Past the canvas was a narrow chamber lit by several bulbs, at the far end, another canvas bulkhead. No men. No explosives. Here the electric lines, the air pipe, ended. Beyond was darkness. Above, the Hun.
Bill turned. “Where’s Welly?” he said to the corporal. “You done your dig! Where are the diggers? Where’s my mate?”
The nig-nog’s eye swam toward Bill. The brown swirled, the gold of it burrowed into him. Bill’s chest went empty. The corporal’s hand barely twitched from his side, the thumb caressed the edge of his forefinger.
“Where’re the other blokes!” Bill shouted with the last air in his chest.
The corporal closed the space between them.
Bill’s ears went dead. The damp wet smell of the earth drained from him. A pale shadow, the scent of pig two days dead remained. The corporal reached toward him, his thumb pointed at Bill’s forehead. Bill staggered backward into the shade between bulbs. As the corporal approached, Bill’s vision faded, flickered, shrank to a bright center. The black thumb reached toward the single warm point, all that remained of Bill. Bill was swallowing himself, darkness, the earth, the night, all time, forever, were becoming him. One point remained. One movement remained to him. He swung the pickax by his side, swung toward the pinpoint place on the surface of his sight.
Then…
The corporal’s hand flew in a spray of bright, bright red. With it, the call of a thousand voices, a sound from beyond the dark, beyond the walls of the tunnel, from above, below and everywhere, filled Bill like air, like light, like space.
The corporal continued to stare at Bill. The black flesh of the corporal’s arm ended in a ragged red place that filled the air with wet. The dark hand lay in the dirt. The thumb tap, tap, tapped the ground.
“How?” the corporal asked. “How I touch you now?” His brown and golden eyes flicked from Bill to the hand. He spoke more but Bill didn’t parleyvoo. He did not care to. He didn’t care to resolve the corporal’s problem.
“Welly!” Bill shouted. “Welly!” he screamed. The corporal continued to stare at the hand. Bill ran to the opening at the far end of the chamber. “Welly!” he shrieked. “Oi! Welly!”
Part of him knew he screamed a woman’s scream, a child’s. The screams continued even after he’d gone through the canvas wall. There, where the electric lamps stopped, he stopped running. No place to run. He sensed rather than saw the light beyond. The rational part of him knew, surely, here was insufficient light to see. Nonetheless he saw. Imagination, maybe, but a misty luminescence filled the space, a pale green glow, more anticipation than sight. An assumption of light, perhaps, but around Bill, floor to roof—and the roof here was high, two, three man-heights, more, into darkness—here were the charges they’d carried and the space was filled with light. The wooden high explosive cartridges were stacked row upon row.
The smell was that old, old smell from home: the reek of pig, of blood and death.
The green dark swam like tadpole fishies in his head. He knew the men who sat upon the boxes. There they were. The lads, his mates. The shamblers in the dark.
“Welly! Welly! Welly!” The name was noise without meaning. In a moment or three, there was Welly.
“Wot?” he said to Bill. He clambered down the crates, like walking down a stairway from the sky.
Bill still screamed his name.
“Hshh,” Welly said. “You’ll wake the Huns.”
Bill hushed. The others of the detail—the fifty that had come and hundreds more—stared at him, shadows among the crates, their bodies and faces an arrangement, high, low, wide and deep, in shadow, flesh and dirty serge. A thousand eyes, unblinking but flickering in the pale and drifting light, fixed on him. They were at rest. Not curious. They waited. A thousand eyes perched above, to the sides, down the cavern. Everywhere, eyes, eyes waiting, eyes at rest, done.
“We’re leaving,” Bill said to Welly.
“Right,” Welly said. His eyes, too, were finished.
“We’re hopping it,” Bill said.
“Right,” said Welly. His eyes didn’t flash or flicker.
The corporal waited at the entrance to the chamber. He’d solved his problem. He held his right hand in his left. He pointed the thumb at Welly like a revolver. “You stay,” he said.
Welly stopped.
He turned to Bill. “You connect wire! I show.”
The world narrowed again. The haze of hoarfrost light from behind faded; his vision narrowed. The corporal advanced. The black hand with its gored thumb filled his sight. The fingers curled as they reached for his cheek.
The world collapsed. The world collapsed on Bill. Another world collided with his head and pressed both eardrums through his nose… or so it felt. The earth fell on his chest.
