The Major's Daughter

by J. P. Francis

  “It’s a broad stream this time of year,” the man added. “Spring runoff. You can wade it but it’s fairly wide. Later in the summer it’s nothing at all. You can step across it.”

  Collie watched the couple for signs of treachery, but she couldn’t detect any. What did they care anyway? They were at the other end of their lives and the war; up here, next to a lake in northern New Hampshire, must seem worlds away.

  “We’re sorry,” August said as they packed up and prepared to leave, “to have interrupted your morning.”

  “It’s the most excitement we’ve had in years,” the woman said. “Keep north.”

  “You can’t miss it,” the man said, which was meant to be a joke, Collie realized too late to laugh.

  “We’ll leave your canoe tied up and we’ll leave the shotgun in it,” August said. “Thank you for the food.”

  When they were ready, the man pushed them off in the canoe. Gerhard sat in back, August in the bow. Collie sat in the middle. The cabin disappeared in no time. The men paddled well. It was pleasant, Collie mused, to be paddled across a northern lake by two stout young men. She felt herself dozing. The sun grew stronger. It was not until they were halfway down the shoreline, halfway to where they planned to leave the boat, that they heard the insect whine of an outboard motor cutting across the lake on an angle to intercept them.

  Chapter Thirty

  Collie watched the motorboat cross the lake toward them, its wake spread out behind it. She was able to make out the figure of a man standing at the steering console. He aimed directly at them, which was unsettling. She squinted to see if the man wore a uniform, but it was impossible to tell at such a distance.

  “How do we play it?” August asked in German.

  “We are visitors who have borrowed a canoe, that’s all,” August said. “Say no more than necessary.”

  “Let me speak,” Collie said, watching the motorboat begin to come into focus. This was why she had accompanied them, she realized. Exactly for this moment.

  “Damn him,” Gerhard said. “Damn our luck.”

  Collie felt better when she made out that the man did not wear a uniform. He was gray-haired and dressed for the outdoors, his head sporting a large, floppy hat with fishing flies tucked in the brim. He cut the engine when he was a little ways off and let the boat glide closer. He was heavyset and smiled broadly. He had nothing to do, Collie realized, and had simply brought the boat out to say hello.

  “Sorry, thought you were the Lepages,” the man called in the new silence created by the disappearance of the motor. The wake caught up to the boat and to the canoe and lifted them both several times.

  “Good morning,” Collie called back. “We borrowed their canoe. We thought we’d do a little bird-watching.”

  “They back at the cabin?”

  “Yes,” Collie said. “Having breakfast.”

  “Johnny Delacrois had a heck of a night fishing up around Cutter’s Point. I was going to tell them. He was trolling but he had five or six good-size togue.”

  “We’re just out for a paddle,” Collie said, trying to fit her words and tone to his. “No fishing this morning.”

  “You visiting?”

  Collie wasn’t sure how to answer that one. She nodded. Let him think whatever he liked, she decided. The man studied them for a long moment. He was proud of his boat, she realized. That was a large part of it. He liked having a boat that could speed across a wide expanse and catch them. His face looked juvenile and at the same time canny and suspicious. She found herself detesting the man and his idle curiosity.

  “All right then,” the man said, “maybe I’ll swing down and have a cup of coffee with the Lepages. I may see you back there. Sorry to come up on you this way.”

  “We won’t be long.”

  The man started the engine. It was obscenely loud on the quiet lake. He puttered around in a half circle, then gradually opened the throttle as he headed toward the Lepage cabin.

  “What do we do now?” August asked.

  “Keep paddling,” Gerhard said. “He can report us as soon as he gets back across the lake.”

  “He’ll contact the border patrol and tell them our plan,” Collie said.

  “We need to hurry,” August said.

  They paddled with more determination. Collie felt her stomach knotting into a ball. She listened for the sound of the outboard, but it didn’t come for a long time. That surprised her. She imagined the Lepages would tell the man in the motorboat what had happened and the man would skim across the lake immediately. But that didn’t occur. She waited for the sound and felt grateful for every second that passed in silence.

  Not far from the end of the lake they beached the canoe and pulled it up beyond the tree line. Clouds had filled the sky behind them and a light rain began to sprinkle and turn the white lake rocks dull gray. Gerhard told them to wait while he made a short scouting foray. He wanted to gain height and look around. He disappeared into the woods, moving west. Collie watched him go. August came to her and took her in his arms.

  “It will be all right,” he said. “We are almost there.”

  “It feels like too much right now.”

  “A few more miles and then it will be over. We’ll be free. Are you sorry you came?”

  She shook her head. It did no good to think what one should or shouldn’t do. One acted, fumbled blindly, and then accepted the consequences. One could only pretend to have a plan, a purpose, a design. Life was far more random and chaotic than she had given it credit for being before. She understood that now. She leaned closer to him. She loved him. She loved him down in her core and she realized she had always been traveling toward this moment. Toward this instant.

