“Doctor,” Jo hesitated. “I know you’ll forgive me for saying this, but I’m not sure you’re up for this surgery.”
In fact, Jo was not at all sure he would forgive her for that outrage. After all, how could she, a lieutenant (“with only relative rank, miss—I’ll be damned if I call any woman ‘Lieutenant’”), dare question him, a doctor? But to her amazement, he stopped kicking his heels, raised his eyes to hers, and smiled, chuckling good-naturedly.
“Now, maybe you’re right, miss, after all. I don’t know when I’ve been so tired . . . just plum tuckered out.” Then he seemed to brighten up a little.
“Have you ever been to Savannah, miss? No? Well, that’s a great pity, a great pity indeed. I’m from Tybee Island, to be exact, miss, spared by the Yankees along with Savannah. It’s what they call a barrier island—Tybee means ‘salt’ in the Euchee tongue of the ancient Indians. It’s a wonderful place, miss. I’ve been thinking of it a great deal today.”
Jo searched the old man’s face for signs of mental instability, but he seemed more lucid than he had been since he had received his initial shock. As if reading her thoughts, he smiled—a benign, paternal smile.
“No, miss. I know where I am. I’m here with you, in hell. I’m not on those beaches of my youth, watching dolphins leap out of the water or those old pelicans dive into the sea. I’m not a small boy swimming with sea turtles or running along the sand to Fort Screven and catching it from my mammy because I was late coming in. Did you know the rifled cannon was first shot from Tybee Island on April 11, 1862? Fired from the island to Fort Pulaski, which surrendered in thirty hours—thirty hours, miss, imagine that—making all such brick fortifications obsolete after that.”
The old man’s eyes shone at the military accomplishment, as if it had just happened, as if it mattered. He took hold of Jo’s hand, gently covering her scarred fingers with his wrinkled ones, tapping the back of her hand reassuringly. “Now, don’t bother your head none over me, miss. I reckon I got one more surgery left in me someplace. Go on now and get the patient ready. It’s just like my mammy always said.”
The doctor stopped speaking, smiling warmly at the recollection.
“What did she say, doctor?”
“Hmm? Oh, my mammy? She was a woman all right, let me tell you. Well, it was a rhyme, a special favorite of hers, let’s see if I can recite it for you. It began, W’en you gits up frum de table . . . Give me a minute here, Lieutenant, it’ll come to me.”
Jo walked out of the small enclosure; it had been closer in there than she had thought. It was much cooler outside in the tent; she felt like she used to feel when she had been a little girl playing under her sheets, using up all of the air until it was too hot and stuffy for her to stand it any longer, then throwing off the sheets and blankets and taking in great gulps of fresh air, relieved. She walked toward the major, who was resting fitfully on his cot. Maybe he could actually survive the surgery. Maybe Grandpa could help him. Maybe she wouldn’t lose him after all.
From behind the sheets she could hear the doctor fumbling over the lines of the old nursery rhyme.
“W’en you gits up frum de table, don’t cha nevuh knock ovur de table . . . no, that doesn’t make sense. Don’t cha nevuh knock ovur de chair . . . yes, that’s more like it. How did the rest go? W’en you gits up frum de table, don’t cha nevuh knock ovur de chair . . . oh, hello, Miss Carroll, it’s about time you showed up for your shift.”
Jo stiffened, dropping the surgery kit she had just hoisted off the ground. She wheeled around to face the enclosure, shaking violently. Time seemed to stand still. Everything stood out in sharp relief—the signpost that used to hang outside the tent, now carelessly discarded in a corner, CLEAR WEAPONS BEFORE ENTERING; the sound of Jonesy’s fingernails as he scratched hopelessly at his cast; the ringing in her ears, the thudding of her own heart in her chest. She took a wobbly step forward.
“W’en you gits up frum de table, don’t cha nevuh knock ovur de chair, kase ef you do, just as sho’s yo’ bawn . . . sure as you’re born what, confound it?”
“Lieutenant,” she thought suddenly, her legs starting to buckle. He called me “Lieutenant.” “Grandpa,” she called out, her voice sounding foreign to her own ears, as if coming from someone else and from a long way off; her feet refusing to move; her chest tightening in panic. “Grandpa.”
