In a smaller square a little to the north of the main street, the priest begged Gatto to stop the jeep in grave but halting English. The square was pegged with the stumps of what might have been elm trees. The stumps were cut clean and all to the same height. They had been felled by ax and not artillery. The cuts looked recent but not fresh.
“We’ve had a very cold winter,” the old priest said. He was sitting up front, next to Gatto. Everyone agreed that this was unquestionably the case. “I gave out the pews and reredos and so forth. The beautiful oak pulpit, which a professor-doctor from Tübingen dated to the thirteenth century. I told them to take the crucifix, too. It was quite large. Used prudently, it might have heated a dozen homes for a night or two. But there they drew the line. They were shocked, I think. I tried to explain that if He would give His life to save their souls, He would not mind parting with His image to warm their bones.” He shook his head, looking at the ruin of his church. “Of course, in the end it went to waste.”
The stray 88 had knocked the square tower off the shoulders of St. Dominic’s Church. The beams holding up the roof, which was clad in metal, had collapsed and caught fire. In their collapse, the roof beams had formed a kind of bowl or funnel into which the metal roof, now a molten pool, had poured. The glowing drizzle had burned a hole in the sandstone floor, then flowed through to fill the crypt. What missed the hole spread in ripples across the floor, setting fire to everything it touched that was not made of stone. The dislodged tower, with lacework iron steeple, had slid onto the parsonage behind the church, landing square on its four corners like a gymnast sticking a dismount. Half the old half-timbered house had been flattened, killing the old priest’s housekeeper but sparing Father Nickel for as yet unknown purposes. When the tower sat down, the counterforce of its impact with the ground had sent the steeple heavenward in a skewed arc that ended, as with so much of St. Dominic’s business over the centuries, in the churchyard. The steeple broke into three large and many small pieces, some of which still smoldered in the churchyard. Smoke rose in plumes to haunt the gravestones.
“So He is in there, buried under all of that,” Father Nickel said. “Saying, ‘Tsk, tsk, silly people, now, why didn’t you burn me when you had the chance!’”
The American soldiers exchanged looks. Private Gatto helped the old priest down from the jeep, and Father Nickel promised to return in a few minutes with something they would be happy to have for the celebration. He had decided that the German retreat across the Ruhr meant the war was over, and he was not interested in counterargument. He dismissed Diddens’s halfhearted insistence that in fact they were still enemies, saying he could not speak for Diddens but that a priest could not have enemies any more than a hog butcher could be a vegetarian.
He had gone half the distance to the gate of the churchyard when he seemed to remember something, a possible difficulty. He turned back to the jeep, considering the three Americans. He pointed to my grandfather. “You will find a shovel in the toolshed,” he said. “An excellent shovel with long experience.”
The iron gate of the churchyard hung half-hinged and twisted, like the bicycle, into a glyph signifying something unknown. Father Nickel lifted the latch nevertheless and swung it open with a certain ceremony. My grandfather went to fetch the gravedigger’s shovel from the toolshed.
One of the headstones was engraved with a name and dates that made some kind of learned Latin joke, one my grandfather did not understand. My grandfather hesitated a moment when the old priest encouraged him to start digging at its foot. He was concerned not about desecrating a grave but about detonating a possible mine that this old coot knew to be buried here.
“You speak German with the accent of Pressburg,” Father Nickel said. “I was born in that city in 1864, under the reign of Emperor Franz Josef I.”
My grandfather explained that his grandfather and father had been born in that city as well, though he was unable to provide dates.
“Did they tell you that a Pressburger is incapable of deceit?”
My grandfather was forced to confess that they had neglected to mention this fact. Nevertheless, he started to dig. The hole he dug was not wide and before long the shovel struck metal, less than two meters down.
“Well?” said the old priest.
“Excellent shovel,” my grandfather said.
The minute Father Nickel heard that Allied soldiers had set foot on German soil, he had sent for his former sexton and gravedigger, Alois. Alois had grown up a ward of the parish. It had been his job as a boy to prepare the church’s most valuable relic, a bone from the body of Saint Dominic, for its yearly presentation. At eighteen Alois had enlisted and been shipped east to Smolensk, where a limonka had taken his left ring finger and pinkie and his left eye. He was returned to Vellinghausen suffering from shell shock that gradually deepened into black depression. He would not return to his former employment at St. Dominikus-Kirche. Every night he drank himself into unconsciousness and slept where he fell. While drunk, he would repeat foul blasphemies he had learned in the army. These did not offend Father Nickel, who had heard everything, but he knew that God was less forgiving, and he worried about the fate of his former protégé’s soul. Hoping to distract the young man as much as to protect the church’s treasures, he had asked Alois to build a strongbox that could be buried in the churchyard, disguised as an actual grave. Alois still had a strong back and clever hands. Despite his injury, he could wield a hammer and shears.
To the old priest’s delight and relief, Alois, guided by lingering reverence for his former charge, the holy relic of Saint Dominic, had accepted the commission. He persuaded the late housekeeper, Maria, to part with an old cedar chest. Then he went to the parish henhouse, which had stood empty for over a year, and pried loose the corrugated sheets of zinc that roofed it. He cut the zinc to measure and nailed the pieces to the outside of the cedar chest. He had carved the jocular headstone to Father Nickel’s specifications, then buried the strongbox, filled with the wealth of St. Dominikus-Kirche, at its foot. Now the chest sat looking impregnable and snug at the bottom of a six-foot shaft dug with machined precision to fit it exactly.
“How heavy is that thing, Father?”
“Seventy-three kilograms.”
My grandfather started to question the precision of Father Nickel’s reply, then realized: “Alois weighed it.”
“He made a complete inventory, which I mailed to the Congregation for Divine Worship at the Curia for safekeeping.”
My grandfather felt that he would have liked to meet this tragic but admirably methodical young man. He hesitated, believing he already knew the answer to the question he was going to ask. “Maybe Alois has some thoughts about digging up the box,” he said. “Where is he?”
“No doubt he would have done,” Father Nickel said. “Unfortunately, the young man you killed today, in the street . . . to whom I gave extreme unction . . .”
“Ah,” said my grandfather. “I’m sorry about that.”
“I was able to comfort him at last,” the priest said. “As you saw.”
My grandfather had seen something he was not prepared to concede or even acknowledge. He managed a nod.
“He had been shooting at you. With the bow.”
“That’s right.” My grandfather nodded back toward the jeep. Diddens appeared to have fallen asleep. “Diddens got an arrow in the foot; I had to remove it.”
“Alois was a fine archer. You’re lucky that the injury to his hand spoiled his aim. You have some Russian trooper to thank for your life.”
My grandfather nodded. Then he and Father Nickel went back to staring down into the hole in the ground. My grandfather made out a groove running down the right side of the shaft. There was a similar faint groove down the left side. “He used a block and tackle. The one he used for the coffins. He passed it around the bottom of the chest, through those grooves.”
Father Nickel nodded. He anticipated my grandfather’s next question. “It was made chiefly of wood,” the old priest said with an air of regret.