by Peter Bowen
I turned her over and her eyes fluttered and she smiled up at me. My right hand was on her belly and the blood was warm running over it. She went to sleep, it seemed, and then her body, which had been tensed against the pain, relaxed and I knew she was gone and I was glad for that, she was cut up awful bad and at least she had no pain.
I picked her up. She weighed no more than a child, she was so light in my arms. I walked away from the surf, toward the hills. When I came to a grassy patch I sat and waited for the boat. They’d been naval shells, and they could see us and we couldn’t see them.
Perhaps it was twenty minutes, I wouldn’t know, a longboat cut in through the surf and some Royal Marines scampered up to me, all bearing rifles with fixed bayonets. A subaltern come along behind and I looked at him level and told him my name and rank and to contact the consul’s office in Cape Town or Durban.
The boy didn’t know what to do. I stood up and carried Marieke to the longboat and stepped over the side and sat on a water-tin, still cradling her.
The subaltern came along, bringing my hat, and the Marines put off and clawed their way back out into the sea.
Two battle cruisers had been laying off, I supposed some lookout marked us in the telescope and they fired at Boers just to test the guns. An eight-inch shell weighs five hundred pounds, a bit large for the two of us, but it had done the job.
When we come to one of the cruisers the oarsmen held the boat steady. I had put Marieke over my right shoulder, had her head and arms hanging down my back, and I grabbed the rope ladder and struggled up to the steel gangway and then on up to the deck. They had put out a stretcher and the ship’s surgeon covered her with a sheet and they hauled her away to the sailmaker’s to dress her for burial at sea, with a cannonball at her feet.
The captain was a short, wiry feller named Fanshaw—that’s how it sounds, the spelling is five times as long. (Featherstonehaugh, so help me.) There will always be an England.
I felt light-headed of a sudden, and the sea motion seemed to grow. I stumbled to a hatch cover and sat, trying to keep what little was in my stomach down.
The surgeon came again, and he looked at my back, and then a couple of his assistants picked me up and carried me to the surgery. They peeled my clothes off and when it come off my undershirt peeled away with a gluey sound.
A small fragment of the shell had come in below my left shoulder blade and lodged somewheres in my chest. It had taken this long to affect me because my left lung was collapsing and the blood was pooling in the space provided. This I all heard later. The surgeon rammed a needle the size of a goddamned pencil into the lung cavity to drain the blood. I struggled a little, so he gave me enough morphia to stun a rhino.
They dumped Marieke off the taffrail while I was sleeping an opium sleep.
10
I WAS TOLD LATER that I almost died of one thing and another that the doctors did to me on the battlecruiser or on the Maine, Lady Randolph Churchill’s steam yacht with bedpans. I carry a few arrowheads, bullets, and bits of shrapnel and I will by God crawl off and heal up my own self, it’s safer. The medical profession is largely made up of them as flunked out of Divinity School.
When I woke up there was a cool hand on my brow which proved attached to the arm of Jennie Churchill, one of the great beauties of this world.
“Luther,” she said. “Behave yourself.”
“Wha?” I said.
She pointed at a tremendous hard prick I had and hadn’t so much as noticed yet.
“Waste not, want not,” I says, grabbing for her bodice. She brushed my hands away, laughing with her head throwed back, a big laugh.
I looked around for the other ill and dying, who was probably hale when they come on board. I was in a single suite in a double bed and there was fresh flowers everywhere.
“What happened,” I said. “Was I promoted to general? Did Teddy get caught in a spasm of guilt and order this up?” There was her lovely breasts under that cloth. I made another grab.
“Luther! I’m a married woman!” she said, still laughing.
“First I knew that ever bothered you,” I says. “I’m hornier than a five-antlered elk and you got to quibble about title deeds. Jaysus Kayrist.” She didn’t fight me off quite so hard.
“Oh, all right, Luther,” she said, flouncing off and locking the stateroom door and pulling the curtains. They was a pale silk and muted the light nicely.
