Remember Ben Clayton (9 page)

Home was a bad thing to think about. He had been practicing for a year to keep his mind away from Ranger. There was no point in that. Maybe someday he could stand to remember what it was like to be in the fourth grade where his mother was the teacher, the way she would glance at him in his desk as she turned from the blackboard, with an expression in her face that only he could read, a secret look that said all this stern distance was for show, that she had not forgotten he was not just another pupil but her beloved son. Maybe when he was an old man and could no longer feel pain in the same way he would allow himself to minutely recall the bracing thrill of the season’s first norther, or the way in summer his father used to scratch Arthur’s back on the sleeping porch until he fell asleep listening to the coyotes madly pleading for something in the barren hills beyond the edge of the town.

In the meantime it was good to be in a place that could not be confused with Texas, except sometimes in its forlorn vastness. It comforted him to speak another language, to work more or less in anonymity, cordially avoided by everyone. The task of restoring the soil of France to productivity gave him an abstract satisfaction, but it was not as deep or as genuine as another feeling he could not hold on to for more than a few moments at a time, let alone define. This sensation had something to do with not really wanting the trees to grow again or the birds to be sweeping across the blank gray sky or rising from the reborn fields. He had taken some sort of comfort in the complete deadness of everything, in the silence, in the understanding that the world had been seeking an end for itself and had finally found it. He had been content to share in that stasis of oblivion, and he resented that life was starting to surge again.

He wished he had never seen those girls but they were lodged in his mind now, their clear skin and beautiful American diction, their haunting sympathy. They were part of the earth that would flower without him.

After an hour of not sleeping he started to shiver in his cot. Then he heard Dervaux cursing at the end of the room as he got out of bed and opened the creaking metal door to the stove and threw a few more thick logs into it. Firewood was precious; most of the toppled and blasted trees were so full of shrapnel they could not even be sawed. After a while the drafty room warmed a little, but Arthur could still not get to sleep. It was the prosthesis that was keeping him awake now. Maybe the drop in temperature was shrinking or expanding the object’s vulcanite base, because it did not seem to be fitting properly anymore. In the French hospital in Paris they had machined grooves into the bone of what remained of his jaw to hold the apparatus in place, and there were wires and hooks too, which he could now feel biting into the tender skin on the inside of his mouth. Removing it was out of the question. Only the doctors were supposed to do that, and in any case he could not abide the thought of lying on his cot with the open crater of his face exposed to view.

He shut his eyes hard and did his best to push the pain aside. He was pretty sure it would be gone by morning, or at most fade into quiet discomfort. The horrors of the last year had left him with a sophisticated understanding of which sorts of pain could be expected to grow and tighten their grip and which would probably recede. Pain that he could identify as fleeting, no matter how intense, no longer caused him much concern.

He heard Jérôme, several cots away, turn in his blankets and sigh. It was time for him to go to the latrine. Arthur watched him get out of bed and set his feet into his boots and pull on his coat and walk outside with his bootlaces whispering on the wooden floor. The men had complained at first about Jérôme disturbing them in the middle of the night and jeered about the smell, but he had handled himself with dignity and soon they left him alone.

It might take him twenty minutes to come back. Arthur resolved to be asleep by then, but the best he could manage was to enter a suggestive still-conscious state in which he saw images that were not dreams, but that were startling in their detail and specificity. He relived the day in the Bois de Vipères, he saw with enthralling precision the way the light came through the leaves and the patterns in the coils of barbed wire. He saw once more the young women from Smith College and felt so much vivid yearning and regret when they appeared in his mind that he shook himself out of this pre-dreaming state and into stark alertness.

And in the place of these hypnotic visitations there was just wretched memory again. He did not know what sort of shell it had been that had wounded him. He had no memory of anything after the fight in the cemetery. The shell that had blown off half his face had also ripped away part of his clothes and buried him in mud, though there had been enough of his face exposed so that he could breathe through his mangled nose. He never knew how long he had been there. The French had been fighting on their flank and it was French
brancardiers
who had found him. The American part of the attack had moved on by then, and his uniform had been so torn and bloody that the
brancardiers
probably did not even know what army he had belonged to and so had just lifted him onto a stretcher and taken him to the French dressing station.

