She was becoming strangely accustomed to this—the feeling of ineptness. Where she had once believed the task of nursing was knowing exactly what to do, here she found, again and again, that the challenge was understanding what she could not do. It was quite simple, really, to rush to an injured man; to walk away was another matter entirely.
In the Rec Tent, she squeezed onto a bench with Major Decker, Dr. Willard, and Mother Hen; in front of them sat a row of patients, crutches laid at their feet. Ration crates lined the sides of the tent where the ward men sat beating out a drumroll with their boot heels. The overhead lights flickered off, and the tent quieted as a preface scrolled on the white sheet:
The author of Lassie Come Home was a man of two countries. Born in England, he survived the First World War as a British soldier, only to die in the Second World War, killed in the line of duty in the uniform of the country he had adopted . . . America. With reverence and pride, we dedicate this picturization of his best-loved story to the late Major Eric Knight.
“To Major Knight,” echoed through the tent.
Then Juliet watched as the young Joe Carraclough romped with his collie. “Ain’t nothin’ wrong with lovin’ a bitch!” a nearby patient joked. But when Joe came home from school and learned that his destitute parents had been forced to sell Lassie, the tent fell quiet. As Lassie lay in her cage, whimpering, Juliet suddenly thought of Tuck—trapped, somewhere far from there, alone—and looked away.
When she heard cheers around her, she glanced up to see Lassie escaping. Juliet desperately clutched the bench as the ragged dog swam across rivers, limped up mountainsides, wrestled other dogs, until, finally, after hundreds of miles, on the verge of death, he scratched at the door of Joe’s cottage. As Lassie collapsed in young Joe’s arms, Juliet’s chest tightened, and a tear slid down her cheek.
“You’re my Lassie come home!” cried Joe.
After “The End” wrote itself across the white hospital sheet and the MGM music blared, Juliet looked beside her at Major Decker and Mother Hen, their faces wet with tears.
Finally, Brother Reardon stood. “Would someone please tell the quartermaster that if the army is going to send us these movies, they had best urgently provision us with Kleenex!” Then he dramatically blew his nose, and everyone laughed.
One by one, the patients limped and hobbled out of the tent. A voice sang out: “Oh, you’re my Stubbs come home!” Another declared: “Ogden, go home!”
Outside, the sky was a dome of black pierced by sharp points of light. Juliet located the glowing dot of the North Star. She found Orion’s belt, Cassiopeia, the Little Dipper. She remembered staring up at the night sky with Tuck on their front porch the night before he left for Fort Branley. She had said that wherever he went they’d be under the same moon, the same stars. She pointed out every constellation she knew. “Pretty names,” Tuck said, “for scalding masses of fire.”
The hoot of an owl drew Juliet’s attention to the jagged tree line in the distance and the snow-capped mountains to the north. She felt unexpectedly light, vaguely euphoric. It was the first time in months she had cried, and it had cleansed her of something.
As she ambled through the clean, crisp air, an image of Tuck came to her—older and wearied, mounting the front steps of their Charlesport home. She imagined hugging him, stroking his scarred and stubbled face. She imagined walking with him to Raven Point, where they would lie in the tall grass and discuss everything that had happened in their time apart. She would describe the hospital and all of the people she had met, glossing over the gory deaths, just as he would gloss over combat stories. Finally, he would explain the meaning of his strange last letter, and thank her for coming so far to look for him.
Again Juliet heard the owl, and below that, mosquitoes. As she approached her tent, the mosquitoes grew louder. Or were they bees? Juliet stopped; there it was again, a low, distant buzz. A white blur in the sky caught her attention, and she hit the ground.
As the siren droned, she pressed her helmet tight to her head and set her face against the grass. She lay still until she heard a stampede; others were racing to the Recovery Tent, and she forced herself to stand and follow the throng of doctors and nurses all stumbling in.
“Get them under the fucking beds!”
“Nurse, help!”
“Cut them down! They’re stuck!”
“Me, over here! Hey, help! I can’t move!”
“Someone get his legs!”
