The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1 (30 page)

XI.

W
HAT A SOUND. IT BLED
resolve from every American who heard it. Reader, I petition your patience. I bolted from the arms of my friendly detainers, vaulted o'er the sandbags, and charged one last time into the crossfire. I veered rightward of a spattering patch of bulleted clay and lunged against a berm of earth tilled by gunfire, behind which I might deduce Church's position.

I was not the only soldier to claim the spot. A GI was crouched there, running a thumb over the pin of his grenade. It made me a tad nervous, so I crawled ten feet northward until the diminishing hill forced me to my stomach. There I stopped and listened. Nothing. Nothing, nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing—wait, yes, there! You couldn't call it a sob, not from Burt Churchwell you couldn't, but the hiccup of pain was unmistakable. He was alive, and close, but in a direction that was, shall we say, inconvenient.

I took my helmet in my hand and nudged it above the hill.

Sniper fire—
zing!
'Twas shot right out of my hand.

I contemplated this event for a moment, then looked to the man fondling the grenade.

“You! Private!”

Languidly he turned his head.

“Sergeant,” clarified he.

I gestured my apology to his chevrons.

“I wonder, Sergeant, sir, would you mind terribly throwing that egg?”

He regarded it, stroked it.

“It's the only one I got,” mused he.

“Oh, they're bringing more, sir, wagons of them,” lied I. “Throw it due west, twenty yards, at my say-so. Go left of that and you'll blow up a corporal. Go short and you'll blow up me. Got it? Sir, I mean?”

He pondered the request long enough for Church to hiccup again.

At last the sergeant sighed.

“No one here lets you keep anything. Fine, I'll throw it.”

I drew myself into a squat and pressed my Chauchat to my chest. Why wait?

“Now, Sergeant! Throw it now!”

His arm reared back in a perfect arc and I bounced to my feet, filling the forest with bullets. The grenade whizzed past me as I ran, and behind bee-swarms of enemy fire I saw it drop. A sergeant indeed!—'twas a bull's-eye right at the edge of the German trench. I veered, emptying my clip, until I saw a man in U.S. fatigues hunkered behind a boulder. The surroundings were littered with unidentifiable body parts, random cuts of meat in beige casings.

I collapsed myself alongside the one living body.

A bayonet blade came jabbing at my face. I batted it away with my own.

“It's me! American! Marine!”

Church moaned through a gas mask caked with dirt.

“Private Prefer-Not-To?
You
?”

Bullets cracked off the edge of the boulder. I pressed a finger to
his lips. He was whole as far as I could tell. Then his leg spasmed with pain and I saw a foot-long strip of fatty skin lying in the dirt like a dead snake. It had been carved from the back of his right calf by a piece of shell shrapnel that lay black and smoking in the weeds. The exposed muscle, as if in shock, barely bled. A mortal wound it was not, yet walking out of here in full view of the Germans might be impossible.

I unlatched my full canteen, pulled the mask from his face, and poured the water at his mouth. He gulped, coughed, and spewed before replacing his mask. I looked for somewhere to set the canteen and, finding no better option, hung it by its strap on a severed arm wedged into the boulder. Yes, I know—not my finest moment.

“Dirty Squareheads tricked me,” rasped Church. “Guy was yelling ‘medic' in perfect English. Bunch of us gyrenes came in for evac and
boom
.” He punched the ground with a fist. “
One
dang Squarehead. With
one
dang submachine gun. Then they started shelling.”

“Submachiner? Where?”

“Dead.” He jerked his chin at a half-empty bag of grenades. “I been tossing these every couple minutes. Won't last, and I'm throwing blind. Out of ammo, too. Got this bayonet, though, so I might take one or two with me.” He grabbed my collar. “Hey, Prefer-Not-To. Do something right for a change. Tell Lilly Eve Johnson from Dubuque, Iowa, I loved her to pieces. Right up till the end I loved her. Will you do that for me?”

