The Woodcarver's Secret (Samantha Sweet Mysteries)

by Connie Shelton

  “Yes, sir!” arose the appropriate response.

  Patricio sent the other doughboy a half-smile which he hoped conveyed encouragement. He didn’t like the idea of the trains. Having his feet on solid ground for a few days would have been far more welcome. He strapped his canteen to his belt, picked up his blanket roll and the standard-issue .30-06 Springfield bolt action rifle that practically felt like a third arm now. A groan escaped him as he stood for the first time in five hours.

  Beside him, Roberto Smith, the one man he’d begun to think of as a buddy, also rose. They exchanged a look that said here we go. But the going was extremely slow as men and gear moved single file up the narrow ladder to the upper deck.

  “Drape it over your shoulder!” shouted a man at the top who handed him a white canvas bag as Patricio emerged into daylight.

  He blinked and looked around, feeling a little like a prairie dog on the first day of spring.

  “Keep moving!”

  He shuffled forward as best he could among the throng of men on deck. Places along the ship’s rail were already crowded and men stood in clumps or stood slack-jawed, realizing for the first time that they were far, far from home. Thirty yards away he found a less-crowded spot on the rail and edged his way toward it.

  From the shore he could hear shouts as sailors handled massive ropes and the ship edged against the pier. A gangway wide enough for two was being trundled into place. Beyond the dock, men with smiling faces gathered in masses and paced about, getting a feel for the earth beneath them once again. A general air of jubilation floated toward him on the light spring breeze. A row of buildings led from the dock area then spread out to form a small town. Only a few curious civilians showed their faces.

  “See any of the others from our company?” asked Roberto Smith, coming closer and fiddling with the strap of the white canvas bag he’d been given.

  Patricio looked around and noticed that most of the men had draped the strap around their necks, diagonally across their chests. He did the same.

  “What is this thing?” Roberto muttered, still having problems untangling the strap.

  “Gas mask.” The gruff voice came from a man neither of them knew. “It’s gonna be your best friend this time next week.”

  Patricio felt a new wave of fear. News of the German gas attacks had even made it as far as New Mexico, and shell-shocked soldiers were already convalescing in the sanitarium at Albuquerque. The excitement of landing in Europe dimmed.

  The sound of leather boots on wood decking became more organized and he realized men were moving toward the gangway. Two by two they trooped ashore and a corporal at the bottom shouted and pointed them in various directions. He and Roberto joined the tide of movement, slowly making their way. No sense in rushing; this ship wasn’t leaving until every last man was off.

  At the bottom of the slanting gangway the corporal took one look at the insignia on their tunic collars. “Infantry C, over there.” He vaguely aimed his arm toward a warehouse where Patricio recognized Sergeant Calloway who appeared to be checking names off a list.

  “Over here! Look sharp!” Calloway said, fierce yet somewhat bored at the same time. He marked his list and pointed for them to join the others.

  Eventually all two hundred fifty men stood in front of the warehouse which, by the smell of it, once contained damp bales of wool. Calloway ordered them to stand in rows and a photographer set up his tripod and made fussy little motions to get everyone in the picture. The men shuffled into place accordingly and the photographer draped a black cloth over his head and told them to stand perfectly still. Patricio wondered if his parents would see that photograph someday. He hoped his hat was straight and his tunic neat.

  An hour later they were marching through the streets of some tiny Belgian town, filling the railroad depot, being herded into train cars with hard wooden benches.

  “At Cantigny, we join the French Army,” Calloway announced. “There’s been German action in the area so stay together and be alert!” The sergeant moved on to repeat the information in the next car.

  “Any luck, maybe the Froggers will already have the trenches dug,” said a man next to Roberto and Patricio. “My brother wrote home, said that was the messiest part of the work.”

