Remember Ben Clayton (31 page)

“I know you’re angry with us,” she said. “You should be. We had no right to come here.”

She tried to look him in the eyes but his face was averted again.

“You look pretty cold,” he said. “I’ve been here long enough I’m used to it, but you ought not to stand out here in the wind at night if you’re not.”

“Are you inviting me in?”

The question seemed to startle him. He didn’t know what to do other than open the door to his hut for her.

“Don’t go more than about a couple feet,” he told her as she entered the dark room. “You’re likely to bump into something.”

He closed the door and brushed past her and lit a kerosene lamp. He opened the stove and threw a few more scraps of lumber onto the coals that were already glowing there. The room was warm and mostly bare: a cot to sleep on, a patched-up wooden chair to sit on, a few planks of wood to serve as shelves. Tacked to the wall was a wrinkled photo of a stern-looking couple in Sunday clothes staring at the camera lens as if it was something they were trying to identify.

“Are those your parents?”

“Yes ma’am. I carried that in my wallet all the way from Camp Bowie. Glad I did, ’cause they’re gone now. Don’t know if I told you that.”

“Yes, you did. I’m sorry.”

“I had a picture of my brother too but I lost that somewhere along the way.”

She sat down on the chair while he remained standing against the wall.

“What was your brother’s name?”

“Franklin. We called him Little Frank, though. I’d offer you some coffee or something to drink but I don’t have any.”

“That’s all right. I just wanted to talk to you. My father and I have both been very forward, coming here when you asked us not to. And I’m afraid he was rude to you tonight.”

“I don’t think he meant to be.”

“It’s just that this statue has gotten under his skin. I’m worried about him. I’m worried about what will happen to him if he doesn’t complete it.”

“Looks like it’s got under your skin too,” Arthur said.

“You’re right. It has.”

She looked once again around the tiny bare room. The ceiling was low, so low that Arthur’s head almost touched it. A toothbrush in a glass, a can of tooth powder, a pitcher for washing, a trunk at the foot of his cot that held his clothes, that plaintive crumpled picture of his parents, posed so sternly in life and now dead: the room was as empty as the future he seemed to be expecting. He was so heartrendingly solitary and self-sufficient.

“Aren’t you very unhappy here?” she asked him.

“Not any unhappier than I’d be anywhere else. I like it here pretty much.”

“Turn your face to me, please.”

He did as instructed, still enough of a child to respond automatically to a teacher’s tone.

She stared at him deliberately. She knew it made him anxious but she did it anyway.

“There’s nothing you have to hide from me,” she said. “I’m your friend, at least I think I am. If you still want me to be.”

“Yes ma’am, I do.”

“Maureen.”

“I keep forgetting to say that.”

She laughed and stood up and tightened her scarf around the neck of her coat. He opened the door for her and escorted her back down the street to the
mairie
.

“The place where Ben died ain’t but a few miles from here. You tell your dad that if he wants me to I’ll take the two of you over there tomorrow and show you what that fight was like and what happened. I don’t know how that would help him with the statue but if it would I’m happy to do it.”

“It wouldn’t be hard for you?”

“Doesn’t matter. You talk to your dad and tell him I’ll meet up with you right after breakfast.”

TWENTY-NINE

T
he gusting wind had swept itself away during the night. The sun was out, presiding over a day of brilliant cold. It was seven in the morning and already the noise of hammering was echoing all over Somme-Py, everyone impatient to rebuild their homes and their village and for the world to return to some semblance of its former reality. Arthur had grown to love the sound, a call to industry as solemn and stirring as the ringing of a church bell.

He shaved at the basin under the glassless window of the
abris
, the crude shutters open, the cold pouring in. He had no mirror. The remaining skin on the left side of his face had been stretched and reconfigured during his surgeries and his beard grew differently there now, like the grass around a stock tank. He shaved by touch. He had not looked at his face on purpose since he had been wounded and did not intend to. Every once in a while, passing a barrel full of water or a window sitting on the ground ready to be framed into one of the new wooden buildings, he would catch an accidental reflection and it would unnerve him for days. The gaping nothingness he saw was even worse than the picture he had constructed in his imagination. He knew it would be better to have a mirror after all, to confront himself with his appearance every morning so there would be no more danger of being taken by surprise. He knew it would be better but he was a long way from finding the strength to do it.

He finished shaving and got dressed and sat down on his cot to eat a piece of bread and sip some of the weak American cocoa that had come in the aid packages. It was during his solitary breakfasts that he gave himself permission to think. If he got the thinking over with before he set out for work he could tell himself that any meddlesome thoughts that came to him during the long hours of the day would just have to wait until the morning. It worked more or less. Sometimes he assigned himself a topic and mostly the topic was painful. He had to remember his parents and his little brother. He had to remember his childhood and the life he had lived in Ranger. It would be easier to let himself forget about all of that, but he knew it wouldn’t be right. And sometimes when he bore in on something that he thought was going to be painful it turned out not to be. One morning he sat there thinking he ought to remember the taste of what his mother had called dream bars. They were a sort of cookie with a thick sugary crust and chopped nuts in the middle and shredded coconut on top. Remembering the taste of something he would never taste again had started out as an exercise in punishing himself, but it hadn’t turned out that way. It ended up that the dream bars felt more like something he’d recovered than something he’d lost.

