The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1 (29 page)

IX.

N
O ONE WANTED BURIAL DUTY
but an awful lot of us got it.

Slews of bodies were unobtainable, dangling from low-hanging trees or sunk head-first into hardening mud. Hundreds of carcasses, though, had been dragged behind our line on stretchers and were to receive a quick burial. Yet another trench had been dug, a nice long one even narrower than most, and after the removal of identifying badges and papers, our compatriots were laid head to feet while the chaplain did his thing. Men wore gas masks against the odor, yet rushed back and forth into the wheat, the only place where one could vomit in peace.

Team A, which included Mouse, was tasked with picking through the clothing of the dead and, if a body was falling apart, securing it inside a tarp. Mouse, spectacles fogged from the heat of spilled innards, had his right hand shoved up a dead man's ass.
Poor Mouse,
thought I,
he's gone batty!
I was wrong; Mouse's courage was something to behold. He extracted from the rotten bowels a swollen rat still clinging to a tube of intestine. Mouse took the offending animal by the tail and smashed it against a rock, again and again, and then, after it was dead, forty or fifty times more. This tender scene was scored by cornet; the kid who did our morning reveilles stood at the end of the trench playing “Taps,” his cheeks washed clean with tears.

Team B carried the bodies to the trench and stacked them with as much dignity as possible. These were two-man teams, one fellow at the shoulders (when there were shoulders) and one at the feet (when there were feet). Major Horstmeier approached and, because we were safely behind the front, I saluted. The bandage on his face had come loose and flapped in the wind.

“Private Prefer-Not-To?”

“Yes, sir!”

“I've got you with—well, shit, that won't work. You're weak as a damn stick, aren't you?”

“I'm afraid so, sir!”

“Let's get you a partner with some meat on his bones. Corporal Churchwell!”

My salute fell several inches.

Church jogged over and snapped off a salute much crisper.

“What can I do for you, Skipper, sir?”

“I'm sticking you with Private Thumb-Up-His-Butt. See if you can teach him how to lift a few pounds. I don't want to hear about one single goddamned dropped body, understand?”

“You got it, sir.”

Horstmeier slapped Church on the shoulder and moved along, leaving the two of us in the shadeless sun, alone for the first time since he'd rescued me on the march to Lucy-le-Bocage. I stared at my crusted boots and counted artillery blasts. There had been a time when I'd delighted in staring into the eyes of those who hated me. Dr. Leather, I feared, had chased off that Zebulon Finch for good.

Nevertheless I designed a nice expression of hostility, only to unveil it after Church had taken off for the bodies. I trotted after like a dog, on the way devising a script of biting remarks that I believed
might cut even a legend-in-the-making down to size. Smart dialogue, indeed, but it was for naught. I came upon the noble warrior embracing a blubbering young radio operator and assuring him that all this, too, was part of the Game.

Behind him, I scuffed at some dirt-weeds.

“You.” Church took a body by the shoulders. “You're on legs.”

Weight is concentrated in the upper body; carrying the soldier's lower half required no special physical effort. The ground beneath us, however, was a calamity of throatlike chasms and spiny ridges, and though Church navigated the blasted geography on a backpedal, I was a blundering lumberer, toppling to knee or hip or elbow while still taking care that not a single pinky finger of the dead man grazed the ground.

It slowed our progress, giving Church more time to inhale the stench of decay, more time for his fingers to sink into pulpous flesh, more time for his hatred of me to reach a boil. At last we straddled the wedge-shaped burial trench, Church on the west side, myself on the east. Together we lowered the soldier as far as we could before letting him drop the final two feet. The
whump
of his landing was no different than that of a sack of potatoes.

I was still stooped over the trench when I felt a hand push against the back of my head. My balance pitched. I reached backward to snag the offending hand in hopes of staving off a fall, but it was Church, he'd been the one to do it, and he was too quick for me to grab. I landed atop two corpses. Hard, smooth objects were beneath my hands—exposed bones? Squishy things, too—tongues, eyes? I tried to stand but tangled with a soldier perforated by machine gun, his raw pink flesh studded with embedded black slugs.

Church smirked at me from high above.

“Oops.”

Wan faces of other Marines appeared over the edge. They'd been trained since Quantico to follow Church's lead and on cue they showed me their best disdain. An oppressive wave of self-hatred sealed me to the trench-mud. Go on! Abhor me! Condemn me! Where else does a fiendish divergent like myself belong if not this grisly abyss?

