Flanders (23 page)

A startling cuss for him. He’d dropped the lemon rind, and now set about salvaging it from the floor’s muck.

There was a vacancy where Foy should have been, a place where the too-silent Calvert sat now. I exchanged another glance with Pickering, the unspoken language that all originals know. My shrug was,
At least he’s not crying.

Pickering’s ironic smile meant,
Not yet.

A long, seemingly endless whistle, descending the scale. The whizzbang struck somewhere down the trench. Someone far away started screaming for the medics.

The kettle screamed, too. I flinched, then laughed at myself. You get used to it, Bobby. Folks die with the shelling, one and two at a time: a parsimony of war. I remember how scared I used to be of artillery, and I have to wonder if the barrage was really so bad the night McPhearson got it. But seems like I can remember the dumb, inescapable blows of 8.5’s coming as fast as windmilling fists, loud as freight trains. Heavy shelling is like an act of God, Bobby. They call it “hate.” And the real hate, the lunatic mad-God hate, kills in squads, in platoons, in companies. I remember the endless storms of 8.5’s. I remember the Boche that we found huddled together in dugouts, stunned to death by our barrage. Compared to that kind of hate, what we were living through was heavenly dislike.

Calvert finally spoke up, and his voice sounded steady enough. “Likes me tea plain, thanks.”

Marrs poured the water into an old biscuit tin, wrapped a field towel around it for a cozy. Another close strike. One of the sandbags on the south wall burst. Black dirt avalanched, burying Pickering’s haversack.

Marrs caught our biscuit tin before it could topple. “Bought us a real teapot a month back,” he said apologetically to Calvert. “But it broke, didn’t it.”

“Considerate old Boche.” Pickering ignored his buried haversack. He lit up a Woodbine, offered the pack around. “They break our teapot, but give us time between shells to ...”

A blast from a whizzbang left him mouthing his last word, left my ears ringing. I dug my fingertip in my ear and shook my head to clear it. The next sound I was able to hear was Pickering’s laughter. “Talk,” he said. “They give us time between shells to talk.”

Three fast ones in succession that left me in a cold sweat. I licked my lips and listened, but the Boche settled down into their slow rhythm again.

“Teatime, gentlemen.” Marrs unwrapped the tin with a flourish and poured.

Calvert took his first sip and spewed it. Marrs got a spray of tea full in the face. His eyes went as wide as eggs.

“Sod all!” Calvert shouted. “Bleeding sugar! There’s bleeding sugar in ’ere!”

“Well, it comes together, now, doesn’t it?” Marrs was saying. “The tea and the sugar. Comes packaged. Can’t pick it apart.”

But Calvert’s polite facade had cracked; no explanation would mend it. “Bleeding army! Effing, bleeding war! They puts the effing, bleeding sugar in our effing bloody tea? An’ wifout asking? Them bastards! What if we don’t likes it, then? They ever bleeding stop and think about that?”

Pickering and me nearly split a gut laughing. No doubt about it. Calvert’s going to work out just fine.

Travis Lee

* * *

AUGUST 31, THE REST AREA

Dear Bobby,

Yesterday Riddell asked permission for all of us to visit Foy. There, just outside the mess tent, Blackhall looked from Riddell to Pickering, from Marrs to me. It was my eyes he lingered on. He owes me. He knows I never told anyone about that beating. But just so I remember that he has the upper hand, he keeps riding me and riding me about my drinking. The asshole. He knows as well as I do that if I ever had a problem, I sure don’t have it now.

Still, he can’t help but put a dig in once in a while. “Long as you sees Stanhope ’ere keeps his nose out of the bottle.”

Then it was salute-the-shit and a chorus of Thank-you-sirs. “Back on time, now. Won’t have yer loitering.”

A click of heels—my uncarved-on, uncomfortable boots. Peckerwood Blackhall wouldn’t have it any other way. We got out of there quick as we could, left the rest of the boys to their forever football game.

