The Secret of Raven Point: A Novel

by Jennifer Vanderbes

  Together they propped Barnaby against the wall of the tent. Willard drew up a chair to face Barnaby and flipped open the glass-covered contraption. He unwound a cord from a microphone and laid the microphone on Barnaby’s chest. He gestured for Juliet to sit on the bed beside Barnaby, then handed her a stethoscope, needle, and syringe.

  As rain drummed on the canvas overhead, she carefully injected the Pentothal into Barnaby’s arm. She held his wrist to monitor his pulse. She wanted to believe what Willard had said, but something in her doubted a mere injection would rouse a man who had been unresponsive to all human interaction, to the entire world, for more than a week. And who knew what permanent damage lurked in his brain? A gunshot wound to the head could leave a man with normal reflexes but cognitively vegetative.

  Dr. Willard leaned forward. “Private Barnaby,” he said calmly, “you’re going to relax now and feel very calm, absolutely at ease, not a care in the world. Private Barnaby, can you hear me?”

  Barnaby remained still, but Juliet felt his pulse begin to slow. He released a long, noisy exhalation, and then, from the depths of his thickly bandaged face, like a righted doll, his good eye flashed open. Startled, Juliet dropped his wrist. His iris was a dark mahogany; the upper lashes were short and thick but the lower lashes were pale and thin, and beneath the eye spread fine, papery wrinkles. She stared at this one piece of him, trying to grasp the whole: it was like looking the wrong way through a peephole. Finally his gaze moved toward Dr. Willard, who offered a proud smile, as though Barnaby were a student with a correct answer. “Hello, Christopher,” he began. “Could you tell me where you’re from?”

  Barnaby’s lips fluttered, light as butterfly wings, as if trying to remember the shapes of words. “Bur . . . ling . . . ton,” he slowly said. “I’m from Burlington, Ver . . . mont.”

  It was strange to hear his voice—husky and soft. He spoke in the long warped tones of someone with a toothache.

  “Your rank?”

  “Priv . . . ate first . . . class.” The words came gradually, unsteadily, and Juliet wondered if something in his mind wasn’t working properly.

  “So I’d like to talk a little, get to know you. Is that okay?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What did you do before the war, Christopher?”

  “Worked at the pap . . . er. The local paper. Setting the type.”

  “Did you like that?”

  “I liked reading the articles before anyone else. And I liked figuring out how to change words here and there so they fit. It was like a puzzle. I was good at it.” His speech began flowing easily, quick and confident.

  “You’re in a hospital right now, in Italy, making a wonderful physical recovery from a gunshot wound. Do you recall your injury?”

  “I’ve been to Italy?” He scratched at his head—a small, simple gesture, but the motion stunned Juliet. It was the first time she’d seen him voluntarily move. “Christopher, would you raise your right arm for me? Excellent. And now your left? Brilliant. Let’s continue. . . . You came to Italy with the United States Army.”

  “Screw the army.”

  “You don’t like the army?”

  “I don’t like what I ate and I don’t wanna talk about it. Stop making me talk about it.”

  “What you ate?”

  “It was right there in my meat tin. I swear.” Barnaby winced as though he were smelling something rotten.

  Willard moved the recording device closer. “Can you tell me about this meat tin, Christopher? You don’t have to tell me what you ate, just tell me what was happening before.”

  The yellow lamplight wavered across Barnaby’s bandaged face. His eye seemed mildly bloodshot, and an ash-gray half circle cradled the skin below. He looked harried, exhausted, which was strange, thought Juliet, since by all appearances he’d been asleep for days.

  Barnaby blinked several times, thoughtfully, dreamily, and Juliet felt uneasy. The violations of privacy that came with her job always made her uncomfortable. Often, when cutting the clothes off a patient and stripping him down to nothing, she felt a deep sense of transgression. But this was worse. To have a conversation with a person who didn’t know he was having a conversation, who might confess his darkest fears and later have no recollection—what right had they?

