“It’s okay.” I backed up another step.
“Unbelievably boorish of me.”
“It’s okay. Forget it.”
“Yes, best done, what?” The too-bright glint returned to his eyes again. He ducked his head quickly. “Never happen again.”
I know that it won’t. That kiss laid something to rest between us. I know for sure now that what I feel for him isn’t romance. There’s love there, though. I felt it from him, strong as I’ve felt from any woman.
I stuck my hand out. “No hard feelings.”
Unlike LeBlanc, Miller’s hands were clean. He held on a shade too long. “Thank you.”
He pulled away a careful distance and stood watching me. I could see it in him, plain as day. I guess when I looked at him from now on, I’d see how he wanted me.
“Needn’t worry about this unpleasantness, Stanhope.
Seems you were indeed on a country stroll. In fact, I found you’d caught sight of me where I’d gone windmill viewing. Would have accosted me at the time, too, had you not been AWL. At any rate, seems you’ve verified the places I stopped, what I looked at, that sort of thing. We’ll be vague with our stories, shall we? Windmills. Canals. Picturesque country, that sort of thing.”
“Makes sense to me, sir.”
I think he meant to clap me on the shoulder again, but thought better of it. “Do keep yourself safe, Stanhope.”
Awkward, standing there, that kiss rift between us. I wanted to say something, but like all pathetic should-haves in life, I didn’t. When I left, I left us both unfinished.
I can’t help but wonder how I would feel if he got killed tonight; so I just wanted to tell you that I love you, Bobby. I wanted you to know that you take up all the half-pint places in my childhood. I think about myself and always remember you: how you trotted after me wherever I went, that diaper of yours drooping. When I’d pick you up, you’d go to kissing on me. Embarrassed me down to the floor sometimes. And your kisses were always sticky. I don’t know why. I’d tell you not to do it. Sometimes I’d spank you—never very hard. Even with the spanking, you’d kiss on me, anyway. Love comes out like that, I guess.
If it was me who died tonight, you’d get the things in my pack. You’d get my letters, so if there was ever any question about my loving you, you’d know. You’d get a “Sorry to inform you” letter from my captain, and you’ll know that when I died, he cried over me in secret, like he got misty-eyed when I pushed him away.
I don’t want him touching me, but I’d sooner tell him I loved him than I’d tell any woman. So if I die, write him for me. Enclose this letter. He should know that much, I think.
Travis Lee
AUGUST 23, THE FRONT LINES
Dear Bobby,
Sorry my letters were spotty for a while. And you’re about to find out that there’s a big gap between this one and the last. It doesn’t mean anything, really. Kinder if it did. Home seems so faint and far, that’s all.
Last week the heat was like a sledgehammer. Not a breath of wind. Flies covered No Man’s Land like a black, restless snow. Swarms of flies filled the trenches; killing heat settled in the dugouts. We stripped down to our shorts and splashed each other with water.
The heat was so bad that when the Boche started coming up for air every once in a while, I didn’t have the heart to shoot them. Their snipers didn’t shoot our boys, either. That week on the front lines I watched bare-assed Germans taking sunbaths: bright pink shoulders, bright pink cheeks. I watched them hang up their laundry to dry.
“Best keep it quiet, now,” Riddell warned us. “Last winter we cut the Boche a Christmas tree and took it over, didn’t we. They came up out of their trenches. We sang carols together—“Silent Night” and “God Rest Ye Merry”—and we gave each other presents. Then someone ’as to go tattle, and orders come down: our artillery’s to lay into the poor blighters worse. We bloody pounded them, we did. Right at Christmas. And for us, it was speech after blinking speech on the joys of killing till they figured we’d got back our stomach for battle.”
Stomach for battle. I’ve had that, Bobby. So has Riddell. It’s a bad belly, and when you got it, you do things that make you sick to puking.
For me, the worst was when I shot a Boche who had reached over the parapet to get something. I don’t know what he was reaching for, or why it was so important. He was half over the sandbags when I hit him, and I didn’t get him clean. Maybe in the throat, for that’s where the blood seemed to come spraying and bubbling out. He thrashed real bad, Bobby. He flailed around so, he fell the rest of the way into No Man’s Land.
