Flanders

by Anthony, Patricia

  When LeBlanc said that we ought to have lunch, I told him hell, why not. I drank from my canteen until the future didn’t hurt no more.

  Travis Lee

  * * *

  SEPTEMBER 24, THE FORWARD TRENCHES

  A QUICK NOTE JUST IN CASE

  Dear Bobby,

  Riddell came by during supper tonight. Seems Major Dunn’s got a bug up his butt again. A few hours from now, our company’s due to go on a stunt—me and LeBlanc included. Even my scratch of a bullet wound—aching as it does once in a while—wasn’t enough to keep me back.

  So if anything happens, I want you to have my mare. Only sell her if you have to, and then go to Sharon Jewel Whitehead first. Sharon Jewel’s always had an eye for that horse, and she’s got a gentle hand. I can sleep easier knowing no one’ll take whip nor spur to her. Sell my books in Austin. They might bring a penny or two. There. I reckon that’s about all of me that’s worth messing with.

  Make it a short funeral and a cheap one. If it was me choosing, I’d have that Taverner’s “Magnificat,” but I doubt anybody back home knows the words. If it was up to me, I’d have O’Shaughnessy in his black dress and linen petticoat, and I’d have everyone speaking Latin, too; so nobody’d have to listen to Pastor Lon droning on and on about folks being called home too soon and all the God-works-in-mysterious-ways excuses. But you and Ma do what you have to. Y’all the ones has to sit through it, not me.

  Pickering’s depressed. Ever since Riddell told us the bad news, he’s been sitting around moping. Marrs went on down to see O’Shaughnessy. There wasn’t nothing better to do; I went on down, too.

  Remember going to the fair and seeing the gypsy? How she stayed in the trailer, and there was a line of folks waiting? Then you went in one by one and she shut the door, remember? Just you and her and your secrets. And there was that candle on the table and all. Well, confession was just like that.

  When Marrs lifted the blanket and came out, crossing himself, I went into the dugout. O’Shaughnessy saw me and smiled a satisfied kind of smile. “Ah! Turning Catholic now, are you, Travis?”

  “Thought we might pretend.”

  His new dugout was cramped. Still, there was a table set up along the back wall, a big white candle and a cross and a painted statue of Mary on it. She had on a dark blue cloak with stars, and she was looking down, mild and indulgent. There was a book resting in her hand, but she wasn’t reading. She was smiling at the tame yearling bull at her feet.

  “My Mary. I felt I must bring her. In war we too easily forget the gentleness of women,” O’Shaughnessy said.

  There was a Bible on the table, too. A fancy one. It was open, a red ribbon trailing down the page like a narrow stream of blood. I scanned the Latin: Dum transisset Sabbatum Maria Magdalena et Maria Jacobi et Salome emerunt aromata ut venientes ungerent Jesum.

  Easier to translate seeing the Latin than hearing it. “ ‘Then’ ... no, when. ‘When gone over Sabbath,’ well, ‘When the Sabbath was done,’ I guess. ‘Mary Magdalene and Mary of Jacob’?” I turned. He was eyeing me.

  He didn’t need to know which page, which line. “Mary the mother of James.”

  I ran my finger along the words. “ ‘Mary the mother of James and Salome brought,’ what?” I looked at him again. “Perfume?”

  “Spices.”

  “ ‘And to go ...’ ” I stopped reading then, for I knew the next two words, and what part of the Bible I was reading.

  “ ‘Anoint Jesus,’ ” O’Shaughnessy said softly.

  He was sitting in his black wool, his purple stole. His hands were laced together on the table. Near him was a bottle I knew was the wine, a little box that must have held the bread. And a tiny glass vial.

  “Did Marrs get the oil and everything?”

  “I give the extreme unction for those who want it. Will you be wanting it, Travis? For you’re not baptized in the Faith, and it would be a sin for me to give it.”

  Bad as he worried about Purgatory, I wouldn’t ask that. “Just thought it might feel good to confess.”

  “It’ll be face-to-face, lad. No grille between us.”

  “I know.”

  “Then sit down. You needn’t look at me.”

  It was him who turned his face away. He propped his elbow on the table and rested his head in the fingers of one hand.

  I looked at Mary.

  “Bless me, Father,” he said.

