One Last Battle
“Hitler had flooded all of the fields. The whole countryside was under eight feet of water. Reconnaissance came back and told us it was like flying over a mirror that stretched from the beachheads back in forty miles. They told us there were a few places that weren’t under, but Hitler had covered them with sharpened poles. Said those places looked like a porcupine treading water. We were supposed to jump in there the next day.”
Papa Cogan paused to cram the stem of his church warden’s pipe between his teeth and thumb a matchbox from the bib of his overalls. Paul looked up from where he sat on the porch steps and watched Papa light the bowl with a quick series of shallow smacks. A garland of blue smoke wreathed the air above Papa’s head, and he rested the long-stemmed pipe between his thumb and forefinger on his knee.
“If a man jumped in that water, with his pack, his emergency 'chute, his gun, them heavy jumping boots, he was one man Hitler wouldn’t have to worry about, because he would drown before he could cut himself out of all that gear. Of course there were a lot of men who would’ve preferred the water to jumping into the Nazzy pickets. I can remember floating down through darkness and watching the tracers zipping up toward us. They were the prettiest red shafts of light. You could hear them popping rips in the silk canopy of your 'chute. I’ve seen soldiers hanging dead in their harnesses as they drifted down out of the night. Once they hit the ground, their 'chutes will fill up with wind, like sails, and drag them until they snagged in a fence row or a tree line. There would be a bunch of dead paratroopers rolled up there like so many tumbleweeds. Mike Hanrahan saved his butt one time by crawling up in the middle of a pile of those dead ones and playing possum while a Nazzy patrol walked by.”
Papa raised the pipe up to his mouth and clenched it between his teeth as he fumbled for another match and relit it. Paul turned from Papa and looked out across the flat field behind the house and imagined parachutes billowing limply to the ground in the middle of the chatter of automatic gunfire.
Paul heard voices from the side yard and then a loud grunt. Porter, Papa’s youngest son, poked his head from around the side of the house and glared up at the old man.
“Mama wants to know if you’re planning on bringing them peas home for supper sometime tonight,” Porter said loudly.
Papa closed his eyes and slowly drew on his pipe. Paul peered past Papa at Porter who had a deep shade of crimson rising up from his neck and flushing in his jowls. Porter was the same age as Paul’s father, but he was single and still lived on the farm with Papa and his mother. Paul would often hide in the horse shed and spy through a knothole across the twenty acres that separated his family’s spread from Papa’s as Porter fed the hogs. Nearly every morning Porter would stalk out to the pen behind Papa’s house and herd the hogs up to the trough with a broad fence-slat. Paul would see the board whip down on the wide backs of the squealing mob, and, a second later, hear the thudding spank of wood on hide. Paul would watch the waggle of Porter’s head and then hear the curses carry across the open field. Paul had never seen this ritual up close, but he imagined Porter’s face to be as florid when he raged at the pigs as it was now as he waited for his father to answer.
“Tell your Mama that I will be there directly, son,” Papa finally replied.
At that moment, Paul’s mother pushed open the back door with a bushel basket of peas and carried it to the edge of the porch where Porter fumed.
“There you go, Papa,” she said and whisked back through the screen door into the kitchen.
“Shake a leg, old man,” Porter hissed, “or you’ll miss your supper.”
Porter spun on his heel, ignoring the basket of peas, and haughtily strode straight-legged across the meadow toward the hog-pen.
“Here, Papa, I’ll carry it over for you,” Paul said as he scurried around the corner of the porch to the basket.
“Have a seat, boy. We’re in no hurry to get over there,” Papa said, waving Paul away from the peas, “Supper won’t be ready for a long while yet.”
Papa shifted in the seat of his chair by half-raising himself on the arms and then slowly settling himself back down. With both hands, he reached down and lifted his left leg just above the knee and then dropped it, his heel landing with a hollow thump on the porch boards. Paul, who had returned to his roost on the porch steps, irresistibly stared at the oddly-scuffed boot that was wedged on over the wooden foot.
“Supper time, Paul,” his mother called from inside the kitchen, “Ask Papa if he’d like to stay and eat with us.”
“No thank you, Ruth,” Papa called back over his shoulder, “but I wouldn’t mind sitting here a while longer and enjoying your beautiful sunset.”
“Suit yourself, but I cooked up two fryers. We’ve got plenty to feed another hungry mouth.”
