The Secret of Raven Point: A Novel

by Jennifer Vanderbes

  “What are the chances of five Germans firing machine guns at him and not even scratching him? He didn’t have a single wound other than the bullet lodged in his head.” Willard began pawing through his papers. “And it’s odd that he thinks the blue eye shot him. It’s possible, though I can’t know for certain until he’s fully conscious, that we’re looking at a schizophrenic break. A break that perhaps began when he bit into that eye.”

  The water came to a boil, and Juliet stood to mix the coffee, letting the spoon clack loudly as she uneasily worked through the possibility of Barnaby’s schizophrenia. What if, after all her waiting and hoping, Barnaby were to regain consciousness and offer up only deranged nonsense?

  She set down the cups brusquely. She had foolishly pinned her hopes on a comatose and questionably sound man.

  “So what do you do if Barnaby doesn’t get better?”

  “I’ll work with him as long as it takes,” said Willard.

  “You’re convinced you can make him better?”

  “I am,” he said.

  His voice wavered, but she wanted to believe him. She sipped at her coffee and studied his face in the candlelight; he seemed lost, lonely. Each day he listened to the pained recollections of men’s most horrific encounters, more intimate and disturbing than a hundred surgical procedures. How did he manage it? How did he fend off the nightmares? The daymares? Were it not for her determination to find out what Barnaby knew about her brother, Juliet would have already quit. But Willard persisted, forging alone, day after day, into the miserable landscapes of other people’s memories. She wondered if anyone else saw it, if others appreciated the selflessness of his work. No, he didn’t cross minefields like Brother Reardon, but he was heroic in his own way. Quietly heroic.

  “You know, Dr. Willard, I don’t even know where you’re from.”

  He looked taken aback. “That’s because there’s no need for you to know that.”

  “That’s considered a personal question?”

  He smiled. “Well, it certainly isn’t professional.”

  “But you asked me where I was from. That day at the lake.”

  “I was considering you for this position; it was professionally relevant.”

  “How is that relevant?”

  Willard scrawled something in his notebook and then began examining his transcript papers one by one and putting them in order.

  “I can do that,” said Juliet.

  “You can sit right there and drink your delectable army-issue coffee. You’re not my secretary.”

  “Well, it would be nice to know something about you. Tell me something professional, then.”

  Willard closed his notebook and took a sip of coffee, registering his full repugnance. “Mark my words, this godforsaken coffee is the reason we’re seeing so many mental breakdowns.”

  Juliet laughed, and Willard smiled, and a conspiratorial warmth spread between them, as if they were passengers on a train talking into the night while the rest of the compartment slept. “Something professional . . .” Willard nodded thoughtfully. “Okay, since you’ve asked nicely.

  “Once upon a time, three years ago, when the war began, I was barely out of medical school. I was one of several doctors commissioned to act as advisors to Dr. Marshall Black Sullivan to write guidelines for the Selective Service Advisory Board. The job was to design questions and descriptions of behavior to ensure the mentally ill were excluded from service. The War Department made it clear: they wanted an army of quality, not quantity. ‘Weed out the mental weaklings,’ they told us. No low-grade morons, psychopaths, eccentrics, emotionally unstable men, sexually perverse, or passive-aggressive men, or even those resentful of discipline. After weeks of meetings, Sullivan announced the guidelines for a psychiatric draftee interview: ‘What do you think about the war?’ ‘Have you suffered a nervous breakdown?’ ‘Do you like girls?’ Sullivan, who, I was quickly learning, was a bit unfit himself, insisted the interviewees be buck naked. I resigned on the spot. Of course, the board followed Sullivan’s guidelines. Any idea how long the average interview actually lasted?”

  Juliet wasn’t sure if the question was rhetorical but she wanted to show her interest. “Ten minutes?” she offered.

