“At first I loved the hope, the possibility that he’d come home. Now I hate it. I want to smash it out of me. I can’t bear the endless disappointment.” It felt good to unburden herself of the feeling she had carried for months.
“Even if he isn’t with us here anymore, Juliet, he is with Our Father. Perhaps you don’t believe in such things, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”
“Tuck was eighteen when he went missing. He’s my older brother. But now I’m eighteen, almost nineteen. I feel like I’m leaving him behind.”
“No one is left behind,” said Brother Reardon. “Ever.”
“It would be nice to believe that.”
“There’s time yet to convince you.” He smiled, his pale face half-eroded by the darkness. “And I’m good at my job.”
The heaviness of the day pressed on her head, weighed against her shoulders, and she yawned. “In the morning?”
“In the morning,” Brother Reardon agreed.
Juliet and Brother Reardon rose early and carried their bags to the main road. The air was cold; the light was grainy. The mountains ahead loomed like distant cities. They had been walking for an hour, pausing every few minutes to readjust their bags, when they heard a supply truck rumble to a slow stop behind them.
The driver, Rufus, happily smacked his meaty hand against the door. He was thankful for the company. Juliet and Brother Reardon climbed into the back and sat atop white pine crates. The truck smelled sharply of gasoline and rainwater; gray morning light streamed through bullet holes in the canvas.
As he drove, Rufus yelled into the back about how he’d heard things up ahead were in one hell of a tangle. Although it was hard to hear him over the churning of the engine, his story came to them in snippets, and Juliet soon made out that he’d spent most of his time far behind the lines as a quartermaster, but that Earl, the main driver, had been killed by a land mine two days earlier. Rufus was jowly and plump in a way Juliet hadn’t seen in months; the soldiers at the front were all muscle and sinew, the Italians were sharpened and shadowed by hunger. A band of fat hung over the collar of Rufus’s shirt, and this made Juliet irrationally angry.
“What are you seeing in the hospitals?” he asked. “I heard there’s everything from gangrene to trench foot. I ain’t never seen gangrene.”
“If you’ve seen bad trench foot, you’ve seen gangrene,” said Juliet. Her mood was dark. At daybreak she’d felt a brief relief, a welcome distance from Beau’s death. But now she sat in the truck staring at her bag filled with his things—his letters, his comic books, his Zippo lighter, his boots; it would all be shipped home to Charlesport, to his grandmother, to this woman who had outlived every member of her family, including her grandson. Juliet thought of writing her a letter, since she had been there at the end, but what on earth could she say? Your grandson was afraid, he was in pain, he asked me to hold him. . . .
The truck lumbered onward, and the air felt cool. Rufus drove like someone nearsighted, hunching uncomfortably forward. Every few minutes he lifted an enormous map from his thighs, studied it closely, and then swatted it back down. Juliet could tell by the motion of his head that he was still talking, but the engine strained so loudly that most of what he said was lost in the racket. Their silence seemed of no concern to him. Like all of them, she supposed, he just needed to talk.
The hospital was now encamped in the mountains; the olive Red Cross tents had been pitched in tidy rows over what seemed to be the base area of a former ski resort. The poles and wires of an abandoned funicular climbed into the white mist. A large stone building, Gothic and alpine, had been commandeered as the Officers’ Mess; it looked as if it had once been a grand hotel, but the windows, all smashed, were covered with white hospital sheets, which billowed in the cool breeze. Rufus pulled the truck beside this structure, and on the front porch Juliet saw a crowd of nurses and ward men.
Before driving off, Rufus asked Brother Reardon to bless him and then to bless the entire truck, and Brother Reardon complied. Then he and Juliet headed straight for the stone building, where she spotted Dr. Willard and Barnaby, seated together at a table.
“You’re back,” Juliet said, trying to suppress her grin.
Willard nodded, perfunctorily.
“They let Barnaby go?”
Juliet dropped her bag and moved beside Barnaby. His chesnut hair had grown in thickly, and he wore a black eye patch where the bandages had once been. There was a new alertness in his stare, and he raised his hands from his lap high above his head to show that he was handcuffed.
