Flanders (47 page)

I pulled him to me, closed his eyes, for that’s what they say to do. I held him, whispered in his ear what the calico girl had taught me: “It’s love.”

Looking up, I saw that the sun was rising. Day was coming on, gray and chill. I heard the machine guns go quiet, the mortars fall silent, until the only noise left was the fragile moans of the wounded.

I closed my eyes and slept, O’Shaughnessy lying close at my side. Instead of walking the graveyard, I walked the corridor of home. Pa was sitting on Ma’s bed, holding the toy in his hands. The silvery afternoon was so still, I could hear the tap of the sash against the window frame and the flap of the lace curtains blowing. I stood in the doorway and watched him a long time, forgiveness plucking at me. I didn’t go in; and when I woke up I saw that the sun was high.

I left O’Shaughnessy, went out to find the wounded, darting shell hole to shell hole, the way I did when I was sharpshooting. I took the first wounded boy I found, a soldier I didn’t know. His collarbone was splintered. One sleeve of his coat had been blasted off him. The bone and gristle of his shoulder joint was poking through.

I seized him by the lapels and pulled him along, ignoring his shrieks, pulled him past boys wounded and crawling, past dying friends begging. I left him only once, even though he pleaded for me not to. I went down in a shell hole and caught Lefleur and Morgan before they drowned.

Morgan was still conscious. He clung to my sleeve. “Crikey, Stanhope. Didn’t think nobody would come.”

Both his legs had been shattered by a shell, so pulverized that he wasn’t even bleeding much. I tied two tourniquets around him, anyway, and settled him higher in the hole. I propped his haversack between him and the waiting water. Then I said, “Somebody’ll be back.”

“Can’t leave me!”

I pried his fingers off, but he seized me again. “Somebody’ll come real soon,” I said.

He clung to me, crying. “Oh, oh, sweet Mother Mary, don’t. You can’t leave me here.”

I tore myself free and left him sobbing. At the top of the hole, I took hold of the boy with the broken collarbone. We went on. It was late afternoon by the time I rested. In the chorus of the wounded, I opened my iron rations and shared it with the soldier I’d chosen to save.

“You’re new, aren’t you? I’ve seen you around. What’s your name?” I asked him.

“Oakes.” Exhaustion had taken him beyond pain to dull-eyed lethargy. “You’re that old soldier Yank. Everyone knows you.”

He ate a little corned beef when I spooned it into his mouth, but he turned his head away when I offered more. There was a grayness to his lips that I hadn’t noticed that morning. Internal bleeding. He’d never make it back.

“Do us a favor,” he said. His voice was weak and seemed to come from a great distance, as if he was already going away. “You take a pinch of that tea and put it on my tongue?”

I did. He sucked the leaves, smiling into the glowering sky. “Sweet,” he said, and I knew that he was dying.

“Sweet,” I agreed.

His eyes were shut but he was still breathing when I had to leave him. The day darkened, and I couldn’t tell if rain was coming or if the sun was going down. I passed Lieutenant Jonathan Call’s body, barely a mark on it, horror in his eyes. I passed a knot of three men together, their splintered bones and mangled limbs joined. A few yards later, I came upon Fowler. He’d been dragging himself home. Something—either a bullet or shrapnel or a flying shard of bone—had struck one cheek and exited the other. Most of his teeth were gone. He tried to smile when he saw me.

“Stick your tongue out,” I told him. When he did, I told him his tongue was torn to hell, but it was still attached. “You’ll be all right. Got yourself a Blighty.”

Cheerful, he nodded. Blood ran his jaw, trickled his neck. I helped him along until I came to Wren. A small boy; and he’d been sprayed by shrapnel. His back was soaked with blood. I told Fowler that he’d have to manage. I was about to grab Wren when I saw Pickering. He was lying in the open several yards away. His eyes were closed, his face blue-white.

I crawled in a panicked frenzy to him, touched his face. “Pickering! “

He looked up at me, blinked.

“It’s me: Stanhope.”

His voice was faint. “Made that part out.”

