The End of War: A Novel of the Race for Berlin

December 31, 1944, 11:50 p.m. Bandy farm Big Laurel, Tennessee Above his head, in the cold, dark, wind-creaked rafters of the tobacco barn, Charley Bandy sees withered souls. Clustered five stalks to a stick, stepped several rows deep, they are hung upside down as though in punishment. The ten thousand leaves fill this lower reach of heaven. The air reeks of tar, thick, like the times Bandy has smelled blood. Brown and drying, crowded and alike, these are not the souls of soldiers, Bandy thinks. No. The spirits of the battle-torn shine and are upright in a much higher neighborhood. There's room among war heroes where they are; what they earned for eternity with their courage and their deaths is space, distinction. Bandy is having a melancholy moment, he knows; he's being drawn back. He shakes his noggin to rattle the pull away. But the tobacco leaves drip their sticky scent and the odor is so much like gun smoke and gauze and the morning mists of Europe. He lowers his gaze to the dirt floor of the barn. Several empty tobacco baskets lie about, waiting for another moist day to put the tobacco in case, that condition where the humidity is high to make the leaves supple enough to be handled. But this has been a dry winter, and the burley tobacco leaves, though sufficiently air-cured now dangling on their sticks overhead, can't be touched without breaking like ancient parchment. This Christmas came and went with little gift money. The family is edgy, waiting for the weather to cooperate and put the tobacco in case long enough to bundle it into hands, arrange the hands into the big woven baskets, then truck it all to the auction hall down in Marshall. The family needs to make some money, get school clothes, fix some machinery, buy next season's seed. Only a third of the leaves have been stripped and separated. The lowest leaves, called "lugs," and the paltry tips at the top all get tossed on a pile outside the barn to be used as ground cover and fertilizer. The broad middle leaves, the "smokers," get sold for bulk tobacco. The best leaves make it as far as cigar wrappers. A good, heavy harvest of smokers pays some bills. Inside the house, Bandy's mom and dad, wife, sister and brother-in-law, dozen or so uncles and aunts and cousins and their kin wait for 1945 to arrive in another ten minutes. Every one of them lives nearby, a dog wouldn't get tired jogging between all their houses, either in Big Laurel, Little Laurel, Shelton Laurel, or on a rural road associated with no town. They are tobacco farmers up here in the Appalachian hollers. The clefts between the high slopes are narrow, and arable land comes only in slim patches, always beside the roads. Nothing makes a buck better on so little land as tobacco. The Bandys, the Ketchums, the Wallins are woven together by marriages and births like the tobacco baskets, broad and firm and white, hundred-year-old clans of soil and nicotine, pocket knives, and Saturday nights at the Masonic dance hall. The clamor of his family's revelry--generational, those kids still awake squeal, the adults clink glasses and toast what they're going to do next year, the old folks cackle, the oldest ones cough--skim like sounds over a lake, tinkling and clear to Charles Bandy through the crisp, frostless mountain night. The mountain doesn't know it's New Year's Eve. The war doesn't know it's New Year's Eve. Bandy opens his palms to the kerosene lantern he brought to the barn. He washes his hands in the little heat above the vent and thinks of the GIs freezing right now in foxholes and slit trenches in France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, and Germany. Pall Malls and Lucky Strikes are dangling from beard-shrouded soldiers' lips right now. Surely some Tennessee tobacco is glowing over there. The barn door slides open. Leaves in the rafteRobbins, David L. is the author of 'The End of War: A Novel of the Race for Berlin' with ISBN 9780553108309 and ISBN 0553108301.