by Josh Ritter
Suddenly he heard voices coming toward him down the road. They were plain, real voices and, most important, they were discussing a Brooklyn Robins baseball game. “American!” he called out, but his voice was far gone from thirst and exhaustion, and it was hard to draw enough breath to yell with Bert’s deadweight pressing down on his chest. “American,” he said again, more softly.
A long, narrow face came into his vision. “Jesus! Nice place to go lie down! Give me a hand with the big one here,” the slight man said to an apple-cheeked, larger man over his shoulder. The two rolled Bert’s body off Bright. “They get you?”
“No.” He lay there pressed into the mud of the ditch until they pulled him to his feet.
“What happened? Christ, look at your face.”
Bright tried to wipe Bert’s blood from his face with his jacket sleeve, but it had dried there and his lips were tacky with the stuff. He explained about the shelling of the village, leaving out the parts about the Colonel’s sons and the angel’s visitation.
The narrow-faced one looked at his bigger companion and they both burst out laughing. “Do you know how lucky you are, kid?” the narrow-faced one asked. “Krauts were only sixty yards away.” He shifted a water bucket to his other hand and pointed with his free arm toward the farmhouse. “You slept next to ’em most of the night.”
“How many were there?”
“Who knows, but they were busy.”
“When did you get here?”
“We got orders to scout the village and find out what happened to you guys about an hour ago. Everyone was dead. Not a soul.”
“ ’Cept you,” the other one said.
“I saw them leave. There was only two of them.”
“Bullshit.”
“They came out of that house and walked right by here, then one came back and did that.” He pointed down at the bloodless bayonet holes in Bert’s back.
“Well, however many of ’em there were, there were enough,” the shorter one said. “Take my word for it.” He pointed over at the farmhouse one more time. “Or don’t. Take a look in there and see for yourself.”
They turned to continue walking, and Bright reached down to Bert’s body and pulled the beautiful silver and gold pistol from where it was tucked in the waistband of the dead man’s trousers. In the fresh morning light the gun looked sylvan, magical. The writing on the filigreed handle was in German and he could not read it, but the bullets—coppery nocturnal things asleep in their snug chambers—he understood well. He released the gate and emptied them onto the ground by the bodies of Bert and Carlson, then he followed the two men to a water pump that had been found in the square. They waited for Bright while he drank and washed Bert’s blood from his face, then they went to stand joking by a group of ashen-faced others while Bright walked back down the road to the farmhouse from which he’d seen Duncan and Corwin emerge. The forced laughter of the men in the square followed him, a kind of despairing jollity that faded abruptly from his ears as he stooped to step inside the doorway. A chaplain was within, also gray in the face. He looked at Bright pleadingly and then spread his arms as if trying to encompass the pitiable carnage he stood in the midst of.
After she had waved goodbye to Henry, Rachel didn’t come to meet him and his mother at the end of the drive for the walk to school anymore. They waited for her the first couple of days, but when she didn’t come they kept going. His mother began to grip Henry’s hand protectively for the first time in a long while. He was eight now and he didn’t like that, but he let her do it anyway, because he knew she was scared.
One day after school he went to meet his mother where she cooked for the elderly couple in town, and the two of them had walked toward home, his mother’s rifle, as ever, over her shoulder. As they neared the turn up to her old house, she gripped Henry’s hand even harder than usual. “Hello, Duncan,” she said. The boy was standing at the mouth of the drive, his head and thin body swaying slightly like a pitcher plant in the stillness. Although the weather was cool and he was still a boy, his sweat-soaked shirt clung to his chest and there were dark circles under his arms. Duncan said nothing in reply, but he repaid the stare Henry’s mother gave him with his own implacable gaze, his thoughts as opaque as his pupils. Henry heard the rifle creak as she shifted it on her back. “Face forward, Henry,” she said. “Chin up. Don’t look back.”
When they arrived home, they found the chickens dead in a white feathery pile, their necks broken. The rabbits had been killed as well and were now tied in drooping clusters to the fence posts around the garden, fastened with the twine that his mother had used to make bundles of Henry’s hair. A few of the rabbits had been skinned, and these lay like enormous overripe strawberries in the middle of the garden, beneath where a stick had been stabbed into the ground. At the stick’s top was tied the golden ribbon that his mother had given to Rachel at Christmas.
