Flanders (53 page)

“A good, clean shot,” I said. I pulled his arm around my neck. He grunted, and I knew he was hurting bad. “I can bring the litter down for you.”

He shook his head. “Bloody shells.”

I understood. He was tired, and it was time. I pulled him up, hoisted him by his coat, and dragged him to the aid station. Uncle Tim, the new boy we named Ears, and the one we named Lack-a-bum stood when we came in.

“I shot him,” I said. “Best get the med officer.”

None of the officers believed us, but Calvert and me had got our stories straight. I was cleaning my rifle when it went off; and I had the oil can and the rag in my pocket to prove it.

Riddell eyed me. “ ’As me doubts.”

But Blackhall shook Calvert’s hand. He shook mine, too. He whispered, “Nice shooting, Stanhope.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Mind you don’t muck wif me others.”

“No, sir.”

Uncle Tim and me and the two boys packed Calvert warm.

We tucked him in, tied his leg so it couldn’t move. We did everything right. When we picked the litter up, he didn’t so much as murmur.

We carried him all the way to the hospital through the growing night, through the shelling. We put him down in the yard with a line of other wounded. I told him goodbye.

Snow was coming down like goose down, piling in drifts by the tents. The lamps were lit inside the hospital. One was burning a welcome at the door. It was so pretty, Bobby, the lamplight, the snow falling. The building seemed implausibly solid, the one thing left that was good and true. I wanted to grab hold of a clapboard corner and hang on for dear life.

“Always remember you, Stanhope,” Calvert said.

“You’ll cuss me every time you take a step.”

In the yellow glow of the lamp snowflakes swirled like moths. Calvert was grinning. “Worth it.” He seized my hand so hard that it startled me. “Got some chocolate in me pack. Want you to have that. All me gaspers, too. Some dirty postcards you might fancy.”

Calvert’s payment for services rendered. I guess it made him feel better about leaving me behind. The chocolate was tasty. The cigarettes were stale, but I’ll smoke them, anyway.

Uncle Tim and me and the new boys made it back to the trenches at dawn. The ground shimmered with fresh-fallen snow and not with vision. Still, it was going to be a pretty day. As morning came on, the mud fields turned cobalt, then pink. When the sun broke through, the frozen earth caught fire.

In the grandeur of that sunrise, I sat in the aid post and got out Calvert’s dirty postcards: all heavy girls with big titties and meaty, gartered legs. I passed them to Uncle Tim, who studied them a long time, then somberly and diligently licked them. Reverent, he wiped them off with his sleeve, handed them back. I stuck them in Miller’s volume of Shelley, and we tumbled into our sleeping bags. I went to sleep listening to Uncle Tim’s soliloquy on whores he’d known. I finally dreamed.

The graveyard was empty. The sun was down, a full moon out. In all the lichened nooks and mossy crannies between the tombstones leaves glistened. Moonlight spilled over the bent shoulders and folded wings of the angels. Down in their graves, Marrs and Trantham glowed like paper lanterns. I ran up and down the steps, searching every glass-topped tomb, shouting Miller’s name. I ran through the milky splashes of moonlight on the mausoleum’s floor. Far away, through the spectral monuments and the dark, glittering trees, I saw a chalky flicker. Maybe the girl in the wedding dress, maybe O’Shaughnessy. I called out, but the flicker faded. I stood there and let the shimmer surround me. Beautiful, that graveyard. Perfect. So aloof that it scared me.

Travis Lee

* * *

DECEMBER 19, THE RESERVE TRENCHES

Dear Bobby,

I don’t know why they don’t move us forward, why they don’t move us back. We stay here, pounded on by the Boche and by the weather. It’s so cold that the new boys bring their braziers inside, even when they’re told not to. Yesterday Uncle Tim and me found three of them curled in their funk hole, their faces serene. Lucky, drowsy boys. The charcoal fire had warmed them; it had seduced them into death while they slept. I wondered if they had been dreaming.

It’s not all gentle. The Boche are hitting us with white stars. The new boys aren’t fast enough with their masks. We find them white-eyed and blind, twitching and slobbering, coughing up scarlet blood and pink lung-lining. They cling to you tight as frightened children when you pick them up. They try to talk, and that’s hard to watch. I wish I knew what they want so bad to say. To tell their mother they loved her? To ask that damned useless question: Why?

I keep hoping I won’t find a familiar face in a funk hole. I keep hoping I’ll
see Miller in the graveyard. Between shellings, Uncle Tim and me sit around like old timers in front of the feed store, talking about the old days.

The new boys try to fill us in on newspaper stories from back home about the evil Kaiser, about a noble Parliament and King. They rattle on about glory and making the world a better place. They bore us shitless.

“Got to believe in the rightness of it,” Lack-a-bum told us finally. “Otherwise, why be fighting?”

“Gor!” Uncle Tim said. “’Cause they keep shooting at us!”

“If you don’t believe in the cause, why’d you sign up, anyway?” Ears asked.

Uncle Tim considered it. He sat back, lit up a Woodbine. “Me girl—a ripe little piece—asks why all the rest of the boys was going, and I was staying behind. Figure I joined up to keep me cock happy.” He turned to me. “Why’d you do it, Stanhope?”

“Damned if I know,” I said.

