The Major's Daughter (3 page)

As the first men began making the right turn into the camp proper, Major Brennan was pleased to see the sun push through the clouds. Perhaps it was an omen, he thought. Certainly it made the camp appear less dismal. He saw a number of the Germans turn to look at the Percy Mountains beyond the chain-link fences. A few elbowed the men next to them to look. Major Brennan wondered what they must think. He knew that Camp Stark resembled the German countryside in some regards at least. Perhaps the men felt relieved to be in a quiet haven, quit of the war. It was impossible to know. Perhaps, too, the men already searched for a path of escape. That was entirely possible.

His driver pulled the jeep over to the administration building, and Major Brennan climbed out, turning to help his daughter descend. She looked lovely this afternoon, slightly misty from the rain and dampness. For an instant she reminded him of her mother, his wife, Mary Elizabeth. Before the illness, he amended. Before all of that.

“Form them up,” he said to Sergeant Clydmore, a short, dense man who waited for orders. “Bring them to the front and I'll address them.”

Sergeant Clydmore trotted off and began shouting orders, and the men herding the prisoners began forming them up. Major Brennan turned to his daughter.

“Are you ready to translate?”

“You put too much faith in me, Papa.”

“I'll keep it short. The men will want to find their bunks.”

“I'll do my best.”

Major Brennan stepped onto the wide porch that fronted the commissary. He smelled the raw lumber; everything smelled of raw wood because it had been nailed together only in the past week or two. Many of the nail holes bled sap. He watched as the prisoners slowly formed ranks, their faces suspicious and tired at once. Many of them looked up at the four towers posted on the corners of the compound. That was only to be expected, Major Brennan thought. Slowly the men quieted. They were soldiers, after all, and they knew how to drill and when to listen.

“Welcome to Camp Stark,” Major Brennan said, his voice somewhat cracked at the start from the dampness and the chlorine gas. “My name is Major John Brennan and I am the camp commandant. My daughter—standing next to me—will do her best to translate my remarks, but she is not a professional translator.”

Major Brennan waited while Collie spoke a few phrases in German. Whether they accurately conveyed his meaning, he couldn't say. Her face had flushed. It surprised him, as it usually did, to hear a different language spill from her lips. She always had a facility with languages, but knowing that intellectually, and hearing it in practice, proved two different experiences.

“You have been brought here to help bring out pulpwood from the forests around us. It is good, healthy work, and you will be fed appropriately. You will work in teams of five and you will be guarded at all times. You will meet a quota each day.”

He waited while Collie spoke. He saw the men watching her closely. Why wouldn't they? She was beautiful and they were men. When she finished she turned slightly to him and nodded.

“It is our intention to follow the rules set forth in the Geneva Conventions, and we promise to treat you fairly if you treat us fairly in return. You will have tomorrow free to adjust to your new circumstances and to form cutting teams.”

Collie translated. Major Brennan tried to think of something inspirational to say, something to end their first contact together with authority, but that was not his personality.

“Get some rest,” he concluded. And the men, after hearing Collie's final translation, turned and began filing into the barracks.

 • • • 

Collie had difficulty keeping her eyes off the windows that looked out onto the camp common. How quickly things had changed! Where before the area had been overrun with men building and carrying things, suddenly it had turned into a prisoner-of-war camp. She still found it remarkable that German soldiers, the Hun, had actually arrived. Certainly she had processed a mountain of paperwork to make the arrival possible, but to see the men lounging beside their barracks, smoking and talking, their eyes flashing to see what new thing might occur, filled her with strange emotions. She was glad, obviously, that they had been defeated, but a sense of something inhumane persisted about closing people in with wire fences cornered by guard towers. They deserved it, of course, there was no disputing that, but she could not regard them without seeing brothers and fathers, beaux and young boys. Remove the uniforms, the garish PW letters on their fronts and backs, and they might have passed for an equivalent batch of American GIs. The entire spectacle made her feel peculiar.

She did not, however, have much time for such speculation. The Germans' arrival had revealed the holes in their preparations. American soldiers streamed into the administration building, asking for decisions on this or that policy, requisitioning needed supplies, requesting clarification about a policing issue. The military questions she passed on to her father; the simple maintenance requests she tried to field with the cooperation of Lieutenant Peters. The entire day had been a mad scramble, and now in the late afternoon she felt tired and short-tempered, like a bear, she imagined, with bees swarming around it.

She put on the teakettle. Whenever she felt at odds with herself, she brewed a cup of tea. It was something her mother had taught her. No one, she had promised, could feel grumpy after a cup of tea or a long walk. Both remedies served her well. Tea, right now, in the darkening afternoon, seemed exactly the needed thing.

