Prisoners of War (21 page)

The captain looked down at the stack of documents again, shaking his head at the display of groundless optimism.

Munson had almost reached his quarters when he heard the footsteps on the gravel. Rather than stop, he opened the door and stepped inside, then turned and looked out, his face still in shadow. “A lot of these farmers down here, they’ve got their backs to the wall, Stark,” he said before the private could request permission to speak. “They’re not like your father— they don’t have enough money to make sure their crops get in on time, year after year. They need these fellows. If we start taking the Germans out of the fields whenever one of them makes a wrong move, they won’t take long to realize that’s a surefire way of not having to work, which in turn will hurt the local economy and make the farmers lose faith in us as a source of labor. The army doesn’t want that—can’t
have
it. So every one of these guys picks cotton tomorrow morning.”

“What about—”

“I told you not to mention him again.”

“You’re not going to put him back in the field with them, are you, sir?”

Munson sighed. He laid the file down on the window ledge, then stepped out into the waning sunlight. “He’s just one man, Stark, and he’s on the wrong side.”

THIRTY SEVEN

THE TEMPERATURE had dipped into the thirties overnight and couldn’t have been much higher than forty when Dan stopped the pickup on the side of the road and climbed out. Rosetta’s chimney belched black smoke, and a piece of loose siding rattled in the wind. He knew she would’ve left the house around six-thirty, just like she did every morning but Sunday, to walk up the road to Alvin’s store. When it started to get cold, she’d always put on two of everything—a second old blouse, a second old skirt and sometimes, under the skirts, a pair of khaki pants.

He hadn’t gone very far across the field before he heard the noise, a lot of groaning and grunting and some kind of percussion, though it didn’t quite sound like a drum. He never missed a step, just kept on walking, and coming closer, he realized L.C. was picking the guitar. He didn’t strum it like a country picker, and there was nothing you could recognize as a chord or a melody. But these observations didn’t interest him much, since he wasn’t there for entertainment. He’d come to apologize to L.C. for thinking he’d stolen his wallet.

He’d barely set foot on the bottom step, when the music stopped. He paused, the plank creaking beneath his weight. Before he could mount the next one, the door opened.

L.C. wore his work clothes, including the coat Rosetta had made him from discarded cotton sacks. He still had a few scabs on his face, and one front tooth was missing. Frank Holder had sure left his mark.

“Ain’t time yet,” L.C. said. “Your uncle done told me don’t start the route now till round about eight. Say folks been getting in the field later and later.”

“I ain’t here about the route.”

“What you want, then?”

“Can I come in?”

“Reckon you can do whatever you like. Last I heard, your uncle owned the house. Land, too.” He turned and stepped inside, and Dan followed.

Colored people, he’d noticed, rarely used the word
live
when they talked about the place where they lay down at night. The verb they chose was almost always
stay.
“Hey. Where you stay?” As if living, in the true sense of the word, was impossible. But on the inside, Rosetta’s house looked like a place where people lived just as well as they could. A Prince Albert can, mashed flat and nailed down, patched a hole in the floor, and old newspapers whistled where she’d crammed them into chinks. Her cot stood against one wall, a quilt that had once belonged to Dan’s grandmother stretched tautly over the mattress, the outlines of corncobs visible beneath the quilt’s ragged surface. L.C.’s cot, on the other side of the room, was neatly made, too. The guitar lay across it.

On the wall above the fireplace hung a sheet of butcher paper, on which somebody had used crayons to draw a picture. In the center, the figure of a man was bent under the weight of an awful-looking cross. A bunch of other folks walked along beside him, waving their fists, their mouths open, their ugly expressions suggesting they were shouting. What was striking about the picture, beyond the artist’s ability to make the forms look real, was that Jesus’s face was way too dark, whereas the faces of the folks in the crowd were perfectly white, their features sketched in simple lines, with no shading added. “Who drew that?” he asked.

“Momma.”

“She made Jesus colored.”

“How you know he wasn’t? You ever seen him?”

“No, can’t say as I have. And don’t want to anytime soon.”

“Worse people’s on the loose than Jesus.”

“Yeah, I know, and I aim to keep my distance from them, too. Be all right if I set down?”

“Do it matter if it’s all right or not?”