Jonesy stopped scratching and looked up at her, alarmed.
“Kase ef you do just as sho’s yo’ bawn, you won’ git marrit dis year,” Grandpa’s manic voice ended, triumphantly. Then, as if she knew it was going to happen, as if it was a scene from a third-rate play coming from offstage, a gun went off, blood splattering in stark relief over the whiteness of the hanging sheets. At the sound, her legs suddenly were under her control again, and she ran in to see the old man, dark blood oozing like molasses from his temple, the pistol still gripped in his weathered hand, the words of his mammy’s nursery rhyme still dancing crazily in her head.
4
Kay Elliott
May 1942, Malinta Tunnel, Corregidor
Dear Jo,
You will never read this letter, but I have to write it. Addressing it to you helps me pretend, for a few more hours anyway, that you can hear me. That what has happened to me—that what will happen to me shortly—matters. Because, of course, it doesn’t. Not to you, and not to anyone, anymore. Not even to me. But it helps me pretend, like I said. And I can’t die this way, without even being able to think. I need to see, on paper anyway, the tangle of my life pulled out straight, for one second even, before the whole thing recoils, the knot’s cut, and I die. Dear Jo, thank God you didn’t come here.
Kay squinted in the half-light to see what she had written. The generators had been straining all night, surging, growing dim; suddenly, they went out altogether and Kay noted that the complaints and curses that usually accompanied the blackouts were absent. It was already like a tomb.
She couldn’t see to write any longer, but Kay’s mind wandered back to last year, to when she first arrived. She could see herself walking down the gangplank, dazzled by the vibrant blue of Pearl Harbor, the sun sparkling on the water; she could feel the heat sinking into her bones once more—but, beneath all that intensity, there had been a kind of peace. She knew it sounded like a dime novel when she wrote home about it, but the breeze really did kiss her face, it was so soft and wet and muted, the water seemed to lap playfully at her toes. She had been young and she had been beautiful and she had run along the beaches singing and screaming for sheer joy. What the hell had she been thinking? Death was just around the corner. But no one had known that then.
The hospital where she was assigned was so different from the one she had worked at with Jo. In New York, there had been steam heat hissing angrily against sealed gray windows, the slushy coldness of an October rain trying to get inside. Here, it was piercing hot sun sneaking through chinks in wooden shutters. Enormous fans spinning lazily overhead, so slowly you could watch the blades go round. Bare legs, and short work shifts for the girls because of the temperature. Some of the nurses had slept during the heat of the day, but not Kay. She was down at the water every chance she got, burning her white skin brown, swimming in a jungle teeming with life, nothing like the cold, dead quarries back home. Swaying kelp, Moorish Idol fish, huge manta rays, and the thousands of oysters that gave the harbor its name. It was on the beach that she had first met him.
Kay could think about Aaron now. Now that she was about to die. That was the only way she could stand it. She knew that Jo would never really read her letter, that no one would ever really read it, so that made it okay, too, to give him life again, to make him real once more. She couldn’t die without thinking of him one last time. So she let herself drift back, allowing herself to remember part of the story, just the tiniest part. The part where they met on the beach, in the sand and the sun.
Kay had written to Jo then, on a postcard with a hula dancer on the front. She had started it, “Jo, I
’ve met a man,” but never got past that line because he had walked into the room just then and scooped her up in his arms and carried her into the bedroom of the bungalow they were sharing, the waves crashing against its long stork legs standing high above the water, making a sound that was even louder than they were.
Jo, I’ve met a man. And what a man. Every day after they had first met, he would be waiting for her after her shift, out there on the dusty, sunbathed street. He was so unlike the other officers she worked with and laughed with and danced with each night. Aaron was like his fellow officers in appearance only—handsome in his daytime khakis, irresistible in his white dinner jacket—but he lacked their sophistication, the witty repartee the nurses had gotten used to, debutantes as they were on that glittering isle of embassy balls and formal dinners. Aaron had wanted her. He hadn’t wanted to take her out on long drives along the coast. He hadn’t wanted the thrill of the chase. He had wanted Kay, desperately, with a passion she couldn’t comprehend at first. Standing outside the hospital and staring at her as she slowly descended those huge, stone stairs after her shift, his face lighting up like he had seen a vision. Handing her the tropical flower he was holding, his huge hand brushing her tiny one almost reverently, the electricity palpably passing through his fingers into hers. I want you, Kay, he would say. Just that. Simply that.
