Elegy on Kinderklavier

by Arna Bontemps Hemenway

  Years later, by the time the most recent war had come and the men of our town deployed, the undersized green plaster dome atop the corner of the empty Temple Mount building was faded and chipped, like an obstacle on a putt-putt course. The Temple Mount building itself had been overtaken and commandeered as the church’s fellowship hall, and so it was where the women met, twice a week, for their “Army Wives” support group, even though half of them were really mothers, or sisters, or girlfriends of indeterminate commitment. Those first few meetings, while our fathers and brothers and cousins were still just sitting on some base in the middle of the nowhere-desert (unassigned as yet, somehow still unnecessary), the voices of the women and girls were very serious, telling each other over and over the latest they’d heard or read about the war or Iraq or army lingo or Arab peoples. But soon after, when word sent from the base became either dull repetition of what we all already knew or petered out completely, the meetings took on a different tone. Nobody knew what to say. The support meetings became potlucks and people brought even the youngest kids, who ran around wildly while their mothers stood, staring blankly at the big maps they’d tacked to the wall next to the Useful Bible Verses display, and chewed their macaroni.

  When the men of our town were eventually given a mission and guided into the budding nightmare that was still just an unsettling dream in Fallujah, the women brought videotapes they’d made of the news reports, and in the Temple Mount they took turns watching the grainy footage or taping up computer printouts of wire articles. Once, some kind of regional administrative officer visited. He wore the strange cubic fatigues they all wore stateside and stood before us and asked if anybody had any questions. Faced with the sudden opportunity, the sudden presence of the one whose absence the wives had taken to bemoaning, everyone was startled into silence. After a while someone in the back asked in a small voice if the officer knew anything about when the men would be coming home, though we all knew he wouldn’t. At the next meeting the mothers parceled up care packages full of chewing tobacco and magazines and made lists of the things they’d ask next time, if they ever saw the man again.

  All of which is to say that nobody—not the adults who worked the booths in the New Old City for the tourists, not the older kids, who had mysterious things to do that involved drinking and summer jobs, and certainly not the mothers—much wanted us around for the long summer months, and so didn’t mind one bit our annual, prolonged stay of boarding and verse lessons at the Hope and Grace Bible Camp (formerly a rickety collection of wooden vacation cabins) on Galilee Lake (formerly Baldwin’s Pond).

  •

  There was no baseball diamond in the entire city of New Jerusalem. The story went that the community of Fundamental Christians (“We’re Fundamental Christians,” Samuel Lincoln explained. “Back then all Christians were fundamental, so you didn’t have to say it”) that founded New Jerusalem did so largely in protest of the burgeoning mining and railway town to the east called Pittsburg, and principal in their complaints (after the brothel for the railroad men and the multiple purveyors of card games and spirits) was the Louis P. Stilton Municipal Ballpark, home of the rough-and-tumble Pittsburg Pickers, apparent corrupters of many a young Christian girl from the nearby Kansas State Teachers College. Whether or not this was the actual explanation for the continued absence of baseball from the town of New Jerusalem, it was at least true that it had never occurred to the powers that were of our New Jerusalem Christian Day School to build a baseball diamond or field a team, the only member of the Southeastern Kansas Independent and Home School Athletic Conference not to do so.

  Strictly speaking, there was no baseball diamond at the Hope and Grace Bible Camp either. There was, however, the Dust Bowl: our space of cloddy soil and four honest-to-god bases and a six-foot-tall homerun wall of corn, kindly provided by the next field over, which had yet to be harvested. The previous summer’s Bible Camp had been full of near disasters (the crowning jewel of which involved an older boy named Calvin Jenks being discovered not only smoking marijuana, but doing so alone with a girl, herself apparently in what Elder Peters called a “near-Eve state of clothedness”), and it was perhaps because of this that we arrived that summer nine months after our fathers’ deployment to find that the church had miraculously invested in both a renovation of our mostly theoretical ball field and an official team manager, who turned out to be Brother Douglas Reeter himself. “IT’S THE DIVINE GRACE OF GOD COME INCARNATE,” big, jolly, slow-brained Hilton Hedis, who had no other volume than ear-blasting shout, said in awe that first day when we saw the field.

