The Secret of Raven Point: A Novel

by Jennifer Vanderbes

  So what if he thought she was sentimental and crazy? She was certainly a lot more sane than the soldiers he dealt with.

  Willard removed the towel and studied her as she laid it over the man. “Most people these days spit on German corpses,” he said.

  “If you need to spit, I won’t stop you.”

  He smiled. “I much prefer shrouds.”

  They walked in silence toward the beach, and once again Juliet was aware of the slight unevenness of his gait.

  “We couldn’t tell if you two were stealing our ball or stealing off!” hollered Lovelace.

  Juliet looked at Willard, and between them emerged the shared realization that they had forgotten the ball. Juliet glanced back toward the woods, and her face must have shown unease in returning there.

  “To hell with the ball,” Willard whispered.

  “To hell with it,” she agreed.

  Together they settled themselves on the blanket and Juliet squeezed water out of her braids and stared contemplatively at the tree line. Dr. Willard picked up his book, began reading, then set it in his lap. “So, Nurse Dufresne, where are you from?”

  Having collected dozens of cigarette packs and cans of Spam and 40,000 lire from the other nurses and doctors that morning, the travelers had decided in advance that the afternoon would be given over to buying wine. So, in the town of Caprarola, the group went from house to house bartering for libations, but it took longer than expected. Hoping to sell as much as possible, the Italians lifted framed paintings off the walls and urged them on the visitors; they emerged from their attics with dusty brass candlesticks. Given the sparse look of their homes, it seemed to Juliet that they had already sold most of their belongings; they stood gaunt and bony and worried, keenly eyeing the cans of Spam. The hospital staff had little interest in the curios, but Glenda purchased an alabaster elephant from a young woman who, when she realized the group wanted only wine and she had none to sell, began to weep. They eventually collected thirty-two bottles and, at Lovelace’s suggestion, opened two of the folding litter racks and laid the wine bottles on their wet towels; they put hospital blankets on top and fastened everything with rope. All of this was done quite slowly, for they were all saddened by the threadbare homes they had seen, the desperation of the Italians. By the time they climbed back into the ambulance and set out on the long, winding roads to the hospital, it had grown dark.

  “Exactly how lost are we?” asked Glenda, leaning into the front and shining a flashlight on the map beside Lovelace after they had been driving an hour, intermittently singing “Thirty-two bottles of wine in the truck, thirty-two bottles of wine . . .”

  “Well, I know exactly where we are,” said Lovelace. “It’s just unfortunately not where we want to be. All of these signs are a mess.”

  “The Krauts love that game,” said Bernice. “They spin them like weather vanes. We’ll be halfway to Sicily soon.”

  “If anyone learned anything about dead reckoning in Basic Training, now’s the time to speak up.”

  For the next fifteen minutes, they rode along in alert silence, the ambulance groaning as it climbed the dark hills. They had switched on the surgical light in the back of the vehicle, as though the hard white glare might help them concentrate on finding their way home. They stared anxiously at one another. It was impossible, thought Juliet, to just sit in the dark and relax. Juliet had heard the awful stories of deadly furloughs: one wrong turn and they could drive over a mine. But she saw there was no point in discussing it. Bernice and Glenda and Willard sat quietly, their jaws clenched, dutifully accepting the risk, as they had done when deciding to enlist, of what it meant to be in a war zone. Following their lead, Juliet leaned back against the cold metal cabin, the faint scent of lake water drifting from her hair.

  Soon the ambulance lurched to a halt, and Lovelace’s voice startled her: “Turn off the light!” he snapped.

  Willard reached up and switched off the surgical light, stranding them in a thick blackness. Juliet could see nothing, but she heard Lovelace wrestling with the gearshift. She was aware that they were slowly beginning to move backward, when suddenly a bright light pierced the back window. “Bloody fuck,” Lovelace huffed, stopping the vehicle. “I’m sorry, gang.”

  Again they were in darkness, but then the light returned, illuminating the crowded compartment in irregular surges. In one quick flash, Juliet saw Willard’s face, looking around at everyone’s shirts. “Does everyone have their Red Cross armbands?” he whispered.

