The Secret of Raven Point (17 page)

“It won’t happen again.”

“Good.”

She had said it firmly, yet she doubted its truth. Her mind was already sifting and speculating, wondering why Barnaby had screamed Tuck’s name and said, “Forgive me!” What did Barnaby want Tuck’s forgiveness for?

“Come,” said Willard, signaling Juliet outside. “He won’t go running anywhere in the next ten minutes.”

The night air offered a faint respite from the muggy tent. Willard patted at his pockets until he found a flattened pack of cigarettes. He lit one and walked ahead of Juliet toward a table outside the mess tent. He sat with his back to the table, so that Juliet was compelled to sit beside him.

“That discussion could have brought him back to the realm of consciousness. It means there’s even more to unlock—perhaps a lot more.” Willard studied his cigarette. “This will take a while. Eating an eyeball . . . I’d love to say it was a nightmare, but there’s one thing I’ve come to learn through all this: The human mind doesn’t invent the worst. Nightmares are mundane compared to what actually happens up there.” He turned to her. “I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask: Are you certain you’re comfortable with what you’re hearing? I wouldn’t hold it against you if it was too much.”

Juliet longed to tell him about her nightmares, but what if he thought her too fragile for the work?

“I’m comfortable enough,” she said, and from the slow, sad nod he offered in response, Juliet wondered if she had marooned Willard with his own discomfort, if he, too, was haunted by the blue eye.

They heard footsteps and turned to see Mother Hen approaching, swinging her flashlight. “Oh, the bloody heat. I thought
Africa
would kill me. This,” she said, wagging her tongue to taste the night air, “it’s like the air itself is sweating.” She thumped onto the opposite bench and in politeness, Juliet and Willard pivoted to face her. Mother Hen’s eyes moved suspiciously between them and she glanced at her watch.

“Your shift ended four hours ego, Nurse Dufresne.”

“I was working with Dr. Willard. We got Barnaby speaking again.”

“I see.”

“Nurse Dufresne has been invaluable,” Willard said. “Barnaby is the most stubborn case I’ve seen.”

“Well, I hope the progress moves rapidly. There’s a racket from above about a court-martial. Major Decker has been getting a lot of pressure.” She pulled a cigarette from her pocket and Willard extended the flame of his lighter.

“I doubt it will come to that,” said Willard.

“I have come to the conclusion these days that anything can happen.” Mother Hen removed a folded paper from her pocket and flattened it on the table. “This crap was all over the hospital perimeter.”

The Girl You Left Behind

The Way of All Flesh

When pretty Joan Hopkins was still standing behind the ribbon counter of a five-and-ten on Third Avenue in New York City, she never dreamed of ever seeing the interior of a duplex Park Avenue apartment. Neither did young Bob Harrison, the man she loves. Bob was drafted and sent to the battlefields of Europe thousands of miles away. Through Lazare’s employment agency Joan got a job as a private secretary with wily Sam Levy. Sam is piling up big money on war contracts. Should the slaughter end very soon, he would suffer an apoplectic stroke.

NOW JOAN KNOWS WHAT BOB

AND HIS PALS ARE FIGHTING FOR!

Joan always used to look up to Bob as the guiding star of her life, and she was still a good girl when she started working for Sam Levy.
But she often got the blues thinking of Bob, whom she hadn’t seen for over two years. Her boss had an understanding heart and was always very kind to her, so kind indeed, that he often invited her up to his place. He had always wanted to show her his “etchings.” Besides, Sam wasn’t stingy, and each time Joan came to see him, he gave her the nicest presents. Now, all women like beautiful expensive things. But Sam wasn’t the man you could play for a sucker. He wanted something, wanted it very definitely. . . .

Poor little Joan! She is still thinking of Bob, yet she is almost hoping that he’ll never return.

“I used to think,” said Mother Hen, her face slack, pulling a flask from her back pocket, “that the sheer magnitude of war—the blood and the bone and the loss of life—would somehow erase all of those smaller concerns of heartbreak and betrayal, lust and covetousness. Or at the very least, idiotic prejudice. Scapegoating the Jews? Half the doctors who stitch these boys back together are Jewish, and yet this filth”—she jabbed her finger at the leaflet—“will have its power. I thought the sight of death and the fear of death would make saints of us all, would strip us bare of all want and worry except staying alive and saving lives, and we would rise to the occasion of discovering our own greatness. Just like all the boys who enlisted—they enlisted believing they were deeply courageous, expecting to prove themselves heroes. And here they are, weeping in their beds at what they have now learned of themselves, of humanity. Are they not, Dr. Willard?”

