Fiction and Poetry Here and Around the Web
Yesteryear Fiction- Choices
Daily Love
Grandma’s Rum Bath to Cure Baldness and Preserve Marriage
Old Foxy Wasn’t the Only Foxy One
Sentimental Old Soldier
The Moonlit Road
Uncle Andy and the Fire Breathing Dragon
Bedtime Stories
The Talking Top
Granny Godfroy Makes Spaghetti
Andrew Birthday Burps the Baby
Avoid Stinky Socks
Lake Effect Living
Fire and Fog
Great Lake Pilot - Fiction - Cove Island Lighthouse - Captain's Contentious
Daily Love
Grandma’s Rum Bath to Cure Baldness and Preserve Marriage
Old Foxy Wasn’t the Only Foxy One
Sentimental Old Soldier
The Moonlit Road
Uncle Andy and the Fire Breathing Dragon
Bedtime Stories
The Talking Top
Granny Godfroy Makes Spaghetti
Andrew Birthday Burps the Baby
Avoid Stinky Socks
Lake Effect Living
Fire and Fog
Great Lake Pilot - Fiction - Cove Island Lighthouse - Captain's Contentious
Poetry
The Seducer Time
Time appears generous, make no mistake,
Stretching life horizons beyond the night,
Endless hours linger, making each day
False promises that they will not take flight.
Time swirls seductive words in its streams,
Home, family, work- life words make demands
Time hammers reality into dreams
Time shapes dreams with twisted, treacherous hands.
Time's cycle -Youth, middle, and old age shows
Eternal truths that even time can't hide:
Time can't keep its trimester from its close
Old age doesn't reflect the youth inside.
False friend time doesn't help mere mortals mock,
The daily, eternal, tick of the clock.
Sentimental Old Soldier
By Kathy Warnes
The stack of pages in his own life calendar and the pages his family contributed had kept Amee hovering at the shadowy edges of Larry’s thoughts, but now that Helen had died and his children were grown and busy with their own lives, Amee had gotten bolder. No longer an uncertain guest, she came to visit Larry every night now, sitting so seductively close to him on the arm of his recliner that he could smell the elusive violet scent that had saturated the soft cloths that she used to wipe the sweat from his forehead in those days she had nursed him back to health in her home in war ravaged Belgium.
“The pleasure of love lasts only a moment,
The pain of love lasts a lifetime…”
“Stop Singing!” Larry shouted, pushing the Amee ghost off the arm of his recliner. “I refuse to let you sing that song to me.” Snatches of the song drifted across the years, blown across ocean and time and space from Belgium to Larry’s home here in Benton, New York, beside the Clinton River and he was back in 1945 again. One day while Larry and Amee sat in two wooden rocking chairs in her Grandmere’s kitchen by the iron cook stove, he watched the sunlight slanting through the narrow kitchen window and admired the velvet sheen of Amee’s long brown-black hair. She had hummed a haunting song, a song that had resounded in his ears louder than the machine gun fire and artillery and screaming of war- a song that whenever he heard it still shook at the iron bars he had built around his heart and mind hard enough to bend them. He had asked her the name of the song and she had whispered low enough not to reach her Grandmere’s ears, Plaisir d’ Amour. The Pleasure of Love. She sang him the first few lines of the song: “The pleasure of love lasts only a moment. The pain of love lasts a lifetime. I gave up everything for ungrateful Sylvia, She is leaving me for another lover. The pleasure of love lasts only a moment, The pain of love lasts a lifetime. He had reached out and touched her sun warmed brown-black hair and then, they had leaned into each other across their wooden rockers and shared a kiss.
Now in his present world, the one without Helen to buffer him, the Amee ghost had turned traitor. Now, instead of helping him forget, Amee, had challenged his forgetting. Larry knew he had to do something. Amee was getting close enough to make him remember. Confused and frightened, he decided to go for a walk in the park by the Clinton River. The Clinton River had been his friend since he and Mack had started fishing and swimming in it when they were both seven.
Larry walked along the sidewalk by the river. The rowing team from the high school practiced on the river every morning and he watched their oars dipping in and out of the water with their precise rhythms that reminded him of a windmill turning, a rhythm that comforted him. He would catch that rhythm, resume his patterned life and the memories would fade safely away into the past again and not even Amee would bring them back.
