Remember Ben Clayton
Read Remember Ben Clayton Online
Authors: Stephen Harrigan
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Historical, #War & Military
ALSO BY STEPHEN HARRIGAN
FICTION
Challenger Park
The Gates of the Alamo
Jacob’s Well
Aransas
NONFICTION
A Natural State
Water and Light: A Diver’s Journey to a Coral Reef
Comanche Midnight
This Is a Borzoi Book
Published by Alfred A. Knopf
Copyright © 2011 by Stephen Harrigan
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto
.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc
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This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental
.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Harrigan, Stephen, [date]
Remember Ben Clayton : a novel / by Stephen Harrigan.—1st ed
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p. cm
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eISBN: 978-0-307-59669-7
1. Fathers and sons—Fiction. 2. Fathers and daughters—Fiction
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3. Family secrets—Fiction. 4. Sculptors—Fiction. 5. Art—Fiction
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6. Families—Texas—Fiction. 7. Sons—Death—Fiction. 8. World War, 1914–1918—Casualties—Fiction. 9. Domestic fiction. I. Title
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PS3558.A626R46 2011
813’.54—dc22 2011001859
Jacket photograph by William Albert Allard/National Geographic/Getty Images
Jacket design by Jason Booher
v3.1
TO MASON LYNN RANDOLPH
AND TRAVIS HARRIGAN RANDOLPH
And to the cast of CAST (Capital Area Statues, Inc.):
Lawrence Wright, Bill Wittliff, Marcia Ball,
Elizabeth Avellán, Vincent Salas, and Amon Burton
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
ONE
T
hey tore at the earth with their entrenching tools and mess-kit lids as the shells burst all around them and in the scattered pine tops overhead. They were already dug in but they needed to be deeper, because there did not seem to be any way to survive above the ground. The concussive turbulence sucked away the air. The men gasped for breath in the vacuum.
Shrapnel pierced the tree trunks and ploughed into the earth with hissing force as the ground heaved and pitched like a malevolent carnival ride. Arthur Fry, a nineteen-year-old feed store clerk from Ranger, Texas, thought one of his ears might have been sliced off but he was not sure. There was a thick pooling warmth below the rim of his helmet but no pain. The blasts had blown dirt into his eyes and when he tried to squeeze them shut it felt as if the insides of his eyelids were lined with broken glass. He had not been under fire before and could not recognize with any clarity the sounds and signatures of the shells. They were supposed to be able to differentiate the smell of mustard gas from that of ordinary high explosive, but in this endless barrage there was no way to tease out one toxic smell from another and the order had not come down to put on their gas masks.
Some of the shells rattled and shuddered like they were tearing the sky apart and some carved a narrow screaming path. In the last few days the Germans had been pushed off Blanc Mont Ridge by the Second Division and now they were engaged in a fighting retreat, using up all the ammunition they did not plan to carry with them in a furious, indifferent barrage of whiz-bangs and jack johnsons and GI cans and other shrieking varieties of ordnance whose names Arthur did not know.
Thick clods of dirt pattered down on his back and then Arthur heard the shell that he was sure was going to kill him, an abruptly withdrawn shrillness somewhere in the sky overhead, a predatory silence as the descending shell concentrated on the terrain below, patiently searching him out. It finally exploded just over the slight swell of land that hid them from the enemy, an eruption whose vicious force seemed to come not from the sky but from deep below, as if the shell had plunged to the core of the planet and detonated there. The inside of his head roared with soundlessness. He could not even hear his own whimpering. He pressed his face still closer to the noxious, gaseous earth. He tried to concentrate on the feel of the cool dirt against his skin.
When he forced his eyes open again it was in response to an odd little brush against his sleeve. Through the haze of gas and dirt he saw an animal he had never seen alive before running about in tight, frantic circles between him and Ben Clayton. In their camions on the way to the front they had passed smashed hedgehogs on the roads, but they had seemed like slow-moving and primitive things and he could never have guessed at their living vibrancy. This one hopped in confusion, its soft quills lying flat and its nose twitching madly as it scrambled around and around searching for a place of safety.
Arthur looked over to Ben. He had the odd thought that he should reach out and grab Ben’s shoulder and point out the strange creature to him. He would have liked to impress his friend, to show that his light-hearted curiosity was greater than his fear. But he could not make himself move and there was no possibility Ben could hear him over the roar of the shells. And in an instant the hedgehog straightened out in its flight and disappeared, bounding back toward Blanc Mont.
