Requiem for the Bone Man

by R. A. Comunale

  Madchen, was ist ihr name?

  “Little one, what is your name?”

  “Ilse.”

  ...

  Nancy heard the other girls in the class snickering. She knew she looked tired and not at her best. She had stayed up a good portion of the night helping her parents with the elderly patients. She had come to hate the cloying decay of old age. Those poor people had outlived their time, their friends, and their families. Strapped into feeding chairs, they sat staring ahead into inevitable oblivion. The worst ones were confined to bed, thrown back into infant-like dependency on diapers and hand feeding and cleaning, unable to make sense or to talk at all.

  Feeding tubes? Bladder catheters? Diapers? Restraints? I’d rather kill myself than wind up like that. I never want to grow old.

  She hadn’t put her hair up so it hung straight down. Its bright, shimmering color made the others envious, and they took every opportunity they could to insult her. College was turning out no better than high school. She had to escape.

  Unbeknownst to her parents, she would be starting as a management trainee at a local bank as soon as graduation was over. She had even scouted out an apartment. She would be out of the house, out of the nursing home for good. She needed to leave the cocoon. She needed a life.

  Ilse Seligman wasn’t stupid. She knew her daughter was an intelligent young woman and needed her space. But her Ira was stubborn, pigheaded even. She laughed at the thought.

  A Jew, pigheaded?

  That’s why she loved him so much. His stubbornness had saved her that night when he stood up against the company commander to get permission to help the starving young girl he had found groveling in the dirt. And he had bucked the rules blocking military personnel from marrying civilians from a combatant country. Somehow, in some miraculous way, he had brought her back to the United States with him.

  A war bride, they had called her, and a German war bride to boot!

  A Jew marrying a German? Oh, yes, my little one, I know what it is like to be a stranger, an outsider.

  He was a good man, her Ira, but he drove his daughter the way he had driven himself. So Ilse prayed that Nancy would find happiness, just as she had that long-ago day. And then Ilse Seligman’s heart leapt with joy. Her daughter stood before her, her face beaming. “Mama, I’ve met someone!”

  “What’s he like, girlfriend? C’mon, spill the beans! Is he the strong and silent type, or does he come on hot and heavy? Does he have a big bris stick?”

  With that, her best friend Betty giggled, and then they both burst out laughing. But Nancy had little to say about her new boyfriend. Well, maybe “boyfriend” wasn’t the right word just yet. “Canoeing partner” might be more appropriate, or even “attentive listener” when she played her violin.

  He was kind of cute, in a pet rabbit sort of way. But could she see herself with him? Golden-orange tresses or not, she knew she wasn’t a looker—and at five feet two and one hundred mmmpph pounds? No, she wasn’t tall and thin. She thought she might even weigh more than he did, and he was almost six feet.

  What does he see in me? Am I wasting time with him? One nice thing about him is he’s smart—though he’s clueless about dealing with girls—but smart and kind and … oh, damn, maybe I am falling for him! Could I have a family with him?

  More daydreaming would have to wait. Right now, she had a date to go canoeing.

  CHAPTER 4

  Sisyphus

  “Bill, come on down for dinner. Your father and I are waiting.”

  He didn’t want to go downstairs. All he would get was another recruiting pitch from his retired Marine father. Be a man! Get tough! Show the world you’ve got balls, son.

  His father seemed to function on the premise that you had to be the meanest sonofabitch on the block or you would get chewed up.

  How did Mom put up with it? For that matter, what could she possibly have seen in him to begin with?

  He remembered his mother taking him to church every Sunday when he was little, when his father wasn’t around much—too busy saving the world. So, his mother would pray for his father’s safety in whatever part of the world he happened to be.

  Once, Dad returned home, covered with ribbons, and right away picked him up. The boy had cried, because he hadn’t recognized the big man with the rough-skinned face and shaved head. He remembered how Mom had taken him in her arms and tried to explain, but it hadn’t helped. He was different. He didn’t want to shoot people. He wanted to help them. And he continued to puzzle over his parents. To him, they were a real-life version of Beauty and the Beast, the gentleness of his mother always overwhelmed by the overbearing crudeness of his old man.

  Maybe he was too sensitive. Maybe he really was the wimp his father considered him to be. But what in God’s name created a man like his dad, retired Marine Gunnery Sergeant William Crowley?

  ...

  Dearest Will,

  You can add another stripe to your uniform. You’re a Daddy now! Bill Junior looks just like you, right down to the bald spot in the middle of his head! He’s going to be a great man, just like his father, I know it.

  Will, I pray God every day to keep you safe. Mom and Dad pass on their hopes for your speedy return. I know you can’t tell us where you are or what you’re doing. I just know that our love will keep us together.

  I love you,

  Helene

  He was sitting reading the letter, just as he had every day for the past three years, when the captain approached him.

  “Gunny.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “We’re ready to take the camp at oh-six-hundred. Get your men together and perform a perimeter search. The Krauts are too quiet tonight. And see if you can find out what that godawful stench is.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said, saluting.

  The brass hadn’t told him what was so special about this shithole piece of real estate, but it wasn’t his job to think.

