Light Over Water (22 page)

          This time it was Sam
holding vigil at Tom Hudson’s bedside.  His reckless, heedless chaplain had
taken off his gas mask to give to a soldier who’d lost his own.  Now his eyes
were covered with bandages.  The skin on his cheeks and lips was red and
blistered from the gas.  Sam sat with several others from his unit, waiting to
see him stir, or better yet, speak.  Frankie was there, the one who lost his
mask and he felt the most miserable and guilty.  Anthony Cilley, who had
snatched the mask off a man who’d been shot dead to help out their chaplain sat
there too.  He’d run after Sam to enlist his help carrying Tom back to the
trench.  It was the first time Sam had turned his back on the front, had left
it, like he’d thought about often but never done.  George Gage and the old man,
as they called Paul Fowler, were with him.  The hospital was full, even after
the armistice had been enforced.

          Tom Hudson sustained
his injuries two days before when the hostilities were at some of their
fiercest.  Some one knew, they said, that the Huns were going to
surrender,
and they were getting in their final licks.  The old man said they were using
up their ammunition and gas cartridges just for the fun of it.

          When the armistice
went into effect at eleven in the morning of November 11th, the fighting
stopped.  In the ringing silence, Sam sat down where he was and cried.  He was
not alone.  Numbness soaked into his bones and he went back with the others to
their trench and slept for close to twenty hours.  Then he came to the hospital
and waited.

          “Why don’t he wake
up?” Frankie asked in a worried voice as he paced back and forth in the tiny
space between the beds.

          “Sit down!” George
barked.

          “Sure!  Where?”  The
rest of them were all parked on a spare stretcher close to the bed.  When the
influenza was at its worst they had rigged sheets to make partitions between
each patient, turning the hospital into a bewildering maze of tiny white rooms.

          “You can sit here,”
came a hoarse croak from the patient.

          “Oh, Chap!  You’re
awake!” Frankie exclaimed.

          “I think I am,” was
the strained reply.  “I know I’m not dead ‘cause you’re the worst sounding
bunch of angels I’ve ever heard.”

          Frankie fervently
spoke.   “I’ll never forget what you done for me, Chap.  Never!  You saved my
life.”
          The figure on the bed was silent for a moment.  “Well, someone saved
mine too, or we wouldn’t be talking about it.”

          Frankie said, “Tony
got a mask off a dead man and he and Sam drug you outta there.”

          “Thanks, guys.  And
thank God.”  He was silent for a long time, clearing his throat and moving his
hands restlessly.

          “The war is over,
Chap.  Can you believe it?”

          “When?”

          “The eleventh hour of
the eleventh day of the eleventh month,” said the old man.  “Just like somebody
planned it that way.”

          “Oh, thank God. 
Thank God it’s over, boys,” croaked the chaplain.

          A nurse approached
them then, looking exhausted and gray faced.  “Clear out, gentlemen,” she said
genially enough.  “Time for a clean-up.”  They filed out.  Sam took a long look
back and saw Tom’s head moving towards the sound of their retreating voices. 
The nurse said something to him and he turned his head back.  She began
removing the bandages around his eyes.

          “Go ahead, you
fellas,” he told his friends.  He went back to sit by the bed.  He slipped his
hand into Tom’s and said quietly in his ear, “I’m still here, Chap.  I won’t
leave you alone.” He nodded at the nurse who had stopped her ministrations with
her eyebrows raised.  “I’m staying,” he said firmly.  She resumed tiredly, more
interested in finishing her task than enforcing a senseless rule.

          Tom Hudson drew in a
shaky breath and his grip was strong.  “Thanks, Eliot.  Are…are the bandages
off now?” he asked the nurse.  She only made a small sound and continued her
work.

          With each layer of
bandage that came off, more of the damage to Tom’s eyes was revealed.  The gas,
a harsh chlorine mixture, caused blisters on any exposed skin and Tom’s was no
exception.  Ulcers covered his cheeks and his eyes oozed with greenish pus.

