The Secret of Raven Point (34 page)

Outside town, they crossed a muddy field, and though the cold had turned the grass a pale and lifeless green, Juliet was certain it was the field where she had stayed with Beau and Brother Reardon a month earlier. The memory of holding Beau as his breath slipped away flooded her; somewhere nearby, Beau was buried. She might be his only friend to ever pass his grave.

Willard drove awkwardly, his wrist limp in his lap while he steered with his left hand.

A drizzle fell, the snow turned to slush, and the jeep splashed noisily along until she recognized the road where she and Brother Reardon had hitched a ride with Rufus. Within minutes they pulled up before the small church.

Inside, the Madonna, polished to a shine, gazed at Juliet from the altar. There were no cobwebs or dust, though a small spider scurried across the chipped blue folds of the statue’s dress. Nearby, a tattered white sheet—a hospital sheet—lay over one of the beds of hay. Otherwise, the church was empty.

“I was right,” said Juliet, dipping her hand in the full basin of holy water. “They were here.”

“Past tense, Juliet.”

She sat on one of the overturned pews. “I know.”

“Any more ideas?”

“They’ve probably gone to another church.”

“Unfortunately, this is Italy. There are over a thousand churches in Tuscany alone.”

“Well, we have
the jeep. They’re on foot.”

He sat beside her. “Forty-eight hours, Juliet.”

But they had come this far; they couldn’t turn back now. “We’ll say we were robbed. We’ll say we got a flat tire.”

“They aren’t idiots.”

“One more day.”

“They’ll throw us in jail.” Willard shook his head. “I do not want you in jail.”

“I can handle jail.” The pronouncement was dramatic, though in truth she had no idea what jail might be like. And she suspected Willard was actually worried about worse than jail. She recalled the Goumiers.

“You’re like the boys fresh off the ships,” he said. “You know there’s destruction everywhere, but you don’t think it can touch you.”

“Touch me? It’s already knocked me flat on the ground. It’s why I’m sitting in a cold church in the middle of nowhere. Look, I don’t think I’m invincible, I think I’m necessary. I know something bad could happen, but I’m willing to risk it. I think you are, too. Anyone can change bedpans or pass a bottle of brandy around the ward right now. We’re the only ones who can help Barnaby and Brother Reardon. We knew, when we left, it might come to this, that it might take a little longer.”

Willard inhaled deeply, as though breathing in everything she had said; he seemed, for the first time, humbled by her. He looked around at the church.

“Regulations give us thirty days,” he said softly, “before we’re considered AWOL. After that, we officially become deserters. ”

“We won’t need thirty days.” She took his hand and urged him to stand.

THEY BACKTRACKED, THEY
sidetracked; they roamed the cold stone corners of abandoned churches; they stopped in dimly lit, smoke-filled taverns, asking patrons and barkeeps if they had seen men fitting Barnaby’s and Reardon’s descriptions.

In between the disappointed silences after each stop, they described to each other their experiences in Basic Training, their grueling transatlantic crossings to Europe. It seemed, somehow, that their lives had begun with the war, and they spoke little of anything else. They debated the skills of other doctors and nurses in the hospital. They ranted about the army supply system. To avoid speaking of what recriminations might await them, they spoke, restlessly, of anything else.

Every few minutes, Willard would interrupt what he was saying to warn, “Depress the clutch!”

“Dr. Willard, if you say it
calmly,
I won’t freeze up.”

“I’ve been driving since I was fourteen. I am an expert driving teacher.”

Juliet grinned. “I didn’t know they had cars back then.”

Having bandaged Willard’s wrist, Juliet had taken over the driving, and the jeep occasionally jolted and bucked as she struggled to shift gears.

