The Secret of Raven Point: A Novel

by Jennifer Vanderbes

  Mother Hen pulled back the blanket; “Heavens to fucking Betsy.”

  The man’s face glistened with blood. One eye dangled an inch below its socket, resting on his cheekbone. The other eye darted about wildly. To the side of the chin gaped a crimson hole, punctuated by the bright white specks of molars. Not a single bandage covered his wounds. Though the man’s mouth seemed incapable of moving, he emitted a terrible groan. Juliet was trying hard not to register any horror on her face.

  “Battalion surgeon wouldn’t touch him,” said the medic.

  “Not even sulfonamide?” asked Mother Hen. “Why on earth not?”

  “On principle.”

  As Mother Hen examined his medical tag, a sad shock of recognition crossed her face. “Oh, it’s Private Barnaby.”

  “Captain Henfield . . .” Juliet offered uncertainly, “our blood supply is extremely low.”

  “Extremely is not a medical term.”

  “Less than six pints,” said Juliet.

  “Well, don’t piss them away on this yellow belly,” huffed the medic. “You’re looking at an Article 85.” Article 85 referred to desertion.

  Juliet watched Mother Hen narrow her eyes, as if trying to locate, on the ruined landscape of the patient’s face, some familiar feature.

  “Reckless, stupid, idiotic fool,” she muttered. Mother Hen was the oldest of the nurses. A maze of wrinkles spread from her outer eyes, and a thick band of freckles, interlaced with sunspots, darkened her cheeks. She looked bronzed, marbled, and brilliantly shrewd. Nothing hen-like or motherly in her manner that Juliet could detect.

  “We’ll administer six thousand cc’s plasma, Nurse Dufresne, one thousand cc’s five percent glucose in saline, penicillin, and thirty milligrams morphine; then get him out of those clothes and dress the wound.”

  Mother Hen left for the supplies, and Juliet began carefully repeating the dosages to herself.

  “Got any straps or cords?” asked the medic.

  “We’ve barely got gauze left.”

  The medic unbuckled his belt and yanked it loose from his pants. “Here. Strap him down best you can. And keep knives away until the sedatives kick in. I’ve got to mop up the hill.”

  Just then, the medic noticed the flesh in his cuff, and with his thumb and forefinger flicked it to the ground.

  Juliet crouched beside the patient; “Okay, stay nice and calm for me,” she whispered. His face was so thick with blood, it seemed like a lunar landscape on which the only sign of life was the startlingly white eye staring up at her. The other eye, drenched with blood, dangled as if it might come loose. Amazing he was still alive. But that was the first thing Juliet had learned in nursing school—appearances deceived. While invisible infections, fevers, and blood clots could be fatal, men maimed or burned beyond recognition all too frequently lived to see the ruin of their bodies.

  Juliet glanced at his tag, where one word had been written: coward.

  “Private Barnaby, I’m a nurse. When I strap you down, it’s for your own good.” Juliet hadn’t yet dealt with a shock patient, but she’d watched other nurses and knew that the trick was to lower his head, raise his legs, and above all else make sure he knew he was off the battlefield. “If you let me push up your sleeve, I’ll give you something for the pain.” With an alcohol swab, she cleared a white track on his arm. “That pinch is just a needle. In a minute, you’re gonna feel like dancing.”

  Mother Hen returned, rigging the plasma bag and intravenous tubes. “Nurse Dufresne, strip him down now. We need him in the Surgical Tent before lights out.”

  Juliet cut slowly through his pants with dull scissors, revealing two knobby legs streaked with bruises. She peeled off his jacket and shirt and found, pressed to his chest, two blood-spattered envelopes, thick with papers; she shoved them in her apron before tossing his clothing into a pile at her side. Somewhere beyond this tent sat pails of blood-soaked shirts and pants, of shrapnel and bullets extracted from bodies, of hands and feet and arms and legs. Hospital debris—if the army had any sense, thought Juliet, they’d pack it onto Thunderbolts and dump it over Germany.

  Private Barnaby lay naked now, except for a silver Saint Christopher medal at his neck, which she unclasped, and his ID tags. He was surprisingly thin, the arc of each rib visible through his skin.

