Stolen Dishonor

The WWI medal is obviously out of place here, but these are otherwise my step-opa’s WWII medals.

My Opa came to visit one summer while we were still living in the Appalachians, somewhere around 1984. It was the only time I ever spent any time whatsoever with him—that one summer. He had been a high-level youth soccer player in Germany during the 1940s, and an able teacher, so I learned enough that summer to carry me into the all-important twelfth man role in high school, a pedestrian midfielder prone to come off the bench as more an enforcer, committing iffy tackles because my heart was still in football, not Fußball. Poor Opa, shaking his head, shouting instructions to me beneath the pin oak tree on the front lawn, encouraging me, shall we say, in a language I didn’t understand because my mom was so ashamed of her native tongue that she spoke to me in her endearing Southern-American English with fantastic German accentuation. I’d later lose grade school spelling bees because my d’s and t’s were indistinguishable. “I said d!” I’d protest, to which everyone in unison would reply, “The word doesn’t end in a t!” I’d lick my wounds by melting crayons on the radiator while the rest of the class was rapt in the competition of d’s against t’s.

Poor Opa, and the memory of him, I must say. I have committed a great injustice against him. I have applied a dishonor upon him, ignorantly, and out of shame.

This singular visit in 1984 was a painful one: he didn’t bring his wife, my Oma; instead, he showed up in a pastor’s house with his mistress, Judith.

How old was my mom at the time? If it was 1984, she was 32, and Judith was much the same age, and beautiful. She also had a daughter by my Opa; she was 10, I think, right between me (11) and my first sister (9). At one point during the visit, my second sister saw Mom standing between the cars in the driveway, hiding from her father, weeping. Christina, my half-aunt, spent the entire summer melded to her mother’s hip, and when she was forced to be apart from Judith, she cried piteously until their reuniting.

This is in strong contrast to visits from my Oma, who invariably brought my uncle Uli, full-uncle, who was only three years older than me: he almost never cried and he was more fun than a barrel of monkeys.

So you can see, by doing the actual math there, how I managed to mis-assign dishonor to my Opa. He divorced my Oma, eventually, disowning his entire family, I’m fairly certain, right unto his deathbed, pledging undying love to Judith even when he croaked. Meanwhile, Oma had proceeded to marry a gentle old man who took care of her until he died.

“David! I schau you some-sing!” he exclaimed upon my first meeting with him, of several. He was such an eccentric fellow, always happy, merry, delighted with everything, and caring for all, a faithful father and husband, and wise, managing his affairs so as not to offend his family from his first wife nor the family belonging to his second wife. “I schau you some-sing!”

And he began to unbuckle his belt and loosen his pants. “My var voont.” I heard the “t”, but it was every bit the same d as I struggled to pronounce when I was eleven years old. His war wound. He was about to show me his war wound. “NO! OPA NO! NEIN! ICH…UH…ICH NO NECESSITO!” Down came his pants and he shoved his ass into my face. “See you!” he said. “My first vords I hear in English var ‘Hands up!’ I var so happy to hear not Russian but British.” It wasn’t technically a whole rear end. I studied it in those several horrifying seconds: half of it did not exist. I presume the missing half fertilized the soil somewhere near Berlin around the same time he was captured by the British. He also showed me his military medals, after pulling up his pants.

This is a curiosity. His house was immaculate: every piece of furniture was laid out according to some divine plan and could not be altered in any way; every ray of sun obeyed his command to shine in this spot and not that; dust dared not alight; every photograph was just so, and perfectly maintained. But behind a series of frames of photographs of his family which were arrayed on a countertop, in a dark recess beneath a cabinet, was a tattered frame, ill-kept, ill-maintained, without a glass, and on it, fastened with scotch tape, were his military medals. He reached into the darkness and pulled the display out for me to examine. The medals were quite frightening, in context.

