Prisoners of War

by Steve Yarbrough

“Well, last year it did. I’ve always thought it was a shame I wasn’t born in 1900, since my body seems to keep such perfect time. If I had’ve been, everybody could just look at me and tell how old the century was. Then we wouldn’t need no calendars.”

  “I don’t need a calendar to tell how old this one is. It’s older than any century’s got a right to be.”

  “You saying not all centuries was created equal?”

  “They may have been created equal. They just don’t stay that way.”

  The rain fell harder, and by the time they got to the parking lot, it was coming down in sheets. He told her to wait under the awning while he got the truck. She watched him pull his collar up, then hunch over and dart across the pavement, water splashing as he ran.

  When he reached the truck, he stood there in the rain with his back to her—probably fishing for his key. Then he turned around and, instead of opening the door, pulled his hat off and threw it straight up, the waterlogged fedora spinning in the air like a yo-yo.

  “Recess!” he hollered while the rain pelted down. “Ain’t it time for recess?”

  Turning up her collar, Shirley stepped into the downpour, grateful at least for the chance to get soaked.

  They sat in the porch swing at his place, listening to the Opry and watching the rain. He produced a bottle and poured her a drink, but since he didn’t pour himself one, she left hers untouched. She’d gotten sloppy the last time she’d been over here, and he’d left the next morning to spend a week in St. Louis, not even letting her know where he’d gone. He came back with a story about meeting Stan Musial that she felt sure he’d made up.

  “It keeps raining like this,” she said, “I guess all the cotton’ll just float away.”

  “It won’t float away. Weather Bureau says the front’ll pass through tonight, and then we’re looking at sunshine. We’ll get Dan in the field with them Germans by the middle of next week.”

  “If he doesn’t take a notion to hit the road.”

  “He ain’t the road-hitting type. Not as long as he’s got some responsibility to shoulder.”

  He leaned back in the porch swing and crossed his arms behind his head—a frequent gesture on his part, and one she’d always hated. She believed that if you’d sat him down in a chair against a brick wall, facing a firing squad, he’d rear back like that right before they shot him. Just to keep anybody from suspecting he might value his life.

  “But he’ll make a perfect soldier,” he said. “They ask for volunteers, his hand’ll go up every damn time.”

  “Somebody’s hand’s got to go up sometime, I guess.”

  “If a war’s to be fought, it sure as hell does. That’s exactly what Jimmy Del thought.”

  “But not you.”

  “No,” he said, “not me. I was always the worthless one. And I’m worth a lot less now than I was back then.”

  She felt herself starting to melt. She added up to so much less than she used to. The years were slipping away, just as people had, and more of both would be gone in no time. She rarely let herself wonder what would happen when Dan enlisted. Being in that house alone was something she couldn’t imagine doing. There were no bars on the windows, but there might just as well have been.

  “I think I want to look for a job,” she said.

  “What for? You know I’ll help y’all make it.”

  “I have to help myself make it.”

  “Well, if that’s what you want.”

  “Did you think any more about driving me up to Memphis? Before I look for work, I ought to do something about my clothes.”

  “I don’t believe us taking trips together’d be a real good idea.”

  “You used to think it was a great idea.”

  “Well, things used to be different. You know that as well as I do.”

  “Yes,” she said, “and when they were, it made a lot less sense for us to go to Memphis or anywhere else. But we went all the same, didn’t we? My God, how far we went.”

  She picked the glass up and took a big swallow of whiskey, then rose and walked over to the edge of the porch. Rivulets ran down the screen, which sagged wherever several drops clung together. The air smelled of ozone, and a cool breeze was starting to blow.

  When she turned around again, she’d made up her mind to hurt him, if only she could find the right words. Then she saw the way he was looking at her, his eyes starting at the floor and traveling up her body, moving slowly, lingering over this detail and the next, caressing every inch of her before coming to rest, finally, on her face.

  Whistling, he shook his head. “Shirley, if I had a million dollars, I still don’t think I could afford you. Just flat couldn’t meet the asking price.”

