The Secret of Raven Point: A Novel

by Jennifer Vanderbes

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He flattened the front of his shirt, then began to straighten hers.

  “It’s okay,” she said.

  She was aware of him shaking his head apologetically as he stepped away; he said nothing more as he hurriedly left.

  As the division continued its assault into the mountains, patients arrived who had been stranded for days on ice-crested peaks, their faces blistered with frostbite, their limbs gangrenous and rancid. Word came that entire battalions were pinned in the mountains, stranded without food and ammunition, fighting for the fifth straight day without sleep. The wounded arrived on makeshift toboggans hauled down ice-lacquered cow paths. Patients were blue-lipped, frostbitten, drunk on morphine. They spoke of peeing on their rifles to loosen frozen chambers. Many, having received hasty amputations at the front, arrived with stumps bandaged with shirts and pants.

  Some nights, when Juliet couldn’t sleep, she lay thinking of all the legs and arms buried across Italy. How many bodies could be stitched together from them? She imagined an army of creatures like Dr. Frankenstein’s, zombies sewn together from every nationality—a German leg on an Italian torso with American arms—all limping across Europe, trying to end the war. Throw down your weapons! Waffen runter! Getatte le armi!

  A bone-chilling cold had arrived, sharp winds hurling through the mountains. Since trucks couldn’t navigate the terrain, mules carried supplies to the front: they left loaded with food and blankets and ammunition; they returned strapped with the musette bags of men who had been killed. Something had been done to the mules to make them deaf so they wouldn’t startle at the sound of gunfire. Juliet watched the animals lope through the snow as they were led past the encampment, a look of calm detachment in their eyes. She thought, That is the way to survive this; I’ll stop listening, I’ll stop looking.

  The mood throughout the wards was grim. The quartermaster complained that he hadn’t been properly supplied for winter and advised the staff to write home for gloves and long underwear. Patients shivered in their beds; the doctors came down with head colds. At breakfast, Juliet stared at rows of raw, blistered noses, sets of puffy and swollen eyes. First the hospital ran out of tissues, then toilet paper. So Juliet cut up old bedsheets, the ones too bloodstained to be used on beds, and distributed the strips to patients and staff; they said nothing of the dark red splotches.

  Word had come that Barnaby was going to be transported to the division stockade, and MPs now stood guard outside the Isolation Tent, where Captain Brilling had ordered him sequestered. Juliet was still in charge of bringing his food, but she’d come to dread mealtimes; she avoided his stare and moved as quickly as possible, afraid that at any moment Barnaby would return to full consciousness and she’d be forced to explain everything. Afraid he would tell her he was frightened, that he, too, would ask for her help. What could she possibly do?

  She had failed them all: Tuck, Barnaby, Beau.

  Juliet volunteered to work nights; she wanted to disappear into the nocturnal underworld, where the patients slept and dreamt and breathed peacefully, where no one was in pain, where no one was afraid. She sipped brandy throughout her shift, and before turning in at dawn, she smoked a cigarette by herself in the raw, cold air on the hotel’s front porch. A wisdom tooth coming in made it painful to eat, and she had begun to lose weight.

  “You look awful,” said Brother Reardon, joining her in the mess hall one afternoon. A red scarf was knotted at his neck. “Really, a complete and total mess.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I mean, you need to eat. Here.” He slid her a bowl of chicken broth, and she distractedly worked her spoon around the edges.

  “They’re taking Barnaby tomorrow,” she said.

  “I must admit, I didn’t think this would happen.”

  “I’ve lost almost a thousand patients in four months, but this bothers me more than all of them put together. We saved him. I nursed him back to health, and they want to kill him.”

  Brother Reardon gestured toward the soup. “Starving yourself won’t help him.”

  Juliet lifted a spoonful, blew on it, and then shoved it in her mouth, only to find the soup was practically icy. She broke a cracker in half, dropped the pieces into the bowl, and studied their flotation. “I just don’t think what he did was so awful. His commanding officer pretty much set him up to go crazy. Wanted him to have his face blasted to bits, no matter who did it. They all seemed to want him dead.”