Perhaps it was the change in her position, but when she looked out at the common again, her hip against her desk, the teakettle sputtering and beginning to heat, her eyes fell on a handsome boy. At first, at least, he appeared to be a boy. He was tall and lithe, with a great thatch of blond hair, and he looked—what was she seeing?—somehow more groomed than the men around him. Perhaps it was only styling, or his trim physique, but his uniform did not hang and sag in the ghastly manner of the other men. The PW on his blouse appeared bright and solid, and when he turned to speak to one of his fellow prisoners she observed his splendid profile. Yes, he was very handsome, she realized, and he was not a boy after all but a young man about her age. Watching him, her mind drifted; she was conscious of watching him, while at the same time the world went on around her. She heard drops from the kettle sizzle and spatter against the hot stove, and she heard the distant drone of her father's voice on the telephone. Those noises registered on her senses, but she traveled down the line of her sight, taking in details that she wanted to recall later, seeing this young man apart from all the other men around him. She had often experienced this mild sense of being out of one's body when on the water in canoes, drifting with the summer breeze, looking down as her fingers dragged furrows in the still surface. It had always amused her to drift that way, half conscious and half given over to revelry, but she had never experienced it while looking at a young man. It was a faintly disturbing sensation.

The kettle brought her out of it, and as she fixed a cup of tea and knocked on the door to inquire if her father would like one, she tried to look out again and force her eyes to be clinical in their assessment. Yes, the young man was handsome, there was no mistaking that, but he was a German, too, and as she took the orders for her father and Lieutenant Peters, she mentally swept the young man into a pile with the other prisoners. She turned her attention to the pleasant job of fixing tea, and by the time she delivered two cups for the men, and one for herself, the German boy was gone anyway.

As she returned to work, the tea warming her, she imagined the letter she could write to Estelle.
This young man
, she thought, then erased that and began again . . .
This young German soldier.
Estelle would see right through her.

By sundown she had done as much as she could for one day. Her eyes hurt and her bottom felt sore from sitting. Her father planned to stay a little longer, and Lieutenant Peters was housed on the camp, so he would not return to the village. The weather had cleared and she decided to walk. Her father protested mildly, but he relented in the end.

“You put in a long day,” he said as she left his office. “And there's another one in front of you tomorrow.”

“Endless odds and ends.”

“Are you sure you won't let me call a driver to take you back to the boardinghouse?”

“I need the walk and the fresh air, Papa. I'll be fine.”

He kissed her cheek. She said good night to Lieutenant Peters and then made her way out of the front gate, a guard halfheartedly saluting as she passed. Then the gate closed behind her and she stood for a moment looking back inside. The river made a soft whispering sound. The moon, a half-horn moon, drifted in a troubled sky. The land smelled of spring and of the snow high up in the hills melting back to the soil.

Chapter Three

H
enry Heights, twenty-five, walked slowly toward the mill, his attention sometimes diverted by workers passing by and greeting him with a good-morning. The workers called him Mr. Heights, a tribute to his place in the ruling family of Berlin, and he was aware of the inequity posed by his age and position. He was at liberty to address the workers by their first names and did so routinely on his leisurely stroll toward the mill office, and not for the first time he felt the injustice of the situation. He had been born to privilege, they had not, and that had made all the difference. His family owned the mill; his father ran it, as his father had before him, and so on back into the earliest memories of anyone living. Henry understood his place in the equation: he was to take over the mill, to run it efficiently and well, and then pass it on to his son in the appropriate season.

On this morning, the proposition of running the mill seemed nearly tolerable. It was a fine spring day and even the perpetual smell of pulp—an acrid, nearly sweet smell like certain tropical fruit left too long in a warm container car—could not diminish the sense of industry that surrounded him. Some of the pleasure he took in the easy morning air stemmed from his recent return from Bowdoin College in Maine, where he had graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in forestry. Absence did, in fact, make the heart grow fonder—even for his balky, rheumatic heart, the same one that had kept him out of the service, leaving him stateside like a child too weak to contest the great issues of the day. On this April morning, his first day returning to his long-anticipated career, he viewed the mill with fresh eyes. It was not a place of beauty, exactly, unless one took a utilitarian view that suggested function was beauty, but its pure energy impressed him. He mused for a moment imagining what his roommate and dearest friend, Wilbur Pace, would have said about the factory as church in the liturgy of American free enterprise and capitalism. Certainly the Brown Paper Company represented as much as any church to the people of Berlin, and in that sense he knew himself to be a young priest, charged with the community's spiritual and economic welfare.

