by Karen Wolff
“He was? That’s a surprise. He never goes anywhere.”
We stood around outside the church for a while, cooling off in the evening air and listening to people talk. “This is wonderful,” I heard. Or, “Just wait till this thing gets going. Things will be a lot better around here.” Gram didn’t say a word, just smiled and nodded to her friends, and then we walked home together. As we approached the house, I ran ahead eager to tell Granddad what we had heard.
I started talking almost before I was through the door. “They’re starting a Klan here,” I said. “My dad came tonight. Maybe they’ll get him a job and a house for us.”
“Whoa, Harry. Slow down. What are you talking about?” He looked up expectantly as Gram walked in. “What’s going on?”
She smirked. “We’ve had some real entertainment tonight, Alfie. Promises like you wouldn’t believe. This fellow’s a stem-winder, all right. Made the Klan sound like the best thing ever to come down the road. And folks bought the whole package.” She shook her head. “I couldn’t believe it.”
“Hmph. I suppose that includes turning everybody into a ‘dry,’ doesn’t it?”
“‘Fraid so. Might not be all bad,” she said as she unpinned her hat. “Not only that, he set his sights on the Catholics.” She related what he had said about Bernie Beaubien.
“Bernie? I never thought there was anything wrong with him.”
“He’s also after Negroes and Jews,” she said, “but I don’t think he’ll find any around here.”
“Yes, but he talked about some wonderful things that the Klan means to do, Granddad,” I said. I ticked off the list—houses, hospitals, universities, and all the rest.
“Well, don’t hold your breath,” he said. “We’ll have to see it first.” He gave us a big, toothless grin. “But wait a minute. I haven’t had a chance to tell you. Harry, you’re an uncle.”
“Polly?” Gram said.
“Yup,” he said. “A baby girl and she named her Mary Josephine. Vince’s mother and dad stopped by to tell.”
This was turning into quite a night. My sister Polly so grown up she had a baby. Right away I wondered what Dad would have to say about it. I’d already planned to ask him about tonight’s meeting when I picked up his dirty clothes in the morning, but before I had it all thought out, Gram said, “You better let your dad know about this when you see him tomorrow.” I dreaded telling him about Polly’s baby worse than a toothache.
GRAM SENT ME to the store first thing in the morning with a basket of tomatoes from her garden for Granddad to sell. His customers were talking about the meeting.
“I paid ‘em my fifteen dollars and signed up right on the spot,” said Walter Trometer.
“So did I,” said another. “I couldn’t believe what he said about our sheriff. I always thought he was all right.”
“You just never know, I guess,” said a third.
“Are you going to join, Alfie?”
Granddad stood behind the counter, fiddling with the charge book. “Can’t do it, gents,” he said.
“Why not?” Walter said. “Are you just cheap?”
“Nah. That’s not it.”
They looked at him expectantly. Granddad wasn’t usually shy about talking.
“You seem to forget,” he said. “I can’t be a member. I’m what you’re supposed to be fighting against. Did you forget I was born in France?”
They all got very quiet.
Finally Walter said, “They didn’t mean you, Alfie.”
“They sure as hell did,” he said. “I was even baptized a Catholic.” He waited a minute and added, “And I sell beer.”
This rocked me back on my heels. I had gotten so wound up last night about what I heard, it had never even occurred to me that it could affect someone like Granddad. I stopped to think about others who wouldn’t be welcome in the KKK. Bill and Jalmer Nelson had come from Sweden with their parents when they were just little kids. And the McVay’s, who ran Dad’s boarding house, were from Ireland and Catholic to boot. None of them could join. I just couldn’t make things jibe with this whole KKK business.
When the customers cleared out, Granddad shook his head. “Those fellows signed up and still don’t even know what they’ve done.”
I GOT ON MY bike and rode over to see Dad. Sally wasn’t home, so he and I sat at the kitchen table. I had Polly’s big news to tell him, but I was scared to say anything after the way he’d acted when he heard about her wedding. This might be worse. I decided to work up to it gradually.
