The Secret of Raven Point (29 page)

“He was a friend of my brother.”

“Not easy, I know. But what a gift for him to have you there at the end.”

“I suppose.”

“Your brother, he is in the army as well?”

“He was,” said Juliet. “I think he died.”

It was the first time the words had come to her, the first time her fear had pushed so unexpectedly into conscious thought. A rush of sadness tightened her chest. Brother Reardon’s gaze lingered on her, and in the yellow light she saw that he understood.

“It’s terrible, the not knowing,” he said.

“At first I loved the hope, the possibility that he’d come home. Now I hate it. I want to smash it out of me. I can’t bear the endless disappointment.” It felt good to unburden herself of the feeling she had carried for months.

“Even if he isn’t with us here anymore, Juliet, he is with Our Father. Perhaps you don’t believe in such things, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”

“Tuck was eighteen when he went missing. He’s my older brother. But now I’m eighteen, almost nineteen. I feel like I’m leaving him behind.”

“No one is left behind,” said Brother Reardon. “Ever.”

“It would be nice to believe that.”

“There’s time yet to convince you.” He smiled, his pale face half-eroded by the darkness. “And I’m good at my job.”

The heaviness of the day pressed on her head, weighed against her shoulders, and she yawned. “In the morning?”

“In the morning,” Brother Reardon agreed.

Juliet and Brother Reardon rose early and carried their bags to the main road. The air was cold; the light was grainy. The mountains ahead loomed like distant cities. They had been walking for an hour, pausing every few minutes to readjust their bags, when they heard a supply truck rumble to a slow stop behind them.

The driver, Rufus, happily smacked his meaty hand against the door. He was thankful for the company. Juliet and Brother Reardon climbed into the back and sat atop white pine crates. The truck smelled sharply of gasoline and rainwater; gray morning light streamed through bullet holes in the canvas.

As he drove, Rufus yelled into the back about how he’d heard things up ahead were in one hell of a tangle. Although it was hard to hear him over the churning of the engine, his story came to them in snippets, and Juliet soon made out that he’d spent most of his time far behind the lines as a quartermaster, but that Earl, the main driver, had been killed by a land mine two days earlier. Rufus was jowly and plump in a way Juliet hadn’t seen in months; the soldiers at the front were all muscle and sinew, the Italians were sharpened and shadowed by hunger. A band of fat hung over the collar of Rufus’s shirt, and this made Juliet irrationally angry.

“What are you seeing in the hospitals?” he asked. “I heard there’s everything from gangrene to trench foot. I ain’t never seen gangrene.”

“If you’ve seen bad trench foot, you’ve seen gangrene,” said Juliet. Her mood was dark. At daybreak she’d felt a brief relief,
a welcome distance from Beau’s death. But now she sat in the truck staring at her bag filled with his things—his letters, his comic books, his Zippo lighter, his boots; it would all be shipped home to Charlesport, to his grandmother, to this woman who had outlived every member of her family, including her grandson. Juliet thought of writing her a letter, since she had been there at the end, but what on earth could she say?
Your grandson was afraid, he was in pain, he asked me to hold him. . . .

The truck lumbered onward, and the air felt cool. Rufus drove like someone nearsighted, hunching uncomfortably forward. Every few minutes he lifted an enormous map from his thighs, studied it closely, and then swatted it back down. Juliet could tell by the motion of his head that he was still talking, but the engine strained so loudly that most of what he said was lost in the racket. Their silence seemed of no concern to him. Like all of them, she supposed, he just needed to talk.

The hospital was now encamped in the mountains; the olive Red Cross tents had been pitched in tidy rows over what seemed to be the base area of a former ski resort. The poles and wires of an abandoned funicular climbed into the white mist. A large stone building, Gothic and alpine, had been commandeered as the Officers’ Mess; it looked as if it had once been a grand hotel, but the windows, all smashed, were covered with white hospital sheets, which billowed in the cool breeze. Rufus pulled the truck beside this structure, and on the front porch Juliet saw a crowd of nurses and ward men.

Before driving off, Rufus asked Brother Reardon to bless him and then to bless the entire truck, and Brother Reardon complied. Then he and Juliet headed straight for the stone building, where she spotted Dr. Willard and Barnaby, seated together at a table.

“You’re back,” Juliet said, trying to suppress her grin.

Willard nodded, perfunctorily.

“They let Barnaby go?”

Juliet dropped her bag and moved beside Barnaby. His chesnut hair had grown in thickly, and he wore a black eye patch where the bandages had once been. There was a new alertness in his stare, and he raised his hands from his lap high above his head to show that he was handcuffed.

“He’s
communicating
?” she said.

“Some,” said Willard. “More so than ever.” He stroked Barnaby’s head, as though comforting a child. “As a reward, they sentenced him to death.”

“I failed him,” said Willard, staring into his coffee that night. They were seated in the back of the old stone building; there was a fireplace at the far end where a fire had been lit, and they had drawn up two metal chairs. Willard poured Scotch into his coffee. “The proceedings were ridiculous. All officers. More brass than a candelabra.”

“Lovelace is saying the army hasn’t killed anyone for desertion since the Civil War,” said Juliet. “I’m sure Barnaby will just go to prison.”

“That’s not an assumption I’m comfortable making. Besides, having him sit in a cell for years is hardly consoling—his mind will lock up further.” He took a long sip of his coffee and raked his hand through his hair. “How are you? How have things here been? How was the patient?”

