The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1

by Daniel Kraus

  In the ditch we huddled like rodents, soaked and shaking, each shocked face a mirror of the next. Our limbs were raveled; it was difficult to tell which wounded part belonged to whom. I stilled myself, made a count. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five—that couldn’t be right. Twenty-five men out of one hundred? All told, the Third Battalion had made out well. Church was peeking over the crest and at his side lay Jason Stavros, gasping for air. The last one into the ravine had been none other than Piano, and he paid no attention to the bullets owning the air above us. Instead, he spread one of his wrinkled maps across his lap and began scribbling revisions.

  “Boys, we gotta move,” said Church. “They’ll drop a potato masher in here sooner or later. There’s a hillside up apiece, a bit of ground we can put our backs to. So we’re gonna hump through this gulch till we can’t hump no more, and then we go topside and run like heck. Everybody got it?”

  Grim nods from all around.

  Piano chewed on his pencil eraser, made another edit.

  Church crammed his helmet tight and wormed northward. The ravine, narrow to begin with, constricted until we had to turn sideways. By then we were being buried in dirt falling along with every shell impact. Church tried to lock eyes with each of us before jabbing upward with his rifle.

  “Two hundred feet, soldiers! Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!”

  He lifted himself over the top, letting rip with his best Marine yap. The rest of us poured from the ravine like ants, screaming to alleviate the fear and hurtling through a darkness lit only by yellow bursts of gunfire popping from the hills. I heard the dull slap of flesh being hit, the wet crack of bodies slammed to the dirt. Troops who’d made it from the river with guns intact returned fire in a crazed attempt to buy a few more seconds.

  It was a bowl-shaped indent at the base of a steep rise and we collided with it at full speed. If all twenty-five of us had survived the charge we would not have fit, not even shoulder to shoulder, but that was not the case. We were five or six down, and a good deal more were asphyxiating with the shock of new injuries—fingers blasted off, a kneecap hanging by ligaments, a bullet hole straight through an ankle.

  Even these sufferers dared not move, for we enjoyed a buffer no more than ten feet; beyond that, a waterfall of bullets poured down so near we could smell the hot gunpowder and the incineration of autumn leaves. Several gyrenes emptied ammunition into the forest behind us until their guns overheated and their palms glistened with burns.

  “Where’s the French?” cried Jason Stavros. “Where’s our French flank?”

  “Telephone!” shouted Church. “Telephone! Telephone!”

  An egg-shaped gent began shouldering past troops to make his way to Church. A ripple of excitement spread man to man. Our signalman had survived? Was it possible that the telephone cable laid by this intrepid paladin remained intact? We craned our heads to watch as the signalman planted his telephone box in the mud, removed the spool, and gave the cable a tug.

  It was taut and from our bellies ejected laughs of relief. But then the cable dislodged from whatever twig or stone or corpse had snagged it. I held up the frayed end to wallow in the tragic absurdity. After being unspooled across the entire river and up the bank, our lone connection to base had been severed by a single goddamned bullet. We were cut off and la Boche, to be sure, was inching closer.

  Piano chose that moment to exit the ravine. It was not that we had forgotten about him but that we’d assumed he’d been killed. Instead, there he was, sauntering through the firestorm without a single bullet hitting home. He reached our hollow and took a seat without a word, too busy scratching at a map to notice our appalled disbelief.

  Church turned to me.

  “I gotta go back.”

  The telephone cable slipped through my fingers.

  “The fire is too heavy,” said I. “The bridge is out. You’ll never make it.”

  “It’s these soldiers who won’t make it. We don’t get backup and medical in the next hour, we’ll all be dead.”

  “Wait. Please. Reinforcements will come.”

  “Private, we’re way off course. They won’t find us before sunup. We don’t have the ammo to last. Look, I’m the fastest runner. I’ve got the best shot of making it out.”

