I was on my way home from the canteen alone one afternoon when I came upon a commotion in the street. In the center of the gathering crowd I heard the dull thuds and grunts of a fistfight. Curious, I peered over heads and between shoulders for a better look. Three middle-aged factory workers from the Irish part of town had ganged up on a fourth man, who lay on the ground like a heap of used clothing. My stomach lurched. Something about that clothing looked horribly familiar.
“You’re a spy for those filthy Jerries, aren’t you, man! Aren’t you!” Every time the fallen man moved, one of the others would kick him.
“Tell the truth, Fritzie. We know you’re one of them.”
“If you’re not, then let’s hear you say the Pledge of Allegiance.”
When the man crawled to his knees and tried to stand, they knocked him down again. But not before I caught a glimpse of the man’s bloodied face. It was Papa.
“Stop it! Stop it!” I screamed. “Leave him alone!” I ran into the street with my fists flying. I had no intention of turning the other cheek to these bullies like my father was doing. The ringleader grabbed my arm. “Well, then, and who might you be, girlie?” He had the florid face and reddened nose of a man who drank too much. I kicked him hard in the shins.
“Aye! You must be a bloody Hun too,” he said, grunting. “You surely fight like one!” He let go of my arm to rub his leg.
“I was born in America, not in an Irish bog like you!”
The other two bullies laughed as they circled around me, teasing and baiting me. I had become the center of their attention now, but I was too angry and too worried about Papa to be afraid for myself. I could hear my father moaning softly on the ground behind me.
“How dare you attack an innocent man! One who won’t even fight back!”
“Sure, and he’s not so innocent, missy,” the red-faced man said. “He talks just like the Kaiser.”
“Vee vill vin dis var!” a short, apelike man cried, mimicking Papa’s accent.
“We don’t tolerate spies,” the leader said. “We believe in America for Americans.”
“We’re more American than you are, you stupid Micks!” I shouted. “Just because you’re too old and decrepit for the army doesn’t give you the right to start your own private war!”
They were no longer laughing. I had made them mad. Monkey-man grabbed me from behind, pinning my arms. “Let me go, you ugly ape!” I kicked and struggled to free myself, but he was too strong. I despaired of anyone helping me, when a man suddenly pushed his way through the crowd of bystanders.
“Leave them alone! Let her go, Liam! What’s the matter with you?” I could tell by his accent that he was Irish like the other three.
My captor jerked roughly on my arms. “We’ve caught us a couple of spies, Paddy. And a feisty one, at that.”
“Aye, this one here refused to buy liberty stamps.” The florid-faced leader gave Papa another kick in the ribs.
Before I had time to cry out, the newcomer grabbed the bully by the front of his shirt, nearly lifting the man off the ground. “You want to fight someone, Kevin, fight me!” he said in his face. “Not a harmless man of the cloth.”
“But he’s a Protestant—”
“This isn’t Ireland! Haven’t you had enough hatred for one lifetime? Isn’t that why we came to America? To get away from prejudice and fighting?” My defender was in his early twenties, much younger than the other three men, but he wielded a mysterious power over them that caused them to back away in respect.
“Now, I’m thinking you owe these people an apology,” he said, releasing the man.
The leader straightened his clothes. “I’m not apologizing to Huns,” he said sullenly.
“Then don’t you dare show your face at St. Brigit’s until you do, Kevin Malloy.”
“Aw, now Paddy, what are you taking their side for? They’re Jerries . . . and Protestants to boot.”
Paddy took a step toward him, fists clenched. “Help the man to his feet, Liam.”
“But he-”
“I said, help him to his feet!”
They quickly obeyed, hauling Papa to his feet none too gently. I couldn’t understand the magnetic authority the young man had over men who were twenty years his senior. After they got Papa off the ground, Paddy coaxed a reluctant apology from the three bullies.
“I forgive you,” Papa said, holding a handkerchief to his split lip. I was furious.
