Drink for the Thirst to Come

by Lawrence Santoro

  The corporal turned. A low growl came from his chest. He looked far into Welly’s eye, laid a black hand across Welly’s mouth. Welly’s eyes widened, he started to speak, but the corporal pressed his left thumb on Welly’s forehead. Pressed and pressed. The thumb entered Welly’s head. Seemed to. Of course it did not, could not. Then the corporal let him go. Eye to eye, the corporal said, “Some carry. Other some dig. Now, you carry. Sometime… sometime you dig. You hope you not dig.”

  The shiny corporal’s eyes scanned the line of men. They rested on Bill, the eyes, gold and shot through with brown. “Now carry.” He walked away and the men followed.

  “He hurt you?” Bill said.

  Welly spit and wiped his mouth. “Nuh,” he said.

  “What’d he do, then?”

  Welly twitched and wiped his face, touched his head where the corporal’s thumb had pressed. “Dunno. Dunno. He mark me?”

  No mark, none that Bill saw.

  “Ah. I always been a bit touched, eh Bill? Touched! Get it?”

  They kipped, wrapped in wool blankets, huddled in a side gallery.

  “How long you fink, Bill? ’Fore they trick orf this lit’le home o’ ours? Blow it to hell and let us get back up to the real fight?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Nor me. Questions mate. Questions is what I got. You too? Yea. Them nig-nogs, now, they’re in charge. They got answers. I reckon we’re here for the duration, like. Here till we’re done!”

  Skitch, skitch, the silence said.

  “What do you fig’r?” Welly whispered to Bill. “Fritz or us, who’ll be first?”

  Bill shrugged. “Dunno,” he said. “Corporal said, so, yeah, I figure,” Bill said.

  Skitch, skitch, said the silence.

  “Fig’r we’ll see Ol’ Nick soon? Eh?” Welly laughed.

  Skitch, skitch, said the earth.

  “Yeah. Fig’r.”

  “Nig-nog ain’t talking big, is sure.”

  Bill thought about it. “Well…” Bill started. The darkness suited thinking. “We gotter get there first,” Bill whispered, “that’s a cert. Dig under No Man’s Land, get to th’ Hun’s line, under his trenches. Then our digger niggers rout out a gallery. For the explosives, you know, a nice tight chamber. Then we haul the blasting stuff, bit by bit. Pack it in…”

  “Yeah. That’s us, I reckon… Hauling HE. Packing high explosive?”

  “Reckon.”

  “Don’t fancy that, Bill. Packing explosions like a bloody horse? Ain’t what me ol’ mum raise her lit’le Welly boy for.”

  “Oi! Hshh…” from way, way down in the dark. One of their own.

  “Hishh, yersel’…” Welly whispered back. There was silence for a minute.

  Skitch, skitch, skitch… said the silence.

  “Them Africans,” Welly started.

  “Wha…?”

  “Africaners. They know somefink. I been watching…” Welly snugged up close. Bill felt Welly’s breath in his ear, smelled their supper of boiled spud and thin horse gravy. “Cookin’ somefink for us all, oh you know they are. Why ain’t we seen sun since we come here? Eh? Why ain’t no one else come down for helping since? Saving us for somefink special.” A gentle breeze came from the darkness beyond. “Hsh,” Welly said.

  They lay in silence.

  “Oi,” Welly said. “Bill? Reckon the Huns is got theirs digging their mines, too?”

  “Their what?”

  “Africaners. Well, whoever. I dunno. Who’s digging fer us, Bill? I ain’t never spoke to no diggers. We do the hauling. Them black boys do the telling. Dunno. I never seen no one dig! Must be blokes up there, past them tarps, niggers maybe? Or what?”

  “Shamblers,” Bill said before he thought about it.

  “Eh?”

  “Nothing, Welly. Old Suffolk tales is all.”

  Beyond the gallery’s low opening, the tunnel lights went dim. Then out. Then there was nothing anywhere, except Welly’s breath and his own. Then something else. Something moved in the near distance, a shuffle at the very bottom of Bill’s hearing. The darkness rippled and from the ripples came a…

  What is it? Bill thought. What?

  “Wha…” Welly began. Bill stopped his mouth.