I watched her slipping off her clothes and thought what a beautiful thing a woman is, and I thought of all the ones I had held, and screwed with, and I smiled.
I was still weak and bandaged, so she got on top and while we thrust our hips at one another she looked at me, eyes half closed, and a smile on her lips.
After, she lay with her head on my throat and ran her hand over the bandages on my chest.
“So many scars,” she said. I raised my eyebrows. Almost all my scars was in back, taken while departing and fast at that.
“I have to go,” she said, sliding away and standing on the cold metal floor. “I have other sick and wounded men to nurse.”
“Maybe you ought to have them buttons replaced with zippers,” I says, grinning.
“Luther,” she said dryly, “I am the captain of this vessel of mercy and you will do well not to vex me. Either I shall have you hung from the yardarm or perhaps make you walk the plank.”
“I’m a wounded man,” I said. “I couldn’t walk the plank.”
“I shall push you in a wheelchair.”
“Come back soon,” I said.
“There could be scandal,” she said, smiling.
“So?”
“So yes, I’ll come back. Poor George is at the front somewhere. Winston is at the front somewhere. If I have to eat one more wretched Cape Town boiled dinner I’ll puke. Of course I shall come back.”
She went out, leaving the door far open so I could get some salt breeze. I was suddenly ravenously hungry, and I wondered what time the grub came round.
I was feeling pretty good, so I shrugged on a robe and went out and leaned against a rail and looked out over the harbor, full of vessels. Warships, including one hulking battleship, coasters, and coal lighters and merchant ships of every size and shape. Down close there were the big fins of sharks, eating the garbage.
The bandages pulled the hairs on my chest and I itched and wanted a bath. I went back in the room and opened a curtain to find a smallish bathtub and when I fiddled with the faucets hot water come and there was soap to hand. I took a razor from the little possibles chest and cut off the bandages and freed up I got in the tub and relaxed.
I suppose I was soaping and soaking for an hour, and I got out and found some clean clothes my size said “C-W” in them, and told myself that Jennie’s new husband wouldn’t stick at lending me some duds, man to man. The other I wouldn’t bring up myself.
A nurse come in and looked at the bed and at me and inquired as to where Mr. Kelly was.
“That’s me,” I says. “Feeling much better.” I eyed her up and down—a bit heavy for my taste—and she blushed and run out. She weren’t screaming, which I took for a good sign.
Not long after a doctor come in and I took off George’s shirt and he looked at my wound, humming and smelling of rum, and then he went out without so much as a grunt.
There was a steward’s bell somewheres at the end of a tasseled silk rope near the bed, and I hauled and yanked until two young matrons wearing the same sort of Piccadilly nursing get-ups that Jennie favored come in about half breathless.
“I just wanted something to eat,” I says. “I’m starving.”
The two was one blonde and one redhead and the blonde went out and the redhead ordered me sternly back to bed.
“You are unwell, Mr. Kelly,” she said, “off with your clothes and into the bed.” I shrugged and undressed, while she stared off somewheres toward Antarctica.
The blonde returned with a little cart packed with food—good stout chicken soup, roast beef, steam
ed spinach, and I ate like a wolf. The blonde took the cart away and the redhead and I had tea and chatted. It was getting on dark and she got up and closed and locked the door and came over to me. She sat on the bed and began unbuttoning her high shoes.
“Jennie had to go to a dinner on the battleship,” said the redhead, “will I do for a bit till she’s free?”
I nodded. “What about the blonde,” I says.
“Greedy, greedy,” said the redhead. “She’ll be coming in about two A.M., to quicken your pulse. And my name is Anne.”
She was slipping off the yards of tulle and unlacing her bodice, a redhead with a skin pale as milk and big breasts and narrow hips.
She turned, naked, in the great pile her clothes had made. I was healing fast, and no mistake.
A few days and nights later—they sort of blended together into one pleasure, mighty different from being shot at, Jennie was eating a bon-bon in bed and she idly asked me if perhaps she should cable Teethadore, who would be worrying about me.