  “The whole company’s encamped in a forest one night,” Barnaby continued, “and Captain comes by to visit the squad. We’re all eating dinner, sitting on logs and packs, having a hot stew for the first time in weeks, and suddenly I get up to go take a piss. Captain calls out to me—‘Get yourself the hell out of my eyesight, Barnaby. I don’t even wanna feel a breeze that touched your crooked cock.’ He was always saying he didn’t want me to contaminate the squad. He liked that word. Contaminate. They all liked it. Anyway, I’d gotten used to it, and you gotta do what the captain says, so off I went. It was one of those noisy nights where the sky was crackling. I walked a good five minutes away. I was half-unzipped behind a tree when a massive boom tore through the sky and things started falling through the trees. I could see smoke in the distance. I rushed back to the squad—I thought we were under attack—but by the time I got to where they were all sitting, I heard everyone cheering. I grabbed my bowl and sat down, eating quietly, trying to figure out what had happened. I was spooning it out and came upon these chunks of meat. But something I bit into wasn’t cooked and I spit that thing out and then I moved my spoon around. . . .” Barnaby’s knee, limp until now, began to tremble.

  “Your spoon . . . what happened—”

  “I saw him watching me.”

  “Who?”

  “Him.” A tear sprung loose from Barnaby’s eye and disappeared behind his gauze; his voice grew quiet, almost a whisper—a child’s whisper. “Right there in my bowl. He was staring at me.” Barnaby hugged himself and began to rock.

  Willard glanced at Juliet. “What was in your mess tin?”

  Barnaby sniffled. “The bluest eye I’ve ever seen.” Juliet leaned closer to listen, mesmerized by the gruesome tale.

  “What did you do?” Willard asked.

  “Captain said, ‘Barnaby, swallow that thing.’ He had a shovel in his hand. All the guys grabbed shovels. Then Captain lifted his shovel, scooped a pile from the ground. It was all boots and arms and hands. One of the hands had a big gold ring on it. Captain set the shovel down and set to tugging it off. ‘It’s raining Jerries,’ he laughs. I bent over and puked. Captain said, ‘Barnaby, you don’t have the stomach to be here. You should be eating Jerry bastards alive.’ Then he stuck the finger in his mouth and sucked off the gold ring, holding it out on his tongue.” Barnaby’s face began to twitch as he spoke; Juliet felt his pulse quicken and signaled Dr. Willard. “I can’t be eating people. I couldn’t eat after that. I’m never hungry.” Barnaby’s breaths constricted to short, sharp inhalations, and Willard looked at his watch.

  “O . . . kay,” Willard finally said, frantically jotting something down. “That’s enough for now. When you wake up, Private Barnaby, when I count to ten, your body is going to feel whole again.” Willard set down his notebook and took Barnaby’s hand between his own. “You’ll eat and you’ll talk and you’ll move about normally. And you won’t remember what you saw in your mess kit, you won’t think about it. One, two . . .”

  Juliet slowly shook her head in disbelief. She’d never imagined such a damaged man could speak in full sentences, in such razor-sharp detail. Dr. Willard was a genius. Utterly amazing. As he slowly counted toward ten, she felt her own breathing quicken, waiting for Barnaby to snap out of his Pentothal slumber as dramatically as he’d awakened with the injection.

  “Six, seven, eight . . .”

  But watching Barnaby closely, Juliet noticed his arms and legs gradually go limp, sinking into the mattress like cushions soaking up water, heavy and sodden. As Willard reached ten, Barnaby’s mahogany-brown eye stared ahead with a haunting vacancy, as though a window had been closed.

  “What happened?” she asked. “I thought
he’d be awake.”

  “Private Barnaby?” Willard leaned close so that for a moment doctor and patient were practically nose to nose. “Christopher? Can you hear me?” Willard removed a small flashlight from his shirt pocket and shined it at Barnaby’s pupil. He turned Barnaby’s head from side to side. “At least his eye is tracking.”

  “But he’s done speaking? He’s still mute?” Juliet realized, sickeningly, that she might have just lost her one opportunity to ask Barnaby about Tuck. In a matter of seconds, her chance had vanished. “Is that normal? A patient not returning to some kind of wakefulness after that . . . ?”

