Good Hope Road: A Novel (42 page)

Gaillard.

He look at me with the one eye that still open. I know at once what he want. I
know
what he askin’ for, without sayin’ one word.

Une bonne mort
. I grip my rifle closer.

‘Don’t be a fool,’ James say shakily. He point at the trench, its mouth open wide in the dark. ‘We carry him there. I’ve had a quick look inside. Two dead Boche, and one wounded. We leave Gaillard there for their medics.’

Gaillard, he make a bubblin’ sound like a man tryin’ to talk underwater. I can’t take my eyes off his face, what left of it.

‘He ain’t goin’ to make it.’

‘You don’t know that. You don’t
know
that. We have to give him a chance. The trench,’ James say again. His voice, it tremblin’.

We shoot him full of morphine, tie tourniquets from what left of our medical kits. We half carry, half drag him down into the trench. Somehow, his musette made it through okay. It drag behind, spillin’ open as we pull him into the trench. A Luger holster, cigarette lighters, spectacle cases, smokin’ tobacco, a knife with a carved handle – all his pickings from Trench Spandau now spillin’ into this one.

There two dead down there, just as James said. The third Boche, he sit with his back to the wall, an arm held against the leakin’ in his stomach.

Gaillard make that bubblin’ sound again. I know what he want.

James squeeze the last of the water from his canteen into what left of Gaillard’s mouth. ‘Courage,’ he say, and his voice shake again. ‘Courage.’

We settle him the best we can before we leave. When I turn at the lip of the trench to look back, he movin’, somehow he
movin’
, tryin’ desperately to crawl after us.

We try to find our way from the torn-up ridge and blasted tree line. Everythin’ look different in retreat. The small hills that rose from the plains this mornin’ been shelled so bad the landscape itself is changed. Everywhere, the dead. I keep hearin’ Gaillard’s voice in my head as we crawl through the long grass.

‘
Une bonne mort
.’

I come to a dead stop. My leg botherin’ me some, but it ain’t the reason I can’t go no further. I rest my cheek against the mud.
Une bonne mort
.

We left him to die in a Boche trench
.

‘Obadaiah,’ James begin, but I shake my head. Turnin’ around, I start crawlin’ fast as I can, back towards the observation trench.

He made it partly up the slope of the trench. Pullin’ hisself after us, inch by inch, with just the one huge arm.

Brother Strong Heart Mighty Oak
.

He lie face down in the mud. The stars, they out now, and I see the wet stain newly spreadin’ over his back.

He was shot. Gaillard, he shot in the back as he try to crawl after us, make it back to the Legion.

The wounded Boche still sittin’ against the wall. There’s a Luger lyin’ by his side. I look at it, puzzled. I know it weren’t on him when we were down here before. Then it strike me: Gaillard’s torn musette, spilled open on the floor of the trench. That Luger, it Gaillard’s, the spoils from Trench Spandau.

Feel like a strange, wakin’ dream as I get down into that trench, real careful around Gaillard’s body. ‘Obadaiah!’ James say urgently from the top. ‘Obadaiah,’ he call again, but there ain’t no stoppin’ now.

I stand before that wounded Boche, and all I can see is that Luger. The Boche, he push it weakly away. His lips move as I bend to pick it up. They cracked and dry and he got to work his tongue around the word.

‘
Erbarmen
,’ the Boche say. His eyes, real tired, wanderin’ from my face to the pistol and back. ‘
Erbarmen
,’ he say again.

I don’t feel a thing as I pull the trigger. A single shot to the head. I lean against the wall, lookin’ down at the body as James climb heavily into the trench.

‘It weren’t a good death. Shot in the back, facin’ away from the enemy.’

James say nothin’. Ain’t never seen him take a thing from the trenches before, but slowly he bend and take the helmet from the Boche.

We make our way out, past Gaillard’s body, and head back for the French lines once more.

Only later, when we at the dressin’ station, all shot up with morphine, that the pieces, they start to come together.

‘What was he sayin’?’ I ask James, without turnin’ around. The Yankee, he awful smart, know all sorts of things. ‘The Boche, what was he sayin’, at the end?’

‘
Erbarmen
.’ His voice real quiet. ‘Mercy. That’s what he was sayin’ – “Mercy”.’

‘Mercy,’ the Boche said. I see his face again in my head, the way he push that Luger aside as if he done, as if he ain’t never goin’ to fire at nothin’ no more.

‘Erbarmen.’

Was he askin’ for mercy, or tryin’ to explain that he gone and killed Gaillard out of mercy? I see his eyes, so tired as they look into mine.

‘
Erbarmen
,’ he say again, tryin’ to get me to understand.

We ordered to wait in the sector a few more weeks after the offensives. They start to bury the dead, so many dead, that for now, all they got for grave markers are empty bottles, stuck neck down in the mud.

An old man sit under a knot of trees, one of the locals, whittlin’ branches into the battlefield crosses that gonna follow. I watch for a long time before I ask.

They all the same, he nod, each cross cut to exactly the same length and width. Whether for our dead or the Boche, the crosses, they made the same.

