David Robbins - [World War II 04]

by Liberation Road (v1. 0) (epub)

  ‘Here’s your stool back.’

  Joe Amos didn’t listen or look the rest of the way down the long jail hall, not even to Boogie’s hoots from the far end.

  ~ * ~

  Halfway to Couvains, McGee sat up. He blinked at Joe Amos behind the wheel, then gazed into the night out the windshield. A mile ahead, the cat’s eye lights of a column climbed a dark hill. Behind rolled the slit lamps of another convoy. Occasionally off in the bocage a farmhouse window or open barn door glowed sallow from a kerosene lantern. McGee drew a deep, resigned breath through his nose and laid his head again on the back of the bench seat. In minutes he was snoring.

  The sun had been down two hours when Joe Amos stopped in the circular drive of the Marquis’s mansion.

  Joe Amos climbed out of the cab. McGee awoke to swing up his feet and stretch out on the bench. Joe Amos closed the driver-side door hard, to announce his arrival at night. Behind the closed door, McGee sighed again.

  Before he had walked out of the gravel of the drive, one of the wide double doors to the house opened. The Marquis leaned out, followed by a lantern. Joe Amos waved to him. The Marquis retreated behind the doors. Joe Amos watched the yellow light recede, but the door stayed ajar.

  He stood in the drive, not sure what the open door meant. Should he let himself in, or was the Marquis coming back? Joe Amos waited until the shine of another lantern lit the doorway.

  Geneviève stepped into the night. Like a ghost leaving the house, she wore pale sleeping clothes wrapped in a trailing white blanket. Her feet were bare.

  He went to her and took the lantern. She gathered the blanket tighter.

  ‘Sorry, I guess I woke you up.’

  Geneviève nodded, her face puffy, fresh from sleep. In the stark lantern light, she looked more than a few years older than him. But her long neck was pure white and smooth, and her smile was young enough.

  ‘I don’t get much time off,’ he continued, ‘and I’m not on shift until one o’clock. So, I figured I’d swing by. I’m sorry. Maybe...’

  She shook her head. ‘It is late for a visit,’ she said. ‘But, bon, you are here. So we shall visit.’

  Joe Amos was flustered. He’d imagined he might find her in the kitchen or reading late in the living room. He did not know what to do with her in her bedclothes, barefoot in the driveway.

  She saw his hesitation. ‘It is a warm night,’ she said. ‘We will sit on the lawn for a while. The stars and the moon are big tonight. And we have a blanket. Oui?’

  A hand peeked out and softly closed around his. The girl led him off the gravel drive, stepping softly to the grass. Joe Amos lifted the blanket off her shoulders like a cape and spread it on the lawn. She stepped to the center and folded to her knees. She wore unbleached cotton britches and a faint silk top that left her shoulders bare. Joe Amos looked at the outlines of her breasts through the fabric while she turned down the lantern.

  He sat beside her, feeling awkward and heavy in his movements, in his boots, beside her luminous feet and skin. He arranged himself with his legs out, ankles crossed, leaning back against his hands flat on the blanket. Geneviève shifted to mimic his posture, and they sat side-by-side like this, heads tilted back at the stars.

  Minutes passed in vast quiet. Joe Amos was again befuddled, he felt pressure to say something very clever or deep. He might have an hour alone with her tonight, until midnight, maybe less. At dinner two nights ago, the two of them were at supper and the conversation was helped by the Marquis and the wine. Now, with only her beside him buttressed on her snowy arms, Joe Amos licked his lips and dropped his eyes from the sky to his dirty boots on her blanket.

  ‘So, um... Geneviève.’

  She turned her face to him. ‘Yes?’

  ‘What was it like growing up here? You know, in that big house.’

  ‘Oh...’ The girl blew out her cheeks, searching for a description of her childhood at this mansion. ‘It was as you expect.’ She gestured across the grounds. ‘Running, playing in the fields. Horses and archery. Cutting the flowers and vegetables from the gardens. Not so interesting, I think.’

  Joe Amos snickered. ‘Yeah, not so interesting. Archery and flowers.’

  ‘But you, Joe Amos.’ Geneviève rearranged herself on the blanket, tucking her bare feet under her. ‘You have had a fascinating life, oui? You are young. You are very kind. You are a soldier. Tell me about your home in America.’

  Joe Amos started talking, eased by her bright manner and flattery. He told the girl about Danville. The big textile mill on the western edge of town. Truck farms and palisades of corn, alfalfa, and tobacco plots on the eastern outskirts. The Dan River, green in winter. Spring lightning bugs, summer bottleflies, autumn crickets. Cars on the paved roads, wagons on the dirt tracks. He bent to his boots and untied his laces. He pulled off one boot and sniffed it to make sure it didn’t stink, then tugged off the other and copied her posture, feet tucked under his rump. Geneviève laughed charmingly at the funny bits of his descriptions. She asked questions to keep him going, and since none of her questions had anything to do with his blackness, he made no mention of what it meant in Danville.

