Under the Same Blue Sky (14 page)

Then, as always, we walked to the midnight service, afterward milling on the sidewalk, exchanging greetings and Christmas plans in that soupy mix of German and English that Saturday school teachers dismissed as “Germish.” But it was familiar and comforting, nothing one would hear in Galway. Friends asked about my first months away. Did I still love teaching? Did I “fit” in a small town? Was I happy to be home for the holidays? Yes, I said to every question. Yes, of course.

Long past midnight, I slipped between freshly ironed sheets in my spotless room and watched a full moon dig through Pittsburgh’s eternal clouds. Sleeping lightly, I was awakened before dawn by thuds, a
smash, a ruffle of laughter, and running feet on the sidewalk below. I dressed and slipped downstairs.

Broken eggs smeared our big store window facing the street. Plastered to the glass was a poster of a great foot poised over a running man in a spiked helmet. “Stamp out the Hun!” red letters screamed. “Kraut!” was scrawled below the new sign: “John Renner, Quality Hardware.” An American name for an American store, but not American enough. A small window was broken. Were we to note the “courtesy” of sparing the big one? Or was this a warning: “Next time we’ll do worse.” If my father did what? Stop being who he was? Stop coming from his country?

I ran upstairs for a sponge, bucket, and broom. My father was in the kitchen. “Again?” he whispered.

“Yes.”

He pulled on his jacket and followed me to the street. We washed away the egg and soap, swept up shards, and covered the hole with flattened cardboard. “How many times has this happened?”

“Several. But they never broke glass before.” His letters hadn’t mentioned vandalism, just as mine never mentioned my troubles. “Don’t tell your mother.”

“Again, Hazel? On Christmas Day?” my mother whispered as I set out breakfast plates and my father shaved. I nodded. “Poor man. Don’t tell him I know.” Nor did he know of hisses she received on the street or in streetcars: “Kraut, Kraut, Cabbagehead.” Turning quickly, she’d see only a bland face or pair of snickering children. Once she’d been pushed and fell on an icy sidewalk, scattering her groceries.

We all kept our secrets and tried to be jolly for Christmas dinner with Uncle Willy and Tante Elise. My mother diverted talk of Galway for my sake, and my father changed the subject when Uncle Willy mentioned vandalism of a nearby German store. So we spoke of new
contracts in Pittsburgh, the difficulty of supplying troops on every side of Germany, and the terrible efficiency of the British blockade. The men took out their pipes. “Finally we got Serbia,” Uncle Willy said. “And we’ll get Montenegro and Gallipoli soon.”

“Small places,” my father muttered into his stein. “And our men are tired. England has an empire to draw from. When Americans come in, they’ll be fresh.”

“And we’ll be the enemy. I’m so afraid of that,” said Tante Elise.

“You don’t
have
to stay in Pittsburgh,” I began, but stopped as four startled faces turned to mine. Their homeland gone, of course they’d stay in this city that first received them. They’d dig down like soldiers in trenches and endure. A memory from a year ago came bounding back. I’d taken a streetcar to the Carnegie Institute and sat near two sleekly dressed young couples.

“Like I’m telling you, Hank,” said one man, “a few divisions of Yanks could finish the job.”

“You bet. Whip those Krauts to Kingdom Come. Forget trenches. Burn the cities down like General Sherman did in Georgia. Then bomb the rest to smithereens.”

I had to speak: “It’s German
civilians
who’d suffer—children, women, old people.”

The second man turned to me. “Once the Kaiser surrenders, all the little Krauts will be safe.”

The red-cheeked girl beamed at him: “You’re right, Lewis. It’s the German
people’s
fault, my daddy says. They shouldn’t have voted for the Kaiser if they didn’t want war.” Useless to explain that Kaiser Wilhelm wasn’t elected. I got off before my stop. “Bye-bye, fräulein,” voices called. “Give Wilhelm our regards.”

If America joined the war, soon Hank, Lewis, and their prim companions would have fallen friends and family to avenge. Then in every
streetcar, store, and workplace, adults would play out the bitter games of our empty lot. Tante Elise was right that we’d be enemies, watched, feared, and unwelcome. In Galway, I was a witch. Where could I simply be Hazel?

