Love and Lament Page 35

  She wrote, “Dear Rebecca, I am writing to you because my brother …” She held the pen over the letter, wondering why it was so hard for her to write her brother’s name, to put down on paper a name that, even in her mind, brought him back into this very room. She went on,

  because my brother Siler spoke fondly of you the year before he died. I’m sorry I never got to meet you. I am the last of a family of nine children. My father is still alive, here at the state hospital where I am visiting and writing this letter. I’ve never been to Wilmington, but I imagine it’s warmer there than it is up here, where it’s mighty cool, even for October.

  But that’s not why I’m writing. I am writing to you because I wanted to know if my brother seemed worried or agitated the last few days before he died. His last letter home didn’t seem out of the ordinary. I have to know if he was troubled, and I don’t know who else to ask. I don’t know if my father ever made any inquiries, and now he’s too far gone in his mind to ask. Siler’s teachers at the deaf school have left, except for one or two, and they don’t remember anything unusual about his mood. Did he seem sad to you? Did he say anything to you about taking a walk along the tracks, and where he was going? I wonder if he was blaming himself for something, and trying to free somebody else from blame. If he was doing that for me, I’ll accept it as a gift, but I feel I must know. If it was a private matter, maybe something between you two, I’ll accept that too. But could you please just tell me what you can, even if you know nothing, can you write me and tell me that?

  Yours sincerely,

  Mary Bet Hartsoe

  She thought of mentioning that she was sheriff, but decided she’d have more chance of a reply, and an honest one, if there was nothing official about the letter. She sealed the envelope and addressed it “Rebecca Savage, Wilmington, N.C.”

  The next morning Mary Bet went back up to her father’s room and kissed him good-bye. “I love you, Daddy,” she said. She could not remember ever having told her father she loved him, but the words came easily to her lips. Her father’s eyes were vacant as he held her hand, not wanting to let it go. Mr. Cane reached over from his chair, and so she offered him her left hand, which he took in both of his. She had the feeling of being tethered by these two ancient men, lost and wandering in their minds.

  “Good-bye,” she said. Her father waved to her as she stood in the doorway. He was seventy-seven years old.

  CHAPTER 30

  1918

  IN THE FOREST, they were still a long way from the front line, but they slept with their gas masks beneath their heads. There were many false alarms, and Leon was amused at how the fellows so readily became a strange tribe of elephant-men. One night German shells shrieked overhead and an ammunition dump less than half a mile away burst into flames. It was shortly after this that something big began happening.

  It was the first time in his thirty-four years that Leon realized he was unafraid. He was robust and vivid, when so many around him began to seem pale and scared and vague, as if they’d caught some disease that was slowly wasting them. They came to him to warm themselves on his cheer and good humor, and he never tired of dispensing it. At home, he’d resisted being the one to set the example for his two younger brothers, and after their father died—when Leon was fifteen—he became even more distant, as though to punish his father for dying and leaving him in charge. He did what was called for, but took no particular interest in his brothers and their concerns. They seemed content to become farmers just like their father, while Leon had a notion of doing something different; he wasn’t vain enough to imagine he was after something more important, he simply was not interested in scratching a living out of the soil.

  And then one day he’d had a spiritual conversion, though he didn’t think of it that way, because it had nothing to do with church or God. To Leon, it was more a change of heart. He was twenty-two years old and still living at home with his mother and brothers, managing the farm until Sid, the middle boy, should become legally capable of running the farm on his own. In another year Sid would be twenty-one, at which point Leon planned to go off to Chapel Hill and earn a degree that would eventually lead to law school. Their mother had been battling illness for a number of years, leaving more and more of the farming business to her sons. Her hope was that Leon would marry, settle down on the farmstead, and leave off his idea of going to college.

