The Secret of Raven Point (23 page)

The Allies finally reached the Arno River, the lower half of Florence was taken, and the hospital moved again. At night, beneath bright sprays of white phosphorous, the convoy crept in darkness along the river; brown water churned over rusted trucks and tanks, eddied around the splintery ruins of bridges. Here and there, bloated corpses bobbed with the current, the smell of rot congealing the night air. Lone helmets slid like turtles.

By morning, they were once again pitching tents, the clack of hammers echoing through the valley. It was early August, and yellow wildflowers had turned the fields the color of dirty gold. Here and there, faded clay-tiled roofs poked into the sky. The sky was a bright blue, a swimming-pool blue, and it was possible to see in the distance the hazy outlines of the Apennine Mountains.

Monte Altuzzo, Monte Battaglia, Monticelli Ridge—the Appenines were the Allies’ next target. For this effort, the Fifth Army was now assisted by bands of Italian partisan fighters. Alfonso and Pico, Juliet’s Italian patients, each boasted a gunshot wound to the arm. It was Alfonso’s eighth wound, Pico’s fifth; intricate white
scars webbed each man’s shoulders and chest. Alfonso and Pico were all that remained of their original partisan group. Alfonso was tall and lanky, Pico short and compact—but they shared a passionate loathing of Mussolini,
fascisti,
and any foreign man who preyed upon their country’s women.

Alfonso was a skilled huntsman; each morning he set out from the hospital with an ancient revolver, and by the afternoon returned with a half dozen rabbits slung from his back. Sitting on a crate, he lit a fire and skinned his prey, and by dinnertime offered his pot of steaming rabbit stew around the ward. He spoke often of his parents, and told Juliet he worried that if his mother learned of the deaths of the others in his partisan unit, she would assume the worst. He hoped to get a letter to her.

At night, the air raids continued: sirens wailed, followed by the drone of planes, the pounding of bombs. But the fighting went well, and throughout the day few casualties arrived.

One afternoon, Juliet was working in the Receiving Tent when the Senator was carried in. She moved to the stretcher and snipped open the side of his trousers.

“Isn’t this exactly where you got hit the last time?” she asked, examining the blackened flesh of a small bullet wound. It looked like the hole a cigarette burns through fabric; the flesh around it was pristine.

“How many lives you think I got?” he asked.

“Not nine.”

“Meow.” He rolled his tongue and his head lolled sleepily. “It’s like I got a bull’s-eye on that leg. Another Purple Heart for the field jacket. Hey, you don’t seem glad to see me. What’s it take to get a little lovin’?”

“For one, try harder not to get shot.”

“You’re a tough nut.” He giggled. “Me? I’m just a nut.”

“Did they give you morphine at the aid station?”

He sipped from an invisible glass. “Champagne for the brain!”

“Munson, how many fingers am I holding up?”

He looked at her seriously. “Twelve.”

“Get some sleep.”

In this transitory quiet, Juliet was able to spend more time with the few patients in the Recovery Tent. The days were sunny and pleasant; gentle breezes circled the tent. The cooks dug potatoes from a nearby field and at every breakfast served beautiful hash browns. The crossing of the Arno had bolstered the troops, and for days the men debated which river Caesar had crossed. They wanted to know if the Rubicon was the Arno; they wanted to have crossed the same river Caesar had.

Barnaby, too, was still there. At the far end of the tent he lay silently in his bed. Since his initial burst of lucidity, he had said nothing more, although Juliet could now feed him with a spoon, and he would sip water from a cup. His dark brown eye would track nearby conversations, but he made no effort to communicate and gave no indication, when Juliet brought him meals or when she sponged his body before bed each night, that he recalled who she was, that he had ever recognized her.

Strangely, this didn’t bother her. After Mother Hen’s death, she had stopped pressing Dr. Willard for further Sodium Pentothal interviews, because it now seemed entirely likely that after months of her hoping Barnaby might know something useful about her brother, he would eventually tell her something she didn’t want to hear. In his silence, she still had hope. And since the court-martial proceedings had been stalled, she told herself there would be time, when she was ready.

Beside Barnaby, a private first class named Bruce Coppelman had arrived with a wound to his forearm, and because he’d been in Able Company, everyone referred to him as ABC, or Alphabet. Juliet liked Alphabet. He was an artist and knew all about the
Renaissance and Italian art; at night, when it was too dark to read, he would describe for the entire tent the frescoes and sculptures scattered throughout the valley, the wondrous feats of human creativity that had taken place six hundred years before their tanks rolled in. His wife in Canton, Ohio, was also an artist, and after each meal he asked Juliet to help write her a letter.

Juliet often wrote letters for the men with arm or hand injuries, signing them from “Somewhere in Italy.” But Coppelman assured Juliet his wife would know exactly where he was and what he was doing; they had devised a code, he said, before he shipped off to Basic Training. Juliet wondered if Tuck’s cryptic letter might have contained some kind of code beyond “Miss Van Effing.” She studied it for hours one night, circling every third letter, then every fourth letter. She tried reading words backward; she read sentences diagonally. Still, it made no sense to her, and she once again resigned herself to defeat.

Beside Alphabet lay Second Lieutenant Lester Cross, an accountant from New York who had undergone a four-hour mending of the femoral artery. He was mostly bald, his head gray and gleaming, with wisps of black hair tucked behind his ears. The afternoon he came out of surgery, he immediately began asking Juliet about the injections he was receiving.

“Good God, it must cost the army a fortune to keep me in here every day!”

