Category: ~ The Earlier Stories

The pre-Mexico stories

The Launching

Posted on by sterlingbennett

Let me say first of all: Welcome to this house!

There’s something inviting about the wind-grayed shingles, wild roses, small pane windows, and porches. You see the sand, how it stretches out in ripples beneath the dune grass toward the blue sea. This is not a place just anyone can come to. We are privileged. I am happy to welcome you back.

I first came here as a boy. That’s a long time ago. My mother cooked apples, not apple pie, the way you might be thinking right now because of the smells in the air. She baked apples, whole, with walnuts and brown sugar in the place where the core used to be. My father smoked his curved briar pipe and sat in a white wicker rocking chair on this porch, over these same Delft blue two-inch boards. He’d have a thought, then rock forward, hold the position up against this same pine table, dip his pen in black ink and write poems that made people’s eyes water when he read them aloud. He wrote poems for friends who had died or given birth or launched boats they’d built. Once, his younger brother–my uncle Flori–built a Seabright skiff. These were Jersey beaches, and that was before the time of big highways and plastic boats. My uncle Flori built the boat, because it was a skiff with a flat bottom and could sit upright on the mud at low tide. He used yellow, pumpkin pine for planking, that mounted up, one lapstreak at a time, gleaming in the gloom of the chicken-feathered barn where he worked.

Then my father stood up. Everyone had gathered in the marsh grass beside the salt creek and the sloping ways. Really, just two two-by-ten fir planks soaped for the launch. He took out his curved pipe, held up his piece of paper and made us see the South Seas, Arctic displays of lights and crystals, and white birds and God inventing boats, and made my Aunt Bessie Kingman cry and my eyes water, and got me thinking of Indian girls lost in swamps, Hiawatha or something similar, about true love and forests, though my father’s poem never ever mention any of that.

And then Uncle Flori put Seamstress, his beloved English sheep dog, in the skiff for weight, took the sledge and tapped out a small wedge, and the skiff and Seamstress slid down and bobbed in the clear high tide of the creek, and bucked a little when Seamstress abandoned ship and swam ashore. My father said, “Congratulations, Flori, you’ve given birth!” And everyone thought that was funny.

And just when they were laughing and had their mouths open and their faces lit up with life and fun, I noticed the face of a girl I hadn’t seen before. The edge of her big straw hat was bent up in front and let the sun down on those teeth and lips and the crinkles around her eyes. And she’d been watering them, just the way I had, so we were really closer to each other than we might have been otherwise. Later, we went walking along the side of the creek, all of us, to the river, to watch Uncle Flori row. There was a spray of roses on the stern seat and a bunch of sunflowers tied to the bow, and Aunt Laura sat in the bow with her skirt pulled up so as not to touch the water, showing her legs, in her white stockings, while Aunt Bessie Kingman sat beside the roses in back and trailed her maiden hand in the water.

And then we went back up the creek, through the marsh grass, crossing the muskrat trails, and talking, and I ended up walking beside Julie, a little back from the others, the girl who had had sun on her teeth, and she seemed wonderful to me, and two months later we were married, and a year after that you Jonah, were born, then you Greg. You Roger were next, then you Mark, and finally you Jim. Always one year apart.

I know you’ve heard this all before, but on a day like this when we gather to remember your mother, here at this old house with the gray shingles and the roses and the beach stretching away, I just wanted to tell the story again. How I met her, what it was like, and why this is a special place, so all of you–your wives and children–won’t forget. As Proust, or somebody said: Reality is a state approached only through memory. Something like that. I don’t remember, and you’re not supposed to at my age.

Anyway, I think it smells like the apples are ready, and I say why don’t we go in and eat them, the walnuts, the brown sugar, all cooked togetherh, like this family, at the old table, in the middle of this house, on the blue boards. And think how very lucky we are. Especially me.

Rainbow Warrior

Posted on by sterlingbennett

On Saturday, November 14, 1998 at 3:30 AM, in a relative calm, the strip-planked crabber “Rainbow Rainbow Warrior” picked its way through a thin fog, turned right at the end of the Bodega Bay breakwater, and took the shortcut between Bird Rock and Bodega Head–a gap about a quarter mile wide and known as a shortcut not to take. Even in calm weather, old swells from the northwest wrap around the headland and join other swells unaffected by the point, and together create two patterns thirty to fifty degrees apart.

Which is to say, when outward bound, it is possible to put your bow directly into the wrapping, more northerly swell, mistaking it for the only pattern, and then be struck from the left by the unblocked, much more westerly, predominant swell of the outer ocean. The unexpected swell can come from as much as fifty degrees to the left of the ship’s heading, resulting in an unplanned rolling motion.

The “Rainbow Warrior” may have had a search light on, sweeping it from Bird Rock to the Head just to get a sense of position. Maybe then, as a kind of headlight, it was aimed straight ahead, over the bow, to see what kind of water was coming. Usually the searchlight is fixed to the roof of the wheelhouse, with a handle extending through the roof, so it can be directed manually. A light positioned on the top of the wheelhouse also shines on the forward part of the boat. The resulting reflected glare can cause night blindness for the helmsman, making it harder to see what’s coming.

The “Rainbow Warrior” rounded the breakwater, turned right, swept Bird Rock and the headlands with its light to determine its position, steamed forward for probably a minute and a half–ninety seconds–plowed through the first swell or two, then rolled suddenly, in a roll that did not end, and sank so quickly that the captain, who was in the wheel house, had to kick out a window to escape. He floated on a hatch cover for fifteen minutes, and was then picked up by another crabber who was coming along behind, perhaps using his own search light, and by chance saw him in the fog and darkness.

