Good Hope Road: A Novel (2 page)

Tonight though, all I can think ’bout is that hand. I wonder what it been doin’ before it came to rest here in the mud. The man it belonged to ain’t never worked in no cotton fields like I done, his skin, it the wrong colour for that. Never stepped inside no ring either I bet, never practised no swings at sacks of river sand – ain’t no scars or bumps to show. Maybe he played the piano someplace where the ladies smelled fine, or tennis in one of those clubs where they serve sandwiches so small, it take thirty to satisfy. Maybe he been a teacher like Pappy, or a writer like James? A passin’ cloud casts a long, low shadow over the fingers; from where I stand, the shadow, it looks like an ink stain.

A writer, then?

A writer, I settle.

I think of all the words those fingers might have written before the war, whatever language they been in.

Food. Sex. Vin. Musik. Cher. Woman. Heart. Sun. River. Père. Papan. Gott.

All the words that poured from that hand before the mud, before this endless, graveyard mud.

‘Obadaiah,’ I seem to hear him say, ‘Obadaiah.’

Even when my watch is over, I find it hard to sleep. I smash the butt of my rifle against the rats that scratch around our boots. Once or twice, I get one and hear it squeal. Don’t stop them though, never do, so I stop. I can hear them runnin’ across coats and haversacks, and try not to think ’bout what they be eatin’ as they root in the mud, or how they be growin’ so glossy and fat they look more like house cats than rats. I think ’bout the hand, stickin’ lonesome and defenceless from the mud, and what those rats might do to it. I hold my rifle closer. If they come upon it, I will shoot, I tell myself. It goin’ to fetch me all sorts of trouble with the Captain, I know, but Lord, I goin’ to shoot . . .

Close to mornin’ when bone tiredness take a hold of me. I fall asleep, sittin’ with my back against the wall of the trench, rifle in my hands. I dream of Pappy’s schoolhouse, ’cept there ain’t nobody inside.

The daily stand-to alarm go off an hour before dawn, shakin’ the sleep from me. It take me a moment to figure out where I am before I get to my feet. All of us legionnaires line up on the fire step, rubbin’ at stiff shoulders and sleep-filled eyes, weapons ready in case of a ‘surprise’ attack. The foolishness of this war: across from us, beyond the bobwire, beyond the stretch of No Man’s Land and then the bobwire belts on the other side, the Boche be doin’ exactly the same.

I’m slow gettin’ to the fire step; when I do, James is standin’ where I been last night. From where I am, I ain’t able to see the dead soldier’s hand. This bother me bad. I look over at James – surely he seen it by now? His expression give nothin’ away. He stare straight ahead, movin’ the plug of chaw in his cheek. I search through the loophole in front of me, but all I see is mud, and wire, and a slowly lightenin’ sky.

I can’t hear it no more neither; ain’t nobody callin’ my name.

We wait there an hour, stampin’ our feet and shiftin’ ’bout to get warm, until the dawn is fully upon us. The stand-down sound and men start to move ’bout the trench, fixin’ to clean their rifles, do repair work, mend the duckboards and such. Danny sayin’ somethin’ to me but I ain’t payin’ no attention as I mosey along the fire step to where I been standin’ last night. I think of them rats, and for a moment, I’m right afraid of what I’m goin’ to see. I set my eyes to the loophole.

A weight lift from my chest and I grin, from one side of my mug to the other. There’s my buddy’s hand, stickin’ from the mud, five fingers, clear as day.

It just a hand, a dead stranger’s hand, but in those five stiff fingers, in that silent, unmovin’ palm, I see all of his life that’s passed before. He no longer just another dead soldier, but a man, once with breath and body and a heart beatin’ with want – a man, same as me. When I see his hand still there, unharmed through the night, it as if that fallen soldier, he gone and survived after all. As if everythin’ that come before – all that those fingers did before the war, the words they wrote, the hands they touched, the rifle they held at the end – all those things, they ain’t been for nothin’.

I grin through the loophole, uncarin’ of who’s lookin’ at me.