The breeze was still warm, but walking the road I could see that summer was ending. Autumn comes on different here, Bobby. It’s like life just thrives so hard in the hedgerows, on the canal banks, in the deep woods, that it wears itself out. I can see it happening around me: stalks gone thick and woody that used to be moist and translucent green. Flowers have used themselves up into seed. Nature’s like an aging woman, sucked dry by childbearing, gone thick around the middle and knobby-fingered.

On the way, Pickering and Marrs pushed and slapped at each other like a couple of kids. Riddell would stop every so often to collect one of his weeds. It was a fine afternoon, Bobby, with clouds towering like white marble fortresses and elfin sun rays slanting through the trees.

We scared ourselves up a lark by the side of the road. It flew toward the dark ceiling of branches. Frenzied, trapped, it made its wild and flapping way down the lane until it was free. Beyond the trees, the bird forgot its panic. Cheerful now, it launched itself toward the radiant clouds, singing.

“ ‘We look before and after,’ ” I quoted softly. “ ‘And pine for what is not.’ ”

The three of them stared.

“Shelley,” I explained. “He said that no matter how contented humans are sometimes, bad memories hang around. The future’s always worrying at us, too. We just can’t ever be as happy as that damned lark.”

They stood in the road, a trio of blank-faced sheep.

“Oh, fucking goddamn never mind,” I said.

The moment, if it had ever been, was over. Pickering mock-punched Marrs. Marrs dodged and slapped back. Riddell stepped off the path to pick a weed. I wondered where Miller was and what he was doing.

We stopped at a little arched bridge over a canal and stared down into the dark water for a while. I thought of Coleridge, of Xanadu and its sunless sea. Then of Poe’s morbid ghosties and how old Edgar Allan would have been drawn to my dreams’ cypress-dark.

“Think I could thump meself up a fish?” Marrs let a pebble drop. It sank into the black water, leaving dark concentric ripples in its wake.

Pickering said, “Gas him. That’d be faster. Go ahead, Marrs. Give him one of your famous farts.”

Pickering held his throat and pretended to choke. Marrs punched him lightly in the arm. They slapped each other for a while.

We walked on. The yellow flowers were gone from the meadows, but wild ducks floated a nearby canal. Spotted cows nosed under wire fences, in a search for the forbidden. I thought of the tumbledown hut, of Dunston-Smith and Miller. Did they talk poetry there? The Holsteins and me—pining for what is not.

Then Marrs started singing. His voice was as pure as a flute, so high that only the top branches could catch it. His voice dazed me. His Latin came so easy. How could something that extraordinary come out of such an unexceptional man? And the song, Bobby. God. That song. If there was ever an anthem for my graveyard, he was singing it.

“What on earth are you bawling about there, Marrs?” Pickering asked.

I could have knocked him down.

“Taverner’s ‘Magnificat.’ I was a choir boy, wasn’t I.”

Pickering huffed. “No. I meant what were the words you were mouthing? I couldn’t understand the bleeding words.”

“Well, that’s ’cause it’s Latin, then.” All in a flood, he said, “ ‘
Magnificat anima mea Dominum. Et exsultavit spiritus meus in Deo salutari meo
...’ ”

How could he do that? How could he remember the words so well, and say them so quick and so matter of fact? It was too fast for me to follow, still I knew the prayer was magic—an incantation for the lips of marble angels.

Pickering’s “Ye-e-es” teetered on the edge of aggravation. “All very well and good, Marrs, but what does it
mean?”

“Well, the fathers don’t tell us
that,
now does they.”

“Sing it again,” I said.

Pickering rolled his eyes.

“Please,” I said. “Sing it again.”

Marrs opened his mouth. Song poured out of his small, ordinary body. I dropped back a few paces and walked behind them to hide the tears he brought to my eyes.

I should have saved them for the C.C.S. aid station, maybe. Easier to get choked up over beauty, though, than it is ugliness. And that hospital was an ugly place.

You could hear the wounded moaning long before we ever got there. They were lying in the grass around the portable buildings. Men, towels over their eyes, were sitting dumbfounded and gasping in the road. We picked our way around dead still on their stretchers, left where they were dropped when it was seen they were without hope.

