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“It’d be a good idea.”
Labiche’s greatcoat was buttoned at the throat. He had a small head and big eyes and gold skin dotted with moles that resembled bugs or drops of mud. “Why’s it cold, Captain? It’s summer. It ain’t supposed to be cold, no.”
“We’re not far from the river. The clouds are low, and the heat from the sun doesn’t get through.”
“It ain’t natural, suh. Nothing about this place is natural. We’re going, ain’t we?”
High overhead, Ishmael saw three British planes headed toward the east, straining against the wind, their engines barely audible. “Most likely,” he said.
“I wrote a letter to my wife and daughter. I’d like you to keep it for me.”
“You’re going to come through fine. You’ll mail it later yourself.”
“I’d feel better if you kept my letter, Captain.”
Ishmael placed his hand on Labiche’s shoulder and smiled. “Listen
to me,” he said. “You’ve been over the top six times. You’re going to make it. The Germans are through and they know it.”
“I feel like somebody struck a match on the inside of my stomach. I never felt this way.”
“Fix us some coffee, Corporal.”
Labiche breathed through his mouth as though catching his breath. “What time we going, suh?”
“Who knows? Maybe after the planes come back. Maybe the Huns will throw it in.”
“I don’t know why I cain’t get warm, suh.”
Ishmael tapped him on the chest with a fist. “See the light in the east? It’s going to be a grand day.”
“Yes, suh.”
“Now, let’s be about it. Let’s show them what the Harlem Hellfighters can do.”
“It ain’t supposed to be cold. That’s what I cain’t figure. That’s all I was saying.”
“Start getting them up.”
“The letter is in my back pocket, suh.”
Ishmael went to his dugout, one whose walls were held in place by sandbags and planks from a barn, whose only light came from a candle that burned inside a tin can. He opened the leather case in which he kept his notebook, his stationery, a calendar on which he marked off the days, a copy of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and letters from his mother. In the same leather case, he had placed a letter that he had just received and for which he had no adequate response or means of dealing with, as if he’d discovered the return of a lump a surgeon had removed from his body. It was dated June 3, 1918, and began with the words “Dear son.” Those two words had not only drained his heart but filled him with a sick sensation for which he didn’t have a name. It wasn’t revulsion or anger; nor was it the loss and abandonment that had characterized much of his childhood as he and his mother moved from one mining town or logging camp to the next. The sickness he felt was like a cloud of mosquitoes feeding on his heart. The only word for it was fear, but it was not of an ordinary kind. It had no face. He feared not only that the words written on the paper were full of deceit but that he would fall prey to them and be forced back into the past and become once again the little boy who believed his father would keep his word and return home to his family.
Ishmael flattened the letter on the table and continued to read his father’s words, like a man determined to overcome a seduction or undo the devices of an enemy.
I wrote several times but learned only recently that you were commanding a different unit than the one you led in Mexico. I went down there to find you and got myself captured and treated pretty roughly by a few of Pancho Villa’s boys, although I can’t blame them considering the damage we did to the poor dumb bastards we always seem to pick on. The irony is I wandered into a straddle house where some of your men were hanged and others ambushed. I made it back to Texas carrying a religious artifact I think someone would like returned to him, but that’s another story. The point is, I didn’t find my little chap.
I let you down. I had telegraphed your mom about getting back together, but I never heard from her again and assumed she had said good riddance, for which I don’t blame her. My letters to her were returned marked addressee unknown. I have never stopped thinking about either of you. My wife Maggie divorced me and took half my property and lives as a respectable and prosperous woman in San Antonio, although I suspect she has her hand in the whorehouses there. You and your mother have every right to bear enmity toward me, but I would love to have the chance to see you both again.
Tell me where you are and I’ll be there, whether you are in France or Belgium or Germany or the United States. In my own mind, I’m still your Big Bud and you’re my little chap and your mother is my darling companion. I realize that’s a mighty big presumption on my part.
Your father,
Big Bud
Ishmael rolled the piece of stationery into a cone, touching the tip of it to the candle flame, and watched it burn. Then he blew out the candle and rose from the table and put on his steel helmet and attached the lanyard to the ring on the butt of his .45-caliber double-action revolver and stepped out the doorway into the trench, just as he heard the three observation planes fly back over Allied lines toward the rear, the flak from German anti-aircraft hanging harmlessly behind them against a porcelain-blue sky.
BUT THE ORDER to go did not come. Not that morning nor that afternoon or evening. At nightfall, the batteries of French 75s began slamming doors, each cannon firing a minimum of fifteen gas and explosive shells a minute, blowing up the enemy’s wire, knocking the trenches to pieces, the explosions flickering miles behind German lines, where an occasional shell struck a fuel depot or a field hospital or ambulances parked in a woods or by luck landed in the midst of a reserve unit, blinding and maiming and dismembering, diluting its spirit before it ever moved into the line.
