A furious clanging within the belfry of his head. Shaking and cluching his pillow. I’m dead, he thinks, I’m dead, and who am I. Who am I. He hears the sound of breathing, another person’s breathing, the soft and sensual breathing of a woman.
“Sssssshhhhhhhh, sssssshhhhhhhh,” she says from beside him, brushing his face with her hand, and the long twirls of her hair brush lightly against his cheeks as she looks down at him tenderly, “Sssssshhhhhhh, sssssshhhhhhhh, it’s okay darling, it’s just a dream,” and she wipes the sweat off his face and her lips meet his and they form one mouth over a long and deep and tender kiss, soft as his tongue caresses the velvet chamber of her mouth, and there is a stirring and a tickly throbbing tightening in his shorts, ahh, it works, this is what it’s like again, it’s wonderful so wonderful to kiss you again I want to make love to you, “I love you,” he says, “I will always love you … ”
Bump! A stir of delirium. Their embrace dissolves into a haze of fragmentary impressions, the dissipation of dream. Eyes squint open to the shadowy bedroom jumble of the predawn. The wardrobe and mirror take shape in the gathering ghostly light. A sighing exhalation. A strange tingling warmth in the loins, a cool breath of air from the window. A draft, the flap of the curtain, the steady murmured whisper of cars. I must have left the window open a crack. Must’ve left it open yes I left the window open. You’ll catch a chill, as Mother says. You’ll catch a chill now close your window, dear, words told a thousand times in childhood. Hand on the white-painted window frame, enamelled in old paint cracking, a congealed drop of it forming a bump under finger; a little oomph and the reluctant window groans shut on its dusty cobwebby runner. I’ve got to do some cleaning. I’ve been too busy lately. Back into bed, a sliding under covers, a cocooning, sheets pulled up to face and enwombing her in nestled comfort, her own soft bed odours. What was that dream? So vivid, the kiss … that floating kiss, a floodgate of feeling. The smell of cigarettes, the smell of sweat and leather and earth. I love you, he said, I love you and I will always love you. Her eyes well up, her heart beats light and feathery, and her breasts pang, oh God I love you too ... A tear runs hot down her cheek in a twisting course, following the vagaries of gravity and contour. She sits up and breaks into tears, stomach muscles contracting in sobs, tears streaming down, lips blubbering, voice shuddering. She dons the rumpled nightgown in the skeletal wooden chair beside the bed. To the closet. The floor is cool on her bare feet. She opens the sliding closet door and is greeted by hanging rows of clothing in collapsed and unworn profile—dresses, skirts, blouses, bloomers on one side, and pants, shirts, undershirts, a blazer and a suit on the other. She sniffs a white button-up cotton shirt, sniffs it, the last civilian shirt he wore before going … when later they parted at the train platform, he looked so handsome in his uniform, oh God he did, didn’t he, he looked so handsome as though he were really meant to be doing what he was doing, but what about the life we were working toward ourselves, what about those dreams we had of starting a family? We would have a child by now if he stayed, yes, a child in a world run amok with death, she thinks as she holds the sleeve, limp, unfilled, cast off like a snakeskin, shed from an earlier time, a time now lost to memory and slipping irrevocably into the past, into its dark erosive depths; and she tries to fill it with her mind, but the images that come are just images, just imaginings; she is here, she is now, holding a hanging sleeve and crying into the breast pocket. It doesn’t even smell like him anymore, it smells like cloth and dust, the gently sifting accumulation of time, domestic decay.
It is two hours until she has to wake up for work. She finds herself in the kitchen boiling water for tea, filling the mesh globe with flaked leaves of orange pekoe and sinking it into the teapot, steeping tea at the kitchen table in the greyish predawn murk, melancholy, eyes wide open, gently rocking herself in the kitchen chair. She pours herself some in a favourite cup with a floral design and a chipped and gilded rim, and adds milk, watching it cloud and diffuse as she stirs it with a tiny spoon, and she takes a sip and opens up a box of letters that she has brought with her from the bedroom upstairs. She pulls out a letter:
Somewhere in Italy, July 20th, 1944
Dear Marianne,
Well, not much new to report around here other than that my arm is healing up fairly quickly. Given all of what I’ve seen bullets can do, I feel I’ve gotten off rather lucky. I am told I will be able to undertake full duties again soon. This makes me feel good. It’s funny—when you’re up at the sharp end you think a trip to Blighty is exactly what you need, and when you are at rest you can’t wait to go back in. I guess we always want what we can’t have, or want to be where we are not now.