“C’mon, Papa,” Paul pleaded, offering his hand to help the old man out of the chair.
“Go on, boy. I’ll wait for you to get finished before I leave.”
Paul backed slowly through the screen door, watching the back of Papa’s head as he rummaged through his bib pocket for his elusive matchbox.
Paul slapped through the screen door onto the porch, wiping chicken grease from the corners of his mouth, and tripped over Papa’s cane which had been propped against his chair. The clatter roused Papa from a catnap, and the old man jerked his chin up from his chest, wide-eyed, and frantically groped the air around his chair for his cane, like a sentry caught without his rifle.
“Here, here, who goes there?” Papa barked down the porch steps.
“It’s me, Papa,” Paul whispered as he snatched up the fallen cane and handed it to the old man.
“Don’t scare a man like that, son. An old timer like me might just keel over.”
Papa sat up and replaced the cane beside him and retrieved his pipe which had fallen from his lap.
“Were you dreaming about the war, Papa?”
“I always dream about the war, boy. The damned thing won’t let me go.”
“Nightmares, Papa, like seeing dead people?”
“Naw, just faces, and things that happened. Just now I was dreaming about sitting in a vineyard outside a little French town, drinking wine.”
“The town where you lost your foot?”
“Yeah, that was the place.”
“Where Mike Hanrahan got killed?”
“Yeah, but, in the dream, he’s still alive, and we’re drinking wine together.”
“Tell me about how he got killed, Papa. Tell me all of that story.”
“Don’t be a ghoul, boy. There’s shouldn’t be any pleasure in hearing about how a person got killed.”
“Please, Papa. I want to know. I want to know what is was like.”
“Let me tell you about...”
“Please, Papa. Tell me about that place. Tell me about you and Mike.”
Papa, in the dwindling light, looked down at Paul on the steps, and, for the first time, maybe because the dream was still fresh, or maybe because Paul, Papa could tell, really wanted to know what happened, without judgment or question, Papa gave words to the story he had held nameless for fifty years. The hysteria and excitement of that time washed over him again.
“It was about two weeks after we got a foothold in France, and Mike and me, our squad, were rolling the Nazzies back toward Germany, fighting from town to town. One night we cleared out this little hamlet, this little-bitty town that wasn’t but a church and school and a handful of houses. We had come up on it that afternoon. We’d covered over twenty miles that day, which was quite a ways because those Nazzies weren’t giving up easy. Anyway, we were real surprised we got that far, and we were even more surprised when we saw the Nazzies clearing out of this little town as we came up the road toward them. They didn’t fire a single shot. They just loaded up about a half dozen halftracks and skedaddled out the back door. We pulled up about a quarter mile from the village and sent pickets around either side. The pickets checked out the town, sneaking door to door, to see if there was anybody hanging around, you know, trying to lure us into a trap, but, sure enough, the whole lot of them had cleared out. In fact, all the people that lived there had cleared out too. The whole place was empty as a poor man’s belly.
“Me and Mike went snooping around the old church because sometimes there would be people hiding down in the basement. Church basements were a favorite hiding spot for them Frenchmen. That wasn’t too smart, because if I could figure that out in a couple of weeks, I’m sure them Nazzies had it figured out too. But, anyway, we crept down there, but the place was empty. Not a soul. What we did find, though, made us a whole lot happier than a bunch of old men and women and kids hunkering in the dark. We found the biggest wine cellar that I’d ever seen. We wondered why a church had this much booze stashed in the basement, and Mike, who was an Irishman and a good Catholic, said that it must all be sacramental wine. I told him that if a church had that much wine on hand then they must have Communion three times a day, all week long. We were real surprised, too, that the Nazzies hadn’t tore the place up. They were real good about wrecking places before they left them. Sure, there were a couple dozen empty bottles laying around the floor, so we figured that a few soldiers had probably gone down and had a party, maybe figured on keeping what they found quiet so they’d have a nice stash if they hung around for very long. There must have been a thousand bottles down there, all lined up in these dusty old oak racks. Me and Mike each grabbed four bottles and headed out of there.
