She lit a cigarette and looked down at it for a while and then, giving it a wide berth, she walked around it and into my kitchen. I thought she might be looking for a cleaver to butcher it to death but what she took out instead was a can of tuna fish from my pantry and a carton of milk from the fridge. She set out two bowls onto the floor. The milk clumped like loose cottage cheese when she poured it but the cat didn’t seem to mind. Caroline stood back and watched it eat from afar and I watched her watch it.
“I never thought I’d see you be nice to a cat,” I said.
“After what we’ve just been through, the little monsters seem almost benign. Almost.”
When we were both showered and dressed in fresh clothes, me in jeans and a white tee shirt, her in a pair of her leggings and one of my white work shirts, her face scrubbed clean of any makeup, we sat down together on the couch, leaning into each other, as if both of us at that moment needed the physical presence of the other. Thinking of her as she fed the cat, the first act of kindness I had ever seen from her, I wondered, maybe, if after everything, maybe, we might actually be right for each other. Maybe we could make whatever was going on between us work. We were both lonely, I knew that, and we were together now and maybe that was enough. And she was stinking rich, so maybe that was more than enough. We sat quietly together, not so much embracing as leaning one on the other, watching the cat as he sat near our feet and licked its paw. Then I reached down and pulled my pack onto my lap.
“This is what I wanted to show you,” I said, drawing from the pack the bundles of letters I had found in the locked drawer of the breakfront. “I found these at the old Poole house.”
“All right.”
“I think we should read them.”
“All right.”
“We can do this later if you want.”
“No, let’s do it now.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t want to run away anymore?”
“Of course I want to run away. I’m desperate to run away. But wherever I ran I’d still be a Reddman. I can’t control who I am, can I?”
“No.”
“And I can’t control who wants to kill me because of it, can I?”
“Apparently not.”
“It’s funny what you learn at the wrong end of a gun. You told me the men who killed my sister and brother are dead, but we still don’t know who hired them. Maybe the answer is somewhere in these letters.”
“Maybe.”
“And maybe the one good thing I’ve been looking for is in there, too.”
“Maybe.”
She waited a moment, looking down at Sam the cat, steeling herself. “Or maybe it’s just more shit.”
“Probably.”
She waited a moment more and then, hesitantly, she reached for one of the bundles. She untied the old ribbon carefully and looked through the letters, one by one, before passing them, one by one, to me. “These are love letters,” she said. “From an Emma.”
“They must be from Emma Poole. Who are they to?”
“They are each addressed ‘To My Love,’ without a name,” she said. “Listen to this. ‘To feel your hand on my face, your lips on my cheek, to feel your warmth and your weight surround me, my darling, my love, my life can hold no more meaning than this. You swear your devotion over and over and I place my fingers on your lips because to speak of the future leaks the rapture from our present. Love me now, fully and completely, love me today, not forever, love me in this moment and let the future be damned.’ ”
I took one of the letters she had passed to me and began to read aloud. “ ‘If we are cursed with this passion, then let the curse torch our souls until the fire consumes itself and is extinguished. I fall not into happiness with you, my beloved, for that is impossible for cursed souls such as we, but instead in your arms I rise to the transcendent ecstasy of which the great men sing and if it be necessarily short-lived than still I wouldn’t treasure it any less or bargain even a minute’s worth for something longer lasting but tepid to the touch.’ ”
She dropped the letter in her hand and picked up another. “ ‘Glorious, glorious, glorious is your breath and your touch and the rich warm smell of you, your skin, your eyes, your scar, the power in your legs, the rosy warmth of your mouth. I want you to devour me, my love, every inch of me, I lie in bed at night and imagine it and only delirious joy comes from the imagining. Lie with me, now, this instant, wait no longer, come to me and lie with me, now, your arms around me, now, your mouth on my breasts, now, the wild smell of your hair, now, your teeth on my neck, now, devour me my love my love my love devour me now.’ ”
I stared at Caroline as she read the words and was not surprised to see a tear. At least some of what she was feeling I felt also. I moved closer to her and put my arm around her.
