The Secret of Raven Point (33 page)

Trying to reach the deserters before the authorities, Juliet and Willard scoured the landscape in their jeep. And yet, as she looked at the wet wreckage of the countryside, at the jagged expressions of the fleeing Italians, she grew afraid of the cold and the looming dark and the unknown roads they might have to travel, afraid they wouldn’t find them. She and Willard spoke little during the ride, and she wondered if he, too, was registering the extent of the risk they had taken.

They crossed the field where weeks earlier the hospital had been encamped, looking for any traces of Barnaby and Reardon. They had agreed it was most likely Reardon would seek out places he knew were safe and had been swept for mines. It looked different now; frost had leached the color from everything. Beneath the bare trunk of a hulking oak tree, Willard eased the jeep to a stop. “Lunchtime,” he said.

They stepped out, stretched their legs, and sat on the hood. In the distance, icicle-fringed farmhouses threw off sparks of sunlight. The winter cold was beautiful and menacing.

From his pack Willard pulled a tin of K rations, peeled off his woolen gloves, and fumbled with the can.

“How many miles do you think they might have covered?” she asked.

“I’d gauge three miles an hour on foot. Assuming
they didn’t hitch any kind of ride, they’re probably already at least thirty miles from the hospital. They could conceivably be all the way to Rome by now, but I suspect they’re avoiding the roads.”

“I hope they brought food,” she said. “They’ll need to eat.”

“You too,” he said. “We’ve a long day ahead.”

He handed her the spoon to lick clean, and they climbed back into the jeep. Intent on their task, they spoke little as they drove, instead surveying their respective sides of the road. For a long time they saw no one; it was as though they had driven off the edge of the world. Rows of gnarled apple trees, dusted with snow, marked an abandoned orchard; the rotted frames of carts and wheelbarrows lay scattered on the ground. Soon the sun began weakening in the afternoon sky. Starlings gathered on the naked trees, and Juliet thought of all the birds flying over the ruined landscape. She thought of the animals in the undergrowth, the squirrels and rabbits and foxes. What did they make of this gutted world?

By evening, the full moon cast a fine blue light over the fields. In the distance, a darkened barn stood like a block of ice. They stopped the jeep and approached on foot, their flashlights searching the eaves, illuminating abandoned nests in every corner. Willard jimmied the door open, and the smell of wet hay, sharp with vinegar, overwhelmed them. There were no animals in sight. Ration tins littered the troughs.

“This will have to do,” said Willard.

He tested the rungs of a ladder and carried his pack to the hayloft before returning for hers. She followed him up to the darkened platform, where he lit a candle and flattened out their bedrolls.

“Don’t knock the candle,” said Willard. “We’ll be cooked.”

“Cooked sounds lovely. At least we’d be warm.”

She recalled all those winters in Charlesport when she had wished for snow. One December she had glued cotton on her windowsill so she would awaken to a white Christmas. Tuck had once built her an igloo from sugar cubes, large enough to stick her hand
in. She had longed to sleep in flannel pajamas on an icy-cold night. That life, those desires, seemed so far away now. She felt old.

“Give me your hands,” said Willard. He was lying beside her and pulled off her gloves. He rubbed her fingers, bringing them, prayer-like, to his face, to blow steam on them. The gesture brought a tingle of embarrassment to her skin, and she looked toward the wall, where a patch of graffiti glowed in the candlelight.
Pfc. Ryan Fitzpatrick spent a damned cold night here, 1944.
Below that, in another script:
Beware: the mice speak Italian.
And to the left, in a childlike script:
Tell Mae West Jimmy Mahoney loves her.

What had happened, she wondered, to the men who wrote those words?

As quickly as the thought came, she pushed it away.

“Are the winters in Chicago this cold?” she asked.

“Arctic. There’s also a ferocious wind. Thankfully I don’t sleep in a hayloft there.” He slipped her gloves back on her hands. “Now, lie like a mummy and tuck them under your armpits.”

Juliet lay back.

“We have about twelve hours until the sun is up,” said Willard. “We should conserve our candle.”

“Okay.”

In the pitch dark, she could no longer make out his face. But she heard the rustle of hay and suspected he had turned to face her, one hand propped beneath his head. He must have been no more than six inches away. She could feel the warmth from his skin, pressing through the cold air. From somewhere above came a steady drip—the sound of ice melting off a tree. She could hear his breathing, and her own. She still longed for him.

“I’m wide-awake, over here,” she whispered. “Cold and wide-awake.”

“Shall I tell you boring life stories to put you to sleep?
Something from awkward, lonely childhood?”

“I’m afraid I take the gold medal there. . . . So how old are you anyway?” she asked.

“Thirty-two.”

“That’s not so old,” she said, but the number did seem wildly far from her own: she was two months shy of her nineteenth birthday. She studied the number in her mind—
thirty-two, thirty-two—
as though it contained a secret about him.

“It’s old enough to remember how different the world looked at your age. How different it all felt.”

“You really are a stodgy old mentor.”

Willard laughed. “I suppose I asked for that. Come on, let’s try to get some sleep.”

She heard his head thump gently back against the wooden loft. Juliet marveled that the night before, she’d thought she would never see Willard again, and here they were, together, in the darkness of the Italian countryside. If there was, as he’d said, only the war and the rest of the world, they had somehow found a secret space in between. As she closed her eyes and tried to sleep, she wondered if any part of her, or any part of him, had understood that the decision to find Barnaby and Reardon would give them
this
.

