This Is How I'd Love You (15 page)

“Good morning, Hennie,” he says as he reaches past her for the pitcher of milk.

“Morning, Daddy.”

“I will not be home for dinner tonight.”

“I remembered. I packed you a sandwich and some pickles.”

He smiles, taking his time to meet her eyes. “Thank you, dear. You are very kind.” He glances at Mr. Reid’s latest letter, folded near her coffee cup. “I believe you are pining. Longing for an escape where there is none. Be careful, Hennie. Reality can never compare favorably to the power of our imagination.”

Hensley puts her hand on top of the letter, chastising herself for leaving it out. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“Oh.” He nods gravely. Then, placing his hand on top of hers, he says, “You should know that I wrote to your brother.” He looks at his teacup. “About you.”

His meaning is clear. “Daddy.” Hensley turns away and pulls her hands into her lap. She glances at the plain white wall, its expanse marked by the smudges of previous summers’ mosquitoes, swatted and killed without a second thought, carelessly. She wasn’t ready for news of her condition to make its way back to New York. If it stays here, beneath the old cottonwoods and the endless sky, it remains small and changeable. But for Harold to know, for him to bear the weight of his disappointment as he jostles among the crowds, sits for a shoeshine, walks through the park, means it is fixed—real. “You might have asked me first. Besides, how could telling him possibly help my circumstance?” Hensley breaks the piece of toast on her plate in half.

“It is a matter of grave importance, Hensley. We are a family still.”

“Really? Since when? What do we know of his life? He might have a hundred bastard children screaming all over Manhattan—how would we ever know?” She cannot explain her anger. Her words precede her thoughts.

“You cannot stay here, Hensley. It is not practical. It is hardly practical for the two of us. You must think of the child.”

She puts her hands to her chest. “I think of the child every moment of every day!”

“But we have to act. Unfortunately, there is only so much time before . . . before he will not have you.”

“Before
he
will not have me? You mean Mr. Lowell Teagan? The very man whose child I am carrying? Does he already know? What was his response? You are so duplicitous. Have you asked Harold to sit across from him and—what? Offer him a bribe to take care of the mess he created?”

Her father takes his glasses off his face and wipes the lenses with his handkerchief. “Hensley, there is honor in facing the facts.”

“Facts? Here are the facts, Daddy:
He
orchestrated this.
He
lied to me.
He
unzipped himself . . .”

“Enough,” he shouts, louder than she’s ever heard him raise his voice. Wincing, as though absorbing a blow, he puts his glasses back on and looks at her. “None of that could have happened, Hensley, had you not been alone with him. There is no way around that fact. For that, I hold some responsibility. I had no idea you were unchaperoned.”

Hensley’s eyes spill the tears that have been gathering, blurring her vision. He offers her the handkerchief still in his hand. Instead, she pulls her apron to her face and wipes it.

“So if he is only required to be a gentleman so long as I am a lady, and I am required to be a lady always, without fail, then I am to blame. Always. It is I who must take responsibility for his actions. For his deceit. And the baby. Is that right?”

“It is not a perfect world, Hennie. But we must live in it.”

Hensley laughs at the irony of her father’s statement.

“Really? You are such a hypocrite. That sounds just like something President Wilson would say about the war, Daddy. Incredible. With any luck this unfortunate child will be a boy. That way, he can rape and pillage the world with abandon. Choose just when he will stand up for what he believes in and when he will tell the girl she must shut up and take it because that’s the way it is. Because for all the power he has in this world, he is too weak to own what happens when he is left alone with a lady.”

Her father folds his handkerchief and replaces it in his pocket. As he stands, Hensley throws her arms around his neck. She abandons all restraint and simply sobs. His shirt smells of the juniper berries so plentiful on the bushes beneath the laundry line. Her father holds her tightly, his own chest swelling with emotion. “I thought he loved me, Daddy,” Hensley says, wiping at her eyes. “I really did.”

Her father places his strong hands on her shoulders. “And he still may,” he says, his lips slightly unsteady. He forces a smile and drops his hands to his sides. “This conversation will have to continue later, Hennie. I must get to the mine.” He moves his dish to the sink, takes his jacket from the back of his chair, and hesitates slightly in the doorway. “I wish there were another way,” he says before collecting his things in the front room.

Hensley nods, busying herself with crumbing the counter. She watches him walk to the truck idling in front of the house, a well-disguised Teresa behind the wheel.

 • • • 

A
s though he could have possibly predicted the monotony of her long, solitary day, Hensley receives yet another letter from Mr. Reid when she walks to the post after lunch. It is postmarked just a day after his last letter, indicating that his new habit may be to write to her every day. Surely not, Hensley thinks, trying to keep her emotions in check. Surely this is an anomaly.

France

My dear Hensley,

Greetings from CCS #13! I’m afraid your father’s sense of the war’s futility may be more accurate than I’d hoped. There is so much destruction here, Hensley, and so little hope of a quick end. Yet we carry on. It seems one consequence is that I’ve become an amateur philosopher, brooding and questioning everything.

