Yours Is the Night Page 6

  “Here,” he said, thrusting the casing at me. “Take it. You deserve it more than anyone.”

  I shook my head, indicating he could keep it. It meant the world to him, clearly, and what use had I for an empty casing? They were a dime a dozen out here, even if I ever had need of one for some unknowable reason.

  “Please,” he said. “It’s—it’s the least I can do. I’m such a good-for-nothing—”

  I reached out and took his offered prize, realizing it might be a mercy to him, a way to ease his torment and perhaps help him learn, too. “Thanks,” I said, holding it up slightly. “I’ll take it, if you’ll take something from me.”

  His head snapped up. “What’s that?”

  “A promise. I won’t forget you on the battlefield. I’ll come for you, any time I can.”

  His shoulders relaxed, his relief and hope billowing so that they might’ve filled the trench. “Thank you, Sergeant.” He nodded gravely. “Thanks.”

  I walked on, leaving behind the kid who’d lied his way into the war, knowing he had been refined today. That he was of the mettle, or well on his way, to being the sort of soldier himself who would never leave a brother behind.

  A chorus of hoorah sounded as I left our interchange and made my way down the trench lined with cheering soldiers, someone tossing my name up in some mangled nickname. “Petticrew? Catch-a-crew, more like!”

  And so I went to bed that night in a hole in the ground. Slicked with mud and blood. Labeled a hero, with a mangled hand and a mind that could not un-see what I had seen that day. I stared at the hardtack Chester had brought me—his own meager rations—and could at least find an almost-smile at that. He was trying to redeem himself. Good man.

  I closed my eyes against it all and willed that dream to come. The one of something good and true and simple. A horse, running with all his might.

  But my dreams were not of Gulliver that night. Indeed, I had no dreams. I had no sleep. And would not, for a long time to come.

  8

  Henry Mueller

  September 1918

  The Front

  For column “Your Boys, America!”

  WAR NOTES UPON ARRIVING AT THE FRONT. AUGUST 1918. SUBMITTED FOR PUBLICATION TO THE WASHINGTON WORLD.

  By Hank Jones (or Henry Mueller)

  This reporter comes to you with hat in hand, asking that you bear with him for the duration of this war. I have been tasked with accompanying a certain battalion (I cannot say which, for their protection) and reporting to you, as truthfully as I can, the happenings of your soldiers, here in France.

  I do not take this duty lightly. These men are your husbands, your sons. It is their lives, held in the sticks and spaces of these words. And who am I but a farm boy who stumbled his way into journalism quite by accident, by fault of a missed streetcar and a sick cow? To honor them, and you, I give you this brief history, that you might know whose hands are working to record your loved ones’ lives here.

  I hopped a train into the city when I was nineteen, leaving our family’s hundred head of cattle to my younger brothers and sisters to milk. One of the cows was sick, and I’d heard of a two-hundred-year-old journal of another Virginia farmer who had unconventional ideas for tending sick animals. Nothing had ever induced me to make that two-hour ride into our nation’s capital before, but Daisy, the Jersey, was in a very bad way. So I journeyed to the library where this journal was kept.

  There’s an entire story of that farm kid trying to find his way to the library, including lots of wary looks from strangers when they saw his suspenders, worn trousers, rolled-up shirtsleeves, and they looked askance at him when he asked about the whereabouts of the library. But I’ll skip those details and the saga of the streetcar bungle trying to get there, and tell you that when I finally stood in front of the library—what I had expected to be a building big enough to house a handful of old journals and books—I must’ve looked like Jack staring up at the beanstalk. It was called, officially, the Library of Congress, and how I was supposed to find one page of two-hundred-year-old notes from a farmer somewhere in that domed white palace of a place, I had no idea.

  Three men in hats and dark suits and a handful of spectacles spoke to each other with great passion nearby as I stood outside dumbfounded, but their words were muddled as I took off my hat to wipe my brow and tell myself to get in that marbled building, for the cow’s sake.

