by Josh Ritter
The woman yanked back from his grasp. “Get the hell out of here!” Her face had gone purple with rage all at once, and she started around the counter toward him. She took a rake from a milk crate where a number of them were standing and knocked a stack of enameled pie plates to the floor. She swung the thing in a wide arc, missing him but sending a stuffed pheasant flying down the aisle. “I’ll give you a beating for talking like that about a war hero!” She pounded the rake’s handle on the floor and glared at him as two of the coal-company men entered the store. “Ralph,” she said. “Edgar.”
“I can see that you are a fine woman and ever the help of those in need,” the Colonel said, with the last reserves of his courtly composure. Strong arms pulled him toward the shop door. “If you see that rogue again, tell him that I am going to find and kill him.”
The woman followed the men to the doorway and out onto the street as they dragged the old man and his sons down toward the coal-company offices. “Make sure I don’t ever see them again or I’m gonna cut them from their ears to their assholes!” She huffed in disbelief at the kinds of people there were in the world, then she dusted herself off and disappeared into the store. In another moment she came back out again and hollered up the street to the roughs. “And when you’re done with them, get on back and help me bury my cash register.”
The coal-company roughs tied the trio and carried them like spitted heifers out of town, dumping them finally by the train tracks running past a coal depot. They pulled out the men’s pockets but found nothing of any interest. One of the roughs drew a long knife from his own belt and held it under the Colonel’s nose. “You ain’t coming back here again, are you?” The Colonel shifted in his ropes and turned his face away. The rough watched him a beat longer, then laughed and cut the old man’s ropes, spun him around, and kicked him hard on the backside, sending him sprawling down the tracks. He threw the unloaded and useless rifle after him. “We don’t want your types around here,” he said.
The roughs walked, joking among themselves, back down the road the way they had come. The Colonel sat gingerly on the railroad track and watched them go, then looked at his sons where they lay, bloody and straining against the ropes that still bound them.
When he was sure the men were gone, he pulled the long brass bullet out from between his cheek and his teeth. “I thought,” he said, holding it up and examining it with a jeweler’s eye, “that you would both be better behaved if I left you outside of the store.”
He rubbed the bullet on his sleeve and, after inspecting its gleam, he chambered the round in the rifle with a satisfying mechanical clack. Then he laid the rifle aside and looked placidly at his sons.
“Henry Bright is nearby, and I have procured the means with which to kill him.” He nodded at the rifle lying by his side. “Since it is growing late and there is nothing more that can be done at present, I feel we are all in possession of a blessed space of leisure time in which I might pass on to you both a few bits of instruction concerning proper manners when residing in town.” This he proceeded to do, talking at length as night fell, his lecture interrupted only once when he saw the light of a train coming and he paused so that he could drag his boys one by bundled one from the tracks, lest they be cleaved in two.
30
He lay there on the battlefield with a hole in his shoulder, until eventually he was found and moved boozily to a Red Cross tent. A racket of haphazard marching bands moved up and down the gruel-colored stretch of camp road at all hours. The walls of canvas were stiff and dreary as the sky, still as paint. The nurse came and retreated. He was woken at times by the screams of others. When this happened, the nurse would be there, and sometimes the doctor too. He would be given something for his pain and would go back to sleep, wake, and eat the cool soup that was spooned to him. There were voices outside and commotion at times. Then everything would get dark again and he would lie there and call out to the vanished angel.
He was in the Red Cross tent for so long that it began to seem that he might be the last one to leave the War. He got up but was made to lie back down again. He got up again, and this time he was put on a truck that took him to a train. The train took him to the coast, and at the coast he was placed aboard a steam liner. After four days of sitting in port, the steam liner left. He never saw any of the men he had known in the trenches again. He kept a careful watch for the Colonel’s sons, but they weren’t on his boat. He found whatever solitude he could on board. He tried closing his eyes or watching the waves as they frothed behind the ship. He took Bert’s stolen gun from his haversack and sat staring at the lettering, letting his eyes unfocus and the talk of others blur around him. None of it was any use. The angel seemed gone for good. His shoulder throbbed in the damp air. The boat landed in Virginia. He was given a ticket and got on a train that, after many stops, dropped him at the same empty station he had departed from just over a year previous.