          “They’re off,” Sam
said, forcing himself to look for his chaplain’s sake.

          The nurse gently
swabbed Tom’s face with a pungent smelling solution that caused him to wince. 
“Don’t even try to open your eyes,” she instructed.  “It’s too soon.”  She
wound some fresh bandages around his head and carried away the basin full of
dirty ones.

          “Will you do
something for me?”

          “Anything, Chap. 
What is it?” Sam asked.

          “Pray for me, son.”

          Sam gulped.  “Me?”

          Tom Hudson sighed.  
“I have…I’m.”  He left off, for once unable to bring words to bear on the
situation.

          “What, Chap?”  Sam
asked.

          “I’ve never been
afraid of dying, Eliot.  Not since I was young, about fifteen, and I thought,
‘what’s the very worst that could happen to me?  I could die, and my soul would
be in God’s hands.  That’s not so bad.’  But, it’s the not dying…” He
swallowed.  “It’s being maimed.  I can’t even think about it.  How can I live
like this?  How can anyone live with such problems?  I’ve never been able to
think about that in a rational way.”  His hands plucked at the graying sheet
covering him.  “I’ve always been good with other people and helping them work
through their fears; helping them figure out how to find God.  But with purely
physical things, I’ve never been much help.  I found the thought…so
disturbing.”

          Sam sat beside him
without saying a word.  His chaplain appeared so fearless and so invulnerable. 
It scared him now to see this fear in him, this weakness. 

          “How will my Ruthie
bear it?  How can I help run the home if I can’t see?  How can I watch my boys
grow?”  His voice died away.

          “Aww, Chap.  Your
wife loves you.  I seen the look on her face when you left.  It was like she
was praying; please God, just let ‘im come home again.  She won’t care whether
you can see or not!” Sam declared, forgetting his grammar for a moment as he
spoke what he had witnessed on their parting.

          Suddenly the nurse
loomed behind Sam.  “Please keep your voice down, sir.  And I believe you
should let our patient rest now.”  She placed a firm hand on Sam’s shoulder,
giving him no choice but to rise and move away from the bed. 

          “I will pray, Chap. 
And I’ll be back in a while.”  Sam went back to the trench that had been his
home for the past few weeks and prayed with fervency he’d never felt before,
even when he himself lay dying.

I Can See Peace Coming Now

          Alison had shadows
under her eyes and a knowing look that came from bitter sorrow.  “Do you think
people change much, Mrs. Reid?” she asked her teacher as they sat on the porch
steps.

          “Which people?” Mary
questioned, thinking even as she asked, about the change that had occurred in
her very self.

          “I’d like to think
that Aubrey Newell was sorry for what he did.” Alison said.  “I’d like to think
he had changed.”  She had told Mary how he’d saved Sam’s life, not once but
twice.

          “I don’t know,
dear.   Sometimes they seem to change.  The real question is, have you
changed?  Are you willing to forgive him, like Pastor Whiting says we must do?
Whether or not he’s sorry?”

          Alison leaned her
head back after shrugging.  She gazed up through the now leafless branches.  “I
don’t know what to think anymore.  I’m grateful for Sam’s life.  I prayed every
day that God would protect him.  And God did.  Do I owe Aubrey anything for all
that?”  The cat Maggie came nudging her back, and Alison lifted her onto her
lap and stroked her.  Sorrow lay like a stone in her chest, for Maggie was
Owen’s cat and she seemed to have lost her animation since he died.

          “Pastor Whiting also
says unforgiveness hurts you more than it hurts Aubrey.”

          “I wanted to hurt
Aubrey.  If I ever saw him again, I wanted to kill him myself.  I wanted him to
suffer too.”  Alison’s eyes flicked sideways to catch the look on Mary’s face,
anticipating shock there, but seeing only sympathy.

          Mary noted her use of
the past tense but made no comment.  “Probably Aubrey has suffered a great
deal.  He has seen horrible things and lived through the nightmare of this
war.”

