Last Bus to Wisdom (22 page)

“What is that place?” I heard my own voice go high.

“Just what it looks like,” Aunt Kate responded, speeding up the car to leave the ghostly sight behind. “The poorhouse.”

•   •   •

T
HE WORD STRUCK
me all the way through as I stared over my shoulder at the creepy building. Put a rocky butte behind it and weather-beaten outbuildings around it and it was the county poorfarm of my nightmares. As if caught up in the worst of those even though I was awake, I heard Aunt Kate's pronouncement that made my skin crawl.

“And that's another reason I must be careful, careful, careful with money and impress on you to do the same. I sometimes think we'll end up there if a certain somebody doesn't change his ways.”

“Y-you mean Herman?”

“Him himself,” she said, squeezing the life out of the steering wheel.

“But—why?” I was stupefied. “How's he gonna end you up in the poorfarm—I mean house?”

“Have you ever seen that man do a lick of work? If only,” she said grimly. Another sigh as if she were about to collapse scared me as much as the first one. “To think, what a difference it would make if Fritzie was here.”

“Huh? Who?”

“Oh, the other one,” she tossed that off as if it were too sad to go into.

No way was she getting away with that. My burning gaze at her was not going to quit until she answered its question,
The other what?

She noticed, and said offhandedly, “Husband, who else?”

I gaped at her. She seemed like the least likely person to believe the plural of spouse is spice, as I'd overheard grown-ups say about Mormons and people like that.

“You've got another one besides Herman? They let you do that in Wisconsin?”

“Silly. Before Brinker, I mean.” She gazed through the windshield. “Fritz Schmidt. A real man.”

Herman seemed real enough to me. “What happened to him? The other one, I mean.”

“I lost him.” She made it sound as if he had dropped out of her pocket somewhere.

Not satisfied, I again stared until she had to answer. “Storm, slick deck.”

“Really?” Strange how these things work, but Herman's shake of the sugar bowl that spilled some over the side when he was showing me the fate of the
Badger Voyager
combined with her words to make my pulse race. Trying not to sound eager, though I was, I leaned across the seat and asked, “Like when the Witch of November came?”

“He's been filling your head out there in the garden shed with his old sailor tales, hasn't he. All right, you want the whole story.” No sighing this time, actually a little catch in her voice. “My Fritz was bosun on the
Badger Voyager
. Washed overboard in the big November storm of '47.”

I thought so! The same storm and ship that took Herman's eye! That Witch of November coincidence inundated me in waves of what I knew and didn't know. Her Fritzie was Herman's best friend on the doomed ore boat. No problem with that, I could savvy the pair of them as bunkhouse buddies or whatever the living quarters were on a ship. But then how in the world had someone she would not even call by his first name get to be the replacement husband? Someone she thought was so worthless they'd end up in the poorhouse? Where that embattled matchup came from, my imagination could not reach at all.

All this whirling in my head after her news about Fritzie's sad fate, I miraculously managed to hold my exclamation to a high-pitched “That's awful!”

“Yes, it's a tragedy.” She gazed steadily ahead at the road. “But that's in the past, we have to put up with life in the here and now, don't we,” she said, as if she didn't want to any more than I did. As if reminded, she glanced over at me and patted her purse enough to make it jingle again in a sort of warning way. “You did fine in today's game, honeybunch, but stay on your toes. Next time, the party is at our house and we'll do as usual and play two out of three.”

Dear Gram,

The dog bus was really something, with all kinds of people like you said. Aunt Kate, as I call her but everybody else says Kitty, and Uncle Herman, who does not go by Dutch anymore, found me in the depot fine and dandy and we went to their house and had what they called a Manitowoc dinner, what we call supper. It takes some getting used to here.