  “What?”

  He didn’t raise his head, but he grinned. “It’s what you say before confessing, lad: Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

  “Bless me—” My throat closed up on the next word, Bobby. It was too hard to say. And the three words taken together started me shaking. The quiet in that dugout, like the magnificent stillness of churches. My eyes burned from the pressure of childhood. By the candle, Mary’s gold leaf halo caught the light.

  I tried to say it. I tried, but my throat, my lips, wouldn’t go on. O’Shaughnessy, waiting so patient. I started thinking about that damned wood horse Pa carved me—painted dun with a blaze, its face as intelligent and sweet as my mare’s—that carefully carved toy that I had hidden down in my haversack, as much of an icon as anything else.

  “Bless—” I had to stop again. Something came pushing from way deep inside. It bottled up in my chest, tight and huge and aching—too big for me to swallow anymore.

  I thought of Ma, and memory swelled even bigger. It pushed a sob out. I clapped my hand over my face. Through the confines of my fingers, I said, “Bless me, Father.”

  I cried. Just like Pickering and Marrs. Just like we all do when we’re tired or war’s made us heartsick. Shit, Bobby. Crying doesn’t matter.

  O’Shaughnessy put his hand over mine. “Are you frightened, lad?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well.” All he needed to say. I guess he knew everything then; knew what was haunting me as sure as I knew those last two words of Latin. He saw in an instant the tragedy that my crying implied. “For your penance, I’ll be having you write a few words to your father, lad. You needn’t send them, but you must put them down.” A whispered incantation. I looked up in time to see him finishing the sign of the cross.

  He told me to go in peace and sin no more, and so I went out and got pen and paper. I figured I’d best put the words down so they won’t be lost.

  I don’t forgive Pa. You tell him that. Hell, that’s not important. I doubt we’re really expected to try and live happy-ever-afters. Tell him that when I come home—if I come home—I’m not going to go hugging on him or nothing. I did all the crying for him I’m going to do.

  But hating’s no good either, so tell him I’m shut of that. I’m not sorry I tried to kill him, and if I had it to do over, I’d aim better. Still, I’m sorry. I’m damned sorry he couldn’t enjoy what life gave him. He had a wife who loved him. A pretty little ranch. Two children. I’m so sorry that instead of being content with that, he spent all his energy fighting his own mind’s monsters. It’s just damned sad, is all.

  Odd, but I’m thinking now that he probably suffered much as Ma and I did. After all, there’s a pecking order to things. Whether he imagined it or not, life beat on him. He just passed the sorrow down.

  So tell him I understand. That’s better than forgiveness, anyway. Forgiving and forgetting’s only for them dim-witted folks, the ones with the short memories. And I don’t expect Pa to forgive me, neither. I just want him to understand his legacy: my nightmares, why I hide in dark, small places. Why, no matter where I am, I never feel safe.

  If I die tonight, kiss Ma for me. Lie and tell her I was happy. Tell her I forgave Pa for everything. Tell her the war wasn’t so bad.

  Travis Lee

  * * *

  SEPTEMBER 29, THE RESERVE TRENCHES

  Dear Bobby,

  Five nights ago we blacked our faces. We took off all metal. We left our packs and our helmets and gear. We pulled stocking caps over our heads.

  Strange to be leaving all that I owne
d behind. Strange to see Marrs and Pickering in blackface. Miller passed down the dark of the trench and caught sight of me. His smile was blinding, so bright in that black world that color didn’t matter.

  “You fit, Stanhope?” he asked.

  “Ready to go, sir.”

  He nodded as if he had expected nothing else.

  Riddell blew out his lantern and the trench subsided into the quiet pool of night. A soft rain was falling. The air was heavy and quiet. Men jostled each other, cursed softly. I heard the sucking sounds of boots in the trench floor mud, the thump of heels on duckboard.

  Then the squeak of a burdened ladder, a whisper down the trench, “Up and over.” Another whisper of, “Luck.”

  I went, Bobby, up the ladder, over the bags, down the incline of our raised parapet. I moved by touch, by sound. A man’s grunt to my right. Not a yard away, the twang of a uniform catching the wire. Right by me, a splash. A whispered, annoyed, “Have a care.”