One apologizes. “Well, he was in the Wehrmacht; probably was conscripted, fighting for his homeland. This gentle creature could never be…” (suppresses a shudder) “…he could never be one of those.” Well…

My father and I explored the vast reaches of the Southeast of these great United States, reaching into the old strongholds of the Confederate States of America, poring over genealogies in graveyards, when we heard a rumor of a tale of a misty memory of a graveyard outside of Cedartown, Georgia. When we made that turn out of town, Dad was lost, but he was convinced he was near to something very, very important. We stopped at a filling station, and after buying me a Dr. Pepper (in a glass bottle), he asked the gentleman tending the store whereabouts this graveyard might be.

“As a matter of fact,” the man said, “I know exactly what you’re looking for. You want to go…let me count the paved roads…one, two, three…no, that’s a dirt road…listen real close: you want to go past four paved roads leading up the mountain; be real careful you don’t count the ones leading away from the mountain, and get on the fifth one. It looks like it’s going up the mountain, but it’s not: it’s going around the mountain. And when you get to a big field opening up to your right, look left, and up. There’s a rise there with three oak trees. You won’t be able to see it, but there will be a small graveyard in that grove.”

We found it exactly as the man said.

In that graveyard were our direct ancestors, lost to my Dad’s immediate family because his grandfather had immigrated to Alabama when he was a little boy, the last of the war generation. Dad was over the moon, and he immediately started pulling up weeds and stomping out saplings. He didn’t notice the approaching middle-aged lady with a drawn pistol. “Dad!” I said. He was swatting at a few wasps and yellow jackets, in utter ecstasy, and my cry annoyed him, but that pistol was a present reality.

“Well, hello!” Dad said, flashing that big gap-toothed smile of his, which could disarm the Soviet Navy. She said, very sweetly, “Do you know you’re trespassing?” And there followed the loveliest conversation involving a drawn firearm I ever witnessed. In fact, we all became friends that day. She had long wondered who might take care of that graveyard. It was a family graveyard, which meant, quite literally, that her property once belonged to our ancestors. It was, indeed, a heady moment, one I treasure to this day, up on that hill, laid out on a blanket, eating a sandwich, drinking another Dr. Pepper, and talking with a perfect stranger about the long and very local history of this settlement outside Cedartown, Georgia.

She showed us the graves of our grandfathers. My great-great-grandfather is buried there (I get lost in all the greats; please forgive me), and at the foot of his grave is a decoration, laid there for all posterity by the Daughters of the Confederacy. He fought in the Georgia Cavalry alongside his father, who is buried right next to him.

One apologizes. “Surely they were fighting for states rights, for a flawed pursuit of constitutional purity, for the integrity of the…” (suppresses a shudder) “…they couldn’t have been slaveowners.” Well…

Our well-armed hostess eventually directed us to go back around the mountain and drive across the main road, this time away from the mountain, and we would happen upon a Methodist church, now abandoned, with a sizeable graveyard in it. Go past that Methodist church, and at the next road turn right, and three houses down would be J.T. Dangler and his dear wife. They were the true local historians.

We found it just as the woman said.

J.T. welcomed us with all the hospitality you’ve heard of, and he began to recite the histories before we had even sat down and been served sweet tea by Mrs. Dangler. “Back in that Methodist church graveyard is Tommy Duke.” Now, I don’t remember who Tommy Duke is to us, but he’s important enough that I named my firstborn after him.

So Dad and I sped back to the graveyard to dig up more old ghosts, and boy howdy, did we ever. Tommy’s grave was there, well-maintained by the graveyard committee, as was the entire graveyard, up to a certain boundary. Dad and I tromped over a dilapidated old barrier of some sort, into a (now this is important, so pay attention) into a little grove of saplings. These trees couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old. “Maybe we have more relatives in here,” Dad said. There were no large trees in this grove, but it was chock full of graves, and all the grave markers were blank. Dad uttered a mild oath. “Oh, these are all so old the inscriptions have worn off.”

At about that moment, J.T. and his wife arrived at the scene. He heard my Dad. “No,” he said. “Those are the graves of all the family slaves.”

I looked back at Tommy’s grave. We were about thirty yards away, standing in the middle of the graves of slaves, and his was in the middle of a host of graves, so that it was difficult to discern where the boundary was between the two sections, aside from the saplings. The church building was right there, as big as life. We made this discovery in 1988 or so. I have been puzzling over the particulars of this ever since.

