Laura’s heart clenched. “No, you’re not.”
“I already have my ticket.”
“God,why?”
“I want to go,” Pim said. Earnest as a child, Laura thought with despair. “To see where Jimmy was. And—Laura, I want to be ofuse. The way you are, and Mary. I know I’m not trained like you, but I can help. I couldn’t help him but I can help someone else, don’t you see? I can write letters and things for wounded men. Wash syringes. Anything, really.” Her tone was fervent; the last four years had made them all cynical, but not Pim. “Do you think your brother is alive?”
Laura didn’t. He wasn’t. Despite anything Agatha Parkey had to say. “They sent me his tags.”
Pim said, “The Parkeys said he was alive. And I don’t think theylie just to make people happy. Or they’d have done it for me. But they said your brother is alive. Why would they lie?”
Damn the Parkeys. “How could they know? I don’t think he is.”
“But you think there’s a chance,” Pim pressed. “Or you wouldn’t be going.”
“Stop being romantic. I want to know what happened to him. Only that.”
“Well, then,” said Pim, “I can help you look.”
Half a dozen arguments ran through Laura’s mind, and all of them sounded hypocritical. Finally she bit the inside of her cheek and held up one of her hands. Pim, who had certainly been beautiful from birth, paled.
Laura didn’t want to talk about this. She never talked about this. She said, voice flattening suddenly to tonelessness, “You asked once what happened to my hands.”
Pim said, her voice small, “I did.”
“It happened over time,” said Laura. “The scarring.” The words would barely come. Speaking of the war conjured it as crisply as life: the smells, the sound of the rain. Cold nights, long days. Flies. The screaming. She forged ahead. “You’ll see the worst wounds in the world, over there. Wounds that shock you, that a man could be so hurt and not dead. You’ll have your bare hands all over those wounds as they go bad—and they will go bad. It’s all farmland, the battlefields; they’ve been spreading manure since the Middle Ages. If you’ve so much as a paper cut, or a blister on your own hand, well, that goes bad too. Over and over. It hurts very much. It scars. Do you want your hands to look like this?”
Pim looked younger than Laura. “It’s all right. I’m not afraid.”
“You should be,” said Laura. “There’s nothing noble about suffering. It’s an ugly, petty, crawling business. You’ll see men die with less dignity than dogs, cursing you sometimes, that you can’t save them. Pim, stay here and knit blankets. Don’t— You’ll never forget the things you see over there.” She couldn’t say any more. She was on the edge of being sick. She turned away sharply, to the coolness from the window.
“I can be brave, Laura, Ican.”
Laura said, “You don’t owe this to Jimmy, Pim.”
She’d struck a nerve. “Don’t I? I could have kept him home, you know. He wanted to enlist. He was so angry after Nate died. I thought the army would steady him. I let him go.”
Laura said nothing. She met Pim’s eyes in silence. Recognized the look in them.God, Iven, who are you to judge what someone else thinks she owes the dead?Finally she said, “I’ll teach you to tie a tourniquet. On the ship.”
Pim smiled a little, and relaxed. “Only if you let me cut your hair. It looks like you went at it with pruning shears.”
PASSCHENDAELE RIDGE, FLANDERS, BELGIUM
November 1917
Freddie had found a tinhat; he scrabbled with it at the wet earth until he could hardly move his hands, and then he and Winter took turns, inhaling mud and water, scraping at the mud and broken concrete, only occasionally encouraged by the fresh air coming in.Useless,Freddie thought. Still he dug. Liquid earth slid down and tried to choke him. He’d never been so tired in his life. He and Winter didn’t talk anymore, except for grunts as they squirmed to change places. More than anything, Freddie wanted to stop. To rest. Perhaps he was tired enough to die, if he fell asleep. But Winter kept on, utterly silent now. Freddie didn’t want to go out whining like a child.
Then, suddenly, he thrust a hand forward, and there was—nothing. Was that light? Was he dreaming? It was Winter’s voice, panting but still matter-of-fact, that steadied him. “Can you put your head and shoulders through? You are not so big.”
Freddie crawled forward. Wriggled. Realized that there was more air. Sucked it in. The gap was narrowing— “Push me!” he called back over his shoulder. “Winter, can you—?”
Winter was already shoving at Freddie’s feet. Even exhausted, with only one good arm, he was strong. Freddie pushed back at him, clawed at wet earth and stone with the final strength of desperation—oh, there was light—not daylight but light, sourly red, but better than their muddy tomb, and so he reached for it.
And stuck.
He writhed, panicking. A freezing hand closed round his calf, and Winter snapped, in a voice like a Lewis gun, “You willbe calm,boy, or I’ll kill you after all.Calm.” Freddie forced himself to go still. Winter’s voice seemed to speak to him from some underworld. “Go slowly, Iven. Slowly.”
Freddie moved. His head. His shoulders. His hips. Squirmed. Squirmed again. Felt his clothes tear. And then his shoulders were past the narrowest point, and he was scrabbling through the foulest oozing mud and out into baleful night. He turned at once and reached back down.
