The Woodcarver's Secret (Samantha Sweet Mysteries)

by Connie Shelton

  He handed down a small box to the dark-haired man who ran forward with a whoop.

  “Atkins!” A happy shout from the back of the crowd. “Foster! Smith, Robert-o!”

  Patricio smiled at the mispronunciation while Roberto pushed to the open tailgate of the truck. Inevitably, most of the fellows in their unit had taken to calling the two of them Patrick and Robert. They’d discovered there were only so many times you could correct someone’s mangling of your language before you decided to give up and go along with it.

  Roberto came back with a box about twelve inches long and five inches tall, wrapped in heavy brown paper and pasted with unfamiliar postage stamps. His grin stretched the full width of his face. “From my mamacita—it has to be something good!”

  The PFC had opened a big canvas bag and was pulling out fistfuls of letters. He called out names and tossed the envelopes, like flat paper airplanes, into the crowd. Patricio focused, aware of the ache inside him for news—any news—of home.

  “Sanchez!”

  The envelope was not one of the flimsies with a red and blue border which many families used for military mail. This one was of quality paper, heavy. The soldier who passed it along to him sniffed it and grinned knowingly. “Sanchez has a girl back home,” he taunted.

  Patricio grabbed the envelope and shot the guy a look. So what, you don’t have someone?

  He wanted to rip open the flap and devour the letter on the spot but names were still being called and there was the chance that he might get something else, a letter from his parents or his little sister. He tucked the precious envelope inside his tunic. Emelia’s words should be saved for a private moment anyway.

  Beside him, Roberto had torn through the brown paper on his package. Inside, Patricio could see that it contained something carved of wood, a box with a lumpy surface.

  “Ah, cookies from mama!” Roberto said sniffing the lid. He cradled the box closely. “We will get into these right away.”

  Just then the mail guy called Roberto’s name again, holding up a letter.

  “Here!” he shouted, and others passed the letter over their shoulders.

  A second letter for Patricio, this addressed in his mother’s hand.

  “That’s all,” the PFC said with a shrug toward those who had not received anything. The disappointed ones shuffled away listlessly.

  “Over here,” Roberto said, nodding toward a quiet spot near a clothing boutique that didn’t look as if it had been open in months. They slid to the ground, their backs against the stone wall, and tore into their letters.

  Emelia’s delicate handwriting filled the single sheet of her personal stationery. My dear Patricio …

  My dear. She still loved him! He read the words, which told of everyday events—the church bazaar, her younger sister making her first skirt on the new sewing machine their father had purchased, a calf getting out of its pen and coming into the kitchen—but the image he clung to was of Emelia the last time he’d seen her. Wearing a blue dress with some kind of small flowers printed on it, a darker blue hat with a brim that dipped in front and shaded her delicate skin. Her face … somehow he remembered her dark eyes and arching brows, but he could not quite make her smile come into focus. He stared at the letter more intently, as if it would make her face appear clearly to him. His eyes dimmed a little. What if he forgot her before he could go home? What if she forgot him?

  A quiver of panic raced through his gut, the urge to run down the street and leap aboard one of the trucks and demand that it take him to the coast, to an outbound ship, to his home. He glanced at Roberto, who was reading his own letter with a little smile on his face. The anxiety passed.

  He reached into his pocket to touch his lucky real but it was not there and he remembered that it had disappeared somewhere on the battlefield. The panic threatened to return and he forced himself not to think of it.

  He folded Emelia’s letter back into its envelope and opened the one from his mother. Three lines down, her words stood out. I do not want to worry you, but thought you should know this. It’s your father. The doctor says it was a mild heart attack. He will be fine, my dear son, please do not worry. We have arranged extra help with this year’s crops and everything will be fine. The corn is already growing tall …

  Patricio blew out a long breath and reread the passage. Papá? His heart? Heart attacks were for old men and his papa had only turned forty; was he an old man already? He stared at a spot somewhere in the middle of the road, thinking frantically. Could he obtain a leave of absence, plead a family emergency? But the commander would want to see the letter and Mamá had made it sound as though everything would be all right. More than ever he wanted his lucky real.