“How can you forgive them? Look how they’ve hurt you!” He’d been beaten so badly he couldn’t even stand up straight, and I feared by the way his left arm hung that it was broken. Papa held up his hand to silence me.
“I forgive them because the Bible says that we must.”
“Well, I’ll never forgive them for hurting you. Never!”
The young Irishman and I helped Papa to a chair inside the canteen. “You ought to see a doctor, Reverend,” he said. “I’d like to help you. Who is your doctor? Let me fetch him.”
“Thank you, but I’ll be fine.” Papa allowed me to clean the blood off his face with a wet cloth, but he insisted that we forget the matter and go home. We went home, but forgetting the matter didn’t turn out to be so simple.
News of the attack quickly spread all over town, and a group of elders and deacons came to the parsonage that night to talk to Papa. I stood in the hallway outside the closed parlor door and listened to every word.
“We need to arm ourselves, Pastor! If they would do this to you, what would stop them from attacking our women and children next?”
“He’s right, Friedrich. These incidents aren’t happening just in Bremenville. Anti-German hysteria has spread all over the United States. We need to fight back!”
“Listen to yourselves,” Papa said. His voice was soft, his phrases clipped, as if it hurt him to draw a deep breath. “We cannot stoop to their level. Those who live by the sword die by the sword. Is that what you want for your families?”
“We want our families safe, not beaten to a bloody pulp!”
“There’s something else we need to say, Pastor Schroder.” I recognized Mr. Metzger’s voice. He was the head of the consistory. “There are new laws . . . the government is inflicting heavy penalties for criticizing the war. We think you should stop preaching sermons about peace.”
“Am I now taking orders from you instead of the Holy Spirit?” Papa asked angrily. “Are you telling me what I can and cannot preach?”
“We are asking you to consider what happened today. It could have been any one of us. Until this war ends, we dare not draw attention to ourselves or to our German ancestry.” He paused, and when he spoke again his voice was calm but firm. “The board has decided to cancel the German-speaking service and to hold English-only services until the war ends. The elders and deacons will be warning our members to speak English in public and to avoid all contact with the Irish-Catholic population. We need to stick more closely together as a community to protect ourselves and our children. . . .”
Disgusted, I didn’t wait to hear the rest. I hated Bremenville and my cloistered life here more than ever, and I renewed my determination to flee as soon as the war ended. I was sure my chance could come soon. The news from Europe was good; we were winning the war. The steady stream of letters I received from Markus were optimistic that victory was close at hand.
Markus’s letters were also filled with his dreams for the future—dreams which, in his mind, included me. He knew about our parents’ scheme to match the two of us and thought it was a good one. But I had no intention of sharing my future with Markus Bauer.
Papa had promised me that he wouldn’t make me marry against my will, but the war had altered him so much that I feared he wouldn’t remember. I loved my family, but I didn’t want a life like Mama’s and Sophie’s. I wanted one that was filled with music and laughter—I wanted to travel to new places and see new things. As restless as the geese flocking in the Metzgers’ field near the river, I waited for the day I could mount up on win
gs and fly away.
Then in the fall of 1918, just as the Allies stepped up their offensive on the western front, the Spanish influenza epidemic hit. The flu swept through army camps and service ports first, and thousands of soldiers fell ill and died. The outbreak spread to the civilian population next, paralyzing cities as thousands of workers became infected.
“I don’t want you girls to work at the Red Cross canteen until this epidemic runs its course,” Papa announced at the breakfast table one morning. “Stay away from all public places.”
I thought he was being much too overprotective. “What about church?” I said sullenly. “That’s a public place.”
Papa’s face was uncharacteristically stern. “Dr. Strauss has already warned me that the church will need to close if any cases are diagnosed here in Bremenville.”
“I feel like a prisoner in this stupid town as it is,” I mumbled as I pushed eggs around on my plate.
