I told him the shame hurt too bad to abide, asked him how I could stop it. He told me he didn’t know. Then he asked me to get up off my knees and sit in the chair. He lit a cigarette, handed it to me.
“Why didn’t I stop him?” I asked.
And he said, “Lust.”
A one-syllable explanation for my shiftless nature and even for my drinking; for it was lust I felt for the bottle, too. I took a deep drag, let it out, watched smoke curl toward the board ceiling.
“I need to quit drinking,” I told him.
“Pray,” he said. “Ask after Sergeant Riddell’s herb cure.”
I promised I would. I promised, too, I’d quit.
He said, “Don’t do your promising to me, lad.”
“They put LeBlanc in front of a firing squad?”
He checked his pocket watch. Did it so sneaky that I barely caught what he was doing.
“It’s what he deserves, Father.”
O’Shaughnessy stared into the corner for a while, then asked if I wanted tea. Whatever appointment he had was going to be broken.
I said I’d be appreciative of some tea, and he put water on the primus. He opened a tin of butter cookies with currants and put it on the table.
“Should imagine it will go hard for Captain.”
My cookie stopped a few inches from my mouth. “Why?”
“Because he’s a Jew, and that lad’s the most decorated soldier in the battalion. Don’t be altogether surprised, Travis, if nothing comes of it. When word gets to Command, they’ll be blaming it on the girl herself, on the natural lusts of a soldier, on Captain not keeping a watch when he knew the boy had a history.”
I put the cookie back in its stiff paper cup. So hurting women was the trouble Miller tried to tell me about.
The water started steaming. O’Shaughnessy went to tend the tea. “Well, Pierre’s a hard and bitter lad. A troublemaker as well, which is why the Canadians wanted rid of him. It was Major Dunn who took a liking to the lad’s combat record and asked after the transfer; but it won’t be the major taking the blame. No, it will fall on Captain, and him only having pity for the boy.”
“LeBlanc murdered that little girl, and Miller knows it. He knew it all the time. Goddamn him, anyway.” I can tell you how betrayal tastes, Bobby. It’s gall-bitter, with an aftertaste of tarnished-penny rage.
“The worst shame of it is that she’s been forgotten already. One death among thousands now. Let it go,” he said quietly and firmly. “Let it go.”
“I’ll kill LeBlanc, Father. Or he’ll kill me out there. He’s bugeyed crazy.”
“He’s lonely, Travis.”
“Lonely, shit.”
“Comes from being raised without a family, and the Sisters of Charity no replacement. Comes from running the Toronto streets. He’ll be looking for belonging, yet pushing friendship away. One has to feel pity for a boy like that.”
“I don’t have to feel a goddamned thing. That’s your job, Father. I’m shut of him.”
I left. We never drank that tea. I never ate the cookie. It’s night. Hours have passed. I haven’t told Pickering, even though he keeps asking what’s wrong. I don’t dare tell him. LeBlanc hasn’t been arrested yet. Maybe he won’t ever be.
Anyway, tomorrow we march to the front lines. There, I’ll be crawling out into No Man’s Land with a murdering boy. Tonight LeBlanc’s curled in his covers, wrapped in his lies, safe. Maybe he’s dreaming of his fantasy horses, his imaginary family. Maybe he’s dreaming about fucking that mangled girl.
Travis Lee
OCTOBER 12, THE FRONT LINES
Dear Bobby,
Still not arrested. And LeBlanc knows I know. The first day out in No Man’s Land with him was a day of terrible silence. I plinked away at Boche. It was all I could do not to blow LeBlanc’s brains out.
That night I dreamed red dreams, and when I woke up, my jaws ached from chewing on fury.
I ate some breakfast before dawn, careful not to wake Pickering and Calvert. By the time I was done, LeBlanc was waiting for me outside the dugout. I didn’t speak a word to him. We climbed up the ladder and snuck out into the dark.
It was about noon that I got started thinking about that girl. I probed the memory like a mouth ulcer, wondering how many other women LeBlanc had hurt. God knows I wasn’t blameless. I wondered what I would have done if I’d seen him with that twelve-year-old girl.
“Three yards to the right of that white post.” He was peering intently through the field telescope.
