Elegy on Kinderklavier (5 page)

The Half Moon Martyrs' Brigade of New Jerusalem, Kansas

Because our town was so small, the Army recruiter, Family Affairs Liaison, and Casualty Affairs Officer were all just one man, who went by the name of Douglas Reeter. This became a problem that winter, after the real fighting started and people had to stop and crane their necks whenever they saw Doug drifting down the half-plowed streets in his ancient Buick, everyone trying to get a good look in order to see by his uniform in which capacity, exactly, he was making his visit. It didn't take long after the first few casualties for people to let the “t” in his last name slip into the “p” it already seemed to be sliding toward. This was how soft-spoken, dark-haired Doug Reeter became sober, bitter Doug the Reaper, whom no one ever wanted around much, even in off-duty hours. When I lay in bed at night that year of the deployment, I used to imagine what he'd look like in the morning if it was a bad day coming, and I'd dream him up in my room's half-light, Doug standing before his little mirror in his Class A uniform, the thin manila envelope pale in his pocket.

Everyone could recite those first few by heart. Daniel Willis's father (helicopter crash); P.J. Holdeman's brother (bullet through the neck while taking a piss); Jackson Kepley's dad (grenade dropped in
his path out of nowhere during a neighborhood patrol). And everybody had their own private reels too, the confused images drifting across our minds in spare moments—the pause in a teacher's endless afternoon grammar lesson, the wait while our mothers filled the car up at Bone's One Stop. Suddenly the air would be full with the concussion of a listing helicopter's blades, or the unhurried spurt of an artery bleeding out in seconds, or the path of light made by the tops of high alley walls as someone looked up at the sound of something falling. But those were the early days, before any of us knew the Arabic word for “stop” or that you couldn't shake on anything because the Iraqis supposedly used one of their own bare hands for toilet paper (though none of us could agree as to which hand). It is true, in all eventual fairness, that those first few dead and their stories did briefly hold our imaginations, back when the men of our town were still dying exotic deaths, deaths with details and accounts, before the casualty announcements just became a series of thick letter-codes that didn't mean anything, really; before the long paper list posted behind the scuffed glass at the armory just read KIA, and IED, IED, IED.

•

This is where we lived: New Jerusalem, Kansas. I always liked to imagine the well-meaning if already disillusioned ladies and gentlemen of the New England Emigrant Aid Society cresting Doak's Ridge way back when and looking down upon the endless plains and the river and the space of mud where they would make their new city of God, really believing (as was their great gift) that it would become something grand. Though they soon enough packed up their wagons and lit out, as they say, for further territories, I also like to think
some of that pure hopeful spirit has hunkered down in the low places around here and stayed, however improbably, like the fog does on some familiar summer mornings. Their pluck certainly has, anyway.

Back around the time of the first war in the sand, a representative from the state tourism board convinced all four members of the New Jerusalem city council that our town could be a minor draw on the endless straight-shot of highway that filleted our state. At the town hall meeting he kept saying the word “synergy” and told everyone we needed to use what we had, which was, as of the year before, no longer the chemical plant. All we had was our name by then. So came into being The Old City at New Jerusalem, a replica of the heart of that other Jerusalem, but right here on the plains. This was also how the funds for the new church sanctuary were raised (via a questionable state grant) and a pale brick and mortar Church of the Holy Sepulcher (of the One True Congregation of the Savior and Nazarene) was built, scaled down seriously in size, on the main street off the highway. Besides the church and the “Temple Mount” building (a would-be community meeting space), everything else in the New Old City was a life-size cutout front, like on a movie set. Even our school got into the act. The New Jerusalem Knights became the New Jerusalem Crusaders (“Lest anyone think we were the bad kind,” Samuel Lincoln deadpanned later) and people painted squiggles for imitation Arabic on the signs marking the fake bazaar, which was actually the flea market. Little kids climbed the piled quarry slag of the Wailing Wall and spit down neon soda pop when their friends tried to follow.

Years later, by the time the most recent war had come and the men of our town deployed, the undersized green plaster dome atop the corner of the empty Temple Mount building was faded and chipped, like an obstacle on a putt-putt course. The Temple Mount building itself had been overtaken and commandeered as the church's
fellowship hall, and so it was where the women met, twice a week, for their “Army Wives” support group, even though half of them were really mothers, or sisters, or girlfriends of indeterminate commitment. Those first few meetings, while our fathers and brothers and cousins were still just sitting on some base in the middle of the nowhere-desert (unassigned as yet, somehow still unnecessary), the voices of the women and girls were very serious, telling each other over and over the latest they'd heard or read about the war or Iraq or army lingo or Arab peoples. But soon after, when word sent from the base became either dull repetition of what we all already knew or petered out completely, the meetings took on a different tone. Nobody knew what to say. The support meetings became potlucks and people brought even the youngest kids, who ran around wildly while their mothers stood, staring blankly at the big maps they'd tacked to the wall next to the Useful Bible Verses display, and chewed their macaroni.

When the men of our town were eventually given a mission and guided into the budding nightmare that was still just an unsettling dream in Fallujah, the women brought videotapes they'd made of the news reports, and in the Temple Mount they took turns watching the grainy footage or taping up computer printouts of wire articles. Once, some kind of regional administrative officer visited. He wore the strange cubic fatigues they all wore stateside and stood before us and asked if anybody had any questions. Faced with the sudden opportunity, the sudden presence of the one whose absence the wives had taken to bemoaning, everyone was startled into silence. After a while someone in the back asked in a small voice if the officer knew anything about when the men would be coming home, though we all knew he wouldn't. At the next meeting the mothers parceled up care packages full of chewing tobacco and magazines and made lists of the things they'd ask next time, if they ever saw the man again.

