Rienzi took my arm and led me past the barn and a fallow field. I stopped on the dirt road and looked back. In the front yard, Aunt Arzula tossed a sand-coated remnant into the washtub and dusted off her skirt. She turned in a small circle, kerosene lamp held high, as if looking for more. Except that she kept up her slow spin, like Mama searching her walls and ceiling for danger during a thunderstorm.
I said, “We should go back. He won’t try to hurt me tonight.”
“I have to leave. Come with me as far as the highway.”
We walked under a sky that seemed so close you could pluck out a star. Rienzi didn’t try to talk; she gave me the gift of quiet. As we neared US 27, I asked her when she aimed to come back. She said, “My daddy will be home for a while. We usually take a springtime trip together, so I might be back next summer. Write to me.”
“I’m warning you, I don’t write too good.”
“My daddy says we learn by doing. You have to write to me in order to improve.”
“It’s OK with you that I’m a bas…that my father isn’t my brothers’ daddy?”
She said, “If it’s OK with you that I never knew my mother.”
“So long as it’s OK with you about my birthmark.”
“And that I’m only half-white.”
“And that I’m—” I laughed and said, “I can’t think of anything else wrong with me.”
Rienzi patted my back and said, “I can’t either.”
She wished me a merry Christmas, told me again to write to her, and set off for home along the highway shoulder, lit briefly by passing cars. I made my way back, wondering just what time it was. Above the eastern treetops, the sky glowed with the promise of a sunrise.
The waxing moon above didn’t show any sign of retreat. Almost full, the Man in the Moon—with his huge sunken eyes and gaping mouth—hollered from the heavens. Mama had always told me he was singing. Darlene had reckoned that he was having a good cry, while Papa said, “Goddammit, there ain’t no man up there.” But my brothers and I could almost hear his screams.
Smoke tickled my nose before I guessed there was a house fire. I ran back to my father’s place. Flames shot through the roof; the center room was ablaze. Orange light flickered from a big hole in the side wall and colored the rising billows of smoke. On the road, someone had stacked my few possessions: the scuffed town shoes, folded clothes, and my slingshot all held down the lid of the Blue Cloud cigar box.
I eased toward the house and, in short order, went from shivering to sweating. Fierce heat and waves of smoke made me crouch low on the front porch. The parlor had not caught fire yet, so I slid inside and crawled on my belly toward the bedroom.
Burning logs fanned out from the fireplace and flames raced up the walls and through the rafters. My aunt sat upright on her side of the smoldering bed, a soaked nightgown clinging to her. In her arm, she cradled the brown rat-poison bottle; a spoon lay across her open palm. Her head tilted back with eyes bugged and mouth agape. A silent scream worthy of the moon.
My father had propped himself beside her, like they were a happy couple enjoying their fireplace. He too was doused with something that darkened his clothes and glistened on his skin. Even with the heavy smoke I could smell it: kerosene.
The box where he’d kept the photographs sat on his lap. Above the lid, his hands still gripped the twin barrels of his shotgun. He’d hooked his naked toe through the trigger guard. The blast had made the hole I saw from the outside—it had utterly destroyed his head.
Fire scurried across the ceiling and dropped hot embers onto my head and back while I puked. The floor had become so hot that my vomit sizzled. In the bedroom, rafters began to tumble down. The whole house twisted: the walls were about to fall in. I scrambled out the front door.
The air was shockingly cold outside, as I sat beside the things that my father must’ve set out for me. His Christmas present. Soon, I could feel the heat while flames ate up the parlor and went to work on the porch. Plumes of orange and yellow danced across the planks. I recalled the hole my father shot in the porch before Papa almost put a bullet in his head.
Fiery wood fell into the breezeway as the floors gave way. The house groaned as it seemed to swallow itself. Burning rafters pulled in the walls. The tin roof warped and crumpled. Everything settled around the foundations, those pillars of stones stacked like grave markers. I lay on my side and pressed my birthmark against the dirt and watched it all burn. At some point, the heat comforted me. I fell asleep, facing the pyre.
