The Sandalwood Tree Read Free

said the soldiers in his platoon were an unlikely bunch thrown together by war, men who would not otherwise have met. Martin, a budding historian, bunked with a fast-talking mechanic from Detroit named Casino. Also in his barracks were an American Indian named William Who Respects Nothing, and a Samoan named Naikelekele, whom the men called Ukulele. Martin said they were OK guys, but a CPA from Queens named Polanski—Ski to the guys—had the wide slab face and flat blue eyes behind too many of the pogroms mounted against the Jews, and Martin had to keep reminding himself that they were on the same side.
    But Ski cheated at cards and had a nascent anti-Semitic streak. Martin said, “Of all the decent guys in that platoon I had to haul Ski back to a field hospital while better men lay dead around us.” His ambivalence about saving Ski haunted him, but it wasn’t
the
thing eating at him like acid.
    One night, in bed, after having had an extra glass of wine with dinner, Martin knit his fingers behind his head and told me about a mess sergeant from the hills of Appalachia, Pete McCoy, who made a crude liquor with pilfered sugar and yeast and canned peaches. Pete had served an informal apprenticeship at his father’s still, deep in the woods of West Virginia, and in a rare, lighthearted moment, Martin did a skillful imitation. He drawled, “Ah know it ain’t legal. But mah daddy’s gonna quit soon as he gits a chance.”
    I said, “The nightmares aren’t about Pete McCoy’s moonshine.”
    “Hey, you didn’t taste that stuff. Burned like a son-of-a-bitchgoing down.” His voice became abstract. “But sometimes the moonshine was necessary, like when Tommie … Well, anyway, McCoy was like the medic who brought the morphine.”
    I said, “Who was Tommie?”
    Martin looked away. “Ah, you don’t want to hear that stuff.”
    “But I do. Talk to me. Please.”
    He hesitated, then, “Nah. Go to sleep.” He patted my hand and rolled away.
    World War II veterans were icons of heroism, brave liberators, and most of them were glad to leave the ugliness buried under the war rubble and get back to a normal life, or try to. But Martin had come home with invisible wounds, and our normal life was as ruined as the German landscape. I wanted to understand. I’d been begging him to talk for two solid years, but he wouldn’t budge. He wouldn’t let me help him, and I felt worn to a stump from trying.
    That business of rolling away from me in bed hurt, but by the time we got to India, I was doing it, too. I was becoming as frustrated as he was tormented, and we took our pain out on each other. We hid in our respective corners until something brought us out with fists raised. I couldn’t fix our insides, so I fixed our outside. I prowled around the bungalow searching for dust mites to exterminate, mold to slaughter, and smudges to wipe out. I vanquished dirt and disorder wherever I found it and it helped, a little.
    The morning I found the letters, I’d filled a pail with hot soapy water and pounced on the sooty bricks behind the old cooker with demented determination. I described foamy circles on the wall with my brush and … what? One brick moved. That was odd. Nothing in that house ever rattled or came loose; the British colonials who built the place had expected to rule India forever. I put the brush down and forced my fingernails into the crumbling mortar around the loose brick, then wiggled it back and forth until it came out far enough for me to get a grip on it. I teased the brickout of the wall and felt a thrill of discovery when I saw, hidden in the wall, a packet of folded papers tied with a faded and bedraggled blue ribbon.
    That packet reeked of long-lost secrets, and I felt a smile lift one corner of my mouth. I set the blackened brick on the floor and reached in to lift my plunder out of the wall. But on second thought, I went to the sink first to wash the soot from my hands.
    With clean, dry hands, I eased the