Chris Offutt - No Heroes - A Memoir of Coming Home

In the barracks, men were killing their wives, and wives were killing their husbands. For instance, a woman would go to a Jewish policeman and say, my husband can’t provide me with bread. He didn’t provide me with anything. Get him out of here. I want to shack up with you. So the policeman would take him out and kill him.

Every so often the prisoners had to be disinfected because they’re full of vermin. The people washed the clothing, shaved the body, cleaned up so they can survive another couple of weeks as workers, because if you are infested, you die. They didn’t want to have a complete outbreak of typhoid. They did it on a scheduled basis. All the women would come in and undress in front of everybody. The Jewish Police were guiding thousands of women to the washing facilities. Right in front of everybody, a mother would say to the policeman, for a piece of bread you can have my daughter.

After the war I see that woman. Do I point an accusing finger on that woman? No. What else should she do? Lie down and die? I said hello, how’re you doing, how’s your husband? She said, my husband, he bought a new car. I said, what did he buy? She said, it’s a Chevy, you know.

What can I tell you, Sonny? This is what you call an oath of silence. We both took it. We all took it, and now I break it.

Mrs. Jayne went fast and it was a blessing, but she’s still dead and I still miss her. Unbeknownst to me, she had dutifully attended my college graduation twenty years ago, wearing her best church clothes in hundred-degree weather. She waited three hours to see me receive my diploma, except I didn’t go. I was already financing my departure by moving refrigerators out of dorms. Mrs. Jayne listened for my name being called without answer.

Today I sat in the front row of church, facing her casket as a pallbearer, and listened to her name being praised. In a jacket pocket I carried my class photo from 1964. Mrs. Jayne stood beneath the schoolroom clock, halted forever at 2:15. After the first day of school, I told my mother that I hoped Mrs. Jayne didn’t die of oldness before my brother went to school.

Many years later I sent her a copy of my first book. She told a local newspaper that indeed she’d taught me to write, but that I learned some of the language somewhere else. She said she sat on her breezeway and just stared at the cuss words. She’d heard them, but had never seen them in print. She said she learned to treat them the same as any word. She said that I’d taught her to read, too.

The service was short, the pews filled with her fellow teachers and people from Haldeman she’d taught, many older than me. We carried her out of the church and drove to a small cemetery and lowered the box into the ground. I lingered after everyone left and threw a handful of dirt in the grave. Her name was Mary Alice Calvert Jayne. She taught me to read and write.

I climbed the hill to a dogwood tree behind the small cemetery. All my life I’ve heard the cross that Jesus bore was made of dogwood, and the tree’s punishment was to be forever worthless. The blossom has four white petals with a rust-colored stain at the tip. These marks represent the nails that held Jesus to the wood, turned dark by encrusted blood. People in the hills understand that is why dogwood blooms near Easter. Only the flowers will rise again. Only the dead can reappear.

Relatives held a small reception at Mrs. Jayne’s house. They gave me my inheritance — a short lectern made by her brother. She kept it beside her desk. Each child stood in front of the class and read aloud. I drove home and set the lectern in my writing studio beside my desk. On it I placed a massive dictionary. My son James suggested I take the next book I wrote to the graveyard and leave it for Mrs. Jayne’s ghost to read. I hugged him and he wiped my eyes.

“It’s okay, Daddy,” he said. “She’s like a grandmaw and they always have to die.”

At the end of a visit with Mrs. Jayne, she often gave me a small item to make me feel special. She did it casually, almost as an afterthought, by saying, “Here, slip this in your pocket.” She always used the same phrase.

One of her last gifts was a bell, the stationary sort that sits on the reception counter of a roadside motel. Mrs. Jayne kept the bell on her school desk and when the class became too uproarious, she tapped the metal ringer for silence. Hearing it, we sat a little straighter, ready to listen. That bell is on my writing desk today. Its convex surface is dull with corrosion and the base is rusted. I have no desire to clean it. My memories don’t sparkle with polish and neither does the bell. I treat it with respect, using it only when necessary. Its clear sound is like a single season compressed. I ring it to clear my mind when I write. I sit straighter and try to focus. I concentrate on the sound as it moves away in waves of time.

We are in Nicarellis and a man says the Germans are coming to kill everyone in the camp. If you want to run away, there’s a train. It was a nice train with benches for the people. I wouldn’t have gone in a boxcar. I go for the benches. And here’s the joke — three hours later that camp was liberated by the Americans. I volunteered to go to Dachau. Now I have to endure another four weeks of very tough life. All for benches.

I’m sitting on the train and it’s dark and I see some red in the sky. Some kind of light. I watch it. I can’t move. I don’t feel like moving. After a while I lose completely this feeling of time. Days pass or minutes, I don’t know. There’s no noise, no sound at all. A lot of smoke. I thought it was Hell and everything is on fire, but I’m not hurt. Quiet like I had never heard such quiet. You have to hear that quiet.

We were caught in a bombing raid. The train is overturned and I am looking through open windows on the side at a burning city. The reason I cant hear is from the bombs. German people pull me out. They gave me a blanket. I remember just a wall of flames and it is Ulm burning.

They give us Red Cross packages and send us to Switzerland. Those packages contain sugar, milk, chocolate, sausages, shortbread, long bread, preserves, bandages, piece of silk, razor blade. All kinds of things I hadn’t seen in the last five years. I would have given away my life for it. They took us into the Alps. Beautiful. I suffered in the most beautiful countryside.

The train stops in the night. We hear heavy artillery and know the Americans are in the area. I’m convinced the Germans will shoot us because they cannot let us go into the civilian population of Germany. We might just be a little bit angry. We might not be so nice to the people. If I find out that my wife and my brother are alive, maybe I would not be mad. Otherwise I don’t want to live and I have to kill the people first.

The train can’t go any farther because the tunnel was bombed by the Americans. Ordinarily we had a lot of guards, heavily armed, but not now. A discussion is going on. They called the chief of the village, and he said, no, you’re not gonna shoot anybody here. If you shoot the prisoners, the Americans will shoot everybody in my town. I wont let you do that here.

So lo and behold we walk to the next town. It’s the end of April. Snow all over the place. And we are marching through the snow. It is magnificent. The sun is going down and the snow on the mountains is fiery red. We are marching through the night and my feet are very tired. I said in my head, don’t fall asleep, because if you fall asleep, you freeze to death. Some of my friends are sitting on the road and fall asleep. The first couple of guys they shoot them. Then they didn’t shoot them anymore. They let them freeze to save the ammunition.