  “Of all the goddamned messes.” The hospital’s commanding officer, Major Bill Decker, had appeared beside her, gnawing the stub of an unlit cigar. “Pistol in the mouth. One hell of a messy way to desert.”

  Self-inflicted? Juliet was surprised. She looked down at the naked boy, the pulpy wreck of his face. Men opted for such gory suicides. A bullet in the brain, a plunge from a bridge—always an act of violence. Women, on the other hand, took handfuls of sleeping pills and pretended it was bedtime. She couldn’t fathom either.

  Juliet grabbed the stretcher, assuming the major would take the other side, but he tucked his cigar in his shirt pocket, delicately, as though it were an heirloom or pet hamster, before lifting the stretcher with dramatic apathy.

  “Oh, let’s stroll,” he sang. “Let’s wander. Let’s talk about Nietzsche and Heidegger and Bergson. Let’s discuss BIG IDEAS, the nature of time, the possibility of life after death. . . .”

  This was the first time Major Decker had spoken to her; he generally kept to himself, except when the hospital was swamped, when he would appear haphazardly at patients’ bedsides with cups of water or in the Sterilizing Tent, scrubbing down scalpels. It was said he once drove an unattended ambulance to the front, returning with eleven wounded men. His expression was dark and pensive and mildly hateful. Hateful of the war, hateful of humanity—a look Juliet had begun to notice in those who had for too long tended to the dying.

  “I think we should bring him to the Surgical Tent,” Juliet said softly. “With all due respect, Major.”

  “The respect is due death. He wanted death. It’s a rarity in this place, and we should oblige.”

  Mother Hen’s wizened face popped through the tent flaps with a simple, scolding “Major.” For two years she had been helping Major Decker run the hospital; together they presided over a staff of 150—litter bearers, surgical assistants, ward men, doctors, nurses, drivers—conducting themselves in a stern and efficient manner; but when engaging with each other, they seemed like eccentric grandparents.

  “Madge,” he replied.

  She pointed toward the Surgical Tent. “Protocol.”

  “Pointless.”

  “Now!”

  Major Decker rolled his eyes, a gesture Juliet had not thought commanding officers capable of. “We’ll fix him up,” he whispered to Juliet, “and then General Clark will use this kid for target practice. But there’s no crossing Madge. Let it be done! Andiamo!”

  In the Surgical Tent, after Juliet helped set down the patient, Mother Hen instructed, “Take a rest, Nurse Dufresne.” She tapped her watch. “One hour. And not a second past. We’ve a bitch of a night ahead.”

  Back in her dark, airless tent, Juliet peeled off her damp shirt and wiped down her chest. After all those broken bones and seeping wounds, her body seemed precariously fragile. There were bones inside of her, she reminded herself, and on those bones lay strips of muscle, tangled with veins and arteries. Skin and ligaments held it all together, the entirety of the mass of flesh she called herself. But no bone of hers looked much different from someone else’s bone; her femur would roughly mirror the femur of any soldier on the operating table; none of the flesh she’d seen in the hospitals—the torn muscles, the exposed stomachs, the broken ribs—had anything to do with the people it belonged to. The same delicate pieces made up everyone, and if the wrong pieces or too many pieces broke, the whole person ceased to exist. Juliet had witnessed this daily for months, and yet the strangeness of it never subsided.

  She tried to clear her mind; collapsing onto her bedroll, she devoured a C ration can—cold hash and potatoes—letting the salt and grease melt in her mouth. As rain needled the tent, she imagin
ed a summer day back in Charlesport. She envisioned the white wicker chaise on the front porch, a row of cool potted ferns. Juliet almost tasted the thick salt air, heard her father’s deep voice from within the house. But when she tried to insert Tuck into the scene—maybe he’d be playing checkers with her as they waited for dinner—the image grew cloudy. Whether she was summoning a memory or a fantasy, Juliet could not have said. Seven months had passed since the awful telegram; almost two years since she waved good-bye to him at the bus depot. It troubled her that her grasp on the details of their past was fading.

