Flanders

by Patricia Anthony

  He put his hands in his pockets, looked around.

  “Want some tea?” I asked him.

  “Nah.”

  I’d known he’d refuse. LeBlanc wasn’t one to stay put long. “Want to set a spell?”

  “Gotta go.”

  Sure he’d have to go. He had to run fast. Had to jump off those high places. Always had to be on the move. Only he wasn’t leaving.

  He wasn’t looking at me, either. “Hey, Stanhope? You teach me how to ride a horse sometime?”

  Such dignified pleading in his voice. It caught me unaware. Tore at me, too, like when a strong woman busts into tears. “Yeah. Sometime.”

  He nodded and left. I tried to finish my chapter of Pickering’s penny dreadful, but simple as it was, as much as I kept rereading, I couldn’t hold onto the words. Finally I put the book down, found Blackhall, and asked permission to see Miller.

  Blackhall was sour about it, and suspicious. Still, he agreed. Must be strange, standing on the outside, watching Miller and me. Hell. I don’t understand it. Nothing, not even hatred, is simple.

  In the rear trenches, someone had put elephant sheets up over the top of the sandbags to make little shelters from the rain. In the shade of one of those elephants I found Miller standing with one of the other subalterns. I stood in the pelting rain and waited.

  At last he looked up. He didn’t seem real happy to see me.

  “Sir? We’ll be marching up to the rest area tomorrow,” I said.

  “You’re confined to billets. You’re aware of that.” He started talking to the lieutenant again.

  I stood quietly, there in the downpour. The lieutenant was trying to listen to Miller, but he kept looking at me, too. Finally Miller whirled. “Blast. What is it?”

  “Permission to speak to you in private, sir.”

  “Permission denied.” He turned away.

  Cool rain pounded my forehead, dripped into my eyes. My greatcoat was heavy with it.

  Miller spun. “What? What is it, Stanhope? You’re a bloody nuisance.”

  “Permission to borrow your horse, sir.”

  His face screwed itself up into the most amazing expression of confusion. “You what? Want to borrow my horse? Good God, Stanhope. What do you plan to do with him?”

  “Ride him, sir. Just around the billet area. Need another one, too. A gentle mount. Private LeBlanc has asked.”

  His expression smoothed. He’d read my face and understood it better than I had understood that penny dreadful. “During your free time, then. I’ll see to it. Request Captain Dunston-Smith’s bay mare. She’ll give him no trouble.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  He tapped swagger stick to cap, then went back to his conversation.

  For pity. O’Shaughnessy had said that’s why Miller took LeBlanc in, took him even knowing what he had done. He was forgiving him even now. How could he do that? Like Christ forgiving the Pharisees. Was self-destructive pardon like that ever worthwhile?

  I could never forgive Pa for hitting me, even though if I live long enough I might learn to forget. It’s not the sins against me that matter. It was him hitting Ma and drawing blood. It was hearing Ma cry the way she did. It was watching the way he made her grovel. Not even Jesus could forgive that.

  Miller didn’t see how LeBlanc used that girl. He never saw her pretty smile or the way she blushed. Pity came easy for him. He never got caught up in the same incriminating passion and hated himself for it.

  Travis Lee

  OCTOBER 17, THE RESERVE TRENCHES

  Dear Bobby,

  I walked through home again in my dreams. It was quiet. The air in the hall smelled of camphor and rosewater and dust. The boards were waxed to satin in the shadows, buffed to a high gleam in the pewter light. Ma’s door was open.

  Pa was sitting on the side of the bed, still waiting for me. That wood horse was lying in his cupped hands. I stopped just long enough to feel the dragging undertow of duty, then pulled myself free and walked on.

  Is he dead, Bobby? Is that why he keeps coming back? Wish you could tell him to stop bothering me. Visiting doesn’t do no good. Shit, I haven’t been able to save Marrs yet. I don’t know if Foy’s still around. It’s them I need to dream about, not Pa. What the hell kind of gift is this, anyway? Now I’m supposed to feel guilty for hating him? I got me enough good people to feel guilty about.

  Travis Lee

  OCTOBER 18, THE REST AREA

  Dear Bobby,

  Blackhall had been told we were going riding, but it was hard for him to believe. He walked us down to the stables himself.