  There was nothing special about the day that Leon became a changed man. He was riding up from the lower field, where he’d been overseeing the digging of a new drainage ditch. The laborers he’d hired, both of them white men in their middle twenties, he’d known nearly all his life. They’d attended the same rural school he had, but had dropped out after sixth grade; it was unclear whether they knew how to read more than their own names. The sun was high overhead, hot for April, and Leon suddenly felt a twitch in his cheek, just as if somebody’d poked him with a piece of straw. He jerked around, half expecting to see some child down below, playing a joke on him. The horse plodded on.

  One full stride. And one more. The skin on Leon’s neck tingled. He knew what he was meant to do with his life.

  He kept it a secret for more than a week, taking it out every so often to examine like a found gem. Then one evening at supper he announced that he was going to become a teacher. His brothers, husky boys who looked so much alike they were often mistaken for twins, glanced at each other with wry smiles, and, as if they’d exchanged some comment only they understood, kept on eating. His mother said, “What about lawyering?”

  “No,” Leon said. “It has to be teaching. And I might open up a school, to run just as long as the private schools. But there’d be no tuition, or almost none.”

  “Sounds like a good way to the poorhouse,” his mother said.

  But Leon didn’t mind. It was another two years before he was able to get the money together for college and to turn the management of the farm over to his brothers. During that time he began at last to understand and love his brothers, no matter how different they were from himself. He felt as though he was in a hurry to teach them everything he knew about the plants and animals around about, the underground aquifers, the way the foothills rose into mountains to the west but dropped to the sandy, coastal plain east, how there was a great comet coming that would light up the night sky like day, why it was that a machine with wings and a man inside could fly—little things that he’d studied on and read about, but kept to himself as if it were arcane knowledge that only a privileged few should have. To his surprise and delight they actually listened; he knew because he sometimes heard them repeating what he’d said.

  He went off to the university, and it didn’t bother him that he was six or seven years older than his fellow students. He was at last on the path of his chosen life. One thing he knew very little about, that his brothers seemed far more advanced in, was women. He had only kissed two girls, one of them in Williamsboro after he lost a debate held by the Prolific and Erasmian Literary Society on the topic, “Resolved, that the Government of the United States has reached its Zenith.” He’d won on the affirmative position, but was unconvincing on the negative. He hardly knew the girl, but she told him he was handsome and a fine orator. The letters he sent to her later, his heartsick love for her overflowing the pages, were never answered.

  Until his early thirties, Leon thought of women as exotic curiosities, like stereoscopic photographs of the Sphinx and the Taj Mahal. They were best appreciated from a distance. He hadn’t enjoyed sex until he met Ann Murchison, a well-to-do landowner’s daughter from Cotten. He’d been surprised to find such an open, freethinking, modern woman, a real flapper, in Haw County. Shortly after he started seeing her, he met Mary Bet Hartsoe, who worked in the courthouse. He couldn’t have said why, but he felt himself drawn to Miss Hartsoe, perhaps because though she was much like Ann Murchison, he knew she would never give herself to him the way Ann had. He felt more comfortable around her than excited, and he thought she was more beautiful and intelligen
t than any woman he had ever known.

  Now on the western front, no one knew exactly what was happening, but for three days the roads were crawling with wagons, motorcycles, trucks, guns, tanks, and all the other modern machines of war, beside which the horses and long line of doughboys seemed incidental. The rumor was that a great push was on for Metz. But at any rate the army was in forward motion and the men could taste the excitement in the air. One afternoon Colonel Fox and his staff rode by Leon’s camp, and the commander touched his open hand to his campaign hat. Leon saluted. He thought he’d never seen a finer, more dashing man, tall in the saddle and as confident as if he were out surveying his crops instead of moving his headquarters for an assault on the Hindenberg line.

  Midnight. Leon and his buddies waited outside their tents, smoking, watching, sometimes saying a quiet word, but mostly listening. It was like waiting for the end of the world, or the beginning of time. “If the Huns get me,” Koonce said, “it’s all right, as long as I get to see this.”

