The Fire by Night

by Teresa Messineo

  “Father? Is there anything?”

  “Would you—would you mind sitting by me for a moment?”

  Jo pulled over a packing box and sat down, slowly.

  “I’ve been—I’ve been going through a very rough patch,” he began. Jo took his pulse and put a hand to his forehead automatically, but he actually smiled a tiny smile and said, “No, no, miss, I don’t mean that. I don’t mean I feel any worse physically. It’s more like, I’ve been through a very dark place. And—and it was awful,” he said simply. “But I think I’m just the other side of it now. I realize where I am, and what’s happened, and how you’ve been here all along, helping, and me not doing anything—not seeming to be doing anything anyway.” He got all tangled up in his words and then smiled, ingenuously, at himself. “But God bless you, miss, for that.”

  He still looked terrible—pale and disheveled and sick—but the lost, vacant look in his eyes was gone. Very quietly, Jo asked, “Do you want to talk about what happened, Father?”

  His face clouded for a moment. Then he sighed, resolutely. “No, but I guess I should, just this once anyway.”

  There was a long pause, so long that Jo thought he had changed his mind. Then, all of a sudden, he started, midsentence.

  “And we were jumping, just—just like we always jumped. The younger guys were getting scared—‘getting religion,’ they used to call it, asking me to hear their confessions, even the ones who weren’t Catholics. The older men laughed at them and cursed, but it was okay, we all knew we were the same underneath. Everyone believes in God just before they jump. So we did—I mean, we jumped. I don’t carry a gun, you know, so they always try to keep tabs on me, always try to have one or two guys pretty close to me, to cover me when the fire starts. The bigger their sins the more valuable I seem to become,” he said, smiling wryly. There was another pause before he started again, in a lower voice this time.

  “It was night, and there were a lot of wind gusts as we got closer to the ground. I got all twisted around—I didn’t know which way was up for a while. Then, all of a sudden, I was pretty close to a couple of guys, close enough to hear them yelling to each other. They were cutting their lines, they were getting out of their harnesses—we were coming in fast over the water, you could see it shimmering beneath us. They wanted to be free of the chutes before they hit so they could swim without getting tangled up in them. Then it came to me all of a sudden—I guess it was seeing the buildings so close by—and I yelled to them not to do it, that it wasn’t water, it was asphalt. Asphalt can shine like that, miss, when the moon’s out. But it was too late and they hit, I mean, they must have hit, miss, at, like, sixty miles an hour.”

  A tear ran down his baby cheek, and Jo thanked God for it. Please, God, let him tell the worst of it, let him let it go.

  Jo reached out her hand and took his, and he didn’t pull back.

  He smiled a little, self-consciously. Then he went on, sniffing and rubbing his nose with his sleeve.

  “Like I said, it had been really gusty. Somehow my chute got pulled up again—no, more like pulled up and out to one side, not toward the buildings, but—there was this row of trees, really big trees, you could see them black against the night sky, and I skimmed over one—not all the way, as you can see here.” His free hand moved and rested lightly on his belly. “I remember crying out, it hurt so much, but I was surprised when I touched down on the ground, I mean, I was okay, I was alive, and in the end I came down so soft. It was like landing on a mattress.”

  Father Hook was staring right through Jo. She was there but she wasn’t there; she was the conduit that made it possible for him to speak, but he could no longer tell he was talking to her, no longer tell she was there at all.

  “And then—I looked up. And—everyone else was still up there.”

  His tears flowed freely now, down the sides of his pug nose; he was crying, silently and freely.

  “They were up there, screaming, all of them. They were stuck—they were—impaled by the branches. The branches were going right through them—they were struggling up there, the moon was out, you could see them—thrashing around, screaming, they just kept screaming . . . Good God, miss,” he ended, shuddering, noticing Jo all of a sudden, coming back to her from the hell where he had been trapped, releasing the vice grip he held her hand in. “Good God,” he repeated in a small voice, staring straight into her eyes, a scared boy, crying in the night.

  Jo leaned forward and wiped the tears from his face.

  “It’s over, Father. It’s all over.”

  “They died. They died, and I wanted to die too.”

