Murder mystery captures Maine> ‘Brother’s Blood’ true to state’s POW camps

A BROTHER’S BLOOD by Michael C. White, HarperCollins, 1996, 323 pages, hardcover, $22.50.

A number of years ago, I covered an intriguing story about the return of a German POW to his former World War II prison camp in Princeton. I hadn’t been aware that there ever were prison camps in Maine, but as a Bangor Daily News reporter I soon learned more than I expected about an unusual aspect of state history.

This older man had been an officer in German Field Marshal Rommel’s elite Afrikaner Corps, captured in Tunisia and sent to Washington County to work with his comrades in the woods. The former POW fondly remembered his stay at the camp, including his unhampered Saturday night trips to town to go to the movies. Apparently, nobody in Princeton was alarmed by a man in a marked POW uniform walking along a town road. The man later was sent to work in Oklahoma and Texas, and then to Belgium, where he escaped his American captors and returned to Germany.

What made the news story especially unusual was that the former POW had had a liaison with a Maine woman and, on his return visit to the United States, happily discovered a son he didn’t know he had. The German continued his relationship with the son and the community, to the benefit of all.

So it was with considerable interest that I read author Michael C. White’s new murder mystery, “A Brother’s Blood,” a skillful and tightly written novel about a terrible incident at a similar prison camp, placed somewhere near Greenville, and its consequences years later on the life of a local woman. I was curious to see how White would handle the story of the Maine camps and how closely his novel would relate to the news account. Given its genre, I didn’t expect the novel to be a sentimental war reminiscence, and I was skeptical that the author would be able to capture the subtleties of Maine characters in a Maine setting.

Too often, less accomplished writers end up relying on lobsters, coastal settings and funny accents to depict Maine people, generally turning characters into caricatures. Such stories inevitably sound like bad scripts for “Murder, She Wrote.”

White successfully avoids the usual cliches and traps — lobster and otherwise — and presents a book of literary quality that reflects the tenacity and toughness of a hard-working people in an isolated region of the state. With patience and a sense of peeling back the layers, he depicts the rigor of the physical hardships his characters must endure, as well as their emotional pain and anger in the face of circumstances beyond their understanding and control. White conveys the overwhelming presence of the woods, the terrifying dark and numbing cold of winter, and their looming dominance even in summer.

White, who lives in Wilbraham, Mass., is a professor of English and creative writing at Springfield College and has written short fiction for national magazines and literary quarterlies. He is founding editor of an annual fiction anthology, “American Fiction.” This book, in the words of his publicist, is his “debut novel.” His connections to Maine are unknown, but from the depth and sensitivity of his writing, White is not just another summer complaint scribbling about Vacationland and lighthouses.

The novel focuses on Libby Pelletier, a 60-year-old woman who runs a convenience store and lunch counter near Moosehead Lake, and who anticipates the return of her younger, alcoholic brother Leon from the VA hospital at Togus. Libby is an independent, self-sufficient woman who has been taking care of her brother since their mother ran off with a scrap-metal dealer and left them both in the care of Ambroise, their brutal, distraught father later killed in a woods accident.

Much to Libby’s discomfort, she receives a letter and a visit from a German man, Wolfgang Kallick, who is visiting the area to find out about the death of his brother, Dieter, years ago at the prison camp. Dieter had been the camp interpreter, and his body was found in the lake several months after he supposedly escaped.

“I went into the kitchen to get some rolls and butter, a can of creamed corn,” writes White of Libby’s encounter with Wolfgang. “When I came out this man was standing there talking to the others. I saw Roland point over to me. The man looked to be in his mid-sixties. He was short and solid, thick through the middle. He wore one of those little hats, what I think of as yodeling hats, with a small grouse feather in it. He even looked like a grouse, with a small beak of a nose. The hair on the sides of his head was silver, curly. The other thing I noticed right off was that he wasn’t dressed for winter up here. It was twenty below and here he was with only a sports coat on … .”

As children, Libby and Leon went to work as helpers at the prison camp with Ambroise, a logging foreman, and it was there they encountered the German soldiers brought to work in the woods for the war effort. On the brink of adolescence, Libby was shyly intrigued by the young men who called her Fraulein and treated her with courtesy despite her harelip.

Libby tries to avoid Kallick, whose presence revives long-suppressed memories, but when Leon is found frozen to death on the lake after reportedly going on a drunk, she finds herself drawn into the past and the mystery of the German soldier’s disapperance. Step by step and with steadfast determination and courage, she pursues both her memories and the truth about the deaths of the two different brothers, discovering a shattering relationship.

Numerous details included in “A Brother’s Blood” — from the description of the POW uniforms to the German soldiers being in the Afrikaner Corps — are fascinatingly similar to those I heard from the former German officer I interviewed. White’s details on working in the woods also have a deadly authenticity.

“I think of that muddy spring day twenty-six years ago,” Libby recalls. “When the men Ambroise was working with then pulled into the driveway to tell me he had been killed. I was standing at the sink cutting carrots. Even before they came in and told me, I just knew something bad had happened. I thought then, as I do now: Isn’t it always the way, the men go out and get themselves run over by a tractor or drink themselves into the ground or get themselves killed in the mud of some field in France or the sands of Iraq, and it’s the women who get stuck holding the bag, who have to stand over the grave, silently cursing them for leaving them so alone; it’s the women who have to get up the next morning and make the coffee and patch things up and keep on with the tedious business of living. And I think maybe I can understand why my mother grabbed the chance when it came and left, so she wouldn’t have to be the one grieving over the dead, the one holding the bag for the men.”

The author has picked a difficult style in which to write, using the present tense for action in progress, then switching to past tense for Libby’s memories. The challenge is that in less skillful hands, transitions can be rough and annoying for the reader. White avoids that, however, creating a seamlessness, a blending of movement through time, that increases the tension throughout the novel and gives it a dreamlike — or nightmarish — quality.

The novel is no tantalizing page-turner, but it keeps the reader’s attention with the same kind of dogged persistence Libby shows in her efforts to find out what happened at the prison camp. It doesn’t matter who did what years ago at the camp, or that Leon is dead; it is inevitable that Libby will find out what happened, and it’s inevitable that the book will end — what a shame.

Jeanne Curran is an assignment editor for the NEWS.