  Amid the quick chorus of yeses, Juliet’s mouth went woolly. She had forgotten hers.

  “We’ve got a Jerry coming up right behind us,” said Lovelace.

  A beam directed at Juliet’s face forced her to turn away. There was a slow knock on the door—one, two, three—and then only the sound of the engine rumbling.

  “Are we supposed to open the door or do they open the door?” whispered Glenda.

  Willard, seated at the head of the compartment, climbed over the nurses so that he was the closest to the door. He raised his hands in front of the windows and called out: “Bitte nicht schießen! Wir sind Ärzte und Krankenschwestern!” Slowly, he reached down and opened one of the doors, gently pushing it open.

  Two men in German uniforms stood staring at the ambulance, each clutching a flashlight and a pistol.

  Willard gestured for the nurses to raise their hands, and Lovelace slowly climbed into the back.

  One soldier stepped forward and barked at them lengthily in German, to which Willard replied, simply, “Nein.” Willard then turned to the nurses and said, “Stay here.” Stepping slowly from the ambulance, he kept his hands above his head. “Wir haben uns verfahren. Wir sind auf dem Weg zurück ins Krankenhaus.”

  Glenda and Bernice fumbled for their armbands, and Juliet drew her knees to her chest. Willard was soon led away, out of sight, though beside the vehicle Juliet could hear fractured bursts of an argument in German. She told herself that if she could still hear Willard speaking, everything was okay. She listened intently for his voice.

  The remaining soldier trained his weapon on the nurses. Juliet closed her eyes and forced her mind through the periodic table. She’d run through it twice and was slowly mouthing “Radium” when the second door of the ambulance flung open. The other soldier had returned with Willard, and his flashlight beam traveled from face to face, armband to armband, stopping on Juliet’s bare sleeve.

  “Wo waren Sie?”

  “Schwimmen. An einem See,” answered Dr. Willard.

  The German signaled everyone to get out. “They want to inspect the vehicle for weapons,” said Willard.

  Juliet followed Glenda and Bernice and Lovelace to the side of the road while the soldier leapt into the ambulance, noisily upturning bags and shaking towels. Behind them, a dark and forested hill sloped toward the night sky; its treetops barbed the low crescent moon. On the other side of the road, heaps of deadfall were piled between skeletal bushes. Through this, Juliet saw a glint of eyes: someone was crouched in the overgrowth, his gun trained on Dr. Willard. Up and down the road, she now noticed, behind the deadfall, every few yards lay men with rifles. Juliet tasted bile rising in her throat.

  Stepping out of the ambulance, the German soldier shook his head at his compatriot and began a serious discussion. The pitch of this debate wavered and surged, each man shaking his pistol while trying to make some passionate point. Eventually, a resolution was reached and a pensive silence ensued. The first soldier climbed back into the ambulance, reemerged with a folded litter and disappeared into the overgrowth.

  A minute later, he lumbered out of the darkness with another soldier, and between them hung the litter, now topped with a man who had damp black hair, a face that was pale and waxy. His eyes were gummed shut. Over the litter’s side, his bloodied leg dangled limply.

  “Helfen Sie ihm,” the soldier announced, sliding the litter into the back of the ambulance and gesturing the doctors over. Willard and Lovelace hesitantly obeyed. />
  “Is he shot?” asked Lovelace, gently lifting the man’s leg.

  “Maybe septicemia?” Willard took the man’s pulse.

  “Or malaria. He probably needs Atabrine. And this leg is infected.”

  Willard spoke to the Germans: “Wir haben nicht die nötige Ausrüstung dabei. Wir werden ihn mitnehmen müssen.”

  The soldiers nodded. “Sie können gehen.”

  “Start the engine, Lovelace,” Willard said. “And get in, ladies.”

  Juliet helped Willard arrange the litter on one of the racks, a matter complicated by the layers of wine suspended overhead. Glenda and Bernice climbed in behind. There was little room for anyone to move. As the wounded German moaned from his litter, his teeth began chattering, and Juliet reached for a towel to wipe down his forehead, knocking into the overhead rack, sending two bottles of wine crashing to the floor.