All of which is to say that nobody—not the adults who worked the booths in the New Old City for the tourists, not the older kids, who had mysterious things to do that involved drinking and summer jobs, and certainly not the mothers—much wanted us around for the long summer months, and so didn't mind one bit our annual, prolonged stay of boarding and verse lessons at the Hope and Grace Bible Camp (formerly a rickety collection of wooden vacation cabins) on Galilee Lake (formerly Baldwin's Pond).

•

There was no baseball diamond in the entire city of New Jerusalem. The story went that the community of Fundamental Christians (“
We're
Fundamental Christians,” Samuel Lincoln explained. “Back then all Christians were fundamental, so you didn't have to say it”) that founded New Jerusalem did so largely in protest of the burgeoning mining and railway town to the east called Pittsburg, and principal in their complaints (after the brothel for the railroad men and the multiple purveyors of card games and spirits) was the Louis P. Stilton Municipal Ballpark, home of the rough-and-tumble Pittsburg Pickers, apparent corrupters of many a young Christian girl from the nearby Kansas State Teachers College. Whether or not this was the actual explanation for the continued absence of baseball from the town of New Jerusalem, it was at least true that it had never occurred to the powers that were of our New Jerusalem Christian Day School to build a baseball diamond or field a team, the only member of the Southeastern Kansas Independent and Home School Athletic Conference not to do so.

Strictly speaking, there was no baseball diamond at the Hope and Grace Bible Camp either. There was, however, the Dust Bowl:
our space of cloddy soil and four honest-to-god bases and a six-foot-tall homerun wall of corn, kindly provided by the next field over, which had yet to be harvested. The previous summer's Bible Camp had been full of near disasters (the crowning jewel of which involved an older boy named Calvin Jenks being discovered not only smoking marijuana, but doing so alone with a girl, herself apparently in what Elder Peters called a “near-Eve state of clothedness”), and it was perhaps because of this that we arrived that summer nine months after our fathers' deployment to find that the church had miraculously invested in both a renovation of our mostly theoretical ball field
and
an official team manager, who turned out to be Brother Douglas Reeter himself. “IT'S THE DIVINE GRACE OF GOD COME INCARNATE,” big, jolly, slow-brained Hilton Hedis, who had no other volume than ear-blasting shout, said in awe that first day when we saw the field.

The Elders had turned two of the less trustworthy picnic tables on their sides twenty feet or so behind home plate, making a backstop. They'd taken what looked to be several fishing nets and strung them together, hanging them down from the high tree limbs that cast their shade onto the batter's box. They'd also taken twenty or so bags of gardening soil and emptied them unceremoniously about forty feet from home plate, making a very messy pitcher's mound. And finally, in the most incredible of all their additions, the Elders had built, via the stacking of many cinderblocks and two well-placed corrugated metal sheets, a pair of real dugouts.

That first day we found Brother Reeter, as Elder Peters instructed us to call him, with several nails in his mouth, standing in foul territory and pounding away at an arrangement of two-by-fours gathered at wild angles.

“I guess the carpenter's our coach,” Samuel said, hugging his leather glove and spitting.

Ralph spat too and said leave it to the Elders to go out and get us a coach only to fix us with some grade-A Jesus luck, which is what we called luck that was likely to get you killed, like being picked to walk point on a security patrol, or being the Son of God, or having a dumb hick carpenter whom everybody hated for a coach.

“I DON'T KNOW,” Hilton blared, looking to Brother Reeter and then back at us, his eyebrows working, which meant he was thinking. “JESUS WAS A CARPENTER AND HE COULD DO SOME OTHER STUFF PRETTY GOOD TOO.”

Where was I during all this? I was on the top plank of the newly carpentered set of wooden bleachers, which none of the boys kicking dirt around home plate had yet caught on Doug the Reaper was crafting a mate for. I don't think it's true that my father wanted a boy. He was a kind, wilting, educated man who was taken to long moods of quiet melancholy and wistfulness. I had a better chance moving him to expression with an idea about a book I was reading than by making my throws pop into his glove in the warm evenings when he came home from work. If he minded much that I'd come out a girl, he never did let me see it, though it's true that he taught me a mean sinking fastball. He used to play catch with my mother, before she died when I was eight, before she'd even had me, when they were just young married kids. I still have a picture of them as they stood lined up in the yard, my father crouched, squinting at something behind the camera, my mother scowling, the ball held trickily behind her back, ready to go into a windup. And it only occurred to me a couple years ago, once I had a house of my own, that it might've been her pitch that he taught me, that fastball with the slight downward movement. But anyway.

I was really mostly allowed as a de facto member of the ball team because my father was the commanding officer of our town's Army company and, when his reserve unit wasn't being called up to go to
war, he worked as the floor manager in the pet food plant two towns over, which still employs most of the people around here. Everyone in New Jerusalem liked him because they thought he was fair. I was allowed more or less free range by the Elders, and the people in the town. The boys on the diamond (which is also to say, the boys in all my classes, the boys who were my friends) let me along with them in most things because both my legs were bound up in painful, complicated orthopedic braces and because when my dad was at home he was the boss of half of their fathers, until the reserves got called up to go to Iraq, and he became the boss of all of them.