Drink for the Thirst to Come (10 page)

“You come.”

“’S alright, i’nnit?” Welly whispered.

“You come.” The corporal pointed to another man, and another and another. Five in all. Bill was left, one of fifteen.

“Soon done,” the corporal said and pointed. Welly went last behind the veil.

Bill stopped where the ridge rose. Either side of him, the line of craters stretched for miles. Where he stood under the stars and in the still gently roiling earth, nothing had happened that morning 13 years ago.

At 3:10 Ack Emma, General Plumer said, “By damn!” and someone closed the electric gap. Along the ridge, 19 mines had blown. The world shouted with the voice of one million two hundred thousand pounds of HE. Ten thousand men died that second, more, later.

Two mines failed.

Bill knew why the one. The other? Not a clue.

Life went quiet when Welly left. Bill had watched men die. He’d known the men who were the empty places in the mess, on the firing step. Things went on. But the silence of Welly’s going was complete. Part of Bill went too. He woke to silence. He carried his loads, a stranger’s back ahead. He went to sleep without a dozen questions, no answers to consider.

The earth, the grass, reached out to caress him. The earth beneath the silent stars breathed. He felt the swimmers in the shadows rising.

“Know one of your own, don’t you?” he said to the rolling runnels that tipped him back and forth.

Time came. The ten who remained carted HE down the tunnel. A nearly endless supply squeaked down the lift from the light above or from the darkness, in rain or dry. It came and came. Tons of it. Carried, one charge at a time, and left at the canvas wall, then back to the lift for more. When they returned, their previous load was gone.

They rested.

The corporal watched.

When they rose, the corporal pointed. “You,” he’d say to one. “You go where charges go. You pack. I show.” And another went behind the canvas curtain.

Finally, only Bill remained when the last charge came down the lift. Bill and the corporal.

“Wire come. We get.”

Bill followed the corporal to the lift. Down it came: a cable spool unrolling, trailing lines to the surface. Together, Bill and the corporal rolled the spool to the canvas wall.

“You go,” the corporal said. He pointed to the canvas flap. “I show.”

Past the canvas was a narrow chamber lit by several bulbs, at the far end, another canvas bulkhead. No men. No explosives. Here the electric lines, the air pipe, ended. Beyond was darkness. Above, the Hun.

Bill turned. “Where’s Welly?” he said to the corporal. “You done your dig! Where are the diggers? Where’s my mate?”

The nig-nog’s eye swam toward Bill. The brown swirled, the gold of it burrowed into him. Bill’s chest went empty. The corporal’s hand barely twitched from his side, the thumb caressed the edge of his forefinger.

“Where’re the other blokes!” Bill shouted with the last air in his chest.

The corporal closed the space between them.

Bill’s ears went dead. The damp wet smell of the earth drained from him. A pale shadow, the scent of pig two days dead remained. The corporal reached toward him, his thumb pointed at Bill’s forehead. Bill staggered backward into the shade between bulbs. As the corporal approached, Bill’s vision faded, flickered, shrank to a bright center. The black thumb reached toward the single warm point, all that remained of Bill. Bill was swallowing himself, darkness, the earth, the night, all time, forever, were becoming him. One point remained. One movement remained to him. He swung the pickax by his side, swung toward the pinpoint place on the surface of his sight.

Then…

The corporal’s hand flew in a spray of bright, bright red. With it, the call of a thousand voices, a sound from beyond the dark, beyond the walls of the tunnel, from above, below and everywhere, filled Bill like air, like light, like space.

The corporal continued to stare at Bill. The black flesh of the corporal’s arm ended in a ragged red place that filled the air with wet. The dark hand lay in the dirt. The thumb tap, tap, tapped the ground.

“How?” the corporal asked. “How I touch you now?” His brown and golden eyes flicked from Bill to the hand. He spoke more but Bill didn’t
parleyvoo
. He did not care to. He didn’t care to resolve the corporal’s problem.

“Welly!” Bill shouted. “Welly!” he screamed. The corporal continued to stare at the hand. Bill ran to the opening at the far end of the chamber. “Welly!” he shrieked. “Oi! Welly!”

Part of him knew he screamed a woman’s scream, a child’s. The screams continued even after he’d gone through the canvas wall. There, where the electric lamps stopped, he stopped running. No place to run. He sensed rather than saw the light beyond. The rational part of him knew, surely, here was insufficient light to see. Nonetheless he saw. Imagination, maybe, but a misty luminescence filled the space, a pale green glow, more anticipation than sight. An assumption of light, perhaps, but around Bill, floor to roof—and the roof here was high, two, three man-heights, more, into darkness—here were the charges they’d carried and the space was filled with light. The wooden high explosive cartridges were stacked row upon row.

