Galore - Michael Crummey [155]
—You think I’m crazy to be happy about it.
—Are you having any pain?
—Nothing I can’t manage.
Newman turned toward the door, put a hand to the frame to steady himself. —That’s grand, he said.
—I used to think you were crazy, Esther said. —Staying here all these years when you could have lived anywhere you wanted.
—I thought the same myself some days.
She smiled across at him, unselfconscious, and looking for all the world like a child herself. —Any regrets, Doctor?
He shook his head. —Not a one, he said.
The regiment was held up by heavy fire from a farmhouse and six soldiers were sent into a stretch of bush to outflank the building. They were spotted as they skulked through the thin foliage and the relentless pendulum of machine-gun fire ripped through the underbrush. The others dropped around him one by one as he scrambled forward, running for his life. He was within shouting distance of the farmhouse when he heard the whistle of artillery incoming, covered his ears against an explosion he never heard.
Still light when he came to himself but the sun was almost below the trees, which meant he’d been out for hours. There was rifle-fire still though it was sporadic and stopped altogether as soldiers dug in or pulled back to support trenches for the night. Quiet, quiet but for the buzz in his head. He could make out the farmhouse through the bushes, watched a German soldier come through the back door to piss behind the building. He tried to crawl deeper into the undergrowth then but his legs would not move. Dead to the touch when he reached down, the flesh no more his than the tree roots or the ground itself. He heard a voice behind him, another soldier coming to and grunting helplessly against some grave injury. He dragged himself away from the sound till his arms could drag no further. Lay face down, trying to will the toes in his boots to wiggle or curl.
When the Germans came through the bush they were walking three or four abreast, whispering to one another. He lay with his face in the dirt as they moved past him toward the steady suck and moan of the injured soldier and the sickening sound of it went still suddenly. A voice called the group to another body a few yards further on. He could pick just enough from the talk to know they were stripping the corpses of their boots, turning out the pockets for coins and tobacco and ammunition, stealing rings and necklaces and keepsakes. He’d crawled away from his weapon in the panic to hide himself and he was too terrified now to move, the tramp of the trophy hunters circling closer in the woods. They would use the knife on him as well, he knew, and he’d likely never be found there in the bush. A mortal darkness gathering at his heart’s heart as that anonymous death sidled toward him—dread and resignation and a searing, wistful longing that felt like homesickness, all of it rising in him like the stench of the fallen world.
A hand gripped his shoulder to turn him on his back and the German soldier pulled away in disgust, cursing under his breath. —Dead a long time this one, he told the others. He covered his nose and mouth with a square of cloth and kept his head turned away, rooting blindly at the pockets, gagging through the muffle of his handkerchief. No one else in the group would come near.
He stared blankly at the green canopy of trees as the German pushed a hand through the collar of his jacket. The dog tags yanked away and examined briefly before being tossed into the shadows. —Leave him, another voice said. —We should get back.
He spent the full of the night alone there, paralyzed and bored and terrified. He tried to choke back a suspicion the German soldier was right, that he was dead where he lay in the bushes. That death wasn’t sudden and complete but took a man out of the world piecemeal, a little at a time. It was a relief to hear the artillery start up just before dawn, to feel it shake through him and ring his head like a bell. By first light hundreds of soldiers were crossing the field toward the abandoned farmhouse and he dragged himself