Losing Julia (23 page)

After dusk extinguished the last shafts of light we appeared cautiously like cockroaches, thousands of us emerging from woods and dugouts and barns and farmhouses, a silent army in search of prey. To the west muzzle flashes and flares punctured the darkness like great big lightning bugs dancing to the muffled thud thud of artillery. The road was swollen with limbers and trucks and mules stretching all the way across France in a somber procession that was fed at one end by factories and trains and boats and drained at the other by explosives, gas, bullets and blades. We were told to hurry.

“Germans broke through the French lines somewheres up north, that’s what I heard.”

“Well, shit. Now we’re just gonna have to chase ’em back again.”

“I got to tell you, I feel sorry for the Frogs. They’ve been doing this for four years.”

“Four fucking years, imagine that.”

I stared straight ahead at Tometti s pack, noting the stains. It smelled everywhere like sweat and urine, except where it smelled worse. I had had diarrhea for three days accompanied by cramps that caused me to jerk forward. Influenza? I prayed not. But everyone talked about it, how it had opened up a third front against humanity. A young kid from Indiana died just four days after he got sick. The pneumonia killed him. They say it’s just like drowning. Julia wrote Daniel that Americans were wearing gauze over their mouths on the trains and buses while office hours were being staggered to reduce congestion. My mother wrote that three houses on our street were quarantined and that little Janey Morgan had died. There was not a man in France who wouldn’t rather be shot in the kneecaps than die from some disease. It just seemed like such a pathetic way to go, coming all the way to France to get sick; to die in uniform with no hope of heroism, to die wondering if your name would even appear on the hometown memorial after the war.

I watched Giles’s head jerk left and right as he walked and I wondered if he was sleepwalking. What a neat trick that would be, especially for a soldier. I felt another spasm low in my bowels. Funny, but when I enlisted it never occurred to me that war would be so monstrously inconvenient, so that not one single thing was easy except getting killed. Again I stopped and searched the terrain beside the road for a place to shit. From behind a tree I looked back at the silhouettes, illuminated by a half moon, that were bobbing and snaking past in an endless column, as though the entire human race had decided to up and move all in one night. I tried to separate the different sounds: whining, groaning engines; banging metal; the clip, clop of horses; creaking wood; a mule baying; the low rumble of thousands of boots on dirt like a centipede walking across the snare of a drum.

I spent two hours pushing and dodging my way forward to catch up to my company, which was indistinguishable in the darkness from every other company. An hour later I stopped and searched for another place to shit.

WE HAVE A
lot of catching up to do.

I’m dreaming again, aren’t I?

Patrick it’s me, Julia.

It is you, isn’t it? And I have so many things to tell you. Did I ever tell you about my brother? My younger brother Ian?

No, tell me about him.

He died of smallpox when he was six. I was nine then. It was awful, Julia. Everybody huddled in his room. My father sitting frozen in his chair in the living room. The look on the neighbors’ faces when they brought by food.

That’s so tragic, when children die.

After he died I’d go and sit in his room for hours. There is nothing in the world so perfectly still and quiet as the room of a dead child.

I’m sorry.

The priest tried to make sense of it but he couldn’t, not to me. When children die it’s always murder, Julia. Always.

Yes, I understand.

I had an older sister, Katherine. She died ten years ago in Arizona. I still miss her, even though we were never that close. I don’t think her husband liked me. Thought I was a bit flaky, not being married all these years.

You’re anything but flaky.

Thank you, Julia.

You don’t look good today.

I feel tired.

Get some sleep.

Yes, I think I will.

Good night.

Good night.

I CAN’T BEAR
to leave my room today. I feel altogether too weak. Not the weakness that comes from old age or even from cancer, but the weakness that comes with sadness, which is much worse. I’m starting to think that sadness is organic; that sad people are cursed with more insight than others. While our smiles defy our bitter plight, our tears acknowledge it.

