Bright's Passage: A Novel

by Josh Ritter

  19

  The night passed with agonizing slowness as Bright lay in the ditch beneath Bert’s body. He thought for a long time about the girl in the church, about her beautiful face and the way that she had looked down from the ceiling at him in the very instant he had put his head through the doorway. It had been as if, in that moment, the girl had wished to go with him but knew that she never could, that her fate was elsewhere. He knew that look well. He’d seen it on Rachel’s face the last time she had come to their house.

  It had been almost two weeks since the death of his aunt Rebecca, and his own mother had been in the house working to mend a hole in the bed quilt. Henry had been in the yard when he glanced up and saw the girl standing there in the road. He knew immediately that everything was different now. She was not the same girl that he had been walking to school with every morning for two years, not the same one who had told him that he and she would one day be married or who had laughingly piled the peeping golden chicks on his chest. This girl looked as if some giant from one of her own stories had stooped down and whispered the world’s largest, worst secrets in her ear. She was barefoot. He could have gone to her, but something, some new kind of law, prevented it. Instead, he had raised his hand to her and she, after a moment, returned the gesture. The golden ribbon was tied around her wrist. She had looked at Henry with the same expression on her face as the girl on the church ceiling. It was a look of farewell, he realized now, lying there in the ditch. She had come to tell him goodbye. She never went to school or came back to the cabin again after that day. Perhaps she didn’t even remember who he was anymore.

  “She does.”

  The world once again got very still, very small at the sound of the voice.

  “You hear me, Henry Bright.” The voice was very close to his ear in the blackness.

  “Yes,” he said finally. Then, “Who are you?”

  “I am an angel, Henry Bright, be not afraid.”

  “I am.” His throat was tight with fear and the words came out with a cracked, whistling sound. “I am afraid.”

  “Be not,” the voice said again.

  “Where are you?”

  “Henry Bright, be quiet. Look.”

  He was quiet and he looked. The sky was getting infinitesimally lighter now, and in the farmhouse down the road, through the gaping holes of one of the window frames, he saw something move. It was slight, a kind of rustle upon the eyes that carried no sound, but it was there nonetheless. “Who is it?”

  “I am an angel. Be not afraid.”

  “No,” he whispered. “Who is that down there, moving around down there?”

  “You must lie very still.”

  The squat figure of a stoop-shouldered man emerged from the house. He stood there in the door frame and looked up into the blue moonlit sky before walking into the middle of the road and stretching, as if just having risen from a heavy meal. The doorway disgorged another figure, this one much thinner than his companion. The two stood in confab a moment, the silver splinters of rifle barrels glinting down their backs in the moonlight. It was too dark to tell what uniforms they wore, but as the duo began to walk down the road in his direction, their movements were animated with a kind of easy contentment, as if whichever side they belonged to, they felt quite safe in their surroundings.

  He tried to pull Bert’s body even farther on top of him.

  “Lie still, Henry Bright.”

  He lay still as they passed him by, but they could not have gone twenty feet when Bert’s empty canteen shifted somehow in the dark and fell against the stone wall, making a clinking sound. Bright caught his breath and, as he did, Bert’s corpse shifted above him once again, the dead man’s head lolling to release a stream of cold, thick fluid onto his face. He coughed quietly once against the wetness.

  “Lie still, Henry Bright.”

  The footsteps pulled up short and stood there in silence. Then the boots came back, mulching and sucking against the mud of the road.

  “Close your eyes. Do it now.”

