Miracle at St. Anna (Movie Tie-in)

by James McBride

  He had no choice. He didn’t want to run. He didn’t trust his commander. The man was from the South. Train had never seen him before that morning. He was a replacement for the old captain, who’d transferred out two days before—whose name Train couldn’t remember either. The men were strangers to him, but they were white, so they had to be right, or maybe not, but Train was from North Carolina and he didn’t know how to stand up to white people like the coloreds from the North did. Train didn’t trust them either. They brought trouble with their highfalutin ways and long words and college degrees, always making the captain—what was his name?— mad. He remembered the first colored soldier he’d ever seen, back home in High Point, North Carolina, just before he was drafted. It was his first-ever bus ride in the city, and the man had spoiled it. The soldier got on the bus wearing a crisp Army uniform with lieutenant’s bars and a shoulder patch with a black buffalo on it. He took a seat down front. The bus driver said, “Move to the back, boy.” The Negro opened his mouth, outraged, and said, “Fuck you.” The driver slammed on the brakes and got up. Before the Yankee could move, there was a chorus of hissing and cursing from the rear of the bus. It was the other blacks next to Train. “Cut it out,” one blurted. “You makin’ it bad for the rest of us.” “Whyn’t you go home, you mooley bastard,” shouted another. Train, stunned, tried to look away, the slight bit of shame that washed over him replaced by relief as the Yankee soldier glared at the blacks next to him, flung open the rear door of the bus, and stomped out, huffing and muttering at them in furious disgust. The bus roared away, blowing black diesel fumes in his face.

  And now Train was following one of those light-skinned, know-it-all Northern Negroes into the drink, a lieutenant from Harlem named Huggs. He called himself “a Howard University guy, ASTP,” which Train guessed had something to do with reading but wasn’t sure since he couldn’t read himself. It was something he had a mind to learn one day because he would like to read the Bible and know his verses better. He even tried to think about his Bible verses as he drove his legs into the water and the din around him grew louder, but he couldn’t remember a single verse, so he began singing “Nearer My God to Thee,” and as he sang, the metal shrapnel and bullets began to ping off the tanks around him and he could hear their treads snapping as they hit mines that blew up. He waded slowly up to his hips in the clear canal and suddenly felt quiet and peaceful, and then—just like that—he was invisible. He could see better, hear better, smell better. Everything in the world became clear, every truth clairvoyant, every lie a blasphemy, all of nature became alive to him. At six foot six, 275 pounds, all muscle, with a soft-spoken charm, tender brown eyes, and deep chocolate skin that covered an innocent round face, Sam Train was everything the Army wanted in a Negro. He was big. He was kind. He followed orders. He could shoot a rifle. And most of all, he was dumb. The other men laughed at him and called him “sniper bait” and “Diesel” because of his size. They placed bets on whether he could pull a two-ton truck or not, but he never minded them, only smiled. He knew he wasn’t smart. He had prayed to become smart, and suddenly here he was: smart and invisible. Two for one.

  He stopped completely still in the water as the sounds of death and machine-gun fire seemed to die all around him, as if someone had turned down the volume and replaced it with the peaceful crowing of a rooster that he could hear all by itself, as if it were singing solo. Standing in the water as men rushed past him, falling, screaming, weeping, he gazed upward at the mountain before him and marveled at the lovely olive trees that lay in the groves above the German batteries, which he could see as clear as day. He saw the bobbing green of the Germans’ helmets as they raced from one smoking artillery cannon to another. The helmets blended perfectly with the shorn leaves and rocks and ridges of the mountains behind them. He marveled at the sun peeking over the ridge as if for the first time. Everything seemed perfect. When Train saw the smarty-dog Huggs from New York spin back toward him with his face shot off, then flop into the water like a rag doll, he felt no fear. He was happy, because he was invisible. Nothing could touch him. Nothing could happen to him. He decided it had to be the statue head.