It did matter, at least to him, so he remained on his feet. L.C. watched him for a minute or two and then, as if he couldn’t bear to maintain the same posture Dan was in, he sprawled backwards onto his cot, locking his hands behind his neck. “You looking at a latter-day nigger,” he said.

“You plan on joining the Mormons?”

“Naw, just planning to act like I’m white. Time’s coming when a lot of niggers, not just the frontwards, gone behave that way. You remember the fellow say man’s the end result of the monkey? Well, what you seeing now’s a
e
volved mule.”

“You don’t put faith in anything, do you, except your sense of humor?”

L.C. unlocked his hands, clasped his knees and rocked forward. “Not a damn thing. But look to me like you can’t even count on that.”

Dan sat down on Rosetta’s bed. To give his hands something to do, he patted the mattress. “My grandma used to own this quilt,” he said.

“We didn’t steal it. She give it to Momma. Right before she died.”

“I didn’t say you stole it.”

“Well, right when you seen it, what you think then?”

Again, he felt like throwing himself on L.C., because in reality he was a goddamn thief, even though he’d taken no material possessions. Earlier he’d robbed Dan of the right to pity himself, and now of the will to say he was sorry. “You know why I came over here?”

“You wanted something.”

“I wanted something?” Dan said. “What the hell could I hope to get from you?”

“I couldn’t say. My mind don’t work that way.”

While Dan looked on in disbelief, L.C. lifted the guitar, set it down on the wrong knee and began to pluck the bass strings. “You know what I been studying on lately? After the Devil get through tempting Jesus and Jesus tell him to get lost, Saint Luke say the ‘Devil departed from him for a season.’ Now where you reckon he went?”

“I don’t have no idea.”

L.C. thumped the top of the guitar, then lifted both feet and brought them crashing down onto the floorboards.

good Lord tell the Devil
get thee behind me
Devil beg for shelter
say winter comin’
on so cold

old Satan bound to wander
got to see the Ritz
get him some rest
bellhop slam the door shut
say this place don’t take
no Devil for a guest

The music sounded ragged, like L.C. was making it up as he went along. And it occurred to Dan as he sat there on Rosetta’s bed, understanding he would not do what he’d meant to, that almost everybody he knew, including his mother and Marty Stark, L.C. and Rosetta, Captain Hobgood and Frank Holder, Lizzie and the prisoner with the ruined face, who claimed to be Polish, the Germans out there in the cotton field, so far away from their homes, maybe even Alvin—all of them were doing the same thing now every day of their lives, just trying to keep rhythm with times so irregular, searching hard for a melody and a few simple words that made any sense at all.

Both towers at Camp Loring were occupied that morning, and the guards manning them had replaced their rifles with Thompson submachine guns. Rather than clustering around the gates, grouped loosely in their work details, the prisoners remained in formation. Guards stood along the perimeter, their eyes scanning the ranks.

Dan waited on the side of the road with Frank Holder, Bob Brown and several other farmers. Once or twice, he saw Holder cut his eyes over at L.C., who was sitting in the cab of the pickup truck, but each time Frank was quick to drop his head.

“What they expecting these fellows to do?” Bob Brown said. “Riot and take over the courthouse?”

“They caught some of ’em planning an escape,” Dan told him.

“Where was they aiming to escape to?”

“Sounds like they meant to head for the Gulf Coast.”

“Far as I’m concerned,” Bob Brown said, “they’re welcome to it.”

A man called Roberts said, “What you got against the Gulf Coast?”

“Too damn close to New Orleans.”

“So what’s wrong with New Orleans?”

“They’s too many mongrels down there,” Brown said. “Can’t tell what nobody is. Nigger and white’s all mixed up together, and half of them don’t speak no English. Send these Germans down there, they just might clean things up.”

“Yeah,” said Roberts, “they done a real good job sanitizing Poland. Maybe we ought to let ’em spray a little cleaning fluid on you.” Then he walked off and stood near the fence by himself.

Bob Brown shook his head. “What’s got into him this morning?”

If the others had any idea, they kept it to themselves and waited silently until the little sergeant walked over, unlocked the gates and stepped out.

