Articles of War Page 2

  One day, after having idled more than a week at Omaha, Heck followed along the coastside cliffs and beaches a couple of miles, then turned inland. He passed through a muddy wood, skirted the high grasses of a swampland, then followed a narrow cart path through several pastures. A skinny goat watched him as he passed. It seemed he had entered a place where the war had not encroached. It was, he thought, very beautiful. He sat for a few minutes on a broad, dry stone and watched a pair of rabbits foraging in a meadow. He smoked a cigarette. He stood again and followed a long hedgerow until it ended among some trees and he worked his way through these until he could see out into another meadow, where a German airplane had fallen. It lay on its belly, and the wings and tail section were gone, the fuselage blackened around the engine and cockpit. Small white clouds scurried by, orchestrating rapid passages of light and shadow, and the wind pushed gently at Heck making his eyes water, so that when he saw a shape moving in the plane’s cockpit he thought at first it was an illusion of the wind, the tears, and the shadows of the clouds. But as his eyes cleared the figure failed to dissolve—it was a small, rounded shape, bobbing up and down in the airplane cockpit. The more Heck studied it, the more he thought it had to be a person’s head. It kept popping up and down, then disappearing for a while, then reappearing. It reminded Heck of a bird, but it was too large. Then a small shape climbed out and began running forward and back along the fuselage and Heck realized it was a child, a boy. Heck could hear faintly the boy shouting. It struck Heck that, for a child, all this mess of war might seem like the equipment of a complicated and marvelous game. Then another figure appeared at the edge of the meadow to the right, a girl or young woman, who called to the boy. Heck turned and started away. He strode quickly, and he was hoping, without knowing or even wondering exactly why, that the boy and the woman had not observed him when there was the convulsive, sharp noise of a detonation, then screams.

  Heck ran back to the edge of the field. The boy lay beside a smoking hole in the earth, screaming and flailing. The woman also was screaming, and she was running toward the boy.

  Heck stepped forward, then halted. The boy, he guessed, had set off a land mine. Heck began shouting for the woman to stop, and she slowed for a step or two, looking wildly in his direction, then set off running again. Heck gazed in fear at her and the boy, then at the route before him across the field. He could see only densely growing grasses. When he looked up, the girl, running clumsily in her skirts, was already nearly halfway to the boy. Peering again at the grasses just before him Heck could see no glint of metal, no dark line of wire. Gingerly he pushed a foot forward, set it down, brought the other foot up beside it. The boy’s screams already seemed to have become something eternal and luminous, thin and bright in the open air.

  Then the woman reached the boy and she tried to haul him up by the armpits. The boy’s screams redoubled then fell apart into loud sobs while he floundered and she staggered with him a couple of steps. The boy in his panic seemed to be fighting her, and he slid through her grip. She tried again but could only bring his shoulders to her waist. Then she looked over at Heck. She waved and shouted. Blood from the boy stood out brightly on one of her hands.

  Heck glanced behind himself. It would probably take at least half an hour to find his way back to someone who could help. The girl continued to yell at him in French, and he couldn’t understand her, but it sounded like she was already shouting at him more in anger than in pleading. For a second he swayed forward and back and forward; then something inside unexpectedly released and he began to run toward them. The tall grasses cracked under his boots, each one feeling exactly like a trip wire, so that every step contained several horrible instants during which he fell toward oblivion. The explosion and pain and void, however, did not come. As he reached the girl she alternately smiled and grimaced and yelled belligerently and loudly at him as though he were still somewhere across the field. She was probably sixteen or seventeen years old, only slightly younger than Heck was himself.

