Lizzie's War

by Tim Farrington

  They had processed from the church under the crossed swords of a bunch of Mike’s old Korean vet Marine buddies, not a starving writer in the bunch, which probably should have tipped her off—Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God—but hadn’t, somehow. There were the scars, of course, a glamorous gash along Mike’s temple from the grazing of a Chinese Communist bullet, mostly hidden at that point by his civilian-length hair, and a Rorschach mottling of raised white ridges on his back, from a spatter of shrapnel he assured her had been no big deal. But she’d thought Mike was done collecting scars for his country.

  And now he was off to this new war, making a career of it after all, in line for a fresh set of wounds or worse. It hurt, strangely, to see that dress, that white scar where her naïveté had been; and it hurt most that it hurt. Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and me.

  Be careful what you wish for, Liz mused, and hated herself for the thought.

  She said briskly, to beat the rising tears, “Well, don’t you look beautiful.”

  Kathie turned a shining face to her. She was the only one of the four who had Mike’s deep, somewhat mournful brown eyes, which in Kathie took on an air of disconcerting pathos. She looked lost in the huge gown, engulfed in an immensity of silk and taffeta. “How old do you have to be to get married?”

  Older than eighteen, Liz thought, but she said, “Probably you should be out of second grade, at least.”

  “Can we take a picture of me to send to Daddy?”

  “Of course, sweetheart.” Liz found the Brownie camera, and her daughter posed happily for a couple of shots, wrestling the train around as if she were grappling with a white dragon.

  They had just finished the roll of film when Angus appeared in the doorway. “Mom—”

  “Angus, what did I tell you about staying in that chair?”

  “Danny’s hurt.”

  Liz bolted past him and hurried down the stairs, with the other children following. Danny was in the kitchen, his right leg below the knee awash in an appalling amount of blood. Liz had an awful moment, thinking he might have severed something, but upon examination she saw the lawn mower had just thrown up a rock and gashed his shin.

  She hastily ruined a couple of dish towels stanching the flow of blood; Kathie, looking eerily nurselike in the wedding dress, had fetched the first aid kit without being asked, and once Liz had cleaned off the worst of the blood and applied pressure to the cut, she began to relax. There was blood on the wedding dress by now, inevitably, as a result of Kathie’s earnest efforts. There was blood everywhere. So much for Cleaning Monday.

  “It’s like you got wounded,” Angus told his brother breathlessly as Liz began to apply the gauze bandage.

  Liz rolled her eyes, but Danny brightened. He liked that. A Purple Heart, the height of glamour. A wound like this probably merited only a telegram: We regret to inform you that your oldest son, Daniel F. O’Reilly, was wounded in action while mowing a lawn in the Virginia Beach province… If he’d lost his leg, they’d have sent two Marines to the door.

  Liz cut a piece of tape to hold the bandage in place. Danny’s face was still tight with pain and shock, and there were tears standing in his eyes, but he was containing them. Go ahead, sweetheart, it’s all right to cry, Liz thought, her heart aching. But he wouldn’t, of course: he was his father’s son. She hated the goddamned Marine Corps.

  CHAPTER 3

  AUGUST 1967

  FATHER ZEKE GERMAINE awoke alone, as he had for the last twenty years, with his whole body quivering in the dark with a peculiar intensity, like a freshly plucked guitar string. The predawn shakes had begun one day when he was seventeen. It had been terrifying at first. It felt like the skin was being stripped from his nerves each night and had to regrow every morning, and every morning less and less grew back, as if his raw nerve endings were being schooled to some ultimate nakedness. He’d been a promising student, and the condition had ruined him for the usual pursuits. This had distressed him at the time, though it seemed comically beside the point now. There had been a phase of doctors and therapists, and then a phase of diets, vitamins, and faddish agendas, and finally one of philosophies; but in the end every attempt at a solution failed, and Germaine had surrendered to his daily incapacitation. In time it had even come to seem like a kind of tenderness, a mercy, as if the staggering weight of God’s presence, bearable in the twilit kingdom of unconsciousness, were being moderated to the flimsier scaffold of his waking self.