  Patricio tried to imagine digging trenches in the soft sand near home. He couldn’t see it holding together well enough for a group of men to fight from such a position. The train started to move and gather speed. He saw Roberto become drowsy with the rhythmic movement. As for himself, he felt hungry. He rummaged into the pack at his feet where he had stashed the last of the empanadas his mother had mailed to him at training camp. The little sweet packets of fruit filling baked into a delicate crust didn’t always make the transit intact but even when he had to pinch the crumbs in his fingers to eat them, they were still his favorite treat from home. These two had survived and he lifted out the cloth napkin containing them.

  Roberto stirred and opened his eyes. “Your mama bakes those too? In Panama, mine did the same.”

  “Have one,” Patricio said. “They’re good.”

  Roberto did not have to be asked twice. The crust practically dissolved in their mouths, and the apple filling was both sweet and tart.

  “At home, mama often made them with pineapple,” Roberto said. “Did you have that?”

  “Once. My mother got some tins of it. My first taste—kind of exotic.”

  “And plantains—mama made a sweet batter and fried them.” His eyes rolled upward. “Her family were all local and she really can cook.”

  “You grew up in Panama? How come you’re in the US Army?”

  “American by birth. My father and grandfather were both with the Corps of Engineers on the Canal project. It was expected of me, to do part of my schooling in the States and to enlist.”

  Patricio nodded. “It’s a little strange for me. New Mexico wasn’t even a state until 1912, barely six years ago. We were a territory the whole time I was growing up. But my abuelo, he tells stories of traveling el camino real, walking beside a donkey cart all the way to Mexico City and back. It’s open desert country. Parts of it, they call it the jornada del muerto where it weaves away from the Rio Grande … he remembers Apache attacks being a real danger.”

  He reached into his pocket and extracted a flat piece of silver, nearly an inch long, stamped with an old-fashioned symbol.

  “A Spanish real that’s been in my family since the 1680s. Someone brought a few of them back then and mama insisted I carry it with me for luck.”

  Roberto examined the coin and handed it back. “Mine made me carry her personal crucifix.” He pulled back the high collar of his tunic to reveal a silver chain. “I suppose all mothers are alike.”

  “I heard there are ten thousand men arriving in France every day,” Patricio said after awhile. “Hard to imagine, isn’t it? There probably aren’t that many living in my home state.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “New Mexico? Well, not like here,” he said as they chugged through a countryside of green farm fields and entered a town where an ornate cathedral dominated the surrounding one-story stone houses with thatched roofs. “Up around Taos a lot of buildings are made of adobe—you know, mud with grass mixed in and dried in the sun. Our house has an horno out in the back where my mother bakes the bread and the empanadas. Up at the pueblo, just outside town, the Indians always did it that way too. There’s a few Anglos, but everyone is just now starting to get along. The Indians didn’t want the Spanish governor telling them what to do. Pretty much the same with the American governor, too.”

  “Panama changed a lot with the Canal,” Roberto said. “They put in theaters and clubs and things to keep the workers occupied. Otherwise, all they did was drink—at least in my grandfather’s day. It’s better now. Lots of families. Pretty good schools.”

  They watched as the French village disappeared behind them. Neither one commented when they passed through miles of burned forest. The sight of
towns with crumbling buildings and people picking through rubble became more frequent as the hours passed. With every mile, their buttocks increasingly felt the unforgiving surface of the wooden bench, and they knew they were coming closer to the war.

  * * *

  Mud, everywhere, mud! A rat scurried into the trench, not pausing as it ran over Patricio’s shoulder and down his leg, poking its nose among papers on the ground but finding only inches of water that had turned the muddy bottom into a bog. The rat ran on.

  Patricio undid the top twelve laces on his knee-high right boot, getting down close to his foot, poking the fork from his mess kit inside to scratch at the itch that never went away. He wiped the tines on his tunic and put the fork away. But the itch was still there.

  “Don’t scratch if you can help it,” Roberto said, lowering himself to sit on the wooden crate beside his friend. “My sores have started bleeding. Maxwell says he’s got pus coming out of his.”

