Bright's Passage: A Novel (3 page)

In front of him suddenly the air felt strange, and then without warning one of his hands was cupping a face. Its features froze in his hand for an awful moment before whispering something. It whispered again, louder this time, and at the sound of the voice the others around Bright went still. If the alarm was raised on either line guns on both sides would open up.

“Shoosh,” the voice said, almost a sigh. The War seemed to fall silent at the voice of the German soldier and darkness lay around it like a pack of bristling, dreaming dogs.

A star shell hissed upward and turned the sky to tin. Bright did not close his eyes. Instead, he looked directly into the eyes of the man’s face in his hand. On either side of the face, four
other men were also pressed tightly to the ground. The man looked steadily back into Bright’s eyes as the light flared and then subsided.

“Shoosh,” Sergeant Carlson himself whispered after a dark age. He said it calmly, and it was returned calmly, the word bouncing quietly around in the darkness until Bright felt the face in his hand speak it as well once more. He pulled away and the party pushed back from the tree, Sergeant Carlson un-spooling the fuse as they retreated. Bright made out the scuffle of fabric and the soft tink of metal as the soldiers on the other side did likewise. Less than an hour later, back in the trench, Carlson and the other two men smoked and talked lowly while Bright sat on a wet duckboard and stared at the nothingness of the trench wall.

“Jee-roosh!” Bert, who hadn’t gone, said to no one in particular.

They waited perhaps ten minutes more and then Carlson lit the fuse. Even as he did, though, the tree exploded up into the night sky with a tremendous crack. A second and third blast told them that the German dynamite had gone off. They listened to the hooting of the men across the field, and watched their own fuse crawl like a lost lightning bug over the ground, finally detonating its charges beneath the wrecked stump of the tree.

Henry Bright had seen many buildings burn in France during the War, but this did not seem to lessen his surprise at the sudden gusts of heat that washed over him and his newborn boy as the cabin blossomed into flames. The roof shingling was first to catch, blazing upward with terrifying speed. The incendiary heat quickly consumed this kindling, and the remainder of the roof collapsed down inside the thick log walls of the cabin, throwing sparks and burning pieces of wood into the air as it did so. The she-goat, who had not been to the War but had earned, by any honest estimation, a hard-won reputation for composure in the last several months, lost the last reserves of her calm and burst out with a serrated bleat of alarm. She tugged against her tether as the horse canted back onto its hind legs in fright. Bright struggled to hold the leads of both animals as he watched the sparks climb into the air. Then it seemed that even the fire caught fire. In the space of a few moments there were three smaller blazes burning at the periphery of the farmyard, one of which had begun to crawl over the chicken hutch on its way toward the graves of his wife and mother. He tried to rush forward in order to stomp out the blaze, but the leads by which he held his frightened livestock were far too short and he could not reach the fire without letting the animals go. The peripheral
branches of the big chestnut tree began to wither and brown, falling to the ground like burning feathers. The young chestnuts popped in their spiky shells, exploding in the angry swell of heat. Then, with a howl, the whole tree was aflame.

“What the hell did you make me do!?” Bright shouted at the angel over the roar, but the horse was twisting and stamping at the ground and would not answer. Bright gave a tremendous pull on its lead. The horse fought him for a few seconds, dancing in panic as the goat darted this way and that. He finally got the horse around somehow, tugging it and the goat into the cool safety of the woods to the east.

There was a short rise half a mile away, and he tied the animals to a tree and walked to the top. A steady floral breeze was blowing at his back and had already pushed the fire below from the chestnut tree to a silver maple nearby. The wood burned in a plume of viscous, greasy heat that shot into the sky like a column of dirty water. He turned and walked back down the rise, the familiar, low rumble of combustion beginning its muttering in his ears.

He did not speak as he untethered the horse and goat from the tree, and the horse, for its part, allowed itself to be ridden into the depths of the woods without a struggle. For all its earlier shows of panic, it now seemed deaf to the buzzing alarm that was spreading through the forest canopy. For the next few miles it clomped along with the maddening contentedness of an old dray taking the pumpkins to town. Once or twice it tried to chomp at the clumps of grass along its path, but Bright pulled back sharply on the reins each time, cursing the angel under his breath.

