Flanders

by Patricia Anthony

“Good to see you, too, sir.” And I meant it.

  He must have heard the welcome in my tone, for his gaze snapped to mine.

  “Sorry, sir. You can’t pass without the password.”

  His eyebrows rose. Cautious now, like a horse the first time in snow, not sure which way to step. “Ah?”

  It was cool. Right in that spot, the air smelled fresh, like there hadn’t been any death around to spoil it. “Yes, sir. Sorry about that, sir. New regs and everything.”

  So damned serious. It broke my heart. He’d caught the upper-class stuffiness of Dunston-Smith.

  I said, “I’ll start it for you, sir. ‘Thou, that to human thought art nourishment.’ ”

  He frowned.

  I prodded him with another line. “ ‘Like darkness to a dying flame.’ ” Daylight was dying, too. And my smile along with it. He had to know Hymn to Intellectual Beauty. Hell, it was one of Shelley’s better-known works, not like The Masque of Anarchy or something. To be truthful, I always thought of it as Miller’s and my private anthem. I went on slow. “ ‘Depart not . . .’ ”

  A smile broke out all over him. It was like, for that instant, that the sun had pierced the clouds. “ ‘As thy shadow came!’ ”

  “Doing good, sir. Just the couplet to go. “ ‘Depart not, lest the grave should be . . .’ ”

  “Password’s too bloody easy, Stanhope. ‘Like life and fear, a dark reality.’ ”

  We stood in the mist grinning like a pair of fools. “Good to see you, Stanhope,” he said again, and this time he meant it. “You’re well, I take it?”

  “You bet, sir.”

  “And the sharpshooting from No Man’s Land suits you? Lieutenant Blackhall and I had quite a discussion about that. He’s a stickler for rules, you know. Sometimes it’s best to let subalterns have their head, if they don’t abuse the privilege.”

  “I understand, sir. Everything’s fine.”

  “Well.” He cleared his throat. His eyes went wandering the gray afternoon again. “Excellent totals, at any rate. Must buy you a dinner when we’re on leave. Perhaps a run at one of your tarts.” He was smiling when he said that, too; but there was a hint of condescension, too.

  It put me in my place. And it hurt, too, Bobby, if you want to know the truth. I’ve seen coloreds get that smile to them when they’re together and a white boy like me’s around—it’s like they share all kinds of secrets, or like suffering makes them better. Maybe it does.

  About then Fritz decided to lob a few shells our way. A Jack Johnson landed toward the rear. Black smoke rose into the cool pewter day.

  “Take you up sometime on that dinner, sir.”

  We shook hands on it.

  A whizzbang landed next—so close that we both ducked, and then we laughed. “Best find shelter, what?” He sounded sorry to be leaving.

  We had an awkward time of it, squeezing past each other. The trench was tight. We went chest to chest, but he kept his hips best he could away from me. He’s a gentleman like that.

  And when we were past each other and I had started away, I heard him call my name. I looked over my shoulder to see him smiling, there in the misty gloom, in the constriction of that trench.

  “ ‘While yet a boy I sought for ghosts,’ isn’t it?”

  The next line of verse. I’d forgotten. Jesus. How could I have? It sent a shudder through me. “Yes, sir. You’re right, sir.”

  He nodded, tapped his cap with his stick. “Must have us a real challenge some day. A witness each to mark our shots and wipe our brows when we’re sweated. The English Romantic poets and fifty paces. Well. Ta-ta, Stanhope.”

  “Goodbye, sir.”

  I watched him leave, then I went on my way, too—through the gloom of the narrow trench.

  That night Foy was in the graveyard. His yellow blisters were healed. His round baby-face was peaceful. He was in his grave, and there were blood-red flowers and ferns tucked all around him. He was smiling a little, even though his eyes were closed.

  I kneeled down at the edge of the grave and put the flat of my hand on the glass. I called to him, but he didn’t stir. The glass was cool to the touch, the roses around him pimpled and wet with dew. I rested my palm over where I thought his heart would be.

  “When you wake up, why don’t you stick around for a while, Foy?”

  The rest of the platoon had all left. I couldn’t bear to lose Foy, too.

  I got up and started away, but stopped when something told me his eyes had opened. I went back. He was still sleeping. I didn’t see the calico girl around, but I left him, anyway. When I woke up this morning I thought of him lying down there, hands crossed over his chest, his eyes blank and open. What’s he seeing, do you think?