He had come to in brief waves of consciousness. He lay on the mud-streaked green linoleum floor of the field hospital, watching men writhe under red blankets, screaming so hard the veins in their throats looked as if they would burst, though with his damaged eardrums Arthur could barely hear their cries or his own. He could feel the wooden structure of the hospital trembling all around him as the shells landed along the front. When he opened his eyes again he saw a priest with pince-nez arguing about something with a doctor. The doctor was rubbing his back against a wooden post, trying to get some relief from the cooties. The men were speaking in French and Arthur could not understand a word, but he guessed they were talking about him and about how the doctor resented having to treat an American when there were so many wounded poilu needing attention.

He remembered the hideous smell of the ether as they poured it onto the mask, and the hallucinatory grid that then appeared over his eyes, each square going blank one after the next until he woke again into a postoperative existence of pain and bewilderment and static time. For the long months he was in one hospital or another the smell of the ether never went away. There was the smell of ether but also the odors of disinfectant, blood, putrid flesh, mud, and gas from the acetylene generators that provided wavery light. Wending through the toxic smells was the aroma of the nurses’ cocoa from the sterilizing room where they kept it simmering on the boiler. The nurses wore starched blue uniforms and the priests wore purple stoles and the wounded were brought in under red blankets. Red hot-water bottles were everywhere; in his delirium they seemed like sentinels, hanging from nails on the wooden posts and resting at the foot of every bed. Wounded men vomited black blood into white enamel basins.

When his eardrums healed he could hear the pounding of the boilers and the crackling sound of gas gangrene bubbles as the nurses pressed on them, and the shrieks of men calling out to God or their mothers as their wounds were dressed.

A French boy with a facial wound almost as bad as his was in the bed next to him for several weeks, and he taught Arthur a few words of French and read articles out loud in
Le Rire
and
Le Petit Parisien
, pointing to the words Arthur already knew to show him how they were spelled. He said he was an apache, and finally made Arthur understand that the word did not mean he was an Indian but a petty criminal from the Paris streets who had been drafted into the Bataillon d’Afrique. Then one day they took him off to surgery and he never came back.

Arthur’s own surgeries were complicated by the impatience of the doctors who resented the fact he did not speak French so they could explain what it was they were going to do to him. Only once had there been a doctor who was fluent enough in English that Arthur could understand him, and what he said only made him more afraid.

“We will take out today a little more of this part of the face,” he announced cheerfully as they were getting the ether ready. “There will be some pain afterwards but God will give you strength.”

Sometimes it seemed to him he went into surgery in one hospital and woke up in another. He never had a clear sense of what hospital he was in, or what ward he was in, or where the war was. Sometimes he could hear shells in the distance and sometimes there were birds singing, and nurses laughing outside on their breaks.

During the last surgeries he was in a ward exclusively filled with cases like his own, many of them worse. Some of the men had no faces at all, just collapsing holes where mouths and noses had been and a pair of frightened, bewildered eyes staring out at the world. Sometimes the doctors were able to create a semblance of a face for them again, as they did for Arthur, but they always had the look of men wearing a mask, trapped behind some fixed expression, unable as he was to smile or to convey emotions except through the plaintive movement of their eyes.

It was just before they were going to put the prosthesis in, sometime in the spring, that an American lieutenant found him in a garden to the side of the hospital in Paris, where he sometimes went to sit in the sunlight with a child’s French grammar book that one of the nurses had given him.

“There you are!” the lieutenant said. “We’ve been looking for you!”

Arthur was startled to hear somebody speaking to him in English—the exclamatory words sounded like an assault. When he saw it was an officer, he saluted, and when the man saw Arthur’s face the heartiness went out of his voice and he set his gaze a few inches above Arthur’s head.