His swagger was absent today. Serious and subdued, he spoke in a low voice, hugging the clipboard instead of brandishing it. “The army don’t want to alarm you fellows,” he said. “We’re glad to be hiring out these prisoners to pick your cotton, and happy that you’ve been so pleased by the results. Most of them are just good solid workers, not your UAW types. If they’d been at Flint a few years ago, up where I’m from, we wouldn’t of had no strike. Your German generally does what the authorities tell him—and in this case, the only authority that matters is the United States Army. But a few of them probably had some Nazi thinking beat into their heads, a bunch of Adolfology, as my pop likes to put it, and it looks like they meant to go for an illegal stroll.”

Consequently, the sergeant explained, some procedures were being altered. Nineteen of the details would leave camp that morning under guard, and only seven would go unguarded. Also, sometime around lunch, the guards would be rotated. And any contractor whose detail was unguarded at any time was responsible for notifying the camp immediately if any of the prisoners went missing. Finally, instead of remaining in permanent work details, men would be shuffled from group to group, so the farmers would no longer see the same bunch of prisoners from one day to the next.

The last statement drew a collective groan. “I’m used to my boys,” one of the men said, and Bob Brown added that he’d begun to think of his group almost as if they were kin. His wife had been knitting gloves and socks for each of them, intending to pass the gifts out right before Christmas.

The sergeant said he could understand their dismay and that he would personally see to it that these young men received their presents. Then, after answering a couple more objections with assurances that everything would go along just fine, he walked back over to the gates and began calling names.

While waiting to hear which prisoners he’d be getting, Dan saw Frank Holder walk toward the pickup, where L.C. was sitting. Holder’s hands were clenched into fists, but he held them in an odd position, both of them pressed tightly against the small of his back, lacking only a pair of handcuffs to complete the picture. He stopped a foot or two from the truck, and for a good while L.C. stared at him through the glass. Then he rolled the window down three or four inches.

Dan couldn’t hear what Holder was saying. Whatever it was, it took no more than a minute or two. When he finished, he just stood there with his hands held behind him. It was a long time before L.C. nodded and rolled the window back up, without ever saying a word. Then Holder shoved his hands into his pockets and started back toward the gates.

The prisoner with the marked face was the only member of Dan’s original group who left camp with him that morning. According to the sergeant, one of the new men, whose soft, smooth skin made him look a lot younger than he must have been, had picked close to three hundred pounds one day for Ed Mitchell. All eight of them rode in back of the pickup, huddling into the collars of their camp-issued jackets. Kimball followed along behind in a scout car, after Marty left with Frank Holder’s detail.

On the way to the field, Dan asked L.C. what Holder had said.

L.C. looked out the window. “Claim he sorry for beating up on me.”

“Well, maybe he is.”

“Then me and him got one thing in common,” L.C. said. “I’m sorry about it myself.”

“You know his son got killed, don’t you?”

“Tell me what in the hell,” L.C. said, “his son getting killed got to do with beating the shit out of me.”

The cab of the pickup truck was small and only a couple feet separated them, but it might as well have been a thousand miles. Dan could’ve answered his question, but when he thought about explaining the connection that probably existed in Holder’s mind between his son’s death in North Africa and L.C.’s living presence in a rolling store on a road near Loring, Mississippi, he realized how pointless it would be, starting with the stuff about defending your country. While L.C. and Frank Holder both inhabited the same general location, anybody with even one good eye could see they lived in two different countries. He didn’t know that he’d fight for the one L.C. had been assigned to, and wasn’t sure if Holder would, either. “I guess it don’t have nothing to do with it,” he said.

Only scrap picking remained. The field had a ragged look, the cotton dangling from the stalks, buffeted that morning by the wind. The air smelled of wood smoke. It was the season when Dan’s father had always worried, because the crop yield was never what he’d hoped for and cotton prices were always lower than he’d convinced himself to expect. But his father wouldn’t have to worry this year, having left all his worries to somebody else.

Until now, Dan hadn’t felt any anger at him. He believed he’d taken his life because his own brother had been sleeping with his wife off and on for God knows how many years, and he couldn’t stand it anymore. Now, though, he wasn’t so sure. Driving home the other night after his conversation with Lizzie, he’d gotten mad at Ralph Hobgood for telling him what his father had said. But he’d woken up the next morning mad at Jimmy Del Timms, and he was still mad at him. Because it seemed to him that in trying to make one life count for two—if, in fact, that’s what he’d had in mind—his father had been successful, though not in the way he’d intended.