At Peace

He is a Pillsbury doughboy with short fingers and pudgy hands. At 53, he carries a journeyman beer belly and a gentle grin indents his puffed out cheeks. He sits in my living room, faded tan jacket still on, and knots with care the apron strings of my daughter’s doll. She, in her own adolescent pudginess, works her hands in mid-air in a perfect mimic of his. A five year olds’ grin mirrors the one on his face. He is my boss at the water treatment plant and he asks me if I would please work a graveyard shift tonight on my day off….and by the age of 20 he has two tank destroyers under his command shot up and is driving a third when they order him to stop at the edge of Berlin so the Russians can finalize their revenge for Operation Barbarossa upon the Berliners and their army….

He has a special regard for me because, at 30, I have two daughters, ages three and five, who remind him of the innocent days of his three now grown daughters. In turn, I have a growing respect for him as we talk at length during our slack periods at the filter plant about our families and about World War II, its history in his life and in books. I pause during our frequent talks, hearing for the first time what he is not saying while he recounts about time standing still….the incendiary shell bursts at his feet and propels him backward with a giant’s sucker punch. Desperate for oxygen, he pulls the first deep lungful in through his nose and the heat sears the mucous lining. He is robbed so completely of a sense of smell that a bologna sandwich is a steak is a chicken leg is a bowl of Campbell’s tomato soup....

“Sure, Claude. Be glad to. I’ll be there at 11,” I say, already counting the overtime money.

“Well, good. Thanks, I appreciate it. You know, we’d be okay if some of our people would just quit flushing their toilets.”

“I know,” agreeing with the old joke all water operators share.

“With that settled, I think I’ll get back to my bird watching,” he softly confides

Another joke shared, I just chuckle. He sneaks out on Friday afternoons when our shifts overlap and states that he is going bird watching.

“I’m still seeking the elusive red-headed, double-breasted mattress-thrasher,” he intones solemnly and I know he really means he is headed for the Airport Lounge for a few gin and tonics and the furtive smoking of borrowed cigarettes. But I follow our ritual and reply with the caution “Keep you eye out for bears”…. the sleeping bag is a double thickness wool blanket with a zipper lengthwise in the middle. The bag can be pulled over his head mummy style. When it is wet, it retains little heat lying on the rain-soaked ground. The German shelling stops sometime in the night. The jeeps, trucks, and tanks pull into thickets of trees and brush in the darkness. They throw their bags onto the ground, so tired that they don’t even shovel away the mud and the pools of water to create a dry cradle for their bodies. His tank cracks, pops, and hisses as it cools nearby. He falls quickly into a hard dead sleep. He wakes when his gunner jabs him in the ribs whispering, “Look! Look there!” Through the lifting morning fog, he sees rows upon rows of green onions. Last night they stopped in their blind weariness by a farmer’s field. Here the spring crop pops up through the French soil. Mindless now of the mud, he joins the other newly-awakened men and crawls on all fours into the field and grabs at the green clumps….

I know full well that he is married, very married, as only those who have lived through the war years can be married. It has now been twenty eight years and her name is Colleen, but he nicknames her The Bear. The war uprooted them, separated them. Friends were shipped to places unpronounceable and some died there. War rationing made for lean times, but not as lean as the Depression. Back then, the concept of uncertainty was transformed into a tangible emotion. Now they do things they can share like hunting together, playing in a band together, eating together, or drinking together: the simple things, the easy pleasures that are as sure as sound sleep…. he still dreams war dreams, some funny, like when they prop up the body of the frozen Kraut captain in the back of their jeep and drive around to the different camps scaring the hell out of the lieutenants. After they are ordered to never do that again, they laugh and say, “What are they going to do? Send us to a war front?” Other dreams weren’t funny, they were nightmares; like when he advances on a distant enemy under sniper fire, looks around and then down at himself. He is dressed in a German uniform. Those soldiers he shoots at are Americans. He bolts out of bed screaming and....Colleen wakes, goes into the kitchen, and starts the coffee which they will drink until the sun comes up and Claude goes to work. She then strips the bed of the sweaty sheets, opening the window to air out the room.

He shows up on the Fridays we share looking like hell. After we get the plant running, the chlorine dosage set, and the flocculent chemistry balanced, he says, “I had that dream again”. We finish our morning chores, getting the water flowing through the plant. We pour our cups of coffee and talk and listen and listen and talk …. today is quiet so Claude turns the driving over to his gunner from New Jersey and steps down off the moving tank. He starts a conversation with a fellow GI from Pennsylvania and they compare deer hunting stories. After a mile of walking, Claude climbs back into the tank and secures the hatch. A couple of minutes later a shell lands so close to them that it knocks them to a stop. Their ears ring from the explosion. Claude lifts the hatch and inspects the damage. The kid is gone and the tank drips red, fresh and wet like a new coat of paint….

Long after the war he first sets their hunting rifles in the corner of the least used room of the house. Then for some housecleaning reason, he moves them into a closet that is now just a storage space with sliding doors. And, finally, coming across them years later, he takes them downtown and sells them .