Walk in Hell (76 page)

In English and in horrible French, the people from the hospital told her the same thing. She was still protesting when an ambulance skidded to a stop in front of the hospital. The driver and an attendant carried in a man on a stretcher. A bloody blanket lay over the lower part of his body; it was obvious he’d lost a leg. Marie abruptly turned and walked back toward the farmhouse.

The first thing Lucien noticed inside the hospital was how warm it was. The Americans did not have to stint on coal. The second thing he noticed was the smell. Part of it was sharp and medicinal: the top layer, so to speak. Under it lay faint odors he knew from the barnyard—blood and dung and, almost but not quite undetectable, a miasma of bad meat.

“You wait here,” the nurse told him, pointing to a bench. “I’ll get the doctor to see you.”

“Merci,”
he said, his injured leg stretched out straight in front of him. A couple of soldiers, young men hardly older than Charles, his older son, sat there, too. The wounded man who’d been brought in on the stretcher wasn’t in sight. They were probably working on him already.

One of the soldiers asked, “You speak English, pal?” At Lucien’s nod, the youngster asked, “You get that from a shell?” He pointed to the wound.

“No, from to chop the wood.” Lucien gestured to eke out his words. The American nodded in turn. Seeing him polite, Lucien asked, “And you—what have you?”

“Flunked my shortarm inspection,” the young soldier answered, flushing. That didn’t mean anything to Lucien. The Yank noticed. “This hoor up in Rivière-du-Loup, she gave me the clap,” he explained. Lucien had heard that phrase in his own Army days. Inside, he laughed. He had a more honorable wound than the American.

“Well, well, what have we here?” That was good French, from the mouth of Dr. Leonard O’Doull. He wore a white coat with a few reddish stains on it. Looking severely at Lucien, he said, “
Monsieur
Galtier, if you want to visit me here, it is not necessary to do yourself an injury first.”

“I shall bear that in mind, thank you,” Lucien said dryly. “It was, you must believe me, not the reason for which I hurt myself.”

“Of that I have no doubt,” O’Doull replied. He undid just enough of the bandage to see how big the wound was, and whistled softly when he did. “Yes, you were wise to come.”

“It was my wife’s idea,” Galtier said.

“Then you were wise to listen to her. As long as one in the family is wise, things go well. I shall have to show you how neatly I can sew.” He turned and spoke to a nurse in English too rapid for Lucien to follow. She nodded and hurried off.

“I am glad you are the one to help me,” the farmer said.

“I speak French,” O’Doull answered, “and you are the father of my friend.” Did he hesitate a little before that last word? Lucien couldn’t tell. O’Doull went on, “This is a duty and an honor both, then.” The nurse came back with a tray full of medical paraphernalia. The doctor went on, “It is an honor that will be painful for you, though,
monsieur
. I am going to give you an injection to keep you from getting lockjaw. This will not hurt much now, but may make you sore and sick later. We must roll up your sleeve—”

Next to the fire in Galtier’s leg, the injection was a fleabite. Then O’Doull said, “And now we must disinfect the wound. You understand? We must keep it from rotting, if we can.” Lucien nodded. He’d seen hurts go bad.

O’Doull poured something that smelled almost like applejack into the wound. Galtier gasped and bit his lip and crossed himself. If the wound was a fire, O’Doull had just poured gasoline on it.
“’Osti,”
the farmer said weakly. Tears blurred his vision.

“I do regret it very much, but it is a necessity,” O’Doull said. Lucien managed to nod. “Now to sew it up,” the doctor told him.

Before O’Doull could get to work with needle and thread, another nurse came in. That was how Galtier thought of her till she exclaimed, “Papa!”

“Oh,
bonjour,
Nicole,” he said. He’d seen her in the white-and-gray nurse’s uniform with the Red Cross on the right breast before, of course, but here he’d looked at the uniform instead of the person inside it. Embarrassed, he muttered, “The foolish axe slipped.”

“Nothing that can’t be fixed,” O’Doull said, fitting fat thread to a large needle. “Do hold still, if you’d be so kind. Oh, very good. I have seen soldiers, M. Galtier, who gave far more trouble with smaller wounds.”

“I have been a soldier,” Lucien said quietly. He counted the sutures: twenty-one. O’Doull bandaged the wound thicker and more tightly than Marie had done. Lucien dipped his head.
“Merci beaucoup.”

