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  Love is a Wounded Soldier

  Blaine Reimer

  Love is a Wounded Soldier

  Copyright 2012

  Blaine Reimer

  Cover by Sarah Hansen

  This book is a work of fiction which features historical events particular to the World War II era. While some scenes may resemble the experiences of many veterans of the war, any depictions identical to the experiences of anyone dead or alive are entirely coincidental. The plotline, dialogue, and characters are all creations of the author’s imagination.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, without the express written consent of Backroad Books.

  Published by Backroad Books

  ISBN 978-0-9879814-1-7

  To

  Danelle

  For believing in me and my book.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  ONE – A BATTLE AND A BAT

  TWO – I FIND MYSELF ALONE

  THREE – ELLEN

  FOUR – OH, SWEET INNOCENCE!

  FIVE – THE PARTING

  SIX – GOOD-BYE HOMELAND, HELLO CLAUDIA

  SEVEN – WAR!

  EIGHT – A GODDAMN ANIMAL

  NINE – FRIENDLY FIRE

  TEN – NOT JOHNNY!

  ELEVEN – HOME!

  TWELVE – BECOMING MOSES

  THIRTEEN – STRUGGLING

  FOURTEEN – YOU STILL LOVE HER, DON’T YOU?

  EPILOGUE – THE ROAD TO ANYWHERE

  A WORD FROM THE AUTHOR

  Table of Contents

  PROLOGUE

  Dear Sam,

  I instructed your mother to give you this package on your 18th birthday, so I’m going to assume today is the big day. Happy birthday!

  You may rightly be wondering what this letter and stack of papers is all about. I suppose it has something to do with the fact you were my only grandson and you lost your father when you were so young. You became more like a son than a grandson to me. I hope you feel that way as well.

  When I realized I probably wouldn’t be around to see you grow into a man, I decided I should write you something. Some sort of roadmap to manhood. But I soon realized there is no such thing as a roadmap or formula to becoming a great man, and if there were, I would be the last to know it. Every man must walk his own road, and you must walk yours.

  You yourself planted the seeds of this manuscript one day during Christmas holidays, several years before Grandma passed on. I’m guessing you were about five years old. You may not remember this story, but I could never forget it.

  You and I were roughhousing in the den that morning, when you stopped suddenly and asked, “Grandpa, what happened to your face?” You ran your little fingertips lightly down the side of my face, looking up at me with eyes sweet and innocent, and as blue as your grandmother’s.

  I groped for an answer fit to satisfy a child’s curiosity. As I thought about how to answer, my mind was swept away by a flood of memories. For a moment, I forgot you were even there. I forgot we were both there.

  When you tugged me back to the moment, I realized my cheeks were wet, and you had a horrified look on your face, as though you felt responsible for making Grandpa cry. You looked like you were near tears yourself, and that made me feel really bad. Thankfully, Grandma had heard everything and quickly distracted you with some cookies. You never again asked me what happened to my face. I suppose somewhere along the line someone else will have told you.

  Your question really got me thinking. Later that day, I remember drinking some apple cider and watching you and Katherine and Grandma decorate the Christmas tree and sing along to carols playing on the radio. I thought about Christmas, and my mind traveled back to the many Christmases I’d celebrated in so many locations, so many conditions. Memories, sweet and bitter, played in the theater of my mind, and I wept quietly to myself as a sentimental old man is prone to do, silently wiping the tears away with my sleeve, not wanting to be noticed.

  You did notice me, however, and your eyes clouded over and you said, “Why are you crying, Grandpa?” I did my best to smile, and gave you a dismissive wave, but you still came over and wrapped your little arms around me. Then you went back to your decorating, without either of us saying anything further.

  I felt as though I needed to be alone, so I finished my cider, put my coat on, and went outside to cut some wood. My mind was heavy. It troubled me that I wanted to share the stories of my life with you, but never did know how to start.

  I fired up the chainsaw and began cutting up a log. My old ticker wasn’t what it used to be, so after a short time, I had to sit down on a chunk of wood and rest.