  EIGHT

  A HUNDRED and ten bolls for every ten feet of row—that’s what we’re looking for,” Dan’s father had always told him. If you got that yield throughout the field, the land could be counted on to produce a bale an acre. They never quite managed it, but a few times they’d come close.

  One year—their best year, he’d heard his father say—they had as pretty a stand as anyone had ever seen. Dan remembered climbing into the trailer and packing the cotton down, tromping it with gusto and then, after he grew tired, falling asleep and lying there while his daddy towed it in. But once they reached the gin, it stood out in the yard, alongside his daddy’s other trailer, while cotton belonging to the Starks and the Stancills went onto the scales. A big front was sweeping down from the Great Plains, and his daddy pleaded with the gin operator, who said only that he’d get around to them when he could.

  But Dan had defied local logic by becoming friends with Marty Stark. “My dad says we could go under,” he told him the next morning on the playground, where they were tossing a football back and forth. “Both our trailers are standing out in the yard over at the Choctaw Creek Gin, full of cotton, and if we don’t empty ’em before the rain hits, what’s left’ll mildew and sell below grade.”

  “How come they don’t pull ’em in there and gin it?”

  “Mr. Crider told Daddy we don’t give him that much business. Says he’s got to get y’all’s ginned, and the Stancills’, and I don’t know who all else’s.”

  “Buford Crider? My daddy says he ain’t got no more spine than a clothesline. And I reckon Daddy ought to know, because he don’t have much spine neither.” Marty drop-kicked the ball straight into the air, ran under it and caught it, then drew his arm back and fired Dan a perfect spiral. “I’ll tell my grandpa what’s happening,” he said. “I guarantee you he can speed old Crider up.”

  The trailers were empty by five that afternoon, and his daddy had them back in the field by five-thirty. They picked most of the remaining cotton before the storm hit, and his father received an abject apology from Buford Crider, though he never figured out what had prompted either the action or the apology, and Dan never told him. He was only twelve years old at the time, but he already knew a thing or two about dignity.

  He thought about that episode, and about being dependent on somebody else’s good intentions, as he walked through the field that Monday afternoon with his uncle. Alvin’s good intentions, assuming he had any, mattered a lot right now, starting with footing the bill for the POW labor. But the way Dan figured it, his uncle owed somebody something, though he’d never been sure who the somebody was or how great the sum might be.

  “Problem you’ll have with them Germans,” Alvin said, pulling his hat off and mopping sweat from his forehead, “is they don’t know a cotton boll from a butter bean. You’ll have to show ’em how to pull the cotton loose—and if you don’t watch ’em, I bet they’ll drop the whole boll in the sack. Another thing: when their sacks get full and they haul ’em in to weigh up, make sure they go back to the same spot, or you’ll end up with a lot of piece rows. I’ll get you a package of white handkerchiefs from the store. Give one to each of them Krauts and make ’em tie it to the top of a stalk before they head for the turnrow. Tell ’em you ain’t trying to make �
�em surrender again, you just don’t want nobody getting lost.”

  They counted the bolls at the ends of several rows, using his daddy’s method, then headed for the low spots in the center of the field. While they walked along through the hot, dusty middles, Alvin speculated about how the Germans might fare when they found themselves out there.”They ain’t got no place in their own country that gets this hot,” he said. “On the other hand, I was talking to that Captain Munson the other day, and he said most of ’em was over in Africa, right smack in the middle of the desert, so I reckon they had ample opportunity to sample warm weather. He claims they’re good workers. Says there ain’t a chance in hell they’ll run off.”

  “You know the army shipped Marty Stark home and made him a guard out there?”

  “Yeah. I heard it the other day.”

  “Why you reckon they sent him back? He ain’t been wounded.”

  “He didn’t say why?”

  “Not a word.”

  “His daddy’s a big wheel. Maybe he just don’t feature his son dodging bullets.”

  “Mr. Stark ain’t that big a wheel.”

