Miracle at St. Anna

by James McBride

  Nights were the hardest, because the boy would not sleep. They vacated crazy Eugenio’s house after a day and slept on the floor in the bedroom of Ludovico’s house so they could use his electricity to power the radio, and on the third night and each night thereafter, the boy would tap Train into consciousness, whereupon the giant would stumble to his feet and hold the boy through the night, the child tugging on him, moaning so loudly that the others would grunt fierce disapproval and force them outside. Train would pace back and forth in the alley behind Ludovico’s house, carrying the boy wrapped in a blanket, rocking him to sleep, the statue’s head bumping up against the wooden wall, causing further cursing and consternation from those inside. No one slept well. Stamps always posted one of them outside the house to watch for Germans, and when Train was too exhausted to walk the boy any longer, the lone sentry—Stamps, Hector, or Bishop—took over, pacing with the crying boy until he slept. The child slept fitfully, murmuring and tugging each of them, covering his ears, as if a loud noise might come crashing through his sleep at any moment. During the day, he would wander off when Train wasn’t around, prompting hilarious chases around Ludovico’s house and through the rabbit pen in the alley behind it, which was now mysteriously populated by two or three rabbits. Even Stamps, hard nut that he was, found himself checking for the kid each night after their short patrols, which really amounted to nothing more than walking the perimeter of Bornacchi’s walls at dusk, peering at the trees in the ridges for a few moments, then hurrying to the relative safety of Ludovico’s house. He had become part of their unit; his eyes were big and dark as olives, his pallor had lifted, and his complexion was smooth and beautiful as ice cream.

  The soldiers fell in love with him. It was not hard. His eyes, once glazed, now took in everything around them. He hugged everyone. He sucked his thumb though he was beyond thumb-sucking years. His incoherent babblings, understood by no one, not even the Italians, came off as cooing sounds, gentle and relaxing, but no amount of coaxing could make him talk sensibly even though he appeared to be of talking age. When he rose out of bed in the mornings and began waddling like a penguin, shaking and showering each of the soldiers with hugs and cuddling, laughing with a row of straight white teeth in a dazzling smile with one front tooth missing, he melted their hearts. After months of savage fighting, with the white man at their backs whipping them and the white man at their fronts shooting at them, the boy restored their humanity, and for that they loved him. He was their hero. They called him Santa Claus, in honor of the Christmas that was coming in four days, and they fought over what kinds of gifts to get him.

  Even now, Bishop watched Train approach the crackling campfire from Ludovico’s house with the kid seated on his broad shoulders, riding him like an elephant, playfully poking Train in the eyes as he walked, and he had to stifle a smile. Maybe Train knew something he did not. He doubted it. Bishop watched as Ludovico and Renata stumbled out of Ludovico’s house behind Train to join the crowd of villagers now circling the sizzling rabbit, its drifting aroma covering the piazza like a halo.

  Stamps rose and approached the old man, whose brow was furrowed in righteous concern. “Where’s all these people from?” he asked.

  Ludovico looked at Renata, who translated. “He’s related to only fourteen of them. Fifteen,” she quickly corrected herself, seeing her uncle Bruno staggering toward them from a house on the far end of town.

  “How come your father got all those rabbits and they’re starving?”

  “They’re not starving,” Renata said. “Franco”—she pointed to the man with no teeth—“he’s the mayor. He’s got more wine in his cellar than Il Duce. Diva, over there, she has a vegetable garden bigger than the Pope’s. Do any of them look like they’re starving to you?”

  Stamps had to admit they didn’t. But they were the oddest assortment of people he’d ever seen. He was amazed at the resilience and creativity of these poor Italians who had obviously survived without the benefits of modern medicine. Many had teeth blackened by cavities, or no teeth at all. One young woman had the prettiest hair and face he’d ever seen, but a wandering left eye that roamed crazily in its socket. Others had broken noses that were not healed. Some were disfigured by broken limbs that had not been set properly, legs bent by mortar shells, still others were missing an arm or a leg, and one young girl had no arms at all. Yet they were smiling, and while they clearly did not look like they were starving, they looked mighty close to it, and all were highly interested in the sizzling rabbit that was browning nicely on the fire. Stamps looked at Bishop and Hector. “What do I do now?”