  As I rested, I started counting the rings on the log. It had come from a walnut tree in our yard that had blown down in an early summer storm. I’d only known the tree for about twenty years, but had guessed it must be at least as old as I was. According to the rings, the thing was close to 150 years old. I examined the rings more closely and could make out the thick rings, the narrow rings, the good years, and the bad. It suddenly occurred to me that maybe I was just like that old walnut tree. We both had our scars, visible on the outside, but the only way for someone to really know how life had been for us was to see the rings within. And so I thought while perhaps I couldn’t bring myself to speak of my life while I was alive, I could leave you this, the rings of my life, after I was gone.

  I’m hoping in some way these stories will make up for the times you perched on my knee and asked me for a story about the olden days, and all I did was sit and sigh to myself as I thought of all the possible stories I could tell you. Read on, my son, and it may not puzzle you any longer why I cried when certain songs played on the radio. Maybe now you’ll understand that sometimes when Grandpa stared at a blank wall and trembled, he didn’t see a blank wall, but rather, he saw a giant picture show, playing vivid and terrible things on a looped tape he would have given anything to erase. Yes, there are images sharply etched on the walls of an old man’s mind, a frieze that the shifting sands of one man’s lifetime are insufficient to erase.

  In my life, I have experienced many things. I’ve seen unbelievable beauty and felt unbearable pain. I’ve witnessed human beings exhibit both a savagery that would shame a beast, and love and grace I’d thought only God could be capable of.

  These are not stories I heard from a friend of a friend, or something I read in a book or saw on television. This is not a Sunday school picnic account of things, or some dressed up, sterilized, sanitized, or glamorized version of my life. These stories are true. These stories are real. These stories are the rings within me. I hope there is something in them that helps you find your way, and perhaps, much like I understood that walnut tree, you may understand me better in death, than you ever did in life. Godspeed my son. I love you.

  Till we walk hand in hand again,

  Grandpa Rob

  Table of Contents

  ONE

  A BATTLE AND A BAT

  We called him Roy the Ripper. It was an exaggerated nickname, derived equally from handy alliteration and a juvenile sentiment that Roy had a bright future as a psychopathic felon. Picture a soul manufactured without the nerve endings necessary to feel empathy or compassion, and you can likely accurately imagine what sort of fellow Roy Visser was; the most low-down, scum-sucking, bottom-feeding bully that Coon Hollow, Kentucky, had ever known. At least that I could remember, anyhow. He was reviled and feared by every child in school, myself included. He had no friends, and it seemed he worked quite hard to maintain that stat
istic.

  It was the sound of his insolent voice that made me stop dead and cock my head. Yes, even though the words were unintelligible, his antagonistic tone and soulless laugh were unmistakable as they floated toward me on the hot summer breeze. It was the sound of a predator toying with his prey.

  My heart beat faster as I quickened my pace, walking to where the trees parted to accommodate Parson's Road, which was not so much a road but a set of ever-diminishing wagon tracks through the woods that serviced several farms before it trickled weakly into Hogshead Creek.

  Sure enough, there was Roy, pounding the stuffing out of Theodore Smiley. Theodore was also friendless, but not by choice. He was also slow, spindly and lame—a bully's dream.

  Theodore was trying to play dead, which was a smart strategy considering who he was up against, but that didn’t keep Roy from grinding his face into the grass and weeds that grew along the thinly graveled road. I still wasn’t close enough to hear what Roy was saying, but I could almost imagine the words oozing out of his mouth and dribbling down his chin in a trail of horrid, viscous slime, as he sat on top of poor gimpy Theodore and taunted him. Theodore’s little sister, Jenny, stood off to the side, crying and pleading for Roy to stop.

  I turned sharply and started to walk briskly toward them. Usually I was too afraid to interfere in Roy’s slug sessions, but today I felt an impetus to intervene. As I got nearer I began to decipher words, rather than just muffled jeers.