Whatever our reasons for being here, the Boche keep punching us. Boys die in pieces. Boys die buried. Boys die coughing, begging us desperate—wordless as deaf mutes—for help. I’m no expert on it, but seems to me that the coughing is the worst.

Travis Lee

* * *

DECEMBER 20, THE RESERVE TRENCHES

Dear Bobby,

Last night I walked the corridor of home. The upstairs was all dim and shadowy. The wood floor gleamed like satin. The air smelled of floor wax and rosewater and camphor. Down the hall, morning sunlight flowed from Ma’s open doorway, throwing a luminous square against the wall. It made the creamy paper glow and the painted rosebuds spark like flames. At her doorway, I stopped.

Ma’s window was open and an autumn-scented breeze blew through. The lace curtains fluttered. Pa was sitting on her bed, on that ring-patterned quilt, in that cascade of light. His back was bowed, his head down. He was looking at the toy wooden horse he held in his hands.

Beside him sat Miller. His stare made my spine go cold. He knew everything about me—why Pa was waiting, why I wouldn’t go inside. Beyond the window, the sky was all soft gray clouds, like a tender rain was coming. Forgiveness tugged at me with its small, insistent fingers. Pa looked so frail, so old. Wars wear you out, Bobby, even the personal ones like Pa fought. I stood there, my hand on the doorjamb, knowing that Miller expected me to come in. I couldn’t. After a while, I walked away.

Travis Lee

* * *

DECEMBER 22, THE RESERVE TRENCHES

Dear Bobby,

Yesterday between shelling and carting wounded, I had tea in Riddell’s dugout. For that short time the day was quiet. I sat on a crate and watched sun wink on the trench’s standing water.

Riddell told me how he gets scared sometimes. How the shelling gets him down.

“I know you’re going to make it home,” I said.

He shrugged.

“I know you will. I seen you.” I’d seen him walking down that tree-canopied path to his sister’s house. It was late fall and the war was over. The path he was walking was strewn with leaves; but the sun was out in England, and the last of the late flowers bloomed. I knew the end of Riddell’s story like I’d once known which shell holes to hide in. There’s a lot of things I’m aware of. I know that when we die, we find kindness. I know that we sleep for a time, and someone watches over. I’ve been told the secrets of spirits. I’m a lucky kind of a man, that way.

Riddell nodded. “Father O’Shaughnessy always said you ’ad the gift.” Politely, he asked, “You see the rest of ’em, lad? Mind telling me?” Riddell, still mother-henning his chicks. “Like to know about Lieutenant Blackhall. Man’s been kind.”

Blackhall would make it through with a pension and some pain. I knew that by the time the war was over he’d consider that to be reward enough—just a little calm, just the chance to hoist a few. Blandish would go home unscathed; and Uncle Tim, whose girl would still be waiting. For me, there was a compassionate mist. It would close over me the way the water accepted Miller. That’s the part I didn’t tell him.

Riddell broke out some candy his sister had sent. It was herb candy, and it had a bite to it. Wasn’t as good as O’Shaughnessy’s box of French chocolates, but it wasn’t bad.

“Calvert?” he asked. “Would ’e ’ave made it, lad?”

“Don’t think so.”

Riddell nodded. “You was protecting ’im. Thought as much.”

“We’re all of us protected.”

Saying it out loud that way made me finally understand. Even Marrs in the fire, even Foy’s leaking and blistered body. No matter the pain, every story has a happy ending, if only because the letting go is sweet.

“I dreamed about Miller,” I told him.

“A good man,” Riddell said.

Miller, who knew forgiveness; who, despite it all, believed in justice. When I dreamed that dream again, I decided, I would walk down the hall that smelled of floor wax and camphor. I would stop in the gentle spill of light from the doorway, and this time I would go inside.

I know things, Bobby, so I know that when I take the toy horse from Pa’s cupped hands, he’ll raise his head. Our eyes will meet and we’ll see each other for the first time.

Riddell said, “Nice to ’ave your gift. A comfort, like.”

“I’m lucky that way.”

It was homey there. Over the stink of the trench, Riddell’s dugout smelled of pungent herbs and hay.

Nothing much happened that afternoon, Bobby, but I’m telling you about it because it was important. It helped me understand what had happened the night before. I woke up from a sound sleep and saw the calico girl standing before me, solid and as real as life. And I swear to God I wasn’t dreaming.

Behind her stretched the graveyard. The moon was high there, and everything shimmered. Past the marble angels, a golden inferno went walking: O’Shaughnessy. Marrs and Trantham walked with him, bright and unknowable as stars.

The calico girl leaned so close that I could smell the lavender scent of her.
No,
I thought. I prayed hard to anyone who would listen:
Please not yet.

She straightened, looked down at me a while. “Not quite yet,” she promised.

She faded then. Everything faded until I was looking at the peeling door of the aid station and remembering her sad smile. I’d let us both down, you see? For despite everything I’ve been through, despite everything I’ve seen, I’m still afraid of the dark.

You listen careful now, Bobby, for I must tell you the most important secret: The black by the cypress looks threatening, but beyond waits a calm and sparkling place. And if I never bequeath you anything else, I give you this certainty: That shimmer I’ve seen is the power of the universe. It runs through me and you, through the dead men in the field and through the rats that eat them. It’s love. Funny how simple ...