Drink for the Thirst to Come (7 page)

Night was over and light was through the trees, God peeking white through black, He touched His ground with His Mighty Eye.

The pot had bubbled night-long. The perfect heat she’d made had concentrated the liquor of the soup; thin soup was now thick soup, rich soup, winter soup, dark and earthy. Smelled so pretty now.

Cordelia took another swipe with her spoon. Dark broth swirled among the roots and other things. She breathed its rich essence as she stirred. Turnips, potatoes, the spinning joint-bones made dull taps against the iron pot, the carrots and parsnips swirled. She tasted with her nose.
Mmmm.

The cabin air had gone winter.
Just that one night. Imagine.
Fire warmth, and blessed-God quiet filled the place. Her room was fragrant with chopped wood, spices, and the bite of soup and winter.

Excepting the morning whippoorwill, the woods were quiet. The cries were gone, all gone.

She added the morels last, fried up in the fat. She tasted the tip of the spoon. She sucked a hot spray of broth, her first savor of Winter Soup.

      It was good.

      After dark she’d maybe take a jar to him in the cellar. A little. She wanted him to last. It was going to be a long, long winter. She felt it in her bones.

WIND SHADOWS

“We owe respect to the living; to the dead we owe nothing but the truth.” —Voltaire

2:50 Ack Emma. Crickets. Finally, morning birds among the crickets’ stillness.

3:10 Ack Emma. General Plumer said, “By damn.”

Bill thought of the shamblers in the dark as he and Welly groped for the tunnel lift.

Then, someone closed the electric gap, a spark gasped. Off went nineteen charges, one voice, a million and more pounds of HE. In friendly trenches up and down the lines, nine and a half miles along, the ground shivered, compressed, shattered. Men fell to earth, the earth quaked, collapsed, ears burst. A half-mile across No Man’s Land, a ridge nine and a half miles long rose slowly—or so it seemed, so vast was it, horizon-to-horizon—and rose and rose and rose.

“The mouf of hell!” someone said.

Beneath the German lines, nine and a half miles of them, nineteen mouths of hell opened wide and the 3 a.m. dawn darkness vaporized in roaring light.

Across the Channel, 130 miles from the Messines Ridge, windows rattled in Maida Vale and Mayfair. In Downing Street, tables set for breakfast quivered, crystal tinkled against crystal. The shiver of silver against silver was deadened by thick white linen. Eyes opened.

3:10 a.m. and some moments. Along nine and a half miles of British lines, whistles blew and the men were over the top advancing through the still shattering dust. Fifteen seconds after zero, the cloud continued to roil upward. Germans, parts of Germans, machines, weapons, and other things began to rain among advancing troops. There were casualties. A blockhouse big as a railcar fell among them. The creeping barrage leading the men toward the blazing craters faltered here and there, shells fell short. There were casualties. It was the beginning of the day. Some men never remembered dying.

The man remained on deck for the Channel crossing, Dover to Calais. He might have been Old Bill of the cartoons, Old Bill himself. He had been, thirteen years before. They all had been Old Bills, all of them decrepit, stinking beyond belief, scratched raw, sucked by louse, dined on by rat. Old Bills by the hundreds of thousands, 1914 to 1918, citizens of those temporary lands: Verdun, “Wipers,” Passchendale, the Argonne and the Somme and others, worlds without end, amen.

