Bright's Passage: A Novel

by Josh Ritter

  Bright ignored the angel and began to lead the party up Main Street. Off in the distance the smoke from the fire painted the sky a sulfurous gray. The wind picked up, its hot tail whipping against their faces as it sucked past them.

  “Bithiah,” the angel began.

  “You’re talking nonsense and I don’t want to hear it,” Bright said as he watched the darkly spreading wings to the west. “Did you see that car? A girl like that, and all them kids dressed up so pretty, ribbons in their hair? Did you see her?” He coughed. “What would a girl like that need with my boy and me?”

  “Bithiah,” the angel continued, “was the daughter of the Pharaoh. She found a baby boy floating in a basket of reeds and she raised him as her own. This child was the prophet Moses. He grew up to lead the children of Israel out of Egypt.”

  “I know all that,” Bright said. “My mother read that to me all the time when I was little.”

  “The Pharaoh’s daughter was named Bithiah,” the angel said again.

  Bright pulled the animal up short. The goat continued on until it reached the end of its lead and came to a stop in the middle of the road. “I said I know all that,” he said, exasperated.

  “Her name is there in the Bible. Bithiah. You could look it up.”

  Bright scuffed the macadam with the sole of his boot and turned to look back down the street. Margaret was ushering the children into the big black auto. “Now you’re just trying to make me mad,” he said. “You know that it ain’t her name we’re arguing about. And,” he added, “I couldn’t look up her name if I wanted to, because you made me go and tear up the Bible to start the fire, remember?” He leaned toward the horse, waving his arm toward the wall of smoke. “Maybe you don’t remember this, but my wife just died! Rachel? The one you liked so much? The one who gave you apples and corn?” His eyes were watering, and he spit to clear the catch from his voice. “You told me she was gonna be safe!” He gave the lead a jerk and got the animal moving again. It plodded stubbornly along behind him.

  “The girl’s many children need a father, Henry Bright. When she approaches, you will tell her of the Future King of Heaven. The words will be put into your mouth.”

  Bright turned and saw the big black auto rolling slowly toward them on its way down the street. The car stopped a few yards away and waited for Bright and his animals to move out of its path.

  “Do it now,” the angel commanded. “The child must be fed. He must be taken in by a woman and cared for. He will surely die otherwise …”

  For a moment the horse looked down its nose at the driver and the driver looked across the leather steering wheel and back at the horse. Bright wavered and then left his animals blocking the road and went to bend down level with Margaret’s face in the back passenger window.

  “I mean to say thank you for your treating Henry so good back there in the store.”

  The children were up on their knees in the wide backseat, giggling at the funny-looking horse and goat in the middle of the street.

  She smiled. “Are you going to name him Henry?”

  “I guess I am.” She squinted at him against the sunlight, his mouth hanging part ways open as he waited for the words the angel had promised would be given to him. Then he closed it and turned to glare at the horse, but the animal seemed oblivious to his discomfort and continued staring down its nose at the car and its driver.

  “Henry needs a mother,” Bright said. “He … He’s … an important child,” he said. “He’s to be important. I think.”

  He paused painfully again, and waited for any kind of help at all from the angel. “I’m a good man,” he said. “Your children need a father.”

  He pinched the bridge of his nose between a thumb and forefinger and closed his eyes briefly in tribute to his own frustration. “I mean,” he said, opening them again and speaking more slowly, “I believe … that you and I … that maybe you and I could …” When the words didn’t come he thrust a hand into his pocket, pulling out his mother’s ancient ivory comb. He offered it to the girl through the car’s window. “I’m sorry if this don’t make much sense. My wife died two days ago.”

