“What. Why. Why now?” I rolled onto my side to cover how raw I felt. “Why’d they leave?”
Though I knew. Even then, newly freed from the fever dream, I knew. I was not a worthy shepherd. Not for them. To them I was a stranger. But to me they had become much more. To me they were a renewed purpose. A tangible direction. Jesus, was I to lose everyone?
“The friar?” I pressed on.
The woman pressed the rag to the back of my neck. “Yes.”
“He took them someplace safe?”
“He brought you here. You’re safe. He’ll take them somewhere as well.”
When I stopped crying, I rolled back to the old woman.
“Will he tell me where they are? If I go back to him, will he tell me?”
She let the rag fall open, then lay the cool cloth over my face so I could not see her.
I kept my eyes closed then and pretended to sleep. When she bent down to feel my forehead I could smell the starch on the cuff of her shirt, the dark odor of boiled vegetables, and the warmth of her breath. When she left the scent lingered, a presence I held on to for comfort.
Once my fever broke, the horrible pain in my feet lessened. It took another week before the swelling went down, and I could stand and start to take a few baby steps. My balance was off. I had to relearn where to put pressure against the floor. The large gaps between my toes felt all wrong. I would put too much pressure on one side of my foot to overcompensate, and at times, the phantom weight of my missing toes ached inside my bandages.
I wandered their home. Now with the girls gone the desire to keep going faded. My appetite for food or love or sex or even safety slipped beyond me. I wanted everything to go black again.
There were a few pictures of the old farmer who took me in as a soldier when he was younger. Looking at them made me feel guilty for running away from my war. I wished for his bravery. I told the old lady as much.
“I’ll get you all killed,” I told her. “You’re risking too much.”
“The old have less to lose, dear,” she said, patting my shoulder as she set a bowl of broth in front of me.
There was another picture on the wall of a young man with a wide, stern face similar to the old man’s. “Is this your son?”
“Yes.”
“Where is he?”
“We don’t know.”
On the wall was another old photograph of a large family standing in front of a small log home. The family bunched together around an old man laid out on a wooden cart that was propped up to face the camera. The old man wore a suit and his long beard had been brushed out, and his hair looked wet and pushed back. At first I thought he had large eyes but when I looked closer, I saw that they had been painted over his closed eyelids. I’d seen pictures like that before. Easterners took pictures of their dead to keep some trace. As pictures were very expensive then, these funeral pictures were an event to dress up for. If you couldn’t travel to see a relative, you could see the picture of them being put to rest. There were old women, rough-looking bearded men, and stern wives with broad children of all ages, some cradled in their mothers’ arms and others as tall as their fathers. It would be a fine way to die, propped up like a meat puppet and surrounded by loved ones. It should be the way we all die.
We had been eating their potato rations, and once, after a bombing close to town, the old man brought back the head of a cow that had been killed. He said he had to use a fellow farmer’s double-handed tree saw to get it loose. He carved the meat off the bone and they both rattled around the kitchen frying it up, and boiling it into a stew.
That night, when I sat down at the table with them and had a meal with them for the first time, the food she laid out almost made me weep. She’d made beef casseroled in beer and served with raisins fried in a pan over the hearth. That night we feasted, but I had a terrible case of the runs. I was strangely happy about this as it meant at least my bowels still worked.
Later that night, the old woman had me lie down on the kitchen floor with a towel under my heels. From a mothballed closet in the shadowed corner of the room she brought out a sewing kit with a polished cherry handle. She undid the bandages at my feet, pinched the rounded eye of a needle, and lanced my cloudy blisters. Each rotting abscess let out a nauseating stench. After that, I limped around the old couple’s house feeling like Thump-Drag himself.
Then I repacked my backpack and readied myself to move on. I left two hundred guilders and the gold coins from the barter kit on the pillow of the mattress they’d given me.
“Thank you for everything,” I said.
“Your fast, running days are over,” the old woman said. “Hide when you can. Please hide.”
Over the next several days of moving west, I stopped in old barns, office buildings, and basements of deserted houses. One home looked ancient, like the small cottages I’d seen with Edwin and Uncle Martin in Borkum, one of the Frisian Islands, which had once been inhabited by whalers. Some of the oldest homes on that island had whale-bone fences surrounding the property.
A Messerschmitt buzzed overhead. The black crosses on the underside of its wings were visible. I stumbled over tree trunks and brambles as it passed. I was always falling, then worming my way forward.
My feet always hurt. Each breath pressurized the feeling I was obligated to carry everyone I ever loved free of this mess. When walking I felt like the beating of all their hearts replaced that of my own.
Outside the town of Guttenfield, there was a parking area and a large sign staked into the ground that read Guttenfield Zoo. There were no cars, and the broad, iron gates were closed and chained shut with a thick iron padlock. A smaller sign hung from the gate on which it had been printed Please Don’t Eat the Animals’ Food. The apostrophe and the word food had been crossed out with a white brushstroke, so the sign now read Please Don’t Eat the Animals.