‘Good mornin’,’ I call to it, man to man. ‘Good mornin’.’

Raydon, Vermont • March 1932

im Stonebridge waded deeper into the river. It extended before him, the grey of winter giving way to a brisk, clear blue, and where the afternoon sun caught it, a quicksilver sheen. He waded slowly, not so far that the water breached the tops of his rubber boots, and with an economy of movement that set off hardly a ripple. Ahead and to his left, an outcrop of rock thrust its shoulder over the river. The water that lay beneath was shielded from the sun, dark and still as a pane of glass. The river ran deep there, he knew, and in those cavernous hollows, trout. Fat-bellied rainbows, he was certain of it.

He stopped, bracing his legs against the silt. A slight breeze nudged at the ends of his canvas shirt. It hung over the river for an instant, weighted with the smell of wet earth and pine. The scent it carried lingered, dense and familiar. He took a deep breath, drawing it in. Tree oil. Resin. Mud. Spring seeding the woods.

Everywhere, the quiet sounds of water. The river flowing freely once more, the floes of ice, speckled with twigs and the debris of last year’s leaf litter, the only remnants of its winter carapace. Water in the woods, dripping from thawing bark, pooling in snowmelt ground. Ice cracked, breaking down, rippling in the ridges marked by his boot, seeping into the frozen earth and awakening the soil.

He ran a thumb over his fishing rod, along the silk that threaded its length. A casual glance at the overhang of rock to anchor his bearings. A controlled flick of his arm, backwards, forwards. Fly, leader and line arced overhead.

A movement in the trees caught his eye. A squirrel, losing its grip on a nut or acorn, bounded along a branch. Idly, he followed its flight, measuring without conscious thought the distance from where he stood. Slipping into the boyhood pattern of old – judging the angle of the muzzle, the trajectory of the hypothetical shot.

A dab of colour on the horizon, drawing his eye further upwards. Just above the stand of grey, bare branches reaching for the sun, a patch of red, marking the sky.

An apple?
was the first thought that jumped into his head, despite its obvious incongruousness. He began to reel in the slack line as the object floated clear of the tree line. He watched puzzled as it sailed overhead, trailing a rippled shadow over the river.

A balloon?

He heard the drone of the plane almost immediately after. Little more than a dull vibration in the back of his teeth at first, but steadily rising in volume, the sound grating in the air. He recast the line, annoyed.

Flatlanders, come from Boston to holiday in hill country with their rich-boy toys.

The noise of the plane grew louder as it came wheeling into view. Stubbornly, he refused to acknowledge it, reeling in the line as if the plane simply did not exist, even though the sound of its engines was now strident enough to spook the fish. He glanced again at the outcrop of rock, got his bearings, flicked his arm. Fly, leader, line in a perfect cast, but the sound of the engine was impossible to ignore, the peace of the afternoon now firmly a thing of the past.

‘Fuck
.
’ Reeling in the line again, he squinted into the sun.

It was a small, twin-engine affair, flying low enough that he could make out the man in the cockpit. Behind him, someone obscured by a mass of balloons. An absurdly large number of balloons, even more than he’d seen in the marquee tent of the carnival that stopped by the town each summer. They streamed from behind the pilot’s seat and out from both sides of the plane. Red. Each the same bright shade of apple red.

The plane banked and flew lower, directly over the river, in an explosion of sound and colour sure to scare even the deepest-lying trout.

‘FUCK.’

He watched it approach, standing stock still, rod in hand. Closer yet, the noise infernally loud, the balloons parted and now he could make out a face. A girl, her hair loose and wild, startlingly red in colour, almost exactly the same tint as the balloons she held. She waved at him, sending the balloons bobbing this way and that. She was laughing, he saw, as she waved again.

He smiled. She leaned to shout something to him, her words lost in the roar of the engines. Had she been closer, she would have seen his smile for what it was – a cold, angry thing that barely touched his eyes. Still smiling, he lifted his arm straight above his head and gave her, the balloons and that damned plane an unmitigated Stonebridge finger.