  Hector walked over to one of the four packs that lay in Ludovico’s front doorway. The Americans had paid Ludovico for four rabbits, the rest of them being so diseased and skinny they didn’t seem worth buying. He pulled out the rabbits and several cans of rations, their last. “We trade. Tell ’em what we got, and see what they got. I’d give anything for fresh vegetables.”

  And so the bartering began, knick for knack, tit for tat. A knife for this, a can of coffee for that. The villagers brought fish, eels, chestnuts, olives, grapes, and real wine. The soldiers produced K rations, D rations, Bishop’s cookies, Bibles, letters from home, pocketknives, phone wire, bullets. The bartering went on for hours.

  As the villagers traded and cajoled, mimicking the soldiers and even one another, gathering around the kid to wonder who he was, Stamps felt something was wrong. He knew better than to get close to these people. It went against his every instinct as a soldier. Yet he couldn’t help himself. The kid was beautiful, plus Stamps was starting to have a good feeling. They had waited and waited for the new marching orders from Captain Nokes back at base but they never came, and as the days passed, and the orders changed from hold for four hours to hold for eight hours to hold for a day to a week to we’ll get back to you, Stamps began to see his luck turning. The silent radio was his first piece of good luck within the division in two years.

  The Army had been a bitter disappointment for him. He couldn’t wait to join after he graduated from college. Everywhere he went, he’d read in the Negro press about the famous all-Negro 92nd Division, the Buffalo Soldiers. They were being sent to Italy to fight as men, and Stamps signed on the day after college, a decision he regretted the moment he set foot at Fort Huachuca training camp, which was rife with dissent and rancor: blacks punished severely by Southern white commanders, Negro plots to retaliate by killing white commanders, Negroes on furlough beaten to death by white civilian mobs, sometimes aided by sheriff deputies who were frightened at the thought of fifteen thousand armed Negroes in their midst. Negroes knifing other Negroes for calling themselves half Indian, Negroes trying to pass themselves off as half white. There was even an entire company of Negroes, two hundred men, the Casual Company, who refused to train or fight and were living in the stockade. The whole business disgusted him. He was alarmed by the hoops the division commanders leaped through so that poorly qualified white officers would always outrank black officers, because of the unwritten law that no colored should ever be able to tell a white man what to do. The policy had created all kinds of problems in the field—including his current predicament. Captain Nokes didn’t know shit about artillery, and everybody knew it. He was from engineering. If Nokes had fired that fuckin’ eighty-millimeter, the Krauts would have vacated his squad’s sector at the Cinquale and they’d be at base now, getting ready to eat the turkey and mashed potato dinner they’d been promised for Christmas. Bishop was right. It was a mistake, he decided, for the Army to allow the colored to fight as combat soldiers. For what? To fight the enemy? Which enemy? The Germans? The Italians? The enemy was irony and truth and hypocrisy, that was the real enemy. That was the enemy that was killing him.

  Stamps had met the real enemy the moment the colored troops arrived in Naples on the troop carrier Mariposo. They had climbed over the destroyed French fleet from boat to boat, their feet never touching the water, and watched the Italian civilians pouring off the harbor
, paddling their small row-boats into the bay to meet the carrier. When the huge boat released its garbage, Stamps was shocked to see the Italians fish through it with their hands and nets, pulling out hot dogs, meat, bread, unopened cans of Spam and coffee. Outside the wire grate fence of the harbor’s compound where the Negro troops were assembled, hundreds of Italians stood in ragged clothes—toothless old women, children begging for food. Stamps couldn’t believe his eyes. The white commanders had issued strict orders not to feed the Italians. “There are enemy Fascists disguised among them,” they said. “You could be feeding the enemy.” But no colored soldier who laid eyes on those starving people that first day could not feel sympathy. Stamps watched every soldier he knew, even Bishop, sorry bastard that he was, fill his chow plate three or four times, then quietly back up to the fence to scrape its contents off into the pots and hands of the starving Italian refugees.