The neglected cabin was in much need of work, but Bright began at the edges. He went into the woods and cut six trees, then spent the next two days fashioning fence posts that he placed around the small garden that his mother had made. Although it was still early in the spring and frost painted the ground each morning, he slept in his army kit in the timothy grass within sight of the cabin. He did not go in. He wasn’t quite ready to resume his former life. He ate whatever he had left from his trip. He walked a half day to Fells Corner for a bar of soap, a pound of nails, and tar paper with which to patch the roof of the hen hutch. At first the old man in the hardware store didn’t recognize the gaunt, uniformed young man who stood before him. When at last he did, the man came out from behind the counter and put his arms around him, and this time he gave him two full pounds of nails for free before making Bright promise to come to the auction the following week.
He returned home and hacked away the tall grass that had grown up around his mother’s grave. Something—the winter snow, wild animals—had pushed inward most of the boards he had nailed over the cabin door to protect the inside from weather. He pried and yanked away whatever splinters remained nailed to the door frame, then he turned in the doorway and looked a while at the homestead he had reclaimed. When he was finally ready, he stepped inside the cabin and sat there on the bed for a very long time, as if waiting to feel something, while the hours passed and the slant of the daylight changed around him. At last he stood on the lumpy straw mattress and felt around in the shadows of the rafters for his mother’s rifle. The gun was missing.
31
Come morning, his boys were a travesty to look upon. Swollen lips, black eyes, cheekbones bruised, foreheads and noses bloody and dirty. After untying them, the Colonel made his way a little farther into the forest and then up a small rise. To his left and right the trees went on to the horizon, deep blue-green and gently breathing. Directly in front of him, about a quarter mile distant, the forest of hickory and oak gave way to an enormous rectangle of lawn with several small man-made ponds strewn carelessly about. They reflected a sky that was one part daybreak and two parts smoke. The Colonel paid the impending fire no mind. His eyes were roving over the spectacular white hotel. The building was at least four hundred feet long, with drowsy, darkened windows just beginning to garner the sunlight, as if the morning was one more servant to be admitted into the room along with the coffee and the big-city papers. Tennis courts and a swimming pool were appended to the right side of the hotel, and to the extreme left, on the far side of the great lawn and set slightly back into the trees, stood a large white barn trimmed in green.
“I am going to the hotel to ask for Henry Bright,” he announced to his sons when he got back to the train tracks. “I gleaned from the lady in the store that he was very close. I will see what further information I can come by there.” Corwin was sitting on one of the rails, throwing small rocks at his brother’s back. The struggle had gone out of Duncan, who sat staring fixedly at the sunlight glancing off one of the rails.
“From the rise there you can see a large white barn,�
� the Colonel said, pointing. “While I am away, I want the two of you to scout it for Henry Bright’s horse. If by luck you do find the animal stabled there, do not harm it.” He looked hard at both of his sons to make sure that they were listening. “Allow me to emphasize. Do not harm the horse! … I want nothing to alert the rogue that we are nearby.” The Colonel removed his uniform jacket and shook it, releasing clouds of dust into the air. “And you would both do well to otherwise keep to the woods, as you look less than presentable.”
He made his way through the woods and down to the road leading through the gates to the hotel. At the foot of the hotel steps, he met a crisply dressed porter who brought him up the wide marble stairs, through an ornate revolving door, and into a large lobby with a sky-blue dome and a beautiful grand piano. Here the ragged old man was passed from the porter to an equally well-pressed bellboy, of whom the Colonel inquired where a proud grandfather might breakfast with his son and new grandson, who happened to be guests of the hotel. The bellboy smiled at him and led the way to the breakfast room. A few reverberant murmurs of conversation met the Colonel’s ears from a group of departing guests as he walked by the reception desk.
