Shadows of Substance.

"Why are you looking at me like that?" I asked.

He shook his head, the smile rueful now, flakes of dandruff fluttered like baking flour down to the floor. He took the paper cup of whiskey from me and sipped it.

“Everybody's got to believe in something. I believe I'll have some more whiskey.” I said and drank it straight out of the glass bottle I brought.

He smeared peanut butter on a slice of bread with a butter knife and pushed it in front of me on a paper towel. An hour earlier I dropped my last fare off and returned the cab. I could have extended my shift another hour and made another fifty bucks. But I had my priorities: I wanted to drink. I showed up at his place near The Powder House just after 3am. I went around the side of his large blue gray house to the basement door. A lone light bulb was on.  I knew he’d be awake. How could a man stay awake every overnight for over 60 years of his life and not be awake.

"Sometimes, a person can get caught up in the idea of suffering. ‘Poor-me-ism’ is just as addictive as any other -isms. I don’t want you to get caught in that rut.” He said.

“That’s a strange thing for a Christian to say,” I said sarcastically.

He’d shrunk physically since the last time I saw him. The prong on his belt buckle poked through a different hole on his belt and his pants bunched up around his waist. The t-shirt he wore wanted to be white, but had been washed so many times it reached only light grey.  His cheeks were sunken. Razor blade nicks and stubble filled his face as if he had tried to shave in the dark with a dull razor and no shaving cream.

And he limped. This bothered me. I took a drink of my whiskey. In a few seconds it bothered me less.

In his last year at the hotel, the cartilage in his right knee had deteriorated. Bone rubbed bone while he worked all night. The VA doctor ordered him to retire. But retirement equaled death to Harry. Instead he carried a bottle of whiskey in his baker’s apron. When the pain got too much he slipped into the walk-in cooler with the frozen product and sipped enough to be able to make it through his shift. He lasted another year at the hotel, but someone at the hotel ratted him out to the suits in upper management. Harry became an overnight liability to the hotel powers who be.

They retired him the following day by eliminating his job. At least, that’s what they told him. He held no resentment. I don’t think he was even capable of such a thing. Unlike myself, I held resentment with both arms, hands, feet and teeth. I bathed in it, clothed in it, drove and walked in it and tucked it in on the pillow at night next to me. I once went down to change my middle name to ‘resentment’, but the courthouse was closed. I’ve resented them since.

The hotel gave him life. For me it was the opposite.

By my tenth and final year the hotel had absorbed me. It sucked my life and filled the very essence of my character; it determined the extent of me, doped me with bread and circus and safety and soap opera then it took it all away. It eliminated me and left a huge void in me all at the same time.

His Forehead wrinkled, and he showed me several pieces of paper he had written on, verbs in pencil, perfect cursive no longer taught in grade schools filled the pages.

“When I finished, I didn’t feel like tearing it up, but I didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t want to keep it around or in my house. So I thought of you. I wrote down something that happened to me one night during the war. As to my belief in God, well one thing I wanted to do with my life was that I wanted to live long enough I thought I could make it. I thought his promise in Matthew 16:28 was meant for me. But now, But now, I’m not so sure”

He sat down at his desk. I realized, I had never seen him actually sit down before. He spread the papers out and smoothed them flat. I sat across from him on an old metal lawn chair that buckled but held my weight. I took not one but two quick shots from my bottle.

“Did you start drinking tonight before or after you dropped your cab off?” He asked.

“This is my second pint, but I’m a good driver.” I answered

He showed no response at what I said and lit a ball of white wax, a homemade candle. The candle light blended well with the lamp light, and our silhouetted shadows filled the wall.

“These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.” I mumbled.

I see you’ve been reading your bible. That’s from Colossians, I believe.” He said

“Is that where it is from? I thought it was from ‘American Prayer’ by Jim Morrison.”

One of the (many) problems when I drink, is that the filter of my sarcasm goes away. 

He rubbed his bad knee and looked over his papers. He took a sip from the paper cup.

“You asked about me often about the War and about God. I’d like to talk about a night filled with both, if you still want to listen?” He said, reiterating.  His eyes went over the pages.

“Absolutely.”

“I can read you some of what I wrote in my notes and talk about it as I go along, how’s that sound?”

“Sounds great.”

“I served as a medic with the 8th Medical Battalion. I survived the hell nights by learning to sleep standing upright. I hugged a fir tree and kept my body under my steel helmet. In the mornings we’d spread out and comb the area for injured and dead. We couldn’t get all of the dead. Some stayed.

Many of the towering Fir splintered, and looked like a giant creature meandered lost in the woods sticking snapped Popsicle sticks into the ground as he went along. Spongy brown needles and rotted logs filled the ground for miles and miles. The rain was constants and most of the time we lived in the mud. Fires were unheard of.  The scouts would tell us where and when to move our camp. One Indian fellow from Idaho was particularly good at picking the spot where we’d set up a field hospital out of reach of the artillery but steps away from the morning injured. But one night our luck had run out.