Bright backed out of the farmhouse and sank to his knees in the middle of the road. He vomited thinly, waited, then fell to all fours and gagged until his chest hurt and the sweat ran out of his scalp, down his face, and onto the ground. When he felt strong enough, he got to his feet and walked back to the town square to stand near the body of the dead horse that he had helped to drag from the church the day before. Fragments of plaster painted as blue as the sky itself lay scattered about. The next morning he was back in a cold, wet trench and November was beginning.
23
After he fell back asleep at the edge of the hotel lawn, Bright dreamed strange, feverish dreams. In one, he found himself rolling Duncan, still a young boy, over and over again in the muck of a field. In that strange currency of dreams, he found the boy to be weightless and his body spun in the mud like a log floating in a river. Each time the boy’s face resurfaced, it was frozen in some new expression, sometimes smirking mischievously, sometimes grinning widely or pulled forcefully downward like a carp’s yaw. Despite the ever-changing set of the mouth, however, the eyes were always empty black holes that bored fiercely into Bright. He became wildly angry. He began to kick and kick Duncan in the head, to no effect. He smelled the mustard gas, a tingling around his nostrils and lips punctuated by sharp little bites, as if he was about to be devoured by a swarm of insects. In his rage he could not stop kicking Duncan. The burning settled like bees around his mouth, and was followed quickly by an awful pain across his neck and chest; still, he could not stop kicking. Only when he knew that it was too late and that he would soon die of the gas did his anger begin to fold. Then he was simply staring at the thin little body bobbing in the muck. Duncan’s eyes pulled him downward, and his awful grin had settled itself into a warm, welcoming smile.
Bright he awoke to the sounds of his son crying and the smell of smoke strong in his nose. It was far too early to be dawn, but the sky had taken on a diseased half-light. He propped himself on an elbow and made clucking sounds to comfort the child, but it continued to wail so loudly that Bright replaced the fragile bundle carefully on the blanket and reached for the bucket. He dipped his little finger in the milk for the boy to suckle, but the child was utterly wild in the darkness. He again went to hold his son close, but the boy’s shit was everywhere and there was something frantic to the smell: a sour, unwholesome odor that rose from the child like heat. Bright got on his knees above the infant and struck a match; then, as if burned by what he saw, he fell backward. The match went out. In the gloom he put his fist to his mouth and bit down hard, a small sound escaping from far back in his throat. Sweat was running down his back in skeins. He lit another match and looked again. The child’s face was covered in amber blisters the size and shape of pumpkin seeds; its mouth was a welter of pain.
He scurried backward on all fours into a thicket of brambles, tearing the skin of his hands and legs. He scratched the ground, clawing at the dirt in his confusion, aware of neither the piercing thorns nor the burning red wings that had spread themselves across his own face and chest while he slept. He looked up a moment at the sleeping hor
se, then hurriedly scooped the crazed child into his arms, broke out of the woods, and ran across the darkened lawn toward the hotel.
24
“Henry Bright.”
He was digging a new latrine pit fifty yards distant from a row of Red Cross tents. If the voice startled him, he gave no indication and said nothing.
“Henry Bright.”
A group of soldiers moved down the road—an exchange of shifts. The relievers were tense and quiet, the relieved looking drawn but laughing loudly as they walked.
“Henry Bright.”
“I know who you are,” he said at last. “You’re the angel from the church.” He made again to dig. His shovel had run up against the sodden wool of a buried uniform. There was no telling, with the muck, whose side it belonged to. He gave up trying to cut through it with the shovel blade and bent to pull it out with his hands. The ground sucked back hard and would not budge.
“Yes,” said the angel. “Fear not.”
“The big one talking to the girl up on the ceiling.”
“Yes.”
“I knew it was you. Why are you here?”
“Because now I’m talking to you.”