The World War II Memorial stood, an open black granite diary that he had not chosen to write in, a black death mountain against the green backdrop of the river. It seemed to him that instead of glinting golden on the letters the sunshine should be blood red like the blood of the American soldiers on the snows of Malmedy. He stared at the river, seeing the field of blood red snow rising out of the water, a misty, bloodstained memorial.
Mack’s name pounded him between the eyes like the German bullet had pounded his left arm. Slowly he extended his wounded arm that still twanged when the mists rolled in from the river. Inch by inch the fingers of his left hand moved toward Mack’s name. He caressed the letters like he used to caress ungrateful Sylvia. The letters felt warm to his touch the way Sylvia’s skin had warmed to his touch. A single tear splashed and spread on Mack’s full name – Matthew Allen Bryant.
Larry brushed off the tear, his eyes darting furtively around to make sure no one had seen it.. The ridges of his fingers turned cold, like the cold ridges of snow in that field in Malmedy. Memories of Mack rushed through his mind as fast as he and Mack used to race their bikes up and down the dirt path by the Clinton River. There they were, two boys riding with no hands and shouting at each other. Mack’s red hair and freckles blazed against the backdrop of the green water and he wiggled his acrobatic ears at Larry when Larry got behind in the bicycle race. Mack sat in front of Larry in school, because his last name started with B and Larry’s started with D. Mack knew that wiggling his ears made Larry laugh, so he wiggled them every chance he got. Larry had to stay after school and clean blackboards lots of times because he laughed so hard at Mack wiggling his ears. Larry watched the story of Malmedy slide across the smooth marble surface of the monument, across endless names like he was watching the credits roll by after a movie or a televisions show. The story began against a backdrop of blinding white snow. He rode in a convoy of trucks. Battery B, 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion near Malmedy in Belgium, fighting its way toward Germany. The soldier’s swayed and careened in time with the truck’s wheels when they rolled into a ditch or lurched across a dirt road crisscrossed by tank treads. Larry fell into the rhythm – an up and down, a sidewinder, snaky rollercoaster ride like the one he and Mack used to ride at the carnival in the summer.
“The Nazi tanks sure tore up the roads.” Larry glanced at the other soldiers. They sprawled around like limp bearded scarecrows, trying to find a comfortable position among the crows. Some of the soldiers coughed, but nobody talked. A few of them smoked, their breaths and cigarette smoke mingled in the air like white frost ghosts. Some of them adjusted their guns to a more comfortable position. Larry looked at Mack who sat statue straight and still and their eyes locked. Larry knew Mack was thinking about home. He was thinking about home, too, and about Sylvia. He had gotten the letter from Sylvia a week ago. Had she said anything to Mack in her letters to him? Did Mack know Sylvia had thrown him over for Sam Whitcomb?
“What general ordered this ride?” Larry asked.
Mack just grunted and closed his eyes.
Sam Whitcomb! He and Mack beat Sam up nearly once a week. Sylvia, pretty Sylvia with red hair the same shade as Mack’s only in pigtails had fascinated him all of the time they were growing up together. The last two years he had been home Sylvia had transformed into a beautiful young woman with long red curly hair, green eyes, long legs and a figure that rivaled Betty Grable’s pinup poster. Before he got shipped out, she had promised she’d wait for him. Her letter last week said that she was marrying that 4F Sam Whitcomb! Now, feeling the crackle of the letter in his pocket, now staring at Mack, somehow he knew that Mack knew.
Now was December 17, 1944, about 25 miles from Malmedy, and the Panzer tanks blazed gunfire and destroyed the lead trucks in Larry’s convoy. The convoy stopped and since the Americans couldn’t return the gunfire, they surrendered to the Germans. Larry remembered the shame that had shattered his pride as the Germans took him and his fellow Americans prisoner. Larry and Mack had been fighting side by side and they stumbled along together as the SS soldiers herded the American soldiers into a nearby field. The tank commander ordered the soldiers to kill the Americans and the SS soldiers opened fire with machine guns and pistols.
Pure adrenalin replaced the blood in Larry’s veins. “Hang on, Mack. We’ll get through this. You and me. We’ll get back home.”