  There had even been a seductive quality to the trembling, in the early days. A sweetness, once you were past the death rattle of ambition. Germaine would lie in bed helplessly, waiting for his nervous system to settle, panicked at first and then defeated in panic and finally at peace with defeat; and when stillness finally came, the peace in which he found himself was precious and fierce with an unassailable joy. In the early years of his calling, he had felt the trembling to be unstable ardency, his soul slipping out of the womb of dreams into the day’s fresh incarnation like a newborn colt staggering to its unsteady feet, eager for the world. That honeymoon spirituality seemed embarrassingly naive at this point.

  There had been a long period in his working priesthood when the trembling had seemed like a side effect of heroic exertion, and then of valiant exhaustion; and then for a time after coming home from the war he had thought it was probably just blown nerves, the anticipation of incoming mortar rounds that would not go away; but these days Germaine knew he woke up shaking from too much alcohol. So much for the hopeful quiver of an infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing: he’d solved his mystical dilemmas by becoming a quiet drunk.

  The room was pitch-black. Recently enough, waking in such blackness, he would have been surprised to have survived so far into the night, been certain that he still lay blind, blasted, and abandoned in the bomb crater muddy with blood, dying beside a wounded river with a dead man in his arms; that he had dozed, merely, in the precious stillness between the fall of mortar shells, at the hour of his death. But two years in a suburban parish had tempered Germaine’s nightmares and retrained his expectations; his terrors now were banality and despair. Though maybe that had always been true.

  Through the wall, he could hear the laborious drone of Father Winters’s snoring and, from the bedside table, the slightly dyssyncopated ticking of the two alarm clocks Winters insisted his assistant pastor set every night so he wouldn’t oversleep for morning mass. Sometimes Winters, reeking of peach schnapps and fraternally disregarding the smell of Germaine’s bourbon, would even come into Germaine’s bedroom before retiring, ostensibly to discuss some bit of parish business but actually to make sure the clocks were wound and the alarm pegs out. Apparently the previous assistant had been a slug-abed, and the older priest had a horror of the handful of faithful old ladies standing outside a locked church in the dark, thwarted in their morning devotions.

  Not that Winters ever woke before 8:00 a.m. himself; early rising was for priests on the rise, as he liked to say. Germaine had needed no alarm in the decades since his body began ringing two hours before every sunrise like a struck gong, but he obediently set the clocks every night to pacify his superior. He even found a bitter pleasure in the petty exercise; those twin clocks keeping superfluous time seemed apt enough symbols of his life these days.

  He lay in the dark, waiting for his soul to settle in his body as gray began to bleed into the sky to the east. Some days the trembling eased by the time the alarms went off, some days not. Today, not. The jangle of the first alarm, and the clatter of the second a moment later, sent a fresh electric jolt through his nerve endings, but Germaine always let both alarms ring, on the off chance that they would wake Father Winters.

  This is the day the Lord hath made, he thought, as he pushed in the knobs and the clamor ceased. Let us rejoice and be glad in it. Was it a sin to long for the way time stopped, in death’s arms in that crater? Was it a sin to
despise the gratuitous new life that God had given him beyond the bloody footprint of that grave? Germaine swung his feet to the floor and limped off to the bathroom. In the other room, his pastor snored on, and it was certainly a sin to hate him so.

  THE AUGUST AIR was soft and warm as the light came up. Germaine walked from the rectory to the church with Venus gleaming above the eastern horizon ahead of him. He was five minutes early, as he always was, to avoid having to make small talk with the old ladies who showed up at 6:00 on the dot, but the new altar boy was already waiting at the locked entrance to St. Jude’s, standing patiently at parade rest in the mild rose light, dressed in a new white shirt and black pants.

  “Good morning,” Germaine said.

  “Good morning, Father.”

  “I’m afraid I’ve forgotten your name.”

  “Danny. Daniel O’Reilly.”

  “You’re up early, Danny O’Reilly.”

  “Yes, sir,” the kid conceded. All the military kids said “sir” when pressed. It always made Germaine’s heart hurt, though he wasn’t sure exactly why.