Another shell exploded twenty or thirty yards down the line and then the barrage ended. The air trembled in the sudden silence. Arthur turned over on his back and looked up at the sky through the swirling chemical vapors and touched his ear. The monstrous wound he expected to find there was nothing but a shallow cut, the bleeding already stanched by a makeshift plaster of gummy soil.
“Jesus God in heaven!” somebody called, and when Arthur looked toward the sound he saw a man lying on his back, his body blown open and his splintered bloody ribs exposed. The dying man stared in fascination at the gaping maw of his own chest and held his trembling hands in the air. He screamed for somebody named Aunt Agnes. Arthur tore his eyes away and convinced himself he hadn’t seen this or heard it; it was just some horrible spasm of imagery that his mind had produced. He had no more responsibility to believe in it than he did to believe in the nightmares of his childhood.
From up and down the line they could hear the groans and pleadings of the wounded. It had stopped raining sometime during the night but the ground was still wet and as the stretcher bearers and runners hurried now through the shallow trenches they kept sliding on the slick chalk that lay beneath the thin topsoil.
Sergeant Kitchens walked down the line to talk to the men and steady them, but Arthur could see he was not steady himself. “Keep digging in,” Kitchens said, “but don’t go all the way to China because it looks like we’ll be jumping off here soon enough.”
“You think this is really the jump-off line?” Arthur said in an unsteady voice to Ben, who was methodically picking away at the chalk with his entrenching tool. Ben looked up and said he guessed it was.
“Well, it’s a lot of open ground to cross, if you ask me,” Arthur said. Between them and the village there was a half mile of open scraggly ground with no cover except for almost untraceable dips in the terrain. The marines were supposed to be in possession of the main part of Saint-Étienne but nobody knew if that was really true. In any case the Boche were strongly entrenched behind a cemetery wall at the eastern end of the village, and on the far bank of the little stream, and on a solitary hill, deadly prominent, just ahead to their right. There were also machine-gun nests, Arthur knew, artfully concealed in every contour and pocket of ground.
“I don’t expect it’ll take us that long to get across it,” Ben said. His voice was clear and steady but his eyes had narrowed to a weird focus that gave Arthur no comfort. The change had come over Ben in the last few days, on the nighttime marches across the cratered fields from Somme-Suippe. What he had learned about his dad back home in Texas from one of the Indians in Company E had closed him in on himself. He wouldn’t talk much; his friendly open face had turned taut. When they stopped to rest or to eat their cold meals he sat apart from Arthur and fingered the little rectangle of metal, cut from some abandoned mess kit, upon which he had laboriously tapped out with a blunt nail his name and rank and unit along with a pretty decent sketch of a horse standing atop a shallow mesa. A number of the men had made trench art like it. They kept them in their wallets as a backup to their dog tags in case their bodies were blown apart and the pieces scattered among multiple heaps of the dead.
The fact that his best friend had nothing else to say to him hurt Arthur’s feelings and made him feel isolated. All right, then, he thought. He would stay silent about things until Ben had the decency to initiate a conversation. He picked up his own entrenching tool again and began to hack away at the bedrock, trying not to think about the blown-open doughboy he had just seen or his own quaking fear and homesickness or the steadily intensifying thirst that he knew would not be relieved until they had taken the village and made their way to the stream that ran behind it. Supposedly the marines had control of a well somewhere in the sector, but nobody in his regiment had yet seen any water from it. The big wooden casks of the water carts had been shot to pieces on their way up to the front, and for the last day they had been filling their canteens with the juice from canned tomatoes. But now even the tomato juice was gone. All Arthur had was a few sticks of the lemon-flavored chewing gum that was supposed to moisten your mouth and blunt your thirst.
It was oddly quiet now up and down the line except for the industrious chocking sounds of the men as they continued to dig in. It was an October dawn in a distant land. France. There was another quick slurry of rain and then the weather hastened away on the wind and the sky was clear. They could hear the Boche speaking to each other in the town they were going to attack, the unknown German words sharp and disciplined and practiced. The enemy was digging in too, getting ready for the rolling barrage that would precede the American assault.
An observation balloon hung in the sky behind the German lines, placidly menacing, its swollen fabric aglow in the morning light. Toward the east, along the Orfeuil road where the 141st was dug in, a solitary German airplane was diving out of the sun. They could hear the distant, earnest pattering of its front-mounted gun, and then a swarm of British aircraft arrived to chase it away.
Something was going to happen soon, Arthur knew. There was too much activity, too many runners sprinting back and forth from wherever the field headquarters were, too great a sense of exhilarating dread, for this heady moment to escape. The thought of the attack coming was the only thing that calmed him. It was a chance to move out of this boggy rut, where the chemical vapors still lingered, mixed in with the smells of shit and tobacco and wet canvas and the dewy morning scent that somehow managed to rise from the ravaged ground. The idea of advancing and taking his chances, rather than sitting here any longer—thirsty and passive and helpless—filled him with a startling surge of happiness.
