by Dean Hughes
“I’ve talked.” He walked to the door. “I’m really all right, Dad. Don’t worry about me. Every time I get another day behind me, I’m a little better off. I just need more time to pass, so I’ll forget.”
“But you’re not getting anywhere that way. Why not—”
But Alex left. He walked down the hallway and then downstairs. He sensed that Dad was following him, was watching, but he kept going, and he got into his car and started it. He would be fine. It was just a matter of getting his breath, of calming down, going to work, and doing his job. He had been to this point hundreds of times before, and he had always made it through. He would keep getting through until he finally won the battle, and all this nervousness, or whatever it was, finally passed away. But he wasn’t going to talk to anyone again; that only made things worse.
***
Peter was out on the loading dock. A truck was backing in, and Peter, with a stack of boxes on a hand truck, was waiting to start loading. Richard had hired a couple of new guys and they were waiting too. The truck needed to be loaded before quitting time that afternoon so the driver could get on the road. The parts would make it on time, to a factory in Illinois, but only if the trucker got a good start on the trip that evening.
When the truck edged close enough to the dock, Peter signaled, and the driver shut the truck down, then hopped from the cab. “Before you start loading, let me see the paperwork, will you?” he said.
Peter struggled with some of the accents of these truckers, but this guy was not hard to understand. “Yes, yes. I’ll bring it. Just one minute.” He turned and walked toward the office. As he passed the other workers, Monte and Ross, he said, “A moment. I bring the paper. We must not load now.”
Peter had almost reached the door to the office when he heard Monte’s rough voice. “I brink za paper. We not load now.” And then both men laughed.
Peter was taken by surprise. He had rather liked these two. They hadn’t seemed bothered when Richard had asked Peter to teach them their duties, even though he was considerably younger. Peter had heard Monte say that he had fought in France, had been sent in as a replacement, after D-Day, and had been wounded in Normandy, but to Peter’s relief, neither man had asked about his own background.
Peter decided to let it go. He could understand that his accent might sound funny to these men. Germans might do the same thing with an American learning their language. It wouldn’t do any good to challenge them on something like that. But he felt an old sadness, one that had often returned to him since he had come to the States.
Peter got the paperwork he needed and headed back to the dock. But he didn’t speak this time. He merely handed
the papers to the truck driver, and then, when everything seemed to be in order, he rolled the first stack of boxes onto the truck. Monte and Ross clearly took that as a signal, and they went to work. For quite some time no one said anything. There were lots of boxes, a lot of work to do before five o’clock, and all three of the men kept a steady pace, passing each other as they walked back and forth.
At least an hour passed before Ross yelled to Peter, as they passed by each other, “Hey, do we get a break sometime? I need a cigarette, bad.”
“Yes. It’s good,” Peter said. He continued into the back of the truck with his load, stacked the boxes, and then left his hand truck on the dock and walked inside. It was October now, but quite warm, and Peter had been sweating hard. He wanted a drink of water. When he walked back out to the dock, he saw Richard. Monte and Ross were sitting on the stairs at the end of the dock, and Richard was looking down at them. They had been talking, but they stopped as Peter approached. “Can you get this done by quitting time?” Richard asked Peter.
“Yes. We will.” He wanted to explain the break, that the men had asked to stop for a smoke, but he didn’t want to use that much English in front of Monte, not now.
Monte stood up, leaned against the metal railing on the stairs, and took a last puff on his cigarette. He was a big man, with fists the size of cobblestones, and a massive, round head. He tossed the cigarette away without crushing it. “Say, Mr. Hammond, I need to know one thing. Is Peter our boss or what?”
“No. He works on the dock and in the packing room, the same as you guys.”
“Well, he’s the one telling us what to do around here.”
“I told him to teach you what we do. But he’s not your boss. Marlin is. You know that.”
“So where’s Marlin?”
“He’s keeping things going inside, in the packing room. I don’t see what you’re getting at.”
