albay
01-02-2014, 09:45 PM
Margaret shuffled the packages under her arms and stepped out of the General Store. She still had hours to prepare supper for her and Jimmy, but if the day-time sky were bright, it didn’t seem so.
Everything felt gray, swept up and scattered since the trains started to carry the men to deadly forests with French names. If anything were still amazing, it was the fact that the depot wasn’t ruined by the flood of tears it saw so often, and that things like train tracks and engines still worked with an iron rigidity in the midst of such a nightmare. Nothing else held any promise of exhilaration or change; Death, dull Death, had settled over the town like a whispered word, so quietly that it seemed it had always been there, so firmly that it seemed it always would be.
Margaret walked without thought, watching her feet but making little use of her eyes. She knew the way well; hers was a house that sat a few miles from town, painted and tall, and the only road that passed it started behind the depot, cut through the woods and continued far past her front door. She used to love walking home; that one road, barely holding back the brush from grabbing at her dress and the trees from winding together overhead, the explosion of civilization in the perfect form of her one, beautiful white house. James had made it for them himself, finished it with a rag in hand and a sweaty forehead, looking at it with a pride that the house reflected with its edges and size. But she saw no pride in such things anymore. The world seemed to be standing right overhead, and when it bent so close what could compare? She saw it the papers even when she didn’t mean to. Death by the thousands, too many to name, reports coming in long after the fact. Suddenly the wheels that spun the world felt enormous, and her nonexistent. If she sold everything she owned, pawned everything she could ever set her eyes on, and met the Reaper and begged him to agree to a penny for a life, a penny for a hundred lives, she would still be immeasurably unimportant. No array of stars, no refusal ever made hope seem so foreign. Nothing so horrible ever felt like truth.
Was this war? Was this always what it had meant? It shocked her that she had heard the word as a child, whispered it and giggled it and used it to invoke fantasies. War had set the backdrop for stories; it had never been more than a setting, a place, substituted by other mythical worlds when games grew tiresome. How cruel it all had been to pull back this veil, to show her that war was nothing less than the eternity of wretchedness spun in the minds of certain men, clawing and chomping at all.
She walked with vague notions of horror past a bench covered by a pile of rags. When she got close, the pile rustled, yawned, and rolled over towards her.
“Tobacco, ma’am?” A man’s head emerged from the pile, one eye squinting open.
She hadn’t seen him but was not startled. She looked at him blankly for a moment before putting down her bags and pulling out a silver cigarette case.
“Thanks,” he said, sitting up when the case flashed closed. A bottle clinked in his jacket. He looked no older than 18, but his youth seemed absent. He was wearing a few more coats than the weather demanded, and on the ground next to him his suitcase was straining against the few remaining unbroken clasps.
“Do you need a light?” she asked, looking in her purse.
“I got matches,” he said, pulling one out. He struck it on his boot and coughed when the end of the cigarette caught. She put the case back in her bag.
“You’re not gonna have one?” He asked, looking at her. She said nothing and pulled out another, lighting it with an automatic lighter. He eyed the lighter with the same look that he had eyed the case, and took a pull from the bottle.
“S’name, hun?”
“Margaret,” she said with no voice.
“Margaret,” he nodded, watching her and then the trail of smoke swaying upward from her cigarette.
“Need any help with those bags there, Margaret?” He pointed to them but stared at her, puffing, hungry-looking.
She was not a stupid girl. It was not only death that was numb to her; murder wasn’t the only inhumane impulse she felt from mankind. But what was death in a valley of death but a train pulling into a depot? What was hope but a distraction, a stray thought that pulled one’s eyes from the schedule and made one forget for a moment at the most that the train would be on time, would always be on time. If anything survived, it was not with her. If anything still shone from the fog that 1917 had set upon her, it would be with someone else, something she never knew existed, something she’d never encountered and felt as thought she’d never even know of. Maybe it was with this man. But she did not delude herself.