Nobody was talking much. Everyone was in the same state of somber watchfulness. Arthur studied Ben as he sat cross-legged in the mud with his rifle on his lap, examining his personalized rectangle of aluminum.
“You’re a pretty good artist,” Arthur said. His own voice sounded dry and thin to him—both from fear and from thirst. “Maybe you could make me one sometime. I’d pay.”
Ben looked up at him and almost smiled. His mood had been so dark for so long that his suggestion of a smile warmed Arthur’s spirits as much as the sun had. He realized how big a threat Ben’s withdrawn demeanor had been to his well-being the last few days, the loneliness and hurt he had been feeling in this foreign land because his best friend could not rouse himself to be sociable.
“You don’t need to pay me,” Ben said. “What do you want on it?”
Arthur deliberated: the house he grew up in, maybe, or the banks of Palo Pinto Creek, where his grandfather had taught him to fish, or a bobcat, which was the mascot of the high school from which he had graduated a year and a half ago.
But thinking of Texas again made him think of what the man in Company E had told Ben.
“You know,” Arthur decided to say, “it’s not healthy to be in this situation we’re in and you being so preoccupied about your dad. It was a long time ago, he said. But maybe if you wrote your dad and gave him a chance to—”
“You don’t know a thing in the world about it so maybe you better just shut up.”
Before Arthur could even get offended the shells started rattling and whistling again overhead. It took them all an anxious moment to realize that the shells were going the other direction this time, fired from the batteries behind their own lines at the German positions ahead. The chewed-over soil a hundred yards in front of the American lines erupted once again as the shells landed with impressive coordination, throwing up an obscuring curtain of dirt and debris.
“We’re going! We’re going! We’re going now!” Sergeant Kitchens was suddenly shouting as he ran up the line pounding men on the shoulder and hauling them to their feet. “Fix bayonets! The sonsofbitches have already started the fucking barrage!”
Arthur pulled his bayonet from the scabbard on his belt and fitted it with shaking hands to the lug on his rifle barrel. He had darkened the shiny blade with lamp smoke as he had been told to do, so that a sniper could not see its reflection at night, and now in his anxiety the dull pewterish gleam sickened him. The bayonet blade, the copper hide of the observation balloon, the heaving, upthrown earth—he was surrounded by the suffocating no-color of oblivion.
“Hurry, goddammit!” Kitchens was calling. “Don’t stand around here chewing the fucking sock!” If they didn’t start at once, they would lose the protective cover of the rolling barrage that was already advancing ahead of the attack. But they didn’t know where to go except vaguely forward. They didn’t know what objectives to attack. The orders had not come down in time.
Arthur hurriedly tightened the straps of his gas mask bag across his chest, he checked the pockets where he had stashed grenades and mills bombs, he touched the hilt of the trench knife on his belt. He shoved the blade of his entrenching tool down the front of his pants. One of their French instructors had told them to do that to shield their genitals from low-flying machine-gun bullets.
And then he looked at Ben. Ben was composed. He was silent. He stared ahead, his face set as he shifted about in his webbing, distributing the weight of his gear. There was something murderous in his eyes.
“Well,” Arthur said. He was thinking maybe he could get Ben to at least apologize before they jumped off. But he was back where he had been, in the dark private mood that Arthur guessed was suited for the work that lay ahead of them.
Kitchens blew his police whistle and the platoon started to scramble upward to the swell of land. Arthur felt Ben pat him firmly on the arm—perhaps in fellowship, perhaps in farewell. It did not make up for his rudeness but it warmed Arthur all the same and gave him a bit of courage.
Arthur said, “Here we go,” but Ben was looking forward again, with that frightening, excluding clarity in his face.
They strode across the open ground, moving apart from each other, following the barrage curtain. Kitchens and a chauchaut team from their squad walked ahead of them—Bernie Rutledge carrying the heavy gun, Kyle and Herman Kuholtz, cousins from Amarillo, lugging haversacks filled with magazines.
A whistle blew. They stopped. The barrage moved forward. They started again, the mud caking their boots. No one was shooting at them, not yet. They went another hundred yards. They could see the barrage outpacing them now, the shells landing not in the town but uselessly in the swales beyond. Somebody had made a mistake.
But still the Boche weren’t shooting. The cemetery was now only a hundred yards ahead. To the left the steeple of the village church shone peacefully in the sun.
