The Secret of Raven Point: A Novel

by Jennifer Vanderbes

  “Nah, green. Like an oak tree.”

  “Well, green eyes can change,” the man beside Juliet whispered. “I got a little brother who had green eyes and then at one year old they turned brown.”

  “Boy, the poor little critter was hungry. She’ll sleep for ten hours now, just you watch.”

  Juliet moved toward the sleeping figures and collected the empty tin cups. She gazed at the baby’s serene face. They had all been that once, she thought. Munson, Beau, herself. All the men around her. They had all been that small, that helpless, that unformed. And they would all, in time, return to that end—some by nightfall. The cries and the babbling would come back; the primordial bewilderment would take hold; and they would leave the world the same way they had come into it.

  A slight bleat came from the baby, and the woman, without opening her eyes, slid her hand behind its head and shifted it higher on her chest. She kissed its scalp and the baby sighed.

  What any of them would have given at that moment, thought Juliet, for their mother.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE NEXT MORNING, sitting in the mess tent, Juliet looked up from her oatmeal to see a girl in the entrance, a boy laid across her arms. His foot was a tangle of muscle and tendon, bleeding in a cylinder of trickles as though from a just-stopped showerhead. The boy stared at the blood, his face marbled with dirt. As he quietly wept, his lips puckered in fishlike motions. The girl, no more than twelve years old, surveyed the tent, her brown eyes darting from nurse to nurse until they lit upon Major Decker’s stripes.

  Major Decker had already risen from his chair, rushing past the crowded tables to carefully lift the boy from the girl’s arms. Juliet recalled that he had a young son.

  “Nurse Dufresne,” he called, “come help stabilize and prep this boy.”

  In the pre-op tent, Juliet explained to the fraught girl in clumsy Italian that the boy would need a blood transfusion. The girl explained this to the boy, splayed on a stretcher. She stood on her toes and watched him intently, trying to monitor everything being done. She waved her arms as she spoke, and from the rapid stream of heavily inflected Italian Juliet made out that the boy’s name was Dante and that he’d stepped on a land mine while playing. “Il pericolo é dappertutto, Dante!” she scolded. “Non possiamo piu giocare!”

  Over the girl’s tattered pink dress a canteen knocked and sloshed against her hips. An empty bandolier hung across her like a sash. She wore a pair of men’s boots, unmatched and much too large, fastened snugly about her ankles with gauze. She looked part gypsy, part mercenary fighter.

  Her name was Liberata, she told Juliet, and she explained quite matter-of-factly that their parents had been killed during the American bombings. She was now a Partigiana, Liberata claimed: a partisan fighter.

  She inspected Juliet’s work rigging the blood and plasma bags. She barked a series of rebukes at Dante—“Tu non mi ascolti! Hai fatto una cosa stupide! Non ho potuto proteggerti!”—and told Juliet that since Dante was a soldier, it was essential to the war effort that he receive unsurpassed care. He drew maps, Liberata urged; he had important information about the landscape; he knew where the Germans would hide munitions. He would lead the Americans through the countryside, if only they would save him. The girl was a tornado of movement and indecipherable proclamations. When color seemed to fade from the boy’s cheeks, Liberata grew still.

  She crouched on her knees. “We will work,” she said. “We will scrub the floors. We will clean the toilets. The men can do their things to me. Please, save my brother. Please.”

  Juliet shuddered: What was happening beyond the hospital? What was happening to the Italians? What in God’s name was happening to the children?

  “You don’t have to do anything; they’ll take care of him. The surgeons have fixed this hundreds of times.” Juliet knelt so that she was face-to-face with the girl, and violated one of the strictest codes of nursing. “He’ll be fine,” she said firmly. “I absolutely promise.”

  Liberata worked her lips until tears covered her cheeks, and Juliet drew the frightened girl closer and tighter than she’d ever held anyone before.

  “Grazie,” Liberata whispered.

  When the ward man arrived to help carry Dante into surgery, Liberata followed, holding her brother’s hand tight.

