Famished Lover (12 page)

We are grateful. There is no recount. Agony works up our enthusiasm for the
Vaterland
for just a few more minutes, then we are on our own at last, trying to contain ourselves.

On the hill a few hundred yards away from the station I heard the whistle and the rush of the train as it approached from the south. I sprinted into the railway yard, past the dusty parking lot and through the old building and got there in good time, just as the train was pulling in. There wasn't much of a crowd: a few ladies in fine hats obviously heading off to town for a day of shopping, some other businessmen on their way back from their own country weekends, a couple of rough lads in working clothes perhaps going in to try to find a job for a few days. I already had my ticket. I had plenty of time and the sun shone so brilliantly just over the trees that I had to shade my eyes.

I suddenly felt no hurry at all. The ladies and gentlemen and rough lads boarded. I stood staring at the warm, blue hills. The engine puffed and snorted. It was a perfect morning for a train ride.

The conductor called, the train lurched ahead, I stepped aboard. The wind chilled my cheeks.

Last fall, catching this very same early train, I'd felt swimming at sea in a rock suit to be leaving Lillian behind. Why was I now in such a godawful hurry to put distance between myself and my wife?

I kept my eyes fixed on the platform. It was passing more quickly now, becoming a blur, rapidly running out. At the last moment I leapt off and staggered a step or two, then
recovered myself. A few seconds later the last passenger car was past, then the caboose. The train disappeared around the bend, its black smoke curling still into the sky above the distant hills.

What was I doing?

I turned and walked back to the station. Nobody had seen me. I might as well have been completely alone in the universe, a puppet turning this way and that. The train whistle sounded — already a mile or more away.

I walked to the telegraph booth and composed and sent a message to Frame:

FAMILY MATTERS STOP WILL MAKE UP TIME STOP THANKS CROME

“All right. Everyone calm down!” Collins says when we are safely back in barracks. “We have to give him a stumbling chance. Does anybody know anything about this? Did Witherspoon plan it all by himself?”

Nobody knows. Napier thinks Witherspoon had a knife and a compass stuck in his mattress, and they aren't there now. McGuire thinks Witherspoon was hoarding food and might have been sewing a pouch for it that he said was for tobacco. Findlay says Witherspoon got quiet all of a sudden after the last mail. “He only got one letter from Beatrice.”

“One letter!” Eastman says. “That man gets more mail from his bloody Beatrice than the rest of us combined. So what if he only got one letter?”

“Maybe he'd had enough of the fine cuisine,” Findlay says.

“Listen,” Collins says, his voice still low but stiff enough
to bring us to silence. “We're all going to fry for this, and that's all right. But it does no good to keep bloody secrets. If anybody else wants to leg it home, then let us in on it so we can help and prepare. I've seen these solo skylarks before. They usually come to no good, and we all get
strafed
whether we knew anything or not. So we might as well know. Understood?”

Napier fishes something out of the little heating box, a half-burned envelope with Witherspoon's name on it. “Hold on!” he says, waving it in front of us even as it crumbles to ashes. “This is it! The note from Beatrice! She's either broke his heart or promised him something so wild he's chasing after her.”

“Bring it here,” Collins says, with enough steel chain in his voice to drag Napier to him. He takes the letter and examines it briefly. Then he returns the envelope to the heater and blows on the coals until it all goes up.

“Let's not become fucking animals,” he says.

I could hear her cries some distance from the farmhouse, and began running then, although something else must have been tugging even before then. Why else had I gotten off the train?

Lillian was screaming as if her body were being torn open by machines. Yet her father sat on the front porch sorting through a box of rusted tools. “It's all right,” he said calmly. “Maisie Campbell's on her way. And I've sent for the doctor.”

“Is no one in there with her?” I yelled.

It seemed he pitied me, getting this upset over something like a birth. “It's not our place,” he said.

I stormed into the bedroom. Lillian was kneeling on the bed screaming into the pillow, her hindquarters hoisted into the air.

“Lillian! What can I do?”

She'd shut her eyes and her muscles seemed coiled like twisted rope. She huffed and groaned, and the sheets beneath her were soaked.

“Is . . . is it coming?” she moaned.