He gave another great pull on the sleeve of the buried uniform, the veins on his forehead popping and his face going red with the effort. The jacket came away all at once in his hands and he fell backward against the side of the hole. He rested a moment there, and then threw the heavy mass on the ground before taking up the shovel again. He spoke under his breath, his eyes fixed on the latrine he was digging. “Why did you tell me to be quiet?”
“Because I wished to save your life. I have chosen you, Henry Bright. I saw what you tried to do for the horse in the church. I saw you looking up at us, the girl and me.”
“Why are you here now?” he repeated. There was a tooth in the shovelful of dirt.
“The church was destroyed. I needed a place to go. I chose you and I am with you now.”
“Was it you told me not to drink the water?”
“The water was poisoned,” the angel said. “Mustard gas.”
“Is it only you come from that church?”
“Yes.”
“Where’s the girl then? The one on the ceiling up there with you.”
“The girl is gone. You and I will find a new girl.”
“I’m just digging a latrine is all I’m doing,” Bright said, but to whom he was speaking would have been obvious to no one.
25
Standing naked and willow-kneed there near the hotel fountain, he began to scream along with his child. Whoever woke from sleep to peer down from the hundreds of windows at the disturbance below saw a man who could just as easily have been a ghost. His mouth hung open in a wail, and his silhouette, partially obscured by the darkness of the drive, flickered with an otherworldly translucence in the light cast by the corona of the burning ridge behind him.
A light came on, and then another and another. Men dressed in pajamas or hastily thrown-on shirts surrounded him with their lanterns and loud voices. Tears and spittle ran down his face. He held his son out at arm’s length toward the uncertain circle of men, as if blindly searching for an altar upon which to offer up the tiny gargoyle of pain.
And then, parting it all, a small and round female figure in a white apron stepped through the circle. Her hair was pulled back and her face was indistinct, lit dimly as it was by the murky orange sky, the lanterns, and the lights of the awoken hotel. The woman approached Bright and his baby slowly.
“Now,” she said. “Now, it’s all right, it’s all right.” She talked to him as if he were a shied horse and held out her arms to accept the child. “Give the baby to me.” For a brief flash he thought that it was the girl Margaret, but even in his panic he realized that this woman was different, moved with greater bearing than the girl he had first followed to the hotel. She held his face in her gaze for a moment. Then, with what could only be a supernatural grace, she lifted the boy from his arms. The child pressed itself against her, almost butting at her chest with its head. Bright just stood there, his red-rimmed eyes blinking hard against the brightness of the lanterns. Then his teeth began to chatter and he seemed to discover his own nakedness and the red welts that had capered across his thin white chest. The woman put a hand to his head, still rocking the child, then she addressed the men within the circle of light.
“It’s all right, gentlemen, just put down the lights, put down the lights, except for you, Dennis.” A tall, sandy-haired man in work boots rubbed sleep from his eyes. “The rest of you, it’s all right now, it’s all right. Just go on back up to bed.” She clucked down at Bright’s son in her arms.
“You’re going to let these two in the building?” a man asked. He had a burgundy nightshirt on, and he pulled incredulously on a corner of his mustache. “They might have the flu.” He stepped forward and thrust his light in Bright’s face. “Just look!” Bright shrank away from the sudden brilliance of the lantern, and the woman stepped between him and the man.
“I’ll take the responsibility for these two myself,” she said. The boy had begun to wail again, but his eyes were cried out. “We have a doctor on call in town. We’ll send for him”—she turned to a young man groggily buttoning a tan and red uniform—“unless there’s one staying here. Is there a doctor staying with us? Yes? Well, then, please wake and fetch him. Apologize, of course.” She turned back to the men. “There. He’s gone to fetch the doctor. I’ll watch them in the meantime.” She looked at the man who had lunged at Bright with the lantern. “And you needn’t fear; this isn’t the first time someone wandered into a patch of poison ivy.”
The men put out their lights, and the glow of the forest fire on the ridge seemed to grow brighter. “By the looks of things, I don’t imagine that we’ll all be worrying too much about poison ivy soon anyhow,” she said. The group turned silently and looked at the flames. “Now, Dennis, help me get these two indoors. Sorry for the disturbance, gentlemen. See you in a few hours at breakfast.” She carried the child to a set of steps leading down to a door that stood open in the foundation. Dennis followed her, helping Henry Bright to walk across the gravel drive and down the cool flags of the basement steps. The rest of the men stood in the drive by the fountain and stared at the approaching fire for a long time, the crying child and its raging father forgotten.
