Bitter Truth (47 page)

54

April 6, 1923
To My Child,
By the time you read this I will be dead. My death will have been a good thing for me and richly deserved, but doubtless hard on you. My father too died when I was young. He was a stern man, I’ve been told, a harsh man, prone to fits of violence. But as he died before I could remember anything about him, I imagine him as a fine and gentle man. I imagine him teaching me to ride. We would have hunted together. He would have given me his rifle to shoot. I imagine him finer and more gentle with me than the real man ever could have been. It is from this imagining that I feel the great gap in my life. I would not mourn him so keenly had he just once reached from his grave and slapped me on the face
.
I have been the worst of scoundrels, the lowest of cowards. I take no pride in these facts, nor utter shame. It is simple truth and you should know the truth about your father. You may have learned that I was awarded a Distinguished Service Cross for my brief adventure in the army but do not be deceived as to any heroism on my part. The medal resides in the silt at the bottom of the pond beneath the Reddman estate, Veritas, where I threw it. It is home among the frog excrement and the rotting carcasses of fish. I joined the army to escape what I had made of my life. Do not think that war is glamorous or good, child, but I welcomed it as a friend for what it was, another way to die
.
In May of 1918 I led a counterattack from a trench near a village called Cantigny. It was raining and fog was rising. The muffled sounds of war were unbearably close even before the Germans attacked. It was our first battle. The Germans advanced in a wave of ferocity and we beat them back with rapid fire. It was a magnificent and ugly thing to see. Young German men fell and cried out from the mud where they fell and we maintained our fire. Then the runner brought orders for the counterattack
.
I wasted no time. I was first over the top. How many trailed my wake and died I cannot know. Shells with a soft sickly whistle dropped and fell gently to the ground. The fog rose thick and green. My eyes burned. My lungs boiled. The Germans we had shot writhed red in the sucking mud. They cried out from the vile green fog through which I charged. I charged not for honor or for Pershing or for France. I charged for death. The artillery, louder now, frightful, our own, rained down like a blessing from on high. We succeeded in running the Germans from their lines in Cantigny and I succeeded, too, in my personal mission. Scraps of metal from the great Allied guns, spinning through the air like locusts with shark’s teeth, sliced their welcome way into my body. I tried to lift my arms in gratitude but only one would rise and I fell face first into the mire
.
Two stretcher bearers found me. I begged them to let me sleep but they ignored me and lifted me from the mud. The ambulance raced me to a mobile surgery unit where the doctors saved my life and took off what was left of my arm. Within half an hour they were cutting apart the next poor wretch. I was shipped off to Number 24 General Hospital, Étaples. It was in Étaples, on the northern coast of France, that I met Magee
.
Number 24 General Hospital swarmed with wounded. Germans filled whole wards, so packed even the floors were crowded with their stretchers. Cries of
“Schwester, Schwester,”
rushed down the hallways. Other wards were stocked with our troops, the mangled, the maimed, the sufferers of trench fever, relatively cheery despite their feverish chills. Many in my unit hadn’t loused themselves, hoping a bite would send them to just such a ward. Because of the crowding, the sisters had cleared offices to hold patients and I was placed in one of those
.
The small room held beds for three soldiers. My lungs were scarred from the gas. I could barely breathe. The stitches in my shoulder had grown infected and the nurses drained pus from the swelling each day. Still, I was the healthiest of the three roommates. The man to my right was swathed in bandages and never spoke my entire time in Number 24 General Hospital. He was fed by the sisters and moaned quietly in the late of night. Every once in a while the doctors would come in and cut off more of his body and bandage him up again. The man to my left had a gut wound that oozed red and then green and then, as he shouted through the night, burst and his insides slid out of him and with a quiet relief he died. They brought a stretcher for him and covered him with a flag. I struggled to stand as they carried him out, which was the custom. That evening, in the low light of dusk, they brought in someone new
.
