We scared ourselves up a lark by the side of the road. It flew toward the dark ceiling of branches. Frenzied, trapped, it made its wild and flapping way down the lane until it was free. Beyond the trees, the bird forgot its panic. Cheerful now, it launched itself toward the radiant clouds, singing.
“ ‘We look before and after,’ ” I quoted softly. “ ‘And pine for what is not.’ ”
The three of them stared.
“Shelley,” I explained. “He said that no matter how contented humans are sometimes, bad memories hang around. The future’s always worrying at us, too. We just can’t ever be as happy as that damned lark.”
They stood in the road, a trio of blank-faced sheep.
“Oh, fucking goddamn never mind,” I said.
The moment, if it had ever been, was over. Pickering mock-punched Marrs. Marrs dodged and slapped back. Riddell stepped off the path to pick a weed. I wondered where Miller was and what he was doing.
We stopped at a little arched bridge over a canal and stared down into the dark water for a while. I thought of Coleridge, of Xanadu and its sunless sea. Then of Poe’s morbid ghosties and how old Edgar Allan would have been drawn to my dreams’ cypress-dark.
“Think I could thump meself up a fish?” Marrs let a pebble drop. It sank into the black water, leaving dark concentric ripples in its wake.
Pickering said, “Gas him. That’d be faster. Go ahead, Marrs. Give him one of your famous farts.”
Pickering held his throat and pretended to choke. Marrs punched him lightly in the arm. They slapped each other for a while.
We walked on. The yellow flowers were gone from the meadows, but wild ducks floated a nearby canal. Spotted cows nosed under wire fences, in a search for the forbidden. I thought of the tumbledown hut, of Dunston-Smith and Miller. Did they talk poetry there? The Holsteins and me—pining for what is not.
Then Marrs started singing. His voice was as pure as a flute, so high that only the top branches could catch it. His voice dazed me. His Latin came so easy. How could something that extraordinary come out of such an unexceptional man? And the song, Bobby. God. That song. If there was ever an anthem for my graveyard, he was singing it.
“What on earth are you bawling about there, Marrs?” Pickering asked.
I could have knocked him down.
“Taverner’s ‘Magnificat.’ I was a choir boy, wasn’t I.”
Pickering huffed. “No. I meant what were the words you were mouthing? I couldn’t understand the bleeding words.”
“Well, that’s ’cause it’s Latin, then.” All in a flood, he said, “ ‘Magnificat anima mea Dominum. Et exsultavit spiritus meus in Deo salutari meo ...’ ”
How could he do that? How could he remember the words so well, and say them so quick and so matter of fact? It was too fast for me to follow, still I knew the prayer was magic—an incantation for the lips of marble angels.
Pickering’s “Ye-e-es” teetered on the edge of aggravation. “All very well and good, Marrs, but what does it mean?”
“Well, the fathers don’t tell us that, now does they.”
“Sing it again,” I said.
Pickering rolled his eyes.
“Please,” I said. “Sing it again.”
Marrs opened his mouth. Song poured out of his small, ordinary body. I dropped back a few paces and walked behind them to hide the tears he brought to my eyes.
I should have saved them for the C.C.S. aid station, maybe. Easier to get choked up over beauty, though, than it is ugliness. And that hospital was an ugly place.
You could hear the wounded moaning long before we ever got there. They were lying in the grass around the portable buildings. Men, towels over their eyes, were sitting dumbfounded and gasping in the road. We picked our way around dead still on their stretchers, left where they were dropped when it was seen they were without hope.
And there wasn’t much hope, Bobby. In the yard, the freshly wounded; inside, men were puffed grotesque with rot: fingers the size of pickles, arms and legs like blood-sausage balloons. God, it stank. The air was thick with the sweet-sick stench of spoiled meat. I wondered if those boys knew they were death-bound, or if they were still hoping.
Riddell stopped a doctor to ask directions. Marrs’s face had gone pasty. Pickering kept looking at the ceiling. I tried the best I could to hold my breath, tried not to meet any of the bedridden’s eyes. Then I saw a familiar figure in a corner. O’Shaughnessy was comforting the dying.
