When Jo looked at the appendix, she didn’t know what it was at first; it was so large and misshapen and not neatly tucked next to the cecum, as it had been on her anatomy charts in school. Half of it was black and necrotic. She blinked slowly, the bright light from the lamp searing her brain. Her mouth felt dry. She eased the slippery, quivering mass through the opening, feeling along it for its base, for where it connected with the mesoappendix. At any point, the appendix could rupture, spilling its deadly contents into the abdominal cavity; one nick, one split, and it would all be over. Jonesy was looking away, burying his face in his sleeve, the smell of surgery—something Jo no longer even noticed—overcoming him. What James felt beneath his layers of bandages, no one could tell. Jo’s fingers came to the end of the wriggling form, to the vasculature containing the nerves and blood endings that would have to be ligated first.
“Jonesy,” she said, her hands shaking. She was feeling giddy, though not from the surgery—surely not that anymore, she had assisted at a hundred worse than this. Missing arms, missing faces; an embedded, undetonated bazooka shell stuck in someone’s leg; GI surgeries with white worms crawling freely in stomachs and intestines, the doctors only stopping to pluck out the ones in their way, their hundreds of companions being sewn back up into parasitic bellies. No, Jo was trembling now from being so close. She was minutes away from this patient actually having a chance at survival. And Jonesy wasn’t responding.
“Jonesy, I know this is rough if you’re not used to it”—here Jonesy threw up—“but I need just a little more help. The thing that looks like a loop, kind of like a clamp with thread, I need that.” Jonesy tried throwing up again, but there wasn’t enough food in his stomach and he just dry-heaved a couple of times. “And I need it now, Jonesy.”
Jonesy finally proffered the implement, which Jo snatched from him quickly. In a moment, she had drawn two tight loops around the thin neck of the mesoappendix, pulling it tight, stopping the flow of blood. Then, with one deft stroke of the scalpel, the appendix was out. She dropped it cursorily into the basin on the floor, where it exploded, filling the tent with an odor of death. Jo exhaled. Then she began the repair.
Jo began the careful suturing of the layers of fascia and tissue with a mindlessness borne of exhaustion and shock. The stitches were perfect, beautiful, each exactly the same. As she mechanically finished each layer, Jonesy shook powdered sulfa over everything, at her direction. Her concentration was solely on the work in front of her, and yet, at the same time, she was elsewhere, reliving past events, her gloved fingers stitching and pulling and stitching again.
Thoughts came to her randomly. She couldn’t find an apartment. Kay couldn’t. That was how they had met. Jo and Kay had just finished their first practical. Jo was walking out when she noticed the quiet girl still sitting at her lab bench.
“Hey, you okay? My name’s Jo.”
“Oh, hi,” the other girl had said demurely, looking uncertainly at the waxed floor and smoothing a strawberry-blond wisp back into place. Then looking up, she suddenly gathered courage. “Actually, no. I thought I had an apartment, it was all set up, but now I don’t, and I’ve been washing up in the lavatory here before class the last two mornings, and I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
The girl looked surprised at herself. She hadn’t meant to say so much.
“And it’s Kay, by the way. My name’s Kay.”
That had been the start of it. At first the savvy New Yorker had just felt sorry for the small-town girl bewildered and lost in a big city. But then—somewhere between apartment hunting and Saturdays at Coney and studying for finals and exchanging family stories—something had clicked. They were such an unlikely pair, thrown together from worlds apart. Jo knew the best place to get a corned beef sandwich and which museums were free when. She explained with infinite patience the labyrinthine subway system, which Kay would never understand. Jo talked back to cat-calling men, shutting them up in two languages. (Kay was amazed by that and a little shocked.) But Kay opened up a new world for Jo too. Here was someone who didn’t even remember when her family had come over: “We’ve just always been Americans, I guess.” It was so long ago—“My great-great-great-great-something or other, Jo, I can’t recall”—that the names, the date, all was lost to memory. They’d always lived there, Kay told her, snug and high up in the mountains. Walking to church, working the land until the mines opened up, and then working the land from the inside out. Watching the endless seasons change, but never changing themselves. In Jo’s mind, Kay was what Jo was but what Jo could never be—American. But the kind of American who almost took that identity for granted. Who walked around with a self-confidence, a self-assurance that Jo couldn’t assume no matter how hard she tried. Jo felt that she had to scrap every day to prove she was equal. That she was good enough. That she was in fact an American. Jo had always been envious of—had always thought she hated—those Americans who knew only one language and one home and one way of life. But Kay made them vulnerable. Kay made them real.
