Fischer remained silent, staring at him nonplussed. Rohde worried that he had overstepped his bounds. Nobody asked his commanding officer for a medal. But the German military was not one to frown upon ambition. There was no higher ambition than to earn the Iron Cross.
Much to his relief, the captain laughed. He clapped Rohde on the shoulder. "You have style, Rohde! I saw that in you, which is why I made you a sniper. It is a shame that you did not finish off that American sniper. Maybe next time. Meanwhile, keep shooting Amis like you have been doing, and you will win that Iron Cross yet!"
Chapter Seventeen
"Mail call!"
At the shout from the mail orderly, a group of GIs pressed around. It was something of a logistical miracle that personal mail got through to the front lines, never mind the fact that the letters and packages from home were sometimes weeks getting there. The mail was certainly a morale builder, but more than that, it was a matter of pride that the mail got through. The military postal service was not going to let a thousand miles of ocean, scores of U-boats, and a hostile Wehrmacht stop the mail.
Vaccaro pushed his way to the front of the group. He almost always got a package from home, or at least a letter. The package contents were invariably practical and sometimes delicious. Socks, one week. Homemade Italian cookies and candy, another week. Once, an entire cake had arrived. That had made Vaccaro the most popular guy in the squad.
Vaccaro was still waiting for his latest package when Cole's name was called.
Cole never got mail. The mail orderly paused and glanced at the label a second time before stating more quizzically, "Cole?"
"I'll take that." Vaccaro grabbed the package and waded to the back of the crowd, where Cole was going over his rifle with an oily rag. He thrust the neatly wrapped box at him, giving it a good shake in the process to try and hear what was inside. No luck there. "Hell must be freezing over, Hillbilly. You got a package."
"Must be cookies," Cole said nonchalantly. He kept on cleaning his rifle.
"You can't tell me that somebody back home in Possum Holler or wherever you’re from made you a batch of cookies. Maybe it's moonshine."
"Blow it out your ass, Vaccaro," Cole said, reaching for the box, not quite successfully hiding a grin. He was just as curious as Vaccaro as to the contents of the package. "Give that here."
"Is it from your mama?"
Cole glanced at the return address. He couldn't actually read, but he could recognize names. "No, it ain't from my mama. Not unless she done changed her name to Hollis Bailey."
"Who the hell is that?"
"An old friend from back home."
The cardboard box within was neatly wrapped in heavy brown paper tied with the sort of rough twine that gardeners favored. Judging from the label on the box, it had once held canning jars. Maybe Vaccaro wasn't that far off about the moonshine.
Hollis had not bothered with a note. A narrow object lay inside, carefully wrapped in layer after layer of newspaper.
"Is there anything in there or is that just a box full of old newspapers?" Vaccaro asked.
"Hollis always liked to say that if you think one nail is good enough, then better make it two."
"Ah, the wisdom of Possum Holler. You ought to write a book."
By now, a little crowd had gathered thanks to Vaccaro's loud mouth. Cole was something of a man of mystery to the rest of the company. He kept to himself. He definitely never talked about home or sweethearts. He never received so much as a postcard.
The thought of someone like Cole getting cookies in the mail seemed ridiculous. It was as if he had arrived fully formed as a sniper, hands forever wrapped around a scoped rifle and clear-cut eyes scanning the horizon. Vaccaro had joked about moonshine, which seemed more likely.
If Cole had, in fact, gotten a jar of moonshine, they all wanted a taste.
Cole unwrapped the object that had been so carefully sent these many miles and held it up. The final layer of wrapping was a Confederate flag about a foot long, just the size that bystanders might wave at a parade. Just the size to mark a grave.
Cole stretched out the flag and admired it.
Vaccaro was busy looking over Cole’s shoulder at the contents of the box. "I'll be damned," he said, more than a little awestruck by what he saw.
The Cole family and Hollis Bailey went back a ways. Hollis lived two miles as the crow flies from the Cole family shack on Gashey's Creek. In the mountains, it helped to be a crow or to have two good feet if you wanted to get somewhere. The Coles were so far back in the woods that nothing more than a trail led to their place. Nobody was driving a car back in there, that was for damn sure. It was only after he'd gotten into the Army and understood more about such things that Cole began to wonder if his family even owned the land that their shack was on. That far back in the woods, nobody bothered much with deeds or property lines. Coles had been living on that land since before the Revolutionary War, but it would be just like a Cole to be a squatter.
The shack was hammered together out of mismatched boards that very well might have gone missing from the side of someone's barn in the dead of night. Sheets of tin covered the roof, so spotted with rust that they resembled a Palomino hide.
Cole still remembered the first time that Hollis had wandered up to the shack, kicking the hounds out of the way, because he was one of the few visitors they'd ever had. With his gray hair and beard, Hollis had looked like an old man even back then. It turned out that he had seen the smoke from their chimney and gotten curious. He was their closest neighbor.
In his mind's eye, Cole could picture his mother greeting Hollis in her bare feet and threadbare dress. If it was warm out, Cole and his brothers didn't wear shirts or shoes. For a dress, one of his little sisters wore a flour sack with holes cut in it for her head and arms. Cole hadn't known any different then, but being in the Army had given him a new perspective on just how poor they’d been.
Old Hollis's eyes had never held a look of pity or of contempt. He had always greeted them with a warm smile, and once or twice, a stick of candy. There had even been a few times when a box of canned food was left on a stump near the start of the trail leading to the shack. Who would have left it but Hollis? No one else had ever given a damn about the Cole family. He turned up every now and then to buy deer antlers and buckskin off pa. He was never interested in buying any of pa’s moonshine, which he called, “Devil spit.”
Once Cole was old enough, it wasn't long before his wanderings took him out to Hollis Bailey's place. He'd heard that old Hollis was always on the lookout for scrap metal, and Cole had brought him whatever he could find. He reckoned it was an easier way to make money than trapping.
The neat, white farmhouse and red barn couldn't have been more different from the Cole family's shack. There was also the fact that Bailey's place lay within sight of the county road. The road wasn't paved, and it wasn’t busy, but the occasional passing car or truck raised clouds of dust.
That first time, he'd found Hollis out in the barn.
“Why, if it ain’t one of the Cole boys. How you gettin' along back there?"
Cole shrugged. "I reckon just fine, Mr. Bailey."
Hollis looked the skinny boy in front of him up and down, then sighed and patted the heavy leather apron he wore. Fine metal dust flew up and sparkled in the sun. "What can I do for you, boy? Looks like you got somethin' in that poke."
Cole did. He had been wandering the countryside, finding scraps of metal where he could. Basically, he gathered any metal that looked flat and straight enough to make a knife out of.