This Is How I'd Love You (14 page)

“F
uck this morning hate,” Rogerson says as he pushes at a browned clump of eggs on his plate. The artillery blasts begin at dawn, marking the beginning of another day. While the shells are falling, the daisy-cutters squealing, the shrapnel bulleting no-man’s-land, Charles and Rogerson spend the hours in the mess tent, waiting for the quiet that signals the end of the day’s battle and the beginning of their work. With each shrill, hard rumble they imagine their effects. It’s impossible to keep images of what they’ve seen here from intruding—a broken artery splattering its bright red blood against the sides of the King George; the disappearance of jaws, mouths, noses, ears, replaced only by a dark, haunting emptiness; a boy clutching his own innards, trying to stuff them back in; a boy’s open skull, jagged and bloodied, his brain already swollen, protruding through the crack like a slick, ocher blossom.

“How long can it go on like this?” Charles says, staring at the shallow sip of coffee he has left.

“Eternity. It’s hell, Reid. I think we’re already dead. We carried our own still-beating hearts in our hands across some bloody battlefield and died in a hole, covered by a thousand others just like us. And now, this is our hell. Watching it happen over and over.”

Charles shakes his head. “It’s worse than that. It’s not hell.” He stands up, stomping his feet just as another daisy-cutter whistles its arrival. He jogs in place, attracting the attention of a small group of nurses playing cards at the adjoining table. He waves at them, smiling broadly. They ignore him. “We are alive. Right, ladies? I feel my heart beating. How ’bout you?” He takes a lap around the tent, then sits again, his breathing heavy.

Rogerson chuckles. “Alive and zany,” he says, looking carefully at Charles’s face. “What’s with the calisthenics?”

Charles shrugs. He places his hand over his heart, where it pulses against his palm, a miracle. Then, he works his hand inside his jacket and, pulling out the latest letter from Hensley, as though it were an actual piece of him, an offering from deep within, he says quietly, “Have yourself a little morning love, Rogerson. Hell would be better. This bit of cruelty, this glimmer of happiness, is part of the world that our heavenly father created. Lucky us, there is not one without the other.”

Rogerson gratefully takes the letter from Charles, pushing his plate away to make room for it. But before he begins to read, he says, “We’re gonna be all right, Reid. It will end. It’s got to.”

Charles nods. As the front continues to vibrate with a showcase of man’s technical ingenuity, Charles watches Rogerson absorb Hensley’s words. He smiles and sighs and shakes his head. When he’s finished, he turns back to the first page to start again. But before he does, he says, “If she ever saw the two of us, come on. Look at me. I’d be the one she’d love. She’d choose me.”

Charles watches Rogerson place a finger against his chin, feigning thoughtfulness. His eyes are heavy lidded but a lovely shade of pine green, his jaw sloping and wide, his lips straight and chapped. Charles shakes his head. “Doubtful, Rogerson. Besides, she’s not your type, remember?”

“You lucked into her because you’re a rich kid with a chess habit. She wouldn’t like those big ears you have. Your posture is too perfect and so are your teeth. Real men have some roughness around their edges. And what about your calisthenics routine? That surely disqualifies you.” He elbows Charles and huddles once more over the letter.

Charles reciprocates, clocking him once on the back of the head before stepping outside. It is a glorious summer day, with loads of sunshine and a bank of afternoon thunderclouds just beginning to organize in the distant eastern part of the sky. He closes his eyes, gratefully letting the warmth of the sun make his skin hot and tingly. His mind wanders to a place he’s never been, where people imagine gold is beneath their feet, where a circus can arrive and transform a piece of the desert into candy-colored magic, where there are rocks as smooth as a girl’s cheek, where there is a girl whose cheek—soft and perfectly curved—is the most beautiful thing he can imagine.

He kicks at the dirt beneath his boots as he opens his eyes. She is not standing beside him, barefoot as she likes to be. He’d almost convinced himself that they were sharing the very same patch of earth. Instead he sees the medical tents, hovering together just across the way, and he knows that in just a few hours they will be full of boys just like him, boys who’ve spent the empty nights longing for the end of this war and who will die on the operating table, or come to in the evac tent missing great pieces of their former selves.

Charles kneels and unlaces his boots. Flinging his socks off his feet, he stands, barefoot, in the dirt, curling his toes. Then he gathers a fistful of the dirt in his hand. She will share his patch of earth. She will stand in the dirt where he’s stood. Leaving his boots and socks, he runs to his tent and places the contents of his hand into an envelope.

Dear Hensley,

He writes quickly, hoping to make the early post.

This is the dirt from beneath my feet. Please place it beneath your own. It will be almost like we’ve shared this day. It will be almost like we’ve been together, our skin mingling in the fine remnants of yesterday’s boulders.

More news later. Until then, barefoot and biddable, I remain,

Charles Reid

U
nable to sleep, Hensley wraps herself in the cotton blanket from her bed and walks to the brick patio behind the superintendent’s house. It is nearly dawn, but the landscape is cold, the sun’s rays still just a premonition in the east. She has brought with her the second of Mr. Reid’s letters to come directly to her in two days. This time her father recognized the return address in France, but as he saw Hensley’s initial, he handed it to her without a word. His eyebrows, however, were precipitously raised.

I find my mind distracted from this bloody field and I am grateful. Through the dark nights, I have figured and refigured my every move in the chess game I am playing with your father, but I cannot solve the puzzle of you.