And then we both joined the Army. What were we thinking. That it’d be fun?
Jo thought of the rough crossing of the Atlantic. With Kay already in the Pacific, what had started out as an adventure for Jo quickly became monotonous, even dangerous; she remembered someone had actually died from seasickness. Waiting impatiently in England. Sailing for North Africa, discovering the mountain of amputated limbs there when they arrived, left by the German forces they were pursuing, not even burned but rotting in the desert sun. The Christmases they had tried to keep, the paper decorations and cutout stars, the one good dress the girls had passed around in shifts when they had thrown a holiday dance. Jo had had to stuff its bodice with tissue paper to fill it out when it had been her turn to wear it. The time when they were struggling across the African plains and both sides had actually called a truce to empty the battlefield of wounded. Like kids playing tag and suddenly calling “time out.” The tanks—the German Panzers with their incredible range, the American “popguns,” little more than mobile, flammable gas tanks—had stopped their fighting, and medics from both armies had pulled the hundreds of maimed and bleeding men out of harm’s way. Then they had started killing each other once more.
She thought of the graves detail, “the worst job in the Army,” Queenie had always called it, the job they gave to the “queer” ones, to the gays who got past the filters and the draft boards. They were the janitors of the war, bringing up the straggling rear, collecting the dead the corpsmen left behind. They would pull off one of the twin dogtags to send to Washington that would generate the yellow telegram that would destroy yet another family, leaving the other on the body—when there was a body. When there wasn’t, they played a macabre game of eeny-meeny-miny-mo, trying to match torsos with nearby arms and legs, assembling “bodies” made up of a half-dozen men, stuffing them into body bags, erring on the side of sending heroes to their final repose with too few instead of too many limbs. Jo wondered how they could stand the job and its utter hopelessness, how they could do it day in and day out, and not go crazy. Then she thought of the chaplains, of every denomination, who had gotten together and given the men on the detail all their alcohol rations so they could get drunk and forget their world for a while.
She closed.
Her hands had been working all the while and, without even noticing it, she had closed. She glanced up at Jonesy, nodded slightly; he removed the ether mask, the sickeningly sweet residue filling the air. That was all she could do. There was no more penicillin. Jonesy had made a little makeshift wheelchair out of a cart on casters and a broken chair, and he slowly wheeled himself to the tent flap, taking in deep drafts of air. Jo removed her gloves and took the lamp from James. He didn’t even need her help now to negotiate his way back to his cot. Jo instinctively wanted to remove the bloodied sheets from under her patient, but decided against it. The major needed to be still, to have time to wake up, or not wake up—either way. But she had done all she could fo
r him.
Everyone else in the tent was asleep. Billy’s breathing had improved with the steam tent; David was quiet, if still incoherent when awake; the priest (“Fr. Justus Hook,” the chart read) had finally unclasped his hands, but his face in repose looked more like a cadaver’s than ever.
Jo walked over to the corner where the doctor had taken his own life and started ripping off the white sheets still spattered with blood, now dried and brown. She grabbed these, along with the accumulated linen of the tent, and headed outside into the chilly daylight. None of the captain’s men were in sight; they were on patrol again, looking for the enemy, remaining hidden themselves. She threw the sheets and towels into the boiling cauldron she had heated earlier—an old drum, fueled by scrap wood and discarded packing crates. She threw the towels in with bleach and soap and stirred its heavy weight slowly with a two-by-four, like a witch from a fairy tale.
