Lizzie's War

by Tim Farrington

  “Damn that woman,” Father Winters said, and signaled Sarah for more schnapps. Purple cards paid double; Winters monitored the house take on St. Jude’s Bingo as closely as any casino manager, and he was no doubt already thinking about how much it would cost to replace the stained-glass window.

  As the two men finished their cake in silence, the phone rang.

  “Father Germaine, it’s for you,” Sarah called.

  Germaine excused himself and took the call in the kitchen. His relief was mingled with guilt; a call at this hour usually meant either that someone had died or that someone was afire with some urgent fine point on the spring open house. But it was Danny O’Reilly, calling from the hospital, and Germaine felt his heart in his chest, abruptly, as if someone had yanked a corset tight.

  “Is your mother all right?” he asked.

  “I think so,” Danny said. “She had the baby. It’s a girl. Anna.”

  “Uh-huh,” Germaine said carefully.

  “She told me to call you and ask if you would do a baptism.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Yes, sir.” Danny hesitated. “Can you do a baptism at a hospital?”

  Germaine relaxed a little. “Of course, Danny. I mean, normally we would wait and have the ceremony at the church, but—”

  “She also wanted me to ask if you could bring the stuff to do the last rites.”

  Germaine was conscious suddenly that he was still wearing the cardboard party hat. He took it off and set it on the counter.

  “Of course, Danny,” he said. “Tell your mother I’ll be right there.”

  CHAPTER 27

  FEBRUARY 1968

  SHE HELD THE BABY in her arms, careful not to pull the child’s IV lines loose or entangle them with her own. Anna’s face, pale gold from lack of air, was engulfed in a transparent plastic oxygen cup that looked like some obscenely premature Halloween mask. Liz wished the two of them could be on the same lines, that they could just run the tubes from her own body to the baby’s, that her blood could move the child’s blood and the breath in her lungs feed her baby’s breathing. But it was too late for that. Her body had given this child everything it was ever going to give.

  Her wheeled bed was canted at a maddening angle of thirty degrees, the most elevation the doctors would allow her so soon after the cesarean, and all Liz could see was the ceiling, an alien country of acoustic tiles, ventilation grates, and water stains, and those hellish fluorescent tubes above everyone’s heads, their light as cold as the smoke off dry ice. But she wasn’t seeing anything anyway except the baby’s face. Anna’s eyes were squeezed shut, and her brow was knit into a seam of delicate determination as she worked for every breath. She looked, Liz thought, like Mike. They all had looked like Mike to her, from the moment they were born. But this baby looked like Mike in pain.

  The curtains had been drawn around their crowded corner of the neonatal ICU. Germaine stood beside her, laying out the trappings for the baptism. To her left, Danny was holding Deb-Deb’s hand, and Angus mingled with the Washington children, while Kathie and Temperance stood arm in arm with Linnell Washington at the end of the bed, weeping quietly like the Marys at the foot of the cross. Liz had asked Linnell to be the baby’s godmother, which probably broke half a dozen Catholic rules. Danny would be the godfather, which no doubt violated several more. But Germaine hadn’t blinked at any of the unorthodox arrangements. She had known he wouldn’t; she had counted on him for that.

  Germaine gave her a nod: good to go. He wore a long purple stole embroidered in gold, but he hadn’t shaved and his deep brown eyes were sunk back in his skull, shadowed with sorrow. Liz hadn’t given a moment’s thought to what she looked like at this point. She could feel her hair dangling in limp, sweaty strands, and her eyes hurt from crying; wrung out like a bloody washcloth, gutted, and spent, she knew she looked like hell. And she didn’t give a damn. She wondered if she would ever give a damn about anything again.

  She nodded back to Germaine. He gestured, and Danny and Linnell stepped forward. The priest said something, and then something else, and then something addressed to Linnell and Danny. It was all said in the quiet matter-of-fact tones of ancient ritual, but Liz realized that she wasn’t registering the words. She wondered for a moment if Germaine was speaking Latin; but Linnell and Danny both responded to their cues in English, answering for the baby. Linnell had her own baby, Luther, on her hip, and Dee Jay was clinging to her other leg, a little overwhelmed by all the solemnity.

