Last Bus to Wisdom

by Ivan Doig

  At first I thought it was only the household’s usual ruckus at breakfast while I was parked on the living room couch as usual, reading a National Geographic, this time about “Ancient Rome Brought to Life,” where according to the paintings shown, people sometimes went around even more naked than in Bali. I was pondering an illustration of a roomful of women mostly that way and the caption with some ditty from back then, “Known unto All Are the Mysteries, Where, Roused by Music and Wine, the Women Shake Their Hair and Cry Aloud,” those mysteries unfortunately unknown to me except for that smackeroo kiss Letty and I exchanged, and I did not notice her shaking her hair and crying aloud from it.

  Just then, though, I heard a woman definitely roused, but not that way.

  “Have you lost half your brain as well as that eye?” Aunt Kate was shouting in the close confines of the kitchen.

  “Does not take any much brain to know you are talking crazy,” came Herman’s raised voice in return.

  “Oh, I’m the one, am I. I’ve told you before, don’t be filling his head with useless things. When I was out seeing what flowers I could cut for our next little party, I heard you telling him more of that Manitou nonsense.”

  “Is not nonsense. You think you are more smart than Longfellow? Not one chance in a million.” Herman went on the attack now. “You are the one filling him up with canasta nonsense and putting him on spot in your hen parties. Let the boy be boy, I am telling you.”

  In a kind of stupor as I realized the knock-down, drag-out fight was about me, I crept to the hallway where I could peek toward the kitchen. They were up on their feet, going at it across the table. I’d heard them having battles before, but this sounded like war. More so than I could have imagined, because as I watched in horror, Aunt Kate leaned across the table almost within touching distance of Herman and shrieked one of the worst things I had heard in my life.

  “Don’t get any ideas about who’s in charge of our little bus passenger for the summer! You’re not wearing a Kraut helmet anymore, so don’t think you’re the big boss around here!”

  Herman’s face darkened, and for a few frightening seconds, I wondered whether he was going to hit her. Or she him, just as likely, given the way her fists were clenched.

  Then Herman said in a voice barely under control, “What I am, you did not care when you wanted your bed keeped warm after Fritz.” With that, he turned his back on her, heading out to the refuge of the greenhouse. Aunt Kate followed him far enough to get in a few more digs before he slammed the door and was gone.

  Shocked nearly senseless as I was, by instinct I scooted for the stairs and scuttled up to the attic while she still was storming around the kitchen. I would have retreated farther than that if I could, after what I had heard. Before long, Aunt Kate’s voice was raised again, this time in my direction and straining to sound melodious.

  “Don-ny. Yoo hoo, Donny, where are you? Let’s go for a little outing and do the grocery shopping, shall we?”

  I stayed absolutely still, gambling that she would not labor up the stairs to seek me out. And if I could make her think I was at the greenhouse with Herman instead, she likely wouldn’t want another shouting match out there. Silence, rare as it was tried in this household, might save me yet. After some minutes, I heard the DeSoto pull away, and so hurt and mad at being deceived that I could hardly see straight, I raced down the stairs two and three at a time, bound for a showdown in the greenhouse.

  • • •

  “YOU LOOK NOT HAPPY, podner,” Herman said beneath his usual cloud of cigar smoke. The only sign that the battle royal in the kitchen might still have him agitated was the sharp strike of his spoon against the pot rims as he fed fertilizer to the cabbages. “Something the Kate did, hah?”

  I wanted to holler at him, No, something you did, turning out to be a German soldier! Swallowing hard, I managed to restrict myself to saying, “I—I heard Aunt Kate bawling you out in there.”

  “Habit,” he wrote that off and tapped his cigar ash onto the floor. “She wouldn’t have nothing to do if not yelling her head off at me.”

  I had to know.

  “Did you really fight on the Kraut side, like she said?”

  Wincing at that language, he looked up at me in surprise. “She should wash her tongue and hang it out to dry.” The big shoulders lifted, and dropped. “But, ja”—which I finally heard for what it was, instead of Yah—“that is one way to put it.”

