Ten-Word Tragedies

by Tim Lebbon

  Were you there? he wanted to ask. Were you there when Richard died?

  But of course the bum hadn’t been there, and he didn’t know Richard.

  That was fine, though. There had been so many like him—begging and wounded, broken and hopeful—so many, in so many places.

  This was why it had been a world war. A great war. Great, the word that Richard had once used to describe his birthday cake.

  It had been a great war.

  When he’d purged his stomach, Thomas got unsteadily to his feet and walked into the church. Empty, as he’d known it would be. Even through the worst of it, believers seemed to respect the routine, the ritual, the unique clock of religion.

  He hadn’t prayed when Richard was alive. Or when his wife was alive. But it had mattered to them, in a way he remembered being blissfully scornful of, seeing their faith as the province of mothers and children.

  Margaret had died three weeks into Richard’s deployment. A heart attack, the doctors told Thomas, but he thought they were wrong.

  It had been anticipation. That simple, that pure, that clean. A mother’s love…well, it was different, wasn’t it? For so many years, Thomas believed he’d understood the ways in which it was different. A father’s role was as an engine, powering the child ahead, never yielding. A mother, she was asked to serve as both the fenders, offering gentle bumps where devastating collisions would have occurred, and the tiller. You steered, you cushioned, you got up the next day and did it all again. You showed them the work ethic of it all, and you were relentless.

  When his only son joined the Navy, Thomas hoped he had shown Richard this much.

  When the Japanese torpedoes shredded the bow of the destroyer, peeling her hull aside and dropping those above first into the fire and then into the sea…

  What had his son thought of then? If he’d had time to think at all, Thomas wondered, would he have thought of the engine, or of the tiller and the fenders? Would he have wanted a driving force, or a kind cushion? Power or guidance?

  Once, Thomas had believed it possible to have all these things at once.

  That had been before he’d even heard of the Coral Sea.

  Inside the empty church, he passed the pews one at a time, as if there were a right one and a wrong one, as if this mattered to anything that would come to pass, or set right anything that had already burned bright and faded to black. They were all empty benches of tired, scarred wood. Why was one any different than another?

  Still, he searched. There was a right place to sit for this, his first prayer in so many years. He was not here to ask for guidance, but for understanding. He would not play their music today. This would devastate some, and they would regard him as cruel, and yet he knew it was right.

  It was not a day for music.

  He wasn’t sure how long he stood in the center aisle, looking left and looking right, waiting for a hint. Eventually, he gave up. He chose no pew, but simply dropped to his knees in the middle of the church, bowed his head and ran a tongue around his dry mouth.

  An hour, they’d told him. On a day like this, so joyous, so victorious, we will give them a full hour of music.

  They knew of his son’s death in the distant waters, but still they’d told him to make music. They were all smiles when they made the request, and they felt right to be. After all—the day was joyous and victorious. The war was over. It was August of 1945 and the Japanese had surrendered, the Germans had surrendered, and there would be no more fighting. Probably forever, he’d heard people say. This was not just the great war, but the last war. After those bombs in Japan, who would dare to fight again?

  Peace, they said. Peace. Finally, finally, there was peace.

  They all seemed to have learned so little, or forgotten so quickly.

  A memory of his son rose unbidden then, as they so often did. Richard at the plate, a man on first and a man on third, down one run in the bottom of the ninth. He’d been 14. A child, still, such a child that Thomas could never have imagined he would be swabbing bloody decks by his 18th year. That day, Thomas had called him to the fence and offered encouragement that came not from his steady-engine approach but slipped—he wanted to steer as the boat’s tiller, or to offer the comfort of the boat fenders. Too often, he’d resisted those desires. Too late, he’d realized how terrible a mistake that was.

  ‘Remember,’ he’d told his son that day, with the sun slanting across the Pacific Ocean that would soon claim Richard’s bones, ‘You get three strikes. Don’t be rushed. He has his pitches, and you have your swings, but you both get three strikes in the end. Don’t be rushed.’