And there wasn’t much hope, Bobby. In the yard, the freshly wounded; inside, men were puffed grotesque with rot: fingers the size of pickles, arms and legs like blood-sausage balloons. God, it stank. The air was thick with the sweet-sick stench of spoiled meat. I wondered if those boys knew they were death-bound, or if they were still hoping.

Riddell stopped a doctor to ask directions. Marrs’s face had gone pasty. Pickering kept looking at the ceiling. I tried the best I could to hold my breath, tried not to meet any of the bedridden’s eyes. Then I saw a familiar figure in a corner. O’Shaughnessy was comforting the dying.

“This way,” Riddell said.

We hurried after him, escaped past a canvas building and barrels piled high with bloody pus-stained gauze to another cheap canvas-and-wood barracks, one filled with the drowning-man sounds of the gas victims. That’s where we found Foy.

He was sitting up on pillows. His arms were raw and oozing. He’d crusted his sheets, and in places they were stuck to him. His eyes were swollen nearly shut, dripping and thick with pus. It looked like he was crying amber.

“ ’Ello there, Foy,” Riddell said gently. He went up to the bed when none of the rest of us would.

Foy kind of tilted his head funny, squinting sideways at Riddell. He whispered something, I think. At least his cracked, swollen lips moved, and bleeding fissures opened. Jesus. He couldn’t be hurt that bad. It was just a little sniff of gas. He’d got his mask on in time.

“You’re right, Foy. ’Course I brought the others.” How could Sergeant understand that dry-leaf whisper? How did he have the heart to smile? Riddell turned and pointed to where we stood in the safety of the aisle. “See, lad? Brought you Pickering and Marrs and old Stanhope, too.”

I looked away. Toward the back wall, yellow-blistered men were strapped to their beds, trying their damnedest to scream. Nothing came out of the wide dark of their mouths but hisses.

“Brung you a comfrey poultice,” Riddell was saying. He took a paper packet from his uniform blouse. “An’ horehound and licorice for your cough.”

I swallowed hard to force my unruly laughter down.

“No, no, it’s all right, lad. Needn’t try to speak. We’ll do the speaking, won’t we?” Riddell looked at us, warning in his eyes.

Pickering said in a wild, bright voice, “Got yourself a Blighty!”

The little joke went through me. Foy’s grunting pain made me shiver. He was trying to smile. The effort cracked his skin apart again.
Don’t,
I wanted to tell him.
Don’t you dare. Don’t you go smiling at Pickering’s lousy jokes.

Marrs’s turn. The best he could manage was a nod and a wave.

“We miss you,” I told Foy.

Pickering looked at me in surprise.

“We got us a new guy, name of Calvert. He’s nice, I guess, but I miss you. I thought you should know that.”

Pickering let out a high, insane giggle. “Long as he doesn’t fart in the dugout, like Marrs.”

Then Marrs asked the unintentionally cruel question: “When are you coming back, then?”

What was left of Foy’s mouth moved. His throat must have been all blisters too. I couldn’t hear what he was trying so hard to say.

Riddell didn’t either. He bent down. “What is it, lad?”

It was a stupid question that Marrs had asked; and the answer cost too much. Foy’s struggle made me look away. In the corner hissing men were lashed tight to their beds, their raw, blistered tongues protruding. I looked away quick, and that’s when I saw them.

They were just standing there, Bobby. Not pale like you’d expect, but hazy all the same, like they didn’t have as much stuffing as the living. God. There were so many. There must have been more than a company, shoulder to shoulder. A silent parade of dead men.

A shock wave of despair went through me. Not my despair, but theirs. I felt their loneliness. Their confusion. Felt the combined fear of over two hundred strong. And through that attack of emotion came a barrage of other people’s memories, too—hand-me-downs, all sepia and faded: snatches of nursery rhymes I’d never known, a fierce mother-bond at the sight of a woman I’d never seen. Dozens of little boys and little girls, pictures of my children, each and every one of them a stranger. Grimy English streets and smoke-filled pubs. Wide sleet-spattered moors. Trout fishing with a father who loved me.