Elegy on Kinderklavier by Arna Bontemps Hemenway Read Free Book Online Page B

bedroom dry and hot in the afternoon sun, the window open, blinds lazily bowing in the occasional puffs of breeze. Samuel was a sweet boy then; he always carefully took off my braces and blew for a long time on the red marks they left, his breath cool on my skin. He liked kissing the freckle that sat catty-corner to my bellybutton before he kissed anything else, and I generally let him do what he wanted after that, my palm prickling warm against the muscles of his tan back as he moved above me.
    We’d been done for a while, not speaking, just lying there together before we’d have to go to get back to our cabins at the camp. This was Saturday afternoon, which we had free from Bible study, and which most of us used to go home and see our families. That morning Douglas Reeter, Casualty Affairs Officer, had visited the Powers household, and Gary (Peter Powers’ son) wasn’t in morning worship, and so we’d all come to know that his dad had become the sixth man from New Jerusalem, Kansas to be killed inIraq. I was thinking about Doug Reeter, Doug the Reaper, wondering what it was he said to Gary’s mother.
    â€œListen,” Samuel said, not looking at me. He sounded unsure, so I stayed quiet. “You know the well-marker shack, out in the third field over, behind the Dust Bowl?”
    â€œListen,” he said, looking at me now, having decided something. “You got a watch and a flashlight?”
    As he climbed out of my window and crab-crawled across the roof of the porch before dropping down into the sideyard, I leaned against the sill. Standing there I saw Marly in her front yard, beside the fluttering white shapes of her wash hung out to dry. She was watching me, one hand on her hip, the other shielding her eyes.
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    I still have the tapes, of course. Though I’ve only watched them once since I made them, on a rainy spring afternoon a couple years ago after I found out Hilton Hedis had been killed in an accident at the grain elevator. I was missing those boys, then, and I realized I didn’t have any pictures of them, only the tapes.
    What is not on that first miniature videotape: the faces of the boys, barely legible in the dark of the shack. It was not a big space, that shack, and they were arranged around the squared U-shape of the well-pipe coming out of the ground. Also not on the tape: the long walk out there: the cool air and imperfect dark of one forty-five in the morning; the cabins asleep behind me; only the small plastic and metal sound of my gait, the seething of the cicadas, the fog drifting between the trees, out of the crops.
    In the shack, P.J. Holdeman shoved the video camera at me and I took it and looked up at them. Samuel nodded and watched me, seeingwhat I would do. The other boys met my gaze, then looked away.
    What is on the tape: the image jolts on and we are outside the shack, the camera’s night vision picking up the ambient glow of the night sky. There is the sound of a struggle as Truman Renolds and Ralph Simonsen materialize out of the stalks of the field, dragging a hooded figure between them that I know is Gary Powers.
    The boys are all outside now, a clump of dark bodies. The five whose houses Doug the Reaper has already visited begin to wrap cloths that I can’t quite make out around their faces: checked red tablecloths, indistinguishable from what we knew were called kaffiyehs. Those five: Ralph Simonsen (roadside IED), Truman Renolds (Vehicle Borne IED), P.J. Holdeman (his brother shot through the jugular while urinating on the base of a tree), Jackson Kepley (his father riddled with shrapnel from the grenade dropped down onto the street at his feet), and Daniel Willis (his dad knocked unconscious, then burned alive in a helicopter crash). Those five, masked now, open the door to the shack and disappear inside. I feel Samuel’s hand push roughly at my back. On the tape, his voice says, “Go on,” faintly, almost gently, but I