We crossed the sea, the Tyrrhenian Sea, early that morning. We flew with the sun, flying low over the blue-green water and the shadow ran along the top of the water like some great dark fish coursing just beneath the surface. I never saw Italy until it came upon us, a surprise from the water, all green, so different from Africa, darkly green like the underside of grape leaves. We followed the coast, what I now know is called the Divine Coast, rushing along over the cliffs and the white houses clinging to the cliffs and the little towns strung along their steep sides and somewhere we suddenly turned in over the mainland. After that I didn’t look at the land much, because my aim was to see and to shoot an Italian plane. The reason for this was that the other members of the Odessa Darling didn’t trust me. One night after he had been drinking in the Officer’s Club Captain Rampey came and found me in my barracks.
“Tell me one thing true, Abrussi. If you was to see an Eyetalian plane in the air you wouldn’t fire on it, would you?”
I told him that I would. He pronounced the word “fire” as far and although I have forgotten many English words now I can still recall every word the captain said to me and the way that he said them.
“You don’t have to lie about it, Abrussi. I won’t hold that against you. You think if my people left Texas and some war came up that I would go back and shoot at Texas people?”
I said that I thought he would if he were ordered to do it. He gripped me by the front of my shirt.
“Shoot my brothers? Shoot at my flesh and blood?” He let go of my shirt in disgust. “I just wish you would be honest about it. Then I might be able to respect you.”
After that I was accepted by the rest of the crew as a built-in handicap, like an engine that never functioned right. They even had a plan for me called Plan Paisan, in case of an attack by Italian planes. Lieutenant Marvell was to leave his post as navigator and to man my machine gun. There was nothing personal about it.
* * *
I was looking then to prove them wrong. If planes were sighted I wanted to fire at them and hit them before Marvell could relieve me of my weapon. Then some time that morning, while passing over a patch of dark pine woods, the Odessa Darling flew into a grove of budding flak—puffs of black smoke and little flowerings of metal. The sky bloomed with them. I had thought we were through this dangerous garden and all of the bursts were behind us, when the plane leaped in the air as if it were suffering a convulsion. The plane shuddered and we started down all at once, in one great sudden dip, as if someone had pulled a plug in the sky.
“Please Jesus, don’t let there be fire,” someone said.
At the end of the drop the plane began to skid through the sky, slipping across it as if we were being towed on a wire cable, going down but across the sky at the same moment, and then there was a thudding sensation, a series of bumps when I thought we were brushing the tops of trees or mountains and then we held, the plane had gotten a hold of the sky again.
He was a good pilot. It is strange now to think that I owe my life to Captain Rampey.
For a long time we flew in silence, trying only to hold the plane in the sky, fearful of trying to turn or to even lift the plane. We flew on, low, and the mountain towns came floating up at us and then faded away like islands in a high green sea. After a period of time—how long it was I couldn’t say or even guess—we began to edge up in the sky again and much later Captain Rampey began to make the turn back again, to wheel the Odessa Darling around in a huge slow arc in the sky.
There was no talking. We listened to the strange sounds we were making, they frightened us, and then Rampey called to Marvell.
“I want you to pick me out a nice little town on the way back. One directly on the line to home.”
I could see Lieutenant Marvell checking his maps from where I stood at my post. He was a careful worker.
“I got you one,” he said after a while. “We won’t even have to bank for it. Name of … name of…”
“I don’t want to know the name,” the captain said. “Just tell me before we get there.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We didn’t come this far for nothing.”
“No, sir.”
“Got to ditch these bombs some place.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t want to waste the whole Goddamn day.”
“Wouldn’t do, sir.”
“Wouldn’t do at all.”
We could see people along the roads, and I could even see the dust rising behind the carts when the oxen put their feet down. Some of the people waved to us. I don’t think, even if I met some, I would ever tell the people the way their town had been chosen. They probably think it was an act of God or an act of War; it wouldn’t do them any good to know.
When we were five minutes from the target area Lieutenant Marvell announced that it was time to begin to ease the Odessa Darling down.
“I don’t see anything,” Captain Rampey said.
“It’s just on the other side of that mountain,” Marvell said.
“You wouldn’t trick me,” Rampey said.
“Sir!”
The Odessa Darling started down.
“Going to get us some paisans today.”
It was a good-sized town, a city really, about three or four times the size of Santa Vittoria. It was on the other side of the mountain, but on a smaller mountain of its own, below the taller mountain, and it covered the crest of it, all white and orange tiles, ringed by a wall, so that in the sunlight it seemed to be a crown on the crest of the mountain. Going down on all sides of the mountain were the dark-green fields that I later came to know as terraced vineyards from my experience here. In the center of all this greenness, circled by its wall, from the air the city looked like the bull’s-eye on an enormous dart board.
“Marvell?”
“Sir?”
“You picked us a jewel, hear?”
There was trouble with the doors of the bomb bay; some of the flak had damaged the mechanism that controlled them. The bombardier tried to work them open, but before he succeeded we were already over the city.
“I can get you a target further down the line,” Marvell said.