  Grab his pistol, put it to his head? Conjure la silenziosità, paralyze him to the spot? There had to be some rash action I could take to keep my friend alive! But Church never hesitated; with a wag of his eyebrows he was crossing the laps of men all the way down the line, until he crouched at the westernmost edge of our hollow. We watched in awe as he calculated our coordinates, scribbled them into his runner’s log, tightened the straps of his gear, and armed both of his guns. Satisfied, he lowered himself to his belly and gave us a thumbs-up.

  The caution with which he crept confirmed the peril of our position. An inch. Two inches. Trying not to disrupt a single branch. We tracked his every move until he slithered beneath a fallen tree and became mystery. The Krauts, meanwhile, were ruthless with the Argonne—it wasn’t, after all, their forest. Bullets continued to rain. We made caves of our helmets and backs and resigned ourselves to trusting the one man who’d never let us down.

  “Psst. Finch.”

  I cracked open an eye. In our huddle, Jason Stavros’s helmet rested against my own. Our part-time florist had celebrated his birthday at Soissons with a tin cup of wine and was now all of twenty-one years. His face was unrecognizable beneath a layer of dry white mud but those pale brown eyes were unmistakable.

  “You want to hear a poem?”

  Come up with six more unexpected words, I dare you.

  “A poem,” said I.

  He forced a laugh.

  “In case Church doesn’t make it. Poems are meant to be heard, right? I got one I been working on and I’m afraid if I don’t tell it now, I won’t . . .”

  I was nodding, nodding, nodding. The war did awful things to everyone; one need only evaluate a human face from Monday to Tuesday to know that much. Jason Stavros, though, was the least corrupted of us all and that was worth perpetuating, if only for a few more minutes.

  “Tell me,” begged I.

  “It’s not good or anything, I just—”

  “Tell me.”

  Jason Stavros learned that the pressure of public performance was not so unlike that of battle. He inhaled, exhaled, wiped his forehead, cleared his throat, and slitted his eyes so as to look into an unclaimed middle distance somewhere between our position and the last known location of Church. Genuine fright lent his recital a cutting poignancy he’d never again capture, not even if he went on to recite his work in the world’s grimiest (and thereby most celebrated) book stores.

  From shallow holes inside which none dare move

  Here is one thing more we cannot prove:

  How poppies beckoned us with dusky slander,

  The sultry moss, silk bedgown clay, the oleander

  Of weddings between men and their ghosts.

  Thunder, rain: a seedling, let the doctors boast

  How they birthed countries from thighs of blood,

  And from them rebuilt a world.

  But a ghost sometimes rolls over.

  He shakes roots to show his displeasure.

  What sways there is a tree, gnarled and tall

  Over his grave. Is that enough? Is that all?

  Will it be noticed when the smoke is not men

  But industry, returned here again?

  Hear me, down here, infinite in my mud;

  Remember when what I died for was good.

  He regripped his rifle to arm himself against my opinion.

  “What do you think?”

  What basis had I to judge literary merit besides a handful of overwrought ransom notes that had probably gotten me murdered?

  “Beautiful,” said I.

&nb
sp; His lips twitched toward a shy smile.

  “Really? You think so?”

  I nodded. “And so upbeat. Just what we need right now.”

  He laughed, eyelids pearled with tears, and gripped my shoulder. A revived round of shelling rocked the forest floor about us. Lend an ear, Jason Stavros—is not imitation the truest shape of flattery? Recitations of bullets fell in meters and Maxims in complete stanzas, each brought to the exclamation-point finish of sniper fire or the full-stop period of a mortar blast. I half shut my eyes and settled into the abstract poetry. There existed entire catalogs of annihilations worse than this, so quieted was I by the lyrical iambics and the steady hand of a brother.

  My thirst for a dazzling destruction was quenched to such degree that I failed to notice, dragging himself toward us on bloodied elbows, the mangled remains of Church.

  XVI.