  The Elders had turned two of the less trustworthy picnic tables on their sides twenty feet or so behind home plate, making a backstop. They’d taken what looked to be several fishing nets and strung them together, hanging them down from the high tree limbs that cast their shade onto the batter’s box. They’d also taken twenty or so bags of gardening soil and emptied them unceremoniously about forty feet from home plate, making a very messy pitcher’s mound. And finally, in the most incredible of all their additions, the Elders had built, via the stacking of many cinderblocks and two well-placed corrugated metal sheets, a pair of real dugouts.

  That first day we found Brother Reeter, as Elder Peters instructed us to call him, with several nails in his mouth, standing in foul territory and pounding away at an arrangement of two-by-fours gathered at wild angles.

  “I guess the carpenter’s our coach,” Samuel said, hugging his leather glove and spitting.

  Ralph spat too and said leave it to the Elders to go out and get us a coach only to fix us with some grade-A Jesus luck, which is what we called luck that was likely to get you killed, like being picked to walk point on a security patrol, or being the Son of God, or having a dumb hick carpenter whom everybody hated for a coach.

  “I DON’T KNOW,” Hilton blared, looking to Brother Reeter and then back at us, his eyebrows working, which meant he was thinking. “JESUS WAS A CARPENTER AND HE COULD DO SOME OTHER STUFF PRETTY GOOD TOO.”

  Where was I during all this? I was on the top plank of the newly carpentered set of wooden bleachers, which none of the boys kicking dirt around home plate had yet caught on Doug the Reaper was crafting a mate for. I don’t think it’s true that my father wanted a boy. He was a kind, wilting, educated man who was taken to long moods of quiet melancholy and wistfulness. I had a better chance moving him to expression with an idea about a book I was reading than by making my throws pop into his glove in the warm evenings when he came home from work. If he minded much that I’d come out a girl, he never did let me see it, though it’s true that he taught me a mean sinking fastball. He used to play catch with my mother, before she died when I was eight, before she’d even had me, when they were just young married kids. I still have a picture of them as they stood lined up in the yard, my father crouched, squinting at something behind the camera, my mother scowling, the ball held trickily behind her back, ready to go into a windup. And it only occurred to me a couple years ago, once I had a house of my own, that it might’ve been her pitch that he taught me, that fastball with the slight downward movement. But anyway.

  I was really mostly allowed as a de facto member of the ball team because my father was the commanding officer of our town’s Army company and, when his reserve unit wasn’t being called up to go to war, he worked as the floor manager in the pet food plant two towns over, which still employs most of the people around here. Everyone in New Jerusalem liked him because they thought he was fair. I was allowed more or less free range by the Elders, and the people in the town. The boys on the diamond (which is also to say, the boys in all my classes, the boys who were my friends) let me along with them in most things because both my legs were bound up in painful, complicated orthopedic braces and because when my dad was at home he was the boss of half of their fathers, until the reserves got called up to go to Iraq, and he became the boss of all of them.

  •

  What do I remember?

  The sun burning
high and hazy in the sky above the green sea of the corn past the outfield, but not yet high enough to burn the color out of everything. It was maybe two weeks before the summer ball season started. The boys were one by one coming in from the field at the end of their morning practice, gathering on the other set of wooden bleachers. I had my braces off and was lying across the highest plank of my own bleachers. Two planks lower, Marly was lying with a forearm draped over her eyes, her cotton shorts and T-shirt scrunched up in a way that had caused a good number of fielding errors already.

  I’ve been holding off on Marly, saving her for as long as possible, but Marly never was one to be held off, even in memory, and I can no longer neglect her presence, her glorious body: thin, tan, her rounded chest, her impossibly blond hair. She was twenty-two I think, seven years older than me, and I counted her as my friend. Her and Doug the Reaper rented the little falling-down house on the rear of my father’s land, and she spent a lot of time that year in our house, especially when my aunt, who was supposed to be my caretaker, was gone to Stillwater to see her friends. Marly was quiet and beautiful wafting around the rooms of our house. People said she’d run around on Doug during the first seven months of our fathers’ deployment, before Doug came back to do his three-fold job in town, and it seems possible, just because she was always so supremely bored, but I don’t like to believe it. Douglas Reeter was the only one of the men allowed to come back before their tour was done.

