Mercy Road Page 12

  No one knew with certainty how he or she would react to horrors, but who would’ve guessed that bashful Dr. Margie Kitchens would blossom under such conditions and Cass Frank would wilt?

  Afraid to leave her alone, I remained at her side for the rest of the evening. The time to meet Jimmy passed, but I told myself I would manage to get away later. I kept hoping Cass would go to sleep, but her wide-open, haunted eyes haunted me. If I left her, I worried what she would do. Jimmy would understand my tardiness once I explained about Cass. I owed it to her to stay until she got better.

  Much later when Cass finally dozed off, I slipped outside and found the spot where I’d seen Jimmy before. Now hours past our meeting time, of course he was not there.

  A chill rode up my arms and tightened my scalp. So tired and worried about Cass, I hadn’t met Jimmy in time. And I had let it happen. I had let minutes and then hours go by. I had put friendship and duty before my heart.

  I pictured Jimmy’s kind face and the disappointment he must have felt when I didn’t show up, and I felt sick. Thinking it the right thing to do, I’d stayed with Cass too long. And now I thought of what I’d missed—more time with Jimmy, talking the way only those who grew up together can talk, looking into those gemstone eyes—and it devastated me.

  Back in the sleeping quarters, I crawled into bed and stared at the water-stained ceiling overhead. Exhausted, I nevertheless could not close my eyes. So much had changed in just one day.

  Sleep evaded me for hours. The old Arlene had died and returned to life, once after the fire and here again in the war zone. So far from friends and family, I recalled moonless nights on the farm, the sky strewn with a ridiculous number of stars, and I, as a young girl, reaching up, hoping to grab just a few for me. Today Jimmy had come within reach, and I’d touched him, then let him go. I imagined him billeted somewhere nearby and I would see him in the morning. I had to believe that Jimmy and I would have another chance meeting soon. But a lonely and regretful reaction surfaced within me, needling me with the awful idea that he might not come within reach again.

  Chapter Thirteen

  In Meaux, we slept in barracks-like rooms lined with single beds occupied by other women in the medical service. I managed to get a bed next to Cass, and when not asleep—fatigue took me away for a while—I could hear her tangling with the sheets and sometimes jerkily moving her body. At one point she turned around and put her head at the foot of the bed. She probably slept but a few hours, or maybe not at all.

  In the morning, at first her face appeared wan, as if all energy and emotion had drained from it. “Are you alright?” I asked her as we readied ourselves for the day ahead. We’d gotten coffee in the mess hall and sat for a moment before the sun rose.

  She shrugged and gazed off, but her jaw trembled. Sorrow floated in her eyes when she faced me fully, but then she looked away again. What had happened to my Cass? Last night gripped by awful doubts and anger, now she exhibited a terrible sadness. The anger felt more appropriate and safer than the sadness.

  Cass and Beryl, so far, had kept me on course, like those planes flying in lofty V wedges over our heads. Now I had to fortify myself and stay solid for Cass.

  She glanced over at me. “You seem to be holding up pretty well.” A muscle in her jaw shuddered as she spoke.

  I said firmly, “It’s an act.”

  She rubbed her arms and touched her face. “Then you’re a better actress than I am.”

  I took the first sip of my coffee. “My mother once told me that if you act the part, sometimes you become the person you’re playing.”

  Cass said nothing.

  “You actually become who you’re pretending to be.” No reaction. “So . . . you just fake it for a while until it becomes true.”

  Cass squeezed her eyes shut as if warding off memories and images she didn’t want to recall. “I don’t think that’s going to work for me.”

  “Of course it will. And you can talk to me anytime. Furthermore, I want us to stay together today and from here on out, no matter what.”

  She nodded.

  I went on: “So we’re scared. We can form our own little club—let’s call it the Chicken Feathers Club.”

  “Chicken feathers? You’re such a farm girl.”

  “At your service.”

  She smiled. I’d made her smile, and so I allowed myself a moment of relief.