“Don’t leave me!”
The buzz of the airplane grew louder, and Juliet raced to Barnaby, pulling him down from his mattress and shoving him roughly under the bed. The ward men dashed from bed to bed, slashing slings with knives. Juliet tore at someone’s sling with her teeth. Suddenly, the ground shook. Juliet lost her footing and banged her head on something metal.
“Help.”
Disoriented, Juliet looked up and saw Private Leo and Private Dunlap, burn victims, bandaged head to toe in their beds, too fragile to be moved. Brother Reardon was fastening his helmet on one of the men, and Juliet began to do the same, but suddenly she was slammed to the ground. An arm tugged her beneath a bed. She smelled smoke and soil and the stench of bedpans. She closed her eyes. In the blackness she heard the siren, the buzz of the plane, anxious voices. “Are you okay? Is everyone safe?” Then she remembered Private Fishwick.
Juliet tried to squirm out from beneath the bed but felt the arm hold hers firmly.
“Not yet.” It was Dr. Willard. “You’re bleeding.”
The siren faded, and Juliet became aware of a dull pain near her chin, the metallic taste of blood.
“But this is a . . .” She wanted to say “hospital,” but her jaw ached.
She heard beds scraping, and suddenly people were reaching out from beneath the mattresses. Their arms were slick with plasma and glucose, their faces crusty with vomit. A man beside her rubbed dirt from his eyes and examined the gauze dangling from his chest wound.
Juliet waded through the patients and stumbled outside. In the darkness, other figures were wandering about, wobbly as sleepwalkers, their faces dirt-blackened. The air seemed charged, pulsing, as though millions of electrons had broken loose from their atoms.
Juliet moved briskly across the encampment, coughing on smoke. Just before the Isolation Tent, she sidestepped a crater. The tent’s wall looked as if an enormous bite had been taken from the canvas, and she climbed through the jagged opening.
In the dark, her foot slid into a hole.
“Shit.”
Juliet extracted herself and limped forward, her hands extended to feel the way.
“Private Fishwick?”
As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she saw what looked to be a figure on the bed, split in two; in the middle was a wet and pulpy heap of innards.
Juliet moved closer and saw Fishwick’s face; his eyes were strangely calm and his nostrils flared with each strained inhalation. She could now see that he was, in fact, pinned beneath another body—someone mangled and bleeding, lying facedown.
Fishwick ’s eyes desperately searched out his papers, and with his hand he tried to write something in the air.
Juliet stepped forward and turned over the body on top of him.
Her heart shuddered; it was Mother Hen.
Dear Juliet,
Pearl and I received the letter explaining your transfer and must say that while we miss you terribly, we both have immense respect for the work you are doing. It must be exhausting—I recall all too well the long hospital days. But I am sanguine you will come out of this experience, grueling as it may be, with a greater appreciation for life. We both commented on how you already sound so much more grown-up. I’m glad the conditions are safe, and hopefully you can get to some dances and mixers and grow in other ways as well. Your mother was quite social during her time as a nurse—thank goodness, because she found her way to shy old me.
Little has changed here since you left except our Victory tomatoes did not fare well th
is season. Pearl thinks we should focus on summer squashes, so I am leaving the planting to her. We had a bad thunderstorm a few weeks back and had to cut some loose branches off the oak beside the house. Chicken pox went through the elementary school, and for days my waiting room was crowded with itchy children.
I’m not good at letters, you know that, so I’m going to stop here. Pearl will write the next one and try to send you some chocolates. I know you are limited in what you can say, but do tell us more of your whereabouts and what is happening there. There is little news of Italy these days.
Love,
Papa
Juliet dipped each of the pale hands in soapy water. The fingers were stiff, and one by one she pried them apart and worked a towel in between. She filed the nails, blowing dust from the half-moon cuticles. Then she laid the hands palms down, one atop the other, below the collar of the olive drab dress shirt.
She stepped back.
Mother Hen’s eyes were closed, her face was washed and powdered—except for the blue tint to her lips, she might have been resting.