  He would never forget his son’s smile that day. The confidence of it was one thing, but it was the sheer boyishness, the childishness, that Thomas would remember. The smile of a boy who understood war as only someone with toy soldiers might.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ his son had told him, ‘I won’t need them all. He can have four strikes, for all I care. Just give me two.’

  And then he’d gone to the plate and taken a pitch outside with perfect patience. One ball, no strikes, a hitter’s count. The next pitch came in over the plate but high, and Richard could never lay off the high ones, and so he’d swung himself nearly out of his shoes reaching for that one, and missed.

  One and one. The parents gave encouragement on each side. To all of their boys, they gave guidance and support. Some would win and some would lose. In that moment, though, with a close game and an even count, victory seemed possible to all of them.

  The third pitch had come high again, as if the rival had smelled Richard’s weakness and was wise enough to exploit it, and Thomas had said ‘hang off!’ just as his son pivoted and swung, whipping the barrel of the bat up, up…

  And somehow, connecting.

  It had been, Thomas recalled now, with his throat dry and his mouth tasting the tang of vomit as he sat alone in the empty church, a terrible choice. It had been a pitch the boy had to lay off on, and yet…

  And yet he’d hit.

  Not only hit it; he’d smacked the holy hell out of that ball. There’d been a moment when Thomas was sure that it would clear the fence. A moment when the white sphere was as small as a puff of smoke against the blood-red sun on the horizon.

  The ball hadn’t cleared the fence, but it had caromed off it on a single bounce, and the winning run was in before Richard had stopped running.

  A game-winner, the stuff of a boy’s dreams, admittedly, and of a father’s dreams, unadmitted, if the father was doing his job right. Or so Thomas thought. How did you know, though? How did you ever know what was the right approach and what was the wrong? What you would remember and wince, wishing you’d chosen another tack, wishing you’d been more honest, or, perhaps worse, less honest with your son?

  He wasn’t ready for this world. He didn’t believe that it was empty and pointless. Things you should let a child believe, but what good did it do him? His casket was empty, too.

  Thomas watched his hands shake as if he had palsy, and he remembered his agreement, on this day of joyous, victorious celebration, and his only prayer—or at least the only one he spoke aloud—was that they would understand why he could not play.

  ‘Give me the right words,’ Thomas said. And then thought, but could not say aloud, Please, Lord, let them understand why I can’t make music today. He couldn’t utter that, though. Thomas had already asked for too much, and been granted too little.

  He rose on unsteady legs and left the empty church.

  The beggar was still in the alley. He’d moved away from Thomas’s vomit, upwind of the stench, but he looked at him kindly, with eyes absent of judgment.

  ‘Can you spare a nickel, friend?’ he asked.

  Thomas walked over to him and dropped a nickel in his cup, and he realized then that the beggar didn’t respond to the sound it made, echoing about the emptiness, and thought that he might be deaf.

  ‘Were you in the war?’ Thomas asked, a question he’d previously dismissed
as impossible, looking at the filthy man with his mangled hand, a man who looked as if he’d always existed in such a fashion.

  ‘Pearl Harbor,’ came the answer, and Thomas blinked and stared.

  ‘You were there when it started?’

  ‘No.’ The man grinned, showing yellowed teeth, and a few of them missing. ‘But when it was done, they needed some help cleaning up. You’d better bet they needed that. And I was there for that.’

  He’s lying, Thomas thought with certainty, and then, and mocking, too, which is so much worse, and his right hand curled into a fist, and in the fist his hand was steady, any hint of a tremor gone. He looked at the ugly man’s face and imagined mashing his fist into it, imagined his knuckles shredding weathered flesh against bone until blood showed, blood as red as the sun of the sky into which Thomas’s only son, who now lay five hundred feet deep on the ocean floor, had once smashed a baseball.

  ‘Were you really there?’ Thomas asked.

  ‘Only after,’ the beggar repeated. ‘Only when no one else wanted the job.’

