Flanders (13 page)

The envelope makes a warm homey place over my chest. I take it out sometimes, just for the smell. I puzzle over the German. The lavender reminds me of fine ladies with hoop skirts and parasols. The script is flowery. You can touch the fondness there.

When we were finished piling things up, Riddell told us to throw it all away.

“Chuck it?” Marrs asked, and he sounded heartbroken.

“Well, stuff’s rubbish, ain’t it?”

So we dug a hole and packed it with odds and ends of cloth. We nestled the memories inside, and covered everything carefully with earth. Marrs crossed himself. We bowed our heads and Marrs said some Latin: a
Pater Noster,
he told me, and an
Ave Maria
thrown in for good measure. Over it we planted a grave marker so the Boche could find it when the war was done.

“It ain’t rubbish,” Marrs said firmly when we were finished; and that was the best blessing of all.

Today was a rest period, but Dunn got a bee up his butt and had us organize a game of football. We were all tired. The Tommies were complaining of the heat. Dewberry had been the Jam-Pot’s best goalie, Dunleavy the best forward. Still, the team played as well as they could. They chased that ball and chased it until Phillips, from 10th Platoon, kicked it over a jagged piece of shell casing and it sprang a leak. Both teams stood looking down at that deflating ball like it was a dying calf or something. It pissed Dunn off, and he stalked away grumbling. When he was gone, both teams sat down right where they were and took off their shirts. They wiped their faces and passed around a canteen. Everybody grumbled about the temperature. I told them about the summer you and me had to sleep in the creek just to keep cool. I told them how the cows died of sun stroke in the pasture and birds fell out of trees. They must be tired of my Texas stories, for they threw dirt clods at me. Despite the have-to football game, a good time was had by all.

Hope all your shits are fine ones,

Travis Lee

* * *

JULY 8, THE FRONT LINE

Dear Bobby,

The replacements came, and every time a mortar shell falls within earshot the new boys go scurrying for cover. Pickering, serious for once, told them, “Wear your legs out that way,” and the new boys looked at him so horror-struck that Foy and me near pissed ourselves laughing.

We didn’t gain much by our battle, I discovered. The Boche fell back to the same fortifications they had advanced from last year. They’re dug in comfortable now. That’s why Dunn didn’t want to press the attack and Miller did. Well, it’s possible Dunn was right. We were pretty wore out, and might have been easy pickings. But lately the Boche have been sneaking up close. They planted a few Maxim emplacements, and they’re busy starting a new forward trench I do believe. They have them a fine communication trench, for I haven’t got many clear head shots. Sometimes I catch the forward diggers.

We got us a new and obliging rum wallah, but Marrs and Foy and Pickering refuse to bet me anymore. Those new boys of ours, though, have yet to down a whole ration of rum. Riddell is teaching them how to keep their rifles clean; Marrs, the best way to crack lice. I teach them the unfairness of odds-taking. They’re too damned young for this.

For the first time in weeks I dreamed about the cemetery. It scared me, too, for I looked down and saw Smoot in one of those glass-covered graves. Smoot, preserved in a bell jar.

In this dream the rest of the platoon was lost and I needed to find them. They were my responsibility, Bobby. It was me who knew the place. And even though it still holds surprises, I had walked every terrace of that graveyard, had looked into the downturned face of each and every rain-stained cherub. So I ran those paint-chipped steps, calling out the names of the missing. I hurried breathless and anxious through marble winter forests. When I came to the end of the gravel walk, the dark stopped me.

Something was bad there beyond the cypress. Maybe it was our deaths, maybe it was the Boche’s; but the dark was stranger and emptier now, and I couldn’t hear Trantham’s voice anymore.

I ran away, back down the twisting path, calling for Dunleavy and Birdsong, Thweat and Furbush and Highwater. I ran past wilting wreaths and faded ribbons and solitary stone angels kneeling. I rushed, frantic and stumbling, on the painted plastered stair. Below me was a domed marble mausoleum, its rusty iron gate open. And there she stood, a gold and blue breath of mercy: the girl in the calico dress.

When I came to her she put her finger to my lips, sweet and gentle-like, to shush me. “They’re resting,” she said.

I’d found them. They were in the mausoleum, all of the platoon. The place was beautiful, with its fluted, cracked columns. I knew it would be cool and quiet inside, and that the air would smell of lavender. Outside, vines twined the walls and birds hopped and played among the leaves. God, they must have loved sleeping there.

I started to tell her that I wanted to rest, too, maybe just put my head down for a while. But she knew; and she held me, not the way a pretty girl would, but the way Ma always used to do—me small in the fortress of her arms.

And in the dream I knew I was finally free to go, because she’d take care of them for me. It was nice knowing that she’d be there, watching over. The dark’s so damned near that it’s easy to fall in, and so deep that you’d drown. She knows that, too. She knows everything: about Pa outside the wardrobe, about the loudness of shells and the bruising shock of bullets.

I woke up filled with a wide deep calm. Boche corpses stank in the walls, but that didn’t matter. Somewhere outside the dugout a machine gun stuttered and then went quiet. A passing sentry laughed. I took the letter out of my tunic pocket and in the dank black cave of the dugout I sniffed the lavender. I think it smelled like her.

