The Fire by Night

by Teresa Messineo

  All she had to do was stand.

  7

  Jo McMahon

  Spring 1945, The Western Front

  The major didn’t die. He looked like he would, for a day or two, but then his fever broke and the glassy look left his eyes. Suddenly, he knew where he was and what had happened to him, and when he was told about it afterward, he was surprised to be alive at all. Billy, too, could hold his own as long as he didn’t move around too much—and especially if Jo could get him anywhere near some steam. “I know I look like death,” he quipped, his lips dusky and dark in his pale face, “but I actually feel less like it than before.” Jonesy took pride in rationing out the food that Grandpa had won them, wheeling himself around the small tent in his crazy contraption, his leg sticking out in front of him like an awkward battering ram. James asked one day to get dressed—“if you still have my clothes, miss. I mean, I’m not sick, I’m not really injured that bad, just my hands, you know. As for my eyes, well, I can’t stay in bed the rest of my life on account of that.” So Jo had pulled out the dirty bundle from under his cot, and now he sat upright in bed in his charred field uniform, the burn marks reaching nearly up to the triangular tricolored badge on his sleeve.

  Father Hook’s visible wounds were slowly starting to heal, but Jo couldn’t reach him, not the man inside. His eyes could dart around the tent now, instead of just staring fixedly at one spot, he could answer in monosyllables: “Yes” to “Is the pain bearable?” and “No” to “Do you need anything, Father?” But when Jo would try to draw him out, asking him an open-ended question—or one about his past, whether long gone or recent—he would freeze up, stiffen inside and out, and be gone for hours and hours. Jo had seen shock before, but seeing it now in a priest unsettled her. To her, these were men who were supposed to minister to others without ever having needs of their own. Priests had visited the filthy tenements back home in Brooklyn, bringing closure to the dying; they fed the hungry masses with their God’s own flesh; they heard the secret confessions of a thousand hardened sinners without ever appearing to be affected or drained of their limitless resources, of their power to heal. Now here was a man Jo thought should have been untouchable, should have been able to overcome his own shock and pain. He should have shouldered his cross, offered it up cheerfully, like someone whose yoke was easy and burden light—and then dip down into the inexhaustible recesses of his being and offer them all—offer Jo—the words of hope and love and salvation that the whole dying world was aching to hear. But all he was was scared.

  Then there was David. Jo had seen typhus cases before, but she couldn’t get a handle on this one. Sometimes he would seem to rally. The fever would lessen, he could sleep—albeit fitfully—and he would seem to be on the upswing. Then, especially at night, the illness would come back, redoubled; he would thrash and moan in his long, narrow cot, his thick hair sticking to his sweating forehead. He would call out for his mother, for his gun, for their Scottish equivalents. He would throw back his head and arch his spine stiffly—a sure sign of the end stages of the dread disease—but somehow, in the morning he would still be hanging on, by a thread at times but still hanging on. Now Jo sat down next to him and pushed back his dark bush of hair, revealing a high, unwrinkled brow. Only the dark, indented circles under his eyes betrayed how very close to death he was straying.

  “David, David, David,” she murmured, closing her eyes, trying to hold on herself, trying to hold on to one of the six men she had vowed would not die, remembering other times she had seen this horrible disease. It had ravaged whole villages in Sicily, the dying mothers bringing in dead children for her to look at, the old men crying and begging the doctors to do something for their wives, their daughters, their grandchildren. They thought we were gods, that we could cure anything. Typhus. Plague. Typhoid fever. Jo remembered how, as they pulled out, the Germans had destroyed the Italians’ irrigation and water supply—crushing artesian wells, smashing two-thousand-year-old walls, toppling ancient aqueducts. The water became deadly to drink—but what else could the people do that long, hot summer but drink the water that had brought life to their towns and their families for millennia? So they had gotten typhoid first, and then cholera; and then the pools of standing water had brought on the mosquitoes and malaria had entered their hopeless lives as well. Jo remembered the nurses’ skin turning yellow from the quinine that protected them, the GIs’ pockets perpetually stained from where they hid the pills they didn’t want to swallow, pills that could destroy even the hardiest stomach.

