Flanders

by Patricia Anthony

  She whispered real tense-like, “Not my babies, Travis.”

  I took aim at Pa and he bolted, bare ass and all. He threw himself through her open window, and I could hear him crashing and stumbling through the underbrush, cussing me all the way down the hill. Odette sat there, shaking. She was holding the sheet up over her, like she’d just noticed me staring. I was confused. Hell, I don’t know which disappointed me more: Pa’s running, or the disappearance of those titties.

  “Travis Lee?” she said.

  I said, “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Please don’t go hurting my babies.”

  I left, and by the time I got home, Pa had come and gone. He knew I’d finally gone hunting him for serious and wouldn’t stop until it was done. Ma never forgave me for that.

  I think of Pa whispering in Ma’s ear, in Odette’s, in mine, how he loved me, just me. How I was every good thing in the world. How proud I made him. Does he tell God that?

  And does God believe him? I know He’s omniscient and all, but I figure He must. Ma believed Pa, and she knew about Odette and her light-colored baby. They both knew about all the others. Pa wasn’t as energetic as Granddaddy De Vrees, but Granddaddy didn’t drink, didn’t smoke. I guess moonshine made Pa only a fair to middling alley cat.

  To this day I have never told a woman I loved her, for I can’t tell no lies. I talk about how their hair’s gold as early spring wheat or their eyes are gray as mourning doves—all that sweet talk they like. But I don’t lie to them. I don’t think that’s right.

  So you tell all them church ladies to be careful. Might as well tell God that, too; for he’ll talk about taking Him fishing, but God’ll never set His ass on a river bank with Pa, they’ll never bait a hook together. You tell God that for me.

  Travis Lee

  JULY 15, THE REST AREA

  Dear Bobby,

  Well, I had my little meeting with O’Shaughnessy. He wanted to walk, so the two of us set off down the lane. He’s a bandy-legged sort, but he can move fast. We went sightseeing in Flanders, saw a lot of it—its white-painted red-roofed farmhouses, its stocky windmills, its spotted cows and white cows, and egg yolk-yellow flowers blooming in neat bouquets. He stopped by a tranquil canal, and I stopped by him. Goddamn if he didn’t drop his pants.

  “Who’s your favorite poet, lad?” he asked.

  Shit. He was a poetry-lover, just like LeBlanc had warned me.

  He shimmied his shorts down, kicked them off, and kept on talking. “Captain says you like the English Romantics.”

  “Not when they’re too romantic,” I told him.

  He pulled off his shirt, and there he stood—except for his socks, buck naked. Then he noticed me staring.

  “Travis, my lad. You’ll not be having thoughts now?”

  “No, sir!” I said real quick. “Not thoughts. Nothing like that, sir.”

  He picked up his pants, rummaged around in the pockets, and came up with a bar of soap. Then he tender-stepped through the deep grass and waded waist-deep into the canal.

  “Haven’t you been swimming in the all-together, lad?”

  That water, dark as it was, looked inviting. I shucked my uniform and tippy-toed through the reeds. Europe was safe, I knew, but I couldn’t help looking all the same. You grow up, but you never get away from habit. Hell, I’d spent my whole childhood being watchful of cottonmouths.

  The water was cold. It smelled of silt and algae. I jumped up and down. Water splashed. He passed me the soap. I scrubbed and watched bubbles float the black surface. Around us, daredevil dragonflies zipped and hovered.

  “Keats,” he said. “That would be your favorite.”

  “Shelley.”

  “But Captain says you’ve a fondness for St. Agnes’s Eve.”

  “Well, I bested him at it once.”

  That quiet water, the reflected clouds drifting. The sky seems close here, Bobby. Home, it’s so big you can’t ever hope to catch it. But here, even if the day is bright, the sky bends right down to you, tender and considerate-like.

  “Are you lonely here without your family, Travis?”

  Lonely? Not with that obliging sky. Sun warmed my shoulders like a shawl, but the rest of me was freezing. My balls had shrunk up to the size of pigeon eggs. At the rest area they’d give us one of them army showers, but it’d been months since I had me a real soaking bath—so long ago that I’d gotten used to the smell of my own stink. Now that I was clean, I didn’t want put on that sweat and death smell again. I waded to shore, grabbed the clothes I’d been issued two days before, and brought them back with me for an extra washing.