  She opened her mouth to tell him, to say what was in her heart, when Gerhard reappeared through the forest. He came quickly, jumping down the hill in places, his voice tight when he reported what he saw.

  “He’s hunting us,” Gerhard said.

  “Which one?” August asked.

  “The man in the motorboat.”

  “Did you see him?” Collie asked. “I don’t understand.”

  “No, but that’s why he hasn’t gone across the lake again. He must have had a rifle in the boat with him.”

  “But you don’t know for certain,” August said.

  “No, but we can’t wait. There is a road up ahead. When we cross it we will be near the stream.”

  It felt, Collie realized, like a childhood game. Like hide-and-seek, only now the stakes were life-and-death. Maybe Gerhard was wrong, maybe the man simply had trouble starting his motorboat, but she did not believe that. She thought back to the man’s ugly face, his floppy hat. He would see their escape as a chance for bravery, as a chance to become a hero of some sort. If he had a rifle, yes, he would come after them. She knew that. It fit too many parts to be incorrect.

  They kept to the shoreline and hurried forward. Gerhard led them. The undergrowth along the shoreline was formidable. Twice they had to stop and wade into the water, then out again in order to continue. It felt like walking beside a jungle, and the rain falling did nothing to make the going easier. The rain came more stiffly now, filling everything with a soft patter. It turned the ground to mud and made the footing treacherous.

  Collie did her best to keep up, but she felt she slowed them down. She thought about telling them to go ahead. They could move faster without her. But then, even as she thought it, they came to the small, two-lane road at the head of the lake. It was not paved. It passed over a culvert that permitted the stream water to flow into the lake. Beyond the road, beyond the stream, lay Canada.

  Gerhard would not let them move forward. He held out his hand and then pushed it earthward, telling them to get down. A car passed. A second one followed. Collie could not see the vehicles for fear of showing her face when she looked for them. The cars did not slow or
give any indication that they had been discovered. The cars continued forward, and then no sound reached them at all except the steady drone of rain on the new green growth.

  She put her head on August’s shoulder and turned and looked up at the sky.

  “I love you,” she said. “I’ve loved you from our first moment.”

  “And I you.”

  “Ich auch,” he said in German. I also.

  Before she could speak again, Gerhard hissed them to their feet. She scrambled up and ran and in an instant she crossed the road. Her eyes, she thought, rested now on Canada. August took her hand when they came to the stream and she half fell, half staggered into the water. Then the water pressed against her and she felt the strain of it trying to drag her downstream, back toward the lake. She heard a third car, this one more urgent, suddenly come across the culvert. They were exposed, she knew, now that they were in the water. It was all confusing, all a mad dash, and she wondered, with surprising clarity, if they had made it to Canada after all. She wondered if crossing the streambed by half made them free, and she turned to August, and she smiled, and he smiled back, and then she heard the sound of the car doors snap open and the rain knitted them to the surface of the stream and she smelled lush green growth and the sky that had broken and fallen on them all.

  Epilogue

  This, then, was Collie’s war.

  It was not much of a war when weighed against the death of millions, but years later, recalling her time in New Hampshire, this was the moment she spoke about. It was rare that she let the full recollection come to her, though she lived with it as a shadow every day for the remainder of her life. August, she sometimes thought at the oddest moments, kneeling in the garden, or bending to pick up a basket of laundry. Then for just an instant he would be there, her boy love, her first heart, her soldier true.

  He was an Austrian and he had run north for his life, and she had traveled with him. That was the story she told to her children, to her grandchildren, but only at some late hour or in some setting that forced the memory on her. Her recollection rested on a single day spent beneath hastily cut branches, buried in a small hole on a hillside in New Hampshire, and she did not like to cheapen it by recounting it. That was Collie’s war. And the first sight of him—yes, she could remember that, but in time, in the many years of her life, that memory mixed with others so that she could no longer count on its veracity. He was a shining boy, a handsome man, and she could still recite the poem. The world becomes more beautiful with each day. The paper transcription, his offering, lived in a small corner of her jewelry box, kept secret even from her husband of thirty-seven years, discovered, finally, by her two oldest daughters when they moved her into the nursing home.

  There were times, many times as she grew old and brittle and sat in front of a gritty television garbled with static, that the memory reformed and changed. Mercifully, she could not always remember what had happened in those last moments against the Canadian border. She could no longer envision Gerhard’s head breaking open like a fresh melon, his blood bleeding out into the water, his steps becoming ponderous in their final heaviness for a moment. She screamed then, but she no longer remembered even that with any clarity. Gerhard fell forward and the water reached up to receive him and his blood became a red flag opening in a wind close to the earth. It spread over her legs, and then the second bullet, or maybe the fifth, or tenth—how could she know?—came for August. She heard it in the chamber of the rifle, in the explosion of gunpowder, in the air, whistling and sharp, as it spread and entered him in the neck and ended his life. She held his hand when he fell forward and for many moments she stood in the water, his body slowly rolling downstream, its weight forcing her to follow him, one step at a time as his weight tumbled and pulled her. She yearned for her own bullet, but it never came. Then men splashed into the water and she felt herself pulled back and she refused to let go of August’s hand. They broke her grip finally and she had screamed to let her go. She intended to follow his body into the water, back to the lake, but they would not permit it. The water rushed over his beautiful face and pushed his hair into a wedge behind his skull.