  The boy’s foot was bloody and looked a mess. Heck took off his shirt for a bandage; finally, he felt like he knew what he was doing. He said, “Quiet now, you’re going to be fine, you’ll be okay,” and the boy probably could not understand any of this but his cries fell to a strangled whimpering. The boy’s hands and face were marked with black streaks of soot from the airplane, the knees of his trousers were patched, and his hair appeared combed but greasy, unwashed for a week or two. Heck got him into a sitting position, then, with an arm under the boy’s shoulders, lifted him upright. The boy bounced on his good foot and moaned. “Be strong,” Heck said. “Be a good boy.” He looked around, and the girl pulled on his sleeve.

  “There,” she said, pointing in the direction she had come across the field.

  Heck hesitated, still wary of mines. It would be impossible to find the precise route the girl had taken across the field—the grasses had closed over and made it invisible. The way he had come was unmarked now, too, but he thought he could see the point where he had come out of the woods. He had run directly out, on a straight line, and he believed he could re-create it. Also, the woods were nearer in that direction. “We’ll go back that way,” he said to the girl. “Then we can circle through the woods.” Half-carrying, half-dragging the boy he started ahead. The girl put an arm around the boy from the other side, and the three moved together slowly. The boy moaned; the shirt tied around his foot grew red and moist with blood. Heck watched the grasses ahead carefully, not sure exactly what he was looking for. Suddenly, about halfway to the woods, a new thought came to him. He looked at the girl. “You know English.”

  She kept her face to the ground and did not immediately answer. Her skirts, brushing the boy’s injured foot, were becoming bloodied. She said, with a thick accent, “A little English. Yes.”

  In the woods the branches hid them from the sunlight and Heck had a feeling of being enclosed and having left the danger behind. When the girl pointed and said, “House,” he did not protest but helped move the boy in that direction.

  Concentrating on helping the boy along, Heck failed to pay close attention to where they were going. They had not walked for long, it seemed, when he looked up and just ahead lay a stone building. It stood in a small clearing among the trees where the weeds and brush had grown so high that the walls of the house were largely obscured. The roof was sagging and had fallen through in a couple of places. As they came up to the door he saw that the windows were gone; some had been boarded up with panels of stained and varnished wood evidently removed from pieces of furniture. They stepped inside, and the walls glistened with water. Spread across the floor were things in sacks and rough bundles, ready, it appeared, to be moved at a moment’s notice. Daylight came through the holes in the ceiling, and under the largest of these was an improvised, blackened fire pit. A man rose from a chair in the corner and hurried to the boy. Only when the man had taken the boy and Heck stood watching the two of them, feeling suddenly useless, did he notice that the man had only one arm. The man laid the boy out on a thin paillasse, then ran around the room fetching water and soap and a vial of iodine, tearing a sheet into bandages, all the while shouting at the children in French. He was extraordinarily dexterous with his single hand, able, using his teeth and underarms as anchors, to tie knots and wrap bandages. Heck stood in his dirty undershirt watching while they worked on the boy’s foot. When it had been cleaned it actually did not look so bad. The boy’s eyes caught the light and shone like beacons while he watched the others work on him.

  When he finished dressing the boy’s foot, the man stood and, for the first time, looked at Heck. His cheeks were scarred by purplish, pocked tissue that was only poorly obscured by a thin beard. He wore a suit of battered, dark blue wool and a yellowing shirt, open at the collar. His left sleeve was pinned up to the shoulder. He said, unprompted, “Lost it during the previous war with the Germans.” He gestured at the pinned sleeve. “You can stare if you like. Nation of brutish engineers, the Germans.” He spoke with an odd, pinched, vaguely British accent. “Running forward and back, up to this trench, back to that one. Then an explosion, and I find I’ve lost the arm. Could’ve been worse, of course.” He laughed, as though this were a joke. “You are American. My name is Albert. What’s your name?”

  “You’re the father? Of the boy, and her?”

  “Yes, of course. Please have a seat. She is Claire. The boy is Ives.”

  Instinctively Heck felt wary of giving his real name. He said, “They’ve been calling me Heck.” He looked at Albert expecting questions, but Albert only nodded.

  “Welcome,” said Albert, “to our château.” Again he laughed.

