“You can stay with me, Miss McMahon. We’ll get the next truck.”
Jo sighed. She hadn’t noticed she was the only nurse left in the tent. Of course, she would not—she could not, ever—leave before the last of her patients did, but she would have rather sat through the long wait for the return truck with any of the other surgeons, even the fatherly ones in their forties who bored her kindly with talk of tobacco and fly-fishing back home. Anyone but Grandpa, who rambled on about the Deep South, its nobility and “gracious amenities.” Maybe, she thought, he really does remember it from antebellum times after all.
“I’ll stay,” Queenie began, but the truck had already shifted into gear, and besides, two patients were holding on to her, looking at her with such intensity that it seemed she was the only thing rooting them to reality, tethering them to a spinning world.
“She’ll be perfectly fine where she is, Miss Carroll,” Grandpa snapped irritably, her real name sounding like an insult as he grabbed a chart hanging crookedly off of one of the litters.
I’ll be perfectly fine, Jo mouthed to Queenie, making a face. And Queenie laughed, her smile lighting up the interior of the cold ambulance already smelling of death, and Jo smiled too and made a little salute. And then the truck was pulling away, Queenie bending over one of the men, her hand gently caressing his forehead; then she was lost to them.
Jo took stock of what was left behind, in terms of supplies yet to be loaded—not much really. The X-ray and all but one of the operating tables had finally been collapsed and carried away, most of the medicines and supplies were already gone, except for one or two surgery kits neatly packed into their boxes, propped up against the center tent pole. One generator, still running, remained, as well as one oil-burning stove, now off and cooling before the journey, some lamps used for surgery, and the less important detritus that always littered the tent floor—disinfectant, bedpans, buckets, soap. Grandpa walked over to a chest marked LINEN and proceeded to speak in his most officious voice.
“Miss McMahon, it is no secret to me that you and your fellow nurses refer to me”—here he spat out the word—“as ‘Grandpa,’ a term you use to convey my age and none of the honor one associates with that esteemed position. Well, such being the case—and denying any fatigue on my part—I will oblige you by acting out the part insofar as setting down for a spell.”
And with that, he sat down stiffly. Jo noticed for the first time how pale and drawn the man looked, more so than he had in Italy, or Sicily, or North Africa before that. He had always seemed aged to the nurses, who were all just over twenty themselves. But this last push through France, closing in now on Germany itself, had been too much for him. Jo noted that his lips were too white, his brows too closely knit together. He looked like an old man who had just realized, suddenly, and with considerable annoyance, that he was in fact old.
“Yes, doctor,” Jo murmured demurely, moving off to check on the remaining patients—and to give the doctor some space. The tent flap suddenly opened, and a man with startlingly blue eyes pushed his way in.
“You still in here? You need to move out,” he said, breathlessly, dripping wet.
“We’re almost ready, Captain,” Jo replied to the stranger, her eyes resting for a second on his shoulder—not one of their corps.
“Almost isn’t good enough, bitch.”
Jo felt as if she had been slapped in the face. Nearly four years of war and how many thousands of brutal deaths later, this breach of courtesy still managed to shock Jo, more than the concussions outside that were shaking the tent. Jo and her fellow nurses were used to working side by side with surgeons and doctors who considered them almost as colleagues, allowing them to make independent decisions and perform difficult procedures no nurse would ever be permitted to do stateside. (Jo had done her first spinal tap with shaking hands, but had done one earlier that day without thinking about it at all.) Even the Germans (to give the devil his due) were respectful, if confused, by the women officers, having no such counterparts in their own armies. (Their Krankenschwesters held no rank and, with their heavy, traditional dresses, were regarded by the men more as nuns than as nurses.) When American nurses were taken as prisoners of war, enemy officers would awkwardly ask the captured women for their word of honor that they would not attempt escape; then, in lieu of imprisonment, the Germans requested they wait out the rest of the war serving in orphanages or makeshift civilian hospitals.
And this man had just called her a bitch.
Grandpa struggled to his feet as quickly as his aging joints would allow, his mouth open in outrage.
