Tide King (7 page)

“Traitors, filthy traitors.” A man, hairs of copper curling from under his hat, spat at them. “Did you think you'd get away with this, arsonists?”

“It was not me—I, a townsperson, am innocent.” Bolek stood up shakily. But he set his jaw, clenched his fist, his eyes unwavering from the man's. “It was witchcraft—I saw it with my own eyes.”

“Witchcraft?” The man laughed, his mouth so wide Ela could see the spaces, far as countries, between the few yellowed teeth in his gums. He set his musket on the ground as he rubbed his blackened cheek with his palm. “You are the speaking the truth, lad? There're no witches in Prussia. We're not governed by spooks.”

“What do you call all this?” Bolek waved his arms around the bone house. “This woman has been selling her witchcraft around the village for years. We all buy it because we're scared of her. You killed her husband years ago, and this is her revenge. And we're paying the price for it.”

“Imbecile,” one of the musketeers bellowed from outside, but the man waved him off.

“So why are you here, then, boy, conspiring with this witch?”

“Because I want to be a hero, like everyone else.” He nodded toward Barbara. “I came here to capture her. Even though she could turn me into a frog or set me on fire just like the town, I knew I needed to separate her from her magic and bring her back for justice.”

“Liar!” Barbara exploded. She looked at the musketeer pleadingly. “Pray tell, sir, who is the one covered with soot, burned? Not me. My tinctures have no such power. My own mother made the same tinctures for your mothers and fathers. You probably even know of her, Agnes Zdunk.”

“Exactly. Her mother gave tinctures to the villagers.” Bolek pointed his finger at Ela's mother as he swayed back and forth. He would die soon, Ela knew, and yet he would still attempt and betray them to save himself. But she was too scared to do anything. “Are they not dead now?”

“Of old age, you fool,” Barbara answered.

“Enough.” The musketeer picked up his musket. He pointed it at Bolek. “You—outside.”

He did not look at Barbara as he passed. The musketeers gathered her remaining vials, glass jars, saxifrage flowers.

“Burn it all outside.” The lead musketeer directed. “If she's really a witch, I don't want her instruments available to her.”

“I'm not a witch.” Barbara shook her head over and over again. “I am a woman of medicine. I have been treating that boy's parents for years. He came here tonight and asked me to hide him. He said the whole town was burned, and it was his doing. My daughter and I have no stake in any of this—we don't even live in Reszel.”

“You are a widow—you may not be a witch, but you have a desire to avenge your husband, do you not?”

“I do not—I just want to be left alone!”

“Well, the matter should be easy enough to solve.” He leveled his musket at Ela. “Are you a witch or aren't you?”

“No, I'm not a witch. Please, stop! Stop it!” Barbara reached for her, but the soldier grabbed her arms and twisted them behind her back. “Good lord! She's a child—a child! Don't you have children?”

The soldier kept his musket aimed at Ela as he spoke to Barbara. “Again. Are you a witch?”

“No…no,” she said. He cocked the trigger. “Yes. Yes! Take me, leave the child. Please!”

“You're a liar, and if you're a witch, so be this child.”

The house exploded with the smoke and sound of the musket, sucking time and air inward, never to be released. The shot hit Ela in the chest and she lay with her lalka in the dirt, hard and milky like a broken vase. She heard her mother scream and struggle against the soldier as he dragged her from the bone house. Soon she was outside her body, following. Outside, she hovered over them, over the shadow of Bolek, his heavy breaths filling him up and then shrinking him as her mother struggled to get at him.

“Bolek, she's dead! Ela is dead!” She clawed the air between them until it was thin and ragged, but he stood unflinching, breathing heavily. “You have taken everything from me! And why—because you are a coward?”

He bobbed his head, laughing like a loon, but his body slumped. She could not believe he was going to get away with it. The lead musketeer emerged from the bone house and threw her mother's remaining tinctures on the ground. He started a small fire and rolled the glass and alcohol and herbs into it.

“Young peasant.” he said to Bolek. “You will be well rewarded by the Prussians for your bravery in bringing this Satanic menace to our attention.”

Bolek lifted his head, and Ela could see his smile, self-satisfied, through her tears. But it was only for a second before the soldier pulled his sword from his side and, in one stroke, lopped Bolek's head off.

“Stupid peasant.” He kicked Bolek's head, no longer smiling, across the field. “Enjoy your reward.”

The soldiers laughed. The fire burned blue and green and then orange as everything spat and cracked and turned to black.

“We'll take this one back.” The copper-haired soldier nodded at Barbara. “If she is a witch, surely it can be proven. And until then, let her bewitch us with her fruits.”

And with that, he dropped his pants and moved toward her mother.

He woke up in blackness. It choked him like a coffin. The trees of the Hürtgen forest and the large bowl of gray sky above them were gone. He tried to sit up, but darkness pressed on him like heavy taffy, ensnarling his limbs. No birds sang in the black trees he could not see. He vaguely remembered winter, the Germans, the cold.

His hip ached. He dug his hands through the black weight to his thigh. He felt a stump where his left leg had once met his hip, the skin smooth and round like a baby's head, a mossy substance covering the tip like afterbirth. A memory of men, of Stanley Polensky and others, swam before him. But they were not here, nor were the others in his unit. In his mind, he could see them around him in the forest still, lumps in faded fatigues, helmets upturned like opened walnuts.

