Heroes (3 page)

I told him about forging my birth certificate. He didn’t ask why I joined and I didn’t expect him to. Everyone wanted to go to war in those days to defeat the Japs and the Germans.

After a while, we fell into a tired, end-of-a-long-day silence. Then he left to rejoin his outfit, walking off into the twilight. He turned and we saluted
each other in a half-joking way, grinning, because we didn’t think of ourselves as soldiers but only as two Frenchtown boys in uniform.

And I had not yet killed anybody.

• • •

As I turn to go back down the steps at 212 Sixth Street, the front door swings open to reveal a woman in a damp apron, a broom in her hand, looking at me with narrow suspicious eyes.

“You want something?” she asks.

I wonder if she is using the broom as a weapon for protection and don’t blame her. I have to keep reminding myself how I look to other people.

“Do you know where the Renards went?” Not expecting an answer but hoping that the question provides me with respectability.

“What?” she asks, frowning as she clutches the broom in front of her.

The scarf has muffled my voice, of course.

“The Renards,” I say, trying to pronounce the words distinctly. “Where are they?”

“All gone,” she says, her voice doleful. “All gone.”

She begins sweeping the doorstep as if she intends to sweep me away, too.

Her words chase me down the steps and into the street:
All gone, all gone
.

• • •

Mrs. Belander is waiting when I return from Third Street, two bags of groceries from Henault’s Market in my arms. I have stocked up on cocoa and bread and strawberry jam, and a variety of Campbell’s soups in the red-and-white cans, mostly tomato and bean and pea soup. Everything soft because my gums are tender and it’s hard for me to chew. I have also bought two bottles of pasteurized milk, a pound of butter and a wedge of cheddar cheese, which I will store in the small electric refrigerator on the counter upstairs. I can keep going on a minimum of food because I lost my appetite somewhere in France and eat now only to sustain myself for a while.

Mrs. Belander holds a deep pot in her hands and says: “I will carry it up for you, the black bean soup I made.”

We climb the stairs together.

In the tenement, I place the groceries on the counter and she puts the pot on the stove. “No boil,” she says. “Just heat …”

Then turns to me. “You didn’t say your name.” Not quite an accusation but as if her feelings have been hurt.

Here is the point where my life becomes a lie.

“Raymond,” I tell her, using the name of my dead brother. “Beaumont,” I add. My mother’s name before she married my father.

“Père et mère?”
she asks.

I am ready to give those answers. “In Canada.” In my mind, I substitute heaven for Canada. “We lived in Boston before but they went back home to Canada when the war came.” The truth is that my uncle Louis, who never became a citizen, returned to Canada while I was in the army.

I see the question in her eyes and am quick to answer:

“I met a Frenchtown boy in the service. Norman Rocheleau. He told me about Frenchtown. He made it sound like a nice place to live.”

Doubt flashes in her eyes and I make a quick addition to my story.

“My mother and father are waiting for me in Canada. But I have to report to Fort Delta for treatments for a while.”

It scares me, how easy it is to lie.

“Vous parlez français?”
she asks.

I shake my head no. I can understand French because of the eight years with the sisters at St. Jude’s but have never been able to speak the language correctly.

She sighs heavily, studies my scarf and bandage for a long moment and murmurs “Poor boy” again as she shuffles toward the door.

• • •

The tenement is heated only by the black stove in the kitchen, fed by a glass oil jug that I will have to fill every day or two from the big metal barrel in the backyard. The stove throws heat only into a small area of the kitchen, and the rest of the tenement is damp with cold even though winter has gone.

I make myself a cup of cocoa, stalling, delaying the moment of going to bed, despite the cold. The clock on the wall, in the shape of a banjo, tells me it is twenty-five minutes after eleven, which means that a long night stretches ahead. I yearn for sleep, my eyes raw and burning, but I know that the dreams will begin when I close my eyes and drift off.

In the bathroom, I apply more Vaseline to my cheeks.

Finally, I slip into bed. Mrs. Belander has provided me with extra blankets and I pull them up to my chin. I double the pillow under my head to prevent the phlegm from running down my throat, causing me to choke and cough.