  He said, “This is your first mass, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Germaine hesitated, wanting to say something to mark the moment, but all that came to mind was a snatch of Job: I have said to decay, Thou art my father; and to the worm, Thou art my mother, and my sister. He wondered again what God really expected of him now, a ruined man like a rotting fruit in a basket full of innocence.

  “Well, then, let’s get to work,” he said. He unlocked the door and they entered the church together, the boy self-consciously matching Germaine’s steps as they paused at the stone font to wet their fingers in the holy water and cross themselves, then walked up the aisle toward the altar.

  ON SATURDAY MORNING, Liz piled the kids into the station wagon and made the three-hour drive north to see Maria Petroski. It felt like a suicide mission, the military wives’ version of the Charge of the Light Brigade, but there was no way around the duty. Maria on the phone had seemed abstracted, her voice strained thin and high, assuring Liz that she was doing “as well as could be expected.” It sounded painfully rehearsed, the party line press release, the noble Marine Corps widow keeping a stiff upper lip, and Liz dreaded getting past that tissue-thin surface to Maria’s actual condition. The worst had happened, the thing they all dreaded, and in the end there was going to be nothing to do except sit there with the worst having happened and cry.

  In the backseat, Kathie was leading the other children in song, a maddening ditty called “You Can’t Get to Heaven.” It was a sort of religious “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” subject to endless elaboration. Kathie had learned the song at the Sunday school she attended sometimes with her friend Temperance; Kathie, the only white child at Lynnhaven Pentecostal, preferred the vivid services there to the stodgy Catholic decorum of St. Jude’s and always came home rolling her eyes back in her head and praising the Lord, fired with unsettling zeal for Our Savior, Jesus Christ. The original lyrics to “You Can’t Get to Heaven” had long since been forgotten. Probably they had something to do with avoiding sin and vice, with the challenge of actual goodness, but now the kids loved to make up their own absurd conditions for salvation. The only real theological criterion was that it had to rhyme.

  “Oh, you can’t get to heaven,” Kathie sang, and the other children echoed, “Oh, you can’t get to heaven!”

  In a Chevrolet (In a Chevrolet!)

  ’Cause the Lord drives Fords (’Cause the Lord drives Fords!)

  Down the heavenly way! (Down the heavenly way!)

  And the chorus, in rollicking unison:

  Oh, you can’t get to heaven in a Chevrolet

  ’Cause the Lord drives Fords down the heavenly way.

  I ain’t a-gonna grieve, my Lord, no more!

  It passed the time, at least, Liz consoled herself, as the next verse started up; it kept the kids amused and squabble free on these long drives. And her daughter was in her element, leading the sing-along. Kathie had the makings of a great camp counselor.

  Oh, you can’t get to heaven (Oh, you can’t get to heaven!)

  In a psychedelic hat (In a psychedelic hat!)

  ’Cause the Lord can take a lot (’Cause the Lord can take a lot!)

  But he can’t take that! (But he can’t take that!)

  South of Fredericksburg, Angus spotted the sign for the Stonewall Jackson shrine and wanted to stop. He had inherited the Jackson biography from Danny, and both of the boys had inherited a perversely glamorous view of the Confederacy from their father. Mike had all three volumes of Lee’s Lieutenants on his shelf, along with endless analyses by partisan historians of the flanking movement at Chancellorsville and the tragedy of the missed opportunities on the second day at Gettysburg. Born in Yonkers and raised north of the Mason-Dixon Line, Mike identified for some reason with the embattled Rebels. Her husband’s weakness for the underdog had led him astray, Liz thought. She often tried to remind the boys that nobility in defense of an inhuman system was nevertheless bloodshed for an ignoble cause, but it was impossible to make much headway with a reasoned abolitionism in the face of vivid images of J. E. B. Stuart dying young with a cavalier feather in his hat and Jackson standing like a stone wall at the first battle of Bull Run, which the boys, like their father—and the rest of the South—called First Manassas.

  “We haven’t got time to stop,” Liz said. “Mrs. Petroski is expecting us.”

  “Oh, Mom,” Angus exclaimed.

