Peace

by Richard Bausch

  It caught his breath.

  His father wanted to have a word with him. The others were shapes now in his peripheral vision.

  “I have two things to say to you,” Charles said, shaking hands with him.

  The younger man held the grip, looking directly back into the somber blue eyes, because he knew it was expected of him. They were two men, standing face-to-face. It meant everything to Marson to be standing there with his father in that way, grown, with a wife of his own and a baby on the way. It caused a little catch in his throat when he tried to speak, so he cleared his throat and kept silent. His father dropped his hand and then put the end of his right index finger on the son’s chest, a light but insistent touch.

  “Do your duty,” he said, and, surprisingly, his voice broke. He took a breath, then stepped back. “And write to your mother.”

  “Yes, sir,” Marson told him.

  Charles took him suddenly by the shoulders, but then let go.

  “Remember.”

  “I will, sir.”

  “Don’t miss the train.”

  “No, sir.”

  The old man’s eyes were brimming. He had come from Germany. His father never spoke a word of English. Marson looked at the porch, Helen’s anguished face, his mother’s, Jack’s, and Mary’s, and he raised his hand to wave, then took one more glance at the street, and his father, and with a kind of wrenching shoved his duffel bag into the backseat of the cab and got in.

  “Train station?” the cabbie said.

  Marson couldn’t talk. Through the blur of tears, he saw the cabbie take one look at him in the rearview mirror. The cabbie leaned slightly toward the passenger window and spoke to the boy’s father. “I’ve got a son heading out tomorrow,” he said.

  Marson’s father held up one hand to acknowledge it. Then he stood close to Marson’s window. “Come home in one piece. We’ll all be praying.”

  “I will, too.”

  The cab pulled away, and Marson watched his father’s shape grow smaller in the fading light of the street.

  THIRTEEN

  ON THE COLD HILLSIDE—or mountain—near Cassino, Corporal Marson let the freezing hour pass, dreaming of home. His life there now seemed a hundred years ago. Or it was worse than that: sometimes, now, in the nights, it felt like something he must have imagined. It no longer carried with it the weight of memory but was marbled with the insubstantial feeling of imagination when the faculty for imagining is sketchy or false. He could not really believe it happened, any of it.

  And, here, in the middle of a war, in the stupid prodigality of killing all around him, he had been witness to a murder.

  He saw Joyner stir and look up. Joyner emitted a soft whimper and then began trying to move his fingers. Joyner turned to Asch, who made a sound like talk, a word that was indistinguishable. “Shut up, Asch,” he said. Then he looked at Marson. “It’s not a hill. We can’t find out anything climbing this fucker.”

  Asch sat up and put his hands to his face. “I say we go back. That’s my vote.”

  “Shouldn’t we go back?” Joyner said to Angelo, who did not know he had been spoken to. “Hey, Mussolini or whatever the fuck your name is.”

  At the mention of the name, Angelo turned to him. “Come?”

  “His name’s Angelo,” the corporal said. “He’s our guide. He knows the paths up this hill. You remember me, I’m the one with the stripes.”

  “Yeah, well ask him if this is a mountain.”

  “Montagna, sì.”

  “See?” Joyner said.

  “Anytime you want to check out, Joyner—you just let me know.”

  “But, man,” Asch said. “I don’t think we were supposed to climb a mountain.”

  Corporal Marson looked at Angelo and made a gesture of questioning.

  “Sì,” said the old man. “Speaka the English. Poco.”

  “Well, praise Jesus and pass the fuck’n ammunition,” Joyner said.

  “If we don’t do anything,” Asch said suddenly, “we’re as guilty as Glick is.”

  “No,” said Joyner. “She’s guilty as who she was with and she paid for it, too. Maybe you didn’t notice that they shot two of us.”

  “He shot. She didn’t do anything but yell. And die.”

  “Both of you shut up,” Marson said. “There’s nothing we can do about it now.”

  “Just quit talking about it,” said Joyner to Asch. “It’s getting on my nerves.” He was scratching his arm again. “We were all in shock. Forget it, will you?”

  “The longer we wait the worse it’s going to be.”

  “You got a radio?” Marson asked him. “Do you?”

  Asch merely stared back at him.

  “We’re going to complete this mission. Got it?”

  The old man had a coughing fit, spat into his hands, and then put his hands down in the snow. It felt very strange having him there, and it was difficult to believe that he did not understand everything in their talk.

  “Move out,” Marson said. He touched the old man on his shoulder and felt bone. For some reason, it got the nausea roiling in him again. The old man sat up and hugged his own skinny knees in the burlap trousers. A few more moments passed while they packed the blankets and gear, and Marson watched Angelo wrap himself in his canvaslike cloak. He thought of his father and wondered if Angelo had many children or grandchildren, a wife who was alive.

  An instant passed in which he saw himself trying to tell them at home about the death of the woman.

  He shook his head, as if to dislodge something in his helmet. The old Italian man looked at him with a question in his eyes. But no one spoke. They were all about to leave the rock. But then they stopped, each realizing in the same instant that the world had grown hugely, unnaturally quiet. The stillness was startling and appalling. Looking at the dim shapes of one another in that tight little space, it came to them that the rain had stopped.