  In the Surgical Tent, Juliet saw that half of the hospital’s doctors and nurses had assembled around the operating table. Dr. Mallick, their best surgeon, the man she had pegged as the least sentimental, brought his face close to Dante’s and touched his chin. “Coraggio, little man,” Mallick whispered.

  Juliet loved them all, this band of colleagues; she wanted to tell them that, that she was honored to know them, but no one did that sort of thing. It was a hospital, it was their job; by temperament they scrutinized their failures and discounted their successes.

  Liberata kissed her brother’s face, whispered something in his ear, and followed Juliet slowly through the gray morning light to the Recovery Tent. At the sight of the men, Liberata once again assumed her soldiery composure. She made her way up and down the center aisle, studying the triangulation of legs in casts, the bright white bandages worn like crowns; the coldness of her expression made Juliet wonder what the girl had seen during the Allied bombings.

  Only when she sat on the edge of an empty bed and pulled from her pocket a small wristwatch, an object that Juliet supposed belonged to Dante, did Liberata’s expression slacken.

  “Hey, little one, your brother’s gonna be A-okay,” a nearby patient said.

  The men passed her caramels and chewing gum, bottles of Coca-Cola. They carried comic books to the edge of her bed. But Liberata sat staring at the tent entrance, keeping vigil. Juliet remained beside her, her hand almost going numb on the girl’s back until an hour later the ward men finally carried in Dante, his small stump bandaged below the knee.

  Liberata sprung from the bed. “Mio fratello!” She assaulted him with noisy kisses.

  “Fratello!” the men cheered.

  Brother Reardon came by soon after, seeking out Juliet: “Major Decker just got word from HQ. Dr. Willard will be coming back to the hospital soon, in case”—he smiled—“it matters to you.”

  The thought lifted her spirits—Willard was returning!—and she settled happily beside the children, who had begun to sort through the comics and candies. Brother Reardon pulled their two beds side by side, wheeled several intravenous apparatus stands around the corners, and draped a sheet on top to create a tent. For hours he sat inside the tent, playing cards with Liberata and a sleepy Dante; he pulled out a harmonica and sang “Beer Barrel Polka” and “Barracks’ Blues.” Juliet brought the children cups of milk and chocolate bars. When the darkness of late afternoon filled the tent and Dante fell asleep, Brother Reardon stood to leave. Liberata looked drowsy, and dazzled. Chocolate stained the corners of her mouth. “You should get some sleep, too,” Juliet told her in Italian.

  Liberata clutched Juliet’s fingertips.

  “We will work,” she whispered back in Italian. “We will scrub the floors. We will clean the toilets. Please, let us stay here.”

  Juliet’s throat tightened. She wanted to break the rules once again, to tell her what she wanted to hear, but this time it would be a blatant lie.

  “I don’t think it’s possible,” said Juliet.

  Liberata nodded, wiped at a tear in the corner of her eye.

  “Then we will continue fighting,” she said.

  After weeks of rain, the air was dry and cool and the sun shone placidly. The leaves in the trees had begun to turn, and from the hills overlooking the encampment, flags of yellow and orange waved intermittently. The grass was tall and noisy and tangled with dandelions; plump daffodils nodded in the breeze. There was something soft and ancient in the light; it looked like the amber of relics, of primordial ants and Neolithic mosquitoes.

  News came that the Fifth Army was going to make a final push into the Apennines, and the hospital was again ordered to dis
mantle.

  Throughout the morning patients were loaded into the backs of ambulances. Ward men collapsed the cots and dragged them noisily in stacks of four outside the Recovery Tent. Beau lay silently in his bed, watching all of this. His lung had collapsed and he was too fragile to be transported. Soon he lay alone in the empty green tent, while outside a group of engineers mounted ladders and slackened the canvas, and the walls slithered gently to the ground. They eased apart the wooden frame so that the poles dropped outward away from Beau.