They walked, then, her ahead and him following with an armful of bags, until the stores faded into trees and the dirt and dust under their feet, less accustomed to being trampled than the road in the town, grew ragged and wild. The woods chirped and hummed like they always had: blankly, matter-of-factly, comforting only those who had read enough stories to think that the mysteries they held were both fantastical and aimed at them. But she felt no stares, no magical eyes watching her from the thicket, and the set that devoured her from behind made her feel even more unseen, even less to see. The wrong things, she noticed, remained when the world began the crumble, and who was she in all this? In this world that clearly had larger concerns of tragic intent, what were her woes, her fears, her discomfort and her depression when all she had to measure them against were widows and thieves? For this man had already stolen from her all he wanted to take, and all that remained was the deed itself and the tending to the wounds she already felt forming. She could run but he had her bags. She could scream and shout and all it would do would send the birds scattering from the bushes. She could grab him by the ears and yank until a shiver of fear betrayed him and yell, or whisper, or even just glare to him that he was nothing, that he was a monster and a fiend, but why introduce anger to such a situation? Why do anything but get home, packages unmaimed, and sit with Jimmy, eat with him and talk about his father and try her best to fall asleep.
They still had a mile or so to walk when he spoke.
“You know, I’ll be shoving off soon,” he said. A crow screamed from an unseen tree top; she barely heard it.
“My name’s John, by the way,” he spoke again after she had said nothing. This time she nodded, turning her head back a hair for a quick moment.
“I don’t come around here much,” he said after another silence. She felt him staring, and turned to look at him without stopping. He smiled instantly when she looked and pointed over his shoulder.
“Family lives up the road some ways that way,” he said. “Quiet house, now. Just my father and mother and sisters. Two brothers went already, I’m going tonight.”
She nodded, feeling far away. She was there and she knew that he saw her there and she knew what he wanted and what he was going to take and yet she was far, far away.
“Ain’t got no girl.” he said quietly after another moment, waiting. She did nothing.
“Ain’t got no girl to say goodbye to,” he said again, “I had one but she left me, went for some flat foot who ain’t leaving. Flattened his nose to match when I heard ‘bout it, lemme tell ya.”
They walked for a while longer, passing a ditch that fell suddenly along the side of the road. She saw a dry patch in it and she saw how low it dipped away from view of the road and she knew, knew right then, but despite this and despite the fact that nothing was more apparent than his stare and his breath her heart still refused to quicken. When she heard his feet stop shuffling and the bags stop rustling against his coat she turned slowly but knew before she saw him that he would be standing in that ditch.
“Come here,” he said in a different voice.
She stood for a moment and tried to think of James, or of Jimmy, or of the days that would follow and bury this man in the mass grave of her memory, strip him of his details and his odor, but nothing came. She saw for a moment his eyes, his bizarrely boyish grin, and was smacked by a deep confusion of pity and envy for this man who thought such a situation was one of simple seduction. That this was a time in which she could coyly smile and slip into his arms for an evening of self-centered ignorance of the damnation that she knew he did not appreciate. And yet he was going. He had been snatched by a hand much larger than hers, lost in a game that had no rules, and this man stood, both smiling at her with saddening naivety and yet threatening everything, holding her packages for her like a cherub and yet dangling them over the mud.
“Come here, Margaret” he said again.
She said nothing, did nothing to indicate an answer, but he would have required nothing short of a tantrum to think she wasn’t just shy. She started towards him, slowly and without decision.
“Won’t you lie with me? Don’t you know I’m leaving tonight?”
He looked at her, careful to meet her eyes, impatient now, standing with his legs wide. His hands were relaxed at his sides but she saw the fists that would curl if he were to ask again.
Her legs ached from straining to walk so slowly and yet far too quickly she found herself right under his chin, her forehead scratched by stubble and the smell of sawdust.
“The war, Margaret.” He said, not thinking of war. “The war.”
She took the packages from his hands and placed them in a dry patch on the dirt. He smiled and put his hand on her waist.
What to do in a storm but let it pass?
What’s left to resist when horror is everything?
And so I took her, that Margaret, right there in the field. That poor, sad Margaret with the drooping eyes and slow steps. I took her right then and there, surrounded by all the life that fills a forest with sounds and wonder, and we felt something, we two, we felt something besides this goddamn war, pressed together in the mud.
