The explosion was set for seven a.m. and by sheer will and determination the tunnelers finished the job with an hour to spare. A shell the size of a whiskey barrel was set into the earth and filled with enough power to obliterate anything within a one hundred meter radius. An immense throwing of the earth that would then be followed by a vast sinking and the exhausted and hungry tunnelers were loaded onto trucks and cleared away. All but Nick who stayed at his post while the explosives were inserted and the charges set. Since the early hours of his post he had resigned himself to staying and he had emptied his pockets to see what he was leaving behind to this world. Some scraps of paper. The nub of a pencil. An army-issued pocket watch. Papers that gave his full name and date of birth. Some loose thread. A piece of wood from one of her frames. The contents laid out on the ground like evidence and he thought of his father and his mother. Thought of their house and the business and the things they owned and the photographs that hung on the wall in the hallway of grandparents and great grandparents and aunts and uncles. His family line and his family’s permanence in his family’s town and to them it all meant something. But this was all that he was leaving and he knew that it didn’t matter. Leaving was leaving and it was all the same. With only thirty minutes to ignition, he took the tubes from his ears and picked up the tin can and drank the water. Then he held the piece of frame between his fingers and he began to cry for a thousand reasons and only God knew he was there.
God and the German listener who sat only thirty feet away from him and had been sitting there just as patiently as Nick. God and the German listener and the two German soldiers who packed the explosive into the dirt and pointed it in his direction. Had he not been crying he would have been wearing the tubes and he would have heard them. Had he not drunk the water he would have seen it wave in the tin. Had he not fallen sobbing face first into the dirt like a man who had found in the years of his life nothing worth salvaging then the explosion would have removed his head from his body.
13
He had been dug out and tossed into a pit with other dead bodies when he had been unconscious. He woke and found himself sandwiched between the arms and legs of others and he heard German voices and he didn’t move. Confused and reaching to remember. Pain in his head and neck and it took some time but it slowly came back to him. Waiting at his post and waiting for the big explosion and falling to his knees and then the blast above him. And then as he dug and pushed at the earth crumbling around him the grand explosion and it all moved and it all shook and the clay and stone around him flew away and hung in the air and then came crashing back down and all went black. His thoughts foggy but he tried to stay with them until he put enough of it back together.
Eventually he slit open his eyes and saw the soldiers standing at the edge of the pit smoking cigarettes and every few minutes other men in uniform would appear at the edge of the pit with a big wheelbarrow stacked with the dead. The bodies wore different flags on their sleeves but that mattered no more as the pit was a place of equality. Nick watched as more bodies were dumped and they slid down and tumbled awkwardly onto the others. He couldn’t move or they would kill him and he knew he was bleeding from more than one place but his choice was to move and be shot or stay still and pray that he didn’t bleed dry before he could try and climb out and into cover of night. To where, he didn’t know.
He prayed. He promised God and Jesus and Mary and whoever else would listen that if someone would please save him he would give it all back and I will pray every morning and every night and I will give everything I have away and I will feed the poor and read to the sick and please let me out of this hole and please stop this bleeding and if you help me climb out of this pit please dear God let my legs work and I promise I will give it all back.
He prayed and promised and prayed and promised for two days as there seemed to be no rush by the men surrounding the pit. He tried not to sleep but he dozed in and out and there was nothing in his dreams that didn’t involve the wrath of man and as soon as he woke he began to pray and promise once again as if it were synchronized with his cautious breathing. The Germans kept smoking and kept dumping bodies and then finally, after two days and two nights of playing dead, after ignoring the vermin that crawled across his face, after promising God and the saints a lifetime of service and gratitude, he heard the German word for fire and he had no choice. The sun was dropping toward the horizon and the sky bled from pink in the west to lavender in the east and he knew that once dark fell he had to move. His lips were dry and cracked and he ached for water and food and he didn’t know if his arms and legs would work. After dusk he listened for the voices but they had moved away from the pit. He watched and listened and the stars appeared and flickered across an endless sky.
And then he moved.
He began by wiggling free from the dead that covered his legs and pressed against his head and chest and as he twisted and turned he had to bite the collar of his shirt to keep from screaming as a shot of pain raced down his spine. Rats and mice skittered across the dead litter as if aroused by his movement and with a clenched jaw he freed himself from the bodies. He was hurt and thankful for the dark so that he couldn’t see what he looked like because he knew that would make it easier to give up.
He crawled up. Stiffened bodies and the smell of hell and eyes frozen open that envied him as he maneuvered his way to the edge of the pit. Again he listened and he heard voices but they were at a distance so he lifted his head and looked out across the land. Maybe a hundred yards away men gathered around campfires and milled around tents. There were hundreds of tents and dots of firelight orange spread out across the treeless fields but they were all away from the pit.
And then he heard a weak voice.
Help me.
He turned and looked. An arm raised from the corpses and the voice came again. Help me.
A soldier yelled something at the edge of the German campsite and he couldn’t wait. He wanted to say to the voice, I can’t help you. I want to but I can’t and I hope that you don’t remember that I was here and that you asked me but I can’t and I pray that you die before they bring the fire.