  “Well? Are you? And is there not a girl waiting at home for you, lad?”

  My teeth chattered. “A bunch of girls are waiting for me, Reverend.” I looked around for a couple of good rocks, and it took me a while to find them, for Flanders is a soft-fleshed place without much skeleton. “Fact is, the female half of town had themselves a crying spell when I left for up East. That’s because I’d done some serious study in the art of making a woman happy. Hell, any man can learn if he wants. See? You start by loving on them real slow.” I pounded my clothes. Stones clicked. The lather on my hands felt slick and smooth as cream. “Then you do something new and you say, ‘Feel good?’ and if they say ‘No’ then you try something else, and you ask, ‘Feel good?’ What you’re going for here is for them to start panting and crying out ‘More, Travis Lee! Do that some more!’ That’s when you know you got yourself a keeper. After a while of experimenting, you get yourself a repertory going. I been working on my repertory ever since I was thirteen years old.”

  My whole uniform was lathered now. A flat island of gleaming spume spread out around me. Foam sailed in flat boats of white down the slow current. I looked up. O’Shaughnessy was staring.

  “Oh, sorry, sir. Shit. I mean, sorry. I plumb forgot.”

  “That is the most amazing confession I have ever heard.”

  “Lord, I’m sorry, sir. I shouldn’t have said nothing.”

  “ ‘Feel good?’ is it?” He went to laughing and trying to slap his thigh, except that he was waist-deep in the canal. He went red in the face. He splashed water and laughed some more. “Merciful Lord! A self-taught man.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about your, you know, Reverend. I’m really sorry.”

  “My?”

  “Your, you know. How you can’t. I reckon I don’t mean ‘can’t,’ but how you folks aren’t supposed to, I guess, have any fun and all.”

  That tickled him no end. He laughed so much, I was afraid he wouldn’t ever catch his breath.

  “Hey. You ever think about it, Reverend? You know?”

  He wiped his eyes. “Ah, and you’ve got a smooth way with changing the subject.”

  I got out and spread my clothes on the sweet-smelling grass. I lay down beside them and let the sun beat the tiredness out of me.

  O’Shaughnessy got out, too. He shook himself dry like a dog. “Yes. There are times I think of it,” he said. He plopped himself down on the grass next to me and crossed his legs at the ankles. He clasped his hands behind his head and peered up at the clouds. “Apparently not as much as you. Did you leave them crying for you at Harvard? For I’ve heard you’re studying medicine there.”

  “Not no more.” I didn’t know it till I said it, and the freedom in those words set me to soaring. “No,” I said, and started to grin. “Don’t think I’ll be going back.”

  He rolled over on his stomach. His shoulders were already pink from the sun. His eyes were quietly troubled. “And why would that be, lad?”

  “I spent all my goddamned time there in Harvard being pointed at and whispered about. I never fit in.”

  He gave me a lopsided grin. “And so you joined the British Army.”

  “Well, soldiering helped me decide a few things. Going back for one. Not being a doctor for another. A couple of weeks ago—that time we took the Boche trenches, you remember? I landed in a shell hole beside a man. He was wounded real
bad, and there wasn’t no way I could help him. All night pinned down there, looking at that blood, listening to him hurting. No, thank you. I don’t want to spend my life doctoring, for there’s some wounds you just can’t heal.”

  Near me, a tangle of broad leaves and spikes with purple flowers all around, delicate as a lady’s petticoat. The wind was still, the air hot and breathless. One of the leaves was shuddering.

  “Do you mind what you’ve just said, lad?”

  A bumblebee. It pulled its fat ass up and over the leaf, then sat there, winded and resting.

  “Travis.” So soft a question. “Haven’t you always been something of an oddity, then?”

  The bumblebee, legs thick and yellow with pollen, took to the air and wove a slow, awkward path among the flowers, looking, looking.

  “And you come here, where you are the rarest oddity of all. Isn’t it that you go seeking after uniqueness?”

  The bumblebee was too big for its aspirations. It landed, and knocked a petal loose. The flower tumbled, lacy and startlingly lilac, down onto dark green leaves.

  “I don’t fit nowhere, sir.”

  “Ah. I imagine that in Texas your intelligence set you apart. Did all around you seem to have blinders on? Was that it? Then traveling to a place of intellectuals, and finding it no home to you, either. Tell me, for I have a bit of curiosity about it: What is it you love in Shelley? Would it be the brightness in him?”