  Outside, I looked about for Jimmy but saw no American ambulances. I wanted to explain why I’d failed to meet him the night before and see if we could try to meet up again. But he must have left already.

  Just after dawn, Cass and I got our ambulances started and got ready to leave. Starting our engines always turned into an adventure. The trick was to crank the engine to life without wrapping your thumb around the crank handle, or else you could really hurt yourself.

  The others told us there might be less fighting today, and when we set out, I followed Cass. As we pulled up to the field hospital, a lone man in a bloodied uniform sitting outside flagged me over, and when he realized I spoke French, he said in a raspy, almost whining voice, “I’ve waited for an hour.” He tried to pull in air, but it looked as if breathing took enormous effort. He nodded toward the hospital tent. “What’s keeping them?”

  “I’ll find out,” I reassured him. “Don’t worry.”

  Inside I inquired of a French nurse on behalf of the man outside, and she said resignedly, “We can’t help him. We’re working on the ones we can save. He has a hole in both lungs. He’s going to die.”

  I failed to swallow for a long time after that.

  I could tell the nurse was impressed by my French, but not by the reaction on my face.

  “Come now,” she said and added the French equivalent of “Grow some skin.”

  With my ambulance almost loaded, I approached the man again. He had lapsed into unconsciousness, his breathing a barely discernible whistle. I stood quiet for a moment, little pieces of my heart falling away. Then even the breathing stopped.

  On the ride back, Cass and I took our own way. My assis, a soldier whose hand was gone, sat still and stared forward and never said a word until we’d traveled about halfway to Meaux. Then he muttered in French, “God must have saved me.” Maybe in some way, the soldier was grateful for the wound, in that he couldn’t go back into battle again. Maybe the loss of his hand would save his life.

  One of my other riders, a German soldier, had received the same treatment as that of a French or Allied patient. Later some mumbling came from the back that sounded German.

  One of the French soldiers in back shouted to me, “Stop! He’s full of bullets, and he is dying. He wants something.”

  I parked and walked around to the back so I could listen closer to the German. He tried to tell me to stop driving. I supposed he wanted some silence and peace before he died.

  I quickly consulted with Cass. We decided to stop in the next village. For that moment, no hatred, no war existed—just human tragedy. But by the time we pulled up to a small Catholic church in the village, the man had died.

  “So much for that,” Cass said as we prepared to keep moving. Her eyes held a haunted shadow.

  Pushing onward, only a stone’s throw outside the village now, I spotted movement at the side of the road. I waved to Cass to stop. And then a group of men materialized out of the dust and smoke, like ghosts emerging from a fog. About ten of them, all wounded. They explained that their village had taken a barrage of shelling, and although injured themselves, they had set off on foot to find help, but now they couldn’t go on. When they spotted our ambulances, they thought rescue had arrived.

  When I explained that our ambulances could hold no more, several begged us to try to fit them in in any possible way.

  Since the German soldier was dead, I drove back to the church we’d passed, and with a villager’s help I unloaded the body. A priest appeared and said he would take care of it.

  By the time I returned to the scene on the road, Cass had
been forced to choose between the French men and determine which one would catch the ride on my now-empty stretcher. Together we loaded a man who held on to his abdomen as if for life. He said he’d taken several bullets there. The others protested, saying their injuries were worse, and we decided to let a couple of the more able-bodied men hang on to our floorboards. We reassured the ones left behind we or someone else would come back for them.

  On the road again toward Meaux, I got to wondering how, if the men’s village had undergone shelling, my passenger had received bullet wounds. Had Cass been duped into taking a man less hurt than some of the others? I hadn’t seen a lot of blood. Even worse, they might have fooled us into transporting deserters, but then again, how had they obtained the civilian clothing? I didn’t know, but something seemed amiss.

  In Meaux I spoke to a French driver who said he would go by the village and find the men we’d encountered on the road as he was experienced and could spot deserters in his sleep. He promised that he would try to talk with the man we’d brought in, too, so I turned it over. Then I remembered the German I’d left at the church and hoped the priest would make sure he’d get a proper burial.

