by Josh Ritter
He stared incredulously at the angel a moment, but the horse just looked placidly ahead at the dark cabin as if waiting for a page to turn. Bright stalked across the dirt yard to the flap, lifted it perfunctorily, and peered inside. The rags sat in the corners of the room, smoking sullenly. He did not look back at the horse but entered the cabin, took the Bible down off the shelf, and began to tear its pages out, crumpling page after page into yellowed knuckles of parchment, finally throwing the ransacked book facedown on the bed when he’d harvested enough. He placed the paper in piles above the smoldering rags and then, twisting a few remaining sheets of Leviticus into a brand, he lit the piles once more.
He rejoined the horse in the yard. It looked at him smugly but said nothing as the dried wood of the cabin popped into flames. Henry Bright bit his fist as the fire took hold. Then, lowering his chin to his chest, he let his eyes rest on the tiny face of his son, the Future King of Heaven.
2
Mud and water and the stumps of trees. In every direction that was all there was. Bodies fell, but the trees died standing up. Nightly they were crucified upon themselves by the zip and whine of machine guns, their leaves corroded by gas, their branches and trunks hacked for kindling, some roots cut by entrenching tools, others drowned by the ceaseless, steady drip-dripping of blood and rain. Back home, these waning days of September could seem at times like one long sunset, the oak and hickory forest a blaze of yellow, orange, and red leaves. Here, it was impossible to tell by the trees what season it was; any that were still standing had nothing left to give away.
They’d been told that the Argonne would remind them of home, but as they’d moved ever closer to the front line, from transport trains to dirt roads to muddy tracks to brutal gashes in the ground, the greenery had disintegrated around them until finally the only tree that Henry Bright could see from where he was squatting in his trench was a barkless and bone-white totem thirty yards distant. This tree, too, had to go, because someone important far back of the line had decided that German gunners must be using it to site their long-range artillery. Perhaps this was so, but the line had been ebbing and flowing around the tree for so long now that it was just as likely that the very same someone important had simply grown tired of looking at it through binoculars all day. Regardless, an order had just come down to Sergeant Carlson that he and three other men were to blow it up when the night was at its pitchest black.
Bright tore a sheet from The Stars and Stripes lying nearby where he rested his haunches against the trench wall. He scanned it:
If we laugh at the cooties when they come, and hunt them with the same merriment that the French hunt the wild boar, the joke will be on them after all, for they do not laugh back. And then they won’t seem half so bad. Laughter is a good insecticide!
He cleaned himself as best he could and pulled his britches back up, then made his way down the narrow length of trench to the zag. Here he angled a sharp right, squeezing by a lumpy yellow-haired kid named Bert plodding in the opposite direction. A few moments later he heard the boy turn and slosh through the mud to catch up behind him.
“Hey, what’s the idea, Bright? That was a paper for all us boys to read! How long’s it gonna last anyway, if everybody comes along and wipes their ass with it?” He waited for an answer from Bright and got none. Bert seemed younger than the rest of the men, or if not younger, at least pinker. He seemed made of pinkness. His father was a banker in Wheeling. Around the next zag, some of the others had finished pulling the sandbags from a portion of the trench wall and were now hollowing out a cavity in which to bury McCauliff and Standish. The two men had been shot by a sniper within a few moments of each other, just before noon. Bert squeezed between Bright and the trench wall, raising his voice so that the men digging could hear him. “So, Bright went and wiped his ass with the newspaper again,” he said, as if it was some sort of common occurrence for there to be paper of any kind lying about.
“Who’s got paper?” one of the others said. “I need a few pages. Let me see ’em, Bert.”
“I need pages too!”
“How’d it stay so dry?”
“This is all that’s left,” Bert said. “I was too late to save the rest.” He waved the unused portion of The Stars and Stripes above his head for everyone to see. The paper exploded in his hand as a bullet tore through the pages.
