River's Edge (34 page)

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Authors: Marie Bostwick

BOOK: River's Edge
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We were nearly back to the house but I'd still hadn't found the courage to speak of the things that were truly on my mind. “Father, I ...”
Father turned to me, an expectant expression on his face. He looked at me and smiled, small lines like arrows pleating the skin at the corners of his eyes. “Elise, I know. I know what you're going to say. You can't go with me. I can see that.” He lifted his arm and swept his hand across the fields. “This is your home now. It is where you belong. You are needed here—you found your destiny.”
“Oh,
Vati!
” I cried and threw myself into his open arms. “
Vati!
I love you so much! Do you know?”
“I know,” he answered, his voice choking with emotion. We held on to each other for the longest time, with the sun beating warm on us, and the smell of the earth all around. We cried from happiness, both of us.
“
Vati,
you should stay,” I said, sniffing as I released myself from his embrace. “You could stay here in Brightfield!” I exclaimed, excited by the idea. “That captain said he could arrange for your immigration papers, and there is plenty of room here in the house. I know Mama would love to have you. You could help with the farm!”
He looked over the fields, and his eyes were wistful for a moment, thinking, but then a shadow passed over his face and he said, “No, Elise. I must go back. I couldn't move in with the Mullers. Mrs. Muller is a very fine woman, very fine, but it is too much of an imposition. Besides,” he continued softly, “if I were to stay, people would find out who I was. They would hate me for it. They've lost sons and husbands and sweethearts. It will not matter to them who I am or that I tried to stop it. I was too late. Too late. They would blame me,
Liebling.
I blame myself.”
He sounded so defeated, and for some reason, this made me angry. “Of course, there will be people who will blame you! There are people here who blamed me! Some still do! But not all of them would feel like that,
Vati,
not the people that matter.”
He raised his hand, preparing to dismiss my arguments, but I forged ahead before he could object. “Listen. When Papa Muller was killed, when Junior came home without a leg, I thought the family would all blame me, but they didn't. Junior was so angry and sullen, and I thought it was my fault. When he wanted his ring back”—Father raised his eyebrows as I said this, but I ignored him and kept talking—“I thought it was because he blamed me. I was sure that every time he saw my German face and heard my German accent he was thinking I was the reason for all his pain. But it wasn't true! He was angry with himself, not me! He blamed himself for Papa's death because he didn't see the sniper!”
Father puffed out a breath, and his eyes bulged at my revelation. “But that is ridiculous! He tried his best to protect his father! He wasn't responsible for his death. He wasn't to blame, any more than you are to blame, for what that madman Hitler and his henchmen did. You were just a little girl when you left Germany. You bore no responsibility for what happened!”
He paused for a moment. His jaw clenched and his gaze grew steely as he looked off into the distance. “You were too young to know, but I was not. I was just like the rest. I didn't like Hitler, didn't trust him, but I did nothing to stop him. I couldn't imagine the things he was planning and even when I learned the truth, I couldn't quite bring myself to believe it. I just stood back like everyone else and watched, hoping someone else would do something. I didn't try to stop him until it was too late. No, you are not to blame, Elise.
We
are to blame,
this
generation.
My
generation, who stood by and did nothing.” He shut his eyes tight, pushing back the painful memories. I reached out my hand and put it on his arm.
I was about to tell him, no, that none of it was his fault, that he had done everything he could do, but I knew he wouldn't believe me, and, sadly, I knew it wasn't true. “You are right,” I admitted softly. “Some of it is your fault. Not all, but some. It is a guilt you share with a nation, and it will not be quickly forgiven, not by yourselves and not by the world.”
“But,
Vati,
” I said urgently, “we are all guilty, each in our own way. There is always blame enough to go around. If you were to stay in Brightfield, some people will hate you for what you did or didn't do, and others will embrace you because, even though you didn't succeed, you tried to stop Hitler, even risking your life to do so. If you go back to Berlin, it will be the same—some blaming, some forgiving. That is the way the world is. I am proud of you,
Vati,
not because of what you did during the war, but because you didn't give up. When you were tired of life, tired of carrying the burden of guilt, hungry for an honorable death, you stopped and thought of me. You found the courage to go on! You could have chosen an easy escape, but instead you picked up the load, admitted your guilt, and decided to keep on going because you knew I still needed you. And I do,
Vati.
I still do,” I whispered.
His head was bowed, and I could only see the top of it, a place that I had not noticed before, where his hair was thin and sparse.
“Someone once told me that courage, real courage, lies in facing your destiny with unclean hands. Once, I wanted to give up, too, but I heard those words, and I found the courage to go on. At the time I didn't know where I found it, but now I know where it came from. It came from you! I am, after all, a Braun.”
Papa lifted his head and smiled at me through his tears.
“You could stay,
Vati.
Promise you'll think about it.”
He nodded his head. “I will think about it.”
 
We walked back to the house arm in arm. Junior was sitting on the porch, rocking. As we approached, he got up from his seat and bowed his head to Father, who bowed in reply.
“Mr. Braun, I would like to speak to you, sir. Privately, if I may.”
“Of course, Mr. Muller,” Father said formally. “I would be delighted.”
Junior opened the door for him and said, “You can call me Carl, if you'd like.”
“Good. Carl, you can call me Herman,” Father replied, and they entered the house together.
Chapter 25
June 12, 1946
 
