The Secret of Raven Point (27 page)

Italian civilians were streaming in, cold and hungry, fleeing the fighting at the edge of the mountains. A young woman Juliet’s age appeared in the tent clutching a baby to her chest. She wore a gray man’s overcoat. Her hair was black and tangled and she communicated in frantic tones that she had been eating only boiled grass and could no longer make milk for the baby. As evidence, she pulled one of her breasts out and twisted the nipple quite hard. Juliet quickly mixed powdered milk for the mother and infant, but the infant wailed and batted at the cup. Again and again the mother tried to urge the cup into the infant’s mouth. The woman finally held out the child and asked Juliet to try. Juliet had never before held a baby. Its bones were light and fragile; it blinked at her suspiciously from its gray, unhappy face, but as Juliet settled on the floor of the tent, she was eventually able to ease spoonfuls of milk into its mouth.

Boy or girl? she asked the mother in Italian. A white line of milk crested the woman’s mouth.

“
Una ragazza
.”

Bernice found Juliet like this, late in the day, feeding the dehydrated girl. “There’s a Private Munson who came in this morning,” Bernice whispered. “A bullet struck his pocket watch. He’s got springs and hands and shards of crystal all over his organs. The infection is spreading fast. He asked for you.”

Juliet returned the baby to her mother and rushed outside to find the Senator as his litter was being carried into the Recovery Tent. She walked alongside. “Hey there.”

His eyes flickered open as he said, dry-mouthed, “Nurse Dufresne.” His face was white—corpse white. Sweat speckled his forehead. A latticework of tubing covered his abdomen. “I’m not doing so hot.”

“Leave the prognosis to the doctors.”

Juliet helped the medics
ease him onto the mattress. “I’m starting to get the feeling you like this place,” she said.

His head began slowly turning left and right, searching the tent. “Barnaby,” he said. “I wanted to talk to Barnaby.”

“He’s gone. . . . Oh, God, sorry, not dead. In Rome. For the court-martial.”

The Senator’s head collapsed onto his pillow. “Bastards.”

“Who are bastards?”

“
Everyone
. You know what I like? I like fairness. I like give-everyone-a-fighting-chance. Look, I need to tell you something.” He gestured her close, and his breath was hot against her ear. She could smell the rot of his infection. “About that last night he was sent out as scout. Brilling would kill me, but”—he glanced somberly at the tubing on his stomach—“I have a feeling he won’t get the chance.” The Senator coughed, and Juliet handed him a cup of water. She knew she should tell him to conserve his strength, but she desperately wanted to hear what he had to say.

“We were drawing straws and Barnaby drew first, ’cause it’s alphabetical. But right off he got the short straw. So no one else ever drew. But I had this hunch, you know? Barnaby was
always
drawing the short straw. Always complaining he had the worst luck. And after the patrol went out, I looked outside the tent in the trash. Poof. A goddamned pile of short straws.”

“Why didn’t you say something?”

“You see a complaint box around here? I just can’t see blaming a man for trying to kill himself when he was sent forward to get killed. They were shits to him. He told me once that his squad hung him from his pack on a tree branch—for five hours. They dropped snakes down his shirt. Said he thought his shoulders would snap out of their sockets. Then someone found some field mice and covered him with K rations and stuck the mice on him. They wanted him dead. His pulling that trigger was a formality.” The Senator took another sip of water, and it seeped from the corner of his mouth. His eyes struggled
to stay open.

“Do you want to sleep?’

“Uh-uh.”

“Do you want me to write a letter home for you?”

“Not this moment.”

“Can I do anything?’

“I think I’ll just lie here awhile.” His chin glistened with saliva and he looked at the ceiling. On the edge of the blanket his fingers tapped out a pattern, careful at first, then rapid, and she was about to ask him if he played the piano when his fingers stopped. His eyes were wide and unblinking and she felt for his pulse.

Another,
she thought.

She remembered the ride from Naples, how he’d boisterously arranged card games, how he’d flirted with her. At the top of his bag, a letter had been set. Blood crusted the edges.

