It was a spine bone, the small one at the base of the skull. I slipped it in my pocket and every once in a while I’d go to rubbing on it. You know, Bobby, that bone had been the prop of thoughts once, a buttress to love and fear. My thumb slides over it, polishing it more. Sometimes I think I can hear thoughts from it. Is that crazy?
Best talk to that bone. Lord knows LeBlanc and me, we don’t speak much anymore. He’ll peer through the field telescope and say, “Three and a half meters left of the coffee tin,” and I’ll snap a shot off.
We lunch in silence. We bear the wet in silence. When I get back to the dugout, I take the silence with me. It’s like I’ve forgotten how to talk.
I lie in my damp cubbyhole, ignoring Pickering’s and Calvert’s gossip. I slip my hand into my pocket and rub that bone. It tells me about Alpine meadows: a hoop of mountains, an embroidery of wildflowers. It brings me the smells and lowing of milk cows. It sends me to sleep.
I dream of Pa, sometimes twice a night now. I’m always walking down that same hall, seeing Ma’s door ahead and knowing what’s waiting. I want real bad to turn and go the other way; but I don’t. I can’t. I just keep walking that same steady pace.
The light still falls across the hardwoods. The hall smells of floor wax and camphor the way it always does. And like I always do, I stop at the door.
I’m supposed to go in. It’s not just Pa waiting for me to make my move; it’s forgiveness.
Pa sits on the bed in that benevolent wash of sun. Light from the window crowns him, throws a radiant stole across his shoulders. He’s always the same: head lowered and pensive, hands cupped. While I stand there, some powerful force pulls at me. I have to grab the doorjamb to keep from being drawn in.
Still, I walk on despite the soul-deep tug. It’s my choice and I take it, no matter what God expects.
Travis Lee
NOVEMBER 1, THE RESERVE TRENCHES
Dear Bobby,
Today was the day I got your news. Riddell came down to the place we were working to find me. Pickering and Calvert and me were working on sump holes, and we were head to foot with mud. Pickering had been telling jokes all morning. Calvert—who’ll surprise you sometimes—was relating a story about a fishmonger philandering uncle of his who pranged a whore in an alley once, then hid his used rubber in his pile of herring.
Calvert told it good, too, making his voice high and squeaky when he was imitating his aunt. Got me to laughing so hard I couldn’t catch my breath. Pickering was wiping away tears.
Calvert was saying, “But when me auntie leaves, ’e goes to find it, doesn’t ’e, and it’s gone! Bleeding thing’s gone! And ’e wonders if it were in the kilogram ’e sold to the last old lady customer. Crikey! ’e thinks. Old biddy might fry it up.”
All of a sudden Calvert stopped talking. Pickering stopped laughing. I turned around. Riddell was standing there looking at me, his face full of bad news.
“Stanhope?” He’s a considerate man, but I’d never heard his voice as kindly. “Captain wants you.”
I thought of Ma. Then for a dizzy, terrible moment I thought of you. I ran pell-mell down the duckboards, pushing soldiers out of my way. I slogged my way through the mud in the communication trench, then down the twenty or so yards to Miller’s.
I knocked. He called for me to come in. I opened the door, breathless, and found him sitting, looking down at a paper in his hand. The lamp was lit behind him and the warm glow had settled across his shoulders. The man and the room were wrong, but something in the way he was sitting, Bobby. Something in the way the light fell. For that brief instant I stepped into my dream. I felt a pull, the tug so strong that I had to clutch the door to keep from falling in.
Miller looked up, broke the spell. “Stanhope.” His eyes were full of secondhand sorrow. “Do come in. Sit down. There is something I need to tell you.”
“My pa’s dead,” I said.
“Dear God. How did you know?”
As I came into the dugout, I staggered. He bolted up as if he was going to catch me. I found the chair, sat down in it hard.
“The Red Cross delivered the news as soon as they possibly could. Your brother thought the tidings too grievous to telegraph. It happened a few weeks past, actually. Dreadfully sorry.”
“It’s okay, sir. I think I’ve known for a while.”
“There’s a letter.” He handed it over.
Funny. It wasn’t that I loved Pa, but my vision couldn’t focus. Your clear, carefully written words swam.
