Miracle at St. Anna (Movie Tie-in) (3 page)

“You was hit and you was dead and I brung you back,” said Bishop. “Don't nobody know about it but me, and that's fine. But you owes me some money, and until you pays it, you ain't goin' nowhere.”

“You puttin a mojo on me?”

“I ain't doing no mojo. I wants my money. Now you go git that white boy out that haystack over there yonder. He's yours to deal with. I sure ain't goin'.”

“What white boy?”

“That one.” Bishop pointed to a stone barn about two hundred yards off and fled, splashing back across the canal as the bombs and artillery splashed around him and didn't touch him.

Train turned on his side and watched as a haystack the size of a small bush crept along the barn wall, then stopped. Underneath it were two tiny feet clad in wooden shoes.

2

CHOCOLATE GIANT

Beneath the haystack, the boy tried to imagine himself, but he could not. There was no front, no back, no middle, only where he was. At dawn, he'd awakened to the sound of thunder overhead and ignored it, crawling to the doorway of the tiny barn where he slept to see if the usual bowl of soup was there. It was not. Neither was the old man who normally brought it. He had not seen him in two days. The boy didn't even know the old man's name. The old coot in vest and dirty shirt simply appeared one day and began talking to him, and from that day forward he'd been the Old Man. The boy could not remember how he'd come to the Old Man. The Old Man had given him a job pulling a few olives from his trees and crushing grapes, then placed him in the barn each night to sleep, leaving a bowl of watery soup there each morning. The boy could not remember how long he'd been living in the Old Man's barn, or why he was living there. His memories were like tiny single slivers of glass blowing through a wind tunnel with a giant fan at one end and him at the other, the slivers jarring and jumbling about, slicing through the air past him, dangerous and deadly when they hit, even more dangerous when they missed, for more often than not they were lost in the roar and din and shrill yelling of fleeing villagers and German eighty-eight shells that landed closer and closer to the Old Man's farm each day. People moved in and out of his clouded vision like ghosts.

One by one, the neighbors came by to warn the Old Man, and through the shreds of what was left of his mind, the boy watched blankly as they nodded at him and talked to the Old Man with grave voices saying, Leave now, for the sake of the boy. The war is almost over. The Germans will lose. The Americans are coming. For the sake of the boy, leave. But the Old Man shrugged and said, Germans or Americans, it's all the same. They will take my farm and use my olive twigs to make fire. I can't have it. The boy can leave when he wants. He is of no relation. He is slow in his mind. I keep him here because his feet are always clean and he crushes grapes well.

Two days before, the boy had watched the neighbors withdraw one by one, their meager belongings piled onto the backs of mules and in wagons, a trail of entire families of women, grandfathers, and shoeless children, heading south toward the Americans, nervously glancing at the boy as he went about his duties in the Old Man's olive field, until a solitary figure remained, a woman, who tried to pick him up but dropped him when he screamed and bit her and tore her dress. “You are a devil,” she proclaimed, and left. He watched her go, perching on a high rock on all fours like a dog, his head pointed to the sky. The cool wind blew the leaves across the dirt road she departed on. Later, a man and his young daughter approached, and the man offered the boy an egg, but the sight of it frightened him. The man laughed as he cowered in fear from the egg, but the man's laughter soothed the boy, so he took the egg and observed silently as the man and his daughter ran down the road. When they were out of sight, he cracked the egg and sucked it dry.

The shelling that drew closer and closer to the barn each day never bothered the boy. He found the noise to be a comfort. The thunderous roar, the shaking of the barn, the whistling and angry chatter of machine-gun and automatic-rifle fire dulled his senses and drew him away from that most painful place where he had once lived, a place where strawberries were red, and candy had real names like peppermint and orange, and trees grew apples, and water flowed from a beautiful fountain in the piazza of a village someplace. He had seen all that once, but he could not remember where. He had no name, no face, no key, no clean shirt, no toothbrush, no mother, no father, no someone who loved him, he was not himself and he was not anywhere. He, too, was invisible.