Today the topic was Ben, since he’d offered to take the Gilheaneys over to Saint-Étienne and show them the place his friend had died. So he sat there on his cot drinking his cocoa and thinking of him and Ben on the
Lenape
. They had both gotten seasick right away. Almost everybody had, crammed in the hold of the troopship with hardly any air to breathe and no space to move, the bunks four-deep, hanging from an endless three-dimensional maze of iron pipes. They didn’t eat anything or get out of their bunks for two days, but one night they were showing a Fatty Arbuckle picture on deck and Ben said he was going up to see it even if it killed him. Somehow Arthur managed to follow him up the ladder. When they got up to the deck they vomited over the side and then watched the picture, an eerie square of movement that looked like it had been scissored out of the black mid-ocean sky. There was no orchestra, but after a time the surge of the water against the ship’s bow seemed to accompany the action of the story and to add emphasis to the laughter of the seasick audience. The open air made him and Ben feel so much better that they hid themselves behind a coal cart and slept on deck. They woke just at dawn. There was no wind and no noise except for the rhythmic shushing of the ship ploughing endlessly forward. They could see the whole convoy, the transports and subchasers spread out over the ocean like playing tokens in some board game as vast as the world itself.

They were weak from hunger but not sick anymore and it felt like they had woken into a different life. That was the morning that Ben told him about his father, how he’d been taken by Indians when he was a boy and how he’d missed out on a good part of his life because of it, and how he’d just turned meaner and more confused and more demanding the older he’d got. A few weeks before the order came down at Camp Bowie to strike tents, he and his father had gotten into a fight over Ben’s aunt wanting to pray over him in the Indian way. The old man could have gone up to Fort Worth and visited Ben and apologized and said good-bye but he never did. He sent the housekeeper, George’s Mary, instead. Nobody knew exactly when the Arrowheads were supposed to leave for the train station but it was common knowledge it would be soon. Ben told Arthur that if you didn’t go to see your son when he was about to ship out it was pretty clear you didn’t want to, so as far as he was concerned his dad could rot in hell. He had tears in his eyes when he said it. It was the only time Arthur had ever seen Ben cry, the only time he’d ever seemed lonely or lost.

HE FINISHED
his breakfast and walked down to the
mairie
. Mr. Gilheaney was standing outside drinking coffee and staring off toward the direction of Blanc Mont.

“Good morning,” he said to Arthur. “Maureen tells me you’ve offered to show us the battlefield.”

“Yes sir, I’ll show it to you if you want to see it.”

Maureen came out of the
mairie
with her coat buttoned against her neck, pulling on her gloves, her breath steaming into the clear air and her skin flushed with cold. They all shook hands the way French people did in the morning.

“Will we need the car?” the sculptor asked. “Our driver isn’t back yet from Verdun.”

“We don’t need a car if you don’t mind a stout walk. It’s three or four miles from here.”

“Nothing would suit us better than a stout walk.”

Arthur went to find L’Huillier to explain what he was doing. He knew L’Huillier wouldn’t mind, since he had lectured Arthur in the past about his unhealthy and un-French dependency on work, his refusal to uphold civilization by joining with his comrades in their rare days of leisure.

“Of course you must guide our friends,” L’Huillier declared, looking up from the writing desk in his makeshift office. “There can be no question of this. I would go with you myself but there are a hundred letters I must write today.”

Arthur filled up his canteen and bought a baguette from the
boulangerie
truck that made the rounds of the devastated villages twice a week. He put the baguette and some cheese and wine from the Gilheaneys into a pack he’d found near the summit of Blanc Mont where some marine had dropped it in the fighting. Then the three of them set out walking down the dusty trace that had once been the rue de la Chaussée and followed it north out of town.

He wasn’t sure why he’d offered to show the Gilheaneys the place where Ben had died and where his own face had been blown off. He had been over this ground yard by yard in the Service, so it was not like he was returning to it for the first time, not like it was still haunted for him, but that did not make it a place he cared to visit. Maybe he’d made the offer because he’d been so nervous around Maureen Gilheaney and just felt like he’d needed to say something. It had been strange to be alone in the
abris
with her, strange to have her looking at him and talking to him the way she did. She had not been like those two girls from Smith College, straining to pretend that nothing was wrong with him, or like Madame L’Huillier, with her motherly pity. He knew that Maureen felt sorry for him like they did, but there was more to it than that, something she seemed to need from him.

