by P. S. Duffy
“Where’s your mum? You’re getting cold,” Simon said. But George’s eyes were fixed on the cherry square in Simon’s hand. Simon offered it up. “Here. Take it. Take all of it.” George lunged forward, hands on his crutches, and bit into it. Crumbs and cherry filling clung to his cracked lips. The rest of it fell to the ground. Simon’s mouth fell open. He backed away.
“I have five silver coins in five silver—”
“No! You don’t!” Simon shouted.
Snowmelt crashed off the eaves and tipped over the rain barrel with a massive thud. George arched back, flung his crutches and dove for the ground. Hands over his head he elbowed into a hole in the lattice work at the foundation of the porch. There he jerked like a string puppet. Simon was rooted to the spot, horrified. Then the leg went still, and he thought George was dead.
He looked up to see Mr. Heist setting the rain barrel upright. A strangled choking came from under the house. “It’s George!” Simon cried out. “That thing tipped over, and he dove under the porch. I’m going to get my grandfather!”
“Ach. Wait now, Simon. Wait,” Mr. Heist insisted, coming toward him in rapid little steps. “Let’s not have everyone out here, seeing him this way. Let’s just give him a little time.”
“Time for what? What’s he doing? Why’s he under there? He’s having a fit. He needs—the doctor maybe.” Simon looked anxiously up at the house.
But Mr. Heist was on his knees by the bushes, talking to George, very softly. “Just a rain barrel. That’s all, George. It’s over.” He stretched out and pushed against the latticework and got himself in far enough to put an arm around George. “Listen,” he said. “Silence. See? It’s safe now.” Simon could hear George’s muffled sobs. They stayed like that for minutes. Simon knelt down, stood up, looked around.
After a time, Mr. Heist eased himself back. His suit was wet and muddy. His collar and glasses, too. “We may be here a bit longer, Simon,” he said.
“It’s my fault. He was trying to tell me something and I wouldn’t let him. I tried to stop him from saying—”
“No. It is not your fault. The barrel went over. It was too loud for George, too sudden. I’ve seen this before.” He took off his glasses and shook out his handkerchief to wipe his face. “We need to hope no one comes out. You see what you can do.”
“Me?”
“Why not? He was talking with you. He doesn’t talk often.” Simon hung his head. Mr. Heist wiped the back of his neck and polished his glasses.
“George?” Simon said, finally, crouching down, keeping his distance. He could see the heaving of George’s breath, could smell his sour sweat, and the odor of urine made his own stomach heave. He swallowed hard and held his breath, then whispered, “Peg’s here.” George lifted his head. Simon looked back at Mr. Heist, who nodded encouragingly. “She’s wondering where you are,” Simon said.
George inched out a bit and finally backed all the way out and hunched over like a baby, head in his hands. Simon looked away.
Voices above. Footsteps crossing the porch. The thumping of a cane. Simon wanted to shove George back under the porch. At the bottom of the steps, Lady Bromley nearly tripped over one of George’s crutches. She and Lord Bromley took in the scene. “George fell,” Simon said quickly. “By mistake.”
“We’re just helping him up,” Mr. Heist added.
“Look at you! Covered in mud! Have you been rolling around on the ground with him?” Lady Bromley shoved at the crutch with her cane. “Of all the bother! Why ever did he come? He should be kept at home.”
“Kept at home?” Mr. Heist said, whipping off his spectacles, one hand on George.
“For his own protection, of course!” Lady Bromley huffed. “What would you know about what’s best for him? Go inside, Simon, and get some help, for heaven’s sake. Get Duncan.”
“We have it in hand,” Mr. Heist said.
“Apparently, you do not,” she replied, and tromped back up the stairs herself, attacking each step with the cane. “Duncan! Mr. Hant!” they heard her call out at the door.
“Ach, wore him like a medal pinned to her chest when he came back,” Mr. Heist muttered. “But now . . .”
George rolled over and sat up, slack and confused. Lord Bromley handed him his crutches and the three of them pulled him to his feet and brushed him off as best they could. A crow swooped down and plucked at the cherry square, then lifted away with it to the roof. Simon stared at the remains of red filling congealed in the dirty snow. “Thiepval, weepval,” George whispered.