“You are young, and you imagine that you are invincible, but I assure you that you are not.” Papa rose from his seat at the head of the table and laid the newspaper in front of me. “Read this, Emma. Read about the tens of thousands of people who are ill and dying. In some cities, the authorities have gone door to door heaping the corpses on carts, like they did during the Dark Ages when the bubonic plague struck. I’m making you stay home for your own good.”
After I’d endured several weeks of being confined to the house, I rebelled. Using the excuse of visiting my sister Sophie in town, I made arrangements to meet a boy at the movies. Eva came with me. We did stop at Sophie’s house briefly, as I’d told Papa we would, then I hustled Eva off to the show.
Bremenville’s main street was unusually quiet for a Friday night. Even the Irish pubs along the riverfront seemed to be doing a poor business, judging by the stillness of the town and the absence of the bars’ noisy ruckus. The ticket lines for the movies stretched to barely half their usual length, but it was the large public warning sign posted outside the theater that stopped Eva in her tracks:
INFLUENZA
frequently complicated with
Pneumonia
is prevalent at this time throughout America.
This theater is cooperating with the Department of Health.
YOU MUST DO THE SAME!
If you have a cold and are coughing and sneezing,
do not enter this theater!
GO HOME AND GO TO BED UNTIL YOU ARE WELL!
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Eva said. “Let’s go home. I don’t want to see this stupid movie anyway.”
“But if you go home, I’ll have to go home too, and I’m supposed to meet someone here. Please, Eva,” I begged. “Do me a favor . . . just this time? You may need a favor someday too.”
I could tell she was afraid, but I pressured her until she gave in. It was the worst mistake I ever made in my life. There wasn’t a thing wrong with my sister that night, but three days later she was burning with fever and gasping for every breath. Papa sent me to fetch Dr. Strauss. I waited in the parlor with Mama and Papa while he examined Eva.
“It’s the Spanish influenza,” he said when he’d finished examining her. He pulled off the gauze face mask he wore and shook his head. “There’s very little we can do except wait for it to run its course.”
I went cold all over with dread. It didn’t occur to me to be worried about catching the flu myself, even though Eva and I shared a bedroom. But the thought that my disobedience had endangered my sister’s life shook me to my core.
“It’s very important that we locate the source of infection,” Dr. Strauss was saying, “as well as isolate anyone Eva may have infected since then. Can you tell me what her movements were for the past four or five days? Did she attend church yesterday?”
“No, she wasn’t feeling well enough to go,” Mama said. Her voice was hushed with fear. Papa took her hand in his and held it tightly.
“The only time in the past week that Eva left the parsonage was when she and Emma went to our daughter Sophie’s house Friday night,” he said.
Everyone turned to me. I didn’t wait for the inevitable questions but quickly confessed the truth, hoping that God would have mercy on Eva if I did. “It’s all my fault. We did go to see Sophie, but then we went to the movies afterward. It was my idea. Eva didn’t want to go inside the theater when she saw the health notice, but I talked her into it.”
Dr. Strauss closed his eyes for a moment. “In that case, I don’t see how we can possibly stop it from spreading now.” He stood and shoved his arms into the sleeves of his overcoat as if it was made of lead. “At this point, you can do much more than I can, Pastor. You can pray.”
As soon as the doctor was gone, I fell to my knees in front of the sofa and began to plead with God, my face buried in the cushions. Papa must have seen that my tears of guilt and remorse were genuine because he was surprisingly gentle with me. He knelt beside me a few minutes later and rested his hand on my back.
“Emma . . . I don’t make rules to spoil your fun. I make them for the same reason God does—to protect the people I love.”
“But why is God punishing Eva?” I cried. “Tell Him to punish me! I’m the one who disobeyed!”
“It’s not a punishment, Emma. It’s a consequence. God isn’t punishing Eva. Sin always carries its own consequences. You both walked past the warning sign. That’s what God’s laws are—warning signs. We ignore them at our own peril.”