  The brightness of Shelley, the low hum of the bumblebee. The air smelled of growing things.

  “For there’s a brightness in Wordsworth, too, although not so powerful a beam.” O’Shaughnessy lifted his hand and wrote across the sky, “ ‘Trailing clouds of glory,’ isn’t it? The part that is the flame. Shelley would have been a unique man, I imagine. There’s some of the same in your own transcendentalists, although Thoreau lived a brighter life than he wrote. Now there’s the dark side, too, the ghostie side Poe knew of. The drink brought it out of him.”

  I sat up quick. The bumblebee wandered away through the stalks.

  “Does talk of drinking scare you?”

  I patted my uniform. “It’s late. Clothes are dry. We should get going.”

  “No? Well, is it the talk of ghosties, then? They’re not as Poe saw them, really, for he was looking through the darkness at the bottom of the bottle. They’re not goblins, Travis. Most are like you, just lads searching for home.”

  I got up and started getting dressed. My shirt was wet, my pants were clammy, my puttees were two sodden wads.

  O’Shaughnessy got up, too. “The first time I clapped my eyes on you, I said to meself, ‘Thomas, now there goes a lad with a gift.’ You see, those that possess the sight recognize it in others. Don’t be afraid of the sight, lad. That’s the brightness of Shelley you’ll be seeing.”

  I have dreams. And a graveyard that’s a gift of my imagination. About me the wind blew. It rustled the leaves. Cold made me shiver.

  “For I saw ghosties when I was but a wee thing,” O’Shaughnessy said. “I saw me gran, and her in the grave a year. I saw me brother, the one that drowned.”

  I buttoned my shirt so fast, the hem ended up crooked, buttons out of place. “You ready?”

  “Listen to me, Travis. Don’t turn away, lad. That time we were gassed and I felt like running, I was afraid only because there were so many of them. Thousands. And they were so lost. Sudden death confuses souls, and it was the bewilderment of those spirits that frightened me, for I’m a doctor of sorts as well, and there are wounds I cannot heal, either.”

  “I dream sometimes. Hell, everybody has dreams. That’s all there is to it. Now we better go,” I told him firmly.

  He nodded. “Yes. I suppose we’d better.”

  We started walking that long way back to the unit, past soggy emerald fields and red and white villages. Near a solitary abandoned farmhouse beaten down by war, we found Riddell. Sergeant was sitting on a low brick cistern a few yards from the road, and he was staring hard at the ground.

  I only stopped because O’Shaughnessy halted. He called out, “You look to be of a mood this afternoon, Sergeant.”

  At the voice, Riddell started and looked up. His face was red, his eyes puffy.

  O’Shaughnessy picked his way through the roadside weeds. “What is it, man? What’s happened?”

  “Oh.” Riddell shrugged. “Me mum died is what.”

  I gave him a lame “Sorry to hear that, Sergeant,” and he nodded.

  “Well, she was took quick, and that was a blessing.”

  I murmured something stupid about how much better that was.

  He wasn’t listening, anyway. “They says it was ’er ’eart. She was sitting at table and keeled right over. My sister thought she’d gone into a faint, isn’t that funny?”

  “We should all go that easy,” I told him.

  O’Shaughnessy put a hand on his shoulder. As if that gentle touch had broken his back, Riddell sagged. “Oh, bless ’er. It’s just that I should have gone first, shouldn’t I. I mean, with the war and all. I never expected it to be me mum. Who’ll I fight for now, then? What’s left to go ’ome to?”

  Riddell thought he had it bad? At least he had a home once. I never did. O’Shaughnessy was right: There never was anyone to talk to in Texas. And here? Why, I fought just to stay alive. Strange. I would have thought honor and duty had more stick-to-itiveness than adventure.

  O’Shaughnessy sat down next to him. “Tell me about her,” he said.

  Oh shit. What time was it? The sun was already starting its long slide down the sky. I felt sorry for Riddell, but I was tired and hungry, and we were going to hear about Mum.

  “An ’ealer, me mum. Smart as a whip, ’onest as the day. Knows ’er ’erbs upside and down. Nettle, for instance. Now there’s something people pulls up and throws away, Father. But there’s nothing better for the dropsy than stinging nettle. The juice strengthens cows’ milk. Stops a nosebleed, too. Mum knew all of that and more. And pretty? Mum was small and delicate, like a wild marjoram bloom; so dainty, it scared me to hug her.”

