The Secret of Raven Point: A Novel

by Jennifer Vanderbes

  One by one people spilled through the narrow gaps between tents, rushing the hospital’s perimeter. At the thin line of trees marking the edge of the encampment, Juliet stopped. Beyond the trees a wide hill arched in the moonlight.

  A shirtless engineer, a backpack slung from one shoulder, stretched his arms ramrod straight, trying to hold everyone back. “It’s a minefield!” he yelled.

  The swelling crowd fell silent, and, as if in answer to his assertion, from the hill beyond came a high-pitched Help! that collapsed into sobs.

  Juliet knew the voice immediately—Glenda’s.

  Bernice gripped Juliet’s hand.

  Someone had plugged in a surgical lamp and now shined it toward the hill. In the dissipated light, Juliet could see a trail of clothing snaking up the hill: an olive-drab jacket, a nightgown, lace-trimmed panties, a large brassiere. At the end of the trail, perhaps twenty yards beyond the tree line, she made out the shadowy figure of Dr. Lovelace, in blood-splattered long johns, suspended over Glenda in an awkward push-up.

  “Stay exactly where you are!” the engineer called. “EXACTLY. These are Schü mines.”

  The engineer opened his backpack and put together a long contraption with a metal disk; he snatched a dozen pebbles from the ground and stepped forward slowly, swinging the mine detector in wide arcs, tossing pebbles ahead of him like horseshoes.

  Along the tree line, the spectators began to assemble in an instinctive half formation. They mumbled and whispered.

  “If he sets off a mine, won’t they get hit?” Juliet asked Bernice.

  “Schü mines explode at ankle height,” she whispered. “It’s the Bouncing Bettys that spray that nasty shrapnel.”

  As the engineer moved forward, his flashlight lit the stranded figures and Juliet could see that Dr. Lovelace’s chin was tucked to his chest, though it was hard to tell if he was wounded or simply trying not to move. Lovelace watched the engineer’s movements intently, though Glenda, beneath him, had turned from the crowd.

  “Poor things,” Bernice said.

  “Crap luck,” someone else muttered.

  “Fucking Jerry land mines.”

  “Goddammit.” Major Decker’s voice boomed behind Juliet. “We’ve got a whole division, five miles from here, about to hurl themselves into the Jerry lines. They count on us not to be blowing ourselves up.”

  By now the engineer had moved ten yards up the hill, the mine detector beeping wildly as he marked his path with white tape. “It’s a sea of shrapnel,” he muttered to himself, but in the silence they could all hear him.

  “Hold on, Glenda,” called Mother Hen from somewhere in the crowd. “We’re going to get you out of there.”

  Suddenly, an explosion sounded and the ground beside the engineer spit a funnel of dirt, showering the grass. Juliet ducked behind a tree, pressing against the trunk. She felt her face knock something hard and splintery and pulled back to examine a sign: CAUTION—AREA ABOVE NOT SWEPT FOR MINES.

  As Juliet emerged, she saw the engineer, halfway up the hill, curled on his side, clutching spasmodically at his leg. From beyond him came Glenda’s sobs.

  “It’s okay,” Lovelace was softly telling her. “Don’t worry.”

  “Listen up,” the engineer huffed. “We’re going to have to try”—he swallowed heavily—“to pull ourselves down. It’s too dangerous for anyone to come get us.”

  “Her femoral’s draining,” called Lovelace.

  You could bleed to death from that artery within minutes. Painfully. Glenda no doubt understood what was happening to her. She was exsanguinating—a deceptively clinical word.

  “Can you walk?” the engineer asked.

  “My knee’s sprained, I think, but I can move. I just have to slow her bleeding. Jesus, she’s gushing. . . .”

  Bracing himself with one arm, Lovelace reached up and tore off his shirt and pressed the shirt to Glenda’s hip. Even at a distance, Juliet could see the cloth darken with blood. Lovelace used his long johns to roughly brace his knee.

  “We’ve got to pull ourselves down,” called the engineer. “But follow the path where you came.”

  “I can’t,” Glenda whimpered.

  “Sure you can. Come on, kiddo,” said Lovelace. “You just gotta climb up on my back. Okay? Hold the shirt tight against your hip. If you’re on top of me, the mines can’t get you.”