  “But you didn’t, Father. You’re here. You’re okay.” Then, repeating it again, deliberately and slow, as if speaking to a very little child, as if her saying it would make it so, “It’s over.”

  Jo was a mess. She knew that. Not just her physical self, but the Jo underneath—she knew how bad off she was. She saw her dead brother, and she’d come close to killing herself, and she knew the worst, most likely, still lay ahead of her. She felt that she had no courage and no strength left, no certainty of her future, of her patients’ future, of the future of the whole damned world. But the only thing she was sure of—as she got up and made her way, achingly, toward the front of the tent—was that she had just acted as a nurse. That that had been important. She had sat with a patient for a few moments only, but she knew what she had done, what she had been. She had been a nurse. And she was surprised how that still made her feel.

  Up until then she hadn’t been sure she could still feel anything anymore.

  Jo sorted through the last of the rations, looking for something they could eat. It had grown steadily darker until she had to light the small spirit lamp she had found earlier, packed away. Now, in the soft glow of its light, she turned the cans around and around in her hand to make out the labels: an open B-unit can (stale biscuits and hard candy, minus the sugar and coffee they had already scavenged), one can of meat and vegetable stew, one can of meat and vegetable hash. She felt she could eat both cans herself and still be hungry, and here she was trying to figure out how to feed the whole tent on just one. She would need to leave the other one for tomorrow.

  She settled on the hash and reached for the can opener, hung, as always, on its rusty hook. She remembered the time, back in Anzio, when she had been holding a post-op patient’s hand, soothing him with her soft words, with her soft touch, and one of the new nurses had been complaining that she couldn’t find the can opener. Jo could still hear her voice, grating and irritable, jarring even if you hadn’t just come out of surgery. Jo had stood it as long as she could before finally swiveling around in her chair and facing the young girl: “Could you be a little quieter? We hang it right here,” and she had felt her patient’s hand go limp in hers almost simultaneously with a sharp round of gunfire outside. The new girl had hit the floor, still whining, and Jo had looked down on her contemptuously, but when she turned back to her patient her heart stuck in her throat. There was a new row of bullet holes running through the canvas just behind the bed where her patient had been propped up, intubated, trying to learn how to breathe. A row of neat holes with the setting sun burning through them now—a row ending where Jo would have been sitting had she not turned around at that exact second. The machine-gun fire had gone right through the canvas, and then the man’s neck and his severed head was on the floor. Jo was holding the hand of a decapitated body. She had stood up, dropping the lifeless hand, tripping over the still prostrate form of the new girl. Jo had run outside, on the far side of the tent, and thrown up, thrown up until she couldn’t anymore.

  Jo nicked her finger with the sharp edge of the lid. She sucked it, and it tasted like salt and smelled like dog food. She began scraping out portions of mash into metal bowls but ran out and had to divide it up all over again. There was no chance of heating it up—their oil stove had run out of fuel that afternoon. Clark thought he had heard something a few nights back, so now that the tempera
ture had edged just above freezing, fires were off-limits. There was a greasy, oily film on the indistinguishable mush in front of her and she was so hungry that she would have been happy to just have that, to lick the inside of the can, the sharp lid. Cut seven ways, there just wasn’t enough. Cut six ways, maybe each man would get a mouthful. She cut it six ways.

  She shivered as a cold gust of air hit her. Her back was to the tent flap, and in the split second it took for her to decide to turn around after getting the last of the hash off of her spoon, a Luger was clamped to her head.

  Even as she felt the man’s left arm come across her neck from behind, pulling her toward him, she held on to the food, managing to put it down, carefully, on the desk in front of her. As if she were outside of her body, looking at the scene unfold, she was pleased, she was proud. She hadn’t dropped the food.

