The Southern Cross

by Skip Horack

  “I’m sorry,” Ellis told her. “I shouldn’t have said all the things I said.”

  Amy folded her arms and sat on the concrete railing of the bridge. Her auburn hair was tucked under a baseball hat, but a few here-and-there strands had worked loose and were wisping in the salt breeze. “Like when you told me I don’t know you at all?” she asked.

  “Yes,” said Ellis. “I think now that I’ve just changed. I remember being happier.”

  “With me?”

  “Happier with myself, I mean.”

  Amy nodded but kept quiet, and so Ellis tied a halogen lamp to a length of nylon rope and lowered it from the railing. The lamp hung suspended over the black water of the bay like a setting sun. Amy leaned over the side of the bridge with him and they watched shrimp flea-skip to the light. He rigged another pole as trout began to feed—mostly whites, but some specks. Together they filled an ice chest.

  Ellis cleaned the fish on the railing and Amy shared her hot tea, offered some of the mandel bread she had made to calm herself after their fight. It looked delicious but he refused. The mandel bread, the old Mets hat she wore so well—on that night those things only saddened him, served to remind him that his wife had left almost everything she knew to follow him from Manhattan to Pensacola. He thought back to a poetry reading in the Village long ago. They’d been in a candlelit basement bar somewhere in the Village, would never love each other more than they did at that moment. In a month he would be finished at NYU. “I’m sorry, but my heart” he had told her, “belongs in the Panhandle.” She had teased him about that for years.

  “It’s funny,” said Amy on the bridge, her voice small in the night, “the shrimp you use for bait aren’t kosher”—she brought her hands together and smiled—“but the trout are.”

  The idea of converting something forbidden and cursed into something useful and blessed—he could tell that this appealed to her. Ellis looked up and saw that she was staring at the bone moon. She looked tired. He loved his wife but knew that he had failed her in nearly every way, large and small, that a man could fail a woman.

  “I’m just not ready for kids,” he said. “Truth is, I’m not sure I ever will be.”

  Amy nodded and asked him to move out, maybe for a month, maybe longer.

  “So maybe forever?” asked Ellis.

  “Yes,” she said. “Maybe forever.”

  The following week she helped him pack. He wanted to take along the extra coffeemaker and so she disappeared into the attic. Before long she returned carrying a small cedar chest. “I found this,” she said. “It was buried under some blankets.”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t really know,” she said. “Old stuff”

  Amy handed him the chest and inside he found an American flag and a Purple Heart, old letters bound by ribbon and yellow with age, a black-and-white photograph of a memorial headstone in Arlington. These were his grandmother’s things, things Ellis hadn’t known he owned but that had somehow, some way, followed him all these years.

  “I thought you might want to go through it all sometime,” she said, and then she turned to go back up and look for the coffeemaker.

  This thoughtfulness, this effortless and persisting kindness, was typical of her. He felt his heart break just a little more as she left him holding the chest.

  Ellis explores Amsterdam until dark, then crashes at the hotel and sleeps until his eleven o’clock checkout. After breakfast he walks to the train station, rents a tiny red Fiat, and leaves the city behind. His passenger seat is plastered with Google maps; Volkstadt is only four or five hours away. He tackles the countryside, the nether Netherlands.

  At midday he enters Germany. He pushes east until he crosses the Weser River and then aims for the North Sea. In the afternoon he arrives in a pretty port town named Cuxhaven. He stops here and walks the beach, sees that the tide is gone. The shallow bay has been laid bare, and the ocean floor is a naked field of compact mud. Tourists wander the bubbling mud flat as a line of ponies slogs north, carrying riders to a barrier island in the hazy distance some five, six miles off. Must be something, Ellis thinks, riding out to an island, shooting a low-tide window. How safe that would feel: to be high and dry at the end of the day, brushing down your tired horse as the sea closes in behind you.

  Volkstadt is just down the road. Ellis has a few hours of daylight and figures he could make it still—but he’s not ready to leave quite yet. Pastor Weis isn’t expecting him until tomorrow, and besides, this shouldn’t come too easily.

