Ot-ta-wa.
Ot-ta-wa.
Halfway through a field I felt large-bore gravel underneath my feet before seeing the railroad ties. I could smell the creosote and tar oil. Nuzzling the compass up to my nose, I saw the tracks at my feet ran east–west and started following them heading west.
My boots landed heavily on the wooden ties, kicking up gravel. I could walk across all of Europe like this without being seen if the heavy snow kept up. My mind went blank on the railroad tracks. Snow and wind kept erasing my path. I imagined I was on some ladder stretching ahead of me through the whiteout. The ladder led upward, left the ground, ascended into the clouds. I recalled my father telling Edwin and me about the pillars of sunlight that burst through the cloud cover and drew giant glowing columns of light on the water’s surface in the Ems estuary.
“Those are Jacob’s ladders,” my father said. He told us about the Bible story of Jacob, which is where my name came from. “Those are the ladders of light Jacob used to climb up to heaven on.”
When a train came, I jumped off the tracks ahead of its iron breath, ran to the woods, and dove into the snow. In the white and silvered edge of the forest I lay motionless. All ache and stink. Beyond desire or prayer. I decided this was what the receding stars felt like at daybreak, or the last embers drawn over with sand. The front of the train had a plow that sprayed sparks off to the side. Rattling cattle cars trembled past, but it was too dark to see through the slats into them as they whooshed by. When the train rounded out of sight, I hurried back to the freshly plowed track, shook the snow off of my body, and started walking the cleared path, churning ice, dirt, and gravel up as I continued.
Several kilometers beyond where the train passed there was a steel bridge. The wind blew into my face, and I crossed to where the embankment created a lee. Halfway across I couldn’t see anything. Going on seemed so useless as the soundless snow beat against me. The emptiness swallowed me, and for the first time I knew what it meant to become nothing. My brother had done that. Not dying. Not dead. But gone altogether. Disappeared.
Everything was white. Frozen. Empty. I took slow, methodical steps forward, letting my numb toes tap out each firm plank. The bridge tucked itself into the far hillside. Below the tracks, I hid from the wind by cramming my body into a fold of the bridge and hillside like a sparrow and only wanted to forget myself in sleep. To let the raw silk wings of rest lift me up into the milky mouth of night. Cold hours passed.
The first graying of the skyline in the east filled the ravine the bridge crossed over. It deepened with more morning light, and by the time I was ready to climb out of the crevice and dig food from my pack, the light was high enough to see the dark shadow of a cave’s mouth farther down the ravine and the stream below that. I packed up my tarp and started making my way toward the cave. When I reached it, the mouth was a large vertical crack big enough to drive a car through.
Inside the cave I felt like I’d been swallowed by night again. My hands ran against the ribs of the dark, searching out the far end of the cavern. I couldn’t see my hands in front of my face as I moved forward.
I wanted to retreat to the back, where I hoped there was a bottomless pit to jump into, or some underground river to sweep me away, or a cup of earth to sit still on while I recovered.
I pulled a small flashlight from my pack and stepped farther into the cave. The little light cut a yellow beam straight ahead of me. The granite crevasse walls rose up on each side. Not far from the mouth was an old blanket caked in mud and ice tamped into the ground. Large exposed slabs of granite protruded from every angle. In the dark mossy cave the air felt cool and fresh despite the clumps of rotting organic decay. The pitch of the earth angled up so the back part of the cave was dry but the darkness became absolute.
My options were to trudge back out into the snow and keep slogging along, or hunker down until the weather let up. I decided to gather firewood and dragged large dead logs back until the pile of wood was large enough to last a few days.
With kindling and a corner torn from one of my paper maps, I used matches to start a fire. I sat by it until I was warm, though when the feeling came back into my limbs, my toes were still numb. I pulled my boots and socks off. Two on the right side and one on the left looked like they’d been swatted with a hammer. Under the skin, a black color rose to the surface, old blood seeping out of the bones.
I placed the frozen firewood around the flame in a circle so it would dry. I pulled a tin of noodles with meat chunk sauce out of the pack and placed it on the lip of the fire pit to heat. In the tin, little bubbles started forming and popping in the sauce, splattering the sides of the can. It shocked me to smell something other than the cold air. When the noodles were hot to the touch, I wrapped a spare shirt around my hand and picked up the can and began taking large, ravenous bites and slurping down the blistering hot food. It burned the inside of my mouth. While I ate, and the fire was warm against my face, the thought of spending the rest of the war hidden in the cave settled on me like a blessing. I rubbed my toes, hoping some spark of pain, of lingering life, would jump up the knuckles and ache, but they remained black nubs no longer associated with my body.
Looking at my toes, I thought, these days cannot be days but lifetimes. This not mine, but a criminal’s life. A victim’s. Not mine, I raved.
The hammering winds and their primal whistling blew down the hillside through the deepest parts of that night.
Each moment in the cave, I felt my instincts gradually relax, yet some inner fear still spread through me. For as much as I wanted to recoil from the world, I knew there was no escaping the human kingdom. Life beyond the cave walls I now saw as manic, sickening, and starved enough that it was consuming itself.
The sun had crossed the ravine, and the direct light rushed up the far hillside where it pulled over my side of the hill like a retractable curtain. The day passed with excruciating slowness, and I lay in my tarp for the rest of it. I tested my memory of my family’s house by mentally walking through it, seeking out the calming hymn of their voices in the dark. Time hung in front of me, dripping away.
The next day passed as the first had, and the days after that still. Long stretches of cold and dark, followed by a few hours of sunlight that touched the open lip of the cave wall where I’d sit with my eyes closed, letting the first warmth of a late spring lean into my eyelids.
“Breathe in the light,” I told myself. “Breathe in the light.”