“Who are the letters to?” I asked.
“They don’t say, as if she was purposefully hiding his identity. But whoever it was we know how it ended.”
“Yes, we do,” I said. Whomever Emma Poole had written these paeans of love to had been the one to impregnate her and desert her, to leave her alone as she nursed her dying mother while her stomach swelled.
“Get rid of them,” she said as she grabbed the letters from my hand and threw them on the floor. The cat leaped away for a moment and then jumped onto the sofa next to Caroline, who barely flinched. “I can’t bear to read them. I feel like a voyeur.”
“These were written more than seventy years ago,” I said. “It’s like looking through a powerful telescope and seeing light that was emitted eons ago by stars that are already dead.”
“It’s not right,” she said. “Whatever she felt for the man who deserted her it has nothing to do with us. The emotions were hers and hers alone. We’re trespassing.”
“There’s another letter,” I said. “It’s not from Emma.” I reached into the pack and pulled out the letter entitled: To My Child on the Attainment of Majority.
She hesitated for a moment and then took the envelope. She unwrapped the string that bound the envelope shut and pulled out a sheaf of pages written in a masculine hand. She quickly looked at the last page to find the signature.
“It’s from my grandfather,” she said. “It’s written to my father. Why was this letter with the others?”
I shrugged my ignorance.
She read the first lines out loud. “April 6, 1923. To my child. By the time you read this I will be dead.”
She looked at me and shook her head but even while she was shaking her head she trained her gaze back onto the letter and started reading again, though this time to herself. When she was finished with the first page she handed it to me and went onto the second. In that way I trailed behind her by a few minutes, as if my telescope was a few hundred light seconds farther away from the source of the dead star’s light than hers, and my emotional response similarly lagged behind.
It is hard to describe the effect of that letter. It solved mysteries that spanned the century, resolved questions that were lingering in our minds, threw into even greater highlight the terrors that stalked the Reddmans and the Pooles. But even with our out-of-synch emotional responses a peculiar reaction took place between the two of us, Caroline and me, in our separate worlds, as we read the letter. Slowly we drifted apart, not just emotionally, but physically too. Where we had been leaning upon one another when we started reading the letter, our sides and legs melded as though we were trying to become one, as the words drifted through us we separated. First there was just a lessening of pressure, then a gap developed that turned into an inch and then into a foot and then into a yard and finally, while Caroline was sobbing quietly, Sam the cat curled in her lap, and I was reading the last lines and the bold signature of Christian Shaw, Caroline was leaning over one arm of the couch and I was leaning over the other, as far apart as two could be on one piece of furniture. Had the sofa’s arms not been there I fear we would have tumbled away from each other until
we slammed like rolling balls into opposite walls.
What caused this fierce magnetic repellence was not any great puzzle. What had come between Caroline and me so strongly in that moment was what had never been between us and the letter was the most vivid confirmation of that yet. Christian Shaw’s letter to his child gave us something that was completely unexpected in this tale of deception and betrayal and murder and desertion and revenge, it gave us an unexpected burst of hope. The letter gave us hope because what Caroline Shaw had believed to be a fiction had been shown to be real, alive, transforming, redeeming. The hope was unexpected because who could have thought that in the middle of the cursed entwining of the Reddmans and the Pooles we would find, like a ruby in a mountain of manure, a transcendent and powerful love.
54
April 6, 1923
To My Child,
By the time you read this I will be dead. My death will have been a good thing for me and richly deserved, but doubtless hard on you. My father too died when I was young. He was a stern man, I’ve been told, a harsh man, prone to fits of violence. But as he died before I could remember anything about him, I imagine him as a fine and gentle man. I imagine him teaching me to ride. We would have hunted together. He would have given me his rifle to shoot. I imagine him finer and more gentle with me than the real man ever could have been. It is from this imagining that I feel the great gap in my life. I would not mourn him so keenly had he just once reached from his grave and slapped me on the face.