Ah, but do not fill the hole with dirt just yet—for what is this? Zebulon Finch is climbing! Up the west wall, no less, and when Church prods at him with a boot, it is knocked aside with a fist. This is interesting, no? Look how our young renegade, drenched though he is in gore, closes in on his larger antagonist, how he bumps his fair chest into that much broader wall of muscle. Dr. Leather hadn't drained all of Finch's verve, not quite.

“Upset, are you?” taunted I. “That your lemon drops have limited influence?”

“Say what?”

“That these men died and there wasn't a thing even the great Corporal Churchwell could do about it.”

Here they came now, the sycophants, the toadies, the bootlickers, encircling us to protect their daredevil demigod. Church, of course, raised a hand to halt them. No one need fight his battles. From my side vision I saw the Skipper at the rear of the pack, arms crossed, letting this conflict play out.

Church poked me with a finger as hard as a 7mm bullet.

“You listen here, Private. No one loved these men like I did.
No one
.”

“Then what is it? Do I pose a threat to your little commonwealth?”

“I'll be burying thirty more of my men tomorrow because of the likes of you.”

“If you wish to perform an act, Corporal, I do wish that you would get on with it. Childish games waste the valuable time of these men you profess to love, and quite frankly they grate upon my last nerve.”

“You're going to question how
I
protect my men? What do
you
do for them, Private? Is the rumor true? Did you let a Kraut go when you had him right in your sights?”

My mouth, somersaulting along a fun, familiar roll, found itself wide open before the specifics of the accusation reached my brain. I faltered and the hesitation was damning.

“How about that other rumor, while we're at it. That you spent the afternoon playing possum in a crater. While these men in this hole right here got their guts ripped out. Is
that
one true, Private? Because if it is, I think it's something the rest of us deserve to know.”

The mood blackened. Church's apostles edged closer with confused, infuriated expressions. I understood; I wished myself back into the catacumbal pit. It was by rare good fortune that these encroaching revengers began to be shoved aside. It was Major Horstmeier, having spent enough time watching the fester of this boil and in the mood to lance it.

“All right, soldiers, that's more than enough of this shit. How about we all have a little respect for the dead? You got beefs, you deal with them on leave, not on duty. That understood, Churchwell? That nice and clear, Finch?”

“Yes, sir,” growled Church.

“Yes, sir,” growled I.

“Then quit eyeballing each other. These bodies won't bury themselves.”

The Skipper aimed his fanatical eyes at a dozen or so individual troopers, each of whom led the retreat back toward the objectionable obligations of Teams A and B. Church gave me a frosty look before stomping back to our designated stack of stiffs. I exhaled, a long-held habit from being human. My cowardice being voiced aloud was bad enough. But a public disavowal by Church? That was the kind of thing that might turn a grunt's life into a living hell.

X.

O
N THE FIRST DAY OF
a renewed four-day Allied assault, shortly after machine guns repelled our 0430 northward push, around the time that pesky mustard gas once again came creeping, the Gods of War reached down and handed me a way out, not just out of Belleau Wood, but out of the whole cockamamie mess of life itself.

The Huns that morning owned the sky. Floating observational “sausages” had enjoyed a bird's-eye view of our maneuvering while taking ne'er a single hit, while Fokker planes shepherded the German artillery with ease. A sequence of dreaded
minenwerfers
(that's “mine-throwers,” Reader; do keep pace with my jargon) were landing with terrific accuracy about my frontline foxhole. Americans to my left and right had been blown right out of their pits; even more astonishing was the number of them who rose back up, shooting.

Then, with no warning, the bawling, bellowing, banging, bursting world went silent. A great pressure quashed my chest and a black wall of dirt came rushing at me. My position had been hit—at last, a direct hit!—and not by the wee 77mm mortars we called “whizz-bangs,” nor the 88mm “quick dicks,” nor even the 150mm “Jack Johnsons.” This was a 210mm “sea bag,” the big, dumb brute of German weaponry, and for a split second I was suspended in a sensory vacuum, a lovely, peaceful place to be, all things considered.

Then: entombment. The weight of a horse upon my back—no, Leather's Pierce-Racine touring car—no, one of those Renault tanks the colonel had promised and never delivered. Not a dot of light cheapened the solidity of my burial within trench mud. Transferred through the packed soil were the startled grunts of men throttled of their last breath. Also, at a higher pitch, rats—viler animals but no less panicked.