Blood created a rapidly widening pool on the front of Mack’s jacket. It reminded Larry of the swimming hole in the Clinton River when the maple leaves fell in autumn and the water spread them out in a scarlet carpet. Mack drew in wheezing, sucking breaths. The blood flowed from the pool on his coat to the ground, making smaller puddles in the white snow.
Somewhere in the distance like two years ago when Larry took Sylvia to the park by the Clinton River and they sat on the bench, watching the moonlight play on the water, Larry felt the sting of the bullets. Somewhere in a dream when Sylvia had said yes she would marry him and they kissed each other in the moonlight by the river, Larry felt blood moving down his left arm. He heard a voice saying in English. “Can I help you?” He heard a mumbled reply and then a single shot. The voice drew nearer and asked the same question. “Can I help you?” This time there were no words, just a single shot.
Larry rolled over, trying to shield Mack with his body. “Play dead, Mack!”
Mack gasped like Old Methuselah, the catfish they had caught and put on the Clinton River bank to hit over the head before they put them in their creel. “Help me, Larry..”
Larry couldn’t get up to help Mack. He felt frozen fast to the snow, frozen as firmly in his fear as his tongue had stuck to the ice frozen on the pump handle in Larry’s backyard when Mack had dared him to touch it with this tongue. Larry felt someone standing over them. He heard a click and then the smell and sound of the bullets hitting Mack.
Somewhere Larry felt the sting of more bullets hitting his shoulder and leg. Larry curled up into a ball alongside Mack in the cold, embracing snow. He sat beside unworthy Sylvia on the park bench by the Clinton River. Sam Whitcomb swaggered over and sat between them, crowding Larry off the bench. Larry pushed his face into the snow waiting for the final bullet, even welcoming it. Under a bright blue June sky, he and Mack raced each other on their bikes to their swimming hole in the river. Sylvia chased them on foot, hollering for them to wait up.
Larry heard footsteps crunching in the snow.
“Stay down, Larry!” Mack seemed to whisper to him. “Stay down.”
Larry snuggled against Mack. When they were six, Larry’s dad had taken them winter camping and they had slept in the same sleeping bag. Larry had heard a coyote howling in the woods and he snuggled closed to Mack.
“Stay down, Larry,” Mack whispered.
That night, a new dusting of snow had fallen and they woke up the next morning with an extra blanket of snow covering their sleeping bag.
Larry never told Mack, but he and Sylvia used to make snow angels in her backyard when they were both eight. He would sneak over on a dark December night before Christmas because the snow came down fresh and fast just before Christmas. He lay beside her in the snow flopping his arms out to make bigger and better angel wings. She laughed at him and flopped her arms wider. He was young, only eight, but he kissed her on the cheek. Her cheeks were smooth and cool and red like a crisp apple. He felt something mysterious and magical about her and he kissed her other cheek. She tried to kiss his cheek, but she missed and kissed his nose. They both rolled over laughing and they had to make their snow angels all over again.
Sylvia lay in the snow next to him. “Make a snow angel, Larry,” she whispered.
Larry snuggled in the snow with Mack and Sylvia until long after dark. He listened but he couldn’t hear the coyote howling and he didn’t hear Sylvia whispering to him anymore. He just heard the wind blowing a slow, sad, song in the trees. He followed the wind song across the snow covered bodies.
Then he heard Mack’s voice. “Let’s go fishing, Larry.” Mack waited for him at the river and they were going to get Methuselah. Sylvia ran behind them, shouting for them to wait for her.
Larry staggered to his feet and walked toward the Clinton River. It seemed like he had been walking forever, but he walked for just a few hours until he saw a light. He walked toward the light that he saw flickering faintly in the distance.
The light belonged to a house. As he got closer, Larry saw that the house was really a single cottage with a small pin prick of light in the window. Focusing his eyes on the light in the window, he managed to stumble a few yards before he collapsed. When he opened his eyes, a girl was bathing his forehead with a warm cloth that smelled like violets and a much older woman bustled around the room talking in rapid French to the girl. The girl answered in equally rapid French without changing the rhythm of the cloth on his forehead.
