Summer of My German Soldier (22 page)

I snapped the knob to the left, and, except for the steady hissing of the radiator, the room was silent.

Back in my room the thick Sunday edition of the
Memphis Commercial Appeal,
a gift subscription from Charlene Madlee, lay on my bed. It was nice having a lady like that for a friend. And I liked having my very own newspaper subscription. I mean besides reading it, it was nice in another way too. It was the something good (instead of always the something bad) that set me apart. I wasn’t like them, like the others, and the paper was proof of that.

After my trial Charlene Madlee was the only reporter (and the courtroom was filled with them) who came over to say she was sorry. And she was too! I caught a look on her face of genuine distress. On my second day at Bolton I received her first note. I read it so many times that it became engraved on my brain.

Patty,

I’m sending you a subscription to my paper

with the hope that you will enjoy reading it.

Keep smiling!

Charlene Madlee

And in each reading of Charlene’s note I scoured her words for the gift of friendship. Sometimes, like an optical illusion, I found it, and other times I didn’t.

Anyway I wrote Charlene back, thanking her and saying the thing I liked most to read were the stories that carried her by-line. That wasn’t hard to say. People like honest compliments, I know that. It was what I said next that made me hesitate because it sounded presumptuous. “I still think I’d like to study to become some kind of reporter or writer someday.” But she didn’t think I was just a presumptuous kid, because she wrote me right back, a whole page.

Footsteps. Determined footsteps came echoing down the corridor. Miss Laud? What would she want me for? I’m not breaking any rules: no cigarettes, no shoes on the bed, door open. About the nondenominational services? But I’ve already explained that, how the services go against my beliefs. I won’t go!

As the footsteps stopped at my door, fear took hold. I forced myself to look up at the full standing authority of Miss Evelyn Laud.

“You know a Nigra named Ruth Hughes?”

“Ma’am?”

“A Nigra named Ruth Hughes, says she’s your nanny, that right?”

“Uh, yes, ma’am, that’s right.”

Miss Laud nodded.

“Well, go on down to the visitors’ room and see her.”

“Ma’am?” I asked, like one who has suddenly stopped understanding the English language.

“Well, go down and see her,” repeated Miss Laud in tones loud enough for the deaf.

Through the open archway of the visitors’ room I could see Ruth, her back towards me, looking out the mesh-covered window to the courtyard below. She was wearing a dress I had never seen before, deep blue like the sky gets toward evening. It looked to be crepe and good enough not only for Sunday but for Easter Sunday as well. Strange, she didn’t seem to hear my approach for her gaze never strayed from the window.

“Ruth?”

Like a spring suddenly released, she turned, her brown face showing a wide, welcoming smile. But it wasn’t the smile that caught me quite as much as her eyes. They had this shine, a gloss that I remembered seeing once before, but I couldn’t quite remember when.

Arms circled me, bringing me close. “Patty, Honey Babe, how you doing?” A fragrance of bath powder scented gardenia. “You doin’ all right, Honey?” My head found its resting place next to her shoulder and I closed my eyes while I silently prayed for the world to go away. “Are they treating you all right here?”

I nodded my head Yes, but I didn’t know for sure whether she got my message, so I said, “I guess they are. Yes.” And there in the protection of her circle, I felt freshly born.

Ruth, still with an arm around my waist, led me to a wooden bench next to the radiator, but before we sat down she pushed me an arm’s length away and gave me a careful looking over. “You shore ain’t doin’ no overeating hereabouts, are you?”

“On Sundays we have scrambled eggs for breakfast,” I said, wondering if my answer fit the question.

“There’s six other days need accounting for.”

“Well, mostly they serve grits for breakfast.”

Ruth looked angry. “You never would eat no grits.”

“I eat them sometimes,” I said, feeling that we should somehow be spending this time together on better things. “Tell me something. What’s new in Jenkinsville?”

“Same old town it’s always been, Honey. When the Bible says that there ain’t nothing new under the sun, I think they musta had Jenkinsville in mind,” Ruth laughed, enjoying her own joke. When her face resettled she added, “Tell you this, I got myself a new job, keeps house for the colored schoolteacher, Miz Cora Mae Ford. You knows her?”

I said that I did while the feeling of betrayal swept over me.