  Thomas stared at him without speaking, and the beggar rattled his cup, the lone nickel clinking around inside.

  Thomas gave him another.

  His son had never heard Thomas play the carillon. He was in basic training the first time Thomas had a crack at the massive instrument, and he was in the Pacific by the time Thomas first played at the Campanile. When Richard was a boy, they’d walked past it and marveled at it together. Thomas remembered his son arching his back and tilting his head in awe, simply trying to see the peak. The magnificent tower was a mere nine feet shorter than Big Ben in London. It was after Richard’s deployment that Thomas, an experienced organist, had begun to study under the university’s carillonneur, and then that man had fallen ill, and Thomas expected it to be the end of his lessons. Instead, it was an accelerant. When the 307-foot bell tower had fallen silent, students and residents alike complained. In dark times, the sound of the bell tower wasn’t just appreciated, it was necessary, they said.

  Calls were made, Thomas was found, and the bells had chimed again.

  He’d written to Richard that night and told him about the experience. Breathtaking, he’d called it, and that hadn’t been an exaggeration. He was overwhelmed by the rich tones of the bells, but also by the sheer exertion of the task. The pedal work was familiar, but the batons were not. The massive wooden levers shaped like oversized broomsticks played the role of keys, activating wires that activated the clappers more than 15 stories above his head—those were another story. The amount of force you used on them affected the sound, and Thomas had been told that everyone wanted the bell tower ringing out for the city to hear.

  He’d done his best. By the end, he’d been soaked with sweat and exhilaration.

  It felt like a battle, he wrote his son, and then thought better of that, and scratched it out.

  He played through the rest of the year, always imagining the day when his son would return and Thomas could show him the fascinating place, this thing that was both structure and instrument, towering over the campus and yet honed and tuned to such a fine pitch.

  Then came the telegram.

  He hadn’t played since that day. A temporary leave turned to a permanent one, and he returned to the classroom and taught musical theory, but not to the keys. The batons. That was fine; he was no longer needed. Another carillonneur was trained and put to work. The bells tolled on, but Thomas didn’t have anything to do with them.

  Today, though, he was the only man for the job. His replacement had gone east to visit family five days ago, not knowing that the trip would remove him from California for the celebration. And what a great celebration it was. The war over. Peace now, peace maybe forever.

  Thousands of bodies in unfamiliar oceans, rotting in their depths.

  A great war, a great day.

  There were five men waiting on him at the base of the tower. He knew them all, and he hated to disappoint them. He hid his shaking hands in his pockets and cleared his throat to begin the apology.

  That was when the sailor appeared around the base of the tower. He was in uniform but his cap was off, and his hair was the impossibly light blond of Richard’s, his smile just as languid, a grin offered with the sense of one who had all the time in the world.

  Thomas hated him for it.

  He tried to turn from the sailor and face the university president and explain that they needed to call someone else, that it wasn’t simply a matter of shaking hands and frayed nerves, but a matter of what was right. The day of celebration was fine for others. For Thomas, it was unacceptable. People spoke of sacrifice, but sacrifice should not come in the blood of children, and one should not talk about peace following the blood of so many children spilled in so many waters and soils, and simply because carnage was finished did not mean that the previous carnage had never happened, and Thomas would be damned if he would help to celebrate when grief was what he needed, when private penance was what this awful world needed.

  The sailor said, ‘I’ve missed those bells. Boys, you’ve no idea how badly I’ve missed the sound of those bells.’

  And the president with his foolish grin said, ‘You’ll hear plenty of them today.’

  Before Thomas could object, the sailor said, ‘Two hours of them, I heard! Who’s gonna do it?’

  They all gestured to Thomas. All of them with their foolish smiles and cheerful faces.

  ‘One hour,’ the president corrected. ‘And that won’t be easy.’

  That won’t be easy. Thomas, who had no intention of playing at all, was still somehow annoyed by that. After all this world had seen, this man could really look into the face of a boy who’d served and tell him that playing the carillon for one lousy hour wouldn’t be easy?