“No, I want this one,” Rampey said.
They unscrewed the barrel of my machine gun and began to use it as a lever to pry the doors open. We were low then, and I could see the city clearly. The piazza was crowded with people and stalls and carts and animals. It must have been market day. At one end of the piazza was a large building, much like here, that I took to be the town hall. At the other end stood the tower of the cathedral of the city.
“There’s your aiming stake,” Captain Rampey said.
The shadow of the Odessa Darling slid over the town, across the wall and over the piazza and the church façade, over the orange roofs, turning them for a moment a dark red, and then over the other wall, like a dark messenger. We have a saying in Santa Vittoria: “Good is recognized only when it goes away, evil when it comes.” But, in this case at least, it wasn’t true. When the shadow crossed over them the people looked up; some just went back to their work and some of them waved to us.
When the bomb bay doors opened the Odessa Darling swung around and came back for the town. Captain Rampey didn’t wait for the cathedral after all. When the plane passed over the city walls he said, “Kick ’em on out,” and all of us became bombardiers. We rolled the bombs through the door and pushed them through and kicked them out with our feet, and they began to follow each other down upon the city, wig-wagging back and forth the way the bombs do, swimming along after each other like fish in a school.
You try to follow the bomb that you personally sent on its way, one that felt the touch of your hand or your foot, and you think that you do; but when the explosions begin and the stones and the roofs and then the fire and the smoke begin to erupt you realize that you will never be able to tell exactly what you have done.
We were low enough to see the confused game the people in the piazza were playing. At
each explosion—the explosions seemed to walk across the town with giant strides toward the piazza—the people would run in one direction, and at the next they would turn back and begin to run toward the place they had just left.
Eventually they must have found their heads, because the second time we turned and came back over the city the people in the piazza were gone. In all of the piazza there was just one man and he was kneeling in the center of it working the bolt of a hand operated rifle and aiming it at the Odessa Darling.
“That son of a bitch could hurt someone,” Marvell said.
This was the run on which the 500-pound delayed-action demolition bomb would be used. This is the heart and even the very soul of the Odessa Darling.
“You have it ready and I’ll tell you when,” Captain Rampey told the bombardier. He was an expert at this, a genius at it perhaps, the owner of a very special talent that God had given him and which could be used only once or twice in a lifetime. If it hadn’t been for war Rampey might never had known he possessed it.
“Now,” he said; and on that word the bomb was pushed out. For a moment it seemed to fly along with the Odessa Darling before arching over the town and suddenly dipping down, and as it did, every one of us, even the ones without the fine instinct of Captain Rampey, could see that it was going to be a success.
It appeared when it reached it to just touch the gray slate roof of the cathedral and then to go through it so swiftly that the hole it made in the roof seemed to close behind it the way water does over a rock. It was a delayed-action bomb and with a bomb such as this there is always the fear that it might not explode, but then this one did, somewhere down among the dark cellars and in the foundation where a great many people from the piazza must have been hiding. The first sign of success was not the noise of the explosion or the sensation of pressure from it that can at times lift a plane into the air and drop it down like a boat when a wave runs beneath it, but the sight of the front of the cathedral, the entire façade, the great circular stained-glass window that had once been the front of the cathedral, coming apart all at once, every piece seeming to come apart at the same instant and flowering out onto the stones of the piazza. After that, the fire began, a spurt of flame from the bowels of the church that took a great part of the slate roof with it, and then the sound, so that when we began to pull up only the far walls of the cathedral still stood. The man with the rifle was gone.
“There’s only the small bombs left,” Marvell said.
“Let’s not waste them,” the captain said.
The center of the city was flaming and hidden in smoke when we made our turn, but the far ends of the town were still not touched; so it was decided to begin to drop the small bombs on the terraces down below the city wall so that we would be sure this way to hit the far ends. People were running along both sides of the wall and some of them were even running along the top, and when the first of the bombs began landing down in the vineyards some of the people jumped down from the walls and began running in the direction of the bombs. They didn’t seem to know what to do with themselves. An ox pulling a cart went mad with fear and began running down over the terraced walls until it must have broken its legs and the cart it was pulling landed on top of it.
“Someone ought to put that thing out of its misery,” Lieutenant Marvell said.
In one part of the city, out along the north walls, was an open rectangular patch of green, a different green from any that we had seen, a lighter green, more even and much brighter than the darker green of the grapevines, and as we came up on it I could see that it was a playing field and that the large red-tiled building next to the field was almost certainly the city school.
In the field I could see a man and a woman standing far apart from one another; in between them, at regular intervals, were little dark stripes stretched out on the grass. There were white lines on the field, I suppose for soccer, and at first I thought the dark lines were some kind of markers for the game, but as we came on them I could see that they were children. The bombs were beginning to come up the terraces by then and the first of them were even reaching the walls, but the man and the woman still stood in the field and none of the children moved. I suppose the man and the woman thought it would frighten the children if they were to get down on the grass with them. When the bombs came nearer the children began to curl up, and in their black school uniforms they looked like little balls of soot rolled up on the bright-green grass.
