Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

“I don’t think it is. An eighty-eight-millimeter comes in like a train. You can hear it powering out of the sky. One of ours, a 105, sounds like automobile tires coming toward you at high speed on a wet highway. The sound can come right into your foxhole with the shell attached.”

“Are you going back to the war?”

“I don’t have a lot of say about that. I’d like to finish it, though.”

“Why do you always address me as Miss Rosita?”

“Because in the American South, you don’t call a lady by her first name without expressing a form of deference. You’re obviously a lady. Actually, you’re a little more than that. You don’t belong in a category.”

“You should go back home if you have the opportunity. You would be a very good university teacher.” Then she seemed to revisit my last remark. “I am not categorical? That is an unbelievable thing to say to a woman.”

She had gained weight, and the shadows had gone out of her cheeks. The cast in her eyes was unchanged, however. It was different from what survivors of the Great War called the thousand-yard stare. I had seen that. The eyes were unseeing,

as though someone had clicked off a switch inside the person’s head, shutting down his faculties. The expression was glazed, the facial muscles dead. None of these applied to Rosita. The look in her eyes was acceptance; she had seen the evil her fellow humans were capable of, and she did not try to find explanations for it. She also knew that few would want to believe the events she had witnessed, and her attempts to describe them would only make her a pariah. The truth would not make her free; it would become her prison.

“Lieutenant, you make me uncomfortable when you look at me like that.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Do I still remind you of a woman outlaw?”

“We grow them tough in Texas.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

I got up from my pallet and sat next to her. My proximity seemed to make her flinch inside, though I had carried her in my arms for days. Her face was inches from mine. “The woman outlaw represented something greater than herself. When people’s homes in Kansas and West Texas and Oklahoma were being tractored out, a few outlaws fought back. In reality, Bonnie Parker was a murderer and treated my grandfather with disrespect, and that’s why I shot at her.”

“I’m a symbol of other people? How degrading.”

“No, not a symbol. You have a huge soul. It dwarfs the souls of others. It certainly dwarfs mine. I’ve never seen eyes like yours. They’re the color of sherry with light shining through it. You’re the kind of woman who’s beautiful inside a camera’s lens no matter what pose she takes.”

I hadn’t meant to say the things I did. My cheeks were hot, my throat dry.

“You’re a romantic,” she said. “I think you see things in others that don’t exist. You might be a famous writer one day.”

“You winked at me, didn’t you?”

“I did what?”

“When you said Viva la República and No pasarán.”

“Like this?” she said.

I felt chills all over.

EARLY THE NEXT day Charlotte ran down the cellar steps, waving her arms. Before Rosita could translate, Charlotte threw open the cellar door and pointed joyously at the bluest, most beautiful sky I had ever seen.

“Better come look at this,” I said to the sergeant, who was shaving with Armin’s straight razor in a pan of water.

He walked up behind me into the sunlight shining through the door. “Great God in the morning!” he said.

The sky was filled with khaki-colored C-47s, more than I had ever seen, hundreds if not thousands of parachutes blooming one after another from one horizon to another. Three American paratroopers came down right behind the barn, rolling with the impact, then collapsing and gathering up their chutes. Pine and Rosita and I and our hosts went into the yard, the grass green and soggy, snow melting and sliding down the barn roof. A paratrooper came down forty feet from us and began pulling his chute from a mud puddle.

“Where the hell have you guys been?” Pine said.

“You know how it is, Mack. The traffic can be a bitch,” he said.

FOR SOME REASON the German army was always praised for its efficiency and its practicality and even, by some, its ruthlessness. Their occupation of an area left no one in doubt about who was in charge. Their methodology was as subtle as a hobnailed boot stepping on an anthill. Unfortunately, unlike Roman imperialists, they didn’t have a culture that transferred readily to the subjects of the countries they conquered.