“Miss,” Jonesy cried out again, frantically.
It might not have been funny; but the utter absurdity of the scene had the effect of cold water splashed on Jo’s face. Without thinking, the nurse in her sprang into action, wrestling the Scot back to his cot, helping Jonesy back into his; she had picked up the blind man, and cleaned up the major’s mess. She was struggling to lift the enormous cast, heavy and cumbersome, back onto its wire line as Jonesy prattled on in his easy, lilting voice.
“Sorry to bother you, miss, I could see you needed a moment, but there was no holding back that damned—I beg your pardon, miss—that infernal Scot. What he thought he was doing, well, no one knows, poor devil; probably thought he was fighting the Führer himself. But as my mum used to say, where there’s life, there’s hope. Not very original I used to think at the time, but Lord, since I’ve seen a bit of this war, I see how right she was. Life’s the main thing, really; I mean, you never notice it until some fool’s constantly trying to steal it away from you, more’s the pity. When my leg got hit, I thought my number was up, I did. But it wasn’t. It’s not over yet for me, not if I can help it. Now, this war’s put us all in a bit of a spot here, and no denying it. I’m not licked yet, mind you.” He paused for breath and smiled broadly. “But I’m glad you turned around, just the same, miss. I needed you.”
Jo got the cast in place and stepped away from the cot. Hearing Jonesy reduce the entire world war to “a bit of a spot” had made her throat catch, his saying he needed her had decided her. Here, then, were six people who did need her. It wasn’t much, perhaps, in the grand scheme of things. They didn’t even know her name. But if she weren’t there, it would make a difference to these half-dozen men. It would matter to them. If she wanted to honor Queenie and all she had stood for, this was the only way to do it. This could be, small as it was, something for her to live for.
I will not lose these six men, Jo vowed to herself, repeating aloud, “I will not lose them.”
“What was that, miss?” Grandpa reentered the tent, dull green cans propped under his arms, his hands laden with assorted boxes and packages. “Here, help me with all this.”
“Where have you been?” Jo asked, looking at the supplies—canned meat, crackers, rice, beans.
“Foraging, miss, foraging,” Grandpa answered, almost gleefully. “We’ve got a hospital to run, and I’ll be damned if some penny-ante captain’s going to keep all the supplies for his own men.”
Jo smiled incredulously at the old man. “But how did you get him to give it to you?”
“Easy, miss. They were all hushing and whispering and motioning for me to get down with their guns. Seemed to be hiding from something or other. Well, I didn’t put up with their shenanigans for a moment. Told them I had come for rations and would stay there and yell to high heaven until I got some.” At this remembrance, the doctor cackled delightedly. “You should have seen how fast they ran to get me food.” The doctor managed to remove the tricky wrapping on some ready-to-eat biscuits, crumbs flying everywhere. “Christmas!” he started yelling at the men, prancing in a circle like a satyr. “Eat up, it’s Christmas!”
“Doctor,” Jo began. If the Germans were anywhere near, noise was the last thing they needed. No wonder the captain had given up his supplies so readily. “Doctor.”
“Well, don’t eat if you’re not hungry, miss,” the man said, turning suddenly nasty. He tossed the crackers to the ground. “The next shift will appreciate them, even if you don’t. Miss McMahon, prepare the major for surgery. That appendix has got to come out.”