  He closed his eyes and pretended to be dead. The boots stood there in the darkness a long time. Then there came a cracking of joints and the crunkle of leather as one of the figures stooped to a squat for a closer look. A hand came down softly on Bert’s back, resting there like the kind of close friend that it was likely Bert had never had. The hand whispered up and down the fabric of the dead man’s back two or three times and then a palm was running along the scalp of Bert’s head, and more cold fluid dripped and slid onto Bright’s face. The fingers trailed down past Bert’s ear and then down the nape of the dead man’s neck until they came to rest on the crest of Bright’s eyebrow. He held his breath in agony as the hand made its way across the wet, sticky surface of his eyelids, down his cheek, and then slowly pried his lips apart and slid into his mouth. The fingers worked between Bright’s teeth and under his tongue as he struggled to hold his breath. Just when he felt that he might explode from lack of air, the fingers pulled away and the figure stood. A metallic sound was followed by a quick punch of pressure from above, and a harsh, sulfurous rip of air escaped Bert’s bloating body through the puncture made by a bayonet. The blade came down hard three more times, but due to Bert’s girth Bright was untouched. What followed was the kind of long, steady silence that accompanies surveyal, and Bright waited behind closed eyes for the bayonet to come for him, but the awful silence went on for so long that he began to wonder whether the figures had somehow slipped away. When the agony of waiting was too much for him, he found himself, almost against his own volition, opening his eyes a fraction in the moonlight, catching the men’s familiar faces in the instant before they turned and continued walking away from him down the road. He did not need an angel to tell him who it was he had seen.

  20

  Bright couldn’t sleep, and so he lay looking at the bilious sky and the hotel, which sat in its pool of electric light there in the middle of the darkened lawn. On occasion the breeze scooped up a few jostling strains of music being played on a piano, and once or twice voices broke out in singing. The infuriating horse shifted lazily on its feet but then slept. It lay down once to dream, but then it got up again. When the baby cried he fed it from the goat’s milk and rocked it slowly until it fell asleep again. Later, he woke to find the hotel silent, and he changed the boy’s diaper in the darkness. When this was done, he fed it once more. Rachel’s nipples had been small, thimbly things, much tinier than his big index finger. On impulse, he dipped his little finger in the milk and offered it to his son. The boy took it in his mouth and suckled greedily.

  She had been out milking the goat when her water broke. As usual in warm summer weather, she was naked, the skin stretched tightly across her enormous belly. She stood there in the yard and called to him. The goat was standing near the puddle of fluid, neck craned up at her. Together the goat and the girl looked at Bright. He had tried to pick her up to take her inside, but she had waved him away and finished milking the goat first.

  He stood above her, unsure of whether to touch her or not, and then after a while he went to stand with the horse under the chestnut tree. “Well,” he said, “I guess that it’s happening now. This is what we talked about, ain’t it?” He watched the girl milk. The horse was not watching, but its nostrils flared, pulling in drafts of the new scent and chuffing them out again. “And she’s happy, ain’t she? I mean, we’re going to have a baby. What I mean to say is, thank you for making me go over there and steal her away.”

  The horse said nothing in reply.

  “Angel?” he said, but if the angel was there it gave no answer.

  His wife stood then, the bucket in her hand. “Maybe it’s time we went in to the bed and see what happens,” she said, and held an arm out for him to slip his shoulder under.

  He went to her then, the angel forgotten, and carried her feetfirst through the cabin flap, one arm holding the bucket, one arm slung around his neck.

  That was the last time she ever put her arm aroun
d him. After that had come a feverish nightmare that he could remember only pieces of. The baby’s head was large, and he had twisted around sideways. Bright had been forced to reach in, as he’d seen a man do once with a cow, and pull the infant out by its heels. At some point during this time Rachel had died. He wasn’t sure quite when. Maybe she had looked at him and tried to say something. Maybe she had said something. She could have been screaming something; he might have been screaming too, but suddenly there was only a single sound in the cabin, and that was the crying of their son, the boy who now lay in a clean diaper against his chest.

  21

  They had watched the young boys as they fished and played in the swimming hole below the railroad trestle. When the sun was starting to sink, the Colonel and his sons emerged from the trees and made themselves known to the boys, who looked at the Colonel in his tattered uniform as if he were some kind of Confederate ghost. While Corwin and Duncan stood on the bank, the Colonel waded into the middle of the stream up to his waist and stiffly saluted the boys on the far bank.