  That’s what she remembered. That was her war.

  Afterward, of course, profound embarrassment. A long trip to her father’s sister in Philadelphia. A convalescent visit to Estelle’s home. Many hushed voices around her. It had been a rash, childish stunt, people said. It had been the result of immaturity and the loss of her mother. Young girls, they said, let their hearts get in the way. And for many years—in her productive decades filled with children and work, the endless cleaning, the meal making, the sick infant, the unmade beds, the open hampers—she had agreed with them. It was a folly of youth, is how she put it. It had been a foolish fling, one, looking back, that she must surely regret.

  But she always understood that was not the whole truth. August had not been a folly. To believe that would be to believe her own life had been a foolish, meaningless passage of days. If she knew love now, then she must have known love then.

  In her last years, after her husband died and when her children had gone off to pursue their own lives, and while she sat in the padded chair of the nursing home that harbored her for the final days of her life, sometimes in the late afternoon August returned to her. He was not the corpse rolling in the water then, not the slack hand in hers, but the young, gallant August, the sweet boy she had loved with all her heart. It was not wrong to remember that, she didn’t think. Dozing, half surrendered to her afternoon nap, he sometimes appeared to her. He was a boy, just a boy, and he held out his hand—the same hand that she had clutched so desperately in those final moments—and smiled at her. Sometimes, in the deepest dreams, she went with him. They crossed the stream and they climbed the bank on the other side, and she turned to him and kissed him. And that was a different life, one equally beautiful in its way, and he led her northward into the new land, and she went with him, always with him.

  I, also, he said. Ich auch.

  Author’s Note

  This is a work of fiction set in a historical setting, and as a result I have felt free to invent elements as needed for the narrative. I have also rounded off certain square ends, made the timeline tidier or more convenient in places, and created events only touched on or suggested in historical accounts, all in service to the story of a young woman and man falling in love in that troubled and difficult period. I have softened much of the prison experience, or kept it from intruding too far into the narrative, because my focus rested primarily on the fate of the story’s couple. Prison life, even under the best circumstances possible, was dire. Food was short; war reports came frequently, often carrying news hard to hear.

  One small footnote. Near the end of the story, August and Gerhard attempt to escape to Canada. While we never learn the fate of the other Camp Stark survivors in this story, it should be noted that many German prisoners were indeed sentenced to forced labor in England. They found out about this final sentence only when they were already on board ship. To add to the cruelty, they thought they were going home when the ships were diverted to Britain. For many, this proved the final straw. Many German POWs took their lives by stepping off the ships at night. Even the prospect of drowning in the wild northern seas was preferable to the thought of more forced labor in a foreign land.

  The fabric of this story was shaped and formed by my reading of Stark Decency by Allen V. Koop and Hartmut Lang. For any reader looking for a comprehensive account of Camp Stark, I cannot send you to a better source. For many years as a professor in the University of New Hampshire system, I had heard vague rumors about a camp, some sort of prison camp holding German soldiers, that existed during World War II in New Hampshire. The idea seemed preposterous to me, but gradually I learned of this singular chapter in the state’s history. Reading Stark Decency gave me the first inkling that there might be a story worth telling not far from my own front door. In time, the scope of t
he German prisoner-of-war camps became clear to me, and I remained astonished that I had never encountered such histories in my years of schooling. My guess is that most Americans, if they think of prisoner-of-war camps based in the United States during WWII, usually recall the Japanese internment camps. In the years I have been working on this novel, I have come across many people who could not quite believe it when I told them German soldiers were incarcerated in a tiny village in New Hampshire a year prior to Hitler’s final days.

  Any errors in this historical account are entirely mine. The characters herein are fictional. Although I was impressed in many instances by the good nature and competency of some of the historical figures involved, I did not “base” my characters on any particular individual. I may say, however, that I was enormously pleased to find that the people of my home state—New Hampshire—acquitted themselves with great courage and decency during that era. I have always found the people of New Hampshire to be kind and levelheaded, and so it did not surprise me to read that they had been fair and evenhanded in their treatment of German soldiers. I am proud to say I would have predicted it.

  In 1986 the people of Stark held a reunion with the former German captives. It was held in the town hall, a classic New England white building with trim lines and a woodstove as a source of heat. By a strange twist, the cowboy song “Don’t Fence Me In” became a sort of anthem for the Germans and guards in the 1940s. At the reunion the former prisoners and their keepers rose and sang it together, most of them crying. Afterward many of the Germans and American guards confessed that their time in Camp Stark had been a highlight of their life. It was a decent place, where captives were treated humanely, and where two cultures, engaged in a horrible war, came together in unity. That was the spirit I attempted to capture in this story and to embody in the love between Collie and August.