Losing Julia Read online

  “My cousin’s at the artillery school at Fontainebleau,” said Jack Lawton, who eyed me suspiciously for a few days before deciding I was worthy of the squad, or might eventually be, if I wasn’t killed first. A tough-looking carpenter from Michigan, he befriended me one morning by pulling out a wad of letters from his pocket and asking in a hushed voice if I might read them to him. Tall and muscular with dark blue eyes and thick, curly black hair that carpeted not just his head but his arms and chest and legs as well, Lawton was the strongest man in the squad. He also had the quickest temper, which struck me as an unfortunate combination until I realized he was quite harmless—so long as you didn’t make fun of his mild lisp, which seemed to worsen when he was scared or horny (the latter condition arising with extreme frequency). Until I met him I never realized that someone so disarmingly dumb could be so pleasant. With his animallike instincts for danger and exceptional marksmanship—he could hit things the rest of us couldn’t even see—I began to think of him as the ideal soldier, complete with an infinite store of extraordinarily dirty jokes.

  “Fuck the artillery,” said Vince Tometti, a hotel clerk from New Jersey. “What the hell do you think the German artillery is aimed at?” Tometti, who claimed to be nineteen, was the puniest-looking soldier I’d ever seen, with only a thin line of peach fuzz on his upper lip and the shoulders of a small woman. Fortunately, he also had one of the best singing voices on the line, which he used to redeem himself several times a week with a vast repertoire of Italian love songs. Most of them he dedicated to a girl back home named Teresa, whose picture he carried in his shirt pocket in a thin, black leather case, frequently removing it to study it and kiss it and show it to everyone he met. She was so pretty that we assumed he either stole the photograph or cropped out extensive deformities in her lower body.

  I reached for my canteen and took a long drink.

  “Easy,” said Daniel. “Only one refill per day.”

  “No shit?” I felt my canteen. It seemed light.

  Behind me a voice sang:

  If the ocean were whiskey

  And I were a duck,

  I’d dive to the bottom

  And never come up.

  As we crossed a culvert I saw dead horses piled in a ditch, their bodies stiff and bloated. On the left side of the road old men and women and young children hurried past pulling mules and oxen and trundling large wheelbarrows teetering with burlap sacks of food and chicken coops and crates and folded featherbeds and furniture. Then a regiment of French poilus streamed past, their sky blue overcoats filthy with mud and their faces drawn and unshaven.

  I couldn’t keep from staring at the passing faces, some completely void of expression while others were set in a sort of permanent wince; the look of someone just about to burst out crying or receive a blow. I wondered what made a person look like that. Most of the poilus stared at the ground as they walked, too tired to look up. Several had their arms in slings while others limped. I looked at the overcoat of one soldier and saw crimson stains all across the front. I wondered how they got there.

  “Your turn,” shouted a poilu. His left hand was wrapped in bloody gauze.

  “Turn back, it’s useless,” said another.

  “La guerre est fini,” shouted a tall, hollow-eyed soldier.

  I caught a Frenchman’s eye. He nodded and slowed down.

  “Là-bas, c’est terrible.” He shook his head.

  “I don’t speak French. Terrible, huh?”

  “Les Allemands attaquent de tous côtés.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He says the Germans are attacking everywhere.”

  “Oh.”

  “Partout.”

  “Yes, well, we’ll see about that,” said a voice behind me in a southern drawl.

  “Damn right,” said another.

  A distant whine grew louder and louder, howling through the sky.

  “Take cover!”

  We scattered into a ditch filled with horseshit. BANG! The air slapped my face and snapped against my eardrums.

  Again, then again.

  Jesus Christ.

  Back on the road, marching. I stared at the bobbing olive-drab canvas pack in front of me; at the bayonet strapped on the left, the small shovel strapped vertically to the back of the pack and the rolled greatcoat tied across the top. I struggled to keep my eyes open.