  It was then, in my moment of dumbfounded glory, that the suited men’s voices grew quieter but broke through my thoughts.

  “What we need for our correspondent, gentlemen, is an everyman. A young fellow. Someone everyone trusts right when they see him. With that farm boy air of integrity about him.”

  “Fresh-faced, but bookish,” the next replied.

  “Smart. Clever. A bit of a blank slate we can shape for what we need. Uncle Sam needs a nephew, so to speak.”

  “Hear, hear! We need the face of the nephew. Brother to the soldiers. Beacon of hope to the mothers. Give him one of those holes on the side of his face when he smiles. You know, an indent. A whatchamacallit.”

  “A dimple!” the second man said, raising his cane in concurrence. “A spark of life in his eye. That’s who we need. Someone approachable. Who’ll write to America like she’s his sweetheart. The boy next door. That’s who we need.”

  They fell silent just as I stepped forward, ready to go to battle against the books within for Daisy. A gust of wind tumbled down the vast white steps of the building, snatching my hat from my head and depositing it at their feet. I lunged to retrieve it, nodding in apology. “Gentlemen,” I said, and turned to go, hat clutched in my hands.

  A current of whispers followed me. Then a chorus of shuffling. They were following me, en masse. I quickened my steps.

  “Son,” one of the men said.

  I froze. Some instinct told me not to smile—lest they see the “hole on the side of my face” that my mother used to kiss when I was a boy. I turned to face them.

  Those men—editor, owner, and advertising man at the Washington World, I would soon learn—followed me into the library and became Daisy’s own entourage, guiding me to the notes I needed. Enthusiastically jabbing their fingers at agricultural field notes of yesteryear while positing their own theories of cures for Daisy (they suggested molasses, fresh air, and the soothing strains of Vivaldi, respectively), they also filled my farm-clad mind with lofty ideas of the written word. “Hope in hopeless times,” they said, speaking of how I could be the vessel of truth to the masses.

  Reader, I owe you truth, and so I own this now: I was ready to hop the train back to the farm that moment and never look back.

  That is precisely what I did. But a letter arrived the following week from the paper’s owner, reiterating his invitation to “be a part of the making of history.” As I looked out my attic bedroom window at the humble forty-eight acres of farm that barely fed our family and kept our small dairy business in enough milk to supply the local neighbors, I knew this was the way I could help. Help my parents, help my country. I was, and am, what my schoolmates called “bookish”—cramming my head full of pages of books when they were all out playing baseball. I tried to join them once, and they sent me back inside to “go finish reading about all the dead kings.” It was a book about the French aristocracy in general, not really about kings at all, but I didn’t correct them. The point is, when that letter came from the newspaper, all I had to offer was the pen and truth. But that was all that was needed.

  We had not joined the war yet. As you may know if you have followed this reporter’s humble offerings thus far, I have had the honor of reporting the journey of America’s entry to this Great War, “the war to end all wars.” And now I come to you from France herself and stand shoulder to shoulder with your boys. They are doing you proud already, and I promise to hold their stories, and yours, with the care and honor they deserve.

  The warmth of the French people has overwhelmed us all, as we’ve marched and ridden to the front. Fro
m village to village, we’ve been met with eyes hungry for hope. People remove their caps and wave them in the air. Bakers bring out what meager supply they have and stuff our soldiers’ pockets with rolls for the journey. There is great thirst for hope here, and hope is what America is delivering.

  But along with the good, there is the bad. The hard. The heart-wrenching, to tell the truth of it. France has become a keeper of souls. We call them “casualties,” but she holds them close in her earth, and each cross we pass that marks a grave reminds us that many have paid the greatest price. That we may do the same.

  We saw it for the first time this week, at Saint-Mihiel. Your boys, America . . . they went over the top like a flood of courage, shedding their own blood to protect that hope. You should’ve seen the way the lightning ripped the sky in two, as if it, too, wished to crack straight down the middle of this war.