  “Big enough to share a drink with Jim Eastland.”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  Alvin squatted down and began to count the bolls on a cotton stalk, actually touching each one, as if he couldn’t believe it was open until he’d felt the fiber. “Friend of mine told me she saw him up at Eastland’s place one time.”

  Dan wondered which friend this had been. The dime-store clerk who’d finally figured out Alvin cared less about her than he did about his boots, or the rich redheaded widow from over in Greenville? The friend could’ve been any one of several women. Or it could’ve been someone he didn’t even know about, or no one at all.

  “I don’t imagine Mr. Stark cares that much, one way or the other, about Marty dodging bullets,” Dan said. “If you ask me, he never was much of a father.” He squatted down himself, intending to count the bolls on his row.

  “You’ll make a hell of a rifleman, Daniel,” his uncle said. “You see stuff other folks don’t.”

  NINE

  ROSETTA’S HOUSE stood in the middle of a cotton field Alvin rented out, where the tractors plowed right up to her windows. L.C. had told Dan that sometimes, in June and July, she’d nail cardboard over them to keep from choking on the dust.

  Wednesday morning, when Dan turned his pickup into the yard, L.C. was waiting, lunch bucket in hand. “You got a gun?” he asked.

  “What the hell for?”

  L.C. walked around to the passenger side, opened the door and got in. “Case any of them Nazis takes a notion to run off.”

  “They ain’t going nowhere. Most of ’em ain’t Nazis anyway.”

  “What make you say that?”

  “They just ain’t.”

  “They wore the uniform, didn’t they?”

  “Wearing a German uniform don’t make you a Nazi.”

  L.C. held his forearms up and examined them, rotating them one way and then the other. “I got nigger skin,” he said. “Reckon that mean I’m white?”

  “Sometimes,” Dan said, “I think that’s all y’all study.”

  L.C. laughed. “Sometimes that’s what we want y’all to think.”

  Dan turned the pickup around and headed back toward the highway. L.C. always made him feel like he was the butt of a joke without ever saying anything you could call a real punch line. Once or twice, he’d been tempted to ask if there was such a thing as black math. Two and two would always be four, as far as he was concerned, but he doubted L.C. would see it that way. He’d think there was something funny, maybe even simple-minded, about wanting two numbers to add up the same from one day to the next.

  L.C. was thumping his foot against the floorboard, humming a weird-sounding melody that didn’t seem to have any real words, just an uuh-huh from time to time, or an occasional I mean. He fancied himself a guitar player and was pretty good, to hear Alvin tell it.

  “What you call that music?”

  “Don’t call it nothing.”

  “Sounds a little bit like them colored spirituals to me.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s got some spirit to it. Maybe not the good kind, though.”

  “What other kind is there?”

  “Evil spirits.”

  “You mean to tell me you believe in all that trash?”

  “Ever know a nigger that didn’t?”

  Dan had half a mind to tell him he’d never known a nigger, because it was impossible to know one if you yourself were white, though it went without saying that they all knew you. “You wouldn’t like it,” he said, “if I was to call you what you just called yourself, would you?”

  L.C. rolled his eyes, as if this was complete nonsense. “You call me that all the time.”

  “I ain’t never called you that.”

  “Naw? In your mind, what you think of me as?”

  He had him there.

  “See?” L.C. said. “You know it as well as I does.” Shutting his eyes, he started thumping the floorboard again and singing about somebody named Holloway, who seemed to be some kind of colored Jesus, because fallen women adored him and— unless Dan had misunderstood something—he died every Saturday night and rose again on Sunday morning.

  Through the wire mesh you could see the prisoners milling around in small groups, wearing what looked like washed-out army fatigues with the letters PW stenciled on the backs of their shirts. There were guards inside as well, but Dan didn’t see Marty.

  He saw somebody else he knew, though. Frank Holder sat on the tailgate of his truck, drawing lines in the dirt with the toe of his shoe. Dan had played football with Biggie, but he’d never found the father very easy to talk to. He was the kind of man who never seemed to smile, never told a story or even drove into town to watch his son play ball.

