Prisoners of War Read online

  “We’ve had one or two instances in which a group of prisoners administered beatings that may have been ideologically motivated, but various factors indicate to me that they weren’t much more than pranks. We found one guy who’d been whipped pretty good and then shackled to a toilet seat with his pants down around his ankles—that kind of thing. Whoever tied him up had enough rope to hang him twice if they’d wanted to, but clearly they didn’t. Of course, we never found out who was responsible. The man who’d been beaten wouldn’t talk.

  “At the training center, they probably told you the prisoner-to-guard ratio’s never supposed to be worse than ten to one. Well, right at this minute, we’ve got eighteen MPs here, nineteen counting you. That’s about sixteen to one. It’s not going to get any better—and, in fact, it’s going to get worse. Soon. They also probably told you that the War Manpower Commission says contract labor goes out in groups of twenty men. But they didn’t have the Mississippi Delta in mind. Most of the contracts we’ve made are with these small farmers, and eighty cents a day per man is pushing them to the limit. For the most part, we’ve got the prisoners set to go out in groups of eight or ten.

  “All the groups are going to be unguarded at least part of the time, and Sergeant Case has worked out a rotation. We’ll have single guards accompanying some detachments, whereas other groups will leave in the morning with the contractors, unguarded, and a roving pair of MPs will be checking on them throughout the day. We’ll vary the arrangements from one day to the next, so the prisoners themselves never know in advance if they’ll be on their own or not.

  “Mostly, it’s public perception we’re worried about—that and the actual welfare of the prisoners. We don’t want folks to think we’re coddling the enemy, because we’re not. But we also don’t want to have to report any acts of violence against POWs to the Swiss, because they’re bound by the Geneva Convention to pass those on to Berlin. And we’re worried about the safety of our guys in the German camps.

  “The truth is, there’s nowhere for these fellows here to go if they do manage to run off. We don’t want them walking into a train station in their prison uniforms and getting everybody worked up, but we’d rather not have to report that we shot them while trying to foil an escape. So what I’m saying to you, Private Stark—and I’m going to say it loud and clear, and I want you to tell me if you’ve got any questions about it in your own mind—is that Fourth Service Command has chosen, for whatever reason, to take a lot of responsibility and place it squarely on your young shoulders. If you think you can’t handle it, then you’d better say so right now.”

  “I don’t think I can handle it, sir,” Marty said. “In fact, I know I can’t.”

  “I see,” Munson said. He moved over to a bookshelf mounted on the wall and stood there examining—or pretending to examine—the titles arrayed before him. Hardy’s Light Infantry Tactics, Fuller’s Generalship: Its Diseases and Their Cure, Sandusky’s A Company Leader’s Guide to Decisions in the Field. Plenty of theory for a man spared practice.

  “I appreciate your honesty, Private,” he said. “But if there’s anything good about war, it’s this: it gives each of us a chance to overcome our limitations.”

  “Hilfe! Ich hab mich verfangen!”

  On his way to Supply to draw arms, Marty halted and looked in the direction the shout had come from. Off to his right, at the corner of the latrine, a prisoner had gotten the back of his shirt caught on a jagged piece of tin siding. Unable to free himself, he stood there, hollering for somebody to come let him loose. Which apparently nobody had any intention of doing. The three men painting the barracks near the CO’s quarters glanced his way but kept right on working, as did the two guys repairing a busted sewer pipe.

  In an effort to free his shirt, the prisoner had turned his back to Marty, who walked over, reached out and grasped the fabric. Surprised, the man jumped and looked around, the shirt tearing loose.

  The POW was tall and blond, with thick wavy hair. His glasses, which he’d knocked askew in his agitation, sat on his nose at an angle. An angry purple stain, either a birthmark or a rash, covered the right side of his neck and part of his jaw, a single streak flaring up toward his eye. For an instant, the two men stood there, their faces inches apart, and Marty was suddenly far away, on his knees in a ditch where the red water smelled like fish, and this man was standing over him, pointing a rifle at him and screaming, and Marty was begging and pleading. Don’t shoot! Dear God, please!