“How—how dare you, sir,” he stammered at last.
The captain stepped forward aggressively. “What the hell are these men still doing here? You were supposed to be moved out hours ago. I’ve only got a goddamned patrol to hold this area, and you’re gumming up the works with your ambulances blocking the roads and drawing fire.”
Jo recovered from her momentary shock, the thick shell she wove around herself adding yet another layer. She did not know this man, she would never see him again. Their paths were crossing for a second only, and that only by chance; soon she would be back with her medical corps, with the men—the hundreds of men—who needed her. This man, she made up her mind, needed no one. “We’re waiting for our truck to return, and then we’ll be out of your way, sir.” She added the “sir” looking level into his eyes, eyes she noted as remarkably beautiful, almost turquoise in color, but cold and lifeless and blank, as if nothing, not even light, could penetrate them.
“Then you wait in the dark, sweetheart,” he said, ripping out the generator cord. Everything went dark; Jo heard him fumbling for a second, and then the motor itself sputtered out, as if in protest. In a flash of lightning Jo could see the silhouette of the captain as he passed through the tent flap; then all was darkness. There was an explosion, but much farther away this time, to the south of them, maybe half a mile down the road, followed by two more, much quieter.
“Of all the, the—” Grandpa was still stuttering, incredulous. Then, in a lower voice, a voice Jo had never heard him use before, almost a whisper: “You all right?”
“Don’t be silly, of course I’m all right,” Jo replied glibly, too glibly, feeling her way in the darkness for the nearest stretcher. “Silly,” she repeated again. But it hadn’t been silly at all.
“I’m sorry, soldier,” she addressed the blackness in front of her, still feeling for the stretcher in the dark. All the tent flaps had already been tightly shut to prevent light escaping; the ambulances would have been driving without headlights, as always; both precautions making the captain’s behavior seem even more senseless and—No, I won’t think of him anymore, he’s gone. “But we seem to have to make shift in the dark here for a little while.” She tried to force cheerfulness into her voice, as Queenie would have done, and failed. “Would you mind telling me which one you are?”
A cockney voice came through the darkness, its edges seeming to curl up in a sympathetic smile. “Jonesy, miss. I’m not as bad off as some of these here other ones. Just the bad leg, if you remember, miss.”
Jo smiled. The English patient. A Montgomery, the boys always called them. Now she remembered, broken leg; a heavy cast would be dangling on a wire in front of her somewhere. Whether or not it was just habit, his repetition of “miss” had sounded almost reverential, as if he were trying to make up for what had just happened.
“Can you carry on for a little while here? I’m sorry, our lanterns and flashlights have already been packed up, so it’s going to be catch-as-catch-can for a bit.” Jo used the English expression for his sake; at least, she hoped it was English. She had read it once in a novel; certainly no one said that back home in Brooklyn.
“Not to worry, miss,” came the grinning reply. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Jo smiled automatically in the dark, moving now with more assurance from one cot to the next, better gauging the distance between them. The Scot was still cursing
; at least he was conscious. There were two post-op patients next to him whose anesthesia hadn’t worn off yet; she fumbled for their wrists, taking their vital signs as best she could, guessing without her watch—at least a stethoscope was still hanging around her neck. She bumped into Grandpa crossing the tent. “Excuse me, miss,” he said gently, all traces of his usual brusqueness gone from his voice. She played blindman’s bluff until she found the last two stretchers. One man was asleep, but breathing raspily and much too fast, his chest sounding like crackling tin foil when she listened to it. The last man was conscious, but groaning, his forehead hot and wet, he nearly screamed when she palpated his abdomen. So they had been right in their initial diagnosis: presenting appendicitis. Good God, right now. She reassured him as best she could, but he didn’t seem to be listening; it was hard to tell in the inky blackness—his moans waxing and waning without a seeming connection to her words, bobbing, as he was, on a sea of pain. She made her way over to Grandpa, who was trying to take the pulse of one of the unconscious patients.