Gram had made me promise, cross my heart and so on, to write to her every week, but doing so when she was in the middle of complications after her operation stayed my hand from so much I really wanted to say, none of it good news as far as I was concerned. Carefully as I could, I was doctoring, so to speak, life with Aunt Kate. If word ever came from that intimidating nun, Sister Carma Jean, that the patient was better, maybe I could somehow sneak a phone call to let Gram know I was being bossed unmercifully, from being kept flat broke to being stuck in the attic. On the other hand, what could she do about it from a hospital bed when Aunt Kate was right here, always looming, seeming as big as the house she dominated top and bottom and in between.

Already she had stuck her head in to make sure I was keeping at it on a space of the card table that didn't have presidents from Mount Rushmore staring at me with scattered jigsaw eyes. She left me to it but not before singing out, “Don't forget to tell her the funny story of mistaking me for Kate Smith, chickie,” which wild horses could not drag out of me to put on paper. Instead:

Aunt Kate and I play cards some, not pitch like we did in the cook shack but a different game I'll tell you about sometime.

Herman wore a broad grin when I told him he and Hoyle had bushwhacked Herta and especially Gerda, to the Kate's satisfaction. “Did you know they play canasta for money?”

“For two bitses,
pthht.
Hens play for chickenfeed, notcherly.”

It was laborious to fill the whole page of stationery with anything resembling happy news. Herman's greenhouse gave me a chance to list vegetable after vegetable growing under glass, which helped, and I recounted the antics of Biggie the budgie as if Aunt Kate and I had simply paid a social visit to old friends of hers. There was so much I had to skip not to worry Gram in her condition—the Green Stamps secret deal with Herta, Herman's out-of-this-world talent at tasting beer, my impressive broken front tooth from the scuffle with the campers, and most of all, Aunt Kate heedlessly throwing away every cent of my money—it would have filled page upon page of writing paper. But if
Reader's Digest
could condense entire books, I supposed I could shrink my shaky start of summer likewise.

The Fourth of July is coming, and Aunt Kate is taking me to the big celebration here where they will shoot off fireworks of all kinds and a famous band whose leader is Lawrence Somebody will play music. It should be fun. I hope you are getting well fast and will be up and around to enjoy the Fourth like I will.

Your loving grandson,
Donny

“Oh, I was going to look it over to check your spelling.” Aunt Kate clouded up when I presented her the sealed and addressed envelope for mailing. The look-it-over part I believed, which is why I'd licked the envelope shut.

“Aw, don't worry about that. I win all the spelling bees in school,” I said innocently. “Miss Ciardi says I could spell down those Quiz Kids that are on the radio.”

“Well, if she says so,” Aunt Kate granted dubiously. “All righty, I'll stamp it and you can put it out in the box for the mailman. There now, you can get right back to your puzzle, mm?”

•   •   •

T
HE REAL PUZZLE,
of course, was how I was going to endure a summer of thousand-piece jigsaws, old
National Geographic
s, and canasta without being bored loco or something worse. Especially seeing as once I'd paid off the bribe to Herta by slipping her my Green Stamps, I was going to be no match for the merciless sharpies in not one canasta game but two, and it took no great power of prediction to guess Aunt Kate's reaction to that. The Witch of November in a muumuu was on that horizon.

So the next couple of days after writing Gram how fine and dandy everything was in Manitowoc, I hung around with Herman in the greenhouse as much as possible to keep my morale up. He was good company, better and better in fact, as he read up some more from Karl May and other books in his corner stash and gabbed with me about cayuses and coyotes—relying on me to straighten him out on which were horses and which were canines—and the wonders of Winnetou as a warrior and the spirit of Manitou living on and on and making itself felt in mysterious ways. “Here you go, Donny, Indians believed Manitou lived in stones, even, and could come out into a person if treated right, if you will imagine.” With the fervor of an eleven-year-old carrying an obsidian arrowhead in his pocket, I certainly did turn my imagination loose on that, seeing myself riding the dog bus west sooner than later to a healthy and restored Gram, her with a job cooking on some ranch where the rancher was no Sparrowhead, me back at things I was good at like hunting magpies and following the ways of cowboys, poorfarm and orphanage out of our picture. In other words, in more luck than I was used to lately.