  They did it every day. It was a running joke, the lines of colored men standing with their backs to the fences, the hundreds of Italians standing behind them, chowing down. And the Italians were grateful, too. They loved the soldiers back. They kissed them on the face. They touched their hands. They spread flowers on the bodies of those who died. They treated them like humans, better than the Americans did. The Italians were like the colored, Stamps thought bitterly, they know what it’s like to be on the outside looking in. Feeding the enemy. He smiled at the irony of it. Who was the enemy? In America, Germans could eat first class, go where he couldn’t go, live where he couldn’t live, get jobs where he couldn’t, and over here in Europe they were killing Jews like it was lunch. He’d read all about it in the Negro press. How the first American troops were finding giant camps full of dead Jews, burned to death, cities in Poland with human ash falling like snow from the smokestacks of the giant ovens where they were burning children, entire families. What Negro would do that? A Negro couldn’t even think up enough hate to do that. A Negro was trying to make rent, save up enough to buy milk for his kids, survive this fucked-up war, and still, when the war was over, when all the fighting was done and all the people made up, a German could go to America and live well, start a factory, work in business, run a bank, while Stamps would still be . . . a nigger. He’d be lucky to get a job delivering their mail.

  Sometimes Stamps felt his conscience was going to snap in two. He was constantly caught between showing his good face to the enlisted men and slogging through the bullshit that came from above him. A man like Bishop didn’t understand. All he wanted was a warm place to shit and a piece of tail. Yet the larger irony of it all was that despite the war, despite the slogging in trenches, the mud, the rain, despite the sulking coloreds and the redneck captains, Stamps loved the Army. The Army had brought him to Italy, and he felt freer in Italy than he had ever felt in his life. The Italians had a lot on their minds, that was for certain—they were in the middle of a civil war, and dying—but one thing they didn’t have on their mind was keeping the colored man down. They didn’t seem to care whether Stamps was colored or not. They gave the colored man something he could neither buy nor earn in America, no matter how many stripes or combat badges or hero ribbons they pinned on him: respect. Stamps quietly noted that the Americans and German POWs were alike in their disdain for the Italians. The soldiers’ arrogance, their lack of respect for these dignified, humorous, spirited people who had done nothing more than to be living in the wrong place at the wrong time, amazed Stamps. And they were all white, too, all of them. He couldn’t get over that.

  Italians, he concluded, didn’t want their share of the cut for being white. They seemed not to care. They were looking to get to the next day. No wonder their music was so good, he thought, all that yelling and passion, all that opera. They got it, he thought. They understood it. Love. Food. Passion. Life’s short. Pass me a cigarette. Gimme that grappa. Live a little. They were like coloreds without the jook joints. He decided, as he watched Renata appear out of a house wearing a dress for the first time and illuminating the piazza with her beauty, that he wanted to live in Italy someday. Right here in Bornacchi was a good start. The silent radio that had ceased barking stupid orders was a blessing. Radio be damned. He looked at the radio on the ground and actually entertained thoughts of destroying it. But he had the others to think of, and there was the small question of his dignity, of which he supposed there was a shred left. Somewhere along with his dignity, he supposed he had to throw in his training and his army discipline, too, though there actually wasn’t much left of it. All the good officers he knew who followed orders, colored and white, were killed or so screwed up mentally they would never be right after the war. The hell with it. He was going to do like the rest of his men. Survive. Be stupid. Get lazy. Fall in love with a dumb kid like Train did, or maybe find out what this beautiful woman’s name was. Why not? He hoped the radio never buzzed and crackled again.

  A card game had started on Ludovico’s steps. Two women had taken Train’s boy and were trying to get him to eat an apple. A chicken had mysteriously appeared and was crackling over the fire. Wine was being passed around, and there were toasts to Christmas, which was only four days away. Out of the corner of his eye, Stamps saw Train giving a piggyback ride to a little girl. Someone had a guitar out and began to play a Christmas song. Bishop was wooing a long-legged girl by the fire. Several more chickens had miraculously appeared. It was a regular party, a real holiday party.