“Well, my only point is, if Marlin sends us out here to load a truck, ain’t no one in charge. We’re just three guys loading a truck. Ain’t that right.”
“Yes.”
“Fine. Just so we know.”
There was something ugly in Monte’s raspy voice, and Peter felt the challenge. Richard clearly heard it too. He stepped a little closer to the top of the stairs and looked down on Monte. “There’s no reason to worry about who the boss is. Just work together and get the job done.”
“That’s fine. But tell him that. It ain’t his decision when we have a smoke, or take a break, or anything like that. Not the way I understand it.”
“Ross ask me,” Peter said. “I tell him yes. That’s all.”
“Well maybe zats all, but from now on, we ain’t going to ask.”
“Hey, come on, Monte, don’t start trouble,” Richard said. “If you don’t like this job, there are plenty of guys who’d like to have it. Peter knows what’s going on around here, knows the paperwork and all that. I don’t see what you’re worried about.”
“Hey,” Monte said, and he grinned, “I ain’t got no grief with nobody. I just wondered who my boss was.”
Ross was smiling too. He was a smaller man, but tighter. He had rolled up the sleeves on his gray work shirt, showing his thick forearms and a “Semper Fi” tattoo. He gave his cigarette a toss and then looked at Peter with his head cocked back defiantly, as if to say, “We took care of you, didn’t we?” Peter suspected that things would only get worse with these two.
But a couple of weeks went by and Peter didn’t have any problems with Monte or Ross. Neither one was friendly, but they stayed mostly together and said almost nothing to Peter. The three worked in the same room most of the time, with other men around. They packed boxes, loaded trucks, and simply went about their business. But one day the three, along with a man named Ken Schmidt, ended up loading another truck together.
Monte and Ross were actually fairly hard workers, but they did like their cigarette breaks. The two of them had stopped for a smoke at one point that day even though Ken and Peter had kept on loading. Later, when they took a second break, Monte yelled to Ken, “Hey, come on. Stop a minute. Take a rest.”
Ken stopped and wiped his forehead with his sleeve. “I don’t smoke,” he said.
“That’s all right. Take a break.” He looked at Peter, whose path to the truck was blocked by the men. “Come on, kid. Lay off for a minute. We don’t have to kill ourselves.” Then he grinned. “I’ll be the boss today.”
That was fair enough. Peter nodded and lifted his hand truck until it was resting on the dock. Then he stood next to it, hardly knowing what to do. “Schmidt, are you a German, like ol’ Peter here?” Monte asked.
“Way back, I am,” Ken said. He was a short fellow, rather slight. He would often work all day without saying more than a few words. Peter had never really gotten to know him, but he had wondered the same thing about his German heritage.
“So you can’t speak any of Peter’s lingo, huh?”
“Nope.”
“Nein?” Ross asked. And then he broke up laughing, as though he had made a marvelous joke.
“Hey, Peter, speak a little German. Let us hear some of that.”
Peter tried to smile. But he shook his head. He didn’t know where this was heading, but he wasn’t going to play any of Monte’s games.
“
How come they call you guys krauts?” Monte asked. “What’s the meaning behind that word?” He was leaning on his hand truck, his shoulders hunched forward, and Peter could see in his steady eyes that this was a challenge, the beginning of something.
Ross was laughing.
Peter didn’t answer. He turned to walk away. He had decided to go inside for a drink of water.
“Do you really like that sauerkraut stuff, Peter?” Monte asked. “It tastes like something gone bad to me. I can’t eat it.” He cursed.
“Lay off, Monte,” Ken said, quietly, but Monte continued to laugh.
Peter turned back around. “Yes, I like it,” he said, defiantly.
“Yeah. I thought maybe you would.” Monte turned to Ross. “I probably told you, I killed a lot of krauts over in France.”
“Yup. You did mention that.”
“Did you know that when their bodies have been out there on the ground a few days, Germans smell just like sauerkraut?”
“No, I didn’t know that,” Ross said. He was looking at Peter, not Monte, and he was grinning, showing a missing tooth on one side.
