Blame the Dead

by Ed Ruggero

  “What’s wrong?” Thomas asked.

  Harkins looked up. “What?”

  “You look like you seen a ghost, and you’re talking to yourself. More than usual, I mean.”

  Harkins looked at his driver, afraid to turn his attention back to the paper in his hand. “I … I don’t know yet. Bad news, I think.” He drew breath, looked down again.

  I thought about moving the photo, Mary wrote, the one of you three boys when you were all home on leave, all looking so handsome in your uniforms.

  Harkins stood abruptly, felt a wave of nausea.

  He looked at the postmarks again. Mary and Saoirse had each written believing that he’d already gotten whatever bad news was in his father’s letter. He turned the last, thin envelope over once, twice. Pinched the corners. Of course the old man would be the one to tell him.

  Harkins leaned over and put his forearms on his knees. When he felt a hand on his shoulder, he looked up into Thomas’ kind face.

  “You need help, Lieutenant?”

  Harkins didn’t trust his voice. He held the last envelope out to Thomas, who opened it with a dirty finger. He pulled out a single sheet—Harkins could see it was written on the letterhead of his father’s law firm—and read it silently. When he finished, he said, “You want me to read it to you?”

  Harkins fell back to a sitting position; Thomas squatted beside him, and Harkins nodded. Thomas licked his chapped and sunburned lips, swallowed.

  “‘My dear son,’” he read. “‘We received a telegram yesterday from the War Department.’”

  Thomas paused, looked at Harkins, who nodded.

  “‘Michael’s ship was sunk on or about April 19. Michael was not among the forty-two survivors rescued by other vessels.

  “‘I am so sorry to have to tell you in this way, and sorry that you are so far away from us when we all need one another.’”

  Thomas’ voice faded into the background, replaced by a low moan, an animal in pain. Harkins pulled his knees in tight, heard the sound coming from his chest, his tightened throat, his breaking heart.

  7

  2 August 1943

  1400 hours

  Colianno and Harkins were almost back at the hospital before the paratrooper, driving now, asked, “Something wrong, Lieutenant?”

  Harkins thought of a reply: My kid brother was killed in the Pacific. But he didn’t trust himself to say it out loud, so he nodded. “Uh-huh.”

  He would have to tell Patrick. Christ, was it just this morning they were together and happily ignorant?

  When Harkins offered nothing else, Colianno asked, “Where do you want to go?”

  “Why don’t you go to the mess tent. Get yourself something to eat.”

  Colianno parked the jeep in a row of ambulances and trucks. A half-dozen mechanics in greasy overalls crawled over the nearby vehicles.

  “You coming, sir?”

  “No,” Harkins said. He needed to be alone, but alone was hard to come by at a crowded hospital compound, on an island crawling with GIs, when he was supposed to be leading a murder investigation. He’d have to stick his grief somewhere, stow it away like a bad memory he’d relive later.

  “I’ll stay with the vehicle. You come back and get me when you’re finished and I’ll figure out who I’ll talk to next.”

  “Can I bring you something? A sandwich?” Colianno asked.

  Harkins shook his head, watched the paratrooper walk away, then pulled out his sweaty pocket notebook and tried to focus on the list of names there.

  Boone.

  Drake.

  Gallo.

  Palmer.

  “Hey, Lieutenant. Lieutenant!”

  Harkins looked up. A sergeant was standing in front of his jeep. No telling how long the man had been there, trying to get his attention.

  “Sorry, sir. Could you move this thing over there?” The GI pointed to another dusty patch on the edge of the compound.

  “I gotta get a tow truck in here and it’ll be easier without your jeep in the way, sir.”

  Harkins moved the vehicle, thought about how the world would keep going, oblivious to one family’s heartbreak.

  He remembered a young GI in his platoon, a McDuffy from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, who’d had a brother killed in North Africa in May, just days before the surrender of Axis forces there. Harkins had gotten the message from their chaplain, and it was his duty as platoon leader to tell the soldier.