Light was fading but we were exposed. Any minute the Boche sniper would start shooting. I grabbed him by the shoulders of his coat and started dragging him to safety. His first scream shocked me. His second scream went on and on.

When we were safe in a shell hole I shushed him. “It’s okay. It’s okay. I’m taking you home now.”

He sighed, closed his eyes, and for a second I thought he was slipping. I wanted to grab him, hold him back. “Rather long walk,” he whispered, “England.”

I opened his coat, saw a plate-sized badge of frozen blood on the front of his hip. I poked my head above the lip of the shell hole, saw Wren sinking into the mud. Another few hours and he’d drown there. Fowler, in his snail’s crawl, was hauling himself inexorably closer to the trenches. I looked down at Pickering. “You’re freezing. We got to get back quick. I’m going to have to drag you.”

His long, droll face twisted. “Stanhope?”

“What is it?”

“It hurts unreasonably, you know.”

I took hold of his coat and pulled. He grunted with pain, squeezed his eyes shut. I told him, “Go ahead and yell, Pickering. Everybody does.”

He was too proud right then, maybe too breathless. Still, by twilight he was openly sobbing. My arms and legs were so tired they trembled. When I came to a good hole, I fell to my knees. We drank from our canteens. I cut open his iron rations and offered him some corned beef.

He wiped his tears away with his sleeve. “That bloody monkey meat?”

“Have the biscuit, then.” I held it to him.

“Attempting to kill me.”

I sucked on an edge of the bread, working some moisture into it. I flipped his coat open, checked his wound again. “Looks like a bullet,” I told him. “Good that it’s frozen.”

“Oh, yes. So effing, flaming lucky.”

“I think you got a Blighty.” A Blighty. That was all.

I made him eat, and was encouraged when he didn’t vomit. We sat in the shell hole and watched dark come on. After the sleet the air smelled fresh, but the mud didn’t gleam. No corpses glowed. The voices in the field fell silent as the dying slipped, one by one, away. I felt liberated, Bobby. Strange, isn’t it? Battle was over. So many dead. Too many wounded to carry. But Pickering and me were alive.

We drank some more from our canteens. He complained that I’d picked the wrong time to dry out. “Could do with a bit of rum, actually,” he told me. “And I’m so dashed tired of the pain. Can’t get the litter here?” His tone was pathetic; his voice faint.

I told him to put his arms around my neck. When I stood up, I staggered. I wasn’t strong enough to carry him. I sank to my knees in the mud, thought for a minute that I’d never be able to pull my feet free, that I’d never again be able to take a step. Still, I struggled out of the shell hole and kept going, weaving like a drunk under the burden. I went, sliding, cussing, sensing our trenches so strong that it was like a searchlight in my face.

In my ear, I heard Pickering’s plaintive “Hurts.”

His grip weakened. I grabbed his hands before he could fall. His fingers were cold. “There once was a man from Texarkana.” We’d dueled limericks from time to time. I waited for the next line, thought it was never coming, then:

“It’s bloody cold.”

I tripped over something, slid, nearly fell. Pickering’s whimper tore at me.

“There once was a man from Texarkana. Come on, Pickering. Think of something.”

“Kept his pecker in his bandanna.”

“And when he was wed.”

Much too soft-voiced. “Chased her from bed.” Abruptly, his head lolled, knocked against my neck. I felt the muscles in his arms, his hands, loosen.

“Pickering?” I kept going. His helmet bumped me. He would have slid from my shoulders if I hadn’t clung to him tight.

“Aw, shit, no. Aw, goddamn.” I kept walking across No Man’s Land until I got tangled in our wire. I called down for a sapper to come cut me out.

Blackhall came running out to meet me. “Stanhope? That you, Stanhope?”

I couldn’t answer. He cut me free, tried to take Pickering. I shoved him away.

“I had to bring somebody back,” I told him.

“All right,” he told me. “All right. Let’s have him in the aid post.”

I handed him down to Calvert, then jumped down myself.

In the light of the lamp I saw how Pickering’s head rolled on his shoulders. His once-droll face was slack and gray and strange.

