Bright's Passage: A Novel (2 page)

“Then stay here—”

“My boy needs a roof over his head.”

“—and let your son die.”

Bright shoved the animal again, to little effect. The horse stood its ground. “We can leave, angel, but I ain’t gonna burn it down!” he yelled. “It’s all I got left!”

On the stump behind him, the baby began to cry. Bright whirled around, shielding his own tears from the horse’s view. He stood with his back to the angel for a long time, his shoulders jerking violently at first and then slowing to a composed rise and fall. He ran the back of a hand across his face and looked at the cabin.

“Henry Bright,” the angel said, finally breaking the silence, “do as I say.”

The back of Bright’s head fell forward as his chin sank to his chest. “I can’t believe this,” he said. “All right. All right, I’ll burn it down.”

He ran a hand across his face again and then, turning back, he gave the horse a final push and the animal stubbornly relinquished his ground. Then he set about digging a grave for his wife next to that of his mother. When he was knee-deep in the ground, he heard the baby begin to cry again, and so he climbed up from the hole and moved the basket out of the sunlight. He fed the boy with the goat’s milk again and returned to digging. When he had finished the grave, he went inside and cut his wife out of her clothes.

Opening the large trunk, he looked down at what to dress her in. The white dress lay there, its stiff collar holding up determinedly against desperate age and the fungal dampness of high July. He reached beneath this garment to where the slip, with its tiny lace eyelets, waited primly. He had bought the slip for her in Fells Corner, an extravagant wedding gift that was almost the only thing she had worn until she was finally too big with child even for it to fit. It glowed out at him with a spectral
whiteness in the ill-lit lowness of the cabin. After that came the brutal, delicate task of getting her stiffening body into the garment, but when he was done he again arranged her beautiful hair on either side of her shoulders, the way he liked it best. Finally, he opened the black lacquer box once more and removed a length of golden ribbon. He tied it around her head like a crown and stood up to survey his work.

He’d dug enough graves to know that she would fit perfectly into this one, but even so he stood there with her body in his arms, a rack of painful hesitation as he considered taking a few planks from the cabin in order to build her a box that would keep her from ending up so dirty.

“There’s no time!” the horse nickered behind him, as if it knew his mind, which perhaps it did. “Leave her buried deep and let’s go.”

He sat at the edge of the grave, his legs hanging into the hole, and dropped her in. He whispered something down at her, then he stood up and began to shovel in the dirt as a preacher might baptize someone in frigid water: quickly, to overcome the shock of the cold. He began to cry again. While he worked, the horse stood nearby, dark and still, perhaps gone to sleep. He filled the grave and then knelt, spreading leaves and sticks over the slight mound. The heat was coming on hard now, and sweat ran over his brow and into his eyes before continuing down his face and neck in the long, dusty canals that had already been carved by his tears.

When he stood up from the grave, he went to the cabin flap and pulled a handful of corn kernels from a sack hanging just inside the doorway where the animals could not get at it. Then he stood in the yard near the chickens. Stock-still, his arms hanging loosely at his sides, he let a few of the kernels fall from between his fingers. The three birds pecked at the kernels and then looked up, pinning him against the sky with their tiny
black eyes and waiting for more. He chose the hen he would try for, and when it looked up at him again he let a few more kernels fall. When he and Rachel had been small, they used to play with the chicks in the yard of the elderly couple his mother had cooked for. Rachel liked to hold the little yellow things against the nape of her neck and would laugh as their feathers tickled her. He would lie very still on his back and they would see how many she could put on his chest.

The third time Bright let the kernels fall, the chickens did not look up but busily went about their feeding. He bent quickly, grabbed the hen by its head, and broke its neck. The goat watched on without emotion from atop her perch.

He plucked the body quickly, then went inside and placed it on a spit above the embers of the dying fire. He brought the baby in and laid it on the bed where it might survey the room it was born in. Maybe someday the Future King of Heaven would need to describe his own humble beginnings.