Dear Pop,

It’s morning here, and I’m all alone, in a dugout. I was awake through the night, but had to wait for daylight so that I could see the page. I’m not afraid. You taught me not to be afraid, and I’ve been thinking of you and hearing your voice, all these dark hours. I was remembering one of our fishing trips, when you caught three trout, and I caught nothing, and you told me I had to learn to be okay with nothing at times; that you couldn’t get to times of something without times of nothing. This is a time of nothing, but I’m holding strong.

I got your last letter and read it many times. It made me thi

Juliet set the letter back down.
Interrupted,
she thought.
Everything, everyone, interrupted.

She wandered mutely from the Recovery Tent as the rain began to fall again. At the Surgical Tent, her scalp cold and damp, she asked Dr. Mallick about Beau.

“He’s stable. We cleaned up his face. But the blast tore his large intestine and collapsed his left lung. I can’t say what’ll happen with that
lung. Oh, and one of his legs had to go . . . right at the knee. Trench foot turned to gangrene.”

Juliet remembered the night in the cave. How she’d rubbed his blistered feet, how his cold fingers fumbled to open the ration tin.

“How long before he comes to?”

“A couple hours. Maybe three.”

“I’d like to be there.”

“Well, don’t worry about timing it exactly. You’ll know because you’ll hear him screaming all the way to France.”

She meandered through the hard, cold rain, her thoughts tangled, and at the outhouse she stepped inside and latched the door shut behind her.
Scream,
she thought. That’s what she wanted to do after all this time: she just wanted to scream. She held her breath and pressed her hands against the wooden walls, pushing hard, wanting to break the structure. Blood rushed to her face, and she imagined a long, primal shriek coming out of her, something warped and wordless, something honest. A scream to name every loss she’d ever felt. But Juliet released her breath and slumped forward in defeat. Even from in there she’d be heard, and she couldn’t bring herself to burden the others with a sadness they no doubt felt themselves. What if all the nurses went off shrieking in the outhouse after a bad day? While the men missing limbs lay quietly in their beds. . . .

A sinking loneliness took hold of her, a sudden desperate homesickness. She missed Tuck and her father. She even missed Pearl. She missed feeling safe. She missed days when nothing happened, those long, rambling afternoons of sun-warmed daydreams. She missed matters of inconsequence: her silly pink bedroom and her posters and the dogwood tree outside her window. She missed
life
. This was death, death was everywhere and all around her; she was living in a cemetery. And like those corpses of former centuries, buried with bells on their fingers in case of error, she wanted to ring the bell and bang on the coffin
and say,
Let me out. I’m not ready to be here. It’s all a mistake.

She had come to find her brother, but she no longer thought he was anywhere to be found. Now she was stuck.

A knock on the door interrupted her thoughts. “Just a sec,” called Juliet, pressing hard at her cheeks as though to hold herself together. “It’s all yours, Helen,” she said as she stepped into the rain.

Slowly, Juliet made her way back to the Recovery Tent to finish her rounds. She tried not to think of Beau and of Munson. She tried not to think of Barnaby hanging from a tree with mice crawling over him. An unusual stillness had settled over the tent; the dozens of men lying on litters were entirely silent. “Everything okay in here?” she asked.

“
Shhhhh.
” One of the men gestured to the corner, where the young Italian woman, sitting on the ground, slept with her back against the green canvas of the tent. The baby was asleep on her chest, its face nestled in the hollow of her neck, gently gurgling. There was a beautiful synchronicity to the rise and fall of their chests, to the soft whisper of their deep, exhausted exhalations. Four empty milk cups sat beside them.

The men in the tent clearly had been watching this scene for quite some time.

“That’s a pretty baby,” one of them said softly.

“Pretty eyes,” another whispered. “I think they were blue.”

“Nah, green. Like an oak tree.”

“Well, green eyes can change,” the man beside Juliet whispered. “I got a little brother who had green eyes and then at one year old they turned brown.”

“Boy, the poor little critter was hungry. She’ll sleep for ten hours now, just you watch.”

Juliet moved toward the sleeping figures and collected the empty tin cups. She gazed at the baby’s serene face. They had all been that once, she thought. Munson, Beau, herself. All the men around her. They had all been that small, that helpless, that unformed. And
they would all, in time, return to that end—some by nightfall. The cries and the babbling would come back; the primordial bewilderment would take hold; and they would leave the world the same way they had come into it.