For the next few days “The Rainbow Warrior” broke up, and pieces came ashore on Doran Beach, the stretch of sand where I jog each morning. The ship’s stern section washed up first, some twenty feet in length, the ten-foot beam, a stable platform for work, curved at the transom, the exposed floor joists carefully arched, so the deck would shed water through the scuppers, if green water came over the gunnels and threatened to overwhelm the ship. It was a well-made piece, massive and at the same time small compared to the sweep of the sea. Perhaps one ton in weight.

The “Rainbow Warrior” was loaded, perhaps over-loaded, with hundred-pound crab traps, each attached to at least one hundred feet of line, with a buoy at the end. A deck ten by twenty feet could have been carrying three hundred crab traps, and thus an additional above-waterline weight of fifteen tons. The unnoticed west, south-westerly swell, probably a sleeper wave, maybe twice or three times its average size, struck the left side of the hull.

The boat rolled, pitched, and yawed. The combined weight of the keel, the lead ballast, and the engine were not enough to counterbalance the additional fifteen tons of crab traps. The boat reached its maximum roll angle or “frozen position.” At the same time, its buried downward gunnell created a pivot-like effect. The crab traps, stacked eight feet high, pitched in the direction of the roll and collapsed on two young Mexican deck hands.

The tangle of traps and lines drove the two men down into the dark cold water, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 feet. Perhaps at 60 feet, they heard the sound of pirules in a warm afternoon wind–the smell of pepper corns–in Calderones, high above Guanajuato. Perhaps they saw burros moving over paths bordered in September by marigolds, children in a pueblito built of green stone–cantera–a small town, where there is no work, or eucalyptus, on a hill near a white clapboard house, that sway in a cooling afternoon wind that arrives just ahead of the fog. This is their new home, far above the border. A woman waves from a window. They feel her caressing hand, their mother, who came up from Michoacán to be with them.

I do not know how long one sees these things, or whether at all, at 60 feet, at 25 years of age, after fifteen seconds of struggle–holding one’s breath.

On the first morning, the Sheriff’s helicopter made great circles overhead, replaced later by one from the Coast Guard, then fixed-winged planes, a Coast Guard cutter, and fishing boats–all looking for bodies. From Bird Rock, close by, came the smell of harbor seals, sea lions, and sea elephants, their muffled throaty gossip, the smell of seaweed and their shit.

The next day the surf built. The “Rainbow Warrior began to breakup. I jogged their each morning. The stern came ashore, then two survival suits, which I told the Coast Guard about, so they could return them to the families. Then the front of the wheel house, with one window kicked out. Then sections of planking, with the wiring still attached, then rubber work gloves, sweaters, a rubber boot, and a slicker.

The day after the sinking, someone placed a bouquet of flowers in the sand, up near the dunes, facing seaward, perhaps to honor the dead, and invite them to come back from the sea. Parts of the Rainbow Warrior decorated all two miles of Doran Beach.

On the third day, another bouquet appeared in the sand at the water’s edge. The Coast Guard refused to dive for the bodies, because it was not part of their charge, and they would not send their young men down into dark water to become tangled in the wreckage.

On the fourth day, fishermen gathered on large dragger, steamed out the channel, turned right at the end of the breakwater, and stopped over the “Rainbow Warrior.” They wrapped the floating crab trap buoys and their lines over a hydraulic pulley and brought up the tangle–in one mass, minus the hull, along with the two young men, boys really, dangling and pale, and not entirely untouched by the crabs they had gone to hunt.

And after that, nothing appeared on the beach. The stern piece of the “Rainbow Warrior” still sits on the beach, two-thirds of the way from the breakwater, a mile and a half, to just where the golf course begins. The flowers reappeared for a while. In all likelihood, I think, a mother may still wait. Burros move across the slopes of Michoacán and Guanajuato. The sun releases the smell of pepper from the pirules. I suppose a young woman looks northward–remembering. She sees someone waving, from there in the north, but after a while, less and less. The Germans have a word: Trauerarbeit, the work of mourning, which describes hearts trying to heal, waiting for the knot in the chest and the heart to loosen and go away.

My Father’s Loves

Posted on by sterlingbennett

My father died on the winter solstice of 1976, and, soon after, notes began to appear.

There are no hints given.
These biscotti are making me non-literary.
The moon has a ring. The air is cold.
My yawns weigh me down.
I write in the first person.
My third person says there is a book I must read: The German Language.
It is 800 pages long.
It’s beginning to turn light.
I am going for a walk.
Shall we have tea when I get back?
Do not forget I love you–Mary Ann

The paper was a faded purple. On the back of it, my father had written “January 3, 1948.”

Mary Ann was not my mother’s name.

My father had kept the note hidden. When he died, I had come right over to the house. The police had gone, the body taken away. That night, my mother drank a little whiskey, so she could sleep. I lay wide-awake on my father’s bed, looking at the ceiling. They had slept separately, in different room, because he snored. They visited back and forth. I lay listening. At last, my mother stopped crying, and after a while I heard her own soft sounds, like the breathing out of a young whale, slumbering on the surface of the sea, her mind resting, but still alert.

I got up and went through every inch of the room, doing what I had done all my life–looking for him. I found the note from Mary Ann under the paper lining of bottom bureau drawer. I returned it to its spot, until I could think what to do with it.

The next morning, my mother came into my room–my father’s room. She sat on the bed. She handed me a piece of paper. This one blue, with a sticky strip on one edge. It was a note my father had written her the day before.

Up at 5, gone for a walk,
we’ll have coffee together
when I’m back.
Don’t forget I love you.

