This Is How I'd Love You (7 page)

Rogerson releases Charles’s arm from his grip and pushes his hand away from his face, wiping his drool across his sleeve. Charles is defeated and chagrined. Rogerson retrieves his cigarette, inhaling deeply as he studies the owl.

His eyebrows rise. “I was kidding, chap. But has he actually fallen in love with you? Dim the lights. This is getting good.”

Charles massages his shoulder as he watches Rogerson take in the letter. His cigarette has burned down to the filter and is still a small orange stub between his yellowed fingers.

Finally, he speaks, quietly. “She’s lovely, chap. I can almost see her, hear her voice. A pixie of a thing, eh? Probably blond, with smart clothes and a musical laugh.” His face is relaxed, transported, as Charles has never seen it before. There is a silence as he refolds the letter and gently slides it toward Charles. Charles does not disagree. He replaces the letter in his jacket pocket.

The cigarette butt sizzles as Rogerson flicks it into his cup of water. “Not my type,” he says abruptly and excuses himself. Then, pausing momentarily in front of the door, he turns and the fierceness has returned to his face. “I like ’em big and hairy and illiterate,” he says, before pushing open the door and letting it slam hard behind him.

Through the night, as he does every night, Charles smokes. He lies on his cot, reading the letter over and over until he has memorized all of her lines. Even when he’s folded the letter and placed it on his chest, hoping for sleep, he recites her words, seeing in his mind the way they look on the page. He imagines her hand, her fingers, the same black ink here on this paper perhaps staining her fingertips. He tries to imagine the rest of her; he wonders what it is she’s done to label herself
deviant
.

He’s spent the last six hours wishing for silence but now that it’s come, he does not feel the relief he thought he would. The latest crop of gassed boys—their continued violation of protocol—have died, each having had the chance to dictate letters home through one of the merciful, fearless nuns. This bit, an opportunity for a last word, is why they continue to defy Foulsom. Charles has made a ritual of standing in the doorway after dinner, listening, as a towheaded soldier, between coughs, entreats his younger brother to take care of their mother, to keep his hands off his girl, and to think of him when he can.

As always, as punishment, Foulsom will see to it that it is he and Rogerson who drive the boys’ bodies up to Base Hospital #8 at dawn, where there is a morgue and crematorium. Charles can’t help but remember the way the first boys stood outside the relay post, their handkerchiefs held to their faces as if in response to a spring allergy. But, without their knowledge, their bodies had already begun decomposing; their lungs were already stinging from the burn of chlorine gas. There was nothing to be done. They watched their own deaths, feeling the clots of burned tissue against their tongues, gasping for an ever-diminishing supply of breaths. Now Charles wonders at the matter-of-fact nature of all this horror. As he lies here, listening to the quiet, imagining the weight of the body bags that he will lift come morning, he notices that panic no longer hovers around him. The boys’ flesh is now worthless, just waste to dispose of. A job to do. A part of what must be done. The thin line between living and dying that seems to be fading more quickly each day.

He cannot stand the quiet any longer. He pulls on his pants and walks out, past the medical tents and into the field behind them. There is a long-abandoned barn, its charming shape lost in the darkness, but its white gables like the dim, slow arcs of shooting stars. The letter is still in his hand and he places it against his chest and runs hard and fast into the night so that the paper holds there, stuck to him by the force of air. He runs until his lungs burn and his legs ache. Then he falls onto the cool dirt, looking up at the stars. The perspiration on his chest has glued the letter to him.

He watches his chest heave, working to keep him alive. The sound of his breath is like a secret code, revealing the meaning of his survival. But it remains undecipherable to his ears. He imagines those hands, those words. They are now his own.
What you must do is believe with all your heart that you can come home and when you do, all the horror that surrounds you now will recede into a past that you can leave behind as simply as a train leaves a depot.
He wishes she were here beside him, listening to his breath, because for some reason, he is sure that she would be able to decipher this code. He is sure that she could place her hands upon him and tell him something true. But this is yet another fantasy. He is getting so good at living without. Beneath him, the dirt has dried in hard crags after the most recent rain and it digs into his shoulder blades. He sits up.

Walking back to his tent, he folds the slightly damp letter and holds it between his fingers, letting it swing and crinkle in the midnight breeze. These letters from Mr. Dench are never short on political commentary. Charles suspects that for Mr. Dench, winning the chess game would be tantamount to winning the argument about the war. He is a hell of a chess player, and a thinker, and the challenge of beating him just once has kept Charles’s interest. But Charles cares less about beating him now than he did. All theoretical arguments about the war are laughable. To be here is to know that the only one who’s right is the one who wins. He cannot prove to anyone the correctness of his choice to join this bloody war. He no longer cares if it was right or wrong. He does care, however, about cultivating another missive from Mr. Dench’s enigmatic daughter.

The other letters that have arrived for him now matter very little, including those from his mother, who writes weekly, dutifully describing her appointments, the weather, and the week’s menu. Her anxiety is palpable and unwelcome. She alludes to his father’s hope that, if nothing else, this “stint” will rid Charles of his medical aspirations. She marvels at the number of girls who have cut their hair short and recounts the dreary task of choosing a new fabric for the furniture beside the pool in the country. At least she supplies endless fodder for the banter he and Rogerson engage in during their runs. Even his correspondence with a couple of friends from college, an uncle in San Francisco, and a girl he once courted in Boston have lost their appeal.

The only images he wants in his mind are the chessboard; the room in which it exists; and the girl who sits watching it. Who is she? Where does she sit while her father writes to him? What do her hands look like? Does she touch the pieces on the board, tempted to rearrange them just as she’s rearranged his thoughts?