She slackened her grip, taken aback, and the balloons in one fist at once spun free. The plane passed on by, banked to the right and accelerated as it swept over the trees. He watched it grow smaller until it was finally lost to sight. Balloons skipped helter-skelter in its wake, like a flock of red-winged birds whose cage had unexpectedly been sprung. Some floated higher, some lower, bursts of apple red blossoming in the clouds and snagging on the wintered tamaracks. A solitary balloon floated towards the river, bouncing off the outcrop of rock before landing on the glassy pool beneath. It settled there, the red of its skin taking on a deeper hue as it touched the unlit water like a dark, slow-blurring stain.

Jim turned and waded towards the shore.

‘How many?’

He hesitated as he nudged the andirons closer to the fire. He pushed a fallen log into place, feeding it into the heart of the flames. ‘None.’

His father grunted. ‘Told you it was too early.’

Jim straightened, turning around so that the fire warmed the backs of his legs. ‘Saw some rising.’

‘You saw nothing. Too early in the season, that’s all. Damn fool’s errand and a waste of time.’

Jim tossed the tongs back on their hook. They landed with a clang, sending dandelion wisps of soot parachuting into the air. ‘They were there,’ he insisted edgily. ‘It was the aeroplane that spooked them.’ Soon as he said the words, he wished he hadn’t.

‘Plane?’ Major James Stonebridge’s eye twitched. The left one, betraying, as it always did, the tension beginning to fester inside. It squeezed shut, fluttered open, fluid pooled in its corners. ‘Boche? A Boche plane?’

‘No. Not Boche, not Germans. Not here.’

The Major stared at his son, his eye starting to water in earnest.

‘It wasn’t the Boche,’ Jim repeated. ‘Just a couple of flatlander asses showing off.’

‘How do you know?’ the Major snapped. He pawed irritably at his eye. ‘You don’t know for certain.’

‘The one behind – she was a woman.’

‘A what?’ The Major’s jaw slackened with surprise. ‘A
woman
? No, not the Boche then.’ Frowning, he looked down at his clenched fists, as if they were foreign appendages, new, unfamiliar. ‘Not the Boche,’ he repeated. He opened his fists, flexed his fingers. ‘Flatlanders. Of course.’

‘Here,’ Jim said quietly, ‘why don’t you sit awhile.’

‘I’ll sit when I want to,’ the Major said sharply. He did. With a small thump as he eased his cane out of the way. He swiped at the moisture dribbling down his cheek and cupped a palm over the still- quivering eye. He sat in his customary place, before the fire, his armchair positioned with its back to the window and the magnificent views that lay outside.

Jim turned away, pretending to fiddle with the flies laid out to dry atop the mantel. Trying to spare his father the humiliation of being caught in open field; of such naked, misplaced apprehension. He felt the seep of the older man’s discomfiture keenly nonetheless, the sour tang of it mingling with the smell of the Major’s whisky breath, of mulch and woodsmoke, hanging heavy and unspoken between then. He smoothed the patch of canvas on which the flies lay, watching his father all the while in the mirror overhead.

The mirror hung over the mantel by means of a thick chain of brass. A massive oval. Its size marked it as out of the ordinary, but was not by itself its most unusual feature. Instead of the customary clear, silver-backed glass, the surface of the mirror was black. Deep, obsidian black, like something forged of rain and pushed up through the stones, or the egg, perhaps, of some nocturnal, giant-winged bird. From where it squatted on the wall, it commanded a view of nearly the entire room. The overstuffed leather armchairs, the rocker in the corner, the maroon and beige wallpaper with its jumble of roses and reverse printed foliage. The silhouette pictures of his great-great grandparents, the samplers on the far wall, picking out family names, births and marriages in a precise cross-stitch. The radio with its dully gleaming knobs, the fishing tackle from that afternoon leaning against the side door, old pictures from magazines, that someone had framed. A pine cone upon a shelf. Mourning pictures worked in silk,the threads come undone from the embroidered arcs of willow and oak, the once white gowns of the women now yellowed with age. A pewter tray. A musical box, its key rusted. A host of amber tankards.