Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

I looked toward the west. Clouds of orange dust were rising into the sky. They reminded me of the year 1934, when I rope-dragged a bucket of water and a hammer and a nail bag and a box of burlap sacks up on Grandfather’s roof and began securing the house against a storm that seemed biblical in proportion. Even though the temperature was close to freezing, I opened the hotel window and unlatched and pushed out the screen and put my head outside. The morning sounds of the city swelled up from the concrete, but it was the wind that defined the moment. It was out of the west, cold and bright and hard-edged and smelling of land that still had the imprints of dinosaurs in its riverbeds. I could feel my face tightening and starting to burn in the cold, my eyes watering. I had a sense of apprehension but also of hope, of new frontiers that awaited us, of finding safe harbor in America’s past rather than in the present.

I closed the window and brushed my teeth and shaved. Then I sat down at the small writing desk with my journal and tried to think clearly. There was one issue to concentrate on. I had to get Rosita out of the asylum, away from functionaries who genuinely believed they were helping others by destroying their brain cells. How would I be able to do here what I hadn’t in Houston? I’d brought the Luger I had taken off a German officer we’d pulled from the basement of a house hit with a phosphorus shell. His skin had literally boiled on his skeleton, dissolving all of his features. Even his fingers had been burned off. The only remnants of his face were his eyes, staring helplessly out of all that pain. The syrette of morphine our medic tried to inject into his arm was useless. The German officer asked me to shoot him. I wouldn’t do it. When we had to move out, he was still alive. Now, with the same Luger I might have used to end a man’s suffering, I was broaching the possibility of shooting an orderly, a nurse, a minimum-wage security officer, a janitorial person, a passerby, a sheriff’s deputy with peach fuzz on his cheeks.

I wrote in my journal: Good morning, Lord. We could surely use some help. Please take us safely over Jordan. If you can’t do that, at least get us out of Texas.

I put on a pair of khakis and sunglasses and a tie and my leather jacket and half-topped boots, and with a clipboard in my hand and two fountain pens and a mechanical pencil in my shirt pocket, I took a cab to the asylum. The cabbie said local people called the asylum the White Sanitarium, not because of its off-white color but because White was the name of its first director. The sanitarium was located on a knoll and was two stories high and had a tile roof and a design similar to that of the high schools constructed all over the country during the 1920s. Except it didn’t look like a high school. There was nothing ornamental or graceful or redeeming about the building’s architecture. It was stark, utilitarian, the fountain in front dry and webbed with heat cracks. Even the solitary tree by one of the walls was as bare as a talon.

“You visiting a family member here?” the cabbie asked.

“I’m trying to track down the survivors of a Nazi death camp. There’s a patient here who might know what happened to them.”

“You came to the right place.”

“How’s that?” I asked.

“The personnel here are good folks. This is a right popular place in Wichita Falls.”

“Can you drive around back? I’d just like to see the building.”

“Sorry, it’s restricted back there.”

“Why is it restricted?”

He looked at me in the rearview mirror. “I guess they don’t want the patients wandering off or getting in people’s automobiles. Where you from?”

He dropped me off in front of the building. I was never good at lying. Most Southerners are not. As flawed as Southern culture is, mendacity has always been treated in the South as a despicable characteristic. Notice how often Southerners casually address others as “you son of a bitch” with no insult intended. When the same person calls someone a “lying son of a bitch,” you know he’s serious. I had just lied to the cabbie. And I was about to tell a lot more lies as the day progressed. I didn’t know if I would be up to the charge.

There is a trick you learn in the army that you never forget. There will always be a man in your unit named Smith or Jones or Brown. That’s why it is so easy to shirk an assignment in the armed forces. All a shirker has to do is scratch his own name off a duty roster and substitute the name Smith or Jones or Brown, and someone else will probably show up on KP or guard or latrine duty in his stead. To my shame, that was the ignoble model I was using.

The receptionist was occupied. I gazed down the corridor and tried to memorize every name I saw painted on the frosted glass of an office door. The light was poor, and I couldn’t see the lettering distinctly. Then it was my turn to approach the receptionist’s desk. Her name was Leona Penbrook. She was a large, cheerful woman with thick hands and rings of baby fat under her chin. She wore a pink suit and a white rayon blouse with frills flowering out of the lapels. Her bright smile, her perfume, her sanguine nature, her southern Midlands accent, which you begin to hear west of Fort Worth, the aura of goodwill she seemed to exude with no agenda, were as pleasant and unpretentious as we can ask of human beings. The word I’m looking for is “heartening.” She was one of those people who remind us that decency and courage and charity are found most often among the humblest members of the human family, and most of them get credit for nothing. This was the lady to whom I was telling the same story I had told the cabbie, and it was creating a sensation behind my eyes like a rubber band about to snap.

“You’re a researcher for a refugee group?” she said.

“More or less. Actually, I have a degree in history from A&M,” I replied. “I always hoped to become an anthropologist.”

“It sounds like you’re doing a very good deed for someone. Whom did you say you spoke to?”

“It was the governor’s office that called,” I said. “I think he talked to someone named Smith and someone named Jones or Johnson.”

“We have a Jones here, but he’s on leave right now. What did you say your name was?”

“Malory. I just need to talk to Mrs. Holland for a few minutes.”

“She’s heavily medicated, but I guess you know that.”

“Not with any specificity,” I replied.

“She?

?s here for a series of procedures. She was in an extermination camp?”

“I think she was in two of them. Terrible things were done to her, Mrs. Penbrook. My outfit liberated one of the camps near Landsberg. After the Ardennes, my sergeant and I went into one of the camps by ourselves. The SS had just pulled out.”

I had told the truth about Rosita’s history. Mrs. Penbrook knew I was telling the truth, and she knew I had seen the same things a patient in the sanitarium had seen, a woman locked in a room with memories others couldn’t imagine, and that somehow I wanted to undo the evil done to that person. For a moment I believed she realized I had lied about my identity and the purpose of my visit and yet was willing to put my deception aside. But in a situation such as mine, one that involved my wife’s survival, I knew it was foolish to presume that others will follow their charitable instincts when it comes to their jobs and supporting their families.

“I tell you what,” Mrs. Penbrook said. “It’s warming up now, and some of the patients are going out on the lawn for a bit. You have a seat, and I’ll make sure Mrs. Holland is among them.”

Ten minutes later, I walked out on the back lawn, one that sloped through trees to a parking lot enclosed by a cyclone fence. I could see Rosita in a wheelchair, her back to me, a blanket pulled to her chest, a shawl over her head. I knew it was she, my warrior woman from the Book of Kings, the woman who had winked at me from under a pile of corpses, the bravest and most beautiful human being I had ever known. A big-shouldered black woman in a nurse’s uniform and a mackinaw attended her. The black woman had dignified features and thick hair with gray swirls in it. She adjusted the blanket to keep the wind off Rosita’s neck. The sun was shining in Rosita’s eyes, forcing her to squint. I walked between the sun and her chair and looked down at her, waiting for her to recognize me. Her face looked freeze-dried, insentient, her eyes half-lidded, as though she were falling asleep or already inside a dream. “My name is Malory, Mrs. Holland,” I said. “I’m here to talk with you about some people you may have known in Germany.”