by R. R. Irvine
“I’m not asking for a sworn affidavit, just a little help.”
Lockhart sighed. “The scuttlebutt I get is this. Life was pretty damned good for the German prisoners here in Utah in ‘44 and ‘45. The fact is, the army was swamped with complaints from the locals, who claimed the prisoners were eating better than they were.
“Everything changed when the war ended in Europe and word got out about the atrocities. After that, people wanted revenge. The army wanted it, too, I guess, because prisoner rations were cut and all privileges taken away. When those six died down south in Cowdery Junction, nobody gave much of a damn. Some say they were murdered, maybe even lynched by locals who’d lost sons in the war.”
“Those death certificates you mentioned, did they say anything about autopsies?”
Lockhart shook his head. “We’re talking rumors and gossip here. Most likely, those six died just the way the paperwork says. Their hearts were worn out by war.”
“Is there anyone else around who could help me?”
“My predecessor at the museum is long gone, pensioned out and buried somewhere in the East. As for the old stories I heard, most of them came from the cemetery’s caretaker, name of Jacob Decker. He’s retired now and lives at the old folks’ place on Twelfth East.”
“I know it,” Traveler said. “The Phoebe Clinton Home.”
“That’s it. I used to drop by there regularly the first couple of years.” Lockhart sighed. “Since then, I’ve kind of neglected the old guy. When you see him, tell him I’m keeping an eye on his graves, will you?”
7
TRAVELER FOUND Jacob Decker basking in a metal lawn chair on one of the sleeping porches that ran across the second story of the Phoebe Clinton Home. Decker had the warm sunlit end of the porch to himself, while a dozen or so other residents, mostly women, clustered forty feet away in the shade.
“Look at ‘em,” Decker said as soon as Traveler introduced himself. “They’re worried about age spots and skin cancer.”
His bare arms, as dark as old wood, had no more meat than a mummy’s. The thick lenses of his glasses were smudged so badly his blue eyes looked milky.
“I worked outside most of my eighty years,” he went on, “and I’m in better shape than ninety percent of the old geezers in here. The old crones, too.” His breath smelled faintly of tobacco.
“Earl Lockhart up at the fort suggested I come see you. He says hello.”
“You tell him for me, a man shouldn’t have to retire, not if he’s still fit.”
“He gave me a message. He says he’s keeping an eye on your graves.”
“Did he say graves or grave?”
“Graves, plural.”
Decker shook his head sharply. “You wouldn’t think a man my age would love a cemetery, would you?”
Traveler shrugged.
“The secret is, young fella, you’ve got to love your work. Take this place, for instance. They’ve got a gardener around here who’s never heard of a rake. No siree. He uses one of them gasoline power blowers. It’s a wonder we’re not all deaf from the racket. And what a stink. When he fires it up, it’s like sucking on an exhaust pipe if you’re out here on the porch at the time. Imagine what it must do to the flowers. They need to breathe, too, you know. Come on. I’ll show you how a real gardener works.”
Decker got to his feet and crossed the porch. He moved at a kind of trot, leaning forward on the balls of his feet as if seeking downhill momentum.
“Keep close,” he told Traveler. “They’ve added so many rooms this place is like a rabbit warren. You get lost in here, you end up like the rest of us. Old and ready to blow away.”
Traveler followed him down a back stairway, along a narrow corridor, through a laundry room, and finally out a back door that faced a neglected yard.
“Look there,” Decker said, pointing to flower beds overrun with weeds. “Mr. Leaf-blower planted tulips, but didn’t know enough to feed them, not that that would do much with the little sun they get out here.”
He moved off again, following a cracked concrete path around the side of the house. Leggy tulips and paperwhites were blooming in a narrow strip of soil between the path and the wall of the house.
“Who do you think planted these?” Decker tapped himself on the side of the head. “Me, by God. I don’t need a blower to keep my beds clean either.”
Squatting, he gathered up some fallen leaves and tucked them into his shirt pocket. “For Christ’s sake, don’t just stand there. Help a man up.” He held out his hand.