He took off his dirty clothes and put on the uniform that he had worn home from the War. His fingertips touched at the bullet hole in the jacket’s shoulder as his eyes searched the cabin for what he would need and what he could carry: a haversack, his woolen blanket and greatcoat, the spare shirt, underclothes, a toothbrush, a cup, matches, a cook skillet, a fork; and his mother’s ivory comb. The bucket would hang over the pommel along with the sack of corn. He took a length of fishing line and hooks and tried laying them flat between the pages of the Bible, but upon hefting the heavy book he decided against taking it with him and replaced it on the shelf. He piled the rest of his traveling possessions at the feet of the horse, then looked up at the ridge warily once more, searching the forest for faces. He thought of his mother’s rifle, but of course it was gone, so he went back inside and sat in the cabin for the last time, feeding
the child with his trigger finger dipped in the goat’s milk and waiting for the chicken to finish cooking.

The sun was high above its cradle in the crook of the mountains by the time he was finally ready to depart. The cabin, stripped of his wife and his few possessions, sat there in naked impoverishment, a sorry matchbox devoid even of matches. He had cut the stiff white dress into strips, fashioning the swath that had been its bodice into a sling that he hung around his neck to carry the child. The other strips he had slathered in the grease of the cooked chicken and placed in the corners of the house. He had only a small ration of matches and he had never been the kind to waste a match anyhow, so once he’d placed the rags in the corners of the room, he lit one and carefully carried the guarded flame from one pile to the next until each was aflame. Then he walked out to the yard and stood by his horse to watch the cabin burn.

“It’s not going to go.”

“It will. I can start a fire without a angel.”

“You can’t do anything without a angel.”

“It’ll go,” he said. “You watch.”

“Get the Bible.”

Bright scuffed the ground with a boot. “You’re always telling me we don’t need the Bible no more! Haven’t you been saying that since we met? That the King of Heaven is bad and we need a new one and all that?”

“What you say is true.”

“So how’m I supposed to understand you if you keep changing what you say? First we don’t need the Bible and now we do?”

“Henry Bright, go back inside and use the Bible to help start the fire. Now.”

“Rachel died,” he said. He swatted at a fly that was tickling his face.

“And you are grieving.”

“Yeah.” He pulled the child from the basket and put it in the sling around his neck.

“I understand. Now go back in and don’t come out until the fire is started.”

He stared incredulously at the angel a moment, but the horse just looked placidly ahead at the dark cabin as if waiting for a page to turn. Bright stalked across the dirt yard to the flap, lifted it perfunctorily, and peered inside. The rags sat in the corners of the room, smoking sullenly. He did not look back at the horse but entered the cabin, took the Bible down off the shelf, and began to tear its pages out, crumpling page after page into yellowed knuckles of parchment, finally throwing the ransacked book facedown on the bed when he’d harvested enough. He placed the paper in piles above the smoldering rags and then, twisting a few remaining sheets of Leviticus into a brand, he lit the piles once more.

He rejoined the horse in the yard. It looked at him smugly but said nothing as the dried wood of the cabin popped into flames. Henry Bright bit his fist as the fire took hold. Then, lowering his chin to his chest, he let his eyes rest on the tiny face of his son, the Future King of Heaven.

Mud and water and the stumps of trees. In every direction that was all there was. Bodies fell, but the trees died standing up. Nightly they were crucified upon themselves by the zip and whine of machine guns, their leaves corroded by gas, their branches and trunks hacked for kindling, some roots cut by entrenching tools, others drowned by the ceaseless, steady drip-dripping of blood and rain. Back home, these waning days of September could seem at times like one long sunset, the oak and hickory forest a blaze of yellow, orange, and red leaves. Here, it was impossible to tell by the trees what season it was; any that were still standing had nothing left to give away.

They’d been told that the Argonne would remind them of home, but as they’d moved ever closer to the front line, from transport trains to dirt roads to muddy tracks to brutal gashes in the ground, the greenery had disintegrated around them until finally the only tree that Henry Bright could see from where he was squatting in his trench was a barkless and bone-white totem thirty yards distant. This tree, too, had to go, because someone important far back of the line had decided that German gunners must be using it to site their long-range artillery. Perhaps this was so, but the line had been ebbing and flowing around the tree for so long now that it was just as likely that the very
same someone important had simply grown tired of looking at it through binoculars all day. Regardless, an order had just come down to Sergeant Carlson that he and three other men were to blow it up when the night was at its pitchest black.

