“The cecum. Between the ascending colon and the ileum. The fat part at the bottom. It’s right there.”
“I thought that was called the jejunum.”
“Juliet, do you see it?”
“Yes, I see it. I just didn’t know what it was called.”
For the next twenty minutes, all Juliet saw was the open abdomen before her: she retracted skin and muscle, the colon, and finally the ruptured pouch dangling off the cecum. Her hands moved nervously, delicately, snipping at the narrowest part of the appendix, until she’d removed it and tied off the last bit. She doused the wound with saline, then sutured closed the incision.
“Please get me out of here,” she said to Willard, setting her forehead against the wall.
In the main room, the metal beds were crowded side by side. Beneath gray moth-eaten blankets, children lay strangely still, staring upward. A pigeon flapped noisily about the frescoed ceiling, and all of the boys and girls seemed to be tracking its motions, but their eyes were lusterless, hauntingly blank. Juliet and Willard wandered the rows, checking the foreheads and pulses of those who seemed feverish, and then Juliet saw her, in the last bed in the row.
“Liberata!”
The girl wore what seemed to be a burlap sack, and her shoulders and elbows were sharp with malnutrition. Her hair had been cut short. She turned her head weakly. Before Juliet could ask, Liberata shoved the blanket off her lap and pointed to her right knee, where her leg now ended: “Bomba.”
Juliet felt sick. She fell to her knees beside the bed and tried not to weep. Willard had drawn up beside her and set his hand on her back.
“Where’s Dante?” Juliet eventually asked.
Liberata tightened her lips and shook her head and also seemed to fight tears. “No lo so.”
I don’t know.
Liberata brought her fist to her chest, and in it Juliet saw a large brass crucifix, the thick chain spilling from her hand. Juliet recognized it immediately.
“When was Fratello Reardon here?”
“Yesterday.”
“Did he say where they were going?”
Liberata shook her head.
Juliet felt a momentary happiness: Reardon and Barnaby had been there; they were close. But that also meant she and Willard needed to get moving. Juliet dug in her pack and laid a pile of ration bars in Liberata’s lap.
“Mange,” said Juliet. “You need to eat, for strength.”
Liberata studied the bars and one by one stashed them under her blanket. “Per Dante,” she said. “Mio fratello.”
“We have to go,” Willard said softly. “If they’re still on foot, we have a chance of catching up to them tonight or tomorrow. But if they get a ride, we’re lost.”
Juliet stood, and Liberata’s eyes flashed with panic. Juliet stiffened as she braced for the entreaties: Please, take me with you, I will work, I will clean the toilets. . . . But Liberata merely lay back, fastening her face blankly on the ceiling, like the scores of other children.
She did not ask to be saved. That was somehow worse.
As the sun set, bats wheeled in the purple sky. The mountains on the horizon were a black smudge, and Juliet now felt very far from where they had set out, from the safety of the hospital encampment.
She drove slowly, and in a thoughtful silence they strained their eyes against the last wisps of dusk, looking for Barnaby and Brother Reardon along the road. When it finally grew too dark to see, they pulled over at a small schoolhouse.
The door opened onto a small, dark classroom, barely large enough for the sixteen wooden desks sitting in tidy rows. A sharpened pencil sat at the top of each, and on the massive teacher’s desk at the front of the room lay a tidy pile of examination booklets. A textbook had been left open, a pencil in the spine. Musty air rose from the stone floor. On the side wall hung a giant faded map of Italy, on which an X marked the town of San Vito-Cerreto and beside that, the word domestico. On another wall hung a blackboard; in faint chalk marks the question lay in a neat script: Che cosa vuoi fare da grande? Beneath, in the jagged block letters of inexperienced hands, was a list: Vigile del fuoco, medico, insegnante, soldato, Mussolini.
What would you like to be when you grow up?