  Heck sat at the small wooden table where Albert had been sitting when they entered. Albert rummaged into a trunk and offered Heck a shirt. It smelled sour and in the stomach was a cigarette burn, but it fit reasonably well. The left arm had to be unpinned. Albert then rinsed Heck’s own shirt perfunctorily, and hung it to dry from a coat rack. The bloodstains still showed. Peering through doorways, Heck could see that the rooms farther back lay in ruined, haphazard arrangements of timber, stone, glass, and roof slates. The building had once been fairly large but it seemed only two front rooms survived more or less intact. The girl, Claire, was sitting in a wooden chair, near her brother. Heck watched her a moment then looked down at the table before him. He hoped this was not too obvious. She quietly studied her father or Ives and it was difficult to guess what she was thinking. Then, when Heck looked up, he saw all three of them gazing at him—hungrily, he thought.

  “Their mother is dead, of course,” Albert said. “I do the best I can. Difficult times.” The flesh of his face and his neck drooped a little, as if he had been partially deflated.

  “Maybe,” H
eck said, “the boy should be taken to a doctor for stitches?”

  “Quite unnecessary,” Albert said. “Not at all. I know there was some blood, which is always rather alarming, but the cuts are shallow. I have dealt with many such wounds.” Albert began pacing the room and an element of herky-jerky uncontrol dominated his movements. Heck was not sure if this could be caused by the imbalance of the missing arm. It seemed possible that Albert was somewhat mad. He wheeled round suddenly. “Don’t talk very much, do you?”

  “Sorry, sir. I’m still catching my breath.”

  “She’s a quiet one too.” He indicated Claire. “Ives sometimes talks as if it were necessary as breathing. But not now. Must have put a scare into him. I told you not to be playing in a place like that, didn’t I?” He glared at the boy and the boy looked back with a defiant expression. Albert turned again to Heck. “I know what you’re thinking. I should keep better watch over my children.”

  Heck shook his head.

  “You are thinking—I would be thinking if I were you—what sort of a father lets his son go out and step on explosives?” He said to the boy, “You’re unbelievably lucky the damage was not worse.”

  The boy appeared unconcerned with any of this. Of course, the father was speaking in English.

  “I should be going,” Heck said suddenly. “I’ll be missed soon.” He wouldn’t, but he felt uncomfortable here; these people seemed ensconced in some peculiar, haunted world of their own.

  “Well,” said Albert. He clenched his single hand into a fist, making a large and dangerous-looking object. “Come back tomorrow. We will be prepared for a guest. We will thank you in proper fashion.”

  “I may not be able to.”

  “My boy, just come. Tomorrow. Please.”

  Without answering, Heck took his shirt and went to the door. He looked around the dank dwelling one more time. “Perhaps I can get some things for you. I could bring food, clothes. No one’s really paying much attention. There’s so much stuff passing through.”

  “No, no,” said Albert. “Thank you. We don’t need anything.”

  “Fresh bandages, maybe.”

  “No,” said Albert, waving toward the door. “You’ve done enough already.”

  Heck glanced once more at the girl—she was watching him quietly—then turned and stepped quickly out the door. He picked his way through the overgrown, weed-infested lawn of the “château,” entered the woods, and stood a moment in indecision. He listened for the ocean or the noise of a road, but could hear only the birds and the wind. Finally he simply picked a direction he hoped would take him back to Omaha and set out, gripping his still wet and bloody shirt in one hand.

  When he heard footsteps coming up rapidly behind him, he stopped. After a moment he saw Claire. She affected to be studying things other than him—the leaves, the path. “Hello,” he said.

