Bright's Passage: A Novel (12 page)

They had watched the young boys as they fished and played in the swimming hole below the railroad trestle. When the sun was starting to sink, the Colonel and his sons emerged from the trees and made themselves known to the boys, who looked at the Colonel in his tattered uniform as if he were some kind of Confederate ghost. While Corwin and Duncan stood on the bank, the Colonel waded into the middle of the stream up to his waist and stiffly saluted the boys on the far bank.

“Which of you here is the eldest?” he called out to them.

The narrow-chested boy who had examined Bright’s uniform lifted his hand. He was perhaps ten years old.

“I see,” the Colonel said with a curt nod. “And did you take any part in the recent War?”

The boy was baffled and looked at his friends for some kind of answer to the strange man’s question.

“You mean over there?” another boy said.

“That is correct, sir,” the Colonel replied. “Over there.”

“No,” the boy said. He puffed out his chest. “But I woulda gone!”

“Brave boy, brave boy,” the Colonel said quietly, as the
stream rushed around him. “Of that I have no doubt. You may observe that I also am a soldier.”

The boy nodded.

“A soldier always recognizes a brother soldier. It has nothing to do with uniform. It has to do with bearing.” He leaned forward in the flow and lowered his voice conspiratorially. “My own sons, the ones on the far bank back there, are not soldiers, sadly. They have none of your martial bearing.”

“We saw another soldier here today,” the boy said.

“Yes?”

“Yessir.”

“Good man. That was my next question. He must have been my son-in-law. A great war hero.”

“A war hero?”

“Oh, yes. And did he have a child with him?”

“Yessir. He had a little baby, and a white goat that climbs on rocks, and a horse too.”

“A little baby, did you say?”

“Yessir.”

“We were escaping the fire and were separated in the confusion. Can you tell me which way he went?”

Corwin and Duncan had begun to set up camp when he waded back across the stream. “The rogue made his way to a town not far from here. He is bent on some new seduction, no doubt. Probably already visiting whores.”

Duncan looked up from a pile of sticks that he was gathering together to build a fire.

“No doubt,” Corwin said. “He’s probably visiting whole bunches of ’em!”

“Contractions,” the Colonel said.

“What?”

“I will not have sons of mine speaking in contractions,” the
Colonel said very calmly. “ ‘Ain’t,’ ‘dasn’t,’ ‘won’t,’ ‘of ’em’—how many times have I berated you, beaten you both, in the vain hope that you will learn to speak in a manner that does not insult the listener with your ignorance?”

“Lots of times,” Duncan said.

“What was that, my boy?”

“Lots of times,” Duncan said again. “You’ve berated and beaten us lots of times.”

The Colonel sighed and sat down in his wet boots and trousers. Almost immediately he stood up again.

“We will not sleep here tonight.”

Corwin, who had found a patch of blackberries by the bank, looked up pleadingly. “Why not?”

“Because Henry Bright may come back in the night and find us unawares. Also, the fire is coming quite close. Should you prefer death by flames or rogue to a restful night’s sleep, you are under no obligation to follow me to my mountainous redoubt.”

“So?” Corwin gripped a blackberry bramble to pull himself up the bank and winced as the thorns cut into his hand. “So what if he comes? We’ll kill that son of a whore, won’t we?”

The Colonel threw a stick at Corwin. “Contractions! And, anyway,” he lowered his voice, “how would you propose to kill Henry Bright, who has recently returned from the War and is well practiced in the taking of life?”

“We could shoot him with the rifle?”

“With the rifle? You may remember, my son, how, without permission, you went to shoot with the rifle in the woods, bringing it home to me without ammunition?”

Corwin looked down into the stream. “The knife, then?”

“Ah, yes, the knife.” The Colonel took the blade out from his belt and held it up. “It
is
a fine blade. At any rate, I will sleep up there tonight.” He turned and began walking toward the slope
of tailings that led up the steep incline to the mouth of the tunnel.

Duncan stood and looked down blankly at the tinder he had carefully arranged for a fire. He ran a hand through his hair two or three times, then followed his father and brother.