“I saw you in the back of the church last night, Dad. What did you think of that preacher?”
“He was long-winded, but I thought he had some good things to say. We can’t let this country get overrun with foreigners. Especially the damn Catholics.”
“I thought he was kinda hard on Mr. Beaubien, didn’t you?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe he deserved it.”
“Gram and Granddad don’t think so,” I said. “His boy is my friend from school.”
He just grunted.
“Do you think you would ever join the KKK, Dad?”
“I might. Depends on what they plan to do. There’s a fellow staying here at Sally’s who talks about it a lot.”
We sat for a minute. I stretched my legs, then my arms. I couldn’t seem to find anything else to talk about, and I couldn’t put off my news any longer. “Dad. I thought…I mean, Gram thought…well, we all thought you should know.” I swallowed hard.
“Know what?” he said.
I let it pop out. “Polly had a baby yesterday, Dad.” His head jerked up, and his eyes bored into mine. I thought I might as well finish what I had to say. “It’s a girl, and they named her Mary Josephine.”
It seemed like it should be good news that he had a grandchild, but, oh boy, did that set him off. He pulled his mouth up in a tight knot and his lips turned white. His eyes grew huge, and he let loose.
“My God! Isn’t it bad enough that my only daughter ran off and married a Frenchman? She must have joined the goddamn Catholic Church down there in Jefferson.” He stood up and banged his good fist on the table. “Now, here she is with a French Catholic brat! She even gave this kid a Catholic name.” He got up and paced around the room, yelling, “I think I’d rather it’d been born dead. You hear me, Harry?”
I stood up open-mouthed at his hateful words.
“Dad, take it easy. Calm down. I think Vince and Polly are getting along fine. They’re happy.”
He went over to the kitchen door and yanked it open. For a moment I thought he was going to stomp out, but he wheeled around and came toward me.
“I can’t stand it. I’m never going to speak to her again. In fact, I don’t ever want to lay eyes on Polly again. Or her kid. Ever.”
His extreme words were hard to take. I didn’t think he had any business criticizing Polly. She mostly had to raise herself, and he’d been no help to her. I wanted him to stop talking so hatefully about my sister.
“Dad, I don’t understand. Why do you hate the French and the Catholics so much? What is it that makes you so mad at them? They fought with us in the war. They were on our side, weren’t they?”
“You might have thought so, but they didn’t want the Americans there. All they cared about was themselves. The damn fools didn’t seem to know they couldn’t have won the war without us. They acted so superior and arrogant. They thought they were so much better than us. It made my blood boil.” His words twisted his face into an ugly mask, but at least he’d stopped talking about Polly.
I said, “Come on, Dad. Did they do something to you?”
“I’ll tell you what they did,” he said all angry-like. He turned and stared out the window for a minute as if reminding himself of what had happened. When he spoke, his voice was quieter, almost as if he were talking to himself. “It was terrible there on the Marne. So many got wounded. Or died. The trenches stunk so.”
“It must have been awful, Dad. We couldn’t tell from here w
hat it was like. How bad it was for you.”
He nodded, calmer now. “After I got shot, they put me in the field hospital. Nobody had time to pay attention to my wound. It didn’t seem all that serious. I figured it would heal right up, and I’d be sent back to the trenches. Then it got infected. I could feel it getting hot. My arm turned red, and pus poured out of it. When the nurse saw it, she said, ‘I don’t think you’ll be going back anytime soon, Cal.’”
Dad returned to the table and sat down. I was almost afraid to move, wanting to hear his story and hoping he’d finally tell something about being over there even if it was terrible.
“The field hospital had to be moved, so they took me behind the lines to a French hospital that was run by a bunch of nuns.” He grimaced. “I can see those whey-faced women yet. No wonder they were nuns. They were so plain and ugly, no man would have wanted them.”
I risked a little smile. “Yes, but I’ll bet they took good care of you.”
He snorted. “Not so. They put me in a room with another Yank and proceeded to ignore us. We were lucky if we got food once a day.”
“They let you go hungry?”