  Finally all the boys were back in, splayed out in the bleachers, and we were listening to Brother Reeter, having finished his pep talk, settle in to one of his stories.

  •

  Pat Lincoln, John Hedis, and Peter Powers are walking alongside the Humvee, which rolls along in the caravan across the dirt road out in the desert. Along one side of the road is a kind of olive orchard, the men think. The trees are not much taller than they are, and scraggly. Along the other side of the road stretches an open, undulating green field. You can never tell what Iraq is going to look like, the men think. Sometimes it looks like this, sometimes something else entirely. Hard to know which is the real country. It is very hot. This is the road that runs behind the orchard of olive trees; on the other side, somewhere through the trees, is the main, paved road that the coalition supply caravans keep getting attacked on. The insurgents are using the olive orchard as cover, the officers think. So now the men are pushing along the back road, trying to flush the insurgents out.

  Are there shadows between the layers of slender trunks? Does the sandy soil shift in the breeze, as the loose end of a scarf masking a face would shift? A stray goat idles in the roadside ditch. Scott Holdeman, who is all of eighteen years old, is up in the vehicle’s turret, slowly swiveling the machine gun back and forth. Doug Reeter is driving the Humvee behind them, watching. His windshield is like a video screen when the explosion goes off. The spray of dirt against the thick glass is unexpectedly gentle in the space after the great sundering, like rain against a house’s window.

  Then they are all out of the vehicles, someone is shouting IED, IED, half of the men are flat on their stomachs taking cover in the ditch, which is now a chaotic landscape of dirt. Is anyone down, is anyone down, someone screams. Reeter is out of the vehicle now, staring at the road in front of them. The road is gone, just a big crater, but placed in it, spanning it actually, like a toy car some giant child has put there, is the Humvee, and the men who were in it are tumbling out, coughing but OK. Reeter, along with everyone else, looks wildly around for the men who were walking alongside it. John Hedis and Peter Powers have fallen together, their limbs tangled, into the opposite ditch, which they are crawling out of, stunned, maybe concussed, but whole. Reeter looks again at the crater. People start screaming Pat Lincoln’s name.

  They can’t find him. They don’t see him. The thought is there in the back of everyone’s minds; they’ve heard about the larger IEDs, guys on patrol being partially or wholly vaporized by the force, especially if they were the ones who triggered it. Then a figure appears across the field, three hundred yards (swear to god) away, and the men on the road almost open fire.

  “Fuck, no, shit that’s him, that’s him,” someone yells, waving his arms. The figure staggers, but waves back. There’s no helmet but they can make out the uniform. He starts to jog toward them in the thick soil, and they can see it is him, it is Pat Lincoln, unharmed. The men stand there, stilled on the road, and stare in amazement. Just at that moment there is a heavy, loud, close, wet sound, and they all fall down again in panic, only to realize that the wild goat’s head, apparently airborne this entire time, has landed on the hood of the stalled vehicle.

  Brother Reeter sat back on the bleacher plank, as if in disbelief at his own story.

  “I mean, can you imagine the trajectory?” he said, reverently, and it was unclear whether he meant the goat’s head or Pat Lincoln’s flying body.

  •

  Later the next day, Samuel Lincoln sat up on my bed to go. We were there in our underwear, my upper-floor bedroom dry and hot in the afternoon sun, the window open, blinds lazily bowing in the occasional puffs of breeze. Samuel was a sweet boy then; he always carefully took off my braces and blew for a long time on the red marks they left, his breath cool on my skin. He liked kissing the freckle that sat catty-corner to my bellybutton before he kissed anything else, and I generally let him do what he wanted after that, my palm prickling warm against the muscles of his tan back as he moved above me.