  Willard shook his head. “Three. Trois. Drei. And pretty soon one out of four draftees was 4-F, sometimes just for nail biting. Then a group of Harvard physicians claimed they could detect unfit soldiers by physical proportions: something idiotic about wide hips correlating to cowardice. There was an actual formula about, pardon me, pubic hair. I guess I should have done something, but I was a novice in the field, a kid as far as they were concerned; I didn’t think anyone would listen. I went about my hospital work and began studying phobias—I’d had a near-crippling phobia of snakes as a boy and was fascinated by where such things came from. So I began conducting Pentothal interviews with patients who couldn’t understand the roots of their deepest fears—and I had unprecedented success. Then we entered the war, and by the middle of last year the Selective Service board was up the creek. Casualties were into the hundreds of thousands, and the army needed replacements. The idea that one quarter of young American males were mentally unsound finally struck them as absurd, and they fired Sullivan and called me. My team nixed over half the original draft interview questions and arranged for actual psychiatrists to be stationed at the replacement training centers to monitor soldiers. But then another problem came up: too many soldiers in North Africa were getting discharged for ‘constitutional inadequacy’—neuropsychiatric incidents were literally triple the number from the Great War. When Patton slapped those soldiers in Sicily, everyone started questioning the whole idea of battle fatigue. The army decided that either the diagnoses were wrong or treatment was inadequate. They wanted ‘maximum utilization’ of the soldiers. So they shipped some doctors—not my team—to evac hospitals. One in Tunisia got seventy-eight percent of psychiatric casualties back to combat duty after forty-eight hours by plunging them in ice baths. A hospital in Tripoli sent ninety-three percent of mental patients back into the lines within a month.”

  Willard drew his cup close and stared desolately at the contents.

  “I was suspicious as hell of the numbers. In the wrong hands, psychiatry can be more impressionistic than a Monet. I needed to see firsthand what was happening. So I demanded to go to Monte Cassino, where the fatigue cases were breaking all records. Those boys were shaking, weeping, banging their heads on the ground. Many couldn’t speak. That’s when I started using Sodium Pentothal again. The first time I made the mistake of doing the interview in the Recovery Tent, with the nurses and ward men and doctors watching. Can you imagine? The patient emerged calm, but the staff was in tears.”

  “It’s some gruesome stuff,” said Juliet.

  “And yet you’ve handled yourself pretty well.”

  “Have I?”

  “You strike me as being entirely too hard on yourself, Nurse Dufresne.”

  “Like you?” she asked, smiling.

  He paused. “Perhaps. . . . Anyway, Monte Cassino was a nightmare, of course. It became clear to me then that any sane, strong man could break down under completely normal combat circumstances. Every break manifested itself differently. And these were breaks that didn’t heal quickly. I rested these men, talked with them, medicated them, fed them with my own hands. I got them to stop shaking and weeping. And when they looked as good as new, I sent them back, just as I was ordered to do. But it didn’t work.”

  “They came back?”

  “Psychosomatic illness. You mentioned it my first day here, remember? Mental illness manifesting itself physically. Did you know that almost eight-five percent of gastrointestinal cases at the front have no organic pathology? You can get rid of the bellyaches, the shaking, the paralysis, the muteness, but that doesn’t mean you’ve cured the illness. You stop the shakes, send the soldier back, but he shows up at the hospital again—suddenly mute.”

  “Like Barnaby.”

  “Like
Barnaby. Because these men don’t have irrational phobias. What they’re afraid of is very real. The products of firsthand experience. In some ways, you could say they’re more sane than we are.”

  “So why try to cure them if they’ll just get sent back?”

  “That is the fateful question. The war is here, and the army needs bodies. What do we do? Force the broken ones back in and hope they’ll end the war faster. Sounds heartless, right? But if I don’t cure the Barnabys and get them back to the front, more men die in the long run. For every torn and tattered man I send back into the lines, there are three more back home I might have spared. There is no ‘right’ in this work, only degrees of ‘less awful.’”

  Willard paused, sat back. “The army couldn’t get enough replacements in Italy, so they had me set up a psychiatric hospital here. Now they want psychiatric units in the field hospitals so we can send boys back in after forty-eight hours. They don’t understand these ‘cases’ are human beings who are going to suffer mental instability long after this war is over, long after all the generals hang up their uniforms. The human mind didn’t evolve to exist under combat conditions. Now . . .” He turned his empty coffee cup upside down. “You asked for information and you got an hour-long graduate-level lecture. I hope my long-windedness will deter you from future inquiries.”

