In Sunlight and in Shadow (33 page)

He stared out over the fields, his balance not completely restored and the roar of the ocean that he heard within almost as loud as its actual static carried by luffing winds into the garden. As if he had not left the waves, if he closed his eyes he didn’t know where he was. For a moment, a cloud of humid, perfumed air from the second floor of the house traveled past him. He heard the water slapping the base of the shower after she had gathered it in her hair and it had overflowed and fallen. Then that receded as the wind moved along the compass rose. As he sat in the garden set like an emerald in fields of row crops planted daringly close to the ocean, he was slowly coming back to land.

In a distant field between a line of oaks and the first rising of the dunes he saw a deer grazing in shadow. He knew that with a rifle he would be able to bring it down with a single shot at three hundred yards. He could calibrate range and elevation and compensate for the easterly wind. He had almost a sixth sense that would tell him when the animal would take a step or if it would stay still. But even had he had a rifle he would not have taken this beckoning shot, for what he knew of shooting he had learned as a prelude to and in the practice of killing men, and he wanted never to hold a rifle again.

The night before, fireflies had woven through the trees in great profusion, blinking in the darkness, crossing overhead as if to find refuge in the camouflage of the stars, and at a distance passing for the traces of meteors. Now, in full sun and heat, the fields seemed solid and immutable, gravity was aligning itself properly in his inner ear, the surf fading, and dreams burnt away by the afternoon sun. This was a tranquil place where beauty, tradition, and wealth were like the walls of Holland that kept back the sea. Surrounded by the great stillness of the fields, he was about to fall asleep.

But then, from the east, with the suddenness of a pistol shot, a brightly colored monoplane came roaring at him, six feet above the ground, as straight as if it were on a track aligned with the cultivated rows. Just beyond the garden, not fifty feet away, the mass of this plane, with blood-red trim but otherwise as yellow as the yolk of an egg, streaked over the hedge in a blur, the engine noise vibrating in Harry’s chest and rattling every pane of glass in the Hale house. Catherine pushed her bathroom window fully open and peered out at nothing.

Then it came back from the other direction, still flying astonishingly low. After attacking the fields with spray, the plane closed its nozzles, flew for an instant in the clear, and, just before it would have ploughed into a dune, pulled up, rolled, and doubled back, dropping low and releasing spray as it thundered by. Catherine returned her window to its former position ajar, and Harry stood up, following the plane to the end of the field and longing for its return.

As mist rose from the ponds and began to cover the lawns of Further Lane, and the ocean thudded nearby like a metronome, it was for Harry the eleventh of July, 1943, at the height of summer and after the triumph in North Africa. The sun rose over the Mediterranean east of Tunisia, changing the color of the sea, first from a furious gray inappropriate to summer heat, to a kind of melon green, and then to cold blue. Far away and in silence, fleets of fighters rose and fell like swallows, dipping over the swells, rising in great arcs, and suddenly turning. Inland at Kirwan, the traffic was immense and unceasing. Dappling the sky like dense flak, British and American planes of every type moved intently upon their separate missions, going to or returning from the invasion of Sicily.

As the sun climbed, the sea became a canvas wet with color, dotted with ships still disappearing over the horizon to mate the rear echelons of the armies to their advance guard fighting in a battle that threw its electricity back upon the troops waiting to take part. To a paratrooper at his assembly point, it was miraculous. Never did the planes not fill the sky; never did they cease forming up, only to move north and away; never did they collide as they swarmed; and never did they not inspire as they lifted from the runways, their engines at full power, each plane rising until it was a silent black speck, then silvery white, then an afterimage, and then nothing. When they returned it was as if they were born out of the same nothingness, though unlike that which is reborn, when they finally touched down they seemed heavy and tired.

