Broken English

by P. L. Gaus

  But Professor Branden would likely remember very little of the first days in Joel Pomerene Hospital. He knew that Caroline was there. He knew that the doctors were satisfied. He knew Bruce Robertson was trying to tell him something important about Nabal Greyson.

  The fifth day was better. On a warm and breezy afternoon, he awoke to voices. Robertson, Niell, and Cal Troyer were in the room. Branden held his eyes closed and listened to talk of David Hawkins. He heard Cal scoff at something Robertson said, and then he heard Robertson laugh.

  Branden pushed up from his pillow, said, “Hawkins didn’t miss,” and fell back.

  There was a warm sponge bath. In another moment, Caroline sat beside him, holding his hand. Blood tests, medication on relentless schedules, and vital signs came in wakeful intervals. Soon he could distinguish night from day, and then the night-shift nurses from the day-shift nurses.

  Sometime during it all, when he lay half awake one night, dozing lightly while the night nurses wrote quietly at their desks down the hall, a tall Amish man with blond hair came into his room unobserved. The Amish man carefully removed his wide-brimmed hat, took off a pair of delicate spectacles, laid them on a side table, drew up a chair beside the professor’s pillow, and sat down to whisper into Branden’s ear. He spoke a greeting in a German dialect, and Branden, with his eyes closed, said, “Herr David Hawkins?”

  “Ya, Herr Professor. Aber, Herr David Raber. I am David Raber. I have taken my wife’s name.”

  “Herr Raber.” Branden lifted his hand, opened his eyes and turned to see a man with blond hair, cut round, in Dutch style. His face was weathered, and his eyes were clear and peaceful.

  “I feared that you wouldn’t figure it out in time, Professor.”

  “You hung the emblem on the microphone stand.”

  “Yes.”

  “You never intended to kill Greyson.”

  “I needed you to believe that I would.”

  “The emblem exploded as I ran up the steps.”

  “I rigged it to do that, when it was shot.”

  “Poetic that you’d choose the motto ‘To Serve and Protect’.”

  “Yes. Greyson betrayed my daughter to Jesse Sands, and he was ex-FBI. The kind of person one ought to be able to expect better of.”

  “But you never intended to kill him.”

  “I needed you to believe I would, once you had figured it out. At the very least, I needed to take that shot at Greyson so Robertson would finally start thinking about why I would want him dead instead of Sands.”

  “They think you missed and hit the emblem instead of Greyson.”

  “Let them. They’ll never find the bullet anyway.”

  “I flushed him out for you.”

  “I couldn’t be sure what he’d do after the emblem exploded. I figured you’d believe at first that he’d been shot. I needed you, Professor, to understand what Greyson had done the night Janet was killed.”

  “He let your daughter die.”

  “Yes.”

  “Sands told you that night in the jail?”

  “He said Greyson was formerly with the FBI, and I should be wondering how he could have found his way to Janet’s house before the police, in their own city, managed to get there themselves. So who was my daughter’s greatest betrayer, Professor? Sands who shot her, or Greyson who stood by and let it happen?”

  “You had everybody pretty worried when you disappeared after Abigail found the gun in your buggy,” Branden said.

  “That was not my gun. Greyson was trying to frame me for Bromfield’s murder,” Hawkins said. “And from what I learned of the sheriff, he pretty well succeeded. Made it so I couldn’t just wander into the sheriff’s office and tell him about Greyson and Sands without getting myself arrested.”

  “You could have turned yourself in and let the sheriff sort it all out.”

  “Professor, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the service, it’s that you never leave your own fate in the hands of others, especially strangers. I figure I had to do things my way.”

  “You could have killed Greyson on those courthouse steps.”

  “Mehr doffa net so du, Herr Professor. Murder is forbidden. It is God’s privilege to avenge. No one else’s.”

  “You must have been tempted.”

  “Sorely tempted, Professor,” Hawkins said. “At first it was all I could think of.”

  “You have transcended it all,” Branden said.

  “By the grace of God, yes. And because of the love of a faithful woman.”

