Nearly a decade younger than Ephraim, Felix was the younger brother of Rosa’s brother-in-law: high-spirited, hot-tempered, impatient with apple-picking and pruning. The Work Committee had moved him to the cannery but he hadn’t liked that either, although he’d shown a great aptitude for fixing the machines. Finally one of the foremen, tired of disciplining him but wanting to make the most of his talents, had sent him off to Syracuse, where the brothers who’d established the cannery also owned a foundry. Just before Felix arrived there, the works had been converted into a shell assembly plant. He’d been assigned to the cleaning shed, where along with sixty other men he brushed off shell casings and cleaned out the protective grease with rags dipped in gasoline.
Ephraim had never known him well, but it was pleasant to sit with Felix on one of the benches in the garden outside the solarium. With his back sheltered by the high wall and the sun beating down, he was warm enough to open his jacket while Felix tossed crumbs to the sparrows clustered around the fountain. Most of his earnings, Felix was explaining, he sent back to Ovid—home, Ephraim thought, imagining the soft brown mole on Rosa’s thigh—and soon he’d be eligible to move into the foundry itself, where he might gain some useful training.
He crumbled another stale biscuit and dotted a trail from the ground across the tip of one work boot and back to the ground again. “Will the birds follow that?” he asked.
“Watch,” Ephraim said. “They’re as tame as we are; they know we can’t do anything to them. Sometimes they take food right out of our hands.”
As a sparrow charged his boot and snatched the crumbs, Felix continued describing his plans—exactly, Ephraim thought, as if planning ever did anyone any good. Until recently, Felix said, his job had been fine, but the plant had contracts from Russia and England for millions of shells and the owners were pushing the workers to their limits. A fence had gone up around the plant; some union organizers had been arrested. Now guards searched them all for what they called “incendiary literature” before they went in, and also for actual matches: Felix’s shed, packed with workbenches on which the men kept pans full of gasoline and mounds of soaked rags, was uncomfortably near buildings filled with detonators, shrapnel, and powder. Each week the quotas increased, and also the grumbling, the late night meetings, the complaints filed with the gang foremen.
“I’m worried,” Felix said, tapping his toe until the sparrow darted away. “That something’s going to happen.”
“What would happen?” Ephraim asked.
Instead of answering him directly, Felix reached into the canvas sack he’d brought—a clean shirt and food for the train trip, Ephraim had assumed—and drew out a tin box the size of a loaf of bread.
“What’s this?”
“My friend Joe had it in his locker, and when he got suspended for gathering some of the workers together and talking about a possible strike, he slipped it to me before the guards came down to search his belongings. He said we’d all be fired if anyone saw it, and asked if I could find a safe place to hide it until some big meeting he’s going to this summer. I took it out with my dirty overalls that night, but then I couldn’t figure out what to do with it. Nothing’s private in the place where I stay.”
He opened the box and showed Ephraim the articles clipped from the Socialist papers, the IWW pamphlets, a copy of a Russian-language anarchist monthly, two compact coils of copper wire, a piece of unglazed white ceramic tile about the size of a playing card, and three pencils that did not, upon closer inspection, exactly look like pencils. Ephraim ran his hands over the wire and then turned one of the pencils around. “And this is…?”
“I wasn’t sure, at first,” Felix said. “But I read the papers like you do, I see what you see: spies have set fires with things like that. The wire, though, and the tile…maybe it’s just stuff Joe confiscated from some of the workers.”
“Why give it to you, then?”
Felix spread both hands in the air. “I don’t know. But when I asked him to take the box back, he said he couldn’t, and he made me promise to keep it safe until the summer meeting. You know what’s going on with unions all over. Things are going to be bad at our plant for a while.”
He looked at Ephraim, and then looked away. “The thing is—I told Joe I’d bring the box up here and leave it with you. You’re so far away, no one would look here for something like this. You don’t have anything like a labor movement, no strikes or demonstrations. Just sick people, and a lot of woods.”