He watched as the bobbing helmets of the Germans grew nearer. Through the shreds of what was left of his mind, he suddenly remembered what the Old Man had said before he'd disappeared two days earlier. The Old Man had been very clear. He had said it several times. He had pointed his finger at the boy and said,
If you are in the barn and see the Germans coming, run to the top of the hill and whistle toward the house, then hide in the haystack behind the barn.
The boy had delayed when he'd awakened because he was starving. He'd spent fifteen minutes looking for the bowl of soup the Old Man normally left just inside the barn door, having eaten chestnuts and flowers for two days straight. By the time he finished looking for the soup, the Germans were too close and he'd run up the hill and hidden underneath the haystack, because he could see them coming. A lot of them. And it was too late to whistle.

His mouth hung open as he stared, fascinated, at the helmets of the German soldiers, which bobbed closer and closer to him from the mountains above. He knew he should be afraid of them, but he was not. His fear of them was merely an instruction given, like “Don't touch the knife,” or “Stay away from fire.” Peering through the hay as they approached, small dots on the mountainside, dipping and dodging, dropping into trenches and crevices, then rising and running forward a few feet more before falling to the ground again, the boy remembered suddenly that he actually had a friend among them, but he was not sure which one it was. Perhaps if he asked, one of them would help him find him. He decided to stay where he was.

Hearing a voice behind him, the boy shifted in the haystack. He turned and saw his friend Arturo. Arturo was his imaginary friend who sometimes appeared to discuss matters—food, toys, how to make a soccer ball from rolled hay—but he usually disappeared when the shelling started. He was a tall boy with white hair, suspenders, and long pants, and unlike him, Arturo was already seven. The boy was surprised to see him. Arturo stood before him holding a soccer ball made of hay tied with string.

“Look,” he said. “Watch me throw this over my shoulder.”

The boy shifted the entire haystack around to watch, his back to the charging Germans, as Arturo tossed the ball over his shoulder. It rolled toward the barn. “Get it and kick it back to me,” Arturo shouted. The boy complied, running toward the barn door with the haystack still over his head. But Arturo arrived first and kicked the ball into the barn. The boy flung the haystack off his head and followed the ball inside.

Inside, it was dark. The ball bounded into a corner, and the two tumbled after it. The boy reached it first and kicked it high against the wall. It struck the wall at the same moment that a shell landed nearby, and the thunderous boom lifted them both off their feet and they toppled to the ground, laughing.

“That was a big one,” the boy cried. He looked about, but Arturo was gone.

The boy frowned. Arturo always did this. Always disappeared at any moment.

He yelled, “Arturo, how come you're not coming out?” Then he saw him on the other side of the barn, against the opposite wall.

“Over here,” Arturo said. “Come this way.” The boy moved toward him, and as he did, there was a tremendous crash, as if a hurricane had suddenly entered the room. Great clouds of dust kicked up, and the walls shook. The boy felt himself being lifted off the ground and flying high in the air. He flew past the stone wall he'd been standing next to, a wall with stones wedged so tightly and carefully by a Tuscan farmer years ago that it had withstood hundreds of machine-gun bullets and artillery fire from previous weeks of fighting. The wall cracked and burst apart, rocks flying everywhere. The boy felt himself spinning in circles and cried out, but his terrified howls were lost in the mad whirlwind of roaring, booming wind. He landed on the floor, and large chunks of the roof fell about him like raindrops, covering him with rubble, leaving a small gap through which he could see the sun shining brightly. He lay on his back in shocked silence and watched, transfixed, as an eight-by-eight beam that spanned the eaves of the roof slowly pulled itself out of place on one side as if being lifted by a giant hand and landed atop the rubble covering him with a distinct pop, making everything dark.

Then he felt nothing. He was clear. All was well. It was quiet.

He lay there for seconds, minutes, hours—he could not tell, because it was dark and he did not know what time was and had only seen a watch once somewhere long ago. He had heard someone speak of time before, but that memory lay deep in the jagged-glass wind tunnels of his mind and he could not find it. He wondered how old he was. He decided he was six. Then he wondered how he had wondered it, since he lived with no front, back, or middle. He suddenly realized that since he'd lost track of time maybe he'd lost being six, too. He felt hungry. His chest hurt. He opened his mouth and cried, “Help! I'm six! Help!”