• • •

I can never trace the moment when I finally fall asleep, that blurred line between wakefulness and oblivion. While waiting, I silently recite the names of the guys in my platoon—Richards and Eisenberg
and Chambers and, yes, Smith—and their first names or nicknames—Eddie and Erwin and Blinky and Jack. Then, more last names, Johnson and Orlandi and Reilly and O’Brien and
their
first names, Henry and Sonny and Spooks and Billy—and then start all over again, arranging them this time in alphabetical order, still waiting for sleep to come.

I don’t want to think about them, those GIs in my platoon. I don’t want to recite their names. I want to forget what happened there in France but every night the recitation begins, like a litany, the names of the GIs like beads on a rosary. I close my eyes and see them advancing in scattered groups through the abandoned village, ruined homes and debris-cluttered streets, our rifles ready, late-afternoon shadows obscuring the windows and doorways and the alley entrances. We are all tense and nervous and scared because the last village seemed peaceful and vacant until sudden gunfire from snipers erupted from those windows and doorways and cut down the advance patrol just ahead of our platoon. Now I can hear Henry Johnson’s ragged breathing and Blinky Chambers whistling between his teeth, the village too still, too quiet. “Jesus,” Sonny Orlandi mutters. Jesus: meaning
I’m scared
, and so is everybody else, clenched fists holding firearms, quiet curses floating on the air, grunts and hisses and farts, not like the war movies at the
Plymouth, nobody displaying heroics or bravado. We are probably taking the final steps of our lives in this village whose name we don’t even know and other villages are waiting ahead of us and Eddie Richards asks of nobody in particular: “What the hell are we doing here, anyway?” And he’s clutching his stomach because he has had diarrhea for three days, carrying the stink with him all that time so that everybody has been avoiding his presence. Now gunfire erupts and at the same time artillery shells—theirs or ours?—boom in the air and explode around us. We run for cover, scrambling and scurrying, hitting the dirt, trying to become part of the buildings themselves but not safe anywhere.

I find myself in a narrow alley, groping through rising dust, and two German soldiers in white uniforms appear like grim ghosts, rifles coming up, but my automatic is too quick and the head of one of the soldiers explodes like a ripe tomato and the other cries
Mama
as my gunfire cuts him in half, both halves of him tumbling to the ground.

I explode into wakefulness along with the booming artillery and I find myself gasping, instantly wide-eyed, not cold for once in Mrs. Belander’s tenement, the sweat warm on my flesh, but in a minute the sweat turns icy. In the alley that day I encountered the German soldiers, all right, but my bursts of gunfire killed the soldiers quickly, no exploding
head, no body cut in two, although one of them did cry
Mama
as he fell. When I looked down at them, in one of those eerie pauses that happens in an attack—a sudden silence that’s even more terrible than exploding shells—I saw how young they were, boys with apple cheeks, too young to shave. Like me.

“Hey, Francis, come on,” yells Eddie Richards and I join him in a scramble out of the alley and into the woods, his smell still heavy in the air, and we stumble around in the woods until nighttime, when we run across the remains of our platoon and learn that Jack Smith and Billy O’Brien are dead and Henry Johnson wounded, his chest ripped open by shrapnel, carried off somewhere behind the lines and we never see him again.

The next day, the grenade blows my face away.

• • •

The morning sun slashes my eyelids and I blink at daylight spilling through the window. I have survived another night, endured the dreams and the memories again although I’m not sure anymore which are the dreams and which are the memories.

My limbs are stiff and the raw places of my flesh sting but I grope from the bed, coughing, my throat filled with phlegm.

Ignore it all, I tell myself, and count your blessings.

You’re back in Frenchtown and your body is functioning. You have a nice dry place to stay and a mission to perform.

And maybe this will be the day that Larry LaSalle will appear on the streets of Frenchtown and you will be able to carry out that mission.

I
tell myself that I will not visit the Wreck Center, that there is nothing to gain by going there just as the visit to Nicole’s house on Sixth Street brought back only loneliness and regret.

Yet even as I acknowledge the futility of such visits, I am walking in the direction of the Wreck Center at the far end of Third Street, bending against the never-ending March wind.

Then a hand grips my shoulder, stopping me in my tracks, and a voice whispers in my ear:

“Land mine?”