He flushed as Ephraim frowned at him. “I know I should have asked you first.”
“I don’t see why you’d pull me into this,” Ephraim said. Framed by the garden walls, the woods meant to insulate him from both germs and worry slipped slightly out of focus, signaling more snow.
“Because,” Felix said, looking over Ephraim’s shoulder, “I’m a little bit more involved with the union organizers than I should be. And who else could I ask? You’re family.”
It was obviously wrong, Ephraim thought, and clearly risky to keep the box. Yet it was equally impossible to refuse Felix’s request. He was family, as well as a member of the Ovid community, and Felix wouldn’t ask this of him unless it was important. At the same time he wouldn’t want to be beholden. Casually, as if nothing had just happened, Ephraim turned away from the trees and said, “You’ll come back for it?”
“More likely Joe will,” Felix said. “Or another friend of his. Someone will come for it, though.”
Without transition they talked, then, about Felix’s parents and Rosa’s sisters, about Ephraim’s daughters and Rosa herself, and finally about Ephraim’s progress and when—“Only a few more months,” Ephraim said. “I feel sure of it”—he might be released and allowed to come home.
LEO LEARNED ABOUT the visit only after supper, when he and Ephraim returned to the room together. As soon as they were out on their cure chairs, Ephraim handed over the innocent-looking box and told Leo to look inside. Just as Ephraim had done, Leo stirred the papers—most no worse that what appeared in our own library after each visiting day—looked over the coils of wire and the piece of tile, and then picked up the peculiar pencils, listening as he did to Ephraim’s account of the visit.
“How involved do you think Felix is?” Leo asked.
“I don’t know,” Ephraim said. “He always exaggerates, but still—I wish I knew what he was up to. And I wish he hadn’t brought this here. He’s a good boy, though. Not such an odd duck as me, at any rate.”
“Well, but it’s not him, necessarily,” Leo said. “Just—everything’s getting so peculiar. Now some stranger is supposed to come here someday and ask for this—I wouldn’t have let Felix do that.” He frowned, thinking of all the shabby items—old guns, worn knives, homemade explosives, smeared pamphlets—he had glimpsed during his last year in Odessa. People had been arrested for nothing more than being near such things.
“You would if he was family,” Ephraim said, reminding Leo yet again of what he lacked.
MILES TOO WAS disturbed that week. Two letters made their way to him by different routes, the first enclosed in a small, heavy package. From Doylestown, his friend Edward Hazelius wrote:
Bad news, my friend. Not Lawrence, thank God: though it is weeks now since I’ve heard from him. Still this is the ruination of so much that mattered to us. Virtually all of the excellent duck-billed dinosaur bones that we shipped east with the rest of the expedition’s finds, and which were destined for the museum in London, are lost. The steamer bearing them from Halifax was torpedoed by a U-boat and now lies at the bottom of the sea. Some but not all of her crew were saved by a passing merchant ship. All the fossils are gone. When I think of our efforts, all our chipping and brushing and plaster bandaging and the work to get these into the wagons and onto the flatboat, not to mention the efforts of those who for two years have been restoring the bones and preparing them for shipment—I can’t believe it’s all been lost in an instant’s vandalism.
I wish we would just fig
ht—don’t you? It is inevitable that we enter this war, every day we put it off only makes our position more false. It makes me ashamed to be an American and if I were younger I would do what Lawrence has done, I would run up to Canada and enlist right now and hope to take my revenge on those who sent our beautiful duckbills down. I am sorry to be the bearer of this bad news but I knew you would want to know. Lawrence fights for something; there is that.
I am sending along—it’s an early Christmas present, I have an excuse—an odd thing that might comfort you. You will remember my great-aunt Grace, who showed us our first fossils. Last month, cleaning out the attic, Mrs. Smithson found some crates of books that Grace had stored there years ago. All are copies of a tract written by Samuel Bernhard, who was my great-great-grandfather. Do you remember flipping through this same book when we were boys? I didn’t understand the family connection then.