  Men stumbling, their noise so loud I knew it’d awaken all of Germany. Coughs and sneezes. The soft thump of colliding bodies, a hissed “Bloody flaming tramp-about.”

  I took a step and the ground dropped. My feet went out from under me, and I slid down the incline of a shell hole, splashed into water that was reeking and greasy with corpse-rot. I held my rifle up into the dry as best I could. From above, came a furious chorus of warning hisses.

  I waded to the other side and clawed my way through the mud to the top. Then I was walking again, trying to keep quiet, never quite sure how close the Boche were.

  There was a sort of lethargy to the night, a feeling of being outside my body. I was so disconnected, in fact, that when Emma Gee started barking, it confused me. The next instant, I realized I’d been waiting all evening for that sound. I dropped to the mud and watched the fast blink-blink of orange from the barrels. A pair of machine gunners were down in a forward emplacement—two men, covering both perimeters.

  I felt along the ground for cover, didn’t find any, got sprayed with mud by a near miss. A Boche flare went up, turned the night a sour-apple green. I looked around quick for a crater, found a piss-poor one, crawled to it.

  Keeping as low as I could, I snapped three or four shots toward the emplacement; but the machine gunners were dug in deep. We were done for, Bobby, just like Pickering had feared. Not ten yards from me was the tangle of Boche wire. Twenty yards beyond, the hill of the Boche parapet; at its top, a line of sandbags like loaves of buttermilk bread. Flashes were coming from up there, too: the front line Boche picking us off one by one.

  I slid back down into the crater. No use fighting back. We were pinned down. We’d never had a chance but surprise. Now the attack had stalled there in the mud, under the merciless green glow of the flares.

  Left of me the night hissed and blazed orange. The smell of kerosene dirtied the breeze. In the blinding, mad crackle of the flamethrower, soldiers shrieked. Jesus God, Bobby. It was a dragon kind of terror. In awe of it, I nearly dropped my rifle and ran. Instead, I squinted through the glare, looking for movement in the dark behind.

  From the howling chorus of burning men came one familiar high, keening voice: Pickering’s. I searched for my target. One shot, that’s all I had time for, then the barrel flash would give my position away. By the time I caught a glimpse of a coal shuttle helmet, I was panting too hard to aim right. My hands shook. I sucked in a breath, let it out slow, counted to eight. Christ almighty. How Pickering shrieked.

  I squeezed the trigger slow. Recoil pushed the rifle butt solidly into my shoulder. It was a sweet shot. The dragon died, hemorrhaging flame. Its blood spilled over the sandbags in a dazzling waterfall. It splashed high, and rained brilliance over the trench. Wails drifted down from above, like a disaster had occurred in Heaven.

  I ducked and reloaded. Miller’s shout brought my head up again. Emma Gee had gone quiet, too. Tommies were already sprinting upward to the bags, lobbing grenades as they ran. The barbed wire was torn, its edges gaped. I readied my gun and ran with them.

  Ahead, the pop of rifles, the deafening crack of Battye bombs, of jam-pots, the boom of cricket ball grenades. Shouts of alarm in English, in guttural German. I slipped in the mud, caught my uniform on the crossbar of the German wire, pulled free, and clambered high, higher until the ground ended.

  I was looking down into the trench, a Boche looking up. I shot him in the face, killed another coming out of a dugout, killed a poor wounded bastard before I could stop myself. Not fury, Bobby. Not hate. What I felt had gone beyond fear, too. It was a bleak need, like something that would make you step across the border at the cypress.

  I jumped over the bags into the Boche trench and stumbled. The walls were rough and too close. Down the way, British grenades thumped like drums. They beat like a heart in my ears. The flares were dying, but a Very light went up. I saw Jerry Winters beside me, grinning like a maniac. Harvey Bowes was there, too; and Calvert.

  Winters said, “Bastards ’ve gone phut now. Went out like an Asquith.”

  I wasn’t detached anymore. I was edgy and excited. “I shot that damned flamethrower. Fire and shit went everywhere. You see that? Huh? One shot. You see that?”

  “Where’s the others?” Calvert asked. “Where are they?” He wandered, stepping on duckboard, treading on dead Boche.