  With her two hands free now, she tried pulling down on the man’s arm. It was strong and hard like iron beneath the dark wool; the most she could manage was to wiggle enough to get her chin down, to wedge it between his grip and her bruised throat. She coughed, and swallowed, and took a quick breath. The tip of the barrel was pressed against her temple. So the Germans had come. She had always imagined them coming—in North Africa, Italy, France, here. In her dreams they were powerful, supermen, tall and dark and merciless. The man was whispering orders to her now in a hoarse voice, not daring to raise it, but Jonesy looked up from his work and opened his mouth. The man tightened his grip on Jo and held his elbow out fiercely to one side, exaggerating his hold on her, repositioning the gun against her skull. He was warning Jonesy, threatening him with Jo’s life. Jonesy didn’t have to know German to understand. He shut his mouth and stared, mutely. Billy blinked and quickened his shallow breathing; Major Donahue struggled to a sitting position, as did Hook—Jo noticed the priest’s face tighten in pain as he sat up too quickly for the first time. (She hoped, abstractedly, that his stitches would hold.) James turned toward the noise and asked what was going on. Hook tried shushing him, but he asked again, louder this time, and the German sounded angrier.

  “James, just sit quietly,” Jo said in a voice so level it surprised her. “Don’t speak.”

  “But what—”

  The German was repeating himself. It was the same phrase, over and over, slowed down, over-enunciated for them; he was breaking it down into syllables, into small, phonetic chunks. Jo thought one of the pieces sounded like the English word why.

  She looked down on David, just in front of her; his eyes were open, but whether he could see her, could see his enemy, she didn’t know—his expression remained unreadable.

  Jo’s ankle hit the leg of the desk and she turned it, involuntarily, stumbling slightly and bumping into the man’s torso. She could feel him wince, feel his grip momentarily weaken, hear his sharp intake of breath.

  “You’re hurt—” Jo began.

  Again, the man began his recitation, but this time he was struggling through it, mumbling some of the words, starting over.

  Jo tried turning to face the man. He nearly shouted at her in warning, catching himself mid-yell. His voice sounded like it was in pain, forced. Jo felt his body trembling. She bet everything on the hunch that he would not shoot her outright and, with a sudden effort, twisted around in his arms. She was terribly close now, right up against him, her head level with the little skulls on his collar. She felt him switch the pistol to her left temple, now on his right side, felt him grab her tightly around the waist, pulling her fiercely toward himself, all the while telling her something she could not understand, something he needed her to know. Jo wished she was wearing something with a red cross on it, a duty uniform, anything.

  “Nurse,” she said, trying to point to herself, but her hands were pinned down at her sides. Then, brushing the edge of the desk with her fingers, she felt for the stethoscope, grabbed it, banged it against the desk to get his attention.

  “Nurse. I can help.”

  The man stopped speaking, glanced quickly at what was in her hand, and asked her a question.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t understand German,” then, struggling, reaching, “Ich spreche kein Deutsch. I think.”

  He loosened his grip slightly, just enough to pull away from her for an instant, enough to look down into her face, to gauge her. Jo looked up into his blue eyes, spastic and squinting in pain. With her head tilted back, his cleft chin was right in front of her, she could see the tiny flecks of golden stubble on it. Again, she looked at the little skulls on his collar—they reminded her of Halloween, of children dressed like skeletons, of pumpkins carved like death masks, lit up with fire, and laughing. The gun was still against her head as he released his hold and took one step back. Jo could see that his great coat hung open and that his uniform beneath was a deeper black—drying blood, a great splotch over his belly. Jo exhaled quickly and reached for the desk drawer. In an instant, his death grip returned, he was almost yelling.

  “Oh, good God,” Jo complained, stamping her foot in her impatience. “Here, you open it.” And she motioned for him to pull out the drawer. He did, and she reached inside for the rolls of bandages, piling them up on the table. She pulled the tiny spirit lamp over and fell to her knees, pulling aside the strips of bloodied cloth. All at once, he was in distress over something, grabbing her hands, forgetting about the gun for a moment, then remembering, clamping it back in place but continuing to plead with her all the while.

  “I don’t understand,” Jo said, pushing his free hand away, struggling to see. “Could you just keep still,” she said more to herself, knowing she was as unintelligible to him as he was to her.

  She was cleaning his wound now, patting at it with gauze in the half-light, washing it with the cold water she had boiled earlier, still sitting in its freezing teapot. He kept getting the gun between her and the light. Exasperated, she grabbed the Luger from him—but just to thrust it back into his other hand, pushing both up against her head. “There, fine, shoot me if you have to, but just stay out of my light.”