Thank you again for sending me treats after you heard that I was wounded—my recuperation has been so much more pleasurable than it may have been without. I should send you more letters telling you that I’ve been wounded! (minus the wounds)
My convalescence and the loss of friends in battle recently has led me to ruminate a lot on the meaning of what we’re all doing over here. It’s made me really appreciate what I’ve got, and it’s made me reflect on the value of each inch of ground taken, each drop of blood spilled.
It’s also made me reflect on just how much I love you, Marianne, and how alone I am without you over here. I love you every bit as much as I told you I did on our wedding day. When I get back let’s have a baby. I wish I had agreed when you suggested the idea that night. With you a mother and I a father we can together create a legacy that will outlast us, a legacy that will be a testament to the better days ahead, the better days after victory. I know this may sound a bit grandiose, Marianne, but hear me out—I long to be with you again.
Please give everyone my regards, in particular your parents. You are always in my thoughts and are a beacon of hope to me. I will see you someday soon—
Love Jim
She had missed him so much. She had feared for him so much. She had loved him, loved him, loved making love to him, like when they made love on their wedding night, the rest of their lives supposedly sealed, she secure and happy and satisfied in his hold, his arms around her as he fell asleep, her eyes starry, the soft whisper of their plans echoed in the early autumn breeze blowing through the trees outside the window—this is the man I will spend the rest of my life with, she said to herself, and a lightness percolated up through her—this is the man whose children I will bear, will happily and lovingly bear. This is the man who will give me the stability I have so always wanted, she thought, her mind turning to the failing family store and her father’s spendthrift and intemperate ways, borne as they were at least in part by his purgatorial stint in the trenches in the blood and bonemeal welter of Passchendaele, leaving her mother stoically and unsmilingly in charge of keeping up appearances with her thrift and savvy as her father slowly decayed, gambling and drinking and wandering and rambling and lending money he did not really have anymore to broken-down old comrades even more down on their luck than he was, who came knocking and asking like in the song oft heard on the radio in the lean and hungry years before the blood-red opportunity of war beckoned again, “Brother, can you spare me a dime?”
When Jim had embarked on the same path and enlisted she had been proud of him, in a way, worried that she would lose him one way or another, in a flash and a bang or in a change so horrific as to make him a different person, a stranger returning home whom she would have to learn to love, and oh, the guilt she has felt from this thought, and the fear she felt and still feels about his safety during these lonely hours of the night gnaws away at her own health, her own wellbeing, magnified by the headlines and movie newsreels and sobering radio reports; and she wonders if he has yet received her letter, and in the kitchen, over tea, over the same table where many an argument had erupted, over a letter, in the gathering ghostly light of the predawn, she starts to sob and tremble. She knows what needs to be done, what can only be done.
She puts the letter away in
the box and carries the box to the hearth. She crinkles a section of newspaper and places it in the fireplace, surrounding it with a small teepee of split kindling, and lights it with a match struck on the stones, watching the paper contract and crumple as it feeds the growing flame. She puts in the letter she has just read and watches it, too, crumple as it is set alight. In goes another, and then another, and another. One by one she sets fire to every letter he has ever sent her, and as she does so, as each letter is consumed in the pyre of their marriage, her heart lightens. She knows that she will have to leave, that she will be held to scarlet-letter shame for her abandonment, but that is the price she is willing to pay, and as the flames burn higher and higher in the fever of their consumption, she feels a feeling of peace come over her. It’s over, she thinks. God bless him wherever he is, but it’s over.
Waiting, waiting, waiting. Did you never stop to think that she was waiting for you, too?
Guilt courses through him. I was there, I was just there I was just there oh my God I was where am I really what is going on I am swimming my head is swimming I am swimming in the sheets I must be near the end.