  ‘Aw, c’mon,’ the sailor said, still cheerful, and why not? The war was done. He was home. The flesh of the ruptured world was knitting back together. ‘Give me two.’

  The others laughed, but Thomas turned to stare at him. He felt the same strange floating sensation, an untethering from his own existence, that he’d felt when the telegram came, when they told him that his only son was somewhere fathoms deep in a place called the Coral Sea.

  ‘What did you say?’ he asked.

  For the first time, the boy’s smile faded. He looked concerned. ‘I was just teasing, sir.’

  ‘No, it’s fine. It’s just…what did you say?’

  The boy looked nervously at the other men, who were watching Thomas with concern.

  ‘I…I asked for two hours,’ he said. ‘But I was kidding, sir. It’s just that kind of day, you know? I just—’

  ‘No, of course. It’s fine.’

  ‘Thomas?’ the music school dean said, leaning in, a hand on Thomas’s arm. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Sir?’ the boy said, and the boy was looking down at him with near fear, they all were, and Thomas wondered what was wrong with his face, what they all saw in him that was causing such alarm.

  It was only then that he realized he was looking up at them. He was down on the ground. He gazed about, confused, unable to remember the fall.

  ‘Go get a doctor,’ someone said, and Thomas waved them off.

  ‘No, no. I’m fine. I just…’

  ‘You collapsed.’

  ‘No. I was dizzy, that’s all. Now and then, staring up at the top…it can get to you.’

  As if on cue, they all looked up, following all that stone to its pinnacle more than three hundred feet in the sky, up where the bells waited, capable of ringing out tones that would carry for seven miles. You could see the Campanile from the Golden Gate Bridge. Richard had seen it. He’d never seen his father play the bells, though. Had he gotten the letters? Had he known?

  ‘Let’s get you to a doctor,’ the dean repeated, and Thomas shook his head, rose, and dusted off his trousers.

  ‘I’m perfectly all right,’ he said, and his voice carried more conviction than he felt
. He looked up at the empty tower, and he thought of empty caskets, of empty churches, and then he turned and looked back at the sailor once more.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But I want to be entirely clear. You did ask for two hours, correct? You said—’

  ‘Just a joke. I don’t care if it’s two minutes, sir, all I meant was that I’m happy to hear the bells again.’

  ‘But you asked for two. You said give me two.’ He knew his insistence on this point was making them all uncomfortable, but the sailor looked back at him, and then nodded slowly.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Then I’ll give you two,’ Thomas said.

  He went up alone. Two hundred feet of steep stairs. He was always sweaty by the time he reached the cabin below the bells where the inner workings of the beast were contained, the polished batons and foot pedals and the silver ribbons of wires going on up to the bell clappers another hundred feet above. His sweat was cold today, though. He stood and caught his breath and stared out across the city, out to the sea. The sycamores below seemed impossibly small, insignificant. It all did, from up here. It all had for a long time now.

  Empty caskets, empty churches, mushroom clouds. Dead sons and telegrams. A world gone mad wanted now to celebrate.

  Peace was here.

  Thomas doubted that. And yet…

  He did say it. A sailor, no less. He said the very words you’d been remembering.

  Thomas looked at the batons and remembered his son’s face, that cocky grin, and then the pitch that was too high but drew his bat anyhow. He remembered a baseball fading into a blood red sun.

  He settled himself onto the bench, wiped sweat from his brow, positioned his foot over the proper pedal, and struck at the batons.

  The sound, rich and rolling, boomed out across the campus and over the town. Seven miles it carried. How many people lived within a seven-mile radius of the Campanile?

  Enough, he thought, and then, in the space between the notes, he heard their cheers.

  Faint, from his perch up here above the world, but still audible. A frenzy of delight, brought to people by the simple sound of a struck bell, by a single note, a single pitch that penetrated their souls and caused them to shout.