Arna Hemenway - Elegy on Kinderklavier

The boys are all outside now, a clump of dark bodies. The five whose houses Doug the Reaper has already visited begin to wrap cloths that I can’t quite make out around their faces: checked red tablecloths, indistinguishable from what we knew were called kaffiyehs. Those five: Ralph Simonsen (roadside IED), Truman Renolds (Vehicle Borne IED), P.J. Holdeman (his brother shot through the jugular while urinating on the base of a tree), Jackson Kepley (his father riddled with shrapnel from the grenade dropped down onto the street at his feet), and Daniel Willis (his dad knocked unconscious, then burned alive in a helicopter crash). Those five, masked now, open the door to the shack and disappear inside. I feel Samuel’s hand push roughly at my back. On the tape, his voice says, “Go on,” faintly, almost gently, but I don’t remember that.

There’s a limit to what you can be surprised by, I guess. And hadn’t I already seen first Daniel’s face, then P.J.’s, then Jackson’s after we’d found out about their dead — bruised, eyes swollen like pastries, lips split, empurpled? I remember it making sense, in a way, when I saw them like that; it was how I imagined it must feel privately, just externalized. But I didn’t think about it, not really, and when I saw them in the shack, tying Gary Powers awkwardly to the pipe, it was no revelation. I’m sure I was surprised. I’m sure the whole thing was vaguely terrifying to me. I was fifteen years old, after all, and not one of them, not really. But I stood there in silence and pointed the handheld video camera where they wanted, and there has to be a reason why I did not leave.

I was more startled by the violence of the movement on the videotape, on my little TV screen, watching it that day after Hilton passed than I was standing there at the time, watching them beat Gary over the top of the little pop-out viewfinder. In person, it felt like one person hitting him (the hood now off his head) at a time, which is, in fact, how it was, each one of the boys taking turns with their fists, but on the tape it looks more like a close mob, a gang, a group beating, unfair. The tape, unlike my memory, has not been granted the small mercy of silence, either, and when I watched it alone in my living room, years later on that rainy afternoon, I winced at the solid, wet impact of the awkward punches, at Gary’s whimpering, more panicked than I remember it being.

One thing that’s not on the tape, but that I do remember clearly, is watching Gary three days later during Bible class. Samuel told me much later about how it was his duty to take Gary to the camp nurse afterward, because he was good at stories. But what I remember, sitting there that morning in Bible study, is Gary Powers’ face, the bruises already turning their muted, sickly colors, half of his upper lip so swollen that it almost succeeded in obscuring his goofy smile at the boys who had abducted him.

•

The 27th season of the Four State Christian Summer Baseball League started off for us about how you would expect. The only thing the members of the One True Congregation of the Savior and Nazarene who ran the Hope and Grace Bible Camp actually paid for were our hats, which were maroon with a gold cross above the bill. We did have uniforms (embroidered by the generous Sisters during a marathon Army Wives meeting in the Temple Mount). They only had two words on them, both on the front: HOPE on the right side of the buttons and GRACE on the left, and each set of letters was situated too high up, almost in line with the collarbone. The effect was to make the words seem like labels for our arms (a detail not missed by our opponents’ bench, who guffawed every time Hilton’s GRACE rocketed the ball to center field while trying to catch a runner stealing second, or Truman’s HOPE sent a batter in the on-deck circle sprawling to the dirt). Four games in, all of which we lost, the league donated some batting helmets so we could stop borrowing the other team’s, and the day before the best prospect for our first win Brother Reeter brought a collection of his old Babe Ruth League bats from when he was a kid, which cheered us all up, even though they were the old fashioned kind (“Wood was good enough to see to Christ’s demise, it’ll work fine for yours,” he grouched). It was also around that time that the other teams started calling us the Martyrs.

I can still see our starting lineup. Everyone’s positions seemed almost preordained, fated in a way. Gary Powers, for instance, whom everyone called You Too after the day Sister Brooks told us about his namesake in history class, was small and wiry and played a rangy shortstop. Hilton Hedis, of course, played catcher (“Just to give the ump some protection,” Brother Reeter said, only half joking). Samuel Lincoln was our star pitcher, but when he wasn’t pitching he wiled away his time bored in the outfield, making comments to himself about the opposing team’s batters that only Ralph Simonsen, whom he split the outfield with, and P. J. Holdeman, who played second base, could hear. Third base was covered by Truman Renolds, a tiny, quiet kid who heckled the batters with surprising meanness and who occasionally, when we were already down by a lot and sometimes when we weren’t, missed incoming throws on purpose, letting the balls fly into the opposing team’s bench and sending them diving. To round out the infield, our first baseman was a slightly older kid named Honor Riley who wanted to be an Elder when he grew up, who we had to convince to be on the team so that we could field an almost full roster. Our only options after Samuel got exhausted on the mound was to end the game watching Truman throw his angry fastballs in the very general direction of the batters, or to watch Ralph loop the one pitch he knew how to throw (a fat curve) over and over again until Brother Reeter stormed out to the mound and told him that if he kept pitching like that even the apparition of Jesus Christ himself wouldn’t be able to save his arm.

•

What do I remember?

John Hedis is lost on patrol. He hasn’t meant to get lost, but there he is, in the alleyways and the narrow streets (that are indistinguishable, in parts, from alleyways), and he is lost. Only Reeter is there with him. Reeter — against the wishes of the unit, which is holed up in a building while they try to figure out where in the hell they lost Hedis along the way — has broken off on his own, because he thinks he knows where Hedis vanished from the group. He is sure that he saw that towering hulk of John Hedis’s body wandering, his big, dumb face distracted, slightly off route as they went through the big open square where the villagers were having their bazaar. Reeter is pretty sure John Hedis got flustered when that kid came up to him and tried to sell him the lighters with the picture of the planes crashing into the towers on them, and when John Hedis looked up, the line of his squad were nowhere to be seen.

It’s not really John Hedis’s fault. Things have gotten pretty relaxed with their new assignment (not yet in Fallujah): just a small village, in the middle of nowhere, no real history of insurgent activity. This feels closer to what they were really qualified to do, as reserves: that is, to walk around with their weapons on safety and nod and smile at the Iraqis.

But then there is the chattering teeth of small arms fire, at once distant and close, and both Reeter and Hedis are now apart from the unit — a major screwup in standard operating procedure — and Reeter begins to run. He rounds the corner and there is John Hedis looking, bewildered, up at the towering wall of an apartment block above him. And there is more small arms fire, and then the muffled concussion of a grenade going off, somewhere back in the direction where the rest of the men are.

Reeter grabs Hedis by the equipment harness and pulls him into the nearest doorway. They collapse to the floor behind some tables and as the dim light resolves, they see they are in, of all places, a bakery. Flour hangs in the air, coats their faces, their arms. Reeter does not think it is a good idea to go back to where the other men are engaged with the insurgents, by the sound of it. The back-and-forth reports go on and on. How terrified they are, in the bakery listening to the destruction outside, half-expecting the walls to come crashing down on them. Afternoon stretches into dusk, then evening, then night.