The Clearing (14 page)

Ella came to the door and gave Randolph a worried look. “I think I’ll make another pot of coffee.”

Byron opened his eyes and smiled easily. “I’ll have a fresh cup. Bring him one too; he needs to wake up.”

“What does that mean?”

His brother pointed at him. “Did one of those fellows wear an eye patch?”

“Why, yes.”

Byron dropped his hand. “Tell me, did you have any doubts before the men stood up on the roof? Did you think ‘Oh my God, this is going wrong’?”

Randolph looked away. “I wasn’t aware of thinking much of anything.”

His brother stood and put a finger on the turntable. “Those four men were in the war,” he said in a low voice. “They could’ve killed you and fifteen others in about six seconds.” He shook his head. “You didn’t know what you were doing.
Everybody
should’ve been out in the open when that train pulled in.”

Randolph looked through a window at a bank of cindery clouds coming up from the south. “I suppose that’s what you would have done.”

“Maybe, if I’d known a thing about it.” He gave his brother a baleful look.

“Well, that’s just what I didn’t want. Had you shot them up out of your jurisdiction, you could’ve been jailed.”

“Jail,” his brother said with a bitter laugh. He reached into the cabinet below the Victrola, drew out a disk of “The Prisoner’s Song,” and soon a sorrowful, thin voice began to fill the room, the high notes sharp as a razor. “This fellow seems to like it well enough. It fills him with a sadness that he enjoys.”

Randolph rubbed his hands together, beginning to understand what he had almost done. “By, do you think they’ll come back?”

“Do you still have those wonderful shotguns you told me about?”

“No. The marshall instructed the agent to gather them for return shipment.”

Byron shook his head. “Too bad. We could use some good ordnance to—well, let’s just say it would be good to have them in the closet.”

His brother put his head down and stared at the cypress floorboards. “How in the world did we get into this?”

“Shhh, that’s not important. Listen to the song.”

“But what if they—”

“Hush, now.”

And after that record, he played John McCormack’s “I Hear You Calling Me” and another sad ballad by Alma Gluck. Randolph was fidgeting in his hard chair when a whiff of whiskey snapped in his nostrils, and he turned. Ella leaned against the door frame, pouring liquor into her coffee, and he looked at her pleadingly, holding a thumb and forefinger apart the thickness of a two-by-four. She nodded, returning in a few moments with straight whiskey for all of them, placing the bottle on a small oak table next to the talking machine.

After four more records and a generous glass, the mill manager was ready to weep, and he wondered what solace his brother found in such music. He thought of Byron’s letters from France. He’d gone over in 1914 as an observer for the Zeus Powder Company, which paid him to study ammunition consumption so they could plan their factory expansion and production lines. After traveling in France for two months and watching Germany grind Belgium into meal, he wrote home that the U.S. government, nervous about the expanding, ceaseless slaughter, had hired him to provide intelligence. At this point he began to see much more of the war than any American soldier ever would, and his letters detailed a conflict pinwheeling out of control. Then, for a few months, he stayed away from the front, and his letters contained long messages about the countryside, the cathedrals, the canal boats and ancient fortresses, but behind these descriptions Randolph could sense that something unspeakable was being left out. The accounts abruptly changed back again to graphic dispatches, one describing a train of boxcars loaded with wounded soldiers, stalled for two whole days in the winter weather, blood pouring through the floors, and that train moving off at last only to be followed by another, loaded down, creeping over the red snow.

In Pittsburgh, Randolph and his father watched the mails, but the slow stream of letters froze and shrank to terse notes, little frigid drops of despair: “Still here among the bodies,” one began. When the American army went over in 1917, Byron wanted to come home, but at his father’s rigid insistence he signed up in France, and that was the last the Aldridge family heard of him until he got off a troop train in Philadelphia in 1918.

The record stopped with the click of the turntable brake, and Randolph watched his brother down the last half inch of his drink. “By, will you tell me what happened in the war?”

“What—you think I’m like one of these records?” He wagged his glass before the Victrola. “Life puts the grooves on you and you play them back when you get drunk?”