“He’s communicating?” she said.
“Some,” said Willard. “More so than ever.” He stroked Barnaby’s head, as though comforting a child. “As a reward, they sentenced him to death.”
“I failed him,” said Willard, staring into his coffee that night. They were seated in the back of the old stone building; there was a fireplace at the far end where a fire had been lit, and they had drawn up two metal chairs. Willard poured Scotch into his coffee. “The proceedings were ridiculous. All officers. More brass than a candelabra.”
“Lovelace is saying the army hasn’t killed anyone for desertion since the Civil War,” said Juliet. “I’m sure Barnaby will just go to prison.”
“That’s not an assumption I’m comfortable making. Besides, having him sit in a cell for years is hardly consoling—his mind will lock up further.” He took a long sip of his coffee and raked his hand through his hair. “How are you? How have things here been? How was the patient?”
Juliet didn’t know what to say about Beau. “I’m eager for a new line of work,” she offered, but something in her voice cracked.
He put his arm around her. “Me too.”
They sat silently, looking briefly and curiously at each other, then at the fire. She wondered if he’d missed her as well. Somewhere above them was a billiards table, and the balls clacked intermittently as a lone player practiced his game.
“It was strange being at the hospital without you,” she said. “I didn’t know if you were coming back.”
He slowly pulled his arm away, leaned back, and crossed his legs at the ankles. “I’m right here. Pessimism and all.”
She felt his refusal once again to engage in any talk of feelings; but there were more pressing matters.
“Anyway, while you were gone,” she said, “one of the men in Barnaby’s unit came in as a patient. He made a deathbed confession. He said Brilling had it in for Barnaby, that he made him draw the short straw and go forward alone. He didn’t say it, but I think it was, you know, about Barnaby being different. It might help with his case.”
“I’m not sure right now what I could say that would help. I tell them a soldier was picked on by his commanding officer, bullied by a captain, lost his mind, and attempted suicide? If Brilling fired at Barnaby, that’s one thing. Brilling not liking Barnaby is irrelevant. The men in that courtroom don’t have a clue what it’s like for soldiers at the front. They make policies, decisions; they offer sweeping judgments. They are strategists, and when they veer toward moralizing, they veer toward evil. They’ve never sat in a dugout all night thinking they would die.”
She thought of Munson’s letter to his father, of his final night alone; she wondered if his father had learned of his son’s death yet.
Willard misunderstood her silence. “Fine, maybe Barnaby’s being ‘different’ cost him some points with Captain Brilling. Let’s even posit that Brilling arranged it so Barnaby would have the most dangerous jobs; that makes Brilling an asshole, but we hardly need a military tribunal to establish that.”
“First-class asshole,” said Juliet. “He should be court-martialed.”
“You’re forgetting the West Point Benevolent Protective Society. They’ll never touch him. Besides, it has nothing to do with the matter at hand—Barnaby’s shell shock.”
“Unless even the tribunal hates Barnaby because he’s different.”
“I think they hate weakness, or what t
hey view as cowardice, in any form.”
“Well, what now?” She stood to poke at the fire, trying to rekindle the fading embers.
“I’ve issued an appeal on medical grounds, arguing that he obviously wasn’t fit to stand trial. He couldn’t speak for himself. I’ve contacted colleagues back in the States to make statements against the army punishing the mentally unwell. But it will take time.”
“How long do we have?” Juliet asked.
“He’s scheduled to be removed from my custody in two weeks. That’s two more weeks to work with him. After that, I don’t know what they’ll do.”
“And you no longer think he’s faking this semicoma, somehow trying to save himself?”
“If that was his strategy, by now he’s realized it is deeply flawed.”
CHAPTER 14
MORNINGS, JULIET AWOKE to clumps of snow weighing darkly on the canvas above her. The balls of her feet were icy and numb, and beneath her blanket she rubbed them briskly. She reached beside her for her winter uniform and wriggled into its stiff, thick layers without moving far from the warm shadow of her sleep. She trudged across the frosted encampment while the engineers, pitched on ladders, swept snow off the tents’ red crosses. The granite peaks looming beyond were beautifully striated, columns of dark gray broken by long ellipses of luminous white. The morning sun shone against them and lit the whitened encampment with a stunning incandescence.
