Flanders

by Patricia Anthony

  I swallowed hard to force my unruly laughter down.

  “No, no, it’s all right, lad. Needn’t try to speak. We’ll do the speaking, won’t we?” Riddell looked at us, warning in his eyes.

  Pickering said in a wild, bright voice, “Got yourself a Blighty!”

  The little joke went through me. Foy’s grunting pain made me shiver. He was trying to smile. The effort cracked his skin apart again. Don’t, I wanted to tell him. Don’t you dare. Don’t you go smiling at Pickering’s lousy jokes.

  Marrs’s turn. The best he could manage was a nod and a wave.

  “We miss you,” I told Foy.

  Pickering looked at me in surprise.

  “We got us a new guy, name of Calvert. He’s nice, I guess, but I miss you. I thought you should know that.”

  Pickering let out a high, insane giggle. “Long as he doesn’t fart in the dugout, like Marrs.”

  Then Marrs asked the unintentionally cruel question: “When are you coming back, then?”

  What was left of Foy’s mouth moved. His throat must have been all blisters too. I couldn’t hear what he was trying so hard to say.

  Riddell didn’t either. He bent down. “What is it, lad?”

  It was a stupid question that Marrs had asked; and the answer cost too much. Foy’s struggle made me look away. In the corner hissing men were lashed tight to their beds, their raw, blistered tongues protruding. I looked away quick, and that’s when I saw them.

  They were just standing there, Bobby. Not pale like you’d expect, but hazy all the same, like they didn’t have as much stuffing as the living. God. There were so many. There must have been more than a company, shoulder to shoulder. A silent parade of dead men.

  A shock wave of despair went through me. Not my despair, but theirs. I felt their loneliness. Their confusion. Felt the combined fear of over two hundred strong. And through that attack of emotion came a barrage of other people’s memories, too—hand-me-downs, all sepia and faded: snatches of nursery rhymes I’d never known, a fierce mother-bond at the sight of a woman I’d never seen. Dozens of little boys and little girls, pictures of my children, each and every one of them a stranger. Grimy English streets and smoke-filled pubs. Wide sleet-spattered moors. Trout fishing with a father who loved me.

  I felt a tug at my sleeve. Heard Marrs’s concerned, “You all right, Stanhope? Need some fresh air, then?”

  I shut my eyes quick. When I opened them, the ghosties were gone.

  I left, too. Left Foy with his prolonged and hideous dying. In the fresh air of the yard I bent double, sucking air. A passing nurse eyed me. I started walking fast, past the surgical hut, toward the road.

  O’Shaughnessy’s call stopped me. “Travis!”

  I watched him scurry over the grass. He had a purple stole over his shoulders. It flapped, its embossing scattering the light. He was holding a Bible in both his hands. When he reached me, he didn’t speak. All around that meadow I could hear the low, sad song of the wounded.

  “ ‘Magnificat,’ ” I said.

  He cocked his head and squinted, a gesture so near to what Foy had done that ice balled up in my belly: O’Shaughnessy trying to see me through the crust the both of us had built.

  “Tell me what it says.”

  He smiled. “Ah. ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord,’ lad. ‘And my spirit hath rejoiced.’ Was that what you were seeking?”

  “Yeah. Thanks.” Nearby were piles of garbage from surgery: red mountains of gauze; a blue-white arm, its graceful fingers splayed.

  “Will you not sit down and have a chat with me, Travis?”

  I took in a deep breath. Rotting flesh, but under that, the sweet smell of damp earth, the perfume of crushed grass.

  “You’ve been to see Foy I take it?”

  I nodded.

  “Good that you did, lad. He’ll be appreciating that.”

  Foy’s slow march of the hours. None of us could go with him, not even those poor bastards whose screams had been stolen; not the ghosts who had already passed through these painful billets and were awaiting orders.

  “A hard death,” O’Shaughnessy said. “And hard to look at. Don’t go blaming yourself for turning away.”

  Wide of the mark. Like Miller had been that time. Misunderstandings from men who should have known me better. “It makes me mad, sir. That’s all.”

  “Don’t be mad at God, lad. Wasn’t Him sent Abner Foy to war. It was the British Army. And still, Travis, you see the horror of it surely, but you’re a thinking man, and so I know you see the glory, too. Suffering the more to appreciate Heaven. Suffering as Christ himself did. Seen that way, why, pain becomes a blessed thing.”