Today, a wise man told me that the objective of life is to be happy. Does this seem heretical? I know that duty matters, and service and charity. But is any of that useful if it is done from the depths of despair? I wish that I could observe your face as I rattle off these questions. Do you think I’m naïve, selfish, or dull? Somehow I’ve not given much thought to my purpose until now. How could that be? I suppose I’ve been busy defining myself in opposition to my parents. How trite! When I read your words, I can’t help but feel that you, too, are struggling with your destiny. And, since we’ve already agreed that these letters will be a part of our legacy, that we will exist long after our respective deaths (I am not invoking it, I promise, only referencing our previous discussion), it would be nice if I had some clarity about life. I do not want to exist in perpetuity as some sort of foggy, ill-defined character. So, as an exercise in clarity, for you and me and the people of the future, all, I will make a list here. Things I believe:

1. Words are inherently more interesting than pictures. (Which doesn’t mean I wouldn’t treasure a photograph of you, if possible.)

2. It is harder to be honest than it is to be deceitful.

3. The end of the day is always the loneliest part of it.

4. A good dog can alleviate #3.

5. The strength of a person’s mind has nothing to do with their gender. Women’s suffrage is fair and right.

6. What’s fair and right can take centuries to accomplish.

7. Cabbage should always be prepared by Mr. Lin.

8. Money matters only when it is scarce.

9. The true perfection of chocolate is clear only once you’ve placed a half-melted square on a man’s tongue whose fingers have been blown off.

10. God is cultural shorthand for the power of human beings to love one another when they’ve no reason to. God is the history of perseverance and tolerance in the face of horror. God is the celebration of the sanctity of music and art and words.

11. No matter their immortality, nor how many future readers have the pleasure of reading them, your letters could never mean more to anyone than they do to me.

Eagerly awaiting your next, I will remain,

Mr. Charles Reid

C
harles and Rogerson usually only drive the wounded from a relay post near the front to the CCS, but today, because of a particularly disastrous offensive, they will trudge through the carnage of no-man’s-land, following the litter bearers, trying to distinguish the living from the dead. For once, their helmets are strapped on tightly and they’ve both secretly made bargains with the God to whom they pray.

“This is a day for a hot bath and a thick novel, not this bullshit,” Rogerson says as the King George struggles through the mud.

“Careful.
You
sound like the spoiled rich kid now.”

The rain smacks the windshield in wide, heavy drops. The headlights on the ambulance look yellower than ever against the gray sky.

They pass the relay post and drive into a gulley just the other side of the support trench, where the landscape changes dramatically. The tree branches are blackened and bare; the ground is churned, like a brown and choppy ocean. It is chaos. Men are running between the trenches, their hands covering their heads, their guns swinging at their sides, their faces still tender and pink beneath all the grime.

This latest round of fighting began an entire night and day before. Nobody trusts the current peace, but there are boys who’ve been waiting all that time, or who’ve given up and are no longer waiting, but begging for another shot to finish them off, strewn across the battlefield.

A couple of the regiment’s own litter bearers intercept Charles and Rogerson and lead them through the trenches to the front. They have hammock stretchers hung over their shoulders and Rogerson and Charles carry three stretchers beneath each arm. It is a dizzying walk, a macabre tour. Decaying arms and legs have been used to shore up the trench, with canteens hanging occasionally from these souring limbs. Charles knows the stench must be composed of urine and blood and rot but it is something more foul than the sum of its parts. He and Rogerson turn their noses and mouths in to their sleeves in order to quell their gag reflex. Several bodies are piled on top of the sandbags, waiting, Charles supposes, for someone to move them. All along both sides of the trenches, there are fat, white, glistening maggots undulating toward the nearest flesh.

As they approach the front trench, the litter bearers turn and motion at the ladder. They must climb over the top, which they do, despite their loads.

The mud beneath their feet smacks and sticks with each step. Suddenly the battlefield erupts with pleas and entreaties. The wounded grab at their ankles and whine profanities. Rogerson and Charles split up, each trailed by a litter bearer. Charles kneels beside the first body he sees, holding his hand beneath the boy’s nose, feeling for breath. There is nothing. He closes the boy’s eyes and puts a piece of black tape across his tags, securing them to his chest. He moves to the next body. This boy flinches when Charles touches his face. They load him onto a stretcher and a few privates, who’ve been recruited to help, carry him the mile or so back to the King George.

A low rumble begins somewhere far beyond the dark clouds and Charles follows the lead of the litter bearer, who slides himself into a wide, soggy hole nearby. There is another soldier already there, curled into a fetal position. They mimic him, with their hands held over their heads, and they wait, eyes shut tight.

As they wait for the plane they’re hiding from to make its appearance, Charles realizes that the boy already crouched in the hole is not moving at all. His hands are not trembling the way his own are. Charles places his fingers on the soldier’s helmet, trying to move his head slightly so that he can feel for a breath or a pulse, but the whole thing falls back against him, the front of the boy’s neck all but gone. He grips the helmet, with its young face still buckled in tightly, and swears.

“Help me get him out,” Charles says to the litter bearer. “Otherwise he’ll be buried in here. His family won’t ever know.”

Charles straps a piece of the black tape to his dog tags to keep them in place, and the two of them push the boy’s heavy body out of the hole onto the battlefield. The head threatens to roll back in, but Charles pushes it gently into the mud.

Turns out, the rumble they heard was a false alarm—only thunder. The rain’s assault intensifies, making it difficult for them to climb out of the hole.

When they do, Charles accelerates his pace, distinguishing the living from the dead quickly. They’ve almost covered an eighth of the field, when Rogerson yells at him. “We’re full, Reid. Help me with this one more, then we’ll head back.”

Charles, soaked and chilled, his hands covered in blood, nods. As he places another piece of black tape across a soldier’s tags, he calls out, “I’m really enjoying the thick novel and this bath. Outstanding.”