  “Danke schön,” the POW mumbled, straightening his glasses, starting to walk away.

  “Wait,” Marty said.

  The man kept going, his footsteps stirring dust.

  “Hey, wait!”

  The prisoner stopped, and when he turned around, a glow—almost like a halo, except that it surrounded his whole body—began to emanate from him. Marty felt as if the ground beneath his feet had suddenly tilted, that he was standing at the bottom of an incline, with the other man on top. “Sicily?” he said, the word emerging as little more than a whisper.

  For a moment or two, the prisoner just stared, then he said, “Ich verstehe Sie nicht.”

  “Sicily.” Louder this time.

  The man held his hands out, palms-up, as if for some reason he believed it was important to show they were empty.

  “Sicily. Was that where you got captured?”

  “Ich kann nichts verstehen.”

  “Were you captured in Sicily?” Marty moved a step closer, and the aura surrounding the other man’s body seemed to dissipate. “You were, weren’t you?”

  The prisoner glanced over at the men painting the barracks, who’d put down their brushes and were watching.

  “Nein,” he said. “Nein. Nicht in Sizilien. . . . In Nord-Afrika.”

  His eyes never straying from the prisoner’s face, Marty Stark slowly dropped to his knees.

  SIX

  FRANK HOLDER had lost a lot in the last year, and one of the things he didn’t have any longer was the radio aerial on his pickup truck. The spindly little thing had gotten bent, and then it had rusted, and one day while he was driving into town to buy some cottonseed, it broke off and flew past his window, and he didn’t bother to stop and retrieve it. But he wished he had it, not because he liked listening to the radio—he found the uppity way announcers talked annoying, and considered listening to music a waste of time—but because the aerial would’ve been the perfect place to attach the flag he now had to drape from his side planks.

  His sense of himself as an American was all of six months old. Before that, if you’d asked him what he was, he might have given any number of answers, depending on who was asking, and none of them would’ve been “American.” If it was the preacher from Arva’s church, he’d say, “Nothing,” because he knew the fellow was trying to trick him into admitting he was a Christian. If it was somebody from Memphis or Jackson, he’d say, “I’m a redneck.” And if somebody from New York was fool enough to walk up and ask, he’d say, “I’m a Southerner, and you’re not, so why don’t you get on back where you come from?”

  He now would say he was an American because he wanted to find common ground with his son, and that’s how Biggie had always referred to himself in the letters he sent home before getting killed back in February at the Kasserine Pass. He’d said he was proud to serve with the boys in his company, who came from all over, and he never would have known them if they hadn’t all come together as Americans, to do what was right for their country. Some’s from Michigan, some’s from New York, there’s fellows here from Indiana and California and a lot of what you hear about folks from them places is not so. They sound di ferent than us but they’re not. It’s hard to think your granddaddy fought a war against these people, but I’m glad they’re on my side now and me on theirs.

  That Biggie had felt the need to explain why he’d ignored his father’s wishes and enlisted was to Frank’s great shame. He’d told his own son that he was a goddamn fool and an ingrate, too. “Me and your momma,”
he’d said, “what did this country ever do for us? We durn near starved to death back in ’33 and ’34, and ain’t nobody got a answer but to wear the Blue Eagle. You know folks was coming down here offering to buy babies if we’d rut one up? That’s right. Folks in big long cars, people that couldn’t have babies and wasn’t meant to, and they wouldn’t come inside, they’d stand out there in that goddamn yard and make a offer while they smoked a big old smelly cigar. Happened not once, but twice. Second time, the fellow’s wife was in the car herself, and when I told him to get his ass out of my yard and get it out fast, he shakes his head and says folks like us deserve to starve, that we’re too ignorant and backward to survive. And you mean to go die for that kind of bastard? You was sitting on the porch at the time, and he didn’t want you, boy,” he’d said, jabbing Biggie so hard in the chest that he almost lost his balance, “because you already had the look of a poor man in your eyes. He wanted him a nice fresh baby.”