  “Should tell Foy. He’d like to know that.”

  “I have told him. I tell them all. Come now. I can see how distressed this has made you. Come. Sit down and let’s have a chat.”

  Misunderstandings. He put his hand on my arm. I pushed it away. “You talked about things I told you private-like. I thought priests weren’t supposed to do that.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “About the whore. You told Miller, didn’t you?”

  O’Shaughnessy’s attention wandered from canvas hut to dying soldiers to a far line of trees. “I could tell you that what we had was nothing that near to confession, neither the form nor the fact that you’re not of the Faith. You’re an apostate, lad. And there are ten bishops at home who would pass over what I did without a squeak about my breaking the seal. Well, truth is, there would be ten bishops as well who would tell you that I’m a poor excuse for a priest. But it was just that Captain told me what the police had found, you see. Then he told me you had scarpered off somewhere that night. He was horrified by the implications, I can tell you, and frightened what the rest of the officers were gossiping. He asked if I thought you could do something so terrible.”

  I felt the first strong emotion since the ghosties’ hand-me-down despair. It was rage.

  He said, “I told him no.”

  Coming out of a door into the cleansing sunlight were Riddell, Pickering, and Marrs. Foy would still be inside, his leaking body on its stained bed.

  “But I had to tell the captain the rest, Travis, for you’re a puzzle whose pieces don’t quite fit. And if it meant breaking a vow and taking on the sin of it, I intended to save your soul.”

  “The army would have give a ten-minute court-martial, then took me out and shot me. What about trying to save my life a little before you went off blabbing about me, sir?”

  “Ah, lad. If it was lives I wanted to save, I’d be telling all these boyos to go home.”

  Marrs, Pickering, and Riddell were waiting. By them, an officer. I ached to confess to someone, anyone, about seeing the ghosties, but it was too late.

  I had started away when I heard O’Shaughnessy’s quiet, “Sorry, lad.”

  Said serious enough, but he was grinning. In the middle of screaming and dying men, talking about suffering and glory. Smiling forgiveness for his own sins. In his purple stole, magnifying the Lord.

  I trotted across the grass to Riddell. The officer with him turned to watch my approach.

  “. . . a week, I shouldn’t guess.” The officer was a major, one with medical corps insignia. “A bit of bad luck, that.”

  Foy’s body weeping into his sheets. Bad luck. A blessing.

  From Marrs a shockingly irate “But I thought he was getting better.”

  The major didn’t take offense. Get used to gassing victims, I suppose, you can get used to disrespect. “Um. Yes. Looked better for a while. Thought he’d turned the corner, what? But it had worked its way into the lungs. No way to know until the lesions started suppurating. Still, a kind word, a familiar face. Cheering them up does wonders, I always say.”

  “It’s possible, then? He could get better?” Marrs asked.

  The major cleared his throat. “Well! I’m sure that he enjoyed his little visit. There’s that.”

  I left Pickering shaking his head at Mar
rs’s question. I went back into the ward and closed the door behind me. No one, not the patients trapped in their grotesque bodies, not the overworked nurses, paid any attention to my entrance. No ghosties came to lend me memories. I walked over to Foy’s bed.

  He was either dead or asleep. I stood and watched until I saw the slight rise and fall of his chest. Too bad. Poor Foy, brimming over with blessings.

  I reached down and took his swollen, scaly hand. “There’s this graveyard, Foy. Look for it, will you? You’ll know when you get there, because there’s no other peace like it. There’s marble angels and a mausoleum with a glass ceiling, glass so thick that light from it shimmers down on the tiles a pure water blue.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was hearing me. The tip of his dry tongue came out, licked his lips. The inside of his mouth, I saw, was bleeding.

  “There’s a woman,” I said. “You’ll like her. Tell her I sent you. Tell her she needs to take care of you special. She’ll do that for me. This is the truth, Foy. I’m sure of it now.”

  I started to leave, but he held onto my fingers for a heartbeat, so light and brief a holding that it might have been reflex.

  I squeezed back, careful not to hurt him. “That graveyard. It’s a goddamned beautiful blessing.”

