Once in the time after a war, there was a girl who fell in love with an American soldier. The girl was fourteen. She worked in a newly re-opened clock factory. The American came from a little town in the far west. He didn't mean to have sex with the girl. He even told himself it had not happened. He knew his cigarette smoking tea and coffee and beer drinking sweetheart would never be accepted at home. Besides, the Army would talk of statutory rape if he tried to marry her. His enlistment was nearly up so he stayed on base. The girl tried to call him. He wouldn't take the phone. She told his friends she was pregnant.
``Not me,'' he said when they told him, ``I never had sex with her.'' And he believed it.
The soldier went home.
When the baby was born she named the father, ``It had to be him,'' she said, ``I hadn't been with anyone else for a long time.''
After the baby was born she worked as a house cleaner and she did some farm work so she could take the child along. It soon became obvious that the child was not quite right. Village kids called him 'the looney'. He never went to school. He followed his mom around. Played in the fields. Dodged the stones thrown in derision. Everyone knew he didn't fight back.
His mother grew tired and fat. With the idiot son no man would have her. One day when she was thirty-four years old she keeled over at the ironing board and died. The idiot now was on his own. They put him in a sheltered living home and tried to train him to work, but he couldn't stand it. He wandered the countryside, sleeping where he could, eating what he could find. They found his body far up in the hill country under a hawthorne hedge. The American's child was cremated and forgotten.
The soldier married young. He became an insurance agent and made a good living. His children went on missions and were pillars of the community. There was one shadow only that afflicted them. A strange weariness that would come over the man and his wife from time to time. It was years before the cause was found. Hepatitis C. The doctor was kind in his questions to both of them. He explained that the disease was transmitted by sex, dirty needles and blood transfusions. He did also say that some cases were impossible to trace.
``That must be us.'' the soldier said.