by Jim Shepard
When you come, your imagination will be given a push. The house dates from 1791. The farm part was years ago split up, though there’s still a good bit of land left. I’m afraid it won’t seem very American to you and Gordon—cold stone walls and big rattling windows that let the wind in (in the mornings outside it’s cold and damp, now, and inside it’s colder and slightly less damp). It’s dull this summer, but very pretty. There are cracks all about the house and the stone is crumbling but it’s far from disaster. The garden is full of old twisted apple and beech trees and one cherry tree which has grown from a pip I planted when I was five. There are forsythia and bluebells and roses and primroses—all untame, all very lovely. In a corner of the garden we found an enormous man-hole (eight feet by six feet and carefully lined with stone) which we romantically claim to have been Cardinal Newman’s hideout when the Protestants were after him.
“Any gum, chum?” the boy said. He was still gazing at Bryant, still standing in the same spot near the hedge.
“Excuse me?” Bryant said.
The boy looked crestfallen. “Then you don’t know it,” he said. “I told him you wouldn’t.”
Bryant waited, and the boy removed his hands from the hedge and withdrew them behind his back. “My friend Keir told me if you asked Americans that way, they gave you chewing gum. He said you found it amusing.”
Bryant fished some gum from his pocket. “He was right,” he said. He leaned forward and handed the gum around the side of the hedge.
“Thank you very much, Sergeant,” the boy said.
“Well, you tell Keir he was right on the beam.”
“I will,” Colin said. “And I hope you remain alive, Sergeant. I have to go now, I’m afraid. Thank you for the chewing gum.”
He waved, and Bryant returned the wave. He watched the boy cross the open grassy area bordering the base and disappear, finally, down the lane.
“I hope you remain alive?” he repeated to himself. He shook his head.
After scrubbing floors and washing windows and repairing mattresses and sewing curtains I was quite fatigued with the indoors and ready for the garden. I asked my neighbour who around here knew about gardens, and the Hampdens arrived.
Lucky me. The Hampdens owned and ran a small plant and feed shop and have retired, it seems, to my back garden. Mr. H. was rather suspicious of my free time, but he’s come around, I think. They’ve provided some expertise, aid, and company, and we spent the last two days gardening in some fairly heavy rain. Again, not very American, I suspect, but something one does, gardening in England. It’s beginning, they tell me, to resemble a real English garden—with the variety and colour. You scoff, I’m sure. I’m not certain I know what makes an English garden (Mr. Hampden likes to say a watering can, some fertilizer, and three hundred years): the rock beds, the beautifully level and rich grass, the sense of age, of hidden surprises.
I’ve been trying to learn the botanical names for the new plants: this morning I pointed out a delicate one at my feet and said “Arabis,” proudly, for I suspected I was right. “Arabis variegata,” said Mrs. Hampden. “Variegata,” I said, as though that were obvious. “Is that Latin?” “No, dear,” she said. “English.” The dictionary says from the Latin variegare.
Mother, and the gardens, and the Hampdens, are almost enough. But almost is not it, is it?
I’m well. I’m fairly happy. I hope you are well. I hope you are safe. I’m very much looking forward to your visit. Mother has said there’s plenty of room for Jean and Gordon, so you shouldn’t worry.
The enclosed, perhaps, I should explain. It comes from my realisation that only watercolours can match some English colours. Though this—my first attempt with flowers since thirteen—conveys only a bit of what I’m trying to send. Please take care of yourself. I hope to see you soon.
Robin.
In the envelope—Bryant had missed it at first—was a piece of cardboard, with a watercolor of a spray of small starburst-like flowers of an intense blue, over green stalks and dark brown earth. It was labeled Endymion nonscriptus (English Bluebell).
That night he lay in the Nissen hut on his bunk, the enlisted men’s quarters cramped enough that an outspread arm would touch Snowberry, sleeping soundly to his left. There was a mission on for the next morning, though the weather was again problematic. Apparently someone was tired of waiting.