She reads the line again and again. In her last epistle, she described the arrival of the circus, her dizzying trip on the strong man’s chair, the way the air smells like licorice. She told him of her life—the dearth of dress shops, the coarse but kind miners who occasionally deliver a dozen fresh eggs or thick-cut bacon and for whom, in return, she mends their shirts and darns their socks. Her favorite, of course, is one in particular named Berto, who has escaped the savagery of the revolution in Mexico City. She also told him about the small, perfect stones that litter the yard. How they feel warm and full of some ancient place as she holds them in her palm. She’d placed a smooth gray one on top of the rock wall that runs the length of their house as she walked her letter to the post. A reminder of how unexpected and perfect his letter had been and that she sent a piece of herself across the ocean to him. And she apologized for the length of her letter, which ran two typewritten pages.
I hope you’ll forgive the length of this, knowing that I am surrounded by many things, but mostly by time. Unlike you, my duties are not many and far from important.

But she knows he wouldn’t have received that letter when he wrote the one she reads now. Their lives are overlapping somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, where a westbound cargo ship flashes its beacon at an eastbound one. Because of the time it takes for their letters to arrive, it is as though Mr. Reid has sent his past thoughts on to the future. In some ways, Hensley cannot believe he is real. She has a hard time imagining a soldier—someone so close to death—caring one way or another about the frivolous musings of a girl in the desert of New Mexico. And part of her believes that if he is real, he must be deranged. A lunacy induced by so much carnage. But his words are clear and genuine:
This is nothing but a single selfish plea: Please write again. I fear I may not have said that in my last letter. Twenty pages if you’d deign. I cannot tire of your words. What madness that across an ocean and amidst this brutality, I feel more connected to you than anything here!

So she answers. In the barely dawn, Hensley composes the letter in her mind long before her father has gone to work when she will have her way with the typewriter.

Dear Friend,

Your last letter was an underserved windfall. I cannot speak to your madness, but, of course, I am utterly sane! Let me demonstrate. The morning has hardly begun, but I am sitting outside the house on the small patch of bricks my father insists on calling our terrace. The two house cats are nowhere to be found. Perhaps they are hunting, still. The sky in the east is the most tender shade of blue, it resembles the glow around a city streetlamp. It certainly gives no hint of the scorching fireball that will soon crest the horizon. I have a view of the back of Berto and his sister’s small house on the hill above our own.

My father is following through on a threat he made weeks ago. At the end of this work day, he will accompany the night shift into the mine. It is one of his efforts to demonstrate his solidarity. I don’t think he likes being the boss. His constitution is much too fueled by irreverence. However, for me, he would urge a life of obedience. A life within the bounds of social expectation. If I give up my place at Wellesley in the fall, which may be necessary, his disappointment will be palpable, but I fear it will not be his only or his greatest one.

So while he is descending a thousand feet to gain the confidence of his employees, I will be perfectly free to cause trouble here on the earth’s surface. Too bad I am so assuredly sane! My chores will occupy most of the morning. There are several items to be mended and I am diligently writing to a member of the American Field Service overseas (that’s you!). Since my father will not be returning for the evening meal, I will be a solitary presence in the house all day. Without anyone watching, I may eat more than my share of the pickled beets and carrots. I may also spread butter on crackers and put my bare feet on the table while I eat. Are you blushing? Surely, this will quell your desire for another letter from this heathen in the desert.

Now that I’ve bored you with my solitary activities, you may assess my sanity for yourself. But before you do, I must make one more confession: my attachment to your words is the sole thread that keeps my self in one piece these days. I read and reread your letters in each room of the house, before breakfast, after breakfast, to each cat, as I walk along the dry riverbank, and even in my sleep. I cannot say for sure why. Simply that I can feel your voice folding itself into every corner of my body. Though I cannot make any request of you, Mr. Reid—as you have already put your very life at stake for all of us—let me reassure you that every word you can spare, every phrase you discharge, is savored.

It is here that Hensley hears her father stirring. She returns to the house, starts his tea, and slices some bread. She fixes him a sandwich to pack in his tin for dinner. As soon as she opens the can of sardines, the cats appear. She lets them lick the oil from her fingers, smiling at the sensation of their rough little tongues.

She has not been sick for several days now. The skin beneath her apron feels tight, though, and is a nearly constant reminder of her predicament.

She and her father have spoken very little about her condition since she revealed it last week. Often, however, he is now the first to rise after their evening meal, removing her plate and telling her to sit still while he scrapes and cleans their dishes. “You need rest, Hennie. That much I know,” he says, smiling kindly as he replaces the dishes in the cupboard.

Hensley suspects that he has not had the news from New York that he’s hoped for. Perhaps he is beginning to understand just how poor her judgment has been. Could it be that Lowell would actually disavow his responsibility to this child?

Depending on the hour, Hensley has believed vastly different things about her future. At times, it has seemed that she could have the baby here, in this dusty place, where the fate of being an outcast would be felt less severely than in New York. Other times, she’s been sure that one of the letters her father is always writing is to arrange her dispatch to El Paso or Los Angeles in order to deliver the baby anonymously and return on the train, alone, with made-up stories of parties and visits. Still other times, especially as she reads and rereads Mr. Reid’s letters, she indulges a restless, reckless fantasy of escaping this fate entirely.

But there is no realistic scenario that appeases the dread in her heart. Every day brings her closer to becoming a mother, yet she knows she is mostly still the same foolish, starry-eyed girl who fell for Lowell’s performance. She will soon have to become someone else’s guide to life—but look at the mess she’s made of her own.

She finishes packing her father’s lunch supplies and butters a piece of toast for herself.