  Germaine turned to Liz. He took off the purple stole and draped a white one around his neck, then leaned in to gently lift Anna from Liz’s arms. He handed the baby to Danny, since Linnell had her hands full. Liz wanted to weep all over again at the look on her son’s face, grave and intent and tender, and the way he held his sister, like an egg, like a beating heart, careful of the dangling array of tubes. But it seemed she was all cried out.

  Germaine picked up the cruet of holy water.

  “Anna Marie, I baptize thee in the name of the Father—”

  “How come they rubbin’ that baby’s head?” Dee Jay asked his mother. “What’s that they pourin’ on that baby’s head?”

  “That’s water from God, child,” Linnell told him. “That baby’s going to heaven soon.”

  “—and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost….”

  Liz watched the water dribbling from Anna’s forehead onto Danny’s arms and chest and thought, involuntarily, of tears. There was more, something with oil, and then more oil, but Liz was drifting again, seeing only her baby’s face, and at last the child was in her arms again, a white veil draped on her head now, and Germaine was saying something about eternal life, and life everlasting, forever and ever, Amen.

  And then it was done, and it was time for the children to go.

  “Say good-bye to your sister,” Liz said, and in turn Kathie, Angus, and Deb-Deb stepped forward and kissed the baby, and turned to leave with Linnell. But Danny hung back.

  “I want to stay,” he said.

  Liz recognized the look on his face, that Mike look, no argument possible. She hesitated, then looked helplessly at Germaine, who raised one eyebrow and shrugged. Her call.

  “Dad would stay,” Danny said. “You need someone here.”

  “I need someone to stay with the other kids too, Danny.”

  “I’ll watch the kids,” Linnell said, and Germaine immediately seconded, gently, “Linnell can watch the kids, Liz.”

  It was the first time he had ever called her by her first name. So this is what it takes, Liz thought, to make a priest a human being.

  “Okay, Danny,” she said. “You can stay.”

  IT WAS INSTANTLY quiet with the other children gone. Liz opened her gown so that the baby lay against her skin. At a nod from her, Dr. Levine moved to unhook the baby’s IV lines, with a tenderness that brought fresh tears to Liz’s eyes. He left the oxygen mask for her to remove, as she had asked. Before he left, he paused beside her and said, “I am so sorry.”

  “Thank you for giving us a chance,” Liz said.

  He shook his head. There had been no note of I-told-you-so from him, at any point. Levine had harbored his own secret hopes for a miracle, Liz knew. This one had gotten to him.

  “So sorry,” he said again, and left the alcove. The night nurse, her face streaming with tears, hovered close and gave Liz a questioning look, prepared to stay or go. Liz sent her away with a touch to her arm.

  And now it was just her and the baby, and Germaine and Danny, and the deepest quiet she had ever known. She could hear the false breath of the oxygen in the baby’s mask. Anna had not cried a single time; her lungs were too weak even for that. It had been that silence, more even than the baby’s eerie golden color and cloak of blood, that had made her fate real to Liz from the moment Levine had eased the child from the slash of the cesarean. There was no way to live in this world without crying.

  Liz looked at the baby’s face, screwed into effort beneath the mask. She hadn’t
seen Anna’s eyes open yet; she didn’t even know what color they were. Dr. Levine had said they probably had five minutes at most, after the mask was removed. Liz thought of Mike, of his story of the morning colors ceremony on the hill, of the men running out with the flag, knowing they had twenty-three seconds to get the colors up and get in a hole before the mortar rounds began to fall. But this was not quite like that. It was more like Mike himself, loading the wounded man onto the helicopter in the moment between explosions. There was no hole to jump into here; there never had been. There was only what you had to do, even as the falling round whistled in the air.

  In any case, time meant nothing anymore. The month behind her, and the years ahead, meant no more than any moment’s breath or breeze, and five minutes were enough for eternity. Liz met Germaine’s eyes, and then Danny’s, and took the mask from the baby’s face.

  Germaine, wearing the purple stole again, began the murmured rite, but Liz was beyond the words now. It all was wind and breath. Danny was holding the oil for the unction, his face wet with tears. Liz held her son’s eyes for a moment and gave him a smile. She was glad now, grateful that he had stayed. They would all have to live with this.