  She said, quietly, in her accent, “Hello.” Her features were now more calmly composed than they had been when she was helping Ives, and she looked somewhat older, perhaps as old as Heck himself. He wondered how old he appeared to her, and he felt self-conscious of his thinning hair. He was curious why she had followed him, but unsure whether she would understand the question, and how she would take it if she did understand, so they walked on together a while in silence. They were on a narrow, vaguely defined path that evidently had not been much trafficked in a number of years. The girl said nothing. Heck fidgeted with the buttons and cuffs of Albert’s shirt. “So,” he said, “where are we going?” But Claire glanced around with a look of not understanding. She looked thin—not terribly so, but the angles of her bones showed a little more in her face than they probably would have if she were eating well every day. She had full lips, narrowly set eyes, and a narrow, sharp nose. The flesh immediately under her eyes was the color of faded bruises. She wore her hair short in thick dark curls. On her pale skin, at the line of her chin, were a series of small dark moles and she looked to him not at all like any of the girls he had known back home. She was soon moving through the woods with a quick confidence, and Heck fell slightly behind her. Sunlight sparkled between the leaves overhead. The path took an increasingly erratic course, meandering around trees and slopes so that soon Heck had no idea where it would ultimately lead.

  They came to a small glade where the trees ringing around blocked all the sky except for a single porthole at the center. Across the ground grew a thin carpet of grass and mosses. There was a buzzing sound that came, Heck saw, from a series of beehives in a row along one side of the clearing, small wooden structures painted white but peeling and weathering to gray and black.

  Claire went to the hives. She seemed to have no fear of the bees, and she opened a door with her bare hands. As she reached inside, the collective whine of the bees altered in pitch and volume, and they began swarming out. In the slant light cast through the opening overhead the stirring, rising bees looked like the sparks of a campfire someone had kicked or prodded. Claire paid them no attention. She closed and latched the hive, and she returned across the glade with a piece of honeycomb in her hand. Or not a honeycomb, Heck saw. It was some other small object, a toy or a box, perhaps—she held it away from him and twisted it in her hands. “What is it?” he said.

  She giggled and continued to twist or turn the thing; then with a flourishing gesture she presented it on the palm of her hand, a small ornate silver box playing tiny notes of music. He did not recognize the tune.

  She smiled broadly at Heck, offering it to him. He gazed, dumbfounded. She said, “It is named? What? Is called?”

  “A music box?”

  “A—music—box,” she echoed. A fat bead of honey hung from a corner. She wiped it with a thumb and forefinger. Then she took Heck’s hand and deposited the music box there.

  “No,” he said, trying to push it back toward her.

  “I give you,” she said, licking her fingers.

  When he tried again to give it back she stepped away, raising her hands in the air. He looked at the music box. The silver was patterned with entangled scrollworks and arabesques. A tiny latch allowed him to open it and peer at the mechanism inside. It was not much larger than a cigarette lighter. The music slowed then stopped and she showed him where to wind it again and left it playing in his hand, this silver, musical thing, and a happy bewildered feeling rose inside him. “Good-bye,” she said, and she waved and walked away, back up the path. When the music box had slowed and stopped he listened to the quiet and realized he could hear, very faintly, the purr of waves striking the shore.

  In the mess tent that evening the army fed Heck with Spam, marmalade, crackers, and thin coffee. It was the same every day. While Heck sat over his dinner at a long wooden table, the man across from him was showing the men to either side a photo of his wife. He seemed to think his wife was something pretty special, and he had a whole monologue going about how beautiful and smart she was. When one of the men set the photo down on the table so he could eat, Heck looked at it and thought she did not look like all that much. He thought of Claire, and Claire won the comparison with the girl in the photo. That evening he lay on his back listening to the creak of the tent canvas as it rocked in the breeze and to the muted indecipherable voices of men whispering around him. He held the music box in his hand, not playing it but feeling the honeyed, tacky surface of it. He recalled the few words Claire had said—It is named? I give you—weighed them and examined them like unusual coins. He began to wonder at his behavior in the field, at the airplane. He felt he had done well once he had gotten to the boy. But he also had a desolate and dry feeling as he considered his hesitation at the edge of the field. He wished Claire had not seen him hesitate. He felt woefully young.