Then he had gone to the river in his herringbone woolen overcoat, puffing on his pipe–a neighbor had seen him–went down past the mill pond, down the lane through pines, over glacier sand to the salt river skirted with ice, and slipped into the black water–without his pipe and coat, and his felt hat, which hung over a wooden post at the beginning of the Town Wharf.

After the memorial–my parents did not believe in funerals–we walked to the river. My mother went by car–my brother’s–still grieving too much to walk, and we threw wreathes of white flowers into the river and sang Martin Luther’s A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.

I had meant to retrieve the note from under the paper liner of the bottom drawer. I think I thought it was still somehow protected by force of the years it had already lain there. Plus, my parents had always respected each other’s privacy. Six months later, when she faced disposing of his things, my mother discovered the note.

The jealousy that seized her put her in the hospital, and, for a week, she nearly succumbed. When she returned, steadied between my brother and me, she asked us to assemble all my father’s papers, place them on the table beside her bed, and leave her alone. My brother produced an old journal. I asked him if he knew what was in it. He did not. He is several years older than me and claims some authority in important matters. He delivered it to my mother’s night table.

That night, she called me at my home in Cambridge. My wife and I had gone for a walk, and Cynthia, our daughter, talked to her grandmother for over an hour. She could not sleep, her grandmother said, without knowing what had become of Mary Ann. She had to talk to her, if she was still alive, and could I, Cynthia’s father, call her back immediately, no matter the hour, and pledge my support in this project. Then she and Cynthia–seventy-four and sixteen–talked about love and passion, and about the excruciating pain of jealousy felt in the permanent absence of the person one loved. And then she cursed Cynthia’s grandfather, and wept, and asked Cynthia if she believed in love, and whether she thought youthful passion meant more than love between those who are old.

Two years passed, and I spent many hours searching through records, telephoning relatives, interviewing my father’s surviving friends. And then I found Mary Ann, in West Arlington, alone in a brick house, with a black Labrador Retriever and a hired companion.

At first she pretended senility, the passage of years, forgetfulness, always disputing her identity as my father’s old love. After three visits I decided I would learn nothing, and I asked her to forgive me for the intrusion. Two days later, she called me. She could not sleep, she said. There were things to say, but they did not concern me. Would I come for her the next morning? She wished to talk with my mother. It would be a private meeting.

The next day was impossible for me, but the following Sunday I drove her to the house beside the lane. My brother had already arrived, to be with my mother as she waited. I led Mary Ann to the front door, the Labrador, Sonya, following behind. My mother opened–cordially, graciously, as she had always welcomed guests. She guided Mary Ann toward the living room and the snapping fire. At the door to the living room, she turned and asked my brother and me to walk to the river and see what the tide was. We protested we already knew what the tide was. She said we looked peaked–that was her expression–and we needed a walk. It would do us good.

My brother looked at me. Mary Ann said, “Could you walk Sonya? She loves the water. She could swim in the river. It’s a place she would love.” And my mother advanced on us, driving us back through the kitchen. Mary Ann clucked Sonya to the door. And together, the dog, my brother, and I stood in the yard, back from the windows, and watched the two women walk on aging legs back into the living room.

Snow fell around us in fine swirls. We moved around the outside of the house so we could look into the living room. We stood there, the three of us. It grew dark. Snow settled on our shoulders, on Sonya’s coat. We saw the old women nod their heads as they listened and talked, and–to our astonishment–laugh, not just once, but again and again. And then they cried and held each other. Then they looked at pictures from the photo album, and drank sherry, and then more sherry, and then our feet began to grow very cold.

Sonya had already found other things to do and wandered farther and farther away from the window, skirting the yard, sniffing for rabbits or squirrels, a skunk or a fox, she, a dark busy form against the whitening pines. Finally she pulled us away from the house, and we led her down the lane, past the mill pond, down over the glacier sands, crunching and squeaking in the dry fresh snow, until we reached the salt grass banks of the river and walked carefully out over the old boards of the Town Wharf. As we stepped up onto it, I briefly rested my hand on the top of the post where my father had hung his herringbone coat, his old brown felt hat, and, on top of that, his probably still lit pipe.

Sonya plunged–black against black–into the icy water and swam toward the opposite bank some two hundred feet away. A fuzzy moon hung over us. The river, already a few hours past flood tide, had changed direction and now rushed back to the sea, sweeping Sonya along with it. We called out to her in alarm, and feared a disaster, but she climbed up onto the opposite bank, far downstream, trotted back up-river through the frozen marsh, this time above us, reentered the water, and, calculating the drift of the current, returned to right where we stood.

The sky had cleared and the moon brightened. Sonya trotted out to us at the end of the wharf. We got out of the way. Jiggling her identifications tags, she shook out a fine cloud of spray that glinted in the moonlight and disappeared. We laughed, my brother and I, and said she was a hell of a dog, and that we’d better get back before the two old ladies killed each other, or got drunk and had heart-attacks, or we got pneumonia. Then Sonya stood beside me for a moment and looked up at me, her tongue out, and happy, and I reached down and lay my hand on her, because she was black like the water, and so warm and full of life.

Why My Hair Stands Up

Posted on by sterlingbennett

One night, I stood in front of the mirror, as usual, naked, and oiled my hair with a viscous goo, a product of Alaska, “Walrus Oil,” it said, no particular color, a natural remedy, Ketchikan organic. Something to encourage my hair, bring on new things, new looks. And then I lay back, showered and cool, on crisp sheets, felt summer breath coming through the screens on both sides of the room. The sound of waves, the rhythmic slosh.

I never expected results. But a cry full of longing rose up from the cove, a toothy contralto, perhaps the walrus cow we’d heard about. How very unlikely.