  During our next run, we both carried full loads back to Meaux. The man in my cab, a French officer wounded in the thigh, wanted to talk. His injury didn’t appear very serious or painful, and he liked that we could converse in French.

  He had such a nice way about him when he told me, “We French are so grateful for you Americans here.” My father would’ve been proud. The officer told me about his wife and son at home in Paris and his best friend, who had perished in the war during its first year.

  Just past a tiny hamlet on the way to Meaux, I must have picked up a nail, and the rear right tire went flat. Cass pulled over, and we intended to replace the inner tube together, but two rangy, eager boys from the hamlet showed up and insisted we let them do it for us. We acquiesced and found a cool spot beneath a linden tree on the side of the road. The French officer hobbled over to sit with us.

  Cass said, “I should probably go on.”

  “No,” I responded quickly. I didn’t want her to go alone. Our passengers didn’t seem as seriously injured as the ones earlier in the day, and the boys would fix the tire in no time. “Just wait a few minutes.”

  She sat down with the French officer and me, but she gazed away and simply listened to the conversation the man and I carried on in French. I would’ve switched, but the officer couldn’t speak any English.

  Even in the midst of this awful war, surrounded by conflict, I found a moment of peace simply sitting beneath a tree and feeling the breeze on my face. Cass would get through this, I told myself. We would both get through this.

  The tire soon fixed, we rose to go onward. But Cass whispered rather urgently to me and in a strangled voice, “You belong here.” As I drove away, I tried to figure out what Cass had meant. Did she mean I belonged here because I could speak French? Or did she mean I was doing well here and implying again that she wasn’t doing as well?

  Ordered to stay put for a while in Meaux, we searched out some bread, cheese, and coffee and waited. It gave me another opportunity to search for Jimmy, but I didn’t see American ambulances anywhere.

  I sat on the trampled but dry grass in the courtyard with Cass for a few moments’ rest. There was no such thing as an easy day in France. But it had somehow turned into a lovely afternoon.

  Cass, however, wasn’t eating her bread, and she stared away with an absent look on her face I’d seen before. I had no idea where she went or what filled her head.

  I scooted closer. “Why won’t you eat?”

  “I can’t,” she said, still staring away at nothing. “I can’t stop seeing it.”

  “Seeing what?”

  “What one of those men on the road told me. He could speak some English, and he pantomimed the rest of it.”

  “What did he say?”

  She faced me, and her pained expression hit me with a bit of a shock. Her brow furrowed with deep lines, she answered, “He said that in no-man’s-land, hundreds of contorted human beings lie in different states of rot. Headless bodies, arms and legs, hands and feet, all in piles being picked over by big black birds.”

  I pulled in a long breath. “Don’t think about it.”

  “I see it in my head.”

  “Well, I wish the man hadn’t told you about that. We don’t even know if it’s true.”

  “It’s true,” she said and then looked off again.

  “We can’t be certain that everything people say is true.” I found it maddening that this soldier had described the gruesome scene to Cass for no apparent reason. I wished he had told me instead. Somehow, someway, I was taking it all better than Cass was.

  Later one of the volunteers who served coffee and food searched me out and passed over a folded sheet of paper, which I opened immediately.

  Dear Arlene,

  Our company has been ordered to another site in Charly-sur-Marne, closer to the front. Before we left I talked to several of the French drivers, and they didn’t know anything about the man you drove with on the ridge yesterday. Rest assured that if someone had gone missing, they would’ve heard about it by now. Please don’t worry yourself any more.

  I’m sorry I didn’t see you again last night.

  Keep safe,

  Jimmy

  The letter drifted down into my lap. Even though I’d stood him up, Jimmy had tried to find out about the French driver, and he’d sought to reassure me. He hadn’t berated me or even asked why I hadn’t met him as promised.

  I would’ve expected no less. Always the gentleman. I had to see him again; I just had to. But we’d met by happenstance, and ambulance companies had spread all over. Reassignments happened very often and quickly.