  When Harkins broke the bad news, McDuffy had simply dropped his gaze to the dirt. Then he sat in the shade for a few hours before telling Sergeant Desmond that he wanted to get back to work.

  The next day, Harkins’ platoon was assigned to guard some German POWs near Bizerte in Tunisia. The prisoners were in a barbed-wire enclosure, nothing more than a corral, really, waiting for a ship that would take them to England. The holding area was crowded, and scores of the defeated men leaned on the wire, filthy, exhausted, thoroughly beaten. Harkins, looking at them, had a hard time thinking of them as “the enemy.”

  He was making his rounds, checking the guards just before dusk, when he walked up on McDuffy, who was aiming his rifle at the Germans. Not holding it loosely, or pointing it generally in their direction. Had the stock to his cheek, right eye open and trained on the front sight, the muzzle steady.

  “McDuffy,” Harkins had said. Quietly, not wanting to alarm the kid. “What are you doing?”

  Without lowering the weapon, McDuffy said, “Could’ve been one of those bastards who killed my brother.”

  Harkins had no idea what to do. Twenty yards away, one of the prisoners saw what was happening. He called out something in German, defiant. Then he opened his shirt, baring his chest to McDuffy’s rifle.

  “Could have been,” Harkins said. “Probably wasn’t, though.”

  McDuffy lowered his weapon, and Harkins told Sergeant Desmond to put him back on traffic duty. Looking back on that strange evening, Harkins remembered how calm McDuffy had been. He hadn’t even seemed angry.

  Maybe each person handled this kind of thing differently. Harkins had always thought it strange when the victim of some crime said, “It didn’t seem real,” or, “It was like it was happening to someone else.” But that was what he felt.

  He looked at his watch, figured Colianno would return in ten or fifteen minutes. For now, that was all the time he had to grieve, then it was back to work. Deal with it later.

  Funny, Harkins thought, he’d been craving sleep for days. Now he was a bit afraid to close his eyes and see what fresh hell his dreams brought.

  * * *

  By the time Colianno came back, Harkins had decided he’d go back to the nurses. The two men were walking near the women’s sleeping tent when Harkins was blindsided, rushed by some small person, hit full body and nearly knocked over.

  “Eddie!”

  Kathleen Donnelly laughed as she held on to him, trying to keep him from stumbling sideways. “I’m so glad to see you!”

  Harkins regained his footing and turned in to her hug. She was the first American woman he’d touched in sixteen months.

  “Let me look at you,” he said, peeling her arms from his shoulders.

  Donnelly and Harkins had lived on the same street in Kensington, a neighborhood of narrow row homes north of Philadelphia’s city center. She had been a year ahead of him in school, all long curls and flashing eyes and movie-star smile, not a timid bone in her compact frame. They’d been friends, but—in Harkins’ mind, at least—she was always out of his league.

  The woman who let her arms fall from his shoulders looked nothing like he remembered. Her dark hair was chopped short and threaded with dust, a few lonely grays wiring out from her temples. Like every other GI in Sicily, she was drawn and sickly-thin, dirt ground into crow’s-feet beside eyes that did not flash, barely looked blue anymore. She wore a man’s fatigue uniform cinched tight at the waist. The legs of her trousers stood clear of her own legs like stovepipes; the uniform was dirty enough to stand up in a
corner on its own.

  Oh, my God, Harkins thought. She looks like hell.

  “Oh my God, Eddie,” she said, appraising him right back, but not holding her tongue. “You look like shit.”

  She put her hands on either side of his waist above his belt, squeezed, as if trying to encircle him with her fingers.

  “Ha, I’ll bet you weigh what I did when I joined up,” she said. “I guess army life doesn’t agree with either of us.”

  She turned to Colianno. “I know you.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the paratrooper said. There was an awkward moment, and Harkins couldn’t tell if Colianno was caught off guard by this lively nurse throwing herself at his new boss, or if it was something else.

  “You were on the ward for a few days, right?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Colianno managed.

  Donnelly turned back to Harkins, made a What can you do? face.

  “I heard you’re investigating what happened here this morning. What are the chances that we’d run into each other like this?”