Around 23:00 enemy artillery slashed the trees of the camp. Then bombs exploded, and seconds later metal and wood fragments rained down us. Nails and screws clinked on my helmet and then the screaming echoed through the darkness.

One soldier died with the pit of his stomach ripped open, another had his head blown completely off.  And another had his back broken by shrapnel. Then the bombardment stopped. I had been spared. But it was just a pause for time to reload. In a few minutes a second bombardment would begin and I knew my life would end.

I closed my eyes and prayed, but God wasn’t there. This was not a place for God.  I heard the wounded yell in the distance and I knew at that exact moment where I was.  I heard the buddies of the wounded yell. And I had learned that if it were their buddies who yelled, there was no longer need for a medic. I squeezed my eyes shut even harder and did my best to bury my face in the bark of the tree. 

A mortar shell hit the ground about 10 yards away where a guy I used to chow with back State side at Camp Barkley hugged a sturdy Pine. The explosion disintegrated him. The best I can describe it was like a fat June bug impacting a windshield on a car doing 100 mph up the highway. He just splashed orange and red and then splattered away.

I waited for a boom to follow and closed my eyes for the end. Instead there was silence. I was terrified.

What happened to the noise of the shells?

Where were the screams of the wounded?

Why the damn silence?

I wondered if my eardrums had been punctured

Did I get killed? Death was supposed to be loud — I thought.

I coughed. My mouth and nostrils filled with frozen dust. I gasped to breathe.  A sick guttural sound formed in a part of my stomach I had never felt before. I tried to understand. The sound turned into a cry and the cry turned into a sob. The sob vibrated up through my chest and came out in a pathetic baritone howl.  All those explosions, reckless, senseless evil, it overwhelmed me. I flushed my mind for hope. I finally opened my eyes.  Ash, dirt and blood covered the forest floor.. I let my hands loosen from the tree. I removed my helmet and I disengaged. I closed my eyes and held my arms and hands out before me and stepped away. I walked out into my resolve. I tried to focus my last thoughts into some that were meaningful. I wished I had had a girl back home to think of. But instead I had had no one in my short miserable life. I had nothing of substance to think about for my final thoughts. I asked God to forgive me for this. But he was obviously busy.

“Those near me usually change their minds.”

I opened my eyes and saw a figure approach. He smiled and walked to me.

The tree that I had hugged splintered down and apart like a zipper and then it fell over. I fell to the mud. He didn’t flinch. He reached down and pulled me up; my boots stayed stuck in the mud as did my socks. I looked down. The sight of my feet surprised me. It’d been sometime since I had seen them. Drizzle drops streaked the mud away my toes.

“I have found that, every now and then, faith must be lived, touched and breathed and not just ordained. The strength that comes from knowing is the greatest strength of all, but it requires a higher level care taking. Do not lose it and give it away as best you can when asked”

I must have lost consciousness because the very next thing I remember is a kettle of water that boiled over a fire. A scout from the 9^th Army wandered in from the crippled wooded trees that survived the bombardment. His entire unit had been killed. He hugged a tree so hard that his palms bruised and bled. He had to hold his cup with his wrists. He had learned tree hugging during hail storms in Maine. I married his sister when we got home. I was ordered out of the battle that day. I spent the rest of my time as a baker and cook at a base in Texas.

Harry looked down. His jaw clenched. He placed his cup on the table and removed his eye glasses. He gently rubbed and pinched the spot on the bridge of his nose vacated by his glasses.

“You once called me a hero… I am no hero…. I came home.”

A breeze swept in through the open cellar door and down to us. It brought with it that sweet pungent smell of rain and sidewalk.

My mine buzzed from the booze and words of an eighty five year old, Christian, pacifist baker with no knee cartilage who refused to carry a gun during World War Two and served instead as a medic. He’d spent the better part of his 19^th year of life in hell where he gathered the wounded and the dead from the battle ground of a muddy Godless forest somewhere along the border between Germany and Luxemburg.

He shared more of his story with me over whiskey and peanut butter like numismatic offering a peak into his coin cabinet. The dawn broke sunless and bruise colored. I staggered up the cellar stares and down to Powder House Blvd. The rain helped steady my gate and I turned right on Broadway and passed the old Powder house where the British had seized some gunpowder in 1774 as a precursor to bigger and better things to come.

It’s extraordinary how we go through life on blind faith and animal instinct. We shut our eyes half way and dull our ears and fill our heads with mundane thoughts. Perhaps it’s just as well. My stomach turned suddenly and I ducked into the darkness of the park and behind a large tree. I gripped the bark of the tree and bent over and vomited into the mud.  The halyard clanged its metal brackets against the monument flag pole. After the last convulsion I cupped my hand along a bush and gathered some rain to my lips. My head cleared and I started to leave. My sneakers stuck in the mud and I lost my balance and fell knees first into the mud. No one reached out to help me up but I didn’t expect there to be.

Shadows of Substance