  She thumbed through a dog-eared Stars and Stripes, months old, featuring three articles on the Salerno landings, about which she’d already gathered every grueling, useless fact. (She knew that Tuck’s division had pushed north from Salerno to Naples, and that he went missing sometime after they crossed the Volturno—but she had little information beyond that.) Juliet surveyed her books and Glenda’s pile of Vogue magazines, and finally grabbed Bernice’s knitting needles and added a few lumpy stitches to a scarf before undoing them and setting the needles beside a box of letters.

  Letters. Remembering the patient’s envelopes, Juliet dug through her apron. Stiff with mud and blood, the first envelope crackled as she shook free a small, worn photograph of a young woman posed on the steps of a single-story clapboard house. The woman’s hair was tied back, and her gingham dress fell loosely, as though trying to obscure any suggestion of a figure. She smiled tiredly and somewhat crookedly, one of those smiles, Juliet knew, that came from posing too long. A thin band glinted on her ring finger.

  So, the troubled soldier had a wife.

  Juliet slid the photo back in the envelope and pulled out a letter; she stared at the address for a moment, taken aback: Private Christopher Barnaby, 88th Infantry Division, 349th Infantry Regiment, Rifle Company C—Tuck’s company. She brought the envelope to her chest, heart thumping, and then remembered that each company consisted of several hundred men. Unless Private Barnaby was in the same platoon as Tuck was, he’d likely be of little use. Still, it was the first shred of hope in months.

  Setting the letter in her lap, Juliet lay back down and smiled.

  All sixty cots in Recovery Tent One were filled. The bandaged men, their limbs suspended in bright white casts, looked like creatures caught in a giant web of intravenous tubing. Juliet checked the med schedule on the nurses’ desk and then made her way from bed to bed to take temperatures, administer penicillin and morphine, rewrap bandages, offer cups of water. Except for the occasional cough, the tent was quiet.

  “Ah, Nurse! I’ll die of thirst!”

  At the far end, a corpulent man fanned his pink face with a Sears, Roebuck catalog. In the sweat-beaded crescent above his undershirt hung a gold cross, his chest rising and falling with each raspy breath.

  “Father MacDougal?”

  He seized the water glass from Juliet and with each long sip his Adam’s apple bobbed; the glass emptied, he looked despairingly to the heavens. “What’s left of me?” he muttered.

  Juliet checked the clipboard, where several notes had been scratched out; added in a different script were the words very serious condition.

  “I told them, malaria or typhoid. The food here, it’s entirely unsanitary. Rats everywhere. And cockroaches! Oh, Italian cockroaches are very crafty.”

  Juliet set her palm on his forehead, warm and sticky.

  “I have the chills, you see. And a pain in my right side. And headaches, splitting headaches. A hammer pounding in my skull. But also, I’m burning up, and there are these swollen glands in my throat. Like walnuts. Here.” He led her hands to the soft fleshy bumps of his lymph nodes, which made Juliet suspicious. She slid a thermometer in his mouth and checked his bedpan.

  “Don’t forget to urinate, Father.”

  His eyes widened. “No, no, no, no. There’s glass in my urine,” he whispered. “They fed me glass.”

  “No talking until the thermometer is out,” she scolded. “I’m going to run a Widal test for typhoid, and draw blood for a malaria test.” With childlike terror he watched her shove back his sleeve and insert a needle. “If it’s malaria, we can give you Atabrine. For typhoid, the symptoms will generally subside. If any coughing begins, we’ll do a lung X-ray for TB.”

  “Tuberhulohis!”

  “Two degrees above normal,” she said, wiping down the instrument. She laid a wet cloth on his forehead. “Get some rest, Father. Patients are sleeping and we should keep it quiet.”

  “Oh, but I need something for the pain or I’m going to let myself swell up like a balloon. I can’t sleep. What would really help, what would really perch the angels on your shoulders for eternity, would be a sip of medicinal brandy.”

  “Have a sleeping pill.” From an unmarked bottle of aspirin, Juliet shook out a tablet. “Twenty minutes, and you’ll be sleeping like a baby.”

  As she leaned forward to adjust his blanket, his thick hand landed on her hip. “Such kindness,” he whispered, sliding his palm up and down. “The angels are all over you.”

  “If they are,” she said, stepping away, “I’m betting they don’t like to be groped.”