“Well, they do. They have that same sour stink. I think that’s how that got started, calling them krauts.” He looked back at Peter. “Do you think that’s how that happened?”
“Okay. That’s enough,” Ken said, with surprising force this time.
Peter turned and walked away again. He was halfway up the dock when Monte called out, “Hey, Peter, don’t let me get you upset. I don’t have nothing against you. The only kraut I hate is that Nazi kid who shot me through the leg.” Peter kept going. He was almost to the door when Monte yelled, “I can see you know how to run away. That’s what we taught you krauts to do during the war.”
Peter stopped. He stood for a time, trying to think what he wanted to do. And then he turned and walked toward Monte. He had no idea what he was going to do when he got there, but he wasn’t taking any more of this. He walked straight at Monte’s grin. He heard Ross laughing and Ken saying, “Don’t start anything, boys,” but he kept on. He didn’t put his hands up, didn’t double up his fists. He merely strode toward Monte until he was about to walk right into him, and it was then that Monte’s big fist shot out and caught Peter flat in the forehead.
Peter fell backward, landing on his backside. Then he stood up, faced Monte, and stepped toward him, and Monte took another shot. This one hurt more, smashed his nose. He felt the blood spurt, felt the pain through his cheekbones and forehead. He stumbled back but stayed on his feet, caught his balance and stepped forward again. But now Ken was in the way. “No more,” he was yelling.
Peter would have taken a hundred punches. He just wasn’t going to raise his own fists. But it was Monte who was retreating now, saying, “Hey, he came at me. I was just joking with him a little. I didn’t mean nothing by any of that.”
And Ross kept saying, “He came after you. What could you do?”
Someone was running from the office by then, the fellow who processed the paperwork inside. He grabbed hold of Peter and yelled to Ken, “Get Mr. Hammond.”
Ken ran inside, but by the time Richard reached the dock, a woman from the office had already come out with a wet towel. She had begun to wipe off Peter’s face. “Take him inside,” Richard said. But Peter was going to leave. He had quit his job—quit it in his mind. He would take a bus home, or maybe walk, but he was leaving, going back to Germany.
He took the towel with him and walked inside, but he kept going, on through the building and out the front door. Richard caught up with him in the parking lot and told him that he had fired those guys, both of them, and then he got Peter into his car and drove him home. And all the way he kept saying things that Peter already knew: that some guys were like that in any country; that Peter shouldn’t let it bother him; that most people at the plant thought the world of him. Peter didn’t say a word, didn’t want to speak with his German accent, didn’t want to discuss any of this.
At home, only his mother was there. Peter was still holding the towel to his face, and when she saw the blood, she hurried to him. “What’s happened?” she asked, in German.
Richard told her, “A big guy down at the plant, one of these guys who can’t forget the war, took into him. We fired the guy, him and his friend. It won’t happen again.”
But Peter looked at his mother. “It won’t happen again. I’m going back to Germany.”
“Oh, no, Peter. Don’t say that,” his mother pleaded.
“It’s not what that stupid man did,” he said in German. “It’s not any of that. I just can’t stay here. I don’t belong.”
Peter went to his room, and after a time he heard the door shut and knew that Richard had gone. His mother knocked soon after that. “Peter, let me look at you,” she said. “Is your nose broken?”
“No. I’m fine. Just let me rest.”
“All right. For now. But when your father comes home, I want to take you to a doctor.”
“It won’t be necessary.”
He lay on his bed and looked at the ceiling. He tried to think how he could manage everything, how he could pay for a trip to Germany.
It was perhaps an hour later that his father came home. Peter knew he had left work early because of what had happened. He came to the door and knocked, and then opened the door. “Let me look at your nose, Peter,” he said. “Richard said you might need to see a doctor.”
“It’s fine.”
His father came in and sat down on the bed next to him. “It’s swollen,” he said, and he looked at it from several angles. “How badly does it hurt?”
“It doesn’t hurt much.”
“What happened?”
“That man—Monte—insulted me because I was a German.”
