Flanders

by Anthony, Patricia

  I woke up the other night to hear Marrs crying. He went on for hours, sobbing quiet so as not to wake us. I don’t know if the others knew. Nobody spoke. Thinking on it, I should have said something, but I was too afraid of embarrassing him. Besides, what could I say? Everything’ll be all right? Jesus. Even Marrs is smart enough not to believe that.

  And Pickering’s in a funk. It’s that goddamned cross of his. He’s convinced himself that he’s going to die here. The second night, when everyone else was asleep, he punched me. “Stanhope? Do me a favor.”

  “Yeah?” The dugout was dark and too close, with the four of us crowded together. Calvert was snoring; Marrs was so quiet that he might have been dead. Even the rats had settled down for the evening.

  “When I die, bury me proper, will you?”

  “Better not die on me, Pickering. Else I’ll have to go to London, look up your wife, and fuck her.”

  “No,” he said. “Truly. You must promise me, Stanhope. I’m not joking.”

  I rolled away from him, disturbing a rat, sending it scampering over my legs.

  “Please.” The whispered plea behind me, nothing of Pickering’s banter in it. “You must bury me, Stanhope. There’s only you to ask. I’m afraid Marrs might muck it up. He has a soft enough heart, but he’s always a bit muddled, isn’t he. Like a fart in a colander. I know you’d see it through.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut and wished he’d go to sleep. “Yeah, okay. I’ll bury you.”

  Just like Pickering to get an agreement, then glue caveats on. “Not in the parados, mind. I’d bloody fall out into the trench eventually.”

  “Not in the parados,” I promised.

  “And I wouldn’t care to be sticking out of a wall someplace. You must promise me that. Bloody awful to be rotting where everyone can see. Good God. And I know it would be my luck to be hanging out the bags with my trousers about my ankles.”

  I started laughing. Calvert stirred in his sleep. I bunched my sleeping bag up to my mouth to stifle the noise.

  “Not funny, Stanhope. I have a horror of being left out with the flies and the maggots. I have nightmares about it, if you must know. Don’t you?”

  The conversation was macabre, considering the darkness, the reek. I wanted to tell him about the graveyard, but I knew he’d either make a joke or he’d tell me to prove it. Pickering’s a rock solid boy, the sort who doesn’t hold to visions.

  “Best you don’t go thinking about things like that, Pickering. You go crazy that way.”

  “Well, we’re here, aren’t we? Proof we’re bleeding bonkers. Also, if you don’t mind, Stanhope, I’d rather not be left someplace where rats could eat me.” His last sentence ended in a tired whisper.

  He must have been exhausted. We all were. “Yeah. Okay. I’ll see what I can do.”

  Something fell on me. I flinched and nearly cried out. Only Pickering’s hand. He squeezed my shoulder tight, tried to speak, but choked up instead.

  We were originals. I knew what he meant to say. “Oh, shit, Pickering. You’re welcome.”

  I couldn’t sleep, not when he was crying. I hated the sound of that. I was so damned tired, Bobby—too tired to even try giving him any ghostie and graveyard hope. He was too tired to hear it. Maybe that’s why he boo-hooed, why Marrs did. Life here beats you down. It’s exhausting, being helpless. Every day we rebuild walls and put up revetments. It doesn’t matter. At night, the sandbags fail. If whizzbangs don’t burst them, damp does. Walls tumble. They bury people. The trenches. What great goddamned shelter.

  Yesterday O’Shaughnessy came on me where I was taking a breather from filling sandbags. My arms were trembling, my back ached. I’d been thinking longingly of Dickinson’s description of freezing: Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go. I started thinking how death and grief must be the kinfolk of exhaustion.

  “I’ve had word from hospital, lad,” he told me. “Foy passed on a week back.”

  I nodded, thought about letting myself go into tiredness—just lying down where I was, closing my eyes, and giving myself so completely to sleep that my resting heart would stop.

  He sat down beside me and lit two smokes. He handed me one. “Have you been seeing his ghostie, then?”

  God, that cigarette tasted good. It woke me up, made me feel alive. I took a deep, steadying drag and blew smoke into the monochrome afternoon. It’s the ugliness that beats me down the worst. Everything the hue of dirt—it’s like being struck colorblind.