“This way,” Riddell said.
We hurried after him, escaped past a canvas building and barrels piled high with bloody pus-stained gauze to another cheap canvas-and-wood barracks, one filled with the drowning-man sounds of the gas victims. That’s where we found Foy.
He was sitting up on pillows. His arms were raw and oozing. He’d crusted his sheets, and in places they were stuck to him. His eyes were swollen nearly shut, dripping and thick with pus. It looked like he was crying amber.
“ ’Ello there, Foy,” Riddell said gently. He went up to the bed when none of the rest of us would.
Foy kind of tilted his head funny, squinting sideways at Riddell. He whispered something, I think. At least his cracked, swollen lips moved, and bleeding fissures opened. Jesus. He couldn’t be hurt that bad. It was just a little sniff of gas. He’d got his mask on in time.
“You’re right, Foy. ’Course I brought the others.” How could Sergeant understand that dry-leaf whisper? How did he have the heart to smile? Riddell turned and pointed to where we stood in the safety of the aisle. “See, lad? Brought you Pickering and Marrs and old Stanhope, too.”
I looked away. Toward the back wall, yellow-blistered men were strapped to their beds, trying their damnedest to scream. Nothing came out of the wide dark of their mouths but hisses.
“Brung you a comfrey poultice,” Riddell was saying. He took a paper packet from his uniform blouse. “An’ horehound and licorice for your cough.”
I swallowed hard to force my unruly laughter down.
“No, no, it’s all right, lad. Needn’t try to speak. We’ll do the speaking, won’t we?” Riddell looked at us, warning in his eyes.
Pickering said in a wild, bright voice, “Got yourself a Blighty!”
The little joke went through me. Foy’s grunting pain made me shiver. He was trying to smile. The effort cracked his skin apart again. Don’t, I wanted to tell him. Don’t you dare. Don’t you go smiling at Pickering’s lousy jokes.
Marrs’s turn. The best he could manage was a nod and a wave.
“We miss you,” I told Foy.
Pickering looked at me in surprise.
“We got us a new guy, name of Calvert. He’s nice, I guess, but I miss you. I thought you should know that.”
Pickering let out a high, insane giggle. “Long as he doesn’t fart in the dugout, like Marrs.”
Then Marrs asked the unintentionally cruel question: “When are you coming back, then?”
What was left of Foy’s mouth moved. His throat must have been all blisters too. I couldn’t hear what he was trying so hard to say.
Riddell didn’t either. He bent down. “What is it, lad?”
It was a stupid question that Marrs had asked; and the answer cost too much. Foy’s struggle made me look away. In the corner hissing men were lashed tight to their beds, their raw, blistered tongues protruding. I looked away quick, and that’s when I saw them.
They were just standing there, Bobby. Not pale like you’d expect, but hazy all the same, like they didn’t have as much stuffing as the living. God. There were so many. There must have been more than a company, shoulder to shoulder. A silent parade of dead men.
A shock wave of despair went through me. Not my despair, but theirs. I felt their loneliness. Their confusion. Felt the combined fear of over two hundred strong. And through that attack of emotion came a barrage of other people’s memories, too—hand-me-downs, all sepia and faded: snatches of nursery rhymes I’d never known, a fierce mother-bond at the sight of
a woman I’d never seen. Dozens of little boys and little girls, pictures of my children, each and every one of them a stranger. Grimy English streets and smoke-filled pubs. Wide sleet-spattered moors. Trout fishing with a father who loved me.
I felt a tug at my sleeve. Heard Marr’s concerned, “You all right, Stanhope? Need some fresh air, then?”
I shut my eyes quick. When I opened them, the ghosties were gone.
I left, too. Left Foy with his prolonged and hideous dying. In the fresh air of the yard I bent double, sucking air. A passing nurse eyed me. I started walking fast, past the surgical hut, toward the road.
O’Shaughnessy’s call stopped me. “Travis!”
I watched him scurry over the grass. He had a purple stole over his shoulders. It flapped, its embossing scattering the light. He was holding a Bible in both his hands. When he reached me, he didn’t speak. All around that meadow I could hear the low, sad song of the wounded.
