The Secret of Raven Point (18 page)

“Up we go.” With audible strain, Lovelace flipped himself onto his hands and knees; with Glenda on his back, his knee wobbled, then steadied. Lovelace threw one arm forward, then the other, slowly crawling down the hill
like a wounded, two-headed creature.

At the hill’s base, the engineer had reached the first piece of tape and came to a stop. Panting, he scanned the spectators, as though looking for someone to carry him the rest of the way.

“I got you, Lieutenant Nelson.”

It was Jim Bailey, the cook from the Officers’ Mess. A big man, he took one stride forward and swept the engineer over his shoulder like a sack of flour. Bailey clearly wasn’t one for drama; he did this quietly and quickly. Medics rushed the engineer away on a litter, followed by Major Decker.

Lovelace, gleaming with sweat, focused his gaze on the line of white tape. He tightened his face with renewed determination and tentatively raised his injured knee, but as he set it down, he wobbled. Glenda, atop him, keeled leftward. He swung his arm back to brace her, but Glenda was already toppling.

She tumbled through the grass, bumping against rocks and picking up speed before coming to a rough stop. Far from the white tape, far from the tree line, she pawed at the ground, tearing up grass, trying to pull herself toward Lovelace. Dirt darkened her face, blood smeared her body. As she tried to wiggle forward, she caught sight of her splintered pelvis, the pulpy wreck of her flesh, and her mouth fell open in a soundless gasp.

“Glenda, we’ll send help,” Mother Hen called. “Dr. Lovelace, proceed along the white tape. You’re too far to help her and too injured to carry her. Follow the tape and let us get you medical attention.”

Glenda’s tear-filled eyes were fixed on him.

Dr. Lovelace, his face pale and expressionless, took a hesitant step forward.

“
Clifford?
” She scratched weakly at the ground and let her face drop. Her cries were quiet now, the cries of hopelessness, and for a moment no one could move, not even Lovelace.

“Heavens, we can’t leave the girl!” The stocky figure of Brother Reardon, in a pair of snug gray pajamas, sprung to the front of the
tree line. He worked his thumb over the large crucifix at his chest, and looked pleadingly at the sky.

He began following the line of white tape, then cut left toward where Glenda lay weeping. He tore pages from a magazine to mark his trail and every few steps looked at the ground with an expression of meditative concentration, proceeding right or left as though by divine guidance.

“Look,” someone beside Juliet whispered. It was Dr. Willard—when had he arrived?—pointing at Dr. Lovelace. While Juliet had been watching Brother Reardon, Lovelace had made it past the tree line. Medics were attempting to roll him onto a litter, but he refused. He sat firmly on the ground, eyes fixed on Glenda.

Juliet returned her gaze to Brother Reardon, who was inching toward Glenda with tiptoe-like steps. At his approach, Glenda weakly raised her head. She blinked slowly, disbelievingly, as finally Brother Reardon drew up beside her, removed his pajama shirt, and laid it over her bare torso.

Juliet’s chest swelled with happiness. “You’re okay, Glenda,” she muttered. She felt Dr. Willard take her hand.

Brother Reardon knelt, and with great care and studious maneuvering he eventually lifted Glenda off the ground. As he stepped forward, the moon bathed them in a strange blue glow, so that they appeared momentarily unearthly, a hazy scene from a book of myths.
Here was the image that had brought them all to this ruined land,
thought Juliet.
Selflessness.
And yet, as he carried her the last few yards down the hill, stumbling under her weight, not a single spectator budged. Like the basest of animals, they clung to their safety.

“Hail Mary! Hail Brother Reardon!” the crowd cheered as Brother Reardon passed the tree line. Applause broke out as he set Glenda on a litter. Glenda looked up groggily, her face ashen, smiling when she caught sight
of Juliet: “Tell Momma I’m okay now.”

“I’ll tell all of Texas,” said Juliet, kissing her forehead.

Dr. Lovelace limped over. “You’ll be okay, Glen, I promise.”

Glenda turned and closed her eyes.

As Glenda was carried off, Brother Reardon leaned his back against a tree and descended jerkily, inch by inch, until he was sitting on the ground, his legs out straight. He studied his knees and Juliet could see that one of them was shaking. He wiped his face with his forearm, and traces of Glenda’s blood smeared his cheeks. For a moment no one seemed to know what to say; he had done what none of them dared to do, and it didn’t occur to them he needed help. Finally Dr. Willard crouched beside him, and gestured Juliet to his other side.

“Reardon,” said Willard, “you’ve probably taken a dozen vows against this, for which I have endless respect, but tonight it’s a medical necessity. . . .” He put his arm around the chaplain. “Let’s get you a drink.”

For weeks, the scene replayed itself in Juliet’s mind: the geyser of dirt, Glenda’s childlike cries. It wasn’t the blood that haunted her but the look on Glenda’s face when she thought she’d been left for dead. Juliet recalled the body of the German soldier they’d found by the lake: What had it been like for him to die alone? Without a hand to hold or a face to look at? Without a comforting voice? The presence of another person humanized the moment; alone, one faced a bleak animal’s death. The
pain
of death had always frightened Juliet, but she saw now that solitude wrought the greater horror. Had Tuck been left somewhere, abandoned?

She tried to keep busy with work. The hospital was short one nurse since Glenda had been sent home. After Glenda had been under full anesthetic for hours while her femoral artery was reconstructed
and massive tissue damage repaired, Dr. Mallick walked solemnly into the Officers’ Mess to inform the staff that she would likely never walk again. Glenda spent several days in the Recovery Tent, her expression unchanged, Juliet thought, since the night she lay bleeding in the grass.