          Alison resisted any
feelings of sympathy for Aubrey.  “Well, so did Sam and Remick.  Why did they
have to suffer too?”

          Mary laid her hand on
Alison’s back, rubbing away the tension she felt there.  “I would never try to
defend Aubrey Newell to you.  Don’t misunderstand me.  But Sam and your brother
have both lived in loving families.  They’ve the promise of a loving future. 
It seems to me that Aubrey, in comparison, has lived a rather blighted life.
That’s no excuse for evil, but it may help explain it.”         

          Alison was silent,
but nodded her head.  Maggie closed her green eyes and purred faintly.

          There was scarcely a
family in Little Cove untouched by the influenza.  It was a near miss with Aunt
Pearl, who survived.  Davey and Owen left a hole in their lives that they were
only able to fill up with work, until now.

          Both the baby
Caroline and little Isabella were taken by the illness.  Cleo died the day
after Alison saw her, and their younger brother Richard, who had been outside
playing with gusto one day, also succumbed two days later.  Another of the
Ouellette girls died.  Annie Bell, Robbie’s sister, lay ill for days,
recovering to discover that all her hair had fallen out.  Mrs. Whiting, who had
been expecting, lost her baby although she herself was recovered.

          One of the three Kens
succumbed after being sick one day, while Ken Alley lingered on for two weeks
before dying.  Alvie Cooper, keeper of the lighthouse, died.  Because there was
no one to keep the light, Remick moved out to the point, until the Coast Guard
found someone to replace him.

          Slowly the crisis
passed.  Soberly the little village assessed its losses and figured out how to
carry on, even while fresh graves stood out starkly in the field beside the
church.  Reports of the devastating losses came in the newspapers, stunning in
their sheer numbers and scope.

          There was a funeral
at the Little Cove church every day for two weeks with Pastor Whiting speaking
at every one.  He himself wept at each, earning the respect and love of the
community in a way he never had before.  “He showed he was one of us,” Aurietta
Alley put it succinctly even though she didn’t go to all the funerals.  She did
show up at her own husband’s funeral with slices of cucumber tied to each ankle
and a mask under her black veil.  Pastor Whiting cried copiously as he
elaborated on the integrity and character of Charles Alley and Aurietta forever
harbored a soft spot in her shuttered old heart for the pastor who was “like a
son to her”.

          School reopened after
a five-week hiatus.  Mrs. Reid and Rena Mayhew spent several days adjusting to
their altered classes and the confused despair evident in the young faces. 
Children were there who’d lost a parent or both parents, or a sister or
brother.  The epidemic affected them, most of them, more personally than the
long far away war.

          But Mrs. Reid was
curiously different, calmly cheerful and strangely at peace.  Her time of
illness seemed to have distilled in her a sense of place, but even more than
that was a new hope that she had, for her heart had opened to the possibility
of a new love.  He just needed to realize it.

Peace Must Be Planted

          When Aubrey Newell
decided to accompany Chaplain Tom Hudson home, Sam finally felt at ease.  He
and his company were still at work in Germany, as part of the occupying
forces.  Even if they were released to go home, the wait for a troop ship was
weeks long.  The chaplain was going home as soon as transport could be
arranged, and Aubrey would go to help him get settled.

          Tom had some of his
sight back, but it was a fraction of what he’d hoped for.  He dreaded being a
burden, another person for Ruth to care for.  But he was thankful for the fact
that he wasn’t crippled.  His lungs suffered from some damage and the pain when
he breathed was more of a concern than his sight.  The doctor warned him that
he must take care not to exert himself or expose himself to those with lung
infections.  An impossibility, he thought, but he gave the warning anyway.

          Tom was grateful for
Aubrey’s company and help.  When he was cheerful he was glad company, and when
he seemed to slip into dark moods, he sought out the wisdom and advice he’d
seen Tom give whoever came to him.