Bright's Passage: A Novel (4 page)

Bright rode on throughout the next day, following the stream and keeping to the hug of a range of foothills where the canopy of hickory was thickest and there was less chance of being seen. He took short breaks to water the horse and to feed the child from the thin skim of goat’s milk in the bucket tied to the saddle pommel. As the sun began to slip behind him, he tethered the horse near an ess in the stream. A few deep-brown trout grazed fatly in the dark holds beneath a stretch of half-submerged hemlock trunk that had fallen across the water. He unswaddled his son, walked out on the trunk with the boy, and knelt down as he had done the previous night to dunk the boy’s naked hindquarters in the water. The child meeped and mewed up at him as he laid it on the ground. He walked out onto the trunk once again to wash the diaper, but this time as he stooped to the stream he lost his balance and toppled headfirst into the water. He stood up spluttering, thoroughly soaked, and, reaching into his pocket, found the matches ruined.

He stood there, waist-deep and dripping, looking down into his palm at them. Then he let them fall from his hand to float away like tiny boats in the current. He sloshed through the churned silt to the steep lip of the bank and pulled himself up next to his boy. The child’s feathery red hair fell thinly across its
knobbled head in the style of a middle-aged auctioneer or feeds tore man. The same coppery color gave the boy a pair of sharp little eyebrows that scrunched and relaxed and then scrunched again as if, behind those tightly locked eyelids, he was figuring a sum of arithmetic. The intricacy of the boy’s ears and the translucence of his tiny nostrils already bore the stamp of Rachel’s beauty. His face was so unlike the faces of the infants Bright had seen frolicking among the painted clouds of a certain church back in France. It was a good, open face, without malevolence or mischief. Bright rolled onto his back and regarded the sweeping trees above. At length he pulled himself to his feet, stripped naked, and hung his clothes up on some low-hanging branches to dry.

When the father and son returned to camp, the horse took one look at Henry Bright’s pale, stem-thin body and snorted. Bright ignored the animal and set about clearing a patch of ground, arranging the woolen blanket, and laying the child upon it. Next he set the goat loose and watched her forage, by which way she led him to a mulberry bush, a serviceberry bush with a few precious berries that had somehow escaped the notice of the birds, and a gnarled old crab apple tree, loaded down with tight, bitter green fruit. He ate with as little compunction as the goat. He had fishing line, but without matches there would be no campfire. Perhaps that was just as well; another fire, one that might betray their whereabouts to the Colonel and his sons, could be even more disastrous than the fire the angel had made him set in order to burn the cabin down. He ate the unripe crab apples and milked the goat, feeding the boy from the bucket and leaving aside a good portion from which to feed him again in the night when the child awoke hungry.

As Bright made ready to sleep, the horse’s derisive humor descended into contempt. It stared darkly from out of a purple
and malignant silence as Bright curled his naked form closely around his son. The boy muzzled into Bright’s chest. Bright noticed the angel’s scornfulness, and though he said nothing, he stared back at the horse from the darkness with a like animus.

He sat up again suddenly. “What did you call me?”

The horse chuffed the air. “What do you mean?”

“You called me something.” Bright flicked the ground with his hand. “You wanna call me names, you just say ’em loud enough for me to hear ’em.”

“You are mistaken, Henry Bright.”

Bright whipped his jacket over his child’s nakedness and then, with a final deathly stare, he rolled over to face away from the animal. Around them in the forest thrummed the ordinary night sounds, but beneath those came the ossiary click as Henry Bright’s jaws worked to eat the sounds deep down in his throat that might betray his great grief at the death of his wife, his foolhardy destruction of their home, and the wildfire that had ensued. He thought fearfully of being discovered in the night by the Colonel and his cruel sons and, as he bit the knuckles of his fist, the bitterness of the crab apples he had eaten mixed against his tongue with the sour shame of being mocked by his own horse.

“You said we were going to be married?” Rachel asked expectantly out of the darkness. She sat in front of him astride the horse as they left the Colonel’s house behind.

“We will,” Bright said.