  “I reckon so. When I dream about the graveyard now, Foy’s always there,” I said. “He’s down in a grave with glass over him and pretty flowers tucked around. His eyes are open, mostly, and that worries me. But the calico girl says he’s just dreaming. What do you think he could be dreaming about, sir? Down in that grave like that?”

  “Heaven,” O’Shaughnessy said.

  All this time I’d been thinking that the graveyard is Heaven, but maybe I’ve been wrong. After all, if the graveyard’s Heaven, why did Dunleavy and the platoon leave? If it’s Heaven, would the flowers fade like they do?

  “Keep watch over Foy, Travis. Don’t be letting him wander.”

  The idea chilled me: Foy sleepwalking through the brightly hued cemetery. Foy wandering past the cypress and stumbling accidentally into the dark.

  That night I went back to the graveyard to look down into Foy’s blank blue eyes.

  “Don’t you be getting up and walking off, now,” I told him.

  The calico girl was standing by a fancy marble urn, laughing.

  “But I got to watch over him,” I said.

  Autumn sunlight tilted through the trees, threw long shadows of blue. Behind her, maples and hickories were already starting to turn. Winter would come soon. The last of the green would dry to brown. Color would leave the graveyard. Snow would gradually, quietly cover the glass. I wondered what Foy would dream then.

  She was still snickering at me.

  “I got to take care of him. It’s my job, ain’t it?”

  The wind rattled through the cottonwood, sent a handful of leaves scattering. Watery sun silver-plated her hair. “He’s never out of my sight.”

  It was said as a promise. And right then, right in the middle of that dream, in the silence of the night, I woke up smiling. The trench stank. Pickering’s elbow was gouging me, Marrs’s butt was in my face; but in the damp of that dugout I felt so damned lucky, protected and coddled down to the bone. Never out of her sight. You see what that means, Bobby? Not just Foy, but you and me, Pickering and Marrs. Every single one. Nobody can ever be lost. Even if we wandered, she’d find us.

  Travis Lee

  * * *

  SEPTEMBER 19, A NOTE FROM THE RESERVE TRENCHES

  Dear Bobby,

  This goddamned toy’s supposed to make me feel better? Shit. Tell Pa if he wanted forgiveness so damned bad, he should have asked sooner. If he couldn’t help what he was doing, he should have left when I was a kid. Now’s no time to be carving me animals.

  You’re wrong, Bobby. It’s a selfish thing he did, not a kindness. He’s asking too much payment for this wood horse. So don’t go begging me to forgive him. And don’t you dare tell me where to find peace. You say Pa and me are staring death in the face. That may well be, but Pa needs to find his pardon somewheres else.

  Travis Lee

  * * *

  SEPTEMBER 20, THE RESERVE TRENCHES

  Dear Bobby,

  This time I went looking for O’Shaughnessy. I asked if I could talk to him alone. We sat on a couple of jam crates in the weak afternoon sun. He treated me to some French chocolates one of the nun nurses had given him. We ate the candy like kids—picking around the box for our favorite. They were great chocolates, Bobby: hearts and leaves and some painted up like gift boxes. They went down smooth as cream.

  He asked how I was, and I told him I was doing okay, considering. I asked how he was doing, and he looked surprised.

  “It’s kind of you to ask, lad. I’m well as can be expected,
I suppose. But you’ve come to tell me of your troubles, and not be hearing of mine. What brings you, Travis?”

  I could have told him “chocolates.” I rummaged around in the tissue paper and picked out a dark square with a pink stripe around it. It was bittersweet with an aftertaste of cognac; and it made me think of Pa and the wooden horse he’d carved me.

  I must have been quiet for too long, for O’Shaughnessy said, “What is it, lad?”

  “Wish you’d talk to Marrs, sir. He keeps crying at night and everything.”

  “Does he?” O’Shaughnessy picked out one I’d had my eye on: a spiky ball that looked like it had coconut in it.

  “Yeah. He cries when the boys are all asleep and he thinks nobody can hear him. He keeps it down, so as not to wake us. I reckon he’s kind of ashamed. Pickering cries some, too. Well, Marrs is Catholic, so you got yourself a leg in; but Pickering’s not much of anything religious. Still, a word or two from you might not hurt. Hell, I don’t know what to tell them.”