“Fuck you.”
Rain was beating on us in that halfhearted way it does here.
He looked around, said, “Take the shot. Don’t be an asshole.”
I snapped one left instead, scared the bejesus out of a Boche officer, dinged the prong off the top of his helmet, sent him diving for cover.
I was ready for LeBlanc, too. When he reached out to slap me like he does when he thinks we’re playing, I struck back, left-handed but knuckle-first. I slammed him hard on the side of the mouth, Bobby. Knocked his helmet off, split his lip for him, made blood run. It felt good. I hit him again, right-handed this time—clubbed my fist down on his ear.
My hand hurt. Christ. Hurt all the way to the elbow.
The blow stunned him. I saw it in his grimace, the way he cupped the side of his head.
“You lying chicken shit bastard,” I said. “You want to ride a horse? Let’s put you on Miller’s damned sorrel. You’d crap your pants, city boy. See, I know all about you, about the orphanage, about how you go fucking women. Is that the only way a girl’ll have you?”
A blow from an unexpected direction. He kicked, bruised the hell out of my thigh, missed my balls by an inch. My rifle, his telescope, went sliding down the mud incline and into the water. He grabbed me. We went slipping down the mud, too, and hit the water, still pummeling each other.
There were dead things down there. The water wore a greasy film of putrefaction. It was greenish-yellow and saturated with gas. I pushed him face-down into it, tried to hold his head under. I was bigger, but he was desperate. He pushed me off, came up sputtering.
“Holy shit, Stanhope!” he yelled.
He rolled out from under me. I hit him again—a glancing blow off the side of his jaw. He gave me one back, but he wasn’t nearly fast enough. I ducked under, grabbed him one-handed by the throat. I saw terror come all over him. He pulled away, started crawling fast up the incline.
I grabbed at his tunic, got a handful of mud for my trouble. He kicked, caught me, sharp and painful, on the side of the neck. I snatched at his trouser leg. He squirmed free.
I climbed the hill after, caught him in the flat, rolled him belly-up. He tore at my face, at my eyes. A bullet smacked a hillock of mud near us, splashed my face. A quick, violent tug at my leg. Not LeBlanc. The Boche sniper had shot my boot heel off.
That surprised me, made me relax my grip. LeBlanc skittered away, fast as a crab. I went after, caught him on the downside of another hole, flipped him over. His eyes were wide. His mouth was bleeding.
“You’re crazy!” he said.
I hit him again.
“They’re shooting at us, Stanhope! Jesus. Don’tcha see? The Boche sniper’s shooting at us!”
“Who’s scared now?” I asked him.
He kept begging me to stop, kept trying to fight back; but I beat him, Bobby. I pulled him down into a shell hole and beat him stupid. I pounded on him till my hand couldn’t take no more. By the time I was finished, I was too exhausted to move. It took me hours to pry my fingers open.
Both his eyes were swollen nearly shut. There was a star hemorrhage in his right. His nose was broken, squashed flat. His mouth looked like one of those ugly cartoons they draw when they’re making fun of coloreds. He really didn’t look human anymore.
I crawled off, found the telescope and my rifle. When dark fell, I let him make his own way back. I could hear him, though, tagging along behind like a kicked dog.
Jesus, Bobby.
What does he want from me, anyway? The horses? My family? Well, shit. He can have all my memories of Pa.
Back in the trenches, Blackhall held up a lantern. He checked LeBlanc’s face, looked at my knuckles.
“A dust-up, is it? Daft, having a row out there. How’d it start?”
I didn’t answer. Maybe LeBlanc’s mouth didn’t work well enough to speak.
“Me, I’d shoot the bof of you, and save the Boche the trouble.” He called for Riddell, who came and blinked sleepily at LeBlanc, looked crestfallen at me.
“Take ’em down to Captain,” Blackhall said. “Let ’im see how ’is two pets is getting along.”
Miller didn’t seem surprised. Unlike Riddell, he didn’t even seem disappointed. He gestured toward LeBlanc. “Sergeant? Accompany this man to the medic. See that both are fined a week’s pay. No free time for a month.”
Riddell said his “Yes, sir”s and “right away, sir”s.
I told Miller, “Think I broke my hand, sir.”