As Juliet climbed the stone steps of the old hotel and entered the mess hall, the nurses and doctors greeted her from the long tables with hunched, wintry hellos. In the cold, they all turned in on themselves: they pulled blankets tightly around their shoulders; they clutched coffee cups as though in prayer and let the steam bathe their faces. At the back of the hall, a modest fire blazed in the fireplace, and those who had finished eating drew close, hugging their knees, staring at their bare toes. The stone ledge of the hearth was carpeted with socks.
Juliet ate a quick breakfast and hurried back across the snow, already snaked with the gray slush of footsteps.
In the Recovery Tent she nodded at the nurses on duty and moved quietly to Barnaby’s cot. Before the start of her rounds each day she now spent twenty minutes alone with him. She sat on the end of his bed and tried to rub the cold from his hands. She read aloud letters from his sister and related the news reports; when all else failed, she hummed. She needed this time, this portion of morning when she was accountable to no other patient, to no other cause; guilt had crept into her thoughts and dug an impassable trench—she had craved Barnaby’s recovery only for news of Tuck, and she was trying to atone. As she sat beside him, she recalled how Brilling had tried to make him eat the eyeball. She recalled what Munson had told her, that he’d been hung from a tree and covered with K rations. All along she had thought fate had brought him to her because of Tuck, but now she saw another reason. Barnaby had been picked on, and she, of all people, understood such torments. She knew now, deep in her bones, the life he had led. The loneliness, the self-loathing. The possibility of his execution filled her with a horrible sickness.
The appeal was stalled, and Willard had managed to buy a few extra weeks convincing the army that his study of Barnaby could prevent other desertions, which were rampant with the final push into the icy mountains.
The good news was undercut, however, by the continued reemergence of Barnaby’s motor skills. His general alertness had persisted, and then one morning Juliet found him at the back of the ward, sitting up in bed, his legs over the side of the cot. He said nothing; he barely nodded in response to her questions—“Can you hear me?” “Do you know who I am?” “Do you know where you are?”—but he took the spoon from her hand and devoured the entire bowl of oatmeal. He lifted the cup of water, drinking greedily, entirely unaware of the significance of what he’d done.
The next day he made his bed and dressed himself in his khakis. His boots were shined and his laces tied; he sat on the edge of his bed expectantly, and she wondered where he thought he was going.
These improvements seemed to her further proof of the injustice of the universe. Was Barnaby recovering only in time to understand his looming punishment? Witnessing Barnaby’s daily feats, the staff shook their heads with heartbroken bewilderment. Major Decker stopped by to commend Barnaby on his recovery, but as he turned to leave, his eyes glazed over with defeat. Each morning Juliet restrained her enthusiasm as she reported Barnaby’s progress to Dr. Willard. Together they tested Barnaby’s reflexes and made notes. Willard had been consumed with the paperwork surrounding Barnaby’s appeal, but now he wanted to arrange an immediate Sodium Pentothal interview. He felt that only a statement from Barnaby, cognizant and articulate, could change the army’s mind. If Barnaby had come this far out of his coma, he might be on the cusp of conscious speech.
“One more door,” Willard told her. “Let’s try to open one more door.”
Juliet guided Barnaby up the wide stone staircase; in the hallway they followed the wavering light from one of the rooms.
She found Willard seated on a queen-sized sleigh bed gleaming with lacquer. The mattress was bare. A small kerosene lamp sat on the stone floor, and near it Juliet saw an oblong stain of blood. The size of an arm or of a lower leg. The rooms on the upper level had been the site of a firefight; her eyes traced the wallpaper until she spotted three bullet holes in a near-perfect triangular arrangement. An ornately framed mirror hung above a wide wooden dresser; the sole jagged remnant of glass now flashed in the half dark. The white sheet covering the broken window blew in on a gust, and she saw that the room had a spectacular view of the moonlit mountains.