  But Juliet hadn’t minded; it surprised her how intently she had listened and how many more questions she still had. It was a feeling she’d previously associated only with books—a hunger to sink headlong into a subject, a person’s voice. She wanted to keep talking, and yet the lantern was sputtering.

  “Everybody else here wants to tell you every little thing about their lives back home the minute you meet them,” she said.

  “I suppose my job is trickier than the rest. By its very nature, it’s so personal that I have to enforce other boundaries. I have to be a trusted authority, with a veneer of self-containment, or I don’t think I could do anyone much good.”

  “Veneer,” she repeated. “So you do get lonely?”

  “Now, that, dear one, is a personal question.”

  Willard said it jokingly, but the words dear one surprised Juliet; even Willard seemed uncomfortable with his phrasing.

  For a moment, neither of them moved.

  Finally, Willard leaned into the table and hugged his papers. As he rose he gathered them clumsily to his chest. “Good night, Nurse Dufresne.”

  “Good night, Dr. Willard.”

  He hurried toward the tent exit, but as he was about to leave, he turned. With an expression of amicable defeat, he said, “For what it’s worth, I’m from Chicago.”

  CHAPTER 9

  THE AMBULANCE WAS heading north, climbing into the pine-and-poplar-covered mountains. Juliet sat beside Dr. Lovelace, who was driving. They’d been ordered forward by Major Decker after the division’s medical clearing company called to say a colonel needed surgery and couldn’t be moved.

  As the ambulance navigated the winding roads, Juliet felt a sharp chill; though it was still summer, it felt more like winter here. She pulled a blanket from the back, perforated with cigarette burns, and begrudgingly wrapped it around her shoulders. The temperature had dropped fifteen degrees since they had set out, a fact she almost mentioned to Dr. Lovelace, but then thought better of. Since the drive began, a thick silence had divided them. Glenda’s absence loomed uncomfortably in the vehicle; she should have been the one riding beside him, assisting him. Lovelace drove quietly, methodically, nothing like the man who had wildly chauffeured everyone to the lake a month earlier; he seemed a cold and saddened version of himself. Juliet wasn’t sure what she could say to him that wouldn’t sound trite.

  Instead she looked out the window at the pulverized stumps of trees along the road. The air was gray and cool and there wasn’t a person in sight. They eased the ambulance across the noisy planks of a makeshift bridge. Below them, the piles and splintered wood of the original bridge bobbed in the current.

  At the command post a sentry directed Juliet and Lovelace to a small stone building used as the battalion aid station. Juliet was happy to finally stretch her legs, happy to be away from the confines of the hospital.

  But as they stepped inside, she clutched the door frame to orient herself. On a cold stone floor, a dozen men lay side by side, writhing and whimpering, their cries pouring into one another. It sounded like a swamp of screams. Against the far wall, two men had been propped up on a metal table, staring mutely at their bloodied legs. A pair of medics crouched over a patient in the corner, tossing forceps and gauze between them. Nearby, a man with a Red Cross helmet furiously pumped at the chest of the patient beneath him, intermittently blowing into his mouth. Without looking up, he called to them, “Colonel Muskegee’s against the right wall.”

  The colonel was tall and broad shouldered and stared calmly up. At first glance, Juliet couldn’t see what was wrong with him. His lips were thin and dry. His eyes moved from Lovelace to Juliet. “I want to live,” he whispered.

  Dr. Lovelace gently lifted his head off the stretcher, revealing, behind the left ear, a mess of gray pulp. The smell of burned brain tissue nearly made Juliet gag; she quickly dug through the surgical bag to find the Novocain and scalpel. Lovelace’s hands snipped and sutured, quick as wings, while Juliet kept her hand on Muskegee’s wrist. “His pulse is dropping,” she warned.

  “Okay, double-vein him. Adrenaline. Then plasma.” Dr. Lovelace moved quickly but calmly, bandaging the man’s skull.