“Pas de quoi,”
O’Doull answered. “I will give you a week’s supply of sterile wound dressings. If it’s still oozing after that much time, come in and see me and we will disinfect it again. Let your sons do the work for a while. They think they’re men now. Work will show whether or not they are right. We’ll take you home in an ambulance, if you like.”

“No,” Lucien said. “Marie will think I have died.”

“Ah. Well, let me get you a proper walking stick, then.” O’Doull did that himself. The stick with which he returned was so severely plain, it was obviously government issue. That the U.S. government manufactured large numbers of walking sticks for the anticipated use of wounded men said more plainly than words what sort of war this was.

But, as Lucien made his slow, hobbling way home, he despised the Americans less than he had before. Almost everyone at the hospital had been good to him, even though he was a civilian, and an enemy civilian at that. No one had asked him for a penny. He was not used to feeling anything but scorn for the occupiers, but he prided himself on being a just man. “It could be,” he said, slowly, wonderingly, “that they are—that some of them are—human beings after all.”

“I wish Pa would come home again,” George Enos, Jr., said.

“Me, too!” Mary Jane said loudly. She didn’t say
no
as much as she had when she’d first turned two, for which Sylvia Enos heartily thanked God. Now her daughter tried to imitate George, Jr., in everything she did. Most of the time, that wasn’t bad at all. Every so often—as when she piddled standing up—it proved unfortunate.

“I wish he would, too, dears,” Sylvia said, and wondered just how much she meant that. No time to worry about it now. “Come on, both of you. We have to get you to Mrs. Coneval, or I’ll be late for work.”

They followed her down the hall to Brigid Coneval’s apartment. Several other children were in there already, and making a racket like a bombardment on the Maryland front.

“A fine mornin’ to you, Mrs. Enos,” Mrs. Coneval said after she’d opened the door. “I’ll see you tonight. Come in, lambs.”

Sylvia went downstairs and headed for the trolley stop. Newsboys hopped up and down on their corners, trying to stay warm. The sun wouldn’t be up for a little while yet, and the air had a wintry snap in it, though Indian summer had lingered till only a few days before.

Nobody was shouting about great naval battles in the Atlantic, nor about a destroyer lost at sea. With the war now in its third year, Sylvia knew how little that meant. A sunken destroyer was the small change of war, hardly worth a headline. Anything might have happened to the
Ericsson
, and she wouldn’t know about it till she found the paragraph on page five.

If she bought a paper at all, that is. These days, she didn’t do that every day, as she had when George was serving on the river monitor. She walked past the newsboys today, too, and stood waiting for the trolley without a
Globe
.

“Men,” she muttered as the streetcar clanged up to the stop. She threw a nickel in the farebox. An old man stood up to give her his seat. She thanked him, hardly noticing he was of the sex she’d just condemned for existing.

She wished George had been either a better person or a better liar. She would have preferred the first, but the other might have done in a pinch. For him not to have the need to visit a whore (
and a nigger whore at that,
she thought, appalled by his lack of taste as well as his lack of judgment) would have been best. If he had gone and done it, she wished she’d never found out.

Actually, he had gone, but he hadn’t quite done it. That didn’t make things any better. How was she supposed to trust him now? (That he wouldn’t have been worth trusting if he hadn’t told her about going to the whore never occurred to her.) When he wasn’t in her sight but was ashore, what would he be doing? “Men,” she said again.

She was so lost in her angry reverie, she almost missed the stop in front of the canning plant. The trolley was about to start up again before she leapt from her seat and hurried out the door. The driver gave her a reproachful look. She glared at him. He was a man, too, even if he had a white mustache.

She punched in and hurried toward her machine. Isabella Antonelli was already at hers. “Good morning, Sylvia,” she said with a smile that did not match the mourning she still wore.

“Hello, Isabella,” Sylvia answered as she made sure the machine had plenty of labels in the feeder and the paste reservoir was full. That done, she really noticed the smile she had seen, and smiled back at her friend. “You’re looking cheerful this morning.” Her own smile was mischievous. “Did you put a little brandy in your coffee before you came to work?”

The capitalists who ran the canning plant hadn’t spent any more than the bare minimum on lamps. The ceiling was high, the bulbs dim. And Isabella Antonelli was as swarthy as any other Italian, which made her seem very dark indeed to fair-skinned Sylvia. Nevertheless, she blushed. It was unmistakable.