“Well? Do you have an answer?” Standing at the front of his fourth grade class, Miss Ward imposing over him, brandishing a yardstick. She glowers in highly studied disapproval at his failure to correctly recite his twelfth timestable. He bungled twelve times eleven, and now has been singled out for public punishment and humiliation. The nervous and expectant silence of his classmates rings loudly and dumbly across the years, and he can still smell the woolly sop of wet mittens baking crustily on the classroom radiator. The windows rattle under a blizzard beating of wet snow. His hands are stretched out in front of him, and he is awaiting the sharp strike of the yardstick across his palms, with which Miss Ward hits those who fail to measure up. She brings it down and it raps his knuckles with a stinging, burning snap. Tears of shame burn down his face, prompted by the stinging of his hands. For the rest of the day, he keeps to himself, on the verge of tears, ashamed of his ignorance and his humiliation at the front of the class. On the way home, bag over his shoulder, crunching through the weighty drifts of wet March snow, he breaks down and punches a snowman in someone’s yard until the head rolls off and splats into the snow like the top of a melting ice cream cone, superimposing an image of himself on the pebble grin, carrot nose and coal eyes as he does so; not knowing what you were supposed to know, taking out your frustrations on something else, something you never made—the shame of it! But he resolved to never again cry in public like that, never again; he would be a man from now on. That was weak! Weak! Weak! You little weakling! Never again! And he projected fanciful dreams of strength from then on. He would be like Louis Cyr the weightlifter and strongman! He would lean down over those who would try to tell him what to do, those who would try to make him cry in shame in front of everybody like that! And cry he never did after that, cry would he never do in public like that ever again until the curbside in San Giovanni, crying into his hands drunk alone at the edge of the world, at the edge of reason so many years later—
“Well? Did you never?” Colonel Hobson looks him up and looks him down, and then booms, “Answer me McFarlane, tell me something! Damn you, McFarlane!” Colonel Hobson shouts curtly down upon him as he huddles broken in spirit rocking himself on the floor of the slit trench, arms wrapped round his knees, hands over his face, the ammonia tinge of urine in the air, the demeaning warm flood in his pants, down his legs, the growing dark stain on his trousers, oh how he hated himself just now, crying and crying, I thought I never cried again—
“You malingering coward, McFarlane! I ought to strike you across the face with my hand, McFarlane! You simpering baby! I ought to have you court-martialled and drummed out for cowardice, McFarlane! Remember when they drummed out Stradwick for buggery? That should have been you we drummed out! Stradwick might have been a sodomite, but you are a malingering coward! You are good for nothing, McFarlane! Nothing!” Next to him a dead man propped against the side of the trench, staring at nothing, eyes unfocused, hole in his forehead, guts in his lap, a twisted slither of intestines turning into worms, into slithering coils of fattening, feeding worms, and the hands move and pinch the worms that they hold, and there is a wan smile and a wink, and a centipede, armoured and segmented and many-legged, emerges from the lips—
“Hey, sir.” A hand, cold and clammy, reaches out and grabs his shoulder. “Come on, sir.” He removes his hands from his face and looks up from the trench corner in which he is huddled. It is Lieutenant Blake, squatting on the lip of the trench, reaching in to pull him out into the inferno with him. He has a jaded and furious look on his pale and greenish face. Jim shudders and tries to withdraw, loosening dirt from the side of the trench, exposing the mucosal sheen of a fat, slithering earthworm. Worms everywhere, slithering in wriggling piles, dozens, hundreds, and he can feel their hunger, and he feels the earth wants to claim him, and he is to be devoured by worms and maggots, the prying, wriggling fingers, the digestive intestines of the claimant earth. There is a choking, gassy stench of decay. He gasps and recoils, kicking at the writhing and slithering stew of worms as he does so.
“Come on, sir! You can’t scuttle away under a church pew this time or go and hug Mommy’s leg! Come and face the music with the rest of us!” Blake yanks his shoulder hard, pulling Jim up to his knees. Blake glowers as he looks Jim deep in the eyes, and he spits, “Don’t send me anywhere you’re too afraid to go to yourself—sir. If you outrank me, then show me the way yourself! Prove your worth!”