  Patricio stared at the narrow strip of sky, wishing for a scrap of sun to dry the intolerable, never-ending wetness. He smiled at his naïve comment about France being different from New Mexico—if only he’d realized just how very different. Dark clouds scudded by. Four days since they’d seen a shred of blue above.

  “Think these sandbags will hold?” he asked.

  Roberto patted one of the fat, once-white bags. “Seems solid enough. If these walls give way, we’re cooked. In more ways than one.”

  The good news about the constant rain was that the Germans had slacked off the shelling. Patricio hoped they were every bit as miserable in their own set of trenches less than a mile away. The rat had come across a candy wrapper that someone had carelessly forgotten to stow inside a container. Its happy squeal was barely audible to the men but five more rats ran down the reinforced wall and skittered across the wooden crates the men were using as seats, joining their lucky pal. Within moments, another dozen joined the fray.

  “Quick! They’ll overrun us!” Four men grabbed their shovels and began whacking at the rodents. Blood splattered Patricio’s boot.

  “Get the candy—that’s what they want!” he yelled.

  No one got the message so he snatched his own shovel and scooped up the paper wrapper, flinging it over the top of the trench. Two of the rats figured it out and scrabbled up the wall after it. A minute later, the other live ones had followed.

  Sergeant Calloway’s voice boomed. “What the hell! Get those things out of here!”

  At least shoveling up the dead rats and throwing them out of the trench gave them something to do, Patricio thought as he joined the effort.

  “Nasty, disease breeders,” muttered Calloway as he walked down the line.

  “Once the rain lets up I’m getting a haircut,” Roberto said, making conversation as the last of the dead rats went over the top. “There’s some Italian guy from New Jersey brought his gear with him, says he ran a barbershop back home. A real haircut by a guy who knows what he’s doing would be nice.”

  “Better than the sloppy one the Army gives you. Maybe I’ll have him do mine too.” Any activity was better than none; the weeks of inaction showed in the blank eyes and slack jaws of the men. No wonder they’d leapt to the task when the rats came.

  The patter of rain on their helmets (those things the men joked about looking like inverted soup bowls) lessened, and as if the clouds had overheard their conversation a large patch of blue appeared. And, in answer, a volley of mortar fire began to land heavy rounds nearby. From boredom to terror—it was the story of their lives these past three months.

  They took two days and nights under siege, returning rounds from their own mortars to push back and retake the slight advantage the Germans had gained. Eventually, there came the reassuring roar of tanks and Colonel Dugan, in charge of the battalion, redoubled the offensive, sending infantry to aid in taking the village only two miles away. Patricio lost track of Roberto in the mad cacophony of sound and flying dirt, only to find him again when they mustered outside a tiny patisserie.

  “We lost about two hundred,” he overheard Calloway reporting to the colonel. “Close to a thousand injured.”

  “Dig graves,” Calloway was told. “The medical corps is coming along to treat the wounded.”

  Calloway began shouting orders. Patricio and Roberto were sent down the narrow lane between buildings to find a group of well over two hundred Germans sitting on the ground with their hands on their helmets guarded by a dozen or so armed Americans. Prisoners.

  “We’re marching them to Bois de Folie where the train will take them to a POW camp,” a Sergeant O’Malley informed them. “Then we’re off to Belleau Wood where we’ll join up with the Marines.”

  Patricio had heard rumor, trench talk, that Belleau Wood was the real objective; it would probably be one of the larger battles of the campaign with two full U.S. divisions plus British and French troops. It looked as if he wouldn’t get his haircut for some time.

  * * *

  Twenty-six days. Patricio’s company joined the battle after the Germans had already broken through the French lines to the left of the Marine division, which had then force-marched ten kilometers through the night, trampling grain fields and negotiating through patches of forest. By the time his division assembled and joined the fierce fighting for Hill 142, the carnage included a significant number of officers as well as enlisted men. Some of the French began to retreat but the cry often repeated through the American troops were the words of Marine Captain Lloyd Williams who said, “Retreat? Hell, we just got here!”