“On the other side of this little place was a vineyard. It had a little stone wall around it, just a few rocks piled on top of each other, really, and , inside, were rows and rows of grapevines tangled all over these wooden poles. We figured that maybe this vineyard was why there were so much wine at the church; maybe they bottled it there. Anyway, me and Mike crawled over the wall into that vineyard and sat back under some grapevines. That day had been hot, but now it was cooling off, especially in the shade there in the vineyard. Our patrol had sent pickets a mile down the road where the Nazzies had gone, to make sure they didn’t sneak back up on us, and we could hear mortar fire off to the north of us, but a long way away, probably ten miles or so, so me and Mike relaxed there in the shade and started drinking that wine. That was the first time we’d been able to kick back and relax since we’d got to France.
“Anyhow, we sat there and drank that wine. The rest of the patrol had set up in the church, but me and Mike stayed out there in the vineyard as the sun set and the whole countryside got dark. After two weeks of hand-to-hand, it was real peaceful out there. We got to talking about how much we missed home. Mike’s family, you know, owned this section that your pa owns now. We’d grown up together, and we’d joined up in the Army together, and, as we sat in that vineyard, it seemed real strange that two country boys that had never been twenty miles from home before the war started were sitting drinking wine in France, half the world away from everything that we knew. The stars came out, and the moon. It was real bright that night, and we ended up drinking all of that wine we brought out there with us.
“Now, neither one of us was much of a drinker. My daddy and Mike’s daddy both were teetotalers. If they’d caught us drinking like that on the farm, we’d have got our hides tanned. But we were in France, and we figured we deserved a break. We thought we were men. We started boasting to each other about how brave we’d been, how we could lick our weight in Nazzies in our sleep. And then Mike started getting weepy on me. He started telling me how I was his very best friend in the whole world. He told me that, if it weren’t for me being there with him, he would have tried to get out of the Army and come back home. He said that he was awful homesick, but, because we were there together, he’d be able to tough it out. He said all he could think about was getting back home, when this was all over. Then I made some dumb comment about whether or not we would ever get back home. Mike put his arm around me and looked me in the eyes, real serious, and he said, 'Buddy, don’t you worry about that. I’ll take care of you. I’ll make sure that you get home okay. I’ll make sure that a bullet don’t send you home in a box.’ And I told him that I’d do the same for him, and we sat there, leaned back up under those grapevines, bone-tired from two weeks of war, two friends in the middle of a foreign land, and we fell asleep.
“I don’t know what woke me up the next morning, but, for some reason, I opened my eyes, and I saw, on the other side of the stone wall, walking up the road, a bunch of Nazzies. Somehow they had gotten past our pickets, killed all of them. Just moving my eyes, I glanced beside me and saw Mike still asleep under the grapevines. The Nazzy patrol on the other side of the wall stopped and circled up, leaning their helmets together and talking to each other, like they were deciding what to do next. What I didn’t know at the time was that they had already found the rest of our patrol in the church. Our guys had found the wine too, and they were all sleeping off a drunk when the Nazzies burst in and killed them. Me and Mike must have got pretty drunk too, because we slept through all of that. I thought that the Nazzies hadn’t seen me and Mike though, because we were up under the vines pretty good. And even though we had got drunk, we had the sense to keep our rifles near us. Mine was laying near my feet, in the grass, but out from under the grapevines, and Mike’s was beside mine. We still had our clips and grenades on our belts though.
“Anyway, I sat there real still. I was hoping that the Nazzies would move on soon, and me and Mike could sneak down the row of vines and crawl into the next field and try to rendezvous with the rest of our guys. As I watched them stand in that circle and talk, I saw a rifle barrel rise up over the shoulder of a Nazzy whose back was to me. They knew we were there, and they were pretending to talk so they could get a shot off at us. A Nazzy on the far side of the circle was using his pals as a blind, and I realized that he was taking a bead right between my eyes. In the same instant that I realized that Nazzy was going to shoot me, I heard Mike holler from beside me and the rifle go off. I tried to jump forward and grab my rifle, but Mike threw himself in front of me, and I heard the bullet hit his helmet. I snatched up my rifle and started firing at them, and I hit one trying to come over the wall. The rest of them ducked down behind the stones and returned fire. I grabbed Mike and pulled him deep into the grapevines with me. I kept firing at the wall from inside the vines to keep their heads down, and then I pulled a grenade from my belt and lobbed it the twenty yards to the wall, and it bounced once and rolled up to the bottom of the wall on my side. I pushed us even deeper in the vines and rolled myself on top of Mike just as the grenade went off. It blew a big hole in the wall and killed a couple of the Nazzies and scattered the rest. I jumped up out of the vines and started picking off the rest of them as they wandered around in the road, dazed by the concussion of the blast.