  I’d probably lost any chance to grasp that star in my hand again. Most likely he thought I’d stood him up because I didn’t want to see him, or because I was too scared to disobey orders. My eyes stung, and I damned myself yet again. Now I had no way to explain why I hadn’t shown up and to ask for forgiveness. No way to atone.

  And yet I’d seen him and touched him, such special gifts; he’d brought back memories of my father and my former life. At least I had those to comfort me.

  I blinked and pictured a cold Saturday, a warm, sweet boy in our stables. He and I were about fifteen at the time, and he was working early, despite deep snow having fallen overnight. I bundled up as I made my way from the house, my feet sinking through the frozen waves before me, leaving perfect figure-eight tracks in my wake.

  When I entered the open doors at one end, I heard Jimmy working in the stalls down near the other. The shovel made a scraping sound as he mucked out manure and soiled straw, and I could also hear some humming.

  Jimmy, unaware of my presence, hummed.

  The horses stood warm in their stalls, and each of their breaths released a frosty brew into the air that lifted and then vanished. The sun poured inside from the open door at the stables’ other end, and an odd sense of peace and reverence came over me. Something there . . . caught in a perfect moment, held in the open palm of that perfect winter day, and I became lost in it, aware that for the rest of my life a morning would never again look this lovely.

  Still unaware of my presence, Jimmy set aside his bucket and shovel and moved to the open doorway opposite me and then just stood there, hitching himself with one arm against the door frame, his silhouette all I could see. He didn’t move and I didn’t move, as though the same silence that had overcome me had overcome him, too. He gazed out over the blanketed land as though he imagined himself a part of it. He’d always treated our horses as if he were a part of them, too.

  This was more than just a job for him; he felt at ease here, and he loved both this land and the animals. His involvement had always impressed me.

  He turned and caught sight of me. He didn’t jump, but his eyes widened. “Hello to you, too,” he said with a smile that he crafted to appear as c
asual as possible.

  Backlit, he made a perfect figure. When had he become so striking? I said, “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry for what?”

  I shrugged. “I suppose for startling you.”

  “Well, darn it all,” he said and smiled. “I thought I’d hidden that.”

  I smiled back, and heat rose in my cheeks. “No need.”

  “May I help you with anything?”

  “No,” I answered. “I wanted to see the horses.” I gazed around. “And I find the snow so beautiful.”

  He glanced down and then looked curiously at me. “Well, let me know if you need anything.”

  At a loss, I shrugged again, my way of appearing unfazed. “Again, I’m sorry if I startled you.”

  Jimmy held still for some long moments; he seemed to think very hard on a matter. Then abruptly he found the very center of my eyes. “The truth is, Arlene, you startle me every time I see you.”

  At that tender age and so unsure of myself, I wondered if he had complimented me or not. One could be startled in a good way, or one could be startled in a bad way. And so I said nothing. I said nothing and avoided anything I didn’t understand and instead walked away and ducked back outside into the waiting cold, alone.

  The memory came back to me powerfully, and now old enough, I could look back and see that of course Jimmy had meant startled in a good way. And I’d managed to hide the memory for years and years as though it had never happened.

  I slipped Jimmy’s note inside my pocket. I would place it next to Papa’s wrinkled photo inside my bag. I had no place to set out any personal belongings in our present living quarters, but I could visit them occasionally and draw strength.

  Cass had taken notice; I must have looked stunned or spellbound. “What?” she asked.

  Now I stared off, but I swiftly pulled myself back. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

  Cass had perked up somewhat, even though her tone still rang flat. “Come on, Arlene. Don’t keep me dangling in suspense.”

  I sighed heavily and then hated myself for it. It shouldn’t have been possible for me to think of myself at such a moment, after all I’d seen the past two days. But I answered Cass truthfully. “I bumped into a boy from home. From Paris, Kentucky, home. Now he’s an American ambulance driver, and I wanted to see him again, but his company was reassigned today.” I’d never tell Cass I’d failed to meet him the night before because of concerns for her.