The orderlies propped him up on five pillows in the bed. They raised him by tape and webbing, which passed under his torso and was attached to the bedposts. The orderlies didn’t joke like they normally did as they worked. The patient smelled of rotting meat and rancid oil and the stench of him flooded through the room. He already seemed more dead than the soldier with the gut wound. Before they left, the orderlies placed a canvas screen between his bed and mine. For three days the sisters came and woke him to feed him soup or change his bedpans. The rest of the time he slept. The only sounds in the room were the soft moans of the soldier to my right and the creaking of the webbing beneath the new patient’s torso and my own shallow wheeze
.
One morning, before the sisters came into our room, I heard a soft voice. “Hey, buddy, scratch my arm, will you? My right arm.” I sat up, unsure from which of my roommates the voice had come. “Scratch my arm, will you, buddy, it’s itching like hell.”
The voice, I realized, was coming from the new man. I tilted myself out of bed, struggled to my feet, and walked around the screen. When the soldier came into view I stopped and stared. For a moment I forgot to breathe. He was an absolute horror. The arm that he wanted me to scratch was gone, but that was not all. His head was facing the ceiling and I stared at the side of his face, but he had no profile. His nose had been shot off. The entire top part of his face, including his eyes, had been mauled. Fluid leaked clear from his bandages. Of his limbs, all that remained was his left leg. His swollen lips shook uncontrollably as he breathed. The smell of rot rose thick and noxious about him
.
“
What about it? Scratch my arm, will you?”
“
The surgeons took off your arm,” I said. “Like they took off mine.”
“
Then how come I still feel it?” he asked
.
“
I don’t know. I feel mine too.”
“
What else did they take off me, hey, buddy?” he asked
.
“
Your other arm,” I said. “And your right leg.”
“
I knew my eyes were gone,” he said. “But I didn’t know the rest. Funny thing is the left leg is the only one I can’t feel. How’s the face? Do I still got my looks?”
I examined his mangled features and knew I should feel pity but felt none. “They blew off your nose,” I said
.
“
Ahh, Christ. No eyes, no arms, no leg, no nose. The bastards.” He took a deep breath. “Don’t that beat it just to hell. Hey, buddy, can you do me a favor? Can you get me a glass of water?”
On the windowsill a pitcher and glasses were set out. I poured water into one of the glasses. I brought the glass to his swollen lips. He choked on the water and coughed as I poured it in. Much of it ran down his chin
.
“
Thanks, buddy,” he said. “Hey, can you do me another favor and scratch my side, my left side? It’s like I rolled around in poison ivy down there.”
I put the glass down on a table by his bed and stepped toward him to scratch his side. He gave me directions, higher or lower, and I followed them. His skin was scabby and dry
.
“
That feels great,” he said. “Hey, buddy, one more favor. How about it? Will you kill me, buddy? Will you, please? Anything I got is yours, buddy, if you’ll just kill me. Please, please, buddy. Kill me kill me kill me won’t you kill me, buddy?”
I backed away from him as he spoke. I backed into the wall. He kept pleading until a nurse came into the room with a pot of water and cloths
.
“
What are you doing?” she asked
.
“
Visiting,” I said
.
“
Don’t,” she said. “Corporal Magee is very ill. He needs his rest.”
I went back to my cot as she began to wipe down Magee’s torso with a wet towel
.
Corporal Magee was quiet for much of the day, sleeping. Later, when we were left alone by the sisters, he started up again. “Hey, buddy. Will you kill me, buddy, will you, please?” I told him to shut up, but he kept on begging me to kill him
.
“
Why should you get to die,” I said, finally, “with the rest of us stuck here alive?”
“
What are you missing?” he asked
.
I told him
.
“
Just the arm, are you kidding?” he said. “I had just an arm gone I’d be dancing in the street with my girl, celebrating.”
“
Leave me alone,” I said
.
He was quiet for another day, for two maybe. I couldn’t stop thinking about him lying there beside me like that. Even when they came in to cut some more off the mute soldier to my right I thought of Magee. When he started in again, begging me to kill him, I said, “Tell me about her.”
“
Who?”
“
Your girl. You said you have a girl
.