He waited until the dugout door had closed. “Best that you have. That should give you a few weeks apart. Because I shall expect the both of you out sharpshooting when the rotation comes round again.”
“You can’t mean that, sir.”
He sat down, crossed his legs that prissy way the Brit public school boys do. He lit a cigarette, didn’t offer me one. “Indeed I do.”
“I’ll kill him, sir. He’ll kill me.”
He reached into a haversack, threw me a towel. “Clean your face, Stanhope. You’re an utter wog.”
I wiped mud with my good hand.
“What occurred out there?” he asked.
“What occurred in here?”
“Pardon?”
“You never told Major Dunn that LeBlanc raped that woman, did you? You’re scared he’ll accuse you of knowing LeBlanc’s tendencies and not watching him careful enough. Shit, sir. Didn’t killing that little girl like he did teach you any kind of lesson?”
He leaned back in the chair, blew a cloud of smoke my way. “Dismissed, Stanhope. Report to the medical dugout.”
I stayed where I was, the towel wadded in my hand. “Where’s the goddamned justice in this, sir? Jesus. Somebody has to do something.”
Miller contemplated the end of his cigarette.
“Well? Don’t they?”
He pursed his lips, tapped ash.
“You forced me into teaching him a thing or two, sir. Just ’cause somebody had to. Now he’ll be hunting for me. I know him. I know how crazy he is. You’ll find me laid out somewheres, stabbed in the back.”
Miller stubbed his butt out on the side of the table. A shower of sparks fell. “Now that you have trounced him, Private LeBlanc will respect you. He is a dog of sorts. Had you beaten him in public, he would have been forced to revenge himself. But do take care not to lose his esteem, Stanhope. Tarnish yourself, and he will feel betrayed. Dismissed. Discuss this matter with no one.”
“You’re just going to forget about those girls? He’ll do it again, sir. Can’t break him of the habit.”
“Dismissed, Stanhope.”
“Goddamn you to hell, sir.”
He looked away, said in a tone of utter boredom, “Dismissed.”
Come to find that I only sprained my hand, Bobby. Bruised it pretty bad, too. The doctor wrapped it, gave me aspirin powders. When I got back to my dugout, Riddell came by. He unwrapped what the doctor did and tied me up in a poultice. It feels a sight better, but it still aches something fierce when I try to write.
Well, enough about my wounds. Hear tell, though, I cracked LeBlanc’s cheekbone for him. Uh-huh. Ain’t that too damned bad. Bet a broken cheekbone don’t hurt near as much as guilt.
Travis Lee
NINE
OCTOBER 14, THE RESERVE TRENCHES
Dear Bobby,
A couple of nights ago I finally took another trip to the graveyard. It had been too long. The gathered angels, the headstones, were just like coming home. I was glad to see it was still green, that there was a place in the world where it wasn’t raining.
It was a simple dream, and a short one. The calico girl sat beside me on a carved bench. She took my bruised hand in both her own, and held it.
She didn’t say a word, but I woke up feeling healed. My hand still aches, but there’s a drawing pain—a mending pain—in my chest, where shame cut me.
I haven’t told anyone what happened between me and LeBlanc. Pickering wants his gossip and so he’s in a pout. No one knows about that bakery shop girl, either. It’s best that the rest of the boys don’t know. Some would be making fun of her getting fucked that way, some would be laughing and calling her a cow. I don’t think I could take that.
Blackhall gave me a new boot heel. I had to nail it on myself. Still, my hand’s not well enough for sandbag duty. The boys leave me in the morning; they come back a couple of hours before dark. I sit and read, play a little solitaire. I’ve tried some of the penny dreadful novels Pickering’s wife sends him.
By the way, Calvert’s wife sent him sugar. Do you believe that? A three-kilogram package of sugar. The next day we were due to move back to the reserve area, so we set about eating that sugar so Calvert didn’t have to cart it. We made syrup of our tea, ate the stuff in spoonfuls out of the package. We passed it down the trench. By the time he got the sugar back, the package was wet and the last of the sugar was melting. He was relieved, I think.
Rain has made the trenches into shallow, narrow creeks; the dugouts are inlets. The water’s up to our ankles. We sleep on top of crates, surrounded by the flotsam of drowned rats and the jetsam of maggots.