“When I was sure there weren’t any more of them on the other side of the wall, I knelt down to Mike, who was still just laying there, and pulled off his helmet to see where the bullet had got him, but he didn’t have a mark on him. The bullet had ricocheted off his helmet, leaving a little dent in the metal right over the temple. It had walloped him good in the head and knocked him cold. Even though I was scared to death and my hands were shaking so hard I could barely hold my rifle, I started to giggle about the headache Mike would have when he woke up. A hangover and a whack in the head to boot. I shook him until he started to wake up, and then he started thrashing around there in the grapevines. I held him, and he opened his eyes, and they were real wide and glassy. I asked him if he was okay, but all he kept asking was whether Mom would be upset that we had been out all night. That bullet had knocked the sense clean out of him.
“I got him up on his feet and handed him his rifle, but he was awful confused and kept asking about his momma. He kept telling me that we were going to be in big trouble for staying out all night. I got us over the wall and back up into the town, and when we got to the church and went inside, I saw what had happened to rest of our patrol. When we came back out, I could hear heavy armor moving up the road to the town from the east. What I didn’t know then was that the place where we had pushed so far ahead the day before had made a gap on either side of us, and the reason the Nazzies had cleared out so quick was to go get reinforcements to try to tear through this hole. What we heard coming down the road was half a Panzer division rumbling up to cut our line and flank the troops to the north. I took Mike by the hand, just like he was a little kid, and led him back through the town to the west, to try to get back to the unit that was behind us. Our troops, since they couldn’t contact my patrol after they were killed that morning, had expected the worst and had poured in every available soldier into our breach, most of them green recruits. Just as we got to this big, open field west of town, Mike started getting upset and argued with me. He kept telling me that we were going the wrong direction to get home. He said that we had to go the other way, through the woods, to get back to the house. I was frantic. The Nazzy tanks were almost into town, and I didn’t know whether to argue with him or just pick him up over my shoulder and carry him. I had my mind made up for me.
“Artillery, mortar fire started falling on the town thick and fast. The church came down in a thick cloud of dust and smoke. Another round hit between us and the church and blew us over. From out of the rubble of the town, the Panzers crashed through and opened up their turret cannons on the treeline on the other side of the field. I threw Mike over my shoulder and took off for that treeline at a dead run. Mike was my size, and heavy, and I let our rifles slip off my shoulder and fall in the weeds. I was running flat out as fast as I could. The treeline was a hundred and fifty yards away, and I wanted to put most of that distance behind me before the Nazzy infantry came up behind the tanks. As I got closer to the woods, I could see puffs of smoke rising through the trees off to my right where our artillery was firing on the town. By the time I got seventy-five yards from the trees, I could see our boys dug in, hiding behind the tree trunks. About that same time, I heard the rifle fire open up behind me, and I saw the grass twitching around me and heard the little thuds of bullets smacking the earth at my feet. When I got fifty yards from the treeline, a medic and a dozen of our boys started running into the field for us. Our soldiers were firing as they ran, putting down fire for cover. Just as the medic reached me, twenty-five yards from our line, I saw a fireball explode in the treeline, exactly in the place I was running to, and then another, in a line between the first explosion and me, and another and another, each closer, until I stumbled into the medic and flames climbed over us, and everything went black.
“When I came to, the grass I was laying in was smoldering, and the air was closed in with smoke. I could barely see the forest, but, in the places where the smoke thinned out, I could see dead men hanging in the trees. Mike was laying beside me, and I could tell from the look on his face that he was dead. When I tried to get up, I realized that my foot was gone. The wound was burned bad, so there wasn’t any bleeding hardly. That’s what probably saved my life. I sat back down and listened to see if I could tell what was going on, but everything was quiet. I started to think about what I’d told Mike, about keeping him safe, and, I’m not ashamed to tell you boy, I started crying like a little girl. I didn’t seem like I could even hear myself cry, and I got worried that I’d gone deaf. But then, as I buried my face in my hands, through that muffled quiet, I heard a bird call from in the forest, a strange call, not like any bird song I knew, some strange European bird...”
As if on cue, a bob-white whistled from the dark treeline across the field behind the house. Paul, in the pale, blue-white light of the sodium-vapor lamp on the peak of the barn, saw the wetness well in Papa’s eyes. Across the field, at Papa’s house, the last light winked out.