  Suffolk tales remembered: Da’s silent house, Mum’s white, white sheets, him, just a lad, lying abed between sleeping brothers, darkness all ’round, above, below, outside, oozing up from the ground. He knew darkness then, Little Bill did, the dark, so full of hairy things, man-things and bigger things, he knew, than Da, things that breathed and shuffled on hard feet. And Bill, a little lad, pressed his palms against his eyeballs, blotting all out. And with the press, explosions of color bloomed behind his lids. Little Bill knew, he did. The shufflers carried the smell of rotted meat on them, a stink like down where Dad butchered hogs and for two days after. There, between his brothers, Little Bill pressed his hands into his eyes and waited for the shufflers to pass.

  They were there now, shambling the tunnel. Shuffling toward the mine head. Not the same, ’course not, but the same smell of dead flesh oozed from them, those man-things, their black hairs and hard dark feet. Probably. They moved through the same silent explosions of color that danced in his eyes behind his hands. Little Bill once thought the shamblers ate those colors that lived in his eyes. They ate them colors and shat dead pig-meat, made the stinks that lived up his nose when Da butchered. He knew them to be hairy, knew them to be black, black as the inside of his head. He knew they ate boys’ dreams and men and all. He knew that, all right.

  Now, they were out there. Now, he was glad he couldn’t speak, now.

  “Whassat, Bill?” Welly said.

  “Nothing,” Bill said. He’d have told Welly about the shamblers but that would make them real.

  Old Bill woke. He hadn’t slept by the roadside, not exactly. He hadn’t slept. The moon lay edge-on along the line of trees on the Messines Ridge and constellations filled the sky. The air was still and still warm. More warmth rose from the earth. In the bright darkness, Old Bill saw the world as it was at that moment and as it had been, the British trenches cut in chalk and mud. He saw the great Between of No Man’s Land, the rolls of wire accordioned out for mile on mile, the broken trees, the stirred dead and rotted horse. Farther off, on the Messines Ridge, he saw the German lines and zig-zags. The shadows of the craters, the great depressions where the mouths of hell had yawned that chirping morning, 3:10 Ack Emma.

  And further, his watery eyes and youth reached down to the dark tunnels, the galleries and mines he, Welly, and the others had scraped and carried from the living earth.

  There it was. The last of the moonlight showed him, before him, beneath him: the Is, the Was, the Always Will-Be. Through collapsed and burned out galleries, below, still moved the shuffling shapes, those shamblers still digging beneath the fields of Flanders. They prowled, they swam in dirt, rock, chalk and mud, pale fish in the depthless oceans beyond the watery moon and turning stars.

  Hun sappers broke through in Bill and Welly’s night (above, it may have been bright, bright Sunday, sun and silence, or drizzly Friday, nothing doing but the wait-’n-wait). Welly had just whispered a Welly sort of whisper. After, neither remembered what, but when he whispered the world went black. From the ceiling of the small side gallery (little more than an underground storage shed) where Welly and Bill were nabbing a kip, a rain of noise and guttural shouts fell on them. A cascade of dirt, first, then bodies. Then the light went out. Something shoved Bill aside. With falling bodies came the smell of strangers, of air from a different part of earth, bodies drenched in different sweats, breaths from different lungs, it poured from above.

  “Oi!” Welly shouted in the din.

  “Crikey!” Bill yelled.

  A gramble of German words spewed into his left ear. Something hard pressed his ribs. Flashes here, there, around. He grabbed the hard thing and twisted it from himself. Another flash and gunpowder thunder lit the space. A grunt from nearby. Other flashes, thunde
rs. He and the other rolled in dirt, clattered among tools, coils of wire, lengths of pipe. Empty sandbags attacked his face, caught his arms, legs. More shots, more grunts. A pickax came to his hands and a blood-cry rose from inside him as he pushed the darkness back to gain swinging space. He swung. He swung again. And again. With each swing he screamed. A buzzing riot shot through his nerves. He stepped forward, swung, took another step and swung again. Ah! The pick connected (the wall, he thought—the pick bit softness and the soft something hadn’t screamed). Again he connected. The pick dug in and wiggled.

  Beyond the gallery, Welly shouted too, a voice brought from his depths. More shots, soft thuds of bullet strikes. Grunts. No screams.