TEN
February 24th, 1917
Arras Sector, France
In the shed, with Paul standing sentry, Angus hovered over Ebbin. He was surprised to see the badge of the 45th on Ebbin’s sleeve. Had he switched units? Ebbin coughed, coughed again, and rolled over. “Ebbin!” Angus whispered. Ebbin spit out blood, cupped his jaw and got up on all fours. Pale as a ghost, dripping blood, he slowly raised his head. Angus froze at the blank stare he got and then remembered how long it could take Ebbin to come to from a faint. Ebbin glanced at Paul and back to Angus. “Thanks,” he mumbled. He sat back on his haunches, pressing the rag against the bleeding cut, eyes closed. Then, staring into middle space, he attempted a salute. “Lance Corporal . . . Lawrence Havers . . . sir,” he said without a flicker of recognition.
Angus shot a glance at Paul, who nodded as if they were consulting physicians.
“Ebbin,” Angus said, gripping his shoulder. “Ebbin. It’s me, Angus. I’ve been searching for you.”
Heartbreak ticked against heartbreak in the seconds that passed without response. Ebbin in his grasp and just out of reach.
Ebbin swayed and fell forward. Angus steadied him, pressed his handkerchief gently against the wound. Ebbin jerked back, and fending him off, tried to stand. “Dizzy,” he said. His breath was shallow. He was clearly in pain.
How much easier it was then to enter in. To help the soldier up, tell him he was taking him to a field hospital, that everything would be sorted out, to break the frail moment through which the past might enter in and break his heart. He helped Ebbin up. “Steady, soldier,” he said.
Paul shut the lantern down. Leaning on Angus, Ebbin stumbled forward. At the shed door, Paul pointed to his eyes, then flipped his hand up for them to wait. A cat darted at them and wound through Paul’s legs. He didn’t flinch. Then he motioned them forward.
When they reached the alley, a woman slipped out the side door of the brothel as if she, too, had been watching and waiting. A diaphanous shape in a loose-sleeved robe, her blond hair was wound with white cotton rags tied into knots. She ran up, barefoot, carrying Ebbin’s coat. “Lurrhrey? Lurrhrey!” she said. Her face sallow in the dim light, her lips pale, she clutched Ebbin’s face in her hands. The coat fell from her arms. “Mon Dieu, mon chéri! But what has happened?”
Ebbin stood helpless. Angus removed her plump hands from his face. “I’ve got him,” he said firmly. “I’m taking him to the field hospital. Go back inside.” He gestured toward the door impatiently. Nearly shoved her. Picked up the coat, draped it over Ebbin. There was no need to ask how she came to have it.
Paul, hopping from one foot to the other, spoke to her in French. In angry whispers, she made clear her contempt and suspicion. Paul nodded vigorously at Angus, and she reluctantly turned away. Angus and Ebbin moved on. “Come on, Paul,” Angus said.
“Brigitte,” Paul panted, when he caught up to them. “I tell her, go back. Retournez! C’est okay.” He rewound the scarf Angus had given him around his neck and offered a supporting arm on Ebbin’s other side. They stumbled on.
“Loohrey?” Angus looked at Ebbin.
“Laurie,” Ebbin corrected him. “For Lawrence.” He stopped and doubled over. He was having trouble speaking or breathing, but he wanted to clarify. “She just . . . says it funny . . . in that French way.”
“Ah,” said Angus. “Of course.” Why not? Laurie, Lawrence . . . They said no more until they reached the field h
ospital. I’ve got him. Found him at last, Angus kept thinking, but felt his own reality slipping away as he led Ebbin on.
“ANOTHER ONE?” THE doctor said, adjusting the light, when Angus and Paul brought Ebbin into an examining area.
“Another one?” Angus repeated.
“Yes. Yes, yes, yes! Another one. That’s what I said.” The doctor, an older man, observed Ebbin from under bushy black and gray eyebrows as he rocked back and forth. He tapped a pen against his thick, pockmarked nose and took a sharp breath. “Had four other fellows in here. Dislocated jaws and broken ribs. Quite a brawl. He was in it, was he? We don’t need more injuries, but there you are. Restless, pent-up. Fight Jerry, I tell them, not each other.”
“Ah,” Angus said.
“Pleasant, actually,” the doctor continued. “Nice change from wounds, self-inflicted, and the rest. Very nice.” He smiled at each of them and rocked back on his heels, as if their business were concluded.