“I want to know what happened.”

Byron poured another drink. “That would take years to tell.” His voice was coming slower.

“Don’t,” Ella said, pulling up a spindle-back chair next to her husband and resting a hand on his shoulder.

Randolph tried not to look at her. “It would help us understand.”

“Maybe, if you can keep from interrupting me, if you just let me drone on like a bee in a bottle, I could give you a slice, just a sliver of what you might call my war experiences.” He put his head back in the Morris chair and closed his eyes. Ella poured herself another drink and retreated into the bedroom, the floorboards popping once under each of her steps. From across the mill yard came the whine of the planer section coming back on line. “In February 1916 I was ten miles to the rear, as usual, checking ordnance reserves, transportation, and hospitals. Oh, I wanted to get on the front line, even though I saw all the bodies that the fireworks produced, as well as the arm-less, legless, jawless casualties.”

He opened his eyes and sat up suddenly, as though something behind his lids had startled him. “Maybe I wanted to see the men going down. One morning, I struck out on my own. Verdun had been going on like a thunderstorm for two days, and the confusion was nearly total, but in my observer’s uniform I could go pretty much wherever I liked. I walked to a section of the battlefield that night with the seventh and twentieth corps of the French army. I don’t know how many thousands of men. A whole civilization’s worth, if you could call it that. Most of them were pretty young. They were sent out into open country that showed five hundred shell craters to the acre and few trenches or any type of protection, and when the Germans realized what was in front of them, why, they fired their artillery as fast as they could load. At dawn I stuck my head out of a fragment of bunker, and my field glasses showed me what I’d come to see. Naturally, the first French columns were shot down, the bodies like piles of rags, maybe ten thousand piles of rags.”

He put a hand out in front of him, palm down. “You know how a pasture looks with a whole herd of cows spread out across it, down on their bellies before a rain? From the distance, that’s how it was, those French soldiers in their big coats.” Byron drew the hand up to his head. “And the noise. I know you’ve heard a boiler explode. Well, imagine two thousand explosions like that every five minutes, because the artillery was packed in there, eight hundred pieces on that part of the line, and several hundred machine guns and a hundred thousand Mausers, Lebels, and Enfields.” He lowered his hand and rolled his head sideways to look at his brother. “Remember Grandfather telling us that at Cold Harbor the opening volley of the infantry was like—what did he say, tearing silk? At Verdun, the rifle fire was like many pieces of silk ripping and ripping without end, the pistols, machine guns, grenades, and cannons joining in one tearing thunderclap that continued day and night. Shells of phosgene gas formed white clouds on the field, and I saw about a thousand of those French boys gagging out their lungs into little lakes of blood.”

Randolph was beginning to sweat, but when his brother turned to look at him, he gulped his drink and said, “Go on.”

“It was a long day, Rando. You sure you want to hear this?” He took a swallow from his glass. “Well, silence means assent. When the men out in front of me were mostly shot up or poisoned, the French generals sent in another wave of thousands, and the new men struggled up to the dead and wounded and just milled around. They couldn’t move forward and were afraid they’d be fired on by their own side if they retreated.” He took a breath and let it out slowly. “So they stayed and were shot to pieces. I saw artillery shells vaporize soldiers into red mist. I saw pieces of men spinning into the sky. And then another wave of maybe five thousand was sent in, and by then there was a pavement of bodies, and in my field glasses I could see mouths working around final words, and I thanked God I was too far away to hear. The third wave came up and began firing from behind the piles of dead, but once the big German howitzers got their range, and listen to me, Rando, because I don’t know if I’ll ever tell this again, I watched whole groups of men disappear body and soul. The shock waves from the explosions were like mallets in the face, even at my distance. Later in the day, another wave of troops went in on top of all of that. I began to vomit from just a whiff of the gas, so I crept back and stayed low, thinking it would end soon and medics would gather up the wounded. But the shelling continued, and toward nightfall the roar became more intense. For days they kept it up in that part of the field, and for weeks and months afterward the whole place stank of corpses. By the next year, they told me, men fighting on that same ground in new-dug trenches hung their canteens on the hands of skeletons sticking out of the walls.”