Making love is such a deep breath when you need it. You never forget you’re alive when you’re with a girl that way. She wasn’t like Becca was before she went to that goddamned flatfoot. Becca at least moved a bit. But war takes it out of some people, I guess. I bet that Margaret lost her husband not too long ago. I bet he died far away from her and she thinks of nothing else but how alone she is, how there’s nobody coming home to watch over her. Poor, old Margaret! I could almost feel how far she’d sunk beforehand, and if she looked under 30 you’d never have known. But making love is like a deep breath, and she needed it most.
I’ll say it myself: something about this war rattles me. Excitement, fear, whatever. Something about it seems quite huge, almost insurmountable. But right then and there, with no boots on and a woman under me, what could strike me down? Right then and there I could have killed forty Jerries with my left hand. Right then and there I could have died with a smile that would have haunted the Jerry who got me. It’s why we’re gonna win this war, and win it quick. We know what it’s all about, this life. If you asked a Jerry what he thought about war, he’d probably just shoot you where you stood. If you asked him what it was he was fighting for, he’d probably either tell you it was for Germany or he’d just damn shoot you. They just don’t understand. A German will throw himself into war because he is bred for violence. He’s lived near it his whole life; he’s been raised by it, shown it in school. He has pointed a gun at a man before he pointed one at a piece of game. He loves blood because he’s been fed man-blood and now starves for it.
Animals. Cunning, treacherous, savage animals. Goddamned animals.
But us Americans, we know. We feel God’s smile on our backs when we march where we have to go. If you asked us what we fought for some may say “America” like the Jerry says “Germany,” but we don’t just fight for America the place. We put on our uniforms and march overseas to take on these monsters in their own backyard because we know what America stands for, and we fight for that, for what it actually means. The sun shines on beauty in America. Riches are for the taking in America. Freedom isn’t just a word in America. And we’ll fight off the depths of hell to save it. We’ll fight anyone for our homes and families. We’ll cast out every snake that threatens our wives and homesteads. We fight for our sisters and mothers. We fight for those in our country’s embrace who are too weak to fight for it. We fight for all those girls we leave in the mud who want nothing more than for us to come right back. And I’m going to fight. I’m going to war. I’m going and I’m going somewhere and I may die but god damn it if I’m not going to die for something a whole lot better than god-damned Germany…
These thoughts were in the small smile that he wore, head leaning against the bouncing window, watching his entire life sweep past with the flying fields and trees, daydreaming about violence without death. That same smile faded long before he was killed in the flurry of Chateau-Thierry, in a moment where the bullets whirled with the wind and his bearings and his mind were thrown completely into chaos. His body was dragged from the front lines to a field hospital by a private who admired him immensely and yelled loudly at the medical personal who seemed too unconcerned. The private sat at the foot of his bed, fingering the rosary beads that his mother forced him to bring and that now only left his hands when his rifle required two, praying to every nurse that flew by to save this man, save this soldier who gave the private socks when the snow ruined his, this man without whom, the private sincerely thought, no good could ever come of this war. But the doctor who glanced at his wounds did little justice to the gravity the private felt, and pronounced Corporal John Harrison dead from gunshot wounds almost immediately.
His body was sent home with a box and a folded flag. His sisters and mother wept over his gravestone for months, and his father found solace in bottles and words like “hero.” It was not long before each of them, privately, secret even to themselves, grew a writhing hate for a God who could send a boy like that and sweep him away, a boy who wore his potential like a horse wears a carrot and who hinted too strongly at the man he would have been for the loss to sit well with any idea of reality.
He was remembered by such minds, in stories and statements that grew grander as alcohol and grief began to cloud the memory. A bull of a boy, a man without the years, a true sacrifice. Could losing the war have been worse than this? Yes, his father would shout, only bringing more hysterics from his sobbing wife, yes, it would have been, for however horrible it was to lose him, he was a soldier to the end, and he wouldn’t appreciate his gift to this country being questioned by women who couldn’t understand. Don’t you realize, he’d shout over all the rest, over his family or a crowded tavern, that he had at least thirteen Jerries to his name? Thirteen men, full-grown German killers, met and fell to his son, thirteen. Unlucky bastards, he’d chuckle to himself after a few, the unlucky thirteen, he’d say too often, as the rest of his family continued to weep and now felt ashamed for being so ungrateful.
Thirteen men his son killed in the Great War. Thirteen souls gagging on their own blood, facing death with eyes widened by fear and pain.