He paused for a moment at the overlook to the Androscoggin River, where in bygone days men in spiked shoes rode logs through the churning spring runoff, assembling giant rafts of wood that choked the river and turned it brown. In 1938 the loggers had brought the detritus of the great New England hurricane, a gale that had done more damage in two days than loggers could enact with whipsaws in many decades, and the Department of the Interior had awarded enormous contracts to the processors. It was the high-water mark, at least in terms of industrial capacity, for the Berlin mills. Now the war was upon them, and the river drivers had given way to diesel trucks for delivery, the stink of engine exhaust mixing with the sweetness of the pulp. Henry felt the world changing, understood that it had, but he could not guess how it would come to rest.

He still stood transfixed by the river overlook when his brother, Amos, joined him. Amos was his older brother and was, by all measures, a rougher, hardier sort, a man's man who had lost two teeth on the left side of his jaw in a mysterious bar fight before he had turned twenty. He had not attended college; he had enlisted in the navy during the first months of the war, and his ship had gone down under him, torpedoed in the North Sea by a German submarine. Burning oil had scalded his waist and buttocks, and his left leg had been lacerated by exploding sheet metal. The bone in his left shin had been shattered, leaving him with a permanent limp that he could not hide. It was a wonder he had survived.

Now Amos clapped Henry on the shoulder and pretended to push his younger brother toward the water. It was not a serious threat; Henry could not have fallen over the stone retaining wall, yet it still made him stick out his arms like a cat falling. Amos laughed loudly and clapped him again.

“I was sent to get you,” Amos said, his wide voice easily distinguished over the sound of the water and mill. “The military people are here to talk terms.”

“Don't do that,” Henry said, his voice surprising him by its edge. He had meant not to be drawn into this sort of thing with Amos, especially not on his first day.

“Do what?”

“Do that. That thing you do. That sneaking up and slapping me on the back, then pretending not to know what you have done. It's annoying. I don't do it to you.”

“Well, feel free to do it whenever you like. It's a friendly gesture. Brother to brother and all that. What's got you all wound up? Is it so horrible to return to the fold? Rather be back at the old alma mater?”

“I didn't say that. It isn't about that. It's about you not sneaking up and slapping me on the back and pretending to push me into the water.”

“Oh, for Lord's sake, you're a touchy one. Really, you are. Now come along. Father has them set up in the outer office for coffee. Major Brennan is here. He brought along his daughter, too, and she's quite an eyeful, I promise you. You'll be glad I fetched you.”

What was the use of trying to reason with him? Henry thought as he followed his brother into the main rear entrance to the mill. They were as locked in their roles as Cain and Abel; it was merely a matter of time before one would murder the other. As soon as that thought crossed his mind, he amended it, however, and barred its insidious roots from digging into any possible soil. They would not kill each other, he promised himself, at least not literally, but in countless metaphorical ways he did not doubt they would vie for their father's approbation. For better or worse they always had, and sometimes Henry imagined them representing two halves of his father's brain: the rough, hardscrabble side harbored in Amos, and the more intellectual, refined side embodied in him. That was an oversimplification but true in its broad outline, and he wondered briefly if he could possibly discuss it with Amos, diffuse it by doing so, and thereby begin things on a better footing.

His thoughts lost their orderly parade through his head, however, when he stepped in the conference room and saw the major's daughter.

“Hello, boys,” said his father, Sherman Heights, when they closed the door behind them. His father, heavy, with wide, bristling eyebrows, sat at the head of the table. He motioned to the others. “This is my second son, Henry. You've already met Amos. This is Major Brennan's daughter, Collie.”

“How do you do?” Collie asked.

Her father nodded. She was in the middle of pouring him a cup of coffee.

Henry had difficulty taking his eyes off her as he made his way to one of the seats at the conference table. How had this happened? he wondered. So vividly did she seem out of place that it was as if a mythical creature had decided to pay them a visit. He had seen beautiful women before, many of them, in fact, at Bowdoin, but none matched the poise and ease with which she seemed to understand her own measure.

He sat across from her as she finished pouring her father's coffee. She motioned with her eyebrows to ask if they wanted her to pour them a cup. Amos shook his head, and Henry managed to say, “Thank you, but I've had mine this morning.”

“You should know that Collie is the camp translator,” Sherman Heights said, sipping his coffee. “At least this far into the campaign. You must be proud of your daughter, Major.”

“Very proud,” Major Brennan said, lifting a dull white handkerchief to his lips. His voice, Henry noticed, seemed sometimes to sink on the last few words, as if his lungs could not quite release them. “She's been doing more than her share in every way.”

“Where did you learn Heiny talk?” Amos asked.

He slouched in his chair. He made Collie uncomfortable, Henry saw, and he deliberately used a slang word to deprecate her ability to speak German. Amos despised social conventions and did his best to disrupt them, but his hatred for Germans ran deeper even than that, Henry knew. Henry watched him with dull astonishment.