  “Why don’t we just give them the wine?” said Willard, glaring at the shards of glass floating in a pool of red.

  “Thirty-two bottles?!” said Glenda.

  “They’ll think it’s poisoned,” said Bernice.

  Without waiting for further instructions, Juliet began removing the wine on the rack above the German, bottle by bottle, passing them to Willard.

  “Ein Moment. Ein Geschenk!” Willard called to the Germans, setting the bottles on the ground.

  One soldier approached, offering a suspicious half smile. “Ich hoffe, daß es nicht vergiftet ist,” he said.

  “What did he say?” Juliet asked as the ambulance slowly rolled away and they closed the metal doors firmly behind them.

  Willard said, “He hopes it’s not poisoned.”

  As the ambulance crept carefully along the winding roads, Juliet fed the German mashed K rations while Bernice held a flashlight close.

  Finally Glenda, who had joined Lovelace in the front, whispered, “Clifford! That’s the tree. We’re close.”

  Within minutes they’d given the two-word password to the hospital sentry, and their ambulance pulled up to the quartermaster’s tent, where Lovelace and Willard wearily unloaded the stretcher and began carrying it toward the Receiving Tent. The nurses followed, lugging their packs and canteens across the dark and silent hospital encampment.

  “Good God, who got hit?” Major Decker, smoking a cigar beside his tent, had spotted them.

  Dr. Lovelace answered: “We were given a German.”

  “Who, exactly, is handing them out?”

  Glenda shook her head as though trying to shake off a headache. “We traded very good wine for a malarial Kraut.”

  “Perhaps I should have been more clear. As noncombatants, you know there’s no need for you to collect German prisoners. They aren’t souvenirs.”

  “We’ll get him into surgery and he should be ready for evac to a POW camp by morning,” said Lovelace.

  “Make sure it’s by 0700 tomorrow,” said Major Decker. “That’s when we start packing up. The front is in motion.” He turned to the nurses. “Ladies, say your good-byes to the bandaged boys.”

  “All of them?” asked Juliet, thinking of Barnaby and everything she meant to ask him.

  “Anyone who’s getting sent back into combat stays with us. And we’ve been ordered to hold on to Private Barnaby. Brilling wants him close, and the army wants him with Willard.”

  “Then I move forward with you,” said Dr. Willard.

  Juliet smiled in the dark.

  In the delicate seam between night and day, the bugle sounded; surrounded by semidarkness, the nurses tugged on their uniforms, packed their musette bags, rolled their bedrolls, and soon lugged the entirety of their belongings outside. One by one they eased the tent stakes from the ground and watched their homes billow and flatten. All across the encampment, as the sun rose, the same was happening, and soon the hospital looked to Juliet like the remains of a massacred giant—canvas skin strewn across the grass, a skeleton of wooden poles.

  While the hospital staff loaded the dozens of vehicles, vague figures began to emerge from the hills. A swarm of women and children and elderly men soon descended on the camp, poking through the abandoned barrels and oil drums, the trash heap; any scrap that had been left on the ground was stuffed into a pocket or laid in the bib of a shirt.

  As the morning shadows slowly lifted, the convoy of half-tracks and ambulances set off into the hills. Juliet sat in a truck with a group of nurses she did not yet know well, but when artillery rumbled in the distance, they began to sing, “Over hill, over dale, as we hit the dusty trail . . .” and the reassuring smiles that always bridged unfamiliarity across an operating table were exchanged. Along the road lay abandoned tanks and overturned trucks, heaps of torn and rusted steel. Everywhere, metal was strewn across the ground as though scattered by a tornado. It unsettled Juliet to think that this equipment might have been built from all those washing machines and car parts Tuck had gathered back home, the balls of aluminum foil playfully tossed around the scrap collection center. Just give us the scrap. We’ll turn it into tanks. We’ll turn it into planes. We’ll turn it into jeeps. We’ll turn it into guns. Such a boisterous effort had gone into building machinery they all believed would be indestructible.