He heard a rumbling sound from above him. A voice. A piece of the rubble was being pulled away. Then another. A sudden sliver of light cut through the rocks and the plaster dust as it billowed about. A slab was lifted from across his head. The sun struck his face like a punch. He shut his eyes. Then a figure blocked out the sun, and he opened his eyes again.

At first he thought it was the Old Man, but it wasn't. This man was a giant, a huge chocolate giant, staring down at him from underneath a battered American helmet, its chin strap dangling lazily in the sun, bandoleers crisscrossing his massive chest, rifle slung horizontally across his back. The giant was straddling the rubble with massive boots, one knee touching the ground, the other leg stretched over the beam covering the boy's chest. His skin was as black as coal. His teeth were white as diamonds. The boy had never seen anything like him.

“Good God,” Train said.

The boy had heard of men like this, somewhere in the corners of his jagged-glass wind memory, but he could not recall. “Where is your tail?” he said in Italian.

The man ignored him and looked around, his huge head swiveling, his large brown eyes rolling from left to right in their sockets.

“I don't have any oil to drink,” the boy said. His chest ached.

The giant looked at the beam pressing against the boy's chest. He placed his large hands around it, grunted heavily, and tried to lift it. It would not budge. He tried again, and the beam shifted slowly and the boy cried out. The sound of his voice seemed to scare the giant, and with one mighty heave he pulled at the huge beam again. Sweat ran down his face in rivulets and into the corners of his wide mouth. He gritted his teeth, and from within his black face the white teeth shone like tiny lightbulbs. He thrust his mighty head toward the ceiling and said, “Lordy . . .” and lifted, his huge hands trembling as the beam slowly rose up, higher and higher.

Only then did the pain hit the boy, it hit him so hard he felt like he'd been jerked into a fire and flung into the jangled glass of his own memories. It washed over him with such force that he couldn't contain it. He felt himself being lifted, high, toward the sun, and he heard the solder cry out, “Hey, Bishop! Bishop!” and then the Negro colossus stuck his ear to the boy's mouth to see if he was breathing.

The boy could not resist. Chocolate. A giant chocolate face. He reached out to touch the man's face. Then he licked it. It tasted terrible. But then sweet unconsciousness came, and it was as sweet as anything he could imagine.

3

THE CHOICE

The Germans came down to the Cinquale Canal from the mountains in a pincer movement, going around the barn on both sides as they rushed forward to meet the American attack. Lying behind the wooden beam with the boy, Train could see them through the jagged ruins of the barn, which was completely open on one side. The beam and stones of the wreckage covered them somewhat, though any of the Germans who ran by could have looked in and seen them if they had wanted to. They didn't seem to have a mind to.

In his invisibility—Sam Train felt it coming and hoped he was right—Train marveled at how tiny the Germans were. He expected them to look like the ones he'd seen in the newsreels back in training camp at Fort Huachuca, Arizona: straight-backed, strong, fit, neat, with starched uniforms and shiny helmets, high-stepping by the thousands as they marched past in formation, arms outstretched in that funny salute as they greeted the biggest white man of them all, Hitler. Instead, he saw soldiers that looked like skeletons, some without hats or helmets, boys and old men, with torn and ragged uniforms, emaciated, exhausted, panicked, stumbling past and yelling at one another as if their hair were on fire. One lurched by laughing madly in a high-pitched voice; another ran past sobbing like a child. Some were dressed like Italians he'd seen everywhere—in fact, he could've sworn he saw two Italian mule skinners from Fifth Battalion that were in camp the day before—and right as he was thinking how unfair it was that they could switch sides anytime they wanted, being white and all, a few more Italians appeared from another direction and shot the two Italian mule skinners he had just seen. “Lord,” he murmured to the boy. “I don't know who's who.”

The boy paid no attention to this, largely because he seemed to be dead. Train squeezed himself farther behind the beam, moving the child's body a little closer to it to keep him out of sight of the open end of the barn, and examined him closely. He laid his own head flat on the ground behind the beam, facing the kid, their noses almost touching, his face just inches away. He nudged the boy gently to see if he was breathing.