My own Clarissa, I should tell you, fell into the sea, two Junes back, while rounding the the nun you can see from here. An accident, a luffing, in irons, the massive red buoy rising too close. And so I–confused by memory–dismissed outright this song I heard. I lay on my bed, lingered on the edge of boyhood, adolescence, and love–remembering Clarissa’s warm skin, her fears.

I heard the gravelly crawling, the sigh of elms, the house’s creaking, an opossum’s rustle. Aunt’s cat’s sat apart, staring at shadows. The moon slipped around the house–and came in the windows on the side away from the sea. I sat up, swiveled, my feet sought their slippers. I saw her, huddled directly ahead, weighing down the floor, blotting out the shelves of molding Miss Marples, Dickens, and Rip Van Winkle.

What can I tell you? How much I pitied her, not my aunt, but my visitor, her big eyes–one turned sideways, spyglassing me, calling on me to explain my hair, the cruel trick of oils, the impersonation of friends she had known, worlds foreign and, for me, impossible.

I thought about checking the tube for ingredients. Was there something in it, something written I had not considered? We sat that way for a time, waiting for the moon to move away–on to the elms, the tennis court, the cove where the boats lay slapping–the recovered Herreshoff sloop that had dropped Clarissa off at her watery grave, then come home.

I felt I owed my visitor some explanation, sitting upright, my hands on my knees, she with one flipper touching Agatha Christie–her tail, the porcelain toilet in the next little room..

“Do you have some kind of message for me?” I asked. “Is there something I should know?”

I expected her to disappear, as all apparitions do, fade into shadows, join recognized shapes– yesterday’s clothes on a wicker chair, rumpled blankets and a mahagony chest. An image mirrored.

She shifted and sniffled, a sinus of seals. I smelled seaweed and fish–some squid. Crab sand, pebbles, and eels. Rotting mud. Low tide. And most curious of all–the hardest to tell–the fragrance of sunlight and air, blond fuzz on the neck–the wry twist of her mouth. Her old friendly mocking, in water, tennis court, dance floor, and bed.

I hesitated–something twitching internally.

“Clarissa?” I asked, softly, fearing her voice, and what a question might bring.

“Clarissa?” I repeated.

But there was only more sighing–the volume up. A shadowy, flippery, uneasy hulk, one eye cocked, indicating clearly: Watch what you say–and think. And for god’s sake, stop globbing your hair with stuff that disturbs our sleep. Leave walrus fat for walruses, find some other goo for yourself.

I started to protest, but something pressed me down against my bed. Complying, on my back, I folded my hands behind my head, and resolved–once more–to leave in peace those who’ve lost their reflection. The Beloved Dead.

In the morning, she was gone. A salt stain remained, from bowl to bed, in the air, the scent of kelp, fiddler crab–the barest hint of maritime excrement.

I rose and showered, threw away the tube. Since then, I have gone dry, tousled, feathered, and fluffed. I have a girlfriend. I am kind. I say I love you. We read together. Study French.

I am careful. I do not sleep naked in moonlight, on sheets pulled tight. Nor slick my thinning hair. Nor yearn for things I cannot have. And never glance for long toward the bathroom door, in that windowed room, above the sea. And never think of her–my Clarissa. As you can plainly see.

Captured By Americans ~ A Short Story

Posted on by sterlingbennett

I have a writer friend. I am quite fond of him. So I told him that he had to work some sort of change into his short stories. He frowned.

I drew him five graphs, showing him variations on the theory. I mentioned Goethe’s requirement: there has to be ein unerhörtes, unerwartetes Ereignis, an unusual unexpected event in the story. And this event changes the character in some way.

My friend shook his head slowly. He looked out the window. He said there were lots of ways of doing something. I fixed him in the eye–to let him know that, no, there was only this one way for a story to be successful. For example, I said, my Uncle George was twenty-four years old when he was captured by the American army.

My writer friend scoffed.

Since then, I said, his name has rarely been mentioned in my family. I said I was not sure whether it was because he was a member of the SS, or because he tried to make his post-war living as an artist. He had been studying at the 300-year old art institute Die Hochschule der Künste, in Berlin. The German government had lost his papers. They discovered him in 1943–not by following an impressive line of empty wine bottles or young women’s knee-length undergarments–but because he admired the Impressionists, who were considered decadent, subversive and French. And because he was trying to paint like them, had shown three landscapes in a local café, and had been caught by a school official painting graffiti on a city bus–Judenmord, Maßenmord, killing Jews is genocide.

There was a stink. The director of the Institute–a recent appointee–said my uncle could prove his loyalty and enlist, or he could receive a visit from the Geheimstaatspolizei, the Gestapo, who would probably take him to a windowless room with a drain in the middle of the stone floor and put a Lugar bullet in the back of his head. Confused, frightened, and hung over–and as someone who had always looked for the easy way out–my uncle went to enlist, thinking he could let himself be captured by the Americans, at the earliest opportunity.

At the time, Himmler was forming international SS fighting groups: Danes, Norwegians, Poles, Hungarians, Dutch, Rumanians, and Czechs. My Uncle George stood in the wrong line and found himself in an International SS Brigade attached to the German 19th. A year later, he was retreating through snow, eastward through Alsace, out of ammunition–wasted by his style of firing over the heads of anyone he saw in his sights–and still carrying the weapon, the feared German MG 42 machine gun. It weighed 11.6 kilos, or 25.5 pounds. He could not drop it because he would be shot for abandoning one of the most effective weapons in the German army.