  And then the ground began shaking, the trees rumbling as if they would come loose and topple. Night became day. The thundering and blasting was like the explosion of a thousand thousand furnaces. For four hours the hammering went on. The smoke and the earth-quavering noise and the smell of burnt sulphur were for a while a bright cocoon for Leon and his mates as they stood transfixed. This was the world’s wound, and they were here to witness it and do what they could to see that history had a certain outcome and not another. They understood this without speaking it.

  Around five o’clock the shelling stopped, and they also knew what this meant. Somewhere at the front, the infantry was preparing to rise from the trenches and advance over the shredded wires. Leon thought of Colonel Fox, and how if he ordered him to the front, he would happily go, would be proud of such an honor. Not until the shelling stopped did Leon and his friends realize it was raining.

  Later in the morning, while Leon’s cooks were preparing lunches to send forward in marmite cans, the prisoners began coming back. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, marching along toward the pens, young and old, looking oddly content. And then the American wounded. And carts bearing the dead. There were three dead in Leon’s battery—a lieutenant, a corporal, and a private first class. All of them fine fellows. The private was from Haw, and Leon wondered when word would get home. He briefly thought of his mother and his brothers, who had been turned away because of a heart condition they hadn’t known about—he felt sorry for them. And he thought of Mary Bet and hoped she sometimes thought about him.

  The next day the entire regiment was on the move, north toward Thiaucourt. It was a monumental undertaking, the muddy roads seemingly designed to slow the progress of a thousand men and their overtaxed horses. The valiant beasts died by the score along the way, the sound of mercy killings ringing out every mile or so.

  It was chilly and damp, and Leon began singing a song that Mary Bet had sung for him before he left for the training camp. She’d been embarrassed, saying she only liked to sing in a group. They were leaving the courthouse at the end of the day, and he pleaded with her to sing, telling her it would be something to hearten him in the coming months.

  They camped in a valley and feasted on some cows and pigs that the Germans had left behind. Two cows joined the regiment, and were given their own gas masks. Captain Pugh took Leon and a few other favored men on a tour of the Germans’ abandoned concrete dugouts. “Underground mansion,” Pugh said, as they poked their heads into rooms that held feather beds, heavy tables and chairs, a grand piano, electric lights, hot and cold running water, a bowling alley. There was a dairy with gleaming tiled walls, a poultry yard, and a summer pavilion with chaise longues and paper lanterns hanging from a trellis.

  Before it had hardly settled in, the regiment was moving again, propelled by an invisible motive that seemed to arise from within itself. On toward the Argonne Forest, the fields strewn with corpses and the lines harassed day and night by black-cross airplanes. “If we can just keep moving,” Leon would say, for there was the illusion that they made easier targets standing still. That sickening rise-and-fall drone coming from somewhere off to the right or left, and nothing to do but keep rolling onward, offering what encouragement he could.

  “Those mosquitoes won’t hurt us, boys.”

  At one encampment, Leon and Corn Koonce went forward as usual with their ration cart. Everybody knew them, because Leon would always wave and have some snappy remark to make about how his food was the best in the regiment, better than anything in France. They made their delivery, and an MP directed them to use a different road back. It was dark.

  “What you reckon they’ll make of prune apple pie?” Corn said.

  “They’ll think it was the best they ever ate,” Leon said.

  They went on a ways, for an hour or more, the sound of shelling appearing to grow louder. The only light they had was from the clouds, sporadically lit by rockets and flares. “I don’t know but what we’re on the wrong road,” Corn finally said. He sucked in his caved cheeks and put a hand to his stubble.

  “Yep,” Leon agreed. “The MPs don’t know from one day to the next.”

  They kept jostling along, the horse as content to go toward the firing as away. There was one pitch of road solid enough to keep the wheels from getting mired. “I don’t like the looks of it,” Corn said.

  “Ssh now, Corn, it’ll be all right. Don’t get all hollow-eyed. We’ll run into somebody before long.”

  “That’s what worries me.”

  “We’ve got these nice woods here.”

  “But over yonder’s all clear, except the brambles. What do you reckon’s on the other side of that rise?”