After a second or so, what remained of Bill thought the mine had gone off. He thought death, considered, yes, this, this was the first moment of hell. Four, five, six seconds later Bill knew that, no, the tunnel was intact, the lights had gone out, the corporal had, well, had vanished, had gone, was dead, maybe, maybe crushed, flattened, torn to pieces. And Welly… Well, Welly held Bill’s hand.
Then he knew he wasn’t dead, not exactly, not precisely dead, but the other mines along the ridge had gone off…
3:11 Ack Emma.
“Le Pelerin failed,” the colonel reported. “And another.”
“Damn,” said General Plumer.
“Will it matter, sir?” the colonel said. “Nineteen will do.”
“Damn,” the general said again. “One prefers perfection.”
De-mobbed, in London, Bill eventually turned up, back in Ouze, back in Suffolk. Da’s place opened its arms to the returning warriors. Bill among them. His sleeping brothers not.
He lay on their bed for a week. Longer. Alone. No one said much. They fed him. He didn’t eat. They smiled. He nodded. Be fair, he thought. He tried to eat his old Ma’s food. Too salty. Too rich. Just too.
He walked among Da’s pigs.
“Don’t forget your Wellies,” Ma said.
“What?” He stared at her.
“Your boots!” She handed him his Wellingtons. “We knew you’d be back. Kept ’em for ’e!”
The muck and shit sucked at his feet. The boots felt heavy. But the stink, ah, the stink made him remember home: the grunts and rumbling snorts of boar hogs, the squeal of shoats so comfortable, and the long crookey smiles of mother pigs in sun, ahh. Home.
He watched Da at slaughter. He helped and all. Naught was right, though. He knew. Da and Ma knew. Naught was quite right. He slept poorly. He waked in the night. Alone. He covered his eyes and pressed. Nothing. No light and color licked the darkness behind his lids. He held his breath, seemed like hours, holding. He waited for the smell, the breathing of the shamblers. No, no. They stayed away. He rose and walked the narrow halls past his parents’ room, down around the narrow steps, the remnants of the evening’s fire and the draining warmth of the kitchen. He wandered here and there. Naught to be seen. No shamblers here.
What he was told, he did. What he did, he did poorly. Nothing filled him.
“Your mind’s not in pigs. Like you’re not all here,” Da said gently.
At the Plow in Ouze, he’d lift a pint or two. Every night. Folk did that. He did, too.
“Howzzat, Mikey!” he shouted to the landlord, arriving.
Mikey Alsop always pulled a pint for him, on the house. “Least the house can do ’nall, right lads?”
Bill smiled and leaned on the bar. He listened to talk of test matches, innings and overs, to farm chat, to word of work and prices and of who was back, who wasn’t, who would never. He spoke of all things right and proper: Plow talk.
Nights at the Plow he leaned on the bar, his spot, by the window. He’d watch the evening rise. When a fellow’d come by with an empty sleeve, a knotted trouser leg, some other notice on him jotted off from the recent war, Bill turned away to watch the sky. No empty parts to Bill’s kit, no sir.
10:00 Pip Emma,
prompt: “Time Gen’lemen, please!” Mikey’d say with a whispered smile. “10:00 lads, Constable Grimm’l be by and by on his little bikey, by-n-by. Shut the door, our Stanley! Dim them lights.” And the life of the pub would go forth blacked out, hushed when the constable’s bicycle squeaked past the door, through the village, on to Lakenheath, beyond. And all the gathered lads and men would smile their beers and jiggers and whisper more of cricket and of pigs.
In the street and tramping up the way in the cool or in the warm mud of spring, Bill watched the sky and counted sunsets.
“High latitude, us,” Stanley’d say walking ’longside Bill as far as the fork in the path. “Look a’ that,” pointing to the sun’s glow that lingered on the horizon, “an hour shy o’ midnight’n all. Day stays well into night, roundabout, you know. Oh yes. We’re a northern country, us.”
“Oh, aye, that we are,” Bill said. And saying it, he felt… “Feels like I’m practicing at sommat,” he said. Surprised he spoke aloud.
“Eh?” Stanley said, perched on the branch of the road his way. “Eh?”
“I walk and talk, I work. But it’s playing scales, you know? Practice. Ma’s parlor piano when I was… Crikey, six years gone! Imagine that and all? I was a lad, these six years back. Crikey. Up and down, up and down.”