“… and so we decided to get out now while the getting out was good …”
“… but I don’t believe it …”
“… if it is worse than ’09, which they say maybe it will be …”
“… never happen …”
The bellboy spoke over his shoulder to the Colonel. “Everything you’ve heard about the breakfast here is true,” he said, as they passed beneath an oaken Tudor arch and into a glassed-in conservatory. The light streaming through the windows gleamed off the polished silver service and scattered brilliantly in all directions, as if the whole room were contained within a bubble in some sunlit brook. “Eggs Benedict, eggs Florentine”—the bellboy stretched the word out like he was describing the Grand Canyon—“eggs Benedict with trout? Believe me, sir, it’s the best there is, and there’s plenty of it.” With a nod to a passing girl, he returned to the lobby and the girl led the Colonel to a setting for two near the far end of the long glass room. Nearby, a group of four young people—two men and two women—was arrayed around a table. They had stopped their talking as he approached and were now looking at him as if he was some acquaintance of theirs who had dressed in costume. The smiles of the two women were already forming as they turned back around to face the men. A chair was pulled out for the Colonel, and he brushed the seat cushion once with the napkin.
“So then …” he heard one of the women say, as she tried to retrieve the strand of the conversation, “so then Amelia went …”
“Good morning to you all,” the Colonel said brightly.
“Ah, good morning,” one of the men said. The other, looking directly down at his crumpet and spearing it absentmindedly with a knife, turned his head and gave the barest, most obligatory of nods before returning his attentions to the pastry.
The Colonel, after nodding respectfully at the women, turned his attentions fully upon his napkin, taking it by the corners and flipping it as if he were taunting a bull before tucking half its length into his collar.
The woman began again, “So then Amelia—”
“I’ll tell it, Evelyn, if you don’t mind, since he did propose to me,” Amelia laughed.
“She’s jealous,” the truculent man said into his crumpet.
“I am jealous,” Evelyn said. She turned, smiling, to the man with a fine mustache at the end of the table, who had first greeted the Colonel. “Lawrence”—she laid her hand on his arm and batted her eyelashes—“if you’d asked me to marry you, I would have said yes in a second!”
“I recall that I did ask you to marry me once, Evie,” he said.
“But that was ages ago. Years. And just moments before, you’d fallen off the railing and into the garden. I chalked it up to a head injury. But if you asked me now—”
“Oh, hush,” Amelia said. “He’s asked me to marry him and I’m not letting him take it back, am I, Lawrence?”
“What a pleasant day for a walk,” the Colonel interjected from over at his small table.
The group paused their conversation and looked at him blankly.
“Yes, it is,” Amelia said after a moment, “and you look as if you’ve already been out walking this morning.”
“About a thousand miles,” the ill-natured man said with a snort.
“Now, Russell … manners … How far have you come, sir? Have you had to escape the fire too?” She twisted her hair and leaned toward him as she asked the question.
“Oh, I live just down the road, a mile back in town,” the Colonel said.
“Pleasant place,” Lawrence remarked. “I’ve been coming here since I was a boy. I’ve always loved it.” He had on a hunting jacket with a leather patch on the shoulder for the rifle butt.
“It is an extremely pleasant place,” the Colonel agreed. He motioned at the extra place setting. “I am meeting my son here for breakfast. He has just had a child.” The waiting girl arrived. “Coffee, black,” he barked. “And steel-cut oats with canned peaches.” She left. “My son is a soldier,” the Colonel said, and watched their faces.
“Well, that’s wonderful,” Evelyn said. “Soldiers everywhere.”
“Was he in France?” Amelia asked.
“Yes he was. Fighting the Boche. Am I to take by your comment that there are other veterans here besides myself and my son?”
“Were you in France too?”
“The Philippines,” he said, his eyes never leaving Amelia’s face. “And you said there were other veterans staying here?”
