“Got to poke the tarts, Yank,” he said. “Otherwise, what good is it?”
“What good is it?” I screeched with ill-conceived and fathomless delight. I turned to the puzzled men behind me. “What the hell good is it?”
I think I sort of passed out. In dogged allegiance to the British idea of “queue,” the men behind me grabbed me by my belt and dragged me up the stairs.
When I came to again, Pickering was coming out of a door, buttoning his pants. He grasped me under the arms and hauled me up. I couldn’t find my direction for shit.
“There, Yank,” he was saying. “No, no. Not that way. Girl’s in there.”
I ran into the jamb and banged my nose. Blood gushed. Seemed like I’d been having a time with my nose lately.
“Blighty!” someone laughed.
Pickering’s hands on my shoulders, me walking into the shadowed room. The smells of old, cheap perfume and sweat and sex. There she was, Bobby, lying all spread out. Those thighs of hers just went on and on; pale and lumpy and huge, like cheap cotton-wad mattresses. She had a pretty pink ribbon tied around her throat.
I hollered out, “Heifer!”
The whore seemed confused. Pickering kept asking, “What? What is it you’re trying to tell me, Yank?”
“Heifer with a ribbon!”
“Can’t get your pants down, then, Stanhope? It’s a crown in the box there, chap. Five shillings, or she won’t go.”
The men behind me asking, “What’s it? Can’t get his blue light on? Be a chum, man, and put it on for him.”
Next thing I know, I woke up thinking that I was being smothered. My face was wedged in the Valley of the Shadow between the whore’s sour, marshmallow breasts. My pants were down around my ankles, and I was positioned between those thighs, my pecker aimed more or less in the right direction.
Someone was dragging me off her; me all the time asking, “I come yet? Hey. Did I come?”
“You’ve had time enough for three men, mate. It’s off with you,” a new and very sober voice told me. Then I was rolling down the steps, falling easy and happy and loose-limbed. I ended up at the bottom, my face resting on top of a boot.
“I come yet?” I asked.
The line moved slowly, inexorably. The boot went away. My head dropped to the cobbles. I found myself staring down the sidewalk to the door of the bar where Captain Miller and one of his subalterns were walking out.
Miller came and stood looking down at me. “Stanhope? Your nose is bloodied. Your privates are showing.”
Drunk, but it did not miss my notice that Miller was scrutinizing my pecker. I lunged up and made it all the way to my knees. The army-issue rubber was dangling, a telltale wad weighing its end. I pulled my pants to my waist.
“And I do believe you’re quite drunk.”
“Sir.”
“I say, Stanhope! Have you been with a strumpet?”
“Oh, sir.” Guilt made me heartsick. In my stupor, I figured that finding me whoring had irredeemably hurt his feelings. “Shit. I’m sorry, sir. It’s not like it’s anything pers—”
The swagger stick struck fast as a rattler. It caught me at the base of the throat. Not to hurt, but to stop words.
His voice was even. “That will do.” And then he called back to the bar, “Sergeant Riddell! I’ve a little lost lamb for you!”
Riddell came out, clucking worriedly. Next thing I remember was sitting with Riddell in the barracks. Except for a pot of brewing tea, we were alone. He was playing McPhearson’s gramophone and waxing poetical about Elgar.
“ ’E’s a beacon of truth, ain’t ’e? Fair knows the heart of it. Pluck and valor and all that. Like Kipling and that poem of ’is. What is it, now?”
I shook my head, and the movement nearly toppled me. My hangover headache had started. “Dunno.”
“ ’Course you do, you all the time reading your poems. A real scholar, like. You must know fair everything.” He cast a soulful look at the ceiling. “ ‘Into the valley of death rode the six hundred.’ That one. What’s it called, now?”
My lips didn’t move too well. “Dunno.”
“Still, makes it all worth it, don’t you think? I mean about dying and all. ’Spite of what some says. If you can just die for something decent and upstanding. That’s what it’s all about, innit?”
God. Not the usual Brit quirk of speech, but a true question. And what desperation it held. When I looked up, Riddell was crying. I opened my mouth intending to say something comforting, but fell asleep instead. I never heard the rest of the parrot story.