  Joyner held out one hand, brought it back, but then seemed doubtful and put it out again. “Well goodness fuck’n gracious,” he said. “Isn’t that the sweetest little mothafuck’n thing. You know what it’s fuck’n doing now? It’s fuck’n snowing.”

  This seemed to stop them all. Asch gave forth a sound like a gasp and then took his helmet off and looked down into it, as if searching for some secret he had hidden there. He put it back on and sighed. “I think I’ve got frostbite already in my feet.”

  Marson remembered the blister on his right heel. He stood. “Let’s go.”

  They moved off the ledge, away from the shelter of the rock, and began to climb again, the old man leading the way. His motions seemed a little stiff now, a little slower. The snow was covering everything quickly, the ground turning white at their feet, and ahead of them, too. It was gathering thickly on the branches of the trees and on every crease in the ground, softening all the crevices and dips and the little ridges and wrinkles of the earth, covering the dead leaves and the windfall as if to hide them all away in whiteness. Walking was becoming even more difficult. The tracks they made were black, and when they slipped there were swaths cut in the whiteness, like wounds. The flakes were very heavy with moisture, dropping with a kind of silent splash, but the flakes themselves did not melt when they hit. They adhered to the surface and were added to, second by second, an impossibly rapid accumulation, and the ground kept getting steeper. Twice the men had to wait while one or the other of them collected himself after a fall—first it was Asch again, and then Marson, who felt in the first loss of footing, as he started down, that he would tumble all the way to the road below. But he caught himself at last, and climbed back toward the others. Joyner gave him the butt end of his carbine and helped pull him up. The old man watched them from the shadow of the floppy canvas hood. He was a dark shape in the whiteness. They all looked like shadows.

  Marson’s foot had grown progressively even more painful, the pain traveling from his heel to the side of the foot, and now he was experiencing shooting pains all the way to his hip. He
called for another pause, and they gathered, a dark knot of shades, amid the black trunks and the outcroppings of rock, huddling together against the cold. They looked around them.

  “I think we should go back,” Joyner said suddenly, scratching his arm again.

  No one answered him.

  Marson waved the old man on. And they began climbing once more.

  “This is shit,” Joyner said. His voice carried in the silence of the snowfall.

  Marson ignored him.

  They went on without speaking, and their huffing and breathing seemed to grow louder. The snow gathered so quickly, thickening, and now they had to lift their feet out of it and put them back down again, climbing, and the resistance of the gathered snow became another impediment.

  Finally they reached another place where the slope leveled slightly, the brow of a crest, like a landing on a staircase, and this led into a clearing. The trees opened out and fanned to the left and right. The four men walked a little ways into the opening. It was a meadow. They could see the sky here, or something of the sky, a screen of the snowfall with the suggestion of moonlight behind it. Marson reflected that it was light, a kind of light. The snowfield was such a change from the trees, the crowded feeling of the trunks surrounding them as they climbed. They spread out and moved slowly into the clearing. The snow was pristine. There were no tracks and no hollows in it, no sign that anyone had walked here. They stopped again about fifty yards in. The old man fell on a hidden stone, startling the others, and they watched as he quickly tried to rise. The corporal helped him and felt the shivering in his frame. The old man was soaked, and the snow covered his head and shoulders. Marson unfurled his blanket and put it over him.

  “It’s a fucking blizzard,” Joyner said. “We’re lost.”

  “I’ll tell you when we’re lost,” Marson said. But he did not believe himself.

  “We could’ve wandered anywhere in this shit,” Joyner told him. “We could be three miles back down the fuck’n road and you know it.”

  “Three miles above the road, I know that,” Asch said. He sat down—he seemed partially to collapse—in the snow.

  “How much farther?” Marson asked the old man, who stood there shivering, holding the blanket tight around himself.

  “Capisco. Non lontano. No far. Ora è vicino. Near. Near.”

  “The son of a bitch is lying,” Joyner said, scratching.

  Asch had lain back on his pack in the snow. “Shut up, Joyner,” he said.

  “Quiet,” said Marson. “We’ll take a break here, and then we’ll go on.”

  “We’re just gonna stay here until the fuck’n snow covers us.”

  No one said anything for a moment. And then they were down, facing out from one another, trying to peer into the trees. A sound had come from somewhere, a snapping of something, a branch falling, heavy with the snow—or a footfall. It made them all realize how exposed they were.

  “Move,” Corporal Marson said, “that way.” They headed into the nearest trees, trying to keep low, though this was undoable because the snow impeded every step. They kept having to lift their feet out of it, and it held them, made their flight a strangely farcical lurching and faltering, a ridiculous clownish rush. Asch even laughed, once, high and soprano sounding in the echoless silence, and Marson told him to shut up. The corporal’s blistered and inflamed foot stabbed him with each lumbering step. But they all got to the trees and ranged themselves among the trunks, looking out at the blank face of the clearing with their tracks in it, going off in the dark.