  I heard Miller far down the trench to my right, calling for a charge. I ran, the others at my heels, around the corner and into a deserted traverse. Then farther, past dark mouths of communication trenches, past rude ditches to the forward saps, wondering if a shot from one of those side paths would kill me. I ran through the artery of that trench until a clot of fallen sandbags and corpses slowed me down.

  Then clawing over broken bodies and into the next traverse, through the sharp smell of cordite, the sick-sweet smell of blood. A Boche popped out of a dugout, firing. Ahead, Winters grunted and went down. Calvert tossed a Battye bomb. It went off in our faces—blinding light, deafening sound, a spray of mud and meat. It stunned me so, I believed for a minute I’d been killed. And it wasn’t a bad death, considering. All in all, quick and without pain. Still, the pretty graveyard and the calico girl weren’t there. The dim, stinking trench was. And the sandbags where the Boche had been standing were avalanched down.

  “Go!” Calvert shouted. “Go!”

  We left Winters behind and climbed the hill of mud. In the next traverse Riddell stood with his Very pistol. Beyond, Miller and a group of men were furiously shoring up a cave-in.

  “Shot the flamethrower, sir!”

  Miller turned. “Stanhope! That you? Bloody hell! Secure our flank, man! Lead them, Sergeant! Sergeant Riddell!” Riddell snapped to attention as if he’d been torn from a dream. “Are you deaf? I said, go secure our blasted flank!”

  Riddell told us to fix bayonets. We charged back down the muddy, corpse-littered trench and climbed the mud hill that Calvert had made. On the other side Winters was sitting, bleeding from the thigh.

  He waved cheerfully as we passed. “Got me a Blighty!”

  We stumbled along in the gloom of the trench, coming across nervous, confused knots of Tommies. We went, bayonets pointed, past Boche bodies chewed by grenades and burned by flaming kerosene, past the blackened, roast-pork and burned-rubber-smelling mess that had been the flamethrower. Just beyond the fire bay a fallen wall stopped us.

  Pickering was there, sitting in a wide spot of the traverse. LeBlanc was there, too. And Tommy Deighton and Eugene Humphreys.

  Pickering. For a minute I was sure that we had advanced until we’d reached Heaven. Only Heaven should have been a wider, prettier place. And the air should have been sweet.

  Pickering was sitting on the German firestep. He looked up at me. His face was stark and hopeless; still blackened from the burnt cork but for pink stripes down his cheeks. “Marrs,” he said.

  “Hey, Stanhope.” LeBlanc was laughing. “You just crawl up from some funk hole? Welcome to the battle, Mama’s boy.”

  “I got the f
lamethrower,” I said loud, my voice twitchy. I wanted everyone to hear what I had done. I was ready to run some more. To shoot. To watch Boche fall. “One shot. That’s all. Burning fucking kerosene went every which-a way.”

  Tommy Deighton rocked back and forth, his head cradled in his hands. “God have mercy, Christ have mercy,” he kept saying.

  Humphreys, agitated, told us, “Brought more grenades? I’m out, and the Boche has been tossing potato mashers.”

  As if he had called for one, a potato masher came sailing up from the other side, black against the green sky. It landed with a bright, sudden crack, wide of the trench, between us and the wire.

  “Not that they have any aim, mind.” Humphreys shrugged.

  We pitched a couple of Battye bombs over the fallen wall of bags. They went off with twin thuds, leaving silence in their wake.

  Truce settled. We waited, but the Boche lobbed no more grenades. We didn’t throw any more either. Without a word said, without another shot, the battle was over.

  We looked at each other. Deighton rocked. Pickering sat rigid with grief. Marrs, he’d said. Not Pickering, but Marrs. Marrs lying out there in No Man’s Land.

  I sat down beside him. He smelled like kerosene and smoke. “I need to go help Marrs?”

  “No.” His body was stiff. If I touched him—if I said another word—he’d break.

  Calvert asked, “What’s to do now?”

  Bowes, fidgeting and nervous, kept looking up at the cave-in, the one between us and the Boche.

  Calvert said, “Well, the effing Boche is on bof sides of us, ain’t they. An’ us sandwiched in between like a bleeding slice of ’am. You gentlemen thought of ’ow we’re effing supposed to get out of ’ere?”

  The flares were faint now. In the dying light, Riddell looked about, blinking slowly. “Best find shovels.”