Willard nodded.

“Death, it seems, only makes us all the hungrier to live deeply and fully,” she continued, “which, in turn, means chaotically and cruelly. I don’t understand. It’s as though we insist on leaving our mark, no matter how messy. All those urges that once seemed fleeting and superficial turn out, when we are faced with the possibility
of slaughter, to be the very essence of us. My nurses finish assisting an amputation, feeling the ruin of a man’s life in their hands, and then rush off to fix their hair and find husbands. Men sitting in foxholes, fighting to save the whole of Europe and civilization, can be brought to tears by
this
printed rubbish—the thought of girlfriends back home fucking their bosses. Such extremes of emotion coexist within the human beast. At times, I confess, it overwhelms me.”

Mother Hen gripped the table and swayed, though whether this was the effect of alcohol or sentiment, Juliet couldn’t tell.

“The human mind,” said Dr. Willard, “is more unknowable than the entire ocean, or all the space between the stars.” He smiled. “It’s why I will always have a job.”

“Especially here.” Mother Hen stubbed out her cigarette. “So when Private Barnaby spoke, dare I ask what he said?”

“Quite a lot,” answered Willard, exchanging a brief look with Juliet. “But it’s hard to know yet what is essential. We’ll get him saying more.”

“The poor creature,” said Mother Hen.

They all sat awkwardly for a minute, listening to the cacophonous pulse of crickets and tree frogs, that primal bleating of insect and amphibian sounding out over the night long before there were wars or humans to fight in them.

Willard stubbed out his cigarette. “We should probably get Barnaby back to the Recovery Tent.”

They said good night to Mother Hen and carried Barnaby’s litter across the encampment. In the Recovery Tent they settled him into his bed, and Willard lifted Barnaby’s clipboard and wearily shook his head. “I didn’t like what she said about the court-martial. I want him saying more. And soon. Maybe next time we’ll try reading him some of those letters again. How far back do they go and when is the most recent?”

Juliet took the envelope stuffed with letters from beneath his bed and shook the contents free. She began unfolding each of the pages, and Willard reached for Barnaby’s musette bag. Juliet was arranging them chronologically when Willard said, “Also, a token from his wife could be useful.” He was waving a small white glove.

Pearl’s white glove.

A RUMBLING OUTSIDE
her tent woke Juliet. It sounded like the earth coughing up crust, a guttural gagging of the ground. For a moment she wondered if she’d dreamt the noise. In the dark she groped for her helmet, and then across the tent a flashlight came on. Bernice was sitting upright, her eyes wide and her chin extended as she turned her head slowly from side to side, straining to listen. Her thin lips shone with Vaseline.

“I don’t hear a plane,” said Bernice. “And I didn’t feel the ground shake, did you?”

Juliet touched the ground. “I don’t think so.”

“A bomb
shakes
the ground.”

Juliet scratched the inside of her ear; she thought she heard something outside, a distant whine, a faint whimper. An animal? A child?

She turned, instinctively, to look at Glenda’s bedroll.

“Where is she?” Juliet asked.

As Juliet and Bernice rushed out into the humid night, figures in bright white underwear were spilling out of the nearby pup tents. The sky was lit by a low full moon. Everyone was swinging flashlight beams in nervous, haphazard arcs, uncertain of what to do next. Juliet and Bernice joined a group of nurses from the next tent, all knuckling sleep from their eyes, yanking out hair curlers to fasten on their helmets. As the distant whimpering grew louder, something in its uneven undulations, something in the broad, haunting silences between moans, made it clear they were listening
to a human. Animals cried out in pain, Juliet knew. Humans cried out in fear of their pain; it was a sound she had come to know well.

Huddled together, the nurses moved cautiously. From nearby tents, groups of ward men and doctors and engineers converged. Soon four distinct bands were traveling the wide row between tents, cylinders of light sweeping the ground around them like electrified particles on the rim of a molecule. The groups veered slightly left, then right, mostly silent, trying to determine the source of the cries, until someone in the lead called, “On the hill!”

One by one people spilled through the narrow gaps between tents, rushing the hospital’s perimeter. At the thin line of trees marking the edge of the encampment, Juliet stopped. Beyond the trees a wide hill arched in the moonlight.