The smell was that old, old smell from home: the reek of pig, of blood and death.

The green dark swam like tadpole fishies in his head. He knew the men who sat upon the boxes. There they were. The lads, his mates. The shamblers in the dark.

“Welly! Welly! Welly!” The name was noise without meaning. In a moment or three, there was Welly.

“Wot?” he said to Bill. He clambered down the crates, like walking down a stairway from the sky.

Bill still screamed his name.

“Hshh,” Welly said. “You’ll wake the Huns.”

Bill hushed. The others of the detail—the fifty that had come and hundreds more—stared at him, shadows among the crates, their bodies and faces an arrangement, high, low, wide and deep, in shadow, flesh and dirty serge. A thousand eyes, unblinking but flickering in the pale and drifting light, fixed on him. They were at rest. Not curious. They waited. A thousand eyes perched above, to the sides, down the cavern. Everywhere, eyes, eyes waiting, eyes at rest, done.

“We’re leaving,” Bill said to Welly.

“Right,” Welly said. His eyes, too, were finished.

“We’re hopping it,” Bill said.

“Right,” said Welly. His eyes didn’t flash or flicker.

The corporal waited at the entrance to the chamber. He’d solved his problem. He held his right hand in his left. He pointed the thumb at Welly like a revolver. “You stay,” he said.

Welly stopped.

He turned to Bill. “You connect wire! I show.”

The world narrowed again. The haze of hoarfrost light from behind faded; his vision narrowed. The corporal advanced. The black hand with its gored thumb filled his sight. The fingers curled as they reached for his cheek.

The world collapsed. The world collapsed on Bill. Another world collided with his head and pressed both eardrums through his nose… or so it felt. The earth fell on his chest.

After a second or so, what remained of Bill thought the mine had gone off. He thought death, considered, yes, this, this was the first moment of hell. Four, five, six seconds later Bill knew that, no, the tunnel was intact, the lights had gone out, the corporal had, well, had vanished, had gone, was dead, maybe, maybe crushed, flattened, torn to pieces. And Welly… Well, Welly held Bill’s hand.

Then he knew he wasn’t dead, not exactly, not precisely dead, but the other mines along the ridge had gone off…

3:11 Ack Emma.

“Le Pelerin failed,” the colonel reported. “And another.”

“Damn,” said General Plumer.

“Will it matter, sir?” the colonel said. “Nineteen will do.”

“Damn,” the general said again. “One prefers perfection.”

De-mobbed, in London, Bill eventually turned up, back in Ouze, back in Suffolk. Da’s place opened its arms to the returning warriors. Bill among them. His sleeping brothers not.

He lay on their bed for a week. Longer. Alone. No one said much. They fed him. He didn’t eat. They smiled. He nodded.
Be fair,
he thought. He tried to eat his old Ma’s food. Too salty. Too rich. Just too.

He walked among Da’s pigs.

“Don’t forget your Wellies,” Ma said.

“What?” He stared at her.

“Your boots!” She handed him his Wellingtons. “We knew you’d be back. Kept ’em for ’e!”

The muck and shit sucked at his feet. The boots felt heavy. But the stink, ah, the stink made him remember home: the grunts and rumbling snorts of boar hogs, the squeal of shoats so comfortable, and the long crookey smiles of mother pigs in sun, ahh. Home.

He watched Da at slaughter. He helped and all. Naught was right, though. He knew. Da and Ma knew. Naught was quite right. He slept poorly. He waked in the night. Alone. He covered his eyes and pressed. Nothing. No light and color licked the darkness behind his lids. He held his breath, seemed like hours, holding. He waited for the smell, the breathing of the shamblers. No, no. They stayed away. He rose and walked the narrow halls past his parents’ room, down around the narrow steps, the remnants of the evening’s fire and the draining warmth of the kitchen. He wandered here and there. Naught to be seen. No shamblers here.

What he was told, he did. What he did, he did poorly. Nothing filled him.

“Your mind’s not in pigs. Like you’re not all here,” Da said gently.

At the Plow in Ouze, he’d lift a pint or two. Every night. Folk did that. He did, too.

“Howzzat, Mikey!” he shouted to the landlord, arriving.