“I most certainly will not. We're going to get you—”

“Then go on, crawl your yellow belly out of here! I gotta be ready when they come.”

He angled his bayonet against the boulder, the perfect position should a German face pop over the crest. With his free hand he
reached into his pouch, extracted a lemon drop, lifted aside his mask, and placed the candy into his mouth.

No soldier, alive or dead, knew the significance of this action better than I. I hurled myself on top of him and pinned down his arms with my rifle. He made fists and tried to raise them but I had the advantage of not just surprise but my returned strength. I pushed aside his mask, dug my fingers into his cheek, forced open his lower jaw, reached inside his mouth, and Reader, call me crazy if you wish, but I dug that yellow son of a bitch out of there and tossed it into the grass.

“You are not going to die, Corporal. You are going to listen to what I say and—”

“Get off me, you coward—”

“You say you love your Marines? If you lie here and die, it is going to kill them. The Third Battalion will fall. The whole Seventh might not hold. So I must insist that you try. Not for me, for I give far less than one damn, but for them, the leathernecks. Your boys.”

Church's bloody teeth ground and his big left arm, seaworthy as ever, slipped out from under my rifle and took my neck so hard that two of his fingers sunk into my grappling-hook wound. He pulled until my forehead knocked against his own.

“Call the play, then, Prefer-Not-To. Let's finish out the Game.”

He secured his mask and then, ever so gingerly, we arranged our bodies into low squats. A hundred rubies of blood gathered on Church's exposed leg muscle, each one matched by a pearl of sweat upon his face. I reloaded and wrapped an arm around his back, the same way he'd supported me on our first march. I nodded at the grenadier bag.

“I need you to throw a couple of those and then we'll—”

“I'm not some tenderfoot, Private. I know the routine.”

He tossed aside his useless rifle and took up the bag. Four grenades remained.

Four measly grenades, one piece-of-shit French rifle, and two hobbling Marines against a full trench of furious Huns. Then, just to top it off, mad orders from a crazed commander:

(((Run away on tricycle or battleship, but dissection awaits you everywhere.)))

(((Here, let me open you with knife, so much more exacting than bullet.)))

(((And look! Your invitation to the People Garden, it has at last arrived!)))

Of course this malevolent mentor impugned me; upon his laugh-rollicked tray he arranged not his favorite kit of scalpels and sutures but rather syringes of toxic doubt, bonesaws of intimidation, chisels of misgivings. I was but a boy playing at being a man. Success of any kind was beyond my reach.

“Counting backward!” shouted Church. “Three—two—one!”

He pulled the pin of a grenade, whether or not I was ready, and hurled the pineapple with the speed and accuracy of a bow-shot arrow. Before it buried itself into German mud, he'd pulled the pin on the next, changed his target, and thrown another blistering fastball.

Mud and men exploded from the trench; Dr. Leather and his paraphernalia of paralysis were simultaneously blown away. I moved, dragging Church's weight behind our cover of black smoke and into the trample of wheat. An outcrop of stone rose fifty feet away, though it might have well been a mile. From the edge of my vision I saw the redirecting muzzles of Jerry's guns, yet rather than falter I thought
again of the Hazard sisters. Perhaps one day they'd replay this battle, hatch a better plan, map for me a superior path. In the meantime? This was the way Zebulon Finch wanted to go out.

I opened fire with my Chauchat, but with only one arm to steady the gun the shots did little more than distract. Church, however, planted his injured leg, cried out in pain, and hurled a perfect spiral into the face of a machine-gunner. Then he was pushing off again and so was I, loping along in artless concert as bullets carved visible paths through the tall grass. Our grenade exploded and German helmets, some with heads strapped in, rocketed from the trench. Church's bellow was automatic.

“MERRY CHRISTMAS! MERRY CHRISTMAS!”