“Last time I let a goddamn angel help me start a goddamn fire,” he said. “He makes fun of me, tells me I can’t start a fire without a angel, and then that very angel goes and burns the whole goddamn forest down.” He rode along in silence for a
piece more. “Goddamn it,” he added. A voluptuous purple-headed thistle drew the horse off to the right, but Bright jerked it back.

“It was you who started the fire, Henry Bright, not me.”

“It’s gonna burn the whole goddamn forest! Ain’t you gonna do something?”

“What can I do?”

“It was you told me to set it. Now you don’t know what to do with it?”

“I didn’t tell you to set the whole forest on fire, only the cabin,” the horse sighed as it ambled along. “Sadly, there’s no stopping it now. But have heart, Henry Bright.”

“But ain’t the Colonel going to see the smoke? You know he will.”

“I know he will.”

Bright pulled back on the reins and the horse came to a stop. “You do?”

“Of course I do. I know everything, Henry Bright.”

“But we don’t want him to see the smoke, I thought. ’Cause he’ll know something’s on fire and he’ll come over the mountain, him and his boys.”

“And what will they find?”

Bright looked down at his own son, who had stopped crying for the moment. “He won’t find nothing, because the whole goddamn forest is gonna be burned down,” he said.

“And what will the Colonel and his sons think then?”

“That we’re dead. Both me and Rachel,” he said. “Burned up in the fire.”

“And your son?”

“Him too. They’ll think he’s dead too.” He bit his fist. “Do you think they’ll really think that? That we all just got burned up in the fire?”

“The fire started in the early morning while you and your
wife were still asleep. By the time the conflagration had passed over, there was nothing to show that you or she and her unborn child had ever existed. It was a tragedy.”

“And you think they’ll believe that? The Colonel is gonna believe that?”

“Why would he not?”

“Well, for one thing, he’s had Corwin and Duncan watching us.”

“How do you know?”

“ ’Cause I saw them. Up on the ridge in the winter, when there was no leaves on the trees. They were just sitting there looking at me one time. And then even last week I saw Duncan. He was on his belly there in the shadows underneath the ferns by the side of the road. I think the Colonel was waiting for my boy to be born. I think he wants to take my boy away from me.”

The angel said nothing to this and Bright mused a while in the saddle, rolling the terrible notion in his mind. The horse made another foray, this time into a stand of nettles, and Bright, lost in his reverie, permitted it.

They rode on for several more hours, the light shifting and dappling, the humidity settling around them like a warm, wet sigh, until at length they came to a rill and followed it down a long hillside to where it emptied itself into a fast-running stream. Here they stopped and he removed the baby from the sling around his chest and placed it on the ground. He stripped off his shirt, and, dipping both shirt and sling in the cool water, he rubbed the fabrics together until the mess the boy had made was gone. The baby wailed as he dunked its hindquarters in the flow, but it quieted some after he laid it upon the woolen blanket. By the time he had milked the goat, the last portion of sunlight was being sopped up by the low moon, and the stars were beginning to show on the plate beneath. He tied the horse to a chokecherry and the goat to a peeling ninebark near the water.
It was muggy, but he unpacked his greatcoat anyway and, sitting on the ground, wrapped himself and the child in the garment, more for relief from the mosquitoes than from any cold. With his finger, he fed the boy from the milk and with his other hand ate a piece of the chicken that he’d wrapped in a few pages from the Book of Jeremiah. Then Henry Bright lay back and thought about Rachel, the delicate shells of her ears, the pinkness of her tongue, the way she laughed in her sleep. The tiny body of his son slept silent and warm in the crook of one arm, and he kept very still lest he should wake the boy.

With the tree gone, the world went aimless for the next several days. Shots were taken at whatever happened to rise above the bags that lined the trenches, but even the bodies of the men who were hit seemed bored by the tedium of the killings and fell to the ground with more listlessness than violence. Of course there were always the punctual, workmanlike exchanges of shelling, shooting, and maiming, called “the hate,” at the beginning and ending of each day, but by now these were ritual, and no one paid them much mind.

