The old man’s name was Albert. Before the war he’d taught ancient history at a college in Brussels. The farm had belonged to his wife’s family for generations and they’d come here in the first days of the war, after his university had sent all its students to the front. He didn’t know how to farm, but his wife did, and they got by on the little they managed to grow. Three days earlier he’d left the farm, walking two miles into town in order to buy medicine for his wife. It was then that the Germans arrived.
“How do you know they were German?” It wasn’t an innocent question. I wasn’t exactly sure who controlled this parcel. It was a gray zone, a borderland. If Lorraine fell in with the English or French, she might be fine. Then again, she might not. But if it were the Germans, she’d have no chance.
We sat at the dining table, a candle burning between us. Albert reached into his pocket and removed an army medal: The Iron Cross.
“Do you think he’ll come back for it?” I asked. “I’m sure he’ll miss this.”
Albert shrugged, his old shoulders cracking and popping with the movement. “Perhaps he thinks he left it on another woman,” he said. “Perhaps he is already dead.”
“Do you have any arms?”
Albert paused, studying the floor. He still feared that I was a thief.
“I had a rifle when the war started, but the English took it,” Albert said. “I have an old gun my father-in-law left in the house, but what good would it do against monsters?”
“David had a slingshot.”
“David had a God,” Albert said. “Do you have a gun in there?” He pointed at Miss Constance’s case.
“Just a camera. I’m a correspondent for an American newspaper.”
“Are you lost?”
“I’m looking for my wife.”
“She is missing?”
“Yes. She’s walking north to the sea.”
Albert pulled off a splinter from the dining table, then stuck it between his teeth, picking. “You’re sure?”
“That’s what she said she’d do.”
Albert nodded then stared off at the candle flame, silent. I remember not minding his disbelief. I understood his lack of faith. But it didn’t matter, because I knew Lorraine and I knew she wasn’t dead. I’d have seen her.
• • •
The rain shook the roof. It surprised me: I hadn’t spent a night indoors for months. The guns quieted for an hour, then began again, as familiar as a sparrow’s chirp. Albert stoked the fire. He rubbed his hands together and held them up to warm near the flame.
“Take off your boots.”
“Thank you.” It felt like I had to amputate them from my feet.
“Do you want a drink?”
“Yes.”
Albert kneeled in the middle of the room, then turned the rug on its side, revealing a trap door with an iron latch. He opened it. It was a small dugout, no more than three feet deep, but from what I could see, there was enough room to fit three people.
Albert reached in, then handed me a bottle of French brandy. I dusted off the bottle and saw that it was half full. He hesitated above the dugout, before pulling out a large painting. He stood, holding the painting outstretched, then he blew the dust from it and hung it above the piano.
“It is my most beautiful possession,” he said. “It is called Girl with Yellow Flower on her Day of Marriage.”
The painting showed a young girl wearing a blue blouse buttoned to the throat, her brown hair tightly bound above her head. She gazed at the floor, her blue eyes vacant, devoid of passion, while holding a yellow flower to her breast. She appeared constricted, like the act of sitting for an artist suffocated her. She sat in front of a large window, behind which lay a city with long, gray canals. Except for the flower, the colors were muddy, dull. The painting was dreadful.
“It was painted by Robert O’Shaughnessy, an Irishman who’d fled Galway for Amsterdam. He painted for the aristocracy and this is his final portrait, during the summer Napoleon entered Amsterdam.”
Albert began to cry.
“I can’t remember last summer.”
“Everyone got sick,” I said. “The flies were awful.”
I poured drinks, and then sat at the piano. My fingers rested on the keys for a long time, while I gazed at the sheet music before me. I couldn’t read it—to my mother’s eternal chagrin—but I thought back to all the songs I’d memorized as a child. Most were American standards or Negro spirituals. I hadn’t touched a piano since the war had begun and none of the old songs seemed quite right, right then.
“Play your wife’s favorite song,” Albert said. “That which would give her comfort.”
I played an old blues tune. I couldn’t remember all of the lyrics, just the chorus. “When your way gets dark/turn the lights up.”
My fingers felt stiff, creaky. Albert tapped his foot against the old floorboards.
When I finished, I turned to the old man who was still crying. “She grew up in St. Louis. In the middle of America,” I said. “They sang a lot of songs like that there.”
“Is your wife colored Negro?”
I hesitated.
“Yes, she is.”
“I’ve studied the Negro,” he said. “In books.”
I didn’t say anything. It seemed like a silly thing to study.
“You cannot go back to America, can you?” he asked.
I looked down at my hands. They were cut in nearly a dozen different places. Pieces of skin peeled off like I was shedding. Lorraine liked my hands, liked how I played the piano with them.
“Not with her.”
“Your family will not accept her?”
“No.”
“But you still search for her?”
It was another silly question, yet I had trouble answering it. “She’s waiting for me.”
“That is a sin of pride.”
This was the last thing I needed. If it hadn’t been such a piss-soaker out, I’d have left Albert to fend for himself. He was old and European and couldn’t understand.