“Oh, good. I hate this thing.” She began to tear at her ragged white dress. A bundle of thread tangled out from the shoulder, where a bow had once blossomed. On the other shoulder the bow was still hanging on, but it drooped lifelessly. “Can’t wait to get it off.” By the motion of her arm he could tell that she was tugging the dirty stretch of silk that ran between her neckline and her breasts.

“Don’t you tear at that thing,” he said, letting go of the horse’s rein to pull her arm down and her hand away from the garment. “We ain’t married yet and I ain’t got nothing else for you to wear.”

“So?”

“So, you can’t get married naked, can you? When was the last time you ever heard of anyone getting married naked?”

She giggled at this, as if he hadn’t just ridden his horse through the front door of the Colonel’s house and stolen her away. “Are we going to get married real soon?” she asked again.

“I said we were, didn’t I? Didn’t I just tell you that?”

“Real, real soon, then?” There came a ripping sound, and a scrap of white fabric floated to the ground. The horse snorted.

Bright brushed the girl’s hands away from her dress once more. “Yes. Now stop tearing at that. Take your hands away and stop messing with it!”

Dawn was breaking as they melted out of the darkness of the woods and into the tenuous circle of habitation that he had reclaimed from the wilderness in the month since he’d returned from the War.

She got down from the horse and stood in the center of it all, surveying the little farmyard expectantly as Bright looped the animal’s tether loosely around the chestnut tree and then went to the stream to dunk his head in the water. He came up gasping from the cold.

“You might want to wash yourself too,” he said, rubbing an arm across his forehead as he looked at her. “Get cleaned up a bit.” The girl stood where she was. He disappeared into the cabin and came back with a clean shirt on.

“You ain’t washed up yet,” he said. “You’re filthy, girl. Goddamn.” In the morning light the girl’s face and hands had lost the marble whiteness with which they’d glowed in the gloom of the previous evening.

“Stay there,” he said. “I’m going to get the Bible. Will you stay right there?”

“I’ll stay. I’ll stay right here with this tired old horse. He’s a nice horse. Aren’t you a nice horse?” She reached up to scratch the animal’s ears.

“You don’t need a Bible,” the horse said. “Come here and stand near the bride.”

He immediately turned around and came to stand near Rachel.

“I thought you were going to get the Bible,” she said.

“We don’t need it.”

“Ask the bride her name.”

“Her name’s Rachel!” he burst out. “You know that’s her name! She’s all you been talking about!” Then, remembering that she was standing right there beside him, he ducked his chin to his chest and looked at her bare feet. “I been talking about you to my horse,” he said, forcing a chuckle out.

“You have?” The girl giggled as she stroked the horse’s head.

“You must ask the girl her full name. This is a sacred ceremony.”

“For God’s sake.” Bright stomped a foot on the ground.

“What?” Rachel asked.

“Nothing.” Bright sighed. “What’s your name, Rachel? Your full name, is what I mean.”

“It’s Miss Rachel Stallsworth Murtry Marion Morse,” she said, and then, unaccountably, “On account of us being Catholic on the Lady Stallsworth’s side.”

“What does that mean?” he asked, perhaps to the horse and perhaps to the girl.

“I don’t know,” the girl said.

The horse said nothing.

“Well, now it’s Bright and you’re my wife, unless somebody has problems with that,” he said significantly, “somebody who makes me go all over the country riding up inside other people’s houses, and stealing people’s daughters.” He spoke expectoratingly into the big face of the horse.

The animal ran its velvet muzzle along the pale floe of the girl’s collarbone and paid Bright no mind.

“Well,” he said, putting his hands on his hips, “you gonna forever hold your peace, or what?”

The horse snuffled with evident pleasure in the girl’s scraggled hair. The girl shied flirtatiously from its attentions.

Bright burrowed his eyes like bullet holes into the animal as it tossed its head for the girl’s amusement. After a long moment
of silence, he continued. “All right. Then I guess we’re married now.”