J.T. then directed us to Sulfur Springs, a decrepit settlement not terribly far from the Methodist church graveyard. Sulfur Springs had been a health spa, complete with a train depot, a hotel, a general store, and the spa itself, all of these institutions owned and operated by those two men in the family graveyard whose graves the Daughters of the Confederacy saw fit to decorate, and worked by slaves they owned and fought to keep. There was some brickwork and a few other stones thrown down to mark the location, along with a spring which continued to seep up from the ground. I’m fairly confident General Sherman’s men threw all those stones down and chased my great-grandfather into Alabama. The slaveowners were now impoverished and deprived of their institutions.

All my aunts and uncles on my Dad’s side recount how my grandfather (d. 1967) would remonstrate with them when they uttered racial epithets. In front of their mother his bride, he would say, “You have more black brothers and sisters than you do white.” My grandmother was widely believed to be an American Indian, and even if she wasn’t, she was treated horribly as though she were. She bore twelve children to my grandfather, eleven of whom survived to adulthood. My grandfather was an alcoholic, driven to madness by a wound he received in World War One, and he would disappear for days at a time, presumably to make babies by other women of all races. Dad would later drive two black girls to the Selma March, meeting Martin Luther King Jr, in passing, shaking his hand at some sort of exchange point. He smuggled them behind the front seat of the car, on the floor board, under a blanket. So he says. Many things for his only son to ponder and treasure up in his heart.

I recall that, for some reason, the church in the Appalachians installed a fluorescent light fixture in the dining room of the parsonage, where we lived, and it never worked quite right, emitting a wan, ghostly light. My Oma sat there, during another summer, bathed in that quasi-light, sucked a cigarette into her lungs, and exhaled with this syllable, “Yooooooooooooooooood.” The d was quite pronounced. She’d been in Hitler Youth, studying ballet. Those years of her youth had an odd effect on her in her retirement years: the volunteer fire department tested its alert system every Tuesday evening, which sent her into conniptions and running into the basement for shelter.

Hm…

I assumed my Opa met my Oma in Hitler Youth, she as an aspiring ballerina and he as an aspiring soccer star. My sister Mary Anne recently remonstrated with me quite forcefully. “No, you’ve got it all wrong. It was her second husband: he was in Hitler Youth. Our Opa fed Jews cabbages during the war.”

“No,” I said, quite certain. I’m the oldest, see, and the thoughtful one. It’s impossible for me to be wrong about such things. “That’s not right at all. Her second husband was the sweetest, gentlest guy in the world. There’s no way. No way.”

Opa, my full Opa, who brought his mistress and his child by her to visit us, was indeed actually part of a minor resistance effort during the Nazi rule over Germany. He and his family hid Jews in their basement as part of a network of escape, something akin to our Underground Railroad. I’m absolutely astonished. How could I be so wrong? What an amazing character!

Well, you can see how. He was an utterly nasty person, without a doubt. Character, however, doesn’t run along straight lines. Things like Nazi rule might have a bending effect on the trajectory of a person’s soul, especially if, by some lie or chance of fate you marry a woman who was actually a sadistic anti-Semite when you yourself harbored Jewish people, at risk of your life, and refused Hitler Youth membership, at pain of ostracization. I can’t bear to discuss this with my mom’s side of the family. I know them, unlike my Opa.

For decades—decades—I have held my Opa in contempt, and I regret it. What a tragedy! I have committed a great injustice against him. I have applied a dishonor upon him, ignorantly, and out of shame. The dishonor belongs to the other man, the one I liked! The boundary of the ocean and language and his death and the divorce and the adulterous affair—boundaries all, preventing a frank conversation between two men exploring the boundaries of human existence…ach, du Lieber!

My dad had a full head of hair, as thick on the day he died as it was when he was wrestling with sacks of gunpowder aboard the USS Braine. My Opa, on the other hand, well, not so much. What have I inherited from my father? A great deal, no doubt, but from my Opa I have inherited male pattern baldness, the slow one which comes in from behind the crown of the pate. I can’t see the progressive thinning in the mirror, but my children and wife can, and all the people I work with. Man, I do wonder what else I inherited from him.