Henry pursed his lips as he tightened a bolt on my engine with a spanner.
“I still can’t believe he’s a part of this,” my brother muttered, shaking his head.
I knew the feeling well. I was running late to a party intended to welcome a group of German families to their new home in Huntsville—celebrating their arrival as if they were special dignitaries. I hadn’t even left my driveway and my skin was already crawling.
Throughout our marriage, my husband and I rarely disagreed. But in the year since Calvin was transferred from El Paso to Huntsville, we’d rarely gone more than a day without arguing about the men he was now referring to as “our Germans.” He said everyone on base called them that, but whenever I heard those words, I wanted to scream.
My brother stepped out from beneath the hood, then slammed it closed. It seemed that whether he found work processing insurance claims in Chicago or laboring on the railway in Tennessee or selling tickets at a fair in Nashville, things inevitably went sour and Henry ended up back with me and Calvin. We never minded when Henry came to us—we’d even added a small studio apartment over the garage so he’d have a private place of his own. When Henry told me he was coming back this time, I called around until I found him some work at a lumberyard just a few miles away. A few weeks in, he seemed to be doing well.
Even so, if we’d had any other surviving family anywhere other than Huntsville, I’d have suggested he go to them instead. Henry spent less than a year in Europe in the dying days of the war and he never spoke about his time there, but he had come back a broken man. And now my brother did not need to be living in a town lousy with Germans.
Henry had changed even since I saw him at Christmas. Sometimes he would get a glazed, confused look about him—as if he were drunk. It was even more perplexing that he’d gained maybe fifty or sixty pounds in just four months and his once-muscular frame seemed bloated. I was worried that he’d been unwell, but Henry said he’d been eating too much fried food at that traveling fair. I couldn’t shake the feeling that wasn’t the whole truth. How much fried food could one man eat?
He wiped his hands on his thighs and gave me a dark look.
“There. New spark plugs. Have fun with your Nazi friends.” He was joking, but his tone was so bitter, I felt a pang of guilt. He suddenly paused, then added softly, “Lizzie, please be careful.”
“Cal says they aren’t a threat...” I said, but I trailed off. That was what Calvin said. The problem was, in the beginning, Calvin fought tooth and nail against those men being allowed into the community, and for good reason too.
“Men like that are a threat as long as they’re breathing,” Henry said abruptly.
“I don’t even want to go,” I insisted. Attending the lunch felt like a betrayal of my brother. I could stay home, but that option felt like a betrayal of my husband. “Calvin says it’s important that I show my support.”
Henry shrugged and turned back toward the house.
Every now and again, I remembered the jubilation I felt the day he came home after the war. It once seemed a miracle that he’d returned physically unscathed. But after five years of ups and downs, it was clear that while Henry’s body was intact, his mind wasn’t. I also knew exactly who was to blame. And I was about to go drink champagne and nibble on sandwiches with a group of them, on a lawn at the Redstone Arsenal facility.
6
Lizzie
Dallam County, Texas
1933
My father and I stood side by side, staring out at a wide, flat field. Every now and again, he wheezed or released a cough that sounded as dry as the earth. A haze of dust lingered across the field and all around us, but there was nothing subtle about it this time—a brown fog had blown in. It would take time for that dust to fall back to earth and longer to clear from our lungs.
“It’ll rain now,” Dad said, nodding with satisfaction toward the field we’d just plowed. “Sure as anything. Rain follows the plow, sure as sunset follows the sunrise.”
This was one of Dad’s good days, so I didn’t point out that his theory had well and truly been disproved. We’d plowed straight after the harvest in ’30, ’31, and ’32, but we hadn’t had decent rain in years. I nodded as if I believed him, but I didn’t know what to believe anymore.
“Are you two going to stand around all day admiring your handiwork, or will you bring the tractor back to the barn so I can take a look at that dicky disc?” Henry called.
Dad and I turned toward the sound of my brother’s voice and found him strutting toward us.
“Why does that boy always look like he just invented ice cream?” Dad muttered. I nodded in bewildered agreement. Much as I adored my brother, I rarely understood him. Henry was born with a uniquely sunny disposition and a charm that meant he could talk his way out of any scrape. That was fortunate, because he also found his way into more scrapes than most.
“Well, aren’t you two peas in a pod,” Henry laughed when he neared.
“Plowing is dusty work, Henry,” I reminded him. “You wouldn’t know because you’ve never done any.”
He threw back his head and laughed, then waved a hand vaguely toward my dusty body.
“I didn’t mean because you both look like someone buried you alive. I meant because you’re both standing there with your hands on your hips. You’re even wearing that scowl you both love so much.” I glared at him, and Henry laughed again. “Are you done with the tractor? I have a date with Betsy tonight, so if you want to plow again tomorrow, I need to get started now.”
I liked Betsy and I wasn’t jealous that Henry had someone special. Despite our dire financial situation, he still went out several nights a week to see her, but I didn’t begrudge the gas he used driving the Model T into Oakden. They’d been dating for over a year and Henry had wanted to propose for almost as long.
I’d been on enough dates these past few years to have quietly decided that romance wasn’t for me. I liked simpler things—the feel of sandy dirt on my skin after I plowed a field, the joy of a new foal’s birth, the sight of those first green shoots breaking through the soil as the wheat seeds germinated. There was nothing I enjoyed more at night than to sit out under the stars, taking cautious sips from the bathtub gin Henry secretly brewed in the barn, enjoying the silence of the high plains with my brother by my side. But admittedly, on nights Henry was out with Betsy, I felt awfully lonely. I had no idea what I was going to do when he finally had the money to marry her.
“You can’t take the car tonight,” Dad said abruptly, turning toward the tractor.
“What?” My brother’s trademark smile slipped into a frown. “But, Daddy, me and Betsy were—”