by Hazel Woods
“Maybe you should try the high wire,” Berto says as she stands beside him, beaming.
But suddenly, as though doused with cold water, she is clammy and nauseous. Her mouth seems to swell and her teeth are chattering uncontrollably. She makes her way through the crowd, excusing herself as she parts couples and families. Finally, standing in the darkness outside the tent, she bends over, heaving. Her skin is damp and chilled, yet her brow and neck seem to be on fire.
Berto is soon beside her, speaking words that are drowned by the ringing in her ears. Hensley does not want him there, but she cannot speak. The rippling in her stomach is violent and unstoppable.
As she retches, she places a hand on Berto’s chest to steady herself. He flinches and pulls away and only as Hensley wipes her mouth on her own handkerchief does she realize that her suspicion has been confirmed without a doubt: Berto has breasts.
The noise from inside the tent fills the quiet of the empty night. Hensley spits once more into the dirt and then moves away from the mess. Berto follows her.
They climb a small bluff that shields the circus tent from a strong easterly wind. At the top, the land in front of them recedes into blackness and the sky shimmers with an abundance of stars.
Finally, Berto places his fingertips on Hensley’s shoulder. “Please don’t tell your father.”
“My father?”
“I need this job. Please?”
“How long have you been . . . ?”
“My brother is sick. I had no choice.”
“Your brother?”
“We are twins. Luckily.”
“So, he is Berto. And you are?”
“Teresa.”
There is a moment of silence in which Hensley absorbs this revelation. The two girls then smile at their delayed introduction. Hensley gives Teresa her hand and they shake, intentionally shirking convention. “I’m sorry,” Hensley says, “about that. About touching you like that.”
Teresa smiles and her fierce eyes are momentarily gentle. “New York City, huh?” Their hands remain entwined.
Hensley nods and smiles. “Right. Very cosmopolitan.”
A cheer rises up inside the tent behind them. Another feat of amazement on this otherwise ordinary evening. The wind pulls and twists Hensley’s skirt.
“I should go,” Teresa says. “Are you feeling better?”
Hensley nods. “I’m sorry that you’ve seen me nauseated twice now. It’s so unpleasant.”
The two girls let the wind’s inarticulate noise fill up their minds. Finally, Teresa says, “What are you going to do?”
Hensley takes a deep breath of the dark night air.
“I’ve no earthly idea. I told my father. He suggested I return to New York.”
“Can you make a marriage there?”
“I suppose.”
“But is that what you want?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Then you are not in love?”
At the mention of the word, Hensley blushes. There is not a face that comes to mind, no warm memories of a kiss or passionate embrace. Instead, a phrase scrawls itself across her vision. Your words, however, have created a self. The man—faceless, far away—who wrote these words is the man who colors her cheeks and makes her heart race. He is the man to whom she wants to give more and more of herself, whispering secrets into his skin, giving him all kinds of words to hold on to.
But Hensley shakes her head, aware that she is prey to any fantasy of a life not her own. “Though it does not reflect well upon me, no. There is nobody. What is your brother’s illness?”
Teresa’s face shifts; her smile disappears. “We don’t know. He cannot move his legs. He is feverish some days. He has no appetite.”
“Have you sent for a doctor?”
Teresa shrugs. “We cannot afford to. But my mother has taught me a lot about medicine.”
“Your mother? Oh. Is she a nurse?”
“My mother is dead, Hensley. It’s just Berto and me.”
“Oh.” Hensley pauses. “Mine, too.”
“Yes. I figured.”
“Was she a nurse?”
“Of a sort. She delivered babies.”
The words echo in Hensley’s ears. “Oh,” she says, her arms crossing in front of her chest. An image comes to her mind of a dark-haired beauty like Teresa creeping across the night, her arms laden with baskets, each of them cradling a newborn and being placed gently at the foot of its mother’s bed. “And you know how to do that? She taught you?”
