The German Wife(125)

I knew Calvin and Lizzie had separated, but it was evident throughout the trial that they were still close. I wondered if she and I would have been friends too, had we met under different circumstances. Despite everything, I grudgingly came to admire her strength and her loyalty to her brother—even in her clumsy attempt to protect him from what he’d done. I had a feeling that if that war never happened, and I had just met Lizzie Miller in a salon or at a dinner party or at a picnic, we’d have hit it off right away.

I was at Jürgen’s side when the jury foreman told us that Henry Davis had been found not guilty of one count of attempted murder by reason of insanity. No one cheered—there was no relief, not even from Henry and Lizzie. She reached forward and squeezed his shoulder, and she kept her hand there as the judge announced that Henry would be committed to a residential facility for treatment on an indefinite basis for the protection of the community.

“Are you disappointed with the verdict?” I asked Jürgen later.

“No,” he admitted. “It’s fitting. That man needs help, not prison. This feels like closure. I’m ready to put all of this behind us and to start the next chapter of our lives.”



51


Lizzie

Dallam County, Texas
1951

It was a beautiful afternoon and I was traveling across the Texas High Plains. It had rained the previous afternoon—one glorious inch of water drizzling down over hours. The sun was out and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, but the earth was still damp. I smelled the moisture in the soil as nature’s finest perfume.

The last time I drove down those roads, fences were buried in dust and every plant in sight was dead and withered. But today, mature wheat waved in the wind and newly planted windbreak trees stretched toward the sky around the fields. Life had returned, and it was glorious.

I turned my car off the main road onto the drive, taking a route I hadn’t traveled for so many years—but it was a journey my heart had made a million times. My breath caught in my throat when the farm came into view. The gate had been replaced with a newer style, and beyond it in the distance, I saw a new windmill and that Texas live oak tree, sprawling with new life and thickened branches.

After the trial, I had Henry transferred to a facility in Amarillo. The doctors there weren’t nearly ready to recommend release just yet, but I was hopeful that it would happen one day. That new hospital had a gentler approach anyway, treating Henry with psychotherapy and low doses of sedatives only when he couldn’t sleep. My brother wasn’t the same man he once was—the brain damage wasn’t likely to heal, and combat fatigue was going to be a part of his life for a long time. His short-term memory was terrible, and he still got that glazed, confused look on his face sometimes—often when I talked too fast or dumped too much information on him all at once. The delusions and paranoia were gone, but maybe those problems would return one day too.

I’d take him however he came, and we’d navigate all that together.

And like Calvin once told me, every man needed a reason to get out of bed in the morning. That was why, after the trial finished, I picked up my pen and wrote Betsy Nagle a letter. Henry had been writing her too, so she already knew about his struggles and the trial. I just wanted to see if she knew what had happened to my parents’ old farm.

Way back in 1935, Judge Nagle sold that patch of land for a song to a man who let the place go to ruin for a while. But the desperate times eventually passed, and the judge’s conscience would not let up. In the forties, his finances stabilized again, and he bought the farm back and put some suitcase farmers on it.

Ever since then, a roster of strangers had done a stint on my land, making money for the Nagle family by growing them crops. But the Nagles just so happened to be looking for new tenants, Betsy told me, and her father said I should come right on up to sign a lease.

I had torn Calvin Miller’s heart to shreds, but just as I’d always known, he was a good man—the best man. He wasn’t obligated to give me a single cent of his money when I walked out on our marriage, but he generously gave me enough money to support myself for a few years while I “found my feet.”

I drove all the way up to meet Judge Nagle in Oakden the day I got that letter, only for him to tell me he’d decided not to lease me the farm after all.

“I’m going to sell it to you instead,” he announced.

“That’s very generous, Judge,” I said reluctantly. “But I couldn’t afford it.”

“You haven’t asked me how much I want for it yet.”

I had to assume the way we lost our farm to him had haunted Judge Nagle over the years too, because all he wanted to hand it right back to me was for me to repay the money Henry had originally borrowed in 1933. I had plenty to cover the cost of that farm, plus enough to keep myself going until it was productive again.

Even as I drove through the gate, I could see that my farm needed a lot of love and care, but that was okay—I had never been afraid of hard work. The vegetable beds would need to be rebuilt, but the chicken house was where it had always been, ready to receive new tenants. I was relieved to see electric wires running to the house, and a new lean-to bathroom added at the back too. There would be no more midnight outhouse runs in winter, and no more racing around to light the lanterns, because that house would have electric lighting at last, just as Mother had dreamed.