Mikey Alsop always pulled a pint for him, on the house. “Least the house can do ’nall, right lads?”

Bill smiled and leaned on the bar. He listened to talk of test matches, innings and overs, to farm chat, to word of work and prices and of who was back, who wasn’t, who would never. He spoke of all things right and proper: Plow talk.

Nights at the Plow he leaned on the bar, his spot, by the window. He’d watch the evening rise. When a fellow’d come by with an empty sleeve, a knotted trouser leg, some other notice on him jotted off from the recent war, Bill turned away to watch the sky. No empty parts to Bill’s kit, no sir.

10:00 Pip Emma, prompt: “Time Gen’lemen, please!” Mikey’d say with a whispered smile. “10:00 lads, Constable Grimm’l be by and by on his little bikey, by-n-by. Shut the door, our Stanley! Dim them lights.” And the life of the pub would go forth blacked out, hushed when the constable’s bicycle squeaked past the door, through the village, on to Lakenheath, beyond. And all the gathered lads and men would smile their beers and jiggers and whisper more of cricket and of pigs.

In the street and tramping up the way in the cool or in the warm mud of spring, Bill watched the sky and counted sunsets.

“High latitude, us,” Stanley’d say walking ’longside Bill as far as the fork in the path. “Look a’ that,” pointing to the sun’s glow that lingered on the horizon, “an hour shy o’ midnight’n all. Day stays well into night, roundabout, you know. Oh yes. We’re a northern country, us.”

“Oh, aye, that we are,” Bill said. And saying it, he felt… “Feels like I’m practicing at sommat,” he said. Surprised he spoke aloud.

“Eh?” Stanley said, perched on the branch of the road his way. “Eh?”

“I walk and talk, I work. But it’s playing scales, you know? Practice. Ma’s parlor piano when I was… Crikey, six years gone! Imagine that and all? I was a lad, these six years back. Crikey. Up and down, up and down.”

“Oh, aye,” Stanly said, and cocked a goodnight wave.

The wind blew and the flat, flat land rippled in the stars and moon, when moon there was. Wind shadows rolled the earth.

He didn’t fit. He was the
between
, the hole in a hole. Beer didn’t taste. Work brought nor sweat nor joy. Old Da, his Ma, the sister girls gave no home that settled him.

“You ain’t come back,” Ma said. “I heard of other lads like you. Likely lads’n all, fellows who left sommat of the’ selfs out there.”

“I died,” he said one day, looking at her.

“Ahh, nor did you!” she said. “You hear that, Nels? Our Bill says he died over there in France.”

“Oh, aye? The Yanks say, ‘How’re you gonna keep ’em down on the farm now they seen Paree?’” Da said.

“No, I’ll never,” Bill said, “never go there,” he said. “Never back.”

“No. Says he died, like. Like Charlie done and Rafe. For real an’ all!” Ma said, staring at him, as though trying to see below his skin and into him.

“I don’t know when it was or how,” Bill said.

“Ah,” Da said, and puffed his pipe.

“Mustna’ say them things, now Bill!” Ma said, crying. “And your brothers dead and buried somewhere over there.”

“I didn’t die?” Bill said.

“Mustna’!” she said.

“I won’t,” he said.

Da collapsed hoisting up a pig to stick him. The pig hung screaming while Bill went for help. Da’s heart, doctor reckoned.

That was ten years after he’d come back.

“That were quick like,” Stanley said after the funeral. “He went in the glory of his time, I’d say. Wouldn’t you, Mikey? Say old Nels went in the glory of his years?”

“Oh, aye,” Mikey said and set the house for Old Bill.

Ma faded after. The girls were gone and married, the brothers, just a pair of pictures. Bill had no marker to her deterioration, none he could say to, “Ain’t Ma favoring that leg, of late?” or “She takes a time goin’ up them steps, eh?”

He noticed she would start a thing and not finish. Not that that was strange. Just that Ma never had done it. Or if she had, Da had finished for her. Now she lingered in the silence. Or times were she couldn’t make an end to something. She’d start chopping onions at the board, times were, and wouldn’t stop when the thing was done. Just kept at it. Chop, chop, chop.

She died. One morning, there she was, on the steps, stopped, coming down, stopped and seated, leaning to the wall.

That was twelve years after Old Bill came home.

After that, well, there was nothing left. No one left to tell him he was still alive, no one to say, “Ach!” when he said the best of him he’d left in a hole below a field in Flanders. No one left to tell him “No.”