Fourteen casualties the war had him take in total. Fourteen robbed bodies, lying in ditches.
Everything felt gray, swept up and scattered since the trains started to carry the men to deadly forests with French names. If anything were still amazing, it was the fact that the depot wasn’t ruined by the flood of tears it saw so often, and that things like train tracks and engines still worked with an iron rigidity in the midst of such a nightmare. Nothing else held any promise of exhilaration or change; Death, dull Death, had settled over the town like a whispered word, so quietly that it seemed it had always been there, so firmly that it seemed it always would be.
Margaret walked without thought, watching her feet but making little use of her eyes. She knew the way well; hers was a house that sat a few miles from town, painted and tall, and the only road that passed it started behind the depot, cut through the woods and continued far past her front door. She used to love walking home; that one road, barely holding back the brush from grabbing at her dress and the trees from winding together overhead, the explosion of civilization in the perfect form of her one, beautiful white house. James had made it for them himself, finished it with a rag in hand and a sweaty forehead, looking at it with a pride that the house reflected with its edges and size. But she saw no pride in such things anymore. The world seemed to be standing right overhead, and when it bent so close what could compare? She saw it the papers even when she didn’t mean to. Death by the thousands, too many to name, reports coming in long after the fact. Suddenly the wheels that spun the world felt enormous, and her nonexistent. If she sold everything she owned, pawned everything she could ever set her eyes on, and met the Reaper and begged him to agree to a penny for a life, a penny for a hundred lives, she would still be immeasurably unimportant. No array of stars, no refusal ever made hope seem so foreign. Nothing so horrible ever felt like truth.
Was this war? Was this always what it had meant? It shocked her that she had heard the word as a child, whispered it and giggled it and used it to invoke fantasies. War had set the backdrop for stories; it had never been more than a setting, a place, substituted by other mythical worlds when games grew tiresome. How cruel it all had been to pull back this veil, to show her that war was nothing less than the eternity of wretchedness spun in the minds of certain men, clawing and chomping at all.
She walked with vague notions of horror past a bench covered by a pile of rags. When she got close, the pile rustled, yawned, and rolled over towards her.
“Tobacco, ma’am?” A man’s head emerged from the pile, one eye squinting open.
She hadn’t seen him but was not startled. She looked at him blankly for a moment before putting down her bags and pulling out a silver cigarette case.
“Thanks,” he said, sitting up when the case flashed closed. A bottle clinked in his jacket. He looked no older than 18, but his youth seemed absent. He was wearing a few more coats than the weather demanded, and on the ground next to him his suitcase was straining against the few remaining unbroken clasps.
“Do you need a light?” she asked, looking in her purse.
“I got matches,” he said, pulling one out. He struck it on his boot and coughed when the end of the cigarette caught. She put the case back in her bag.
“You’re not gonna have one?” He asked, looking at her. She said nothing and pulled out another, lighting it with an automatic lighter. He eyed the lighter with the same look that he had eyed the case, and took a pull from the bottle.
“S’name, hun?”
“Margaret,” she said with no voice.
“Margaret,” he nodded, watching her and then the trail of smoke swaying upward from her cigarette.
“Need any help with those bags there, Margaret?” He pointed to them but stared at her, puffing, hungry-looking.
She was not a stupid girl. It was not only death that was numb to her; murder wasn’t the only inhumane impulse she felt from mankind. But what was death in a valley of death but a train pulling into a depot? What was hope but a distraction, a stray thought that pulled one’s eyes from the schedule and made one forget for a moment at the most that the train would be on time, would always be on time. If anything survived, it was not with her. If anything still shone from the fog that 1917 had set upon her, it would be with someone else, something she never knew existed, something she’d never encountered and felt as thought she’d never even know of. Maybe it was with this man. But she did not delude herself.