“
I don’t got nothing anymore. The Huns they blew her away with the rest of my body.”
“
But you had a girl.”
“
Yeah, sure
.”
“
Tell me about her.”
“
Why?”
“
Because I’m asking.”
He was quiet for a long moment. I thought he had gone to sleep. “Her name,” he said finally, “is Glennis. The prettiest girl on Price Hill.” He told me about her, how pretty she was, how kind, how gay, and in the telling he also told me about his life back in Cincinnati. He worked as a typesetter on the
Enquirer.
He went to ball games at Redland Field and himself played second base in Cincinnati’s entry in the Union Printers’ International Baseball Federation. He went to church and helped with collections for the poor. Nights he spent at Weilert’s Beer Garden on Vine Street or sitting with Glennis on her porch on Price Hill. As he spoke of his good and honest life before the war I felt a bitter taste. He told it all to me and then, after the telling, he complained that it was gone. Once again he asked me to kill him
.
“
No,” I told him. “You don’t deserve to die.”
“
I don’t deserve to live like this.”
“
Maybe not, but I won’t kill you.”
“
Well, the hell with you,” he said
.
Later that week the colonel came to give us our medals. There was a little ceremony in my room and I stood while an aide gave the colonel the box and the colonel extracted the cross with the eagle’s wings reaching high and pinned it onto my pajamas. “For outstanding gallantry in the battle of Cantigny,” he said. The sight of the dark metal and the red, white, and blue ribbon made me sick. Magee was given a written commendation from his commanding officer for his bravery at Cantigny. I learned there that he had been in the wave of soldiers following me in my mad counterattack
.
Two nights later he began begging me again
.
“
No,” I said. “We’re all stuck here, why should you break out and not the rest of us?”
“
I’d kill you if I could, buddy. I swear I would.”
“
But you can’t, can you?”
“
Blame me for that, why don’t you, you son of a bitch.”
“
You just have to suffer then along with the rest of us.”
“
Tell me all about your suffering, buddy. Tell me how terrible it is to see. Tell me how repulsive it is that you have a hand to feed yourself. Tell me how horrible it is that you are free to walk the corridors whenever you want. From where I’m lying, you’ve got nothing to die about.”
“
Shut up,” I said. I was angry. Bitter and angry and furious at him for his innocence. “Shut up and I’ll tell you what I have to die about and you’ll be glad as hell you’re not me.” And so I told him what I had never told another soul, and what I am telling you, my child, as a slap from the grave
.
My family owned a fashionable store on Market Street in Philadelphia. We were always of money but while I was at Yale the store found itself in financial distress. My father died when I was an infant and it was up to my uncle and me to save the store. My uncle fought with the bank. I decided on an easier route and became engaged to a woman whose father was a vicious businessman but extremely wealthy. My fiancée’s father agreed that after the wedding he would buy a portion of the business, satisfy the banks, and save the company. The woman I was to marry was pretty and proper and harmless enough. It seemed to be an amicable enough business transaction
.
While planning for our wedding, I surprisingly found myself in love. Unfortunately I fell in love not with my fiancée but with her younger sister and she loved me back. By then, of course, arrangements had been made and to explain my infidelity to the father would have ruined any chance for the family company to survive. I had no choice but to go through with the wedding. Even so I hadn’t the strength to give up my love and, inevitably, she found herself pregnant
.
In the one truly brave act of my life I determined to run off with the younger sister and endure the wrath of both our families. It was but a few days before the wedding that we arranged to meet in the back of her house. But first, she told me, she needed to tell her sister, my fiancée, to explain to her everything. It was raining that night, and dark. I waited on the porch of the old caretaker’s cottage at the bottom of the hill, unoccupied that night, for my beloved to come for me with her suitcase. Finally, I saw a female figure descend the slope. My heart leaped with excitement, but it wasn’t the younger sister coming for me. It wasn’t the younger sister at all
.
My fiancée stepped noiselessly toward me in the night. A rain cape was swept about her shoulders. She clasped her hands before her. In the darkness her face seemed to glow with an unearthly dark light