He dreamed of Training, of Basic and Gunnery, and he woke and lay still, his friends’ quiet breathing filling the space around him. Snowberry’s breathing had a slight wheeziness to it that always inspired inappropriate tenderness in him, as though he were listening to an infant son with the croup. The metal canopy of the Nissen roof above made random and hushed sounds in the wind. The air was close. The blanket beneath his nose had a flat, airless smell, and beyond it the darkness was chilled. Bean’s socks were somewhere nearby. Outside the rain was returning, the soft rush on the aluminum light and uneven. He imagined the canvas flaps on the fuel bowsers, billowing and wet in the darkness.
He remembered field-stripping the fifty-caliber Brownings day after day at Harlingen in the dreamy Texas sun. In only shorts and boots, on a square piece of olive canvas dusty and patinaed with grit. The gun was heavy and difficult to manipulate, smooth with oil. There were cocking levers and bolt assemblies, firing pins and sears, belonging to a system of order which had to be retrieved once broken down, and Bryant had always been the slowest, the clumsiest. He mashed fingers and skinned palms repeatedly wrestling with oil buffer body spring locks. The procedures were difficult to hurry, though the stripping and reassembly were being timed. In the intense heat there was an unpleasant, dreamlike effect of having to do something rapid and intricate while submerged in warm water. Men he knew slightly and would never know again were spread in distant rows on the canvas squares across the baking and flat earth. The impression was that of a series of desolate, individual picnics. On good days shirts were piled and tied sheik-like on heads, and the rotating, depressing, releasing, and the click and clatter of interlocking metal components coming apart proceeded with a more ordered if still-hesitant smoothness.
There was one instructor, a Sergeant Favale, whom he remembered with fondness. Favale was a heavy-set Italian who’d been through two whole tours and seemed almost thirty, and had always had for Bryant a sly and kindly manner to go with an impossibly coarse sense of humor. Favale had guided him through the field strip drills, always benevolently late to start the stopwatch, with long and pointless dirty stories that he now understood had been intended to help him relax. Bryant remembered the surreal discomfort of having to endure the drills blindfolded and wearing flying gloves, oversized and lined with sheepskin, that soaked up their sweat and swaddled their arms in the heat like great floppy weights, while Favale reported his sense of what ways of dying most flyboys preferred. Bryant had fumbled and lost parts and Favale had ticked off flak, anoxia, shellfire, burning. He remembered clearly the exhilaration of finishing and ending the frustration, tearing off his blindfold and gloves to grin sweatily up at a happy Favale, the two of them looking around at others still working blind with their oversized and swaddled hands, like prisoners of a mysterious sect. A hopelessly frustrated boy, still blindfolded, had called out to him across the spread tarps, “What way do you want to die, Sergeant?”, and Favale had said, “Boys, the only way: I want to melt and drain out my prick.” The tarps had rocked with laughter, and Bryant remembered the moment, blindfolded and laughing boys all around him slapping their thighs with gloves like enormous weighty potholders.
He remembered Favale as having pins and plates everywhere in his body, everyone knew, having been wounded over France, all two tours of missions done. He remembered Favale’s small fat figure in the late afternoon on the thirty-caliber range, a lunar plain with stumplike mounts in a lonely line, the instructor off firing absently by himself, the tracers a curving hot arc under the sun, bouncing and trembling where they intercepted the target.
He woke again in the ni
ght from a dream in which Snowberry and some Germans had been pointing at the nose of Paper Doll and laughing.
Gabriel had pulled rank for the name in Gander. The final choice—he remembered Miss Behave and Wrecking Ball as other finalists—had been explained to him in a complex and confusing way and was lost to memory. A series of in-jokes had been involved. He hadn’t been unhappy with the name, though he remained slightly uncomfortable with the suggestion of flimsiness. But that was part of the bravado, he understood: with the Flying Fortress, word was you could fly into a cliff and need only to replace the Plexiglas afterwards. You could joke in those terms.