“Shall we start?” Willard dragged a green armchair beside the bed and gestured for Barnaby to sit. Barnaby stroked the armrests and surveyed the room until he happened on the bullet holes.
Juliet crouched before him, rolling up the thick sleeve of his winter shirt. “Don’t worry about that. We’re going to go away from here for a little while,” she said, sliding the needle into his arm.
She watched the familiar flutter of Barnaby’s eye, the slackening of his mouth, the dip and rise and dip of his chin as he keeled, like a boat, toward semislumber. They waited nearly a minute until his eye opened fully and he stared straight ahead.
“Christopher, it’s Dr. Willard.” Willard, seated on the edge of the bed, leaned toward Barnaby. “We’ve talked before, and we’ve talked a lot about you not feeling right, and it’s important to me that we find a way to get you better. So I want to find out exactly when you started having trouble. I’d like you to tell us about the time you were shot in the shoulder. When you first came to the hospital, months back. Okay?”
Barnaby’s long figure sank into the chair. He nodded slowly, as though part of a perfectly normal conversation. “Well, we were somewhere near the Volturno. We’d been walking for days. My helmet weighed a hundred pounds. My pack straps were eating into my shoulders; I was bleeding through my shirt. The platoon got orders to clear out some town. Make sure Germans weren’t hiding in the buildings. Clearing a town is leapfrog business, and my squad had to go in first over this old wall with deep ditches on either side. It wasn’t an easy climb, and I kept losing my foothold. Three of us were over when Geronimo, right beside me, pumping his fist for us to move in—boom, collapsed. I saw the black dot on his forehead before he started bleeding. Sniper fire.
“The rest of us made it over the wall, Sergeant McKnight shouting for us to spread out. Spread out—they tell you that all the time in training but all you wanna do when you’re out there is bunch up, stick together. Three of us made a dash from the wall to the house where the sniper was firing from. He must have been alone, ’cause as we got close, he hung a white rag out the window. McKnight shouted something in German and the sniper dropped his gun out the window. Pretty soon he came out, hands over his head. He was the very first German I’d ever seen. He looked small and fairly normal. I remember thinking, if he were wearing a different uniform, you’d never know he was German.
“The rest of the squad was coming around the back of the house. Pretty soon, McKnight and Rakowski began shouting at the German. They’d been fighting alongside Geronimo well over a year, since Africa, so they were frothing at the mouth. . . . ‘You fuckin’ Jerry devil . . . Geronimo was a good man.’ The German puts his hands behind his head, biting at his lower lip, and gets down on his knees. He’s looking at the ground, and his helmet tilts forward over his eyes, but he’s too scared to move it. ‘Nicht schießen,’ he says. ‘Nicht schießen.’ He keeps repeating that in these short, stabbing whispers, like he’s talking to himself, talking to God. Sergeant McKnight’s watching him, kicking at the dirt, that vein in his forehead getting fat. He orders Rakowski and Dufresne to take the Jerry to the rear, so they each grab an elbow and haul the German off the ground and start heading back toward the wall.”
At the name “Dufresne,” Juliet’s neck tensed. Her hands went cold. She looked to her lap, staring at the thick weave of her khaki pants, the brown stitching along her zipper, trying to tune out everything in the room, listening carefully to Barnaby’s words, holding each detail in her mind like a pebble plucked from a riverbed.
“McKnight’s looking at me. ‘Stop batting your fucking eyelashes at every Jerry,’ he says. Just as Rakowski and Dufresne get close to the wall, McKnight signals them to let go of the sniper. So the German’s standing there all alone, his helmet still tilted, and McKnight trains his rifle on him. McKnight’s just waiting, waiting for him to start moving, and finally the Jerry takes one step, then another, and soon he’s walking, walking faster, staring at the ground, breaking into a run, and I hear a gun go pop. Dufresne ran right over to the sniper, crouching to see if he was alive.
“As he walked back to the rest of us, he shook his head.
‘I’m getting tired of that shit,’ Dufresne shouted, throwing his gun down. He hadn’t slept in days. McKnight said it wasn’t a committee and ordered us to move out.”
The Secret of Raven Point: A Novel Page 21