  He stopped complaining after that, standing there meekly, eyes cast down. It struck Jo that that was exactly the kind of thing Queenie would have done; and, for the first time, she realized she could think about Queenie without her heart breaking, think about her and even smile a little, just like she was alive, like she would come through that tent flap soon and get a kick out of Jo telling her how she’d wrestled a gun from a German only to give it back to him.

  Jo covered the wound with gauze, then began wrapping it. The long strips of bandage had to stretch around the man’s back, then back again, cross over and over. Jo laid the side of her face against him as she reached behind him, passed the roll from one hand to another, pulled it back, switched it around again. When she pressed against him, she could feel him trembling. He still kept the gun to her head, but it hung awkwardly now, unsure of itself, as if it stayed there because it couldn’t think where else it should go. Jo finished and stood up. The man still held her, but loosely, the gun merely a token, brushing her shoulder.

  “You should give yourself up,” Jo began automatically, but she was uncertain even as she said it; she was unsure of what Clark would do to an injured German, to someone he could more easily persuade to give him information. The Geneva convention would mean little to a man like Clark. Jo shuddered; she had not believed it could be like this, that the enemy would have a face, that she would care. The German shook his head slowly, unable to understand her words.

  “All right, then,” Jo said, looking around. Then, “You must be starving.” She glanced down at the food, and he followed her gaze.

  “Guess I can split it seven ways after all,” and she picked up a bowl to give to him. He did not move. He was staring into her eyes, an incomprehensible expression on his face.

  “Go ahead, it’s all right,” Jo coaxed, smiling. “Back home, I had to skip meals regular.”

  Still he didn’t move.

  “Afraid these men here will jump you?” Sh
e smiled again. “I think you’d be okay without the gun, mister, but if you can’t give it up—” and she scooped up some of the food and held it up for him. He ate it hungrily. She fed him again, a tiny speck getting stuck on the side of his upper lip; she scraped it off and fed it to him again. There were only a couple of ounces of hash on the plate, but time seemed to stand still as she fed him. They had always been there, a man and a woman, locked in that bizarre embrace, a loaded pistol hanging impotently between them.

  Finally, Jo glanced down. She came back to the here and now. Clark’s men could come back at any moment—a realization that sickened her.

  “You’d better go,” she said, and found she was whispering.

  He took a step past her, heading for the back tent flap.

  “No—” she called, reaching out a hand in warning. The man hesitated, looking back at her, puzzled.

  “Damn it all to hell, how do you say it?” Then, guessing, hoping the English word was anything equivalent: “Land mines that way. Land mines.”

  “Landminen?” the German asked, startled, eyes wide open.

  Jo closed her eyes and silently thanked God. “Yes, you understood me. Landminen.”

  The man hurried toward the front of the tent; then he stopped, turned around, and strode resolutely back to Jo.

  “Sie sind der letzte wahre Mensch in Frankreich.”

  And he kissed her.

  He pulled her toward himself, and she could feel the gun again in his closed hand, but it was the handle this time, and he was holding her close and kissing her. She could hear the ticking of his wristwatch near her ear and the men rustling uneasily in their cots. She was distant and cold and detached—and then a spring broke within her, a cog, a wheel, a dam that had held her back, kept her unthinking, unfeeling, alive and yet dead all these months. The shackles of her self-preservation fell from her, and with a power that was overwhelming, it all came back to her at once. Her love for Gianni, her agony at his death, at the death of everyone she had cared for—she could hear Grandpa humming his tune, and see Queenie laughing as Jo saluted and the truck pulled out into the night. She was holding that boy’s hand and his head was looking up at her from the floor, and every sight and every sound and everything she had witnessed but not felt came rushing back, the good along with the bad. So she kissed this man, her enemy, the figure that had haunted her dreams since the war began, and she found that he was just another human being, lost and maimed and alone; he was cut off from his friends, from his countrymen, just like she was; he was starving and cold and searching, just like her. Her hand reached up behind his head, and she found she had to stand on her tiptoes to press his eager mouth to hers but she did and she wanted him. She wanted again. She felt. And then he was gone, rushing out the front tent flap, and Jonesy was calling out for Clark, for anyone, sounding the alarm.