  “I stopped using the word normal when I became a psychiatrist.” Willard wound the cord around the microphone and returned the recording device to its case. “We opened a door,” he said. “Unfortunately, it was a wrong door, a false turn. But we’ll try again. For now, let’s get him back to the Recovery Tent.”

  The rain had let up but the ground was slick, and they had to carry the litter slowly. After settling Barnaby into his bed, they wandered outside, and Juliet began to follow Willard back to the Isolation Tent, where he had left the equipment.

  Willard raised a flat hand. “I can clean up our mess. You should go get some rest.”

  Juliet knew that it couldn’t be past nine o’clock. Had her questions been that out of line? She felt like a child being sent to bed. Doctors often socialized with their assistants postshift, and there was good reason: what they saw in the hospital was often hard to shake off. Barnaby’s interview had been unexpectedly gory, and it felt wrong to simply pack up and say good night as though it had been a routine surgical procedure. She assumed they would debrief, discuss, something. “Did I do okay assisting in there?” she asked.

  “You were excellent, Nurse Dufresne! Very helpful. A natural. We’ll try again soon and see if we can draw more out of him.” Willard patted Juliet’s shoulder—politely, paternalistically—and he said good night.

  As he walked away, something in her sank.

  In the thick of a hot July day, the hospital dismantled once again. The Fifth Army was charging north toward Florence and needed doctors close behind. The convoy departed at night without headlights, as the sky above roared and growled like a monster. Somewhere ahead, German planes banged, buzzed, coughed, belched; bursts of gunfire tore through the air, dashes of silver against the velvet blackness. Juliet, seated in an open truck beside Brother Reardon, clutched her helmet and closed her eyes.

  In their new encampment, she slept fitfully, awakening at the slightest rustle.

  By morning, bleary-eyed, she saw a stream of casualties begin to arrive: on the first day alone, two hundred litters snaked past the Receiving Tent. Mother Hen instructed Juliet to number foreheads: lipstick 1s, 2s, 3s, 4s, and 5s indicated who most needed surgery. The plan worked efficiently, except that patients stared in feverish bewilderment at one another’s numbers. Cots in the wards lay so close together that Juliet banged her knees as she sidestepped between them. Her day was a flurry of injections and bandaging, transfusions and debridements. Barnaby lay in the far corner, silent and unresponsive and, for the moment, forgotten.

  With the influx of patients had come several new battle-fatigue cases: a man who chewed the inside of his mouth and kept drooling blood; a man who repeatedly struck his own face. Another patient tucked his knees to his chest and whimpered incessantly. Juliet watched Dr. Willard draw up a chair beside each of them, his notebook in his lap, spending hours at their bedsides, patting their shoulders, bringing them coffee, humming them to sleep. She wondered if they, too, had stories like Barnaby’s.

  Juliet still couldn’t shake the night in the Isolation Tent with Barnaby. In her shallow sleep, the image of the eyeball sometimes came to her. She dreamt she was swimming in Charlesport, doing a breaststroke, as the eyeball floated toward her. Sometimes, while she was eating, she envisioned the blue eye beneath her food. She lost her appetite, merely poking at her hot meals, feasting intermittently on dry ration bars. However, she didn’t know in whom she could confide, since the psychiatrist himself had put the ghastly picture in her mind, albeit inadvertently. And in the first hectic days at the new encampment, she’d barely had a chance to speak to Dr. Willard.

  But when the division pushed farther north, the most critical patients were trucked south and a period of tentative quiet followed.

  In a cool sliver of morning air, before the sun was up, Juliet lay awake on her bedroll while Glenda and Bernice slept. Again the blue eye had come to her in a dream. This time, she was in the chemistry lab at school, mixing various beakers, when from a froth of steam and bubbles the blue eye bobbed to the surface. The night before, she had dreamt she was washing her face over a basin of water when the blue eye appeared in her cupped hands. She woke in a damp sweat, wondering why the horrors that had rendered her patient silent were becoming her own.