“Jee-roosh!” Bert jerked his arm below the lip of the trench. His eyes were the size and shine of quarters as he looked at the remnants of the newspaper in his hand. He let the scraps fall to the mud and turned dejectedly back down the trench in the direction of the latrine. Everyone else, Bright included, finished burying McCauliff and Standish in the wall of the trench. Then they all sat there waiting for something, or nothing, to happen.
Five hours after darkness fell, they sat in lines against the trench wall and listened to the random fire of ammunition for miles to either side. It began to rain again, though at times star shells would brightly illuminate the ground, as if the moon were making bayonet lunges at the earth. The rain slapped at the soil in weary, unwelcome applause. Finally, Sergeant Carlson heaved himself off the trench wall. Bright and two others did the same, dressing themselves in the dung-colored burlap they wore in order to blend in against the hummocked and devastated ground of the battlefield. They climbed over the top of the trench and out into the open, moving slowly on their bellies as if the slurry of mud and bodies, wire and spent casings, were in reality only a thin layer of ice that might at any moment shatter and fall away into an abyss beneath them.
The dynamite was strapped to Bright’s back, and Sergeant Carlson had the fuse on a spool tied to his belt. The other two, just in front of them, had wire cutters. They had blacked their bayonets and entrenching tools over a cook flame so that the metal edges would not glint out of the darkness and give them away to the opposite line. They wore no helmets for the same reason. They would dig small holes at the base of the tree and deposit the dynamite. Then they would unspool the fuse, setting a light to it once they were back in their own trench.
It took almost an hour to cover a distance of thirty yards. There were bodies everywhere, mostly from an earlier failed advance on a group of machine-gun emplacements. After the advance had been repulsed, stretcher bearers from both sides had gone into the field to collect the wounded and had been shot; now the bodies lay there in jumbles to be crawled over. There was much wire to cut, and the ground was cratered hellishly, but at length they reached the tree as the rain began to ease to a drizzle. Carlson untied the bundle of dynamite from Bright’s back and handed the first stick to the next man, so that he could in turn hand it to the next man to place in the hole. Bright lay still on his stomach, his arms outstretched in front of him, his body pressed flat against the earth.
In front of him suddenly the air felt strange, and then without warning one of his hands was cupping a face. Its features froze in his hand for an awful moment before whispering something. It whispered again, louder this time, and at the sound of the voice the others around Bright went still. If the alarm was raised on either line guns on both sides would open up.
“Shoosh,” the voice said, almost a sigh. The War seemed to fall silent at the voice of the German soldier and darkness lay around it like a pack of bristling, dreaming dogs.
A star shell hissed upward and turned the sky to tin. Bright did not close his eyes. Instead, he looked directly into the eyes of the man’s face in his hand. On either side of the face, four other men were also pressed tightly to the ground. The man looked steadily back into Bright’s eyes as the light flared and then subsided.
“Shoosh,” Sergeant Carlson himself whispered after a dark age. He said it calmly, and it was returned calmly, the word bouncing quietly around in the darkness until Bright felt the face in his hand speak it as well once more. He pulled away and the party pushed back from the tree, Sergeant Carlson un-spooling the fuse as they retreated. Bright made out the scuffle of fabric and the soft tink of metal as the so
ldiers on the other side did likewise. Less than an hour later, back in the trench, Carlson and the other two men smoked and talked lowly while Bright sat on a wet duckboard and stared at the nothingness of the trench wall.
“Jee-roosh!” Bert, who hadn’t gone, said to no one in particular.
They waited perhaps ten minutes more and then Carlson lit the fuse. Even as he did, though, the tree exploded up into the night sky with a tremendous crack. A second and third blast told them that the German dynamite had gone off. They listened to the hooting of the men across the field, and watched their own fuse crawl like a lost lightning bug over the ground, finally detonating its charges beneath the wrecked stump of the tree.