  And then they were done, and the five minutes passed, and five more, in silence broken only by the soft gasp of the baby’s breath. It went on, and impossibly on: an O’Reilly baby, stubborn to the end. And then the gasp made no sound at all, and Anna’s face relaxed and her eyes opened, easily, naturally, a baffled look, her glimpse of a world without sufficient air. Brown eyes, Liz saw. Like Mike’s, like Kathie’s.

  The little girl looked at her for a long moment, expectant and helpless; and then she gave a tiny sigh and was gone. And still Liz held her, in the silence and the stillness that had no end.

  CHAPTER 28

  FEBRUARY 1968

  STINSON WAS SHORT. His thirteen-month tour of duty ended on March 1, but it was a leap year, and Stinson was sure he wasn’t going to survive the extra day. He’d been bemoaning his fate all month, passionately and profanely, but as his departure date approached he grew quiet and resigned. He gave Mike a packet of letters, already addressed and stamped, to send for him when he was killed, and paid off his poker debts.

  “You can have my mustard,” Stinson told Mike mournfully. The radioman’s #10 can of spicy Dijonnaise had been the envy of everyone throughout the siege. He doled out the mustard in portions the size of dimes.

  “You’re not going to die, you fucking moron,” Mike said. But he accepted the mustard happily enough. The stuff was pure gold in the Khe Sanh food economy.

  He tried to get his radioman out early, to avoid the fatal twenty-ninth altogether, but the weather settled in and nothing went in or out from the hilltop for several days. And so Mike found himself in a trench fifty yards from Hill 851’s single chopper LZ with Stinson, three walking wounded, the tactical-air-control radio operator and his “bodyguard,” and a dead Marine wrapped in a poncho, on the last day of February.

  Stinson had his pack on and his helmet strapped under his chin and was muttering a Hail Mary under his breath. On the horizon, a dozen CH-46 cargo choppers with external loads dangling from slings circled desultorily, chasing tail and waiting for their moment.

  The TAC guy was on the radio, making his cryptic coordinations; with the cargo choppers on station, it was time to call in the fixed-wing air strikes. One of the wounded men was fretting about his leg, afraid it wouldn’t hold up during the dash to the chopper. But they all knew he was better off trying to run than going out on a stretcher. You were a sitting duck on a goddamned stretcher when the shells began to fall.

  Stinson handed Mike a tarnished silver flask. “I want you to have this.”

  Mike twisted the flask’s top off and sniffed, smelling bourbon. The flask was ornately monogrammed with leafy entwined letters like climbing vines, TIS, and looked like it was about a thousand years old.

  “It was my great-great-grandfather’s,” Stinson said. “Maybe three greats. Tobias Stinson. He was from Kentucky, and the story is he drank whiskey from that flask with Daniel Boone. Or was it Davy Crockett? One of those coon-tailed cap guys.”

  “You can’t give me this,” Mike said. “This is for your kids. For your grandkids. For all those future generations of Stinson alcoholics.”

  “I want you to have it,” Stinson insisted.

  A burst of 12.7mm machine fire made them all duck; but the NVA gunner on the next hill was just getting his range down for when the chopper landed. Mike put the flask back into his radioman’s pocket and closed the flap over it. Stinson’s fatalism was starting to get to him. He’d seen too many Marines sure they were going to die, who had, and he’d be damned if Stinson was going to be one of them.

  “You stupid superstitious motherfucker,” he said. “Just get your ass on that chopper. Have an extra drink at Dashiell Hammett’s bar in San Francisco and tell John to put it on my tab.”

  The TAC guy gave them a warning nod and settled his helmet on his head; the jets were coming in. Everyone hunkered down, and a moment later six Marine A-4 Skyhawks screamed fifty meters to either side of the hilltop, streaming clouds of smoke and tear gas like the world’s loudest crop dusters. The bombs tumbled in the air and the valley, and neighboring hills erupted into antiaircraft fire. As the bombs hit, the CH-46 supply chopper made its run to Hill 851, and as it swooped close, everyone in Hotel Company opened fire, trying to keep the NVA gunners’ heads down.

  “Go, go, go,” the TAC operator hollered through the din, and Stinson and the three wounded men grabbed one corner each of the dead Marine’s poncho and scrambled out of the trench for the fifty-yard dash to the LZ as the chopper touched down.