That morning, Bernice had stitched and washed the body. Another nurse had pressed the uniform by arranging it in the sun beneath an assortment of books. The final touches fell to Juliet—which at the start seemed simple enough, except that she had never touched the corpse of someone she knew.
For the first time in years, Juliet thought of her own mother. Juliet had been three years old when her mother got pneumonia. Thinking it would frighten her, Tuck and her father would not let Juliet into the room once her mother had passed, and had kept her away in the final days. So Juliet’s memory of her mother had always been of the beautiful, healthy woman in all the mantel photographs. A woman who might return any day. But Juliet now grasped the shuddering fact of what Tuck and her father had witnessed. Death was a vague concept until you felt the cold, limp hand of someone you knew.
Juliet lifted off Mother Hen’s helmet, revealing thick auburn hair fastened with two jagged railroad tracks of bobby pins. One by one, Juliet pulled loose the pins, segments of hair springing to life. Slowly, she ran her fingers through the strands. She dipped a comb in water, combed her hair, and then neatly refastened the bobby pins.
You were saving a patient, she thought. A dying patient.
Juliet recalled what her father had told Tuck: “You realize, of course, that grenades have no sense of justice. That bullets and bayonets care nothing for morality. Being right doesn’t protect you from having your brain blown to bits.”
Grenades were just the tip of it, though; there was no justice anywhere. She saw that now. How many men had died in the hospital because they’d come to stop the Nazis? Noble causes, selfless acts—none of it mattered. Nothing could be trusted. What could be expected from such a cold, indifferent universe? Forgive me, Barnaby had said. What if the man she was desperately trying to save had actually harmed her brother? The thought made Juliet momentarily nauseous. She knew nothing, she realized, not even whether she was on the right path. She’d come all this way and had no more information than on the day her father had received the army telegram. Suddenly Juliet tilted back her head and stomped her foot. “What happened to my brother?” she shouted.
Her face had gone hot, tears clouded her eyes, and Juliet breathed heavily in the silence that followed. In the thick air of the tent, she looked all around as though expecting a response, expecting something, though she could not have said from whom.
She wiped her eyes. She sat very still.
Then slowly, wearily, she began to collect her things. In an hour, Graves Registry would come. She stepped outside into the wreckage of the hospital, wandering past smashed garbage pails, the splintered shower stall, the torn ruins of the Isolation Tent, still tangled with Mother Hen’s bloodied clothes.
Outside Willard’s tent, Juliet heard his typewriter.
She shook the canvas flap.
“Yes?”
She stepped in and lingered at the threshold. She had not been there since the night they had worked with Barnaby, since the night he scolded her for asking about Tuck.
He looked up from his typing. “Come.” He patted a space on the ground and shoved a stack of books against the wall. “How’s your jaw?”
Juliet touched her face. “It hurts when I chew.”
“You’re eating at least.”
“Some.”
He stared at her, as though expecting her to speak, to explain why she was there, but she could not.
“Do you want to go for a walk?” he asked. “Get some fresh air?”
Juliet shook her head.
“Do you want to get some hot food?” He drew his hands together. “Or a drink! I probably have some Scotch hidden around here somewhere. . . .” He began pawing through the clutter of his tent, lifting notebooks and Dopp kits, digging through his medical bag.
“This is either single malt,” he said, waving a bottle, “or engine oil.”
Juliet gently pushed the bottle away. “May I just sit here?”
Willard moved close. “That’s perfectly okay.”
The Allies finally reached the Arno River, the lower half of Florence was taken, and the hospital moved again. At night, beneath bright sprays of white phosphorous, the convoy crept in darkness along the river; brown water churned over rusted trucks and tanks, eddied around the splintery ruins of bridges. Here and there, bloated corpses bobbed with the current, the smell of rot congealing the night air. Lone helmets slid like turtles.
By morning, they were once again pitching tents, the clack of hammers echoing through the valley. It was early August, and yellow wildflowers had turned the fields the color of dirty gold. Here and there, faded clay-tiled roofs poked into the sky. The sky was a bright blue, a swimming-pool blue, and it was possible to see in the distance the hazy outlines of the Apennine Mountains.