We had halved the distance to the outcropping when we heard the
whizz
that preceded the explosion of a whizz-bang. On instinct we threw ourselves to the dirt. When the
bang
came it scooped a gorge in the field, the charred ground belching a truckload of virgin dirt that then fell heavy as cadavers. My Chauchat was torn from my hands and I revoked every bad word I'd said about that Frog hunk of junk—I wanted it back!

I whipped out my .45 and began popping off rounds, a waste of ammo, though the dirt cloud hid us long enough for me to drag Church back to his feet. We stumbled through the freshly carved ravine and up over the side, then dashed for the outcropping while four or five Huns rushed along their trench to match us step for step.

Church threw the last grenade sidearm, a movement of inexpressible grace, and it cut across the wheat with just enough backspin to make it over the lip of the trench and into the laps of our pursuers. Instead of shots fired there was a German babble of panic, followed by detonation and screams—and then our outcropping was right
there! A steep bank of stone promised to slow us, so I took Church in a bear hug and with all of my might flung him to safety. He landed on his back, screaming through his gas mask, clutching his raw, open calf.

He made quite a bit of noise. So much so that I did not hear the
whizz
. Church did.

“Down, Private, down!”

In many respects I was fortunate. The shell was not a direct hit. The field behind me surged upward as if it were an ocean wave. Moist clay bestrewed Church's appalled face before I felt a mallet blow to my right leg. I teetered, then looked down to see a snarled wad of shrapnel stabbed into the dirt, pinning beneath it a hunk of bloodless gray meat. Feeling only a dull disturbance, I decided to take a closer look at my legs.

My left leg was fine, but a hole the size of a baseball had been punched through my right thigh; I could see through it to the scorched grass beneath. With no muscle to support it, the flesh walls began to crumple. I pitched forward, right into Church's arms. He wrapped me tight and yanked me behind the rock, shouting self-evident silliness.

“You're hit! Aw, Private, you're hit bad!”

I propped myself against the rock. It was a fine enough spot to sit until they approximated our new location and launched another mortar.

“Stop moving, Private! Medic!
Medic!
”

One could excuse his agitation. Mine was, without doubt, a killing blow. Major arteries had been more than severed; they'd been blown out entirely. Even were there a doctor close by armed with tourniquet, he would not bother, for there was not a man alive who
would not bleed out in thirty seconds. Church knew this and yet, despite his pain, despite the knock-knock of Death upon his own chamber door, he dug out a lemon drop and offered it as distraction from what he believed must be unimaginable agony.

“Save it,” said I.

The forest floor was blanketed with dry wheat and sloppy mud. I gathered both by the handful and began to stuff them into my thigh cavity. Behind the window of his gas mask, Church's eyes widened. Once the thigh was full enough to support weight, I gave Church a polite nod.

“Your belt, please?”

He asked no questions. In seconds he had it unbuckled, wrapped twice around my thigh, pulled tight, and knotted. While I tested my reconstructed leg against an embedded rock, Church fought against twenty-two years of rational convictions, even, perhaps, against the abrupt and irrecoverable loss of Gød. I did not have the time required to feel bad about any of it. For now, we had to move, and fast, before the Huns, those angry wasps, sunk their stingers.

“Grab onto me,” said I. “I shall do the crawling.”

He pointed at my face in expanding wonder.

“You're not even wearing a mask. How . . . ?”

I held out my .45.

“Can you shoot? I need you to do so, Corporal, and with precision.”

Though the mask hid much of his face, I could see enough to follow the cycle of his abhorrence, repudiation, and denial. But was this not war? Did not each new day shine its torch upon some rare abomination? Resolution diamoned Church's eyes and then his body.
He snatched the .45 from me, popped the rod, thumbed the cylinder, and counted the remaining bullets. With practiced flash, he whipped shut the mechanism and yanked the hammer.

His teeth were blood-splattered, mud-spattered, but still, when he flaunted them, objects of American splendor.

“Can I shoot? Heck, Private. I was born to shoot.”

XII.