  The four of us didn’t talk much on the walk back. It was coming on twilight. We passed under a line of poplars, disturbing a roosting flock of pigeons, sending them flying, rustling softly through branches, fluttering and cooing above our heads, tree to tree. We walked like potentates, the birds announcing our coming. Rabbits in a nearby meadow lifted their heads to watch us pass.

  When we hit the rest area, Riddell had a long private conversation with Blackhall. He came back grinning. “Got us a few hours more leave. That inn? Frenchie cook has learned ’imself fry-ups. Does a fair fish and chips. Anyone want to go?”

  The fish was soggy, the fries cut too big. I had a few glasses of wine and tried to explain to the cook about cornmeal and buttermilk, about the need for bacon drippings.

  Pickering just had to visit the whores, and even Riddell took a turn. I got the skinny one this time. Her hair was all done up in dark curls. Ringlets framed her cheek. We lay side by side, not talking, not fucking. She had the most amazing milk white skin, Bobby, and rosy little nipples. I ran my hand all over her slow. A miracle how whole her body was, what a blessing. She kept trying to kiss me. She played with my pecker. But after a while she stopped trying to earn her five shillings so hard. She stared at the ceiling, and she was smiling a little. I stroked her. I smelled her skin, Bobby. I buried my face in her ringlets and smelled her hair.

  When my nose and hands knew her, I rolled on top and nudged her legs apart. Being in her felt safe. I rested there for a while. My head was against her chest. I could hear her heart beating, a sound to sleep to.

  I took hold of her hand and put it to my cheek. Whores are good at understanding what a man needs; and so she caressed my face, my shoulders until I felt real again. She moved against me slow, and we rocked together into loving. She showed me a nice time, and I left her a pound note for her trouble. When I started to go out the door, she grabbed my hand to stay me. She ran her fingers over my forehead, my cheek. She kissed me real light on the corner of my mouth.

  “All right,” she said in her broken English. “All right,” she promised, stroking me. “Is all right.”

  It is all right, I think. When I got downstairs, Riddell was beaming, so proud of himself he was near to bursting.

  “A fine night, d’ye think so, Stanhope?” As if a good fuck had turned him into Pickering, he punched me in the arm. “Fine night.”

  And so it was.

  Travis Lee

  SEPTEMBER 2, A POSTCARD FROM THE FRONT LINES

  Dear Bobby,

  They got me sharpshooting the way Blackhall says it should be done. No more acting on my own, either. Got me a partner. Gives me somebody to talk to, I guess. Heatwave’s broken; the weather’s fine. The nights are downright chilly.

  Travis Lee

  SEPTEMBER 2, ONE YOU DON’T NEED TO SEE YET

  Dear Bobby,

  Blackhall called me into his dugout today. “I’m putting an end to your little game, Stanhope. Starting tomorrow, you sharp-shoots from No Man’s Land, the way the other sharpshooters does.”

  My knees started to buckle. I would have sat down then and there if I’d had a place to sit. Instead, I took a quick step back so I could brace myself against the sandbags. From his perch on an ammo box, Blackhall looked up at me. He knew how scared I was. That’s why he was smiling.

  “Lacks the belly for it?”

  I tried to keep my voice from shaking. I wouldn’t give him the damned pleasure. “Sir. Aren’t my totals good enough, sir?”

  Blackhall’s dugout, like most, was open to the trench. A breeze found its way to me down the traverse, but it wasn’t enough of one. I was sweating. Farther down, men argued as they repaired the walls. Over the ceaseless barrage of grumbling came Pickering’s braying laugh.

  “Ain’t your totals. Don’t like your attitude is what.” Blackhall scratched furiously at his belly. He’s a hairy man, with bunches of black curls climbing the front of his collar and springy tufts growing out his ears. The lice get to him bad. “You don’t get your head shaved like the rest of us. Got to stay pretty, don’t you, nits or no. Lifts extra rum. Or won’t tell me who gives it. Don’t sharpshoot like the others. Can’t bear to do sod all the way anybody else does.”

  Despite the sluggish cool breeze, it stank in Blackhall’s dugout: the lieutenant’s rank animal odor, my own sharp fear.

  “Nights, you reads your bloody poetry. Waste of candles, my opinion. Schoolgirl notions. Takes the fire out of your belly. Won’t have it.” He leaned back, took out his pipe, packed and lit it. He took his time, maybe hoping I’d leave. I didn’t.