  NOTHING BUT HONED INTUITION COULD have brought him back. His face was blown open, the right cheek excavated to reveal a neat row of molars still snug in their gums. The boys moaned. They wept. They reached for their fallen hero but I ripped their hands from his clothes. The arms of the living were blunderous, wobbling things and I would not trust them to honor the delicate injuries of the greatest friend I’d ever had. I dragged Church into my lap and stared helplessly into the brown stew of mud, weeds, and gristle, within which two frantic blue eyes goggled.

  I raced through the standard pat-down for mortal wounds but all that I could see in the dark was the pale spotting of melted lemon drops against black blood. From his throat came a thick death-gurgle, so I flopped him on his side and jammed my dirty fingers down his clotted throat. What I would have given to hear, bubbling up from the blood, that asinine “Merry Christmas!”

  Hands pulled me away so that a soldier more experienced in resuscitation could take over. I kicked in protest, good sense be damned, driving my boots into the mud until I’d motored myself to the far point of our hollow, the same beachhead from which Church had set sail. His brave belly marks still scored the forest floor.

  I did not have to think about it for long.

  Running was my job, too.

  I planted my heels and launched, only to be dropped by a pair of hands around my good thigh.

  Piano had lunged for me at the last instant.

  “Ye can’t go, boy-o!”

  “Dolt! Unhand me!”

  I kicked at his hands but the cuckoo kept contriving new grips. He offered me an obsequious grin and pulled from his pocket the wad of paper over which he’d been slaving.

  “It’s for you, Prefer-Not-To. Take it and travel well.”

  “Give me your gun instead so that I may shoot you!”

  “Ye won’t make it no farther than Church without an O’Hannigan map. They’re the best. Always have been.”

  How I would have liked to give the Irishman a brisk strangling! But time was paramount. I swiped the farcical drawing, stuffed it into my uniform, and then gave the dunce a good kick in the stomach. From his shoulders I propelled myself with the opposite of Church’s inchworm discretion, racing in four-legged style through moist clay dredged up by a hundred shells. I felt the pause of German surprise, then felt a hot gust of Maxim fire coming up from behind. Unburdened by the weight of a rifle I made it to an oak and fixed my spine against it. Presently the tree was torn to pieces as if by the tiny hands of a hundred feral children.

  From there I writhed through underbrush, lost but for the knowledge that downhill equalled riverward. Soon I was out of rifle range, probably sniper range, too, though shells, of course, continued to drop. I was not a good soldier but none in any nation’s history moved with my sort of stealth, and when I spied my first German crouching in the weeds, he did not, in turn, spy me. I lay there for a time, without weapon, without breath, without pulse, perfectly undetectable and just as perfectly harmless.

  Despair can direct one to do the oddest things.

  I dug out Piano’s map and peered at it in the moonlight.

  The schizophrenic universe he’d invented was pink and populated with both gray and gold saucer-shaped objects, each sprouting red limbs crosshatched with blue. Though the night’s abortive charge had speckled the map with mud, I could see that painstaking attention had been paid; eraser burns marked where blue hatches had been removed from one side of a red line and added to the other, along with a particular sort of serif.

  A bomb exploded one hundred feet to the west and its flames brought sudden illumination. The German squatting before me was reconciled with a gray icon upon the map, itself rather squat.

  These were not geographical features that Piano had been notating. These were bodies, live and dead, American and German both. And those hatchmarks upon each one? Those were weapons, estimated quantities of ammunition. Which meant that I could, if I wished, crawl twenty feet south where laid, according to Piano’s bookkeeping, a dead American, and take up what Piano indicated was a bayonet, and, if I wished, use that bayonet upon this unsuspecting Hun to effect a soft death that would go unnoticed in a thicket of such unnatural commotion.

  If I wished.

  For doing so would mean splitting from the covenant, Church’s beguiling Theory of 17, to which for months I’d been true. What needed answering, and right now before Church bled out, was a question viscid enough to have mired every race of people since the dawn of consciousness: whether defending the life of a loved one was worth the destruction of others.

  Since Church’s befriending, I’d packed away my fear, fool that I was, and now it leapt back to my heart where it belonged, more painful then ever, for this fear was not for myself but for another. This, I declare to you, is the fear above all others, the field on which the least forgiving of combats are waged.