Charles returns to camp no longer intent on playing a perfect game of chess. His next move suddenly matters very little. Mr. Dench has brought out his king’s knight to intimidate him. Charles will still take the king’s pawn. He will not spend any more time trying to forecast Mr. Dench’s next three moves. He will only imagine the way the white pawn might look in that room, removed from the board and cast aside, perhaps just beside his own letter. And he will imagine that if nothing else, it might elicit more marginalia from Mr. Dench’s daughter. In fact, if Mr. Dench’s next letter arrives without any trace of her, it will be worse than a bad trouncing.

He cannot inquire directly about Mr. Dench’s daughter, as this may jeopardize their continued correspondence. Instead, he will simply ask about their new address. Or perhaps he will hope she’s as astute as she seems and understand a hidden message. Perhaps he will wonder if the species of owl in New Mexico is as interesting as he’s heard.
I’ve always admired the daring and wisdom of those birds, their round, echoing hoots making even the darkest night less lonely.

T
o the south, Hensley sees cascading gradations of brown that stretch to the far-off horizon. To the north, a distant mountain range stands blue and solemn.

“There she is.”

“Two weeks I’ve been here,” Hensley says, wiping the sweat from the back of her neck with her father’s handkerchief. “And I still don’t see anything but brown.”

Berto laughs with the high feminine cadence that Hensley cannot believe her father hasn’t yet noticed.

“The mine, Hennie,” her father had said to her when Berto first pointed out the scar in the land. “The Ready Pay.”

They’d been riding for hours when suddenly Berto had brought the truck to a stop right where the drop-offs on either side seemed the steepest. Now she is on horseback, and the drop seems even less forgiving.

“That’s the mine? The one that’s going to save us?”

Her father had stiffened his back. “Salvation, Hennie? What a quaint concept—one I thought I’d succeeded in educating out of you.”

The mere memory of it makes Hensley’s forehead burn from the hot prickles of her father’s reproach. Now, fingering the braided leather of the reins, she stares at her own hands, still pale and gaunt, folded in her lap like two dead swans.
This is just the way my hands looked in New York,
she tells herself.
I could be sitting in a subway car or in a taxicab. On my way to a luncheon or an afternoon in the park.
She concentrates only on keeping her hands utterly still, as though their inaction can disguise her distress.

Her mind floods with this small task and, still, a tear escapes and falls onto her skirt. This drop, this nothing, this small bit of herself becomes a dark circle on the fabric. An imprint of her present self in this place she can’t comprehend.

Certainly Harold has given her no reason to expect that this pacifist demonstration of their father’s is reasonable. But she also knows he is not objective. With two years of law school completed, he serves as a lawyer in an office at the Naval Yard in Brooklyn, helping to write the legal justifications for the war their father deems unjust. This has left relations chilly between the elder and younger Mr. Dench.

The day before they left, Harold came to the apartment in his uniform while she was packing flatware into boxes. Hensley clung to him, immediately ashamed of her tears, surprised by her own emotion. Her father had sprung the news on her just the night before, giving her only two days to prepare for their departure.

“Oh, Harry,” she said, wiping at her face.

“He’s crazy,” her brother said, offering her his handkerchief.

Hensley stepped away, shaking her head. “They fired him.”

“He knew they would.”

“That doesn’t make it right.”

“Don’t be a simpleton. We’re at war, Hen. He’s reckless.”

Hensley couldn’t help smiling. “Daddy?”

“Doesn’t New Mexico sound a little reckless to you, Hen? What the hell does he expect you to do? Marry a miner, pan for gold in the dirt?”

“Good God, Harold, it’s just for the summer. We’ll be back and I’ll go to Wellesley in the fall.” She wished she could confide in him, confess her confusion, her own anguish about Mr. Teagan, but she didn’t.

“Is that what he’s told you?”

“Why not?” She turned her back on him, resuming her chore.

“You think the
Times
will rehire a German American pacifist in three months’ time? The war will only get hotter, Hennie. If you go, you should be prepared to stay.” Harold put his hand on hers. She pulled it away.

She couldn’t bear his self-righteousness anymore. “Fine. Then stay I will. There. Happy? You are always right about everything from the very beginning, Harry. The rest of us must do a bit of floundering.”

 • • • 

N
ow, over four weeks later, she lifts her eyes from her lap as she hears Berto call back to her.

“Shall we go on?” he says from ahead. They are both sitting astride their horses, Hensley having declined a sidesaddle out of some attempt to garner a confession. “I won’t use one if you don’t,” she said to Berto as he stood in front of the pen, a sidesaddle over his arm.

He raised his eyebrows, without a trace of guilt or recognition. “Huh. So you are a suffragette?”

“Of course. Aren’t you?”

“I am a Mexican.”

“Yes, but don’t you think women should have the right to vote? All women, everywhere?”

“I’m tired of fighting for anything.”

So they both saddled up and luckily Hensley was wearing a skirt she’d made upon their arrival: loose, pale gray linen with a longer hem than usual, because she’d abandoned her heels in favor of daytime boots, and a matching jacket that she draped across the back of her saddle an hour ago. Straddling this saddle would have been impossible in a hobble skirt and heels. Really, fashion in Hillsboro is somewhat of an oxymoron.

Their horses clop forward and Berto lifts his hat ever so slightly to cool his forehead. Hensley sees the thicket of black hair that’s been dragged up from the nape of his neck and hidden away. This secret, like her own, sends a jolt of danger up the back of Hensley’s spine.

As the large brown horse named Thunder shifts beneath her, Hensley wonders if she will ever have a post from Lowell. Has he already forgotten her? Or has the dialogue of some new play taken residence in his head and supplanted her entirely?