Fergus treated the woods as his buffet: dead birds, squirrels, and the occasional skunk carcass. Each in turn his body processed late at night, coming out one end or the other. Most of the time his wet heaving woke someone in time to shuffle him out back. If he ever found something too foul to eat, he rolled in it and came back stinking of animal feces, rancid meat, and swamp scum. Edwin and I had to take turns holding him and brushing away the filth and knotted burrs, but neither of us had bathed him in a long time.
Fergus howled again, and ran across the butcher paper, his claws tearing the paper before he retreated to some other corner of the house.
“Oh no,” I said, worried about his creation.
“That’s okay. I’ll make a better one next time,” Edwin said.
Our father constantly read the papers for news about Germany. While we were at camp, Volkswagen had given him a massive order to test his lights and ability to supply them. If everything went well, they would give him the majority of their business. He worried about getting the order ready. His clothes were wrinkled. His hair stood up as if licked against the grain. He looked nervous, though he kept his concerns from us. When Uncle Martin came over to visit or eat dinner, the two of them went into a separate room and whispered about what they should do if “the worst” happened.
Then, on September 1, our father spread a late edition newspaper onto the kitchen table while we ate dinner.
At 4:45 that morning, 1.5 million German troops invaded Poland along its three-thousand-kilometer border with German-controlled territory. Simultaneously, the Luftwaffe bombed Polish airfields, and German warships and U-boats attacked Polish naval forces in the Baltic Sea. The paper had a transcript of Hitler’s address to the Reichstag claiming the massive invasion was a defensive action.
“What does this mean?” Edwin asked.
My father paced the kitchen muttering. “We should have known better. That man was not to be trusted. Of course he wasn’t going to stand by the treaties.”
Edwin and I didn’t know what to make of the news. It would have been boys like Günter who crossed the border into Poland.
Over the next few days the papers said that France and England didn’t believe Hitler’s rationale for the invasion, and on September 3, 1939, they declared war on Germany.
“We are in the middle of this madness now,” my mother said. “We’ll have to leave, there’s no other choice.”
“Drika, I have sixty employees. That’s sixty families to tend to. I have to stay.”
“I don’t care. You have to ask what you care about. What’s important here?”
My father didn’t look at her, but at us.
My mother walked from the room and I followed to comfort her. She sat in the den on a bench next to her candle-making kit and looked out at her flowers. She made candles by dipping wicks into large cans of molten wax and letting them dry after each dip. They came out slender, tapered, and the color of tulip bouquets when she hung them from small nails on the wall.
“Can I do something for you, Mom?”
She looked at me and shook her head no. Her eyes were welling up, and I knew she had an expanding bubble in her chest that kept her from talking. I wanted to swallow her bubble of mute hurt and keep it buried in my gut so she could breathe easy.
She ran her finger under the drying candles, which touched one to the next like a faint wind chime.
“They add atmosphere to a home,” she’d said. Birthday cakes, summer meals, almost every room, and especially her and my father’s bedroom were covered in her candles, like she wanted to always see and be seen in light that swayed.
“Do you remember what you used to tell me about your flowers?” I asked and tapped on the glass to point at her garden.
She snorted and tried to smile.
To make sure Edwin and I wouldn’t pick her flowers she’d told us that forest pixies didn’t have cradles for their infants so at night lay them in the tulips to have the breeze rock them to sleep in the chalice of the bloom.
My father walked into the room. “Maybe I can have Martin take the three of you across the Channel if things get any worse.”
“Of course they’ll get worse. We’re between two countries at war, between all this madness,” my mother said.
My father was silent but held his arms out and she stood, walked to him, and let herself be folded into him.
Ludo, Edwin, Hilda, and I each took a box of extra lightbulb casings from our father’s lab, carried them out back to the fort we’d made from mildewed wooden factory pallets, and used them to play a war game where we treated the small glass casings as grenades. Fergus followed as we chased one another in circles through the forest. We pretended the bulbs held light inside of them as we arced them behind our backs and hurled them. When Edwin hit me square in the spine, the glass exploded, dropping me to my knees. Hilda ran up to me and kneeled by my side. She put her hands on my chest and her hair hung down and grazed my cheeks. Her rich smell—sweet grass, lilac, sweat—fell over me, pinioned me. Pinioned, another of my father’s assigned vocabulary words. I tried to memorize her in this moment, how the sunshine gleamed along the palms of leaves overhead, down the sharp needles of the pine boughs. The world glowed as the image of her face made room for itself in my memory where it would move like a fish, fluid and glinting, down the river of my life.
Fergus howled and yelped every few feet among the trees. He stopped after a yowl, sat down, twisted behind himself, and jammed his back foot into his mouth as if trying to swallow it whole.
When we ran out of bulbs, we hid the empty boxes in the fort, said good night, and went home for dinner. Our mother was in the kitchen making the homemade noodles she used for casserole. Puffs of flour dusted the counter. She leaned into the wooden roller and flattened out sheets of dough. She cut the sheets lengthwise into small strips that she then draped over all the open cupboard doors. Raw dough noodles hung limp over everything, as if the shelves were bursting with food. The cupboard was stocked with molasses, rye, dry yeast in little tins with sealable glass lids, cloves, vinegar, dried fish, and chocolate bars my brother and I would nip when we thought they’d go unmissed.
“No, no, out, get out, take that stinky dog with you too,” she said, chasing us out with the roller raised over her head for show. When she was in the kitchen’s doorway she stopped and looked at the ground behind us. “What happened?”
Fergus had followed us through the front door, across the main entrance carpet, and into the kitchen where he walked in dainty little circles behind Edwin, who hadn’t noticed the small blotches of blood each paw print left behind.
5