For the first time in the war, Jo was truly scared. Surely, she had felt fear before—with their first amphibious landing—not Normandy, no, by Normandy they had known better. But in North Africa—she had felt fear there as they landed the nurses along with the infantrymen, the smaller girls sinking under the packs that weighed as much as they did, the men going down after them, hauling them back up to the surface. Then the insanity of the beach; the nurses indistinguishable in their men’s uniforms, awkward and clumsy, struggling out of the breakers like drenched cats. Jo remembered bullets flying, someone yelling Get down, an explosion of gunfire, someone body-slamming her, pinning her to the sand, saving her life. Laying there forever in the salt and the blood, crushed by his weight, waiting for the shooting to let up. Deciding to run for the trees, thanking the soldier for protecting her, only to realize he had been dead since he fell. And for the next two days, waiting idly for the first wave of casualties to arrive, hidden in the filthy, lice-infested villa they were to use as a hospital, she had felt fear again, her first real fears of the war. So, yes, she had felt fear in North Africa, but her heart and mind had still been her own. Gianni had still lived, somewhere, on his carrier at sea; the nurses had still sung as their trucks rumbled through the scruff-lands and deserts with their headlights off. She had felt fear then, but that fear had always been outside of her, the fear of what others might do to her or to the other nurses or to their men. She had never felt a fear of what harm they might inflict upon themselves. Not like now. She was scared, and she did not know what to say to Grandpa now.
If the major’s appendix was not taken out soon, he would die, that was certain. His fever was no better, his abdomen rigid and painful to the touch; he wouldn’t even let her check him anymore, grabbing her wrists defensively if she tried to turn down his blanket. But Grandpa was in no condition to operate, snapped back as he was into some different time, angry one minute, giddy the next. The man was not fit to perform surgery. But her patient—one of the patients she had so recently sworn not to lose—would die if he didn’t.
“Yes, doctor,” Jo mumbled, stalling for time. “Let me just check on the other patients first. Let me get them settled.” Give me a second here to get my thoughts together. I have to think of something. She walked over to the bandaged man, sitting down beside him.
“I’m sorry, soldier, I haven’t had a moment, this must all be so confusing for you,” she began. Confusing for him? She herself didn’t know which way was up. “We’ll be—we’ll be busy with surgery for a little while here. Is there anything I can do for you before then?”
The man reached out his maimed hand, feeling along her arm, taking her hand in his. What could she possibly give this faceless person, disfigured and blind for life most likely? Even if she had had an entire general hospital at her disposal, nobody could do anything for him.
“Yes, miss,” came the quiet reply. “I’ve been lying here, thinking there is one thing . . .” Jo drew back within herself. No. Don’t ask me to kiss you. To take off your bandages and kiss the twisted blobs of flesh. Even on her best day, Queenie couldn’t do that. Please God, not that—
“I was wondering,” he continued shyly, almost apologetically. “Could you tell me where I am?”
Jo’s racing mind was stunned into silence. The man went on, slowly, deliberately.
“I can’t see anything, you know. I realize I might never see anything again. But the worst part is feeling helpless, not knowing what’s around me, where I am. And it would help me feel less useless too, miss. I’m not that badly off—I mean, the rest of me. Sounds like you’ve got your hands full here. I’m not much use now. But I’d like to at least know where I stand.” Here the bandages tightened slightly, as if he were smiling underneath them. “Literally.”
Jo was taken aback by the simplicity of his request, the last thing in the world she would have thought mattered amid all this chaos. “You’re in a field hospital, soldier—what’s your name?”
“James, miss.”
“James. You’re in a field hospital, James, or, really, just the tiniest piece of it—what’s left of it. There used to be other tents, but—anyway. The closest tent flap is about fifteen feet from your bunk, this way.” She turned his body toward it. “There is a bunk on either side of you, and three across the way. The man next to you has—well, he’s seeing things right now, it’s not his fault, just the fever. We’ll try to keep
tabs on him, but he isn’t all that strong, so if he does bother you, just hold him off until I can get to you, all right? The patient to your right is pretty badly off, a paratrooper injury. I need to check on him next, but he shouldn’t worry you at all. Across the way are three men—the one we are about to operate on, just an appendectomy (“just,” Jo thought—good God), one’s having a little trouble breathing, and the last has a broken leg. He’s a Tommy, but he’s a real okay guy. It’s just the one doctor and myself now, I don’t know if you heard—” her voice trailed off.
“Yes, miss, I couldn’t help overhearing. I’m sorry.”