  Amy would like this place, he decides, this place where the ocean simply disappears, vanishes twice a day. Ellis checks in to a hotel near the beach and thinks of her, watches from his window as families and lovers return from the empty bay, racing to beat that same tide they’d once chased.

  After the split Ellis moved into a furnished, second-chance apartment near I-10. From the balcony of his new home, he could glimpse just a sliver of Escambia Bay. His first day at the Gulf Winds Suites, he watched a sailboat slide across his pie slice of water. The landlady told him that he was lucky as she pressed a key into his hand—month-to-month rentals are low priority, these units typically face the interstate. The sailboat disappeared and he felt less than lucky.

  A stocky man was smoking a cigar in the sweltering parking lot, a white towel draped over his bald head. He spotted Ellis unloading his dying Taurus and shuffled over, asked if he needed a hand. Ellis didn’t have much but the stranger wouldn’t take no. “Name’s Frank Thaxter.” The sweaty man grabbed the heaviest suitcase. “Lead the way.” Two trips and they were done.

  Frank was about fifty and retired army—in at eighteen, out at thirty-eight—now he ran a small pressure-washing business just to stay busy. Ellis told him that he taught in the English department at West Florida. Frank pressed and Ellis explained that he taught poetry. That he was, in fact, a poet.

  “Hey, like Shakespeare?”

  “Sure, yeah, I like Shakespeare.”

  “No, I mean you’re a poet, a poet like Shakespeare?”

  “Exactly like Shakespeare,” said Ellis. “Maybe better.”

  “Are you famous?”

  Ellis shook his head. “There are no famous poets anymore, not really.”

  “Sure there are.”

  “Name me one.”

  Frank shrugged and invited him for beers but Ellis begged off, said he needed to go and wash up.

  “Wash up?”

  “Yeah,” said Ellis.

  Frank slapped him on the back. “I’ll give you an hour, Shakespeare. Meet me outside at seventeen hundred.”

  Frank left before Ellis could form another excuse. The door closed and Ellis glanced out the window. Overhead a plane crossed the big blue sky, pulling a long banner from some pine-woods airport south to Pensacola Beach. He stood there and read about happy hour—dollar Long Islands and two-for-one Jell-O shots at some bar he’d never even heard of.

  Ellis sat down with his notebook at the small table in the kitchen. He was still considering the sailboat and thought that maybe there was a poem there—poetry in the sadness of a man staring out at his own cut corner of the sea. A man watching, waiting, hoping for beauty to pass on by, afraid that if he looks away he’ll miss something special. Ellis compared the sailboat to a butterfly: a monarch carried across a tide pool, teased by a clear current.

  Even as Ellis wrote he knew that it was all wrong, that he’d used this before. The floating-butterfly-as-a-sailboat metaphor was buried somewhere in his first collection. Yet again he’d come full circle and plagiarized himself, recycled a sentimental image that once had come honestly to his younger self. Worlds in tide pools. Christ. If he didn’t stop soon she would come—her—the girl from the first stanza of the first poem he ever published. She would have dark hair and skin smooth as river sand. She’d smell honeysuckle in the tangles / for loneliness, there would be a whippoorwill / to suggest movement, deer, just off the beach, a herd of whitetails easing through the longle
afs in one fluid motion.

  Not that it really mattered. He’d been dismissed early on as a poet of consequence. If he was appreciated at all it was as a regional voice, the quaint Southern poet, a cartoon of sorts. Ellis broke his pencil and rose from the table. He went downstairs to meet Frank and found him waiting in the parking lot for his new friend Shakespeare.

  The receptionist greets him in English as he checks out of the hotel in Cuxhaven. He passes her the room key, and she asks him where he’s headed this morning. He tells her Volkstadt, and she points to a young man in the corner of the lobby. The man is sitting on a toolbox and dressed in work clothes. The receptionist smiles as she suggests that Ellis might give the wanderbursche a ride south.

  “Wanderbursche?”

