When We Meet Again (5 page)

“You’re doing the right thing,” my grandmother told me over and over as my belly—and my doubts—swelled. “Boys don’t stick around. You can’t count on them. I’m so sorry, but Emily, it’s better for you to do this without Nick.” She brought me the name of an adoption agency, and we talked, night after night, about how she’d help me find the baby a good home. “You’ll give your child a better life,” she told me gently. “It’s the greatest gift you could give. It’s an option that didn’t really exist for me when I was your age.”

“You would have given my dad up?”

She was silent for a long time. “Maybe it would have been better for him if I had.”

By the time I went into labor three weeks early, I was fully convinced that I was doing the right thing by giving my little girl up for adoption. She’d never have to worry about people leaving her. And by not telling Nick, I was doing him a service. There was no way that at eighteen he was prepared for a baby any more than I was. Becoming a father would have derailed his life.
I’m protecting him too,
I told myself.
One final act of love.

But then I held Catherine in my arms for the first and only time. She had Nick’s eyes, Nick’s dark hair, and the beautiful shape of his lips; seeing his features so clearly reflected in her made me realize, in a flash of searing lucidity, that I’d made a huge mistake. Nick and Catherine were my family, even if that wasn’t what I had planned. And even if Catherine would go on to have a good life with her adoptive parents—as I believed she would—my reasons for giving her up were all wrong.

But it was too late. Everything was already in motion.

I never saw my daughter—or talked to Nick—again. And for the rest of my grandmother’s life, we never spoke of the child I gave away—or of the yawning hole in my heart that could never be filled.

I almost missed the turnoff for Belle Creek, a town so small that there was no road sign announcing its existence. But Jeremiah Beltrain’s directions took me left at an intersection and right at a stop sign. Then, I turned once again, my Mazda CX-5 rumbling along a dirt road flanked by two fields of wispy, grassy stalks at least a dozen feet tall, like tropical, supersized versions of the cornfield in
Field of Dreams
.

The stalks eventually gave way to a much neater-looking field of short, dark, leafy bushes in militarily precise rows. Beyond them lay a small, wood-framed house that sat slightly crooked on its foundation. The pale blue paint on the exterior was worn and peeling, but the flower beds out front, sporting marigolds and petunias, looked well tended.

I parked in the small dirt driveway beside a rusted-out sedan from the late ’70s or early ’80s that was covered in a fine layer of dust. For a moment, I just sat there, trying to imagine my well-spoken, put-together grandmother growing up around here. It just didn’t feel right, and I was temporarily paralyzed by the conviction that I was in the wrong place.

Still, I’d come all this way, so after a few minutes, I got out of the car and walked up to the front door. I took a deep breath and knocked. I could hear a television on inside, but no one came, so I knocked again, harder this time. I could hear the television volume being lowered, then footsteps moving toward me. The door opened a moment later, revealing a tall, slightly stooped man. His hair was snow white, his skin the color of espresso beans. Two jagged scars ran down the right side of his face. He looked me up and down and broke into a broad smile.

“Emily,” he said. “By golly, you look just like your grandmother. It’s so good to see you.”

“Mr. Beltrain?” I asked, extending my hand.

His smile widened as he shook my hand firmly. “Please, call me Jeremiah. And come in, come in. I have so much to tell you.”

I followed him down a dimly lit hallway into a sparse living room. There was nothing on the walls save for a plain white clock with thin black hands. In front of a small television with rabbit ears sat a beat-up brown leather recliner and a brown fabric sofa with faded blue throw pillows. “Have a seat,” Jeremiah said, gesturing to the sofa as he settled on the leather chair.

“So,” I said after sitting down, “how exactly did you know my grandmother?”

He smiled and looked out the window without saying anything for a moment. “You know what that is? That crop growing out there beyond my back fence?”

“Corn?” I guessed, following his gaze to the seemingly endless expanse of homogeneous farmland that rolled toward the horizon.

He chuckled and turned back to me. “That, my dear, is sugarcane, as far as the eye can see. And back in the day when your grandmother and I were young, it was the lifeblood of this here community. Now, most of the fields are part of bigger conglomerates, but when we were young, there was still work for locals like us.” He paused. “Did you know your grandmother used to farm sugarcane?”