  Juliet noticed the patient beside the colonel, watching the surgery, nervously fingering the back of his own skull. From litters surrounding them came the words doctor and help. Juliet glanced around the room at the blank and weary faces, men staring at giant hooks hanging from the ceiling—she had not noticed them before. Christ, were they in a butcher shop?

  “Thank bloody God!” the battalion surgeon exclaimed. The man whose heart he’d been pumping finally doubled over, coughing.

  Then Juliet felt a hand on her shoulder: Dr. Lovelace was shaking his head. He began wiping down his surgical instruments, setting them back in the bag. He stood, quietly moving to another patient.

  “How’m I doing, nurse?” the colonel asked. A silver star was pinned to his jacket.

  “Good,” she whispered.

  Then he died.

  At 1600 hours, they began heading back to the hospital. Dr. Lovelace drove and Juliet sat quietly, her head resting against the window. Three patients had died in an hour, and she was numb, out of emotion as if out of breath. When Lovelace said, “Roadblock ahead,” Juliet barely raised her head.

  A line of troops, hunched beneath swollen packs, stood across the gray road, motioning them to stop.

  “A bit late for sightseeing,” said one of the soldiers.

  Dr. Lovelace began to explain where they had been, but the soldier cut him off: “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Orphan?”

  “Annie,” Juliet answered flatly.

  The soldier’s demeanor suddenly changed; he grinningly tapped the hood of the ambulance. “Camp with us and make your way back in the daylight. This forest is crawling with Krauts. They’ve been snatching up uniforms from dead GIs and moving around like they’re one of us. You sure as hell don’t want them to get their hands on you.”

  Climbing into the back of the ambulance, Juliet and Lovelace tried to determine which supplies they needed for the night. Juliet stuffed some blankets and ration bars into her bag and stepped down onto the road. She didn’t care where she slept, so long as she didn’t have to hold the hands of any more dying men for the night.

  “Sure as shit, is that Juliet Dufresne?”

  Juliet almost didn’t recognize the hulking man covered with mud. “Beau Conroy?”

  The cold, the fatigue, the months away from home, Tuck’s disappearance—it all came rushing powerfully at Juliet, a wave of longing and exhaustion, and she tumbled into Beau, her arms outstretched, pressing her cheek against his chest.

  He
patted her back. “Hey, there. Hey. It’s gonna be all right.”

  Juliet wiped her eyes and looked up. “I never . . . I just never expected to see someone from home.”

  Beau stared at her; tears were pooling in his deep green eyes. “Come on,” he whispered, throwing his arm around her. “Before these guys call me a pussy.”

  As they followed the troops through the pine forest, Beau walked beside her, occasionally stepping ahead to take her hand. The moon cast a silver light over the towering trees. The air was cold, stinging Juliet’s cheeks, crawling through the fabric of her shirt. They clambered across the crackling limbs of fallen trees, sloshed knee-deep through chilly puddles, hiked along a rise of limestone, the soft white rock crumbling beneath their boots, until finally, at the entrance to a small cave, the soldiers all loosened their packs.

  “Home sweet home,” Beau announced.

  The men drew sticks for guard duty, and Beau snapped his disbelievingly in two. “I’m the tallest guy here, and somehow I always pull the short stick.” He yawned, and Juliet saw that he had lost a molar. As if suddenly recalling the gap in his teeth, he quickly closed his mouth.

  “Want company?” she asked.

  “Sure you don’t want some rest?”

  “It’s not every night I get to see someone from home.”

  The soldiers dragged their packs inside, laid down their bedrolls, and wiggled themselves, fully dressed, into sleeping bags; they used their helmets as pillows. Lovelace settled in beside them.

  At the mouth of the cave, Juliet and Beau arranged a bedroll and sat on it side by side, staring out at the night. He set his rifle on his shoulder and shook his canteen, the last few sips of water sloshing around.

  “All yours,” he said.

  “I can do better.” She dug in her bag and found the medical brandy.

  “God, I love you.”

  Beau took a long sip and rubbed the back of his hand across his wet lips. Juliet sipped a pinch and leaned against the rock wall. She unlaced her boots.