As soon as Traveler hauled Decker to his feet, the old man was off again. He didn’t stop until he reached a circular bed of carefully tended paperwhites that surrounded a weeping mulberry tree at the front of the house.
“Look at this place.” Decker gestured at the Phoebe Clinton. “It would look deserted without me to keep things growing.”
The retirement home, three stories in the center with two-story wings on either side, had been built in the 1880s by one of Utah’s silver kings. It was said to be a replica of a stately home he’d once visited in England, though Traveler had his doubts. The architecture was pure Utah Gothic, right down to the massive Egyptian columns that held up an elaborately corniced, gargoyle-friezed porte cochere.
“I haven’t thanked you yet, have I?” Decker said. “Your arrival saved me from naptime, young man.” He wet his fingers to rub his glasses. The spit added to the murk on the lenses. “Naps are for children, which is the way they treat us around here. ‘Eat your lunch, dearie, and then tuck yourself in.’ That’s all I ever hear. It’s better to walk off a meal, I say. What do you think?”
The moment Traveler nodded agreement, Decker started his downhill gait again. He didn’t slow until the Phoebe Clinton was half a block behind them.
“Walking this city is a revelation, young man. It’s seven blocks to a mile, precisely. That’s the way Brigham Young laid it out. Shall we try for one of the prophet’s miles?”
“I’ll keep up with you,” Traveler said.
“Just so we’re away from all the ladies who have nothing better to do than listen in on what a man has to say. Now tell me, Moroni. Why come looking for an old fart like me?”
“I’m working for a man named Lewis Stiles. Major Stiles.”
“I remember him. An important officer up at the fort during the war. He was in charge of payroll or something like that.”
“You have a good memory.”
Decker stopped abruptly and grabbed Traveler’s arm. “My God. I know why you’re here now. My prayers have been answered. That’s it, isn’t it?”
Moisture added a sparkle to the old man’s eyes. “I’ve been writing letters for so many years now, I’d almost given up.” He held up two bony fingers, a V for victory sign. “I’ve mailed off two letters so far this year. I even had the last one typed by a lady friend at the home. That’s what did it, isn’t it? They thought I was somebody because the letter was typed and looked official.”
Traveler sighed. “Major Stiles is looking for a man named Karl Falke.”
“Forty years I’ve been thinking about this, knowing where I wanted to rest. It goes all the way back to when I started caretaking at the cemetery. I was thirty-eight then. I guess you think that’s strange, a man getting attached to the dead, but they’re all the family I’ve got.”
“Do you recognize the name Falke?”
Decker dug a finger into one ear. “I must of missed something.”
“I’m trying to trace a German prisoner of war. A man named Karl Falke who disappeared in 1945.”
“Then you’re not here about my resting place?”
Traveler shook his head.
“Those damned bureaucrats in Washington. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve written them. I don’t think it’s too much to ask, not after the years I put in. Summer evenings I’d work until dark up at the cemetery. On my own time, too. I never asked for overtime. I never expected it.”
Decker turne
d away to wipe his eyes. “I don’t mean to get blubbery on you. It’s not like living at the Phoebe Clinton isn’t okay, if you know what I mean. The way I see it though, it’s just temporary, like waiting for a bus. When it comes time to be called home, I want to rest with my friends.”
The old man started walking again, only this time he moved on his heels as if trudging uphill. “For a while there, right after I retired, Sergeant Lockhart used to come regular and drive me up to visit my boys. Lately, though, he’s been too busy. Of course, things being what they are these days, what with the military cutting back, it’s not a good idea for a man to take too much time off from his job. You don’t want them thinking they don’t need you.”
He coughed, rattling like a longtime smoker. “These days, I only get to my cemetery when someone from the home’s driving up that way.”
“Maybe I can stop by now and then.”
“Now that I think about it, Falke’s not in my cemetery. Not that I know the names of my German family to say out loud, but I trimmed around those headstones long enough to know Falke wasn’t among them.”