  Margaret turned in her seat to look at the children. They were watching the strange man and his animals in rapt fascination, as if a single sound might break the magic spell of their presence there in the middle of the road. The wind peppered stray bits of grit against Bright’s face, and the goat began to snuff her nose at some message in the air. The lights in the girl’s eyes did not dim but became sadder somehow. She looked at the comb in his outstretched hand and then gently placed her fingertips against his palm and pushed it back at him. “I’m sorry she died,” Margaret said. She reached her hand through the window and brushed it against the child’s copper-colored head in its sling. She smiled at him, a beautiful smile, like a dream in passing. Then the driver backed up and swung around them, leaving Henry Bright and his livestock to stand dumb, dirty, and still in the rising heat of the afternoon.

  16

  The concussive shock of the first shell hitting the church was the only one Bright actually felt. After that came the now-familiar feeling of capsized calm in which the world seemed viewed from beneath a great depth of water. It was as if all sound and feeling were gone suddenly, and, within that watery silence, death was not something hurtled from above but more like a meadow of wildflowers that blossomed from the ground in radii of plaster, mud, and dust, swallowing buildings and bodies, chewing them in the air a while and then spitting them back out upon the trammeled ground like the ends of gnawed bones. When the flowers finally stopped blossoming, the earth lay back down again and the senses returned.

  After several minutes he began to pick his way through the church rubble in search of the others. Bert and Sergeant Carlson were the only ones that he found alive. Carlson lay next to an avalanche of roofing tile by the enormous splinter of the fallen steeple. He had a hole in his chest that had not yet begun to bleed but hung open in an “O” that looked like a mouth that was about to start screaming. He was breathing, but that was all. Bert was unhurt, though his pale face was pocked with plaster and his eyes were wide and shiny.

  “That was really something, huh? Wow!” he said. “I mean, wow!”

  Bright stooped next to Carlson. “Help me.”

  “You bet!” Bert said, but he didn’t move. “How you doin’, Sergeant? Don’t you worry none, you hear me? You’re doin’ real good, real good!” He laughed to himself in disbelief. “Jee-roosh! We had a tight one today, didn’t we, boys?” He was staring at the bodies scattered about; his brow was furrowing and unfurrowing. “Jee-roosh!” he said again. He began to shake.

  “Help me,” Bright said again, but Bert’s whole body was now convulsing in some no-man’s-land between laughter and sobs. Bright stood, hauled back, and hit Bert hard with the flat of his hand. “Help me,” he said one last time, and Bert’s eyes focused and he stopped shaking so much. “We need to move him someplace safe,” Bright said. The sergeant’s wound had finally begun to bleed.

  It was terrible ground to try to carry a man over, and Carlson’s feet shambled loosely against the pebble and debris as his legs began the process of forgetting how to walk. They passed the ruins of the church and had made it about a hundred yards down the road before Bright began to wonder if he’d been turned around by the shellings. Without the steeple it was hard to tell, suddenly, which direction they had first entered the village by. It was also beginning to get dark, and so he pulled Bert and the sergeant to the side of the road and down into a ditch by a stone wall. The hate had begun now, and stretching away for miles to either side of them came the sounds of the War.

  Artillery passed high above their heads in singsong trajectories that merged and lifted with one another into strange musical chords, like cats crossing pump organs. The gigantic trench mortars were the loudest, the reverberations of their fusillades abating slowly across the night sky, briefly disappearing behind the sound of howitzers before the red-hot shards
of metal they had fired into the air came screaming earthward once more.

  “We’ll go back to the line tonight,” he said to Bert. “After dark.” They angled Carlson into a sitting position against the wall and Bright put his ear close to the dying man. The sergeant’s wound burbled as if a flock of sparrows had made a nest deep in his chest. To their left the road led back into the little town square and, to their right, sixty or seventy more yards down the road, hunched a glowering stone farmhouse.

  “Why not take him over yonder?” Bert asked, motioning toward it.

  “That’s no good for us if someone comes in the night. They’ll check the buildings first. We’re better here.” He looked down at Carlson.