  Within an hour they had arrived in a two-acre field. Before the convoy came to a stop, Major Decker leapt from the lead truck and began barking orders. The assembly of the hospital, it seemed, was much more complicated than the disassembly. Climbing groggily from the truck, the nurses made their way to the ambulances to check on patients, while around them the engineers staked flags into the ground as they swept the field for mines, and the enlisted men, moving close behind, hacked away at the overgrowth. By lunchtime, tarps were laid on the ground, where the nurses ate quickly, and when the ward men finished pitching the Recovery Tent, the nurses scraped their mess kits and carried in stacks of linens to make the ward beds. As they carefully transferred all the patients from their litters, Juliet arranged Barnaby on his bed; a downy layer of chesnut hair now covered his scalp. His neck had thickened, and a ruddy flush brightened his chest. “That’s it,” she said, arranging his feeding tube. “You’re on the mend.” But his eye remained closed, and he appeared lost in his silent slumber.

  As the day wore on, Juliet, Glenda, and Bernice pitched their own tent, unpacked their bags, and hung mosquito netting at the entrance. Outside their tent Glenda attached a sign she had been carrying since North Africa: Waldorf-Astoria.

  By the time the sun began to fade, dynamos whizzed to life, bare bulbs flashed on, stoves were lit; once again, the hospital began to glow and thrum like a carnival. Sweaty from the day’s exertion, Juliet searched out the shower house, an uncovered wooden room with benches on either side.

  “Oh, no, what’s this?”

  Glenda sat naked on a bench and from a large metal drum scooped water with her helmet. Juliet had grown unexpectedly fond of the perforated beer cans that dumped water when she tugged a rope.

  “No showerheads until tomorrow,” Glenda explained. “The engineers had to go to the front for a mine sweep.” As she doused her shoulders, the water sloshed onto the wood planks and steam swirled from the wet timber.

  Juliet unfastened her braids. The ends of her hair were dried and split, but her scalp was oily from lack of washing. Using her fingers, she worked through the tangles, tugging hard at several knots. “Birds could lay eggs in this mess,” she said.

  “Wow, you look older with your hair down. Womanly. It frames your face real nice. You should let it hang long, put some curlers in.”

  “The braids are easy,” said Juliet. “I’ve been wearing them forever.”

  She peeled off her clothes, hanging them on a nail, and sat on the bench beside Glenda, who had begun intently soaping her breasts. Something in the way Glenda flaunted her body perturbed Juliet. It made her aware that she didn’t, or couldn’t, flaunt her own, that she was cursed with being awkward and demure. Prudish was the word; she was prudish without wanting to be. But growing up without a woman i
n the house, she never learned how to primp or prance about or even pluck her eyebrows. She feared her inexperience was feeding on itself: Was she too priggish even to be at ease near a woman who wasn’t?

  “What do you think of Clifford?” Glenda asked.

  “Dr. Lovelace? Well, he’s a lousy furlough driver, but he seems like an excellent surgeon. He did an amazing job with Barnaby’s face.”

  “I mean personally.”

  “I’ve only known him a few weeks!”

  “But a girl gets impressions, feelings. . . . You seem observant. Don’t be stingy with your smarts!”

  Juliet plunged her helmet into the bucket and doused her shoulders, rubbing at the dirt on her arms. “He seems like a good man.”

  “He’s going to make me a plaster cast for my alabaster elephant so I can ship it home to my momma in Texas.”

  “That’s very sweet.”

  “That’s what I thought. Beyond the call of duty.” Glenda nodded slowly, and the soap slipped from her hand. As she retrieved it from the wet planks, her bare bottom rose momentarily, and Juliet turned away in politeness. Glenda laughed and offered Juliet the bar. “Here, you’ll smell like strawberry shortcake.”

  The soap slid smoothly across Juliet’s stomach, and she practically drank the fruity musk.

  “Now, don’t forget to go down south.” Glenda gestured between Juliet’s legs. “You never know when a visitor might drop by.”

  “Ugh.” Juliet dramatically shuddered with disapproval. “Trespassers will be shot.”