“Don’t suppose you could cable him and tell him I’m dead,” I says. “Died valiantly at sea of ...”
Jennie didn’t suppose she could do that. It would be a lie. Found out, Teethadore could perhaps cause difficulty for her son Winston.
“Mother!” come a voice, very like young Winston’s, “Mother! Where are you?”
“Shit,” said Jennie, grabbing for her clothes. She was adept at getting them on in a hurry. Winston didn’t make but about two circles of the ship before she was all bricked up to decent. When Winston sounded again on the other side of the ship Jennie calmly stepped out of the door, the heat of our lovemaking shimmering in the air. She had sand, that one.
I dozed off, the work had been delightful and heavy and I needed my rest.
Which I didn’t get much of. In less than an hour Winston was barging through the door of the cabin, all smiles and smarm, ready to clasp me to his manly bosom, a wounded hero, and better yet one that he knew.
“Yellowstone!” says Winston, his lisp making a gumbo out of my hated nickname (a pox on Ned Buntline). “Felled by a treacherous enemy bullet! You live!”
I was mumbling cusswords and smiling. Also wondering what in the hell a treacherous bullet was. They go where they’re sent.
I wriggled and cuffed him till he unclasped me from his manly bosom and then I politely asked just what in the fucking hell he was so cheerful about.
“War is glorious,” he said, smiling and happy.
I thought of the murdered Boers in the donga and Marieke bleeding to death in my arms and I almost lost my temper. It wouldn’t have done no good. Men like Teddy and Winston never get wounded bad and they never die and I suspect if you cut ’em they wouldn’t even bleed. Bleeding is for the lower classes.
“Are you recovering?” said Winston, remembering why I was here in the first place.
“Slowly,” I said. Jennie had come in. “Every night I run a fever and I’m spent and exhausted for most of the day. One of them comes-and-goes fevers, I hear they can last for months.”
Jennie smiled at me, but her eyes wasn’t.
“I’m sure that you’ll be ready to march on Kimberley,” said Winston. “We leave tomorrow to relieve the gallant garrison.”
I was about to list all the serious unhealed physical ailments which would prevent my going.
Jennie was waving a long yellow cable at me.
I grabbed the damned form and read it. It said get off my philandering arse and to the field, signed Nelson Miles, General, USA.
“When did this arrive,” I snarled, waving the damned death warrant.
“Just arrived,” said Jennie, looking innocent. I believe that I knew what had prompted it—a cable from Cape Town, from her.
“I ain’t got spit in the way of gear,” I says. “And I don’t plan to wrap one of these here sheets around me and ride Roman.”
Jennie went to the closet and hauled out my money belt, heavy with gold, and tossed it on the bed.
“Way things been going round here,” I says, “it’s a wonder any coin at all is left.” I got out of bed then, so Jennie turned away. I put on my pants and boots and jacket. The shirt was long gone.
“I’ll escort you!” said young Winston, beaming.
“Lady Churchill,” I says to her as I passed, “thank you for your many kindnesses.”
“Fuck you,” said Jennie, real low.
“That, too.” I tipped my hat and wandered up the promenade after Winston.
The Bay was full of garbage and sewage and dead horses and mules being chewed on by the sharks. There wasn’t a heavy stench yet, though there would be if the transports sat there much longer.
We walked up the quay the ship’s boat took us to and on into Cape Town. I spent the afternoon buying good stout clothing and good stout guns.
“All American,” I said, pointing to the twin Colts and the two Winchesters, one a .30-40 and the other a ten-gauge pump gun held eight shells and could be fired off in under thirty seconds if you practiced a little. I got five hundred rounds of double-ought buck and leather scabbards and had the saddlemaker sew the scabbards high and pointed back of the skirts, where they was easy to hand.
“Unsporting,” Winston sniffed. He meant the shotgun.
