand near the hand of the skeleton, relieved to find it too big to be her matka’s.

  But she was not relieved long. She looked around her and saw that the road of the hill to their hut, normally well traveled and flattened into the earth, was overgrown with weeds and grass. She crouched and listened very hard to the ground like her matka had shown her. Silence. A silence that comes with time, forgetting, settled heavy over her like a humidity. It pressed at her chest, her eyes, and she did not know what to do.

  The bone house had become porous. From holes in the arc of the ceiling, swords of light crossed through the center of the room, as if exposing the tumult that had occurred. Her mother’s tinctures and herbs were missing. The mattress was stained with old blood, rust colored and faded. Their few pieces of furniture—stools and a table—were broken and splintered. A damp, earthen smell of absence lingered. How long had she been in the dirt? She was no bigger than she remembered—it could not have been for long. She shut her eyes and groped for her mother—her scent, her voice, the intangible weight of her presence. But something had closed in the world, a door, a window, and she could no longer feel even the dimmest breeze of her. She dropped on the mattress, away from the blood, shut her eyes tightly against her tears, hoped things would be different when she woke up. She would have to be a big girl and wait.

  She dreamed of fires, an herb flower, chalky in her mouth, her mother. And she also dreamed of Antoniusz.

  He would know where her matka was. Perhaps she was with him. Although she’d never been to Antoniusz’s house, she walked toward the town to find him. At the first house she came to, on the outskirts of Reszel, a woman hung blankets in the green valley. The grass was lush and alive and so unlike the charred hill of her house.

  “Antoniusz? Do you know where he lives?” Ela asked her, and the woman looked at her with soft, wet eyes. She patted the ground near her damp bundles.

  “Looking for your father?” She pulled at Ela’s clothes and pinched her cheek. “No meat on you, that’s for sure. So many families torn apart after the fire.” She clucked her tongue. “It’s a shame.”

  The woman went in the cottage, stone with a thatched roof, and brought out some goat’s milk and bread. A man, her husband, followed.

  “She’s looking for her father, she says—Antoniusz.” The woman ruffled Ela’s hair as she tore the bread with her teeth.

  “Antoniusz?” The man scrunched his dry, brown face at her. “Antoniusz has no children. He lives with his sister.”

  “Where?” Ela stood up, wiping the milk from her face.

  “Up aways, a good afternoon’s walk.” The man pointed up the road. “Too far to walk on little legs. I’m going to town later. I’ll give you a ride in the wagon.”

  When he was ready, Ela climbed on the bench of the hay-filled wagon beside him. The town grew before them, the red roofs and stone walls, in various stages of construction, and they were different from the ones she remembered from the older, finished stone ones.

  “Why is the town different?” she asked.

  “From where you come, little one?” The man asked. He rapped the reigns softly against the behind of his horse. “Did you hear of the fire?”

  She remembered the dream and shook her head.

  “Do you have parents?”

  “I want to see Antoniusz.”

  “Antoniusz hasn’t been well since they burned the witch.” The man shook the reins and frowned.

  She choked; her chest trembled. Witch was what some of the villagers, the mean ones, the ones who spread gossip or thought her mother overcharged for her tinctures, called Matka. Did he speak of her mother? She felt everything inside of her crumble like old stone, and the rubble filled her lungs and she cried out, gasping for air, her eyes singed with tears. She pressed herself against her knees, felt the dusty stone drain from her like sand. The farmer put his hand, big and calloused, on her back as she emptied the contents of her stomach over the side of the wagon.

  “There, there, now. Why don’t you lie in back on the hay?” He stopped the horse. “Back there, it is not as rough a ride for little stomachs.”

  “I’m fine.” She shook her head, lacing her arms around her stomach, empty and twitching. “Please, take me to Antoniusz.”

  “What is your business with him?”

  “It is my own,” she answered. “Why…why did she burn? The witch?”

  “Why, it is known to everyone, I thought.” He chewed on the inside of his cheek for a minute. “And perhaps those who do not know have ears too young and tender to hear.”

  “I am old enough to know, and if you do not tell me, I will find someone else, like Antoniusz.”

  “Well, better me than Antoniusz tells you.” He bent toward her. “Did you not lose someone in the fire, child? Your parents, your brothers and sisters, perhaps? Then you have the witch, Barbara Zdunk, to blame, just as we all do. Some say she avenged Pilowski, our master, for killing her husband and daughter. But why, why burn the whole town? Why kill so many innocents, all for personal gain? And Pilowski is a good man—he pays us better for our crops than some of the others. He could have punished us all. But he burned the right one. And let it be a lesson to the rest of them and their silly uprisings—Antoniusz included.”

  “There is no such thing as witches.” Ela felt her cheeks burn, her fists clench. She would make a tincture, she vowed, and kill him. “You are a stupid old man.”

  “Who taught you your manners?” He lifted his hand and made to slap her. “Surely you are an orphan. No one in our village would allow such a mouth.”

  “I would not want to be the child of any fool in this village,” she answered and hopped down from the wagon. A stone hut leaned at the top of the road, just outside the town, and a man, folded and beaten like a weathered sack, sat outside on a carved wooden bench, whittling a piece of wood.

  “Antoniusz!” she shouted, and when he saw her, he stood up slowly, his mangled leg even more shrunken than she remembered it.

  “Young thing.” He hobbled toward her, drawing a dirty wool cloak across her shoulders. “What business do you have with me?”

  “It’s me, Antoniusz! It’s me, Ela!” She ran her hands on his good leg, feeling its warmness, inhaling the faint traces of pipe that lingered on his clothes. “Do you not know me?”

  “What kind of laugh do you play on an old man?” He pulled from her grasp, and nodded toward the wagon, where the farmer sat watching. “Idzi, whose child is this?”

  “I haven’t the faintest.” Idzi shrugged, drawing up his reigns. “A dirty orphan that I will call the magistrate on if she keeps talking her mouth.”

  “Antoniusz!” She grabbed his good leg and did not let go. “Please, you have to believe me! Where is Matka?” />
  She felt his hands underneath her armpits, herself lifted up. She met his eyes, brown broken spires that drew in her features before rejecting them, the way an ocean rejects a shell. His brow wrinkled, his eyes wet before he blinked and put her back down.

  “By God, if you don’t look like her.” Antoniusz reached and touched her hair, her shoulders. He looked past her. “Idzi, I will take care of this. I am sorry that I have detained you.”

  The farmer shrugged and went on his way to Reszel.

  “Would you like some milk, little girl? A little honey?”

  “I want Matka.” She buried her face in his stomach. “Please tell me where she is.”

  “Come.” He moved toward the cottage. Inside, she ate some bread and apple slices, hoping she would not throw them up as well. She studied the carved figurines that lined the walls of the cottage, little men and women and birds. He watched her eyes, the folds of his face leaking sorrow despite the firm lines of his brow. After a time, he reached into a box by the table, emerging with a wooden horse. He placed it in front of her.