  How nice it would be to lie down, just for a few minutes. The thought of going into battle without sleep made me want to cry, big vulnerable tears of protest spilling down my cheeks. Since I was a child sleep deprivation has always made me feel grossly inadequate to the day’s demands, causing many weepy scenes in kindergarten, when I would simply collapse in great big puddles of frustration. But to fight? Hand-to-hand combat with knives and bayonets when I can barely put one leg before another?

  I felt sick, sure that a terrible, irrevocable mistake had been made.

  Farther up we passed a makeshift field hospital built in the partial ruins of a large church. Then a first aid station, where dozens of men lay in rows under blankets while others stumbled about bearing freshly bandaged wounds. That’s where I first heard the moaning, which seemed a pitiable reply to the roaring guns. From the sound of it the war was like a shouting match between men and machines. Only you could barely hear the men.

  We stood at the side of the road as five Ford ambulances passed, men clinging to the running boards.

  “Gas,” someone said. I looked and saw a row of men with their eyes blindfolded. They shuffled slowly to the rear, each man clinging to the shoulders of the man in front. We moved quietly to the side to let them pass.

  “Look at them damn German sausages,” said someone ahead of me, pointing to the sky. I looked up at the horizon and saw two silver observation balloons hanging in the distance. Could they see us? A few men waved. “Over here, you bastards.”

  At nine p.m. I entered a reserve trench, ate some hardtack and a can of corned beef—which made me thirsty—and curled up in the dirt, feeling the earth shudder and snarl as I withdrew into sleep.

  “YOU UP for a game of checkers?” It was the ever-flatulent Oscar Bellamy, who is constantly on the prowl for a partner. I was sitting in the lounge with an unopened book in my lap. Emily Dickinson’s poems.

  “Sure, I’ll play you,” I said, regretting my offer immediately. Oscar smelled unusually bad.

  “Great!” He unfolded the board he keeps in the back pouch of his wheelchair and set up the pieces. I began first.

  “So, how long’ve you been here, Oscar?” I asked.

  “Four years. Six months after my wife died I had a stroke. Small, but scared the hell out of me, you know? I went to live with my daughter and her family, but after I fell and broke my hip we decided I’d be better off here.”

  “You miss being home?”

  “Home’s not an option anymore,” he said, hopping his red checker over three of my black checkers. “Besides, I sort of like it here, what with the different levels of care. It’s not just a bunch of critical cases, know what I mean? And with all the dances, sing-alongs, guest speakers and field trips, what more could you want?”

  “Beats me. It’s a wonder we don’t get any honeymooners.”

  He ignored me, concentrating on his checkers. “After Rose died I couldn’t bear to be in the house by myself. She did all the cooking and homemaking. Jesus, I never realized how hard she worked, my poor Sweets. I just about starved on my own. You ever try cooking lasagna? You’ve got to be a structural engineer just to put the ingredients in the right order.” He skipped a king loudly across the board, scooping up my remaining two pieces. “Another game?”

  “One more.”

  “What about you?” he said, pausing to fiddle with the oxygen tube strapped beneath his nose. “You’ve been here about two years, right?”

  “Yeah, after my bypass operation… ”

  “How many bypasses?”

  “Three.”

  “Had two myself,” he said.
“Wife dead?”

  “No, we divorced many years ago.”

  “How many years ago?”

  “How many? Oh God, I don’t know. That was, let me see, 1932.”

  “No kidding?”

  “She remarried. Lives in Florida. Some retirement community.”

  “Her husband’s still alive?”

  “Died years ago,” I said.

  “Now you were a… ”

  “Accountant.”

  “Ah yes, a numbers man.”

  The description made me wince. “I quit right after the divorce.”

  “Quit your job?” He raised his eyebrows.

  “Quit my job.” I smiled. “I traveled around the country a bit and then got a job teaching history at a small high school in Vermont. Later I quit that and opened a bookstore.”

  “That’s why you read so much.”

  “No, that’s why I opened a bookstore.”