Juliet recalled how many fantasies of adulthood she once had, the elaborate list of dramatic feats she felt destined to accomplish. All those dreams now seemed decadent and ludicrous. She thought of the boy on the operating table, and of Liberata. What had they imagined for their futures? What would happen to them? Who would take care of them? And what had become of her—the girl who once rescued a wounded bird, who traveled thousands of miles to find out what happened to her brother—that she could now walk away from injured children? That’s what adulthood was bringing her, she thought: pragmatism, heartlessness. Something within her was eroding, something she knew she would never restore.
She threw down her pack and sat on one of the desks and began tugging off her boots. “I’ve never been so tired,” she said.
“Hey, you did wonderfully,” said Willard.
“If he’s alive in the morning, I suppose. But we’ll never know.”
He took her boots from her and set them tidily on the floor. “Listen, if we don’t have any luck locating them tomorrow,” he said, standing before her, “we have to start heading back to the hospital.”
Juliet nodded. They wouldn’t find them; she saw it clearly now. Just as she hadn’t found Tuck. She’d been defeated in everything. “Absolutely fine.”
At daybreak the air was clear and sharp. As they emerged from the schoolhouse, Juliet stared at the empty space where she had parked the jeep the night before. She circled the nearby oak tree as though the jeep might be hiding on the other side.
“How did we not hear the jeep starting in the middle of the night?” she asked.
Willard stood silently on the steps of the schoolhouse. He scanned the horizon and then seemed to work through some complicated thought.
“Dr. Willard?”
Willard was opening her pack, yanking out several articles of clothing and shoving them into his own pack. He lifted her pack, testing the weight.
“You’ll need to carry this,” he said. He handed her the pack and hefted his own onto his shoulders. His motions were rough, nervous. He began walking toward the road. “Come on, Juliet. We need to start moving. Now. This is bad.”
She followed quickly. The morning frost had crispened the grass, and there was a biting chill in the air. Everything looked different without the jeep. The trees loomed shadowy and frightening. The distances were vast. A small brook she hardly noticed when they drove over it the night before now had to be forded; they held each other’s hands and sidestepped the black ice-glazed rocks, jabbing sticks into the slushy water for balance. It was the first time Juliet had hiked since Basic Training, the first time her legs had covered distances beyond the hospital encampment. Her back ached; she shifted her pack from one hip, then the other. Her toes grew cold, and she felt a blister forming at her heel. A pain at the front of her feet finally brought her to a halt after only thirty minutes.
“Dr. Willard, I forgot to cut my toenails.”
Willard, who had been nearly silent during their hike, dug into his pack and tossed her a small scissors. “Do it now; it’s not getting any warmer.”
She sat on her pack and tugged off her boots. “Don’t watch. This isn’t pretty.”
“Juliet. Don’t be ridiculous.”
“It’s cold and I’m carrying thirty pounds on my back. Let me be ridiculous.”
He threw his hands up and turned, and her fingers, already numb from the cold, fumbled to snip the nails. She carried the scissors back to his bag.
“We have to keep moving,” he said, cinching his pack.
“I’m sorry about the jeep, Dr. Willard.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“Then why are you so angry?”
“I’m not angry,” he snapped. He turned his back and lifted his pack. He w
as afraid, she thought, as afraid as she was. He knew the darkest stories of the war, stories worse than the Goumiers, no doubt. They had never anticipated trying to make it back to the hospital without the jeep.
“Now, lift your pack and come on,” he urged.
Without the noise of the jeep, the landscape was hauntingly silent. Juliet could hear each of her footsteps on the ground, and she thought about land mines hidden beneath the soil. She wondered, too, who had stolen the jeep; were thieves lurking across the countryside? Would their food and bags eventually be taken from them? Willard insisted on walking ahead—so that he might trigger a mine first, she supposed—but he turned around several times a minute to make sure she was still in sight. Juliet had trouble moving as quickly as he did, and every few minutes he halted, impatience evident on his face. All their playfulness had vanished. They had lost their vehicle, lost their chance to find Barnaby and Reardon, and if they somehow managed to return to the hospital, they would likely be punished.
Only when they crossed a stream where several old women were filling buckets with water did Juliet feel her spirits lift.