  I took up my task with an Aztec’s ardor. I found the bayonet where Piano’s map placed it, made my silent advance, and drove it through a ribcage hard enough to affix the torso to a tree, and while the Kraut quivered and drooled I consulted the map for my next prey.

  Reader, oh, Reader, I was born for butchery. How was it I’d believed anything else? So gratifying, the release of life from one of these fragile humans; so invigorating, the gush of warmth over my cold hand. I killed and killed, and when I reached what remained of the bridge, I consulted the map, my murderer’s handbook, and located the resting place of two Americans. I took up their rifles, nice ones too—one of the coveted Brownings as well as a swell bolt-action Springfield—and loaded them. Stealth would not be required for this final spree.

  The last bastions of German hope had pillared themselves atop a riverside knoll, a smart enough position were they not besieged by so proficient an assassin. I scaled the least expected face and caught one sleepy-eyed Jerry picking his nose. Give him credit; one handed, he managed to bayonet me as I returned the same favor through his right eye. The soldier’s aim had been canny; from my stomach popped Johnny’s golden marble. Let it go, thought I, but I, if you have not noticed, was unstoppable, and I fired the Browning to jar it free from the soldier’s skull while using the recoil to power my pivot. As I sailed into view of the dozen or more dumbfounded Germans, I juggled the rifles, snatched the aggie from the air, tossed it back into my mouth, and opened fire with both guns into every last Heinie on that hill.

  I left no survivors. Not even myself.

  Reinforcements escorted the GIs and gyrenes of that harrowing hollow back to HQ around eleven o’clock that morning, the same time Armistice took effect. Even men missing limbs or blinded behind bandages lifted victorious fists into the air or cried through masks of mud, while the healthy gave a cheer that I figure still echoes through the valleys of the Meuse and circles the summits of the Argonne. At 1101, the woods came alive with happy Huns, their arms raised the same as ours except to signal surrender.

  Church was rushed from the forest on a stretcher and lifted into an ambulance. I reached to take his hand, but it was b
loody and, to my horror, slipped through mine. I shouted his name. Four medics, three more than allotted for the average man, thumped me aside as they tried to stabilize him. For the moment, Church was alive; his stripped-naked chest pounded in uneven jags. What was unknown was what, exactly, remained of his big, handsome face, for his head had been swaddled in thick cloths that already were soaking with gore.

  Someone had scrounged his deflated football and tucked it under his arm. The Game might be over, but a long solo contest was about to begin.

  The ambulance left. My shoulders became gallows and from them I hanged. Some time later, I cannot be more exact, an elbow nudged at my ribs. It was Jason Stavros, helmet vanquished, hair swooped into a coiffure of hardening mud. His precious volume of Percy Shelley was lodged in his armpit, riddled with bullets. Poetry, it turned out, had saved him.

  He handed me a lit cigar while, from behind one of his own, he sang along to some patriotic drivel. I hated to puncture his pleasure but a question of consequence needed asking.

  “Did Piano make it?”

  “Piano?” He frowned as if he did not believe in so preposterous a name. But artifice would never work for Jason Stavros. He looked through his cigar smoke to the broken earth beneath his boots. “Nah. Didn’t work out for Piano.”

  I bit down upon my cigar and searched the horizon. It would always be the horizon for me, wouldn’t it?—never a proper end in sight. I straightened my back until I felt the comforting crinkle of Piano’s map alongside my heart. On that sheet of paper had been transposed each of the Gød-loving Catholic’s many scars, the same as my body bore each of mine. Yes, you might call it crazy. Or you might call it a conscientious document of survival, not unlike the manuscript you now hold.

  Over the bacchanalia of exulting Americans and capitulating Germans I lifted my gaze. At last I settled upon a sight I shan’t forget no matter the decades I spend spoiling down here in my tomb. Unattended Maxim guns on tripods sat high along an empty ridge, black scarecrows against a tangerine sky, dormant but deadly, just like me.