  “Why would anyone want that?”

  She studied the concern on Brother Reardon’s face; she liked him, but she was not certain what his reaction might be. “He’s different.”

  “Different?”

  “Not like the average man. I’m not sure you would understand.”

  Brother Reardon looked away thoughtfully, then brought his palms together and set his clasped hands firmly on the table. “I pray daily they will commute his sentence.”

  “And that the war will end? And that violence will vanish and we’ll all be wonderful, sensible creatures? That we can look after Dante and Liberata? That everyone who died senselessly will come back to life and grow old with the rest of us? There is too much to pray for, don’t you see? And none of it helps. If there is a God, he just doesn’t seem to care. . . . Sorry, Brother Reardon. I overstepped. I’m just at the end of my rope.”

  He narrowed his eyes and reached for her hand. “I understand. What I can do, in addition to praying—and what I’d very much like to do—is spend the evening with Private Barnaby, alone. You and Dr. Willard have gone to great and admirable lengths to deal with the well-being of his mind, but I’d like to address the well-being of his soul before it’s too late. Would it be all right with you if I looked after him in my own tent tonight? You can fetch him in the morning. I’ve asked the MPs and they’ll grant me custody.”

  “You think he believes in God after all he’s been through?”

  Brother Reardon clutched the ornate crucifix hanging from his neck. “It’s at precisely these times the Lord makes Himself known.”

  That evening, Juliet visited Willard’s tent. She wasn’t on duty. It was after dinner, and the soft noise of a musical quartet drifted across the snowy encampment from the old stone hotel. It was the first night of entertainment in weeks, an attempt to distract everyone from Barnaby’s situation. She had not been alone with Willard since their kiss.

  “Brother Reardon has Barnaby for the night,” she said.

  “I heard.”

  “May I come in?”

  “Of course.”

  He was reading, his back half-turned to her, his feet crossed on his desk. His typewriter had been covered with a large piece of felt and piled with two stacks of notebooks. A tidily packed duffel leaned against the side of the tent.

  “You’re going with him in the morning?”

  He pulled his feet down and turned to face her. He closed the book in his lap. “At 0800.”

  Her eyes roamed the charts on his wall. The statistics of battle fatigue, desertions, suicides.

  “Are you coming back?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not up to me.”

  She sat on the end of his bedroll and hugged her knees. “I wish I could go home. Tuck is dead, they’re going to kill Barnaby, you’re abandoning us.”

  “You know very well it’s not up to me where the army sends me.”

  “We might never see each other again.”

  “That’s a possibility.”

  “Does it bother you?”

  He set his book back on his desk and pressed his hand contemplatively on the cover. “Yes, it bothers me.”

  Juliet tried to assemble her courage. She had already lost everything and didn’t want to lose this, him. If only she could shake him, force him to admit what was happening between them. She planted her palms on her thighs. “Well, I’ve decided I’d rather embarrass myself and say everything than wake up tomorrow and realize I no longer have a chance to say any of it.”

  “Y
ou should never feel embarrassed in front of me. I’m your friend.”

  Her mouth slackened into a sulk. Juliet had no guile, no powers of seduction. Everything she felt was rising hotly to the surface. “Friend,” she repeated flatly. “But we kissed.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t want you to be sorry. I want you to acknowledge what it meant.”

  Willard removed his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and looked up at her with a pleading tenderness she had not before seen. “Juliet . . . You do know, I hope, that I’m perfectly capable of administering Sodium Pentothal injections and monitoring vitals. I’m even able to trim my own hair.” He looked back at his desk, shaking his head at his own admission. “I enjoy your company very much—perhaps too much. Maybe I shouldn’t say that; maybe I can only say it now that I’m leaving. Maybe I shouldn’t have indulged those feelings. But I’m human.”

  “Feelings.” The word made her wildly happy. “Explain.”

  “I don’t think I can.”

  “You can explain everybody’s mind but your own.”