  “Just around the billets, mind,” he warned before he left.

  The sorrel and the little bay were saddled and waiting in the aisle of the army’s cheap clapboard stable. Blackhall checked the stalls as if he was looking for women or liquor. When he finally left, I told LeBlanc to take off his boots.

  He kept staring starry-eyed at Dunston-Smith’s mare. “Hey, you worthless peckerwood,” I said. “You hear me? Can’t get those hobnails through the stirrups.”

  He sat down where he was and unlaced them. I caught a glimpse of the right sole as he put the boot away. One hobnail was broken. There were holes where two nails were missing.

  “Only a chicken shit has to lie about where he came from,” I told him.

  Easy to say. I knew about my dugout mates’ families, but they had an incomplete picture of mine. Not even Miller knew about Pa.

  LeBlanc hadn’t heard me. He kept looking at those horses as if he was seeing glory.

  When he got up, I saw he’d kept his socks on like a city boy. Odd how gentle he touched the horses. His hands were tender, like yours are around puppies, Bobby.

  I always envied you your hands. I wonder if my fingers ever caress anything that way: women or horses or kittens. I wonder if my face ever goes as merciful, if I ever look at anything with such beautiful longing.

  I gave him a leg up, mounted Miller’s sorrel from a block, and we walked the horses into the paddock. LeBlanc rode about the way I thought. He sawed at the reins. When we trotted, his ass bounced. He hung tight as he could onto a lock of that poor mare’s mane.

  She was good-natured with him, and patient—a beginner’s mount. Me and LeBlanc rode all that afternoon through the misting rain. We rode around the officers’ quarters, around the enlisted barracks. I showed him how to keep his hands down, how to tuck his elbows in. I showed him posting, but he only tried it once. He came down and that mare came up. LeBlanc’s nuts and the pommel met in the middle with a God-awful slam. Knocked the wind out of him, made his face go sickly. Thought he’d quit then, but he didn’t. LeBlanc kept trying his best. I’ve been riding so many years that I forget how it first happens; but at some point I think you have to surrender. You have to stop trying so hard.

  Too bad, Bobby. He doesn’t have enough time to learn. I don’t think it matters. As we cantered past the barracks for the tenth or twelfth time, I looked back. I’ve never seen a grin that wide on any grown man.

  When the light turned blue and the mist thickened, we dismounted and led the horses into the stables. We lit lamps while hazy twilight gathered at the windows. The air inside was warm with horses, the straw golden in the lamplight.

  LeBlanc was so sore from riding that he walked bow-legged. He couldn’t sit without groaning. Still, I didn’t want to laugh at him. He’d stayed the course.

  I showed him how to strip off a saddle, how to hang it, how to rub a horse down. He currycombed with the clumsy diligence of a little kid. “What’s her name?” he asked me.

  “Don’t know.”

  “What’s Miller’s horse called, then?”

  “Never asked.”

  “If you ride a horse, you should know its name.”

  “Yeah? You know the name of everything you ride? Huh?” I asked, my voice sharp. “Do you, you shithead? You as gentle with everything as you are with that goddamned horse?”

  He looked surprised.

  “Yo
u should know people’s goddamned names.”

  I jerked the sorrel’s reins, was mortified when I saw the horse flinch. I rubbed him behind the ears and led him into his stall. Calf-deep in the dry straw, I slipped his bridle off, hung it aside. When I looked around again, I saw LeBlanc eyeing me.

  “You like him?” he asked.

  “Who? The horse?” I scratched the gelding on his blaze, sweet-talked him a bit. “You’re okay for a worthless, stilt-legged thoroughbred, aren’t you, son?”

  He nuzzled my arm, whuffled. Miller must have made sugar cubes or carrots a habit. I held up my hands, fingers flat, to show him I wasn’t carrying. Damned if that horse didn’t rub his nose up and down my shoulder, a gesture that won me.

  “Old horse,” I murmured. I scratched up a storm on his ears and forehead. “You old horse.”

  It’s amazing what animal affection can give you: no demands in return. We had us a mutt one time. I know you don’t remember. Died when you were just a baby. Every time Pa’d whop on me, that old dog would come looking; and he’d find where I’d be hiding. He’d put his head in my lap and let me hug on him. Made it easier, the beatings. That horse of Miller’s, the smells of that stable, the foggy blue twilight at the door—they eased the war.