Yours,

Travis Lee

* * *

JULY 12, A POSTCARD FROM THE FORWARD TRENCHES

Dear Bobby,

Everything’s fine here. The weather’s warm and dry, and all the Tommies are getting sunburned.

Hope this finds you happy and in good health. Kiss Ma for me and thank her for those angora socks she knitted. They’ll come in handy this winter.

Love,

Travis Lee

* * *

JULY 12, THE FRONT LINE TRENCHES

A LETTER FOR ME TO HOLD ONTO

Dear Bobby,

Two days ago Riddell called me into his dugout. LeBlanc was there, too. “Major Dunn wants more patrols,” he said. “So tonight the pair of you are going on a stunt, under my command. Remember: ’Eads down, mind each other but don’t lose sight of me, no noise to draw fire. And if the Boche send up star shells, find yourselves a ’ole to ’ide in. Just a bit of a tramp, then, and we’ll come back and have ourselves a cuppa.”

When we were dismissed, LeBlanc followed me down the trench. “I been with Riddell before. He’s gutless. Let’s have us some real fun, eh? Make sure your sheath knife’s sharp.”

It was hard to imagine anything with knives being fun. “Come on. You’re not a goddamned tit-sucking baby like Riddell and the rest of ’em, are ya? Hey, I tell you, there’s nothing like it—looking somebody straight in the eye while they die. They squirm like bugs, you know?”

I said, “Uh-huh,” like I’d done that so much I was plumb tired of it.

“I can trust you, Stanhope. The rest of them are a bunch of wet cunts.”

Trust me? We were ordered to face No Man’s Land together, and he hadn’t bothered to ask why I was politely trying to get away or even why I’d been ignoring him lately. But then LeBlanc’s not a man after honest answers.

“Let’s do it, eh? I know right where the forward sap is. Two Boche at the most. One for each of us. We’ll pretend we got lost, that’s all. Riddell’s too stupid to know any different. Shit. Come on. Whaddya say? It’s easy. You sneak up behind ’em, jump on their backs, and shove their faces in the dirt like this—”

It happened so damned quick. He whirled me around and slammed me against the sandbags. I banged my nose. Air exploded out of my lungs.

His body was close and hot against mine. In my ear he whispered, “You prick ’em a little.”

Something stuck me in the side. God, that knife was sharp; like the Bowie we keep to castrate the billies.

“You slide it and fish around till you hit a lung. That’s so’s they can’t scream. Slice their liver to get ’em bleeding. And when you feel ’em go weak, you just turn ’em over ...”

He flipped me so we were face-to-face. His eyes were hectic. “You ever see a dog die of distemper, Stanhope? That’s the way old Fritz shakes under you. At the last minute their eyes get wide and scared ’cause they know what’s happening and they can’t do a thing.”

The Mad Hatter delight in him.

“Better than a good fuck,” he said.

He let me go. I staggered away, wiping at my mouth. He laughed like he’d just told a joke.

I felt the need for people—maybe a witness or two—so I hurried on down the trench to my dugout. He followed. When we got there, Pickering asked LeBlanc to stay and have a cuppa. “Come and join us, why don’t you? We’ll do it up right, just like home. I’ll play Mother, shall I?” Pickering set out the field cups and an old potted meat tin for LeBlanc.

I sat as far away from LeBlanc as I could and drank the tepid tea that Pickering fixed on his Tommy cooker. He didn’t really visit, but LeBlanc was still sitting there, wordless and solemn, when the kitchens sent up dixie cans of meatless stew. I couldn’t eat. Pickering watered a biscuit with his ration of Jam Of Uncertain Origin. He added a few currants his wife had sent. He stirred the whole mess in an old tin and passed the mush around.

A Maxim started up a surly rat-a-tat-tat that ended when the sun set. We lit a candle and played a game of cards. LeBlanc left for God knows where. After the card game, Marrs and Pickering and Foy rolled themselves in their blankets and went to sleep.

I sat and sharpened my sheath knife. I took all the metal pieces off my uniform. I blackened my face with burnt cork till I looked like a vaudevillian. Then I had a smoke, counting my fingers the amazed way folks do when you come into the world, not the way you’d think you’d do leaving it. When the others started snoring, I snuck me a couple of jiggers of courage.

Sooner than I expected I heard LeBlanc’s hissed “Stanhope!” at the open door. My stomach flip-flopped. I got up so fast, I nearly fell back down.

Riddell was waiting outside in the trench. “Ready, then?” he asked.

I didn’t have enough spit in my mouth when I said, “Sure,” and the word came out cracked in two.

LeBlanc elbowed me. “A good fuck, eh?”

Down at the bend of the traverse, Riddell went up the ladder. No whistles. No masks. Over the top in silence this time, and into limitless dark. This was the place, the dark beyond the cypress, and maybe when you fell in you found yourself in LeBlanc’s lunacy. I crawled blind, hearing cloth scrape against dirt, pebbles rattle. Was that LeBlanc ahead of me? I figured that he could see through the thick night—for I knew my dream graveyard, but he was a native here.

Cold rusty metal pricked my cheek: the barbed wire. So soon? A twang as wire gave under the bite of cutters. Riddell’s whisper to my right, “Through ’ere.”

By faith I followed his voice. I crawled, my cautious hands fumbling over trash: empty tins with sharp edges, jagged rusting shrapnel, a burst and ruined canteen.