  Throughout the night, the ward was full of breathing, the intimate breaths of human sleep. Juliet paced the dimly lit tent. Here and there a bed creaked as a patient thrashed in the privacy of a dream. Occasionally, she checked a bandage, trying not to rouse the sleeper. As the hours stretched on, her eyes began to ache with exhaustion. Rules forbade sitting down (in case she fell asleep), so as she walked she recited the periodic table to herself, and when in the last heavy hours of darkness her limbs began to revolt, she windmilled her arms. Despite this exertion, her eyes had begun to drift closed when two surgeons appeared with a litter, letting the soft white light of morning spill into the tent.

  “No more beds?” asked Dr. Lovelace, his eyes pink and ragged.

  “The best I can do is the floor.”

  “Well, Private Barnaby won’t know the difference. He’ll be lucky if he has broccoli left for a brain.” Dr. Lovelace was the hospital’s chief trauma surgeon. Brawny and thickly bearded, he was also, according to Glenda, exceptionally wealthy.

  Dr. Mallick stood silently. He was short and pigeon-breasted and had the wide-eyed look of someone holding his breath, perhaps for decades.

  “Psst. Is that Private Barnaby?” This question came from the Senator, squinting against a band of sunlight.

  “Go back to sleep, Munson,” whispered Juliet.

  “You can’t put Barnaby on the ground. Enough’s enough already. Give the poor sod my bed.” With evident annoyance, the Senator yanked loose his bedsheet and settled on the narrow strip of floor between cots. He burrowed his face in the crook of his arm, sighing with exasperation. In the silence that followed, he seemed aware of Juliet’s puzzled stare. “It’s nothing,” he said. “I’m used to sleeping on the ground.”

  The doctors held the litter steady, and Juliet eased Barnaby’s body onto the cot. Through the thick gauze, the rasp of his breathing had an insect-like quality; he seemed an entirely different creature from the one in the ambulance. Bandages and casts were like cocoons, thought Juliet, and the person who would eventually emerge would look entirely unfamiliar. From her pocket she pulled the Saint Christopher medal, rinsed of blood, and fixed the clasp around his neck.

  “If you’ll excuse us,” said Dr. Lovelace, “we’ve still got two thoracotomies, a laparotomy, and one crappy flashlight. Wish us luck.” He gave Juliet a sportsmanlike hug, resolutely patting her back. Lovelace was known for this—hugging his entire surgical team after every operation.

  As they left, she looked at her watch—thirty more wearying minutes until her shift’s end. Around her men lay splayed and motionless in the last firm grip of slumber, and the sight made her desperate for rest. It became an ache. To pass the time, she turned over a page on one of the clipboards and drew a tic-tac-toe board. She had played almost a dozen games when from a nearby corner a voice rose with panic.
“Hello? Is anyone there? Please, someone!”

  Juliet rushed to the man, whose bandaged head was swinging in desperate arcs.

  “I’m here,” she whispered. “You’re in a field hospital. It’s okay.”

  He stopped moving. His eyes were wide open, his pupils strangely dilated, like the shocked eyes of a dead fish.

  “Jesus, I thought I was taken prisoner. When can I take these bandages off?” He touched his eyelids, then his eyebrows, and blinked several times, poking his fingertips at his eyes as terror slowly took hold of his face.

  Juliet skimmed his medical sheet. “Lieutenant Geiger. A piece of shrapnel pierced your helmet. It severed your optic nerves.”

  “Well . . . just turn on the lights.”

  “That bit of shrapnel, it tore the nerves that control your vision.”

  “But my eyes don’t hurt.”

  “It happened inside your head. I think you’re blind.”

  “How do I know you’re not a German trying to trick me? A Kraut nurse who speaks English?” He slowly crossed his arms, raised his chin. “So tell me, Miss America, what’s the name of Roosevelt’s dog?”

  Juliet paused, wanting to give him a few more seconds of hope. But in the uncertain silence, his upper lip trembled, and she finally whispered: “I’m sorry. Fala.”

  A tear traveled the ridge of his cheekbone and pooled above his lip; he was quite handsome. It was strange to think he would never see his face again; he would never see himself grow old. Years from now, as a man of fifty, he would imagine himself exactly like this.