“When I was a boy, the nuns told me that lust was the worst of all sins. God hates the lusting man. Fools. Pride is worse.” He finished his drink and poured another. He leaned against the piano and his expression was sorrowful and patronizing and it made me cold. “Take your wife home with you. Let fate decide.”
“I’ll go to jail. They’ll do worse to her.”
“So you stayed in Belgium to avoid pain?”
“Yes.”
“You’re either a liar or a fool.”
I looked at the keys and repeated the song. I felt Albert’s gaze, but I couldn’t return it. When I began playing the song a third time, he laid his glass on the piano and walked into his bedroom and closed the door.
• • •
While the rain poured against the house, I tried to sleep on Albert’s sofa. When I closed my eyes, light, like from a prism, slapped the darkness. I felt horrible for resting, for pausing even for a night. Although Lorraine had promised to walk north, I worried she might have wandered off and could be heading toward the Germans. She’d never had a great sense of direction—always asking which way was west—but I hoped she’d been clever enough to head the right way.
Although Albert didn’t believe me, I was certain Lorraine was still alive, because when I’d abandoned my unit, I’d run toward her, but an explosion sent me into an irrigation ditch. When I woke, I couldn’t tell whether it was day or night. Smoke smothered the sky and I could neither remember how I landed in the ditch, nor how long ago it had happened. Miss Constance had fallen out of her case, and I had to search for her amidst the rubble, and, after I found her, I climbed to flat ground, bracing myself against a telegraph pole. My legs wobbled and I tasted blood. Above me, a body hung suspended from the telegraph, its arms knotted in the wires, its skin bu
rned away with smoke emanating from the coals. A pair of boots lay below the corpse. I picked them up—saw they were too small—then walked on.
I searched the rest of the day for the hospital tent, circling over and over again the place it should have been, but there was only the wreckage wrought by an explosion—bodies, burned and maimed, lay strewn throughout an enormous crater—and it wasn’t for hours, my head keening, until I realized it was her tent I circled. I dropped to my knees. There must have been nearly forty corpses, most burned to the bone. A shell had lit the tent and sent a fireball down upon the wounded and their caretakers.
What I did next wasn’t a conscious choice. It was mechanical and passive.
I went to the first corpse, a stiff, single coal. Whether it was a man or woman, I couldn’t tell. I took its charred left hand and counted the fingers. Five. From the smallest I looked over to the next finger and saw that it didn’t have a ring.
I went to the next and did the same. Repeat.
A few wore rings, but they were gold bands melted into the corpse’s hand. None were silver. None were Lorraine’s.
I am sure of this.
• • •
The rain continued. Lightning struck like cannon shells along the hillside. I didn’t have a book to read and I had no paper to write on, so I pitched a tent in the middle of Albert’s living room and developed my last roll of film—at the front, I found, you could build a makeshift darkroom nearly anywhere. As expected, I had a lot of boot pictures. I also had a lot of negatives of men looking right at me: eventually I’d print them and send them to their wives and mothers. But I also had one frame that made no sense. It was a man on fire, levitating.
I can’t remember anymore what I thought of that photo. It’s tinged with so many other memories by now—seeing it in newspapers and on recruitment posters—that it seems like something separate from me, its own entity. I’m not even sure I connected it with the image of an angel. Yet, I’m certain that I hadn’t tied it to Lorraine. Not in Albert’s house. It was only later, after I’d gone back to America, when I threw all my war photos across the floor that I began to construct the story of The Trench Angel.
• • •
In the morning, I found a bucket and dug into the mud. It had rained all night long and the mud was heavy like concrete. The sun was warm, but a breeze cooled my neck. The wind blew from the south and the air smelled like smoke. The first hole took over an hour. When I was three feet deep, I climbed out of the grave and dusted off. I walked to the front of the house, to the well and pulled a drink of water. Two vultures, perched on the porch railing, scouted the dead women. I clapped. The birds flew away.
I dug the second hole. Afterwards, I walked inside the house. The bedroom door remained closed. I found two old blankets in the linen closet. I wrapped each woman in a blanket and carried them, one at a time, behind the house. I dropped them into their graves.
When I returned to the house, Albert was at the stove, making tea.
“Do you want to step out and say a few words?”
Albert stood above the graves, but he didn’t speak. Their bodies were hidden, wrapped in the blankets. Only their feet remained visible, rain swollen and blue. He dropped a handful of dirt onto his wife, then another onto his daughter.
“Thank you.” He shook my hand. “Take what you need.”
The vultures squawked from behind the graves as Albert walked toward the house. When he shut the door, I picked up the bucket. I was wasting time, I thought. I should let the old man finish the job. They were his dead, not mine. Lorraine needed me.
A gun fired inside the house. I dropped the bucket and closed my eyes and the farm went quiet.
I dug a third grave.
By the time I’d finished burying Albert and his family, it was past noon. I washed myself off in the house. I ate the remains of the soup and scavenged the last of the food from the cupboard and placed them in my pack. I went through the family’s drawers and closets.
I looked inside the dugout. It was empty. I climbed inside and pulled the trapdoor down. I listened. I heard the breeze blow against the windowpanes and the tree branches bending and the grass rustling and the guns firing. I heard everything clearly as if I was standing on the front porch.