“Oh, aye,” Stanly said, and cocked a goodnight wave.
The wind blew and the flat, flat land rippled in the stars and moon, when moon there was. Wind shadows rolled the earth.
He didn’t fit. He was the between, the hole in a hole. Beer didn’t taste. Work brought nor sweat nor joy. Old Da, his Ma, the sister girls gave no home that settled him.
“You ain’t come back,” Ma said. “I heard of other lads like you. Likely lads’n all, fellows who left sommat of the’ selfs out there.”
“I died,” he said one day, looking at her.
“Ahh, nor did you!” she said. “You hear that, Nels? Our Bill says he died over there in France.”
“Oh, aye? The Yanks say, ‘How’re you gonna keep ’em down on the farm now they seen Paree?’” Da said.
“No, I’ll never,” Bill said, “never go there,” he said. “Never back.”
“No. Says he died, like. Like Charlie done and Rafe. For real an’ all!” Ma said, staring at him, as though trying to see below his skin and into him.
“I don’t know when it was or how,” Bill said.
“Ah,” Da said, and puffed his pipe.
“Mustna’ say them things, now Bill!” Ma said, crying. “And your brothers dead and buried somewhere over there.”
“I didn’t die?” Bill said.
“Mustna’!” she said.
“I won’t,” he said.
Da collapsed hoisting up a pig to stick him. The pig hung screaming while Bill went for help. Da’s heart, doctor reckoned.
That was ten years after he’d come back.
“That were quick like,” Stanley said after the funeral. “He went in the glory of his time, I’d say. Wouldn’t you, Mikey? Say old Nels went in the glory of his years?”
“Oh, aye,” Mikey said and set the house for Old Bill.
Ma faded after. The girls were gone and married, the brothers, just a pair of pictures. Bill had no marker to her deterioration, none he could say to, “Ain’t Ma favoring that leg, of late?” or “She takes a time goin’ up them steps, eh?”
He noticed she would start a thing and not finish. Not that that was strange. Just that Ma never had done it. Or if she had, Da had finished for her. Now she lingered in the silence. Or times were she couldn’t make an end to something. She’d start chopping onions at the board, times were, and wouldn’t stop when the thing was done. Just kept at it. Chop, chop, chop.
She died. One morning, there she was, on the steps, stopped, coming down, stopped and seated, leaning to the wall.
That was twelve years after Old Bill came home.
After that, well, there was nothing left. No one left to tell him he was still alive, no one to say, “Ach!” when he said the best of him he’d left in a hole below a field in Flanders. No one left to tell him “No.”
He watched the earth, nights, homing from the Plow. After leaving Stanley at the fork, he climbed the gentle rise. He’d start across the fields near home and watch the earth ripple in the still, still air.
“When’d I die?” he said. “Who took me?”
Nothing.
“You think I’m the only one left walking in the air?” he asked Welly.
Welly, drowned and gone in the chops of the Channel, never said a thing. Nothing at all.
“You went and drownded yourself because! Ain’t that right?” Bill said. “Because why? Because you din’t want ter go unnerground no more, ain’t that it? You were dead, too, and knew it and wanted no more crawling in the mud, ever after. Right, am I, Welly?”
And nothing spoke to him, but the questions seemed complete. The air winkled in the field and shadows rolled in the starlit grass.
“Down there, Welly? Well there’s dead below the waters, too, old son!” Bill shouted to the night. “You dancing in the deep are you, Welly?”
Maybe it was the beer but the next day Bill put a fiver in his pocket and took the train to Dover.
Messines Ridge blocked the eastern sky. Dawn was a way away and the moon long gone. The ripples in the earth raised, became flesh, flesh and bone and urges. The urges grew fingers and the hands from the earth stroked Bill’s feet. They reached upward. The emerging arms shed earth and flesh as they gripped and climbed his legs. The weight of their bodies, unbuoyed by the dirt they displaced, staggered him. They didn’t hurt. They meant no harm, Bill knew. What harm could they do? He didn’t know them, not by name, not yet, but they knew him. Heads and shoulders lifted from the dark that rolled beneath. They only wanted him.
“I’m watching you, you horrid little man,” one said, his voice, a whisper at Bill’s ear. Others spoke. Whispered French twittered at his nose, German rolled around his face, other words and ways, Bill knew, but didn’t know what.
