“Shoot-them-ups, you want,” he sighed. “Karl May should write Western Front westerns for you.”
At first I thought he was not going to answer further, but finally he came out with, “I was at H?he Toter Mann, was enough.”
That didn’t sound bad, nothing like Omaha Beach. Disappointed at his evidently tame war, I said just to be asking, “What’s that mean, Ho-huh whatever you said?”
He half closed his good eye as if seeing the words into English. “Dead Man’s Hill, about.”
That sat me up, all attention again. “Yeeps! Like Boot Hill, sort of?”
“More ways than one,” he evidently decided to give me Herman the German’s side of the war. “H?he Toter Mann was fought over time after time, back and forth, forth and back, Germans and French killing each other all they could.” He grimaced, and after what he said, I did, too. “You could not see the ground, some places, dead men or parts of them was so thick.”
I’d wanted to know the blood-and-guts truth about him being a soldier, had I. That would do. “H-how come you weren’t killed there?”
“The shovel is sometimes better friend than the rifle,” he said simply. “Learned to dig such foxholes, I did, could have given fox a lesson.” He paused to frame the rest of that story. “Here is a strange thing soldiers go through. The more of my comrades died on H?he Toter Mann, the more it saved my life. My outfit, I think you call it?”—I nodded—“Second Company, lost so many men we was moved to rear guard duty. Behind the lines, we had chance to survive the war.” His face took on an odd expression, as if skipping past a lot to say, And here you see me, in America.
“Yeah, well, good,” I spoke my relief that he had been in a separate war from my father. Now I could be curious about things less likely to bring the whole summer crashing down. “My dad was a private first class—what about you?”
“Private no class, my soldiering was more like,” he told me, memory turning toward mischief now. “Not what you might call hero. Mostly, behind the lines I was chicken hunter.”
“Uhm, Herman, that sounds awful close to chicken thief.”
“In peacetime, ja. In war, is different. When rations are short, you must, what is the word, when cattles go here and there to eat grass?”
“Forage?”
“Sounds better than ‘thief,’ don’t it,” he went right past that issue without stopping. “Same eye-dea, though. Go find what you need to survive. ‘Sharp eyes and light fingers’ was the saying. When night came, so did chance for hunting. You must understand, Donny”—he could see I still was trying to sort this out from chicken thievery—“we was being fed a pannikin of soup like water and slice of bread per man, day’s only meal, before armistice came. Starvation ration, too bad it don’t rhyme better.” He looked contemplatively at his private garden of vegetables under glass. “I grew up on little farm at Emden, cows lived downstairs from us and chickens loose outside, so I understanded where food could be rustled.”
We heard the DeSoto jouncing up the bumpy driveway. “Tell you what, podner,” Herman suggested rightly, even if it was not what I wanted to hear, “go help the Kate with the groceries, hah? Keep her off the warpath for once.”
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I WENT THROUGH that day of Aunt Kate’s bossy supervision—here, honeybunch, help me with this; there, sweetums, do this for me—with Herman’s words outlasting anything she had to say. Sharp eyes and light fingers; there is no switch you can reach in your brain to turn something like that off. It fit with me, for if I hadn’t been what he called a hunter, the black arrowhead still would be on the hall table at the Double W instead of within the touch of my fingers in the security of my pocket. Even after a suppertime so tense I wondered whether one of them might throw the sauerkraut at the other, and another march to bed when I was wide awake, a tantalizing possibility kept coming to mind, like an echo that went on and on: Go find what you need to survive.
When I went to bed, my eyes not only wouldn’t close in favor of sleep, they barely blinked. Put yourself in my place, doomed to screeching bedsprings and attic confinement for the rest of the summer and no mad money to see a great movie like Tomahawk or do anything else that was halfway interesting, and see if your mind doesn’t become a fever field of imagination and you don’t turn into an eleven-year-old desperado. I ignored the plaque on the wall that preached getting down on my knees and praying as the one-and-only answer, and instead saw through the house, to put it that way, to the sewing room. Where Aunt Kate kept her purse and maybe significantly more. Those quarters that jingled all the way home from the canasta party had to live somewhere.
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