Bright tore a sheet from
The Stars and Stripes
lying nearby where he rested his haunches against the trench wall. He scanned it:

He cleaned himself as best he could and pulled his britches back up, then made his way down the narrow length of trench to the zag. Here he angled a sharp right, squeezing by a lumpy yellow-haired kid named Bert plodding in the opposite direction. A few moments later he heard the boy turn and slosh through the mud to catch up behind him.

“Hey, what’s the idea, Bright? That was a paper for all us boys to read! How long’s it gonna last anyway, if everybody comes along and wipes their ass with it?” He waited for an answer from Bright and got none. Bert seemed younger than the rest of the men, or if not younger, at least pinker. He seemed made of pinkness. His father was a banker in Wheeling. Around the next zag, some of the others had finished pulling the sandbags from a portion of the trench wall and were now hollowing out a cavity in which to bury McCauliff and Standish. The two men had been shot by a sniper within a few moments of each other, just before noon. Bert squeezed between Bright and the trench wall, raising his voice so that the men digging could hear him. “So, Bright went and wiped his ass with
the newspaper again,” he said, as if it was some sort of common occurrence for there to be paper of any kind lying about.

“Who’s got paper?” one of the others said. “I need a few pages. Let me see ’em, Bert.”

“I need pages too!”

“How’d it stay so dry?”

“This is all that’s left,” Bert said. “I was too late to save the rest.” He waved the unused portion of
The Stars and Stripes
above his head for everyone to see. The paper exploded in his hand as a bullet tore through the pages.

“Jee-roosh!” Bert jerked his arm below the lip of the trench. His eyes were the size and shine of quarters as he looked at the remnants of the newspaper in his hand. He let the scraps fall to the mud and turned dejectedly back down the trench in the direction of the latrine. Everyone else, Bright included, finished burying McCauliff and Standish in the wall of the trench. Then they all sat there waiting for something, or nothing, to happen.

Five hours after darkness fell, they sat in lines against the trench wall and listened to the random fire of ammunition for miles to either side. It began to rain again, though at times star shells would brightly illuminate the ground, as if the moon were making bayonet lunges at the earth. The rain slapped at the soil in weary, unwelcome applause. Finally, Sergeant Carlson heaved himself off the trench wall. Bright and two others did the same, dressing themselves in the dung-colored burlap they wore in order to blend in against the hummocked and devastated ground of the battlefield. They climbed over the top of the trench and out into the open, moving slowly on their bellies as if the slurry of mud and bodies, wire and spent casings, were in reality only a thin layer of ice that might at any moment shatter and fall away into an abyss beneath them.

The dynamite was strapped to Bright’s back, and Sergeant
Carlson had the fuse on a spool tied to his belt. The other two, just in front of them, had wire cutters. They had blacked their bayonets and entrenching tools over a cook flame so that the metal edges would not glint out of the darkness and give them away to the opposite line. They wore no helmets for the same reason. They would dig small holes at the base of the tree and deposit the dynamite. Then they would unspool the fuse, setting a light to it once they were back in their own trench.

It took almost an hour to cover a distance of thirty yards. There were bodies everywhere, mostly from an earlier failed advance on a group of machine-gun emplacements. After the advance had been repulsed, stretcher bearers from both sides had gone into the field to collect the wounded and had been shot; now the bodies lay there in jumbles to be crawled over. There was much wire to cut, and the ground was cratered hellishly, but at length they reached the tree as the rain began to ease to a drizzle. Carlson untied the bundle of dynamite from Bright’s back and handed the first stick to the next man, so that he could in turn hand it to the next man to place in the hole. Bright lay still on his stomach, his arms outstretched in front of him, his body pressed flat against the earth.