In the days after Christmas I wanted only deep tunnels of sleep without memory, but had nightmares instead. Dream classrooms hosted pageants of witch trials. I drifted between benches of moaning, bloody children of war I couldn’t help. My blue house was bombed. I walked out of Burnett’s Grocery into a gauntlet of glaring faces. Ben appeared and disappeared in frozen forests. I was with him in Cuba, pushing men off cliffs. Walking by the sea together, we passed invalid girls wrapped in blankets, each small face a festering mass of warts.

In daytime, lines at shops were lines of seekers at my house, their silent faces asking: “Are you saving
it
for me?” Crossing any bridge in Pittsburgh, I imagined twitching Bens falling like rain. “When are you going back to work?” my mother asked when days passed after Christmas and I still hadn’t spoken of return. I told her the holidays were longer in the country. She didn’t press me.

Yet slowly, as roots begin to waken even under frozen earth, I was beginning to know what I must do next, where I had to go. Not Galway or any new, exotic place. Certainly nowhere in Europe now. I had to find where the strains of healing and hurt kinked together, where Hilde was made and how she became Hazel. I had to follow my bloodline back to Margit, in Dogwood.

On Epiphany, January 6, when my parents’ anxious, guarded glances at each other became unbearable, I told my story after dinner. Outside, snow fell fast, dampening the distant clang of factories and wail of freight trains carrying munitions east.

“All the houses in Galway are white, but I wanted mine blue,” I
began. They listened, my mother with her mending, my father with his pipe. I told them about John Foster, my night visitor, and how Ben painted my house. I’d written briefly of Ben before. I told them more. “Please believe me. It happened this way.” I related how Henry and Agnes were apparently cured, Ben’s scratching and Alice Burnett’s fits stopped, and Edna’s warty face transformed. I described the growing lines of seekers at my blue house, the chipped paint, and glaring, jealous eyes. My father put down his pipe; my mother’s threaded needle rested in her lap. Their eyes widened.
Our daughter did this? Our Hazel?

I explained how suspicions gathered as my tremors ceased and “witch” was voiced around me. Then the last, terrible week: Susanna gone and returned, Ben’s fall, and the school board’s vote against me. Crowbars pulling my house apart. Yes, I’d been “extraordinary.” All the early signs of my healing touch were true in ways that none of us could imagine. Who could have seen the tangled consequences in a peaceful town? My mother reached across the table for my hand. Our windows rattled. The mystery brooded like another being in the flat, a stranger to us all.

My father cleared his throat. “Hazel, what you just told us is nothing we can understand. All I know is that it isn’t your fault.” My mother nodded.

Of course they’d say this. They loved me. They didn’t want to think that with or without “fault,” my coming to Galway had turned one wheel that turned another and finally killed a man in Red Gorge. They scrambled to crush mystery with practicality. I should speak with Pastor Peterson. No, I knew him too well. “Pray for understanding,” he’d say. “Learn from the Gospels.” But he’d never tell me how to do that, and he’d never, never believe me. I’d be a witch
and
a liar in his eyes.

Pittsburgh was full of jobs, my mother noted. I could help in the
store. Or get a higher teaching certification. Did she realize how mined with dangers teaching was for me now?

“No. I need to go to Dogwood.” Our kitchen clock ticked heavily as I tried to explain why I had to see where my story began. In a little town like Dogwood there could still be faint traces of Margit Brandt. I’d find them. And more: I’d learn why each new land, each chapter of her life defeated her or proved insufficient, why Heidelberg’s ancient charms were as empty for her as Pittsburgh’s booming growth was for me. I couldn’t go forward without first going back. This much I knew, even if my parents couldn’t follow the path of reason that brought me to this certainty.

“But you don’t have to,” my mother said. “You’re nothing like my sister Margit.” Except that she had voiced exactly this to Tante Elise.

“It’s like—” I strained for higher authority. “Like Martin Luther said: ‘Here I stand. I can do no other.’ I
have
to go.”

“For how long? A few days?”

“I don’t know.” And truly, I didn’t. I saw myself in Dogwood, at a train station, on the street. I didn’t see seasons pass. I didn’t see where I’d live. I imagined myself asking strangers about Margit. “I might stay awhile. I have some money of my own.” I explained the Burnetts’ gift. “I could find a job.”

“Not teaching.”

“No, not now.”