I should have finished him off. You’d do that much for a deer. But I was too shaken, and pulling the trigger again was too hard. I’d popped all the other Boche without much thought, and they’d fallen fast out of my sight. This boy was suffering so, it made me heartsick.
Instead of doing what I needed to, I sat down on the firestep. I guess I was hoping the whole thing—his mistake and mine—would just up and go away. But when I peeked through the trench periscope again, the boy was still twitching.
His buddies had thrown him a rope, but he evidently didn’t see it. They started to shout, too. I thought they were yelling at him to grab hold; then I caught on that they were shouting in English. They were begging me to kill him.
You do what you have to. It took me two shots, for I was shaking pretty bad at the time. I didn’t even bother to change my position. I was lucky, I guess, that their sniper didn’t nail me.
The next morning I was relieved to see that he had vanished. His buddies had gathered him in.
When bad things happen you put them in a little box somewheres, Bobby. You wrap those memories up real neat and store them in a closet. When you least expect it, though, you’ll turn a corner and find that damned package sitting out. Riddell’s back to his normal self after bayoneting that Boche boy who was trying his best to surrender. Sergeant must have boxed the memory up. Still, I bet sometimes he opens a piece of mental mail and finds out too late that it contained the boy’s death throes and how the rifle stock felt, twitching in his hands.
I hadn’t had a drink until the day the Boche begged me to kill their friend. Hadn’t wanted one, really. But LeBlanc found me, made me sit down with him on some old empty ammo boxes. As the sun set, we had us some brandy.
“Tell me about your mare,” he said.
LeBlanc’s a strange sort. I don’t know where he sleeps night to night. I suspect nobody does. Sometimes when I’m lying in the dugout with Pickering and Marrs I get to thinking about LeBlanc and wondering if he’s out in the dark, hunting No Man’s Land. It sends shivers down me.
“She’s a born cutting horse,” I told him. “Hell, she wasn’t but a year-old filly when she started watching cows. I think sometimes she figures it’s a step-down for her to guard goats. She sees I got the Border collies for the chasing, so what the hell? What about yours?”
“Had to sell him when I joined up. So your mare figures you got her slumming, eh?”
It’s like LeBlanc was raised up without any stories to tell, and so he wants to possess mine. I resent that in him. There’s times I feel like he’s thieving my memories in the casual, sneaky way he takes lives.
I asked him, “You’re Catholic, right?”
Twilight was falling. The trench was murky, the sky above an unsettled color, not blue, not quite pink. I heard LeBlanc moving around, saw the flare of a match, smelled the nose-tickling, intoxicating smoke of a Woodbine cigarette.
“Want one?”
I reached out, fumbled for the pack. LeBlanc was just a dark hulking shape with a coal in its hand. We sat smoking and sipping for a while.
“Yeah,” he said. “Raised in the Church, anyway. You had your nose up O’Shaughnessy’s butt for a while. You turning Catholic there, Stanhope? Better watch yourself. Once the Church gets hold of your short hairs, they never let go.”
“He saved my life once,” I told LeBlanc.
“Who
? That mick? That’s what you say. You also promised to kiss my great big baton.”
I watched him take a drag on his cigarette. The coal at the tip went bright. Somewhere outside the sun must have been setting in a bonfire blaze. Pink and orange streaks gloried across the sky.
I said, “I’m puckered and waiting.”
LeBlanc doesn’t laugh a lot, leastways not happy ones; so his gut-loud guffaw surprised me.
“You’re such an asshole, Stanhope.”
The fondness in his tone surprised me, too.
I said, “I thought priests wasn’t supposed to tell on you, I mean, your secrets and all.”
“Can’t trust a priest.” Then he said, “They lie all the time, especially about Heaven and Hell, you know? All that shit.” The cinder-tip of LeBlanc’s Woodbine fell like a shooting star, then lay there, smoldering. “None of us goes anywhere, eh? When God’s finished with us, He tosses us in a garbage can. That’s all we get: darkness. Maybe the stink of old cabbage. Shoulder to shoulder with used rubbers. Goddamn cats rooting around you. Flies all over, and rats pissing on your head. That sort of thing.”
