House of the Rising Sun: A Novel (19 page)

“I’d be happy to send off another message,” the telegraph operator said.

“It wouldn’t do any good. She’s a union woman. She moves around a lot. I’ll try again directly.”

The telegrapher nodded to show he understood. “It’s a mighty nice day, isn’t it?”

Hackberry didn’t go home. Instead, he rode into the country, out where the train tracks followed the river through limestone bluffs and cottonwoods whose leaves trembled with the thinness of rice paper. He tethered his horse and lay down in the shade of the trees, in the coolness of the wind off the water, in the moldy smell of leaves and night damp that never dried out during the day. It was a fine spot for a rest, to close one’s eyes and let go of the world and abide by the rules of mortality; in effect, to let the pull of the earth have its way, if only for a short while.

He fell asleep and awoke in the gloaming of the day, the air dense, like the smell of heavy stone prized from a riverbed or the smell of a cave crusted with lichen and guano and strung with pools of water. At first he didn’t remember where he was; then he saw the train wobbling around the bend, its passenger cars fully lighted, not unlike an ancient lamplit boat crossing a dark lake. He could see the figures inside the passenger car clearly: a conductor in a stiff cap and buttoned-down uniform similar to that of a ship’s captain; a teenage girl who seemed to smile from the window; a nun wearing a wimple and gauzy black veils that accentuated the pallor of her skin; a man in a plug hat with buckteeth and greasy hair that was the color and texture of rope, all of them moving irrevocably down the track into hills whose lines were dissolving into nightfall.

What was the destination of all those people? Why did he have the feeling their journey was a statement about his own life? He got to his feet unsteadily and mounted his horse as though drunk. The evening star was rising, like a beacon to mankind, but it brought him little comfort. Was there any doubt why men killed one another? Not in his opinion. It was easier to die in hot blood than to watch your death take place incrementally, a day or a section of railroad track at a time.

When he arrived at his house, Maggie was waiting for him in the doorway. “I was worried,” she said.

“You thought I was in the saloon?”

“You could have been hurt, or worse. How was I to know? I care about you, whether you’re aware of that or not.”

He walked past her into the living room. Wet leaves were pasting themselves against the windows. He had not slept with Maggie since returning from Colorado. She seemed to read his thoughts.

“Am I your legally wedded or not?”

“You are indeed that,” he said.

“Then treat me in an appropriate fashion.”

“You once said we’re two of a kind. That’s not true.”

“You want to explain that?”

“I’m not deserving of you. You’re a far better person than I am, Maggie. You tolerate the intolerable. You’re a remarkable woman.”

“I think that’s the finest compliment I’ve ever had.”

He put his hat on the rack and rubbed one eye with the back of his wrist, the floor shifting under his feet. “We got anything to eat?”

“I fixed you a steak sandwich and potato salad. Go upstairs. I’ll bring it to you. This time you’d better not go to sleep on me.”

“I won’t,” he said.

“We were meant to be together, Hack. It’s the two of us against the world. We’ll have a grand time of it. I promise.”

W
HEN ISHMAEL WOKE
, the walls of his trench were seeping water and the dawn was colder than it should have been, the sky an unnatural and ubiquitous pale color that had less to do with the rising of the sun than the passing of the night. The terrain was cratered and devoid of greenery or vegetation, glistening with dew and in some places excrement, the root systems of grass and brush and trees long since ground up and pulped and churned by the treads of tanks and wheeled cannons and the boots of men and the hooves of draft animals and marching barrages that exploded holes so deep into the earth, the tons of dirt blown into the air were dry and eclipsed the sun at high noon and robbed men not only of their identities but their shadows as well.

Except for their uniforms, the men of color Ishmael commanded could have been mistaken for the French Zouaves and other colonials on their flank. Most of them were asleep, wrapped in their blankets or greatcoats, some with their rifles and packs on the fire steps that ascended to the top of the trench. Their Adrian helmets were strapped under their chins, their putties stiff with mud, their faces soft inside dreams, their arms crossed peacefully on their chests. They made him think of sleeping buffaloes, humped up against one another, each trying to avoid the telephone lines and pools of dirty water strung through the bottom of the trench and the constant ooze from the basketlike weave of sticks holding the trench wall in place. In the soup of animal and human feces and the offal of war, they made him think of children, in the best possible way. In moments such as these, he tried to suppress his affection for them, lest he become too attached.

Most of them were former National Guardsmen from New York and in peacetime had been porters and draymen and scullions and hod carriers and janitors. They loved their uniforms and marching on parade and seldom complained about the food or verbal abuse from white soldiers. They loved the army in spite of the fact that the army and the country sometimes did not love them. Their courage under fire left Ishmael in dismay and unable to explain how men could continue to give so much when they had been given so little.

The third time he was about to go over the top, he said a prayer that became his mantra whenever his mind drifted into thoughts about mortality and the folly and madness and grandeur of war:
Dear Lord, if this is to be my eternal resting place, let me be guarded by these black angels, because there are none more brave and loving in your kingdom.

He gazed through a periscope that gave on to an immense stretch of moonscape chained with flooded shell holes and barbed wire that was half submerged in mud six inches deep that never dried out. In the distance he could hear the dull knocking of a Maxim, similar to the sound of an obnoxious drunk who taps a bony knuckle on a locked door after he has been expelled from a party. The fog from the river was white on the ground, puffing like cotton on the floor of a gin, shiny on the tangles of wire, sometimes breaking apart in the breeze and exposing a booted foot or a skeletal hand or a face with skin as dry and tight as a lampshade protruding from the soggy imprint of a tank tread.

“We going this morning, Captain?” a voice behind him said.