Jo continued quickly. “And the Germans seem to have really made some inroads around here lately, so we’re trying to be as quiet as possible until the roads are—well, until we can move everybody out. By the way, I’m sure you can feel it, but the stove is directly in front of your cot, near the tent pole. Try to avoid it, James.”
“Yes, miss, I have enough burns already.”
She squeezed his hand. How could he joke? The world was ending and he was cracking jokes. For some reason she was so proud of him, irrationally proud, as if he were a little boy who had just gotten through a difficult recitation with no mistakes. She squeezed his hand again, unthinkingly, as she rose from his bed, not seeing him wince under his bandages, his own gratitude and affection for his nurse mingled with the agony of his raw hand.
“Hello, soldier,” Jo began again, sitting down casually at the foot of the next man’s bed. Then, rereading his chart, she stood up quickly. “I’m sorry. Father.” She hadn’t noticed the prefix before, couldn’t believe this boy in front of her could be a military chaplain. But there was the information taken down before surgery—chaplain, Catholic, date of birth, June 4, 1920. She looked again at his round, farm boy’s face sprinkled with freckles, at his small, upturned nose. She imagined that in peacetime his short-cropped hair would have still run to curls, his cheeks rosy year-round, as if kissed by the sun. She curbed the desire to call him “son,” repeating instead, “Father.” Then, “Is there anything I can do for you?”
She had already changed his bandages in the light of the captain’s forgotten flashlight. She remembered his massive abdominal injuries, looking like he had been shredded, slashed by a dozen knives. They had patched him up the best they could, hoping Evac would be able to do more for him later on, loaded him up with penicillin. There was a good chance he would make it, physically. But now he lay there straight and silent, his hands folded neatly over his chest as if he were already laid out for burial, staring straight up but not at Jo—he hadn’t even turned his head when she spoke. She looked into his eyes—pupils regular, equal, round; they had reacted normally to the light of the flashlight when she had checked him earlier. Not his brain, then, but something more, something deeper, was damaged. He probably would have called it his soul. She placed a hand on his, and, almost imperceptibly, his body stiffened.
As she crossed the tent, Jo avoided even looking at the major, who was twisted under his blanket, moaning. She sat down, instead, with her back to him, on his bunkmate’s bed and listened to his lungs.
“How did you ever get into this war?” she asked him bluntly.
“I lied,” came the equally pointed response.
“I see. You must have always had this asthma, even as a little boy?”
“Oh, yes, miss. Used to scare my mother something fierce.” Here he had to pause to breathe, fast, little breaths, the oxygen never reaching his constricted blood vessels; breathing in and breathing out virtually nothing. “I was air raid warden, but that just didn’t seem good enough. Not for me. Not for my girl either. I mean, people started to talk, why wasn’t I doing my duty—”
“But that’s ridiculous. You can’t serve if you can’t even breathe.”
“That’s what I found out, miss.” His blue lips curved wryly. “I could fudge my way good enough when I was well. But ever since I caught this—”
He couldn’t continue, his chest rising and falling rapidly, looking for all the world like a fish out of water, drowning in a sea full of air he could not use.
“That’s enough for now—William?” she asked, checking his chart.
“Bill, if you don’t mind, miss. Billy, if you could manage it.”
“I’ll see what I can do. All right, I have a couple of things I have to take care of first—but first chance I get, I’ll be over with some hot water. Growing up, I used to babysit these two awful twins next apartment over. They got croup regular, so there’s not much I can’t do with a towel and some steam.”
Billy tried to smile, his dark lips looking ghastly in his pale face. Jo patted his foot under the blanket and moved on.
“You still okay, Jonesy?” Jo asked.
“Yes, miss. Is there anything I can do for you?” He looked up expectantly, like a spaniel.