By late afternoon, they had reached Pistoia, where Brother Reardon had once gone on a leave. The town was quiet and gray, and the low stone buildings crumbled into the street. From scraps of khaki army canvas and wool blankets a band of beggars and prostitutes had erected a camp in the piazza. A fire had been lit, fueled by splintered scraps of old furniture, and above it a large cast-iron pot sat on the massive front grille of a truck. Nearby, a one-armed man prowled with a large net. Beneath the arches of the gateway, he halted to watch the pigeons above. He dipped into his pocket and scattered bread crumbs. A dozen pigeons swooped down, and in one swift swing he netted four birds. The net erupted with a flutter of wings. With his good arm the man leaned into the net and, using his forearm and biceps like a vise, sealed it closed and scooped up the birds. He scampered off, his eyes darting nervously, the pole dragging along the wet cobblestones,
click click click
resounding through the square.

Children playing hopscotch shouted,
“Buona caccia oggi, Luigi!”
as he passed. In galoshes made from tire rubber, the children splashed through puddles.

“Chiesa?”
Juliet asked the children.

A girl pointed to a narrow street off the square—
“
Oratorio”
—then tossed a bullet casing onto one of the squares. The entire hopscotch board was strewn with bullet casings.

She and Willard walked to the small church. As they opened the wooden door, Juliet had the impression of a flurry of massive crows. But the crows were, in fact, long black robes from which the worn and worried faces of nuns peered out. Heads bowed in concentration, the nuns rushed about with trays and pitchers, cups and bedpans, moving in a constant stream, their feet invisible beneath their skirts. Around them, the beds were filled with children. A small nun, no more than five feet tall, eyed Willard’s Red Cross armband and threw her head back:
“Dottori! Che fortuna! Abbiamo pregato!”
Grabbing Willard’s elbow, she led them both toward a shivering boy.

“Il ragazzo non mangerà.”

Juliet looked at the child, and Willard pulled back the sheet over his swollen belly. Gently, he pushed on the boy’s right lower abdomen and the child burst into tears.

Juliet and Willard simultaneously pronounced: “Burst appendix.”

“He needs surgery,” said Juliet.

Willard raised his splinted wrist. “You’ll have to do it.”

“You’re joking. I’ve never cut anyone open.”

“You’d prefer to leave him?”

Intently eyeing their debate, the nun stuck her index finger in the air, whisked away, and returned with a tray of medical implements that looked as though they were meant to open nuts and shellfish.

“Let’s at least get him somewhere private.” Willard scooped the boy into his arms and Juliet followed with the instrument tray. The nun led them behind the altar to a small, dimly lit sacristy, where a row of dusty purple cassocks hung from ornate brass hooks. They set the boy on a bare table laid with a white sheet.

“What do we have in the way of antibiotics?”

“Sulfonamide,” said Juliet.

“Good. But all we have for anesthesia is Pentothal. We’ll have to make that work.”

When the Pentothal had quieted the boy’s sobs, Juliet washed her hands and the instruments in a basin of water the nun had brought.

Willard handed Juliet a scalpel. “McBurney’s point. Two-thirds of the way from the navel to the anterior superior iliac spine.”

“Here?”

“Make the cut.”

Juliet took a deep breath and pressed the knife to the child’s hardened abdomen. The skin parted in one smooth stroke, opening a crevasse of bright pink muscle. She had watched hundreds of incisions, but it was different making the cut herself. It seemed a violation of something sacred, exposing the body, revealing its fragile and hidden machinery. She stared for a moment, stunned by how thin the
skin was, what a delicate organ held a person together.

“Keep going.” Willard handed her the scissors, and she carefully snipped the muscle.

“Do we have anything like a Kelly clamp? I think . . . Dr. Willard, I think I made this incision too medial.”

“It’s fine.”

She continued the retraction until the peritoneum was in sight.

“Retractors?”

“We only have one. Do you see the cecum?”

“The what?”

“The cecum. Between the ascending colon and the ileum. The fat part at the bottom. It’s right there.”

“I thought that was called the jejunum.”

“Juliet, do you
see
it?”

“Yes, I see it. I just didn’t know what it was called.”

For the next twenty minutes, all Juliet saw was the open abdomen before her: she retracted skin and muscle, the colon, and finally the ruptured pouch dangling off the cecum. Her hands moved nervously, delicately, snipping at the narrowest part of the appendix, until she’d removed it and tied off the last bit. She doused the wound with saline, then sutured closed the incision.