“My life is over, sugar.”

“Don’t say that.”

Juliet had carried Glenda her dinner tray: a bowl of beef and potatoes crowded by a cup of wine and a block of butter pecan fudge Juliet had received from home. Juliet brought the radio so they could listen to Axis Sally. Glenda hummed happily to the dance songs, but when “Lili Marlene” came on, she sang an English rendition, her voice low and tormented, as though singing a dirge:

Underneath the lantern

By the barrack gate,

Darling I remember

The way you used to wait.

’Twas there that you whispered tenderly

That you loved me;

You’d always be,

My Lili of the lamplight,

My own Lili Marlene.

Glenda flicked off the radio. Her eyes seemed to swallow sorrow. “Who’s going to want me like this?”

Juliet’s tongue went dry. “There are good men out there,” she said, but quickly looked away in embarrassment. What on earth did she know of men? Of life? Day after day she tended captains and corporals who had faced death, men who had stormed enemy lines, while she faced nothing but injections and bedpans and bandages. She told them all to piss and eat, to take their medicine,
as if they were children. Because she was
healthy
; because the hidden curse of injury and illness was an unspoken demotion within the ranks of humankind. The mere wholeness of Juliet’s body bestowed on her an authority entirely unearned. The guilt of this shook her. After all,
she
was the child here, Glenda had always known that; but if Glenda thought it now, she was too kind and forgiving to dispute the platitudes of someone who had not yet owned up to her own mortality.

Glenda smiled gently. Her face, without makeup, was pale and lifeless. “Perhaps you’re right.”

The morning Glenda was loaded into an army truck, the nurses all handed her bottles of nail polish, tins of hot cocoa, silk scarves, charm bracelets, rollers and hairpins—items they deeply coveted. Juliet offered up a pewter frame she had bought in Naples and a leather scrapbook. At the moment of departure, Glenda mustered up her former exuberance, dramatically blowing kisses and promising to write, but Juliet suspected she’d never hear from her again. Patients usually wanted to leave their injuries, and any reminders of how they happened, far behind.

If Lovelace and Glenda ever spoke after the night on the hill, no one knew of it. As far as Juliet could tell, during the few days both were in the Recovery Tent, Glenda refused to look at him. Her chilliness seemed to anguish him, and he returned to work before his knee had fully healed. After regularly pressing Juliet for updates on her progress, on the day of Glenda’s departure he asked Juliet to give Glenda a letter. Glenda stared fixedly at the envelope before tearing it in half and handing it back to Juliet. Juliet tucked the pieces into the side of Glenda’s bag.

Mother Hen seemed to take Glenda’s departure hardest. At midnight, she popped into all the nurses’ tents, checking each bedroll, and for the rest of the night, in a robe and helmet, she dutifully roamed the perimeter of the hospital, her flashlight searching for clandestine lovers. The staff took to jokingly calling her “the lady
with the lamp”—Florence Nightingale’s famous title—but were silently grateful for her concern. By morning, Juliet saw Mother Hen perched on an oil drum, her eyes narrow with sleeplessness, meditatively smoking a cigarette.

For days after Glenda left, people spoke of her constantly, exchanging stories in the mess tent of the playful touch she had with patients. Juliet told the story of their trip to Lago di Vico—how, using up all of her occupation currency, Glenda had bought the ridiculous alabaster elephant from an Italian woman desperate for money. Someone related how at Anzio she had donated her own blood to save a patient. But as the fighting for Pisa intensified, casualties streamed in faster than the hospital could accommodate, and it seemed to Juliet that Glenda’s story, like so many others, was lost in the noisy sea of misfortune.

July pressed on. An unremitting heat hammered the days into a blinding white sameness. Juliet shuffled between the Supply and Recovery Tents, her boots scratching at the dry ground. Thick black flies buzzed through the wards; gray mice, gaunt and possessed, scampered endlessly across the Officers’ Mess.

By day’s end, bats wheeled and tumbled against the luminous pastels of dusk. On occasion, one swept into the Recovery Tent, madly circling the sea of patients until, to cheers and applause, it escaped back into the night.

The capture of Pisa was proving difficult. The Germans had set up an observation post in the Leaning Tower. A tiltin’ Hilton for Jerry snipers, the patients said. But the division had been ordered to protect the landmark at all cost, so artillery had been withdrawn and the soldiers were fighting hand to hand. Hundreds of replacement soldiers had joined the division
and were experiencing the first shocks of combat.

In the Recovery Tent, Captain Alan Jarvis spent his day constructing a twelve-inch replica of the Leaning Tower from wet scraps of bread and old oatmeal; before bed, in one violent stroke, he would smash his replica, only to build another tower the next day.

Private Vance, beside him, had been burned on the top of his head; wispy thatches of brown hair snaked along his pink and tender scalp. Throughout the day, he sat in his bed examining a butane lighter, slowly tilting the flame upside down.

Dr. Willard spent hours at their bedsides and with the other battle-fatigued patients. By the time he came by to see Barnaby at the day’s end, his glasses were smudged and the tidy side part of his morning hair was lost beneath jagged brown curls. He looked fatigued himself. Drawing up a chair at the foot of Barnaby’s bed, he sat and craned his head from side to side, massaging his neck. He set his elbows on his knees and clasped his hands beneath his chin, gazing at Barnaby’s quiet form with glazed weariness. His notebook lay on the ground.

“Still nothing?” Juliet asked.