He remembered standing outside their cold and low Nissen hut and Snowberry’s noncommital attitude toward the winning name. Snowberry had crouched beside him against the cold wind, stroking the greens and grays of the lichen and pronouncing the words for the new plane, Paper Doll, and this new place, Gander, slowly, exaggerating the enunciation.
All of them but Lewis had met as a crew weeks earlier, in Florida. Lewis had joined them in Britain, much later, a replacement for a boy named Fichtner who’d been the original tail gunner, a pale boy from Missouri with white spindly hands who told them only that he was a musician, and cleared his throat with a quiet precision that annoyed everyone. He had seemed anything but their idea of a Southerner, and they had been frankly relieved to discover he’d gone AWOL one morning soon after their arrival in Britain. There was an official notion of crew compatibility as the basis for assignments, and if they were in a group with a guy like that, Piacenti had wondered aloud one night, eyeing Bean as well, what did that say about them?
They’d imagined themselves arriving by train from all parts of the country to come together as a permanent crew, a lean and single-minded fighting force. As they got to know each other, the suspicion grew that there had been a series of unobtrusive mistakes, that the selection process had involved dice or cutting decks of cards. The immediate blood bonds they had heard about seemed something for other crews, and they got to know each other slowly. Other crews seemed more confident, more raunchy—their slang for anything casually masculine—more competent.
Florida struck Bryant as the way he would have imagined a casual penal colony. They slept on raised wooden platforms screened on four sides with canvas traps. Bryant assumed a steady stream of lethal nightlife passed routinely beneath the boards and listened for every scuttle. Bean hectored them into the night about the horrors of the insects’ size and persistence, and distinguished himself as well by being maddeningly clumsy around the zippered door, his embarrassed and muted struggles when returning from the latrine letting in clouds of mosquitoes which sang and tortured Bryant in the humid darkness until he found himself spending hours resolving to kill Bean and stuff his mouth and ears with insects.
The field looked as though it had been leveled in an afternoon. Half-crushed spider lilies with thick white stamens and stinging nettles grew and bloomed at oblique angles, and stagnant puddles filled the bulldozer tracks, giving off at dusk still more mosquitoes. Palmetto swamps bordered the asphalt runways. While they waited for their first Fortresses, they stayed out of the sun and flipped gravel at posing lizards and gazed at the groups of brown and ugly B-24’s spread along the aprons like giant dragonflies in the waves of heat. They sweated through their shirts by seven each morning and talked with enthusiasm of their good fortune in drawing Fortresses. When the Fortresses finally appeared, they delighted in comparing the two heavy bombers: the Forts, like swept-back and low racers with their noses in the air, alongside the hopelessly boxy Liberators, each with all the military aplomb of an old flying boat. They liked to say that the Liberators were the crates the Fortresses had been shipped in. When the time came, they flew two unremarkable orientation flights in a tired old E variant, their first B-17.
Bryant had risen early the morning of that first flight and had gone over the plane nose to tail with the ground crew chief as the sole flight engineer for the first time, feeling fraudulent and redoing and botching checks, whispering to himself. He had waited, later, until Gabriel was seated in the cockpit and gazing at him pointedly before officially pronouncing the engines ready, in a voice so constricted with fear over the interphone that Snowberry had later compared it to Andy Devine’s. The four old Wright Cyclone engines, decommissioned after fifty or so missions over God knew where in France and Holland, performed with efficiency, and by the end of the flight his checks had become routine. His confidence had grown. He had imagined his fellow crew members admiring his steady professionalism, and then had discovered that Gabriel had been having the crew chief double-check the important systems.
They had flown without warning from the Floridian heat to the Newfoundland cold. Fichtner had sat on the gray and cold rocks of Gander like a seabird. They’d flown from Florida to Texas to Iowa to Newfoundland and he was disoriented by the changes. The crew had treated him as they might have treated a strange dog in camp that was behaving erratically. They spent much of their time waiting for assignment to a bomb group, pulling chairs around the stove of their Nissen hut. The stove had thrown off heat so feebly they had nicknamed it “the Icebox” and had all urinated on it together the day their orders had come through.