  “Which of you here is the eldest?” he called out to them.

  The narrow-chested boy who had examined Bright’s uniform lifted his hand. He was perhaps ten years old.

  “I see,” the Colonel said with a curt nod. “And did you take any part in the recent War?”

  The boy was baffled and looked at his friends for some kind of answer to the strange man’s question.

  “You mean over there?” another boy said.

  “That is correct, sir,” the Colonel replied. “Over there.”

  “No,” the boy said. He puffed out his chest. “But I woulda gone!”

  “Brave boy, brave boy,” the Colonel said quietly, as the stream rushed around him. “Of that I have no doubt. You may observe that I also am a soldier.”

  The boy nodded.

  “A soldier always recognizes a brother soldier. It has nothing to do with uniform. It has to do with bearing.” He leaned forward in the flow and lowered his voice conspiratorially. “My own sons, the ones on the far bank back there, are not soldiers, sadly. They have none of your martial bearing.”

  “We saw another soldier here today,” the boy said.

  “Yes?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Good man. That was my next question. He must have been my son-in-law. A great war hero.”

  “A war hero?”

  “Oh, yes. And did he have a child with him?”

  “Yessir. He had a little baby, and a white goat that climbs on rocks, and a horse too.”

  “A little baby, did you say?”

  “Yessir.”

  “We were escaping the fire and were separated in the confusion. Can you tell me which way he went?”

  Corwin and Duncan had begun to set up camp when he waded back across the stream. “The rogue made his way to a town not far from here. He is bent on some new seduction, no doubt. Probably already visiting whores.”

  Duncan looked up from a pile of sticks that he was gathering together to build a fire.

  “No doubt,” Corwin said. “He’s probably visiting whole bunches of ’em!”

  “Contractions,” the Colonel said.

  “What?”

  “I will not have sons of mine speaking in contractions,” the Colonel said very calmly. “ ‘Ain’t,’ ‘dasn’t,’ ‘won’t,’ ‘of ’em’—how many times have I berated you, beaten you both, in the vain hope that you will learn to speak in a manner that does not insult the listener with your ignorance?”

  “Lots of times,” Duncan said.

  “What was that, my boy?”

  “Lots of times,” Duncan said again. “You’ve berated and beaten us lots of times.”

  The Colonel sighed and sat down in his wet boots and trousers. Almost immediately he stood up again.

  “We will not sleep here tonight.”

  Corwin, who had found a patch of blackberries by the bank, looked up pleadingly. “Why not?”

  “Because Henry Bright may come back in the night and find us unawares. Also, the fire is coming quite close. Should you prefer death by flames or rogue to a restful night’s sleep, you are under no obligation to follow me to my mountainous redoubt.”

  “So?” Corwin gripped a blackberry bramble to pull himself up the bank and winced as the thorns cut into his hand. “So what if he comes? We’ll kill that son of a whore, won’t we?”

  The Colonel threw a stick at Corwin. “Contractions! And, anyway,” he lowered his voice, “how would you propose to kill Henry Bright, who has recently returned from the War and is well practiced in the taking of life?”

  “We could shoot him with the rifle?”

  “With the rifle? You may remember, my son, how, without permission, you went to shoot with the rifle in the woods, bringing it home to me without ammunition?”

  Corwin looked down into the stream. “The knife, then?”

  “Ah, yes, the knife.” The Colonel took the blade out from his belt and held it up. “It is a fine blade. At any rate, I will sleep up there tonight.” He turned and began walking toward the slope of tailings that led up the steep incline to the mouth of the tunnel.

  Duncan stood and looked down blankly at the tinder he had carefully arranged for a fire. He ran a hand through his hair two or three times, then followed his father and brother.

  “I bet he was visiting whole bunches of whores!” Corwin whispered again to Duncan after night had fallen and they were safely encamped in the railroad tunnel. “Whole bunches!” Duncan listened to his brother’s conjectures without reply. “Whooooooooo!” Corwin hoot-owled behind him in the dark. “Oooooooooo!” his echo came back.