“That’s right, you coward, follow this man!” barks Hobson. “He’s a hero! Died for King and Country he did, right at his post. If you have the balls to call yourself captain, then you should do the same!” Kicking at the worms again as they inch toward him in his hole, his grave.
The thunder of the shells pounding the earth. The bullets cracking overhead. A sudden desire to charge into this maelstrom, to consummate his fear into action. Out of the trench and into the ruined streets. Volcanic ash rains down upon them in hot sifting winds; pumice falls like hailstones. A dog lies gagging, curled up, chained to a post. A sign on a newly painted house shouts out, Vernice fresca! A fuel truck burns; flames hiss and crack and lash the sky red. All the soldiers around him charge into the fray, into the red and black glowing volcanic roar, the crackling inferno; and to a man, they fall, gagging on the ash, the dust, the earth that claims them; they fall to their knees, onto their faces, onto their backs, and they curl onto their sides in their death throes and are buried in the ash, and he can see their faces, every one; among others he sees Fitzpatrick, Bly, Leprenniere, Peltier, Harrigan, Kelly, Blake, Schneider, Symic, Cooley, all frozen in their final postures, eyes squeezed shut and hands over mouths and noses; and he tastes the bitter ashes and the ashes lash and sting his eyes and choke his throat and rake his air passages, and he peers down upon his fallen comrades, and the air is thick and sulphurous hot and acrid poison, and he gags and his throat begins to close and he falls to his knees to take his place among them and he feels his body stiffen as he too is buried in ash and pumice, and his essence dissipates into nothing, the void breaking the bonds between molecules and between atoms, the void expanding as his form dissipates like particles of smoke into the moonless blackness of the night sky, bonds broken, matter inert, energy released … and the ash is blown away and the sun is shining, the storm is over, and he hovers above this scene and sees all of them, himself included, reduced to petrified plaster casts of their final agonies on the stones of the street, grey and twisted, filled in from the hollows formed through the centuries of their bodies’ dissolution, the ruined façades on either side of them, the faded sign still shouting out Vernice fresca!, weeds protruding from between the stones and the sun shining over all; and his bed of ashes is a bed of snow, and he is lying on his back in the snow of childhood, making a snow angel as the flakes sift softly down from the sky, and he exhales a crystalline smoke of fro
st, a million perfect symmetries, just close your eyes and catch a snowflake on your tongue and then it’s homeward with your sled in tow for hot chocolate and a hug and a kiss oh yes, just close your eyes and float into the sky, a restful release … He hovers above the bed, above his own form, his eyes closed, his face an ashen grey turning white, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and he feels an unspoken understanding commingling with all those who have died recently in all the recent battles and those who have expired in the hospital, and he feels the world leave and himself leave the world, sounds and images fading, a wordless understanding, and there is a tunnel and a pinprick of light at the end of it, a compression of white flowing light, eternity compressed in a diamond, and is this the heavenly meadow of forever he wonders as he wondered once in his mother’s lap in church and in his bed during the childhood nightmare storms and under a pew as another storm raged, a storm not of innocence but of experience, a storm of men and their fury, and he lets that go, he lets it all go and lets himself bathe in the soft white approaching light and he feels himself freed and floating toward the light peace beyond words an acceptance, and I the pillar of the ego melts like a candle in the approaching of the light, and he is dissolving in the light enfolded in the night, understanding and expanding and truth at once unsequenced and ungrammared in the arrival of the light—
No! No! Pulled back, dragged away from the light through the cold cosmos, centred and solidified back into the supine form of his own broken self. Eyes flutter open to shapes and shadows and a muddle of noise. Shapes sharpen into doctors and medical instruments, noise articulates into voices; and he sees himself being transfused, blood from another running from a Coca-Cola bottle into his arm in a new tributary from the ongoing stream of life, of consciousness, opened up and carried along from anonymous others into and through his veins. Two masked doctors brace him, one with spectacles and furrowed brow staring intently at him, what can be seen of his face defined sharply by the demands of the urgent task at hand. No! He cannot form the words; he can scarcely move and his mouth is dry. If only he could just ask for a sip of water.
Beckoning War Page 29