“Oh my God.” She looked at the both of us in amazement. “But, if he was on fire, like you say, he was burning so hot and bright you couldn’t even look, why did you grab him?”
Henry looked at her like she was from another planet, which I guess she was, as far as this was concerned. “Because one of us was in trouble. That’s what you do. The war made us family. Any one of us would have done it without hesitation. It just happened to be me because I was the closest. If I had been two more steps away, it would have been your grandfather, or any one of us. We watched out for each other, no matter what. Reaching into a fire is nothing, it never even crossed my mind not to.” That brought thoughts of Shadroe to my mind, but I pushed them away.
“What was it? What was in the pool?”
Henry hesitated, and then glanced at me. I just shrugged, so he answered. “It was blood. A giant pool, who knows how many feet deep, of human blood.”
She turned to me, her mouth twisted in disgust. “Why would there be so much blood? How could there be that much blood?”
I told another lie. “We never found out. About then the demo charges we’d planted went off, and we got out as fast as we could.”
“You must have seen something. What were you doing when you fell?”
“I was trying to kill a man named Piotr Rafal Ostrowski. We were at an old train yard, long since bombed out of service by the Germans, and I had chased him up to the control room overlooking the tracks. We fought, he won. Then he threw me right out the window from three stories up.”
“Peter who?”
We heard the screen door creak open, then slap shut.
“Piotr. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”
Leon tromped into the room, bringing the scent of the night air and pine trees with him. “It’s all clear, Uncle Henry.”
Henry stood up creakily and clapped his nephew on the shoulder. “Thank you, Leon. I think we’ll be alright tonight.”
“Me and Carlos will be back tomorrow morning, early.”
“You don’t have to do that, we can handle it from here on out.”
Leon looked at Anne and myself, then back at his uncle. “No offense to your friends, but I don’t think so. If somebody is coming here to mess with you, they’re gonna be damn sorry. I’ll see you tomorrow. Nice to meet you folks.”
I could see the pride in Henry’s eyes as we waved good-bye. I knew what sort of trouble was coming to visit tomorrow and wished there was some way to keep Leon out of it.
Leon left and Henry got everyone settled for the night. Anne got the guest room, and I got the couch in the den. I listened to Anne moving around and making the zippers on her duffel bags sing. A little while later I heard the sharp snap of the light going off and then the creak of the bed as she settled down. Henry must have heard it, too, because a few minutes later he padded into the den and sat down in his easy chair. “Still up?”
“Looks like it.”
He sighed and rubbed his knees. “My joints act up at night. Everything but my hands. I guess that shows that there’s a blessing in everything if you look at it the right way.”
“I guess so. Of course, if you close the other eye, you see there’s a curse in everything, too. Is that because there’s good and evil in everything, or because everything is both good and evil depending on how you look at it?”
He shook his head. It was an old fireside conversation. “I like Patty’s granddaughter.”
“Me, too.”
“Seems a shame.”
“She insisted that I bring her along. She lost her grandfather to the bags. They killed him right in front of her, Henry.” I clenched my fists in my lap. “They’re here. All those years and miles, and they’re right back here with us. Can you believe that?”
“Oh, yes. And so can you. We knew it wasn’t over. We’ve been waiting all these years for the other shoe to drop, the both of us. Anne doesn’t care about ancient history, though. She doesn’t really even want revenge, I’d wager. Oh, there might be some of that in her heart, but mostly I imagine that she wants to know that there’s order in the world. Justice. She wants reassurance that things happen for a reason, that her world still makes sense the way it used to.”
“I know. I’d like a little reassurance on that score, too, come to think of it.”
He chuckled, his deep voice smooth in the moonlit room. “I think you and I both know better by now. It’s not that the universe doesn’t want justice, it’s that it doesn’t even know the concept. Like color to a blind man.”
“Maybe that’s what we’re here for, then. Maybe we, of all things in the universe, sow justice in a field that was never meant to have it.”
“Could be. In any case, you know that she wouldn’t be here right now if you didn’t want it, no matter what she said or who her grandfather was.”
“I need her, Henry. I can’t finish this without her.”
“Is it worth it, considering what might happen to her?”
I leaned forward on the couch, suddenly angry. “You tell me, Henry. You’ve been working on what happened that day for decades now. So you tell me. Is it worth sacrificing her for? And you and me besides? Shit, we just sat on those pieces all this time, heads in the sand, hoping it would all go away. Or maybe just hoping to die before anything else was required of us. Isn’t that what we were doing?”
He sighed a long, tired sigh. “Maybe we were. The question is, why aren’t you still? You gave up on us twenty years ago and went to hide down on your farm. You didn’t even come out to Frank’s funeral. And I’m pretty sure I know what you’ve been working yourself up to since Maggie died. Why are you here now?”
I thought about the kind of obligation that can never be denied. Ties that cannot be cut. “Patrick called me for help. I had to go. And when I got there I didn’t save him.” I met Henry’s eyes. “They killed one of us. I will endure for as long as it takes to teach the man responsible what that means.”
He nodded and I could see for a moment the old Henry, full of fire. “And then?”
“And then it will be finished. I’ll be done.”
We sat in silence for a little while, each lost in thoughts of the past and the friends who dwelled there.
“I came out here to show you something.” He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a small dark object and put it into my hand. It was light, maybe as heavy as a spool of thread and as big as an unshelled walnut, and made of wood. I smiled as it uncurled in my open palm and stood up.
“Mr. C!”
“Oh, yes. He’s still around. Will be until we’re both gone, I imagine.”
Mr. C, or Mr. Careful as he was known to the squad, was a small wooden spider about three inches long and two inches wide. His head, thorax, and abdomen were all one piece of wood, carved by Henry with a pocketknife over a month of campfires. It was pretty crude. The shape was right, but there was no real detail carved into it.
The two eyes in the front, on the crown of its head, were the largest, and made from two sewing pins with round black plastic heads on them. The pins had been cut in half, and the steel shafts of the top halves had been pushed into the wood until only the round heads were showing for eyes.
The sharp bottom halves had been bent into gentle curves and pushed into the wood underneath the head for fangs. Those only stuck out about a half-inch or so. There were six more eyes around the top, but they were actually just dents pushed into the wood with the tip of a knife and colored in with a felt tip pen.
The legs were made out of matchsticks with the square edges whittled off until they were pretty round. Each leg was made up of three segments, a long one pushed into a hole in the body like a dowel, a short one in the middle, and a slightly longer one that was whittled down to a point at the end.
The ends where the segments met were wrapped in a tiny piece of cloth cut from one of Henry’s shirts, and then carefully wrapped again entirely in brown thread to make a joint. When Henry had first finished putting it together, the legs had stuck straight out from the sides of the body, like eight spokes.
We didn’t know what to think of the serious black man in our midst at that time, new as we were to both the army and each other, especially since Henry was the only black man some of us had ever met in person.