Maybe that’s why the only people who have really interested me in my life—besides children—are those who have experienced the loss of a loved one. People who haven’t felt the caustic burn of death are like students who haven’t yet held a real job; the world is still theoretical; intellectualized, vigorously debated, but not fully experienced or comprehended.

Any search for the deeper meanings in our lives has to start at our deaths. That’s the fundamental, overwhelming dilemma of our humanity. But the great absurdity of our lives—which I can only now see clearly—is our unwillingness to concede that we are in a bit of a pickle in the first place. It’s quite funny, really: several billion people all feigning immortality, as though they each have some secret exemption, or at least an indefinite future, and thus can afford to run down the clock without the least sense of urgency. And the incredible thing is, you can live through a world war and still not make the most of the time that you’ve got.

LAST NIGHT
I dreamed that I met a young boy who told me with the saddest eyes that he was never born and I asked how could that be and he explained very slowly and quietly that his father had died at the front. And then I looked behind the boy and I saw hundreds of thousands of children, just standing there. Infinitely mute.

Rapidity of fire. Men are trained to fire at the rate of about three shots per minute at effective ranges (600 to 1200 yards) and five or six at close ranges (0 to 600 yards), devoting the minimum of time to loading and the maximum to deliberate aiming…

Muzzle velocity. When the bullet leaves the muzzle of the rifle it is going 2700 feet a second, or roughly, 1/2 mile a second, or 30 miles a minute.

—Privates’ Manual, 1917.

LAWTON BECAME
an accomplished sniper as the months passed, methodically picking off careless Germans from seven hundred yards with a patient squeeze of the trigger. Page seemed to grow more quiet while Tometti waxed on endlessly about Teresa and Giles amassed a small fortune trading in German souvenirs, using much of the money to supplement his diet with chocolates and jams and smoked meats. Daniel kept us all together with his calm confidence and unerring sense of terrain so that we each trusted him instinctively, even when he led us out on raiding parties loaded with sacks of grenades slung around our necks and shoulders and stumbling through the pitch-black darkness over ground churned like the North Sea by the shelling.

I turned twenty that July. In August Page’s father died and Tometti spent a week in the hospital with a slight bullet wound in the arm. Except for the occasional shows at the Y or pickup games in the rest areas, there was little in the way of relief from the intense fear and boredom and loneliness that gripped us. Good news seemed unheard of.

Maybe that’s why we made such a fuss on the day Daniel learned that Julia was pregnant, celebrating with brandy that Giles scrounged up and howling drunkenly into the night, until the MPs rounded us up and sent us weaving back toward our tents.

It was our first mail call in weeks and several of us were sitting against the side of an abandoned barn fifteen miles from the front, greedily tearing open letters.

“I’m going to be a father!” he said, shaking the pages. His voice was cracking. “Julia thinks it’s a girl and look here, she has a list of names and wants me to circle the ones I like.” He stood up and pranced around like a Russian dancer as he recited the names. Several of us slapped him on the back.

“What if it’s a boy?” I asked.

“If it’s a boy, we’ll name him Patrick. How about it, assuming Julia agrees?”

I blushed, and hoped fervently that it would be a boy.

Daniel decided right away that he would marry Julia and spent weeks crafting his proposal, which he carried on a small writing pad he kept in his breast pocket. “I don’t think she expects I’ll ask, because of my family, but I always knew I would. Now we’ll just have to marry by mail, if that sort of thing can be done, and to hell with what everybody thinks.”

“Where will you live?” I asked.

“San Francisco, unless that embarrasses my parents. We could always travel down to Monterey or even Los Angeles.”

I couldn’t imagine such spontaneity.

“I don’t suppose you’ve given any thought to how you’ll make ends meet?”

“Julia can teach painting, and maybe even sell a few of her works. I could try to get a job writing for some newspaper or magazine.” Daniel was always writing, even during bombardments. He said it was the only way he could understand what he was thinking. He had submitted three articles on the soldier’s life to a magazine in New York and one had already been published, much to the delight of the battalion.