  He’d found it in Florence the first day he’d arrived, next to a river where the Germans had destroyed a bridge. Everybody in the army wanted souvenirs, but for some reason nobody was interested in it. There must have been four companies that marched past that marble head, but no one grabbed it, maybe because of the weight. But Sam Train had carried a forty-six-pound radio in training camp for six months and that had never bothered him. He picked the head up because he wanted it as a gift for his grandmother. He kept it in a net bag laced to his hip, and before the day was over, three guys had offered him ten dollars for it. “Naw,” he said, “I’m keeping it.” That night he changed his mind and decided to test the market. He wanted to see if the Italians would buy it, because he’d heard they would pay twenty dollars for a carton of cigarettes. Before digging his foxhole outside Florence, he walked into town to look for an Italian, but he couldn’t find a soul. The streets were empty, barren, save for an occasional rat that leaped out of the wreckage and quickly disappeared into the rubble again. Finally, Train found an old woman wandering down a deserted street. She was the first Italian he had ever met. She was ragged and filthy, with her head wrapped in a scarf and her feet swathed in rubber tires worn like sandals, even though it was winter. He held out the statue head as he approached. He offered it to her for fifty dollars. She smiled a toothless grin and said, “Me half American, too.” Train didn’t understand. He dropped the offer to twenty-five. She turned around and staggered away as if drunk. He stood, blinking in misunderstanding. Halfway up the block she straddled the curb, spread her legs, held her dress out, squatted, and pissed, steam coming from the piss as it hit the ground. He was glad he didn’t sell it to her. It would have been a waste.

  He was thinking about the woman squatting over the curb, pissing, as the murky parts of Huggs’s face floated past him in the water. Then he heard a soft plop and felt a sucking inside his chest and a pain in his head. Suddenly, he no longer felt peaceful. He could feel his invisibility slipping off like a cloak, so he ran like hell, past two burning tanks, past a bobbing arm connected to a bobbing body, straight across to the other side of the canal, where a group of soldiers cowered behind a rock in a grove of trees, a man named Bishop among them.

  He flopped on the canal bank and heard Bishop say, “Oh, shit. You been hit in the head.”

  Train wiped the moisture from his face, glanced at it, realized it was blood, and lay on his back and died. He felt his spirit leave his body. It was as if his spirit had drained out of the bottom of his shoes and floated away. He was truly invisible now.

  “Thank you, Lord,” Train said. “I’m prepared for Thee.” He waited to feel the sweet nothingness of death. He opened his mouth to taste the sweet smell of heaven and felt instead stinking, hot chicken breath blowing down into his lungs. It tasted like dog shit and hog maws mixed together. He opened his eyes and saw the big, black, shiny, eel-like face of Bishop stuck to his—Bishop stuck to his mouth. He sat up straight.

  “Goddamn, you crazy?” Suddenly, the booms and din around Train seemed to screech to an unbelievable roaring pitch. He heard moans and screams of death. He heard fire crackling as nearby tree limbs and branches snapped under the thunderous slams of eighty-eight shells that whirred past, blowing branches and bark down on them like rainwater. It was as if some giant, inhuman beast had broken loose and was out to destroy the world. He looked across the canal and saw the unit retreating, the dozens of bodies in the canal, a white captain waving them back in, and then his view was blocked by Bishop’s huge, black, shiny face and several glistening gold teeth, which adorned the front of Bishop’s mouth like a radiator grille. Bishop grabbed him by the lapel and roared at him over the din, “You owe me fourteen hundred dollars!”

  It was true. He did owe Bishop fourteen hundred dollars from poker and craps, but that was before today. B
efore he’d learned to become invisible.

  Just as suddenly, it got quiet. The screaming meanies quit, the German machine guns quit, the American ack-ack guns quit, and the only sound Train could make out was the crackling of a burning tank in the canal just short of shore and the soft murmuring of someone who was obviously burning to death inside it. He suddenly remembered where he was and what had happened to him.

  “Wasn’t I hit?” he asked Bishop.