I stepped into the bedroom. On the bed where Albert shot himself, below the bloodstain on the pillow, lay the pistol. It was an old single-action French revolver. It had been recently cleaned. I picked it up and swung open the cylinder. Three chambers were empty.
For a long time, I stood over that bed. Out the window I could see three muddy graves. I put the revolver in my pocket, and then hoisted my pack over my shoulder. I checked through the living room one more time, finding nothing of value. I hesitated in the doorway, then went to the piano and looked at the painting. In the daylight, the painting seemed even worse than at night, yet I began to see Albert’s fascination with it. The colors were muddied, the composition sloppy, but I no longer saw vacancy in the girl’s expression. Just hopelessness. I looked at the window behind her and saw past the cityscape and into the sky, where a plume of smoke rose to the heavens, a symptom of an anticipated defeat.
I walked out of the house and over the hill into a new valley where a stream snaked toward the sea. I followed it. About a mile from Albert’s farm, I slipped into a bog and had to pull myself out. Exhausted, I rested beneath a tree. I searched Miss Constance’s case. I had a single package of film left, a change of clothes, and a Bible. My mother’s old Bible. I opened it, flipping through the pages until I stopped at the Book of Matthew, where my ticket acted as a bookmark. I didn’t know if the steamship line was running anymore. Maybe all those ships had been sunk. It didn’t matter. What mattered was this: I hadn’t torn it up, even after Lorraine made me promise to never return to America. She’d never forgive me.
I walked on, toward the sea. I remember considering what I’d do when I found Lorraine, how I’d feel when I discovered what had been done to her by men, how I’d explain my shame for not keeping my promise during that sad time of our lives, how I was just as culpable as any man, for the sins of fathers and husbands run deep in our memories, but then I sighed, knowing she was already dead, and I was relieved.
—29—
We drove off into the plains along a scraggly dirt road, cratered from the remnants of old prairie dog colonies, rutted from spring floods. Along the roadside, through the scattering snow, the green eyes of coyotes stared at our passing car. I lit a cigarette to keep warm. The snowflakes slipped into the cab and settled on my trousers. Even though the landscape was familiar, the darkness of the night, the quiet of the snowfall, the foreignness of the road, made it seem like my father was taking me somewhere secret and important, toward a world that only those who choose to live on the borderlands, the outsiders and anarchists, dared to tread.
“You cold?” he asked.
“A little.”
“Tired?”
“I think so.”
“That’s the worst kind of tired,” Jesse said. “The kind you’re only a little aware of. Mattie and I once walked clear to Kentucky with maybe a day’s sleep. Never been so tired in my life, but we couldn’t stop, so it was like I wasn’t tired, but I didn’t feel alive either. Like I was a ghost in some shit dime novel.”
“You told me that story, yesterday.”
“You get old, you repeat yourself.”
“Mattie’s a sharp woman.”
“She a good old broad.”
I felt the absence of Miss Constance on my lap, and the outline of the gun in my coat pocket. It was heavy, solid, and loaded.
“You upset at me?”
“No,” I said. “Why?”
“Mattie?”
“No.” I wasn’t, not anymore.
At a crossroads, Jesse steered into the grassland, and then motored up a snowy slope, stopping atop a hill just
before the road descended further into the plains. He shut off the car, then rubbed his hands together and blew into them, his breath blending with the smoke. The car rocked back and forth. The moon split the clouds and cast a white beam along the grasslands like a lighthouse shining upon a frozen bay. Across the valley, a train gunned its engine south toward Denver.
“I saw something awful today,” I said. “I don’t know how to feel about it, what to say.”
“I know.”
“What do you know?”
Jesse squeezed the steering wheel, his old hands strong like they could still climb a rope or strangle a man. “I know you helped pin that O’Leary boy’s death on Forest and you were wrong to do that even if it was to save your sister, but that’s not what killed Forest because the Pope could have decreed Forest a damned archangel and Seamus still would have strung him up because that’s who Seamus is.”
“He could have run. Man didn’t seem scared at all.”
“Don’t make him a saint, Cowboy,” Jesse said. “He’s not. He was a tough man and knew what he was doing and what Seamus might do to him, but he took his chances because he thought it right, but it wasn’t like he walked on water or nothing.”
“He said he didn’t kill O’Leary. I believe him.”
“You’re probably right. But Forest would have if he had thought it had done any good, because he’d done in scabs and backstabbers, so what’s the difference between those men and someone like Big Hank’s boy who was no good? Just don’t go romanticizing anyone. Not me and certainly not Forest. I don’t care what the leftists are going to say. He was a hard man. Killed plenty of scabs. Beat them with pipes. Just poor bastards, so desperate, so hungry, they’d do anything to feed their kids. That’s the problem, Cowboy. It ain’t union versus baron. It’s pain versus pain. It’s this exploitive system that sets the whole cycle up, and you did what you did because you thought saving your sister would set all the other things right, but it didn’t because saving her won’t absolve you.”
The Trench Angel Page 18