Not to be ignored, Evelyn leaned in closer. “Early this morning, a veteran in his uniform came in from the direction of the fire. He was out of his senses.”
“Shouldn’t have let him in,” sullen Russell opined. He sat back in his chair and looked in the opposite direction from the Colonel. “He’ll get the whole place sick with the mumps. That on top of the fire, on top of them letting the whole pikey hillbilly world come and stay for free until it passes? I won’t be coming back here. I don’t pay good money to get the mumps and eat possum stew.”
“I swear, Russell, you’re such a pussy willow sometimes.” Amelia cocked her thumb back at her new fiancé. “You’re as bad as Lawrence. After all, it was only poison ivy.” She turned back to the Colonel. “Lawrence thinks I was crazy to have the man moved up out of the basement and into the hotel, but I had a nice room and he is a veteran after all, so I wanted him moved to a place where he could be absolutely comfortable. It was the very least I could do. We’re leaving today anyway.”
“What was the room number?” the Colonel asked. “Perhaps I will visit him before I leave. Veteran to veteran, you know.”
“Oh, dear, I don’t have any idea. There are no room numbers on the top floor, are there, Lawrence?”
“I haven’t got the foggiest,” Lawrence said, grown bored.
The group drifted back into their own conversation, and the room filled with the boisterous laughter of men about to go out for a last round of golf or shooting before they all got in their cars to drive away and escape the fire. As he ate and drank his coffee, the Colonel listened for further word of Henry Bright, but he heard nothing.
Before the bill could be brought, he stood and bowed to his neighbors. “Have a blessed day,” he said sweetly. Holding his paper-white palms out toward Amelia, he took her hands in his and bent low across the breakfast table to kiss them. “May your impending union be as fruitful as my son’s has been.” He nodded once more at Lawrence, who returned the nod sternly. Then, with great and gathered dignity, he walked across the breakfast-room floor and out into the smoke-filled morning to go find his sons and fetch his rifle.
32
For the next few days after he arrived home, Bright worked steadily at making more repairs. He cleared the garden patch, beating back the intruding tendrils of the wilderness and in the process exhuming nearly a bushel of ho
muncular carrots. He climbed up on the roof and repapered with the tar paper he had bought at the hardware store, then he chipped some new shingles from the pitchy remnants of the fence posts he had set around the garden. He removed the contents of the cabin and placed them in the yard: the enameled washbasin, the trunk for his mother’s clothes, the mahogany credenza, the moldering Bible, and the bed. He swept out the cabin’s lantern-blacked interior, then filled the bucket with water and used a rag to work the deep dirt out of the floorboards. When he was done, he stripped off his clothes and washed in the stream. Then he shaved, climbed into his uniform, and set off to Fells Corner for the auction. Though he’d dumped the bullets on the ground back in the War, he held Bert’s beautiful stolen gun in his hand, visible to anyone who might be watching him from the woods as he passed the house where the Colonel and his sons lived. Once he was down the road a ways, he tucked the gun back into his haversack.
He was unprepared for the stir he would make at the auction Since he’d returned from France, he’d spoken to no one but the conductor on the train and the man at the hardware store. After such long silence, the little town at auction time was a nightmare of back slaps, hand-wringing, tears, and canned fruit. A fat little man with a straw hat and a blueberry stain on his shirt turned out to be the mayor. He stood on a crate, clasped Bright’s hand above his head, and made a speech. Everywhere Bright went, small boys followed him around, patrolling left and right and using the same kind of talk that Bert had before he was shot in the head. Old men saluted him and young men watched him from the corners of their eyes.
The auctioneer referred to him as “our very own” each time Bright raised his hand to place a bid. He bought the hens first, then the two white goats. He went outside and ate some fried chicken that was given to him and drank a mug of beer and a cup of buttermilk. He ate a piece of pie that had been brought to him by a detachment of flat-chested girls. When he was done, he got up from the picnic table and went back into the sweat and tobacco of the auction hall to examine the horses.