  Alone on the large wooden platform beneath the bright noon sun, Beau watched as Juliet said her long good-byes to Dante and Liberata and the other patients. As the trucks and ambulances pulled away, splashing through puddles, spewing mud, Juliet felt the knowing weight of his stare. Juliet and Brother Reardon had been assigned to stay with Beau until a rear medical unit arrived, or until, as Major Decker instructed, “his condition changed.” She knew Beau would not last the night. Together they watched the convoy snake along the narrow road toward the distant crown of mountains. After months of their being surrounded by scores of people, there was something unsettling about being left there alone, just the three of them. All that remained of the hospital were several ward tent platforms and a dozen rusted metal trash drums. Where the pup tents had been, rectangles of grass were pale and flattened, shadows abandoned by their objects.

  There was a slight chill in the air, and Juliet and Brother Reardon lifted their musette bags onto the platform beside Beau and erected a small tent around his cot.

  “We’ll just wait here until the evac hospital catches up with us,” said Juliet, fastening the final stake.

  “Keep the front open,” Beau said, “so I can see the sun. The sun . . . looks so . . . pretty.”

  Each of his breaths was a labored gasp. His lips were crusted white, as though he had washed up from the sea. He looked nothing like the football player she’d kissed outside her school, nothing like the man she’d made love with. She felt a strange anger as she looked at him, as though this weakened, ruined creature had stolen that other Beau from her.

  “Hey, Juliet . . . remember how you and Tuck once saved that raven? Cher Ami? He told me about that. . . .”

  Juliet nodded and rested her hand on his knee.

  As the afternoon grew dark and cool, she laid a blanket over him and lit a small stove. She fed the stove with the broken plank of a tent platform. There were dark circles beneath his eyes. She heated a can of soup and slid spoonfuls into his mouth.

  “This wasn’t . . . supposed to happen,” he said, broth dripping from his lips.

  “I know.”

  “I wanted to go home.”

  “You will.”

  His deep-green eyes bored into her, as though all the life left in him had gathered in his stare. “Tell me I’m dying . . . so I can tell you I’m afraid.”

  She could not lie to him, not after everything. “You’re dying, Beau.” The words split open something inside of her. Something she knew she would never repair.

  He nodded slowly. “I’m afraid.”

  “It’s okay.”

  Brother Reardon drew close on the other side. “‘You will sprinkle me with hyssop, O Lord, and I shall be made clean,’” he said softly, “‘you will wash me and I shall be made whiter than snow.’” He anointed Beau’s eyes, ears, lips, hands, and feet. “You have nothing to fear, my brother. This body, this vessel, is no longer serving you, but your spirit is well. Do you hear me?”

  Beau looked sadly around the tent, at the empty corners of the canvas, at the stove’s orange flame; he strained to lift his head and glimpse the snowcapped mountains.

  “Crap. I like all this,” he said. “I like life.”

  “I know.” Juliet felt sickened by the magnitude of her ineloquence.

  Beau’s eyes seemed to whiten and moved wearily between Juliet and Brother Reardon. His breathing quickened, and he tried to cough, his face blanching with exertion.

  “Can you hold me?”

  Juliet was grateful for the request; she had no idea what more to say. He was the only one leaving, going somewhere that no one around him had gone. She gently wrapped her arms around him and set her head on his chest. His lungs rasped and rattled—the sound of a frightened bird caged within his ribs. She nestled close and hummed a song, or not quite a song but some notes she thought sounded pretty. Soon the movement of his chest stopped and the tent was silent, but she stayed there awhile.

  Eventually she was aware of Brother Reardon lifting Beau’s wrist. “He’s gone.”

  Juliet sat up slowly, as though from an interminable sleep, and let her forehead fall into her hands.

  “Come on,” said Brother Reardon, taking her elbow. “Let’s get some fresh air.”

  They stepped from the tent into the blue light of the evening. The sun, low and orange, was dipping behind the mountains.

  “He is with Our Father now, Juliet. He is at peace.”

  Juliet nodded politely, but she did not have Brother Reardon’s faith. Instead, as she sat and kicked at the grass, her own vision came to her, a wish: she wished that all the ghosts of all the men and boys who had died in the war—and the wars before this—were standing there in the field, invisible to her and Reardon, arms outstretched, welcoming Beau. Patting him on the back, uttering their obscene, affectionate epithets, those sobriquets of soldiery love. She imagined Tuck welcoming Beau, and for a moment she felt so cracked by sadness that only gravity held her together.