“ ‘Magnificat,’ ” I said.
He cocked his head and squinted, a gesture so near to what Foy had done that ice balled up in my belly: O’Shaughnessy trying to see me through the crust the both of us had built.
“Tell me what it says.”
He smiled. “Ah. ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord,’ lad. ‘And my spirit hath rejoiced.’ Was that what you were seeking?”
“Yeah. Thanks.” Nearby were piles of garbage from surgery: red mountains of gauze; a blue-white arm, its graceful fingers splayed.
“Will you not sit down and have a chat with me, Travis?”
I took in a deep breath. Rotting flesh, but under that, the sweet smell of damp earth, the perfume of crushed grass.
“You’ve been to see Foy I take it?”
I nodded.
“Good that you did, lad. He’ll be appreciating that.”
Foy’s slow march of the hours. None of us could go with him, not even those poor bastards whose screams had been stolen; not the ghosts who had already passed through these painful billets and were awaiting orders.
“A hard death,” O’Shaughnessy said. “And hard to look at. Don’t go blaming yourself for turning away.”
Wide of the mark. Like Miller had been that time. Misunderstandings from men who should have known me better. “It makes me mad, sir. That’s all.”
“Don’t be mad at God, lad. Wasn’t Him sent Abner Foy to war. It was the British Army. And still, Travis, you see the horror of it surely, but you’re a thinking man, and so I know you see the glory, too. Suffering the more to appreciate Heaven. Suffering as Christ himself did. Seen that way, why, pain becomes a blessed thing.”
“Should tell Foy. He’d like to know that.”
“I have told him. I tell them all. Come now. I can see how distressed this has made you. Come. Sit down and let’s have a chat.”
Misunderstandings. He put his hand on my arm. I pushed it away. “You talked about things I told you private-like. I thought priests weren’t supposed to do that.”
“And what would that be?”
“About the whore. You told Miller, didn’t you?”
O’Shaughnessy’s attention wandered from canvas hut to dying soldiers to a far line of trees. “I could tell you that what we had was nothing that near to confession, neither the form nor the fact that you’re not of the Faith. You’re an apostate, lad. And there are ten bishops at home who would pass over what I did without a squeak about my breaking the seal. Well, truth is, there would be ten bishops as well who would tell you that I’m a poor excuse for a priest. But it was just that Captain told me what the police had found, you see. Then he told me you had scarpered off somewhere that night. He was horrified by the implications, I can tell you, and frightened what the rest of the officers were gossiping. He asked if I thought you could do something so terrible.”
I felt the first strong emotion since the ghosties’ hand-me-down despair. It was rage.
He said, “I told him no.”
Coming out of a door into the cleansing sunlight were Riddell, Pickering, and Marrs. Foy would still be inside, his leaking body on its stained bed.
“But I had to tell the captain the rest, Travis, for you’re a puzzle whose pieces don’t quite fit. And if it meant breaking a vow and taking on the sin of it, I intended to save your soul.”
“The army would have give a ten-minute court-martial, then took me out and shot me. What about trying to save my life a little before you went off blabbing about me, sir?”
“Ah, lad. If it was lives I wanted to save, I’d be telling all these boyos to go home.”
Marrs, Pickering, and Riddell were waiting. By them, an officer. I ached to confess to someone, anyone, about seeing the ghosties, but it was too late.
I had started away when I heard O’Shaughnessy’s quiet, “Sorry, lad.”
Said serious enough, but he was grinning. In the middle of screaming and dying men, talking about suffering and glory. Smiling forgiveness for his own sins. In his purple stole, magnifying the Lord.
I trotted across the grass to Riddell. The officer with him turned to watch my approach.
“ ... a week, I shouldn’t guess.” The officer was a major, one with medical corps insignia. “A bit of bad luck, that.”
Foy’s body weeping into his sheets. Bad luck. A blessing.
From Marrs a shockingly irate “But I thought he was getting better.”