*
The self-contained blaze kept me warm through the night. When I awoke in the blue predawn light, the collapsed house still burned beneath its splayed and twisted roof. The metal rippled with the ongoing fire it covered; tin that hadn’t burned away bore a hellish rainbow of heat rings, black and blue on the outside falling into orange and glowing red.
Blackened rafters jutted out like spears that had brought down an elephant. At the center of the fire, where the heat and light still radiated, heart-pine floors would burn among the foundation stones until the wood turned to ash. Flames would devour everything.
Curiosity-seekers had not yet arrived. With the cold night, the smell of wood smoke was expected, and typical early bedtimes meant that no one would’ve noticed the midnight sunrise. However, I did wake to see many pairs of eyes watching from the fields surrounding the house. Owls and hawks circled overhead as their prey paused to warm their fur in the open.
While I walked out the stiffness from sleeping on the cold ground, I spotted the scarred rabbit near Aunt Arzula’s ruined garden. It had salvaged a clutch of heat-withered mustard greens, chewing them as it stared at me. The pink wound on its back made an easy target for the hunters above.
I saw how calm the rabbit appeared in the face of certain death. When Rienzi had fed it, she’d whispered, “Don’t be afraid,” and it wasn’t. Muscular confidence rippled its tawny fur, defying the awful scar. A cruel life had not bowed the creature I’d hunted.
One of the hawks wheeled and plunged, swooping down like an arrow. I screamed at the rabbit. I ran at it, waving my arms; it discarded the scavenged food but held its ground. Waiting. Watching. The hawk surged below the treetops with talons poised. At the last instant, the rabbit raced for the undergrowth and safety. It got away.
In those moments, I saw the courage to stand firm and the wisdom to flee. I saw what I had to do.
BOOK THREE
CHAPTER 23
Thanks to my true father, Mama set up housekeeping again. He’d stuffed crumpled one-dollar bills, a few fives, and piles of coins in my Blue Cloud cigar box. A little over sixty-seven bucks: he had probably given me every cent he’d ever put by. Still, I was disappointed that he didn’t include a single picture of himself. My father had erased his face in every possible way.
We lived in a number of rentals through 1939 and into the war years. Mama eventually moved us back into the home of my early childhood, with Papa’s bullet hole still in her bedroom wall. Fretting more and more about her looks and “wasted life” as she aged deeper into her thirties, she returned us to the place where everything had begun to go wrong. Apparently she’d agreed this time to whatever price the landlord demanded.
No matter how much Mama spent on herself and Darlene, we always seemed to come up with another job and a bit more money. To make sure we never got split up again, Chet followed Jay’s lead, quitting school to work fulltime at the sawmill. Try as they might, though, time separated us like cotton in a gin.
Darlene was the first to go, married at fourteen. Then she divorced but immediately married again at fifteen. By the time Jay enlisted on his seventeenth birthday in 1944, she’d moved to Atlanta with husband number four. On the morning of that June wedding, I overheard Mama hissing at her, “Aye God, I never said you had to get hitched to each and every one of ’em.”
Instead of dropping out of school, I doubled-up, going to classes in the summer and wrangling any advanced tutoring I could manage. I still earned money, taking
over Jay’s bread run with Jerry Flynn and helping Cecilia’s parents, but I profited from books much more. It wasn’t merely my love of learning that kept me away from home; Mama had become more open about her “no-hitch” rule of courting. Whenever a stranger’s car hunkered in our yard, I’d choose to camp out with coursework instead of going indoors.
The extra schooling leapfrogged me from a year behind students my own age to a year ahead, bounding me across the street to Colquitt High before my former first-grade teacher took a job there. Now Mrs. Gladney taught English and other courses in the upper grades, while her husband took over as high school principal. When I saw her in the hallway at the start of my sophomore year, she held my shoulders—we were now the same height—and sized me up. “Bud, your wish came true. You’re growing up fast.”
“Ma’am, would you call me Roger now, please?”