“Shall I read it to you?”
I wiped my eyes. “No.”
“Well. I’ll leave you alone for a bit, shall I?”
“I didn’t love him,” I said.
My words must have caught him at the door. Behind me, I heard him clear his throat. “Perhaps you’d like a chat with Father O’Shaughnessy.”
I froze, staring straight ahead. I couldn’t look at the girl he was going to marry, couldn’t turn to look at him. He’d left his pencil on his tabletop. What the hell would he do with his hands? It was a cheerful yellow pencil. There was a red eraser beside it. Some things are made so they’re easy to change.
“I been thinking,” I said. On a wall peg, the lantern flickered erratically. Something was wrong. The wick was bad. Maybe the oil low.
“Yes?”
“You’re stuck with your fathers, you know? No choice or nothing. I reckon your fathers are stuck with you.” My eyes were tired, my lids heavy. The room went hazy, all the edges blurred. “You love yours?”
Miller cleared his throat again. The door squeaked as it opened. Light and air rushed in, rattled papers on his desk. He must have stood there for a while, half-in and half-out of the rain. When he left, he shut the door so quiet that I knew only by the darkness.
O’Shaughnessy arrived to find me staring at the lantern, your letter crumpled, still unread, in my hand. I heard him walk up behind me.
“I’m all right,” I said.
He put his hand on my shoulder.
“He didn’t mean nothing.”
It struck me that I’d been sitting there too long. Miller would want his dugout back. They’d be needing me at the digging. I thought of that damned story about the rubber in the herring and how I’d been laughing only a little while ago. I thought about the way Pa’d hug on me sometimes, right at the start of his drunks, when he must have been feeling bad about how things had turned out between us. I thought about that little horse Pa’d carved me. Dun. He’d known to paint that mare dun.
I got up. “I better go.”
“If you need me,” he started to say.
“I won’t.”
I shoved your letter in my pocket and left. Back at the sump holes Pickering and Calvert were still cussing. I told them my pa had died, and then I picked up a shovel. They were respectful for a time. Then Pickering told a joke about a man who’d trained his pecker to sing. Calvert dumped a load of mud on Pickering’s foot. I shoved my hand in my pocket and rubbed that spine bone.
That night I got a little drunk. I went to pushing Pickering around. He pushed back, and I would have hit him if Calvert hadn’t pulled me off. I went out walking along the trench until Billings, the sentry, stopped me.
He lifted his lantern. “It’s past lights-out, Stanhope. Best get your arse back to the dugout. Can’t let Blackhall see you drunk. He’ll have you in field punishment soon enough.”
I said, “Fuck Blackhall.”
He laughed. “You’re a caution.” Then his face fell. “Oh! I heard about your father, chum. Me condolences.”
I jumped him. If he hadn’t dropped the lantern quick as he did, if he hadn’t ducked, I’d have broken his nose. Calvert and Pickering, knowing I was up to no good, had followed me. They arrived in time to wrestle me off. Lucky Billings.
“Why’d he want to hit me? You see that? He hit me for nothing. Why’d he hit me?” Billings said.
Calvert had me pinned in a hammerlock. “ ’E’s in mourning.”
They hauled me back to the dugout, kicking and fighting. Pickering scrounged up some rope. The two of them hogtied me, threw blankets over my legs, and told me to go to sleep.
I said they had to let me go. I said I had to piss. I said that come morning, I’d get them.
They said I’d better shut up. That if I kept yelling, Blackhall would come. He’d find out I was drunk.
I told them I hated my father.
Calvert got a Woodbine from his pack. “Mine’s all right.” He struck a match. “I suppose ’e’s all right.” The cigarette was damp, and he had to suck on it hard to get the fire started. “For an ill-tempered sodding little blighter.”
Pickering said, “Mine hates my house. Thinks my wife’s a tart. And when I was at the bank, he was forever asking when I planned to get a decent job. Silly me. All the while I’d imagined I had one.”
“I gets wif me da, I ends up wif me peter shriveled. Stubborn old sot. Never can win an argument wif ’im.”
“Mine’s always in a paddy about something,” Pickering said. “The government’s cocked up. The newspapers print trash. Nothing’s ever right.”