Paul was awakened by voices arguing in the side yard. As he slipped on his jeans and sneakers, he recognized Papa’s and Porter’s voices, Porter’s voice loud and slurred. Paul squeezed out the screen door onto the porch and saw Porter waving around an old carbine rifle as Papa tried to snatch for it.
“C’mon Ed, this thing’s worth two hundred dollars,” Porter said to Paul’s father, “I’ll let you have it for eighty.”
“Give me that weapon, son,” Papa hissed.
“Ed, you know that old Peterson down the road will give me a hundred for it in a heartbeat. I’m trying to give you a deal.”
“I’m no collector, and neither is Peterson,” Paul’s father said evenly, “why don’t you just give your daddy his gun back and go home and get some sleep. It looks like you had a pretty good time in town last night.”
Paul’s father grinned at Porter, like he was trying to be his chum, gave him a wink.
“The heck with you,” Porter spat at Paul’s father, “I’m getting me some money for this thing.”
Paul had joined the men in the yard, and he could smell the whiskey on Porter’s breath, and he could see his father’s eyes narrow, the blood rise in his face.
“Porter, I’m going to ask you this just once. Take that rifle and get off my property.”
“Ed, he don’t mean anything by it,” Papa pleaded, stepping between the two men.
“Leave now or I’ll remove you myself.”
“You ain’t going to do squat. I’ll leave when I’m good and ready.”
Paul’s father stepped around Papa, and Porter leveled the rifle at his hip. Papa put himself between them again, his back to Porter.
“That weapon’s loaded. I don’t know if he knows it or not,” Papa tersely whispered to Paul’s father, “just go on in the house, and I’ll take him home.”
Paul’s father stood silent for a moment, and then he backed up, reaching out with his hand, behind him, to feel for Paul.
“C’mon, Paul. Excitement’s over.”
“You’d better get. Ain’t no one tells me what to do, mister,” Porter slurred, waving the rifle, “you and that brat of yours. Maybe, Papa, you ought to just move over here. Live with somebody likes to listen to your old stories.”
Papa kept himself between the rifle barrel and Paul and his father as they moved around the porch to the back steps. Porter stayed where he was, swaying slightly, but he kept the barrel trained on the three of them.
“Nobody tells me what to do,” Porter repeated, his eyelids getting heavy, “especially not some old man or his goody friends.”
Papa and Paul and his father stopped at the bottom of the steps, watching Porter’s head begin to nod forward, the rifle sag from his grasp.
“Especially some old man who can’t do nothing right,” Porter mumbled.
Papa whirled toward Porter, his cane up in the air, like a sword.
“What did you say, boy?” Papa bellowed.
Porter, startled, swung the gun up, toward Paul and his father. In one instant, Papa, with an astonishing spryness, pivoted on his wooden foot and lunged through the air to shield them, and the rifle went off with a deafening crack. Papa fell hard at Paul’s feet, and Porter dropped the gun and ran toward his house, stumbling across the field. Paul’s mother rushed out of the back door and shrieked when she saw Papa lying in a crumpled heap at the foot of the stairs.
“Call an ambulance,” Paul’s father barked, and he knelt beside the old man, gently rolling him over to find the wound.
Paul, stunned, knelt also and cradled the old man’s head. Paul gently brushed the dirt from Papa’s forehead, and Papa, flinching from the boy’s touch, opened his eyes.
“What happened,” Papa asked, trying to raise himself on his elbow.
“Be still, Papa, we’ve got to find out where you’ve been hit,” Paul’s father said, frantically checking Papa’s shirt for blood, “where does it hurt.”
“The only place it hurts,” Papa replied, “is my elbow where I fell on the concrete.”
Papa sat up, slowly, and rubbed his arm.
“The Lord be praised,” Paul’s father said, “I think he missed you.”
Papa felt up and down his chest, amazed, and struggled to get back up on his feet. Paul, as he pushed off the ground to stand also, caught a glint of metal out of the corner of his eye.
“Look,” he said, as he picked it up from the ground in front of where Papa fell.
Paul held up a piece of lead, and he quickly dropped it because it burned his fingers. His father retrieved it and held it up in the sunlight. Papa slowly took it from Paul’s father and turned it in his fingers. It was the rifle slug, flattened on one side as if it had hit something hard, like metal. As they looked closer, they could see, in the tiny scrapes on the side of the bullet that had flattened, traces of olive drab paint.