Juliet didn’t know what to say about Beau. “I’m eager for a new line of work,” she offered, but something in her voice cracked.

He put his arm around her. “Me too.”

They sat silently, looking briefly and curiously at each other, then at the fire. She wondered if he’d missed her as well. Somewhere above them was a billiards table, and the balls clacked intermittently as a lone player practiced his game.

“It was strange being at the hospital
without you,” she said. “I didn’t know if you were coming back.”

He slowly pulled his arm away, leaned back, and crossed his legs at the ankles. “I’m right here. Pessimism and all.”

She felt his refusal once again to engage in any talk of feelings; but there were more pressing matters.

“Anyway, while you were gone,” she said, “one of the men in Barnaby’s unit came in as a patient. He made a deathbed confession. He said Brilling had it in for Barnaby, that he made him draw the short straw and go forward alone. He didn’t say it, but I think it was, you know, about Barnaby being different. It might help with his case.”

“I’m not sure right now what I could say that would help. I tell them a soldier was picked on by his commanding officer, bullied by a captain, lost his mind, and attempted suicide? If Brilling
fired
at Barnaby, that’s one thing. Brilling not liking Barnaby is irrelevant. The men in that courtroom don’t have a clue what it’s like for soldiers at the front. They make policies, decisions; they offer sweeping judgments. They are strategists, and when they veer toward moralizing, they veer toward evil. They’ve never sat in a dugout all night thinking they would die.”

She thought of Munson’s letter to his father, of his final night alone; she wondered if his father had learned of his son’s death yet.

Willard misunderstood her silence. “Fine, maybe Barnaby’s being ‘different’ cost him some points with Captain Brilling. Let’s even posit that Brilling arranged it so Barnaby would have the most dangerous jobs; that makes Brilling an asshole, but we hardly need a military tribunal to establish that.”

“First-class asshole,” said Juliet. “
He
should be court-martialed.”

“You’re forgetting the West Point Benevolent Protective Society. They’ll never touch him. Besides, it has nothing to do with the matter at hand—Barnaby’s shell shock.”

“Unless even the tribunal hates Barnaby because he’s
different
.”

“I think they hate weakness, or what they view as cowardice,
in any form.”

“Well, what now?” She stood to poke at the fire, trying to rekindle the fading embers.

“I’ve issued an appeal on medical grounds, arguing that he obviously wasn’t fit to stand trial. He couldn’t speak for himself. I’ve contacted colleagues back in the States to make statements against the army punishing the mentally unwell. But it will take time.”

“How long do we have?” Juliet asked.

“He’s scheduled to be removed from my custody in two weeks. That’s two more weeks to work with him. After that, I don’t know what they’ll do.”

“And you no longer think he’s faking this semicoma, somehow trying to save himself?”

“If that was his strategy, by
now he’s realized it is
deeply
flawed.”

MORNINGS, JULIET AWOKE
to clumps of snow weighing darkly on the canvas above her. The balls of her feet were icy and numb, and beneath her blanket she rubbed them briskly. She reached beside her for her winter uniform and wriggled into its stiff, thick layers without moving far from the warm shadow of her sleep. She trudged across the frosted encampment while the engineers, pitched on ladders, swept snow off the tents’ red crosses. The granite peaks looming beyond were beautifully striated, columns of dark gray broken by long ellipses of luminous white. The morning sun shone against them and lit the whitened encampment with a stunning incandescence.

As Juliet climbed the stone steps of the old hotel and entered the mess hall, the nurses and doctors greeted her from the long tables with hunched, wintry hellos. In the cold, they all turned in on themselves: they pulled blankets tightly around their shoulders; they clutched coffee cups as though in prayer and let the steam bathe their faces. At the back of the hall, a modest fire blazed in the fireplace, and those who had finished eating drew close, hugging their knees, staring at their bare toes. The stone ledge of the hearth was carpeted with socks.

Juliet ate a quick breakfast and hurried back across the snow, already snaked with the gray slush of footsteps.

In the Recovery Tent she nodded at the nurses on duty and moved quietly to Barnaby’s cot. Before the start of her rounds each day she now spent twenty minutes alone with him. She sat on the end of his bed and tried to rub the cold from his hands. She read aloud letters from his sister and related the news reports; when all else failed, she hummed. She needed this time, this portion of morning when she was accountable to no other patient, to no other cause; guilt had crept into her thoughts and dug an impassable trench—she had craved Barnaby’s recovery only for news of Tuck, and she was trying to atone. As she sat beside him, she recalled how Brilling had tried to make him eat the eyeball. She recalled what Munson had told her, that he’d been hung from a tree and covered with K rations. All along she had thought fate had brought him to her because of Tuck, but now she saw another reason. Barnaby had been picked on, and
she,
of all people, understood such torments. She knew now, deep in her bones, the life he had led. The loneliness, the self-loathing. The possibility of his execution filled her with a horrible sickness.

The appeal was stalled, and Willard had managed to buy a few extra weeks convincing the army that his study of Barnaby could prevent other desertions, which were rampant with the final push into the icy mountains.

The good news was undercut, however, by the continued reemergence of Barnaby’s motor skills. His general alertness had persisted, and then one morning Juliet found him at the back of the ward, sitting up in bed, his legs over the side of the cot. He said nothing; he barely nodded in response to her questions—“Can you hear me?” “Do you know who I am?” “Do you know where you are?”—but he took the spoon from her hand and devoured the entire bowl of oatmeal. He lifted the cup of water, drinking greedily, entirely unaware of the significance of what he’d done.