  There was scarcely a day, hardly an hour even, when Frank failed to recall that conversation. Every time it came surging back in on him, he wanted to fall to his knees, and if he was where nobody could see him, he did exactly that. He’d knelt down in the cotton patch and in the outhouse; he’d even climbed out of his pickup to kneel in the middle of the road. He wasn’t praying when he dropped down, just assuming what he saw as the proper posture for a man who’d called the son he loved names.

  He’d been thinking about that conversation shortly before the colored boy who worked for Alvin Timms stopped the bus near his barn. Holder and three of his hands were in the lot, all of them hot and sweaty, trying to shore up sagging joists in the feed shed. Termites had eaten a good bit of the floor, and as he lay on his back looking up through the rotten boards, sweat stinging his eyes, he found himself thinking that the world, when you got right down to it, was just crawling with vermin. If you added up the creatures that served some purpose, like building something or growing food, then added up the ones that were only here to eat and shit, to hurt and kill, you’d see how far out of balance things really were. He was getting to the point where he didn’t give a damn at all and would just as soon knock the shed down as shore it up. It could cave in while he was under it, for all he cared.

  Then the colored boy parked Alvin’s bus on the side of the road and honked the horn—not once, but twice.

  His son was dead, the termites were eating his feed shed, his cotton crop was so scrawny that he hated for anybody to see it and a nigger felt like he could pull up to his barn and make a ruckus. “Now if that don’t beat the blue-butted devil,” he said. “He think he’s in Chicago?”

  If he’d been the kind of man who reasoned things through, he might have realized that L.C. couldn’t see him because he was under the shed, that he could only see three colored men standing in the yard, that if he’d known a white man was within range of that horn, he would never, under any circumstances, have blown it. But Frank Holder applied reason to hard objects only, to a pump that wouldn’t prime or a hoe that needed filing.

  He pressed his palms against the ground and shoved himself backwards; then, as soon as he’d cleared the shed, he rolled over and bounced up. He was a big man—huge, most folks would’ve said—and when he began to move in a particular direction, people got out of the way. His hired help scattered fast.

  The boy sat at the wheel, fingertips drumming his kneecap, his eyes clamped shut. He was humming.

  Frank smacked the side of the bus with an open hand. He figured that would make the boy’s eyes pop open like those doors on cuckoo clocks, but for some reason they stayed shut. So he slammed the bus again, setting it rocking on its axles. Then the boy took notice.

  “You think that horn’s a trumpet, or what?”

  “No sir,” the boy said.

  “Think you one of them nigger bandleaders?”

  “No sir.”

  “I like to rose up and hit my head when that damn thing went off. What you in such a goddamn hurry about?”

  “Mr. Alvin say tend to business and then get on home.”

  “Mr. Alvin does, does he?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Mr. Alvin know you’re sitting on the bus with your eyes shut and chanting mumbo jumbo?” The boy just looked at him, and his silence was enraging. “Mr. Alvin tell you that when a white person asks you a question, you supply an answer and make it fast?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “So let’s try again, just like before. Because some folks seem like they need to practice. Ready? One, two, three. Mr. Alvin know you’re sitting on the bus with your eyes shut and chanting mumbo jumbo?”

  “No sir.”

  “That’s better. You been to school, ain’t you?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “How much?”

  “Seven or eight years’ worth.”

  “Sir.”

  “Seven or eight years’ worth. Sir.”

  “So you familiar with the concept of being sent home with an assignment?”

  “Yes sir. Sir.”

  Frank considered the possibility that he was being made fun of, then rejected it. The boy was so scared now that he’d probably developed a stutter.

  “I’m gone give you an assignment,” he said. “Call it a chance to further your education. What I want you to do, when you get through with your route, is to tell Mr. Alvin Timms, ‘Sir, I been sitting on that big yellow bus chanting mumbo jumbo. And a gentleman by the name of Mr. Frank Holder done seen it and corrected me.’ Think you can do that?”