  “Like an apprentice,” she explains. “They travel Germany and train under different masters.”

  “Neat,” says Ellis. “Cool.”

  The receptionist studies him. “It is good luck to assist them,” she says.

  Ellis looks over at the wanderbursche. He is thin with stringy brown hair. The man is grinning as if he senses someone might be about to help him. “No problem,” says Ellis at last.

  “No problem? Is okay?”

  “Is okay.”

  The receptionist speaks to the wanderbursche, and he rises and shoulders his bag. Ellis shakes his hand and the man follows him out to the car. He is shy but seems pleased by the red Fiat. He slips inside and immediately falls asleep. That would be nice, Ellis thinks, to be a wanderbursche. To wander, but to wander with some greater purpose, a whole nation looking to play Samaritan and help you on your way.

  Frank was a divorcé regular at Hooters and knew all the waitresses. They hadn’t even sat before a tanned blonde named Stacey had set them up with a pitcher and two cold glasses. She sat down as she took their order and built the illusion that they were just three great friends—Frank, Stacey, and Ellis—three great friends watching the Braves play over by her house. Wait right here while I get you boys some wings, make yourselves at home.

  Ellis recognized one of the girls. She was on the far side of the restaurant and hadn’t spotted him yet. Frank told Ellis her name, and he placed her, remembered her from a workshop that she had dropped midsemester, remembered how she had written a sestina that made Amy cry when he read it to her at dinner. Ellis pretended to be watching the baseball game but was really watching the talented redhead. He was wondering whether she still wrote poetry, whether she was now working outside the rigid structures of sonnets and sestinas that he had forced her to learn. Whether she was once again experimenting with free verse and sprung rhythm. It was there, she had told him in a goodbye e-mail, that her heart truly belonged.

  After they left, Ellis spun around in the parking lot and looked back at Hooters glowing like a spaceship in the dark night. The poet waitress was watching him from a window, and he gave a little wave. She waved back and smiled to let him know she remembered him. He felt bad for not saying hello. She returned to wiping down her tables and he thought, not for the first time, that you could tell a lot about a society by the way it treated its artists.

  Alone in his new apartment, Ellis started to set up the coffeemaker but instead poured a scotch from the quarter bottle of Chivas that Frank had insisted he take. He tried Letterman before the dead screen reminded him that the cable hadn’t been turned on. With nothing else to do, he carried his grandmother’s chest over to the couch and pulled out the old letters. The delicate blue ribbon fell apart in his hands, and he imagined her tying it for the last time. Grandma Conner. He had met her only once. She drove down from Birmingham for his father’s funeral and the scattering of his ashes in the Gulf. She showed up late and never cried—just pinched Ellis for wiggling during the service. A year later, his mother told him that she had passed, slipped on some rare southern ice and broke her mean neck. They both skipped her funeral.

  He spread the letters out across the coffee table and read them from beginning to end. They covered just three months, following Claude Conner from flight school to England. He’d been younger than Ellis was now, a boy captain bragging on his plane and his buddies, promising his pregnant wife that they had the Germans on the run. He’d named his fighter ‘Bama Belle, let his best girl know just how much he missed her.

  Ellis tried to picture his angry grandmother as a young woman, as a person who deserved such words. There was something his mother had told him when the Alzheimer’s was tipping her hidden cards, back before it stole her deck. “Grandma Conner was horrible to your father,” she had whispered. “That woman did not have a good life.”

  The thought that all lives are not equal. That a person could simply have a bad life. Ellis shook his head. You spend a lifetime living, your allotted years of loving, laughing, and struggling, then someone comes along and weighs it all out for you, sums it up in a sentence—a good life versus a bad life. At what point is the die cast? At what point does it become too late to salvage a life, pointless to even try?

  He was returning his grandfather’s letters to the chest when he spotted a single envelope hidden within the folds of the American flag. The stationery was different but, like the others, was addressed to his grandmother in Alabama. Ellis studied the postmark, saw that it was German and dated 1946. Two sheets of paper were tucked inside. He flattened the first out on his thigh and deciphered the shaky script:

  Ness,

  My plane went down and I believe that this is it for me. I will love you always. Remember that—Always.