Thirteen years on, Old Bill stood on the deck of a Channel ferry. France rose from the morning ahead. He was old, but who could tell? Bill was old at seventeen, he was. He was old from waiting, from seeing too much or burning too brightly. At eighteen, his eyes were craters in his face, sun-creases radiant from them, a walrus mustache curtained a grin going toothless. That was a boy’s grin grown too sure of death and worse. At nineteen his skin was waterlogged and scabbed, hands cracked, feet shocking. But ah, those cheeks, scraped to the skin by razors two-years dull, morning stubble softened by cold water and equal parts mud, old bone, blood, piss and shit, those bright red child’s cheeks put the lie to his age. All their sweet young faces, plucked whisker-by-whisker for morning turnout to quarters: inspection on the firing step, heads down facing No Man’s Land, rifle at the ready. Ready for the Hun (should the Hun come today) and, worse, the Lieutenant (who came every day). Worse yet, the Sarge, who was always there, taking names
(“You two! I’M LOOKING AT YOU! You and you shall walk the Dixie down to ’Bert today and fetch the water back! Chop-chop!” Sarge screamed. “Can’t the niggers hop it, Sarge?” Welly’d said. “Their turn, I’m sure…” Sarge’s mouth engulfed Welly’s nose and he give him what for: “The Nig-gers? Them Niggers ain’t yours to detail. Sing me not that hopeful song, you horrid little man! Them nig-nogs got another job, a task of never-you-mind, you dirty bugger! Now you two ’op it, you and you!” And Welly and Bill made the two-mile saunter from the front, down the zigzag to the reserve, guessing all the way—this time lucky—where and when to duck and wait the sniper’s eye, then another mile rearward along the muddied duckboards and into Albert. “Whatcher fink, Old Bill?” Welly said, pumping water at the well. He pointed at Albert’s pocked and potted steeple. The Madonna sagged, barely hanging on, her arms raised, baby God held at 9 o’clock in the shell-singing sky. “Fink she’s gonna topple or fink she’ll stay? What say ther, Bill?” And Bill, he’d had no idea except to reckon if the steeple fell one day, it would fall on him, a cert. Him, detailed by the Sarge to sit beneath and “wait for it,
wait
for it!” Then, with pranged and tinkered Dixie full, Bill and Welly made the same miles back to the line, ducking snipers at the crossroads of their luck/his skill and, slipping on the muck-soft duckboards—Welly remembering at one place along the way, “I sawr him go, Bill. Ol’ Ned. One minute there, then
zing
he scratches at a rabbit in his pants and orf the boards he slips and down he goes into that ther shellhole—that’n ther—and thas the last anyone seen Ol’ Ned, drown he was wiff all his kit. You remember Ned?” And Old Bill laughed and laughed remembering Ned. Welly, too. And returning with the Dixie barely half sloshing full of water. “GOD Damn you two! I’m watching you!” Sarge says at the nearly empty Dixie can.)

Ahead, in France and beyond, more memories. Inspection mornings: faces scraped, clothes dried and brushed as mudless as could be, their weapons ready.

“Wait for it. Wait for IT!” Waiting for the Sarge’s whistle and the call to stand down.
(“You there!” Sarge yelled, plain and simple this time, no trench poetry to color it. “Munger! Keep away from that Loop, you! Hans’ll have you in his sights and I’ll be down another fool!”)
Waiting for it. Waiting for it.

Then the call, “Staaand. DOWN.”

Morning. Each morning: cold water tea and the bouquet of shit, of all things redolent of the body, life steeped in piss and blood. Trench life, a heady marinade of rotted corpse brewed in No Man’s Land.

“It’s
between
,” Welly said. He was peeking with Munger through the sniper’s loop toward the German lines. “
Between
is what that is,” he whispered, looking at the sea of bloodied khaki that stretched from here to there. “No shelter, no trench, just holes and holes and holes blown in holes.”

Bill peeked. Some khaki bits moved but never for long. Sometimes the bodies were blown and buried by artillery, then resurrected from the muck and water-filled holes, their parts pounded, mixed and buried again by the shells. Over it all a spreading mist of night and death, gassy, gangrenous, heaving or jostled by amyl nitrate and steel. Here and there, tiny sparks of life flickered, or here and there they screamed. There was that. Since One July, screams licked day and night. The screams were of men and (he still had to laugh) horses. Horses! Mud-drowned horses. The cavalry, up for one last charge,
for the old century’s sake, don’tchaknow?
Haig’s urge, “Soften the Hun with HE and steel, pound ’em week upon week, then a steady walk ’cross the green to the German’s lines. Who’d survive that barrage, eh? Punt a football, why don’t you lads? A prize to the first goal in Otto’s trench, eh. And, oh yes, let’s have horses. Big push, eh? Cavalry to drive through the hole, enfilade the Hun and crush him, what?”

So: there remained a moaning, seething carpet of pounded khaki and horse bodies dusted pale, yes, and Munger (the peeker at the loop), Munger among them, he and others, Riley and others, others by the thousands all in a few minutes chopped, churned, and added to the pot, stirred with mustard gas, and phosgene spice. Then sprinkled with the hopeless hope of quicklime—lime to dissolve it all, wash all away, but lime left to lay and fly, white and drifting in any breeze.

At night, tucked below the trench lip, night shone green in the downfall swinging brightness of the Very pistol’s flares descending like God-rays through drifting powdered bone, gas, and dust.