“We must be near something,” she called.
“We should be getting close to Massa,” he shouted back. “We can try our best there to see about getting a vehicle.”
They pressed ahead into a field of felled oaks, zigzagging between wet stumps. They scrambled over the fallen trunks, stirring squirrels and mice from beneath logs. Against one stump, two bundled figures lay locked in an embrace.
Willard gestured for her to veer around the figures; Juliet followed his path, but midway she paused, turning curiously toward the motionless forms. Beneath the draping of blankets, she glimpsed the pants of a khaki uniform, and in a surge of irrational hope, the last she would ever permit herself, she shrugged off her pack and slowly walked toward the men. She moved quietly around the other side of the stump until she could see their faces. Frost clung to their unshaven cheeks; their eyes were closed, the lashes ice-crusted. They were huddled together, arms linked, facing the stump, as though to avoid being seen. Juliet couldn’t believe it; it was them.
“Dr. Willard,” she yelled, taking their pulses. “They’re alive.”
It took four hours for Juliet and Willard to carry the men, one by one, back to the schoolhouse. It was the only shelter they knew of. There they shoved aside the desks and laid each man on the stone floor. Juliet draped them with blankets and her own jacket.
“Jesus, they’re pure blue,” she said, kneading their limbs. “They need a fire and food.”
Willard lit their stove to heat a bowl of water, and when it was warm, Juliet peeled off their gloves and dipped their fingers in. When some color had returned to their faces, she did the same with their toes. Tugging off Brother Reardon’s boots, Juliet saw that his left ankle was swollen.
“We’ll need a lot more than the rations we have,” said Willard. He set his hand on her back. “I’m going into town.”
Juliet looked up in alarm.
“What town?”
“I’m fairly certain we were almost to Massa before. If I backtrack, I think I can be there and back by sundown. Sooner if I can find us a vehicle there.”
She didn’t know what to say. He was right, and yet she dreaded the thought of him wandering into the wilderness alone. Of being left alone. They were not supposed to separate; that was the rule. What protection could Barnaby and Reardon offer her?
“What if you’re not back by sundown?”
“I’ll be back. You’re safer here than out there with me.”
She knew the men needed food; she knew their options were limited. And she saw in his face that he was not particularly eager to go.
“Come back as fast as humanly possible,” she pleaded.
“Lock the door.”
The hours passed in a painful slowness. Brother Reardon and Barnaby were still sleeping, and only the sounds of their snores kept Juliet company. She paced the small classroom, collected all the pencils from the desk, snapped them in two, and used them to feed the fire. Twice, she opened the door a crack and stared out at the darkening landscape. The trees, stripped bare of their leaves, stood oil black against the gray sky. But it wasn’t until she began to hear the sounds of nightfall—the sharpening winds, the low, faint hooting of owls—that a weak knock finally sounded on the door. Willard waddled in, cradling eggs in his jacket; in the crook of his arm was a wine bottle. She wanted to berate him but saw exhaustion in his face. His cheeks were red from the cold. “I’m so sorry,” he huffed.
A breath of raw air had come in with him, and she hurriedly closed the door. Without looking him in the eye, Juliet took the eggs, trying to mask her anxiety and anger. “Brother Reardon sprained his ankle,” she said, matter-of-factly.
She cracked an egg, and with her forefinger she beat it in a cup. She added water from her canteen, then held the cup to each man’s mouth, coaxing him to swallow.
“There, that’ll put color back in their faces.”
She laid Barnaby’s head in her lap and carefully peeled his eye patch away from his tangle of blisters and facial hair. The patch was fraying at the edges; she tried not to tear the skin beneath, but one section pulled at a patch of frostbite and he winced.
“Ouch.” His dark brown eye was staring directly at her.
“Dr. Willard,” she whispered.
Willard crouched beside her, and Barnaby turned to look at him, somewhat sleepily.
“Hey there, Doc.”
“Hi, Christopher. How are you feeling?”
He hugged himself and rubbed his shoulders. “Fucking cold.”