“I only know a few things about the body. Teas that fight infection. Treatments for fever. None of it seems to be working, though.”
Hensley takes a deep breath. How in the world will a baby—no matter how small—escape from her body? The idea of it is as preposterous as some of the circus feats she’s seen tonight.
Hensley makes a confession. “I had a visit from my own mother tonight. Up on the chair. It was as though I could feel her very hand on my forehead.”
“Sometimes it feels like that, doesn’t it? As though if we could just keep our eyes closed, they might actually be there, beside us?” Teresa reaches out her own hand. She places it on Hensley’s brow. Hensley closes her eyes. Teresa’s fingers are cool and slightly rough—nothing like her mother’s—but Hensley likes the way they feel. The scent of the landscape’s juniper bushes is carried to her on the wind. It has become a smell she now associates with this place. It’s as though there is a licorice factory nearby, churning out its sweet candy all through the night. But the licorice in the local grocery is hard and stale. Not at all like the kind that her mother used to greet her with after school some days: a brown bag full of beautiful, pastel pieces of licorice. Hensley always liked the way they looked better than the way they tasted. But now, as the sourness of her own vomit coats her mouth, she thinks that she’d like to try one again. A luscious pink one or a pure black one with dainty white sugar sprinkles. Hensley remembers her mother doling them out, one at a time, as they walked the long crosstown blocks.
“Your secret is safe with me,” Teresa says as she lets her hand drop from Hensley’s face.
Hensley opens her eyes and the girl is gone. Berto, however, is walking away from her, down the hill to the circus tent, with a perfectly manly gait. “Likewise,” Hensley shouts across the distance between them.
“Fuck this morning hate,” Rogerson says as he pushes at a browned clump of eggs on his plate. The artillery blasts begin at dawn, marking the beginning of another day. While the shells are falling, the daisy-cutters squealing, the shrapnel bulleting no-man’s-land, Charles and Rogerson spend the hours in the mess tent, waiting for the quiet that signals the end of the day’s battle and the beginning of their work. With each shrill, hard rumble they imagine their effects. It’s impossible to keep images of what they’ve seen here from intruding—a broken artery splattering its bright red blood against the sides of the King George; the disappearance of jaws, mouths, noses, ears, replaced only by a dark, haunting emptiness; a boy clutching his own innards, trying to stuff them back in; a boy’s open skull, jagged and bloodied, his brain already swollen, protruding through the crack like a slick, ocher blossom.
“How long can it go on like this?” Charles says, staring at the shallow sip of coffee he has left.
“Eternity. It’s hell, Reid. I think we’re already dead. We carried our own still-beating hearts in our hands across some bloody battlefield and died in a hole, covered by a thousand others just like us. And now, this is our hell. Watching it happen over and over.”
Charles shakes his head. “It’s worse than that. It’s not hell.” He stands up, stomping his feet just as another daisy-cutter whistles its arrival. He jogs in place, attracting the attention of a small group of nurses playing cards at the adjoining table. He waves at them, smiling broadly. They ignore him. “We are alive. R
ight, ladies? I feel my heart beating. How ’bout you?” He takes a lap around the tent, then sits again, his breathing heavy.
Rogerson chuckles. “Alive and zany,” he says, looking carefully at Charles’s face. “What’s with the calisthenics?”
Charles shrugs. He places his hand over his heart, where it pulses against his palm, a miracle. Then, he works his hand inside his jacket and, pulling out the latest letter from Hensley, as though it were an actual piece of him, an offering from deep within, he says quietly, “Have yourself a little morning love, Rogerson. Hell would be better. This bit of cruelty, this glimmer of happiness, is part of the world that our heavenly father created. Lucky us, there is not one without the other.”
Rogerson gratefully takes the letter from Charles, pushing his plate away to make room for it. But before he begins to read, he says, “We’re gonna be all right, Reid. It will end. It’s got to.”