  Claude, Your Husband

  The second sheet was without salutation or signature, just three paragraphs of neat German. Ellis turned over both pages in his hands but there was nothing more. He sat back on the couch and sipped the last of his scotch, pondered the letter until he fell asleep holding an empty glass.

  On the outskirts of Volkstadt, the wanderbursche taps the dashboard. Ellis pulls over and wishes him all the best, then leaves the young man standing at the roundabout intersection of two country roads. Alone again, he does three or four circles in the Fiat. The wanderbursche is doubled over laughing like a silent-film actor when Ellis finally breaks his comic orbit and continues on his way.

  He can see the town in the distance and then, there, a steeple rising above fields of cut hay and feed corn. St. Sebastian. Ellis parks at the quiet church and walks a path that leads around back. There is a cemetery here, a neat acre. He wanders the rows searching tombstones until, on the fifth row, he finds him.

  The grave is framed by a rectangle of smooth stones. Inside, the black dirt has been raked level and freshly planted with geraniums: pretty reds, whites, and blues. Ellis runs his fingers across the small granite marker, the Christian cross, the three short lines:

  C.C.

  VERM. IM OSTEN

  1922–1945

  The air is clean and the green grass soft, that lush summer grass you find in places that collect heavy snow in winter. Ellis is about to sit down when he sees a man enter the cemetery and begin walking toward him.

  His first morning in the Gulf Winds Suites, Ellis woke early and spent an hour on his poetry. For writing, the apartment was perfect—spare and without distraction, silent save for the distant, white-noise hum of traffic on the interstate. Still, he could not finish a line. There was no flow; there was no rhythm. He could think only of the letter and so he took it out, stared at the German words as if something might click, as if the consonants and vowels might reshuffle on the page, reveal their meaning following some mad, magic scramble.

  He took a walk to clear his head and found Frank in the parking lot loading equipment into the back of his truck. They talked awhile then Ellis mentioned the letter, told Frank that he might head over to the bookstore and pick up a German-to-English dictionary.

  “Hey, don’t bother,” said Frank. “My partner, Johnny, served three years in K-town. He can speak German like the goddamn kaiser.”

  “Partner?”

  Frank punched him in the shoulder
. “Business partner. We spray houses together.”

  “No kidding?”

  “Like the goddamn kaiser,” Frank repeated. “He should be here any minute.”

  “Good enough” Ellis flipped a five-gallon bucket and watched Frank mix gas. After a short while an old white van pulled up, PATRIOTIC PRESSURE WASHING spelled out on the hood in shiny mailbox letters. The driver was a tall, thin black man who looked about Frank’s age. He strode over and Frank introduced him to Ellis, said, “Hey, Johnny, hey. We’ve got a big mystery that needs solving.”

  Ellis explained to Johnny about the letter and the man nodded as if someone had just told him the same story an hour ago, like he was called in on this sort of thing all the time. Ellis removed the letter from his shirt pocket and read Claude Conner’s short goodbye aloud. When he was finished he passed the second sheet to Johnny.

  Johnny cleared his throat and started in with the German, reading very slowly as he translated.

  On the third of January 1945, your husband’s plane crashed into a field near our village. He was very badly injured and died that night in my home, only a short time after writing you.

  Please know that we are Christians. We cared for your husband the best we could and brought him no harm. He died bravely and without much pain. I am sorry that we were not able to save him.

  The horrible war has finally ended. Many of our own young men never returned home, and you should know where your loved one rests. Our village is Volkstadt, near the North Sea in Lower Saxony. In the cemetery of St. Sebastian Church, there is a tombstone that bears your husband’s initials. God bless.

  Johnny finished and Frank whistled between his teeth. “Holy shit” he said. “Your grandmother never told anyone about this?”

  Ellis shook his head and Johnny handed him back the letter. “You have to bring him home,” he said.