  The sentiment got them through as waves of soldiers were cut down when they advanced on the German positions, as attacks and counter-attacks went on with little progress in either direction for days, then weeks. When the Woods were finally declared to be definitively in American hands, the men spent the following days digging graves. Patricio and Roberto had lost a number of comrades—but at least not each other.

  Calloway had been killed and the new sergeant in charge granted the men a brief leave to go in small groups to the nearest town on the Paris-Metz road. A command center had been set up there, and Sergeant promised them a place to get a hot bath and to receive mail from home. The six mile walk felt like nothing, not after the torture they’d been through.

  “All I want—after the hot bath—is a letter from Emelia,” Patricio said, his step remarkably light.

  “I’ll just be happy to have the bath,” Roberto said, with a little pang of envy. There was no girl waiting for him, either in Panama or America.

  It turned out that the bath would be a shower, since the first tub of water filled for one of the soldiers had turned to a muddy mess and water was too limited to allow each man a full tub of his own. But the water coming from the spigots in the tiled room was hot and there was plenty of soap. No one complained.

  Patricio waited his turn, pulling off his nearly rotten boots and socks, massaging his aching feet. He would need to ask for salve for the blisters, but at least they had not become infected from the endless damp during their month in the trenches.

  His tunic came off next and he poked his fingers into the inside pocket for the reassuring feel of his lucky Spanish real. His finger went through a hole in the material and he realized with a sinking feeling that the ancient coin was gone. Lost somewhere on the battlefield. All the terror of being shot at, all the blood, burying hundreds of his fellow soldiers—he’d held himself together through it all. But now he felt tears spill over his eyelids. A piece of home, of his family heritage, was gone forever.

  “Next up,” said a man with a towel around his waist who had just stepped out of the shower.

  Patricio picked up a towel for himself and stumbled blindly toward the tiled enclosure. You’ve been through worse, he told himself. Surely papa has more of the coins at home. He can send another one. But as he scrubbed his hair with the bar of homemade French soap he had to wonder—had his luck already run out?

  An hour later he stood in front of the d
ark green command center tent. The mail truck had apparently been delayed but was due soon. Roberto came limping toward him, a dour look on his face.

  “What’s wrong?” At least Patricio’s mind had something to focus on other than his own loss.

  “Doc says my foot’s pretty bad. I have to stay here, get admitted to the hospital tent.”

  “Don’t joke around.”

  “Not joking. It’s the stupid infection I got out there in the trench.”

  “I told you not to scrat—”

  “I know, I know.” Roberto looked down at his feet which were, Patricio noticed for the first time, clad in soft slippers instead of his regular boots.

  Patricio’s thoughts bounced around. He would go back to the front without his best friend, the one who had kept him sane out there with his silly jokes and his comments about haircuts and stories of his sweet little mama from Panama.

  “My toes are turning black,” Roberto said quietly. “Doc has to cut two of them off. If it gets worse, I could lose my whole foot.”

  “What!”

  “Shh—don’t say anything in front of the others.”

  A dozen men from their company approached, jostling each other, big smiles all around, relief at having survived the past month’s horrendous battle, happy to be clean and anticipating mail from home. In answer to that prayer, a large truck lumbered around the bend in the road, a big transport with canvas cover and squealing brakes.

  “Got mail for Companies A, C and G,” shouted the man who had bounded from the passenger side. “Give us a minute.”

  No one wanted to give them even two seconds, but one thing you learned in the Army was to wait for things; wait weeks in a trench in the rain and mud until your day came to be shot at, followed by your few hours of freedom so you could be told your foot might have to be cut off. Patricio slid a glance toward Roberto. His friend looked grimly determined to enjoy the possibility of a letter from home. Any bit of joy in the face of the unthinkable.

  “Packages first!” shouted the PFC. “Santini!”