“Ken told me that you didn’t defend yourself, that you let him hit you. Why?”
“I don’t know.” Peter looked away. But after a time, he added, “He said that in the war Germans only learned how to run away.”
“Oh, Peter. What a silly thing to listen to. How could you do this?”
Peter didn’t answer. He looked at his father, who had aged so much in the past few years. His hair was gray now. His eyes looked tired. “How did all this happen?” Peter asked.
“What?”
“All this? Everything. We were happy in Frankfurt, and then everything went wrong. I want to go back and have my life. I never got it.”
“I know,” Papa said. He nodded, looking so solemn that Peter wished he hadn’t said it.
“I’m going back to Germany,” Peter said. “As soon as I can.”
“But Peter, we have good jobs here, this nice house.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“We’re together. If you go back, we may never see you again. That would be too much for your mother.”
“Papa, how can you stay? We’re not ourselves here.”
His father nodded. “I know what you’re saying, Peter. I miss my language. I miss our country. I miss our way of living. But it can’t be helped. Anna will be here, our grandchildren. We can’t leave them.”
“I want to live in Germany and have grandchildren for you there.”
“Oh, Peter, don’t do this to us. Don’t divide us that way.”
Peter didn’t want the separation either. He had been the one separated from the others during all those nightmarish months he had been at war. But he couldn’t stay. He would go back to work at the plant long enough to earn the money he needed, but he just couldn’t stay. “We’ll see each other. I’ll come back someday, for a visit. But I have nothing here—not one thing to look forward to.”
“Is it Katrina? Is that what you have in Germany?”
“Yes. That’s one thing.”
“Then bring her here.”
“No. I’m the enemy. I chose Germany when I chose the army. I didn’t know it then, but I know it now.”
Papa didn’t tell him no again; he only sat on the edge of the bed and cried. And then his mother
came in and knew what this meant, and she cried too.
***
Katrina had a job now. She worked for the British, the same as her mother. Her English was not as good, but language skills were not required. She worked every evening, late into the night, cleaning offices, scrubbing sinks and toilets, washing uniforms. She didn’t mind the work; she only hated the routine of her life, the boredom. What she lived for were
the letters that came once or twice a week, from Peter.
She got home very late each night and slept long into the day; then she had only the evening of work to look forward to again. And so she got up each day hoping that mail had come, that Peter might say a little more than he usually did in his noncommittal letters. When she got up this November day, she found a letter on the kitchen table, where Frau Heiner always left them. She sat down and opened it carefully, slowly, wanting to savor this time—always the best of her life. She read:
Dear Katrina,
I have decided. I’m coming home to Germany. But I don’t know when. I have to earn the money to travel, and I have to save enough to live for a time. I don’t know how I can do all this, but I have decided, and nothing will change my mind now. I’m coming back.
Katrina, you owe nothing to me. But when I get to Germany, I will come straight to you, and then we can talk about everything. I don’t know how I can make a living. I have no idea how I could marry now, with no job, no future. But if I come to you, can we talk about all these things—maybe think of a way we can manage? Do you still want to think about me that way? If you do, please write back and tell me. I need something more in my life. I want you.
Love,
Peter
Katrina was more relieved than ecstatic, and she felt the reality of his concern. She didn’t know how they would manage. But she got out her paper—her dear, costly paper—and she wrote:
Dear Peter,
Please don’t wait. Come now. We’ll find a way. I love you. Write again, and please say those words to me, finally, once.
She could think of nothing else to add, so she merely signed the letter and sent it.
Chapter 24
The Thomases were not planning to gather until nine o’clock on Christmas morning. To Al Thomas that seemed the middle of the day, and he couldn’t understand why everyone wanted to wait so long. But Alex and Anna said they wanted to have Santa leave his presents for Gene under the tree in their own home. The other married couples—Wally and Lorraine and Richard and Bobbi—also wanted to exchange personal gifts before they came over. Both couples were in their new houses now, just a few blocks east of the old family home.