  “So you were living alone before you came here?”

  “Until my heart attack. Then I lived with my son for a year but his house is small and I felt in the way. When the doctors discovered cancer I decided to move out before I got worse.”

  “You’ve got cancer?” He perked up. “What kinda cancer?” Nothing so fascinates the elderly as diseases, especially cancerous ones.

  “Stomach cancer,” I said. “Seems to be in remission for the moment.”

  “Stomach cancer?” he said, slowly sounding out the words. “That’s tough.”

  “Gotta go some way, right?”

  “Yeah but Jesus, I’m real particular about which way.”

  “Nice if you have a choice,” I said.

  “For example, I can’t stand the thought of drowning.”

  “That seems unlikely.”

  “You never know. You can drown in just a couple of inches of water. Did you know that?” He hopped over two of my checkers. “And fire. Oh Jesus I’d hate to burn to death. I don’t even want to be cremated. Told my son I said, ‘I don’t want to take up a lot of space when I die but no way do I want to be shoved into some goddamned oven and toasted like some goddamned overdone Belgian waffle.’ Of course, coffins scare me too. You know, some of the poor bastards aren’t even dead. No kidding. Read an article once, I think it was in Reader’s Digest, about how somebody dug up a lot of old caskets in England from the eighteenth century and found that ten percent of them had scratch marks on the inside! Ten percent! Imagine that? Awful way to go, eh? Worse than drowning, I’d say.”

  I’ll make sure you’re out cold,” I said, as he swept away the last of my checkers.

  “Thanks Patrick, I’d appreciate that.”

  POINTS TO BE REMEMBERED WHILE FIRING

  1. Don’t breathe while aiming. Take a deep breath; let some of it out, and then hold the remainder until after you have fired.

  2. Get your sights aligned, and gradually squeeze your trigger. Keep your eye open when you discharge the piece. Continue your aim for a moment after discharge.

  —Privates’ Manual, 1917.

  THE FIRST THING I killed in France was a horse. One of our horses, a small underfed animal requisitioned from some farm in France or Britain or even America. We were marching through the Aisne-Marne region alongside overloaded French camions and the sides of the road were carpeted with rotting animal carcasses, some distended with legs pointed straight and others crumpled in piles of fur and bone. As we passed one horse lying on its side with its legs bent at odd angles I noticed its large brown eyes blink once, then twice. I stopped.

  “That horse is alive,” I said.

  “Not for long,” said a passing voice.

  “We can’t leave it like that. Look at those front legs,” I said.

  “Both broken, it looks like,” said John Giles, joining me by the side of the road. A short but powerfully built farmer from Ohio who hated farming but loved horses, Giles dreamed of being in the cavalry until he saw what artillery did to horses. I think that bothered him more than the human carnage. The animals had nothing to do with it.

  He looked closely at the maimed horse. “Wonder how long he’s been lying here?”

  “I’m going to shoot him,” I said.

  “What?” asked Giles, whose boyish, well-freckled face and pronounced overbite defeated his strenuous efforts to look soldierly.

  “I’m going to shoot him.” I pulled out my pistol from its leather holster.

  “Might get in trouble,” said Lawton.

  “For what, disturbing the peace?” I asked.

  “Well, it ain’t exactly no German spy you’re shooting,” said Lawton.

  The rest of the battalion was steadily marching past. I leaned over the horse and stroked his head. His eyes were filled with terror but he didn’t move.

  “What an awful place for an animal to be,” I said.

  “How do you think we feel?” said a passing soldier.

  “Where should I shoot him?” I asked Giles.

  “In the head, of course.”

  “I know that,” I said. “But where in the head; which way should I aim so that he dies instantly?”

  “Well, the bone is pretty thick between the eyes,” said Giles, leaning over the horse and pointing. “It’s like a bear. You shoot a bear in the forehead and he’ll keep charging you. Probably best up behind the eye, say right about here.”