Charles nods. As the front continues to vibrate with a showcase of man’s technical ingenuity, Charles watches Rogerson absorb Hensley’s words. He smiles and sighs and shakes his head. When he’s finished, he turns back to the first page to start again. But before he does, he says, “If she ever saw the two of us, come on. Look at me. I’d be the one she’d love. She’d choose me.”
Charles watches Rogerson place a finger against his chin, feigning thoughtfulness. His eyes are heavy lidded but a lovely shade of pine green, his jaw sloping and wide, his lips straight and chapped. Charles shakes his head. “Doubtful, Rogerson. Besides, she’s not your type, remember?”
“You lucked into her because you’re a rich kid with a chess habit. She wouldn’t like those big ears you have. Your posture is too perfect and so are your teeth. Real men have some roughness around their edges. And what about your calisthenics routine? That surely disqualifies you.” He elbows Charles and huddles once more over the letter.
Charles reciprocates, clocking him once on the back of the head before stepping outside. It is a glorious summer day, with loads of sunshine and a bank of afternoon thunderclouds just beginning to organize in the distant eastern part of the sky. He closes his eyes, gratefully letting the warmth of the sun make his skin hot and tingly. His mind wanders to a place he’s never been, where people imagine gold is beneath their feet, where a circus can arrive and transform a piece of the desert into candy-colored magic, where there are rocks as smooth as a girl’s cheek, where there is a girl whose cheek—soft and perfectly curved—is the most beautiful thing he can imagine.
He kicks at the dirt beneath his boots as he opens his eyes. She is not standing beside him, barefoot as she likes to be. He’d almost convinced himself that they were sharing the very same patch of earth. Instead he sees the medical tents, hovering together just across the way, and he knows that in just a few hours they will be full of boys just like him, boys who’ve spent the empty nights longing for the end of this war and who will die on the operating table, or come to in the evac tent missing great pieces of their former selves.
Charles kneels and unlaces his boots. Flinging his socks off his feet, he stands, barefoot, in the dirt, curling his toes. Then he gathers a fistful of the dirt in his hand. She will share his patch of earth. She will stand in the dirt where he’s stood. Leaving his boots and socks, he runs to his tent and places the contents of his hand into an envelope.
Dear Hensley,
He writes quickly, hoping to make the early post.
This is the dirt from beneath my feet. Please place it beneath your own. It will be almost like we’ve shared this day. It will be almost like we’ve been together, our skin mingling in the fine remnants of yesterday’s boulders.
More news later. Until then, barefoot and biddable, I remain,
Charles Reid
Unable to sleep, Hensley wraps herself in the cotton blanket from her bed and walks to the brick patio behind the superintendent’s house. It is nearly dawn, but the landscape is cold, the sun’s rays still just a premonition in the east. She has brought with her the second of Mr. Reid’s letters to come directly to her in two days. This time her father recognized the return address in France, but as he saw Hensley’s initial, he handed it to her without a word. His eyebrows, however, were precipitously raised.
I find my mind distracted from this bloody field and I am grateful. Through the dark nights, I have figured and refigured my every move in the chess game I am playing with your father, but I cannot solve the puzzle of you.
She reads the line again and again. In her last epistle, she described the arrival of the circus, her dizzying trip on the strong man’s chair, the way the air smells like licorice. She told him of her life—the dearth of dress shops, the coarse but kind miners who occasionally deliver a dozen fresh eggs or thick-cut bacon and for whom, in return, she mends their shirts and darns their socks. Her favorite, of course, is one in particular named Berto, who has escaped the savagery of the revolution in Mexico City. She also told him about the small, perfect stones that litter the yard. How they feel warm and full of some ancient place as she holds them in her palm. She’d placed a smooth gray one on top of the rock wall that runs the length of their house as she walked her letter to the post. A reminder of how unexpected and perfect his letter had been and that she sent a piece of herself across the ocean to him. And she apologized for the length of her letter, which ran two typewritten pages. I hope you’ll forgive the length of this, knowing that I am surrounded by many things, but mostly by time. Unlike you, my duties are not many and far from important.