Patton’s Third Army had swung north to stop the German breakthrough in the Ardennes Forest, the famous Battle of the Bulge. When that was contained, Patton swung south and joined the Seventh Army. Together they began chasing my Uncle George and the rest of the depleted and starving 19th Army through the Vosges Mountains. To get out of Patton’s way, he climbed alone over 4,671-foot Grand Ballon mountain, slept on the dining room floor, beneath the rich wood paneling, of the Grand Ballon Inn, under the eyes of two frightened but sympathetic French maids. They knew the tide was changing, and they knew the machine gun was out of ammunition. He may have been gaunt, but they also found him appealing. They invited him to lie between them on one of the guest room beds, under a thick down comforter. All night they listened to his deep breathing, draped their limbs over his dirty uniform, and resigned themselves to his exhaustion–chastely and dutifully pressing the warmth of their breasts against him as he slept.

In the morning, he walk down the inn road to Thann, and then turned east, out onto the Rhine plain toward Mühlhaus, leaning into an icy January wind. My uncle and other soldiers walked as fast as they could ahead of the whining, diesel-belching tanks of Patton’s armored columns. If he walked toward them, he risked being shot by an SS officer for desertion, or by Patton for armed resistance.

So he walked east.

He was starving. He had wrapped his feet in rags, because parts of his soles were missing. SS officers appeared in their field cars and ordered them to turn around and walk back toward Patton. They complied, until the officers raced off. Then they turned around walked east again.

They walked all day, and then all night. People left baskets of winter-stored carrots, stale bread, and flasks of water along the road. At night, so they themselves would not be accused of undermining the general defense.

The following morning started clear, then it began to snow. My Uncle George and sixty other men walked slowly now. Most of them had thrown their weapons to one side. Snow built up on their heads and shoulders. They walked like ghosts, one foot in front of the other, head down, never registering when the earth began to tremble, and Patton’s tanks came up behind them, and then passed them. They barely looked up. American soldiers rode huddled over the warmth of their tanks’ motors. Occasionally, they tossed down chocolate and cigarettes. Occasionally, they sneered and pointed with their M1s. Once, too close, there was a shot, like close-striking lightening, and a hunched dark figure, part snowman, went down.

A Sherman tank stopped. A soldier on top motioned to my Uncle George with his rifle. He pointed down at the tracks left by the tanks ahead. My uncle understood and lifted the 25.5 pound MG 42 from his shoulders and let it fall exactly perpendicular to the tracks. It fell a foot from him. That was all he was capable of. He had been the only one still carrying a weapon. No belts of ammunition hung around across his shoulders. Himmler had denied the International SS Brigade the Gothic SS’s on their uniform collars, because he was not sure of their loyalty. Those two things saved him. No ammunition. No SS markings. My uncle contemplated raising his hands. He considered saying something in English. But there had been stories of English-speaking German commandos wearing American uniforms and dog tags, talking their way through American lines. They had been executed summarily. The difference between their situation and his did not seem great enough. The man on the tank nodded several times, perhaps thankful that he had not had to kill a starving, frost-bitten ghost of a fellow soldier. My uncle nodded, even managed a small smile, glad that he had not been shot for either carrying or not carrying a weapon–for being or not being an American.

The tank crunched over his MG 43 machine gun. Now he was 25.5 pounds lighter, and things seemed better. Trucks stopped. Soldiers ordered my uncle’s sixty companions into the trucks. It took half an hour to get them in. The first step of the ladder was too high. They were too sick and stiff and hungry to climb up by themselves, and had to be hauled and pushed up.

They were taken to a barbed wire enclosure in a sugar beet field. They received C-rations, thin hot coffee, blankets, toilet paper and cigarettes. There was no shelter. They used the supplied shovels to deposit their shit and yellowed snow in one corner, then to spread new snow where they would squat again. They huddled together at the opposite end of the compound, taking turns being the windbreak for each other. The snow fell, covering their shoulders, built up on them, like lawn furniture left outside. Five men died of infections from wounds. Five more just died. Medics gave them shots. Their strength returned. They walked in a circle and did gentle exercises, to stay warm. The sun came out and eventually the snow thawed. They were loaded into trucks. They were told they would stay in houses now. During the day, they would clear land mines.

My Uncle George was in the last truck, near the back of it. He could not see himself clearing land mines. The American guard dozed, and my uncle, who preferred being shot to being blown up, rolled up onto the truck’s tail flap and let himself drop. He broke his shoulder, but got up and walked into the woods. Over the next month, he walked from farmhouse to farmhouse. A doctor bound his shoulder. This was a time when many farms had no men, and so it was often women who took him in. And it was women who heard his story, told with an American accent, how he had been studying Impressionist painting in Berlin and how he had been forced into the International SS Brigade.

The women fed him warm milk from their cows, cooked him eggs, helped him get in and out of his farmer’s clothes, and on a few occasions took him gently into their arms on chilly Spring nights. Eventually, he arrived at a farm deep in the Böhmischer Wald, a dark forest of beech and hidden meadows in the easternmost edge of Germany. It was a place missed by the advancing Soviet Army. He stayed with and helped a young woman whose mother had died and whose father had not returned from the Russian Front. Her name was Elizabeth. She was twenty-three years old when she died giving birth to his child.

For a year, my Uncle George hid from the Russians and the East German political police. Then, when Elizabeth’s father returned to the farm, a drunk and homicidal, my uncle took the one year old girl–whom he had also named Elizabeth, and walked for two weeks to the Austrian border and, in the American Sector of Vienna, to the door of the American Embassy, and–after some fact checking–to safety.

I stopped talking. My writing partner paused for a moment, then snorted. “Well, there wasn’t any real change that took place in your example,” he snorted. I disagreed. I thought my uncle had matured.

I nodded, wisely. Well, then you get my point.”

“Besides,” he said, “None of it was true.”

I fixed him in the eye to show the confidence I had in the veracity of my story. But I could see he wasn’t buying it.