Larry closed his eyes, soothed by the rhythm of the cloth, the smell of violets, and the musical lilting of the words.
He stayed at the Belgian cottage for the next two weeks while the girl- her name was Amee- nursed him back to health. Although Amee didn’t speak much English and Larry didn’t speak any French, they managed to talk to each other. They sat in her Grandmere’s kitchen for hours in the two wooden rocking chairs by the stove. Amee showed him faded tintype photos of a women who looked like her, mere, she called the woman. She showed him a picture of a stern looking man that she called pere. She made Larry understand that her mother and father had been killed fleeing the Germans on the way here to her Grandmere’s house.
Amee guided him to one of the wooden rockers beside the iron cooking stove in the kitchen, and she sat in the other rocker. They would sit for hours basking in the warm shafts of sunlight shining through the high, narrow kitchen window. He remembered one of the songs that his first grade teacher had taught them., Alouetta. He sang to her and she sang back to him.
She sang him the first few lines of the song, Plaisir d’ Amour.
“The pleasure of love lasts only a moment. The pain of love lasts a lifetime. I gave up everything for ungrateful Sylvia, She is leaving me for another lover. The pleasure of love lasts only a moment, The pain of love lasts a lifetime. Amee had told him the correct name of the song - Plaisir d’ Amour- but he always thought of it as Amee’s Song.
The final day they had leaned into each other across their wooden rockers and shared a kiss. The kiss turned his senses into a kaleidoscope of colors and emotions. It took some time for the knocking at the door and the sound of heavy boots clomping down the hall to shatter the kiss.
Then a voice made him jump out of the chair despite his wounded shoulder and arm and reach for a weapon he didn’t have. He recognized the voice that belonged to the soldier who walked up and down the field asking soldiers he had ordered massacred if he could help them.
Amee grabbed his arm. She tugged him out of the chair and helped him into a wide wooden cedar chest that stood under the window. She covered him with two thick wool blankets. As she closed the lid she said something that he knew meant “shut up” in English.
He heard the German soldier’s footsteps come into the kitchen. He half expected to hear the soldier ask, “Can I help you?’ This time the soldier stomped around the room calling, “American? American?”
Larry heard Amee say something to the soldier in French. The soldier answered her in German and stomped over to the chest where Larry was hidden. Larry held his breath and listened to the soldier breathing. Then he heard the soldier fire a pistol and felt a bullet tear into the blankets. The bullet lodged beside his ear.
Before the soldier could fire the pistol again, Larry heard the Amee say something to him that sounded like Schnapps. He knew that schnapps was a German kind of alcohol.
“Schnapse?” the soldier asked her.
“Schnapse,” Amee said. “Schnapse.”
Larry heard glasses clinking and then the sound of a chair scraping and Amee screaming. He tried to open the chest lid, but his arms wouldn’t move. He was back on the snowy field snuggled next to Mack and they were winter camping with his father and staying down from the coyote.
Suddenly Amee’s screams stopped and Larry heard more thuds and then her terrified sobbing, “No, no!” Then a single shot and the slamming of the door.
Somehow Larry finally climbed out of the chest. He carried Amee to her bed, the one where she had nursed him back to health and movement and he tenderly tucked the blankets around her chin. He imagined a blanket of snow softly covering her and a snow angel resting beside her. He kissed her cool cheek. He sang Plaisir d’Amour to remember her and then for the next fifty years he tried to forget her.
The pleasure of love lasts only a moment, The pain of love lasts a lifetime
Somehow Larry stumbled out of Amee’s cottage and down the rutted, dirt country road. Somehow he found the American lines and by January 1945, Larry had reported to an Army Colonel that the SS had shot 84 Americans at Malmedy. The United States forces got the word that Germans were shooting POWs which made them more determined to hold the lines against the German advance until reinforcements came, and they held them. Soon the Allied armies cooperated to drive the Germans back to their original starting positions in the Battle of the Bulge.
Soon, the United States soldiers reached the field where the SS men had shot the American POWS. The field was buried under two feet of winter snow, but the medical corps used mine detectors to find the 84 bodies that had lain there since the day of the shootings. Larry’s stomach turned when he saw the distorted shapes of the American soldiers.