I laughed. I took my last lungful of Woodbine and threw the butt down. Above, the gold and pink rays had faded. The first shy stars were peeking through.
“You think it’s funny, eh? You’ve been in this crapper of an army, Stanhope. You chicken-shit sentimental cunt-headed bastard. You’ve seen what death looks like. You think after death’ll be any better?”
“Well, okay, but you said ‘God,’ right? Seems to me that if you believe in God, you got some sort of pattern going. Come on, LeBlanc. See what I’m saying? Else why believe in God at all?”
“Goddamn Church never gave me any choice.”
He sounded so sad when he said that, like the Church had stolen all his could-be’s.
I don’t know. The way that Boche boy of mine fought dying, you’d think he’d caught a peek of what was to come. He whipped his arms around so, maybe he was battling LeBlanc’s trash-can Purgatory.
Me, I’ve been dreaming about the cemetery again. The mausoleum’s doors have been flung open. The marble niches are empty and waiting. A warm breeze blows through, and birds flutter around the domed glass ceiling. Fallen leaves gather in the quiet corners; they scrape along the floor.
The platoon’s gone, but for some reason that’s all right. Trantham doesn’t call anymore, and that’s all right, too. I walk the gravel path and look down into the glass-topped graves. There are other soldiers sleeping: Boche and Frenchies, Tommies and boot-black Algerians. I look for familiar faces, but all I see are strangers.
I see the calico girl sometimes. Coming across her is always a surprise. When I least expect it she’ll be seated on a fallen tombstone or standing by a pensive angel. She has a thoughty look, as if she’s concentrating hard on all her drowsy charges.
The graveyard’s flowers have gone to seed, Bobby, the plants long bolted, life sucking them dry and woody. Fruit has gone so overripe, so sweet, that it’s all windfalls now. Even in my dreams, autumn’s coming.
Travis Lee
* * *
AUGUST 23, THE RESERVE TRENCHES
Dear Bobby,
This afternoon a shell hit one of Nye’s secret dumping grounds. Shit went skyward. It came down over the enlisted trenches in brown, aromatic sprays. It pattered down in a heavy stinking rain all the way from HQ to the aid post. Hear tell Major Dunn got his fat-assed self a face full. Ain’t war wonderful?
When we’d cleaned ourselves up, me and Marrs and Pickering and the new man, Calvert, were sitting around the dugout when the Boche began shelling for serious. Marrs looked up dubiously at the piece of elephant sheet over our heads. The strikes were close, but without punch, mostly all Jack Johnsons. Still, the earth vibrated. The dust on our plank table erupted into clouds. Bits of dirt and pebbles danced the boards. Pickering and me exchanged looks. Calvert’s first time in a barrage. He’d go to screaming or crying or shitting his pants.
Marrs lit the primus stove that we’d all chipped in to get. He put on a kettle for tea. A Jack Johnson exploding outside the door made our tin cups clatter, sent black smoke billowing over the parapet.
“Milk or lemon?” Marrs asked.
Only powdered milk. Just dried lemon rind, but still. Riddell’s sister had sent him a box full of tea fixings and he shared it with all the platoon. Poor old Foy. Rumor had it he was due back about the same time we got those tea fixings. The fool sent us a message that said he was happy he didn’t have a Blighty. Crazy, isn’t it? Said coming back to the platoon would be just like being home. But I heard that three nights later he took a turn for the worse, his blisters oozing again.
A sharp crack, the blast so near that even Pickering ducked. Dirt rattled down the sheet metal of our elephant like hail.
“Bloody hell,” Marrs said.
A startling cuss for him. He’d dropped the lemon rind, and now set about salvaging it from the floor’s muck.
There was a vacancy where Foy should have been, a place where the too-silent Calvert sat now. I exchanged another glance with Pickering, the unspoken language that all originals know. My shrug was, At least he’s not crying.
Pickering’s ironic smile meant, Not yet.
A long, seemingly endless whistle, descending the scale. The whizzbang struck somewhere down the trench. Someone far away started screaming for the medics.