“Have you ever heard the name before? Maybe in connection with a missing prisoner.”
Decker shook his head. “My wife was cremated, you know. Now there’s no place to go to visit with her.”
“Do you remember anything about Cowdery Junction?”
The old man shrugged but his eyes gave him away.
“It’s all right,” Traveler said. “It’s not a secret anymore.”
“That’s easy for you to say, but I was told to keep quiet about it.”
“It’s been too long to make any difference.”
“Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’ve been a fool for keeping quiet all these years.” He blew out a long, noisy breath. “I always figured it would hurt my chances with Washington if I blabbed.”
He reached out and laid a hand on Traveler’s arm. “There are some things you don’t want to go messing with, young fella.”
“I won’t quote you, if that’s what’s bothering you.”
“Let’s sit down and take a load off.”
Decker left the sidewalk to sit on the curb. Traveler settled beside him.
“Cemeteries are like confessionals,” Decker said after a while. “You’d be surprised what people say there. They talk to the dead in front of the likes of me, a caretaker, as if I was as mute as a tombstone. I’ve heard it all, sex and sin.”
His voice dropped to a murmur. “Once I heard that the Mormon church was to blame for what happened in Cowdery Junction. Another one of its Mountain Meadow Massacres.”
Traveler swallowed a groan. More than a hundred years had passed since Brigham Young’s avenging angels had dressed up as Indians to wipe out a wagon train of Gentiles, and people were still whispering about it as though it had happened yesterday.
Decker snorted. “You think I’m gaga, don’t you?”
Traveler answered with a shake of his head.
“I just wanted to see where you stood, what with you being named after an angel and all. I made that massacre bit up, but I did talk to a couple of weird Germans once.”
Decker grinned, showing tobacco-stained teeth. “You wouldn’t have a cigarette, would you? Or better yet, a chew?”
“Sorry.”
“The Phoebe Clinton isn’t LDS, but they’re down on tobacco just as bad. For my own good, they say. I say, I kept a pinch in my cheek for forty years and it didn’t hurt me.”
Decker tried to spit but couldn’t raise enough juice. “Like I was saying, a couple of Germans showed up at my cemetery after the war. Sometime in the fifties, I think it was. They were nice and respectful, not so pushy like most Krauts. Not tourists either. They’d been prisoners, all right. They still had that lost look about them.”
Traveler nodded to keep him going.
“They got to talking and one of them said he was sleeping in a tent down in Salina when that guard opened up. Do you know about that?”
“The machine-gunning, you mean?”
“You’re damn right. My Kraut said he got shot in the stomach. It’s hard to say whether it was true or not, what with the way people exaggerate their war stories and their suffering. You’re too young to remember, but the camps were damned nice. Those prisoners ate as well as I did, I can tell you. Better maybe. Us locals had a name for them camps. Fritz Ritzes, we called them.”
He licked his lips as if savoring the taste of a memory. “I wasn’t a caretaker in those days. I was an army guard at the POW stockade in Brigham City.”
He paused to adjust his glasses. “Because of my eyes, I was unfit for overseas duty. That’s why they made me a guard. That put me in with a bunch of misfits, I can tell you. Your average guard was only one cut above a four-effer. Thank God none of them ever got buried in my cemetery.”
Decker stopped speaking to look Traveler in the eye.
Traveler said, “Somebody’s been putting flowers on the Cowdery Junction grave for years.”
“They started showing up about twenty, twenty-five years back,” Decker said, “before Earl Lockhart’s time even. These days, of course, he does the honors.”
“Who brought them?”
“A woman.” Decker closed his eyes and squinted at the memory. “She was in bad health there at the last. I always figured something must’ve happened to her. Otherwise, the flowers would have kept coming.”
He reached out to Traveler. “Thinking back on it, my health’s just as bad now.” He sighed deeply. “Maybe we’d better start back.”
He needed Traveler’s help on the return trip.