Turning, raising my eyes under the visor of the Red Sox cap, I find Arthur Rivier looking at me curiously. The curiosity is softened with sympathy.

I shake my head, not deserving his sympathy.

“Grenade, then?” he asks.

My silence provides him with his answer and he murmurs: “Tough … tough …”

His eyes are bleary and bloodshot and there’s no recognition of me in them, for which I am grateful.

Before he enlisted in the army, Arthur Rivier had been a star first baseman for the Frenchtown Tigers and hit booming home runs over the fence at Cartier’s Field. I remember when he returned on furlough in his khaki uniform with the corporal’s stripes, along with the other servicemen home temporarily from the war. I wanted to be like them, these heroes, fighting the Japs and the Germans, going off to battles on land and sea. I was impatient to reach the age when I could join them in that great crusade for freedom.

Arthur Rivier points to the entrance of the St. Jude Club and says: “Come on, I’ll buy you a drink …”

The club is where the young men of Frenchtown gather to shoot pool and play poker and drink beer
and wine and hold Saturday-night dances for their girlfriends after a long week in the comb and button shops. The rules require a member to be twenty-one years old before joining and every Frenchtown boy looks forward to that birthday.

At my hesitation, Arthur says: “You deserve a good drink …”

Inside, the club is crowded and smoke-filled, billiard balls clicking and everyone talking at once and a sudden blast of music from the jukebox, “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree with Anyone Else but Me,” which I last heard on a radio in the English hospital.

Familiar faces turn toward me. Big Boy Burgeron and Armand Telliere and Joe LaFontaine and some others, all of them veterans and survivors, ballplayers and shop workers who became fighting men in uniform.

“Beer,” I answer, raising my voice above the din when Arthur asks me what I want to drink. I drank beer for the first time in the English hospital when Enrico bribed a male nurse on the late shift to bring us a few bottles. The beer was warm and bitter but at least a change from all the medicine I had to swallow every day.

I gulp the beer now, lifting the scarf, as Arthur enters into a discussion with Big Boy Burgeron
about whether it would be better to become cops or firemen now that the war is over.

Big Boy, who weighed about three hundred pounds before entering the service and is now sleek and hard with no soft edges, says firemen offer the best career because you don’t have to march or walk as a fireman. “With my luck, as a cop I’d end up walking a beat. And I’m not walking anymore—the infantry spoiled my feet …”

“I could never climb a ladder,” says Armand Telliere, speaking to nobody in particular as he lines up a shot at the pool table. “Besides, they say cops will be riding in cars on patrol from now on. Walking or riding, no more piecework at the shop for me …”

“College for me,” Joe LaFontaine announces, holding up his beer and studying the way light strikes the glass. “The GI Bill. The government’s willing to pay, so I’m going …”

“You didn’t even graduate from high school,” Arthur Rivier says but in a joking way, laughing. Others join in the laughter, creating a camaraderie in a bar, a fellowship that I wish I could be a part of.

“I can make up the studies,” Joe LaFontaine replies. “They’re going all out for veterans.” He takes a swift gulp of the beer. “I’m going to college,” he
proclaims, raising his voice so that everyone can hear. “I’m going to be a teacher.”

“Sister Martha must be turning over in her grave,” Armand Telliere says.

“That would be a trick,” Arthur says. “I saw her just last week. Still knocking guys around in the eighth grade. No bigger than a peanut and she still knocks them around.”

“The way she knocked you.” Big Boy laughs.

And everybody joins in the laughter, and someone calls for another round and the jukebox plays “I’ll Be with You in Apple Blossom Time,” such sweet voices in the air.

Arthur turns to me. “You don’t talk much, do you?” he says.

I want to ask about Larry LaSalle, if anyone knows when and if he’s coming back, but I don’t want to call more attention to myself. The scarf and bandage are enough to cause curiosity.

“That’s all right,” he says, “you earned the right not to talk.”

What if I told him that I was little Francis Cassavant who shagged balls behind the bases when the Frenchtown Tigers played their crosstown rivals, the West Side Knights, for the Monument championship? That I am not the hero he thinks I am, not like the other veterans here in the St. Jude Club.