But she knows he wouldn’t have received that letter when he wrote the one she reads now. Their lives are overlapping somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, where a westbound cargo ship flashes its beacon at an eastbound one. Because of the time it takes for their letters to arrive, it is as though Mr. Reid has sent his past thoughts on to the future. In some ways, Hensley cannot believe he is real. She has a hard time imagining a soldier—someone so close to death—caring one way or another about the frivolous musings of a girl in the desert of New Mexico. And part of her believes that if he is real, he must be deranged. A lunacy induced by so much carnage. But his words are clear and genuine: This is nothing but a single selfish plea: Please write again. I fear I may not have said that in my last letter. Twenty pages if you’d deign. I cannot tire of your words. What madness that across an ocean and amidst this brutality, I feel more connected to you than anything here!
So she answers. In the barely dawn, Hensley composes the letter in her mind long before her father has gone to work when she will have her way with the typewriter.
Dear Friend,
Your last letter was an underserved windfall. I cannot speak to your madness, but, of course, I am utterly sane! Let me demonstrate. The morning has hardly begun, but I am sitting outside the house on the small patch of bricks my father insists on calling our terrace. The two house cats are nowhere to be found. Perhaps they are hunting, still. The sky in the east is the most tender shade of blue, it resembles the glow around a city streetlamp. It certainly gives no hint of the scorching fireball that will soon crest the horizon. I have a view of the back of Berto and his sister’s small house on the hill above our own.
My father is following through on a threat he made weeks ago. At the end of this work day, he will accompany the night shift into the mine. It is one of his efforts to demonstrate his solidarity. I don’t think he likes being the boss. His constitution is much too fueled by irreverence. However, for me, he would urge a life of obedience. A life within the bounds of social expectation. If I give up my place at Wellesley in the fall, which may be necessary, his disappointment will be palpable, but I fear it will not be his only or his greatest one.
So while he is descending a thousand feet to gain the confidence of his employees, I will be perfectly free to cause trouble here on the earth’s surface. Too bad I am so assuredly sane! My chores will occupy most of the morning. There are several items to be mended and I
am diligently writing to a member of the American Field Service overseas (that’s you!). Since my father will not be returning for the evening meal, I will be a solitary presence in the house all day. Without anyone watching, I may eat more than my share of the pickled beets and carrots. I may also spread butter on crackers and put my bare feet on the table while I eat. Are you blushing? Surely, this will quell your desire for another letter from this heathen in the desert.
Now that I’ve bored you with my solitary activities, you may assess my sanity for yourself. But before you do, I must make one more confession: my attachment to your words is the sole thread that keeps my self in one piece these days. I read and reread your letters in each room of the house, before breakfast, after breakfast, to each cat, as I walk along the dry riverbank, and even in my sleep. I cannot say for sure why. Simply that I can feel your voice folding itself into every corner of my body. Though I cannot make any request of you, Mr. Reid—as you have already put your very life at stake for all of us—let me reassure you that every word you can spare, every phrase you discharge, is savored.
It is here that Hensley hears her father stirring. She returns to the house, starts his tea, and slices some bread. She fixes him a sandwich to pack in his tin for dinner. As soon as she opens the can of sardines, the cats appear. She lets them lick the oil from her fingers, smiling at the sensation of their rough little tongues.
She has not been sick for several days now. The skin beneath her apron feels tight, though, and is a nearly constant reminder of her predicament.
She and her father have spoken very little about her condition since she revealed it last week. Often, however, he is now the first to rise after their evening meal, removing her plate and telling her to sit still while he scrapes and cleans their dishes. “You need rest, Hennie. That much I know,” he says, smiling kindly as he replaces the dishes in the cupboard.
Hensley suspects that he has not had the news from New York that he’s hoped for. Perhaps he is beginning to understand just how poor her judgment has been. Could it be that Lowell would actually disavow his responsibility to this child?