“We had to shoot the camp dogs,” the old man said abruptly when they reached the home. “They said we had to do it because the prisoners were using them to smuggle in cigarettes. I buried the animals myself. After that, pets were banned, but the cigarette trade didn’t stop. The other guards were making too much money on it, what with smokes and black-market food. The Germans were great ones for eating, you know. We used to have a saying in the guard towers—‘A German with a fork is more dangerous than an Italian with a machine gun.’ ”
Decker ran out of breath and didn’t speak again until they were back on the sleeping porch and he was stretched out in his chair. “Come to think of it, that wounded German told me he was applying for citizenship. He said he owed his life to this country. If he hadn’t been captured by us, the Russians would have killed him, he said.”
“Do you remember his name?”
“I don’t think he told me. Probably I didn’t ask.”
“Do you remember anything else?”
“He said he would have died if it hadn’t been for the good nursing he got at the hospital down in Salina. ‘One day,’ he said, ‘I intend to go back there and repay their kindness.’ ”
Decker winked. “Funny how some things stick with your memory, isn’t it? I remember thinking at the time that he’d probably fallen for one of the nurses.”
The old man sighed. “That’s it, young fella. You’ve sucked me dry. There’s nothing left to tell.”
Traveler shook his hand.
“One last thing,” Decker said. “If you get the chance, put in a word for me with the government. Tell them I’m going to be needing my plot up at Fort Douglas pretty soon now.”
8
TRAVELER HONKED at Brigham Young. The prophet ignored him. So did traffic at the head of Main Street.
The signal light changed to green. Half a dozen cars managed to edge past the prophet before time ran out.
Resigned, Traveler counted those still ahead of him. Two lights to go, maybe three if an engine died or a driver wasn’t paying attention.
He yawned. His eyes felt full of grit. Without thinking, he rubbed them. Smelter fallout from Kennecott Copper permeating the air started tears flowing hard enough to blur his vision. He gripped the steering wheel with both hands to keep from scratching. He closed his eyes. The driver behind him honked. Others took up the call.
Blin
king cleared his sight enough to allow him to ease the truck forward at the next change of light. As he did so, he had the urge to abandon the damn thing right there in the intersection. Just open the door, step out, and join the bronze figures at the base of Brigham’s statue. Whatever happened to Moroni Traveler? He had himself bronzed like baby shoes.
Two traffic signals later, Traveler ran the yellow light, circled the block, and parked in front of Thomas’s Indian Trading Post, two doors down from the Chester Building. As soon as he stepped onto the sidewalk, Bill and Charlie rushed to meet him, rattling their donation cans in his face. The placard on Bill’s sandwich board read: GOD IS ALWAYS WATCHING, SO GIVE TILL IT HURTS.
“You’re a godsend,” Bill said. “It’s been a slow day.”
“How much do you need?” Traveler asked.
Bill rapped a knuckle against his board. “We got so desperate, Charlie tried one of his medicine dances but it raised small change only.”
Traveler was about to ask for an encore when the Indian dashed after two ladies who’d just left the nearby Mormon Handicraft Shop. The women, looking intimidated, fed coins into his coffee can. As soon as Charlie stopped rattling his container, they fled toward Main Street, casting furtive looks over their shoulders to make sure he wasn’t following them. The Indian waved them out of sight before trotting back to place the donations in Bill’s outstretched hand.
Bill closed his fingers around the coins and shook his head. “We’re still a long way short.”
“What’s going on?” Traveler asked.
Bill touched his swollen cheek.
“I told you before,” Traveler said, “Doc Ellsworth won’t charge you a cent. If you don’t believe me, I’ll drive you there myself.”
“Charlie’s been treating me with a dash of magic added to either Thunderbird or Wild Irish Rose,” Bill said. “It makes the stuff taste as good as a California cabernet.”
Traveler rubbed his eyes. “You look worse than ever.”
“If I pray harder and do more magic, Charlie says the pain will go away altogether. It’s a matter of faith.”