  Still, Dan hated to see him sitting there alone. When they held the memorial service for Biggie, Mrs. Holder had clawed the varnish off a church pew and Holder himself had buried his face in a handkerchief.

  Leaving L.C. in the pickup, he walked over. “Hey, Mr. Holder.”

  “How you doing, Danny?”

  “Not too bad. You waiting for a labor detachment?”

  “Yeah. Supposed to get me eight of ’em.”

  “Me, too. You reckon Germans can learn to pick cotton?”

  “They’re pretty sharp folks,” Holder said. “I imagine they’ll do all right.” He gazed at Dan’s pickup. “Ain’t that the nigger that drives Alvin’s rolling store?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “What’s he doing here?”

  “He’ll help me get ’em started this morning.”

  “I been watching that boy. He come by my place one day and laid down on that damn horn, and when I walked over and asked him what the hell he was doing, he didn’t show too much respect. Since then, I seen him tearing up and down the roads, throwing up rocks and dust, just batting it to beat all. Like to run me in the ditch one day. I got a good mind to report him to the Civil Defense.” He shook his head. “These Germans is the enemy all right, and if the army asked me to, I’d stand ten or twelve of ’em up against the barn and cut loose. But if they could speak English, I bet you wouldn’t have no trouble understanding what they was saying. Not like the niggers. Maybe they know what they mean when they open their mouth, but can’t nobody else figure it out.”

  One of the guards unlocked the gates, and a sergeant Dan had seen downtown, eating a burger and reading the funny papers, stepped out holding a clipboard. “All right now,” he said, his voice loud and unmistakably northern. “We’ll be following the same procedure every morning. What I got here’s a list of all the contractors and the men assigned to each one. When I call off a contractor’s name, I’ll ask him to hold his hand up to identify himself. And don’t none of you local gentlemen worry, you’re not volunteering for hazardous duty or nothing like that.” He paused in case the line drew a laugh.

  It didn’t. Dan had
heard more than a few folks say they didn’t like having so many outsiders around—and it was clear they weren’t referring to the Germans.

  “All right, then. Ain’t nobody got a sense of humor here this morning. But hell, this is serious business, right? Right. We got to get these Jerries out there picking old king cotton. And so we will, so we will. My first name on the list this fine morning’s Mr. Robert L. Brown, and I bet I know what the L stands for. Probably had an ancestor fit for the greatest in gray. Where’s Farmer Brown?”

  Raising his hand, Bob Brown stepped forward.

  In a low voice, Holder said, “Lock that damn Yankee in a room with one of them Krauts and his breakfast’d run the hundred down his leg.”

  The sergeant pointed at Brown, then turned to the prisoners and began shouting names. “Abeken, J. . . . Daim, R. . . . Detten, A. . . . Lasker, G. . . .”

  Dan watched the Germans stream through the gates. He’d always heard they were usually blond, but a lot of them had dark hair, and there were even a couple redheads. Few exhibited any memorable physical traits, and they were mostly of average height and average weight. Standing there, he had a hard time believing any of them would’ve been willing, much less eager, to kill him. It seemed impossible that he couldn’t have convinced them to let him live, if only because he was every bit as ordinary as they were.

  Two men in each group carried five-gallon water cans, which they hoisted into the backs of the pickups. The other prisoners stood by silently while the farmers signed for them; then they climbed into the trucks and rode off. Most detachments were unaccompanied by guards.

  “Daniel Timms,” the sergeant finally called. “Where’s Mr. Daniel J. Timms?”

  Dan stepped forward, his hand in the air.

  The sergeant looked him over. “Your father send you?”

  Right then, for the first time that morning, Dan saw Marty. He was standing inside the fence, a rifle slung from his shoulder. The MP armband had slid down close to his elbow. Raising his right hand, he pointed an imaginary pistol at the sergeant’s back.