  Travis Lee

  Autumn 1916

  SEVEN

  SEPTEMBER 14, A POSTCARD FROM THE ROAD

  Dear Bobby,

  They’ve moved us out. We’re heading north, I hear. Maybe I’ll get to see the ocean.

  Thank Ma for the angora underwear. I’m the envy of the platoon. Tell her next time, though, she don’t have to dye the wool. Believe me, up here with this bunch, plain goat-tan’s best.

  Travis Lee

  SEPTEMBER 14, ON THE MARCH

  Dear Bobby,

  They pulled us back and sent us north, away from the best trenches we’d ever had. Nobody wanted to go. That place had been home for a while—a little damp, maybe. Certainly stinky. Still, there was elbow room in all the dugouts and most of the walls were strong—decent Boche digs. Then one morning, as the Brits would say, Bob’s your uncle. Another battalion was coming to take our place. We don’t know why. They tell us to go, and we march. They tell us to fight, and for some unknown reason we do.

  The land here is even flatter. We march past black dirt farmland plowed by combat. Plants grow—mustard and turnips and kale—but everything’s growing in the fallow. Here, war shoulders up to the road. It encroaches on the towns, Bobby. You can see it in the roadside trash, in the odd shell holes, in the forsaken, dismal little villages. This afternoon, we passed our only hints of life: a woman poling along in a flat bottom boat and an old man scavenging through a weedy garden.

  Teatime, we stopped by the burned trunk of what had been an enormous tree. It must have lived centuries, that tree. Must have spread its branches near fifty feet across. Around the bare trunk was piled trash: rusting tins with labels in English, in French; a broken Boche belt buckle.

  Pickering leaned his back against the charred bole. He lit up a smoke. I asked him if I could have one, but he flat-out ignored me.

  Marrs caught on pretty quick to the reason for his mood. “New place won’t be so bad, maybe,” he said.

  Without a glance in Marrs’s direction, Pickering muttered, “Sod off.”

  Pickering’s scared, Bobby. He’d had to leave his cross on the sandbag, that sun-faded T that he took as some sort of sign. I remember the day we got to our old place, he’d seen it. He just had to have that cubbyhole, always had to sleep with his head toward that particular sandbag. Marrs’s private salvation is the letter from his sweetheart promising she’d marry him, the one he keeps over his heart. With me, it’s nothing I can touch particularly, but Emily Dickinson’s poem of grief my mind can’t help playing with: This is the Hour of Lead—/Remembered, if outlived,/As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow.

  Thinking on that, I went quiet, too. I was disoriented. I’d packed up that morning and left home. Pickering had walked away without his sun-bleached cross and now he watched the sky, afraid a shell would kill him.

  Marrs kept trying to get Pickering to talk, but I knew how heavy those lead hours could be, so I didn’t bother anymore. Across the way I saw O’Shaughnessy praying with a soldier, LeBlanc staring at them both. Having those bad thoughts again? Was he wanting O’Shaughnessy to help him? Wish he could help us. It’ll be a new No Man’s Land I’ll be facing. I’ll have to find new shooting spots, new resting spots, new places to snipe from. War’s so goddamned tiring.
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br />   At sunset we bivouacked in a fieldstone farmhouse with shattered walls. Rain started falling faster. Our charcoal fires went out, and we drank lukewarm tea with our cold dinner. When we were finished eating, we settled into our sleeping bags and watched the world fill up with night.

  From the dark next to me came Pickering’s quiet voice. “Bleeding luck.”

  “What?”

  He was no more than two feet away. We’ve slept beside each other so long, I knew his smell. Out of all the snorers, I could pick out his breathing. “Should have cut it out with my penknife, Stanhope, that cross of mine. Would have too, if they’d warned us ahead of time that we were leaving.”

  Pickering leaving his cross. Riddell, his gramophone and Elgar. Miller and Dunston-Smith their straw-warm hut. There wasn’t anything I wanted to go back for. I took a deep breath. The air was perfumed with rain.

  “Might have carried it, you know. Just the T part. The rest of the sandbag might have stayed.”

  “Yeah,” I whispered back. “It’s a shame.”

  “Bleeding British luck,” he said, a man resigned to fate.