C
HURCH WAS CARTED AWAY, ALONG
with scores of others, to a med station set up inside a barn near Marigny. That night, I emptied the wilting straw from my thigh, improvised sticks as replacements for the missing bone, packed the hollow with clay, and tied it with bandages.

With Church left the regiment's capability for transcendence. That does not mean the boys did not fight well. Through morning mist, we captured two-thirds of the Wood on June 11. The whispered word was that the Marines were holding at a seventy-percent casualty rate. The Skipper requested reinforcements; it did not happen. The next day at 1730 hours we launched an offensive in hopes of breaking through into the northern third of the Wood; that, too, did not happen. The lines of fire clotted, the paths of attack coagulated. The rough arithmetic was one inch gained per life lost.

On the night of June 15 our runners brought the overdue word that we were to be relieved in the morning. Such news would have ushered in celebration if not for Mouse. He was lost somewhere in no man's land, laughing out beneath the stars. The sound was so unexpected from Mouse that a few of us chuckled, too. Hours later we figured out that he was dying, his lungs shot up so that his screams came out like giggles. By then it was too late. Jerry lit the skies with magnesium, making rescue impossible. Mouse, the quiet one, was
not quiet near the end. He damned soldiers by name, mine included, for not coming to save him, damned the whole regiment, the whole military, the whole war, the whole world.

Our march to bivouac grounds was a glum one indeed. What few of us were left humped across the same gutted landscape we'd come in on and tipped our helmets to the same dead farm animals. They were in worse condition this time, but then again, so were we.

We made camp at dawn, a miraculous sight: clean gray tents, a pond for bathing, warm chow for the eating, tables for card playing, men who still dove at the whistle of distant bombs, and their good buddies who pretended not to notice. The Skipper left us at ease near a sentry tower, returning a few minutes later with a surprise.

With his crisp laundered uniform and easy grin, Burt Churchwell was ready to model for enlistment posters. That calf wound of his had been a “blighty,” an injury serious enough to put him on the next westward boat. Church, though, not only walked upon the leg but swaggered
.
A shocked silence prevailed until someone let out an
EEE-YAH-YIP!
and the battalion, maudlin since Mouse's death, erupted. Church was swarmed. There came a percussion performance of back slapping and all the best expletives. The Prof hoisted two bottles of French wine. Where had he acquired them? Who cared! The starstruck scene, thought I, had to remind our guest of honor of his days leading homecoming parades as a Grinnell College Pioneer.

Celebration made it a challenge, but his eyes found mine. He was of meat-and-potatoes Iowa stock and it clearly bothered him to accept so much adulation while I, his deliverer, stood friendless to the rear. But I understood that this was the necessary order. Were these boys to survive, they needed a leader, and that leader's shine could not be smudged.

I left them to their rejoicing and wandered the camp. Everywhere I saw men trying to recall ordinary behavior. I saw them sit for haircuts and wince at each
snick
of the scissors—Jerry crawling through the wheat with his bayonet. I saw them sunbathe, donning sunglasses as if that might help shield them from the clanking of artillery shells being unloaded, the moans of despair from the medical tent, and, worst of all, the hyperventilations of troops fresh off the boat. How prematurely we'd become the grizzled vets.

Only Piano rejected the chance for R&R. He usurped a corner of the camp and paced it until dust clouds rose, his left cheek clenching as if from invisible jabs. Every five or ten minutes he dropped to the grass, unrolled his tube of maps, removed his colored pencils, and added clarifying granularities. War had stripped most soldiers of their patience, and to preserve sanity they repeatedly ejected Piano from earshot, often by force. At last the Irishman spoiled the isolated nook I'd claimed.

“. . . arseholes be
lost
without me maps . . . those woods are bleedin'
thick
 . . . they gonna
die
out there if they don't
listen
 . . .”

The blather needled me the same as any other. I gathered my gear and walked away. Evening had arrived and guys everywhere were burping compliments to the best corn willy they'd tasted in weeks. They waddled about, overfed and dazed, dousing firepits so that German biplanes could not isolate our location at night. In fifteen minutes it was as black as a trench but for the million or so glowing cigarettes flitting about like fireflies.

