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Jendi Reiter's first book, A Talent for Sadness, was published in 2003 by Turning Point Books. Her poetry chapbook Swallow won the 2008 Flip Kelly Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Amsterdam Press. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The New Criterion, Mudfish, The Adirondack Review, The Broome Review, FULCRUM, Juked, The Sow's Ear Poetry Review, Clackamas Literary Review, Alligator Juniper, MARGIE: The American Journal of Poetry, Best American Poetry 1990 and many other publications. She is the editor of Poetry Contest Insider, an online guide to over 750 literary contests, published by winningwriters.com . Visit her blog at jendireiter.com .
Jendi Reiter
Waiting for the Train to Fort Devens, June 17, 1943
This photograph was taken right before forty boys turned into soldiers. In fairy tales, transformations are sudden, painless. Seven brothers lift up their white arms in unison and become swans. Forty comical thieves peek out of fat-bellied oil jars. But these forty men waiting for the train to Fort Devens will have a long way to go before they all become the same.
They line up, as if for a yearbook portrait, beneath the slatted wooden balcony of the old Bay State Hotel, which must have been a cheap hotel because its front porch is only a dozen feet from the railroad tracks. A place for salesmen and card sharps, or girls who thought they needed to make a quick getaway from their parents' sleepy fireside. Some of these boys might have taken a girl to the Bay State Hotel after a night of confused carousing, hooked up by an elder brother who offered a knowing wink that both annoyed and excited them. Some of these boys have never had the opportunity, and are distracting themselves from thoughts of German bullets by imagining the grateful softness of French girls in a farmhouse where a single candle burns in a wine bottle. These boys kissed Mary Sue or Ethel in the back seat at the drive-in and promised to wait for her, and she might have unhooked her bra even though she knew waiting was powerless against male hormones and the U.S. government.
So here they are at the train station, a scene made up entirely of straight lines: the upright men, the long repetitive balcony, horizontals of windows and tracks. Like schoolboys they are still distinct, their motley characters accentuated in a group. Sixty-five years later, is there anyone who could name them all? How quickly accumulation wearies the mind, the way one bird is a pet, twenty a nuisance, fifty a horror pecking at Tippi Hedren in the phone booth. She is remembered, if at all, for that. Some of these boys will drown very stupidly and some will grab desperately at a floating branch that turns out to be their buddy's arm and receive a Silver Star for saving him, that is if his arm is still attached to his body. Some will come home to open a hardware store and run for city council, and no one will know what deaths they saw, because they do not belong to a generation that tells their wives their dreams.
We will have to name them ourselves. The tall one with thick dark hair and a sleepy smile, slouching under the Dawson's Ale sign with one hand in his pocket, like a gambler fingering his dice—that's Charlie, second son, class clown, popular with the best friends of the prettiest girls. He thinks he won't be brave, and he's right. But it doesn't matter what you feel inside, all you need is a good enough grip on the railing when the monsoon hits, says crew-cut Scott, on his left, who deserves to live and won't. Ricky is short, with a nasal voice and big ears, but he knows how to wear a suit. He's used to thrusting his head forward to be heard. He'll open up a bar in Berlin, selling passports to the Communists, girls to the Americans, and every kind of cigarette a soldier desires. Too bad about Scott, he'll tell Douglas, poor dumb Douglas standing at his other side in this photo, who left school in tenth grade and hoped the army would be keener than pumping gas. Doug is big but soft and friendly, at least he is now, which is why Ricky won't at first recognize him after he's killed people.
Handsome Henry, the next in the row, has always looked the same and always will. His face says Sunday School prizewinner, class president, first lieutenant, state representative for Massachusetts. He did what he had to do over there and he really doesn't think about it much at all. Not even when his grandson fires clips of bullets at the screen, making men's heads explode in bursts of digital blood, not even then is Henry likely to picture the plumes of ash and fire that sprung up like black trees seeded by his bomber. It would be nice to tell the story otherwise, but the trains to Fort Devens keep rolling on.
In fact, to understand the war to which they are going, you have to think of trains, those boxcars of bodies that rumble across six decades, into our films and our sleep. The Nazis were great archivists: they understood the horrors of abundance, of over-satiated repetition, how a pile of eyeglasses is the best argument for despair. Sam, on Charlie's other side, is a Jew, though his family chopped some syllables off their name when they moved to this small Massachusetts town. His sergeant will send him through Auschwitz at the end, to round up the stunned and cowering skeletons that are still breathing. Fleeing his people, Sam hides in the commandant's office, as once he hid in the library from the playground bullies, behind the calfskin fortress of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Here is other skin, drawers of teeth, packets of hair, sheaves of photos taken of bodies, from bodies. Sam stuffs grandmothers in his pockets, snatches up wallets of baby faces, until the sergeant stops him. Crazy Jew. The tracks to Auschwitz stretch unbombed to the horizon, straight lines in the commandant's ledger. For the rest of his life Sam will collect photographs, including this one: Waiting for the train to Fort Devens, June 17, 1943.