“That’s right. The other fellow was in bad shape, out of his head a lot. He’d already been there a couple of weeks, and he wasn’t getting any better. One time he told me that the nuns used all their medicine on their own wounded men, and there wasn’t anything left for us Americans.”
“That’s terrible. How could they do that? Was it true, do you think? Did you ever find out?”
“Not really. One morning I looked over at the other bed and I saw that Buck, that was his name, was dead. I had a little bell beside my bed so I rang it and rang it, but nobody came. I was so weak from the infection and no food that it was all I could do to get to the hallway. I just stood there leaning against the doorway and yelled and yelled. It took a long time, but finally one of those pasty-faces showed up. She said, ‘Oh, Mister Spencer. You must stay in bed.’
“I said, ‘For God’s sake, woman. You’ve let that man die. He’s lying over there dead since last night.’ She looked in and crossed herself, and then started mumbling some prayers. Oh I was pissed.
“‘I’m going to die too if I don’t get some care,’ I said. ‘I haven’t seen a doctor. Nobody has changed my bandages, and this wound stinks. I want some food and new bandages, and I want some help getting this cleaned up.’
‘Yes, Mr. Spencer,’ she whispered. They all whispered.”
I listened in horrified silence as Dad went on.
“She went away, and finally some boys took the body out of the room. Nobody came to help me until after dark. Finally that same sickly looking woman came back. She had no food. No bandages. She said, ‘You must pray Mr. Spencer. Pray to Our Lady. Pray to St. Joseph to help you get well.’ She handed me a little Jesus statue. It was like a kid’s toy. I looked at the silly thing, and I took it in my good hand and threw it out the window. We heard it hit the paving below. I screamed at her, ‘Goddamn it. Get me some food.’ She squealed and scurried away like a little mouse.”
“Dad, I can’t imagine anything so awful. How could they get by with ignoring you like that? There must have been something you could do. Wasn’t there a doctor around?”
“Oh, Harry. You don’t know anything. Not a goddamned thing.”
Dad stood and tried to pour himself some coffee. He was still clumsy with his left hand, and the cup teetered on the counter and fell to the floor. He was silent and watched while I picked up the broken pieces and dumped them in the wastebasket. I found a rag and wiped up the spilled coffee. I wondered if I should leave. A part of me wanted to get out of there, away from him, but another part of me wanted to hear his story, and he seemed to want to talk.
“They sent a doctor all right. The next morning. He was an old man, too old to be in the army. He had a thin little mustache and a mean face. He couldn’t speak English, so they found somebody to translate. He wanted to put me out and cut away the rotten flesh on my arm, put in a tube to drain it, if necessary. He thought it would heal up fast. I was so tired of the whole thing. What he wanted to do sounded all right to me after all this time, and I told them to go ahead. But first I wanted some food.”
“Did they feed you?”
“Finally. I got a bowl of oatmeal and a piece of bread. And can you believe it? A cup of coffee. I thought things were really turning around. They came mid-morning and gave me something to knock me out before they started work on my arm.
“When I woke up in the middle of the afternoon, I was all alone. My arm was bandaged up, and it hurt like hell, but I figured I could tough it out. I finally got my eyes to stay open, and that’s when I saw it. Across the room there was a table about as high as my bed where they had put their instruments. Only now there was a white enamel bowl on it. And, oh God, Harry. My arm was in it.”
I felt my stomach churn.
He put his good hand over his eyes before he went on. “I just stared and stared at my own hand over there in that bowl. I couldn’t make sense of it. How could my arm be over there? Then it came to me. That sonofabitch had cut off my arm.”
I STUMBLED OUT of Dad’s place, my head spinning with what I had heard. I had to get away by myself to think. I started running without knowing where. I ran and ran all the way to the edge of town and across the main road. I started up the tall bluff on the other side and climbed in the hot sun until I was out of breath and had to stop. I fell to my knees and felt my stomach sicken as I replayed the story in my mind, shuddering with the thought of the cut off arm, the saw, all the blood, and the pain. I imagined what it would be like to wake up with the limb still in the room but not attached. It was horrible, too horrible to bear.