Travis Lee
MAY 8, THE REST AREA
Dear Bobby,
Strange what you told me. It’s hard imagining those sharp eyes of Pa’s going blind. In his glory days he could flat pick out sin, Bobby. Sins of the flesh and sins of the mind. “You’re thinking up deviltry, boy,” he’d tell me. Omniscient, omnipresent. All of creation hung on his mood. When Pastor Lon preached about God’s terrible ire, it was Pa’s scowl I pictured. I figure if God has each hair of our head numbered, He’s nothing we can hide from. And for me, God was always Pa.
God scared me a lot in those days. They say none of us can know the end, but I used to I think that if Hell existed I wouldn’t get flames: I’d spend eternity hiding inside Ma’s old dark wardrobe, trapped with the stink of mothballs and nervous sweat.
So I got to figure your letter is a lie, Bobby. Pa can’t be going blind from the moonshine. It would break every universal law. You write to tell me he’s got whupped in bars so often that he’s crippled up now. Don’t let him fool you. One day he’ll stop limping and his eyes will go keen. He’ll stand ramrod-straight and he’ll take off his belt. He always wears a big buckle—you ever notice?—the better to bruise with.
I took a walk today past the hospital and saw the shell-shocked: cots of staring men, fingers plucking, always plucking at their lips, all with dazed smiles—men stricken stupid by fear. The company priest, O’Shaughnessy, was with them. He was sitting on a cot, holding a man’s hand. Not talking. Not preaching. Just touching. It was nice, in a way. When he got up, he saw me standing there.
His voice was quiet, not like Pastor Lon’s, who seems to be always working on his Sunday delivery. “Do you have need of me, my son?”
“Not a Catholic, sir.”
“Well, I’ll be here for more than Catholics now, won’t I. You’re the Yank, I take it.”
“Yes, sir.”
We stood close, there in the ward of the lost. The barracks was pungent with the smells of carbolic and rubbing alcohol, but not a wound in sight. O’Shaughnessy had shucked his uniform for a long black papist dress and purple silk scarf. He was wearing a comfortable smile. “Calling me ‘sir’ makes me feel more the officer. I’d prefer ‘Father.’ ”
“Can’t call you that,” I told him. “You got another choice?”
He took my arm and gently steered me outside. The sunlight was dazzling. Birds chattered in the gathered trees. A clear sky, but the wind smelled of coming rain.
The fresh breeze teased the hem of O’Shaughnessy’s skirt, toyed with the ends of his purple scarf. “Thomas, then, if you’ve a mind. Some Protestants have a problem with the ‘Father,’ and calling me by my first name is no offense, to be sure. What faith are you?”
“Not much, sir. Sorry. Reverend Tom.”
“Why the lack of faith . . . ah, Private Stanhope, isn’t it?”
“Travis Lee.”
His eyebrows rose. “You were the one injured. And those to either side of you killed. Was that not enough proof of God for you, then?”
“He’s a son of a bitch for irony, ain’t He, pastor?”
“Pardon?”
“God. Like those men in there, smiling so ferocious that you’d think they feel joy, but the joy they feel hurts like holy hell. Any minute that joy’s going to come exploding out, and when it does, it’ll kill them.”
A puffball cloud came over: flawless white at its top, a soft rabbit-gray
at its bottom.
“Did you ever stop and think, my son, that because these men felt so much fear, God took them to someplace kinder?”
“No, sir,” I said. “I don’t.”
O’Shaughnessy has an intensity to him that’s disturbing. Only the rumble of thunder—softer than any artillery—brought his head up and took his eyes off me. He squinted at the sky. “Great good heavens. What time is it getting to be? Nearly three,” he said, checking his watch. “Dear, dear. I’m due to meet with Colonel Caraway, and he’s not one for waiting. Travis, is it? We must talk again sometime.” He had a nice handshake—not the Baptist preacher pump I’m used to.
“Don’t want to be prayed over, Pastor. I’ve been prayed over before, and it never took,” I told him, and that’s about the truth of it.
Someplace kinder. That only happened once. And it wasn’t God I was with, but a calico-clad girl. All the times I hid as a boy knowing Pa was going to come in after, all the times I listened to Ma beg him to leave her be—God never took me away, Bobby, and I asked Him lots of times.