  Bishop was a minister from Kansas City. They called him Walking Thunder. He was a short, trim man with smooth skin that covered a handsomely sharp, coal-black face, with dimples and devilish laughing eyes that seemed to wink all the time. His uniform always appeared starched and neat, even in battle. His voice was like silk, his hands slender and delicate, as if they had never held dirt, and his gold-toothed smile was like reason itself. He had a church of two hundred parishioners back home who sent him care packages every week, full of chicken and cookies, which he used to barter at poker. Train had heard him preach once at training camp and it was like watching a steam pump sucking coal on a hot July day. He could make the hair on the back of your neck stand straight up on end.

  “You was hit and you was dead and I brung you back,” said Bishop. “Don’t nobody know about it but me, and that’s fine. But you owes me some money, and until you pays it, you ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

  “You puttin a mojo on me?”

  “I ain’t doing no mojo. I wants my money. Now you go git that white boy out that haystack over there yonder. He’s yours to deal with. I sure ain’t goin’.”

  “What white boy?”

  “That one.” Bishop pointed to a stone barn about two hundred yards off and fled, splashing back across the canal as the bombs and artillery splashed around him and didn’t touch him.

  Train turned on his side and watched as a haystack the size of a small bush crept along the barn wall, then stopped. Underneath it were two tiny feet clad in wooden shoes.

  2

  CHOCOLATE GIANT

  Beneath the haystack, the boy tried to imagine himself, but he could not. There was no front, no back, no middle, only where he was. At dawn, he’d awakened to the sound of thunder overhead and ignored it, crawling to the doorway of the tiny barn where he slept to see if the usual bowl of soup was there. It was not. Neither was the old man who normally brought it. He had not seen him in two days. The boy didn’t even know the old man’s name. The old coot in vest and dirty shirt simply appeared one day and began talking to him, and from that day forward he’d been the Old Man. The boy could not remember how he’d come to the Old Man. The Old Man had given him a job pulling a few olives from his trees and crushing grapes, then placed him in the barn each night to sleep, leaving a bowl of watery soup there each morning. The boy could not remember how long he’d been living in the Old Man’s barn, or why he was living there. His memories were like tiny single slivers of glass blowing through a wind tunnel with a giant fan at one end and him at the other, the slivers jarring and jumbling about, slicing through the air past him, dangerous and deadly when they hit, even more dangerous when they missed, for more often than not they were lost in the roar and din and shrill yelling of fleeing villagers and German eighty-eight shells that landed closer and closer to the Old Man’s farm each day. People moved in and out of his clouded vision like ghosts.

  One by one, the neighbors came by to warn the Old Man, and through the shreds of what was left of his mind, the boy watched blankly as they nodded at him and talked to the Old Man with grave voices saying, Leave now, for the sake of the boy. The war is almost over. The Germans will lose. The Americans are coming. For the sake of the boy, leave. But the Old Man shrugged and said, Germans or Americans, it’s all the same. They will take my farm and use my olive twigs to make fire. I can’t have it. The boy can leave when he wants. He is of no relation. He is slow in his mind. I keep him here because his feet are always clean and he crushes grapes well.

  Two days before, the boy had watched the neighbors withdraw one by one, their meager belongings piled onto the backs of mules and in wagons, a trail of entire families of women, grandfathers, and shoeless children, heading south toward the Americans, nervously glancing at the boy as he went about his duties in the Old Man’s olive field, until a solitary figure remained, a woman, who tried to pick him up but dropped him when he screamed and bit her and tore her dress. “You are a devil,” she proclaimed, and left. He watched her go, perching on a high rock on all fours like a dog, his head pointed to the sky. The cool wind blew the leaves across the dirt road she departed on. Later, a man and his young daughter approached, and the man offered the boy an egg, but the sight of it frightened him. The man laughed as he cowered in fear from the egg, but the man’s laughter soothed the boy, so he took the egg and observed silently as the man and his daughter ran down the road. When they were out of sight, he cracked the egg and sucked it dry.