He thought of his parents in Ohio. He imagined them sitting in the living room, listening to
The Abbott and Costello Show
on the radio, interrupted by a knock at the door. It would be the only knock, as their nearest neighbors were a half-mile north, they were expecting, the knock they'd hoped never to get. His mother's hands would clench her knitting, her fingers moving over the seams, counting them absently as the officer at the door took off his hat and his father turned toward her, his face like a quarry. He thought of his room, the clothes he would never wear again, the line of sun crawling over his bedroom wall and dresser in the red dawn that he would never see. He imagined the wife he would never touch, whose shoulder he would squeeze in the car on the way to somewhere, anywhere, as long as she was beside him. Would he ever kiss anyone again? Would anyone ever love him, beside his parents?

He thought of the field behind his parents' house and the beet and carrot seeds he would never again press into the yielding earth with his mother during the spring, his hands still chapped from the raw March. He would not hear the sound of husks swishing in the wind in the late summer, the smell of warmed dirt and motor oil and the sound of crickets and the glow of the moon from his window.

He thought about the war. He wondered where the war had gone, if everybody had died. If he was dead. If this, this suffocating purgatory, was all he had for all his prayers.

He had fallen asleep. When he woke up, his left leg itched. He still could not see and could barely move. His hands swam to his phantom thigh and grazed something firm, fleshy. Now, his stump ended at his knee, smooth and round like a baby's head. A sticky glue clung to the end. He felt sweat in his armpits, in his crotch. It was warmer, smellier in this darkness. He could see slits of light above him, like cracks around a basement door. He had dreamed, or hallucinated, that he was a full amputee.

Where were the men? It was so quiet, a few birds, rustling leaves, a voice, laughter, far away. He pushed against the weight above and around him, remembering the shells raining from the canopy of trees and the bullets whizzing like mosquitoes.

Whatever the medic had done, it worked great. Johnson ran his hand over his exposed knee. No gangrene. A completely healed-over stump. That man deserved a medal. If he'd only been good enough to save the whole leg, but this was better than nothing. Johnson wondered how he lost it in the first place. All he knew was that he was pissed as hell at Polensky. Leading them back to the forest like that, when they could have followed the ditch. Nearly gotten him killed.

It was not Polensky's fault. If Johnson were, in fact, dead, if this were hell, or the afterlife, he could not be mad at Polensky. He could have followed the ditch if he wanted. He would tell Stanley, if he could, that it was okay. That he was sorry for being such a jerk, for teasing him all the time. When he thought about it, although he played poker and talked rough stuff with Green and the others, Polensky was the only one he'd ever told anything to. About his childhood nightmares of faceless men who kidnapped his parents and led him into the field to beat him. About how he lost his virginity to an older woman, Eva Darson, a divorcee who didn't go to their church but who always smiled, a mouth of slightly crooked teeth, and asked him about his parents when he was at the drugstore. That she had asked him to come over to help move her couch but they had moved their lips, their bodies against each other, against things instead. That he thought of marrying her once, that he liked how she ran her index finger along things, sizing them up, speaking her mind in a way that most women had not been taught, or allowed.

“I am half Spanish.” She'd bounce the bottom of her coffee-colored hair with the palm of her hair. It fell in bangle-sized curls around her neck. “If we do not speak, we do not breathe.”

He did not spend time with her because she was half Spanish. He supposed he felt sorry for her. She always prepared extravagant dinners for him—pork loins and sirloins—although he was too young and probably too self-absorbed to consider how she managed them on her meager resources. Once she gave him a bottle of cologne, called Garcon, that he hid, like a girlie magazine, on the top of his closet shelf, lest his mother smell something on him other than the Skin Bracer aftershave she bought him for Christmas and his birthday, like an obligation. Eva always had cigarettes, which she liberally encouraged him to smoke. He supposed now that she had done these things to extract some sort of promise from him that, even if he didn't love her, he would always be available to her. That he would always worship and admire her with the dewy eyes of youth, that she, in various stages of emotional starvation, could at least quench her thirst with a tall, cool drink.

She did not love him, he knew. She did not love anyone, as far as he could tell. Her drunk of a ex-husband who couldn't provide for her in the way she was accustomed, the men she'd dated who could barely spring for dinner and a movie, always skipping those acts and wanting to add a third, which usually took place in her bedroom. The girls at the telephone company where she worked, who gossiped and were boring and never heard of the Louvre. Eva required a sophistication and kindness and curiosity from everyone that she assumed she had herself, if only because she always reminded him she was all of these things.

“I can't help it; I'm a sophisticated woman,” she had apologized after he asked her, with his money, to buy his mother a nice blouse at Pennelmen's Department store. “I would never step foot in Pennelmen's. The cheapest fabrics you ever saw. And no imagination, no style. I mean, maybe that's okay for an old woman…you should let me get her something at Barrett's.”

“I don't think my mother would wear anything from Barrett's,” he answered, looking in his wallet. And even if she looked good in the frilly chenille, the billowy scarves, and other French-looking outfits, he couldn't afford it.

“Well, I will not set a foot in Pennelmen's, I'll tell you that. My reputation couldn't stand it.” She lit a cigarette and crossed her arms, ending the conversation. She had compromised enough in her life, she'd always told him—and look where it had gotten her!

It was not the sex, not only the sex—the sole benefit he imagined most boys to derive from such a relationship—that he continued to see her. She was a good-looking woman, for thirty, and had a quick wit and could flatter one with a single raise of her eyebrow. But why he thought he had loved her, he didn't know. He supposed he felt sorry for her. It was the hole of the persecution in which she was buried, by men, women, by society, she had impressed upon him to believe, all while she stood there holding the shovel.

“People from Ohio, they just don't know anything.” She floated her eyes to the ceiling, taking a cigarette herself. “They certainly don't know how to live.”

Well, he had certainly lived, and he had seen some things. He had lived, she would be happy to know. If he saw her again.