“My mother was fond of German opera and lieder music,” Collie said, apparently ignoring his tone as she slid the coffeepot onto the silver tray at the center of the table. “We lived in Munich for a short time when I was quite young. My father convalesced there, and he also served as an adjunct during the peace discussions.”

“That's very impressive,” Sherman Heights said. “I may need to steal her from time to time, Major, if it comes to that. We depend on a fellow up in a logging camp here to translate when the need arises. A German fellow, but he's so long in this country that his language has dried up on him.”

“I'll part with her reluctantly,” Major Brennan said, “and only for the briefest periods.”

“Of course, of course,” Henry heard his father say. “Now, I should also mention that Henry has joined us permanently. He's going to be put in charge of shipping. It's his first full day, in fact.”

Henry felt himself flush. He was aware of Collie, the major's daughter, glancing quickly at him. He had seen that look before: one of quick appraisal, then dismissal. What was a man if he could not join the service when his country needed him? He was young and outwardly robust, he knew, and he suspected that many people, hearing the news of his disqualification, attributed it to his family's prominence. It was emasculating. Any attempt to explain his circumstances only made the situation worse.

Fortunately, before they could delve further into the matter, they began discussing the details of their business arrangement: how many workers, how many hours, what terms, when the loads would be delivered, and so forth. Much of it had already been hammered out, but Henry nevertheless had difficulty keeping his mind on the discussion. Some of it was too new for him to comprehend, but he was also distracted by Major Brennan's daughter's presence. Collie, he reminded himself. What proved most distracting was trying not to look at her or to be distracted by her; he felt if he could simply give in and gaze at her as much as he liked, he might be satisfied with his study and turn his attention to the matter at hand. It was the surreptitiousness of his glances that complicated everything. When at one point the conversation paused and he realized he was expected to speak, he cleared his throat and simply nodded. That produced an awkward gap that his father hurried to fill with his own voice.

After the meeting, he joined his father and Amos in walking the Brennans out to their waiting jeep. Their driver held the door open.

“Good-bye,” his father said, shaking hands with them both, “let us know if we can be of any assistance.”

“Good-bye,” Collie said to them all. “It was a pleasure to meet you.”

Then with a slight grinding of gears, they departed.

“Lovely girl,” Henry's father said. “She must have quite an impact up at the camp.”

“It's a wonder the Germans don't rape her,” Amos said. “Ugly bastards.”

“Not every German . . . ,” Henry started to say, then stopped. It was no use.

“Back to work,” Henry heard his father say. But Henry's eyes remained on the jeep, the blond hair receding like a soft, yellow blossom.

 • • • 

It was a day for it, August thought as he watched the twitch horse heave against the traces in order to drag the raft of logs to the landing an eighth of a kilometer below. The flies swarmed fiercely and surrounded his ears with sound, but the sun shone brilliantly and the smell of pines drifted everywhere. It was the sort of day that his father might declare a
wandertag
,
a day to wander in the Black Forest, backpacks and staves at the ready, afterward a visit to a
heuriger
for a meal of sausage and cheese and the bright happy singing of the accordion. It felt something of a dream that such an outing had ever been possible. But the weather at least was as fine as what they had known in Austria before the war. It was a spring morning and the birds had become crazed with its luscious warmth.

With Gerhard, one of the team members, driving the horse down to the landing, the men took a break. Two guards stood above them on the hillside, their rifles held lazily across their chests. Even the guards, August realized, could not resist such weather. At first both had stood guard resolutely, their faces locked in a neutral expression, their eyes alive to treachery. Gradually, however, the increasing warmth of the morning, the dull snore of the two-man saw working back and forth over the logs, had softened them. By midmorning they had devised a system where one of them would sit while the other remained alert. It had taken time, but the guards, August understood, had eventually realized that their captives would not flee into the woods at a moment's inattention. Escape
was
possible, certainly; that had become clear almost immediately. Too many men moving in all directions, combined with the horses, the odd Coca-Cola trucks filled with reporters, the newness of the daily routines, all held countless opportunities for flight. In the barracks the men had laughed at the security system. It was their duty to escape if they could, and some of the men already had plans to do so, but other men, men tired of the war and of hardship, had cautioned against it. It was one of the many threads of talk the men had engaged in freely, because the Americans, they soon understood, had no knowledge of German. The prisoners had tested the Americans many times over on the first few days, speaking a vile epithet to get a rise from them, but the Americans had been deaf to everything out of ignorance. The older German men, especially the hard core of Nazis who had already assumed command of the barracks, had ridiculed the Americans ceaselessly, calling them ignorant pigs.