  “She loved you,” O’Shaughnessy said.

  “Oh.” A breathy, awestruck sound, a faraway look, as if her love spanned all of Europe. “Not by ’alf. It was ’er taught me everything. Cowslips all over this place, you know, and that was ’er favorite. Plain little flower, it is. Overlook it, if you’re not careful. But she made a tea for nerves, and compresses for the ’eadache. It was ’er taught me never to throw away.”

  “And a valuable lesson it was.”

  “Was that. Just because something’s common, well, it can still be important, can’t it.”

  They talked on, sometimes it seemed at cross purposes, sometimes with such a private meaning that I couldn’t quite catch on. But, simple as the words sounded, immortality stood behind them. I finally sat down on the grass. Sun streaked through a nearby stand of trees, threw lemony light over Riddell and O’Shaughnessy—splashes of grace.

  Riddell cried some more, then wiped his eyes. He talked about Scotch broom and dandelion, about colt’s foot and feverfew. I lay down on shaded grass that still smelled warm from the sun and watched white butterflies flirt with a hedgerow while Sergeant Riddell wove a quiet funeral wreath for his mother.

  When Riddell was finished, O’Shaughnessy said, “I remember when me own mother passed on. It was hard, and me being a priest. I know that you’re not of the Faith, Sergeant, but all the same, I’ll pray for her when I say the Mass.”

  I rolled over on my back. One lone butterfly floated upward, teased through the tree branches, free and on its way.

  “ ’Tis important to remember her, I think. To say a few words. For knowing she’s in a better place doesn’t help with the hurting. There. There now. I know. It’s all right. I know.” The ugly sounds of a man’s weeping, and over that O’Shaughnessy’s simple and eloquent comfort. Finally, “Would you be wanting to pray with me now, lad?”

  “Thank you, Father.”

  High up,
where the butterfly drifted, a commotion of branches and birds singing loud. I thought about Ma, and what sort of wreath I’d weave her. Stern heart-ribbons, I guess, plain and strong. Nothing fancy.

  I dozed off during the whispered prayer. O’Shaughnessy woke me and helped me to my feet. I woke dazed and bleary-eyed, confused to find myself in a meadow.

  “Will you be coming with us?” O’Shaughnessy asked Riddell.

  I saw Riddell’s tear-swollen face and remembered.

  “In a bit. I’ll splash me face first. Get presentable. You go on, then.” He stuck his hand out at me. “Thank you for coming by, Stanhope,” he said, like we were standing around in his parlor.

  I shook his hand, told him again how sorry I was, and got polite murmurs in answer.

  Back on the road, O’Shaughnessy said, “I saw me mum after, you know. Me da, too. Wouldn’t doubt that Sergeant will see his. Mothers come back to check, to tuck you in of a night, and see that you’re eating well. Is yours alive?”

  “Alive and kicking and ornery as ever.”

  “And your da?”

  “He’s a son of a bitch.”

  The breeze brought with it a faint reminder of the sea. I was hungry all of a sudden. Restless and ready for a drink.

  “Would you be wanting to talk about him, lad?”

  I told him, “Not ever.”

  When I got back to the rest area, I left O’Shaughnessy and found the rest of the platoon. Pickering said he wanted to visit the town whores, so we went to the blue-light tent and then we walked to town together. There were four whores in the whorehouse, all of them ugly; but I fucked the tar out of one all the same, hammered her so hard that she got to complaining. I threw an extra five shillings in the cardboard box and left. Pickering and me picked up Foy, and the three of us went out drinking together. In the bar, a Belgian soldier shoved me and I coldcocked him. Foy, who’s a corporal now, had the balls to give me a dressing-down, and him every bit as drunk as I was. Pickering made us leave before the Belgian came back with his friends.

  As soon as my head hit the pillow, I was asleep. Wildflowers were blooming among the marble angels now: yellow flowers in little bouquets and lilac ones with long lacy stems. All around the graveyard the trees—dark and secret with leaves—had fruited. Everywhere you looked there was life, Bobby. It hung heavy and pregnant from the branches. In the sunny spaces, it sprouted high and wild. Life, God, plentiful as the seeds in a woman. And through that fertile graveyard bees circled, their legs thick with golden creation.