  “I still don’t see that you had to go on the run when Abigail found that pistol.”

  “Like I said, Professor, that was Greyson’s pistol. I had to assume that he was capable of coming after me. Or Abigail, to get to me. So I started shadowing him while he followed you.”

  “He followed me?” Branden asked.

  “You, Cal, and Caroline. Practically everywhere you went. Ricky Niell when he could, too. If I had given him the chance, I believe he would have followed me too, and killed me if necessary. After all, if I was in hiding, who would be surprised if I never showed up again? So I never gave him a chance to find me. Instead, I stalked him until I could figure a way to flush him out. That was also the only way I could make sure that he didn’t hurt anyone else.”

  “And he would have tried to stop us if we had figured out his treachery?”

  “I have no doubt.”

  “Was he ever really that close?”

  “One day. You and Niell were in my basement, and he was in the house with you. Upstairs, in a closet. I figure that was about as close as it got.”

  “You were there, too?”

  “In the house, Professor. A sniper’s training comes in handy from time to time.”

  Branden’s eyelids fluttered and fell. When he awoke, the blond Amish Raber was still there.

  “Can you still hear me, Professor?”

  A nod, “Yes.”

  “I want to tell you about Cal Troyer.”

  Another nod.

  “I saw him two times in Vietnam.” Raber faltered, choked back tears and continued. “It’s important to me that you know this.”

  Branden turned, opened his eyes and saw a Dutch face with inestimable peace and strength. Raber’s blue eyes held soft pools of tears.

  “I was set up, with my spotter, at the edge of a clearing. The chopper had dropped us in two days earlier. The sun was coming up from behind, to our right. On the other side of the clearing, about a hundred and fifty yards away, a footpath emerged from the underbrush, and we were set up there to watch. The target was an NVA colonel. He was to be on that path, at dawn, with his unit. I don’t know how we knew he’d be there. We just did. Our orders were to take him at any cost.

  “While we lay there in cover, my spotter caught movement at the edge of the clearing about fifty yards up from the path, across from us, to the right. I swung the rifle scope over and there was Cal Troyer, ten feet back from the edge, kneeling. He pulled a soldier’s head up, took off his helmet, and gave the man water. Cal was medical. But he stayed there, kneeling. I think they had been there all night, separated from their unit. I watched him through my scope. He knelt in the jungle and prayed.”

  Raber fought his emotions, but tears came softly as he remembered. “The spotter wanted to call off the shot. We argued. The colonel came into view, and I forced the spotter to range me. He protested, but I took the shot anyway. The last thing I saw as we backed up into the jungle was Cal picking up that wounded soldier, and the dead colonel’s men spreading out to search the clearing.”

  “You betrayed Cal’s position?”

  “Yes.”

  “You knew they’d search for you, and likely find only Cal.”

  “Yes. If I had held off the shot, the unit would have gone on through, and never seen either of us.”

  “Does Cal know?”

  Raber nodded yes, and wept with his eyes buried in his hands. In time, he was able to continue. “We were forced to
stay put too long, and missed our primary extraction. Two days later, we hit the secondary, and as we scrambled aboard, the chopper started taking fire from Charlie. As we lifted off, a round nicked something in the hydraulics or the engine, and we started trailing dark smoke. The pilot hollered something back at us, and ten minutes later we set down at an artillery firebase near Chu Lai. Nowhere near our base down south. The battery was shelling the HCM Trail over in Laos, and when our chopper came in low over the mountain in their line of fire, the First Sergeant had to call a ceasefire. We were about two clicks out and coming in smoking hot.

  “It was Bravo Battery, 3BN, 18 ARTY. Their 175s were so hot I can remembering seeing one gunner light a smoke off the barrel. They’d been ramming the shells into the breach with steel poles because the hydraulic loaders were two slow to suit them, and there we came, right down their line of fire.