Sylvia waggled a finger at her. “You
did
put some brandy in your coffee.”

“No such thing,” Isabella said. Maybe she hadn’t. Sniffing, Sylvia couldn’t smell any brandy, but they weren’t standing face to face with each other, either, and the whole plant reeked of fish anyhow. But Isabella Antonelli had done something or other. What? How to find out without embarrassing her further?

Before Sylvia could come up with answers to either of those questions, the production line, which had shut down for shift changeover, started up again. Here came the cans. They came fast enough, nothing else mattered. Sylvia began pulling the three levers that carried them through her machine, gave each one a couple of girdling squirts of paste, and put on the label bearing a fish that looked much more like a fancy tuna than the mackerel the cans contained.

Pull, step, pull, step, pull, back to the beginning, pull, step…It was going to be a good day. Sylvia could feel that already. A good day was a day she got through barely noticing she’d been at the plant at all. On bad days, her shift seemed to last for years.

Here came Mr. Winter, limping up the line, a cigar clamped between upper and lower teeth. “Good morning, Mrs. Enos,” the foreman said, almost without opening his mouth. “How are you today?”

“Fine, thank you,” she answered, politely adding, “And you?”

“Couldn’t be better,” Mr. Winter said. His mouth still didn’t open wide, but its corners moved upwards. He was happier than she’d seen him in a good long while. After a moment, he returned to business: “Machine behaving?”

“Yes—see for yourself.” Sylvia hadn’t missed a lever while talking with the foreman. “The action feels smoother than it has.”

“They oiled it last night. About time,” he said. After a brief pause, he went on, “Hope your husband’s all right.”

“So do I,” Sylvia answered, despite everything more truthfully than not.

“God’s own miracle he was saved off the
Punishment
,” Mr. Winter said.

“I suppose that’s true.” Sylvia had all she could do not to laugh in the aging veteran’s face. George had gone up on the riverbank to get drunk and commit adultery. The God she worshiped wasn’t in the habit of manufacturing miracles of that shape.

“God’s own miracle,” the foreman repeated. He, of course, didn’t know all the details. Sylvia wished she didn’t know all the details, either.

Nodding to her once more, Mr. Winter went on up the line to see how Isabella Antonelli and her machine were. Over the noise of the line and of her own machine, Sylvia couldn’t hear much of what the two of them said to each other. She could see, though: could see the foreman’s hand rest lightly upon Isabella’s for a moment, could see the way the widow’s body bent toward his as a flower bends toward the sun.

Sylvia automatically worked her machine. She stared at her friend, stared and stared. She was not a blind woman. When things went on around her, she noticed them. If Mr. Winter and Isabella Antonelli weren’t lovers, she would have forfeited a week’s pay.

I should have known what kind of smile that was,
she thought, annoyed at herself for not recognizing it on Isabella’s face. She’d worn it often enough herself, when things with George had been good. Mr. Winter’s smile wasn’t quite the usual large male leer, but the cigar would have fallen out of his mouth if it had been.

Pull, step, pull, step…She wanted to see if Isabella would say anything at lunch. All of a sudden, the day that had been moving swiftly ceased to move at all. At half past twelve, the line finally stopped. The weather was too raw for Sylvia and Isabella to eat outside, as they had earlier in the year. They sat down together on a bench not too far from one of the handful of steam radiators the factory boasted.

Isabella solved Sylvia’s problem for her by speaking first. She blushed again as she said, “I saw you watching me.”

Sylvia’s face heated, but she nodded. “Er—well, yes.”

“He is not a bad man. I have said this since he and I were only friends.” Isabella Antonelli tossed her head, as if defying Sylvia to make something of that. Sylvia only nodded again. That seemed to mollify her friend, who went on, “He has been lonely for years now, since his wife died. I know what being lonely means—
Dio mio,
how I know. Believe me when I tell you not being lonely is better.”

Sylvia imagined lame old Mr. Winter touching her, caressing her. She didn’t know whether to be revolted or burst out laughing. But she was lonely herself a good deal of the time these days, with George aboard the
Ericsson
…and when he had been home, had she been anything more than a piece of meat for him, a more convenient piece of meat at the moment than a Negro harlot? Did she want him to love her, or to leave her alone? For the life of her, she didn’t know.