  He approached the dozen dirt-covered soldiers—all that was left under his command—their eyes ranging, never settling in one place, hardened veterans like himself. They had seen it all, and he was proud of them. He would trust his life to any one of these men, and he knew each would do the same for him.

  “Listen up, men. We need to do a standard border check—the whole bit. The Krauts can pull some real nasties, but we can do better.”

  Yes, they could do better. Each and every one of them could gut a foxhole full of Germans before they knew what hit them.

  They spread out in pairs, creeping forward almost silently to avoid rousing the camp’s guard dogs. Strange, the spotlights weren’t scanning the empty ground outside the barbed-wire fencing. So far, so good.

  “Holy Mother of God!”

  It was Spurling. What the hell was happening? The men knew not to break silence! Holding back in the rear, he crouched down, expecting gunfire from the camp towers, an ambush from a nearby grove of trees, something—but there was nothing. Then he heard the others. Sanchez repeating over and over, “Madre de Dios!” Benning crying like a kid and the others moaning. What the hell could it be?

  He moved out of concealment toward the men—all of them just standing, staring at a lumpy, silver-gray mound at least eight feet high and several yards wide. In the half moonlight, he could also see the outline of a small bulldozer next to the mound.

  That stench! It was getting stronger as he moved closer. He wanted to vomit. He knew that smell, but never so strong, never so cloying as this. Not even in the worst battle he had fought. It was death incarnate.

  And then he realized what he was looking at. It was a mountain of bodies, corpses, maybe thousands, piled like cordwood, compressed into a freestanding mound by the bulldozer.

  He stood there with his men, seeing but not really comprehending. He turned his head away. And then the sign over the camp gate caught his eye. He started to laugh. He couldn’t stop. And then he fell to his knees and began to cry. The sign stared back at him in mocking silence.

>   ARBEIT MACH FREI

  Work will free you.

  ...

  Bill just couldn’t deal with his father right now. He needed to get out of the house. So he slipped quietly down the stairs, trying to ignore the photos along the wall, of his father, his grandfather, even his great grandfather, all in uniform, staring at him in silent disapproval. He was nearing the door when his father yelled out.

  “William Crowley, you get your ass in here now or you won’t be able to sit on it for a week!”

  Bill knew he meant it. He always kept that damned razor strop handy when he wanted to make a point. Will Crowley was a big man, a powerful man. His son, on the other hand, took after his mother in size as well as disposition. Compared to his father’s swarthy, six-foot, one-hundred-ninety-pound frame of muscle, he was the proverbial ninety-eight-pound weakling at five feet six, one-fifty. Not a good match.

  Head hanging, he walked slowly into the dining room, taking his place at the table. His father glared at him. His mother, trying to relieve the tension, announced, “Bill wanted to surprise you, Will. He’s just been accepted at the university!”

  “Well, why didn’t you say so, son? Have you signed up for ROTC?”

  “No, Dad, I’m going to register for a double major in divinity studies and biology.”

  His father started to spew out his usual cluster of coarse profanity. One of the few words Bill could make out in the torrent was “pansy.”

  “Please excuse me, Mother.”

  He got up from the table and quietly walked to the front door, opened it and left.

  “Will, he’s still a boy. He doesn’t know what’s out there yet.”

  “Ellie, how can I make him understand? He needs to be tough!”

  “You had the dream again, didn’t you? Have you told Billy about it?”

  She put her arms around him as he shook his head and started to cry.

  Bill climbed into his jalopy and drove into the countryside, just as he had so many times. And before that he had worn the tires off his bicycle doing the same thing.

  It was getting dark as he motored along the country road. His mind, still knotted up by the ongoing conflict with his father, failed to notice the figure moving along the road’s shoulder. He felt and then heard a strange bump. He pulled over and, in the remaining light, barely made out a body-sized shape lying on the pavement about a dozen yards back. He raced over and saw a shabbily dressed man lying there, blood streaming from his nose and mouth. Maybe he had been drunk and stumbled into the path of Bill’s car.

  He crouched down and tried to pull the man to the side of the road when he felt the man’s whole body suddenly shudder and then emit a long gasp of air from his mouth. Bill knew: The man was dead.

  He ran back to the car and drove as fast as he could to the nearest pay phone, dialed the operator, and asked to be connected to the local police. He heard the desk sergeant answer then blurted out the location of an injured man on the road. He hung up before the officer could ask his name. He leaned against the wooden phone booth door and began sobbing uncontrollably.

  He had killed someone.

  ...

  “Bill, I’m so proud of you, a college graduate now, and going to medical school. I wish your father were here to see it.”

  “Thanks, Mom. I couldn’t have done it without your help ... and Dad’s.”

  He half-swallowed those last two words. His father had died suddenly of a brain aneurysm a year back, but he still couldn’t escape the double nightmare of his father’s memory and the dead man on the road. His sleep would never be normal again, always haunted by the twin specters of disapproval and damnation.

  “Mr. Crowley, may I speak with you?”