  “Where are you?” Roberto asked. “You seem a million miles away.”

  Patricio shrugged and put his letter away. “A little incident at home. Mamá says it is fine.”

  Roberto had torn the remaining brown paper from his parcel.

  “This funny old box,” he said, holding it with both hands. “My mamá kept it on a shelf in the living room. It’s been around forever, maybe from my grandfather’s side? Oh well, it’s full of cookies now and that’s what has my interest.”

  He raised the lid and held the open box out to his friend. “Have a couple. Bizcochitos con canela.”

  The first bite filled Patricio’s mouth with the warm, familiar cinnamon flavor of home. His mother often baked a similar recipe and he found that the memory was nearly enough to bring tears. He cleared his throat noisily and thanked Roberto for the cookies.

  “Remember the day we met, on the train? You had empanadas from home and you shared with me. So, this is my way of sharing back.”

  So much they had endured together. Patricio had heard men talk of the bonds of wartime, lifelong friendships that formed because of the trauma. No one mentioned that simply sharing cookies was a part of that. In the distance, the heavy thuds of shelling punctuated his thoughts.

  Rowdy voices caught his attention, a half-dozen soldiers laughing together, light roughhousing as they walked along the street. No doubt they had already located the bars, or the women. Patricio bent his knees, drawing his legs in close. Roberto had the wooden box on his lap and was balling up the paper in which it had been wrapped. One of the soldiers came to a dead stop in front of them.

  “Hey, amico! Where did you get that?” He was staring hard at the wooden box.

  Roberto placed a hand protectively over the lid. “A gift from home.”

  The dark-haired soldier knelt a few feet away, while his buddies staggered on down the road.

  “My uncle had one just like it,” he said. “Back in the old country. Torino.”

  He held out a hand. “Marco Santini. Company A. I’m from Jersey—New Jersey—but my family, they come from Italy. I was just there, stationed on the Italian Front. Crappy job but I get sent there cause I can speak enough Italian to issue orders at those stupidos. Man, talk about cold! Snowy mountains, terrible clothing … Italy not at all ready to be in a war, I kept telling my Uncle Giuseppe. But, you know, he’s nothing to do with the government. He’s a bishop, doesn’t get to make those decisions.”

  Marco shook his head. “Bad place to be all last winter. Belleau Wood was … well, awful … but I’ll take a summer battle over a winter one any day.”

  Roberto looked confused.

  Patricio spoke up. “So your Uncle Giuseppe—he had a box like this one?”

  “Oh. No, that was Uncle Marco. I was named for him. He’s the one in Torino. Giuseppe was in Rome, actually kind of high up in the church, emissary to the Holy Father, I think. Something like that.”

  He touched the box with his index finger. “So, yeah, the uncles came to see us once and that’s when Uncle Marco had the box with him. He’d packed his socks in it. I was pretty little then, so I was fascinated. Giuseppe was telling us how he’d found this old thing down in some vault at the Vatican, locked away in this big room full of stuff, like treasures. Except
all the other treasures were gold and silver and shit like that. The box was really ugly and plain compared to everything else so I guess he used his ‘power of office’ or some such and he took it. Laughed about how it was the cheapest birthday gift he’d ever given Uncle Marco. Marco just stayed quiet. I got the feeling he really loved the thing. He seemed pretty attached to it.”

  “It couldn’t have been this one,” Roberto said. “It’s been with my family in Panama for a long time.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m sure it was. I mean, the one my uncle has couldn’t have left Italy for a hundred years or more, not until he brought it with him on that trip. It’s just funny, you know, to see two of them. Who’d be dumb enough to make two boxes alike, when neither one of them’s exactly a work of art—know what I mean?”

  Santini stood up and gave a little salute before dashing off to join his friends who were now two blocks away.

  “Quite a talker,” Roberto observed.