That day, the paratroopers rested and checked their equipment over and over. The 504th and 505th Regiments of the 82nd Airborne were already fighting the Hermann Göring Division north of Gela on the coast of Sicily. Though the battle was fought far from sight, it was possible to feel the tension rising and falling, and though the remnants of the 82nd, held in reserve at Tunis, were supposed to be at rest, their exhaustion began as the first of the other regiments departed for Sicily. They could not help it.

As the day wore on, a messenger delivered orders. Between 2230 and 2400, they would be dropped onto the beach at Gela to reinforce troops already landed and fighting. Harry and the seven pathfinders with whom he shared a tent would fly on and jump at Ponte Olivo, perhaps, depending upon the course of the next hours’ fighting, beyond a line that the 504th and 505th had not been able to breach. The object was to get behind advance elements of the Hermann Göring Division that had descended to defend the coast, mark drop zones for subsequent landings, scout the terrain, cut telephone wires, change road signs, and blow bridges.

The waiting was difficult in itself and made more difficult in trying to decide, for example, what to eat, a problem no one had ever solved completely. Rough air, natural anxiety, and day-long intermittent nausea dictated that they should not eat much, and the temptation was not to eat at all. No one wanted to drop or land, much less move and fight, on a full stomach. On the other hand, their strength was already draining from them, and in just hours on the ground it would be much more rapidly depleted. A proper balance was hard to achieve, true rest improbable.

As the commander of his small detachment, the oldest, and an officer, Harry had to take charge, an improvisation that he himself had to believe so as to give others confidence. Everyone had tried to sleep, but even had it not been too hot in the tent they wouldn’t have been able to, and they worried that when having to draw upon all their resources to stay alive they might instead surrender to fatigue and death. This, in turn, made sleep, which had been merely unlikely, only something to dream about.

He told them that they should neither try to sleep nor be anxious for lack of sleep. “Your anxiety will disappear in the roar of the engines,” he said. “From the moment of takeoff you’ll want to make the jump more than anything in the world, and when you exit the plane you won’t be afraid. You’ll work your skills, move as you’ve never moved before, and wonder, How did I get from there to here if I can’t remember it? And you won’t be weak or tired for at least a day or two.”

As always and often, they checked and rechecked their equipment: their many times cleaned and well oiled carbines, their pouches of ammunition, the radio, grenades, explosives, and harnesses. They counted their rations and calculated days. They opened pouches to make sure that the bandages and morphine they had seen there twenty times that day were still in place. And every time they looked up they saw the planes beginning or ending their missions, circling slowly in the far distance almost over the sea, rising quickly, descending sharply, and, nearer the field, turning in vertiginous arcs.

In a vast, prayerful order of silence, thousands of men went about their separate tasks. Even before battle they had entered into a deep connection with those, past and future, who had found or would find themselves part of a great host, moving as if without will, coordinated and sanctified by death. This pointless and tragical fugue had rolled through history since the beginning. The pace may have varied, but the harvest was steady over time, its momentum increasing and undiminished. It moved evenly, treated all passions equally, and was as cold and splendid as the waves in winter.

What force, he wondered, could paint such a canvas and command such dedication while never failing, again and again, to take sons from mothers, husbands from wives, and fathers from children? Unable to hesitate or protest, he looked toward the weapons and equipment he had made ready many times over, and felt love that would forever abide for all those he had followed, and all who would follow after, in thrall of this tide.

Townsend Coombs was too young for his name, which properly belonged to a portly, middle-aged insurance salesman in a small town, though not the one in New Hampshire from which Townsend Coombs had come, but perhaps in Indiana or Ohio, or some other place that sophisticates, having visited for perhaps an hour, would then mock for eternity.