  His eyes brightened with amusement, and for a moment things felt pliant and playful. But his smile quickly flattened and he pulled his chair forward. “What I can explain is this: you are everything to me here, you know that, but here, this hospital—this war—isn’t everything. Because I care about you, I refuse to look you in the eye and tell you a lie. And while, yes, I have feelings for you, I still love my wife. She writes three times a week. She cares as much about my work here as I do. She is a moral, loyal woman of the highest order. You’d like her, Juliet. Her name is Claire. She is a real person. Claire Curtis Willard. She’s out there, in that part of the world that isn’t bleeding and screaming and losing its mind. And someday, the war will be over, and we’ll get to go back there. Yes, I slipped. Yes, I have feelings. But you need to understand why my feelings can’t matter to me, to you, to us. Why I must only be your friend.”

  Juliet felt her throat tighten; she was jealous of the name itself: Claire Curtis Willard.

  “Every other married man here makes exceptions.”

  “You wouldn’t be an exception. You would be a change of course.”

  Juliet felt the air seep out of her. He was telling her everything, finally, but none of it changed the reality of his departure, the fact of his marriage. She looked at his belongings: his typewriter, his notebooks, his recording device. She stared at his face. Such indefatigable kindness in this man, such integrity. Such love. He loved her, she knew it. And she loved him. She felt as though she’d found an ancient arrowhead on a mountainside, as though she’d glimpsed what only God was meant to see: the particular radiance of one soul. But at what cost? For what was supposed to happen in such situations, what every book and movie and story had prepared her for—that they would live together happily ever after—was not happening. Juliet had a vision of missing him for the rest of her life.

  Willard lifted her hands: “You’ll forget me. I know it and it pains me. I’m a mentor, a superior. It’s a situational crush for you. I’m at least ten years your senior. You’ll look back one day and think, What was I doing, chasing after that stodgy old doctor? While I’ll be wondering if I made a horrible life decision.”

  It was the first time he’d ever shown insecurity.

  “I won’t ever think that.”

  She buried her face in his bedroll, and he removed her jacket and laid it over her back. “Come on, rest here, and in the morning we can go see Barnaby together.”

  Juliet slowly curled up in a ball, turning away from him, but listening carefully to his motions. She would replay this moment, this conversation, a hundred times, she knew. He’d be gone tomorrow, and she’d have only her memory of this, this one glimpse of his true feelings.

  When daylight seeped into the tent the next morning, she was in the same position. Willard sat at his desk, hair cowlicked, studying her as she stretched her arms. She recognized his clothes from the night before, and saw on the side of his face an imprint from his wristwatch where he must have laid his head.

  “It’s almost seven,” he said. He offered her his canteen and she took a sip. He looked sad. “We should probably get going soon.”

  The shadow of the previous night’s conversation hung over them, but there was nothing more to say. They had work to do. Juliet splashed water on her face, and Willard ran a comb through his hair. As he propped a mirror on his desk and lathered his face with shaving cream, she looked at his duffel bag. Willard was leaving, Barnaby might be killed. Tuck was gone. She was alone in the army in the mountains of Italy. The starkness of her life terrified her.

  Outside, the snow had softened to slush in the night; they walked past the MPs waiting by the Officers’ Mess and then made their way to Brother Reardon’s tent.

  Willard shook the tent flap. “It’s us, Brother Reardon.”

  No one responded.

  “Brother Reardon?”

  Willard paused and then, as if understanding the magnitude of his mistake, looked with alarm toward Juliet and pushed aside the tent flap.

  The tent was empty.

  PART III

  November 1944

  CHAPTER 15

  THE SNOWY HILLS glittered in the late-morning light. Juliet sat beside Willard as he drove the jeep, wheels grinding into the ice-crusted road. They had traveled two hours, heading south, snaking through the mountains, the road so rutted and curved that it looked at times to Juliet as though Willard were wrestling the steering wheel.

  Cold air swept through the jeep, whipping Juliet’s hair into her eyes. Her breath steamed. At the base of the mountain the winds slowed, and the air shed its icy chill. She pulled the wool cap from her head and unlooped her scarf.