He couldn’t bear to look for Mack. Use the sleeping bag under the snow, Mack. Sleep warm and well.
The memories wouldn’t stop torturing Larry. “They were unarmed POWs,” he shouted as the armored columns of American soldiers rode by the bodies of their dead comrades. The soldiers shepherded columns of German POWS and both sides passed by the frozen bodies of the American soldiers.
“Shoot those Nazi murderers!” Larry shouted at his fellow soldiers, but none of the American soldiers shot the German POWs. Before he could personally shoot any of the German prisoners himself, Larry’s orders came and he moved on with the troops going to Germany.
Larry really meant to write to Amee’s Grandmere. He owed her and Amee his life after all, but once his feet touched American soil they raced away from Amee. Larry could have moved away from Benton, but he stayed there. He felt that in a way he was paying tribute to Mack by living in their home town. Mack’s parents told him that they had decided to leave Mack buried in Belgium and the Army buried him in the military cemetery at Henri Chappelle.
Larry’s footsteps took him to Helen Swanson’s doorstep in Benton often enough to court and marry her. Larry heard the news that a United States Military Tribunal had tried the SS men including Joachim Peiper for what they did at Malmedy while he was at the hospital with Helen waiting for their son Jason to be born. On July 11, 1946, the SS defendants were found guilty, but Larry was too busy rocking and burping Jason to give the news more than a passing “good for America.” That’s all the attention he could bear to give to the news.
The years with Helen and their three children – Jason, Andrew, and Jessica-and his job at Seneca Machinery kept Larry’s body, mind, and memory walking the same path for decades. Sometimes his footsteps would stray to Aimee, sometimes to Mack and only to Sylvia in his dreams, but then he always retraced his steps to the main paths of his life.
He heard that Sylvia had married Sam Whitcomb. He couldn’t help hearing snatches of information about her through the years, through Helen and then through the kids, because they played with Sylvia and Sam’s kids. Larry’s emotions were knotted as tight as Andrew used to tangle his fishing line, but he was still safe.
Mack was buried far away, and his memory hovered outside Larry’s life. Helen and his children had formed a protective cocoon around him allowing him to smile and say hello to Sylvia when they ran into each other around town. She became surface Sylvia so he could survive.
By now Jason had gone into the Army, (chip off the old block) Andrew into computer science and Jessica into television. He had retired from Seneca Machinery and he and Helen were talking about Florida in the winter and New York in the summer. Then after one winter in Florida, Helen had died in New York during the summer. The core of his protective cocoon was gone. He had to rely only on himself again.
Larry gently traced his fingers over Mack’s name on the war memorial. Then the voice that had haunted him all of these years spoke in his ear and she stood there in front of him.
Her voice and her words dissolved the years between them.
“Larry, thanks for staying with Mack,” Sylvia said.
Larry’s heart shone naked in his eyes.
“I couldn’t protect him, Sylvia. Snow on the sleeping bag.” I stayed down low, but I couldn’t protect him.”
“He died beside his best friend. You spared him a lonely death.”
“I couldn’t protect him and I couldn’t protect Amee.”
“You gave them years of guilt and memories. It’s time to move on, Larry,” she said.
“I’m grieving for my wife, Sylvia.”
“Grieve for her and the good life you had together and grieve for Mack and Amee and what you had with them, but then move on with your life.”
“I’ve lived a full life, Sylvia, no thanks to you and Sam Whitcomb.”
“Sam died five years ago. And even if he were still alive, that wouldn’t change the way you haven’t lived for a long time.”
“I’m okay, Sylvia.”
“You’re haunted, Larry. So am I. I’ve made my mistakes and tried to erase the memory of them just like you have. But now we both have to move forward.”
“Move where, Sylvia?”
“Move to where our hearts and memories take us.”
Larry continued tracing Mack’s name with the fingers of his left hand.
I gave up everything for ungrateful Sylvia, She is leaving me for another lover. The pleasure of love lasts only a moment, The pain of love lasts a lifetime. .
Larry touched Sylvia’s hair in the sunlight slanting off the war memorial, light from the same sun that had streamed light into a high narrow Belgian kitchen window onto Amee’s hair so long ago.. He didn’t wipe away the tears that fell on Sylvia’s hair.