  “I wish it didn’t involve me playing detective,” Harkins said.

  Donnelly led Harkins and Colianno to the edge of the hospital compound, to an ancient stone wall surrounding a church. There were four neat, almost perfectly round holes shot through the building’s roof, black gaps like missing teeth where the windows used to be. As they waited to cross one of the lanes between rows of tents, a jeep rolled by slowly, an orderly in the driver’s seat, a stretcher on the back and another on the hood, each holding a body packed inside a cloth sack of some sort.

  “Are those…?”

  “Mattress covers,” Donnelly said. “When we boarded the ship in North Africa to come here, they gave us each two mattress covers to carry. We joked that we were carrying our own shrouds. Turns out it wasn’t much of a joke.”

  There were three pyramidal tents along the church wall, all of them with their sides rolled up. She pointed to a large thermos in one of the tents and said to Colianno, “That coffee has been there for six hours at least. Maybe since last night, possibly since D-Day. But it’ll be strong, and it’s free.”

  With Colianno settled into a patch of scanty shade under a shot-up olive tree, Donnelly took Harkins into one of the tents. There were three field tables, with stacks of papers held down by bricks from the damaged church. No one else was inside.

  “This is where the nurses do paperwork,” Donnelly said. She grabbed a wooden chair someone had liberated from a house and straddled it like a man.

  It was midafternoon now, the hottest part of the day, no breeze stirring. Flies droned lazily near the top of the tent.

  Donnelly took off her uniform blouse. She wore a man’s T-shirt underneath. It had once been white, he imagined, and it hung in loose folds on her small frame, so big that there was no sign of any curve or bump.

  She lifted her arms, sniffed unselfconsciously. “Whew. We could use my armpits as secret weapons. Kill a lot of Germans with that aroma.”

  “Yeah,” Harkins said. “I’ve gotten used to smelling like the police stables.”

  She pushed the short sleeves up over bony shoulders.

  “How did you wind up here?” Harkins asked.

  “It was the Eleanor Roosevelt poster,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Eleanor Roosevelt did an advertisement for army nurses—they were looking for forty thousand volunteer nurses, something like that. And Eleanor was quoted saying, ‘I just want my boys’—she’s got four sons serving, I think—‘I just want my boys to have the best care. Won’t you do that for them?’”

  “Classic guilt trip,” Harkins said.

  “I know. And Eleanor—I feel like I can call her that, don’t you think?—Eleanor isn’t even Catholic.”

  “So you volunteered?”

  “Me and about a dozen other girls from Pennsylvania Hospital. At first it seemed like an adventure. They sent me to Washington, issued me some snazzy uniforms—all skirts and dresses, nothing you’ll ever see here. On the ship coming over, a converted liner, we got to stay in first-class cabins. Had meals with the senior officers on board. Colonels and generals.”

  “I’m sure they were all feeling very fatherly,” Harkins said. “Wanted to tuck you in at night.”

  “Something like that,” Donnelly said, arching one eyebrow.

  “So it was like a sorority?”

  “Absolutely. Of course, it wasn’t like that for the gals that went ashore with the first wave in North Africa.”

  Harkins was surprised. “How’s that?”

  “Yep. Climbed down those big cargo nets, jumped for the landing craft that was bobbing up and down, just like in the newsreels. Went in under fire. Started treating casualties right away, right on the beach, even though their equipment didn’t come in for forty-eight hours.”

  “I didn’t know they sent nurses ashore with the first wave.”

  “No one knows. I heard Ike got spooked—what would the folks at home say if they found out he was sending nurses, America’s daughters, onto an invasion beach? On Sicily, we came ashore at D plus three, though I still had to dig my own foxhole and sleep in it for five nights.”

  “Probably won’t see those photos in Life magazine,” Harkins said.

  “That’s for sure. And at the rate I’m going, I’ll never willingly get my picture taken again,” Donnelly said. “See this?” She pulled at the hair on the sides of her head. “Gray. I’m twenty-six years old.”

  “The work doing that?” Harkins asked.