  The engineer tucked himself into a ball and began to shimmy down the hill. “Once you get to my position,” he called behind, “follow the tape.”

  Dr. Lovelace flipped over so that his back hovered over Glenda’s chest. “Grab on, Glen.” Slowly, Glenda slid each of her trembling hands around his neck. She wrapped her leg around his, and Juliet saw that Glenda was still wearing her shoes.

  “Up we go.” With audible strain, Lovelace flipped himself onto his hands and knees; with Glenda on his back, his knee wobbled, then steadied. Lovelace threw one arm forward, then the other, slowly crawling down the hill like a wounded, two-headed creature.

  At the hill’s base, the engineer had reached the first piece of tape and came to a stop. Panting, he scanned the spectators, as though looking for someone to carry him the rest of the way.

  “I got you, Lieutenant Nelson.”

  It was Jim Bailey, the cook from the Officers’ Mess. A big man, he took one stride forward and swept the engineer over his shoulder like a sack of flour. Bailey clearly wasn’t one for drama; he did this quietly and quickly. Medics rushed the engineer away on a litter, followed by Major Decker.

  Lovelace, gleaming with sweat, focused his gaze on the line of white tape. He tightened his face with renewed determination and tentatively raised his injured knee, but as he set it down, he wobbled. Glenda, atop him, keeled leftward. He swung his arm back to brace her, but Glenda was already toppling.

  She tumbled through the grass, bumping against rocks and picking up speed before coming to a rough stop. Far from the white tape, far from the tree line, she pawed at the ground, tearing up grass, trying to pull herself toward Lovelace. Dirt darkened her face, blood smeared her body. As she tried to wiggle forward, she caught sight of her splintered pelvis, the pulpy wreck of her flesh, and her mouth fell open in a soundless gasp.

  “Glenda, we’ll send help,” Mother Hen called. “Dr. Lovelace, proceed along the white tape. You’re too far to help her and too injured to carry her. Follow the tape and let us get you medical attention.”

  Glenda’s tear-filled eyes were fixed on him.

  Dr. Lovelace, his face pale and expressionless, took a hesitant step forward.

  “Clifford?” She scratched weakly at the ground and let her face drop. Her cries were quiet now, the cries of hopelessness, and for a moment no one could move, not even Lovelace.

  “Heavens, we can’t leave the girl!” The stocky figure of Brother Reardon, in a pair of snug gray pajamas, sprung to the front of the tree line. He worked his thumb over the large crucifix at his chest, and looked pleadingly at the sky.

  He began following the line of white tape, then cut left toward where Glenda lay weeping. He tore pages from a magazine to mark his trail and every few steps looked at the ground with an expression of meditative concentration, proceeding right or left as though by divine guidance.

  “Look,” someone beside Juliet whispered. It was Dr. Willard—when had he arrived?—pointing at Dr. Lovelace. While Juliet had been watching Brother Reardon, Lovelace had made it past the tree line. Medics were attempting to roll him onto a litter, but he refused. He sat firmly on the ground, eyes fixed on Glenda.

  Juliet returned her gaze to Brother Reardon, who was inching toward Glenda with tiptoe-like steps. At his approach, Glenda weakly raised her head. She blinked slowly, disbelievingly, as finally Brother Reardon drew up beside her, removed his pajama shirt, and laid it over her bare torso.

  Juliet’s chest swelled with happiness. “You’re okay, Glenda,” she muttered. She felt Dr. Willard take her hand.

  Brother Reardon knelt, and with great care and
studious maneuvering he eventually lifted Glenda off the ground. As he stepped forward, the moon bathed them in a strange blue glow, so that they appeared momentarily unearthly, a hazy scene from a book of myths. Here was the image that had brought them all to this ruined land, thought Juliet. Selflessness. And yet, as he carried her the last few yards down the hill, stumbling under her weight, not a single spectator budged. Like the basest of animals, they clung to their safety.

  “Hail Mary! Hail Brother Reardon!” the crowd cheered as Brother Reardon passed the tree line. Applause broke out as he set Glenda on a litter. Glenda looked up groggily, her face ashen, smiling when she caught sight of Juliet: “Tell Momma I’m okay now.”

  “I’ll tell all of Texas,” said Juliet, kissing her forehead.

  Dr. Lovelace limped over. “You’ll be okay, Glen, I promise.”