Monte Altuzzo, Monte Battaglia, Monticelli Ridge—the Appenines were the Allies’ next target. For this effort, the Fifth Army was now assisted by bands of Italian partisan fighters. Alfonso and Pico, Juliet’s Italian patients, each boasted a gunshot wound to the arm. It was Alfonso’s eighth wound, Pico’s fifth; intricate white scars webbed each man’s shoulders and chest. Alfonso and Pico were all that remained of their original partisan group. Alfonso was tall and lanky, Pico short and compact—but they shared a passionate loathing of Mussolini, fascisti, and any foreign man who preyed upon their country’s women.
Alfonso was a skilled huntsman; each morning he set out from the hospital with an ancient revolver, and by the afternoon returned with a half dozen rabbits slung from his back. Sitting on a crate, he lit a fire and skinned his prey, and by dinnertime offered his pot of steaming rabbit stew around the ward. He spoke often of his parents, and told Juliet he worried that if his mother learned of the deaths of the others in his partisan unit, she would assume the worst. He hoped to get a letter to her.
At night, the air raids continued: sirens wailed, followed by the drone of planes, the pounding of bombs. But the fighting went well, and throughout the day few casualties arrived.
One afternoon, Juliet was working in the Receiving Tent when the Senator was carried in. She moved to the stretcher and snipped open the side of his trousers.
“Isn’t this exactly where you got hit the last time?” she asked, examining the blackened flesh of a small bullet wound. It looked like the hole a cigarette burns through fabric; the flesh around it was pristine.
“How many lives you think I got?” he asked.
“Not nine.”
“Meow.” He rolled his tongue and his head lolled sleepily. “It’s like I got a bull’s-eye on that leg. Another Purple Heart for the field jacket. Hey, you don’t seem glad to see me. What’s it take to get a little lovin’?”
“For one, try harder not to get shot.”
“You’re a tough nut.” He giggled. “Me? I’m just a nut.”
“Did they give you morphine at the aid station?”
He sipped from an invisible glass.
“Champagne for the brain!”
“Munson, how many fingers am I holding up?”
He looked at her seriously. “Twelve.”
“Get some sleep.”
In this transitory quiet, Juliet was able to spend more time with the few patients in the Recovery Tent. The days were sunny and pleasant; gentle breezes circled the tent. The cooks dug potatoes from a nearby field and at every breakfast served beautiful hash browns. The crossing of the Arno had bolstered the troops, and for days the men debated which river Caesar had crossed. They wanted to know if the Rubicon was the Arno; they wanted to have crossed the same river Caesar had.
Barnaby, too, was still there. At the far end of the tent he lay silently in his bed. Since his initial burst of lucidity, he had said nothing more, although Juliet could now feed him with a spoon, and he would sip water from a cup. His dark brown eye would track nearby conversations, but he made no effort to communicate and gave no indication, when Juliet brought him meals or when she sponged his body before bed each night, that he recalled who she was, that he had ever recognized her.
Strangely, this didn’t bother her. After Mother Hen’s death, she had stopped pressing Dr. Willard for further Sodium Pentothal interviews, because it now seemed entirely likely that after months of her hoping Barnaby might know something useful about her brother, he would eventually tell her something she didn’t want to hear. In his silence, she still had hope. And since the court-martial proceedings had been stalled, she told herself there would be time, when she was ready.
Beside Barnaby, a private first class named Bruce Coppelman had arrived with a wound to his forearm, and because he’d been in Able Company, everyone referred to him as ABC, or Alphabet. Juliet liked Alphabet. He was an artist and knew all about the Renaissance and Italian art; at night, when it was too dark to read, he would describe for the entire tent the frescoes and sculptures scattered throughout the valley, the wondrous feats of human creativity that had taken place six hundred years before their tanks rolled in. His wife in Canton, Ohio, was also an artist, and after each meal he asked Juliet to help write her a letter.
The Secret of Raven Point: A Novel Page 16