The sticks of bombs, the ones that might reach them, were already in the air, but I began to wish that I could hold them back in some manner. The children in the playing field must have trusted their teachers, because although the noise must have been getting terribly loud and frightening none of them moved; they stayed exactly where they had been placed, out on the grass; and it was right, because it is much safer to be out in the open than crouched under a school desk where one might be buried under the old beams and stones of the school and trapped there in fire.
But I still have this feeling, about the bravery of their teachers and the bravery of the children. If only they had looked up they might have seen the line of black things dropping and been able to get up and run to one side of the field away from them. But they stayed where they had been told to stay, face down on the playground, never moving at all until the first of the bombs landed among them, and even after the second and the third, when the bright-green grass began to fling up into the air along with pieces of the earth and the flame of the bomb and the dark little balls of soot.
A soldier does his duty, and this was my duty. And I think now that I might have been spared some of the pain, had it not been for the boy. When the bombs had stopped, I could see him running across the grass to what still remained of the school gate and I could see that his clothes were on fire and that the boy was burning. Even from where we were I could see that he held something white in his arms and I knew at once that it was important to know what it was. What can be so important for a boy to refuse to drop when he is burning. It is this that makes me wake up some nights and find that I am crying out to drop it and I find my arms are striking out and I am trying to put out the flames with my hands.
The street outside the school was wide and there was no one in it, and so it was easy to follow the boy. It was impossible not to follow the boy. The street was steep, but instead of running down it he began to run up the street, and so I know that he must have been trying to reach his home and whoever took care of him there. He didn’t run far. After a few steps he went down to his knees and he seemed to stay that way for a long time, although it was probably a very short time, I hope only a moment, before he fell, face forward, onto the stones of the street; and as he did, the white thing that he was holding was freed and it began to roll and then to bounce its way back down the steepness of the street. It was his soccer ball, and it continued to bounce and roll away from him long after the boy had stopped burning and we had begun to pull up from the city to avoid the pillar of fire and smoke that was rising from it. But I could still see that white ball burning in my own eye, the way the sun will burn there for minutes after you have looked at it, and then even that ceased and we had banked up and away from there and were headed back for Africa.
“That concludes the program for the afternoon,” Captain Rampey said.
The shadow of the plane was leaping over the green fields, and behind us the city was burning like a crown set afire.
“I will tell you one thing,” Marvell said. “We did us a job of work.”
Those were the last words that I remember hearing on the Odessa Darling. I have no recollection beyond that, but I must have done all the things that must be done to cut oneself loose from an airplane, as complicated as cutting the umbilical cord that ties the baby to its mother. I have no recollection at all of stepping out through the bomb bay doors or of pulling the rip cord on my parachute because at that moment I had no desire to do it. My first recollection is of dropping down onto Italy, the rays of the late
afternoon sun glowing in the white nylon of my canopy as if I were hung to a silken lantern, and it must have been this that caused me to glitter in Santa Vittoria, far to the south of me then, like a star or an omen in the evening.
I was happy at that time, sometimes it seems to me like the happiest moment of my life and I don’t know why. At other times I see it as the saddest, because it cut me loose from myself, perhaps forever. I dropped out of the sun into the shadow of the mountains to the north of me, and it was cold, and the gold of the canopy turned to a whitish blue, and then I struck the terraced side of a mountain that was no longer farmed. The earth was hard, the earth was clay and rocks, and when I hit it I heard a bone snap in my leg and a little later I felt it. The cooling air of the late afternoon caught in my canopy and I began to be dragged down and across the old terraces until I finally became caught in some old vines and was held there by them. I pulled the parachute around me and made a nest for myself as a wounded animal would do.
Later, in the night, I was wakened by some small dark men who smelled of manure and wine. They said nothing to me. They lifted me up and put me in a large basket that stank of earth and manure and grape mold and they put the basket on the back of a mule and took me back up the mountain I had landed on. I thought they were going to kill me, and I didn’t care then. I was in great pain. I was now a deserter. I was alone. Of all the Americans I knew I had for some reason declared my personal end to the war and I was ashamed of myself. Who was I, to have attempted such a thing? The arrogance of my act overwhelmed me and I would close my eyes and soon as I did I would see the burning boy. As I look back on it now, there was very little reason to wonder why I wanted to die.
They kept me in a little hut made of branches and twigs and straw, out in the middle of a field. I have no idea for how long. They fed me some kind of white runny goat cheese and hard bread and bitter olives and wine, and if it hadn’t been for the wine I think I would have starved to death. One night they came and got me and put me in the basket again and toward morning, when I could stand it no longer, I heard the clop of the mule’s hoofs on stone, and looking up from the basket I could see the roofs of houses and I knew I was in some sort of town. They dumped me here then, in the shredded old grape basket, in the Piazza of the People at the door of the Leaders’ Mansion. Italo Bombolini was mayor of the city, as I was to learn, and he had already been mayor for several weeks by then and perhaps for longer.
The Secret of Santa Vittoria Page 7