Love Latin Style

Posted on by sterlingbennett

When I was a young man, I went through a period of doubt about myself, questioning whether I was the only male in our family who had difficulty approaching women he was attracted to. To gather advice, I decided to write my older cousin Dave, whom I knew the family considered–with clucking and raised eyebrows–something of a rake.

Ten days later, my answer arrived.

“Dear Cousin,

When our History teacher Mr. Plumley returned from four years in Mexico, he said things that made me uneasy. Also something had happened to his English, and he said verdad? when he meant, really? Frequently he qualified his statements with the phrase más o menos, which in English apparently means more or less. This qualifier left me confused as to how firmly he believed in the truth of anything he said. For example, in 1915 when Pancho Villa took reprisals against the village San Pedro de las Cuevas, shot the kneeling priest with his pearl handled pistol, and then sixty-two other poor villagers for an imagined betrayal, he was más o menos a paranoid homicidal maniac.

Mr. Plumley was a man who clearly knew things and said them right out, even if he had to qualify them in order to remain perfectly honest. In addition to that, he only ate avocados, Roma tomatoes, and tortillas, flat corn discs más o menos, which he bought in a Mexican market on the edges of the great declining industrial town of Lawrence, Massachusetts. This was a city we never went to because it was working class and did not figure our prep school’s view of what was relevant. He preferred gorditas, a somewhat thicker peasant tortilla, which he had delivered to his home by S.S. Pierce–each one carefully wrapped in pear-type wrapping paper, with a picture of a large-eyed Mexican woman, in a frilled folk dress, with light skin and a Betty Crocker likeness. Over her right ear, she wore what looked like an artificial rose, in full bloom.

None of this bothered us. But there was talk among the faculty, we heard, that Mr. Plumley, who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, might have already acquired the romantic, that is to say, seductive habits of Mexicans. For that reason, they watched him closely when, at tea dances, he welcomed the girls from the neighboring girls’ boarding school Winston Road.

I attended those dances, and I too watched him very closely. Sophía was the half-American, half-Mexican dark-eyed beauty I waited to see, and I suffered greatly when on the occasion of the first dance after Mr. Plumley’s return, he shook her hand, looked her in the eye with sincerity and kindness and said, “Bienvenida, señorita. Cómo le va?” And she dipped as she had been taught and chirped, “Muy bien, Señor! Gracias!

I could only turn away, fighting for breath, and look out the window at the wet blowing leaves, the cold night and the awful darkness that was waiting for me on the walk home to my dormitory. Behind me, the phonograph played Guy Lombardi, the waxed oak floor began to squeak, and in the reflection of the window I saw Mr. Plumley reach out his hand and ask Sophía to dance.

It was clear what was happening, and I hoped that the other faculty could see it. Sophía’s young breasts–I had never seen breasts–were practically in Mr. Plumley’s experienced hands. Her green satiny dance dress, strapless, waited to be slipped down over her tan belly, and her lipstick lips, as soft as a real rose, were parted and breathing a softness that Mr. Plumley was in the very process of directing toward himself.

I forced myself to dance with Victoria, who asked me questions about American History. Did I know who had laid waste to Georgia in the Civil War? Instead of gliding into a step, she hopped. She was taller than me, blond, with braces weighing her teeth down so that her mouth stayed open when she finished a remark. How could she know that American history was nothing compared to Mexican history or to Mr. Plumley’s, not Sherman’s, march to the sea. His campaign, evident to me, was to ravage that landscape south of Sophía’s brown belly, an area I had difficulty imagining, but which I knew Plumley could, because he had been in Mexico.

Several times I came close to having to dance with Sophía during partner exchanges announced by the faculty hostess, Mrs. Thompson. Once, abruptly, Sophía stood before me again. I pretended I did not see her and chose Victoria, who immediately brayed out the question as to where I had heard about Plumley’s march to the sea and what exactly was it that he was intent on ravaging. I know Sophía heard, because she had not moved away, and her look was dark.

My face burned. I did not realize I had actually said the words. But then I did not see how Sophía could have understood the reference. I guided Victoria away in a few coordinated hops.

When the dance ended, we were good little gentlemen and helped the girls on with their coats, saving the scarves for last. I helped Victoria. Then we headed for the door and stepped into the cold night, with our sweaty bodies, saying good-bye, good-bye and hunching over against the wind.

I was just in time to see Mr. Plumley bow and, right in front of our eyes, take Sophía’s mole skinned glove and pretend to kiss it. “Gracias por todo, Señorita Sophía,” he hummed. And she cocked her head to one side, bobbed slightly, and said, in a clear, essentially adult voice, “Por nada, Señor!”

Stricken, I took that moment to slip past. Mr. Plumley stepped into a car with other faculty. I thought I saw a high heel enter just ahead of him. I heard the car door shut with a heavy click. I heard the purr of the engine and the tires squishing over wet leaves. I hurried forward into the dark. And I thought this must be what it is like to fall out of an airplane at night, without a parachute.

The night was wild. The bare limbs of the maples and elms slapped and rattled against each other. But I do not think I heard them. It was if I was under water, the sounds grew muffled, my steps were slow and labored. I had taken the long way home, chosen a path where I would not meet anyone, and was not paying attention. In the next moment, I hit the ground. I managed to tuck a shoulder just in time to break the fall, and rolled over to see what bastard had kicked my feet out from underneath me on this the most miserable night of my life.

Sophía stood a trip-length behind me, in her long blue coat, her white scarf, and her moleskin gloves. Her big dark eyes bore down on me. Her arms hung at her sides. She took two steps forward and kicked the bottom of my right shoe and then stood glaring at me.