“Please get me out of here,” she said to Willard, setting her forehead against the wall.

In the main room, the metal beds were crowded side by side. Beneath gray moth-eaten blankets, children lay strangely still, staring upward. A pigeon flapped noisily about the frescoed ceiling, and all of the boys and girls seemed to be tracking its motions, but their eyes were lusterless, hauntingly blank. Juliet and Willard wandered the rows, checking the foreheads and pulses of those who seemed feverish, and then Juliet saw her, in the last bed in the row.

“Liberata!”

The girl wore what seemed to be a burlap sack, and her shoulders and elbows were sharp with malnutrition. Her hair had been cut short. She turned her head weakly. Before Juliet could ask,
Liberata shoved the blanket off her lap and pointed to her right knee, where her leg now ended:
“Bomba.”

Juliet felt sick. She fell to her knees beside the bed and tried not to weep. Willard had drawn up beside her and set his hand on her back.

“Where’s Dante?”
Juliet eventually asked.

Liberata tightened her lips and shook her head and also seemed to fight tears.
“No lo so.”

I don’t know.

Liberata brought her fist to her chest, and in it Juliet saw a large brass crucifix, the thick chain spilling from her hand. Juliet recognized it immediately.

“When was Fratello Reardon here?”

“Yesterday.”

“Did he say where they were going?”

Liberata shook her head.

Juliet felt a momentary happiness: Reardon and Barnaby had been there; they were close. But that also meant she and Willard needed to get moving. Juliet dug in her pack and laid a pile of ration bars in Liberata’s lap.

“Mange,”
said Juliet. “You need to eat, for strength.”

Liberata studied the bars and one by one stashed them under her blanket.
“Per Dante,”
she said. “
Mio fratello.”

“We have to go,” Willard said softly. “If they’re still on foot, we have a chance of catching up to them tonight or tomorrow. But if they get a ride, we’re lost.”

Juliet stood, and Liberata’s eyes flashed with panic. Juliet stiffened as she braced for the entreaties:
Please, take me with you, I will work, I will clean the toilets
. . . . But Liberata merely lay back, fastening her face blankly on the ceiling, like the scores of other children.

She did not ask to be saved. That was somehow worse.

As the sun set, bats wheeled in the purple sky. The mountains on the horizon were a black smudge, and Juliet now felt very far from where they had set out, from the safety of the hospital encampment.

She drove slowly, and in a thoughtful silence they strained their eyes against the last wisps of dusk, looking for Barnaby and Brother Reardon along the road. When it finally grew too dark to see, they pulled over at a small schoolhouse.

The door opened onto a small, dark classroom, barely large enough for the sixteen wooden desks sitting in tidy rows. A sharpened pencil sat at the top of each, and on the massive teacher’s desk at the front of the room lay a tidy pile of examination booklets. A textbook had been left open, a pencil in the spine. Musty air rose from the stone floor. On the side wall hung a giant faded map of Italy, on which an
X
marked the town of San Vito-Cerreto and beside that, the word
domestico
. On another wall hung a blackboard; in faint chalk marks the question lay in a neat script:
Che cosa vuoi fare da grande?
Beneath, in the jagged block letters of inexperienced hands, was a list:
Vigile del fuoco, medico, insegnante, soldato, Mussolini.

What would you like to be when you grow up?

Juliet recalled how many fantasies of adulthood she once had, the elaborate list of dramatic feats she felt destined to accomplish. All those dreams now seemed decadent and ludicrous. She thought of the boy on the operating table, and of Liberata. What had
they
imagined for their futures? What would happen to them? Who would take care of them? And what had become of
her
—the girl who once rescued a wounded bird, who traveled thousands of miles to find out what happened to her brother—that she could now walk away from injured children? That’s what adulthood was bringing her, she thought: pragmatism, heartlessness. Something within her was eroding, something she knew she
would never restore.