The telegrapher nodded to show he understood. “It’s a mighty nice day, isn’t it?”
Hackberry didn’t go home. Instead, he rode into the country, out where the train tracks followed the river through limestone bluffs and cottonwoods whose leaves trembled with the thinness of rice paper. He tethered his horse and lay down in the shade of the trees, in the coolness of the wind off the water, in the moldy smell of leaves and night damp that never dried out during the day. It was a fine spot for a rest, to close one’s eyes and let go of the world and abide by the rules of mortality; in effect, to let the pull of the earth have its way, if only for a short while.
He fell asleep and awoke in the gloaming of the day, the air dense, like the smell of heavy stone prized from a riverbed or the smell of a cave crusted with lichen and guano and strung with pools of water. At first he didn’t remember where he was; then he saw the train wobbling around the bend, its passenger cars fully lighted, not unlike an ancient lamplit boat crossing a dark lake. He could see the figures inside the passenger car clearly: a conductor in a stiff cap and buttoned-down uniform similar to that of a ship’s captain; a teenage girl who seemed to smile from the window; a nun wearing a wimple and gauzy black veils that accentuated the pallor of her skin; a man in a plug hat with buckteeth and greasy hair that was the color and texture of rope, all of them moving irrevocably down the track into hills whose lines were dissolving into nightfall.
What was the destination of all those people? Why did he have the feeling their journey was a statement about his own life? He got to his feet unsteadily and mounted his horse as though drunk. The evening star was rising, like a beacon to mankind, but it brought him little comfort. Was there any doubt why men killed one another? Not in his opinion. It was easier to die in hot blood than to watch your death take place incrementally, a day or a section of railroad track at a time.
When he arrived at his house, Maggie was waiting for him in the doorway. “I was worried,” she said.
“You thought I was in the saloon?”
“You could have been hurt, or worse. How was I to know? I care about you, whether you’re aware of that or not.”
He walked past her into the living room. Wet leaves were pasting themselves against the windows. He had not slept with Maggie since returning from Colorado. She seemed to read his thoughts.
“Am I your legally wedded or not?”
“You are indeed that,” he said.
“Then treat me in an appropriate fashion.”
“You once said we’re two of a kind. That’s not true.”
“You want to explain that?”
“I’m not deserving of you. You’re a far better person than I am, Maggie. You tolerate the intolerable. You’re a remarkable woman.”
“I think that’s the finest compliment I’ve ever had.”
He put his hat on the rack and rubbed one eye with the back of his wrist, the floor shifting under his feet. “We got anything to eat?”
“I fixed you a steak sandwich and potato salad. Go upstairs. I’ll bring it to you. This time you’d better not go to sleep on me.”
“I won’t,” he said.
“We were meant to be together, Hack. It’s the two of us against the world. We’ll have a grand time of it. I promise.”
On the Marne,
1918
WHEN ISHMAEL WOKE, the walls of his trench were seeping water and the dawn was colder than it should have been, the sky an unnatural and ubiquitous pale color that had less to do with the rising of the sun than the passing of the night. The terrain was cratered and devoid of greenery or vegetation, glistening with dew and in some places excrement, the root systems of grass and brush and trees long since ground up and pulped and churned by the treads of tanks and wheeled cannons and the boots of men and the hooves of draft animals and marching barrages that exploded holes so deep into the earth, the tons of dirt blown into the air were dry and eclipsed the sun at high noon and robbed men not only of their identities but their shadows as well.
Except for their uniforms, the men of color Ishmael commanded could have been mistaken for the French Zouaves and other colonials on their flank. Most of them were asleep, wrapped in their blankets or greatcoats, some with their rifles and packs on the fire steps that ascended to the top of the trench. Their Adrian helmets were strapped under their chins, their putties stiff with mud, their faces soft inside dreams, their arms crossed peacefully on their chests. They made him think of sleeping buffaloes, humped up against one another, each trying to avoid the telephone lines and pools of dirty water strung through the bottom of the trench and the constant ooze from the basketlike weave of sticks holding the trench wall in place. In the soup of animal and human feces and the offal of war, they made him think of children, in the best possible way. In moments such as these, he tried to suppress his affection for them, lest he become too attached.
Most of them were former National Guardsmen from New York and in peacetime had been porters and draymen and scullions and hod carriers and janitors. They loved their uniforms and marching on parade and seldom complained about the food or verbal abuse from white soldiers. They loved the army in spite of the fact that the army and the country sometimes did not love them. Their courage under fire left Ishmael in dismay and unable to explain how men could continue to give so much when they had been given so little.
The third time he was about to go over the top, he said a prayer that became his mantra whenever his mind drifted into thoughts about mortality and the folly and madness and grandeur of war: Dear Lord, if this is to be my eternal resting place, let me be guarded by these black angels, because there are none more brave and loving in your kingdom.
He gazed through a periscope that gave on to an immense stretch of moonscape chained with flooded shell holes and barbed wire that was half submerged in mud six inches deep that never dried out. In the distance he could hear the dull knocking of a Maxim, similar to the sound of an obnoxious drunk who taps a bony knuckle on a locked door after he has been expelled from a party. The fog from the river was white on the ground, puffing like cotton on the floor of a gin, shiny on the tangles of wire, sometimes breaking apart in the breeze and exposing a booted foot or a skeletal hand or a face with skin as dry and tight as a lampshade protruding from the soggy imprint of a tank tread.
“We going this morning, Captain?” a voice behind him said.
Ishmael lowered the periscope. It was Corporal Amidee Labiche, a transplant from Louisiana who had moved his family to the Five Points area in New York.
“Hard to tell,” Ishmael said. “Have you eaten yet?”
“No, suh.”