Angus tightened his hold on Ebbin, trying not to squeeze his chest, amazed at how familiar the form, yet how light, how nearly hollow it seemed. “Shall I?” Angus nodded at the examining table.
“What? Of course, be my guest.” They got Ebbin up on the table. A nurse thrust a thermometer in his mouth and opened his tunic. She gently cleaned the blood from his cheek. The doctor inspected the wound, felt his chest. Told him to breathe, listened with his stethoscope. His eyebrows shot up and down. He whipped the thermometer out. “No temperature. No influenza. No sepsis. No shrap in the abdomen. No gangrene. Wonderful.” He continued his examination of Ebbin’s torso and shook his head. “So messy, shrapnel in the belly. Eh? No phosgene. Just had six of those. Gas set off accidentally. Didn’t get Jerry, did it? Course not. Got our boys, instead. Lungs frothy mush by the time they got here. Unwrap those puttees, would you? Get his boots off.” He nodded at Angus, who pulled off the boots and began to unwrap the bindings. Ebbin stared ahead with glassy eyes. The doctor glanced at Angus. “You’re glad of those long socks under that skirt of yours, I’ll wager. Or should be. I have a theory about trench foot. Puttees compress when they get wet. Cut off circulation. So. It’s not just about manhood, eh now? The entire force would be in kilts, instead of just a few regiments, if I had my say.”
Angus moved back around the table. The doctor continued his probing. “And look!” he said, holding Ebbin’s chin in his hand. “He has a whole face! Swollen, badly cut, but whole. Think of it, Nurse!” He smiled at her. “I’m imagining a brain in there, too.” He tapped Ebbin lightly on the head with a spoon he produced from his pocket while he held a hand out for the narrow flashlight and tongue depressor. “Eh? Have we got a brain? Tongue to go with it? Open wide. Grand. Hmmm . . . Nurse will stitch that cheek up and send you on your way. Name and rank, soldier. Ah, wait. Swelling here on the back of the skull.”
With that, Ebbin fell back across the table. “Well, sir!” said the doctor, grunting as he swung Ebbin onto the table.
“I think he was hit pretty hard or fell back on the stones. He’s an easy fainter, and it’s always hard to bring him round,” Angus said.
“Easy fainter, eh? You must know him well.”
Angus realized his mistake.
The doctor frowned as he lifted Ebbin’s lids and demanded to know if he’d been unconscious and for how long.
“Few minutes. Five at the most, maybe ten,” Angus said. It had all been so dream-like he had no real idea.
“Ten? Why didn’t you say so? Did his breathing stop?”
“More like five. Maybe. I don’t know. He never stopped breathing, no.”
“Good, because he’s barely breathing now.” He bent over his patient. “Legs up!” he shouted. The nurse raised Ebbin’s legs. “Come on, Nurse. Higher! Straight up! Yes, you help her. Get that blood back into the head.” Even Paul pushed against the thighs and helped hold them in the air.
“Hello,” the doctor said, listening with his stethoscope. “Here with us? C’mon. Let’s get that pulse back. Good lord, where is it? He’s stopped breathing.”
He had. Then his eyes flew open and his breath returned in a rapid tattoo of deep grunts. Angus pushed his legs higher. He’d seen this look on Ebbin before—the fixed, unseeing stare. Had heard the death rattle as he came to. Ebbin always said that coming out of a faint was like returning from death’s embrace. It was a struggle. Death isn’t so bad, he used to joke. His breath began to gain its natural rhythm, and his eyes began to focus.
“You with us?” The doctor’s tone was urgent. Ebbin moaned. “Hold on. We’re just going to keep you like this,” the doctor said, a hand on Ebbin’s shoulder. “You can lower his legs. Slowly now. Keep them bent at the knee. You see,” he said to the nurse. “We’ve just witnessed the kind of shock that can overtake the entire system from what for some people is a simple loss of consciousness, for others, is life-threatening. If only we knew why.” He leaned over Ebbin. “Are you with us, man?”
Ebbin grunted, “Yeah, I’m here.”
“Where is here?”
Ebbin stared at the light above him. “Hospital? Did I pass out? Am I wounded?”
Angus looked up with a stab of hope.
The doctor said, “Not wounded in the traditional sense. But yes. And you did faint, dead away, as we say. And you are in a field hospital. Right. Right indeed. Your friend here can fill you in.” He rapped Ebbin lightly on the shoulder. “Name and rank, soldier.”
