“That’s awful, Henry. I’m so sorry.”
“The captain sent us to clear buildings. I was with Bobby and we’re just walking through these buildings looking for Nazis and all we’re finding is dead people and half-dead people. Sometimes their eyes were dead, even if they were still breathing. Bobby opened a storage room and it all happened so fast. In just a few seconds, the Nazi in that little room shot Bobby and I shot the Nazi and they were both dead and I was just standing over my dead best friend and this dead stranger wondering...who won just now? You know what I realized?” His voice cracked, and the anguish on his face nearly broke me.“We all lost, Lizzie. Every single man and woman and child touched by that warlost.”
This was a bad idea. For five years, Henry had been unable to speak about this. Talking about it now—stirring up allthis pain—could only lead to more chaos.
“Honey, maybe you should just go to bed—”
“Every man gets what he deserves.Sometimes I see that camp like I’m still there and it makes no damned sense, except maybe if I left some part of myself behind there.”
“Is it getting better as the years pass?” I whispered.
“The first time I went to a hospital was in 1946, not long after I left your place in El Paso. I couldn’t hold down a job. Couldn’t get out of bed. Couldn’t sleep or eat or stay calm in a thunderstorm. Something had to give, so I rang the VA. They said I’ve got combat fatigue and I just needed to rest. They put me in a hospital and gave me medication to make me sleep all day. I was calm while I was taking it, but coming off it—God, that was the pits. It was clear by then that they were just guessing how to help men like me. Hell, at one point they prescribed a course of ‘flower-picking therapy.’ And I was desperate, so I went with the nurse, and we picked flowers all day.”
“I can’t believe you never told me any of this.” I wasn’t just shocked. I was deeply hurt. Didn’t Henry trust me? Didn’t he understand how much I loved him—how I’d do anything to support him?
“I was ashamed, Lizzie. I still am,” he admitted, sighing heavily as he shook his head. “I just want to be normalagain, but it’s like my brain is broken and nothing works to make it the way it was. In January I went up to that VA hospital in Nashville and I told them to do whatever they could to fix me. They said they were having good results from this new therapy. Insulin shock therapy, it’s called.”
“I’ve heard of electric shock therapy but...”
“It’s the same idea,” he muttered. “They use insulin to treat the diabetes too, but for veterans with combat fatigue, they give a huge dose of that medicine every day. Six days a week. Two months.” He glanced at me. “My only day off the treatment was Monday. That’s why, when I called or wrote you, it was a Monday.”
“What does it do?”
“It makes you feel real weird. Sweaty and sleepy and confused and sohungry, and sometimes really restless, like I couldn’t move my legs and arms enough to burn up the energy in my body. That would get worse and worse until—boom—I’d be so relieved when I knew I was about to go unconscious. I’d stay in that coma until they brought me out of it. They said it would jolt my brain back to the way it was.”
“And...has it? Was it worth it?”
“The psychiatrist who discharged me told me it was normal that I’d put on so much weight. Sixty pounds in eight weeks,” he said, his voice low. “He said it was normal that my brain would be damaged from the shock but that would get better. But some days now, I’m so confused, I can’t even follow basic instructions. I can’t remember anything new.I have to write everything down. I can’t even add two and two. So no, sis. I don’t think it was worth it.”
“Why are you telling me this now?”
“The hatred that drove those Germans wasn’t some tidy thing you can put a period after and move on from. I saw the inside ofonecamp. Just oneout of nearly a thousand of those hellholes, and even five years later my mind is so scarred there’s some moments I don’t even know what continent I’m on. I let those doctors give mebrain damage,Lizzie—just in the hopes that I’d feel myself again. And those hospitals are full of veterans just like me, all of us so—” he pointed to his head, shaking his fists beside his head with palpable, painful frustration “—so shakenby what we saw that we might never be the same.”
Henry slid off his chair and stretched to his full height, cracking his neck in the process. He glanced down at me, his expression dark.
“You need to understand that these men on Sauerkraut Hill aren’t harmless. No one is safe while they’re in this country. Not you, not Calvin, not anyone else in this town.”
“There’s nothing we can do about it, though,” I whispered. “The government wantsthem here.”
“I can’t control that and neither can you. But those people are the kind of evil you can’t even begin to comprehend. You can’t take stupid risks like leave the back door open. The devil himself is living two blocks away.”
He stared at me until I nodded. Then he forced a smile and took a step toward the house.
“I guess I’m finally tired enough for bed. Good night, sis.”
“Good night, Henry,” I said, and as he started to walk away, I blurted, “I love you.”
He threw a glance over his shoulder as he muttered, “Love you too.”
I’d held back my tears while Henry told me his story, but now that I was alone, I let myself cry. It wasn’t just the details Henry shared about the camps; it was the thought of him in those hospitals all alone with his pain, too ashamed to even admit how much he was hurting.
For the first time in a long time, I thought of my mother. I remembered her telling me that the women in our family were strong...that we were survivors. But there was a burden in being the strong one. You propped people up, tried to fix their problems for them...and sometimes you got it wrong and made everything worse. Then you had to live with the guilt of that.
I turned my head slightly and looked at the place on the brick pillar where I found that dish shard, and then thought about everything Henry told me that night—his curious use of the phrase “haven’tseen him” to describe Jürgen Rhodes, as if the threat were both real and ongoing. Henry was hurting all over again, and it was worse this time. Should I leave him be? Or should I try to help again?
I slid off the porch chair and let myself into the house. It was late, but I walked straight down the hall to Calvin’s room. I knocked on the door, but he was predictably snoring, so when he didn’t stir, I went in anyway.
“Cal?” I whispered, as I sat on the mattress beside him. I reached and shook his shoulder gently, then leaned closer to him and whispered, “Calvin?” He came to slowly, staring up at me with heavy eyelids.