A slight bleat came from the baby, and the woman, without opening her eyes, slid her hand behind its head and shifted it higher on her chest. She kissed its scalp and the baby sighed.

What any of them would have given at that moment,
thought Juliet, for their mother.

THE NEXT MORNING
, sitting in the mess tent, Juliet looked up from her oatmeal to see a girl in the entrance, a boy laid across her arms. His foot was a tangle of muscle and tendon, bleeding in a cylinder of trickles as though from a just-stopped showerhead. The boy stared at the blood, his face marbled with dirt. As he quietly wept, his lips puckered in fishlike motions. The girl, no more than twelve years old, surveyed the tent, her brown eyes darting from nurse to nurse until they lit upon Major Decker’s stripes.

Major Decker had already risen from his chair, rushing past the crowded tables to carefully lift the boy from the girl’s arms. Juliet recalled that he had a young son.

“Nurse Dufresne,” he called, “come help stabilize and prep this boy.”

In the pre-op tent, Juliet explained to the fraught girl in clumsy Italian that the boy would need a blood transfusion. The girl explained this to the boy, splayed on a stretcher. She stood on her toes and watched him intently, trying to monitor everything being done. She waved her arms as she spoke, and from the rapid stream of heavily inflected Italian Juliet made out that the boy’s name was Dante and that he’d stepped on a land mine while playing.
“Il pericolo é dappertutto, Dante!”
she scolded.
“Non possiamo piu giocare!”

Over the girl’s tattered pink dress a canteen knocked and sloshed against her hips. An empty bandolier hung across her like a sash. She wore a pair of men’s boots, unmatched and much too large, fastened snugly about her ankles with gauze. She looked part gypsy, part mercenary fighter.

Her name was Liberata, she told Juliet, and she explained quite matter-of-factly that their parents had been killed during the American bombings. She was now a
Partigiana,
Liberata claimed: a partisan fighter.

She inspected Juliet’s work rigging the blood and plasma bags. She barked a series of rebukes at Dante—
“
Tu non mi ascolti! Hai fatto una cosa stupide!
Non ho potuto proteggerti
!”—
and told Juliet that since Dante was a soldier, it was essential to the war effort that he receive unsurpassed care. He drew maps, Liberata urged; he had important information about the landscape; he knew where the Germans would hide munitions. He would lead the Americans through the countryside, if only they would save him. The girl was a tornado of movement and indecipherable proclamations. When color seemed to fade from the boy’s cheeks, Liberata grew still.

She crouched on her knees. “We will work,” she said. “We will scrub the floors. We will clean the toilets. The men can do their things to me. Please, save my brother. Please.”

Juliet shuddered: What was happening beyond the hospital? What was happening to the Italians? What in God’s name was happening to the children?

“You don’t have to do anything; they’ll take care of him. The surgeons have fixed this hundreds of times.” Juliet knelt so that she was face-to-face with the girl, and violated one of the strictest codes of nursing. “He’ll be fine,” she said firmly. “I absolutely promise.”

Liberata worked her lips until tears covered her cheeks, and Juliet drew the frightened girl closer and tighter than she’d ever held anyone before.

“
Grazie,
” Liberata whispered.

When the ward man arrived to help carry Dante into surgery, Liberata followed, holding her brother’s hand tight.

In the Surgical Tent, Juliet saw that half of the hospital’s doctors and nurses had assembled around the operating table. Dr. Mallick, their best surgeon, the man she had pegged as the least sentimental,
brought his face close to Dante’s and touched his chin. “
Coraggio,
little man,” Mallick whispered.

Juliet loved them all, this band of colleagues; she wanted to tell them that, that she was honored to know them, but no one did that sort of thing. It was a hospital, it was their job; by temperament they scrutinized their failures and discounted their successes.

Liberata kissed her brother’s face, whispered something in his ear, and followed Juliet slowly through the gray morning light to the Recovery Tent. At the sight of the men, Liberata once again assumed her soldiery composure. She made her way up and down the center aisle, studying the triangulation of legs in casts, the bright white bandages worn like crowns; the coldness of her expression made Juliet wonder what the girl had seen during the Allied bombings.