Flanders (35 page)

Well, enough about my wounds. Hear tell, though, I cracked LeBlanc’s cheekbone for him. Uh-huh. Ain’t that too damned bad. Bet a broken cheekbone don’t hurt near as much as guilt.

Travis Lee

OCTOBER 14, THE RESERVE TRENCHES

Dear Bobby,

A couple of nights ago I finally took another trip to the graveyard. It had been too long. The gathered angels, the headstones, were just like coming home. I was glad to see it was still green, that there was a place in the world where it wasn’t raining.

It was a simple dream, and a short one. The calico girl sat beside me on a carved bench. She took my bruised hand in both her own, and held it.

She didn’t say a word, but I woke up feeling healed. My hand still aches, but there’s a drawing pain—a mending pain—in my chest, where shame cut me.

I haven’t told anyone what happened between me and LeBlanc. Pickering wants his gossip and so he’s in a pout. No one knows about that bakery shop girl, either. It’s best that the rest of the boys don’t know. Some would be making fun of her getting fucked that way, some would be laughing and calling her a cow. I don’t think I could take that.

Blackhall gave me a new boot heel. I had to nail it on myself. Still, my hand’s not well enough for sandbag duty. The boys leave me in the morning; they come back a couple of hours before dark. I sit and read, play a little solitaire. I’ve tried some of the penny dreadful novels Pickering’s wife sends him.

By the way, Calvert’s wife sent him sugar. Do you believe that? A three-kilogram package of sugar. The next day we were due to move back to the reserve area, so we set about eating that sugar so Calvert didn’t have to cart it. We made syrup of our tea, ate the stuff in spoonfuls out of the package. We passed it down the trench. By the time he got the sugar back, the package was wet and the last of the sugar was melting. He was relieved, I think.

Rain has made the trenches into shallow, narrow creeks; the dugouts are inlets. The water’s up to our ankles. We sleep on top of crates, surrounded by the flotsam of drowned rats and the jetsam of maggots.

Every Thursday, Riddell holds trench-foot inspection. Pickering jokes that he’s hoping for a case, waiting for a Blighty; but I’ve seen men’s flesh soften like boiled chicken, seen pale, bloated meat fall off the bone. We’ve lost three out of our company already from it, and the rains have just started.

Riddell packs weeds into our whale oil when Blackhall’s not looking. It turns green and stinks like a compost heap—worse than the drinking cure he made me—still, I’m not drinking, and our platoon’s free of the rot.

The enemy’s changed, Bobby. We fight mud. We battle lice. We hold entire campaigns against trench foot. Miller lectures about nits and the importance of changing socks. When he comes by for his dugout visits, he’ll give offenders a gaze that’d make your balls wither.

But I’m disappointed in him, Bobby. I’d thought Miller was a brave man. For those girls’ sake, I reckon he’s just not brave enough. I think about his fiancée sometimes, when I dare. When I let myself. I wonder if she stares at him from that wall. It’s a haunting face she’s got. An unforgettable one. He must have to turn away.

Last night was the first time I walked No Man’s Land in my sleep. The afternoon reveries were one thing, but God, that dream was real. A three-quarters moon was up. I felt the chill of the rain on my back, smelled the stink of that death-saturated earth. The light was spectral and full of deceit, the way moonlight always is. And walking through that lacerated place—a land frozen into upheaval—I came upon Marrs. He was sitting bowed, his shoulders, his head splashed with moonlight. I sat on the lip of the shell hole with him.

“Need to come with me, Marrs.”

He’d finally got tired of his wandering, I guess. He wasn’t grinning anymore. His elbows were propped on his knees, his hands clasped. His head was down.

“Can’t catch me breath, Stanhope.”

“You’re dead,” I told him, gentle as I could. “Don’t you remember?”

“Can’t catch me breath.”

It must have been the fierceness of the blast that stayed with him: the oxygen burning, and not himself.

“Come on. Come with me.”

He looked up, not at me, but at the sky. His face sagged into an expression of vague woe. “They firing?”

“Not anymore.”

“Seen me letter?”

“It’s waiting for you in the graveyard.”

He looked down at his hands. “They firing?”

I told him the firing had stopped. That the battle was won. That he could go on.

“Stanhope?” “Yeah, Marrs?”

“Sometimes,” he said in hushed confusion, “I just can’t catch me breath.”

I finally had to leave. I don’t think he ever noticed my going. Marrs carries with him such a foggy sadness. All of the wandering spirits do. There’s nothing keen about ghosts, Bobby. A shame that death takes all our passion.

Travis Lee

* * *

OCTOBER 16, THE RESERVE TRENCHES

Dear Bobby,

Today I was alone, sitting in the dugout reading, when a shadow fell over the page. I looked up to see LeBlanc blocking the dugout doorway. What I’d done to him was awful, Bobby. Green and purple bruises bloomed across his cheeks. His nose was grotesque with swelling. His lip was torn. His eyeball was full of blood.

“Hey.” Looked like it hurt him to speak.