  “So you really truly are a”—I had trouble even saying it—“a German?”

  “Ja, double cursed,” he said, as if life had done him dirty at the start. “The name ‘Herman’ even means ‘soldier’ in German language, if you will imagine.”

  “But then how come you don’t talk like they do in the movies?” I demanded to know, as if his squarehead accent was a betrayal. “The Nazi bad guys, I mean.”

  “Pah, those Nazi bigwigs, they speak like they are chewing a dictionary,” he dismissed that. “I am from where we talk different German than that. Emden, on the North Sea. Netherlands is next door, the Dutchies are a spit away, we say.”

  “So aren’t you sort of Dutch, any?” I seized on what hope there was. “Like when you were called that before it went down with the ship?”

  “No-o-o,” he drew the answer out as if calculating how far to go with it. “‘Dutch’ was sailor talk for ‘Deutsch,’ which means ‘German.’ Better than ‘Kraut,’ but not much.”

  That clinched it. A Kraut by any other name, even his shipmates recognized it. Imagination did me no favors right then. My head filled with scenes of landing craft sloshing to shore under a hail of gunfire from Hitler’s troops, and sand red with blood, and a figure on crutches in the hallways of Fort Harrison hospital trying to learn to walk again, which was not imaginary at all. Giving Herman the German, as he now was to me, the worst stink eye I was capable of, I demanded:

  “Tell me the truth. Were you one of them at Omaha Beach?”

  “Hah? What kind of beach?”

  “You know. On D-Day. Were you there shooting at my father, like the other Germans?”

  Realization set in on him, his face changing radically as my accusation hit home. “Donny, hold on to your horses. I am not what you are thinking. The Great War, I was in.”

  What, now he was telling me it was great to have been in the war where my father got his legs shot to pieces? I kept on giving him the mean eye, hating everything about this Kraut-filled summer and him along with it, until he said slowly so I would understand, “World War Eins. One.”

  I blinked that in. “You mean, way back?”

  He looked as if his cigar had turned sour. “You could say. I was made a soldier thirty-seven years ago,” which I worked out in my head to 1914.

  Slowly I sat down on a fruit box as he indicated, a whole different story unfolding than what I had imagined. “No choice did I have, Donny, back then.” He gazed up at the photographic panes of glass holding olden times in the poses of the portrait sitters, as if drawing on the past from them. “You have heard of the draft, where government says, ‘You, you, and you, put uniform on,’ ja? Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany in the Great War was very drafty place.” The joke made a serious point. “There I was, young sailor on the North Sea, and before I knowed it, foot soldier wearing a pickle stabber.” He put his hand on top of his head with the index finger up, indicating the spiked helmet of Der Kaiser’s army.

  Comical as that was, I was not deterred from asking, “So, were you in any big battles?”

  He puffed out cigar smoke that wreathed a rueful grin. “With my corporal, many times.”

  “Aw, come on, you know what I mean. Real fights. Like Custer and the Indians.”

  “Shoot-them-ups, you want,” he sighed. “Karl May should write Western Front westerns for you.”

  At first I thought he was not going to answer further, but finally he came out with, “I
was at Höhe Toter Mann, was enough.”

  That didn’t sound bad, nothing like Omaha Beach. Disappointed at his evidently tame war, I said just to be asking, “What’s that mean, Ho-huh whatever you said?”

  He half closed his good eye as if seeing the words into English. “Dead Man’s Hill, about.”

  That sat me up, all attention again. “Yeeps! Like Boot Hill, sort of?”

  “More ways than one,” he evidently decided to give me Herman the German’s side of the war. “Höhe Toter Mann was fought over time after time, back and forth, forth and back, Germans and French killing each other all they could.” He grimaced, and after what he said, I did, too. “You could not see the ground, some places, dead men or parts of them was so thick.”

  I’d wanted to know the blood-and-guts truth about him being a soldier, had I. That would do. “H-how come you weren’t killed there?”