3
Henry Bright had seen many buildings burn in France during the War, but this did not seem to lessen his surprise at the sudden gusts of heat that washed over him and his newborn boy as the cabin blossomed into flames. The roof shingling was first to catch, blazing upward with terrifying speed. The incendiary heat quickly consumed this kindling, and the remainder of the roof collapsed down inside the thick log walls of the cabin, throwing sparks and burning pieces of wood into the air as it did so. The she-goat, who had not been to the War but had earned, by any honest estimation, a hard-won reputation for composure in the last several months, lost the last reserves of her calm and burst out with a serrated bleat of alarm. She tugged against her tether as the horse canted back onto its hind legs in fright. Bright struggled to hold the leads of both animals as he watched the sparks climb into the air. Then it seemed that even the fire caught fire. In the space of a few moments there were three smaller blazes burning at the periphery of the farmyard, one of which had begun to crawl over the chicken hutch on its way toward the graves of his wife and mother. He tried to rush forward in order to stomp out the blaze, but the leads by which he held his frightened livestock were far too short and he could not reach the fire without letting the animals go. The peripheral branches of the big chestnut tree began to wither and brown, falling to the ground like burning feathers. The young chestnuts popped in their spiky shells, exploding in the angry swell of heat. Then, with a howl, the whole tree was aflame.
“What the hell did you make me do!?” Bright shouted at the angel over the roar, but the horse was twisting and stamping at the ground and would not answer. Bright gave a tremendous pull on its lead. The horse fought him for a few seconds, dancing in panic as the goat darted this way and that. He finally got the horse around somehow, tugging it and the goat into the cool safety of the woods to the east.
There was a short rise half a mile away, and he tied the animals to a tree and walked to the top. A steady floral breeze was blowing at his back and had already pushed the fire below from the chestnut tree to a silver maple nearby. The wood burned in a plume of viscous, greasy heat that shot into the sky like a column of dirty water. He turned and walked back down the rise, the familiar, low rumble of combustion beginning its muttering in his ears.
He did not speak as he untethered the horse and goat from the tree, and the horse, for its part, allowed itself to be ridden into the depths of the woods without a struggle. For all its earlier shows of panic, it now seemed deaf to the buzzing alarm that was spreading through the forest canopy. For the next few miles it clomped along with the maddening contentedness of an old dray taking the pumpkins to town. Once or twice it tried to chomp at the clumps of grass along its path, but Bright pulled back sharply on the reins each time, cursing the angel under his breath.
“Last time I let a goddamn angel help me start a goddamn fire,” he said. “He makes fun of me, tells me I can’t start a fire without a angel, and then that very angel goes and burns the whole goddamn forest down.” He rode along in silence for a piece more. “Goddamn it,” he added. A voluptuous purple-headed thistle drew the horse off to the right, but Bright jerked it back.
“It was you who started the fire, Henry Bright, not me.”
“It’s gonna burn the whole goddamn forest! Ain’t you gonna do something?”
“What can I do?”
“It was you told me to set it. Now you don’t know what to do with it?”
“I didn’t tell you to set the whole forest on fire, only the cabin,” the horse sighed as it ambled along. “Sadly, there’s no stopping it now. But have heart, Henry Bright.”
“But ain’t the Colonel going to see the smoke? You know he will.”
“I know he will.”
Bright pulled back on the reins and the horse came to a stop. “You do?”
“Of course I do. I know everything, Henry Bright.”
“But we don’t want him to see the smoke, I thought. ’Cause he’ll know something’s on fire and he’ll come over the mountain, him and his boys.”
“And what will they find?”
Bright looked down at his own son, who had stopped crying for the moment. “He won’t find nothing, because the whole goddamn forest is gonna be burned down,” he said.
“And what will the Colonel and his sons think then?”
“That we’re dead. Both me and Rachel,” he said. “Burned up in the fire.”
“And your son?”
“Him too. They’ll think he’s dead too.” He bit his fist. “Do you think they’ll really think that? That we all just got burned up in the fire?”
“The fire started in the early morning while you and your wife were still asleep. By the time the conflagration had passed over, there was nothing to show that you or she and her unborn child had ever existed. It was a tragedy.”
“And you think they’ll believe that? The Colonel is gonna believe that?”
“Why would he not?”
“Well, for one thing, he’s had Corwin and Duncan watching us.”
“How do you know?”