  In a minute, maybe more, others arrived. Some, from the break-through above, rained down, more dirt, more stench. Others. Their own reserves, from the tunnel, other galleries, wherever. English, German, Welsh, maybe, African jabber-jabber, Bill didn’t know, it all exploded in darkness: words, shots, now screams and a continuing rain of dirt, a dirtfall, an avalanche of bodies and steel filled the space. More muzzle flashes, reports. Bill dove face-down, flattened himself in the dirt. He tried swimming deeper. He crawled. He screamed as he did. When he reached a wall, he wriggled, farther, still screaming, no idea, not a notion where safety was, if safety was at all where hell poured from above and death stank everywhere.

  In a minute, he’d crawled beyond, beyond cordite flash and grunts, the clash and sparks as shovels met picks or found softer ground in dirt or flesh. He crawled and crawled. He screamed. In another minute he realized he was calling Welly’s name. He shut up.

  It seemed he’d escaped the battle. His heart thudded against his eardrums, his breath came in, went out. His hands shook. He felt it all. If he bled, he bled small. Life tingled, filthy, smelly, fucking sweet. He rose, his hands clawed, dragged himself upright. His hand found steel: the pipe, the pipe that breathed from the surface down to them, the pipe. He was in the main tunnel and still the dark held him, the blind dark.

  Bill wedged himself against a wooden brace. His body screamed for clear air, for light, for silence, for some open place where nothing pressed him into himself and where he didn’t dig into darkness.

  He took a moment.

  In that moment something shambled by. He pressed the tunnel wall. Another something passed; it spread a chill of… What? Of old meat, of piggie two days dead. A whiff from Suffolk childhood. Another darkness shambled by, and another and more, more.

  They were advancing from the mine head, from the face, beyond the veil. The diggers. They were coming, shuffling to the rescue.

  He held himself close. He sank, his face between his knees. He whispered quietly to himself, kept the prayer inside so they wouldn’t hear. He pressed his eyes so the colors blazed within him. Give them something to digest, he thought. The colors in his head. Vittles for the fight.

  From beyond, where the small war clashed and grunted, he heard a wet tearing, a soft cracking. Screams, now. Not the enemy, his mates giving voice to pain, to terror, to life leaving. The clash of metal on metal or into flesh, the crack of pistols faded one by one to nothing. The soft wet shredding of flesh and the soft crackle of bone went on. And whimpers from the darkness, they increased.

  Soon the screams ended but the whimpers lingered.

  Then, in the near silence of sighs, the darkness shambled by again. No rush, no need, just darkness rippling past him again and again in the dark, back toward the mine face, back to the veil, dragging, carrying the moans, the whimpers.

  Something touched him and he screamed. “Bill, Old Bill!” the thing shouted and embraced him. “Welly!” Welly wet and shaking. Welly screaming him, his name. And Bill, of course, shouted his.

  “Bill!” he shouted. “Oh Bill! They’re us, them is! Them diggers at the face, them behind that tarp! They’re us!”

  Bill held Welly. A sticky wet covered him, but Bill held him, let him sob.

  “Old Ned,” Welly sobbed. “He’s here! Old Ned what slipped orf the path and drownded wiv his kit! He’s one. I sawr his face in a gunflash. Sawr it, Bill. He’s down here, one’a them! And Riley, Munger. Uvers, so many uvers! All down wiv us!”

  The moon set. Morning was close but star-night filled Old Bill’s eyes. He thought better, heard better. Old Bill heard the grasses stir. The windless night was full of wind shadows and rolling earth. He stood and began walking across the field toward the ridge.

  Later, Welly said, “You believe in God?” He whispered to Bill’s back as they carried their dirt to the lift.

  Bill shrugged. “Dunno.”

  “I never. Fig’red this was it, wa’n’t it?”

  “I reck’n.” They reached the lift and dropped their loads onto the stage with the others. Welly rubbed his forehead. The rest shuffled past, dropped their bags and trudged back toward the mine face.

  Above them, the tiny circle of day cast white silence and flickering shadow as the load of bags rose.

  “Nothing stirring. No war today,” Bill said.

  “Always somfink happen’in’, I reck’n.” Welly kept staring at the bright circle above. His body shook. Tears showed in the dirt of his eyes. He rubbed his head again. “Billy, I al’ays figured, ‘God? None of that guff for old Welly.’ I dunno. Scares me, Bill, but there may be a God’n all.”