•   •   •

I
T IS SAID
a blessing sometimes comes in disguise, but if what happened in the middle of that week was meant to be any kind of turn of luck, it made itself ugly beyond all recognition when it came.

At first I thought it was only the household's usual ruckus at breakfast while I was parked on the living room couch as usual, reading a
National Geographic
, this time about “Ancient Rome Brought to Life,” where according to the paintings shown, people sometimes went around even more naked than in Bali. I was pondering an illustration of a roomful of women mostly that way and the caption with some ditty from back then, “Known unto All Are the Mysteries, Where, Roused by Music and Wine, the Women Shake Their Hair and Cry Aloud,” those mysteries unfortunately unknown to me except for that smackeroo kiss Letty and I exchanged, and I did not notice her shaking her hair and crying aloud from it.

Just then, though, I heard a woman definitely roused, but not that way.

“Have you lost half your brain as well as that eye?” Aunt Kate was shouting in the close confines of the kitchen.

“Does not take any much brain to know you are talking crazy,” came Herman's raised voice in return.

“Oh, I'm the one, am I. I've told you before, don't be filling his head with useless things. When I was out seeing what flowers I could cut for our next little party, I heard you telling him more of that Manitou nonsense.”

“Is not nonsense. You think you are more smart than Longfellow? Not one chance in a million.” Herman went on the attack now. “You are the one filling him up with canasta nonsense and putting him on spot in your hen parties. Let the boy be boy, I am telling you.”

In a kind of stupor as I realized the knock-down, drag-out fight was about me, I crept to the hallway where I could peek toward the kitchen. They were up on their feet, going at it across the table. I'd heard them having battles before, but this sounded like war. More so than I could have imagined, because as I watched in horror, Aunt Kate leaned across the table almost within touching distance of Herman and shrieked one of the worst things I had heard in my life.

“Don't get any ideas about who's in charge of our little bus passenger for the summer! You're not wearing a Kraut helmet anymore, so don't think you're the big boss around here!”

Herman's face darkened, and for a few frightening seconds, I wondered whether he was going to hit her. Or she him, just as likely, given the way her fists were clenched.

Then Herman said in a voice barely under control, “What I am, you did not care when you wanted your bed keeped warm after Fritz.” With that, he turned his back on her, heading out to the refuge of the greenhouse. Aunt Kate followed him far enough to get in a few more digs before he slammed the door and was gone.

Shocked nearly senseless as I was, by instinct I scooted for the stairs and scuttled up to the attic while she still was storming around the kitchen. I would have retreated farther than that if I could, after what I had heard. Before long, Aunt Kate's voice was raised again, this time in my direction and straining to sound melodious.

“Don-ny. Yoo hoo, Donny, where are you? Let's go for a little outing and do the grocery shopping, shall we?”

I stayed absolutely still, gambling that she would not labor up the stairs to seek me out. And if I could make her think I was at the greenhouse with Herman instead, she likely wouldn't want another shouting match out there. Silence, rare as it was tried in this household, might save me yet. After some minutes, I heard the DeSoto pull away, and so hurt and mad at being deceived that I could hardly see straight, I raced down the stairs two and three at a time, bound for a showdown in the greenhouse.

•   •   •

“Y
OU LOOK NOT HAPPY,
podner,” Herman said beneath his usual cloud of cigar smoke. The only sign that the battle royal in the kitchen might still have him agitated was the sharp strike of his spoon against the pot rims as he fed fertilizer to the cabbages. “Something the Kate did, hah?”

I wanted to holler at him,
No, something you did, turning out to be a German soldier!
Swallowing hard, I managed to restrict myself to saying, “I—I heard Aunt Kate bawling you out in there.”

“Habit,” he wrote that off and tapped his cigar ash onto the floor. “She wouldn't have nothing to do if not yelling her head off at me.”

I had to know.

“Did you really fight on the Kraut side, like she said?”