  Jo’s hand was absently stroking the dying man’s hair as she found herself humming a theme from Hänsel und Gretel. Only a few years earlier—it seemed ages and ages ago now, in this place without a name—she had been studying opera. With Signor Luigi. What a crotchety bastardo he had been, but oh how he had loved her voice. He had offered her lessons for next to nothing, screamed at her, cursed at her, done everything in his power to transform her voce argento (voice of silver, as he called it) into a voce d’oro (voice of gold). But then Jo had started nursing classes and begun working nights; and then the war broke out and Gianni was drafted. Jo’s studies fell by the wayside as everything began to crash down around her. She still had the music inside of her, though, even now—muffled and nearly drowned out, but deep down it was still there. It would rise to the surface at unexpected times, like now—“Papageno,” “Abendsegen,” “O mio babbino caro”—music written in German, Italian, English, the languages that now screamed at each other across the continents, music from a dream world, from a peaceful world, from a world that no longer existed.

  Abends, will ich schlafen gehn,

  Vierzehn Engel um mich stehn:

  Zwei zu meinen Häupten,

  Zwei zu meinen Füßen,

  Zwei zu meiner Rechten,

  Zwei zu meiner Linken,

  Zweie, die mich decken,

  Zweie, die mich wecken,

  Zweie, die mich weisen,

  Zu Himmels-Paradeisen

  Without even thinking, she softly sang the words now for David—like they were a lullaby, like he could hear her—and her mind wandered as time slouched by, marked only by an increase in hunger, an increase in cold, each moment interminable, endless, unreal. Jo thought of the first war movie she had seen, Foreign Correspondent, put out before America had even gotten into the war. She could still see the gloss and the polish, the glamour of espionage, plucky heroines, bravery that unfolded before her eyes in an hour and a half, dressed up in tailored dress suits, high heels, and permanent waves. She thought of the scene where they sneak into the old apartment building and her thoughts shifted to the tenement where she had grown up, where she’d taken care of herself through each of her childhood illnesses. She thought of the smell of oily meals cooking without ventilation, the sound of domestic fights on two floors in three different languages, the feel of the splintery wood of the banister, the hard iron of the fire escape where she would sleep in the summers when the heat of the whole city seemed bottled up in their one room. She hoped the place had burned to the ground by now, rats and all. At the thought of rats, her quick eye caught a shadow as it darted under the canvas. She turned her head, and there, running in and out, was a little mouse . . . two mice . . . half a dozen. There was nothing for them to eat. They were just getting out of the cold, into the cold, back out again, scurrying from dark into light.

  She had stopped singing the words in German and switched now into English, just as she had done countless times for sick and injured children of all nationalities trapped in the crosshairs of war, children who had been brought to her bleeding, crushed, and battered, children she could help and those beyond anyone’s aid. She had sung soothing strains of lullabies that transcended all language barriers, giving those innocents, if not the healing they deserved, at least a moment of peace and calm and safety in a world gone mad.

  When at night I go to sleep

  Fourteen angels watch do keep

  Two my head are guarding
r />   Two my feet are guiding

  Two are on my right hand

  Two are on my left hand

  Two who warmly cover

  Two who o’er me hover

  Two to whom ’tis given

  To guide my steps to heaven

  Jo thought again of that little toddler in Italy, the one whose foot had been lost when a truck ran over it. They had brought her to Jo a few days later to look at the wound, to beg for some antibiotic, and Jo had given it to her. “Who did the amputation?” she had asked in English, looking at the crooked, primitive stitches; the little girl in front of her was wriggling, wanting to get down from the table. Jo repeated her question, knowing her parents’ Sicilian dialect would be understood this far south on the mainland. The old village dentist had shuffled forward, fingering the felt hat in his trembling hands. The girl began to cry, and Jo let her jump down from the table, the child steadying herself with her pudgy hands, hopping away from the old man.