  ‘Tell me about your family,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, my mama,’ he said, chuckling, ‘she runs the roost. I got four older sisters and they’re all married. Then there’s me, the baby. Now everybody’s starting to have grandkids, too. Mama, she don’t need a switch or nothin’ to get her meaning across. She’s God-fearin’, but everybody says “How high?” when she says “Jump.”‘

  He told her about the mules he’d run over his mama’s land, and the brothers-in-law who taught him to plow, hunt, and be a man. He didn’t shy from telling her his father had run off when he was an infant, and was never seen in those parts again.

  He paused to think of more to tell her now that he was rolling. In that still moment, he was struck by how pretty she was, how her dark hair framed her features. He knew her eyes were green even washed into gray by the stars.

  ‘Geneviève?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your father asked me not to say anything about it to you. And you don’t have to, it’s okay. But, I was wondering... can you tell me about your mother?’

  Her eyes fell from his. Not like shooting stars, without the brightness, but just dark stones.

  ‘What did he tell you about her?’

  ‘That she died from the flu. And the Germans did nothing about it. Just let her go.’

  The girl played her fingers over her bent knees. Joe Amos wanted to reach for her hands but did not.

  Without looking up, Geneviève told him, ‘Yes, she is dead.’

  ‘The Marquis said she was a real pistol. Gave the Krauts hell the whole time they were here.’

  ‘Oui. Even so, she died quietly.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘My mere, Joe Amos, she was a woman like your mother. Strong. But when the Germans were here for four years, she used all her strength.’

  ‘How about your father? What did he do?’

  ‘He is a willful man. It was he who made my mother quiet, who made her bend her will to the Germans. He was correct to do this. If we would have resisted, they would have shot us or sent us all to a camp, perhaps burned our home. I do not know that we would have survived. I do not blame him. But it was silence that killed my mother.’

  With care, Joe Amos reached under her chin. He lifted her face. He imagined he saw there the vestiges of the brave mother, the years and sacrifice under the Germans, her fevered death. He saw no anger for the Marquis, so felt none on his own. Geneviève took his hand. Joe Amos squeezed her palm, then lifted it to his lips.

  ‘We should go now. It is late,’ she said, ‘and I heard your McGee snoring in the truck.’

  She stood first, stepping lightly off the blanket. Joe Amos pulled his boots over his OD socks, then raised the blanket and shook it out. He wrapped it around her. He bent for the lantern and handed it to her. She did not turn up the wick but left it dim
.

  Geneviève stepped close. Her lips brushed his cheek.

  ‘Come back,’ she whispered.

  She turned away. The girl floated over the grass, the blanket a train behind her. Again, she was all in white, again a ghost, but now returning to the big dark house.

  ~ * ~

  D+32

  July 8

  A milk of moonlight spread across the face of Mont Castre. The Norman summer night lay cool. Shadows and crater pools creaked with stepped-on sticks and shifting men. Each sound drew fire, blue gunpowder blinks from the GIs and the whiz of bullets from the Krauts above and below. When the shooting eased, they left someone hurt either in the doughs’ lines or the unseen ranks of the enemy. Cries for corpsmen tolled the damage in English and German. For a mile across the surrounded positions of 1st and 3rd Battalions, the night and the slope of the hill snapped like a campfire with shots.

  The Krauts called twice more for the thousand Americans to surrender. Between the loudspeaker assaults, they spoke with guns, mortars, and running boots. The GIs fired back their waning ammunition.

  With dawn two hours away, Sergeant Pullin plopped next to Ben. The radioman private did not follow the sergeant around the trench any longer, the last battery was drained. Captain Whitcomb and the rest of Lima Company were out of touch with 2nd Platoon except for runners, and these rabbits ran under intense fire.

  ‘Chap, you got any more of those cigarettes?’

  ‘Gave out the last one two hours ago.’

  ‘Figures.’

  The sergeant licked his lips, perhaps wanting tobacco, or to moisten his mouth, with nothing in his canteen. Ben had no water or smokes to offer, just words, and he had none of them that were not stale. Somewhere to the east, shots rang. Pullin didn’t turn his head that way. He kept his eyes down the hill.

  ‘Why don’t they just come for us?’ he asked.

  Ben knew the answer. The Germans hadn’t changed their style of defense in a quarter century. Their Generals valued territory more than anything, more than the raw numbers the Americans used to yardstick success. Whenever the Krauts lost ground, they always counterattacked. They could lose ten thousand men and hold a fortress and call that victory. Americans would not bleed into the soil the way the Germans would. More than anything, more than any weapon or trait, that made them fearsome enemies.

  ‘They’re trying to wear us down first. They figure we’ll get desperate enough to go after them downhill, to get out of being surrounded.’

  ‘Then they’ll disappear into the woods. We’ll swing and miss. I get it.’

  ‘And all we’ll have done is give them back the hundred yards of this hill we already took.’

  Another yap of fighting erupted out in the fields at the north foot of Mont Castre. The sergeant nodded, comprehending.

  ‘They’re keeping the whole damned division busy,’ Pullin said. ‘No one can get to us.’

  ‘Someone will,’ Ben answered.