  Glenda turned and closed her eyes.

  As Glenda was carried off, Brother Reardon leaned his back against a tree and descended jerkily, inch by inch, until he was sitting on the ground, his legs out straight. He studied his knees and Juliet could see that one of them was shaking. He wiped his face with his forearm, and traces of Glenda’s blood smeared his cheeks. For a moment no one seemed to know what to say; he had done what none of them dared to do, and it didn’t occur to them he needed help. Finally Dr. Willard crouched beside him, and gestured Juliet to his other side.

  “Reardon,” said Willard, “you’ve probably taken a dozen vows against this, for which I have endless respect, but tonight it’s a medical necessity. . . .” He put his arm around the chaplain. “Let’s get you a drink.”

  For weeks, the scene replayed itself in Juliet’s mind: the geyser of dirt, Glenda’s childlike cries. It wasn’t the blood that haunted her but the look on Glenda’s face when she thought she’d been left for dead. Juliet recalled the body of the German soldier they’d found by the lake: What had it been like for him to die alone? Without a hand to hold or a face to look at? Without a comforting voice? The presence of another person humanized the moment; alone, one faced a bleak animal’s death. The pain of death had always frightened Juliet, but she saw now that solitude wrought the greater horror. Had Tuck been left somewhere, abandoned?

  She tried to keep busy with work. The hospital was short one nurse since Glenda had been sent home. After Glenda had been under full anesthetic for hours while her femoral artery was reconstructed and massive tissue damage repaired, Dr. Mallick walked solemnly into the Officers’ Mess to inform the staff that she would likely never walk again. Glenda spent several days in the Recovery Tent, her expression unchanged, Juliet thought, since the night she lay bleeding in the grass.

  “My life is over, sugar.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  Juliet had carried Glenda her dinner tray: a bowl of beef and potatoes crowded by a cup of wine and a block of butter pecan fudge Juliet had received from home. Juliet brought the radio so they could listen to Axis Sally. Glenda hummed happily to the dance songs, but when “Lili Marlene” came on, she sang an English rendition, her voice low and tormented, as though singing a dirge:

  Underneath the lantern

  By the barrack gate,

  Darling I remember

  The way you used to wait.

  ’Twas there that you whispered tenderly

  That you loved me;

  You’d always be,

  My Lili of the lamplight,

  My own Lili Marlene.

  Glenda flicked off the radio. Her eyes seemed to swallow sorrow. “Who’s going to want me like this?”

  Juliet’s tongue went dry. “There are good men out there,” she said, but quickly looked away in embarrassment. What on earth did she know of men? Of life? Day after day she tended captains and corporals who had faced death, men who had stormed enemy lines, while she faced nothing but injections and bedpans and bandages. She told them all to piss and eat, to take their medicine, as if they were children. Because she was healthy; because the hidden curse of injury and illness was an unspoken demotion within the ranks of humankind. The mere wholeness of Juliet’s body bestowed on her an authority entirely unearned. The guilt of this shook her. After all, she was the child here, Glenda had always known that; but if Glenda thought it now, she was too kind and forgiving to dispute the platitudes of someone who had not yet owned up to her own mortality.

  Glenda smiled gently. Her face, without makeup, was pale and lifeless. “Perhaps you’re right.”

  The morning Glenda was loaded into an army truck, the nurses all handed her bottles of nail polish, tins of hot cocoa, silk scarves, charm bracelets, rollers and hairpins—items they deeply coveted. Juliet offered up a pewter frame she had bought in Naples and a leather scrapbook. At the moment of departure, Glenda mustered up her former exuberance, dramatically blowing kisses and promising to write, but Juliet suspected she’d never hear from her again. Patients usually wanted to leave their injuries, and any reminders of how they happened, far behind.

  If Lovelace and Glenda ever spoke after the night on the hill, no one knew of it. As far as Juliet could tell, during the few days both were in the Recovery Tent, Glenda refused to look at him. Her chilliness seemed to anguish him, and he returned to work before his knee had fully healed. After regularly pressing Juliet for updates on her progress, on the day of Glenda’s departure he asked Juliet to give Glenda a letter. Glenda stared fixedly at the envelope before tearing it in half and handing it back to Juliet. Juliet tucked the pieces into the side of Glenda’s bag.