  While this is sobering, while the sound of shelling reaches our ears even now from miles away, it also awakens a sort of urgency in the men. Your boys, America—they are standing for all that is good: Justice. Truth. And someday . . . Victory. They stem their fear with courage, and the whole land is palpable with it.

  They are perched on the precipice of triumph. I feel it. All of France feels it. Your boys . . . your men . . . they are heroes already.

  I tapped the last of the article over the wire from the dugout beneath the ground. It boggled my mind, that words could travel like miniature soldiers, lined up in invisible letters through a wire that runs deep through this earth, past the shelling, under trains and thousands of feet marching, beneath ocean currents where fish swim in peaceful oblivion, arriving at a news office in Washington in little dots and dashes. Where they will be transcribed, printed, rolled into newsprint, and tossed onto front porches to bring hope to anxious families and courage to a country. And where I fear the dots and dashes will, as they almost always are, be changed by editorial, censorial hands eager to protect the public from fear.

  I understood the way words can shape hearts. Evade the creation of mobs and fear, and instill a home-front army of citizens armed with hope. And I understood that the words published must protect our soldiers, too. That they must cloak their movements while reporting them at the same time. To inform our own and pull a potato sack of blindness over enemies scanning our papers, eager for intelligence to get ahead in this never-ending battle.

  And yet, where, in all of this, did truth lie? They will make me out to be the “face of the army, the voice of the men.” Uncle Sam’s nephew. Hank Jones, they call me, to make me feel like “the all-American fellow next door.” But what about the farm kid, Henry Mueller, who spent his life elbow deep in mud and straw up until now? Sure, his name is much too German sounding to be related to Uncle Sam. Sure, he’s just a gangly bespectacled guy, a vehicle for the words behind the face of this fictional character the paper has created. Still . . . I hoped plain old Henry Mueller might have a voice in this, too. I hoped he might be brave enough to report truth, always.

  The men here deserved it. The people deserved it. And then, some blessed day, I’ll go back to milking cows.

  9

  Captain Jasper Truett

  September 1918

  “Rot.” I slammed the newspaper down on the makeshift table in our dugout. A light bulb swung above like a pendulum powered by the distant explosions of shrapnel.

  “What’s that, Captain?” Sergeant Steerforth yanked his head up from a map.

  I jabbed a finger at the newspaper so hard it should’ve snapped my knuckle. “That. Makes the war out to be one big parade.”

  Steerforth picked up the newspaper and read aloud.

  “‘YOUR BOYS, AMERICA, issue 8. AMERICA A BEACON TO THE FRONT —WASHINGTON WORLD —SEPTEMBER 1, 1918. By Hank Jones.” He read on a bit and then got to the part that made us out to be one collective savior. Nothing of the hardships of war, the flies that buzz over fields of wreckage and the birds that have fled the same. The writer seemed bent on declaring a syrupy version that made himself a hero.

  “‘The warmth of the French people has overwhelmed us all, as we’ve marched and ridden to the front. From village to village, we’ve been met with eyes hungry for hope. People remove their caps and wave them in the air, bakers bring out what meager supply they have and stuff our soldiers’ pockets with rolls for the journey. There is great thirst for hope here, and hope is what America is delivering.

  Your boys, America, they are standing for all that is good: Justice. Truth. And someday . . . Victory. They stem their fear with courage, and the whole land is palpable with it.

  Your men are heroes already.’”

  My jaw twitched.

  Steerforth shuffled his feet, squinting at the paper. “I . . . don’t know that I see the problem, sir.”

  “The problem?” I raised my brows, feeling the old anger simmer. “The problem is that if the families who read this are to be receiving death notifications any day, we’d do best not to raise their hopes higher. They’ll fall all the harder for it. America is going to suffer enough as it is.” I knew too well what it was to get a death notification. Knew too well the way it carved itself, word for word, on a person’s very bones, marking him for all of time.

  I knew it from long ago, and too many back home were learning the same every day this war went on. I would not stand by and let their blow be made even crueler.

  Steerforth gulped. The heat of my words, lacking anyone else to land on, snaked around him.

  “Who did you say wrote that?”