“I bet he was visiting whole bunches of whores!” Corwin whispered again to Duncan after night had fallen and they were safely encamped in the railroad tunnel. “Whole bunches!” Duncan listened to his brother’s conjectures without reply. “Whooooooooo!” Corwin hoot-owled behind him in the dark. “Oooooooooo!” his echo came back.

“Silence!” the Colonel yelled. He lit his pipe with an ember from the fire and listened to the river below. “Mark me well, boys, Henry Bright is not content to seduce and murder only one woman; no, he will do it over and over again. He must be killed and his child taken and raised properly.” He talked on like this for a little while, caught up in whores and murder.

At some point in his father’s monologue and his brother’s hooting, Duncan stepped from the mouth of the tunnel and climbed out onto an outcrop of the cliff face just to the side of the trestle tracks. He curved his thin torso tightly against the rock wall. “Train,” he said softly.

It happened very fast. The light of the train filled the tunnel, and the breeze sucked past them; the Colonel left off from his sacred vows and bloody imaginings, and Corwin from his hooting. Both burst out of the tunnel’s mouth and onto the moonlit trestle. Corwin found the opposite ledge from Duncan and somehow managed to pull his big body up onto it, hugging the cliff side in terror and leaving his father to stand blinded and trapped on the tracks above the abyss. The Colonel stood agape only a moment before he ripped his belt off. The knife fell away and was swallowed up by the emptiness. For an instant his
crouching form was silhouetted by the locomotive’s headlight against the slope of the far mountainside. Then he was gone.

He hung there in the cathedral darkness, his belt looped over a trestle tie as the wheels razored deafeningly above him. When the train had crossed over the canyon and disappeared into another tunnel on the far side, he called out for his boys to pull him up. He brushed himself off, patting and straightening his clothes.

“My knife.” He looked over the side of the trestle, but the watery dark below was even blacker than the smoke-blotted night sky above. The knife was gone. “The rifle,” he said then. “God help the both of you if the rifle is gone.” It was not. The gun lay against the tunnel wall and had been untouched by the passing train. All that it needed was bullets.

After he was sure that the Colonel’s sons were well and truly gone, Henry Bright lay in the ditch beneath Bert’s body and waited for the voice that said it was an angel to speak to him again. He waited for a long time but it didn’t, so he remained there, unmoving lest he be seen or heard. Bert got colder and stiffened above him. The sky changed color with the same maddening imperceptibility as time’s passage.

He was sure that he had not been dreaming when he heard the voice. It had been very clear, had spoken his name, had told him what to do. He stared intently at the sky for a time more. A flock of geese passed overhead—very high up—and then, lower in the sky, the first rays of sun played themselves against the wing of an airplane. In the dawning light it looked like the lost leaf of some autumnal tree, baked golden and blown far afield. Finally, he twisted his torso in the ditch and, getting his palms flat against Bert’s chest, he gave a great push until he could look the dead boy in the face. Bert’s mouth had been very close to Bright’s ear all night. His eyes were open, and in death they looked every bit as confused and angry as they had in life, the childlike glare of one who has grown up suspecting that he’s being laughed at. Bright had seen another boy once, about to go over the top of the trenches, suddenly turn white, his hands
moving through every pocket and then searching his helmet before looking around in a mute panic at the others as they made their preparations. He had lost the address of a girl that he’d met on leave. Where could it be? Would he ever see her again? It was not a thing to worry about for a boy going almost certainly to death, but there it was, and what it was, it was. Another time, while sitting out a mortar barrage in a muddy, melting trench for almost six hours, Bright watched a man pour a portion of kerosene on a sleeping friend’s foot and light the man’s big toe on fire. The joke had been far more absorbing to everyone than the hell going on above.

Perhaps it was Bert who had chosen to speak Henry Bright’s name as his last words, Bert who had somehow proclaimed himself an angel and warned him of the coming of the Colonel’s sons. There were certainly stranger last words in the history of war. But what of the voice he had heard by the animal trough, the one that had told him to wait before dipping his canteen in the poisoned water? Could that voice really have been Bert’s as well? There were no answers in that vacant stare. He relaxed his arms and let the body fall back on top of him.