“Wanner come down and ’ave a swim wiv us, Old Bill?” another said. Munger. “You’re one o’ us, there, Ol’ Bill, right enough!”
“Am I?” Bill said to the face that had climbed his chest and stared up his nose. “I’m one o’ you lot?”
“Wait for it!” called a familiar voice. “Wait for IT…” another. So many familiar parts and places swam and rose in the field around him. Bodies by the hundreds lifted from the dirt and from the holes in the holes around the Messines Ridge. Bodies broke the surface in the starlight, their world glinting from the bone between the flesh and serge and wool and rusted steel. They hugged him and the scent of earth filled his nostrils, the scent of old explosions, of shit and piss, of gunpowder and dead horse, of blood and garbage, of old gas attacks and the eternal smell of men and sweat and breath and fear and life near the edge of the great hole.
Their bodies were not heavy, light as dust, in fact. Just so many of them. He waited, though. Waited for it.
“Now lads,” Sarge shouted, “over the top!” His whistle blew across the morning and Bill went forward, falling, swimming, digging, crawling; crawling down to glory.
IN A DAINTY PLACE
I was a magician when the old hallway returned. Just a phase, Mother said. Still, the doomed deer, the flying dog and weeping women, the whole world I’d imagined, returned to the upstairs hall. Magic? Not mine. I’d paged through The Big Book of Malini. I’d memorized a few stories to distract the audience—patter, we called it. I knew gags that could confuse my kid brother. “Alikazam,” a quarter drops out of his nose and he grabs for it or “Shazam,” his rubber duck vanishes and he starts squalling. That was it. The hallway? No. The hallway was beyond me. Way beyond.
We lived in Grandfather’s house. Grandfather was “Pop-pop.” In Pop-pop’s house there was a hallway on the second floor. The hall ran between Mother’s room and mine. The floor was splintery wood, a worn maroon carpet, from one end to the other
. Nothing hung on the walls. They were wallpapered. The paper felt like thick fabric, fabric with pictures, a picture, same on both sides of the hall. The thing that almost caught your eye first was the dog, flying. That wasn’t the first thing because just below the flying dog was a dying deer, a stag, taller than my father had been. The stag’s antlers were huge, thirty-two points to be precise. Magicians need precision. The stag was surrounded by hunters, men on horseback, on foot, with pikes, bows and arrows, dogs. The dogs’ fangs and claws had raked cruel stripes across the animal’s flanks and he bristled with arrows. One of the mounted hunter’s pikes had pierced its shoulder. The horse had reared. If the light was right and you watched for a time, the hooves seemed to move, but only if the light was right. The hooves mixed with the stag’s tossing antlers so the deer’s head seemed to move too.
The hunters were not cowboys or Indians. “They’re of a different age,” Pop-pop said, from long-ago and far-away. Not Americans, they came from where Pop-pop’s stories had come.
Seven women stood on the outskirts of the clearing, eyes and faces turned away from the killing. They wore tall pointed hats; veils streamed from them. Two clutched their hearts.
The deer’s eyes, the eyes of the pikeman’s horse were wide and wild. Terror, I guessed, both of them, maybe anger or other things I didn’t understand, the sight and smell of bleeding dogs, the whinnies of a downed horse. And there was that flying dog. His howls. He must be howling. I could hear. Terror. Wide terror. Terror of being tossed by those antlers, of flight. Dogs aren’t used to flying. The kid always looked there first, always laughed at that flying dog. Not at everything, but at that.
I don’t remember the whole of the picture, not exactly, not anymore. Whenever I spent a rainy day sitting on the floor, watching it, I continued the story, on my own. I heard the animals, the shouts of the hunters, the women’s sobs; all of that became part of the little world. I felt the heat of that day on my face. I smelled the blood, the green richness of the forest, smelled smoke from campfires beyond the picture. I don’t remember the whole picture because so much of my memory of it is conjured, the story I made up that began, went into the broader world, and ended in that clearing. I heard voices. The men, the women, then others, close by, then distant ones. Voices meant lives lived. Lives lived in there. It was me, of course it must have been. And so I made stories of what had come before, what happened after, what was happening in the trees or through them, in the castle that must be beyond the woods, in the town around the castle. Where else are those hunters from? Details. I made details I knew weren’t there but which had to be somewhere.
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