  “Right here, huh?” I examined the spot closely. “You think so too, Lawton?”

  “Yeah, that’s the best spot,” he said, stepping back.

  I looked down at my pistol and then at the horse. Then I stood sideways to the horse, aimed my pistol, leaned back, and fired. After I put the pistol back in its holster, Lawton, Giles and I turned back to the road. An hour later I saw another crippled horse, on its side with its lips drawn back and its belly split open, revealing bright red and pink and purple colors, glistening. I didn’t stop.

  THE HOTEL WAS completely quiet when I awoke. I must have dreamed about the ceremony because in my first moments of consciousness I could still see the names clearly, as though etched on the insides of my eyelids. I lay in bed for an hour watching the sunlight gradually cut through an opening in the curtain and illuminate a thin slice of dust particles that danced in the air. I imagined Julia lying in her bed and wondered if she was awake yet and if she was thinking of me.

  After washing up I went for a walk toward the east side of town, hoping I could still find the house of a French couple I met in July 1918. The father had lost his father to the Germans in 1870 and two of his three sons had been killed on the Western Front, one on the Marne and the other on the Chemin des Dames, which means Ladies’ Way, after King Louis XV’s daughters, who used to ride their carriage along it. Daniel and I had billeted at their house for three nights and I had promised myself to return and thank them for their generosity.

  The house was still there, a two-story stucco with a slate mansard roof. The dark red paint on the shutters was chipped and the flower boxes on either side of the front door were empty. I knocked and waited for several minutes but no one answered. Then I found a neighbor returning on his bicycle who told me that Mr. Luchère had died but that his son Pierre, an invalid, lived in the house with his mother. Perhaps they were out and I should try later. I thanked him and then went shopping for a basket which I filled with breads and cheeses and wines from three different stores. Then I sat on the street corner and struggled to write a note in my meager French, then left the note and the basket at the Luchères’ front door.

  When I got back to the hotel Julia was sitting out front at a small round table having coffee and reading a newspaper. The sorrow was gone from her eyes and I wondered if she was one of those people who begin each day completely healed from the previous day’s lacerations.

  “Hi!” she said, smiling with such enthusiasm that I nearly tripped over the curb. She was dressed in a lavender-colored chemise and her hair hung loosely around her shoulders. I couldn’t detect any makeup and the only jewelry she wore was a small silve
r bracelet on her left wrist. From Daniel?

  “Good morning.”

  I sat and ordered coffee, feeling anxious in her presence. Was I staring? Was my hair doing funny things? I discreetly reached up and patted it down, wishing I’d combed it properly.

  “How long will you be staying here?” she asked.

  I hesitated. “Four or five days. I told my wife I wanted to look around a bit. And you? “

  “I haven’t decided.”

  Her eyes looked even greener than before, the color of some sort of precious stone formed deep underground. I glanced at her lovely features, her nose and lips, her slender bare arms, before turning my eyes away.

  She picked up her coffee cup, leaned forward and took a sip. Then she gently placed it back in its saucer, turned to me and asked, “Are you still game for that hike?”

  “Sounds wonderful. I thought we might head toward the ridge east of town. I could show you a few sights, if I can still find them.”

  “Yes, I’d like that very much,” she said, and from her eyes I could sense that she was eager to connect the descriptions from Daniel’s letters with the actual roads and ravines and fields of France.

  We drove, then parked in the countryside and walked for a while, stopping to rest against an old stone wall.

  “Those were the German lines,” I said, feeling myself tense as I pointed toward the low ridgeline about half a mile away across a broad plain. “And if you look closer, you’ll see some of our lines still.” She held her hand flat above her eyes and squinted toward the weathered trenches that snaked across the fields. I wondered if I should tell her that the soil wasn’t soil at all but recycled human flesh; a vast experiment in fertilization. I picked up a clump in my hand and smelled its wet pregnant smell and I thought that this right here in my hand is a man in his afterlife.