As wrongheaded as the book seems now, I cherish it as one of the things that got us interested in the field, and I thought you might like a copy of your own. May it cheer you during your long evenings in bed. I’ll be thinking of you reading it as I travel through Arizona (which is where I am going for the Christmas holidays; a tiny excursion, much diminished by your absence).
You will have heard from Mr. Maskers that there have been some small incidents at your plant as well as mine. Nothing to worry about, it is just the usual unrest. The troublemakers have been fired.
Inside the package was a brown book, smelling of leather and mold. Miles felt nothing when he looked at it. No wave of nostalgia, no stab of recognition. Why would he want this old tract, more theology, really, than paleontology? Edward’s great-aunt he could hardly remember; her face had vanished, and when he thought of her now he remembered only her narrow, wrinkled hands, cupping fossils or writing with her darting, vertical strokes. He wanted not reminders of his past but Arizona, the bone quarries, mountains, crisp air. Travel, freedom, work. In the absence of those he wanted, at least until he got the second letter two days later, news from Lawrence.
I haven’t written to my father. What would I say? I’m alive. I can’t tell you what this has been like. What I have seen. What I have done. Nor can I tell you where I am now. Dirt above me, mud below, live men sleeping next to me and dead men crumbled all around, as thoroughly mixed with the soil as if they were designed all along to be fertilizer.
A white mist hides us completely this afternoon. I can hear but not see the men around me. I can see this paper only when I hold it close to my face. The air is still, the mist doesn’t move. Mist, gas, fog, smoke—I can’t tell the difference anymore until it’s too late but before it came I was watching a dead plane, caught in the tree next to me. The man inside, charred quite black with his arms and legs burned off, looked like a cigar. I miss you and think often of our time together in Alberta.
8
SHORTLY AFTER MILES got those letters, and with no understanding of how they might affect us, we gathered for our usual Wednesday session. We were looking forward to it more eagerly than usual; it was Dr. Petrie’s turn to speak, and we thought we might learn something new about him. He knew parts of us that we didn’t know ourselves: not just the calcifications in our lungs, the tubercular lesions on our bones, the sores and infections we concealed from each other beneath our clothes, but also what we looked like when he gave us bad news. What happened to our faces when he said, gravely, that we must resign ourselves to another six months or a year inside these walls. For all he knew about us, though, we knew almost nothing then about his personal life.
Back then, he wouldn’t have told us, for example, why he was so short. It wouldn’t have seemed right to him that we should know about his own case of tuberculosis, which had infected his spine when he was a boy, permanently stopping his growth before he reached five feet tall and deforming his vertebrae. Although the pain sometimes made him absentminded and curt, he concealed the cause, just as he dressed to disguise the curve below his neck and the lump where his shoulder was misaligned. That day, in fact, he entered the room rubbing his shoulder but stopped as soon as he saw Ephraim noticing.
Christmas was only a few weeks away, and the staff had hung huge garlands from the rafters and decorated an enormous tree. The resemblance between the cloth wrapped around its base, and the green tartan scarf of the same pattern pushing out Dr. Petrie’s pointed beard, distracted some of us. He smiled above the scarf, released his shoulder, and started our eighth session by saying he wanted to discuss what he’d seen in France during the spring of 1915. The French government, he explained, had asked him to visit their military hospitals and evaluate their plans for the treatment of tubercular soldiers.
“Miles has been telling me about his young friend Lawrence, who’s off fighting with the Canadian forces,” he added, “and that made me think again about my own time there. I’ve been meaning to write this down.” He looked at something in his lap. “I know these talks are meant to be informal. But I never could speak without notes, so I hope you won’t mind if I read from these.”