My father sighed. “Well then, it’s time to give her Margit’s letters.” He pushed back his chair and stood up. Slowly, as if he’d rehearsed this walk a thousand times, he went to their room and returned with a small, flat box. “They won’t make you happy. But you’ll learn something about her.” It was past midnight. “We’re all tired, Hazel. Let’s go to bed. We’ll be here in the morning.” Yes, they were my solid ground that now was not enough to hold me.

I
TOOK THE
box to my room. No letter was more than a page, written
large in a childish hand. “New Jersey is so dull,” one declared. “Farms, woods, fields, and boring little towns. Worse than Bavaria.” Other letters complained that “He”—I assumed her employer—was demanding and hard to please. Only days off brought pleasure. Men’s names sprinkled the pages: Chester, Pat, Bert, Arthur, Emil, Jack. They took her to Atlantic City and dance halls in New York City, all “great fun.” Some letters ended: “How is the child?” Nothing else about me. No regrets, concerns, or great curiosity. No plans to visit Pittsburgh. The last announced: “I’m going to New York! Jack found me a job!”

A large envelope was addressed in a different hand, with a note inside: “These were found in Margit’s room.” I set the note aside and gasped at a stack of pen and pencil sketches: young men with eager eyes, a stone archway, and a woodland path. In one, a small child is seen from behind walking past rosebushes. Me? The figure could be any child or simply there to balance the scene. Margit struggled with perspective, but her lines revealed the weight of stone, the lightness of petals, and the warmth of a young face. I’d never heard that she drew. Perhaps this seemed too close a link to me. Perhaps it was her secret pleasure, for she hadn’t mailed the sketches. They’d been sent after her death by someone who wanted no trace of her left behind.

I meant to leave for Dogwood right away, but sickness kept me home. Like everyone in Pittsburgh, I’d had a mild cough all my life. It was too common a condition to note, like sweating in the tropics. After a month in Galway, when I could speak whole conversations without disturbance, I’d thought this fact was extraordinary.

The night after telling my story, a heaving, hacking cough left me panting, my chest aching and throat raw, as if torn by brambles. Had the clean country air weakened me? Or, I thought wildly, was this the consequence of saying what should not have been said? In any case,
within a day, I could barely speak. “Don’t try,” my mother said, producing a pad and pencil to express my needs that grew steadily simpler: water, broth, blanket.

Nothing helped, not soups, teas, or steaming pots of herb infusions I breathed at the kitchen table, my head under a Turkish towel. Dr. Edson didn’t strain my voice with questions, only listened to my chest and said to raise a hand when his gentle probing brought on pain. Then he cradled his trusty stethoscope and diagnosed bronchitis that must run its course. I’d also cracked my breastbone with coughing, which would take time to heal.

“It hurts.” I scribbled.

“I’m sorry, Hazel, but there’s no magic cure. Just rest and good hot broth.” If Dr. Edson noted how we all stiffened at “magic,” he gave no sign. “You must be patient. Once the wet cough stops, you’ll have to stay home another week to be completely cured. Otherwise you’ll infect others. You don’t want that, do you?” I moved an aching head from side to side. No, I wouldn’t bring infection to another place.

My sickness dragged on and on. At least my parents were healthy. But because of me, they couldn’t receive friends in our flat. My mother shopped, then hurried home. “I’m sorry,” I wrote on my pad. “Tante Elise?”

“I can visit her. The problem is, Elise’s cakes are much too heavy.” She talked about baking, which always gave her pleasure. For her sake, I scribbled questions:
Why? How much? How long?
There was little else I could do. Even reading was exhausting. Coughing jarred my hand too much for drawing. Dr. Edson had prescribed five circuits of my room daily to keep my legs from weakening. Even this was difficult. Sickness was another land unimagined by the strong and healthy; now I knew how seekers at my blue house rankled when others whose pain seemed insignificant were rewarded with a miracle.

It was early March before Dr. Edson declared that we could safely have guests at home. Finally recovering my strength, I helped my mother disinfect every surface with Lysol. We washed curtains and linens, capturing the rare, bright blue day to throw open windows, beat dust from cushions, and boil, dry, iron, and fold away the cloth squares I’d used for coughing. To celebrate, we invited Uncle Willy and Tante Elise for Sunday lunch. Since I said nothing of the Galway troubles, everything about my Dogwood plans was inexplicable.

“You’ll teach?” Tante Elise asked.

“No. Not now.”

“But you’ll work?”

“I hope so.”

“This is because of Margit? You do know that some things are better not examined.”