Wincing at that language, he looked up at me in surprise. “She should wash her tongue and hang it out to dry.” The big shoulders lifted, and dropped. “But, ja”—which I finally heard for what it was, instead of
Yah
—“that is one way to put it.”

“So you really truly are a”—I had trouble even saying it—“a German?”

“Ja, double cursed,” he said, as if life had done him dirty at the start. “The name ‘Herman' even means ‘soldier' in German language, if you will imagine.”

“But then how come you don't talk like they do in the movies?” I demanded to know, as if his squarehead accent was a betrayal. “The Nazi bad guys, I mean.”

“Pah, those Nazi bigwigs, they speak like they are chewing a dictionary,” he dismissed that. “I am from where we talk different German than that. Emden, on the North Sea. Netherlands is next door, the Dutchies are a spit away, we say.”

“So aren't you sort of Dutch, any?” I seized on what hope there was. “Like when you were called that before it went down with the ship?”

“No-o-o,” he drew the answer out as if calculating how far to go with it. “‘Dutch' was sailor talk for ‘Deutsch,' which means ‘German.' Better than ‘Kraut,' but not much.”

That clinched it. A Kraut by any other name, even his shipmates recognized it. Imagination did me no favors right then. My head filled with scenes of landing craft sloshing to shore under a hail of gunfire from Hitler's troops, and sand red with blood, and a figure on crutches in the hallways of Fort Harrison hospital trying to learn to walk again, which was not imaginary at all. Giving Herman the German, as he now was to me, the worst stink eye I was capable of, I demanded:

“Tell me the truth. Were you one of them at Omaha Beach?”

“Hah? What kind of beach?”

“You know. On D-Day. Were you there shooting at my father, like the other Germans?”

Realization set in on him, his face changing radically as my accusation hit home. “Donny, hold on to your horses. I am not what you are thinking. The Great War, I was in.”

What, now he was telling me it was great to have been in the war where my father got his legs shot to pieces? I kept on giving him the mean eye, hating everything about this Kraut-filled summer and him along with it, until he said slowly so I would understand, “World War
Eins
. One.”

I blinked that in. “You mean, way back?”

He looked as if his cigar had turned sour. “You could say. I was made a soldier thirty-seven years ago,” which I worked out in my head to 1914.

Slowly I sat down on a fruit box as he indicated, a whole different story unfolding than what I had imagined. “No choice did I have, Donny, back then.” He gazed up at the photographic panes of glass holding olden times in the poses of the portrait sitters, as if drawing on the past from them. “You have heard of the draft, where government says, ‘You, you, and you, put uniform on,' ja? Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany in the Great War was very drafty place.” The joke made a serious point. “There I was, young sailor on the North Sea, and before I knowed it, foot soldier wearing a pickle stabber.” He put his hand on top of his head with the index finger up, indicating the spiked helmet of Der Kaiser's army.

Comical as that was, I was not deterred from asking, “So, were you in any big battles?”

He puffed out cigar smoke that wreathed a rueful grin. “With my corporal, many times.”

“Aw, come on, you know what I mean. Real fights. Like Custer and the Indians.”

“Shoot-them-ups, you want,” he sighed. “Karl May should write Western Front westerns for you.”

At first I thought he was not going to answer further, but finally he came out with, “I was at Höhe Toter Mann, was enough.”

That didn't sound bad, nothing like Omaha Beach. Disappointed at his evidently tame war, I said just to be asking, “What's that mean, Ho-huh whatever you said?”

He half closed his good eye as if seeing the words into English. “Dead Man's Hill, about.”

That sat me up, all attention again. “Yeeps! Like Boot Hill, sort of?”

“More ways than one,” he evidently decided to give me Herman the German's side of the war. “Höhe Toter Mann was fought over time after time, back and forth, forth and back, Germans and French killing each other all they could.” He grimaced, and after what he said, I did, too. “You could not see the ground, some places, dead men or parts of them was so thick.”