  I couldn’t sleep. Every time I closed my eyes it felt like I was tumbling into the graveyard’s dark. Before dawn I got up and crawled around the sleepers. I went outside. In the yard of the farmhouse I found an old lean-to. There, I lit a candle and read a little Shelley. I wrote you a postcard, then I wrote you this letter.

  When I get to the new trenches, Blackhall will send me into the No Man’s Land there. I have the strange feeling that I’ll recognize it, every nook and hole and cranny. What’s worse is, I understand why: When it comes right down to it, Bobby, all darkness is the same.

  Travis Lee

  SEPTEMBER 19, NEW RESERVE TRENCHES

  Dear Bobby,

  The trenches here are crumbling. The mud’s ankle-deep. Dig a hole anywheres, it fills up with water. The soil is full of stinking bodies and white, knobby bones. The earth spews up death. It’s built into the walls. Down the trench a Frenchie, last season’s casualty, is sticking halfway out the bags: one horizon-blue leg; a bloated arm with two fingers off, another rotted to bone. The boys who were here before us said they’d miss him.

  Hearing that, Riddell did a double take. “Whyn’t take ’im with you?”

  They didn’t, but before they left every damned boy in both platoons shook that Frenchie’s gray hand. They bid him adieu. Then they marched away, leaving us with their piss-poor trenches and their dead Frenchman.

  The dugouts here stink of piss and rot. They’re dripping wet. They’re so small that the four of us have to take turns sleeping with our feet stuck in the aisle. Goddamned sentry’s always tripping over us.

  When the Boche shell, we huddle up real tight together, shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee, and wait for the walls to fall on us. We hunker shivering under the elephant sheet. There’s not even the comfort of hot tea. We light up the brazier, but the charcoal stinks so bad it chases even the rats out.

  I woke up the other night to hear Marrs crying. He went on for hours, sobbing quiet so as not to wake us. I don’t know if the others knew. Nobody spoke. Thinking on it, I should have said something, but I was too afraid of embarrassing him. Besides, what could I say? Everything’ll be all right? Jesus. Even Marrs is smart enough not to believe that.

  And Pickering’s in a funk. It’s that goddamned cross of his. He’s convinced himself that he’s going to die here. The second night, when everyone else was asleep, he punched me. “Stanhope? Do me a favor.”

  “Yeah?” The dugout was dark and too close, with the four of us crowded together. Calvert was snoring; Marrs was so quiet that he might have been dead. Even the rats had settled down for the evening.

  “When I die, bury me proper, will you?”

  “Better not die on me, Pickering. Else I’ll have to go to London, look up your wife, and fuck her.”

  “No,” he said. “Truly. You must promise me, Stanhope. I’m not joking.”

  I rolled away from him, disturbing a rat, sending it scampering over my legs.

  “Please.” The whispered plea behind me, nothing of Pickering’s banter in it. “You must bury me, Stanhope. There’s only you to ask. I’m afraid Marrs might muck it up. He has a soft enough heart, but he’s always a bit muddled, isn’t he. Like a fart in a colander. I know you’d see it through.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut and wished he’d go to sleep. “Yeah, okay. I’ll bury you.”

  Just like Pickering to get an agreement, then glue caveats on. “Not in the parados, mind. I’d bloody fall out into the trench eventually.”

  “Not in the parados,” I promised.

  “And I wouldn’t care to be sticking out of a wall someplace. You must promise me that. Bloody awful to be rotting where everyone can see. Good God. And I know it would be my luck to be hanging out the bags with my trousers about my ankles.”

  I started laughing. Calvert stirred in his sleep. I bunched my sleeping bag up to my mouth to stifle the noise.

  “Not funny, Stanhope. I have a horror of being left out with the flies and the maggots. I have nightmares about it, if you must know. Don’t you?”

  The conversation was macabre, considering the darkness, the reek. I wanted to tell him about the graveyard, but I knew he’d either make a joke or he’d tell me to prove it. Pickering’s a rock solid boy, the sort who doesn’t hold to visions.

  “Best you don’t go thinking about things like that, Pickering. You go crazy that way.”

  “Well, we’re here, aren’t we? Proof we’re bleeding bonkers. Also, if you don’t mind, Stanhope, I’d rather not be left someplace where rats could eat me.” His last sentence ended in a tired whisper.

