But later, as she gave him morphine in preparation for his surgeryand his eyelids grew heavy with the drug, a terrible thought came to Adele. If only Jerry had been hurt more severely. If he had lost a limb or more of his face, they’d send him home. If he recovered from this wound, he’d be back at the Front with his brother in short order, facing death once more.
twoJERRY
Morning came to Jerry in the middle of the night. The darkness was the same as it had been when he’d first arrived at the clearing station, but he was not.
He couldn’t remember much about what had happened in the tunnel, just that they’d thought the muffled thumping in the walls wasn’t cause for worry. After so many hours, how could a man possibly determine if he was hearing shell fire in the distance, the thudding of an enemy shovel only inches away, or his own heartbeat? Then the world had exploded, cutting through him, burning, then burying—until there was only blackness and a great, gasping weight pinning him down, invading his nose, his mouth, and his lungs until John’s fingers clawed him out. Then fragments. John’s clenched jaw fading in and out of Jerry’s view as he carried him to the ambulance. An unspeakable dread spilling through him that this might be their last moment together.
But today Jerry was alive. He knew that much at least, though it was a foggy certainty. The bandage they’d wrapped around his head covered one eye, so his vision was restricted, and the muted sounds of conversation seemed very far away.
But he still heard the anxious, ragged whispers of the men in the tunnel in the moments before it had all happened.What do you hear? What is it? Shell fire? Digging? Which is it, man?
Slowly, Jerry ran inventory of his body. He began by wiggling his toes, assuring himself that they were there. If he still had his feet, that meant he had his legs, too, and if he could move his toes, he could walk again. His chest was restricted, but from the uniform tension around it, he figured it was bandages. He wouldn’t be surprised if he’d busted some ribs or something. When he reached his neck, he paused, remembering the simple sensation of a cloth following the line of his throat, caressing his jaw. The nurse in blue. The sense of being looked after was so out of place these days. In those moments when she’d touched him, he’d been a boy again, cared for, cared about. Now that he lay alone, he craved that comfort again.
He continued his self-assessment, his eyes still closed. With effort he lifted his hand and followed the path of the cloth on his face. He carefully touched what he could of his upper lip, swollen to twice its size. Stranger still was the fact that it and half of his face were numb. He felt nothing but hot skin against his fingertips. He walked his fingers up his cheek to where the skin was tight and inflamed, but still insensitive to his touch. Foreign. The inside of it swelled, and the stitches felt like the seam of a coat, puckered and rough. His mouth was sticky with the coppery taste of old blood. Though it was painful, he used the tip of his tongue to explore the thread looping over and over through his cheek, trying to count how many stitches it had taken to put him back together, but it was hard to tell from the inside, and he had no mirror. Not that he was eager to see his face.
He was whole. That’s what mattered.
Assessment complete, he became more aware of the sounds around him, the metallictink tinkof metal being dropped into pans, the dull monotone of voices. So calm here, he thought blearily. So quiet compared to the relentless fighting and killing outside of this place. Somewherenearby a man moaned, then began to sob, but it was all right. It wasn’t the same as the screams of terror he’d lived with at the Front.
Shifting his head ever so slightly, not wanting to disturb the field of stitches stretched over his skin, Jerry slowly opened his eyes. The room came into a dreamlike, grey view, a slowly moving landscape of bodies. Individual cones of light lit the crowns of doctors and nurses bent over wounded men. He wondered vaguely if he knew any of those men. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t about to talk with anyone. Considering the state of his face, he wondered if he’d ever be able to speak normally again. Not that he’d ever been a big talker, but still.
“You’re awake,” came a woman’s voice. She appeared before him in her robin’s-egg-blue dress and white apron, a few blond wisps of hair peeping out from under her veil. “Remember me?”
Did he? The hours were fuzzy, but yes, she had been there, a pillar of reassurance standing across from John. A ridiculous wave of shyness came over him, and he worried that if he tried to speak, he’d come off as a total fool. He wanted to smile at her, to thank her for the care she’d given him, but he gave up the thought. He had no idea if the part of his face he couldn’t feel still moved when he told it to.