“This is a ludicrous situation, Miss McMahon,” he began, pausing to count as he found another wrist in the dark, lost count, and gave up. “These patients, with the exception of that Scotsman, whom I don’t like the look—I mean, the sound—of in the least, appear stable, if in various degrees of discomfort. Rather than knock our heads together walking around in the dark, may I suggest you stay by his bedside and I’ll rotate between these two and that major over there—yes, he’s a major, they were supposed to move him out first—with the overripe appendix.”
It was a plan at least. Something to do until the truck came back, whenever that would be. Jo sidled over to her patient; he was easy to find. She wondered vaguely if they were really Scottish curse words he was uttering, or the by-product of his fever, or a combination of both. She sat down next to him on the packed ground. And then she thought of Gianni.
She had tried to stop thinking of him; there had been a time when she had tried to forget him altogether, to banish him from her thoughts each time he struggled to resurface, his body disfigured and floating, the dark blood spreading from his open wounds in all directions in the cold water of her consciousness. But she had lost the power to fight her brother anymore. Sometimes, when the pace of war made her unable to function except by memory or rote, there would be a reprieve; he would still be there, but in the back of her mind, hiding in a dark corner of the tent, lying on the last stretcher in the ambulance. But during the few hours of sleep allotted her, or now, with an enforced period of inactivity thrust upon her, Gianni in all his horror, in all his glory, came flooding back. She loved him, and she hated him for haunting her, and wanted him to leave her alone, and felt she would die if he ever did.
“What were you thinking, Josie?”
She could see him now, looking down on her again, his dark olive skin, his even darker eyes, eyes that were so angry with her, eyes that would love her and pain her and punish her forever.
“What were you thinking?”
He had grabbed her arms rudely and held her in front of him, shaking her, shaking himself. He had to be brave now, and he couldn’t be brave, not with her doing this terrible thing, not with her leaving too.
“I was drafted, that can’t be helped. But Mama and Papa will be all alone when you leave. How could you sign up?” Again, that reproach: “What were you thinking?”
She had stammered something about the war and about duty; about how they were calling for nurses, thousands of nurses, an army of nurses to fill the ranks; how the other girls were going, how it was the right thing to do. In her dreams (waking and sleeping), her words changed, got mumbled, turned around, twisted. It didn’t matter—Gianni hadn’t heard them then, he didn’t hear them now.
Then he was crying. She had never seen him cry, not ever, not even when he broke his wrist in the park—where they weren’t supposed to be playing in the rich kids’ neighborhood—and he had turned white from the pain and wanted to scream but hadn’t because of his scared baby sister looking up at him with her wide, blue eyes, one streaked with brown.
“It’s not just Mama and Papa,” Gianni had begun, but couldn’t finish. He had stopped shaking her now and was holding her close, sobbing, wracking sobs, worse than his anger had been; this was good-bye. They were, to each other, all they had ever had. Their parents (a loveless arranged marriage) had grown prematurely old from lives spent slaving away in navy yards and sweatshops; it had been the nuns at Saint Cecelia’s who raised the two immigrant waifs. But for affection, for compassion, for protection in a strange new world, Gianni and “Josie” (his pet name for her—to everyone else she would be plain “Jo”) had only ever had each other; two people, one mind, always in agreement, always together; now, suddenly, about to be torn apart.
In her dreams he dies then. He dies in her arms, their parents coming into the small apartment looking older than ever, glancing up tiredly, mumbling that they would like to come to the funeral but have to work in the morning, an extra shift, what can we do, if we don’t, we’ll lose our jobs. It is a nightmare of course. But it is a dream too, because he dies there—not later, not on that carrier, not with the hundreds of other boys screaming and choking and slipping on the decks wet with blood and water and gasoline as the planes roar overhead and the explosions go off and they’re hurled into the sea and he’s dead before he hits the water; sinking, crushed by the incredible weight, his mouth filling with seawater, drowning out the last word he would never get to say, the last word he was saying to her now, the same word he always said to her.
“Josie.”