His town had a name like that of one of Fenimore Cooper’s Indians, and neither Harry nor anyone else could ever get it straight. In writing reports that called for this reference Harry had to look it up each time and carry the spelling verbally from where he saw it written to where he himself would write it—Ashtikntatippisinkinkta (truly)—as if it were water that would run through his cupped hands. He never managed to spell it the same way twice, and neither did anyone else, and the only one who could actually say it was Townsend Coombs himself. This and other things suggested very strongly that Townsend Coombs should have been in that town rather than in North Africa somewhere south of Tunis. He was more than ten years younger than Harry, who, not yet thirty, seemed to him to be heavy, slow with age, someone who knew what was over the wall. Townsend Coombs hardly had a beard, and his face was almost as round as a child’s. He did—often unconvincingly—what the older men did, and adopted their expressions, their language, and to some extent the way they moved, although his age allowed him to move with a smoothness he could not banish even when he tried to imitate what he thought was the weariness of experience. As the youngest, he had no choice but to follow. This was to be his education, and he took to it not from a tendency to imitate but as a means of staying alive. They were much older, they were still living, and theirs was the only story available to heed. And as he discovered in training and their time in North Africa, the other seven were watching out for him.

The great assemblage and activity on and above the land and the sea were more exciting for him than for the others, whose view was colored by their knowledge of things he had yet to experience. For Townsend Coombs, all this seemed not the potential end of things but their beginning. He was proud of the strength of his country, comforted and assured by the vast numbers and their balletic efficiencies. He was fascinated by the British, from whom he had sprung, and delighted by colors and climates so different from the white and slate-blue New Hampshire winters and its short, cool, entrancingly deep green summers.

Harry often listened patiently and respectfully when Townsend Coombs told him what Harry already knew, or, wanting to impress, about the triumphs of his sports teams, or mischief he had done with his friends. Putting a skunk in a teacher’s mailbox, things like that. Harry had tried to steer him to the soldier’s craft and draw his attention to what he would need in battle. It was sad to heavy the heart of a youth, but it had to be done.

Sometimes Harry was not patient with him, and would revert fully to rank, ordering him to do something unpleasant or criticizing him in ways that he suspected he himself would regret for the rest of his life. Once, when the boy was acting foolishly, Harry had snapped, “Not that way, you idiot!” which, although it had hardly been a mortal wound, had shamed and hurt Townsend Coombs in front of the others. And because Harry was his commanding officer, he could not, and did not, apologize.

In evening light forty miles east, the sea turned a color blue that hid details shown by day. From beaches and bluffs it was no longer possible to see wave lines sweeping in on winds from the Levant, or whitecaps spilling over, though one could see night hanging over Palestine and Egypt as the sky above them tended to violet as it cooled. On the airfield, as far as the eye could make out, long lines of men blended into the desert and dusk as they moved with military patience into fleets of transports and gliders. Though assembled en masse, they would fight in much smaller groups, and at times individually. But gathered in thousands for a flight that would end with thousands of parachutes silently blooming in the dark, they felt the great pride and elation of battle that battle itself almost always destroys.

If you looked ahead or back, right or left, you saw on the rust and ochre desert sinking into the dark thousands of armed men quietly boarding the planes to sit in facing rows. Insane and guaranteed to break hearts into eternity, there it was nonetheless, war inescapable, elevating the sense of being alive like nothing else but love. The engines started with such great noise that cheers were made silent and doors closed and bolted without sound. They felt the brakes strain as the throttles were opened, and then the transports moved slowly into lines to await their turn to rise. It seemed to take forever, but in a steady rhythm the aircraft ahead of them in the queue began their runs and screamed past. Then they themselves turned. The first ninety degrees put them on edge. The next promised everything at the end, and, almost to the degree, they knew when the turn would flatten out. For most the timing was perfect, and the engines came up to full exactly when they expected. The airframe shuddered as if all its rivets would pop at once, but the more it vibrated the more it moved, and soon it was racing down the runway, following the path of the other planes rising in the half darkness like fat, olive-drab dogs.

Its propellers spinning in occasional flames of exhaust, the plane lifted. The last thing Townsend Coombs saw in the light was the illusory basketwork of the spinning propeller blades, as gold as a woven bracelet. Soon they were over the sea, which despite the fact that evening had long sunk into violet and black, somehow held a trace of powder blue where it ran beyond the shadow of the cape.