He crawled out and began in the opposite direction. His legs had gone numb under the weight of the others and two days of immobility and they dragged behind as he moved on his elbows. There was nothing that he could remember about the direction of the attack or the trenches or anything. He only knew that he was crawling in the opposite direction of the men who would light the pit on fire. He groaned as he crawled across the damp and tattered earth. Darkness all around him. He came to puddles and wanted to drink but he knew the gas lingered in them and that it would burn him through. He bumped into a canteen and the cap was gone but several dirty drops fell onto his tongue and disappeared.
Several times he looked back and it seemed as if he was going nowhere so he stopped looking and only crawled and began to talk to God and though he asked for His power and strength, the notion of such a being became so vague to him that the word itself seemed as nothing more than a sound. Only another of the many sounds that filled the wartorn landscape. He began by talking to God but then began talking to himself and he didn’t speak of faith or hope but he spoke of the literal world, reminding himself of the colors in a sunset or what he liked to eat for breakfast or the most efficient way to shovel snow from a sidewalk. And he talked of Paris and the way her eyes seemed to turn from green to blue in the sunshine and how when he spoke too much English she would touch the top of his hand and nod slowly as if to motion him back to their halfway point.
He talked and crawled and stopped and rested and crawled and muttered again. It took time but soon he was beyond being seen. Behind him he heard voices and he turned and saw men with torches walking toward the pit. He heard their laughter and their silhouettes staggered and he rested and watched. Two of the men circled the pit and emptied large containers of kerosene onto the bodies and the others with torches followed them to give light. To make sure that this would
be a good soaking and only have to be lit one time.
Help me, the voice whispered across the darkness. Nick bowed his head. Believed that death would come for him anytime now. He slapped at his legs and told them to come on. Come on right now.
He heard the flush of fire when the first torch was tossed into the pit and a scream splintered the night. He began again and didn’t look back. You can’t look back and you can’t think back and you had no choice. None of us have a choice. There were only so many hours until daybreak and he didn’t know if he was half a mile or a hundred miles from anything that may give him cover. He struggled for hours and his elbows began to bleed and he felt himself bleeding again from other places and he no longer talked to himself or to God as he knew that better men than him were burning in the pit or would die tomorrow or the next day. The dehydration and hunger moved on him and his mind began to play about as he nudged farther. Animals moved that weren’t there. A song echoed from a soprano voice. Shells exploded that hadn’t been fired. Familiar faces from his boyhood appeared across the field. Ella smiled at him from across the café table. He didn’t know how far he had come or how far he had to go but he knew that it was over. Exhaustion overcame him and he lay still. Cheek against the dirt. Arms outstretched. A beautiful night above.
Help me.
14
He opened his eyes in a barn. He lay in a scattering of hay and he wore somebody else’s white shirt and overalls. His uniform hung from a clothesline outside and the holes and tears had been stitched together. A little old woman and a cow sat with him. He raised up and grimaced at the ache that pulled through the length of his body. She had bandaged a slice in his thigh and a gash in his shoulder. The little woman moved to him with a cup of water and he drank. She refilled the cup with an old pitcher next to the stool and he drank again. And again. He tried to raise his knees and his legs but they were grasped with pain and he grabbed at his thighs and whimpered. The woman helped him to lie back down and then she took his ankles and pulled and helped Nick to straighten his legs and then she massaged them until he fell back asleep.
He woke later and she was still there and now with an old man beside her. His hair white and shaggy and a badly rolled cigarette hanging between his lips. Nick nodded to them and the man said something but Nick didn’t know if it was intended for him or for the wife but either way he didn’t understand. He drank more water and the old man walked over to Nick and poked him in the thigh. Nick looked at him, confused. The old woman barked a quick phrase at the old man.
He poked Nick’s leg again and said in French do you feel that. The words meant nothing to Nick and he sat still. After two more pokes and repeating the question, the old man finally pulled a short piece of rope from his back pocket that he used to swat the cow when she didn’t do what he wanted. He gave Nick a quick and sharp thwack across his thighs and Nick sat up and yelled and slapped back at the old man. The old man threw up his hands and laughed and pointed at the old woman and then back to Nick as if to say I told you so. She stood from the stool and marched over to the old man, swiped the rope away from him, and slapped him with it while he laughed some more and then he made for the barn door. She threw the rope and hit him in the back as he walked out and then she dipped a rag in the water pitcher and wiped Nick’s face and neck.
His leg hurt where the rope had lashed him and he understood what the man was trying to find out. He lay back down and tried to remember. It took a moment but he heard the rush of the flames and saw the blaze throwing light into the black night and he felt the fire on his own skin and on the skin and the hair and the uniforms of all those piled into the great hole in the earth and then he heard the voice calling for help and he pushed the woman’s hand away and pressed his hands against his own mouth and tried not to scream.