  “The pilots sure caught it from the First Sarge. The motion sensors on the HCM Trail had been lighting up like fireworks all morning, and they’d been throwing everything they had out of the 175s for two hours by the time we shut them down. Penetrators that’d explode deep underground. And the kind that’d detonate overhead, as well. Bouncing Betties. You name it, they threw it at Charlie. Their motto out on the gate read “Bravo Does Make Charlie Hurt.” It didn’t slow them down any that Firebase Marianne had been completely overrun the day before, and Bravo Battery had it in mind to vaporize everything that moved in Laos that day. By the time we had piled out of the chopper, they had started up again.

  “Then, three days later, Cal Troyer staggered in with that G.I. on his shoulders. I stood in front of a tent and watched him stumble toward the gate. Other guys ran out to help him. They put the G.I. on a stretcher, and Cal walked in on his own.

  “I had forgotten about Troyer. Figured him captured and dead. And then he came up to Bravo with that wounded grunt draped over his shoulders.”

  Raber drew in a labored, clearing breath, leaned back in his chair with his eyes locked on the ceiling, and continued, “Professor, if I had all the words to speak and all the time to speak them, I’d never be able to describe the overwhelming power and majesty that Cal Troyer carried with him that day when he brought that guy into camp.”

  He stopped, dried his eyes with a handkerchief, and shrugged an apology. He told the rest of it with lines of tears streaming down his cheeks and into his blond chin whiskers, his head shaking slowly side to side.

  “I don’t know how he made it back, and he’s never told me. It could only have been by the grace of God. But I do know this about Cal Troyer. I’ve known it since the day he carried that kid out of the jungle. It’s the reason I came here to Millersburg. You said it yourself, Professor. Cal never gave up on me. Cal Troyer never quits. He doesn’t lose hope, and he doesn’t give up. Not even on the likes of me.

  “When I came here to Millersburg, after leaving the forces, he helped me, even though he knew what I had done in the war. When I finally had the courage to tell him about the colonel in the clearing, he told me he had known for years. He had known, Professor. He took me in, and yet he had known for years that I had betrayed him in Vietnam.”

  33

  Wednesday, July 2

  THE white concrete silo had gone up first, four stories high, and then its red metal dome. The masons had traveled from Pennsylvania, but would not stay for the raising. The block foundation had come next, cut into the side of a hill near David and Abigail Raber’s little cabin. On the low side, the exposed foundation rose to a height of fifteen blocks. On the high bank, only the top three foundation blocks were exposed above the ground. From there, the slope of the land would give direct access to the second floor of the bank barn.

  The lumber had been delivered a week ahead of time. David, Abigail, and her brothers had sorted the boards in the evenings, after they had come in off their fields. They had stacked the boards around the foundation, according to where each type would be needed, and had measured and hammered the wall frames into place on the ground. Most of the wheat had been shocked. The strawberries were in. The corn was as high as a man’s chest, and all the gardens in the District were coming along fine.

  When the day came, the families of the District began to arrive early, some before daybreak. The men came with their tools, the women with food aplenty. The children came, too, all ages, some with careful instructions, some with special duties, the youngest with gentle admonitions to stand well clear of the work. There would be a noon meal, and the three-story barn, with one long run and a smaller wing attached at the middle, would be finished by 3:00 P.M.

  The buggies came onto the Raber farms at the second lane, behind the big house where Abigail’s oldest brother lived. Some stopped at the big house, some at the little Daadihaus in the back. Most went straight on over the hill, buggies and wagons alike, past the windmill and down the back pastures. From there, the lane dropped through a field of tall corn, green and luxuriant in a gentle breeze, along a wooden fence line, and into the bottoms. The little lane turned right and followed the edge of a wooded stand of scattered sycamores, along a small stream, and came out at the far end of the glade where Abigail’s cabin stood waiting. The families parked their rigs along the fence line, twenty-seven in all before the day was well along, with half a dozen lads assigned to tend the horses at the tether line. The wagons rolled up to the barn, dropped off supplies, and then turned back to unhitch at the fence with the buggies. As the barn went up on the hill, respectable front and back screened porches were added to Abigail’s cabin. A cousin brought a white, three-level martin house, with green roofing, and stood it up on a tall iron pole beside the cabin. Women quietly carried in gifts, trying not to be observed doing it. They brought practical household items for the kitchen, linens, sheets, and pillows for the bedroom, and toys for the children to come.