  “Yeah.” Their eyes met and they laughed. Then Patricio remembered their earlier conversation. “So … your leg. What’s going to happen?”

  “Oh, not much. They’ll take me to the hospital up the road, docs will take off those two bad toes and I’ll rest up awhile. Probably be back at the front with you in no time. A few weeks.” He shrugged it off as though he believed that was all there was to it. “They told me a transport leaves at three o’clock. I suppose I better get back there.”

  He started to rise and Patricio saw his friend’s face go white when he put weight on the bad foot.

  “I can’t believe you walked those six miles this morning.”

  “Hey, they promised a hot bath.” Roberto found his balance, forcing the heel to take the weight. “And mail—don’t forget the treats.”

  He nearly tipped over when he waved the box of cookies toward Patricio.

  “Let me carry that for you. I’ll walk you back to the truck.” Once again he wished for his lucky Spanish real. Right now he would give it to Roberto to ward off a bad outcome from the foot surgery.

  He tucked the letters into his tunic and the wooden box under his right arm, offering his left as support for Roberto’s increasingly bad limp.

  “Nearly there,” Patricio said. “Lucky you, getting a ride and going farther from the front.” The sounds of gunfire had grown progressively louder from the south. The rest of them had better get back to their company soon.

  The troop transport vehicle sat in the middle of the Paris-Metz road, facing the opposite direction from the way Patricio would need to hike back to their bivouac area. Two other vehicles, one an escort and the other carrying a general, were idling in front of it. A corporal waved Roberto forward.

  “We’re rolling in five minutes. Good thing you got here when you—” His final words vanished in an explosion of fire, dirt and hot gas.

  Patricio found himself lying twenty feet away, face down with Roberto’s wooden box pressing into his chest. A high-pitched whine screamed in his ears, but no other sounds came through. He shook his head and rubbed to get granules of dirt out of his eyes.

  When he could see through the rolling dust, the general’s vehicle was a mass of tangled metal and the escort truck lay on its side a dozen yards farther along what was left of the road. Men were running, their mouths working but Patricio heard none of it. The truck Roberto had just climbed into was nothing but a charred mass at the bottom of a crater.

  * * *

  “Patrick Sanchez?” The faint voice came from very far away. “Patrick? Can you hear me?”

  Patricio became dimly aware of a young woman’s face near his. Her lips moved but the sound was unclear and seemed distant. He felt his eyelids flutter and then he went back to sleep. A gentle touch on his arm wakened him at some later time.

  The same female face smiled at him. “Patrick?” This time he registered enough to know that she had Anglicized his name.

  “Pa—” The word caught in his dry throat and he coughed. Pain ripped through his body. “Patricio. It’s a … Spanish … name.”

  “Well, Patricio, it’s good to have you with us again,” she said. He caught about three words of the sentence but her smile told him what she meant.

  “My ears … I can’t hear too well.”

  She nodded. “The doctor said that might be the case. It’s a miracle you’re alive. You were standing right next to the place where the shell hit.”

  He worked up a smile, still unsure what she was talking about. A bandage on his face itched and blocked part of his right eye but he couldn’t seem to move his hand to scratch it. Soon it was too much effort to decipher her words. He slept again.

  The light in the room was different when he woke this time. Three shafts of golden sun came from behind him, hitting a pale gray wall somewhere beyond his feet. As he watched, the light grew more intense, then quickly faded. Sundown.

  His eyes traveled the expanse above his head. Angels floated on fragile wings above him; a white-bearded man in flowing red robes pointed toward some people who stared upward at him in awe. Then Patricio knew. He had died. This was heaven.

  But if that were the case, why did his body hurt so badly?

  He dragged his gaze away from the beautiful scene. Elaborately carved stone molding decorated the junction where the painted ceiling met a wall. It registered someplace inside him that he was in a building. He couldn’t remember the last time he was in a building, and never inside one like this. He heard himself moan.

  A man in a white coat immediately appeared at his side. “Well, Corporal Sanchez, you seem to be feeling a little better today. I’m Doctor Mitchell.”