Early evening I was sitting enjoying a smoke when I saw Miller walking with O’Shaughnessy. Their heads were together and they were speaking quiet—the pastor with his head bent, like he was listening to sin.
LeBlanc sat down on the steps beside me. “Look at ’em. Captain better keep his pants buttoned, eh?”
That brought me bolt upright in a hurry. What LeBlanc said next eased the startlement out of my spine. “You can’t trust micks. O’Shaughnessy’ll go hunting for some balls to play with.”
Above us, clouds had gathered, and the late afternoon was fast becoming night. A damp breeze misted my face. Cool for nearly summer. Sweet weather, still I knew a storm was coming. “You believe in God, LeBlanc?”
“I believe in a good fuck,” he said. Then he said, “I believe in horses.”
I watched Miller and O’Shaughnessy, shoulders touching, fade into the gloom. What were they talking about so seriously? Not God, surely. Why, God isn’t a serious thing at all.
Next morning all of us would move out, agnostics and believers together. I said, “I believe in horses, too.”
Travis Lee
MAY 9, ON THE ROAD
Dear Bobby,
We made poor time to the billeting area, marching in a driving thunderstorm, pelted by bullets of rain. Wind bent the poplars this way and that. My wet pack weighed me down. Waiting for Miller and O’Shaughnessy and the subalterns at the end of the march was a warm farmhouse occupied by a cordial-looking farm family. For the other two hundred and forty of us there was a leaking stone barn and a hayrick—no place to build a fire without unintentionally barbecuing some milk cows.
We cleared a spot and heated a Tommy cooker, for all the good that did the cold tea. Sergeant sent Smoot and Dedoes to the field kitchen’s tent. They brought us back dixie cans of bully beef and hard biscuits, and not near enough of that.
When we griped about the food, Smoot chortled, “It’s the motto, ain’t it? Eat Less to Save Shitting. Get it? Eat Less to Shave Sitting,” and then he’d howl so with laughter that I knew he’d been in the rum ration.
I chipped at my biscuit with my bayonet. Foy, disgruntled, was all for stealing and eating a chicken. He would have, too, except that Riddell got wind of it. He grabbed Foy by the scruff of his neck and bellowed, “Thieving, is it? I’ll have no thieving ’ere! You’ll do nothing in this platoon but that you’d do for God and King.”
By the time Riddell was finished dressing him down, Foy was pale and shaking. LeBlanc sidled up to me. “Riddell took McPhearson’s shouting place, you notice? Wants Miller to name him lieutenant, I figure. McPhearson’s ass always puckered for God and country, too. Say. I heard we were going to get a green lieutenant, but a whizzbang landed dead in his lap, so to speak. Platoon’s screwed. Speaking of which, your whore any good the other night?”
“Not as I recall. Your pecker find a resting place, LeBlanc?”
He shrugged. I pounded the biscuit until a piece broke off. I put the bread chip into my mouth and sucked a little flavor from it. Outside, the rain went on and on. Pickering found himself a barn cat to play with and laughed when it turned up its nose at his bully beef. The air smelled of cows and mildew. Through the chilly blue dusk I could see the welcome glow of the farmhouse windows. I wondered how Miller was faring, and if he had bread and cheese and wine, and if he was enjoying the company.
Late spring, but it was cold in that barn. I hiked my coat about my shoulders and had started writing you this letter when LeBlanc leaned over. “Hey. You’re always writing to people. What is it with you, Stanhope? You got some pussy waiting?”
“Not unless my brother’s changed in new and interesting ways. Anybody at home for you?”
“Nah. All dead and buried. But that’s the secret to life, you know—dying. Jesus and Mary. Just look around at the idiots here, Stanhope. They really think that one day the army’ll let ’em go home. You and me, we never had any illusions, did we?”
I don’t know, Bobby. I break off pieces of life and suck what flavor I can: the memory of Ma’s drop biscuits, the sheen of my mare’s hide, delicate-hued as a doe’s. The tastes of chili and cornbread. The hot straw smell of high summer.
Just a fool, I guess. Travis Lee
MAY 11, ON THE ROAD
Dear Bobby,
When we left the barn there was sunlight and mud; and as we went, we tiptoed as careful as we could through the farmer’s kale field. The 10th Platoon started up a song that Miller soon shushed, not from critical sensibility but from caution. We passed signs of battle: a row of saplings that had been mowed down like the troops at Shiloh. Their stumps were shattered but still standing—their fallen branches like surrendering arms.
