Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [86]
At the end of the porch, the children played the kindling game, improvising a new rule where the palms of the losing player got whacked three times each with a stick of kindling. Which worked only until somebody hit too hard and Luce went over and shut the game down and aimed the kids toward the record player.
Back in her rocker, Luce reached her hand to Stubblefield. The wine had put her in a mood. It was just a feeling, but she had become certain Lit was dead. She was not grief-stricken at all. They hadn’t ever been much at all to each other, but she was swept over with post-funeral numbness. Except, no funeral because no body.
When the wine was gone, Stubblefield let go of her hand and fetched two short glasses of Scotch dating back to the age of silent movies.
He said, I didn’t know him beyond two conversations where he set me up to act a fool. I can’t guess what you’re thinking about.
—The war. It was the center of his life.
In memoriam, Luce told Stubblefield how, when she was little, not many of the men around town wanted to talk about the war in any detail. They wanted to shut up about it and bask in victory and have a family and a good job and own a house and drive a new car all the time without having to smell a previous owner’s hair oil in the headliner ever again. Lit, though, wanted to talk about it. Luce and Lily composed his audience, for Lola classed every one of his stories as lies and left the room when he got going.
But Lit told the little girls all about the many bad scrapes he had fallen into. D-Day, for starters. But after that spectacle, things soon broke down into countless little brutal skirmishes, not at all like something involving generals in the background making big plans with an overview. Lots of blood all the time, in graphic detail. Days and days with hardly any sleep or food. Small bunches of half-lost men with their faces blank from exhaustion and fear. France was nothing but footslogging and gunfights. Way later, far eastward, the final movement of Lit’s tale began with getting shot at by a Nazi tank in a frozen turnip field.
Lit and a dozen hungry men trying to eat half-frozen turnips like apples, raw with the skin still on and not bothering to more than brush at the black dirt clinging to them. Dug them up with their hands clawed and stiff. Grey sky, snow imminent, a bitter wind. Such had been the weather for weeks. A boy named Codfelter, subject of much amusement, and not just for his name, had come up with an enormous turnip. Right then, a round from the tank’s cannon hit beside Codfelter and all but took his leg off at the middle thigh, though a flap of skin kept it attached. The force of the round wrapped the lower leg around a strand of fence wire. Several rotations. The boy tried to crawl away, bleeding heavy. But the band of skin held him back.
In some versions of the story, Lit shot Codfelter to put him out of his misery. In others he cut the rope of skin with his knife and improvised a tourniquet and helped Codfelter elude the tanks only to watch him die in a hedgerow, all bled out and white-faced. Sometimes Lit was captured in that tragic vegetable patch, and sometimes it was days later. The only parts that never changed were the weather, the field and its black dirt, the tank, and Codfelter’s awful leg.
The capture always led to the story of being liberated from the German prison camp near war’s end. Knowing the Russians were coming with overwhelming force, the commandant lined up all the prisoners and the German guards in the yard. Two lines, face-to-face. Lit figured they were about to be machine-gunned. Yet when the Russians topped the closest hill, the commandant pulled out his Luger and shot himself through the roof of his mouth and out the top of his head. It was quick Lit who dashed and grabbed the pistol before it hit the ground. And then, he claimed, all the stunned and defeated Nazis put their weapons down so that moments later, when the Russians came rolling in to liberate the camp, Lit was in charge.
There were endless