The cool, damp tonnage was not unpleasurable. I tried to relax. From so far beneath dirt, war sounded like a kindergarten playtime: a full brigade's charge became a delicate pitter-pat, the boom of howitzers became no louder than a pop-gun's cork. Yes, it was time to rest, old boy, and to let the children play. Down here, I was no longer Private Prefer-Not-To but instead a stack of buried bones as meritorious as any Church and I had laid to rest.

My thoughts drifted first to Wilma Sue. If there was a Heaven, I would not be seeing her anytime soon, though perhaps Hell, located just down the block, was near enough that she might hear me when I screamed her name. I thought, too, of Abigail Finch. If word reached her that her boy, Zebulon, had been lost at Belleau Wood, would she feel pride? Would she feel regret? Or would she think only that my French lessons had paid off?

The long-promised solace of my demise was impeded by memories of those who'd shown me the kindness that Abigail had not. What if it were Johnny here fighting for his country? Why, he'd tape his cane to his wrist and learn to shoot one-handed. And what of Mrs. Joseph Thomas Hazard, daughter Susannah, and the rest of those screwy broads at Sweetgum; what would they say about my decision to lie fallow amid the loam? They relived the Civil War each night due to a belief that some ideals were worth the fight.

My brain, that inexplicable organ that had bedeviled Leather, now bedeviled me. This, I knew, was a coward's way to expire. For the sake of those who'd given me solace, I had to do better.

My gray fist rose from the mud.

The soldiers of Belleau Wood are long dead. Scores died during the three-week battle, scores more died in the subsequent months of war, and the survivors kicked the bucket in humdrum ways over subsequent decades. But I wonder if there isn't one timeworn old soul still out there, slurping down creamed corn in a nursing home rec room, haunted by visions of war, none more jarring than the time a U.S. Marine buried for over half an hour clawed from the earth like a goblin, black water draining from his mouth and ears, blobs of clay plopping from his eye sockets. This man-thing rose from the depths as if he were the golem of a million dead men, still clutching the rifle they'd handed him in Hell—and what was it that he did?

He charged the line.

The horizon tilted before me like an ocean seen from a ship's bow. The forest looked melted
,
leaves sizzling down in stalactites of ash, black bark peeled from pale trees like burned-off skin. Fire was everywhere except for the camouflaged boulders and gullies where Jerry hid. The Germans had painted their skin with soot, and their guns too, to prevent glare, and the disguises worked well.

So did mine.

Wherever I ran I looked like just another splash of mud. I bolted right past a unit of four infantrymen swearing in German as they tried to repair their jammed Maxim. They wore respiratory gear and only then did I notice the stench of mustard gas. I kept going; straight ahead there was a clearing, the familiar din of men shrilling through pandemonium, and a plume of flame taller than the trees.

Ten stories of dirt hung in the air as wide as a great brown elm, tossed up by an underground mine. I was transfixed until flamethrower fire tore across the trampled wheat, flinging me to smoldering grass. I rolled sideways and came to my knees. Black smoke billowed down from the crackling blaze, but not enough to obscure the green dye staining the air. By bad luck of wind, the gas sat stagnant over our position. To my left I saw a soldier fumbling to affix his gas mask, fretting along the edge of the imperfect seal. Out of habit I lifted my own mask from where it dangled upon my chest and I tightened it to my skull. The sound of my breathing filled the mask—no, I had no breath—then what . . . ?

(((Hweeeeee . . . fweeeeee . . . hweeeeee . . . fweeeeee . . .)))

Forever he was there, a sadistic father deriding my every decision!

I lifted a hand to rip off the mask but hesitated, for such an act would reveal me. I looked to my right, hoping for a ravine into which I could delve, but the forest was flat and crawling with injured Americans. Two retreated on their elbows due to the horrible machine-gun strafing of their shins. One sat with his back against a tree, his gas-blistered fists balled over his bleeding eyes. Yet another lay motionless upon his back, choosing to watch the swirls of gas and fire above rather than consider the wet, purple hole in his stomach.

It was a massacre.

What luck I had blundered right into it.