The lieutenant was studious-looking, with a spare build and a distracted manner. He told Arthur he had been listed as missing in action until a few weeks ago, when word came that he was alive and with the French. The 36th was in Tonnerre, getting ready to leave for Brest and embark for home.

“If you want to go home with the rest of the Arrowheads,” he said, “you’ve got to get on a train in the next three days.”

Arthur said he was supposed to be fitted for a prosthesis and didn’t think he could make it.

“Well, I don’t know what the hell to do about that,” the lieutenant said. “We’re all going home and I’ve got other men to see about before we do.”

Arthur said he was sorry and the lieutenant nodded in a distracted way and shifted nervously on his feet. There was an empty chair next to Arthur in the garden but he didn’t sit down. He told Arthur he was sorry to have to tell him this but both of his parents and his little brother had died of the flu three months ago.

The news did not seem so bad at first because it could not be true. But then he could feel the reality of it forming and growing, and he knew it was useless to argue against it. After seeing Ben die, after catching a glimpse of his face for the first time in the shaving mirror of the man in the bed next to him, he had developed a swifter acceptance of inconceivable things. All of his family was dead; he could try to rally his imagination against this knowledge but he knew that in the end his imagination would be crushed.

“Can I get a discharge, sir?” he asked the lieutenant.

“What are you talking about?”

“I didn’t want to go home anyway, looking like this. And now there’s nobody to go home to.”

“You want to live in France?”

“Yes sir, I think so.”

The lieutenant said he would come back the next day. When he did, he brought with him discharge papers for Arthur to sign. Arthur didn’t even read them. He just scrawled his signature where the lieutenant told him to. The lieutenant wished him good luck, put the papers back into his satchel, and walked away, hurrying to catch the train for Tonnerre so that he would not be left behind.

From the first week Arthur had arrived in France he had been homesick and had almost driven himself insane by casting his mind forward to the day they would be boarding the ship to return home. After a few months the feeling had eased somewhat, but he could never have believed the relief he felt now at not having to go back at all. His parents were dead but at least now they were spared from having to see him when he stepped off the train, their son who had left half his face in the mud of Saint-Étienne and who now tried to hide the damage with a frightening apparatus that was almost as hideous as the wound. No one else would have to see him, either: not his brother or his classmates or the people he worked with in the feed store, not the soldiers he had trained and fought with, not the girls he had spoken to at high school dances or camp meetings, not the grandmother who had already buried three of her sons and always had a look in her eyes that said she knew God had worse in store for her.

He had the sense that in France his disfigurement would not be quite so freakish or horrid, because the war had been going on for so many years before the Americans had come that the people were used to seeing men with appalling wounds. It was easier just to think of himself as someone who had died and been imperfectly resurrected in a strange new place, with a new language to learn and foreign manners to decipher, someone who was now free of any expectation of happiness or companionship.

•

IN HIS MOST
contented moments Arthur thought of himself as an unfeeling ghost, drifting above all the fear and hurt of the world. Nothing else could be taken from him because all that mattered was already gone. But then there would be an encounter, such as the one today with those girls from Smith College, to remind him that there were still yearnings that could not be suppressed or fulfilled. No matter how purified of emotion he might feel at certain times, there was always something left to be stirred up, some new assault of homesickness that was all the more forceful because he knew in his heart he could not quell it by returning home.

Weeks later, after they had cleared the Bois des Vipères and the nearby trench and Blanc Mont Ridge, and after he had recovered the blank state of mind that was his only source of peace, he found himself standing where he and Ben had stood before, at the jump-off line where the attack on Saint-Étienne had started. It was a cold, cloudy day, colder than it had been this time last year. The village’s church steeple was shattered and half the buildings were now rubble. The wire where the Kuholtz boys had fallen was still in place. He and Jérôme spent the better part of two days removing it, then began clearing the machine-gun nests and filling in the scrapes that were hidden in almost invisible swales of the terrain. Arthur realized as he worked what an effective killing zone this had been, the machine guns positioned to reinforce one another and to cover deliberately placed gaps in the wire where the inexperienced attackers had been channeled.