“God bless you, Jonesy, yes. Here,” she said, picking up the fruits of Grandpa’s labors, strewn over the floor, “I don’t know when we’ll get more food, so this has got to last; but could you see about opening one or two things? Anyone in here who can eat should get a little something. You too, Jonesy.”
“Oh, I ate two days ago, miss,” he replied, grinning, happily sorting out the various cans and boxes on his blanket. Jo tried to think of a time when a rejoinder like that might have been taken as a joke, and failed.
Jo needed more time to stall. Unless she was ready to risk the major’s life, that only left one patient. She picked up his chart and read aloud over the now-inert figure of the Scot: “David MacPherson. Well, you’ve been a regular pain in the ass, David, and that’s a fact.”
“Not as much as you,” came his immediate reply.
“David?” she asked, astonished, sitting down next to him and pulling back his eyelids. “Can you hear me?”
“Not as much as you, Bumpy. You’re ever so much heavier. Get off and give me a turn.”
Jo sighed. No, the penicillin couldn’t have acted that quickly, even at the high dose she had been giving him through the night. There were only four more tablets in the box she still carried around in her trousers—would it be enough? Another box might have done it, but there simply wasn’t any more; penicillin had been the first thing they packed up. And post-surgery, what would the major do without it, even if he did survive the appendectomy? She thought of how their lives had changed since 1943, when Washington started sending over the miracle drug. At first they hadn’t known what it could do, treating it as interchangeable with sulfa, as something to help out, to cut down on infection. And then, before they knew it, they were using it for everything—gunshot wounds, infectious disease, postsurgery, VD—and miraculously, their mortality rate plummeted to 4 percent. Four. That meant, if they managed to pull a boy off of the field, he had a 96 percent chance of surviving. Incredible. Jo shook her head, fingering the battered cardboard box with something bordering on awe. If they somehow ever managed to win this war, it would be in large part due to the tiny pills rattling around inside the box—the “secret weapon” the Germans wanted so badly but had, as of yet, been unable to reproduce.
“Come along, David, let’s do this again.” She cradled his head in her arm, lifting her canteen to his mouth. “No, Kit, tell Bumpy it’s his turn.” At least she could make out his words today, if not his meaning; his blue eyes were open now, staring through rather than at her face as she looked down on him. “All right, all right, David, I will, but only if you take this.”
“No, I don’t want to take it. Make Bumpy take it.”
“I will, he’ll take it next, I promise. Just open up.”
“That was nasty, I don’t like it.”
“It wasn’t nasty, David,” she said, replacing his head gently, as he swallowed. “It might have just saved your life.”
Jo was used to treating dozens, even hundreds of men on one shift, and practice had made her too efficient. Long before she was ready, the five patients’ needs had been taken care of and Jonesy had handed arou
nd some meager rations. There was nothing left but her surgery patient. Every inch of her—her training, her common sense—cried out in protest that she could not put her patient at risk like this. Yet avoiding one risk would only bring on another, even greater one. She would have to try to talk to Grandpa, to gauge how severe his mental shock was, to see if there was any chance of the surgery succeeding.
At one corner of the tent, the nurses had set up three sheets—“three sheets to the wind,” Queenie had always quipped, grinning wickedly. One was clamped to the ceiling of the tent—just like the sheets that used to hang over each operating table—and the other two were hanging down at right angles, making a little enclosure—the “nurses’ office,” they used to call it, though it looked more like a changing room in a thrift store. Here they could talk briefly, away from the patients and doctors, discuss their schedules, give advice on difficult cases. More practically, in a world with no privacy, here was a place they could duck into for a moment—to curse under their breath, say a quiet prayer, adjust a falling brassiere strap—before walking back out, ready for whatever faced them. Now Grandpa sat in their inner sanctum, on the huge packing cases Jo had slept on fitfully the night before. He was kicking his heels against the green metal boxes like a boy at a soda shop counter. Jo tried to swallow and stood in front of him, unsure of how to begin.
“Is the major ready for surgery, miss?”
The Fire by Night Page 5