I stared at him. “I knew her father had been a farmer, but . . .” My voice trailed off.

Jeremiah frowned, and his expression was suddenly faraway. “Ah yes. Your grandmother’s father. Sure, he was a farmer. A bean farmer, mostly, on the edge of the sugarcane fields. But your grandmother, she didn’t have much to do with him. They didn’t see eye to eye about many things. In fact, your grandmother didn’t see eye to eye with many people around here. But she sure looked out for me. From a very young age, she was like my guardian angel. She must have been twelve or thirteen when I met her, and I was only six. I worked sometimes on her family farm.”

“You worked when you were six years old?”

“Had to. My mother died in childbirth, and my daddy was a real hard drinker who couldn’t hold down a job. The only way I could keep food on the table was to go out there and work. Never got to go to school, but Margaret, she taught me to read and write and to understand history. Sometimes, I harvested her family’s green beans, but mostly I worked in the cane fields. Margaret harvested cane too, because her family’s farm was failing and they needed the extra money. It wasn’t exactly traditional in those days for a girl to do manual labor like that, but she wanted to help her family out, and her father, he didn’t have much choice if he wanted to keep afloat.

“She always seemed to arrange it so that we wound up on the same crew,” he continued. “We’d be working, and she’d be quizzing me about who the president of the United States was in 1845, or how the First World War had started. Nearly everything I knew when I was a boy came from her. Back in the day, Emily, your grandmother was a vivacious young woman, so full of hope.”

“She was?” The thought made me sad, because by the time I knew her, she had retreated into herself. “What happened to her? What changed?”

For a moment, I thought he wasn’t going to answer, but then he said abruptly, “In the 1940s, one of the worst things to be in the South was a black boy. Did you know that?”

I wasn’t sure what to say or what that had to do with my grandmother, so I merely nodded and waited for Jeremiah to continue.

“The second-worst thing to be in the South was a German prisoner of war,” he said, looking me in the eye.

I shook my head, confused, although his mention of Germany suddenly had me thinking about the painting that had come from Munich. “A German POW? In the United States? What do you mean?”

He smiled, but he didn’t answer. “And the third-worst thing to be, as far as I could see, was a person who sympathized with both little black boys and German prisoners. And that’s what your grandmother was—someone who looked beneath the surface when the whole rest of the world wanted only to judge. It made life difficult for her.”

“I’m sorry, I’m afraid I’m not understanding you. You’re saying there were Germans here in Florida? During World War II?”

“It’s amazing that your generation doesn’t know that.” He glanced at me and added, “It’s strange how some stories get passed down and others don’t. Truth is, there were German prisoners of war all over the United States. The U.S. government set them up in camps in places where there weren’t enough laborers. You got to realize how many young American men were off fighting in Europe and the Pacific. There just weren’t enough people left to keep the factories and farms running. Here in Belle Creek, we had a bunch of POWs from 1943 on who came to harvest the cane.”

“Here in Florida,” I repeated flatly, still trying to process what he was saying. “Right in the middle of the war? Germans?”

“Hundreds of them. And they were hard workers, too. Hardly ever complained, at least as far as I could see. Lots of people around town, the ones who didn’t work in the fields, hated the Germans on sight. It was like that back then; the war made a lot of people angry. But those of us who worked with them, well, we came to realize that most of them were a lot like us. Just from a different part of the world.”

“And my grandmother was friendly with them?” I asked, perplexed.

“She was just that kind of a person, polite to everyone. But she kept most people at arm’s length too, at least until she got to know them. And as far as I saw, during those last years she lived here in Belle Creek, there were just two people she let into her heart. Me, a little boy who was supporting his family, and him, a German soldier trying to find his place in the world.”

“
Him?
” I repeated. “Who do you mean?”

Jeremiah held my gaze. “Peter. The man you came to ask about. Your grandfather.”

J
eremiah excused himself to use the bathroom, and I sat paralyzed, staring out the window at the sugarcane fields my grandmother had apparently once farmed, trying to process what Jeremiah had told me.