  Mike watched them go, his eyes stinging from the smoke and drifting tear gas and his ears ringing from the bombs. The stretch of open red dirt between the trench and the chopper looked weirdly vast, like some kind of endless demented prairie from hell painted by Bosch, and the Marines lugging the body across it seemed to be moving in nightmare slow motion. He could see puffs of orange-pink dust being kicked up just to the four Marines’ left as the 12.7mm machine fire started in earnest, and he realized he was counting to himself: four-Mississippi, five-Mississippi…It was too loud to hear the mortar tubes pop, but he knew the rounds were already in the air. The twenty-three-second limit was absolute. Four Marines with a stretcher case had taken twenty-five seconds on a recent emergency medevac, and they’d had to call in a second chopper for them and send out four more stretchers, each carried by four new targets. The guy on the original stretcher had died of his wounds by then; they’d transferred him to a poncho, to save the stretcher, and he’d gone out on a later flight.

  …twelve-Mississippi, thirteen-Mississippi…The men making for the chopper passed the replacements who had just jumped off it and were on their way to the trench, a bit of a Keystone Kops moment. The outgoing Khe Sanh vets were hobbling and filthy and so low to the ground that they looked like a different species, while the new guys were ridiculously upright, moving much more slowly than they should have been, their heads ducked slightly, more on principle than from any real sense of danger, as if they were uncertain about the decorum in a new church. In their startling green uniforms, they looked like unripe fruit.

  Halfway to the chopper, the man who had been fretting about his wounded leg stumbled, then fell, and the other three men lugging the body went down with him. They sprawled in the dust, then scrambled to their feet again, with the two less-wounded Marines supporting the guy with the bad leg now. Stinson, his hands free, hesitated for an instant, then grabbed two corners of the poncho and starting dragging the body alone.

  “Leave it, Toby!” Mike hollered, but there was no way Stinson could hear him, over all the firing. “Goddammit, Stinson, leave the fucking body!”

  …eighteen-Mississippi, nineteen-Mississippi…The other three men made the chopper, heaving the guy with the wounded leg in first and then diving in after him. Stinson was still ten steps away, draggi
ng the corpse like an ant with a raisin. He wasn’t going to make it, Mike saw. The chopper pilot was counting too, and he would take off at twenty-three seconds if he had a lick of sense. It was that or get blown up.

  The poncho tore off at the corners, and Stinson stopped and got a fresh grip. Mike stopped counting. Dear Mrs. Stinson, he thought. It is my sad duty to tell you that your son died today because he was a total fucking idiot and one of the finest Marines I ever knew. He remembered a moment in Dong Ha, not long after Stinson had become his radioman. A group of the men had been sitting around a bunker on ammo boxes, drinking warm beer, talking story and swapping the usual bullshit tales of who was the fastest gun in the Far East. One of the guys had one of those little toy pianos that he’d picked up as a joke in Japan, the kind that Schroeder played in Peanuts, and people were horsing around on it, playing “Chopsticks” and ditties about Okinawan whores. At some point the piano had ended up beside Stinson, and the kid had tapped out a few idle notes, checking the tuning, then started playing quietly, using only his right hand, because the thing was too small to play the left-hand part. You couldn’t even hear the music at first, as the palaver went on all around him, but it was relentless and complex, and gradually the talk faded and all you could hear in the bunker was the surge of the sonata, tinny and tinkling and surreally magnificent, like a stream of light in a muddy ditch.

  The first mortar rounds landed about twenty meters from the chopper, which meant there was some wind blowing aloft. Pure luck, pure dumb luck. Stinson reached the door, and some idiot jumped out and helped him heave the body into the bay. The chopper went up like a loosed balloon just as both men dived in after the corpse. Mike could see their four legs still dangling over the side, could see Stinson’s dirty white ass through a tear in his dungarees, hanging out in the Khe Sanh breeze as the bird lifted away, inadvertently mooning two divisions of the North Vietnamese Army.

  And then the mortar rounds were falling in earnest and the new arrivals had reached the trench and were standing there looking around as if they were waiting for their tour guide to issue passes to the museum. It was almost impossible to grasp the realities of Hill 851 right away; often men came in as reinforcements on one chopper, only to leave on the next one out as casualties.