Jo watched the swirling water tinged with pink and her thoughts left North Africa, sailing for Italy once more aboard the HMS Newfoundland, painted white with an enormous red cross visible on it, lit up like a Christmas tree in a world of blackouts to proclaim itself a hospital ship. How very formal and refined the British “sisters” had seemed to the Yankee nurses; how even the name of their branch—the Queen Alexandra Imperial Military Nursing Service—had made them sound like royalty. How easy the sailing had been, at first, with only two patients. Then the heat had started, almost tropical for September. In the open air, with the wind, it had been bearable, but below decks the thermometer had stuck at the top. The nurses sweltered, tossing in the night, unable to sleep.
“Queenie,” one of the girls complained, “I can’t sleep. This is hotter than Alabama down here. The thermometer read 118 when we came to bed.”
“Take your clothes off, sugar.”
There had been nervous giggles from some of the girls.
“No, I mean it. It’s just us girls down here, and it’s dark as pitch anyway.”
“Are you naked, Queenie?”
“Of course.”
“Jo, how ’bout you?”
Jo had stripped down to her undershorts.
“Just about, Ellie. Now go to sleep. Or not. But quit whining about the heat. It’ll be dawn in an hour or so and—”
It was then that the aerial bomb had hit. Below decks, the girls had not heard the single plane approaching, had not seen it close in on its illuminated target. The side of the ship was there one minute, dark and impassable, trapping in the heat and the air, suffocating the girls; the next moment there was a smash and a whooshing sound and Jo’s eardrum ruptured and anything that wasn’t fastened down was sucked out of the gaping hole in the hull. There were alarms going off, whistles sounding, men yelling above them on deck. Everything was noise and confusion and, above it all, Queenie screaming at her girls to line up, to get out, to leave no one behind.
“Our clothes!” someone was saying. Smoke began to filter into the darkness around them. They could hear the men coughing outside.
“Forget them, they’re gone,” Queenie snapped, pushing the girls in front of her toward the door.
“But our clothes!” The girls themselves were coughing now, the black smoke mixing with the black of the night, the heat from the spreading fire adding to the heat already engulfing them.
“My rosary,” another voice called shrilly, a girl suddenly breaking from the column and heading back toward where her bunk had been.
Jo grabbed her arm, smoke burning her own eyes. “We’ll get you another one in Rome, sweetie. Just get back in line.”
The girls were climbing the ladder and staggering out into the black morning, their modesty conflicting with their instinctual need for air. They stood on the deck, huddled together, arms crossed in front of pale breasts, turning sideways, toward the bulkhead, toward the stern, staring at the huge pillar of smoke rising from just behind the bridge, at the fire snaking its way across the ship. Queenie was the last one out. She was holding her arm at a weird angle and didn’t seem to be able to move it.
“Jo, someone needs to go back in there and make sure everybody’s out.”
There was no other way to check. They couldn’t be sure how many girls had actually been down there when the bomb hit. Someone was always heading to the lavatories or getting up for a glass of water. The captain had forbidden it, but several girls had even been desperate enough from the heat that they had slept on the tilting decks, risking being rolled, silently, into a dark sea.
Smoke was visibly coming from the doorway as Jo darted inside. She could hear someone frantically say, “You’ll get the Purple Heart for this, Jo,” but then she was down there, the water up to her ankles already, ducking under the smoke, feeling behind overturned cots, in corners, calling out for anyone who could hear her. Her throat was raw from yelling, and from the smoke, but she didn’t climb out again until she was certain they had all made it. When she emerged, men were running by with buckets and hoses, turning their heads toward the girls, unsure of what they were seeing in the uncertain light of the fires.
“Thank God you’re okay, Jo. You’re a hero either way,” and then Queenie had winced a little in pain, from her arm. “We’re abandoning ship, the girls first anyway. They don’t think they can stop the fire. Come on, ladies.”