“That’s me da,” Calvert agreed.
I’d stopped struggling long ago. No use. I was too tired. You can’t ever win the war with your father. I closed my eyes and heard Calvert saying, “Pickering? You write a note to me da for me? Just a little note, maybe just asking ’ow ’e’s getting on.”
I slept. I didn’t dream. Now that I’ve been told, maybe Pa’ll finally leave me alone.
Travis Lee
NOVEMBER 1, A POSTCARD FROM THE RESERVE TRENCHES
Dear Bobby,
Captain called me in today to tell me that Pa’s sucking flames. Go ahead and do your crying, but don’t bother telling me any more about how he suffered. I see better suffering here most any day.
Kiss Ma for me. Tell her all the old lies about him being in a better place.
Thanks for the goatskin vest.
Travis Lee
TEN
NOVEMBER 4, THE RESERVE TRENCHES
Dear Bobby,
LeBlanc’d been watching me all that day. That should have set me wondering. He never said nothing to me. Well, neither of us talked. We ate lunch hunkered down in a shell hole. The Boche had thrown some mortars, and we kept having to move. It was cold and it was raining. The mud dragged at my legs, sucked at my feet. My whole body was weighted down with wet. I guess we were both tired.
And I was drinking heavy. It pains me to admit it, Bobby, but I’d been drinking hard again—ever since I’d seen what LeBlanc did to that girl. Drinking makes time go fast; and there’s something nice and uncomplicated about speed, Bobby. It’s got a dimwit kind of happy to it. No thinking. God. No thinking. Thinking slows you down. LeBlanc knows that.
Still, he was watching me; and I knew he was up to something. I drank anyway. My own damned fault. Drink does that to you, too: blunts importance. Muddles things.
I don’t remember going to sleep that afternoon, but I remember waking up.
I was blind.
“LeBlanc?”
It was so damned quiet. But for the cold and the wet, the whole world was missing. I wondered if I’d died without knowing it and fallen into that cloying dark beyond the cypress. I stuck my dirty fingers in my mouth just to taste something. I shouted just to fill up my ears with noise.
“Hello!” I called, hoping the calico girl would hear me. “Anybody?”
She wouldn’t come. My mouth was gritty from the mud I’d tasted, my throat raw from yelling. The air was too cold and clammy to be Hell. I was lying with my head higher than my feet. No Man’s Land, then; and probably a shell hole. But where were our lines? Where were the Boche?
It was one of those nights when the air’s nearly too thick to breathe. No rain, but damp condensed on my face, tickled down my forehead. I took a breath and thought I could smell the sea.
Something splashed through a nearby puddle. I jumped, hissed “Shit, shit, shit,” groped through the darkness for my rifle, couldn’t find it. My heart beat so fast that the insides of my chest quivered.
“LeBlanc!” I called. “Hey! Hey! Anybody!”
No answer—not a tracer bullet, not a flare. I wanted for shelling, longed for the brilliance, for the clamor of it. I scrabbled out of my shell hole, my eyes desperate, my body frantic. I got to my feet, mud sucking and pulling at me. I nearly toppled, nothing but black to hold onto.
“Hey!” I called.
I took a step into nothingness, went tumbling into the dark, splashed into frigid water, smelled dead fish, thought, Gas. Phosgene gas. Stale water made me sputter. My eyes stung. I thrashed my way to my feet. I was waist-deep in that stinking water and, God, I couldn’t see.
I clawed my way upslope. At the top I hugged ground, my mind as empty as a panicked animal’s.
The air was icy, there in that blackness. I lay for a long time, my teeth chattering. A sly and terrible way that LeBlanc had of killing me—leaving me drunk and sleeping. For I was bound to perish there in No Man’s Land. I didn’t know which direction to head for safety; if I tried to stay where I was until dawn, I’d freeze to death.
When I saw the blue glow I first thought I was seeing one of those visions you get when it’s so dark that your eyes play make-believe. Still, I crept through the blackness, over jagged trash, over things slimy and wet. My uniform caught, snagged. I was terrified that the blue would evaporate like a mirage when I got closer, but it lingered: a small, contained patch of color. The ethereal sort of blue the sky turns at twilight.