  “I reckon it’s a music hall, boys gettin’ illuminated, and the prettiest girls you ever saw.” A shell dropped so close, up to their right, that the horse flinched and stalled. Leon flipped the reins and they plodded on. He began chewing an old cigar. He hadn’t been nervous until Corn got worried, and now Corn could relax knowing he’d stirred Leon up. Leon would have lit the cigar, except that Corn would worry even more about the light. As if anybody’d waste a shell on a ration cart.

  They crested a little hill and found themselves in a vast bowl from which they could see the shelling at a low angle; the ground shook almost constantly. “I don’t like this at all,” Corn proclaimed.

  On a little knoll off to the right stood the ruins of a stone house; beyond lay a desolate plain, with a row of stumps at the farthest edge, and in the light of a flare Leon could see another plain beyond. A doughboy emerged from the ruins. “What the hell’re you doing here with that damned ration cart?” he said.

  “I’m looking for my battery,” Leon told him.

  “Well, you won’t find it here, and you won’t be here much longer yourself. You’re practically in no-man’s-land.”

  “You got a match?” Leon asked. He wasn’t about to make a dash for the rear to please a tough-sounding private.

  The soldier handed him one, and Leon took his time. He asked the soldier for directions, then drove out into the rutted field, making the widest turn he could. Shells dropped to their right and left, the air in concussion. Corn held onto his hat. “You trying to give them something to shoot at?” he yelled.

  “Those are our shells,” Leon said. “They’re not gonna hit us.”

  As they drove past the doughboy, standing on guard in the ruins, Leon saluted. The doughboy saluted back and watched as they headed off into the night. It was not until they were a mile up the road that Corn could bring himself to speak. He shook his head and guffawed to himself, and then he laughed so hard he vibrated from knees to chin. “Them’s our shells,” he repeated, “they ain’t gonna hit us.”

  In late September the regiment went into position at the edge of the Bois d’Esnes in the Argonne Forest. Over the next two weeks, casualties were commonplace, and horses became fodder for the drive. “There won’t be any left,” Leon said one morning, looking sadly at a pile
of carcasses, carted there by the remaining healthy animals. “It’s a shame.” But he let it go at that. There was no time for thought or sleep, let alone pity. He had a battery to feed, and the battery had a regiment to serve. And the regiment, shuffled from one division to another, lived only to fight.

  Sometimes they slept on the ground, other times in cootie-infested shacks, but Leon always chose to be near his wagon and ration cart over whatever makeshift comfort the battery had found. He began to see clearly that his mission in life was to fuel his men. When he thought of home and his days as a classroom teacher, it was as though he were looking through a series of muddy windows that revealed a scene he could barely discern. The only real thought he had of home was of Mary Bet, and he composed mental letters lying in his bedroll, until he could no longer stay awake.

  The days were filled with cooking and carting. As the Germans were pushed back, they seemed fiercer to retaliate, and Leon’s rolling kitchen became the target of machine guns on a couple of occasions. Once a Boche plane picked him out when the cart was stuck in the mud and he and Corn were gathering stones to put beneath the wheels. Finally Allied planes found the Boche with tracer bullets, and Leon watched with admiration as the German aviator dipped and slipped and, at last, looped his way out of trouble and disappeared. He and Corn pulled the cart free and went on their way. Showing up with food on schedule, no matter how impossible the situation, and acting as if he’d just gone to the store for a bottle of milk—that became the joy of his life.

  They came along a track beside a desolate field that had been plowed and replowed by so many shells it seemed there were more craters than solid ground. In one crater, a bloated rat was gnawing on a corpse that was still holding a Bible. A group of soldiers had just discovered a blue-eyed German lad of perhaps fourteen hiding in another of the yellow-green craters. Leon stopped his cart and watched as the leader tried to tell the boy to drop his rifle, but the boy was too afraid to let go. The American handed his own rifle to a fellow soldier and started forward, showing his palms, talking calmly. The boy raised his gun and fired. There was an explosion of gunfire. Leon and Corn watched as the boy’s right half was ripped away below his shoulder, and then they moved on.