Every Thursday, Riddell holds trench-foot inspection. Pickering jokes that he’s hoping for a case, waiting for a Blighty; but I’ve seen men’s flesh soften like boiled chicken, seen pale, bloated meat fall off the bone. We’ve lost three out of our company already from it, and the rains have just started.
Riddell packs weeds into our whale oil when Blackhall’s not looking. It turns green and stinks like a compost heap—worse than the drinking cure he made me—still, I’m not drinking, and our platoon’s free of the rot.
The enemy’s changed, Bobby. We fight mud. We battle lice. We hold entire campaigns against trench foot. Miller lectures about nits and the importance of changing socks. When he comes by for his dugout visits, he’ll give offenders a gaze that’d make your balls wither.
But I’m disappointed in him, Bobby. I’d thought Miller was a brave man. For those girls’ sake, I reckon he’s just not brave enough. I think about his fiancée sometimes, when I dare. When I let myself. I wonder if she stares at him from that wall. It’s a haunting face she’s got. An unforgettable one. He must have to turn away.
Last night was the first time I walked No Man’s Land in my sleep. The afternoon reveries were one thing, but God, that dream was real. A three-quarters moon was up. I felt the chill of the rain on my back, smelled the stink of that death-saturated earth. The light was spectral and full of deceit, the way moonlight always is. And walking through that lacerated place—a land frozen into upheaval—I came upon Marrs. He was sitting bowed, his shoulders, his head splashed with moonlight. I sat on the lip of the shell hole with him.
“Need to come with me, Marrs.”
He’d finally got tired of his wandering, I guess. He wasn’t grinning anymore. His elbows were propped on his knees, his hands clasped. His head was down.
“Can’t catch me breath, Stanhope.”
“You’re dead,” I told him, gentle as I could. “Don’t you remember?”
“Can’t catch me breath.”
It must have been the fierceness of the blast that stayed with him: the oxygen burning, and not himself.
“Come on. Come with me.”
He looked up, not at me, but at the sky. His face sagged into an expression of vague woe. “They firing?”
“Not anymore.”
“Seen me letter?”
“It’s waiting for you in the graveyard.”
<
br /> He looked down at his hands. “They firing?”
I told him the firing had stopped. That the battle was won. That he could go on.
“Stanhope?”
“Yeah, Marrs?”
“Sometimes,” he said in hushed confusion, “I just can’t catch me breath.”
I finally had to leave. I don’t think he ever noticed my going. Marrs carries with him such a foggy sadness. All of the wandering spirits do. There’s nothing keen about ghosts, Bobby. A shame that death takes all our passion.
Travis Lee
OCTOBER 16, THE RESERVE TRENCHES
Dear Bobby,
Today I was alone, sitting in the dugout reading, when a shadow fell over the page. I looked up to see LeBlanc blocking the dugout doorway. What I’d done to him was awful, Bobby. Green and purple bruises bloomed across his cheeks. His nose was grotesque with swelling. His lip was torn. His eyeball was full of blood.
“Hey.” Looked like it hurt him to speak.
I’d tensed so, my hand throbbed. “Hey.”
Standing at the door, he looked up the trench and then down. Calvert and Pickering were gone, the sentry not due. LeBlanc’d take out his knife. He’d gut me the way you would a deer.
“You won’t tell anybody?”
I swallowed hard. Tell what? About the rapes? About besting him? I couldn’t best him now, not with my hand the way it was, not if he had a knife.
“Promise?”
He was such a murdering, lying shit, how could I promise him anything?
He shifted his weight, cleared his throat. “Hey, Stanhope? I don’t want anybody to know I was a born a bastard.”
How can something as fragile as childhood hide such lasting things? Pa’s beatings; LeBlanc’s orphanage. Fungus secrets that thrive without light, without air.
“You bet,” I told him.
He shouldered his way further inside the dugout, stood looking down at me with his blood-filled eye.
He shoved his hand toward me. “No hard feelings.”
I shook it, left-handed. “No hard feelings.” And I knew that I was the only one lying.
“So. We’re going back out there in a couple of weeks, eh?”
“Seems like it.”
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