  “She no longer likes me,” he explained, his graying head shaking sadly, the white stubble standing out on his face in the afternoon sunlight, “since I took away her foot.”

  “What did you use for anesthesia?” Jo asked, knowing the civilian doctors were hard up for supplies.

  “Non ne avevamo niente,” the man said simply. We had none. Jo had nearly thrown up from sheer pity. The plump little girl in front of her, now happily playing with an overturned box of tongue depressors, had had her mangled foot cut from her tiny body while she was fully awake. Jo could see her now-smiling face twisted, as it must have been, in a contortion of pain, could hear her low, delighted babble at discovering a new toy, then her scream of horror and agony and outrage at the injustice of war. Where had her angels been then?

  Jo had stopped caring after that girl. She had still cared a little, sometimes—while delivering a baby for a peasant woman perhaps, or helping a soldier get onto his crutches for the first time—but she had cared a little less each day, until now she could run her fingers lovingly through the damp hair of a handsome soldier, singing him enchanted words of love and peace, and feel no more than the captain felt, securing his post; or Jonesy did, counting up his rations and doing short division to see how long they could possibly hold out. Jo had shored up her heart so there were no more chinks where love or feelings could sneak in any longer; nowhere where pain could find a way through. Or, if there were any weak spots left, Jo was working all the time—awake, asleep, thinking, unthinkingly—working to patch them, to solder them closed, to bury her soul alive. That was the only way she could survive, survive the weeks and months and, possibly, years of war ahead of her.

  How long had it been since Grandpa had shot himself? Since Queenie had died? The captain came in sometimes, telling her useless, meaningless things about the shifting front, about resupply lines and chains of command; reinforcements would come next week, in two months, from the rear, from smack-dab in front of them. He was mining the field behind the tent in case of a sneak attack by the Germans; he was sending three scouts to the south to see if they could reestablish contact with command. Whatever he said, it changed daily, it didn’t matter, it was never the same plan twice; and it made no sense anyway to Jo, whose only concern now was her men. The entire war had boiled down to six lives—those were the only lives she cared about, the only lives she could touch. She was satisfied that the major had lived—not glad, or happy, or thrilled, as she would have been had someone told her, as a young nursing student, that she would perform surgery successfully and save an officer’s life. No, she was satisfied. Satisfied that Jonesy recovered and James sat up, that Billy’s airway was open, that Father ate something that morning, that David slept and was stable and his fever hadn’t spiked again today. These were her only concerns. And they concerned her only as far as she allowed them to, only as far as her brain and her hands and the nerves that connected them were concerned. But her concern for these six lives bypassed her heart and bypassed her soul. Because if you loved, you could lose. If you loved, you did lose. Jo McMahon had lost enough.

  Jo got up and walked back into the tiny enclosure she had re-created with those same three sheets—she had washed them and washed them and washed them again, but in her mind’s eye she could still see the outline of Grandpa’s blood where it had splattered, a distinct pattern no longer visible to anyone but herself, its silhouette seared into her brain. She knew the stains were there and she knew they weren’t there and knowing one did not detract from the other in the least. In the relative privacy of her cell, she buried her face in her hands, then rubbed it hard, as if trying to wake herself from this marathon of duty that would never come to an end. She looked at herself in the smudged, blistered mirror that hung crookedly from a nail, and she did not recognize the person she saw. Her ivory skin (so valued among southern Italians) was now lifeless and gray; her hair was tangled and matted, the worst of it hidden out of sight in a disreputable bun. She ran her fingers lightly over her neck, her collarbone, her shoulders—everything was too long, too thin, too bony. She looked down at her hands. The veins on the backs of them were swollen and squirmed like living things when she touched them. There was no part of her that was beautiful, no part of her that was her, no part of her that was even clean or decent. She looked down at her tattered nightshirt lying on the damp ground, soiled with a dozen old bloodstains, the result of not having enough Curity diapers, the only sanitary napkins the girls had been able to find. She hated how cold and how hungry and how ugly she was; the hair on her legs and under her arms disgusted her. She vowed that she would wear the contraband negligee that very night. She would wear it—something fine and silky and lovely—wear it just to be a woman again, not a drudge cleaning up after man’s orgy of death and carnage. She would do it. She would.