But she had not been ready to be caught. She had always joked with Jo about not settling too soon. Play the field a little first, they had laughed, see what’s out there. And what a field it was. The men were wild about the new nurses—every night another party, another dance, some new form of excitement, of dalliance. It went to their heads. The wit and the banter. The allure of dark, foreign men with their suave accents, kissing the girls’ suntanned hands. The flashy American officers with their smiles and their ready drinks. The venerable ambassador and his glittering circle of exotic friends. Kay was a small-town girl, but no one had known that. To them she was a sophisticated American, a belle even, desirable and desired by a room with ten men to every girl. But just when she was caught up in all that, swollen by flattery, she caught sight of Aaron on the far side of the room, just gazing at her, longingly, hungrily. Her heart stopped at that naked desire, the pain in his eyes at not having her. The lights had dimmed and the tinkle of crystal and the murmur of the guests had faded away. Then there had been only the two of them, running down to the water in the deepening twilight, Kay losing her heels in the sand, wading up to their waists in the rolling waves, kissing each other madly, her wet ball gown clinging to her body, the weight of it pulling her down, Aaron’s strong arms holding her, pulling her up toward his waiting mouth. They were in love.
Marry me, Kay, he had said in November, before she had been there a month. He was a captain, he had some money put away, he would inherit his family’s vineyards in California or something. Who cared what he was saying? Kay realized she could live a thousand years and never find a man who would want her that much. His wanting awoke something inside her, something she hadn’t even known was there. She tackled him and said yes, and their joy exploded, and he was fending her off with one arm the whole time he was trying to get the chaplain on the phone—There was the rumor of war, sir, could we marry right away, without the exemption? Yes, sir, I’ll hold.
So they were married. She had begun to write Jo about it, but he had picked her up and carried her away, and then later there was no time to write because their world had ended and Pearl Harbor itself was burning.
Dear Jo, thank God you didn’t come here.
The lights flickered on for a second before going out again, and Kay reread that line. She felt as if she had to think of everything, remember everything, regret everything, one last time.
She regretted every moment. Every moment she had spent dancing with other men, all the nonsense she had said, the foolish, empty, stupid talk. All the jokes she had laughed at. Every time she had turned her cheek at the last second to tease some would-be suitor and thwart his kiss. She regretted every party and every dance and every dinner when she wasn’t with Aaron. She regretted that she didn’t sleep with him the second they both knew they wanted each other; she regretted not going to him that very first day, giving herself to him completely, running down those stairs, and throwing herself into his arms. What had she been waiting for? She had never loved like that before—no one had, no one ever could love like that again, she had been a fool to wait even a few days. But how could they have known that a few days would be all that was left to anyone?
She allowed herself to remember Aaron, some parts of his whole. His deadly earnest, his face when he wanted her, his face when he had her; his sudden high spirits, when he’d be giddy as a schoolboy; his laughing and laughing and trying not to laugh as he waited on hold for the Protestant minister to come back to the phone, slapping her backside and telling her to behave. Those parts she let herself recall.
Then there were other things, even now, even with death staring her in the face, that she could not, would not bring back.
Then there were also things she would have chosen to forget because, without their even knowing it, they had been the precursors of doom. Like that time, newly married, when he had let her shampoo his hair, him sitting up to the armpits in soapy bath water, his knees big and bony in front of him in that tiny tub, holding a scrub brush in one hand like it was a wand, chatting about a war, It’s not a real war, it doesn’t matter, it’ll never touch us. It was just the same as when he talked about baseball, or his favorite brand of cigarettes, or anything at all—Keep talking, darling.
There was a noise far down the tunnel, voices and then someone yelling. The words were too muffled to make out, but Kay knew what they meant. She was already up to the third sentence when the lights came back on, contracting her pupils, blinding her for a second, but she kept writing, kept writing as long as she could.