  We’d been done for a while, not speaking, just lying there together before we’d have to go to get back to our cabins at the camp. This was Saturday afternoon, which we had free from Bible study, and which most of us used to go home and see our families. That morning Douglas Reeter, Casualty Affairs Officer, had visited the Powers household, and Gary (Peter Powers’ son) wasn’t in morning worship, and so we’d all come to know that his dad had become the sixth man from New Jerusalem, Kansas to be killed in Iraq. I was thinking about Doug Reeter, Doug the Reaper, wondering what it was he said to Gary’s mother.

  “Listen,” Samuel said, not looking at me. He sounded unsure, so I stayed quiet. “You know the well-marker shack, out in the third field over, behind the Dust Bowl?”

  “Listen,” he said, looking at me now, having decided something. “You got a watch and a flashlight?”

  As he climbed out of my window and crab-crawled across the roof of the porch before dropping down into the sideyard, I leaned against the sill. Standing there I saw Marly in her front yard, beside the fluttering white shapes of her wash hung out to dry. She was watching me, one hand on her hip, the other shielding her eyes.

  •

  I still have the tapes, of course. Though I’ve only watched them once since I made them, on a rainy spring afternoon a couple years ago after I found out Hilton Hedis had been killed in an accident at the grain elevator. I was missing those boys, then, and I realized I didn’t have any pictures of them, only the tapes.

  What is not on that first miniature videotape: the faces of the boys, barely legible in the dark of the shack. It was not a big space, that shack, and they were arranged around the squared U-shape of the well-pipe coming out of the ground. Also not on the tape: the long walk out there: the cool air and imperfect dark of one forty-five in the morning; the cabins asleep behind me; only the small plastic and metal sound of my gait, the seething of the cicadas, the fog drifting between the trees, out of the crops.

  In the shack, P.J. Holdeman shoved the video camera at me and I took it and looked up at them. Samuel nodded and watched me, seeing what I would do. The other boys met my gaze, then looked away.

  What is on the tape: the image jolts on and we are outside the shack, the camera’s night vision picking up the ambient glow of the night sky. There is the sound of a struggle as Truman Renolds and Ralph Simonsen materialize out of the stalks of the field, dragging a hooded figure between them that I know is Gary Powers.

  The boys are all outside now, a clump of dark bodies. The five whose houses Do
ug the Reaper has already visited begin to wrap cloths that I can’t quite make out around their faces: checked red tablecloths, indistinguishable from what we knew were called kaffiyehs. Those five: Ralph Simonsen (roadside IED), Truman Renolds (Vehicle Borne IED), P.J. Holdeman (his brother shot through the jugular while urinating on the base of a tree), Jackson Kepley (his father riddled with shrapnel from the grenade dropped down onto the street at his feet), and Daniel Willis (his dad knocked unconscious, then burned alive in a helicopter crash). Those five, masked now, open the door to the shack and disappear inside. I feel Samuel’s hand push roughly at my back. On the tape, his voice says, “Go on,” faintly, almost gently, but I don’t remember that.

  There’s a limit to what you can be surprised by, I guess. And hadn’t I already seen first Daniel’s face, then P.J.’s, then Jackson’s after we’d found out about their dead—bruised, eyes swollen like pastries, lips split, empurpled? I remember it making sense, in a way, when I saw them like that; it was how I imagined it must feel privately, just externalized. But I didn’t think about it, not really, and when I saw them in the shack, tying Gary Powers awkwardly to the pipe, it was no revelation. I’m sure I was surprised. I’m sure the whole thing was vaguely terrifying to me. I was fifteen years old, after all, and not one of them, not really. But I stood there in silence and pointed the handheld video camera where they wanted, and there has to be a reason why I did not leave.

  I was more startled by the violence of the movement on the videotape, on my little TV screen, watching it that day after Hilton passed than I was standing there at the time, watching them beat Gary over the top of the little pop-out viewfinder. In person, it felt like one person hitting him (the hood now off his head) at a time, which is, in fact, how it was, each one of the boys taking turns with their fists, but on the tape it looks more like a close mob, a gang, a group beating, unfair. The tape, unlike my memory, has not been granted the small mercy of silence, either, and when I watched it alone in my living room, years later on that rainy afternoon, I winced at the solid, wet impact of the awkward punches, at Gary’s whimpering, more panicked than I remember it being.