  “The hell we are!” Bert snapped. “And, anyway, like we got to be afraid of anything! You and I, we’re good old West Virginia boys!” He pulled the German pistol from the waistband of his trousers. It was silver and shiny and seemed to distill, like dew, all the light from the darkening gray sky, so that the sky itself grew darker as Bert rolled the gun first one way and then another in his hands. Its barrel looked as narrow as a knitting needle. Bert pointed it at Bright an uncomfortable second, then laughed. “Boy, didn’t I get you good?” He laughed again at the memory of frightening Bright with the gun as he’d come around the doorway of the deserted trench. “You ’bout shit your britches! You thought some big old Kraut had you dead by rights! Pow,” he said, puffing the air.

  Bright looked steadily at Bert and said nothing.

  “I killed that Kraut officer,” Bert said with petulance. “I know you all don’t think that’s so, but I did. He was gonna shoot me dead, but I shot him first.” He turned it around so that the handle was to Bright. “And, look at this.” He reached to light a match.

  “No matches,” Bright said.

  “I want to show you the carvings and what all that’s on the handle. They’re something devilish. Dang! It’s too dark to see ’em.” He made again to strike a match. “Here.”

  “No matches. No light.”

  “Fine,” Bert sighed. “Anyway, if you weren’t so scared, you could see it’s got a handle that’s pure gold or something and carved with all that crazy Kraut writing. And if you’d let me strike a match, I was gonna show you the dragon with the spear through its neck. So don’t you tell me that we got anything to worry about, ’cause if any Kraut Boche Fritzy decides he’s gonna scout that farmhouse over yonder while we’re in it, he’s gonna find out exactly what the last fella found out who thought he could outdraw me.” He tossed the gun in the air and caught it with surprising grace. “Now, Bright, let’s get the sergeant over to that farmhouse and not say anything more about it.”

  “We’re staying here.”

  Bert’s face fell in the purpling light. “Is that all?” he whined. “Here we are, so close to those stinkers we can smell the pickles, and we’re just going to hide out until we can sneak on back with our tails between our legs?” He poked the toe of Bright’s boot with the pistol barrel. “Hell! This is as close as we’re gonna get to them? What am I supposed to say when I get home? That I didn’t kill a German the whole time I was in France?”

  “I thought you did kill one.”

  Carlson coughed wetly then, expectorating blood. He raised his head and banged it against the wall several times like a man fluffing a pillow. There was a gravelly sound from his chest.

  Bert looked at the dying sergeant a moment and then back at Bright. He stood up. “Boy, I know you want to, boy,” he said to Bright as one might talk to a fire being stoked. “I know you want to go after them too! Ooooh, I can see it! I can see it in your eyes! You’re a good old West Virginia boy!”

  “All right,” Bright said finally. “You want to go over to that farmhouse, go on over there. Check to make sure it’s safe, and if it is, then we’ll all go over. If it isn’t, you just go ahead and kill as many Germans as you find in there.” He tossed his canteen up at Bert. Bert stood looking at it. “Sergeant’s thirsty too. You find any water, you bring plenty back for him.” Bright handed him Carlson’s canteen as well. “Well, go on,” he said. “Git.”

  Bert looked from the empty canteens in his hands to the farmhouse waiting for him in the failing light. “Well, I ain’t going over there alone,” he said, and squatted back down again next to Bright. “And don’t you go orderin’ me to do nothin’ either. We do things together.”

  “We can’t leave him here alone,” Bright said, nodding at Carlson. “And we can’t carry him. And he needs water.”

  “You go, then,” Bert said, and pushed the canteens back at Bright. He unhooked his own canteen and placed it atop the other two. “I’ll wait here.”

  Bright peered through the darkness for signs of danger, but everything around him was a testament to that, so he climbed cautiously from the ditch and headed toward the farmhouse, crouching low as he hurried down the road with the empty canteens in his arms. He slowed as he approached the dwelling. The once-white paint gave off a muted glow against the fields, and the slate shingles were scruffy with lichen. The window-panes were mostly gone from their frames, save for a few stray shards that glinted viciously out at him from the gloom like fangs. He went to his knees and peered between them into the dwelling, but it was as dark in there as a crack in the earth. He got to his feet and began to search for water. On the far side of the house he found what he was looking for. He held one of the canteens under the spigot but the pump handle dangled uselessly on its hinge. After a minute of pumping, he abandoned it for the stone livestock trough that his eyes now made out dimly, set flush against the house’s wall. In the shadow of the farmhouse, the rainwater that came up to the lip of the cistern looked like a sheet of black glass. He knelt down in the mud and quietly set the empty canteens next to one another at his knees before lifting the first one above the still surface of the water.