Ruth went on. “She and her husband, Robert, he’s got himself a good job too, drives one of them trucks for Dixie Transport. Well, they got themselves three of the cutest children. Now the baby, Michael Augustus, ain’t even walking yet and I declare if he ain’t ’bout the sweetest little thing I ever did see.”

I told myself to forget it. Ruth didn’t just up and desert me, remember that. She was fired. Fired! She has to make a living, get along as best as she can. And if she didn’t care for me, would she have made this long trip just to see me?

“How did you ever manage to get here, Ruth?”

Her eyes grew wide and the gloss disappeared. It must have had something to do with how the light from the window struck her eyes. “Would you ever think that your old Ruth would come a-visiting in a big vehicle driven by a chauffeur?”

“Really? You’re kidding me?”

She put a look of mock disgust on her face. “Well, if’n a
Greyhound Bus ain’t a big vehicle and if’n a uniformed driver ain’t a chauffeur then I don’t know much of nothing no more.”

I felt the muscles about my mouth tugging upward into an unnatural or, at least, seldom-used position. “I’m really glad you came to see me. Must have been a long trip.”

“No-o-o-o.” said Ruth. “Wasn’t too long ’cause I got to see me places I ain’t never seed before. Heard about, but never seed. Places like Wynne City, Jonesboro, Bolton, places like that.” She suddenly jumped up and rushed across the room to a red-and-white-striped shopping bag.

Reaching low into the bag, she brought out a box whose lettering was clearly readable through the white tissue paper wrappings. “Ginger snaps. Thanks. You know they’re my very favorites.” I gave Ruth a quick hug. “I’m sorry I don’t have anything for you this year, but I didn’t get to do any Christmas shopping.”

“Now that don’t make no nevermind, Patty Babe, ’cause come next Christmas I’m gonna give you a list more’n six feet long. But right now I got you a little somethin’ else.” She reached into her shopping bag to bring out a yellow shoe box tied with red paper ribbon. I broke the string to find a whole family of fried chicken breasts, each one sitting on its very own pink paper napkin.

“Nothing there but the breasts,” she said. “See, Ruth remembers.”

And I saw too that Ruth had remembered her own rule about the proper frying of chicken. “Secret is,” she used to say, “to fry it, and fry it done in corn meal.” And while the chicken fried, there was something else she always did. She’d break an egg or two into a bowl of corn meal, throw in a
chopped-up onion, and then she’d drop spoonfuls of the batter into the pan next to the chicken. Hush puppies. I don’t think I ever in my life had fried chicken without them.

I pinched off a crispy piece of skin and placed it on my tongue. “Haven’t had anything this good since I’ve been here.”

“Miz Bergen, she been up visiting you?”

Ruth’s question sounded vaguely disloyal, maybe because any true answer would be pointedly disloyal. “She’s got a bad back. Says long trips make it worse. Have you seen her? Any of them?”

Her face brightened. “In the Sav-Mor Market a couple of Fridays ago I heard this little voice a-calling, ‘Ruth! Ruth!’ and when I turns around sweet little Sharon comes a-rushing to my arms. ‘Ruth,’ she says to me, ‘where you been so long?’” She shook her head like she was still short an answer. “Poor little thing, and her all the time asking, ‘Where you been so long?’”

“You saw my mother too?”

“I surely did. She was nice to me too, said she was glad to see I was gettin’ on all right. I ’members more’n fifteen years ago when your folks moved to Jenkinsville to open the store. Folks, white and colored, said Miz Bergen was the best lookin’ woman to ever come to town, and I reckon she still is.”

“She say anything, Ruth? I mean, did she mention me at all?”

Ruth looked surprised. “Why, shore she did, Honey. You her daughter, ain’t you?”

“What did she say?”

“Why, she said ’bout what any mother would say.”

I waited to see if Ruth was going to add anything more ’cause vagueness wasn’t exactly her natural state. I watched while she looked down and began adjusting the gold band on her left hand.

“Ruth, I would very much appreciate your telling me the truth. The whole truth. Please!”

“Patty, Honey, I ain’t never lied to you and I ain’t gonna start lying now, but the truth be known, Miz Bergen didn’t say too much. But I’ll tell you everything I recollect. Well, let’s see now,” she said, warming up. “Told me she gets letters from you and how you always say you’re getting along fine.”

I nodded Yes.

“And she told me how she had just sent off a sweater to you through the mails.”