“Dead, inn’t ’e,” Blackhall said, and I told him to shut up.

“Get the med officer, goddamn you,” I said. “Wake up the fucking medical officer.”

Calvert ran down the trench. I slung Pickering over my shoulder and waded through the half-frozen water. Worthy and Higgens and Dearden saw us coming and stepped out of my way. I’d bury him right, just like I’d promised. Bury him so the rats wouldn’t get his body, so the walls wouldn’t tumble out his bones. I’d make sure he got to the graveyard right enough, and if I didn’t see him there, I’d go back out to No Man’s Land and find him.

The aid station was full, a fetid place of whimpers and carbolic and vomit. I found a cot, laid Pickering down, heard the groaning sigh of his last air being pushed from his lungs.

The doctor took my arm, jerked me away. I stumbled back, yelling, “You bastards! Where’s the goddamned justice?” all the while the medical aides were telling me to shut up.

I saw the doctor cut open Pickering’s coat, slice the uniform away from the wound.

“You shitass! Hey, limey! You hear me?” I shouted at the doctor while his aides fell on me, tumbled me to the floor. “I’ll kill you, you asshole! You and Dunn, too! You another goddamned public school boy? Huh? Sending poor folks out to die.”

The doctor straightened. “Get that man out,” he snapped. “The wounded need their rest.”

They wrestled me to my feet. I was too tired to give them much of a fight. A few feet away, in the quiet glow of the lamp, the doctor was tucking a blanket to Pickering’s chin, and Pickering was blinking sleepily.

“Let me stay,” I gasped. “Please. Please. Just let me stay with him.”

The medical officer evidently forgave my outburst on the spot. He told me Pickering had a shattered hip. A Blighty, just like I’d thought. Who knows? Maybe I’d have made a decent doctor, after all.

They let me sleep on the floor beside him. I held his hand until I heard him snoring, then I went back to No Man’s Land in my dreams.

The place was full of wandering ghosties, bewildered folks without direction. I didn’t see O’Shaughnessy, but Wren caught up with me. He was beaming.

“Leaving in a tick,” he said, and he was as chipper as I’d ever seen him. “Won’t be long now.”

Far away, along the Boche trenches, I saw one solitary and desperate figure running, running; formless and dark as a piece torn out of the night.

LeBlanc didn’t make it.

Travis Lee

* * *

DECEMBER 5, THE RESERVE TRENCHES

Dear Bobby,

The next day dawned cold and brittle. That morning I said goodbye to Pickering before they carried him to the hospital; and that afternoon, the obstinate, indestructible Fowler finally made it back. I thought of the ones I had left in the field, frozen now, their cries silenced.

Riddell made it through. And Calvert, who along with Billings, had saved Rupert Littleton. And Harold Crumb, who had brought back George Day. Miller came in two hours before sunrise after the long night of the raid, exhausted and trembling and dragging Swarthout with him.

I remembered Morgan and wanted to go get him, but Riddell said to wait until nightfall. Sleep dragged me down. It weighted my shoulders, it pushed my body into the blankets. It pressed my eyelids closed. I dreamed of a gravel path in the apricot dusk. Marble angels knelt with their heads bowed, their graceful wings folded. O’Shaughnessy walked beside me, laughing. We passed Wren, happy-faced in his grave, then a comforting surprise: Marrs and Trantham tumbled together like napping children. I stopped to study the sleepers nesting there under the glass, among the flowers.

“Tired lads. I put them to bed,” O’Shaughnessy told me. “Come to find, Travis, the gathering ’twas intended as my job, not yours.”

That was all right. Everything was. I saw Morgan sleeping and knew he hadn’t made it. I told O’Shaughnessy how I had come across Morgan where he was wounded, told how he had begged me to save him. I said it was nice to stop worrying.

He chided, “Ah, but didn’t you know they’d all be cared for?”

The graveyard was quiet except for the birdsong, except for the breeze coursing through the trees with the sound of a far rushing river. I looked into the indigo shadows, saw pale lights glittering. They outlined a tombstone’s carved rose, a cherub’s calm brow.