  “Silence!” the Colonel yelled. He lit his pipe with an ember from the fire and listened to the river below. “Mark me well, boys, Henry Bright is not content to seduce and murder only one woman; no, he will do it over and over again. He must be killed and his child taken and raised properly.” He talked on like this for a little while, caught up in whores and murder.

  At some point in his father’s monologue and his brother’s hooting, Duncan stepped from the mouth of the tunnel and climbed out onto an outcrop of the cliff face just to the side of the trestle tracks. He curved his thin torso tightly against the rock wall. “Train,” he said softly.

  It happened very fast. The light of the train filled the tunnel, and the breeze sucked past them; the Colonel left off from his sacred vows and bloody imaginings, and Corwin from his hooting. Both burst out of the tunnel’s mouth and onto the moonlit trestle. Corwin found the opposite ledge from Duncan and somehow managed to pull his big body up onto it, hugging the cliff side in terror and leaving his father to stand blinded and trapped on the tracks above the abyss. The Colonel stood agape only a moment before he ripped his belt off. The knife fell away and was swallowed up by the emptiness. For an instant his crouching form was silhouetted by the locomotive’s headlight against the slope of the far mountainside. Then he was gone.

  He hung there in the cathedral darkness, his belt looped over a trestle tie as the wheels razored deafeningly above him. When the train had crossed over the canyon and disappeared into another tunnel on the far side, he called out for his boys to pull him up. He brushed himself off, patting and straightening his clothes.

  “My knife.” He looked over the side of the trestle, but the watery dark below was even blacker than the smoke-blotted night sky above. The knife was gone. “The rifle,” he said then. “God help the both of you if the rifle is gone.” It was not. The gun lay against the tunnel wall and had been untouched by the passing train. All that it needed was bullets.

  22

  After he was sure that the Colonel’s sons were well and truly gone, Henry Bright lay in the ditch beneath Bert’s body and waited for the voice that said it was an angel to speak to him again. He waited for a long time but it didn’t, so he remained there, unmoving lest he be seen or heard. Bert got colder and stiffened above him. The sky changed color with the same maddening imperceptibility a
s time’s passage.

  He was sure that he had not been dreaming when he heard the voice. It had been very clear, had spoken his name, had told him what to do. He stared intently at the sky for a time more. A flock of geese passed overhead—very high up—and then, lower in the sky, the first rays of sun played themselves against the wing of an airplane. In the dawning light it looked like the lost leaf of some autumnal tree, baked golden and blown far afield. Finally, he twisted his torso in the ditch and, getting his palms flat against Bert’s chest, he gave a great push until he could look the dead boy in the face. Bert’s mouth had been very close to Bright’s ear all night. His eyes were open, and in death they looked every bit as confused and angry as they had in life, the childlike glare of one who has grown up suspecting that he’s being laughed at. Bright had seen another boy once, about to go over the top of the trenches, suddenly turn white, his hands moving through every pocket and then searching his helmet before looking around in a mute panic at the others as they made their preparations. He had lost the address of a girl that he’d met on leave. Where could it be? Would he ever see her again? It was not a thing to worry about for a boy going almost certainly to death, but there it was, and what it was, it was. Another time, while sitting out a mortar barrage in a muddy, melting trench for almost six hours, Bright watched a man pour a portion of kerosene on a sleeping friend’s foot and light the man’s big toe on fire. The joke had been far more absorbing to everyone than the hell going on above.

  Perhaps it was Bert who had chosen to speak Henry Bright’s name as his last words, Bert who had somehow proclaimed himself an angel and warned him of the coming of the Colonel’s sons. There were certainly stranger last words in the history of war. But what of the voice he had heard by the animal trough, the one that had told him to wait before dipping his canteen in the poisoned water? Could that voice really have been Bert’s as well? There were no answers in that vacant stare. He relaxed his arms and let the body fall back on top of him.