I lay looking up, stunned in more ways than one. The sidewalk was empty. A gust of cold air pushed wet leaves against my ear. It blew a strand of Sophía’s black hair in front of her face. She pushed it aside. Then she dropped down on her knees. I could feel them against my ribs, on my left side.

“Plumley’s march to the sea,” she said, as if she were prompting testimony.

Another gust blew the same lock of hair back across her face. She reached up and this time tucked it back behind her ear. I lay very still, vaguely aware that there were stars visible on either side of her head.

She never took her eyes off me–like a surgeon, I thought, taking her time to decide where to make the first cut. She wriggled her knees deeper into my ribs. Then she leaned forward, placed her hands on either side of my head, swooped in, and kissed me on the lips. Without lingering. Just long enough to feel the cold tip of her nose. The strand of black hair had come forward again. She sat back and poked it behind her ear. Then she rested her hands on my stomach, just where it joined my chest, as if I was a piano and she was deciding what to play.

“I can feel your heart,” she said after a while, and I thought she looked pleased with her discovery. When I tried to rise a little, she moved her moleskin gloves up my chest and pressed me back down.

This was not like in the movies. Perhaps it was love Latin style, but I had no way of knowing. It did not seem dangerous. I could not help myself and smiled.

“Are you happy now?” she asked.

I nodded. In fact, I was enjoying my position very much. No más o menos about it.

I hope this has been helpful.
With love,
Your Cousin Dave”

The Down from a Thousand Geese

Posted on by sterlingbennett

My Great-, Great-, Great Uncle was half Chinese, half English. Chu Li was the son of a Portsmouth merchant and a warlord’s daughter. His parents were attacked by robbers on the high road and killed. Chu Li was still a very young man and went to live with his grandfather, the warloard. But not long after, he ran away from home because, he said in letters to those who knew him, there was more cruelty in his grandfather’s house than there was down on a thousand geese.

His grandfather sent out searchers and warned them that they would die if they did not find Chu Li and bring him back.

Meanwhile, Chu Li wore a disguise and sat on the bank of a great river, thinking about the beauty of the world and the pettiness of human beings. One day the warlord himself came to cross the river. While the group waited for the boat to ferry them over, the warlord asked the young man sitting on the bank if he would care to be one of his soldiers. The young man, who was in fact Chu Li, answered, after some thought: “If I declare my loyalty to you, what obligations will you have to me?”

The warlord waved his hand dismissively. “I will give you one thousandth of what I earn in a year, plus food and shelter and rice wine enough.

“But will you care for me like a grandson?” Chu Li asked.

The great man waved his hand, but did not leave. “I do not know how to treat a grandson so that he will not leave. I have lost my grandson and am looking for him. When I find him, he will not dare leave again.”

“Your lordship,” said Chu Li, “I do not think I would want to be the grandson of one so powerful, so impatient, so unwilling to learn.”

At that the warlord raised his sword and struck Chu Li on the shoulder with the flat of the blade, sending him rolling in the dust of the river bank.

When the boat crossed the river, a cable broke and horses and men were drowned. Only the warlord still struggled above the waves. Chu Li entered the muddy water, swam to him and held him by the beard like a goat. The water had washed away Chu Li’s disguise, and so his grandfather recognized him.

“I will throttle you like a goose when I have you in my hands again, you impudent excuse for a warrior!”

At which, the young man let him go.

“Why are you drowning me?” shrieked the warlord.

“I am not drowning you, old man,” said Chu Li. “I am only respectfully not interfering in my own coming punishment.”

At which the warlord hissed: “You will die by my hand,” and sank beneath the waves–heavier than the down from a thousand geese.

The Curve of the Earth

Posted on by sterlingbennett

One day, they say, a man my grandfather knew—actually it was my grandfather—fired up his tractor early and chained on the twelve-by harrow and started across the black earth, in his wake a cloud of crows swooping over the damp soil. He followed the curve of the earth, toward a distant boundary where, as the story went, maybe the lovers were below deck, he peeling her bathing suit off her brown body, exposing white, and curly hair, and sighs, the sea cocks opened, popped inward, and the tractor disappeared from the earth’s round, sailing over the horizon, leaving only the crows, and worms exposed to cries and sun and the sadness of young people’s death, lovers with flowers in their hair and flushed cheeks, dying into each other. That’s what he said, my grandfather.

There were other things, too. It was the summer Grandmother got up on the roof and refused to come down or speak until he promised to keep his hardness to himself, at least to ask first and to try thinking about her the way he first knew her, standing between the sunlight on the counter top and rows of preserved apple sauce, peaches, and cherries. And the flurry of snow, holly trees, and red berries. Didn’t he remember her with lipstick, her chestnut hair in a knot and her lower lip undiscovered, blue eyes unkissed. Did he remember her blue eyes, the sunlight, her white aprons, the arched silver buttons specially sown down her blouse?

When my grandfather disked or harrowed and I sat on the fender holding on, the sun circled about the field like a duck coming in to land–over near the bog with the rushes and herons and turtles and quiet newts. I shouldn’t tell you these things, he used to say, but how will you know if I don’t. You don’t want to be like me in every way.

Well, the dust followed us across the field, before the rains, making Arabs of us, or Indians, unrecognizable to ourselves, sailing across vast plains, lovers caught below with flowers, and preserves and hard things of joy and sighs and bathing suits that fell off just when the tingling reached boundaries, like the far end of the field, and disappeared, just at the curve of the earth.

I saw things drown in the furrows of that sea. Thistles, mugwort and tar, and small flowers, that didn’t know the ship was filling, too much in love, slipping bathing suits, the candles, ice cream, the preserves on the window sill, golden in the last of the afternoon’s sun.