“It’s the one I’m wearing.”

Ruth looked at the sweater and I hoped that I hadn’t distracted her. Then she gave me a look like she had turned a little shy. “And Miz Bergen said”—Ruth gave her wedding band a full turn—“she said I was the only one knows how to handle you.”

Anger blazed within me. “That’s all they ever think about—handling me, controlling me! Why can’t they just let me be?”

I watched Ruth shake her head like she didn’t quite know what to say anymore. But I felt like I just had to ask her the question I was always asking myself.

“Ruth, I want you to tell me something. You know me better than anybody else. What’s really wrong with me?”

“Oh, Honey Babe!” Ruth shook her head like she was trying to shake my words from her ears. “There ain’t nothing
wrong with you—nothing a few years and a few pounds won’t take care of.”

“There’s gotta be!” My voice was high enough for scaling mountains. “There’s just gotta be something or I wouldn’t always be getting into trouble, having people hate me.”

“When you get older you’re gonna see that sometimes it looks like most of the good folks done gone and acquired most of the troubles. Yes, siree! Even the Lord Jesus could’ve ’voided getting himself crucified if he could’ve learned to stay out of trouble.” It sounded as though Ruth was pretty close to blasphemy, and I searched her face for a secret sign made only to God that she was just kidding. She gave me a squeeze. “Sometimes I shore wish you knew how to go pussyfooting around your pa and your ma, but then I says to myself, if Patty learned pussyfooting then it wouldn’t hardly be Patty no more.”

“Even if you don’t know for 100 per cent positive sure,” I encouraged, “there must be things that you suspect about me. And if I knew I’d begin working on ridding myself of them. Only first I’ve got to be sure what’s wrong.”

“Don’t ask me to tell you something I don’t know. There ain’t nothing bad about you, and that’s the God’s truth. I’ve cared for chillun white and I’ve cared for chillun black. I’ve loved every single one of them, but nary a one as much as you, Patty Babe. Nary a single one.”

“You couldn’t love me as much as you do Sharon.”

“Don’t you go telling me what I couldn’t do! ’Cause I knows what I knows. And from that first day I walked into your house I loved you the most, and I loves you the most today.”

“It’s so hard to believe.”

“Why, I ain’t even the only one. He loved you. Anton did. With my own eyes I saw that man come rushing out of his hiding place to save you. And I saw his face, and I ain’t never gonna forget what was written there. ’Cause it said: ‘I’d give my own life to save her.’”

“Maybe that’s true. He gave me his ring so I’d never forget that he loved me, and that I was a person of value. Only thing is I lost the ring, and then gradually I guess I lost its meaning.”

Ruth snapped open her pocketbook. “Honey Babe, you didn’t lose your ring. I heard you tell that to the man from the FBI and you musta told that story so many times, you come to believe it.” She held up the ring. “You gave me this for safekeeping when I told you your pa was coming home to see you. Remember?”

I brought his ring to my lips, barely believing it. “He did love me,” I said to Ruth. “And maybe one day my mother and father will too.”

Ruth’s eyes came level with mine and I could feel her resources rushing forward like front line soldiers to battle. “I ain’t nevah ’fore cast me no ’spersions on other folks’ folks,” she said slowly, “but your folks ain’t nevah gonna feel nothing good regarding you. And they ain’t the number one best quality folks neither. They shore ain’t. When I goes shoppin’ and I sees the label stamped, ‘Irregular’ or ‘Seconds,’ then I knows I won’t have to pay so much for it. But you’ve got yourself some irregular seconds folks, and you’ve been paying more’n top dollar for them. So jest don’t go a-wishing for what ain’t nevah gonna be.”

“But I always thought it was me. Because I was bad.”

“You ain’t bad!”

I kissed my ring again, and then gave Ruth the strongest squeeze I could manage. “Nothing has changed, but I feel different. Good. Like a good person! And that was what all the whispering was about!”

“What whispering you talkin’ bout?”

“Every so often, there’s this whispering going on inside me. And whispering’s always so soft I could never make it out before.”

“Was it God a-speakin’ to you?” asked Ruth, her eyes wide.

I never thought about it being God. What would God be wasting his time with a twelve-year-old for? “I don’t think,” I said, “that God would whisper, do you?”

Ruth pressed her lips together. “The ways of the Lord are filled with wonder and mystery.”