  The road widened and flattened into the valley. Along the road’s rutted edge, women cradled babies, their faces blank as they stumbled through the snow. Old men jabbed thick branches at the frozen ground. Two women, their hair long and graying, walked with linked arms; Juliet turned and saw that they were her age.

  “Where are they going?” asked Juliet.

  “As far from the front as possible, I imagine.”

  They were studying every figure, every shifting shadow on the horizon. They had obtained forty-eight-hour passes, agreeing with Major Decker that they would try their best within that time to find Barnaby and Brother Reardon and get them safely to Signora Gaspaldi’s, where Juliet and Willard had spent the night in Florence. Within hours of Barnaby’s disappearance, the two MPs at the hospital had been joined by six others, all ordered by the high command to track down the escapees. Barnaby’s disappearance had erased any chance of clemency, and Brother Reardon had also been charged with desertion.

  Here, finally, was something Juliet could do; she could save the man her brother had meant to save. The decision came swiftly, passionately, propelled, in part, by the uncomfortable awareness that Brother Reardon had thought to do what she and Willard, despite countless opportunities, had not: to abandon the appeals and petitions and simply abscond with Barnaby. In a matter of hours, the chaplain had thrown aside all theoretical entanglements and arguments, had revealed the cold, sharp essence of the matter: the battle had never ended for Barnaby. He was being pursued and needed rescue.

  Trying to reach the deserters before the authorities, Juliet and Willard scoured the landscape in their jeep. And yet, as she looked at the wet wreckage of the countryside, at the jagged expressions of the fleeing Italians, she grew afraid of the cold and the looming dark and the unknown roads they might have to travel, afraid they wouldn’t find them. She and Willard spoke little during the ride, and she wondered if he, too, was registering the extent of the risk they had taken.

  They crossed the field where weeks earlier the hospital had been encamped, looking for any traces of Barnaby and Reardon. They had agreed it was most likely Reardon would seek out places he knew were safe and had been swept for mines. It looked different now; frost had leached the color from everything. Beneath the
bare trunk of a hulking oak tree, Willard eased the jeep to a stop. “Lunchtime,” he said.

  They stepped out, stretched their legs, and sat on the hood. In the distance, icicle-fringed farmhouses threw off sparks of sunlight. The winter cold was beautiful and menacing.

  From his pack Willard pulled a tin of K rations, peeled off his woolen gloves, and fumbled with the can.

  “How many miles do you think they might have covered?” she asked.

  “I’d gauge three miles an hour on foot. Assuming they didn’t hitch any kind of ride, they’re probably already at least thirty miles from the hospital. They could conceivably be all the way to Rome by now, but I suspect they’re avoiding the roads.”

  “I hope they brought food,” she said. “They’ll need to eat.”

  “You too,” he said. “We’ve a long day ahead.”

  He handed her the spoon to lick clean, and they climbed back into the jeep. Intent on their task, they spoke little as they drove, instead surveying their respective sides of the road. For a long time they saw no one; it was as though they had driven off the edge of the world. Rows of gnarled apple trees, dusted with snow, marked an abandoned orchard; the rotted frames of carts and wheelbarrows lay scattered on the ground. Soon the sun began weakening in the afternoon sky. Starlings gathered on the naked trees, and Juliet thought of all the birds flying over the ruined landscape. She thought of the animals in the undergrowth, the squirrels and rabbits and foxes. What did they make of this gutted world?

  By evening, the full moon cast a fine blue light over the fields. In the distance, a darkened barn stood like a block of ice. They stopped the jeep and approached on foot, their flashlights searching the eaves, illuminating abandoned nests in every corner. Willard jimmied the door open, and the smell of wet hay, sharp with vinegar, overwhelmed them. There were no animals in sight. Ration tins littered the troughs.

  “This will have to do,” said Willard.

  He tested the rungs of a ladder and carried his pack to the hayloft before returning for hers. She followed him up to the darkened platform, where he lit a candle and flattened out their bedrolls.