She didn’t look like he thought she would. She had told him in her letters that she was thirty-two, and in his mind he pictured thirty-two as closer to fifty than his own age. She wasn’t beautiful or anything like that. If she had been, he would have been even more nervous around her than he was. But she had some quality that made you feel you ought to be looking at her and listening to her. And as they walked down the road toward what was left of the Bois des Vipères she and her dad were mostly silent, waiting for him to decide when to speak.

Mr. Gilheaney was tall, with long arms and powerful hands and from beneath the brim of his hat he stared out at the cratered fields like a hawk looking for something to kill. He walked a few feet ahead, outstriding Arthur and Maureen without seeming to be in a hurry, every now and then pausing to let them catch up. Sometimes he took out a sketchbook and made some drawings or notes, holding it close to his chest like it was a secret what he was writing, but mostly he just stared at things, taking it all in, turning it all to his own use in a way Arthur could not quite factor out.

“We filled in most of the trenches and a lot of the big shell holes last year,” Arthur told them. “There was a big German trench over here on the left side of the road. This was the front before me and Ben and the rest of the Arrowheads got here. The Germans had machine-gun nests all in these woods and when the marines came down this road to take that hill up there they got shot up pretty bad. They call the hill Blanc Mont, I guess because it snows on it sometimes in the winter. But I’ve never seen it white. It’s always just been dirt-colored.”

The hill rose up before them like a cresting wave, a raw heave of earth, no longer full of twisted metal like when Arthur had first seen it but still riddled with unnatural dips and swells from the uncountable shells that had landed here. The Service had done its best to contour the slope back into something that resembled the work of nature, but it still looked nightmarishly wrong to Arthur. There were no grasses, no crops, just hard, black, poisoned soil.

He told the Gilheaneys that when he had first seen Blanc Mont, on the night of October 7, it had been so clawed apart by shells you couldn’t even recognize it as a hill, you couldn’t get your bearings about whether the land was rising or falling because the ground right at your feet seemed to pitch every which way itself.

They had been at their advanced training camp in Nuisement when the orders had come to roll packs and head for the front. They had stood in line at the scales next to the threshing barn where they had camped, a Percheron horse plodding endlessly nearby on a treadmill. They watched in wonder as the great beast exhausted its pointless life. The scales told Arthur his pack weighed forty kilograms, and it wasn’t until they were halfway to Bar-sur-Aube that Ben told him that forty kilograms was the same as ninety pounds. Arthur told him he wished he hadn’t said that, because just knowing he was carrying that much weight on his back made the pack feel heavier. They were both stupefied with fatigue and by the time they reached the train that was to carry them to Chalons their arms quivered as they handed up their packs to the other men in the forty-and-eight railcar.

At Chalons they were told to leave their pup tents and dress shoes and extra blankets behind and they marched on from there with their packs fifty pounds lighter. Up above them the big German Gotha bombers were flying west—to Paris, Ben guessed. They ate cold meals of canned salmon and canned hash. They heard the shells of the long-range guns roaring and whining above them, and though none of the shells hit nearby they could still feel the earth shake when they landed. No one told them where they were going.

They had marched to a village named Somme-Suippe and then after a rest they moved north. Beyond Somme-Suippe they came to the heart of the war, the fields in every direction no longer fields, no longer anything, just a heaving infinity of shell craters under the gray winter sky. It was like the ocean he and Ben had seen from the deck of the
Lenape
, except that on the ocean they could watch the waves moving as the wind pushed them, they could smell and sense the throbbing life below the surface. This ocean did not move, it was as still as death. The ground had been so wildly uneven that every step they moved forward took four or five more steps of clambering up and down. In some stretches work crews had come ahead of them to build a kind of road across the shell holes, but otherwise they just had to climb in and out of the craters, their light combat packs growing heavier and heavier, the mud caking their boots and weighing them down even more.

Most of the dead had been removed by French burial crews, but once the Arrowheads came across a burial crew that had themselves been killed by a shell before they could make it back. The soupy corpse they had been carrying lay on its back with its eyes gone and its slack skin pulling away from the skull. But the stretcher bearers were newly dead and looked surprised to be so. The three of them were grouped around a splintered tree where they had stopped to take a break when the shrapnel struck them. One of the dead men was sitting up. He held his canteen in one hand and the opposite arm was outstretched and resting on his bent knee, as if he were still talking to the other men and trying to make a point about something.

Arthur didn’t tell Maureen about any of this as he walked along beside her up the slope that led to the long ridgeline summit of Blanc Mont. Her father was ahead of them again, already up to the top, standing with his hands on his hips as he stared off to the west. Maureen stumbled a little on the uneven ground as they climbed. Arthur thought about holding his hand out to her, but she wasn’t helpless or frail and he couldn’t really see himself doing something like that.

“Is that the Reims cathedral?” Mr. Gilheaney called out to Arthur as he and Maureen joined him at the top.

“Yes sir, that’s Reims,” Arthur told him.

“I had no idea we’d be able to see so far.”

“The country here is pretty open. Even more open once so many trees got blown up in the war.”

He joined them in staring across the rolling landscape of the Champagne to the distant cathedral spires on the horizon.