  He looked pensively down into the chocolate box. “Don’t you?” He plucked out a white lozenge with a red marzipan heart and rolled it around in his fingers.

  “Hey. Don’t tell them I said nothing, about them crying and all, okay?”

  It seemed he was sad to be eating the candy. He finally popped it into his mouth and sucked a while. “Well. I’ve seen this sort of thing before: men breaking down when they’re moved out. I’m sure they’ll be settling down soon enough. And you, Travis? How would you be?”

  Marrs’s and Pickering’s despair dismissed so carelessly. “I’m fine, okay? This ain’t about me. See, Pickering left his cross behind in the old digs. It was just a faded mark on a sandbag. I never did see much in it, but he took a shine. Always thought it protected him from the shelling. Now he’s scared. Guess he feels like he don’t have nothing to hold onto anymore.”

  “A cross, is it?” O’Shaughnessy shrugged. “Well. Seems he has something after all. He’s not entirely a nonbeliever, lad.”

  “No, sir. That’s not the way it is. What he’s hanging onto is superstition.”

  “Who’s to say that religion and superstition are not sometimes one and the same?”

  That threw me. Before I could recover, he changed the subject. “You were well for a while, Travis. I saw your joy come back, and your gentleness with it. What causes you to drink again?”

  “I’m not drinking.”

  He set the top on the chocolate box, put the box away. “Would my eyes be lying?”

  “Look. I come to ask help for Marrs and Pickering, sir. Not to talk about me.”

  “Ah, and what a grand altruistic gesture.”

  The contempt in his voice got me to my feet. “What the hell’s the matter with you? I come to talk about problems, and you go riding me again. Damn your ass, anyway.”

  He seized my wrist. “You’ve no right.” His grip was so tight, it hurt. “Listen to me, Travis. If God gives you a gift, you’ve no right to be throwing it away. You’ve been sent to us because we need you. When you drink, souls can be lost.”

  Sent? Shit. I didn’t like the implications of that. “All due respect for your beliefs and such, sir, but I don’t see this ghostie stuff as no goddamned gift. It scares me sometimes, thinking I’m going to turn around and come face-to-face with a dead man. Now, that graveyard’s all well and good. Hell, the truth of it is, I like being there. But don’t you go looking to me for answers. I don’t know nothing. Besides, that girl in the graveyard, why, it’s her job to keep an eye on things.”

  “And well it might be; but we need you, anyway. Her keeping an eye on us doesn’t mean we can’t be blinded.”

  He confused the hell out of me. Troubled me, too. I jerked free and stumbled back. “Sorry, sir, but you don’t want to go counting on me handling things. I’m really kind of worthless, you want to know the truth.”

  “Worthless or no, promise me, lad. Will you promise me one thing? If you ever see me in your graveyard, promise that you’ll stay with me. Will you do that? Will you keep me company a while?”

  In his voice was such an ache that I broke out in goose flesh.

  “Travis?”

  I walked away fast. He might have called me again, but if he did, he called soft-voiced, and I didn’t hear.

  No matter. O’Shaughnessy begging my help to get to Heaven? Because begging was what he was doing, Bobby. There was something frightened in his eyes.

  If Heaven lies beyond the graveyard, a priest of all people should go. Oh, I could see God leaving Pastor Lon wandering. If war’s taught me one thing, it’s that the Church we grew up in is shallow, all fellowship and “Shall We Gather at the River”s and dinners on the ground. Preachers fretting about dancing and vaudeville shows. They’d never recognize an ancient, murky dark like the one that’s hiding in LeBlanc. When LeBlanc was a boy, that Catholic priest must have recognized it. I figure that’s why he beat him with a hot ruler. Baptists are sunshiny folks. They don’t know how to exorcise a demon. Hell, they’re too inconsequential to even bury somebody right.

  I couldn’t ask O’Shaughnessy about what was really worrying me, so I caught Marrs alone. He explained last rites and why O’Shaughnessy goes out into the field even when Emma Gee’s firing. His job, no matter what, is to save the souls of the dying.

  “Well, what if O’Shaughnessy himself dies out there?”