Old Bill remembered: the eleventh hour of 11/11, 1918. He remembered that other boat. How he had a drink with Welly on that boat back then… Going home to Blighty.

Now, thirteen years on, he’d come across the Channel again (like he said he’d never), unarmed, a fiver in his pocket. He squinted at the water washing the rusting prow.
Blackout drill?
Years ago. Tonight? Boat lights laughed across the black water.
Silent drill?
The band played on the promenade tonight. Tonight, the boat danced, shameless splashing, shining bright, cutting through moon and stars. There was music and light, men and women danced, whites and wogs, Frog and Hun, Brit and Black (he stared at African faces sweating in the white and blue and red lights).

All them muddled together in jazz and night, Welly. Crikey, what a world we made!

No U-boats below reached out. Not now. He knew that much.
What U-boats there are, are drowned down there. And if they wait, they wait in the dark, alone forever, torpedoes rusting with the wait.
But the boats? Unmoving, dead, the boats.
The crews?
Ah, the crews in the dark, in the dead drowned boats?
Them? Who knew? Who knew?
He did not, that was one thing certain.

Old Bill blinked. So long. Thirteen years on. The water beneath them? So much of it. So much
below
to this old world; too much
beneath
for any man to see and know. He tried. And couldn’t. He blinked again.

The band had finished. Short numbers. It was on the cheap for this day-trip crossing. A lark for the young who’d never been, echoes and shadows for the widows who came across to wonder. For those among the still-living, those who returned to walk in the sun and seek to find where IT had happened—whatever
IT
was carried: a fragment in the leg, an armless sleeve, a missing mind. All this? Less than a lifetime ago, a few years only. Thirteen, just.

The IT Bill carried: Welly and Bill in the
estament
at… Where was it? What town? Albert? The chantusey (“Oh, weren’t she a piece? Whoo
Parleyvoo
!”) Musky, dark and (“
There
, right there!”) on the stage, (“Two meters away, Crikey! A woman!”) singing. And in tears. Who knew what for?

Later, they waited in the narrow hall behind the piano to have a genteel squat.

“Imagine, Billy lad. A loo!”

A door there was, to close your privacy within. A dozen or two waited in the narrow place. The place was filled with blue smoke and scorched and boiled serge.

Then she burst from the W.C., the chantusey, hands balled, shouts and no more tears. The manager of the
estament
, a big man on Civy Street, old silk and braces, he eases through the waiting line, plunger in hand.

“Lookit. Such a dainty fing.” Welly nudged Bill, pointed at the plunger. “Who’s seen such a fing as that in years?”

There she was, the chantusey, shrieking, fists tensed to fight. They met, manager and woman, she took and held the ground not a foot and a half from Old Bill’s face. Shaking fury, her eyes blown wide and mad, she held up one foot then the other to the manager, her dainty shoes sloshed, sogged with shit, stockings soaked and smeared. French words blew past Old Bill, shrapnel blasts of spit, tabac, whiskey, garlic, tooth decay and other things he didn’t know what.

Old Bill breathed her clothes and her. Her smell was apart from theirs, a thing from another world. Here were their bodies. The familiar: the trenches disinfected. There was she…

Well, apart, she was one with them. She had voice, sweat, piss, shit, passion.

Then he realized, of course, no, she shared nothing. A mere foot and a half from her, he wasn’t there. Not leastways for her. Yet there she was: breath, life, woman. For her, Old Bill, Welly and the rest might as well have been home in Blighty, might well have been dead for all she knew, and her just a foot and a half from him.

A blink: They were hauling their fool selves and a hundred pounds, each, of trench supplies back to the line. On the way, they passed beneath the muzzles of their guns. At intervals of four, each piece—six yards apart and ten miles of them—spit flame angled at the night. Their fires cracked and roared away, rolling down the line. Each gun by numbers, the Gunny Sergeant chanting his count: “If I wasn’t a gunner, I wouldn’t be HERE. Fire now the GUN!” The piece shouted again and again and again as they walked. They walked below, ducking unnecessarily, beneath the elevated mouths.

“You know, Welly,” Old Bill said as they passed beneath the nitrate breath and downfalling thunder.

“No, what?” Welly shouted as the 8-incher clicked and blew another thundering cough to the Hun, five miles out.

“That’s her!” He cocked his head at the gun.

WHOOM the gun said to the night.

“Who?” shouted Welly.