“I bet you’d like some water,” she said. “I’m going to sit you up straighter so you can drink on your own. Your face is still numb, so that might be a challenge, but I’m here to help.”
Before she moved behind him, he caught her name tag.Sister Adele.A nun. The world could be a very cruel place sometimes.
She raised the back of his bed gently, and he winced slightly as his torso adjusted to the angle, reminding him he’d broken bones as well as his face, then she put the cup in his hand. “Here you go. Just small sips.”
The lukewarm water came straight from heaven. He wanted to drain the entire cup, but his face felt heavy, awkward around the tin.
She dabbed at his chin with cloth. “That’s enough for now.”
“Uh,” he managed, mortified to discover that water had dribbled out of his mouth. He hadn’t felt a thing.
“Don’t worry. That’s to be expected. But you must be feeling better if you’re concerned about what I think. Drink a little more, then I’ll need you to open your mouth as wide as you can so I can look at the stitches.”
The skin of his face, his jaw, his cheekbones, and everything else above his shoulders screamed with defiance when he did as she asked. But Jerry would never complain. After peering inside his mouth with a little lamp, she straightened and smiled. She had a pretty smile, he thought. It reached right into those blue eyes of hers.
“You know, I have seen much, much worse. Dr. Bertrand did an excellent job stitching you up,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll get you a mirror just yet, but eventually I think you’ll be pleased. We don’t want you to speak for a while, since we have to let your face heal, but I can read to you if you’d like. We do have a small lending library.”
He made a little sound of approval, hoping she understood.
“I’ll fetch the book I’m reading.”
She came back with a worn copy ofThe Thirty-Nine Steps. He knew the book—or rather he knew of it. Jerry had found what was left of his sergeant slumped on his chair, his copy of the book still open, facedown on his desk. The man had blown his brains out rather than climb back down the shaft and enter the tunnel.
Jerry didn’t care what she read, he just wanted her company, and he listened with half an ear. Something about her gentle, matter-of-fact voice drew him in more than the words. Like the cloth on his throat, the soft flow of her voice was a balm. He shut out the sights and sounds of the hospital, letting his mind follow the cadences. Somewhere behind her, the wind sent a gust of pelting rain against the side of the tent, but he was safe inside, her voice an undulating river, stretching and twisting as he slipped deeper beneath the surface.
At the Front, Jerry would have given anything for sleep. Out there, he dug for ten or more hours at a time, hunched within the tunnel, constantly vibrating with the uncertainty of living beneath the war while hundreds of thousands of boots and hooves and weapons and trucksrumbled over his ceiling or blasted through it with shells. Behind him in the dark, men hammered in timbers at the side and ceiling to shore up the tunnel, but no one could guarantee they’d hold. He blinked through dirt. He listened through dirt. He breathed through dirt.
After his shift, bleary-eyed and aching with weariness, Jerry would climb the ladder to the surface and emerge into a world of burnt-out trees and barren ground. Even up there, he didn’t trust setting his feet flat on the ground. He knew about the deep, treacherous paths that wound beneath, because he’d dug them. He knew the whole thing could cave in and swallow them all. In those brief moments when he had an opportunity to sleep, he could not. Because he always had to be listening. Listening through the dirt in his ears and the dirt in the walls.
Underground, the only sounds the men wanted to hear was the air pump, giving them life, reminding them they were human, and the quiet cuts of their shovels. If for one minute, in those millions of dank, claustrophobic minutes, a man forgot to listen, he might never hear anything again.
On the day it happened, Jerry had been loosening clay with his spade and passing it back for disposal, thinking of nothing at all. He had forgotten to listen. Then he did, and he froze, paralyzed by thefeelingthat he’d heard something—a thumping, a vibration, a hushed German word beyond the tunnel wall—but it was too late. An explosion burst his eardrums, threw him backward. Bits and pieces of men, clay, metal, and blood spun through the darkness. Then nothing.