  “Stop screamin’,” I heard Roy order little Jenny, “you’re a little loud-mouthed sow, just like your ma.”

  My walk became a lope.

  “Yeah, go ahead, cry, that’ll help,” Roy derided Theodore.

  My lope became a run.

  “Have you learned your lesson, ya little piece of shit? Next time a man asks you for money will you be a little more polite?”

  Roy looked up, but I was already upon him. I grabbed his coarse, tan shirt collar and could feel his shirt stretch and snap as it strained at the seams. The top two buttons popped as I jerked him up and off. I didn’t have the strength to lift him entirely up, so I pulled him up until his head was level with my waist and dropped him. Dust briefly puffed up and hung haloed in the fingers of light that shone through the trees onto the road.

  Theodore lay still a moment, and then I could see his shoulders shake. He stiffly propped himself up on his elbows and proceeded to struggle to his feet. He didn’t look up, but bent over and picked up his syrup can dinner pail, and collected a few tattered books that were scattered at the perimeter of the battle site. As his face turned, I could see it was scratched and bloodied, and a few tears had fought through a flurry of blinks to trickle down the sides of his nose, mingling with blood and snot before trailing a line down to his mouth.

  Roy got up slowly, too, but more with the ponderousness of a fighting bull who rises deliberately, disdainfully, as if coiling himself for a crushing charge. His measured manner looked designed to intimidate, dramatize, suspend. He turned to face me. Sweat was beading on his pimply forehead, and his top lip glistened.

  “You got sumpin’ to say to me, Mattox?” His pig eyes were challenging. He slowly chewed a plug of tobacco. Though only 16, he had chewed as long as I could remember.

  “You leave him be,” I said, my voice low and shaking, half from fear and half from rage.

  “You should mind your own potato patch, lily liver.” The skin on his jowl wrinkled as he talked. I could see the brown tobacco stains on his front teeth.

  “Have you been chewing, or did someone take a shit in your teeth?” I asked, stunned by my own temerity. He appeared to be taken aback—nearly as taken aback as me. He stood oafishly, as if stunned by an unexpected blow. I don’t think he was expecting lip from someone two years his junior and a good many pounds lighter.

  “Now you stop bothering him,” I ordered authoritatively.

  He regained his aplomb and casually tongued his plug of tobacco to the other side of his mouth. Then he spat, right on the front of my shirt. I looked down and watched the thick string of spittle slither slowly over a fold in my shirt. It dangled and swayed like a slimy brown pendulum, hesitating a moment before it dropped. I felt ill.

  “I guess you’re gonna have to make me stop. Pussy.” He grinned.

  I struck. My fist hit him straight in the mouth and glanced off, the knuckle on my small finger briefly catching the corner of his lip before powering down the left side of his face to his ear. After that, I don’t remember the sequence. I just remember hitting, again and again and again, and not getting hit back. I remember rage and insanity and feeling no mercy.

  When I finally brought him to his knees, I just stood for a moment, unsure of what to do. I turned, wanting to run, but I forced myself not to. I was the victor. I didn’t have to run. Though I was no longer fearful, part of me just wanted to get as far away from the scene as quickly as I could.

  So I walked, leisurely, until I turned the corner. And then I ran. I ran until my lungs screamed for oxygen and pain stabbed my side. I ran off the road and through the hills I knew as well as my own bedroom. I ran to my spring.

  I’m sure someone else knew about my spring, but I never saw anyone else there, unless you count deer or gobblers. My spring was a place of retreat, a sanctuary. Somewhere I could relax, read and dream when I needed to escape the often grim reality that my life was. Today, my spring would once again serve its cathartic purpose.

  Panting like a dog, I sat down on a piece of limestone that jutted out over the pool and let my dusty, brown bare feet dangle in the clear, cool water. The water gurgled gently out of a crack in the rock before flowing down like a pint-sized waterfall into a placid, glassy pool.