He took Rachel by the hand and pulled her away from the lecherous animal’s ears mid-scratch. “Over there”—he motioned toward the cabin—“is where we live. There’s where the chickens live. You always been good with them. Those are the goats. This here is a beaten-down old farm horse with no sense in it at all.” He was about to point out the stream but she had already begun walking toward it, not even stopping as she pulled the dress over her head and let it fall forgotten on the bank. Then she was wriggling in the icy water. When she stood, the water halfway up her calves, Henry Bright looked upon her naked body for the first time. She bent her head to the stream, dunking it, and then straightened, looking frankly at him as she twisted the water from her hair.

You were never to run when advancing. You were to move at a slow and steady pace that allowed the artillery behind you to fire over your head and clear the way for you. Of course, when the ground at your feet exploded it was impossible to tell whether the barrage was coming from in front of you or behind you, so you forgot about slowly advancing and you ran, you ran right into the gun barrels of whoever was there in front of you.

When the order was given, the men climbed the lip of the trench and were soon running across the field. There was always much screaming when this happened, and even Bright would find his mouth hanging open and releasing sounds that he could never quite catch up with and that he could never quite remember afterward. He never looked down no matter what he felt himself stepping on. The fields in between the trenches were wind-whipped ponds of bodies, and even though the bodies were dead they could still pull you down with them; the dead were hungry that way. This morning, with the white beacon of the church in the distance marking the location of the village toward which they were to advance, he climbed out from behind the bags and ran keening and lurching across the dead world of cold limbs and helmets and faces with forgotten names. He had done this before, but this time something felt
different. To either side men should have been falling by now. Instead, two had gotten tangled in the barbed wire and a third was frantically trying to cut them loose with a wire cutter. Bright continued on, expecting at any moment to be shot, but as he got ever closer and was not cut down, it became evident that the trenches that lay between them and the village had been surrendered.

After the ragged and slapdash improvisation of their own dwellings, the deserted German trenches were a wonder to behold. Cut much deeper into the ground than the American and French ones, they were reinforced against the shifting mud with concrete. There was a regularity to their construction as well, as if they had been designed dispassionately by some crisp gray architect rather than a panicked animal with a short shovel. A man of average height could almost stand upright in a few of the rooms, and the German soldiers who lived in them, far below the clamor of artillery barrages above, must have experienced, in quieter moments, the same placid satisfaction that brown trout feel as they dream away far beneath the rainaddled surface.

Uniform artillery gaps between the sandbags afforded a clear view of the cavitied village in front of them. The little cluster of buildings seemed far less worthy of defense than the snug bunkers that Henry Bright and his companions now found themselves in.

They scoured the trench for souvenirs but there was little left to take. A couple of large skillets had been abandoned, their weight disqualifying them as items to accompany rapid retreat. There were indecipherable books and a few utensils. Bright was holding an empty cracker tin when a shot rang out. Twenty yards off the trench cut sharply left, then right. Rounding the turn, he saw a wooden door that had swung wide from the trench wall. He crept up to it and, peering around the doorway, found
himself looking directly down the black pupil of a pistol barrel. He squeezed the trigger of his own gun reflexively, firing a bullet into the ground between Bert’s feet.

“Whoa, Bright! Whoa!” Bert said. “It’s me! It’s me!” He lowered the pistol he had been pointing at Bright. “Jee-roosh! You trying to kill me or what?”

Three others came around the corner, rifles at the ready. Bright set his own down and sagged back against the trench wall, rubbing his knees and breathing deep.

“It’s all right, boys!” Bert called out. “Bright’s got an itchy trigger finger is all! Hey, look! I got one! An officer!” Behind him in the room was a man in a wooden swiveling office chair, his head thrown back, his mouth drawn open as if in mid-snore. There was a hole blasted in the side of his head and another one in his stomach.

Carlson pushed through the others in the narrow doorway. “What the hell happened?”

“I came round this corner and found the door open,” Bert said. “I crept on up and this big Fritzy in the chair here had his pistol pointed at me. He had a bead on me but I was faster, yessir, I was! I blew him away before he had the chance to pull the trigger!” He held up the officer’s pistol that he’d pointed at Bright. “And just look at this! Jee-roosh!”