JO STARTED AWAKE. Not that she had been asleep, but she hadn’t been there, in that tent, sitting in the cold and the dark. The Scot was trying to get out of bed, asking for his shoes in English; then it was a jumble of words again, nonsense in any language. She got up and pushed him back onto the cot. “Pushed” is too strong a verb; he was so weak, she held two fingers in place on his chest; he moaned, delirious, and fell back.
Gianni was dead, and her parents now too—they had died while she was overseas. What did it matter anymore? Everywhere was death, and where it wasn’t yet, it was coming. She noticed the bombing had stopped outside and switched to gunfire. The captain hadn’t come back. He would have his work cut out for him, defending this useless patch of France—or was it Germany?—with only twenty to a platoon. The truck was taking forever too. Had it been an hour yet? Two? Time was uncertain for her—her reveries sometimes lasted mere seconds, and at other times an entire night’s sleep would be sacrificed to watching Gianni die again and again. The truck might not be back for hours now, even if the roads weren’t taken out, even if they did find a way around the lowlands and the mud and the Germans. She tried looking at her wristwatch, angling it to pick up even the faintest glimmer of light, but it was useless; the darkness engulfed them completely. The tent was wrapped in its own envelope of blackness and rain, and there wasn’t even lightning anymore to split the sky.
After a long while, it grew quiet. For some time the gunfire had come from farther and farther away, until Jo thought it had either stopped entirely or was continuing on in some ravine or valley too deep or far away for the sound to carry. The Scot seemed to be praying, just by the cadence of his speech alone. There was a petition of some kind, a labored pause for breath, a response. None of it made sense to Jo; maybe God could unravel it in heaven. It seemed important to him, though, whatever it was. She tried to imagine what it could be. A litany? A rosary? Something embedded and a part of this man, surely, for it to rise to the surface like this when all other senses had left him. As his voice rose and fell with the desperate intercessions, she felt for her musette bag, took out her rosary, and held the weathered beads in her hands, pressing them hard between her fingers until they hurt, the pain clearing her mind for a second. But no prayer rose to her lips—at least, not the Our Fathers and Hail Marys she had anticipated, the prayers she had used to plead with God when the telegram had first come, w
hen she had learned Gianni was killed in action, when her own life had ended but, cruelly, her body had been forced to keep going through the motions of being alive. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. From evil. She was surrounded by evil, it was everywhere. There was evil in Germany just ahead of them, and there was evil in Japan, half a world away. There was evil in the bottom of the sea where dark things fed on the bodies of the lost, and there was evil in the mountains around them where the traitors and the deserters and the lovers had fled.
But, now, there was evil, too, right among them; the captain tonight had seemed evil—but maybe she was still naive, for all her experience, maybe this was the real world now, the world they were fighting to save. Maybe this would be as good as it ever got, even if the Axis powers were ultimately defeated; maybe the Allies had become little better than the thing they had set out to destroy. After all, what had just happened in Dresden? Even with their mail and radio so closely censored, they knew something obscene had happened there, something wicked and wrong, something that was not them—or not them as they still imagined themselves to be. What had happened in Dresden was the kind of thing the “other side” did, not them, not the upholders of justice and freedom, not the liberators, not the good side.
But was she good anymore? Was anyone good? This was hell, with no chance of heaven. She saw herself again as a little girl, her voluptuous hair severely restrained by tight braids, her secondhand school uniform fitting too tightly under her arms. She was reciting her catechism answers for Sister Jonathan, the nun’s parted white hair peeking out from under her wimple. “War is the punishment for sin, Sister,” she had said from memory, along with a hundred other pat answers. Punishment for sin. What colossal sin had some fool committed for this to be its outcome? Or was this the fault of all of them collectively? Was this everyone’s sin, everyone’s hatefulness, all the small, petty, stupid crimes piled up, multiplied a million million times over—lust and envy and greed and betrayal, pressed down, running over? Was this the whole world crying out, proclaiming its suicide creed of hate, vengeance, murder, power, death? And then their unholy prayer finally being answered with firebombs raining down from the sky.
The Fire by Night Page 2