Queenie cradled her bad arm and led the way, holding her head up high as if she wasn’t buck naked, as if this was something her training had prepared her for. Several of the British nurses met up with them along the way, also heading for the life rafts, disheveled and confused and scared. And then they heard the scream.
It was one of the sisters. The cabin she was in was on fire—its door had been completely smashed in with the impact. There was no way out, and she was sticking her head out of the porthole and screaming. The nurses all stopped in their tracks, horrified; the men who were nearby stopped fighting the fire and yelled orders, trying to get to the door, but it was buried under a ton of twisted steel and cable. They couldn’t reach her. The nurse kept screaming. It was the worst sound in the world, the worst thing anyone had ever listened to. The women forgot their own fear, their own nakedness and vulnerability, and stood there, petrified, their bare feet rooted in place, unable to cry or pray or scream themselves but just watch, appalled, mesmerized, unable to look away.
“The door is gone, it’s gone, there’s no way for us to get in, this window’s too small.”
There was a man outside her porthole now trying to talk to her, trying to explain why they couldn’t get to her, gesturing wildly with his hands and pointing. Standing alongside him was a teenage cabin boy, fourteen at best, eyes wide, mouth open in panic. Then the fire reached her and her scream redoubled and her hair alighted and the cabin boy picked up a two-by-four off the deck and brought it down on the back of her head and he started crying and she was dead.
The cinders were in their eyes now, making the nurses blink, forcing them to shuffle out of the wind. “To the lifeboats,” someone ordered gruffly, a potbellied man with thick spectacles he kept taking off and rubbing with his shirtfront and putting back on, not realizing it was his tears that made him unable to see.
The boats were being lowered with the first of the nurses—the British sisters inconsolable, the American women silent, in shock. There was another explosion as the oil tank ignited, shaking the ship. Jo grabbed on to the rigging as the lifeboat she watched being lowered struck the side of the ship sharply. She looked around the deck. She didn’t see any of the doctors. No one would ever see them again, bunking, as they had been, beneath the bridge. The nurses waited numbly in line, the first light of dawn revealing their figures to the unsuspecting men. Jo’s face burned in spite of herself.
“Here you go, miss,” said the sailor standing next to her, taking off his shirt.
All around the deck now, men were taking off their shirts, their pants, handing them to the naked girls, who hurriedly put them on, not daring to even raise their eyes in their tangled mess of rage and shame.
“Thank you,” Jo murmured. Her fingers were having trouble with the buttons. Only then did she realize that they had been burnt.
“It’s okay, miss. They’re sending the Tommys over here to pick you up, and I’d be damned to see a sister of mine picked up—well, like that, miss.”
Jo stopped stirring and pulled out the heavy sheets, wringing them with her hands. They were more gray than white as she slung them over the thick rope clothesline they had forgotten to take down in their hurry to evacuate. Then the towels, the washcloths—she scalded her hands scooping out the last of the linen with her makeshift paddle. She was no longer off the coast of Salerno, no longer that young nurse being lowered in a lifeboat in a man’s shirt smelling of sweat and tobacco; she could no longer hear the frantic screams of that poor nurse, or the desolate sobs of the child who killed her. Jo was here, in this dirty yard, where the water was running off the sheets, making little channels in the dirt. That sister had died, and Queenie had died, and most of those girls sweltering away on the Newfoundland that night had died too, half a mile from where she stood now staring at the dirty wash water, kicking out the last of the fire. She thought vaguely about the major, wondering if he was dead. She tried to rouse herself enough to go in and check, but failed. Instead, she stood looking at the deserted clearing where, so recently, an entire field hospital had stood, on the very edge of a war they were now losing. It seemed wrong that she alone should still be alive—wrong, but not sad. No, nothing was sad anymore. She had shut herself off—or the part of herself that had been lovable, that had been her, she had shut that off. The woman who stood alone now among the damp sheets was not herself. This woman might have cheated death, but had not won life in the process.
The Fire by Night Page 7