I’d tensed so, my hand throbbed. “Hey.”

Standing at the door, he looked up the trench and then down. Calvert and Pickering were gone, the sentry not due. LeBlanc’d take out his knife. He’d gut me the way you would a deer.

“You won’t tell anybody?”

I swallowed hard. Tell what? About the rapes? About besting him? I couldn’t best him now, not with my hand the way it was, not if he had a knife.

“Promise?”

He was such a murdering, lying shit, how could I promise him anything?

He shifted his weight, cleared his throat. “Hey, Stanhope? I don’t want anybody to know I was a born a bastard.”

How can something as fragile as childhood hide such lasting things? Pa’s beatings; LeBlanc’s orphanage. Fungus secrets that thrive without light, without air.

“You bet,” I told him.

He shouldered his way further inside the dugout, stood looking down at me with his blood-filled eye.

He shoved his hand toward me. “No hard feelings.”

I shook it, left-handed. “No hard feelings.” And I knew that I was the only one lying.

“So. We’re going back out there in a couple of weeks, eh?”

“Seems like it.”

He put his hands in his pockets, looked around. “Want some tea?” I asked him.

“Nah.”

I’d known he’d refuse. LeBlanc wasn’t one to stay put long. “Want to set a spell?”

“Gotta go.”

Sure he’d have to go. He had to run fast. Had to jump off those high places. Always had to be on the move. Only he wasn’t leaving.

He wasn’t looking at me, either. “Hey, Stanhope? You teach me how to ride a horse sometime?”

Such dignified pleading in his voice. It caught me unaware. Tore at me, too, like when a strong woman busts into tears. “Yeah. Sometime.”

He nodded and left. I tried to finish my chapter of Pickering’s penny dreadful, but simple as it was, as much as I kept rereading, I couldn’t hold onto the words. Finally I put the book down, found Blackhall, and asked permission to see Miller.

Blackhall was sour about it, and suspicious. Still, he agreed. Must be strange, standing on the outside, watching Miller and me. Hell. I don’t understand it. Nothing, not even hatred, is simple.

In the rear trenches, someone had put elephant sheets up over the top of the sandbags to make little shelters from the rain. In the shade of one of those elephants I found Miller standing with one of the other subalterns. I stood in the pelting rain and waited.

At last he looked up. He didn’t seem real happy to see me.

“Sir? We’ll be marching up to the rest area tomorrow,” I said.

“You’re confined to billets. You’re aware of that.” He started talking to the lieutenant again.

I stood quietly, there in the downpour. The lieutenant was trying to listen to Miller, but he kept looking at me, too. Finally Miller whirled. “Blast. What is it?”

“Permission to speak to you in private, sir.”

“Permission denied.” He turned away.

Cool rain pounded my forehead, dripped into my eyes. My greatcoat was heavy with it.

Miller spun. “What? What is it, Stanhope? You’re a bloody nuisance.”

“Permission to borrow your horse, sir.”

His face screwed itself up into the most amazing expression of confusion. “You what? Want to borrow my horse? Good God, Stanhope. What do you plan to do with him?”

“Ride him, sir. Just around the billet area. Need another one, too. A gentle mount. Private LeBlanc has asked.”

His expression smoothed. He’d read my face and understood it better than I had understood that penny dreadful. “During your free time, then. I’ll see to it. Request Captain Dunston-Smith’s bay mare. She’ll give him no trouble.”

“Thank you, sir.”

He tapped swagger stick to cap, then went back to his conversation.

For pity. O’Shaughnessy had said that’s why Miller took LeBlanc in, took him even knowing what he had done. He was forgiving him even now. How could he do that? Like Christ forgiving the Pharisees. Was self-destructive pardon like that ever worthwhile?

I could never forgive Pa for hitting me, even though if I live long enough I might learn to forget. It’s not the sins against me that matter. It was him hitting Ma and drawing blood. It was hearing Ma cry the way she did. It was watching the way he made her grovel. Not even Jesus could forgive that.

Miller didn’t see how LeBlanc used that girl. He never saw her pretty smile or the way she blushed. Pity came easy for him. He never got caught up in the same incriminating passion and hated himself for it.

Travis Lee

* * *

OCTOBER 17, THE RESERVE TRENCHES

Dear Bobby,

I walked through home again in my dreams. It was quiet. The air in the hall smelled of camphor and rosewater and dust. The boards were waxed to satin in the shadows, buffed to a high gleam in the pewter light. Ma’s door was open.

Pa was sitting on the side of the bed, still waiting for me. That wood horse was lying in his cupped hands. I stopped just long enough to feel the dragging undertow of duty, then pulled myself free and walked on.

Is he dead, Bobby? Is that why he keeps coming back? Wish you could tell him to stop bothering me. Visiting doesn’t do no good. Shit, I haven’t been able to save Marrs yet. I don’t know if Foy’s still around. It’s them I need to dream about, not Pa. What the hell kind of gift is this, anyway? Now I’m supposed to feel guilty for hating him? I got me enough good people to feel guilty about.

Travis Lee