Randolph turned his head as though he’d been slapped. “By, this won’t—”

“I want you to be quiet,” his brother told him. “You and Father have always begged me to talk about this. It’s why we’re here, isn’t it?” He put down his empty glass and filled it from the bottle. “I stayed away from the front after that trip, until late 1917 when my services as an observer were no longer necessary and the whole country was filling up with Americans whose eyes worked as well as mine. Then I started to receive long letters from Father, each proclaiming my duty to enlist—to make the family proud. And because of his allfired pride I did, as a private. I think I felt guilty because all I’d done was watch people die, and somehow, I thought I’d get used to it, you know, to things like the entire British Fifth Army being slaughtered in one offensive. But I got more frightened with each engagement. Watching, I found out, is nothing like being in battle.

“And then there was my big one, the night thousands of us moved along a rutted road, filling it from fence to fence, and I could see our close-packed helmets moving on the hills in front like the scales on a snake. In the dark we filed into mud-swamped traverses, and before dawn everyone was packed into the forward line of trenches. The Argonne forest looked like this place here will look when we’re finished with it. I heard there were four thousand pieces of artillery on our side only, and when they opened up, well, I don’t have the words for that sound. The concussion from a siege gun behind our trench split the seam of my canteen and the water wasted down my leg. As quickly as the barrage started up, it stopped, giving us an awful few minutes of dark empty silence. In the middle of it I heard hail hitting an iron roof far off to the east, but the sound traveled toward me, growing louder in the blackness. I asked myself,
What is that rattle?
The hair on my neck stood straight up when I realized it was men fixing bayonets. Tens of thousands of bayonets. Whole cities putting knives on their guns. The order was given at the distant end of the line and the noise itself continued the command as men heard it and understood what to do. The fellow next to me clicked his over the muzzle of his Springfield, and I slammed mine on and turned my head to see pale hands rising and falling in the dark, the clatter diminishing all the way down toward the Meuse River. Next to me, my best old buddy, Walter Liddy, a Pennsylvania man, began to pray aloud. The sergeant came down the line lugging a box and stopped next to me. Without a word he began to hang grenades about my coat by their spoons, stuffing them in my pockets, until he’d given me twenty or so. The weight was staggering, but I felt protected by all the bombs I had to throw. Then the cannons kicked the air out of our lungs and the sergeants began screaming and pushing and we went over the top right as the German artillery laid down a wall of shrapnel in front of us. A man behind me took a shell all by himself and flew off like a rag doll in a tornado. I went down then, my back on fire with bits that had blown through my pack and clothes. It was Walter Liddy who’d got it, they’d told me later, old joking, pipe-smoking Walter. After twenty minutes, getting angrier by the second, I gathered my strength and plunged on, as they say, a hundred yards or so, to the first coil of wire where three or four dozen men hung dead and those coming up behind were stepping on their backs to get over. Some bent down to the bigger corpses and started plucking grenades from them. I saw that our loaded-down first wave was
supposed
to get shot and tangled in the wire, our bodies serving as depots for the other waves coming up, you see. That’s when I learned the worth of one life to a damned general. I threw all my grenades away unexploded, picked up my Springfield, and went over the wire myself, stepping square on the back of a fellow from Aliquippa, an excellent harmonica player named Angeloz. Bodies were twisted on the ground like trash paper, everywhere you could see. We all should’ve gone crazy, I guess, but there wasn’t time to go crazy, with the air around us flying with Mauser bullets. Crazy came later.”

Byron put down his glass and it fell off the table, bouncing away from his shoe, but he seemed not to notice. He turned to his brother, whose hands were covering his face. “I killed a lot of men that day, Rando. I got good at putting a 30.06 round right under the rim of a helmet, and that afternoon it was like shooting pumpkins in a field, but every pumpkin was a Dieter or a Fritz with thoughts in his head just like mine.” He stared down at his spilled glass, and his face seemed like something carved by wind out of the side of a mountain.