  For just an instant, the boy looked away. Then, as if he realized his answer would be disallowed unless he was staring at an appropriate spot, he aimed his gaze below the man’s eyes but above his waist. “Yes sir,” he said.

  “That’s good,” Frank said. “Keep improving that comportment and you can’t never tell, maybe one day you’ll make janitor at the Piggly Wiggly. Ever nigger loves the city.”

  To send the boy on his way, he slapped the fender again and kicked one of the tires, but even that brought him no pleasure.

  SEVEN

  SATURDAY NIGHT. There had been a time—not so long ago, either—when those two words, linked together, had possessed magical qualities. Shirley remembered one time in particular. It must have been 1936, because by then they’d quit renting from the Stancills and were living on their own place. Jimmy Del had gone into town that morning to see old man Gaither for the purpose of requesting that year’s furnish, but the banker came very close to saying no. As it was, Jimmy Del told her, he’d loaned them enough to get the crop in the ground, but not nearly enough to buy any of the new fertilizers that might actually have made cotton grow on land as poor as theirs. When she asked him what they were going to do now, he tipped his hat back and grinned at her. “Why don’t we invite some folks over and build us a big old bonfire?”

  They came from all over the community—the Youngs with their hand-cranked Victrola and a bunch of hard-pressed 78s, Luke and Noonie Baker, the Washington brothers and their wives, the Blanchards, Alvin and the store clerk he was seeing. They ate molasses candy with parched peanuts, the kids used a tin can to play stickball and later on, when the young ones had been put to bed, those not opposed to drinking sipped wine made from possum grapes. She got drunk and danced with every man she knew, and Jimmy Del sat there on the porch steps, master of the ball, grinning and cranking that Victrola.

  Then the war started—“Yet another of those bastards” was the way he once put it—and he turned morose and brooding and couldn’t get along with her or Dan or Alvin or anybody else, either. He’d sit on the back steps for hours at a time, whittling a piece of wood, watching the shavings pile up around his shoes.

  And Saturday night came to mean no more than any other.

  “You mark my words,” Alvin said. “When they look back on this year, they’ll say there wasn’t a single good movie made. Not a one.”

  This Saturday night, they were walking down the street past the darkened Western Auto, where
several lawn mowers stood on display behind the window. She’d been seeing the same stuff in all the store windows for the longest time, and knew the lack of variety wasn’t due solely to a shortage of new products. Most folks had stood all the change they could take and weren’t looking for anything new, whereas Shirley had weathered so much change that she wanted a lot more of it. If she’d had her way, she would’ve torn down every building in town, replacing all of them with bigger, modern-looking structures made of glass and steel. She would’ve lined the windows with bright lights and filled the shelves with wondrous junk.

  She walked as close to Alvin as she dared. Not just because she was on the side nearest the street and a light rain had begun to fall, dripping on her whenever she stepped out from under the awnings, but also because she wanted him to offer his arm. And he wouldn’t.

  “I liked Road to Morocco,” she said.

  “That was last year.”

  “Well, then, what about Mrs. Miniver?”

  “That was last year, too. See, you’ve proved my point. This is a year to forget.”

  They passed the dime store and turned the corner onto Loring Avenue. A group of girls came toward them, talking loud and acting silly. As they got closer, a chubby redhead blew a huge bubble, which another girl promptly punctured. Bubble gum clung to the plump girl’s face, sending the rest of them into rollicking hysterics. The little redhead peeled some of the gum free and stuck it in the other girl’s hair; then all of them took off running, shrieking their lungs out.

  “You remember what that felt like, I reckon?” Alvin said as they walked on down the block.

  “What?”

  “Being the age of them kids.”

  “More or less.”

  “I don’t. Seem like I’ve always been forty-two years old.”

  “Last year, you said it seemed like you’d always been forty-one.”