My grandfather had been a Nazi soldier? How could my grandmother fall in love with a man like that? And how had she gotten close enough in the first place to know him? Wouldn’t prisoners of war have been kept separate from local residents for safety reasons? And most pressingly, what had happened to him?

My mind was still spinning when Jeremiah returned, carrying two glasses of iced tea. He handed one to me. “I bet you have a lot of questions,” he said, raising his eyebrows as he sat back down. “But let me start by telling you this. The fact that Peter was a German didn’t mean a whole lot. Most of the German boys who wound up over here weren’t even really Nazis.”

“What makes you so sure?” I gave him a skeptical look.

“Most history books would agree with me,” he said with a smile. “These young Germans didn’t have a choice about joining the military. Truth is, most of them were relieved to be away from the battlefield. Here, they worked eight-hour days and got three square meals and a warm place to sleep. It was better than the lives many of them had come from.”

I nodded slowly. What he was saying was plausible, at least. “Okay. But how did he and my grandmother even meet? Weren’t the prisoners kept in, well, a prison camp?”

“Believe it or not, in many places around the country, including Belle Creek, it was common for the prisoners to work alongside the locals, with guards supervising them. There was still a separation, of course, but if you were viewing it from the outside, you might think we were all the same, the locals and the Germans.” His gaze turned faraway again, as if he was looking into the past. “I was with her the first time they spoke. I’d cut my hand with a cane knife, a foolish accident, and I was bleeding.” He held up his right hand to show me a jagged scar. “Margaret—your grandmother—was walking me to her house to clean it out, and out of nowhere, this tall, blond German soldier called out to us. I didn’t understand at first—I wasn’t exactly used to white people being kind to me, nor were any of us accustomed to being spoken to by the Germans—but he was actually offering to help us.

“Seemed to me he and your grandmother talked for a time,” he continued. “And later on, when Margaret was dressing my wound, she looked like she was in a daze. I asked her what was wrong with her. I remember asking her, ‘Did that no-good German say something to make you upset? I can tell the guard if you want.’ ” He paused and shook his head. “And you know what your grandmother said? She said, ‘Jeremiah, you can’t judge people before you know them. I think maybe that German soldier is a good man.’ ”

He stopped speaking and seemed lost in thought. After a while, to urge him back to the present, I asked, “And was he? A good man?”

Jeremiah sighed. “I don’t know. I thought he was.” He drew a ragged breath. “And your grandmother, well, she came to love him. She really did. I never knew that they’d—you know—consummated their relationship. I was just a boy; she wouldn’t have told me that.” He cleared his throat, and I could tell that even now, so many years later, he was embarrassed to be speaking of such a thing. “But then she was pregnant. Her family was threatening to disown her once the baby was born if she didn’t just abandon it at the church like a piece of unwanted trash. Of course she wouldn’t do that. In those days, there wasn’t any guarantee your baby would wind up safe and sound. So she decided to keep the child, of course. And Peter, he was nowhere to be found.”

“But what happened to him?”

“Eventually the war ended, and the prisoners were sent back to Europe. Margaret wrote and wrote to him, you see, but he never wrote back. Until the letter that changed everything.” He turned his head to gaze out the window again, and when he looked back at me, I could swear there were tears in his eyes for a moment before he blinked them away. “He broke her heart. And I never saw it coming.”

“What did the letter say?”

Instead of replying, Jeremiah stood and shuffled out of the room. In a moment, he returned clutching a yellowed envelope. He handed it to me and shook his head. “Your grandmother had just given birth to your father when she received this. At first, she didn’t believe it. She thought someone must have forged it. But then she never heard from him again. What other explanation was there? He wasn’t the man we thought he was, in the end. It wasn’t long after that your grandmother decided to leave Belle Creek forever.” He gestured to the envelope in my hands. “Go ahead. Read it.”

I hesitated. “Why do you have it?”

“Your grandmother threw it out. I kept it, just in case she ever changed her mind. Just in case she tried to find him. I wanted to remind her that he’d left her and that she was better off.”