They walked, then, her ahead and him following with an armful of bags, until the stores faded into trees and the dirt and dust under their feet, less accustomed to being trampled than the road in the town, grew ragged and wild. The woods chirped and hummed like they always had: blankly, matter-of-factly, comforting only those who had read enough stories to think that the mysteries they held were both fantastical and aimed at them. But she felt no stares, no magical eyes watching her from the thicket, and the set that devoured her from behind made her feel even more unseen, even less to see. The wrong things, she noticed, remained when the world began the crumble, and who was she in all this? In this world that clearly had larger concerns of tragic intent, what were her woes, her fears, her discomfort and her depression when all she had to measure them against were widows and thieves? For this man had already stolen from her all he wanted to take, and all that remained was the deed itself and the tending to the wounds she already felt forming. She could run but he had her bags. She could scream and shout and all it would do would send the birds scattering from the bushes. She could grab him by the ears and yank until a shiver of fear betrayed him and yell, or whisper, or even just glare to him that he was nothing, that he was a monster and a fiend, but why introduce anger to such a situation? Why do anything but get home, packages unmaimed, and sit with Jimmy, eat with him and talk about his father and try her best to fall asleep.
They still had a mile or so to walk when he spoke.
“You know, I’ll be shoving off soon,” he said. A crow screamed from an unseen tree top; she barely heard it.
“My name’s John, by the way,” he spoke again after she had said nothing. This time she nodded, turning her head back a hair for a quick moment.
“I don’t come around here much,” he said after another silence. She felt him staring, and turned to look at him without stopping. He smiled instantly when she looked and pointed over his shoulder.
“Family lives up the road some ways that way,” he said. “Quiet house, now. Just my father and mother and sisters. Two brothers went already, I’m going tonight.”
She nodded, feeling far away. She was there and she knew that he saw her there and she knew what he wanted and what he was going to take and yet she was far, far away.
“Ain’t got no girl.” he said quietly after another moment, waiting. She did nothing.
“Ain’t got no girl to say goodbye to,” he said again, “I had one but she left me, went for some flat foot who ain’t leaving. Flattened his nose to match when I heard ‘bout it, lemme tell ya.”
They walked for a while longer, passing a ditch that fell suddenly along the side of the road. She saw a dry patch in it and she saw how low it dipped away from view of the road and she knew, knew right then, but despite this and despite the fact that nothing was more apparent than his stare and his breath her heart still refused to quicken. When she heard his feet stop shuffling and the bags stop rustling against his coat she turned slowly but knew before she saw him that he would be standing in that ditch.
“Come here,” he said in a different voice.
She stood for a moment and tried to think of James, or of Jimmy, or of the days that would follow and bury this man in the mass grave of her memory, strip him of his details and his odor, but nothing came. She saw for a moment his eyes, his bizarrely boyish grin, and was smacked by a deep confusion of pity and envy for this man who thought such a situation was one of simple seduction. That this was a time in which she could coyly smile and slip into his arms for an evening of self-centered ignorance of the damnation that she knew he did not appreciate. And yet he was going. He had been snatched by a hand much larger than hers, lost in a game that had no rules, and this man stood, both smiling at her with saddening naivety and yet threatening everything, holding her packages for her like a cherub and yet dangling them over the mud.
“Come here, Margaret” he said again.
She said nothing, did nothing to indicate an answer, but he would have required nothing short of a tantrum to think she wasn’t just shy. She started towards him, slowly and without decision.
“Won’t you lie with me? Don’t you know I’m leaving tonight?”
He looked at her, careful to meet her eyes, impatient now, standing with his legs wide. His hands were relaxed at his sides but she saw the fists that would curl if he were to ask again.
Her legs ached from straining to walk so slowly and yet far too quickly she found herself right under his chin, her forehead scratched by stubble and the smell of sawdust.
“The war, Margaret.” He said, not thinking of war. “The war.”
She took the packages from his hands and placed them in a dry patch on the dirt. He smiled and put his hand on her waist.
What to do in a storm but let it pass?
What’s left to resist when horror is everything?
And so I took her, that Margaret, right there in the field. That poor, sad Margaret with the drooping eyes and slow steps. I took her right then and there, surrounded by all the life that fills a forest with sounds and wonder, and we felt something, we two, we felt something besides this goddamn war, pressed together in the mud.
Making love is such a deep breath when you need it. You never forget you’re alive when you’re with a girl that way. She wasn’t like Becca was before she went to that goddamned flatfoot. Becca at least moved a bit. But war takes it out of some people, I guess. I bet that Margaret lost her husband not too long ago. I bet he died far away from her and she thinks of nothing else but how alone she is, how there’s nobody coming home to watch over her. Poor, old Margaret! I could almost feel how far she’d sunk beforehand, and if she looked under 30 you’d never have known. But making love is like a deep breath, and she needed it most.