  He must have been exhausted. We all were. “Yeah. Okay. I’ll see what I can do.”

  Something fell on me. I flinched and nearly cried out. Only Pickering’s hand. He squeezed my shoulder tight, tried to speak, but choked up instead.

  We were originals. I knew what he meant to say. “Oh, shit, Pickering. You’re welcome.”

  I couldn’t sleep, not when he was crying. I hated the sound of that. I was so damned tired, Bobby—too tired to even try giving him any ghostie and graveyard hope. He was too tired to hear it. Maybe that’s why he boo-hooed, why Marrs did. Life here beats you down. It’s exhausting, being helpless. Every day we rebuild walls and put up revetments. It doesn’t matter. At night, the sandbags fail. If whizzbangs don’t burst them, damp does. Walls tumble. They bury people. The trenches. What great goddamned shelter.

  Yesterday O’Shaughnessy came on me where I was taking a breather from filling sandbags. My arms were trembling, my back ached. I’d been thinking longingly of Dickinson’s description of freezing: Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go. I started thinking how death and grief must be the kinfolk of exhaustion.

  “I’ve had word from hospital, lad,” he told me. “Foy passed on a week back.”

  I nodded, thought about letting myself go into tiredness—just lying down where I was, closing my eyes, and giving myself so completely to sleep that my resting heart would stop.

  He sat down beside me and lit two smokes. He handed me one. “Have you been seeing his ghostie, then?”

  God, that cigarette tasted good. It woke me up, made me feel alive. I took a deep, steadying drag and blew smoke into the monochrome afternoon. It’s the ugliness that beats me down the worst. Everything the hue of dirt—it’s like being struck colorblind.

  “I reckon so. When I dream about the graveyard now, Foy’s always there,” I said. “He’s down in a grave with glass over him and pretty flowers tucked around. His eyes are open, mostly, and that worries me. But the calico girl says he’s just dreaming. What do you think he could be dreaming about, sir? Down in that grave like that?”

  “Heaven,” O’Shaughnessy said.

  All this time I’d been thinking that the graveyard is Heaven, but maybe I’ve been wrong. After all, if the graveyard’s Heaven, why did Dunleavy and the platoon leave? I
f it’s Heaven, would the flowers fade like they do?

  “Keep watch over Foy, Travis. Don’t be letting him wander.”

  The idea chilled me: Foy sleepwalking through the brightly hued cemetery. Foy wandering past the cypress and stumbling accidentally into the dark.

  That night I went back to the graveyard to look down into Foy’s blank blue eyes.

  “Don’t you be getting up and walking off, now,” I told him.

  The calico girl was standing by a fancy marble urn, laughing.

  “But I got to watch over him,” I said.

  Autumn sunlight tilted through the trees, threw long shadows of blue. Behind her, maples and hickories were already starting to turn. Winter would come soon. The last of the green would dry to brown. Color would leave the graveyard. Snow would gradually, quietly cover the glass. I wondered what Foy would dream then.

  She was still snickering at me.

  “I got to take care of him. It’s my job, ain’t it?”

  The wind rattled through the cottonwood, sent a handful of leaves scattering. Watery sun silver-plated her hair. “He’s never out of my sight.”

  It was said as a promise. And right then, right in the middle of that dream, in the silence of the night, I woke up smiling. The trench stank. Pickering’s elbow was gouging me, Marrs’s butt was in my face; but in the damp of that dugout I felt so damned lucky, protected and coddled down to the bone. Never out of her sight. You see what that means, Bobby? Not just Foy, but you and me, Pickering and Marrs. Every single one. Nobody can ever be lost. Even if we wandered, she’d find us.

  Travis Lee

  SEPTEMBER 19, A NOTE FROM THE RESERVE TRENCHES

  Dear Bobby,

  This goddamned toy’s supposed to make me feel better? Shit. Tell Pa if he wanted forgiveness so damned bad, he should have asked sooner. If he couldn’t help what he was doing, he should have left when I was a kid. Now’s no time to be carving me animals.

  You’re wrong, Bobby. It’s a selfish thing he did, not a kindness. He’s asking too much payment for this wood horse. So don’t go begging me to forgive him. And don’t you dare tell me where to find peace. You say Pa and me are staring death in the face. That may well be, but Pa needs to find his pardon somewheres else.