Battle Mask: Prologue

BATTLE MASK

A Novel

By Michael Renfro

Prologue

August, 1937

Etta had been drawn to and fascinated with the trunks—one in particular because of its soothing moss green paint—ever since she could remember. Maybe it was really a fascination with far off places. And the old trunk with its faded customs stamps represented tangible evidence that the world could indeed be traveled. She listened in rapt attention when the old folks got together and talked about how her grandfather, Gunter Gruenwald, had emigrated from Bavaria. She felt she knew him, sensing him sometimes in her dreams. And she longed to visit that ancient Teutonic village—Gruenwald—where he had come from in those blue Bavarian Mountains. And to know the circumstances that caused him to leave his family and come to America. She read books about Germany, its history, people. And took all the German language she could in school, memorized hundreds of definitions and spent hours going over conjugations. After school she’d sit cross-legged on the old shipping trunks to do her homework and wonder about Germany.

Her fascination with the trunks would change her life. Around a campfire one night the older kids were telling ghost stories and when it was her turn she went blank.

“You know the rules, Etta,” chided Arty. “You gotta tell something.”

“This stuff is silly, don’t know any ghost stories,” she said rolling her eyes.

“Then tell us your greatest fear,” demanded her brother.

“Okay, give me a minute to think,” she said leaning back against her cousin Roz. She closed her eyes and shuddered.

“What is it, being chased by wolves?” asked Arty.

“No…”

“Okay, what? And it better be good,” said Emeril.

“Just being shut up…alone, in the dark,” she said. “I think it would scare me…to death.”

“What do you mean? Locked up, how?” whispered Roz.

Her shoulders shuddered again. “I have these dreams about it, like I’m in a coffin or something,” she said trancelike with fire shadows dancing off her face.

Emeril made a mental note. He had a sadistic streak and lusted for opportunities to make it manifest. One evening a few weeks later when the lid slammed on the old box she knew instinctively she was in trouble. The younger boys were whooping and hollering, laughing at the fear in her eyes but their voices faded as strong hands pushed her down. They were just playing a game. But for Emeril it was not a joke, but something that drove him. Causing others to suffer gave him an obscene excitement. Like one of those fire starters. He said it was more than just fun. That he got tingles and goose bumps all over. “It’s ten times better than a girl,” he told an incredulous Arty.

He knelt beside the trunk so he could breathe in her fear when the lid slammed, then put his ear to the side to listen for her hysteria. The last image Etta saw before the darkness enveloped her was his face, distorted, half crazed, demonic, like a ceramic mask—as if he had become another person entirely.

When she heard the metallic cinching of the locks she kicked and banged frantically at the wooden panels until her knuckles were afire. Then she rested and tried to calm herself, think rationally. They’d come back for her, she knew. It was not the stifling heat that scared her. It was getting dark and would cool off soon. And there was enough air to last for hours. The thirst wouldn’t bother her. She was as tough as them, could go without water, just like out in the scorching cotton fields picking until her hands were bloody. She learned to pace herself until she came to the end of a four-acre row before taking a drink from the water jug.

But there is a fine line between confidence and despair.

When she no longer heard their voices her pulse quickened. Her eyes dilated, seeking awareness in her new abyss. Her lungs felt like a bellows, sucking scarce air from a fireplace. Yet she gasped for it anyway in spite of her blistering lungs. Then she wheezed and coughed frantically; at first just to expel the thick dust. Then her chest expanded and contracted uncontrollably in a futile attempt to exorcise the ramping fear. And the wheezing morphed into strange guttural sounds, like something between a deep tuberculin cough and those despondent howls made by paid mourners in Oriental cultures.

But knowing she was on the verge of losing control she tried to muster courage, summon calm. Thoughts ricocheted wildly in her brain like scared and confused rabbits, darting here and there. Nothing in her life had prepared her for this. If she had been able to move, she thought, or even bend her knees and turn over it might be bearable. Or if she could just curl up in a fetal position and wait till they released her it would be easier. But the trunk was narrow and low and almost any movement was impossible. And the boys had covered her with wads of prickly un-ginned cotton, further restricting her movement and muffling any sounds from outside her imposed tomb.

She wheezed again and again just to hear her own sound. As if it were her umbilical cord to the rational, the voice of a friend offering comfort, assuring her all was going to be okay. That she was going to make it out alive.

It was now a question of how to control the fear while she was entombed, how to deal with the frightening delusion that the hot, smothering trunk was encroaching on her being, was closing in on her, was snuffing out her life. Hysteria, she knew, might actually kill her. Yet she couldn’t control it and each moment brought a new wave of fear, another magnitude of desperation. I must hold on, must think straight, must be there when Mae returns from the errand. I must be the one who brings the medicine to Mama.

But those were her last rational thoughts for days. And had anyone been left in the old barn to notice he would have heard muffled screaming, horrific screaming. But it was hard to tell whether she was begging for mercy or begging to die.

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