  “A priest?” It must have been the first Marrs had considered it. “Without extreme unction? Unconfessed and all?” He looked worried, and I didn’t care for that. “Well, if he’d a mortal sin, he’d have Hell, wouldn’t he. Venials, a bit of Purgatory.”

  The whole notion’s crazy: Heaven depending on the timing of your death and who’s around and all. It’s just not fair. O’Shaughnessy’s been so damned faithful, Bobby. God owes him Heaven. He shouldn’t have to count on me.

  Travis Lee

  * * *

  SEPTEMBER 22, THE FRONT LINES

  Dear Bobby,

  Early yesterday before the sun came up, LeBlanc and me went out to the new No Man’s Land. The sky was overcast, not as much as a star to guide us. I might have been a blinded soul wandering. The world was reduced to touch: sharp things that startled me; mush things that made me sick. We crawled through shell holes that stank of dead fish, and I wasn’t sure if were smelling old carcasses or phosgene gas.

  Black finally lightened to gray. A colorless sun came up over mud fields. We ate breakfast in a watery shell hole where two swollen rats floated.

  LeBlanc was too chipper; but after all, it was his sort of weather, his landscape.

  “You find yourself a dugout?” I asked him.

  “Yeah. Hey. I been working on something. You ever blow up a toad?”

  “Nope. So who you rooming with?”

  “You never blew up a toad? Holy shit, Stanhope. What kind of childhood didya have? I’m thinking of making firecrackers out of bullets. Stick ’em up rats asses.”

  More about killing things. I rolled over on my stomach and lifted the periscope to see if I could spy some Boche. In the other trenches, nothing much was happening.

  “Ka-blooey,” LeBlanc said. “Get enough powder up ’em, there’ll be guts and brains flying, you know?”

  I looked around. He’d lit up a cigarette. I slapped it out of his hand. “You asshole. Get us killed that way.”

  He didn’t yell or nothing. He stared, and that was worse.

  “Come on, LeBlanc. They’ll pinpoint our position. Smoking like that is dangerous.”

  “And your drinking’s safe?”

  I took another peek through the periscope.

  He said, “Rum slows you down, Stanhope. It makes you do crazy things. Maybe you’re crazy, Mama’s boy. You ever think of that?”

  “Could be.”

  Something hard slammed my back. Air exploded out of my lungs. For a terrifying minute I couldn’t breathe.

  He relaxed his fist, spread his fingers. The sympathetic heat of his hand pressed the spot
between my shoulder blades. He whispered into my ear, warm and soft and close, “You think you’re better than me. You’re no better than me. Nobody is. You shit like I do, eh? You piss like I do. Only I don’t get scared. Do you ever get scared, Stanhope?”

  He jumped to his feet, waved toward the Boche trenches, shouting, “Hey! Hey, assholes!”

  I caught him around the knee, bowled him over backward. He fell, and we rolled down the slope into the water. Bullets buzzed in a fury over our heads.

  He thrashed and spat. The dead rats bobbed wildly. I grabbed his bandolier and pulled him out.

  “You think you’re something special, Stanhope. You and your Harvard. Your mother sending those blue angora socks. Your goddamned dun mare. You’re nothing but shit.”

  “Stop it.”

  “You think you’re smart, don’t you? Mr. College. Kissing up to that kike Miller.”

  I shook him hard. “Shut up.”

  “You a kike, too, huh, Stanhope? You a sheeny? Wait! Maybe you’re a poof. That’s it! You and Miller’ve been buttfucking, eh?”

  Rage made me careless. I raised my fist up high. Something stung my upper arm. A bee, I thought, until I saw the blood pouring out. I’d been goddamned shot. And by the Boche sniper.

  Just a scratch. Not much of a wound. Still, I forgot all about hitting LeBlanc. I hugged the ground. He started laughing like nothing at all had happened. He clapped me on the back, on the place his fist had bruised me. “Jesus and Mary, Stanhope, but you’re fun.”

  Right then, Bobby, I felt the future roll away, this never-ending war, the years whirling out of control, always beyond the reach of my fingers. Days of mud and bullets and lunacy. Seasons passing, ugly and colorless. At my feet dead rats rode the waves of our struggle.