Galore - Michael Crummey [156]
—This one’s lost a hell of a lot of blood, the medic said.
—He doesn’t appear to be bleeding, Sergeant.
—Well what’s wrong with him?
—Couldn’t get a word out of him. Some stink coming off the man though.
The smell suggested an infected wound and they stripped him out of his clothes but there was nothing there to be found. The medic looked down at him again. —Even his eyelashes are white, he said. —He wasn’t wearing his tags?
—No sign of them. He’s a Newfoundlander, that’s all we know.
—What’s your name, Private?
He opened his mouth to answer and then shook his head helplessly.
—Psych case probably, the medic said. —We’ll have to transport him back to Casualty. He leaned over the man on the stretcher. —Don’t worry, he said, we’ll fix you up.
——
Two days later he was moved to a base hospital in Rouen. He was in a ward with twenty-three other soldiers until their complaints about the stench forced the orderlies to set up a tent where he could be kept on his own. He was bathed twice a day in a concoction of carbolic and lye but it did nothing to lessen the smell.
A girl from Belleoram in Fortune Bay was nursing with the Voluntary Aid Detachment and she made a special project of him when she learned he was a Newfoundlander. Morning and evening she came to the tent in a surgical mask to massage his dead legs and talk about home. Guild socials and hooking mats and berry picking on the barrens and painting her bedroom floor a shade of green she’d seen on Johnny Lee’s boat. He followed her with his eyes and she could see he didn’t know what she was talking about. —You don’t remember home, do you.
He shook his head.
—But you miss it.
And after he’d considered this a moment he nodded.
The weather was already bitter before the German surrender in November but he never complained or showed any discomfort in his unheated tent. At the end of the month the nurse brought him a sheet of paper and a lead pencil. —Tell me something you’d like for Christmas, I’ll see if I can’t find it in Rouen.
He stared at the implements as if he’d never laid eyes on such things in his life.
—Do you not have your letters? she asked. She was embarrassed for him and made a move to retrieve the materials but he shook his head. He held the pencil over the page a moment before starting in. Death and life are in the power of the tongue, he wrote, and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof.
She took the paper when he was done and held it toward the light through the tent flap, trying to make it out. —Whoever taught you to write like this? she said, scanning back and forth the page. —I can’t pick out the half of it. You wants some fruit, is that what you’re saying?
He stared at her blankly.
—Fruit? she said again and he nodded, though there was no conviction in his face.
After Christmas he was shipped across the Channel to a convalescent hospital in England where doctors stuck pins into his legs and feet, examined his throat and ears, performed a series of tests to assess his mental faculties. They held conferences at his bedside, speaking about him as if he were deaf. His muteness and the paralysis were clearly the result of shell shock and they prescribed fresh air and quiet along with electrical massage to slow the muscle atrophy while he recovered his senses. But as time passed with no improvement they began to suspect the debilitation might be permanent. And the smell of the man was a riddle they had no answers for.
In the middle of March a woman stood at the foot of his bed in a surgical mask. —Do you remember me? she asked. She was waiting in London while her repatriation arrangements were made, she said, and was looking up boys from home still recuperating. —Just to keep myself occupied, she said. She sat in a chair by the window. She was booked to leave on a boat sailing for Newfoundland on the thirtieth, she told him. Three years she’d worked in France and she couldn’t wait for a home