The kettle screamed, too. I flinched, then laughed at myself. You get used to it, Bobby. Folks die with the shelling, one and two at a time: a parsimony of war. I remember how scared I used to be of artillery, and I have to wonder if the barrage was really so bad the night McPhearson got it. But seems like I can remember the dumb, inescapable blows of 8.5’s coming as fast as windmilling fists, loud as freight trains. Heavy shelling is like an act of God, Bobby. They call it “hate.” And the real hate, the lunatic mad-God hate, kills in squads, in platoons, in companies. I remember the endless storms of 8.5’s. I remember the Boche that we found huddled together in dugouts, stunned to death by our barrage. Compared to that kind of hate, what we were living through was heavenly dislike.
Calvert finally spoke up, and his voice sounded steady enough. “Likes me tea plain, thanks.”
Marrs poured the water into an old biscuit tin, wrapped a field towel around it for a cozy. Another close strike. One of the sandbags on the south wall burst. Black dirt avalanched, burying Pickering’s haversack.
Marrs caught our biscuit tin before it could topple. “Bought us a real teapot a month back,” he said apologetically to Calvert. “But it broke, didn’t it.”
“Considerate old Boche.” Pickering ignored his buried haversack. He lit up a Woodbine, offered the pack around. “They break our teapot, but give us time between shells to ...”
A blast from a whizzbang left him mouthing his last word, left my ears ringing. I dug my fingertip in my ear and shook my head to clear it. The next sound I was able to hear was Pickering’s laughter. “Talk,” he said. “They give us time between shells to talk.”
Three fast ones in succession that left me in a cold sweat. I licked my lips and listened, but the Boche settled down into their slow rhythm again.
“Teatime, gentlemen.” Marrs unwrapped the tin with a flourish and poured.
Calvert took his first sip and spewed it. Marrs got a spray of tea full in the face. His eyes went as wide as eggs.
“Sod all!” Calvert shouted. “Bleeding sugar! There’s bleeding sugar in ’ere!”
“Well, it comes together, now, doesn’t it?” Marrs was saying. “The tea and the sugar. Comes packaged. Can’t pick it apart.”
But Calvert’s polite facade had cracked; no explanation would mend it. “Bleeding army! Effing, bleeding war! They puts the effing, bleeding sugar in our effing bloody tea? An’ wifout asking? Them bastards! What if we don’t likes it, then? They ever bleeding stop and think about that?”
Pickering and me nearly split a gut laughing. No doubt about it. Calvert’s goi
ng to work out just fine.
Travis Lee
* * *
AUGUST 31, THE REST AREA
Dear Bobby,
Yesterday Riddell asked permission for all of us to visit Foy. There, just outside the mess tent, Blackhall looked from Riddell to Pickering, from Marrs to me. It was my eyes he lingered on. He owes me. He knows I never told anyone about that beating. But just so I remember that he has the upper hand, he keeps riding me and riding me about my drinking. The asshole. He knows as well as I do that if I ever had a problem, I sure don’t have it now.
Still, he can’t help but put a dig in once in a while. “Long as you sees Stanhope ’ere keeps his nose out of the bottle.”
Then it was salute-the-shit and a chorus of Thank-you-sirs. “Back on time, now. Won’t have yer loitering.”
A click of heels—my uncarved-on, uncomfortable boots. Peckerwood Blackhall wouldn’t have it any other way. We got out of there quick as we could, left the rest of the boys to their forever football game.
The breeze was still warm, but walking the road I could see that summer was ending. Autumn comes on different here, Bobby. It’s like life just thrives so hard in the hedgerows, on the canal banks, in the deep woods, that it wears itself out. I can see it happening around me: stalks gone thick and woody that used to be moist and translucent green. Flowers have used themselves up into seed. Nature’s like an aging woman, sucked dry by childbearing, gone thick around the middle and knobby-fingered.
On the way, Pickering and Marrs pushed and slapped at each other like a couple of kids. Riddell would stop every so often to collect one of his weeds. It was a fine afternoon, Bobby, with clouds towering like white marble fortresses and elfin sun rays slanting through the trees.
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