I have been the worst of scoundrels, the lowest of cowards. I take no pride in these facts, nor utter shame. It is simple truth and you should know the truth about your father. You may have learned that I was awarded a Distinguished Service Cross for my brief adventure in the army but do not be deceived as to any heroism on my part. The medal resides in the silt at the bottom of the pond beneath the Reddman estate, Veritas, where I threw it. It is home among the frog excrement and the rotting carcasses of fish. I joined the army to escape what I had made of my life. Do not think that war is glamorous or good, child, but I welcomed it as a friend for what it was, another way to die.
In May of 1918 I led a counterattack from a trench near a village called Cantigny. It was raining and fog was rising. The muffled sounds of war were unbearably close even before the Germans attacked. It was our first battle. The Germans advanced in a wave of ferocity and we beat them back with rapid fire. It was a magnificent and ugly thing to see. Young German men fell and cried out from the mud where they fell and we maintained our fire. Then the runner brought orders for the counterattack.
I wasted no time. I was first over the top. How many trailed my wake and died I cannot know. Shells with a soft sickly whistle dropped and fell gently to the ground. The fog rose thick and green. My eyes burned. My lungs boiled. The Germans we had shot writhed red in the sucking mud. They cried out from the vile green fog through which I charged. I charged not for honor or for Pershing or for France. I charged for death. The artillery, louder now, frightful, our own, rained down like a blessing from on high. We succeeded in running the Germans from their lines in Cantigny and I succeeded, too, in my personal mission. Scraps of metal from the great Allied guns, spinning through the air like locusts with shark’s teeth, sliced their welcome way into my body. I tried to lift my arms in gratitude but only one would rise and I fell face first into the mire.
Two stretcher bearers found me. I begged them to let me sleep but they ignored me and lifted me from the mud. The ambulance raced me to a mobile surgery unit where the doctors saved my life and took off what was left of my arm. Within half an hour they were cutting apart the next poor wretch. I was shipped off to Number 24 General Hospital, Étaples. It was in Étaples, on the northern coast of France, that I met Magee.
Number 24 General Hospital swarmed with wounded. Germans filled whole wards, so packed even the floors were crowded with their stretchers. Cries of “Schwester, Schwester,” rushed down the hallways. Other wards were stocked with our troops, the mangled, the maimed, the sufferers of trench fever, relatively cheery despite their feverish chills. Many in my unit hadn’t loused themselves, hoping a bite would send them to just such a ward. Because of the crowding, the sisters had cleared offices to hold patients and I was placed in one of those.
The small room held beds for three soldiers. My lungs were scarred from the gas. I could barely breathe. The stitches in my shoulder had grown infected and the nurses drained pus from the swelling each day. Still, I was the healthiest of the three roommates. The man to my right was swathed in bandages and never spoke my entire time in Number 24 General Hospital. He was fed by the sisters and moaned quietly in the late of night. Every once in a while the doctors would come in and cut off more of his body and bandage him up again. The man to my left had a gut wound that oozed red and then green and then, as he shouted through the night, burst and his insides slid out of him and with a quiet relief he died. They brought a stretcher for him and covered him with a flag. I struggled to stand as they carried him out, which was the custom. That evening, in the low light of dusk, they brought in someone new.
The orderlies propped him up on five pillows in the bed. They raised him by tape and webbing, which passed under his torso and was attached to the bedposts. The orderlies didn’t joke like they normally did as they worked. The patient smelled of rotting meat and rancid oil and the stench of him flooded through the room. He already seemed more dead than the soldier with the gut wound. Before they left, the orderlies placed a canvas screen between his bed and mine. For three days the sisters came and woke him to feed him soup or change his bedpans. The rest of the time he slept. The only sounds in the room were the soft moans of the soldier to my right and the creaking of the webbing beneath the new patient’s torso and my own shallow wheeze.
One morning, before the sisters came into our room, I heard a soft voice. “Hey, buddy, scratch my arm, will you? My right arm.” I sat up, unsure from which of my roommates the voice had come. “Scratch my arm, will you, buddy, it’s itching like hell.”