I’m running out of time. This is it for us. I don’t need to write anymore, Jo, I don’t need to tell you where I am or how I got here or where Aaron is now or how the Japanese destroyed our air force in one morning or how we rushed across the airfield at Clark, pulling burning bodies off of the tarmac, or how I wish I was home, how I wish I was already dead and never had to see a Japanese straddled over me, defiling me like some Chinese village girl, and I hope you are alive and safe and that you win this war and that you never come here. Or come here much later, Jo, come with the whole army and stop these men. Because they are brutal and because they are cruel and because I am scared and I didn’t think I could even feel fear anymore, but I do. The world is ending for me, Jo. I hear them in the tunnel. They’re coming
5
Jo McMahon
Spring 1945, The Western Front
Jo made the first incision. She had already shaved the curly hairs off of Major Donahue’s abdomen, painted his bloated belly with iodine. The scalpel was razor-sharp. A bright red line followed neatly in its wake, the blood suspended for a moment in time, not moving; then gravity pulled it down the man’s sides in little rivulets, staining the sheets, dripping down noiselessly to the mud floor below.
Jonesy looked sick as he held the ether mask in place, whether from the sight of blood or from the escaping fumes Jo couldn’t tell. She was through the epidermis now, hitting the tiny bleeders. Next came a layer of fat; she could feel her scalpel sink through it like butter. Then muscle; then something coarse and fibrous impeded her blade. Shit, the greater omentum, I’ve cut it too high. She had known she was too high, knew she might run into that thick layer of fat and lymph and connective tissue, but it was that or risk cutting the internal iliac artery. One nick of that and he’s done. God knows where it is now. It would have been adjacent to a healthy appendix, she knew, but with this one so swollen and distended, it could have been pushed anywhere by now. This is like walking in a minefield, Jo thought and swallowed, her throat feeling like broken glass.
The tent was quiet now. The captain and his men had left. They had rushed in at the sound
of the shot, weapons drawn, and found Jo standing over the dead man, not moving, not speaking. She had no memory of the questions the captain had asked her, she had not heard him order the men to remove the body; she hadn’t heard the familiar sound of shovel against dirt and stone and a new grave being dug. She was beyond that now.
She glanced up again at Jonesy, who was turning green, and at James, his head still bandaged, who was holding a surgery lamp in place. The blind leading the blind, Jo thought abstractedly, wondering who on earth had asked him to help. She finally decided that, although she had no recollection of it, she must have done it herself.
Jo considered making another incision, lower down, but she had already compromised the muscle and another incision made so close to the first would be difficult to heal—assuming he would ever have time to heal. She widened the existing cut, tugging at the sides to open it further, asking Jonesy for the retractors. When he didn’t move, she said impatiently, “The things like scissors that don’t cross in the middle—come on.” He seemed to wake up, handing her the tools, one by one, with his gloved hand. She pulled back hard and locked them into place, looking inside. She had missed the internal iliac by two full inches, but come dangerously close to the larger, right common. God, robbing Peter to pay Paul. But she had missed them both.
Jo thought of the first appendectomy she had observed, back in training in Tennessee. They were about to be deployed, and she hadn’t seen one yet, so the head nurse had arranged for her to be driven to the segregated “colored” ward on base. Jo remembered how everyone had stared at her, a white nurse, come down to their end of camp. She remembered the dark faces of the men in their cots; the contrast between the white starched uniforms of the nurses and their ebony skin; the black doctors, the young ones with regulation buzz cuts, the older men with wiry gray hair standing up straight from their heads. She had donned her surgical clothes and stood in a corner of the tiny operating room. She remembered the figures huddled around the patient, indistinguishable from the people she worked with every day except for the dark skin showing above their masks, the rest of their bodies swathed in impeccable surgical white. She hadn’t seen much of that surgery, and she certainly hadn’t learned enough to perform one now. But Jo still remembered her genuine surprise that there was a whole parallel hospital within a hospital—a world that, except on this one rare occasion, never touched hers and that up until that point Jo had never even known existed. The black soldier on the table that night had made it under those skilled hands, the color of which hadn’t mattered in the least to his survival. Jo’s white fingers were unsure now, and trembling.
The Fire by Night Page 6