“ ’Cause I saw them. Up on the ridge in the winter, when there was no leaves on the trees. They were just sitting there looking at me one time. And then even last week I saw Duncan. He was on his belly there in the shadows underneath the ferns by the side of the road. I think the Colonel was waiting for my boy to be born. I think he wants to take my boy away from me.”
The angel said nothing to this and Bright mused a while in the saddle, rolling the terrible notion in his mind. The horse made another foray, this time into a stand of nettles, and Bright, lost in his reverie, permitted it.
They rode on for several more hours, the light shifting and dappling, the humidity settling around them like a warm, wet sigh, until at length they came to a rill and followed it down a long hillside to where it emptied itself into a fast-running stream. Here they stopped and he removed the baby from the sling around his chest and placed it on the ground. He stripped off his shirt, and, dipping both shirt and sling in the cool water, he rubbed the fabrics together until the mess the boy had made was gone. The baby wailed as he dunked its hindquarters in the flow, but it quieted some after he laid it upon the woolen blanket. By the time he had milked the goat, the last portion of sunlight was being sopped up by the low moon, and the stars were beginning to show on the plate beneath. He tied the horse to a chokecherry and the goat to a peeling ninebark near the water. It was muggy, but he unpacked his greatcoat anyway and, sitting on the ground, wrapped himself and the child in the garment, more for relief from the mosquitoes than from any cold. With his finger, he fed the boy from the milk and with his other hand ate a piece of the chicken that he’d wrapped in a few pages from the Book of Jeremiah. Then Henry Bright lay back and thought about Rachel, the delicate shells of her ears, the pinkness of her tongue, the way she laughed in her sleep. The tiny body of his son slept silent and warm in the crook of one arm, and he kept very still lest he should wake the boy.
4
With the tree gone, the world went aimless for the next several days. Shots were taken at whatever happened to rise above the bags that lined the trenches, but even the bodies of the men who were hit seemed bored by the tedium of the killings and fell to the ground with more listlessness than violence. Of course there
were always the punctual, workmanlike exchanges of shelling, shooting, and maiming, called “the hate,” at the beginning and ending of each day, but by now these were ritual, and no one paid them much mind.
Bright’s company was relieved and went to sit in the dirty basements of eviscerated villages under the watchful eyes of old women. Everyone had fleas. Bert argued with whoever would listen to him, mostly about whether chickens could get the cooties. Finally someone had gone out in the yard and killed a bird, brought it in, and inspected it. There had been no fleas. Behind a basket of onions in a nook that served as a kitchen, Bright found a small patch of plaster wall so white that it seemed supernatural, a solitary untouched thing in the whole wet and muddy world. He stared hard at it while the others smoked cigarettes and slept around him. They were moved from the basement back to the reserve trenches, and he resumed watching the treeless early October sky with the same intensity as he had the wall in the old woman’s house. Shells burst around him, but they burst around everyone. Many had caught the flu, and there was coughing at all hours. Some suffocated in the night from the infection in their lungs. Men came back from the field hospitals looking sicker than when they had left for them. They died of fevers in the cold, their bodies shivering so violently beneath sodden blankets that it seemed their bones might break. It was not unusual to wake and find the man sitting next to you dead; the War had become something so powerful that it could kill without wounding. On occasion even Henry Bright smoked, but not often.
Back he moved to the front line, and, one morning, the hate was louder and longer than normal, and he began to clean his rifle with his toothbrush and then fix his bayonet in preparation to go over the bags. The word being passed around was that the village in front of them had been relinquished in the night. Some speculated that it was a trap, that this portion of the line was playing possum, luring in as many as they could in order to surround them in one last, desperate attempt to turn the tide of the War. Farther south, another rumor had it, an entire German company of starving old men and young boys had surrendered en masse. Some held that this would be the final push, that the Kaiser had had it and the German army was collapsing. Still, if this was the case, no one in charge was saying so, and until they did say so, the only thing that mattered was the village that lay before them a little ways distant, close enough that the white steeple of its church could be seen peeking out above a small rise of hills.