  There was noise outside the tent—not the muffled whispering of the captain’s platoon, but talking. Then yelling. Unfamiliar voices, and they were coming closer to the tent. Jo stepped out quickly from behind the sheets just as half a dozen men, Rangers, barreled into the tent. They looked like supermen to Jo, each half a foot taller than Clark—who had followed behind in their wake—the blue and yellow “lozenge” patches on their sleeves marking them out as elite. Here were men who could face anything, overcome anything, no matter the odds; here, finally, were men who could save Jo—and more importantly, save her men.

  But as Jo looked at them again she realized that these were not men coming to her aid, coming to get her out of this pit of death and hopelessness. These, instead, were yet more men who would be demanding help of her.

  “Doctor,” one of the men was yelling. He was covered in blood, but it was not his own. He and another Ranger held between them all that remained of their comrade—he had tourniquets on both legs and one arm (what was left of them), a blood-soaked bandage wrapped hastily around his head. His eyes were lolling backwards, lost in the delirium that is on the other side of pain. Jo took one look at the boy and knew. She shook her head, almost imperceptibly, at his friends, at those who had struggled through who knew what to find him help. There would be no help for him.

  “We have no doctor. And even if we did . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “Damn it, miss, we’ve come this far . . . There’s got to be something.”

  They were rolling up their sleeves, offering blood—as if this kid needed any more blood, he was red from it. They couldn’t, they wouldn’t believe that there was nothing to be done, that his body was shutting down, that no one—not even a Ranger—could lose that much of himself and still survive. The boy started to convulse, and they yelled again for help, for a doctor, for a man to fix what was broken and bring their friend back to life. And then a woman—a highly trained woman, a woman who could have fixed almost anything but knew that she could not fix this, that no one could fix this—did what no man could do. She climbed up onto the only remaining operating table, her right shoe falling off softly, curling her foot up under her, motioning for them to lay him in her arms
. They resisted at first, eyes welling with tears no Ranger could let fall, denying that death would defeat them after all their effort. But the injured man’s body was shaking and shaking, and they gave him to her in the end. His wild eyes focused one last time, focused on the last thing he thought he’d find so far from home, on something he never thought to see again—the dark, moist eyes of an American woman, eyes that were gazing down on him like a mother’s, like a lover’s, like an angel’s. He could see she was real—not the phantom of his pain, but real—he could feel her arms, real arms supporting him—and then there was only her, everything peripheral turning into a hazy blur, the war, the tent, even his buddies, who had been more to him than family, disappeared and there was only her. Looking down on him like heaven. Suddenly, he was no longer scared and no longer in pain, and he wasn’t even unhappy to be dying (he knew, he knew now that he was dying), because she was there and she was real and she was holding him and now everything, even death, was going to be all right.

  “There, baby,” she was saying, delicately pushing back a lock of hair that had gotten into his eye. “There, love,” and those words were the same words his mother had used and he was safe again. “There, sweetheart,” she murmured, pulling him closer to her soft, warm body, and she was his lover, and even with his life rushing out of him, his body responded and he wanted her and he loved her and he would get well and make violent love to her and he would be happy forever because she was not some cheap trick in Paris that helped to pass the time but the woman of his dreams at last, a real woman, and now everything was going to be okay. He closed his eyes and his tired body rested against hers, swaying gently, oh so gently, back and forth on the hard table he could not feel, in the cold tent he could no longer see. The rhythm of her body relaxed him and excited him at the same time, and he was safe, the war was over, they were all going home together. “Baby, baby, baby,” she whispered, her lips tickling his ear caked with blood, and his body flooded with pure bliss, with obscene pleasure, with heat and power and might; he was soaring with houri in a Muslim paradise; he was eighteen again, kissing Katie Sue and she had taken his class ring in her tiny hand and she was crying and saying she would wait for him (oh, the joy of it) and that she would marry him when he came home. And then suddenly, without any pain, he was home.