  Professor Hardison, chairman of the Philosophy and Religion Studies department, had acted as a steady mentor for him these past four years. He could talk with him about anything—or almost anything, with the exception of that eternal black mark on his soul.

  “Bill, I know it’s been rough for you since your father died. But you’ve continued to produce remarkable work. The entire department would love to have you stay on in the graduate program and get your Doctor of Divinity here. If you are what we think, you might even become chairman one day!”

  He couldn’t bring himself to tell Hardison that he had received a similar offer from Dr. Blankenship, head of the biology department.

  He also couldn’t tell anyone that he had secretly been relieved when his father died. As he thought about it again, he felt the usual overwhelming guilt crushing him. How could God accept him as a purveyor of His word when he was patricidal in his heart and a murderer in reality?

  “I’m honored that you hold me in such high regard, Dr. Hardison. And someday, I hope to live up to your expectations. But I’ve given considerable thought to this. I’d like to be a medical missionary someday, so I think medical school should be my next stop.”

  Hardison put his hand on Bill’s shoulder, as Blankenship had done, and wished him well. Both men knew that Bill Crowley would become a fine doctor. But they also sensed a darkness hanging over him. And both prayed that the darkness would someday lift.

  CHAPTER 5

  Non Ho Figlio

  I have no son!

  The sting of those words still haunted him three months later as Galen accompanied his medical school roommate to his parents’ farm in Spout Springs, Virginia. Only a four-hour drive from Richmond, it might as well have been in another world. He had seen a farm only once before, and the quiet expanse of the tree-surrounded pastures seemed foreign to the city kid—agreeably foreign. He imagined the spaces filled with soot-scalded, decaying buildings and shuddered.

  He sat with Dave and his father under a large maple tree. Both men, bean-pole thin—one with a craggy, lined face and arthritis-knobbed hands, the other still smooth-skinned and supple-limbed—chewed on grass-seed stalks and stared off into the distance, seeing things he could not fathom.

  Twins, Galen thought, not father and son. He wondered what it would have been like if his own father and he could have just sat together like that, saying nothing. But that wasn’t the cultural imperative in his home, and he envied his friend for having it.

  When he first met Dave just a couple of months before, he had wondered what devils had driven him to leave the peacefulness of his country home and dive into the helter-skelter study of medicine.

  If our roles were reversed, I would have stayed here, surrounded by the trees, the plants, the birds—even the insects!

  Their early probing into each other’s backgrounds hadn’t unearthed the motivation behind Dave’s career choice. His father and mother had come from pre-Revolutionary War pioneer stock. Both sides of the family had been farmers back in the old country, and they had become farmers here. The major difference was that here they enjoyed the fruits of their labor.

  Earlier, inside the house, Dave had shown him the handmade furniture, some going as far back as his great-great grandfather, whose shaving kit Dave kept almost like a shrine on his small bedroom clothes chest. The hand-thrown pottery jugs and dishes his ancestors had made so carefully still bore the baked-in fingerprints of those long-dead men and women. The farm boy held them as gently as he would any relics of the saints.

  Sitting under the tree and taking in the landscape, Galen tried desperately to think of something to say. As he noticed the cattle grazing, he found his opening.

  “Those bulls look pretty fierce, Mr. Nash.”

  His roommate doubled over and burst out laughing. His father, barely containing himself, looked at Galen.

  “Shee-it, boy, bulls ain’t got teats!”

  The city boy stared as father and son laughed uncontrollably, holding each other. He felt tears welling up but couldn’t stop them. Then he felt the older man’s arm around him and heard the words he so much wanted someone else to say:

  “I’m sorry, son. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  On the way back from the farm, Galen finally asked Dave why
he had chosen a career in medicine. The answer surprised him, because it was the same reason that had driven him.

  The farm boy talked of seeing for the first time the doctor who had ranged through the community’s valleys in his beat-up ancient black Ford. He seemed like some 19th-century Methodist circuit rider, going from place to place checking the families and their children for everything from low-iodine-induced thyroid goiters, so common before iodized salt, to the dreaded childhood disease, polio.

  Young David had watched as the doctor clucked like a mother hen at Big David’s healing arm wound, sustained from an errant sharp scythe. He stared wide-eyed as the portly sawbones reached into his big black leather bag, filled with who knows what mysteries, and took out a small glass syringe. Carefully twisting on a stainless steel needle he had removed from a glass jar filled with red liquid, the doctor took another glass bottle, smaller and milky-colored, stuck the needle into its rubber stopper, and pulled up some of the liquid into the syringe.

  His father was wide-eyed as well.

  “Y’all really need ta do that, Doc?” his father asked in a shaky voice.

  The gray-haired doctor looked his father right in the eye.

  “Big Dave, you don’t want to die like Rufus’s pigs, the ones that got the tetanus, do you? What would Mary and little David do without you? Now, this stuff’s called tetanus antitoxin and it’s made from horse serum. You ain’t sick with horses, are you?”

  Before his father could reply, the doctor wiped his shoulder with some of the red liquid, plunged the needle into the skin, and pushed the plunger of the syringe until it was empty. The patient hadn’t even had a chance to complain.