I’ll say it myself: something about this war rattles me. Excitement, fear, whatever. Something about it seems quite huge, almost insurmountable. But right then and there, with no boots on and a woman under me, what could strike me down? Right then and there I could have killed forty Jerries with my left hand. Right then and there I could have died with a smile that would have haunted the Jerry who got me. It’s why we’re gonna win this war, and win it quick. We know what it’s all about, this life. If you asked a Jerry what he thought about war, he’d probably just shoot you where you stood. If you asked him what it was he was fighting for, he’d probably either tell you it was for Germany or he’d just damn shoot you. They just don’t understand. A German will throw himself into war because he is bred for violence. He’s lived near it his whole life; he’s been raised by it, shown it in school. He has pointed a gun at a man before he pointed one at a piece of game. He loves blood because he’s been fed man-blood and now starves for it.
Animals. Cunning, treacherous, savage animals. Goddamned animals.
But us Americans, we know. We feel God’s smile on our backs when we march where we have to go. If you asked us what we fought for some may say “America” like the Jerry says “Germany,” but we don’t just fight for America the place. We put on our uniforms and march overseas to take on these monsters in their own backyard because we know what America stands for, and we fight for that, for what it actually means. The sun shines on beauty in America. Riches are for the taking in America. Freedom isn’t just a word in America. And we’ll fight off the depths of hell to save it. We’ll fight anyone for our homes and families. We’ll cast out every snake that threatens our wives and homesteads. We fight for our sisters and mothers. We fight for those in our country’s embrace who are too weak to fight for it. We fight for all those girls we leave in the mud who want nothing more than for us to come right back. And I’m going to fight. I’m going to war. I’m going and I’m going somewhere and I may die but god damn it if I’m not going to die for something a whole lot better than god-damned Germany…
These thoughts were in the small smile that he wore, head leaning against the bouncing window, watching his entire life sweep past with the flying fields and trees, daydreaming about violence without death. That same smile faded long before he was killed in the flurry of Chateau-Thierry, in a moment where the bullets whirled with the wind and his bearings and his mind were thrown completely into chaos. His body was dragged from the front lines to a field hospital by a private who admired him immensely and yelled loudly at the medical personal who seemed too unconcerned. The private sat at the foot of his bed, fingering the rosary beads that his mother forced him to bring and that now only left his hands when his rifle required two, praying to every nurse that flew by to save this man, save this soldier who gave the private socks when the snow ruined his, this man without whom, the private sincerely thought, no good could ever come of this war. But the doctor who glanced at his wounds did little justice to the gravity the private felt, and pronounced Corporal John Harrison dead from gunshot wounds almost immediately.
His body was sent home with a box and a folded flag. His sisters and mother wept over his gravestone for months, and his father found solace in bottles and words like “hero.” It was not long before each of them, privately, secret even to themselves, grew a writhing hate for a God who could send a boy like that and sweep him away, a boy who wore his potential like a horse wears a carrot and who hinted too strongly at the man he would have been for the loss to sit well with any idea of reality.
He was remembered by such minds, in stories and statements that grew grander as alcohol and grief began to cloud the memory. A bull of a boy, a man without the years, a true sacrifice. Could losing the war have been worse than this? Yes, his father would shout, only bringing more hysterics from his sobbing wife, yes, it would have been, for however horrible it was to lose him, he was a soldier to the end, and he wouldn’t appreciate his gift to this country being questioned by women who couldn’t understand. Don’t you realize, he’d shout over all the rest, over his family or a crowded tavern, that he had at least thirteen Jerries to his name? Thirteen men, full-grown German killers, met and fell to his son, thirteen. Unlucky bastards, he’d chuckle to himself after a few, the unlucky thirteen, he’d say too often, as the rest of his family continued to weep and now felt ashamed for being so ungrateful.
Thirteen men his son killed in the Great War. Thirteen souls gagging on their own blood, facing death with eyes widened by fear and pain.
Fourteen casualties the war had him take in total. Fourteen robbed bodies, lying in ditches.