The voice, I realized, was coming from the new man. I tilted myself out of bed, struggled to my feet, and walked around the screen. When the soldier came into view I stopped and stared. For a moment I forgot to breathe. He was an absolute horror. The arm that he wanted me to scratch was gone, but that was not all. His head was facing the ceiling and I stared at the side of his face, but he had no profile. His nose had been shot off. The entire top part of his face, including his eyes, had been mauled. Fluid leaked clear from his bandages. Of his limbs, all that remained was his left leg. His swollen lips shook uncontrollably as he breathed. The smell of rot rose thick and noxious about him.
“What about it? Scratch my arm, will you?”
“The surgeons took off your arm,” I said. “Like they took off mine.”
“Then how come I still feel it?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I feel mine too.”
“What else did they take off me, hey, buddy?” he asked.
“Your other arm,” I said. “And your right leg.”
“I knew my eyes were gone,” he said. “But I didn’t know the rest. Funny thing is the left leg is the only one I can’t feel. How’s the face? Do I still got my looks?”
I examined his mangled features and knew I should feel pity but felt none. “They blew off your nose,” I said.
“Ahh, Christ. No eyes, no arms, no leg, no nose. The bastards.” He took a deep breath. “Don’t that beat it just to hell. Hey, buddy, can you do me a favor? Can you get me a glass of water?”
On the windowsill a pitcher and glasses were set out. I poured water into one of the glasses. I brought the glass to his swollen lips. He choked on the water and coughed as I poured it in. Much of it ran down his chin.
“Thanks, buddy,” he said. “Hey, can you do me another favor and scratch my side, my left side? It’s like I rolled around in poison ivy down there.”
I put the glass down on a table by his bed and stepped toward him to scratch
his side. He gave me directions, higher or lower, and I followed them. His skin was scabby and dry.
“That feels great,” he said. “Hey, buddy, one more favor. How about it? Will you kill me, buddy? Will you, please? Anything I got is yours, buddy, if you’ll just kill me. Please, please, buddy. Kill me kill me kill me won’t you kill me, buddy?”
I backed away from him as he spoke. I backed into the wall. He kept pleading until a nurse came into the room with a pot of water and cloths.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Visiting,” I said.
“Don’t,” she said. “Corporal Magee is very ill. He needs his rest.”
I went back to my cot as she began to wipe down Magee’s torso with a wet towel.
Corporal Magee was quiet for much of the day, sleeping. Later, when we were left alone by the sisters, he started up again. “Hey, buddy. Will you kill me, buddy, will you, please?” I told him to shut up, but he kept on begging me to kill him.
“Why should you get to die,” I said, finally, “with the rest of us stuck here alive?”
“What are you missing?” he asked.
I told him.
“Just the arm, are you kidding?” he said. “I had just an arm gone I’d be dancing in the street with my girl, celebrating.”
“Leave me alone,” I said.
He was quiet for another day, for two maybe. I couldn’t stop thinking about him lying there beside me like that. Even when they came in to cut some more off the mute soldier to my right I thought of Magee. When he started in again, begging me to kill him, I said, “Tell me about her.”
“Who?”
“Your girl. You said you have a girl.
“I don’t got nothing anymore. The Huns they blew her away with the rest of my body.”
“But you had a girl.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Tell me about her.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m asking.”
He was quiet for a long moment. I thought he had gone to sleep. “Her name,” he said finally, “is Glennis. The prettiest girl on Price Hill.” He told me about her, how pretty she was, how kind, how gay, and in the telling he also told me about his life back in Cincinnati. He worked as a typesetter on the Enquirer. He went to ball games at Redland Field and himself played second base in Cincinnati’s entry in the Union Printers’ International Baseball Federation. He went to church and helped with collections for the poor. Nights he spent at Weilert’s Beer Garden on Vine Street or sitting with Glennis on her porch on Price Hill. As he spoke of his good and honest life before the war I felt a bitter taste. He told it all to me and then, after the telling, he complained that it was gone. Once again he asked me to kill him.
Bitter Truth Page 48