Usually he stood over us as we lay passively in bed; he asked and we answered; he wrote down, with sharp and vigorous strokes, what our bodies revealed. On his rounds his manner was so strong and reassuring that we often forgot how tiny he was beneath his stethoscope and starched white coat. But here, as he joined our circle as an equal, his hands shook as he fingered his index cards, his voice trembled, and he couldn’t hide the fact that he had to point his toes to reach the floor. He was nervous, the rest of us realized. Perhaps because of that, his description of the spread of tuberculosis in France was a little dull.
In a light, dry voice he spoke about the rapid mobilization of the French army and the failure to thoroughly examine all the troops. Many, he explained, suffered from latent or incipient tuberculosis, which in the cold, wet conditions of the trenches had quickly developed into active disease and, in the overcrowded billets, had spread rapidly among the men. Lydia made a face at Nan, who raised her eyebrows in response—was this something we wanted to hear?—but Dr. Petrie didn’t notice, instead taking encouragement from the expression of interest on Eudora’s face. The sickest had been sent back home, he continued, where there were no trained tuberculosis nurses, very few sanatorium beds, and no special wards in the hospitals. Paris, where the soldiers mingled with the refugees who’d fled the German invasion, was the worst, and few of the French doctors were as experienced as any sanatorium doctor here. He’d visited hospitals and refugee centers and military encampments and prisons, making recommendations and gathering data for his reports. Some of the data he had here, summarized on these cards…
We avoided each other’s eyes. For the last couple of months we’d been able to read current news about the war, thanks to a doctor in New York who, when Dr. Petrie complained to him about our wretched library, had started gathering up the daily papers and sending them in batches on the train. Now that we had those, what we most wanted was an insider’s view of the war, but this wasn’t it. There were charts involved, some tables and figures. Our eyes glazed over even as Miles leaned forward avidly.
When Dr. Petrie finished we murmured politely; Pietr complimented him on his scarf and Olga praised the neatness of his tables. We managed not to say to each other what we thought, or how much better we would have liked learning something about his personal life, but the following week only half of us showed up. Once more we prepared ourselves for a dry set of facts. During that second talk, though, Dr. Petrie surprised us, shedding his nervousness along with the foolish scarf. After a few sentences about the care of tubercular soldiers, he was suddenly describing the early days of that May, when along with every other available physician and scientist in the country he’d been rushed to an enormous makeshift hospital to help treat the victims of the first German gas attacks.
He spoke about his hurried journey, the sidewalk cafés crowded with little tables and the men walking with bareheaded girls, soldiers and sailors from Siam and Senegal mingled with
poilus and Tommies. “Plane trees,” he said, looking at the wall across the room as if they were painted there, “and the gardens, the thatched roofs, the pears espaliered on the walls—you should see what they do with fruit trees over there.”
He described the fields, which like those back here were filled with clover and alfalfa and rye but dotted unfamiliarly with brilliant poppies. As he made those leap before our eyes we began to see what he’d seen—it was beautiful, he said, the undamaged parts of France were so beautiful—and so we also saw the desolation as he neared the front, the shattered trees and the churned-up ground, the twisted wrecks of automobiles and, once he reached Boulogne, the far worse wrecks of men.
Near Ypres, he said, the Germans had released a poisonous gas, which had killed thousands of French troops and wounded thousands more; a few days later more had been released, this time against a Canadian battalion (here Miles drew a sharp breath); other attacks had followed swiftly and no one knew how to care for the casualties. Those who hadn’t died in the trenches or dropped as they tried to run away had collapsed in the primitive treatment posts just behind the front.
“When I saw those men,” Dr. Petrie said, “I—nothing could have prepared me for the shock.”
His feet fluttered against the lower rung of his chair. Gas warfare, he said indignantly, was the exact reverse of everything he’d spent his life learning to fight. He knew more acutely than most what those victims were suffering and he thought that we, so alert to the difficulties of living with imperfect lungs, might also sense what those men had been through. We did, we were fascinated by what he said but shaken too, and most of us would have been glad if he’d stopped then. But something about what he’d seen made him keep talking and us keep listening. We took no break, instead sitting horrified in our circle as he continued.
The Air We Breathe Page 10