“Finch.”

I was strolling between dual rows of tents. Against better judgment, I ducked down and parted the flap of one of them.

Church sat alone, his back straight, his legs crossed like an
Indian. Before him lay a collection of French pin-up girl postcards and a perspiring bottle of Coca-Cola, though both had the feel of untouched props. He was shirtless except for his bandolier and his guns were arranged close for quick access. His face was difficult to read. He pointed at the space in front of him.

“Sit,” said he.

“Nice of you to offer. But I think I shall—”

“Sit.”

The tent flap swept shut behind me.

Church positioned a piece of beef jerky between his teeth and watched my right thigh as I manipulated it into a sitting position. The jerky was tough and he wrenched his head side to side to bite off a hunk.

“I've seen you give Piano your rations. My thinking was always, well, he's a bully, you're a chicken. I didn't think any more of it.”

“Thank you.”

“Why are you thanking me? I haven't done anything for you. Not a darn thing.” He flung the rest of his jerky into the tent wall. “I've been sitting here five days now and it's like there's a grenade in my brain with the pin pulled. Listen—will you just listen? You saved my life and I can't go on like it didn't happen.”

“Rest assured it was not personal.”

“Here's the problem. I can't just go to the Skipper and have him write you a commendation. Because I've got a hunch you wouldn't want me to. He'd find out about your—you know. Your leg. What you
are
. Not that I know myself, because I don't, but I sure as heck know you're not normal.”

“Who's normal?”

Church barked once in laughter.

“That's true. Out here they blast the normal right out of you.” His smile withered and he peered at me with raw curiosity. “Why in the world are you here? Someone like you?”

Call it battle fatigue, call it a hunger for the sort of conversation I'd not shared in twenty years, but in that tent I found myself willing to release the burden of my secret.

“It seemed a fine place to die,” said I.

“Huh. Golly. I don't really know what to make of that.”

“Why are you here, Corporal?”

“Me? Fact is, I read a story in a magazine: ‘A Soldier's Glory.' All full of pomp and circumstance. Got me riled up, I guess. But now I'm thinking different. Maybe what it did was make a sucker out of me.”

“If anyone is supposed to be here, it is you.”

“See, that's the thing.” He tapped his chest. “I'm still here because of you, Finch. You and me, we're connected. I owe you. My folks owe you. Lillian Eve Johnson owes you. We Churchwells, we pay our debts.”

It did not escape my notice that he was at last using my real name. This moved me more than I would have guessed, but it did not mean I would drop my guard. One need only peruse recent history to find that affiliation with me was hazardous.

“There is nothing from you that I want,” said I.

“C'mon, fella. You've got nothing to hide from me. Tell me how you got this way. I've never begged for nothing my whole life and I'm begging you now.”

Dickens had it right: this dream of life was an undigested bit of beef, a fragment of underdone potato, more gravy than grave. Me, fighting for a country instead of for myself? Me, happy to be inside of a cramped tent beside an armed man? Me, in
France
? The pure
farce of it dictated that it mattered not a pinch what I told to whom. So I began with the Black Hand escapades from before Church's birth and then toured him through such popular destinations as Dr. Whistler's Pageant of Health, a bona fide secret lab, and a plantation full of southern-fried whangdoodles.

It was a fable without a discernible moral, and at its completion Church swallowed hard, as if General Pershing had informed him that the moon was made of stinky green cheese and he'd just have to accept it. Church chose to believe, I think, because believing was, for him, the easier path. Now he could go about reimbursing what he felt was owed.

“If you're . . . dead, like you say . . . what would put you at peace?”

It struck me as a penetrating opening question.

“I used to believe it would be revenge against he who killed me. What else but revenge can drive one for so long?”

“But you said you came here to die.”

“The trail went cold. All things, to me, grow cold.”