Bright was laid in a small bed in an empty white room. He cried out. The light burned his eyes.
The woman came in and placed wet rags on his face. “I’ve had a cradle brought down to my room,” she said. “I’ll look after your son until you’re feeling a bit better, all right?”
Then he lay there, a sliver of yellow coming in from the hallway, and fell asleep as voices murmured low and soft next door. He woke once more in the night and something was poured down his throat. After that he slept, and if he dreamed, the dream was forgotten.
26
“Check his pockets.”
“I know to check his pockets!” Bright was on burial detail.
“In his pockets there is a packet of cigarettes and a lemon.”
“I know that already, ’cause I saw him put the lemon in his pocket! You saw me see him put the lemon in his pocket!”
“This one has no flask. That last one had a flask. It was in his boot.”
“What do you need any whiskey for?”
“You could still get it. It’s still there.”
“How do you know?”
“I know everything, Henry Bright.”
Henry Bright bent down and reached in the dead man’s pocket to retrieve the lemon. Unlike the man, the lemon had escaped the machine guns unscathed. He put it into his own pocket and then began to roll the body slowly into the forty-foot-long hole that he and the others had dug for the bodies.
“The packet of cigarettes.”
“Would you—” Bright swiped at his face in frustration; his voice dropped to a hiss between his teeth. “Would you just stop talking? I know all about the cigare
ttes and I was about to get them, but you’re always, always talking at me. Can you please just be quiet?”
For a moment there was silence.
“Give the cigarettes to Sergeant Matthews.”
Sergeant Matthews was his new sergeant, now that Carlson was dead back by the farmhouse near the village. He found Sergeant Matthews digging through another dead man’s clothes, putting whatever he found into his own bulging pockets before rolling the body into the hole and standing up. He saluted the corpses. “Hinky, dinky, parley voo,” he said. “Adios, so long, adieu.”
“Sergeant. I thought you might want these.” He held the cigarettes toward Sergeant Matthews with solemnity.
“Toss ’em here, Bright. There’s a good kid.” He lit one of the cigarettes and scoped, squinty-eyed, through the tobacco smoke at Bright. “You need to shave, Bright. You look like a German or a bomb-throwing anarchist.” He looked down the line of bodies. There were thirty-six of them. “Or a German anarchist!” he erupted. He laughed for a little while about this. “Hmmmm,” he said. Then he smoked the rest of the cigarette. “Well,” he said. His eyes were red.
They were taking their time. The brigade had been sent into the woods on information that only the southernmost part of it was held by the enemy, and loosely at that. In reality, machinegun emplacements were everywhere, and maybe six hundred men had been killed or wounded in the few minutes after the first companies had entered the forest. The advance had been a complete disaster, and the order to fall back came after one endless hour of slaughter. After that it had been two days of sitting in the mud, during which there had been much talk of the supposed armistice. Some said it would happen any day now, that the order would come and they would all rise from their trenches like the dead hearing the last trumpet sound, and head to Paris and eat steak with oyster mushrooms. Others had it on good authority that peace of any kind was as far away as the moon. Regardless of all conjecture, there followed a day and then another day of shells raining blindly into the trees as the enemy slowly relinquished ground. During this time the angel hadn’t talked to Bright, though he had called for it several times. Now Bright and ten others were on burial duty. At first they had moved in pairs, picking up soldier after soldier by the boots and arms and placing them on the lip of the grave, but then time and the sloshing mess of it all began to eat away at the last vestiges of formality, and the men began to break from one another so that they could do the numbing job as quickly as possible. There were regulations about the respect to be shown toward American dead, but the numbers were enormous, and in the end the only concession that seemed to matter was that the bodies were rolled, not thrown, into their graves. The rules said nothing about what was supposed to happen to whatever money, chocolate, or cigarettes they might find while doing so.