  “It’s probably just some big piece of granite with a plaque on it anyway, Angus.”

  “No, it’s the house where he died,” Danny supplied from the back of the car. “The big piece of granite with the plaque on it is at the place where he got shot.”

  “Well, there you go,” Liz said, but Angus had lit up.

  “Can we stop at the place where he got shot?” he persisted.

  “Some other time, Angus.”

  Her son flopped back against the seat. Danny, to cheer him up, said, “They had to amputate Stonewall Jackson’s arm, and they buried that outside the field hospital in Chancellorsville.”

  “Wow,” Angus said, brightening.

  “Robert E. Lee wrote him a letter that said, ‘You have lost your left arm, but I have lost my right.’ It looked like he was going to make it, after the operation. But then he died of pneumonia.”

  “A glorious death in a stupid, ugly war is still just a stupid, ugly way to die,” Liz said by way of ending the discussion. She hated these drives through the hallowed battlefields of northern Virginia. The boys had way more fun with Mike at the wheel.

  THE CREPE MYRTLES were in pink, white, and lavender bloom at the Petroskis’ big colonial home in suburban Dumfries. Trees planted by Larry, Liz couldn’t help thinking as she pulled into the driveway beside Maria’s station wagon. She was dizzied by a glimpse of how much of mundane life must be painful for Maria now. The garage door was open, and Liz could see the lawn mower, the neatly hung tools above the workbench, and a battered yellow Renault inside. Larry’s lawn mower, Larry’s tools, Larry’s car.

  Nailed to the back wall of the work area was the LIVE ORDNANCE AREA / OFF-LIMITS TO CIVILIANS sign Larry and Mike had stolen from the gunnery range at Camp Lejeune in 1959. Liz remembered the night they had brought it home. She and Maria, who lived across the street then, had been drinking coffee in the kitchen of the drafty little house the O’Reillys were renting in Jacksonville when the men came in after a long day firing howitzers, flushed with North Carolina winter cold and adolescent excitement over their trophy, their fatigue jackets smelling of cordite. She and Maria had long since adjusted to the fact that boys would be boys: they’d just laughed with the men—live ordnance, stolen government property, ha-ha—and added Jameson’s to the next round of coffee. The sign had hung over the O’Reilly stove for years, but the Petroskis had ended up with it somehow. Maybe when Mike had made captain and Larry had been passed over for the first time. A co
nsolation prize.

  A sudden series of explosions just outside the car window jolted Liz back to the present. She flinched as Kathie and Deborah shrieked.

  “Incoming!” Danny hollered, flinging open the back door of the station wagon. “Out of the vehicle, Angus! Hit the deck!”

  Angus opened his own door, dived out onto the ground, and rolled into a combat-ready position. Cranking her window up, Liz could see movement in the azalea bushes near the front of the house now, and three strawberry blond heads. They had been ambushed by the Petroski boys. The attack was not unprecedented, and not even really unusual, though Liz had expected a more subdued atmosphere this visit, given the circumstances.

  A second string of firecrackers arced through the air and landed next to the car. Kathie shrieked again, a little gleefully this time, beginning to enjoy the attention. She and Lejeune Petroski, Maria and Larry’s middle son, had had crushes on each other since nursery school, though the courtship manifested mostly as teasing.

  The azaleas shuddered as the Petroski kids gathered themselves for a direct assault, after the artillery prep. Danny and Angus were already moving along the shielded side of the station wagon, preparing to launch a counterattack. Visits between the Petroski and O’Reilly clans involved a surprising number of small-unit infantry tactics.

  The front door opened, and Maria Petroski appeared in a ragged pink bathrobe. Liz glanced at her watch; it was almost one o’clock. Her friend was normally up with the sun, with her face on and her perky colonel’s-daughter outfit of the day in place by the time she cooked the boys breakfast. Liz’s languid morning ways had always made a comic counterpoint to Maria’s tendency to hit the ground running. But Maria’s hair was unbrushed today, unwashed, and unhennaed, with a shocking trace of gray showing at the brown roots. Liz steeled herself to keep her mouth shut.