  “Juliet?” Brother Reardon rubbed her back. “Are you okay?”

  She stood and wiped off her pants. “I guess we should bury him and find somewhere to sleep.”

  The lavender sky was slowly darkening. A field of crooked white crosses, blue in the dusk, fronted the small stone church. They hauled their musette bags inside, swollen and heavy with what they had been able to carry of Beau’s belongings. The inside of the church was cold and dark; it had the raw, wet smell of a barn. Juliet struck a match and saw that empty ration cans and dead black flies littered the floor. A half dozen beds of hay, browned and uneven, lay at the foot of the altar.

  “We’ll at least be safe here,” said Brother Reardon. He eased his bag off his shoulders and dropped it on the floor. A rodent, roused by the thud, scratched and scampered across the dark floor, banging into several ration tins.

  “They want our food, not us, right?” said Juliet.

  “So I’m told.”

  Brother Reardon clicked on his flashlight and, noticing the empty basin of holy water, poured what was left of his canteen into the basin and blessed it. He walked to the altar and swatted away a sheet of cobwebs; with the hem of his shirt he dusted, then righted the toppled Madonna.

  Juliet set down her bag and lit a kerosene lamp. A jumbled mass of splintered pew planks and rotted tree branches stood beside the door. The few pews that were spared had been turned on their sides, pushed together to form a table at the edge of the church. She set the lamp on the table, and the light spilled across three dog-eared copies of Stars and Stripes. A large, dusty Bible lay open to the first page, where someone had penned Kilroy was here. She flipped through the strange soft pages, hundreds of them; she’d read so many books, but never this one.

  “I have to confess,” she called across the darkness, “I haven’t spent much time in churches.”

  “In their defense,” Brother Reardon answered, “they usually look a lot better than this.”

  “I feel like an intruder.”

  “The intruders are the ones we most want to enter churches!”

  “Well, I’m not much of a sinner, I’m afraid. It’s just that my father is an atheist.”

  Brother Reardon shined his flashlight at her. “I never took you for much of a sinner.”

  “You can tell by looking?” she laughed.

  “Secrets of the trade.”

  He had stuffed one of the hay beds inside a knotted hospital sheet and was noisily shaking it and smacking it, trying to purge the lump
s. He set it on the ground and signaled Juliet over. He began to arrange another bed for himself, whistling cheerfully as he stuffed in the fistfuls of hay. It was hard for Juliet to imagine how he kept himself together; he had held the hands of so many dying men.

  “So how does a person become a monk?” she asked.

  “How or why?”

  “Why, I guess.”

  He smiled. He set his bed beside hers, and they sat with the kerosene lamp perched above them. “You fail at everything else—miserably. I’m kidding, but only a little. I was a terribly lazy and confused person, bouncing from job to job after high school. I sold tickets at the movie theater; I apprenticed with a watchmaker; I was briefly a stage actor, playing Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Everything seemed so transitory to me, so meaningless. I simply couldn’t muster the energy to do things I didn’t truly believe in. I was always distracted by larger questions: Why are we here? Why are we as we are? Who is watching over all of this? I hadn’t been raised with any answers. My father was an atheist as well.”

  “Your career choice must have shocked him.”

  “Sadly, he was too piss-drunk to notice.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He turned to adjust the lamp, and she sensed the admission had embarrassed him. Reardon was like Willard in this way; he felt he always had to be the listener.

  “So you knew that man from home?” he asked. “Our last patient?”

  “He was a friend of my brother.”

  “Not easy, I know. But what a gift for him to have you there at the end.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Your brother, he is in the army as well?”

  “He was,” said Juliet. “I think he died.”

  It was the first time the words had come to her, the first time her fear had pushed so unexpectedly into conscious thought. A rush of sadness tightened her chest. Brother Reardon’s gaze lingered on her, and in the yellow light she saw that he understood.

  “It’s terrible, the not knowing,” he said.