It was a corpse. A Boche. His skull was cerulean. The tatters of skin left him were the complex hue of the ocean. A god of a creature, Bobby. His hands were open. Maggots shone like golden suns in his palm.
I raised my head and I could see, Bobby. Sweet Jesus, it was beautiful. Across the torn field, bodies gleamed a calm, tender indigo. Rats raced among them, brilliant earthbound meteors. Even the soil teemed and sparkled with life. My own muddy hand burgeoned with it.
I watched a sentry peer over the Boche sandbags—glowing like a yellow petal backlit by sun.
I stood up, but the sentry didn’t raise his rifle. When I looked back at my own trenches, I witnessed a golden angel on the parados take a fiery piss.
So I started home, slogging through the glittering mud, past shell craters where brilliant existence twinkled on the water. Past last season’s bones shining gas-flame blue. Beyond the British sandbags, our sentry was a beacon. Goodson, I saw as I got closer. He didn’t hear me until I was nearly on him.
He raised his rifle quick.
“No,” I said. “Don’t shoot.”
He peered so hard, Bobby. Confused and frightened. Awed by me, maybe.
“It’s just me, Goodson.”
“Gorblimey! Stanhope? That you, Stanhope?”
I climbed over the sandbags and into the sizzling incandescence of his candle. He was so bright, I had to shield my eyes.
Then Goodson was yelling. “Sergeant! It’s Stanhope! Thought he was a ghost! But it’s bleeding Stanhope, Sergeant, standing right in front of me!”
Riddell came sparkling down the trench. He grabbed me by the arms. “You all right, lad? Stanhope, you ’ear me? The boy’s freezing! Get ’im a blanket! Sod all! Get ’im some tea!”
Riddell took me to his dugout. A universe away, he was shouting orders. “Nash? Best get Lieutenant. Bring ’im ’ere. Go tell Captain that Private Stanhope’s been found alive.”
Blackhall came. Then Miller. They asked me questions and I answered. When Miller and Blackhall left, Pickering and Calvert came in. They shook my hand. They clapped me on the back. Filthy as I was, Pickering hugged me. On Riddell’s order, they accompanied me to the medical dugout. The doctor’s assistant gave me a cot, a bucket of warm water, a couple of towels, and a change of clothes.
When everyone left, I scrubbed down, dried myself in the warmth of the brazier. Alone, I watched the mud wall gleam. The intensity of it, Bobby. Li
fe, every place I looked. I slept cradled in it. When I woke, the vision had faded. Just as well.
They kept me a day. When I was released I was told that Miller wanted to see me. I found him in his dugout, reading field reports.
“Now that Blackhall is not about, you should have no fear to tell me: What actually happened out there?”
“Like I said, sir: LeBlanc and me just got separated.”
“I have not discussed my suspicions with Blackhall, but it would not surprise me to find that you were drinking, and that LeBlanc was annoyed enough to leave you where you had passed out.” His doubting eyes searching, still searching.
“You’re right, sir.” His fiancée smiled at me from her perch on the wall. A girl with fire in her. A golden, blazing girl.
He nodded. “Well, I should think your night out has been punishment enough. Still. Intolerable of LeBlanc to report you dead. Despite how Command feels about him, something will be done about it, I can assure you.”
“I know I been a worthless shit, sir. That’s going to change.”
He looked at the picture, then at me. Was it jealousy I saw, or caution? I could never steal her from him. Didn’t have the elegance, the breeding. Wouldn’t embarrass him like that.
“I say, Stanhope! Would you care to see the letter I had started to your family? Worked bloody hours on it. Brilliant piece of prose, actually. Someone should get the good.”
I took the paper. Address neat in the upper left corner.
Mrs. Leon Stanhope
Box 56
Harper, Texas
My dear Mrs. Stanhope:
I regret to inform you that
Then nothing.
“Worked literally hours. Stared at the paper. Nibbled on the pen. Hadn’t the least idea what to say. Hate to write them, you know. One more of your adventures, and I’ll force you to write your own.”
“Please, sir. If it happens, write to my brother. Tell him I died of a hard-on.”
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