  Donnelly raked her fingers through her hair, took a breath. “Mostly the work. Also the lies.”

  Harkins was quiet. Outside he could hear women’s voices, a vehicle going by, an inept driver grinding the clutch.

  “Some of them ask ‘Am I going to die?’ And you know they are. Shot up bad or burned so that there’s nothing we can do except get some morphine into them, kill some of the pain. And when they ask me that question, I look them right in the eye and I lie to them.” Donnelly wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Jesus,” she said.

  “I’m sorry, Kathleen.”

  She smiled, passed her hand over her eyes. “You?”

  “Seemed like the thing to do after Pearl Harbor.”

  “Your brothers joined, too, right?”

  “Patrick is here on the island, in fact. Saw him this morning. He’s a chaplain with the paratroopers.”

  “That’s great you got to see him!” Donnelly said. “And Michael, that other cutie-pie brother?”

  Harkins swallowed, not sure if his voice would hold. He wanted to bury his face in his hands, but he forced himself to hold Kathleen’s eyes.

  “Michael was lost at sea this spring when his ship went down.”

  Donnelly’s mouth formed a perfect O, like a cartoon character. “Oh, Jesus, Eddie, I’m so sorry.”

  “Thanks” was all Harkins could say. He wondered if he would ever tell anyone about the forged birth certificate. Could someone keep a secret like that? For life?

  Donnelly got up and walked over to him, stood beside him, rubbed his upper back. She didn’t smell as bad as he did, and her touch was a blessing.

  After a minute or two, she asked, “You want to talk about it?”

  “Not really.”

  She stood beside him for another moment, then squeezed his shoulder. When she sat back down, Harkins managed to say, “I always had a crush on you.”

  “So why didn’t you ever ask me out?”

  “Didn’t think I had a chance,” he said.

  Harkins remembered walking behind Donnelly and her girlfriends as they all left a high school dance one autumn night, must have been in ’35. He’d hung back, awkward and tongue-tied, secretly hoping that some guy they passed would mouth off at the girls so he could rush up and rescue them.

  “You sure you weren’t just chicken?”

  “Quite possibly. You were one of those girls who didn’t even know how many hearts you were breaking.”

&n
bsp; Donnelly laughed. “Oh, I knew exactly what was going on. But go on two or three dates with the same boy and he’s talking to your dad about marriage. I wasn’t going to settle for some guy who couldn’t pass math without copying my homework.”

  “I’m good at math.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” she said, holding his eyes. “Anyway, I got plans for when this show is over.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’m going to medical school.”

  “A girl doctor?”

  “Yes,” she said. “A girl doctor. I’ve been watching surgeons up close for a couple of years now. I can do anything that they can do. Hell, I can already run circles around some of them.”

  “I’ll bet you can,” Harkins said. “But do medical schools even admit girls? Will patients be OK with it?”

  “Nobody admits girls. But some schools admit women. I might start by just treating female patients.”

  Harkins smiled, sang a line from the old World War I song. “‘How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?’”

  “Something like that, I guess. How about you? What do you want after all this glamour?”

  After he’d enlisted, all Harkins could think about was getting back to his beat, his precinct, his family. Lately he wondered if he’d fit in. Somebody he once read claimed you can’t go home again.

  “Not sure,” Harkins said.

  “Weren’t you in college? Villanova?”

  “Yeah, I don’t let that get around too much. Being labeled a college boy is a big insult in the army.”

  “Why’d you leave school?”

  “Might have had something to do with I beat the crap out of some asshole from the Main Line.”

  Kathleen chuckled. “Couldn’t get along with the rich kids, huh? You can take the boy out of Kensington…”

  Harkins was surprised to feel a flush of embarrassment for something that happened years ago. Back home he had a reputation as a hothead, a stereotypical Irish street tough, fists up, touchy about any insult. He didn’t want Kathleen to think of him that way.

  “Did he deserve it, at least?”

  “Yeah, I thought so. Still think so. He was some big jock, a rower. Every day in the dining hall he’s picking on this little guy. I told him to stop.”