Besides Fichtner, only Bryant and Snowberry spent any appreciable time outside. The sky was gray and roiling and close, and clouds moved aggressively offshore, flapping windsocks and causing splashed mud to spatter dismally and unpredictably. Gulls cried and sideslipped over Fichtner, who spent whole half days off by himself, perched above rocks washed black by the swells.
They had sat in small groups the night of their transatlantic flight, Bryant talking quietly with Snowberry. The water was black and vast over the rocks beyond the airstrip. Seabirds huddled near the leeward sides of the huts like pigeons, their feathers puffed against the cold. The support staffs had gone ahead by boat, and the aircrews would make the flights alone, under cover of darkness. They felt isolated and closer, not only as a squadron but as a crew. Reticent girls in blue Red Cross uniforms at a makeshift canteen served them a sad and metallic tea while they waited. All of their gear, stowed in huge green duffels, had been piled in the nose, and they were waiting for a cold front to pass. The wind was high and the sky low and opaque and they could hear the sea. Ice glazed Paper Doll’s rubber tires like doughnuts. Hirsch and Gabriel and Cooper worked the charts and reckonings, and rechecked agreed-upon headings by flashlight, their murmurs reassuring.
On takeoff he remembered clearly the sensation of the plane gathering speed in the darkness in its rush down the runway, and the gentle shift in his stomach as the Fortress lifted into the air, banking around to the north. He climbed into his station in the top turret for the view and saw the lights of the field behind and below them, turning slowly away, and the red lights of the Fortresses ahead of them, lifting into the cloud cover. They climbed until they broke through the clouds like something emerging from the sea, and the half moon illuminated the entire world.
Far ahead they could see the other 17’s. He stayed in the top turret, his weight back on the turret’s padded sling. His goggles were up on his forehead and the elastic strap bunched the crown of his soft, sheepskin-lined headgear. Cooper and Gabriel threw shadows in the yellow glow of the cockpit before him, and the enormous wings extended out beyond him dark and reassuring on both sides.
The stars were brilliant and foreign and extended undiminished to the cloud line. Every so often Hirsch’s head appeared in the glow of the smallish astrodome in front of the cockpit, taking a fix with the sextant. The plane tipped and rocked smoothly. His toes curled and flexed in the sheepskin linings. St. Elmo’s fire shimmered and glowed furtively around the wingtips and propellers. Hirsch intruded on the interphone in a low voice to give new headings.
Still hours from first light or landfall in Ireland, Bryant had felt completely happy in a world all those back home could never know. Below, everyone but pilots and navigator slept, deep in sheepskin jackets with collars up
, curled around parachutes and duffels. Above, Bobby Bryant rode high in the cold dark air in his glass bubble under the stars and watched Paper Doll all around him sweeping toward Ireland, across the darkness, skimming the fluid and onrushing ceiling below, the smoothed and ever-changing clouds a ghostly topography.
They woke him with a flashlight, the glare harsh in the darkness. Men were making startled and angry sounds and the orderly on wake-up duty was going from bed to bed uncovering faces and giving blanketed legs a hard shove. He called the briefing time, 0330, in a clear and tired voice, without malice. The lights flicked on and off. Men cursed and thrashed under bedding and someone down the line of steel bunks, dreaming or awake, called Sylvie, Sylvie, don’t you go away now.
Bryant stretched, miserable. Bean lay as if stunned. Lewis sat on the side of his bunk with his feet on the floor and his hands on his face. Bryant could feel the shock of the cold on Lewis’s soles. Metal lockers were slamming and johns flushing. Snowberry was calling, “Oh, Mama, can’t we fight in the daytime?”
Piacenti went by with a towel over his head, fumbling with his kit. The far end of the hut remained dark and quiet, the other crew, not flying today, ordered and still, as if breathing or movement might give them away, children hoping the heavy snowfall has canceled school. The last time, too, this crew had not gone when they had, and Bryant remembered one of the guys off the hook guffawing like a loon in the dark.