I
got up early today, even before it was light. Last night I told Mama not to worry if I wasn't home for breakfast, that I was going to go out early and gather wildflowers to decorate the tables and the poles of the tents. But that's not the true reason I am walking across the dewy grass before the dawn.
I need to be alone this morning. Just for a little while more. I want to think. I want to remember.
It rained a little last night, and the ground is damp and spongy. I walk barefoot through the fields, between the rows of half-grown tobacco, my naked feet sinking into the soil, pressing down the cool, yielding earth, leaving deep prints so people will know I passed this way.
I walk, and the sun walks with me, ascending into the sky even as I ascend the slowly sloping path that leads to the lip of the valley. I come to the edge of the field and part the plants, pushing aside a curtain of leaves and stepping through them as if I were entering another part of a house with many rooms, a plain of untilled ground grown waist-high with wild grasses and sweet hay.
I move quietly and slowly across the face of the world, in satisfied silence, picking armfuls of wildflowers—yellow, blue, pink, purple—flowers that Cookie and I will tie into beribboned bundles to make beautiful the wedding tent. Adorning the tent with blossoms of the valley because they belong there as much as Junior and I do—a seed planted in the valley and a seed blown in on an alien wind, both burrowed deep in the soil, each pushing stubbornly through the fertile earth to stretch searching vines toward the light, drawing strength from the river and soil and sun and one another. We two are twisting green stems that wrap round and round each other, rising higher to bring forth two blooms, similar but separate, each made more beautiful by proximity with the other.
I hear a noise on the breeze, a sound of contended humming. I look across the field to see
Vati
outside his new house, the Schollers' old one, singing happily to himself as he cuts flowers from Mrs. Scholler's rosebushes. I notice he has planted something new in the south corner of the garden. Squinting through beams of the dawning day, I see it is a lilac bush. It is small now, the blossoms are few and underdeveloped, but every plant finds new soil shocking at first. Given time, sun, and nourishment it will grow and flourish, its branches bringing forth heavy, unruly blossoms to perfume the air and delight the eye. But that will not be for some time yet. These things take time.
Today Father concentrates on his roses, choosing the finest blossoms he will bring as a gift for Mama, as he does on so many mornings now. She will ask him in for coffee, and he will accept, and they will sit, talking and not talking, but none of it awkward because they are too wise and have seen too much to worry about what might come next. They are friends, and that is enough. And if someday they are more than friends, then that will be enough for then.
I don't call out to
Vati.
I don't want to speak to anyone just now. Ambling through the silver-green grass, I brush my hand across the tops of the blades to feel them caress my palms. I'm in no hurry to get to the water. I know the river will be waiting for me, as it always is and always was. Before I ever laid eyes on it, long before that day when Papa brought me to the ridge above the river, this place, this soft curve of the Connecticut, was destined to be my home.
The wedding will take place in the church, with the afternoon sunlight shafting through the plain, unstained windows, in front of the altar where Papa used to preach and where I embraced belief and exchanged fear for faith.
In a few hours,
Vati
will escort me down the aisle and place my hand in Junior's. We will repeat words that before God and men that will bind us one to another for life, though our hearts were bound long before. Afterwards, we'll come here, to this perfect place to dine and toast and begin a new day, sitting at tables with friends and family, feasting under the protection of specially built shade tents whose linen walls let in the breeze and the sound of the flowing river.
Another step, and the grasses give way to sandy riverbank, another door to another room, and I walk across the sand to bathe in the current, washing the dirt from my feet. I look up, marveling at how perfectly the water meets the earth and the earth meets the sky, admiring the way it all joins together, this world meeting the next without a ripple or seam.
We've invited guests to join us today, perhaps fifty, not more. The faces we love most will stand as witness to our first day together, smiling in celebration and solemn in commitment to stand as guides and shields in the days that will come after.
Standing side by side and flanked by those who love us, there is no possibility of our failure, but I had thought of leaving one chair empty—just one, in case old friends come by unexpectedly: Mr. Scholler, Papa, Mrs. Ludwig, Mother. I wanted to be sure to leave room for them, but as I look around, at the sky, the trees on the far bank, the fields on the near, at the river Jordan that divides us one from another, I realize there is no need.
They are here already, watching and waiting, rejoicing from the other side of the river, applauding the day with newly washed hands.
Ackowledgements
I
've heard many authors say that writing their second book was ten times harder than writing the first, and now I know why.
For one thing, a published author is an author on a deadline and that puts external pressure on the writing process. But the greater pressure is an internal one: the small voice of inner doubt that fills writers with a terrible fear that their first success may have been accidental, that perhaps they had only one story to tell.
As I faced a blank computer screen many months ago and wrote chapter one, those were my fears. Now, three hundred plus pages later, I was able to write “The End” on the final page of the manuscript largely because of the support, advice, and encouragement of the following people:
As always, first and last in every endeavor of my life, I am grateful to my husband, Brad. You are my greatest love story—my partner, confidante, and friend in all that brings meaning to life.
To Jill Grosjean, my agent and friend, who talks me through the doubts and allows me to focus on writing, secure in the knowledge that she has the business end of things well in hand. To Audrey LaFehr, a wonderful editor whose literary judgment I trust and who has gone the extra mile for me on many occasions. Thank you both so much.
To my mother, Margaret, and my sister, Betty Walsh, who have been tireless in promoting my last book and who were such patient sounding boards as I worked on this one. To my father, Ray; my stepmother, Carolyn; my sisters, Donna Gomer and Lori Crace, and my friends Pam Helm, Beth Popadic, Marjie McCandless, Carol and Greg Fullerton, Susan and Glenn Wagner for their ongoing support and for bringing humor and perspective to my life. Many thanks to Adam Kortekas, webdude extraordinaire, and to Jeni Hulett and Juana Pena for helping me keep the home fires burning and more or less organized.
I owe special thanks to Reverend Steve Treash, whose own Christmas messages served as the inspiration for Papa's sermons in this book. Also to the wonderful women of Black Rock Church who have upheld me in prayer in these last months and years.
And, most importantly and eternally, to the God who hears our prayers and is faithful to answer, with gratitude that the love that binds us is based not on how I feel, but on who You are.

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