A shirtless engineer, a backpack slung from one shoulder, stretched his arms ramrod straight, trying to hold everyone back. “It’s a minefield!” he yelled.

The swelling crowd fell silent, and, as if in answer to his assertion, from the hill beyond came a high-pitched
Help!
that collapsed into sobs.

Juliet knew the voice immediately—Glenda’s.

Bernice gripped Juliet’s hand.

Someone had plugged in a surgical lamp and now shined it toward the hill. In the dissipated light, Juliet could see a trail of clothing snaking up the hill: an olive-drab jacket, a nightgown, lace-trimmed panties, a large brassiere. At the end of the trail, perhaps twenty yards beyond the tree line, she made out the shadowy figure of Dr. Lovelace, in blood-splattered long johns, suspended over Glenda in an awkward push-up.

“Stay exactly where you are!” the engineer called. “EXACTLY. These are
Schü
mines.”

The engineer opened his backpack and put together a long contraption with a metal disk; he snatched a dozen pebbles from the
ground and stepped forward slowly, swinging the mine detector in wide arcs, tossing pebbles ahead of him like horseshoes.

Along the tree line, the spectators began to assemble in an instinctive half formation. They mumbled and whispered.

“If he sets off a mine, won’t they get hit?” Juliet asked Bernice.

“
Schü
mines explode at ankle height,” she whispered. “It’s the Bouncing Bettys that spray that nasty shrapnel.”

As the engineer moved forward, his flashlight lit the stranded figures and Juliet could see that Dr. Lovelace’s chin was tucked to his chest, though it was hard to tell if he was wounded or simply trying not to move. Lovelace watched the engineer’s movements intently, though Glenda, beneath him, had turned from the crowd.

“Poor things,” Bernice said.

“Crap luck,” someone else muttered.

“Fucking Jerry land mines.”

“Goddammit.” Major Decker’s voice boomed behind Juliet. “We’ve got a whole division, five miles from here, about to hurl themselves into the Jerry lines. They count on us not to be blowing ourselves up.”

By now the engineer had moved ten yards up the hill, the mine detector beeping wildly as he marked his path with white tape. “It’s a sea of shrapnel,” he muttered to himself, but in the silence they could all hear him.

“Hold on, Glenda,” called Mother Hen from somewhere in the crowd. “We’re going to get you out of there.”

Suddenly, an explosion sounded and the ground beside the engineer spit a funnel of dirt, showering the grass. Juliet ducked behind a tree, pressing against the trunk. She felt her face knock something hard and splintery and pulled back to examine a sign: CAUTION—AREA ABOVE NOT SWEPT FOR MINES.

As Juliet emerged, she saw the engineer, halfway up the hill, curled on his side, clutching spasmodically at his leg. From beyond
him came Glenda’s sobs.

“It’s okay,” Lovelace was softly telling her. “Don’t worry.”

“Listen up,” the engineer huffed. “We’re going to have to try”—he swallowed heavily—“to pull ourselves down. It’s too dangerous for anyone to come get us.”

“Her femoral’s draining,” called Lovelace.

You could bleed to death from that artery within minutes. Painfully. Glenda no doubt understood what was happening to her. She was exsanguinating—a deceptively clinical word.

“Can you walk?” the engineer asked.

“My knee’s sprained, I think, but I can move. I just have to slow her bleeding. Jesus, she’s gushing. . . .”

Bracing himself with one arm, Lovelace reached up and tore off his shirt and pressed the shirt to Glenda’s hip. Even at a distance, Juliet could see the cloth darken with blood. Lovelace used his long johns to roughly brace his knee.

“We’ve got to pull ourselves down,” called the engineer. “But follow the path where you came.”

“I can’t,” Glenda whimpered.

“Sure you can. Come on, kiddo,” said Lovelace. “You just gotta climb up on my back. Okay? Hold the shirt tight against your hip. If you’re on top of me, the mines can’t get you.”

The engineer tucked himself into a ball and began to shimmy down the hill. “Once you get to my position,” he called behind, “follow the tape.”

Dr. Lovelace flipped over so that his back hovered over Glenda’s chest. “Grab on, Glen.” Slowly, Glenda slid each of her trembling hands around his neck. She wrapped her leg around his, and Juliet saw that Glenda was still wearing her shoes.