  Hector was seated next to the fire. He broke off a piece of rabbit leg and passed it to a middle-aged signora and her little boy. The signora looked with more than mild interest at Hector’s long fingers. “Hec, something’s wrong here,” Stamps said softly.

  “You’re right,” Hector answered him, as the signora grasped him by the hand and pulled him up for a quick dance around the fire. The guitarist struck up a faster song. “But if you think on it hard enough,” he gasped, as the woman flung him in a circle, laughing wildly, “maybe tomorrow will never come.”

  14

  THE GERMAN

  But tomorrow did come, and with it came snow and a German.

  The sun had stretched its fingers above the mountain’s horizon, and snow was falling lightly on the wooded ridge facing Ludovico’s house. Stamps had just emerged from the alley behind the house and was washing his face in the icy creek when the German appeared beyond the stone wall, walking down the ridge from above. Stamps saw him and flattened behind the waist-high wall, reached for his carbine, then remembered he’d left it inside. He ran inside the house to grab it and tell the others, but Train had gone behind the house to take the kid to the bathroom. Bishop and Hector were gone.

  Stamps ran to the corner where his carbine stood, grabbed it, checked to see if it was still loaded, then ran back outside and took a position against the wall, his rifle aimed at the approaching German.

  Across the open field and down the mountain ridge the German came, alone. He was helmetless and unarmed, his hands at his sides, staggering down the grassy ridge of the mountain as if his legs could barely carry his weight. Behind him, the bushes parted and four young men appeared, holding rifles trained on him. Stamps heard yelling in Ludovico’s house and in the other houses, and Bishop and Hector appeared out of nowhere. Stamps snapped, “Hector, go get Train and the old man.”

  Hector went into the house and emerged with Ludovico and Renata.

  “Oh, no,” Renata murmured, crossing herself as she ran down to the creek to join the Americans.

  Stamps, Hector, and Bishop crouched, their rifles cocked, as the Italians and their prisoner slowly made their way down the ridge and across the field, and approached the creek. Renata waited until they were about thirty feet off and shouted at them. They shouted back.

  “What did they say?” Stamps asked.

  “They want to eat.”

  “Tell them to put down their weapons and we’ll feed them all they want.”

  Renata shouted and the Italians responded. “They say they’ll put theirs down if you put yours down.”
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  Stamps looked at Hector. “That’s what they said?”

  “Sounds right.”

  “I ain’t lowering this gun. They could be Germans disguised.”

  Renata snorted. “They’re not Germans.” She motioned the partisans forward.

  The Italians advanced slowly into the creek that fronted Ludovico’s house and waded across.

  “What you think? You think they Italian?” Stamps asked Bishop.

  “If it looks like fish, smells like fish, and tastes like fish, you can bet it ain’t buzzard.”

  Stamps watched Renata march up to the Italians, who had emerged from the water onto the snowbank. She walked up to the one who had huge ears and grabbed an ear. Rodolfo winced as Renata shook him by his ear. “No German has ears like this,” she declared. She said something in Italian, and the four partisans laughed.

  Stamps lowered his weapon slightly as the Italians approached to within ten feet, but he kept the barrel close to his hip just in case. The leader, a short, thin, balding man with a handsome, slender face, motioned for the others to stand back. His eyes were dark and hard as pool balls, his stare as straight as a razor’s edge. His face was weathered and seemed to have the wind in it, as if shifting breezes and strong gales blew about it without stirring it. He was a young man, Stamps guessed, perhaps in his mid-twenties, and while his clothing was worn, Stamps could see that beneath it the man was built for power and speed. Though he moved slowly, he was lithe and easy in his movements, like a panther or a small mountain lion. Stamps was immediately afraid of him. He glanced at the others. They were young, too. One was a boy whose rifle was nearly as long as he was.

  The leader came forward to meet Stamps.