I looked, but didn't know what I was seeing. A flash of pink amidst blood and hair.

“I think so.”

A spasm drove the breath from her lungs. She grasped my arm and moaned again rapidly into the pillow. When the tumult had passed she said in a tiny voice, “It's killing me.”

“You'll be all right.”

She had not released her grip. She screamed again into the bed.

“You'll get through it. You'll forget how much it hurts.” She reacted then as if struck in the belly and sat up suddenly, then leaned against me, thrusting her chin hard into the flesh of my shoulder. I straightened up to bear the load.

When the spasm had passed once more she said, “What makes you . . . such an expert?”

She snapped her weight against my shoulder again so hard I nearly folded. I leaned into her and held on.

“Maybe . . . you should lie down.”

Again and again, spasm after spasm, and where was the bloody doctor?

Her limbs were shaking. I eased her back onto the bed. Her
eyes were shut tight now and her face looked greenish. For a moment she seemed to loll back into a ghostly stillness. Then suddenly she screamed as if being torn within by shrapnel.

When the terror passed I looked again to see what I could of the baby. The pink slit was more pronounced now.

“That's better! The baby is coming. Slowly, darling, but the baby's coming!”

I don't think she heard me. I moved around to grasp her hand, and she lashed out suddenly and walloped the side of my jaw. I staggered back.

“Gaaaaawwwdd!” she screamed. “

That's better! Lillian, hang on, it's coming, it's . . .”

I could see more clearly now. The pink slit was a heel, not a head.

Maisie Campbell entered the room then. “What are you doing here?” she said, and I swear I could feel the cold wind on the back of my neck. “This is not your place!”

She was a tiny woman, brown hair twisted on her head and the tendons in her neck taut as wires.

“I'm the husband!” I declared. “

Then go boil water!”

She looked at Lillian splayed upon the bed. “I'll call you when the Lord has finished His work,” she said.

Blasphemy bangs through the door just as I am shivering myself to a semblance of sleep. He comes with dogs and other guards, all of them barking. We shuffle as slowly as we can out into the rainy night. Then we stand, as ordered, in muddy pools and stare at the barbed wire growing grey in the dying
light and listen to the howling of the dogs sent out to bring back Witherspoon.

The searchlight scans our features as the screaming of the dogs recedes further and further in the distance. I try to think of becoming a fence post — of planting myself far down in the ground and letting the stiffness of my limbs hold me up, whatever the elements.

Finally men begin falling, and we are allowed inside the barracks to moulder and shiver in our beds. The dogs come back to camp. The rest of the night I hear them sounding in and out of my dreams. When the bell rings in the morning and we are herded out —
Raus! Raus!
— I feel as if I was the one who'd been scuttling about in the wet and cold, waiting for snarling beasts to snap at my throat and haul me down.

Once again we stand as they count us over and over. Blasphemy in particular looks as if he's going to be assigned to shovel shit in a field himself — or much worse, to feed cannons at the front — if a single further one of us disappears into the dreary countryside. When he screams at us now his face is blood red.

It seems certain they will send us back out to the fields to work another day without any food whatsoever. Suddenly the barking resumes in the distance, but it is clearly different — yelps of triumph and self-congratulation. We stand and listen to the sickening approach. Gradually they come into view: this army of grey-clad guards with their pack of beasts on leashes and the stumbling, muddy, wretched soul, bound and hobbled yet made to march and kicked back to his feet whenever he falters.

There is nowhere else to look but at the spectacle of With-erspoon's torment.

Blasphemy goes on a tirade. Prisoners of war are bound to follow orders, to obey the German officers as if they are our own, to report for duty, not to violate the generosity of our hosts.

“Tolerate, lads,” Collins says in a calm undertone, as he is translating. “Humour the misguided fool.”

We are being fed and housed and protected while our fellow soldiers are dying in the slaughter of the Western Front. It is our great privilege to be afforded such treatment.

“To starve and shiver like rats,” McGuire mumbles.

“Look grateful about it, boys,” Collins says, his bad eye running, the rain giving his face a terrible sheen. “Think about what you're going to do with your lives when this nightmare is done.”