Brother Memories

The little boy had a brother, Sietze, four years older, a big buddy he looked up to as daring, smart, and inventive.  He loved to go out in the fields with his brother early in the morning, before breakfast.  The dew would still lie heavy on the grass.  Their footsteps left a trail across the silent fields, footsteps searching for the silver strips tossed from allied planes to jam enemy radar.  Sometimes they would be able to gather a big bundle of these strips and pass it on to underground resistance, for silver paper was much in demand.  But to the boy, the best part of those occasional early morning forays was the silence of the still slumbering world all around, the peacefulness of paths and pastures, of streets and sky.  It made him forget in those mist-shrouded hours that the world was at war, that the enemy ruled the land, and that danger was never far away.

                                                                       

*-*

 

There were other things the brothers would do together.  Every Saturday afternoon the two were given the chore of peeling the potatoes for the family’s Sunday meal.  They would sit across from each other, the basket of potatoes between them.

It was a tedious and boring task, and Sietze did not take kindly to boredom.  He would usually invent a way of lessening the tedium, a way of amusing himself.

On this particular late afternoon, Sietze took a piece of potato peel and reached across the basket to “paint” a swastika on his little brother’s forehead.  It felt clammy and dirty.  “Quit that!”  protested the victim.  But the peel hadn’t made enough of a mark to satisfy Sietze.  He took another peel, this one a little thicker and dirtier to do a better job.  Again he reached across to put the mark of the hated enemy on his brother.  But this time the younger boy was ready to retaliate.  He had his own dirty peel ready on his paring knife and now leaned toward his good-natured tormentor to pay back in kind.  But that’s not how it turned out.  It wasn’t only the peel that reached Sietze’s forehead; it was the blade of the sharp little paring knife as well.

The blade went in smoothly and deep, and blood came out—lots of it.

Screams.  The mother rushing.  Gasping.  Grabbing a towel, pressing it to Sietze’s bloody forehead, yelling for somebody to get the doctor, quick!

More blood.  The mother finally pressing the two lips of the gaping wound firmly together with thumb and forefinger of each hand, stemming the bleeding till the doctor arrived at last.

The doctor sewed Sietze up right then and there, without anesthetic.  The trauma ended, but a two-inch scar would always remind the brothers that once blood flowed between them because of a potato peel.

 

But the young boy, though unintentionally, had spilled his brother’s blood, and the shock and fear of it drove him into hiding.  He lurked nearby until the doctor came and it was clear his beloved older brother would live.  Then he sought a hiding place where he felt safe.  He could not face anyone.  The shame of his careless mistake weighed on him like the curse of Cain.  He simply had to hide because he was afraid of himself, of his parents, even of life itself that so quickly could turn teasing into near tragedy.

So he hid inside a large open wooden box that functioned as a liquid manure tank in all seasons except summer.  With the box resting on a wagon and a spreading device behind it, the farm horse would pull it across the fields.  The home-produced fertilizer was potent both in smell and in effectiveness.  But in late spring, when the cattle were released in pasture, the manure box would be thoroughly cleaned and disinfected.  It was then ready for use as a playhouse; sometimes it even functioned as a huge kind of crib for children and friends to sleep in.

This is where the young fugitive hid.  Cowering at first under the awful knowledge of what his hand had done.  Visions, of his mother, her face tight with tension and a terrible exertion of will power to keep the gate shut tight on her son’s lifeblood.  At last the doctor’s arrival.  Relief.  But his brother’s blood stained his conscience, though he knew it had been an accident.

The late afternoon turned into evening. When voices began to call for him to come to supper, he did not respond.  He heard them searching, but they looked in the wrong places.  After a while it grew quiet, and he knew they were eating without him.

He hoped they worried a little about him. If they worried enough, maybe their anger at his misdeed would subside.

Even when it grew dark, he stayed in his hiding place.  Only when he felt some confidence at last that his parents might regard his self-exile as sufficient punishment, did he emerge.

He went to sleep that night, not filled with food, but filled with a kind of grace that came from his brother beside him and his parents’ hug that said, “We know what you’ve been feeling, and it’s all right now.”

 

                                                                        *-*

 

Sometimes the boy would sit close to his brother on the hay wagon in the backyard, looking out over the fields that were slowly fading in the descending dusk.  They would talk about war, the war that was raging in nearby lands where the German enemy was pursued by soldiers from England and Canada and America.  Even now they heard the steady drone of planes overhead on their way to bomb Germany.  He listened intently when his brother began to talk about his dreams.

“I’m going to tell you a secret.  I know you’re good at keeping secrets.  And this will be our secret, nobody else’s. I’m building an airplane, with my friend Steffen.  Someday I’m going to fly it, just like the pilots are in the planes above us.  And I want you to fly with me.  I want you to be my navigator.  That means you will sit next to me, in the co-pilot seat.  You will study maps and help us find the way.  We will fly all over the country, maybe all over the world.  And if the war is still on, we will drop baskets of food for the hungry people.”

The boy’s eyes grew wide, and his imagination nearly exploded: flying a plane, sitting up front beside his brother, becoming heroes for feeding the hungry from the air.  Suddenly, in the chill of early evening, he felt warm and good all over.  The future had lost some of its mystery.  He and his brother, they would be part of the future and part of an exciting adventure that now became his dream too.

“When is the plane going to be finished?”

“I don’t know.  It’s a big job.”

“Can I watch you build it?”

“No, I’m afraid not.  Nobody’s allowed in the building where we’re working on it.”

“All right, but will you tell me about it again sometime?”

“Oh yeah, we’ll talk about it lots of times.”

“That’s good.  I think I’m going to bed now.”

“Sweet dreams.”

And they were.  That night the boy dreamed about floating through the air, dropping food to the hungry people, and watching the children race to find white loaves of bread and oranges and candy bars—all the things they had not eaten during the years of war.