  “The shovel is sometimes better friend than the rifle,” he said simply. “Learned to dig such foxholes, I did, could have given fox a lesson.” He paused to frame the rest of that story. “Here is a strange thing soldiers go through. The more of my comrades died on Höhe Toter Mann, the more it saved my life. My outfit, I think you call it?”—I nodded—“Second Company, lost so many men we was moved to rear guard duty. Behind the lines, we had chance to survive the war.” His face took on an odd expression, as if skipping past a lot to say, And here you see me, in America.

  “Yeah, well, good,” I spoke my relief that he had been in a separate war from my father. Now I could be curious about things less likely to bring the whole summer crashing down. “My dad was a private first class—what about you?”

  “Private no class, my soldiering was more like,” he told me, memory turning toward mischief now. “Not what you might call hero. Mostly, behind the lines I was chicken hunter.”

  “Uhm, Herman, that sounds awful close to chicken thief.”

  “In peacetime, ja. In war, is different. When rations are short, you must, what is the word, when cattles go here and there to eat grass?”

  “Forage?”

  “Sounds better than ‘thief,’ don’t it,” he went right past that issue without stopping. “Same eye-dea, though. Go find what you need to survive. ‘Sharp eyes and light fingers’ was the saying. When night came, so did chance for hunting. You must understand, Donny”—he could see I still was trying to sort this out from chicken thievery—“we was being fed a pannikin of soup like water and slice of bread per man, day’s only meal, before armistice came. Starvation ration, too bad it don’t rhyme better.” He looked contemplatively at his private garden of vegetables under glass. “I grew up on little farm at Emden, cows lived downstairs from us and chickens loose outside, so I understanded where food could be rustled.”

  We heard the DeSoto jouncing up the bumpy driveway. “Tell you what, podner,” Herman suggested rightly, even if it was not what I wanted to hear, “go help the Kate with the groceries, hah? Keep her off the warpath for once.”

  • • •

  I WENT THROUGH that day of Aunt Kate’s bossy supervision—here, honeybunch, help me with this; there, sweetums, do this for me—with Herman’s words outlasting anything she had to say. Sharp eyes and light fingers; there is no switch you can reach in your brain to turn something like that off. It fit with me, for if I hadn’t been what he called a hunter, the black arrowhead still would be on the hall table at the Double W instead of within the touch of my fingers in the security of my pocket. Even after a suppertime so tense I wondered whether one of them might throw the sauerkraut at the other, and another march to bed when I was wide awake, a tantalizing possibility kept coming to mind, like an echo that went on and on: Go find what you need to survive.

  When I went to bed, my eyes not only wouldn’t close in favor of sleep, they barely blinked. Put yourself in my place, doomed to screeching bedsprings and attic confinement for the rest of the summer and no mad money to see a great movie like Tomahawk or do anything else that was halfway interesting, and see if your mind doesn’t become a fever field of imagination and you don’t turn into an eleven-year-old desperado. I ignored the plaque on the wall that preached getting down on my knees and praying as the one-and-only answer, and instead saw through the house, to put it that way, to the sewing room. Where Aunt Kate kept her purse and maybe significantly more. Those quarters that jingled all the way home from the canasta party had to live somewhere.

  • • •

  IT IS TOO MUCH to say I waited for the cover of night the way Herman had poised himself behind the lines to go out into the dark of war to forage, but I did make myself hold back, tingling to go and do it, until long after everything in this battling household went quiet.

  Finally swinging out of bed, I hurried into my clothes, Tuffy-wrapped arrowhead in my pocket for luck, and slipped into the moccasins. Cracked the door open, listening for any sound downstairs. There was none whatsoever except that nighttime not-quite-stillness of a house holding people deep asleep. Quiet as a shadow I crept down and into the sewing room. I didn’t know what I was going to say if I got caught at this. Something would have to come. It usually did.

  Almost the instant I entered the small darkened room, I blundered into the cot, barking my shin on the metal frame and causing a thump that seemed to me loud as thunder.