My parents wouldn’t let me go into the bedroom for fear that I would get sick too, so I stood outside the door, pleading with Eva for forgiveness. I don’t know if she heard me or not.
Papa and I nearly wore holes in the floor of the empty church where we knelt and prayed for Eva, but God didn’t listen to either one of us. Eva died a week later. Mama and Papa were both at her side in the end. The look on their faces when they closed the bedroom door and came downstairs to tell Vera and me the news haunted me for years afterward.
No one from our church was allowed to come to her funeral and mourn with us because the Department of Health feared that the epidemic might spread. Even my sister Sophie, who was expecting her second baby, didn’t dare to come. But Gus and Magda Bauer defied caution to stand in the cemetery behind the church with us that cool fall afternoon and help lower Eva’s coffin into the ground. As brilliantly colored leaves drifted to the ground all around us, it seemed impossible that Eva‘s life, like the leaves’, had ended.
My grief and guilt were beyond measure. I felt responsible for Eva’s death as surely as if I’d put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger. I couldn’t face Papa, who sat in his study the rest of the day, refusing to eat. I couldn’t face Mama, who wept and grieved for her daughter upstairs in their bedroom. I couldn’t face my sister Vera, who eyed me as though I might somehow cause her death too. And I couldn’t face being alone in the room I’d shared with Eva all my life, staring at her clothes and dolls, remembering her, missing her. I sat shivering on the front porch that evening, wishing with all my heart that I had died instead of Eva.
As twilight fell, I heard a car coming down our road. When it slowed near the church and turned into our yard, I was surprised to see that it was Uncle Gus. He and Aunt Magda had just gone home a few hours ago after the funeral. He turned off the engine and sat in his car for several minutes, unmoving. I wondered if he’d been drinking, but he finally got out and slowly walked toward the house. He looked disheveled, his eyes red, his face streaked with tears he hadn’t bothered to wipe.
“Where’s Fred?” he asked in a hoarse voice.
“In his study. . . . What’s wrong, Uncle Gus?”
He trudged past me into the house as if he hadn’t heard my question. I followed him as far as the door and saw Papa come out of his study to meet him in the hallway.
“Gus?”
“It’s too much to face in one day, Fred,” he wept. “It’s too much. . . .”
Papa gripped Uncle Gus by the arms as if they could hold each other
up. “Tell me,” he whispered.
“Magda and I just received word . . . Markus is dead.”
“No!” I cried out. “No, he can’t be dead, he can’t be! When did he die, how long ago?”
Uncle Gus gazed at me, bleary-eyed. “He died in a tank explosion last week.”
I covered my face and wept. I had written to Markus to say that I did not want to marry him when he came home. Now he was dead at the age of twenty- one on a battlefield in Germany—the very soil his parents had left a year before he was born. For the second time, I felt the rod of God’s punishment and wrath strike me to my core.
The third blow came a week later when Magda Bauer became ill with influenza and died. She and Eva were only two of the twenty million influenza fatalities worldwide, but we mourned as if they were the only ones.
After the armistice was signed in November of 1918, terrible news began to pour in from Germany too. The nation had been devastated by the war, then ravaged by disease and famine. One after another, my German grandparents had all died. Aunt Runa’s son and all three of Uncle Kurt’s sons had been killed in battle. Aunt Ada’s son had been wounded. The war was finally over, but neither of my parents was ever the same. Nor was I.
FIFTEEN
* * *
“Karl Bauer is back in town and has asked permission to court you,” Papa told me in the spring of 1919.1 hadn’t even realized that Karl had left town. He disappeared when he was eighteen and I was twelve, but there were so many more ragged little Bauers running around that I don’t think anyone even noticed he was gone. He had been sick shortly before that, laid up in bed for almost a month, but no one ever said what the illness was. Now he was back in Bremenville.
“I’ll go out with Karl,” I said. It didn’t matter to me who I dated. Eva had been my best friend, and I was so lonely after she died that I would have agreed to be courted by any boy who asked just to dull the pain.