  The two of us tended to the little things. We soaped Miller’s and Dunston-Smith’s saddles. I showed him how to check the bridle leather for cracks. When we were done and he had started away, I grabbed LeBlanc’s arm. The bruises on his face were fading like sallow sunsets.

  “Only say it once,” I told him.

  He was attentive, like I was going to tell him something about horses.

  “You do it again—you know what I mean—and I’ll blow your brains out. No discussion. No nothing. You understand?”

  He nodded and I let him go.

  Nearly a perfect day, Bobby, the horses, the misty cool. But when we got to where we’d left our boots, I saw that somebody had moved them from the spot where we’d set them down. My belly wobbled. I remembered clear: My boots had been nearest the door.

  LeBlanc didn’t notice. He was still smiling horses. He sat down and pulled his boots on.

  Someone had checked our soles, Bobby. And whoever did it had known we were at the stables. Miller? Dunston-Smith?

  LeBlanc looked up at me. “Hey, asshole. You going to go barefoot to dinner? Those damned limeys won’t like that.”

  No. Blackhall.

  “Come on, Stanhope, for Christ’s sake.”

  I nodded. “Sure.” I shoved my boots on and we walked down to the enlisted mess.

  When we were finished eating we wandered back toward the barracks. Blackhall was standing outside tamping his pipe bowl under the light of a hanging lantern. Beyond him the night was foggy and close. A pale dusting of rain blew through the circle of lamplight. When we passed, he returned our salute with barely a look. Five or six steps later I turned around and saw that he was eyeing us hard.

  I give LeBlanc four days at the most, Bobby. Takes gossip that long to spread. Then they’ll haul him before the court-martial board. I’ll testify to what I know. They’ll bring up the other charges: the blinded old lady, the dead little girl. They’ll put LeBlanc before a firing squad.

  It’s best that way. He’ll go quick, and I can remember him well: bouncing up and down on that bay mare, grinning.

  Good to go happy, I think. No matter what you’ve done, you should have one of your dreams come true. LeBlanc’s will be a death that won’t haunt me. It was me who gave him an afternoon of horses.

  Travis Lee

  OCTOBER 19, THE REST AREA

  Dear Bobby,

  Well, it’s back to drills, back to marching. We get a few days off, and the army can’t leave us alone. About four o’clock when the drills are done and the boys get their free time, LeBlanc and me scrub the barracks floor. We peel potatoes and carrots down at the mess hall. We scrub pans. We lime the latrines.

  It’s nice to have tasks with limits, ones that you can tell when you’re done. LeBlanc and me scrub the floors on our hands and knees. It’s a prayerful sort of thing. I like the rasping sound the brush makes. I like the memories it brings, too: Ma and me in the kitchen, splashing buckets and flicking water at each other. You never was no good at it, Bobby. Have you learned the chore better? If you do learn it, you’ll find there’s a calm, soapy goodness to floor scrubbing. Don’t you never tell Ma I said that.

  They haven’t come for LeBlanc yet. It’ll pain me some when they do, for he sticks to me like slick on grease. He does things like me. Walks like I do. Eats like I do. LeBlanc’s private game of Simon Says. It scares me sometimes, like there ain’t enough stuffing in him to make a person, so he has to go borrowing from someone else. How will it be, I wonder, to watch my own shadow die?

  Travis Lee

  OCTOBER 20, THE REST AREA

  Dear Bobby,

  Last night while I was walking the graveyard alone, I heard someone singing. The clear tenor voice wound like a lustrous thread around granite markers, between praying angels. Marrs. And not Latin this time, but Scots-tinged English.

  “. . . the broom, the broom, the bonnie, bonnie broom . . .”

  Marrs had made it out of No Man’s Land. I hurried into the mausoleum, calling his name. The place was empty but for stray autumn leaves and the plaintive echo of his voice.

  “. . . all maids that ever deceived . . .”

  I stood in the puddle of light from the glassy ceiling and listened. Where was he? And who was he serenading? I left, twined my way through mounds of bright paper flowers, past graves of sleeping strangers. I turned a corner and there he was, seated below me on the steps. He looked wrong somehow.