Willard laughed. “Me too. Do you know where you are?”
Barnaby looked around and squinted at the chalkboard. “This looks like a schoolhouse.” He looked back at Willard. “We’re not at the hospital anymore?”
“We left the hospital,” said Willard. “It wasn’t safe there.”
Barnaby slowly nodded, taking in the breadth of danger that might be lurking.
“They wanted to lock me up,” he said.
“Yes,” said Willard.
“We made a run for it?”
“So to speak.”
“I owe you,” he said.
Juliet, unable to contain herself, pressed her head to Barnaby’s chest. The world seemed filled with glorious possibility.
By midnight, Brother Reardon had finally awakened and explained, in a mild delirium of fever and dehydration, where they had been since leaving the hospital. Willard listened intently, crouching over the stove, boiling an egg in a crackling C ration tin. Juliet spooned steaming food into Reardon’s slack mouth, his face white and glossy with fever.
When the men had both fallen back asleep, Willard carried a cup across the dark classroom to Juliet. “I made some coffee,” he said softly.
She set it down to cool and leaned back against the wall. Willard sat beside her, and they were silent for a long while.
“No luck finding a vehicle in town?” she asked.
“I couldn’t even try. The MPs were there.”
“Did they see you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“How are we going to get them to Signora Gaspaldi’s?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and her disappointment in his answer must have shown. He brushed off his knees and stood. He began pulling a hospital sheet from his bag. “We need to black out the windows. With Brother Reardon’s ankle, we’re definitely stuck here for at least a few more days.” Willard hung the sheet over the window, but it was sheer and torn in spots; they could both see it would hardly help. He surveyed the room, rifling through the drawers of the teacher’s desk. “Plenty of pencils and paper, though. Rulers. Stencils. An abacus.” He took one of the rulers and said, “Well, we can use the big map.”
With the ruler’s edge, he pried out the nails along the map’s right side and peeled back the corner. He yanked the map from the wall, and a wooden door stared at them.
&n
bsp; Cobwebbed desks and chairs cluttered the cold, dark cellar. Against one wall stood a supply shelf stacked with boxes of chalk and pencils, a pile of blank writing tablets, and shiny tins of assorted treats for children: cookies, peppermints, caramels, candied chestnuts. Two marionettes—one boy and one girl—dangled limply together from a hook in the ceiling.
As rain fell on the schoolhouse above, Juliet and the men made a camp in the darkness, drinking wine and feasting on the sweets. They rubbed olive oil into their blistered feet, bandaged their toes, mended their socks and gloves.
The dirt floor held the chill of winter, and for warmth Juliet stuffed crumpled pages from the writing tablets inside all of their clothing. They all lazed around, swollen and bloated. When any of them moved, it made a racket.
By candlelight, they read aloud to one another from Italian children’s books. They played tic-tac-toe and told stories of their former lives. Former lives—it was how they spoke of things back home, with no mention of ever returning there, as though it were behind them. They had disappeared, thought Juliet, absconded from danger, from the war, from illness and injury, and from the world itself. In the cellar she felt safe; it provided the same thick, cavernous comfort she’d felt as a child pulling blankets over her head.
Willard once again related the tale of how he’d come to work for the army, adding a few new details, which Juliet savored: Willard’s father, too, had been a psychiatrist, and he had a younger brother who was a concert pianist.
Brother Reardon had grown up in Pittsburgh, raised chiefly by his aunt, Beth, and had a wily boyhood of thieving and vandalism before Beth stayed up all night with him once, insisting that together they smash every car window, drain every fire hydrant, steal every purse or parcel in sight, carry off every signpost not nailed to the ground—and then the next morning she dragged him to a soup kitchen where they watched men line up for bread; then she took him to an orphanage. “We could stay and help here,” she said, “or go back to running around and breaking things. Shall we ask the children what they think?” Brother Reardon said his aunt chased the devil out of him that day and set him on the path to serving God.
The Secret of Raven Point: A Novel Page 25