  The men were organized loosely by tasks, and by age. Those who didn’t swing a hammer or pull a saw carried and stacked wood for those who did. The massive six-by-six walnut uprights went up first along with their bracing frames. The exterior wall frames were poled into place and hammered down. The inside rafters and crossbeams were next. The floorboards were laid as soon as possible on the first level, and then the outer walls and roof were framed out.

  As the interlacing wood frame began to rise and take shape, the noises of construction filled the little glade. There were clattering hammers and handsaws that coursed their rhythms through lumber. There were discussions and quiet consultations. The men took to the various tasks, small and large, as if they had all been given their special duty. There was quiet instruction for boys too young to have learned the art of raising a barn.

  A small gang of children skittered by, too close to the work, and were scolded away. A half dozen odd tables were set up with drinks and food. An occasional buggy or wagon went back to town for supplies.

  On a grassy hill near the cabin, a dozen or so children sat down to play and to watch. The boys all wore straw hats, and the girls bonnets of black or white. All were barefoot, boys and girls alike, as they had been since the day school had let out. The girls’ aprons were white in front. The boys’ suspenders were uniformly black, straps crossed in back.

  Out on a nearby county road, where several cars were parked as locals watched, Mike Branden leaned back against the hood of a new van, crutches propped up under his arms. His jeans on the right leg were split up to the hip, along both the outside and the inside seams, to make room for his cast. His hair was tucked under a broad, straw hat. Caroline was with him, in a long summer dress that closed at the neck, her hair tied in a bun at the back of her head.

  They watched as the frame of the barn rose off the foundation in three sections. There would be two long peaks off a roof line that formed a ‘T.’ As the roofing frame went on, they saw Cal Troyer high up with the older men, nailing down bracing. Next to him, there was a tall, blond Amish man.

  As they watched, a black-and-white sheriff’s cruiser rolled gently to a stop on t
he gravel behind their van, and Ricky Niell emerged in uniform, along with Bruce Robertson in civilian casuals. They strolled to the van and joined the Brandens to watch the throng of Amish carpenters below. Robertson took out a pair of binoculars, and Niell gave Branden a knowing smile.

  After several minutes scanning the wooden rafters, Robertson said, “Found Cal. Now, where’s Hawkins?”

  Branden guffawed and said, sarcastically, “Sure Bruce, why don’t I just point him out to you? No thanks. Greyson had him framed for murder, and you turned half the county upside down looking for him.”

  “You two stop it,” Caroline scolded.

  Robertson winked at her and said, “Can’t blame me for trying. I’m not really after him now, anyways. As far as I know, there was no bullet. Just a truck’s backfire on the square. Even if there was a shot, I wouldn’t arrest Hawkins for it. Got no evidence. Which is probably just how he planned it.”

  Branden smiled appreciatively at Robertson’s restraint.

  At the barn raising, nearly half the men could be seen now, coming down out of the rafters to lunch. Half stayed to work. The wallboards were handed up to men hanging in the high frame, and soon the interior walls were being hammered into place. Cal Troyer and David Hawkins were the last to come down off the roof, and Caroline caught the professor’s eye to see if he had noticed.

  Robertson said, “You know Cal’s got the Hawkins house sold.”

  “For Hawkins?” Branden asked.

  Robertson nodded. “You also know that Cal hauled a load of guns up to a gun shop in Wooster and sold them outright for cash?”

  “Figures,” Branden said.

  The exterior walls had started going on, in vertical strips. The interior framing was entirely done. The men trickled back from lunch and some began to lift the heavy oak two-by-eights to others high up in the rafters. The long boards were then shuttled out to the exterior framers, who nailed them into place one at a time, three or four men forming a vertical line to perform the task. Each would hammer in his place, and step back in unison with the others to work on the next board coming up. Then another board would be lifted into place for them, shimmed with a few raps of a hammer, and nailed down. In this fashion, an entire wall was hammered into place, fully two hundred feet by fifteen on the lower story, in less than forty minutes.