  ‘He better bring me a steak.’

  Ben was hungry, too.

  ‘When’s the counterattack, you reckon?’

  ‘Sunrise.’

  ‘You scared, Chap?’

  ‘Yep. As much as anybody on this hill.’

  ‘Funny. The men don’t think you are.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yeah, they figure since you’re older and you been in the other war, you’ve seen this kind of thing, being surrounded. And you got, you know, the God thing working for you.’

  Ben looked into the dark outline he made on the trench, wishing the shadow were a hole he could drop into, a tunnel leading away. He would not say to this sergeant how wrong the men’s assessment was. He was more frightened now than he’d ever been as a fighting man. Ben Kahn the chaplain did not have the luxuries of a rifleman. He did not fix his stare into one place in the dark, uphill or down, guarding his station and doing his bit, he did not have comrades at his sides to whisper and confide in, no gun took up his hands with single purpose. His memories of the first war were no help, they only added to his burden of images in the dark and toted up the body count far more than what lay in the trench tonight. Ben was afraid and God was no solace because, godlike, he saw everything—struggle, life, and death. Ben could not look away, he, too, had to be everywhere and always selfless. And now that he was not even credited with fear by the men, he felt like God, alone.

  The sergeant waited for a response but got nothing. Ben pivoted away. Keeping below the lip of the trench he walked to the far end, where the bodies were collected. Since nightfall another corpse had been added, another of the wounded had died. There were now three dead beside the lieutenant. Ben sat at their feet, his back to the platoon. He put his face in his hands. Should anyone come close, he would look to be praying.

  ~ * ~

  Phineas Allenby arrived with the following dusk. The little preacher seemed to step out of a dream. The way dreams have coronas, Phineas glowed.

  ‘Hello, Ben.’

  ‘Hello, Phineas. Get down.’

  Phineas stood too tall above the trench. He would be shot. The Germans shot everyone they could see.

  ‘It’s alright, Ben.’ Phineas came closer. He held out a canteen. ‘Have some water.’

  Ben could not take the canteen. His own hands were busy buttoning the pockets of Waco, the corporal who’d gotten the Dear John letter. Ben had rifled the boy’s body, not looking for personal items, not trying to retrieve the twenty pictures of the platoon’s gals, but scrounging for rations, cigarettes, water, anything the dead boy did not need, but the two dozen living men of the platoon had to have to go on fighting.

  Sixteen bodies lay at this end of the trench, arranged in four piles. All the heads faced one way, boots the other. If Phineas asked, Ben could describe the wound that killed each, the last sounds from each mouth, the many kinds of prayers he whispered, the pressure of each hand before release. Deaths at dawn, daylight, sundown, or darkness, each had his own moment and parting light. He could tell Phineas how this one’s from Houston, that one’s got a gal who’s a pinup model, this one wants to be a crop duster pilot. It was sad and wrong to stack them like this, to mingle them.

  Behind Phineas, the tatters of the platoon were still there, squatting and staring up the hill. Ben could point at each of the twenty-four men still breathing and tell details of their living. Half of them wore the last wraps of me dead medic’s gauze supply, scavenged by Ben from the medic’s pockets and cubbies. All had bayonets fixed, out of ammo at last.

  There were other figures in the trench, faces he did not recognize. Each dogface of the platoon had an angel with him, another soldier giving him things, settling beside him and aiming another gun up the slope. Sergeant Pullin spoke into his radio, someone had found him a fresh battery. The men puffed cigarettes, though Ben had given them the last of his pack a day ago. Phineas was Ben’s angel. Ben cupped his blood-rusted hands under the canteen Phineas still held. Phineas poured. The water instantly became red, slippery with blood. Phineas stopped pouring.

  Ben turned from Phineas. The boots of one of the corpses began to rise. Above the trench, where the Germans would surely shoot them if this were not imagined, three teams of litter bearers lifted bodies out of the trench to lay them on stretchers. Ben did nothing to stop them, dream or not. The dead had been his alone for thirty hours but he knew they would be taken from him. He watched the first boy carted off, and with the boy went the memory Ben held of him. He could not recall the boy’s name or his town or what he’d found in his pockets. He watched another hoisted and hauled away. Ben had meant to mark every one of them. When a third was plucked from the trench, Phineas woke him with a firm touch. Ben’s hands were cold. He looked up at the little chaplain and blinked.

  ‘Drink some water, Ben.’

  His awakened body was a miser. The water in his throat stoked his need. Phineas would not let him drink as fast and much as he desired. Ben let the canteen go reluctantly, gasping as though running.

  �
�I reckon you’re hungry.’

  While Phineas opened a K-ration pack, Ben could not stop his fingers from waving like antennae. He devoured every edible thing. When he was done, he huffed, glaring at the knapsack for more.

  Phineas sat in the trench. All the bodies were gone. Ben had not noticed the last of them ferried away. The trench was peopled again with living soldiers, their guns faced to the crest of Mont Castre. Where were the Germans downhill? Ben was not thirsty and only a little hungry. He looked at his washed hands.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked Phineas.