*
He caught the arrow in midflight and turned to the yellow house, looking up. Swagger in the angle of his head, taunting the archer, a red needle of Philadelphia climbing inside him. He saw a flicker of white in one of the third-story windows: a shirtfront. A brown sleeve. A pink hand. A gaping mouth. A man leaned out of the window, propped at the hip against the window ledge, half-bracketed with a dark brown bow. Something loose and careless in the way he was hanging himself out the window suggested that he was not much older than my grandfather. He dangled an arrow like a long cigarette between the fingers of one hand. He nocked the arrow and shifted himself a little. My grandfather raised the gun and then, to satisfy the strange code duello of Vellinghausen, they fired off their respective shots.
A sharp hammer, or maybe a pickax, took a sudden whack at my grandfather’s helmet, front and center. The archer sagged and let go of the bow. It dropped and hit the street with a twang. The archer listed and hung balanced on the window ledge for what felt to my grandfather like a very long time, as if making up his mind whether to go after the bow. Then he tumbled from the window and hit the cobblestones with a doubled sound: a drum crack, a carpet beater smacking against wool.
My grandfather holstered his gun and took off his helmet. It looked like the prop from a movie comedy, some kind of farce in which GIs fought Indians. He turned the helmet upside down. The arrow had pierced to a depth of not quite an inch. Later he would find a dot of dried blood beaded at the center of his forehead.
He yanked out the arrow and put the helmet back on his head. He walked up the street to the bow and picked it up, then turned to the young man. My grandfather guessed he might be about Ray’s age. He lay twisted into a swastika under the bakery window. His skull leaked blood at the back where it had smacked against the stone street. He wore dark suit trousers, a dark tie, and a shirt with a tab collar and pearl snaps. There was nothing about his clothing or face to suggest that he was the kind of man who would try to kill you with a bow and some arrows.
My grandfather was about to kneel beside the young man to see if he was dead when he heard from behind a long, soft exhalation that might have been despondent, angry, or both. There was no time to draw the pistol, so he raised the bow and fitted the nock of the arrow he’d caught to its string. He was ready to let fly. He had never shot an arrow, but he was willing to try. He had managed okay, after all, with a canoe.
It was an old priest in a cassock that reached almost to the tops of his pointed shoes. White dust patterned the black cassock in big splotches like continents or the spots on a cow. He was standing by the white bicycle that the shock wave of a bursting shell had wrapped around a pole, mourning its loss. He reached out to run his spider hand along the tubes of its frame. He might have been bidding it farewell or trying to puzzle out the geometry of its torsion. He did not seem aware that in principle he was within arrowshot of an American soldier.
“Good morning, Father,” my grandfather said, lowering the bow.
The white-haired priest looked up. His mouth fell open. He took note of the bow and arrow, and his eyes went a little dull with understanding. He closed his mouth. His gaze traveled the street until it found the body of the archer. “Is he dead?” the priest said.
“I don’t know. I think so.”
The priest approached the body. He moved quickly for a man of his age and with a doctor’s officiousness. Screwing up his face, he worked himself into a crouch alongside the body and laid a ruddy hand on the archer’s chest. He lowered his head to the archer’s until his left ear nearly brushed the archer’s lips.
My grandfather heard a scrape behind him. Diddens limped up the street, his left foot printing the paving stones with roses. “He dead?” Diddens said.
There was a first aid kit back in the jeep with the driver, who had completed his medic’s training. Unless of course the driver had been killed by an arrow, or a blunderbuss, or some retired merchant seaman with a blowgun.
The archer opened his eyes, two pannikins of water stained with two blue droplets of gouache.
“Apparently not,” my grandfather said.
The archer’s face was aimed at the sky, but he fixed his pale eyes on the old priest’s head, the pink pate, the milkweed-tuft hair. This gave the archer a downcast or shy expression. The old priest’s ear was angled to catch the sentences emerging from the archer’s lips in softly popping bubbles of blood. The words were spoken too low for my grandfather to hear and, in any case, seemed to be in the local dialect, which gave my grandfather difficulties. The old priest nodded, said something, nodded again. He folded the archer’s hands between the bones of his own, clasped them, and began to speak. It was not a reply, or not a direct one, at any rate.
The old priest spoke the requisite Latin and drew a hasty cross with his fingertips curled at his chest. He reached into a slit in his cassock. His hand moved around inside the dusty fabric. He wore the universal expression of a man searching his pants pocket for something that must be there. When his hand reemerged, he was holding a small brown medicine bottle with a black cap. His right hand shook as he worked to get the bottle unstoppered.
In the gray and cold of that place, the smell that came from the little bottle alarmed my grandfather. It was overripe as fruit and acrid as summer. It made the heart leap. It smelled the way the word sacrament sounded.
The bottle shook as the priest dripped a dime of golden liquid into his left palm. Now the left hand started to shake. The oil trembled. It found a crease in his pink palm that drained it all down the side of his hand. It drizzled down onto and stained the dying man’s white shirt.
“Shit,” said the old priest. Aughenbaugh would have been scandalized. “Idiot.”
The priest smeared a thumbprint of oil onto the dying man’s forehead. The archer made a sound of animal contentment.
As a young man, my grandfather seems to have had no higher regard for religion than he displayed in the days when I knew him. I have his old black hardback copy of The Magic Mountain, his favorite novel. Across its front flyleaf in block capitals, under his name and the date (March 11, 1938), as though announcing to the world some kind of solemn verdict or choice, my grandfather printed the word HUMANISM. By the spring of ’45 he had lost that all-caps certainty about his choice of worldview. Cold, hunger, darkness and blood, and the random assignment of death as the coefficient to victory and defeat alike had conspired to bankrupt his humanism. The only choice that seemed to remain, seven years after he inscribed his copy of The Magic Mountain, was a choice between faith and numbness.