The Bavarian Gate

13

Leave

Because they were headed overseas, the men assigned to the 503rd were given leave-two weeks plus travel time. Macurdy gave his destination as Nehtaka, Oregon, but went first to Salem, Indiana, where Charley and Edna met him at the depot.

They hadn't seen their youngest son for more than nine years, and Edna hugged him, weeping, a remarkable display of emotion for a Macurdy. Charley simply stared. "Good God," he breathed when Curtis was able to give him his attention. "You're another one. You haven't aged a day." Then he too embraced their son.

Curtis spent two days with them, and his parents told him some old family lore, stories he hadn't heard before-that very few had in his generation. His great great gram pa was said not to have aged. He'd disappeared when his oldest boy reached seventeen, only to turn up again, briefly, on one leg and two crutches, at the end of the Civil War. Even then he'd looked young, though scar-faced and short a limb like so many who were young. To learn that his wife had died sixteen years earlier. His two sons recognized him when he told them who he was, but at his request referred to him as "Cousin Martin from back east."

But after "Cousin Martin" was gone again, one of them told his wife who their visitor had been, and the story leaked to others in the family. But not all, and mostly it stopped there. Until one of the "old man's" grandchildren-one of Edna's uncles, who was also a second cousin of Charley's-had left his wife and children when he was thirty-six and looked about twenty-five. Left without warning, but semi-regularly had wired money from California until about 1915.

"You can probably understand how we felt when Varia didn't age," Charley said. "We thought she might be one of my cousin's kids by some second wife out west. Although from what you told us before, I guess she couldn't have been."

Edna took Curtis's hand. "And now here you are, thirty-eight years old and still so young looking, no older than Frank's oldest boy. And married, you say."

Curtis nodded. "Mary knows about me. About how I don't age. I told her before we got engaged, and she married me anyway. I guess it wasn't all that real to her then; even I wasn't entirely sure. And of course, she's still not quite twenty-six. We'll probably leave Nehtaka when the war's over." If I'm still alive, he added silently.

Liiset, or whichever of Varia's clones it had been, had returned just once, a few months after Curtis had left. After that it was as if the Sisterhood had given up on him. So Curtis gave his parents his Nehtaka address.

His reception in Nehtaka was also marked by hugs and tears. The next day he got hold of some black market gas, and in their '35 Chevy, he and Mary drove south down the coast, where they rented a cabin and spent three days alone, walking the beach, hiking the old spruce forest, watching the surf beat on massive black boulders and ledges… and loving each other. It seemed to both of them they were more in love than ever.

His leave melted like snow on the stove, but when Mary delivered him to the train, she didn't cry. She waited till she got home. And Klara, the tough old Prussian peasant widow, half blind now and three-quarters crippled, comforted her granddaughter. The old woman's tears were for the young wife, not the soldier. Soldiers were expected to die.