That Christmas of 1915, a couple of football matches break out here and there between the Allies and the Boche. Orders pass down at once, the generals makin’ sure it brought to a quick end.

‘No fraternising with the enemy this year,’ newspapers on both sides report. The war, they seem to suggest, is on for real.

The war, this endless, bottomless war, the war to end all wars.

Raydon • 1932

asked her to marry me.’

Ellie looked up startled, a half-folded sheet in her hands. ‘What?’

He fidgeted with the edge of the table, suddenly shy. ‘Madeleine. She said yes.’

He’d proposed soon after they’d returned from Washington. The events of the 28th had played over and over in his mind. Their jaunt in the plane, the thrill he’d felt at winging through the sky. Her face, lit with laughter, eyes aglow as she watched him take it all in. The evacuations downtown, and his fear, the bone-chilling fear he’d experienced at the prospect of her coming to harm.

Later that same night, their small group had stood on the bluff in Anacostia, watching the burning camp. All that had been built with so much pride was lost in an instant, lives flipped inside out on the turn of a moment. He remembered looking up, at the three-quarter moon floating overhead. Fire below, ice above, and men, eking out what lives they could in between. Although barely twenty-four, with the prime of his life yet ahead, Jim was suddenly aware of a sobering sense of finiteness. He saw his life unfolding before him not as a wide open sea, but a river, bound by the banks through which it flowed, his years ahead dotted with a precious few interludes of true grace. Fuelled by the defeated faces of the Major, Connor, the other men on the bluff, Jim was seized by a sense of urgency, of the importance of recognising each benediction as it appeared, of taking firm hold before it swept permanently out of reach.

This woman, this particular woman, standing beside him. Of russet hair and ready laughter, a tic in her forehead when she was mad. The small, red mole between her breasts. This sense of belonging he felt, whenever she was near.

Madeleine had slipped her hand into his. Jim gripped it tightly, knowing he never wanted to let go.

A broad grin broke out on Ellie’s face now. ‘Well of course she said yes!’ she exclaimed. ‘She knows what’s good for her, doesn’t she?’ She hesitated. ‘Still, do you think it’s all a bit too soon? You’ve barely known each other three months and—’

‘Feels right, Ellie.’

Her eyes grew moist. Casting aside the laundry, she reached up and kissed him soundly on the forehead. ‘Who’d have thought it? My little Jim poopie-pants, all grown up and about to be married.’

‘Ellie!’ he began indignantly. He paused, studying her face. ‘Are you crying?’

She cleared her throat noisily. ‘Of course not.’

‘You
are
, Ellie.’

‘Am not!’ She turned back to the sheets. ‘When’s the last time you saw me sniffle, Jim Stonebridge?’ she demanded, surreptitiously wiping her eyes.

‘About two seconds ago.’ He came up behind her and awkwardly put his arms around her.

Ellie started to tear up again, her glasses getting so fogged that she had to take them off and wipe them clean on her apron. ‘Now see what you made me do.’ She laughed, and patted his cheek. ‘Have you told the Major?’

The Major had withdrawn into some dark and lonely place. He’d collapsed into his bed upon their return from Anacostia, and not stirred until well after noon the next day. He rose only briefly, before retreating beneath the covers again. For days he drifted in and out of sleep. He dreamed no dreams, there were no night sweats, just a bleak emptiness. Jim came upstairs time and again to check on him; each time the Major heard him on the stairs, he turned away and closed his eyes once more.

‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Jim wanted to say to his father as he stood worriedly at the entrance to his bedroom. ‘You did everything you could.’

The words did not come, remaining unspoken as had so many between them over the years. Jim knew instinctively that the unexpected camaraderie they’d shared in Washington was gone, the relationship between father and son falling once more into the patterns of old, conforming to the silences that webbed the contours of this house and the striped shadows of the barn. All the same, there lay a new understanding between them, a fragile, delicate thing, but there nonetheless, taking the brittle edge off their bond. The wariness that Jim had always felt around his father, as if he were walking on eggshells, was gone, and in its place, was a new-found empathy.

When finally the Major found it within himself to shake off his torpor, he’d aged, seemingly overnight. It had been early, the house thankfully silent as he’d limped haltingly downstairs. The light still so paltry that he could see nothing reflected in the black mirror, its glass a dark sheen against the wall.

Was it Obadaiah he’d seen in the camp, he wondered again. Just that one time, by the boxing ring, then he was gone. Or had he imagined it?

The Major searched in the mirror for answers. He shuffled closer, and now his image emerged from its centre, pale and attenuated. He looked at his reflection, filled with revulsion for the indistinct figure in the glass, a man with no more substance than a ghost.

Hands trembling, he opened the door of the long-case clock that stood ticking against the wall. He drew out the bottle of whisky hidden there, and twisting open the cap, tilted the bottle to his mouth. The immediate singe of alcohol obliterated the need for thought.

He headed for the orchard. It had rained sometime in the night, the grass wet against his slippers and the hem of his robe. A robin called unseen, clear and fluting. It halted its song at his approach and then called again, after a moment, this time from somewhere to the east, where among the banks of white starred pennyroyals, the Cortlands were beginning to swell rosily.