  After a long interval of waiting and listening, Joyner muttered, “There’s nobody else on this fucker but us.”

  “You want to walk out into that clearing?” Asch said. “You go right ahead.”

  “I want to turn around and go back down, remember?”

  “Well, we can’t stay here.”

  The snow flew at them sideways now, the wind having picked up, blowing across the open space.

  “You guys are Christians,” Asch said. “You believe in an angry God who’s interested in payback. Right? ‘Vengeance is mine’—all that. Well, we’re gonna pay for yesterday. I think we might be paying for it now.”

  “You’re so full of shit,” Joyner said. “Let go of it, will you? It’s our religion so we’re the ones who’ll go to hell, not you.”

  “I’m not even going to answer that,” Asch said. “Jesus, Joyner. The way your mind works.”

  “It’s stupid to argue about it here,” Marson said.

  “I can’t get the image of her legs out of my head.”

  Marson almost turned to Asch to say he had the same unwanted picture in his own mind. But the knowledge of it frightened him. He had again the obliterating sense that everything of his memory, everything of his knowledge and his dreams and the hopes and aspirations of his lived life, was in a kind of gray, lifeless suspension. Even the wish to be generous and to seek the good opinion of others. It was all elsewhere.

  But he could not think about that now, could not let himself give it room in his mind. There was no place for it there, but only for getting through these hours of the cold and the rising wind.

  Joyner and Asch were waiting for him to say something.

  He looked out at the snowfield, then at his compass. He took the scope out of his web belt and panned the field slowly. He could see only the snow inscribing the shape of the wind. “We’re gonna go until we can see what’s beyond this,” he said. “And we’re gonna keep to the trees and go around.” He took the old man by the elbow. “Capeesh? Around? You know the way?”

  The old man nodded, gesturing toward the tree line. “Sì. Around.”

  FOURTEEN

  THEY KEPT as much as possible to the trees, with the dusting of snow limning the trunks on one side, the side where the wind was coming, raising a blinding cloud and stinging their faces. Marson’s foot was now burning deep and was strangely numb at the same time. It seemed that the flesh around the abrasion, leading down into the toes, was dead. And the snow made each step a crucible, an agony. He kept trying to offer up the pain, but his concentration was breaking down. The old man’s rope-soled shoes were packed with the snow, and he was shaking so visibly that again it became necessary to stop. Marson made the others gather close to him, to try warming him. The corporal’s blanket was stiff with freezing, adhering to the old man’s frame.

  “Morirò di freddo,” Angelo said, shivering.

  “We don’t understand you,” Joyner said. “Fucking stupid—”

  “Shut up,” Marson told him.

  “Morirò. Die. Wintry!”

  “Yeah,” said Joyner. “All of us.”

  “We’re gonna have to build a fire,” said Marson. “Look for a place away from the field.”

  “Shit. You think that’s safe to do?”

  They all waited, facing into the clearing on their left, as if listening for anything like another human presence in the acres of white before them, the crowding trunks behind. There wasn’t anything but the sweeping flakes and the wind.

  “I don’t know,” Asch said. “If anybody else is around they’re building a fire, too, or they’re gonna die.”

  Once more, they waited.

  “Let’s just stay awake and alert,” Marson said at last, and led them deeper into the trees. They came to a hollow of sorts, a dip in the ground, in the lee of another stone outcropping. Asch and Joyner went off to forage for kindling, and the other two dug out a place just under the curve of the rock. It was difficult to tell which way they had gone now, how far from the other side of the mountain. It was even possible that they had retraced some ground, heading back down toward the road. The snow could’ve hidden their own tracks from them. According to the compass, they had been moving steadily east.

  But the most important thing now was getting out of the wind.

  Joyner and Asch were two ghost-dark shapes in the falling curtain of flakes, the wide whiteness out of which the snow-lined trunks of the trees rose. Their s
quabbling carried back, even in the face of the storm. Marson and Angelo sat against each other side by side, in the lee of the rock. The snow had turned to sleet, mixed now with more freezing rain. They huddled under the declivity, just beyond the reach of the worst of it, and watched Joyner and Asch come stumbling back, their arms full of the windfall for which they had had to dig. It took a while to build the fire, but when it was going, they hunched close, feeling the warmth.

  It felt like the first warmth of the world.

  Marson watched the ashes and embers rise into the snowing sky and felt them as an announcement of their position. But the crackling of the fire and the groaning of the branches above them were the only sounds now. Clods of snow shook loose from the tops of the trees and dropped like rags among the branches.

  In the firelight, he looked at Angelo’s face. It was full of wrinkles and faintly dishonest looking—there was something about the way he kept glancing away. He had a long nose, and bony cheeks, and deep-socketed eyes that, in the flickering, suggested the skull beneath the flesh. There was a thin downturning of the mouth on either side, a permanent frown. On his forehead were two marks, upside down Vs, like little scars, and you thought of nails until you realized it was the way the wrinkles in his brow gathered, just under what would’ve been the hairline. When he opened his mouth to speak, you could see that the front teeth, upper and lower, were all he had, and the upper ones were in bad shape.