The strange man who told me this. This man whose bent and twisted thinking sickened me. He was so bitter and filled with hate. Was he my father? I didn’t know him anymore. I didn’t like him much, and that made me feel guilty and ashamed now that I’d heard his story.
I sat there on that hill until I could breathe again, the wind whipping the tall grass and drying my sweat. I let the sun bake into me. After a long time, my body quieted and I was able to get to my feet. I stood on the high clay bluffs that marched alongside the Sioux River all the way to the Missouri. Below me Richmond lay on the flat flood plain. Occasionally a child’s cry could be heard, or the slamming of a door. Nothing in that peaceful scene could have foretold the misery that I knew was down there.
I didn’t want to think about my father. I was angry with him and felt cheated by him. I was the one who had gotten hurt. I didn’t have a regular family anymore; my brothers and sister were gone; our home was gone. And it was all his fault. He had brought on all this misery. Yet I couldn’t forget the horror in the hospital, the meanness and the callousness of those people. What if it had happened to me?
No. No. I didn’t want to feel sorry for him. I didn’t want to feel his agony. If he hadn’t left us, this would never have happened. I stood on that high place trying to empty my head of all I had heard and felt. Still, the thought of my father’s misery wouldn’t leave me alone. It kept sneaking in from the corners of my mind. It niggled at me, and I tried to put it away from me. I’d taught myself to forget about Dad, not to care about him, not to think about him. But his agony and the shame he must have felt for what had happened to us kept coming back to me, circling round and round in my mind like the great red-tailed hawk flying over my head. Finally I could deny it no longer. His pain spiked itself through me. I sat down again, and great choking sobs overtook me. My father. My father.
I wanted to put a fist down Ory Gable’s throat. Every Sunday he told us that God loved us, that He cared about each one of us, that we were His children. We just had to put our faith in Him. Put our lives in His hands. Well, Ory Gabel was wrong. This God hated our father and hated me. Otherwise He wouldn’t have allowed the butchery that crumpled my father. Oh, I spent a long, hot afternoon hating God. I sat up there on that high bluff until the sun beg
an to go down, and I blamed Him and hated Him. I stayed until that great western sky went from gold to purple as evening came. The hot wind died down, and I could feel the clay dust of the bluffs, finer than sand, in my mouth and in my hair, inside my clothes. I was spent now, my anger gone, my mind empty, only wanting to go home.
Gram, who was sometimes hard to love, saw me come in and brushed the hair from my eyes.
“Where have you been, Harry?”
“I went to see Dad. Then I needed to get away for a while.”
She looked into my eyes. “He must have talked to you? Did he tell you his
story?”
I looked at her in disbelief. “Did you know all that stuff?”
She nodded.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “You were so young. We wanted to protect you.”
“You shouldn’t have kept me in the dark. I needed to know.” I felt the heat of anger boil up in me again. “Why did you treat me like a child? Everyone knew but me. It’s my dad. You shouldn’t have kept it a secret from me.”
“I’m sorry, Harry. We thought it was the right thing.”
I slammed out of the kitchen.
THAT NIGHT AS Ty and I were going to bed I asked him if he knew about Dad and what had happened in France.
“Dad didn’t tell me directly, but I heard bits and pieces when he told Uncle Lyle and Aunt Hazel. He talked about it over and over again so I figured out most of it. I think they got sick of hearing his story.”
“Is there anything to do for him, Ty?”
“What could we do, Harry? Uncle Lyle did his best to get him beyond it, but he wouldn’t listen. What could we do that would be better?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Aw, Harry There’s nothing we can do. It’s just the way he is. We just have to forget about it and let him be.”
DREAMS OF BLOOD, dead bodies, and severed limbs disturbed my sleep that night. Sometimes men in white masks armed with saws were so real that I woke up rigid with fear and trembling. In my dreams I looked and looked, but could never find my father, though I could hear him calling for me. Ragged, wailing calls.