  “Could be…”

  “No. Fink of it! Them fings diggin’ down there. I reckon them is us. You know? Them blokes as gone before. The dead. Figure them…” he leaned close to Bill’s ear, “them Africans—ours, theirs, who knows—is jigabooin’ the dead to life. Some nig-nog jinxin’, mebbe. War’s making lots of dead for all the work down here, somewhere’s else. Maybe everywhere. I dunno. I mean, I saw Old Ned. I saw him. That was him. Sure as I’m me. Old Ned coming after them fings as was falling down from the German mine… An’ Munger… Him as was always peekin’ out the loop to No Man’s Land…”

  “Welly,” Bill started. He started to say it was all a load of old cobblers, that he’d gone shell-shocked, rounders. He didn’t. “Welly,” is all he said.

  “Yea. An’ he din’t even know me, Bill. Ol’ Ned din’t know his old mate. Nor Riley. No.”

  Bill let it go. He looked up at the dim circle of light. A cloud across the sun, maybe.

  “So, I fig’res, Bill… They all gone and snuffed it. And there it is. They’s somfink else, now. Something from after death! There’s that much about what we don’t know. You know? If that shite’s out there, then, what the hell? Bad shite means there’s good stuff, too. If ther’s the devil, you know, there must be God.” He was crying. “God, Bill. If there’s God, then there’s… Y’know? I been a bad’n. Y’know? We bof been. Crikey. God means hell…”

  The wind shadows rolled past Old Bill like waves. Grass caressed his legs, his thighs. The stalks played him like a billion dust dry fingers. His palm played across their tassels. They rasped with small, edged teeth. He walked toward high ground between craters at the ridge, the place that hadn’t opened its mouth to the 3:10 sky that June morning, 1917. He crossed what had been the British lines, stepped into the Between, No Man’s Land.

  Morning wake up. Bill, Welly, those left, in a line down the tunnel, empty sacks in hand. Twenty men of the forty that had come down with them. The shining black corporal with the golden eyes walked the line in shadow and light: light, dark, light, dark passed over him…

  “You. Here!” The corporal pointed to Welly.

  Welly looked at Bill. “Wha?” he whispered.

  “You come.”

  “’S alright, i’nnit?” Welly whispered.

  “You come.” The corporal pointed to another man, and another and another. Five in all. Bill was left, one of fifteen.

  “Soon done,” the corporal said and pointed. Welly went last behind the veil.

  Bill stopped where the ridge rose. Either side of him, the line of craters stretched for miles. Where he stood under the stars and in the still gently roiling earth, nothing had happened that mo
rning 13 years ago.

  At 3:10 Ack Emma, General Plumer said, “By damn!” and someone closed the electric gap. Along the ridge, 19 mines had blown. The world shouted with the voice of one million two hundred thousand pounds of HE. Ten thousand men died that second, more, later.

  Two mines failed.

  Bill knew why the one. The other? Not a clue.

  Life went quiet when Welly left. Bill had watched men die. He’d known the men who were the empty places in the mess, on the firing step. Things went on. But the silence of Welly’s going was complete. Part of Bill went too. He woke to silence. He carried his loads, a stranger’s back ahead. He went to sleep without a dozen questions, no answers to consider.

  The earth, the grass, reached out to caress him. The earth beneath the silent stars breathed. He felt the swimmers in the shadows rising.

  “Know one of your own, don’t you?” he said to the rolling runnels that tipped him back and forth.

  Time came. The ten who remained carted HE down the tunnel. A nearly endless supply squeaked down the lift from the light above or from the darkness, in rain or dry. It came and came. Tons of it. Carried, one charge at a time, and left at the canvas wall, then back to the lift for more. When they returned, their previous load was gone.

  They rested.

  The corporal watched.

  When they rose, the corporal pointed. “You,” he’d say to one. “You go where charges go. You pack. I show.” And another went behind the canvas curtain.

  Finally, only Bill remained when the last charge came down the lift. Bill and the corporal.

  “Wire come. We get.”

  Bill followed the corporal to the lift. Down it came: a cable spool unrolling, trailing lines to the surface. Together, Bill and the corporal rolled the spool to the canvas wall.

  “You go,” the corporal said. He pointed to the canvas flap. “I show.”