“Of course.” We moved from the busy hall into an unoccupied classroom that smelled of floor wax and window cleaner. Mrs. Gladney had given up her sweet perfume. She continued, “I remember outgrowing my nickname, giving away my toys.”
I touched my birthmark, which had kept pace with my growth and, if anything, was darker than before. “Some things’ll always be a part of me. I use to daydream I was a snake; anything I didn’t like about myself I’d shed away.”
“Do you still think about that?”
“No, ma’am. Not for a long time.”
“I’m glad, Roger. Better to think of yourself as a tool that gets used for a lifetime. An axe, for example.” She explained, “You can keep your head sharp for years and years, but your body will show the scars and stains. Eventually, even the blade will become dull.” With a glance at her wedding band of white gold, she said, “At the end, all of us are worn out, but if we just stayed in a dark shed all our lives, we’d be useless from the start. Anyway, it’s better than being a reptile, don’t you think?”
I lingered as long as I could with her, still giddy in her presence. She told me about her two children, one toddler and one baby, and I asked as many questions as I could. When Mrs. Gladney said she needed to get to homeroom, I told her, “After I do a hitch in the military, ma’am, I want to go to college for a teaching degree.”
“How wonderful! You like school that much?”
“I like you that much—you showed me what I could be.” That earned me another precious minute with her. Finally, though, I had to let her go.
*
No matter how much I learned from my teachers, Rienzi stayed ahead of me. She had an advantage. Barricaded for safety in her father’s San Antonio home after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, she had all the time in the world for studies. In her letters, she called herself a “prisoner of war.” I knew something about that, because the Third Reich had invaded South Georgia.
Jerry and I watched the Army build the prisoner-of-war camp outside of Colquitt, long barracks and small, sturdy houses. A ten-foot-high chain-link fence topped with inward-slanted barbed wire surrounded the compound. Jerry pointed at pipes lying beside an enormous pit. “Know what’s going in there? A big ol latrine. Like a outhouse for dozens of guys, except it’ll have showers and sinks along with toilets. Indoor plumbing.”
“We don’t have any of that and we’re winning the war.”
“If you were a GI or swabbie you’d have that stuff and more.”
Jay wrote to say that the Army had forced him to grow up very fast. He described the drills and constant marching and often sent stories clipped from Stars and Stripes. In his September 1944 letter informing us that he was shipping out to the Far East—the censors wouldn’t let him tell us where—he included a blurry copy of a commendation he received for improving the bayonet mounting on the M-1 Garand rifle that most infantrymen used. He wrote, “The Krauts skedaddled from Paris and we got the Japs (sorry, Ry) on the run too. Too bad my invention won’t get made before the war’s over, maybe by Christmas!” For days after that, I had sweaty nightmares of him stabbing at a shadowy enemy with a bayonet that kept falling off.
A few weeks before my fourteenth birthday, a convoy of trucks delivered hundreds of POWs: captives from the Afrika Korps. The German officers stayed in the camp, but the enlisted men were hired out by farmers, who’d lost most of their local laborers to the war effort. Most of the Germans wore broad-billed caps that peaked in the front and bore a silver-gray patch of an eagle perched above a swastika. The caps were the same color as their light-olive cotton twill uniforms. On their left shirt-cuffs they wore a patch that declared “Afrika” with flanking silver-gray palm trees. Some of the prisoners opted for looser-fitting uniforms made from surplus CCC denim, with a giant “PW” painted in white across their backs.
At the entrance to the camp, a huge sign proclaimed “Visiting Prohibited,” but the military police let me and Fleming and other boys trade at the opened gate with German prisoners. They’d give us a penny for each English word we taught them. Many of the words they’d pay for multiple times; we wore our shabbiest clothes to encourage their charity.
Prisoners of war received rations from the Red Cross that we couldn’t buy in town, so Mama would send me to the camp with homemade biscuits to trade for cans of evaporated milk. Fleming discovered a real talent for haggling. Whenever one of the Germans wanted a Hershey chocolate bar but balked at his asking price—which could include two cakes of soap, a roll of bandages, and a button or a patch off their uniform—Fleming would cry, “Hey, you think Hershey’s easy to come by? Don’t you know there’s a war on?”