  The shelling that drew closer and closer to the barn each day never bothered the boy. He found the noise to be a comfort. The thunderous roar, the shaking of the barn, the whistling and angry chatter of machine-gun and automatic-rifle fire dulled his senses and drew him away from that most painful place where he had once lived, a place where strawberries were red, and candy had real names like peppermint and orange, and trees grew apples, and water flowed from a beautiful fountain in the piazza of a village someplace. He had seen all that once, but he could not remember where. He had no name, no face, no key, no clean shirt, no toothbrush, no mother, no father, no someone who loved him, he was not himself and he was not anywhere. He, too, was invisible.

  He watched as the bobbing helmets of the Germans grew nearer. Through the shreds of what was left of his mind, he suddenly remembered what the Old Man had said before he’d disappeared two days earlier. The Old Man had been very clear. He had said it several times. He had pointed his finger at the boy and said, If you are in the barn and see the Germans coming, run to the top of the hill and whistle toward the house, then hide in the haystack behind the barn. The boy had delayed when he’d awakened because he was starving. He’d spent fifteen minutes looking for the bowl of soup the Old Man normally left just inside the barn door, having eaten chestnuts and flowers for two days straight. By the time he finished looking for the soup, the Germans were too close and he’d run up the hill and hidden underneath the haystack, because he could see them coming. A lot of them. And it was too late to whistle.

  His mouth hung open as he stared, fascinated, at the helmets of the German soldiers, which bobbed closer and closer to him from the mountains above. He knew he should be afraid of them, but he was not. His fear of them was merely an instruction given, like “Don’t touch the knife,” or “Stay away from fire.” Peering through the hay as they approached, small dots on the mountainside, dipping and dodging, dropping into trenches and crevices, then rising and running forward a few feet more before falling to the ground again, the boy remembered suddenly that he actually had a friend among them, but he was not sure which one it was. Perhaps if he asked, one of them would help him find him. He decided to stay where he was.

  Hearing a voice behind him, the boy shifted in the haystack. He turned and saw his friend Arturo. Arturo was his imaginary friend who sometimes appeared to discuss matters—food, toys, how to make a soccer ball from rolled hay—but he usually disappeared when the shelling started. He was a tall boy with white hair, suspenders, and long pants, and unlike him, Arturo was already seven. The boy was surprised to see him. Arturo stood before him holding a soccer ball made of hay tied with string.

  “Look,” he said. “Watch me throw this over my shoulder.”

  The boy shifted the entire haystack around to watch, his back to the charging Germans, as Arturo tossed the ball over his shoulder. It rolled toward the barn. “Get it and kick it back to me,” Arturo shouted. The boy complied, running toward the barn door with the haystack still over his head. But Arturo arrived first and kicked the ball into the barn. The boy flung the haystack of
f his head and followed the ball inside.

  Inside, it was dark. The ball bounded into a corner, and the two tumbled after it. The boy reached it first and kicked it high against the wall. It struck the wall at the same moment that a shell landed nearby, and the thunderous boom lifted them both off their feet and they toppled to the ground, laughing.

  “That was a big one,” the boy cried. He looked about, but Arturo was gone.

  The boy frowned. Arturo always did this. Always disappeared at any moment.

  He yelled, “Arturo, how come you’re not coming out?” Then he saw him on the other side of the barn, against the opposite wall.

  “Over here,” Arturo said. “Come this way.” The boy moved toward him, and as he did, there was a tremendous crash, as if a hurricane had suddenly entered the room. Great clouds of dust kicked up, and the walls shook. The boy felt himself being lifted off the ground and flying high in the air. He flew past the stone wall he’d been standing next to, a wall with stones wedged so tightly and carefully by a Tuscan farmer years ago that it had withstood hundreds of machine-gun bullets and artillery fire from previous weeks of fighting. The wall cracked and burst apart, rocks flying everywhere. The boy felt himself spinning in circles and cried out, but his terrified howls were lost in the mad whirlwind of roaring, booming wind. He landed on the floor, and large chunks of the roof fell about him like raindrops, covering him with rubble, leaving a small gap through which he could see the sun shining brightly. He lay on his back in shocked silence and watched, transfixed, as an eight-by-eight beam that spanned the eaves of the roof slowly pulled itself out of place on one side as if being lifted by a giant hand and landed atop the rubble covering him with a distinct pop, making everything dark.