  “Sir? When I started sharpshooting, they gave me a choice. I proved I could get me enough kills without moving any closer. Point is, aren’t my totals good enough? If they’re not up to snuff, just send me out there. Do whatever you goddamned please. But seems to me that if something ain’t broke, you don’t go trying to fix it.”

  “I’m tired of your insubordinate, degenerate ways.” He made an O of his lips and blew a smoke ring my way. It rose toward me like a gray halo before dissolving into ghosties. “I won’t have nobody bucking my orders or stealing rum or scarpering off. I wants real soldiers in this platoon, not prissy little sods who go giving others ideas.”

  “What the hell kind of ideas you talking about, sir?” I knew what the bastard meant, Bobby, and my knuckles itched to knock him down.

  He smiled. There was a dark gap where three of Blackhall’s front teeth were missing. The Tommies have bad teeth, damned near all of them. Maybe Blackhall resented my teeth, too.

  “I knows Captain give you an alibi, Stanhope, but I takes that for what it’s worth. I figure you done that girl in. Figure ’e knows it, too. But you’re a pretty boy, vain as a cock and a bit of a pet, I figures. Too, you got them bleeding sharpshooting totals. For whatever reason, ’e thinks you’re a valuable piece of muck. But for now, I owns you. So tomorrow before sunup, Stanhope, I want your arse out through the wire, and you’re to take a spotter along.”

  “A spotter? I’ve done without till now.”

  “You’ll sharpshoot by the book. Besides, I don’t trust you out there alone.”

  “I’ll take Pickering.” Then I changed my mind. “No, sir. I’ll take Marrs. We work good together.”

  “LeBlanc.”

  The eerie cold that possesses LeBlanc found its way down the traverse and entered me. I swallowed hard. “Sir,” I began, but he didn’t let me finish.

  “Should like that—partnering with LeBlanc—seeing as how he’s a sneaky devil just like you.”

  I tried to protest again, but he wouldn’t listen.

  “Wouldn’t give you who you chose, any case. Might get out there and start your mischief. Slap and tickle. D
ropping your bloody pants. Maybe you already ’as, you sharing a dugout with Marrs and all. Is that it? Is that why you wants Marrs out there with you?”

  My face went hot. My fists clenched. “Goddamn it.”

  He moved fast, Bobby. One heartbeat he was sitting, sneering at me, the next he was on his feet. There was a trenching tool in his hand.

  I took a deep breath, counted real slow to ten. “I ain’t no goddamned queer, sir.”

  He was clutching the trenching tool so tight that his knuckles were pale. Not from fear of me, neither. From absolute killing hate.

  “That girl had a tree branch rammed up inside ’er. I figures only a poof would go buggering a woman with sommit other than what ’e was born with. It’s unnatural. Well, degenerates can’t ’elps themselves, I suppose. See? I knows you, Stanhope. Didn’t I tell you once? Now go find LeBlanc. Tell ’im to get his arse ’ere on the double.” When I hesitated, he took a step forward. I didn’t back up. For a disturbing time we were too close.

  His breath bathed my face; and it was so heavy with rot that it made me sick. He growled, “Get out of me sight.”

  LeBlanc took the news the way he does everything: a few cusses, then sulky resignation. But I saw something else in him, too. A deadly joy. Part of him wants to go under the wire, Bobby, and that scares me bad.

  Travis Lee

  SEPTEMBER 4, THE FRONT LINES ONE TO HANG ONTO FOR A WHILE

  Dear Bobby,

  The night before LeBlanc and me crawled out to No Man’s Land, Marrs and me and Calvert had ourselves a little goodbye party. Marrs made tea. We put some of my rum stash and some of Pickering’s jam in it. It tasted like chlorinated puke; but even Calvert, who likes his tea and rum plain, drank it down. In war, you do what you got to, I guess.

  Marrs tried to make me feel better. He kept patting me on the back. And every damned time he did, I thought about what Blackhall had imagined us doing.

  “Yeah, okay,” I said, and shrugged him off.

  But he kept hovering. “It’ll be all right, Stanhope. Won’t be so bad. You’ll see.”

  Always patting on me. “Yeah, Marrs. Okay. Fine.”