The major didn’t take offense. Get used to gassing victims, I suppose, you can get used to disrespect. “Um. Yes. Looked better for a while. Thought he’d turned the corner, what? But it had worked its way into the lungs. No way to know until the lesions started suppurating. Still, a kind word, a familiar face. Cheering them up does wonders, I always say.”
“It’s possible, then? He could get better?” Marrs asked.
The major cleared his throat. “Well! I’m sure that he enjoyed his little visit. There’s that.”
I left Pickering shaking his head at Marrs’s question. I went back into the ward and closed the door behind me. No one, not the patients trapped in their grotesque bodies, not the overworked nurses, paid any attention to my entrance. No ghosties came to lend me memories. I walked over to Foy’s bed.
He was either dead or asleep. I stood and watched until I saw the slight rise and fall of his chest. Too bad. Poor Foy, brimming over with blessings.
I reached down and took his swollen, scaly hand. “There’s this graveyard, Foy. Look for it, will you? You’ll know when you get there, because there’s no other peace like it. There’s marble angels and a mausoleum with a glass ceiling, glass so thick that light from it shimmers down on the tiles a pure water blue.”
I couldn’t tell if he was hearing me. The tip of his dry tongue came out, licked his lips. The inside of his mouth, I saw, was bleeding.
“There’s a woman,” I said. “You’ll like her. Tell her I sent you. Tell her she needs to take care of you special. She’ll do that for me. This is the truth, Foy. I’m sure of it now.”
I started to leave, but he held onto my fingers for a heartbeat, so light and brief a holding that it might have been reflex.
I squeezed back, careful not to hurt him. “That graveyard. It’s a goddamned beautiful blessing.”
The four of us didn’t talk much on the walk back. It was coming on twilight. We passed under a line of poplars, disturbing a roosting flock of pigeons, sending them flying, rustling softly through branches, fluttering and cooing above our heads, tree to tree. We walked like potentates, the birds announcing our coming. Rabbits in a nearby meadow lifted their heads to watch us pass.
When we hit the rest area, Riddell had a long private conversation with Blackhall. He came back grinning. “Got us a few hours more leave. That inn? Frenchie cook has learned ’imself fry-ups. Does a fair fish and chips. Anyone want to go?”
The fish was soggy, the fries cut too big. I had a few glasses of wine and tried to explain to the cook about cornmeal and buttermilk, about the need for bacon drippings.
Pickering just h
ad to visit the whores, and even Riddell took a turn. I got the skinny one this time. Her hair was all done up in dark curls. Ringlets framed her cheek. We lay side by side, not talking, not fucking. She had the most amazing milk white skin, Bobby, and rosy little nipples. I ran my hand all over her slow. A miracle how whole her body was, what a blessing. She kept trying to kiss me. She played with my pecker. But after a while she stopped trying to earn her five shillings so hard. She stared at the ceiling, and she was smiling a little. I stroked her. I smelled her skin, Bobby. I buried my face in her ringlets and smelled her hair.
When my nose and hands knew her, I rolled on top and nudged her legs apart. Being in her felt safe. I rested there for a while. My head was against her chest. I could hear her heart beating, a sound to sleep to.
I took hold of her hand and put it to my cheek. Whores are good at understanding what a man needs; and so she caressed my face, my shoulders until I felt real again. She moved against me slow, and we rocked together into loving. She showed me a nice time, and I left her a pound note for her trouble. When I started to go out the door, she grabbed my hand to stay me. She ran her fingers over my forehead, my cheek. She kissed me real light on the corner of my mouth.
“All right,” she said in her broken English. “All right,” she promised, stroking me. “Is all right.”
It is all right, I think. When I got downstairs, Riddell was beaming, so proud of himself he was near to bursting.
“A fine night, d’ye think so, Stanhope?” As if a good fuck had turned him into Pickering, he punched me in the arm. “Fine night.”
And so it was.
Travis Lee
* * *
SEPTEMBER 2, A POSTCARD FROM THE FRONT LINES
Dear Bobby,
They got me sharpshooting the way Blackhall says it should be done. No more acting on my own, either. Got me a partner. Gives me somebody to talk to, I guess. Heatwave’s broken; the weather’s fine. The nights are downright chilly.
Travis Lee
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