My grandmother stayed on the roof for something like nine months. At least the whole summer. At least it seemed that way. Grandfather said she was giving birth to someone he didn’t know—to a woman who sang not only in church but also alone in the bath tub which she had placed outside at the edge of the garden, overlooking the field so that when he passed he would see her and remember what she could have been but never became, because of his intrusions at night when the fields slept their damp sleep.

When the nine months had passed and the wheat waved in the summer wind like the ocean, with us sailing before the wind on the red-seeded sea, my grandmother—who had not spoken since she first climbed the roof—all at once did speak to my grandfather when he had just switched off the tractor and stepped down over the hydraulics, walked out over the harrow and jumped ashore. She said, “William?” That was his name, and it was a question. He didn’t really hear her because of the seacocks and bathing suits and dust, I suppose. And she said it again, “William?” standing there in the claw-footed bathtub in the garden near the rhododendrons, naked, her hair up in a knot, and, as he tells it, with lipstick on her lips and the sun catching her chestnut hair, no longer twenty, nearer fifty, as I recall. And that was when it struck him, what a wonderful woman she was and he actually knelt before her and cried and apologized for his damn tractor and said other things about seacocks and dust and would she teach him to see her the way she had always wanted to be seen, and other things, a lot of it hard to understand after a world that curved into the distance all the way to the bog, with drowning flowers, thistles folded under, and the smell of tar weed and hope, and crows swooping down over the wake of his red tractor. That’s all I remember really—with variations. Memories that come around like the morning sun, and set, and are never ever quite the same, except that they’re always true.

The Fence

Posted on by sterlingbennett

I was standing by the fence on the morning of the stillest day of winter. Frost crisped the ground, the eucalyptus were silent, some of their outer branches dying. I saw him at some distance. On his tractor, the high ping ping of the engine carrying across the fields. I imagined him smoking, but I’d heard he’d stopped since Alice had died. The one thing he treasured most he gave up as a way of being with her. When he normally would have been with himself. A neighbor said he also wore his wife’s scarf. A pale Angora sort of thing that farmers did not wear and felt some unease about, even when their wives wore them. But John had changed and was dangerous to laugh at. At least, no one dared to, and wouldn’t have anyway.

We talked about him at Booth’s Cafe. How he wore the scarf, and had put the pipe back in his mouth, upside down, maybe because of the rain – except that it wasn’t raining, and therefore had to be some sort of half-mast gesture. We talked about his farm and how it needed painting and plumbing and tanks cleaned, and cows wormed. Gary was his vet, and had come of his own accord finally, with an excuse that the county required it of him — an inspection for sleeping sickness, or something like that. But we all knew that Gary had come because of grief, and had spent as much time watching John as feeling cows’ udders and necks and veins.

And the whole time Gary was there, John drove his tractor out across the corn stubble, hooked up to nothing, and leaving his herring-bone tire tracks against the frost, a confused sort of writing, perhaps a letter to Alice.

That was what worried Gary. His father had walked across his own fields with a shotgun and blown off his left ear. Out of grief. When Gary’s mom died. And Gary had come after him, found him, and led him home, the old man not being able to hear a thing, weeping, and laughing about how he’d missed and what a damn fool he’d been, and how he loved Gary. And then he had stumbled, and the two of them went down, fell, and got up on their knees and held each other for the first time in their lives, and wept, and clung to each other, the way the frost had back that winter.

I stood at the fence. I could hear the tractor long before it came up over the curve of the earth. Gary couldn’t keep inventing reasons to watch over John. He’d already made four veterinary visits that same week, and his receipts were showing it. He’d called and suggested maybe I should find something to do down by the fence. That John would come by eventually. And so I’d gone straight over, driving the pickup across the gorge and up over the long ridge that separated us.

I could see him clearly now. There was purpose in his life again. At least enough to have him follow the line of the fence and not just make tracks all over the fields. I tapped the fence post in front of me with my quarter-sledge, as if it needed something. I banged on the top strip of the barbed wire a few times, testing for tension. I walked around the pickup, kicked the tires, checking for air pressure. I opened the hood of the truck and pulled one of the distributor wires off and dropped it down through the engine onto the ground, and bent over the engine, poking around at nothing.

I heard the tractor stop. John sat looking at me, and I watched him, gazing into his sad eyes, looking for some indication of what his intentions were. He sat there on his steel spring-seat for a long time, Alice’s scarf hanging down as if he was a college boy, his pipe inverted, his hands red from the cold, gripping the iron steering wheel. I said nothing. No greeting seemed appropriate. And he just sat there, his back a little hunched, the engine running, the cold white sun above us moving slowly toward the dying eucalyptus grove to the west.

“My truck won’t start,” I managed to say eventually.

His face remained as it was before. And then just the hint of a smile appeared at the edges of his mouth.

“What?” I said, prompting him.

His mouth opened farther. I wanted to say, how are you? But didn’t. I knew how he was.

“I miss Alice,” he said.

I was unprepared for that, and John reached up and took the pipe out of his mouth. I mounted the wire fence and jumped down on the other side, and walked to the tractor. He handed me his pipe, but didn’t let go when I took it. His eyes brimmed and filled, I was sure he couldn’t see a thing. The pipe trembled, and I reached up and pulled him down from the tractor, and knew what to do, though I had never done it before, and held him while he cried. And then couldn’t hold back myself, and let loose.

Gary had returned for the fifth time that week and had followed the herring bones across the field and along the fence and saw us and approached and stopped his truck a little way off and shut off his engine and listened to our howls, like two sad dogs, he said later. The ping ping of the tractor and our crying swallowed up by the frost, I suppose. And the winter sun curving westward.