  Steerforth studied the paper. “Jones. Hank Jones. Embedded with our battalion, sir.”

  I’d have to find a place for Jones, where he’d find something less glamorous to shine his words on.

  “Bring Jones here. And a couple of others, too.”

  “A couple?”

  “Two or three.”

  “Anyone in particular?”

  A sea of faces swarmed my thoughts. This Jones needed exile. The shame of it. And one tortured face—the wide-eyed shock of Matthew Petticrew back at Saint-Mihiel as he gripped my arm from that shell hole—needed it, too. The mercy of it. We would need him and his leadership again soon. Best to have him rested, restored, as much as a man could be out here, for the next battle.

  “Bring Petticrew.”

  10

  Matthew

  Meuse-Argonne Region

  The Front

  We were men. It was why we were here.

  And then we were uniforms. Bearing them proudly, morphing into one force. Bent on saving humanity.

  And then, finally, we were ants. Tunneling earth, shoveling graves, running with speed and conviction we did not feel, past diseased mud and stench we could not forget, through networks that were more lifeblood to us than what ran through our own veins.

  I closed my eyes against it. We are men, I reminded myself. We are human. I leaned back against the cold sandbag wall and lifted my face to the sky. Nearly night, and the clouds promised rain.

  Yes. Please, God. Rain.

  The sky opened, but it was shrapnel and dirt that fell. I remembered then what one of the officers had said—that a trench is just a grave with the ends kicked out.

  I closed my eyes and drowned out the sound of that memory. A trench was also the way a field was watered in Greenfield Springs, a bringer of water. Green grass. Life.

  I reached into this truth to remember what life sounded like: the song of birds and the lift of gates and the pounding, always, of hoofbeats. Majesty unleashed. It had come to the point that if I didn’t do this—if I didn’t carve a place in my mind for a trench to mean life—I would die. And, more than that, hope would die.

  “Petticrew!” Sergeant Steerforth hollered and my eyes flew open. I stood tall. The first day in here, I hunched over, afraid my height would not fit entirely into the safety of the trench. I needn’t have hunched, as it was redundant on two counts—the trench was deep enough, and the trench was not safe to begin with.

  “You�
��re up,” Sarge barked. I stood straight.

  “I’m going over the top?” Something flopped inside me and I rallied it back up. I could do this. I’d done it before. But the images of that day were engraved in my mind . . . and they were not the sort to bolster a man. I knew, now, that I could do it—but I felt myself slipping into some mechanical, detached place, preparing.

  “In a manner of speaking, sure. You can call it that.”

  I leaned in, not understanding.

  “You’re on lumber,” he said. “Trench fell a quarter mile south. Mudslide from all the rains.”

  Rains? They were getting rain, a quarter mile south. Water from the sky instead of shrapnel. My rain. The rain that only came to us as drainage downstream in the sickly trickle at our feet, carrying with it vermin and worse. Things unfit to think on, let alone speak of.

  “We need trees from the woods,” Sarge said. “Lumber to shore up the trenches, if your hand is up for it.”

  “Lumber,” I muttered the word like it was a dream. Lumber—a trip out of this place—sounded too good to be true. “Yes,” I said. “All good,” I raised my hand to show it was ready. It had its . . . issues. But they would cease. I was sure of it. “Thank you.”

  “Good. You and Jones.”

  “Jones?” George Piccadilly piped up, suddenly there. He was always suddenly there. Popping up like a dog at a banquet table, begging for crumbs. Only the way George carried himself, you’d think this particular dog presumed he belonged at the head of the table. “When you said ‘Jones,’ did you mean ‘Piccadilly’?”

  “I meant Jones.”

  “Or possibly Piccadilly?” Piccadilly was indefatigable. And he wasn’t even a soldier.

  Steerforth was losing his patience. I spoke up before he could, hoping to avoid a blow dealt to Piccadilly. He wasn’t terribly . . . thick-skinned. Just incredibly oblivious.

  “I don’t think chaplains get lumber duty,” I said.