Machine-gun fire poured from the enemy trench like jets of water. Go ahead, Fritz! Shoot me, I dare you! I leapt to my feet and legged southward toward downed doughboys while opening fire with my inhumanly steady hands; helmeted Krauts ducked one after another like tots at a nursery game. Ten feet I ran, ever closer to the
fallen. Finally, a German with a spine took aim and a bullet struck me in the right side. I staggered. But did I fall?

Hell, no, sir, I did not fall!

A flamethrower's inferno mushroomed into my path, a second too early to envelop me. When I dove through its shimmering vapor, I felt the edges of my hair frizzle and the skin of my left shoulder shrivel. In a living man, the burns would be unbearable. But did I falter?

Hell, no, sir, I did not falter!

Here, at last, was a GI squatting in the mud, barely older than I, the red blotches of his infected skin beginning to suppurate into yellow blisters. I dropped into the crater and crawled on my belly while Kraut fire tore the trees limbs above, pelting us with daggers of wood. The GI fumbled at his mask with his teeth and feet, a ridiculous stunt.

My judgment, I admit, was rushed. His attempts were valiant, actually, seeing how his hands had been reduced to fingerless nubs. I grabbed his mask, tightened the straps, but before pushing it onto his face noticed the green condensation streaking down the glass. Mustard gas—I hurled the mask toward the German line, a tiny poison bomb, and a machine gun shot it to pieces midair. Oh, to hell with it! I whipped off my own mask and tightened it around the GI's face. Life was so much improved without that Isolator wheeze!

“Can you walk?” shouted I.

He shook his head. A yellow blister on his nose burst.

I slung my rifle over my back, looped one arm beneath the boy's shoulders, and with the other lifted his knees. In the same motion I snatched up my .45. I mounted the hill in full view of the Germans and let loose with a war scream, burial dirt tumbling from my mouth
and firing the .45 with an accuracy Pullman Larry would have coveted. Huns dove for cover.

A full round is what it took for me to achieve total astonishment. I was carrying the soldier with no more difficulty than Church had once carried me. Somewhere beneath the dirt—or when choosing to rise from it—I'd rediscovered the strength that had deserted me after death. Could it be because the task in which I was involved was, for once, a virtuous one?

It was a moment ill-suited for reflection. Still roaring, I crashed through the woods until I spied a group of masked Marines holding a position behind a bastion of sandbags. I heard one of them shout, “
Covering fire!
,” followed by the chunky rattle of just that. Beneath their bullets I slid around the bags and let them catch the injured boy. The soldiers stared at me in disbelief; even the medic paused in shock before taking a look at the GI.

I holstered my .45, brought down my Chauchat, reloaded, and began to scale the sandbags. A hand gripped me. It belonged to an incredulous private. His voice was muted behind his respirator.

“You can't go back out there!”

“Let go of me,” said I.

“You need a mask! It'll burn you alive!”

I grinned; I could not help it.
This
was why I had been brought to this ruined hunting preserve in northern France. Thank you, Death, for burying me deep enough so that I might remember.

“Then burn I shall,” said I.

Jerry won my respect. He shot right at me, unlike the coward who'd assassinated me in 1896. But no combination of Central Powers could match me that day. Bring on the Germans, the Austrians, the Bulgarians, the Turks! I'd take on all of them with this
single French lead-hucker despised for its lousy calibration. With it I ripped rifles from the hands of snipers, shot grenades while they still hung the air. My first trip back across the field of fire cost me some machine-gunning of my left calf, but I brought to the medic an officer with a bayonet blade in his neck. My next trip involved taking a slug to my left hip and wading through a thick new stew of gas, but I came back with a legless private tucked beneath an arm.

On and on it went. Impervious to bullets, able to play dead to perfection and then dart forward like a rabbit, unaffected by the sounds or tremors that had normal soldiers pissing their pants, I saved those men with the riskiest jobs of all: the chaplains, the stretcher-bearers, the runners. Had I a free hand, I'd collect firearms along the way. Yes, yes, bits of flesh were blown from my body, but hell, Reader, I'd suffered worse.

A dozen rescues later, the soldiers of the sandbag citadel fell upon me and swore that they'd recommended me for the Croix de Guerre and Silver Star, even a Medal of Honor, provided I halt my demented redemption. The rest of my long existence would have been different had I listened. But the deafening peals of back-and-forth bombardments were pierced by a cry of pain close to the German line, a voice that each of us recognized, though never had we imagined it could sound anything less than unshakable and unafraid.

Church.