“Maybe there are better things to live for.”

I thought of Merle, out there somewhere, still wilding.

“Perhaps,” said I.

“I got another question. This
la si . . . len . . . sio . . .
”

“La silenziosità.”

“Right. It lets people see their own death?”

“It is more akin to
feeling
their own death. The state of their soul at the end should they not alter their path.” I shrugged. “Or so I believe.”

Church slapped his bandolier. “Do it to me. I'm ready.”

I gave my head a mild shake. “I will not. It saps all energy and willpower.”

“For you? Or for me?”

“Both.
La silenziosità
is not something to trifle with.”

He considered this for a moment.

“All right, another question. How many minutes did you say you were dead?”

This question, on the other hand, struck me as offbeat.

“Seventeen,” replied I.

“And how old were you? Are you, I mean.”

“Seventeen.”

“Merry Christmas, Finch! Don't you think that's a clue?”

“How do you mean?”

“Look, how many people did you hurt with the Muddy Fingers?”

“The Black Hand.”

“Right. Make an estimate. Any chance it was seventeen?”

This resourceful young man! I was sad to let him down.

“More. Much more.”

“Then how many people have died? From your
actual hand
, Finch. Could that be seventeen?”

“I suppose.”

“Well, you ever think that's why you're here? To
save
seventeen lives, to pay back as many as you took?”

Dr. Leather, for all his vials, calipers, and annotated bits of fastidious flesh, had never struck upon an idea so crystalline as had this cornfed corporal. Math: nothing was simpler or more profound. Could my resistance to shooting the young German be linked to a tacit inkling that I remained here on Earth not for murder but for salvation?

In the end, of course, the idea was no more than a rose-tinted fancy. What Church had not calculated into his tempting Theory
of 17 were the recent figures that weighed the equation against me: Johnny, Pullman Larry, perhaps by now Mary and Gladys Leather, or even Merle, not to mention the troops who died on June 6 while I cowered in a crater with an unspent rifle.

“Maybe,” continued Church, “I'm Life Saved Number One. And if you're, you know, rotting away like you say, then I'd wager there's no time to waste.”

“'Tis an attractive notion,” said I, “but I should need to save the entire regiment to compensate for all I have taken.”

“Heck, is that it?” Church chuckled. “If anyone can do it, it's you.”

We were interrupted by a tipsy, red-eyed GI passing word that some musical son of a bitch had himself a gee-tar and a bunch of jackasses were singing songs and it was all sorts of god-danged fun and if we Marine bastards liked fun we ought to do ourselves a favor and get our butts over there. Church shot me a raised eyebrow. Our conversation was hardly finished, but then again, if we were as bound as he claimed, would it ever be? He grabbed his Coca-Cola and crawled toward the door.

“C'mon, Finch, let's see if we can kill Jerry with the worst singing this side of Berlin.”

Indeed it was a racket unrivaled. The Army guitarist, a captain, was an able plucker, but the brawling conglomeration of off-tune louts gave the inharmonious Carlo Gesualdo a run for his money. Their cause went unassisted by the snappy pap of wartime rags: “Over There,” “Pack All Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag,” and that counterintuitive classic, “Oh! It's a Lovely War.” Reader, it drove me out of my skull until Church slung an affectionate arm around my neck. Every Marine present witnessed the gesture and promptly lost track of the lyrics.

Their faces said everything. This pairing of brash American hero and unpopular ghoul was unnatural and they would not stand for it. I wished to retreat, but Church gripped me more fiercely. Soon enough, the music rediscovered its pace, the intoxicated Marines grew tired of holding mistrustful glares, and Reader—it pangs me even now to say it. Gød help me, I put my arm around Church, my
friend
, whom I resolved to treat better than Johnny if it was the last thing I did, and I lifted my voice until it chased away the final vestiges of Leather's phantasmal scorn, until I sang just as poorly and loudly as Church, as the Professor, as Jason Stavros, as all of those doomed fools.