We stopped for lunch in a meadow embellished with grassy shell holes and cheerful yellow flowers. While we lounged, one of our aeroplanes buzzed us and everyone waved. The pilot waved back before flying on. I lay back on the damp grass and thought of how free I could be sailing through that silence of air. I don’t know, Bobby. Is it better to go out and meet death head-on, or wait for it to come in and get you? Maybe I should have given myself the choice and studied flying. That pilot might have been an American himself; and nothing special, just any farm boy from Ohio, any city kid from New York.
A shadow moved between me and the sun. From a height, a round face looked down. “Sentimental me, but I can’t help thinking that aeroplane pilots are closer to Heaven,” O’Shaughnessy said. “And that to gather that man to His bosom, God need only reach out His hand.”
From the grass next to me came LeBlanc’s acid “Crashed and buried, though, eh? In the end it’s the goddamned ground that gets ’em.”
I suppose LeBlanc was hoping for an argument. O’Shaughnessy ambled away. Next thing I knew, Riddell was scowling at the both of us. “It’s a smart mouf on the pair of you.”
“He did it,” I said right quick.
LeBlanc elbowed me.
Riddell tsked and shook his head. “And you a good Catholic lad, too. Sister a nun and all. Well, me mum raised me Church of England, didn’t she. But I’ve noticed it’s not our C. of E. chaplain what goes out to comfort the wounded with the bullets whizzing and the shells flying. It’s that papist. And for all his idol-worshipping and Mary silliness, well, in the end it’s ’im what has the pluck. So watch what you say, lads, or you’ll have my boot up your bums.”
When Sergeant walked away, I told LeBlanc, “I thought your family was all dead.”
LeBlanc sat up. He tore off a stem of pasture grass and stuck the end in his mouth. I asked him, “Well, are they?” but he got to his feet, grabbed his pack, and wandered off to where the rest of the platoon were gathering.
That night we bivouacked in an abandoned chateau, its walls untouched by war, its interior stripped of furniture and paintings, its owners months or years gone. Outside was an herb garden, wild and overgrown. All during that long afternoon Riddell wandered, beaming, through
its scented tangles. Later, I saw Miller and O’Shaughnessy seated in the freckled shade of a garden bench, deep in conversation.
“There goes an interesting bit of work, Father,” Miller said as I passed. “A cowboy and literary scholar.”
I turned around. They were eyeing me.
“Most of the lads will be getting off their feet now, won’t they, Travis, me boy? After the long march, I mean.”
“Well, Father, I do believe Stanhope’s enjoying a bit of sightseeing. He likes sightseeing, don’t you, Stanhope? France is new to him, you see. And if you will take care to notice the boots . . .”
“Ah! And what fine boots they are.”
“Dislikes shoes intensely. That’s because he’s part wild Indian. Stanhope! Recite us a bit of poetry. I’ll start one for you, shall I? ‘O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being . . .’ ”
I had to take that shit from the Harvard Congregationalists, but I wouldn’t take it from him. Heat rose in my face. Before my rage turned billy hell loose, I stalked away. I could hear them laughing all the way to the house.
Just before dark we heard shelling, muffled and far away. I thought about the farm family of the night before: craters marring the familiar places where war had brushed past. I spent the night in a grand ballroom that smelled of nothing but dust. In the dark our lowered voices echoed along the arched and painted ceiling. I wondered where the wealthy family had gone, and if it was hard to go so completely from a place that you leave nothing, not even scent, behind.
The house was too big for me: wide open, with no crannies to hide in. I don’t know, maybe I got too familiar with dark, tight places to ever make much of a pilot.
I went to sleep soothed by the murmurs of the platoon and the low booms of distant shelling. I dreamed about a graveyard terraced and old, with peeling whitewashed steps running up and down. Low plaster walls outlined the graves, while at their heads sat attentive marble angels. Cypress stood quiet vigil at the borders: candles with melancholy green flames. Some of the graves were mounded with paper lilies, Bobby, and some had roofs of glass; and down in those beds little girls in frilly white dresses slept, encircled by dusty flowers.
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