  “Corporal?”

  “You received a promotion and, I believe, a couple of medals for bravery.”

  Patricio turned his head aside. Roberto was dead—he remembered that much. What good were medals?

  “Once the leg has mended you’ll be given light office duty for a few months.”

  Leg. Patricio looked toward the foot of the bed. A thick white cast encased his right leg, which hung suspended from a contraption of metal and wires.

  He fumbled through the information, working to make sense of it while the doctor talked quietly with a nurse who had appeared at his bedside and was making notes on a clipboard full of pages.

  “A box—” Patricio said. “I was holding a box.”

  The doctor had a blank look but the nurse’s expression brightened. “Yes, they found it. The medic said it was under your body and it looked like something of a keepsake. It was on your stretcher with you when you arrived.”

  She tucked her pencil behind her ear and set the clipboard near Patricio’s uninjured leg. A metal-frame table sat beside the bed and she knelt to pull something from its lower shelf.

  “The box is right here,” she said. “A little scuffed but basically it’s just fine.”

  He reached for the box, laying it beside his hip, keeping one hand on it. The ringing in his ears made him want to scream. Sensing his distress the nurse injected something into his arm with a large hypodermic needle. She pulled the sheet up to his chest and he began to drift away once more.

  The next time he opened his eyes, the ward lay in darkness but for the soft glow of a few small lamps. Patricio turned his head to the left—saw a long row of white-sheeted beds filled with wounded men. The same to his right. Had they been here all along? Some of them tossed in their sleep, some groaned with the pain of their injuries. Aside from the patients, the ward was empty and quiet.

  He drew a hand from under the blanket and took inventory: A bandage wound around his forehead, one very tender area beneath it; scabbed-over abrasions on his nose and right cheek; wads of cotton in both ears—he pulled them out; the right leg in its cast—he remembered that—and a length of gauze around his right forearm. His hand touched something hard on the mattress beside him. Roberto’s wooden box.

  He pulled himself up against his pillow, awkward with the leg in its harness, scooping the box onto his lap. Roberto, my friend�
�� Images filled his head—scraps of that mangled vehicle. Your poor infected foot. You thought an amputation was the worst that would happen. Patricio’s tears began to flow. The horror of the trenches came pouring back, all the times he had been certain he would die, then the shock of the completely unexpected shelling. He allowed himself the moment to mourn all that had happened to them.

  Tears dripped from his chin, landing in the dust that coated the box. Absently, he picked up a corner of his sheet and began to wipe it clean. The dark wood became more attractive the more he rubbed at it. It felt warm against his thighs. He laid both hands flat against the carved surface and a rush of comfort traveled up his arms. He could hear a man three beds away whispering a woman’s name, the swishing of sheets as the man rolled over in delirious half-sleep. He paused and listened, picking up tiny sounds from all over the ward.

  The box now appeared to be golden brown, not the uneven, blotchy dark color as before. For the first time he noticed small stones of red, blue and green, and they sparkled now as if lit by some inner source. He ran his hands across the lid and down the sides. The colors intensified.

  “You saved my life, didn’t you?” he whispered to the box. “There is something magical about you.”

  He slid back down, flat on the mattress once again, his hands resting on the wooden box on his belly. He felt his eyes drifting shut.

  * * *

  Patricio woke to the sounds of efficiency. Nurses bustled through the ward, delivering breakfast to those who could eat, bowls of some sort of porridge. Some of the men sat upright, feeding themselves; others relied upon an attendant to spoon the food for them. Plenty were still incoherent in their misery and he saw that the nurses were doing their best to attend to everyone.

  The wooden box still rested on his belly. He must have slept very quietly after his wakeful period in the night. Staring at the box he wondered what had happened—it looked perfectly ordinary now, no special colors, no glowing stones. The dust was gone. He remembered that he had cried, had wiped off the dirt. He lifted the lid. Only crumbs remained of the cookies Roberto’s mother had sent.