“Ernest Lawrence Havers, Lance Corporal with the, the 45th.”
“Right—good enough. Don’t need your whole biography. My advice? Stay out of estaminets, away from drink. There’s a good fellow. Stick to the trenches and you’ll be fine, eh? Little joke. There you go. Right as rain. Now,” the doctor turned to Angus, “we have a bit of other work to do, Nurse and I . . .” His eyes slid over Paul and back to Angus as if Paul’s presence was not only unaccounted for but never could be. “Work to do,” he continued briskly. “You can imagine. It’s a hospital. So your job, after Nurse cleans that wound, stitches him up, two or three should do it, applies a compress to his head, is to keep this man awake! We don’t want him falling asleep on us. Might not wake up if he does. Got that? You’re right, he’s a fainter. And maybe has a concussion. No way of knowing. Keep him talking. Or keep him listening. If you’ve got a story or two to tell, tell it now—to him, not me. In two hours, if he’s not passed out again, he’ll be able to leave. Got it? Someone will be around to check.” The doctor tapped his nose with his pocket spoon and cocked his head at Angus.
“Got it, yes,” Angus said.
“Good. Stay awake!” he commanded Ebbin, who was trying to prop himself up on his elbows. With that, the doctor left. The nurse took out dressings and tape. Angus took Paul outside. He needed to get him home. A corporal he knew with the Red Cross, just off-duty, happened by and agreed to take him. Paul wanted to stay, but Angus would have none of it.
“I had the truth,” Paul said before he left.
Angus whispered in his ear, “You did. I’m proud of you. Listen, I’m counting on you to keep it a secret. For now. Can you do that?”
Paul nodded. “Havers,” he said.
“Right. Good. Go home, Paul, and thanks.” Angus saluted. “Well done, soldier.”
Beaming, Paul saluted back.
Angus grabbed the door frame as Paul and the corporal left, grateful to be alone. Above his upturned face, not a single star penetrated the cloud cover. The night air, cold and damp, pressed against him. A fragile moon appeared. For just one more moment he wanted to close his eyes and savor the part of the dream in which Ebbin was found—before he considered how lost he truly was. But he could not sustain it. He stamped out his cigarette and went back to the ward.
The lamp was low in the long room with the lined-up cots, all but two occupied. The sharp smell of disinfectant pierced the fetid stench of wounds. It was a surgical ward, the only place they had beds that night. Ebbin, awake next to the wall at the far end, was propped against two pillows. A
nurse was just leaving him. He shut his eyes as Angus approached. “You’re the one brought him in?” the nurse asked. “Good. Keep him awake. Don’t dare let him slip into sleep. You can talk softly. There’s a chair over there. I’ll be back.”
Angus brought the chair over and gripped the back of it, nearly overcome by the familiar rounded forehead, prominent cheekbones, the light brows, the small black mole beneath the earlobe. A gauze dressing was taped across Ebbin’s cheek, split and swollen now, and dark red with bruising. His hair, Angus noted, was parted on the opposite side. He was in blue pajamas. He did not open his eyes when Angus sat down.
His uniform, neatly folded, was at the foot of the bed. Angus stared at the badge. How had he switched regiments? He looked down at the deep blues and greens of his kilt, at the yellow line rippling through the pleats, and remembered Hettie Ellen in a plaid skirt, its greens and yellows blending into the dappled greens of the woods behind his father’s house where, back against a tree trunk, he’d been sketching afternoon sunlight through the trees. Bending through the branches, light flecked her blouse, caught her swept-up hair, the silver buckle of her school pin. Your father told me I might find you here, she said. I’m home on holiday. Half a term left and I’ll be done. Brought you something. She held out two thin sable brushes and took a step toward him, a willow in sunlight. A twig snapped beneath her feet. Hettie. Home from school. Alone with him.
He turned back to Ebbin. Laurie, short for Lawrence. What terrible thing had happened that he took another man’s name, another man’s uniform and rank? Angus found the situation so preposterous that he began to believe the answer would be easy to grasp as soon as Ebbin regained himself.
“Ebbin,” he whispered. “Open your eyes. It’s me, Angus.” Surely Ebbin could not resist his voice, surely not his name. Not this time. But he did.
Angus tried his other tack. “Soldier, I’m talking to you.”
Ebbin’s eyes snapped open.
Angus sat back hard. “Name and rank,” he said.