Suddenly he heard voices coming toward him down the road. They were plain, real voices and, most important, they were discussing a Brooklyn Robins baseball game. “American!” he called out, but his voice was far gone from thirst and exhaustion, and it was hard to draw enough breath to yell with Bert’s deadweight pressing down on his chest. “American,” he said again, more softly.

A long, narrow face came into his vision. “Jesus! Nice place to go lie down! Give me a hand with the big one here,” the slight man said to an apple-cheeked, larger man over his shoulder. The two rolled Bert’s body off Bright. “They get you?”

“No.” He lay there pressed into the mud of the ditch until they pulled him to his feet.

“What happened? Christ, look at your face.”

Bright tried to wipe Bert’s blood from his face with his jacket sleeve, but it had dried there and his lips were tacky with the stuff. He explained about the shelling of the village, leaving out the parts about the Colonel’s sons and the angel’s visitation.

The narrow-faced one looked at his bigger companion and they both burst out laughing. “Do you know how lucky you are, kid?” the narrow-faced one asked. “Krauts were only sixty yards away.” He shifted a water bucket to his other hand and pointed with his free arm toward the farmhouse. “You slept next to ’em most of the night.”

“How many were there?”

“Who knows, but they were busy.”

“When did you get here?”

“We got orders to scout the village and find out what happened to you guys about an hour ago. Everyone was dead. Not a soul.”

“ ’Cept you,” the other one said.

“I saw them leave. There was only two of them.”

“Bullshit.”

“They came out of that house and walked right by here, then one came back and did that.” He pointed down at the bloodless bayonet holes in Bert’s back.

“Well, however many of ’em there were, there were enough,” the shorter one said. “Take my word for it.” He pointed over at the farmhouse one more time. “Or don’t. Take a look in there and see for yourself.”

They turned to continue walking, and Bright reached down to Bert’s body and pulled the beautiful silver and gold pistol from where it was tucked in the waistband of the dead man’s trousers. In the fresh morning light the gun looked sylvan, magical. The writing on the filigreed handle was in German and he could not read it, but the bullets—coppery nocturnal things
asleep in their snug chambers—he understood well. He released the gate and emptied them onto the ground by the bodies of Bert and Carlson, then he followed the two men to a water pump that had been found in the square. They waited for Bright while he drank and washed Bert’s blood from his face, then they went to stand joking by a group of ashen-faced others while Bright walked back down the road to the farmhouse from which he’d seen Duncan and Corwin emerge. The forced laughter of the men in the square followed him, a kind of despairing jollity that faded abruptly from his ears as he stooped to step inside the doorway. A chaplain was within, also gray in the face. He looked at Bright pleadingly and then spread his arms as if trying to encompass the pitiable carnage he stood in the midst of.

After she had waved goodbye to Henry, Rachel didn’t come to meet him and his mother at the end of the drive for the walk to school anymore. They waited for her the first couple of days, but when she didn’t come they kept going. His mother began to grip Henry’s hand protectively for the first time in a long while. He was eight now and he didn’t like that, but he let her do it anyway, because he knew she was scared.

One day after school he went to meet his mother where she cooked for the elderly couple in town, and the two of them had walked toward home, his mother’s rifle, as ever, over her shoulder. As they neared the turn up to her old house, she gripped Henry’s hand even harder than usual. “Hello, Duncan,” she said. The boy was standing at the mouth of the drive, his head and thin body swaying slightly like a pitcher plant in the stillness. Although the weather was cool and he was still a boy, his sweat-soaked shirt clung to his chest and there were dark circles under his arms. Duncan said nothing in reply, but he repaid the stare Henry’s mother gave him with his own implacable gaze, his thoughts as opaque as his pupils. Henry heard the rifle creak
as she shifted it on her back. “Face forward, Henry,” she said. “Chin up. Don’t look back.”

When they arrived home, they found the chickens dead in a white feathery pile, their necks broken. The rabbits had been killed as well and were now tied in drooping clusters to the fence posts around the garden, fastened with the twine that his mother had used to make bundles of Henry’s hair. A few of the rabbits had been skinned, and these lay like enormous overripe strawberries in the middle of the garden, beneath where a stick had been stabbed into the ground. At the stick’s top was tied the golden ribbon that his mother had given to Rachel at Christmas.