  Sucking in my breath against the hurt, I froze in place for what seemed an eternity, until I convinced myself the sleepers had not heard. Burning up as I was to get this done, but not daring to put on the lights in the room, I waited until my eyes adjusted to the dark and the furnishings in the room took form, if barely. What I was after had to be somewhere in here. Aunt Kate’s purse hung next to the door as always, but I knew better than to risk going into it. Tightfisted as she was, she would keep track of every cent she was carrying. No, in any household I knew anything about, there was a Mason jar where loose change, the chickenfeed, was emptied when people cleared out their pockets or purses of too much small silver. Normally kept in a kitchen cabinet or on a bedroom dresser, but from what I had seen, not in this case, undoubtedly to keep even the smallest coins out of Herman’s reach. That stash must be, ought to be, had to be in here in the vicinity of her purse, something like hunter instinct insisted in me.

  I cautiously hobbled over to where the sewing machine was located. If I was right, a Singer model this fancy might have a small light beneath the arm of the machine to shine down on close work. My blind search ultimately fumbled onto a toggle that switched on a small bulb above the needle and router, perfect for my purpose. In its glow I could pick out objects shelved around the room, stacks and stacks of cloth and pattern books and such. But nothing like a jar holding the loose change of canasta winnings.

  Doubt was eating away at my courage pretty fast—maybe I was loco to even try this and ought to sneak back upstairs to bed. Instead, Manitou or some similar spirit of the miraculous guided my hand into my pants pocket, where I squeezed the arrowhead for all the luck it might have. That steadied me enough to take another look around the room. My last hope, and it did not appear to be much of one, was a standard low cabinet next to the sewing machine, designed to hold thread and attachments. Quietly as possible I pulled out drawer after drawer, encountering a world of spools of thread and gizmos for making buttonholes and ruffles and so on, until finally I reached a drawer that jingled when I opened it.

  I dipped my fingers into the discovery, very much like a pirate sifting gold doubloons in a treasure chest. This was it, coins inches deep and loose and rattling to the touch, nickels, dimes, and quarters, quarters, quarters, some in bank wrap rolls. My heart rate and breathing both quickened like crazy. There was so much accumulated small silver, a dozen or so quarters and the rest in chickenfeed would scarcely make a dent in it.

  Biting my lip in concentration, I sorted out onto the platform of the sewing machine in the pool of light about the same proportion of quarters and dimes and nickel
s to make the drawer’s holdings seem as even as ever. There. I had it knocked, my rightful five dollars of the hard-won canasta pot. I was wrapping my withdrawal, as I saw it, in my hanky and about to pocket it for the journey through the dark back up to the attic, when the voice came:

  “Are you done, you little thief?”

  She was practically filling the doorway, in a nightdress as tentlike as the muumuu and wearing those fuzzy slippers that were noiseless on the living room rug. At first my tongue did fail me as I stared at a greatly irate Aunt Kate and she at me, an outpouring of words no problem for her. “I was on my way to the bathroom when I noticed this funny little glow from in here. It’s not like me to leave the sewing machine on like that, is it. And what do I find, Mister Smarty Pants, but you stealing for all you’re worth.”

  I didn’t know anything to do but fight back. “Why is this stealing when I won the pot in the canasta game just as much as you did, remember? I bet Minnie Zettel got her share every time the two of you won. So why can’t I?”

  “I went over that with you in the car—”

  “And you told me you and Herman were headed for the poorhouse, but looky here, you have money you just throw in a drawer.”

  “—will you listen, please.” She was growing loud now. “You need to get used to not having your own way all the time. I hate to say it,” but it was out of her mouth as fast as it could come, “Dorie has spoiled you something serious, letting you behave like a bunkhouse roughneck or worse.”

  That infuriated me, not least for her picking on Gram while she was fighting for her life in the hospital. “Gram’s done the best she can, and I am, too, here. But you treat me like I’m a bum you took in. If I had that money you threw in the garbage, none of this would’ve happened.”

  “That is no excuse for stealing,” she said loftily, advancing on me with her hand out for the hanky-wrapped coins.

  “I don’t think it’s stealing,” I cried, “when you won’t give me anything and I’m only taking my five bucks of what we won as partners. Why, isn’t it stealing, just as much, for you to keep it all for yourself?”