  Mother Hen seemed to take Glenda’s departure hardest. At midnight, she popped into all the nurses’ tents, checking each bedroll, and for the rest of the night, in a robe and helmet, she dutifully roamed the perimeter of the hospital, her flashlight searching for clandestine lovers. The staff took to jokingly calling her “the lady with the lamp”—Florence Nightingale’s famous title—but were silently grateful for her concern. By morning, Juliet saw Mother Hen perched on an oil drum, her eyes narrow with sleeplessness, meditatively smoking a cigarette.

  For days after Glenda left, people spoke of her constantly, exchanging stories in the mess tent of the playful touch she had with patients. Juliet told the story of their trip to Lago di Vico—how, using up all of her occupation currency, Glenda had bought the ridiculous alabaster elephant from an Italian woman desperate for money. Someone related how at Anzio she had donated her own blood to save a patient. But as the fighting for Pisa intensified, casualties streamed in faster than the hospital could accommodate, and it seemed to Juliet that Glenda’s story, like so many others, was lost in the noisy sea of misfortune.

  July pressed on. An unremitting heat hammered the days into a blinding white sameness. Juliet shuffled between the Supply and Recovery Tents, her boots scratching at the dry ground. Thick black flies buzzed through the wards; gray mice, gaunt and possessed, scampered endlessly across the Officers’ Mess.

  By day’s end, bats wheeled and tumbled against the luminous pastels of dusk. On occasion, one swept into the Recovery Tent, madly circling the sea of patients until, to cheers and applause, it escaped back into the night.

  The capture of Pisa was proving difficult. The Germans had set up an observation post in the Leaning Tower. A tiltin’ Hilton for Jerry snipers, the patients said. But the division had been ordered to protect the landmark at all cost, so artillery had been withdrawn and the soldiers were fighting hand to hand. Hundreds of replacement soldiers had joined the division and were experiencing the first shocks of combat.

  In the Recovery Tent, Captain Alan Jarvis spent his day constructing a twelve-inch replica of the Leaning Tower from wet scraps of bread and old oatmeal; before bed, in one violent stroke, he would smash his replica, only to build another tower the next day.

  Private Vance, beside him, had been burned on the top of his head; wispy thatches of brown hair snaked along his pink and tender scalp. Throughout the day, he sat in his bed examining a butane lighter, slowly tilting the flame upside down.

  Dr. Willard s
pent hours at their bedsides and with the other battle-fatigued patients. By the time he came by to see Barnaby at the day’s end, his glasses were smudged and the tidy side part of his morning hair was lost beneath jagged brown curls. He looked fatigued himself. Drawing up a chair at the foot of Barnaby’s bed, he sat and craned his head from side to side, massaging his neck. He set his elbows on his knees and clasped his hands beneath his chin, gazing at Barnaby’s quiet form with glazed weariness. His notebook lay on the ground.

  “Still nothing?” Juliet asked.

  Willard shook his head. “It doesn’t usually take this long.”

  “Is there anything else we can do?”

  Willard sighed, vigorously rubbed his face, and looked up with ruddy determination. “Let’s meet tonight,” he said, “to discuss our next move.”

  “I’ve been reviewing my notes,” said Willard, “and as I read over the transcript from our last session, I am tempted to say the Germans shot him, but the medic found Barnaby’s pistol in his mouth.”

  The mess tent was empty but for the ruins of a party: empty green wine bottles and overflowing ashtrays. A large cardboard drawing of what appeared to be a donkey had been abandoned on the ground, alongside several blindfolds. Juliet lit a candle and sat beside Dr. Willard, who had spread his papers over the yellow crumbs of hardtack.

  “Maybe one of the Germans made it across the stream and got hold of his pistol?” she asked, standing to fill the kettle in the corner from a Lister bag. She lit the kerosene stove.

  “The Germans would have shot him at a distance with their own guns. And everything in Barnaby’s mental framework suggests a suicide attempt, everything but the fact that he doesn’t recall it.” Willard tapped his pencil on his papers—“We know who did it; the question is why.”

  “Well, is being scared out of his mind an option?” said Juliet. “If he thought he was going to die anyway, it’s not that outrageous.”

  “Or,” said Willard, “there were no bullets or grenades. No Germans.”

  “A hallucination?”