Bright’s company was relieved and went to sit in the dirty basements of eviscerated villages under the watchful eyes of old women. Everyone had fleas. Bert argued with whoever would listen to him, mostly about whether chickens could get the cooties. Finally someone had gone out in the yard and killed a bird, brought it in, and inspected it. There had been no fleas. Behind a basket of onions in a nook that served as a kitchen, Bright found a small patch of plaster wall so white that it seemed supernatural, a solitary untouched thing in the whole wet and muddy world. He stared hard at it while the others smoked cigarettes and slept around him. They were moved from the basement back to the reserve trenches, and he resumed watching the treeless early October sky with the same intensity as he had
the wall in the old woman’s house. Shells burst around him, but they burst around everyone. Many had caught the flu, and there was coughing at all hours. Some suffocated in the night from the infection in their lungs. Men came back from the field hospitals looking sicker than when they had left for them. They died of fevers in the cold, their bodies shivering so violently beneath sodden blankets that it seemed their bones might break. It was not unusual to wake and find the man sitting next to you dead; the War had become something so powerful that it could kill without wounding. On occasion even Henry Bright smoked, but not often.

Back he moved to the front line, and, one morning, the hate was louder and longer than normal, and he began to clean his rifle with his toothbrush and then fix his bayonet in preparation to go over the bags. The word being passed around was that the village in front of them had been relinquished in the night. Some speculated that it was a trap, that this portion of the line was playing possum, luring in as many as they could in order to surround them in one last, desperate attempt to turn the tide of the War. Farther south, another rumor had it, an entire German company of starving old men and young boys had surrendered en masse. Some held that this would be the final push, that the Kaiser had had it and the German army was collapsing. Still, if this was the case, no one in charge was saying so, and until they did say so, the only thing that mattered was the village that lay before them a little ways distant, close enough that the white steeple of its church could be seen peeking out above a small rise of hills.

His mother had died during a windstorm that made the trees bow to one another like ballroom dancers. He had buried her in the whipping rain and then trudged through the mud to Fells Corner for nails with which to patch the holes where the singles
had blown off the cabin’s roof. The hardware man had measured out the nails, offered his condolences, and then asked Bright if he’d considered signing up to go to the War. The hardware man had been made a registration officer with the responsibility of signing up men to go across the sea to avenge the women and children of the
Lusitania
, to make the world safe for Democracy, to defend France, and, lastly, to aid England. With his mother dead, there was nothing really to stay for. Bright had signed his name, listened wordlessly to the instructions the man gave him, and then headed back to the cabin with an extra portion of nails for being the first to sign up in the book. It had been as easy as falling in a river.

In early March 1918, he hid his mother’s rifle in the rafters above the bed, used the extra portion of nails to cover the door frame against the weather and wilderness, and then walked to the train depot in Fells Corner. He was mustered at a camp in Virginia with a company of gangly and goosenecked men and boys. By late April they were on their way to France.

Feeling for the War was high, as was excitement over the ocean voyage. Men showed it in different ways. Some told stories of their valor in advance. Others prayed and gave up vices. Most wrote letters of some kind to be mailed home upon their arrival, and a chaplain assigned to their unit tried to get everyone’s soul in order. He was most concerned about the Catholics of France. “You stay the hell out of those churches, boys,” he would shout as they went to sleep. “You just walk the other way. There ain’t nothing those Catholics can give you except fleas and the clap. You need anything, you want to unburden your soul, you come to me or you go to the YMCA.” He was naturally red in the face and, according to Sergeant Carlson, accidentally shot himself during a training exercise, only two weeks after their boat had landed in France.

They entered the War like men stepping out from beneath an awning into a torrential thunderstorm. The first man that Bright saw die fell back down into the very trench from which he’d just climbed. His uniform was still fresh and the tops of his boots had been shined. Only the soles looked muddy.