15
The summer that Nick was twelve years old he was baptized in the Episcopal church. The summer he was thirteen he was baptized in the family business. He arrived with his father in the morning at eight a.m. He swept the floors and the sidewalk. Straightened stock on the shelves. Emptied garbage. The first couple of weeks his father had to make a list or point and tell him what to do but Nick soon took to his chores with a mechanical nature. At ten he took a break and ate crackers and cheese sitting on a stack of pallets in the stock room. At noon he ate a sack lunch while he sat on the bench outside the storefront. His father sat beside him and drank coffee and nodded and spoke to the passersby. At three o’clock his father told him to be good and he hopped on his bicycle and hustled to catch up with the neighborhood kids at the city pool or in the clump of woods on the backside of the neighborhood. And this was the pattern of each summer of his teenage years and though his pals moaned and groaned when he said he had to work, or laughed at him for being stuck in his old man’s store, he didn’t complain though he felt a sinking feeling sometimes in the quiet hours of the late night. A feeling that something was slipping past. A feeling that would not leave him but instead would follow him his entire life.
During the work his conversations with his father were calculated and measured as Nick hung hammers in the proper rack or stacked cans of paint or learned to count and cut six feet of rope. He never said much as a toddler and his mother had worried. He never said much in elementary school and his mother had worried. And he never said much at home or as he worked in the hardware store and his father didn’t seem to mind and took it as an opportunity to fill Nick with as much doctrine as he could. Give a man a firm handshake, his father told him. Every time. The one time you don’t they’ll remember and try to take advantage of you later. Roll your sleeves up when you work and keep a pencil handy. Speak with respect to others or you’ll never get respect in return and there’s nothing more important in this world. And you need to remember, Nick, not everybody has the same advantages that you have. Not everybody has a house, a family, a business to learn. So before you criticize anybody, you think about that.
He always watched, no matter what he was doing. He took notice of the mannerisms of men when bartering with his father. He took notice of the way women walked. He took notice of the way the American flag hanging from the storefront flapped in the wind near closing time each day. He took notice of the morning sun through the front windows and the change in the shadows of the store racks and shelves as the sun rose and then dipped in the sky.
He was a watcher. He was a listener. And he was quick to remember the names of his father’s customers, remember which carpenter preferred which nail or which painter preferred which brush. When the bell to the door jingled, Nick could look and see who was coming in and before they reached the counter he could damn near correctly predict what it was they wanted and how much. His father made a habit out of pretending to be occupied to see how far Nick could go on his own and by the time the boy had spent one summer in the store his father had turned over running the counter. When he was sixteen he was ordering stock. In the summer before Nick’s senior year of high school, when Nick no longer left at three o’clock but stayed until the end of the working day, his father wrote the boy’s name on a strip of masking tape and stuck it on the office door, right under his own blacklettered name. It was an act of gratitude, of tradition, maybe even of love by his father. But it had a single impact on Nick that took him in the opposite direction.
There had been few times that he had thought of anything other than this life but seeing his name underneath his father’s name on the office door seemed to present a literal future through that very door. And he began to fear it. Fear that he would go to college and meet a girl there and then work in the hardware business and then marry that girl and buy a house in the same neighborhood that he grew up in and then have children. It ended there when he thought about it. It ended with having children because he could see the clear vision of himself and a wife and two small children sitting at the kitchen table and there was no exit from that. So there was no need to consider his life any further. It was what everyone expected to happen and until
he saw his name on the office door, he had expected it of himself.
He couldn’t decide if there was something wrong with that vision or not. Not everyone has had the advantages you have had, his father’s voice echoed. He spent the year that he was seventeen battling the guilt of feeling unsatisfied by prosperous yet predictable coming years that had no guarantee of arriving. Battling the guilt of wanting to leave. Battling the idea of his mother alone in the house with his father and what may happen to them during the blackness without his presence to balance out the sorrow. The predictable was becoming something less to rely on and more of a weight. The Midwestern life, the great American neighborhood, knowing where you are going to be every day. Forever. College was less than a year away and in a subtle attempt to change his fate he talked his parents into letting him attend school in the East.
“Why?” his father had asked. “Chicago is closer. So is Madison. Columbus. So is most everywhere else. You can get whatever you need close enough.”
Because I have to get out of here or I am going to die, he thought to say.
“I want to go to Yale. Like you,” he had answered. Knowing the sound of it would appeal to his father’s pride. And it worked. When he was accepted at New Haven, there was no hesitation. When he graduated and the war began, he did not wait to be called but instead volunteered. It was the chance to escape and he took it. And he would kill and love and bury himself over and over again.
16
Day by day his strength gradually returned and he joined them in their quiet life. They lived in a small brick house with flowerpots in the window and red blooms bright with the sun. In the mornings the old man milked the cow and sometimes she gave and sometimes she didn’t. He fussed and admonished and berated the cow on the bad days and on the good days he brushed her ears and sang bits of songs to her in a careful and soothing tone. He pointed and asked Nick each morning if he wanted to help and Nick said no but that didn’t stop the old man from directing Nick to sit next to him and then he’d show him how to do it. The French he spoke was different from the French he had heard in Paris. The vowels more extended and the accent bearing the sound of a patient life. The man complained that he once had more cows and he held up nine fingers. He once had pigs. At least that’s what Nick thought he said. Three of them. Then the old man made the sound of a truck and he raised his arms as if holding an imaginary rifle and Nick figured out that the animals had been taken away by the uniforms.
Nick Page 8