Ishmael lowered the periscope. It was Corporal Amidee Labiche, a transplant from Louisiana who had moved his family to the Five Points area in New York.

“Hard to tell,” Ishmael said. “Have you eaten yet?”

“No, suh.”

“It’d be a good idea.”

Labiche’s greatcoat was buttoned at the throat. He had a small head and big eyes and gold skin dotted with moles that resembled bugs or drops of mud. “Why’s it cold, Captain? It’s summer. It ain’t supposed to be cold, no.”

“We’re not far from the river. The clouds are low, and the heat from the sun doesn’t get through.”

“It ain’t natural, suh. Nothing about this place is natural. We’re going, ain’t we?”

High overhead, Ishmael saw three British planes headed toward the east, straining against the wind, their engines barely audible. “Most likely,” he said.

“I wrote a letter to my wife and daughter. I’d like you to keep it for me.”

“You’re going to come through fine. You’ll mail it later yourself.”

“I’d feel better if you kept my letter, Captain.”

Ishmael placed his hand on Labiche’s shoulder and smiled. “Listen to me,” he said. “You’ve been over the top six times. You’re going to make it. The Germans are through and they know it.”

“I feel like somebody struck a match on the inside of my stomach. I never felt this way.”

“Fix us some coffee, Corporal.”

Labiche breathed through his mouth as though catching his breath. “What time we going, suh?”

“Who knows? Maybe after the planes come back. Maybe the Huns will throw it in.”

“I don’t know why I cain’t get warm, suh.”

Ishmael tapped him on the chest with a fist. “See the light in the east? It’s going to be a grand day.”

“Yes, suh.”

“Now, let’s be about it. Let’s show them what the Harlem Hellfighters can do.”

“It ain’t supposed to be cold. That’s what I cain’t figure. That’s all I was saying.”

“Start getting them up.”

“The letter is in my back pocket, suh.”

Ishmael went to his dugout, one whose walls were held in place by sandbags and planks from a barn, whose only light came from a candle that burned inside a tin can. He opened the leather case in which he kept his notebook, his stationery, a calendar on which he marked off the days, a copy of
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
, and letters from his mother. In the same leather case, he had placed a letter that he had just received and for which he had no adequate response or means of dealing with, as if he’d discovered the return of a lump a surgeon had removed from his body. It was dated June 3, 1918, and began with the words “Dear son.” Those two words had not only drained his heart but filled him with a sick sensation for which he didn’t have a name. It wasn’t revulsion or anger; nor was it the loss and abandonment that had characterized much of his childhood as he and his mother moved from one mining town or logging camp to the next. The sickness he felt was like a cloud of mosquitoes feeding on his heart. The only word for it was fear, but it was not of an ordinary kind. It had no face. He feared not only that the words written on the paper were full of deceit but that he would fall prey to them and be forced back into the past and become once again the little boy who believed his father would keep his word and return home to his family.

Ishmael flattened the letter on the table and continued to read his father’s words, like a man determined to overcome a seduction or undo the devices of an enemy.

I wrote several times but learned only recently that you were commanding a different unit than the one you led in Mexico. I went down there to find you and got myself captured and treated pretty roughly by a few of Pancho Villa’s boys, although I can’t blame them considering the damage we did to the poor dumb bastards we always seem to pick on. The irony is I wandered into a straddle house where some of your men were hanged and others ambushed. I made it back to Texas carrying a religious artifact I think someone would like returned to him, but that’s another story. The point is, I didn’t find my little chap.

I let you down. I had telegraphed your mom about getting back together, but I never heard from her again and assumed she had said good riddance, for which I don’t blame her. My letters to her were returned marked addressee unknown. I have never stopped thinking about either of you. My wife Maggie divorced me and took half my property and lives as a respectable and prosperous woman in San Antonio, although I suspect she has her hand in the whorehouses there. You and your mother have every right to bear enmity toward me, but I would love to have the chance to see you both again.

Tell me where you are and I’ll be there, whether you are in France or Belgium or Germany or the United States. In my own mind, I’m still your Big Bud and you’re my little chap and your mother is my darling companion. I realize that’s a mighty big presumption on my part.

Your father,

Big Bud

Ishmael rolled the piece of stationery into a cone, touching the tip of it to the candle flame, and watched it burn. Then he blew out the candle and rose from the table and put on his steel helmet and attached the lanyard to the ring on the butt of his .45-caliber double-action revolver and stepped out the doorway into the trench, just as he heard the three observation planes fly back over Allied lines toward the rear, the flak from German anti-aircraft hanging harmlessly behind them against a porcelain-blue sky.

B
UT THE ORDER
to go did not come. Not that morning nor that afternoon or evening. At nightfall, the batteries of French 75s began slamming doors, each cannon firing a minimum of fifteen gas and explosive shells a minute, blowing up the enemy’s wire, knocking the trenches to pieces, the explosions flickering miles behind German lines, where an occasional shell struck a fuel depot or a field hospital or ambulances parked in a woods or by luck landed in the midst of a reserve unit, blinding and maiming and dismembering, diluting its spirit before it ever moved into the line.

At 0500 the next morning the guns went silent. The stillness was so pervasive and numbing, Ishmael felt he had gone deaf; he thought about Quasimodo swinging on the giant cast-iron bells in the tower, delighted to hear the only sounds available to him, the same ones that had destroyed his eardrums.

A flare popped in the sky, briefly illuminating the greasy shine on the surface of the flooded shell holes, the greenish uniforms and bloated bodies of German sappers who had been caught in their own wire and cut to pieces by Lewis guns, a disemboweled horse whose eyes were as bright as glass. Then the flare died, and the shadows of the blasted trees and corkscrew pickets and timber posts anchoring the coils of wire dissolved into the darkness.