  As my breaths became less ragged, I looked down at my hands. The backs of them were smeared with dried blood. I made fists and watched cracks appear in the smears on the skin of my knuckles, making them look scaly. They throbbed a little, especially my right hand. I leaned forward, scooped up a handful of water, and gently rubbed my hands together. As the stains of blood softened and sloughed off, I could see the skin on my fingers had red patches and some light blue bruises. The knuckle on the middle finger of my right hand had a three-cornered tear about the size of a black-eyed pea where it had caught onto Roy’s tooth. I carefully tugged away at the little white flap of dead skin. It was reluctant to part with the hand it’d sworn to protect, so I decided to let it release when it was ready. I patted my hands mostly dry on my pants, clasped them in my lap, and turned them this way and that, looking at them as if I’d never seen hands before. That was the first time they’d ever really hurt someone. For a moment, I viewed them with awe, as instruments of devastation, invincible weapons. I flexed my fingers and imagined how mighty, how terrifying they must have looked in the heat of battle. I traced my fingers along the lines and calluses, and thought how strong and hard they looked. Maybe even strong enough to fight Moses.

  ~~~

  Some kids have a pa. Some have a daddy. I had Moses.

  I don’t ever remember calling my father anything but Moses. That’s what everyone called him, and he didn’t want to be called anything else by anyone, not even his son. I was 10 years old before I found a birth certificate for a Samuel Delaney Mattox in a box in the attic and finally figured out that Samuel was his birth name.

  Moses was a lion of a man, with wild eyes that would have been a pleasant shade of blue had they not been perpetually bloodshot and yellowed. His hair was dirty blond and his shaggy mane tumbled down on all sides of his head, in his eyes, down the back of his neck, mingling with the similarly-colored sideburns that tangled the sides of his face. The top of his lip grew a broad mustache that almost concealed his mouth when he wasn’t talking. The rest of his cheeks and jaw always seemed to have about a week’s beard growth on them, rarely more or less.

  I didn’t see that much of him growing up, yet it still seemed I saw him too much. Moses was a drunk and a brawler. He would spend a few days on the farm, working with a li
ttle encouragement from a brown bottle. Then, after two days, or three, or four, if he was strong, he’d just drop what he was doing and be gone.

  One time when I was nine, I found our plow horses, Shiver and Shake, calmly grazing unsupervised in a meadow about a quarter mile from our yard, still hooked to the plow that had caught up on a stump. That might have alarmed most children, but not me. That’s what happened when the intermittent swigs from Moses’ bottle could no longer fend off his mind’s craving to be bathed in alcohol. He would leave. Sometimes two days, or three, or four, if he was weak.

  There were times when I was younger, when he was almost sober, that I’d see a ray of humanness in him. A faint warmth, like light timidly shining through a clouded bulb. There were brief times I reached toward that light, moments I thought Moses might be changing, salvageable, lovable. But I learned soon enough not to invite disappointment by anticipating the change that would never come: the day Moses would become Pa. Nonetheless, I yearned for his affirmation, alternately wanting him close, and then never wanting to see him again, until the latter feeling completely usurped the former, and I was filled with a glowing rage that smoldered, just waiting for a breath of an excuse to burst into a fiery fury.

  ~~~

  There’s a day when I was 12 that particularly stands out in my mind. The occasion was the Tobacco Road Baptist Church annual picnic. That picnic was one of the two or three highlights of my year, and as always, I was looking forward to the three-legged races, foot races, relay races, horseshoes—heck, there would be more things to do than time to do them in.

  And the potluck tables would groan with a superfluity of salads, baked beans, pig’s knuckles, great dripping slabs of watermelon, and pies almost erupting with sweet fruit.

  But as much as I anticipated the activities and food, it was all overshadowed by one thing: baseball. That year was what I considered to be my “breakout year.” It was the year I really learned to love playing baseball, mostly due to the fact that my gawky limbs were learning to take orders. Our school was too small for a team, and there was no such thing as organized ball in our little town, so I had to be content with playing during recess and after school with whomever we could scrape up. I played baseball whenever I got a chance.