I looked at him, wishing I could drag him by his fat neck to the donga where the butchered bodies lay, and inquire of him which noble Englishman ordered that carnage, and which noble Englishmen obeyed that order. And then I thought that he wouldn’t see it, he could stand up to his hips in the rotting dead and speechify about the glorious Empire. He reminded me a lot of Teethadore.
Bungo and the glorious South African Light Horse was already up the rail line, and our train would leave at midnight and get to them at ten the following day. I debated getting drunk and gave up on it because tomorrow I’d have to ride sick and I had done about enough time at that.
We et a good dinner at a hotel and saw our gear on the train and then we walked up and down the platform not speaking till the trainmen called us aboard.
Winston was subdued; ordinarily he was bouncy and babbling enough to drive you to homicide.
I asked him what the matter was and he said that his birthday was coming on in about one minute.
“Well, happy birthday,” I says, thrusting out my hand.
He burst into tears. “Oh, the shame, the shame,” he said.
“What shame?”
“I shall be twenty-five! Oh shame!” he blubbered.
“Look here,” I snarled, “you shouldn’t be crying. All the rest of us should.”
“Beg pardon?” he said.
“I should have shot you when I had the chance, in Cuba.”
“Why would you have done that?”
“Fun,” I says. “Now what’s so awful about being twenty-five?”
Winston heaved a great sigh and looked at his plump hand and mumbled something so low it couldn’t climb over the lisp.
“What?”
“I said that Napoleon had taken Toulon by age twenty-five.”
Well, I sat back in my seat, goggle-eyed. This little shit was crying because he hadn’t sacked a city yet.
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” I said, reaching over to pat his hand, “Alexander of Macedon had conquered Greece, Asia Minor, Babylon, and everything else but India by age twenty-five. So you’re definitely second rate, like the rest of us.”
Winston busted out bawling. I looked out of the window, wondering what caused mental defectives to flock to me like stink on shit. All my good friends were cast-iron sonsabitches and my women all far too tough and smart for the likes of me. Life was unequal, but this was ridiculous.
Winston had recovered far enough to hide most of his snuffling in a monogrammed silk handkerchief—a sight better than my shoulder.
We pulled off at a siding in the dead of night, and sat there for an hour. A hospital train come past, brightly lit, I could see the wounded men stacked in it.
Winston didn
’t notice. They were inconvenient to his dreams.
Finally the train pulled on and we come to a tent city about noon—the headquarters of the force relieving Kimberley. It was surrounded with barbed wire and trenches, revetments and gun emplacements and a nice graveyard in the far corner.
We got off and a sharp-looking adjutant took us immediately to Bungo, who was slapping a riding crop into his palm and staring off north. The enlisted men impressed as porters doffed our kit and went off. We picked horses issued by the veterinary surgeon and prepared to ride—Bungo finally had a job to do and were I the Boers, I’d get the hell out of the way.
“I sure hope this turns off better than the last time we went hunting their artillery,” I said, voice low.
“Fortunes of war,” said Byng. “The odds are neither for nor against us.”
Sir Julian was dressed nondescript, as were his men. A few troopers had decorated their pith helmets with long gaudy feathers—fine by me, I have always strived in warfare to go unnoticed by all—and I looked at Winston staring at the bobbing plumes, turning beet red for not having thought of it.
I could hear a faint thump of exploding shells—miles north—so this wasn’t any gentlemanly brawl of an afternoon, there was heavy artillery and where there was that there would be machine guns and trenches and wire and terror. For you crouch in cover and hear the shells whistle and zip, wondering if the next one’s for you.
We rode off up the rail line, crossing a small river and coming over a saddle between two mountains, and then we could see up ahead where they was mixing it up. Bungo picked up the pace and the troopers fanned out beside him, they was South African boys mostly, used to fast riding in country full of ant-bear and warthog holes.
The Boers had the Tommies jammed up some, hard by some big broken rocks. The artillery wasn’t doing much, but there was some snipers above pouring down fire and taking an occasional man. The heights would have to be swept. We off-mounted and picketed the horses.