  I stopped behind him. At his feet was a glass-topped grave. There, comforted by flowers, a little girl was sleeping. She was dressed all in white, and in her hands was a bouquet of violets.

  The song stopped. He turned, tapping his finger to his lips.

  It wasn’t Marrs. It was Foy. “Poor mite. Too young to be married,” he said.

  I sat on the steps beside him. The breeze was chill. It smelled clean and astringent, like lavender.

  He sang, “. . . the bonnie, bonnie broom . . .”

  Marrs’s same high, piercing register; Marrs’s clarion tone.

  “He gave me his voice when I dreamed,” Foy told me. He was grinning, hugging his knees like a kid.

  I looked down at the girl: the blinding white lace, the childish innocence of her hands.

  “You’re holding me here,” Foy said. Accusing words, but there was nothing but concern in his voice.

  He wanted to leave me. Panicked, I stood. Down the steps and beyond a cluster of gravestones, the calico girl waited by the mausoleum’s iron gates.

  “Please, Stanhope,” Foy said. “Don’t need me so bad.”

  But who would be left to understand when all the old gang went away?

  He stood, too. “She’s been though a hard spot, the girl.”

  LeBlanc’s smallest victim. I knew it sure as the world. “Seems to me you need to stay with her, then.”

  “I’ll stay if you want.”

  But he wanted so damned bad to leave. “Please,” I said. “Can’t you, please?”

  I knew he couldn’t; and so I watched him go—up the stairs and down the gravel path. I caught glimpses of him making his way among the tombs. His leaving knocked the stuffing out of me so that I had to sit down.

  I sat there for a while with the girl. Her face was sweet. Her lids were closed, but underneath them her eyes slid, restless with visions. I kept watch while the sun lowered and the light turned brassy, until foxglove blooms blazed like indigo candles in the last of the light.

  I woke up feeling sad. The sad stayed with me, and so that morning, cleaning up the officers’ mess, I didn’t have much to say.

  LeBlanc was a blabbermouth. “Hey. When this shit’s over, I’m gonna save up my money and raise a buncha horses. You want to be partners with me?”

  Th
ree days left for him to live, I figured. Three days, time enough for aspirations. “Sure,” I told him. I plunged the brush into the bucket, sent water sloshing.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “That’s what we’ll do. I won’t even mind cleaning out the stables or anything. We’ll get us some land in Alberta, eh? Right near Calgary. It’s terrific there. I saw it once—went through Alberta on the train. I won this spelling bee, see, and the Sisters sent us on a trip. Christ, Stanhope, the mountains. Jesus and Joseph, you wouldn’t believe the mountains. And a yellow plain that comes right up. The whole damned place is yellow and purple. That’s Alberta.”

  He was whistling as he scrubbed. Even if I went looking for LeBlanc after the firing squad was done, I wouldn’t find him. He’d be traveling so fast, I’d never catch up. He’d be running over the golden plains. He’d be climbing purple mountains. And all the time he’d be grinning. I just knew he would.

  He said, “We’ll have us paint horses, those white ones with the big brown spots. And palomino horses, and solid black ones, too. Shit, Stanhope. We’ll have us all colors of horses.”

  He got up, took our buckets out to the tank to get more water. I kept on scrubbing. He’d gotten me to picturing it too: the wheat-colored land, a purple petticoat of mountains. All colors of horses. A sound startled me out of my fantasies. O’Shaughnessy was standing in the door of the kitchen, a case of officers’-issue tea in his arms.

  He was smiling a cheerful little smile. “ ’Tis very domesticated you’re looking, Travis. It strikes me that you’ve a natural way with the brush.”

  “Back home, floor cleaning was one of my chores, Father.”

  “Ah, and your mother had you doing the rough for her, was it? Me own mother spoiled me. I’m useless for housework. Can’t wash a kettle.”

  It was comfortable there in the kitchen. The air smelled of pine soap and damp and hardwood ash. By O’Shaughnessy’s shoulder hung a braid of yellow onions, their chubby bellies taut and translucent. Sun cascaded through the windows, poured in a broad glowing stripe down the wall.

  “Does it make a penance, lad?”

  I scrubbed the boards around the table leg, startled myself up a bug. “Not suffering enough, Father. If you want to know the truth, it’s kind of fun.”