Mr. Turner hired ten Germans to help with the peanut harvest. School closed for the annual community activity, so I worked alongside the POWs and a dozen white and black laborers who were either too young or too old for the draft.
The prisoners arrived by truck after sunup. The Army didn’t post a guard, though an unarmed soldier always came back with dinner at noon and took a quick headcount. Before nightfall, the POWs would mount the returning truck to have their supper at the camp.
My favorite German was named Hermann Lohbeck. I’d learned his name while bartering at the prison gate. Tall and strapping, with my blond hair and Mama’s dark brown eyes, he looked like my idea of a soldier in his desert uniform, even if he was only eighteen and my country’s enemy. Hermann spoke English with deliberate precision, trying hard to hide his accent. We worked the same row, shaking sand from peanuts and the long, tangled vines and draping them to dry out over knee-high slats. Smaller boys hurried to stay ahead of us as they nailed the slats into poles, like crosses planted upside down.
Hermann said, “Roger, please, what are the first names of Mr. Turner and his wife?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“The information is for my diary. I want to get all of the details correct. Do they have children?”
“Two daughters, Geneva and Cecilia.”
“‘Geneva’ like the city?”
“Right. She’s married and lives in Athens. Georgia, not Greece.” We piled up the vines until they stretched five feet across and towered several feet above Hermann’s head. He tossed a final bunch over the top, and we worked the next thirty yards on the row, cloaking another upside-down cross.
He said, “And the younger one’s name again, please?”
“Cecilia. She’s fifteen.” I spelled her name for him, closed my eyes, and vigorously dislodged sand from more peanuts and roots. I was coated with grit.
“Oh, you do not like her?” He made a face while he throttled some vines; I realized he was mimicking me.
“No, I like her a lot. I was just knocking off the sand.”
“Ah, you like her a lot. She is pretty, yes?”
“She’s beautiful.”
He said, “She is. I saw her when we arrived here.”
Cecilia walked along the rows lugging two water buckets with gourd skimmers so we could all refresh ourselves under the warm morning sun. Where auburn hair touched her damp neck, it turned the color of black cherry cola. She’d tucked most of it un
der a wide straw hat like the one Rienzi used to wear as part of her disguise. In her floral-print dress, however, Cecilia made no attempt to hide that she’d become a young woman.
Hermann and I filled up the adjacent peanut pole while she made her way to us. After a quick smile, she said, “Water?”
I sipped from a skimmer and let the cold water trickle down my dusty throat. Afraid of appearing undignified, I didn’t take off my hat and dump water over my hot scalp. Hermann had no such qualms. He whisked off his Afrika field cap and doused his head, flattening the short blond hairs. The water clung to his long eyelashes and closely shaved chin and washed dirt from his face in long, slender columns.
Before I introduced him to Cecilia, he patted his face with a sand-colored kerchief. His desert-tan made his teeth look very white. “You are lucky, Cecilia, to be friends with Roger, a fine young man.”
“He tries to look out for me.” She raked a few sweaty strands under her hat. “More like a big brother than a younger one,” she said, still bitter about a lecture I’d given her about not getting too serious too quickly about boys. I didn’t want to see her with husband number five before she turned twenty. Besides, I still planned to court her in a year.
“That is a good thing,” Hermann said. “I have lived…nightmares, Cecilia, seen friends die. The world is a scary place. Here you are, surrounded by brutal men: Field Marshal Rommel’s elite Afrika Korps.”
She tilted back her head and gave his face thorough study. “Should I be afraid of you?”
“Didn’t your father warn you to stay away from us?”
“He doesn’t know I’m out here.”
Hermann glanced toward the distant back porch. “You might get in trouble, except that you have a strong American boy to protect you.” He slung his arm around my shoulders and squeezed. I felt surrounded by muscle like leather and bones of steel.
Her brave smile turned shy as she glanced at me. For one moment, a girl’s blush replaced the flirty, cynical mask she sported lately. She said, “How’d you learn such good English?”
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