“Don-ny. Yoo hoo, Donny, where are you? Let’s go for a little outing and do the grocery shopping, shall we?”
I stayed absolutely still, gambling that she would not labor up the stairs to seek me out. And if I could make her think I was at the greenhouse with Herman instead, she likely wouldn’t want another shouting match out there. Silence, rare as it was tried in this household, might save me yet. After some minutes, I heard the DeSoto pull away, and so hurt and mad at being deceived that I could hardly see straight, I raced down the stairs two and three at a time, bound for a showdown in the greenhouse.
? ? ?
“YOU LOOK NOT HAPPY, podner,” Herman said beneath his usual cloud of cigar smoke. The only sign that the battle royal in the kitchen might still have him agitated was the sharp strike of his spoon against the pot rims as he fed fertilizer to the cabbages. “Something the Kate did, hah?”
I wanted to holler at him, No, something you did, turning out to be a German soldier! Swallowing hard, I managed to restrict myself to saying, “I—I heard Aunt Kate bawling you out in there.”
“Habit,” he wrote that off and tapped his cigar ash onto the floor. “She wouldn’t have nothing to do if not yelling her head off at me.”
I had to know.
“Did you really fight on the Kraut side, like she said?”
Wincing at that language, he looked up at me in surprise. “She should wash her tongue and hang it out to dry.” The big shoulders lifted, and dropped. “But, ja”—which I finally heard for what it was, instead of Yah—“that is one way to put it.”
“So you really truly are a”—I had trouble even saying it—“a German?”
“Ja, double cursed,” he said, as if life had done him dirty at the start. “The name ‘Herman’ even means ‘soldier’ in German language, if you will imagine.”
“But then how come you don’t talk like they do in the movies?” I demanded to know, as if his squarehead accent was a betrayal. “The Nazi bad guys, I mean.”
“Pah, those Nazi bigwigs, they speak like they are chewing a dictionary,” he dismissed that. “I am from where we talk different German than that. Emden, on the North Sea. Netherlands is next door, the Dutchies are a spit away, we say.”
“So aren’t you sort of Dutch, any?” I seized on what hope there was. “Like when you were called that before it went down with the ship?”
“No-o-o,” he drew the answer out as if calculating how far to go with it. “‘Dutch’ was sailor talk for ‘Deutsch,’ which means ‘German.’ Better than ‘Kraut,’ but not much.”
That clinched it. A Kraut by any other name, even his shipmates recognized it. Imagination did me no favors right then. My head filled with scenes of landing craft sloshing to shore under a hail of gunfire from Hitler’s troops, and sand red with blood, and a figure on crutches in the hallways of Fort Harrison hospital trying to learn to walk again, which was not imaginary at all. Giving Herman the German, as he now was to me, the worst stink eye I was capable of, I demanded:
“Tell me the truth. Were you one of them at Omaha Beach?”
“Hah? What kind of beach?”
“You know. On D-Day. Were you there shooting at my father, like the other Germans?”
Realization set in on him, his face changing radically as my accusation hit home. “Donny, hold on to your horses. I am not what you are thinking. The Great War, I was in.”
What, now he was telling me it was great to have been in the war where my father got his legs shot to pieces? I kept on giving him the mean eye, hating everything about this Kraut-filled summer and him along with it, until he said slowly so I would understand, “World War Eins. One.”
I blinked that in. “You mean, way back?”
He looked as if his cigar had turned sour. “You could say. I was made a soldier thirty-seven years ago,” which I worked out in my head to 1914.
Slowly I sat down on a fruit box as he indicated, a whole different story unfolding than what I had imagined. “No choice did I have, Donny, back then.” He gazed up at the photographic panes of glass holding olden times in the poses of the portrait sitters, as if drawing on the past from them. “You have heard of the draft, where government says, ‘You, you, and you, put uniform on,’ ja? Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany in the Great War was very drafty place.” The joke made a serious point. “There I was, young sailor on the North Sea, and before I knowed it, foot soldier wearing a pickle stabber.” He put his hand on top of his head with the index finger up, indicating the spiked helmet of Der Kaiser’s army.
Comical as that was, I was not deterred from asking, “So, were you in any big battles?”
He puffed out cigar smoke that wreathed a rueful grin. “With my corporal, many times.”
“Aw, come on, you know what I mean. Real fights. Like Custer and the Indians.”