  “Wait.”

  At the sound of the voice, the world fell silent. There was no night breeze, no rifle fire. Even the large-caliber guns seemed to pause from their thundering and look around themselves, as if the unexpected word had wandered in like a small child and interrupted their supper conversation.

  Bright stopped as well, the canteen in his hand frozen above the trough. It was impossible to tell how distant the voice was or even if it had been speaking to him. It had seemed to come from all directions at once, a calm command without emotion. He lifted his eyes to the farmhouse window above the trough, expecting to see a face framed in it peering out at him, but the darkness there was just as still and solid as it had been before. Beneath his hand, the water’s obsidian surface reflected the shadow of the canteen against a cold backdrop of stars. He knew then that whoever was speaking must be behind him, training a rifle at the back of his head, a killer whose face he would never see.

  “I … I’m fetching water,” he stammered. “I got a shot man and I’m fetching him some water.”

  He took the silence that followed as incomprehension or consideration.

  “English?” he asked. “American? Water?” He waited for an answer, thinking of the rifle slung on his back. There would be no time. He put his hands in the air, one still clutching the empty canteen, and stood slowly. “Water?” he said again, turning to face the man who had snuck up behind him. There was nothing and no one there. He shifted to the right and left, then made a full circle in the darkness to show whoever had whispered that he was only holding a canteen in his hand. “Water?” Running was hopeless, the voice had been too close. He waited for a reply another minute at least, but the hidden man did not answer. Expecting at any moment to be killed, he stooped to the trough once more and put the canteen to the surface of the water.

  “Wait,” the voice commanded.

  He froze again. “Who are you?” he said, louder now. Compared to the hidden man’s voice his own sounded thin and desperate.

  A faint scent, insidious and sharp as chopped radishes, rose to his nostrils. In an instant he had thrown the canteen on the ground and dropped h
is hand to grope at the belt where he kept his gas mask. It wasn’t there, and he searched frantically for it before realizing that he’d left it with his jacket back in the ditch by the stone wall. Cold panic held him for an instant, then drifted away like mist. He’d heard no shells fall nearby.

  It was still possible he had missed the sound of a gas canister, which traveled at slower speeds than artillery shells and hummed lowly like old men in workshops as they flew. When a gas alarm was raised, you had six seconds to get your mask on or, if not, you had two days in which to experience annihilating agony and then forever to be either dead or terribly wounded. There were many false gas alarms on the line, and men were forever putting on and taking off their masks. Sometimes men would dream the alarm in their sleep and would open their eyes with their masks already on, having put them on without waking. Phosgene, if you noticed it at all, smelled of new-cut grass. The next day, however, you were coughing up pints of thick yellow fluid from your lungs every hour, and the day after that you were headed for a lifetime in some peeling hospital, the helpless ward of aging nurses. Unlike phosgene, mustard gas didn’t even need to be inhaled. It was heavy, gangrenous stuff that trundled close to the ground, burning any skin that it came in contact with and causing huge, disfiguring blisters. Eventually the gas would settle, collecting with the rainwater in greasy floating slicks at the bottom of shell craters, potholes, and trenches.

  His temples were throbbing and he realized that he had been holding his breath. He let it out slowly and sniffed the air again. The smell of the gas was certainly there but it was very faint. Looking down, his eyes came to rest on the trough. In the darkness, its pale-gray stone shone up around the water it held like the wide mouth of some monstrous fish. Whatever mustard gas had recently drifted through this farmyard was gone now, save for the stuff that had settled in a thin layer over the surface of the water in the trough.