“It does,” joked Juliet. “So get better soon.”

When Cross saw the X-ray machine wheel by, he jabbed his forefinger toward it. “A contraption like that—come on!”

Cross spent hours discussing maneuvers and operations with other patients, trying to calculate how many $18.75 war bonds it took to pay for a half-track and a tank. On a thick ledger he was figuring the cost of the war. He claimed gasoline costs alone would plunge the United States into bankruptcy.

When Cross spoke, the patient across the aisle,
Private Wilkowski, stood on his bed and pressed his finger to his lips, saying, “Shhhhhh. They can
hear
us.”

Wilkowski had thick, carrot-colored curls, threaded with wirelike gray hairs, though he couldn’t have been a day over twenty-one. He was pale and gaunt, and ash-gray circles rimmed his eyes. He did not sleep. He did not lie down. He smoked for hours on end and continually counted and studied the cigarettes he had not yet smoked. Each morning and evening he recited unsettling quotes from books no one had ever heard of. He’d been in combat for only two months, since the push from Rome, but had the haggard, hateful look of the men Juliet had seen entering their second year of fighting.

Of particular concern to Wilkowski were the constant rumors of Germans impersonating American soldiers. With each newly arriving patient in the ward, Wilkowski hobbled over and fired off a stream of incensed questions: Where did the Red Sox play? What team was Lou Gehrig on? Who wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner”? He regularly tested the nurses and ward men on the Founding Fathers and refused much-needed medication.

He had suffered a pancreatic disruption from sniper fire when racing from a foxhole where the two other soldiers suddenly gave off what he called “a stinking Jerry aura.” One of them, Wilkowski said, looked like Adolf Hitler.

His mother back home in Pennsylvania wrote him regularly, though Wilkowski did not appear to reply. After several extensive interviews, Dr. Willard told Juliet that Wilkowski had once sung in his church choir and volunteered at his local library bringing books to the elderly. Juliet shook her head. It was hard to imagine a kind boy inside the madman interrogating her every day.

“Why don’t they just ship him home?” Juliet said. “If he goes back to the front, he’s going to end up taking a shot at one of our soldiers.”

“Only if he’s not cured.”

“You think you can cure
him
?”

“A sane man is trapped somewhere inside of him,
and yes, I believe I can cure him. Absolutely. Besides, he doesn’t want to go home, so the army would never send him. He loves being in the infantry, loves killing Germans. He actually
wants
to fight. It’s combat exhaustion, minus the exhaustion. My hope is to work with him a few more weeks. If I can get him to relax, he might sleep, and if he sleeps, he might be able to shake the paranoid delusions. But without Sodium Pentothal, I can’t find out where all this started.”

The day Wilkowski was scheduled for his injection, however, he overheard Willard speaking German with a POW in the ward. Wilkowski threw off his bedsheets: “Get out, Kraut! Get out!” He pulled at his hair, saliva bubbling from his mouth, and hurled his body repeatedly against the tent’s canvas wall. Eventually, two ward men had to restrain him.

That night, when Juliet made her final rounds, his dinner tray lay untouched beside his bed. A fly buzzed madly over the gelatinous soup. His eyes were red from weeping and he rolled an unsmoked cigarette between his fingers.

“‘Darkness rises in the unseen night, and the ghosts of those forsaken and forgotten claw at the recesses of our minds until we bleed.’” He looked ahead blankly. “A. R. Turnley,
The Death of All Souls
.”

“At least have some water,” she pleaded, handing him a glass.

He poured the water down her dress.

“German water,” he said. “From the German’s lover.” He let his eyes half close in exhaustion. “Rest in peace, Germany.”

Juliet stumbled away, amazed that Willard believed he could cure the man. Wilkowski was far worse in the head than any other patient she’d seen. But when could you say a person was truly ruined—damaged so hideously that he could never return to his former life, his former self? She saw it all the time with bodies: amputees, cripples, the blind. Physical injuries wrought clear changes; gauging wounds of the mind was complete guesswork.

“Nurse Dufresne,” Cross called from across the
tent, “how much dough are they throwing at you to work in this circus?” It was getting dark, and the crickets chirped loudly; it was the hour when the men spoke eagerly, as though afraid of nightfall.

“Not enough,” Juliet answered, toweling her dress dry.

“Me? I’m making one-third what I raked in back home, with the added bonus of bullets flying past me all day. No G.I. Bill of Rights is gonna make up for that kind of a pay cut. But I’m collecting every scrap of Jerry junk I can get my hands on. Watches, Lugers. Even pulled a gold brooch off a Kraut I nailed and sent it home to my mom for her birthday. I figure it’s worth at least five hundred. Of course, back home, I’ve got money in the stock market. Forget war bonds. You wanna get fat off this war? Head for Wall Street. The longer the war drags on, those stocks are gonna soar. So I’ve devised a sure thing, assuming I make it home to cash in. How about you, Berenson, what were you?”

Private Berenson had pulled his sheet to his waist and stared dreamily at the top of the tent. “Plumber,” he said.

“Hey, Donner, what were
you
before all this started?”

Lieutenant Donner set his book in his lap, and everyone looked over to hear his answer. He was the most taciturn of the patients.

A slight grin lit his face: “Happy.”

“Big day today,” said Juliet, pulling a stool beside Barnaby.

Peeling back the gauze, she soaped the toughened ridges of his scars. She snipped the strand nearest his eye and pulled out each stitch, one by one, dropping the short black threads into a metal bowl. Pink zippers of flesh stretched across his cheekbones, encircling his mouth.