The next day, they followed a mountain path into a woodland of towering poplars. The jeep zigzagged for hours through the cathedral of trees, branches whipping the windows, clumps of snow padding against the roof. Here and there, squirrels scrambled through the forest. Out of sight, the greedy rattle of a woodpecker’s beak sounded disturbingly like machine-gun fire.

From the forest they emerged into warmer air. The snow hardened to icy pellets, clattering against the jeep as they bumped along a muddy mule path. Beside them ran an old stone wall, uneven and
crumbling, upon which sat the occasional helmet, an abandoned mule harness, the soaked remains of a vulture.

“Even the scavengers have been scavenged,” said Juliet.

In Firenzuola, they entered a tavern brimming with Polish soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder, stomping their beaten black boots to the strum of a banjo. Shaking the water from their coats, Juliet and Willard wormed through the smoke-filled room; at the bar, an elderly woman with one milky eye monitored the soldiers and the focus of their attention: a girl, perhaps eleven years old, dressed in a khaki man’s shirt belted with a frayed rope. Barefoot, with blackened toenails, she twirled and spun, a large Polish helmet on her head falling over her eyes each time she came to a stop. For a moment Juliet thought it was Liberata, and then she realized the girl’s hair was too light, her eyes too dark. What was similar was the weariness in her face.

The barkeep announced,
“Mia pronipote.”

The girl was pulling up the hem of the khaki shirt, jutting out one bare leg, then the other. Her knees were calloused.

“
Abbiamo solo grappa
,”
the barkeep said to Juliet.
“Che cosa vuoi?
”

“Grappa,” answered Juliet.

A whoop rose from the crowd as one of the soldiers swayed and collapsed into his compatriots.
“Józef! Józef!”
they called. Someone doused his face with grappa, and his wet eyes flashed open.

Willard studied the men’s uniforms, their arm patches. “It’s the Monte Cassino regiment,” he whispered to Juliet. “They lived through the ninth circle of hell.”

Juliet took a sip of her drink and handed the glass to Willard. He brought the glass to his mouth and surveyed the room.

Just then a group of American GIs burst into the tavern.

“The Polacks bothering you?” one of the Americans, having elbowed his way to the bar, asked the old woman.

“
Abbiamo solo grappa. Che cosa vuoi?
”

“What’s she saying?” the soldier asked Juliet.

“She asked what you want to drink. I suggest you say grappa.”

“Listen, these Polacks acting up? They better not lay a hand on that girl,” said the soldier. “I’ve seen just about enough of that shit. I have a daughter back home, and it ain’t right.” The man’s eyes started to tear and he gulped the grappa that had been poured. “It ain’t right.”

Willard took Juliet’s hand. “Let’s get going.”

The man looked her slowly up and down. “Wait, s
he’s
not a child.” He suddenly moved behind Juliet and grabbed her waist and pressed himself into her. “Hmmm. She can stay.”

Willard moved to pry away the soldier’s hands and the soldier released a canine snarl. He grabbed Willard’s wrist, wrenching it hard, then abruptly let go and began to tear up again. He touched his cheeks in disbelief. “Oh, God, I’m sorry. It ain’t right what I done.”

Willard cradled his injured hand. “Private, there’s no threat here. You’re just here to have a nice time at a bar. Go find your friends.”

“You’re my friend.” The soldier opened his arms to hug Willard. “Stay and drink with me, friend. Have my grappa. . . .”

Willard pulled Juliet through the crowd onto the street, in time to hear the sound of a shattered glass. The banjo was silenced and the angry voices of Poles and Americans tumbled into the street.

Willard shook his head as he looked, with apprehension, back at the bar.

“He was just an idiot drunk,” said Juliet. “I’m okay. How’s your wrist?”

Willard pulled her brusquely down the street. At the corner, he turned and faced her squarely.

“I want to tell you something,” he said. “About Monte Cassino. About the Goumiers.”

“The mountaineer Goumiers Lovelace always talks
about?”

“Yes. The fearlesss Moroccan soldiers who managed to finally conquer the abbey. I never thought I’d tell you this because I didn’t want to frighten you. But now I want you to be frightened. I need you to understand certain things about where we are and what’s happening. The night after Cassino was taken, the Goumiers spilled into the villages beyond the monastery. They raped thousands of women and girls. We don’t even have a full count. Some of the girls were as young as eleven. Any men who tried to protect their wives or daughters were killed. These were the victors; these were our allies. The men don’t just go mute and tremble and turn guns on themselves when they go mad. They do worse. Our soldiers all know this happened, and it’s only made the men more unsettled, more confused. Anyone can do anything. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she said.

“I’m not sure I did the right thing in letting you come.”

“I never would have stayed behind.”

As they stood in the gray afternoon looking intently at each other, two MPs briskly approached.

“Sergeant, Lieutenant, a moment. We’re looking for two deserters.”

The MPs produced two small photographs: Barnaby and Brother Reardon. Willard glanced at them with a distinct halfhearted interest, but Juliet couldn’t help staring at the photograph of Barnaby: His hair was cropped, his face entirely unharmed. His eyes were radiant. He was a perfectly healthy and handsome young man.

“We’ll keep a lookout,” said Willard.

The MP looked Juliet and Willard up and down. “I assume your papers are in order?”

Willard pulled Juliet close. “We’re on leave. Personal time.” It felt so close to the truth, so momentarily real, that Juliet leaned her head against Willard’s shoulder. As Willard reached for their passes, the MP gestured for him not to bother.

“Hell,” he winked, “grab it while you can.”

She wanted to remain standing like that but made herself pull away.