  Because of Tuck, she thought. He’s what is really haunting me. She needed to find out, once and for all, if Barnaby knew what had happened to Tuck. Even if Barnaby was drugged, even if it meant angering Dr. Willard. Then at least she’d be done with the nightmarish interviews.

  Juliet also decided to write to Barnaby’s wife. For weeks the question of what, if anything, the army had told this woman had plagued her. Suppose Barnaby’s letters had just stopped? His wife was entitled to the facts, no matter how disturbing. And news of a suicide attempt certainly bested an unexplained silence. Rising in the semidarkness of her tent, Juliet composed a single-page missive describing Barnaby’s medical status, noting his auditory startle and visual tracking and other healthy reflexes, his drug-induced lapse into coherent speech, and her conviction that he would improve, though the timetable was uncertain. At the end, Juliet added a brief postscript—she had to—asking if Barnaby had ever mentioned Tucker Dufresne.

  Before breakfast, Juliet took the letter to the PX and then sought out the table in the Officers’ Mess where Dr. Willard was seated. She made small talk about supplies with the other nurses and then, between sips of coffee, asked Dr. Willard if he intended to conduct another Sodium Pentothal session with Barnaby.

  “I’d like to assist again,” she said. “I wanted you to know that.”

  Willard removed his glasses and cleaned them with a handkerchief. When he slid them back on, he looked at her with concentrated surprise. She felt sweat gather on her forehead. A fierce humidity had laid claim to the landscape. For days the sun had vanished behind screens of gray vapor, but the moisture never managed to gather into rain. There was a hot, jellied stillness to the air.

  “You haven’t been upset since our last session?” he asked.

  Juliet wiped at her brow. “What do you mean?”

  “No need for me to put ideas in your head.”

  The people seated around them began to gather their utensils and bowls; they pushed their chairs back and stood.

  “Dr. Willard, you said there are a lot of locked doors in his mind. I just thought we might try another one.”

  “I appreciate that you’re ready to pick locks and rattle doors on his behalf. Unfortunately, it’s a problem of logistics at the moment. The Isolation Ward is occupied, and it would be wildly irresponsible of me to subject the patients in the Recovery Tent to his memories. They could have troubling effects on the listeners. As I’m sure you can understand.”

  Juliet looked away; did he know about her nightmares? Was he having the same ones?

  “Well, surely there’s somewhere else,” she said.

  The night was sweltering, the air thick and moist. Willard’s tent was a mess of textbooks and notebooks; graphs and charts hung from the canvas. At the head of his bedroll, where a pillow should have been, sat a black Smith-Corona typewriter, a letter abandoned midsentence. Nearby, on the ground, a tin bowl held a shaving brush and razor; a Monarch Lincoln camera sat barricaded by film rolls. Clutter everywhere, but not a single personal effect—no photographs, no postcards, no souvenirs or trinkets. The only private element of the
space was the distinct musk of aftershave—rosemary and cedar, she thought—a scent Juliet hadn’t realized she associated with Willard.

  She seated herself beside Barnaby’s litter, which they had set just inside the entrance of the tent, his feet jutting out into the night. Juliet hugged her knees so as not to disrupt the space.

  Willard was busy rigging the recording device. A parabola of sweat stained the back of his shirt.

  “This is much cheerier than the Isolation Ward,” said Juliet.

  “Except my domestic organization habits leave something to be desired.”

  “Are these books stacked for an air raid, or are you reading them?”

  “I wrote one or two of those.”

  Juliet thought she detected a boastful smile, but Willard turned quickly to dip the needle into the vial of Sodium Pentothal. He passed the needle to Juliet.

  “We’re going to give you another injection, Christopher.”

  The day before, Juliet had removed and redressed some of the bandages on Barnaby’s face, and she could now see the bridge of his nose and a section of forehead. His eye was open, motionless and vacant as usual, but as she slid the needle into his arm, his eyelid fluttered.

  “Private Barnaby, do you feel relaxed?” Willard asked.

  “Hmmmm . . . very relaxed.”

  “My name is Dr. Willard, I’m your doctor here, looking after you. Can you do me a favor and raise your right arm? Excellent. Your left? Wonderful. Can you touch your face for me?”