Silver Stars (Front Lines #2)(111)
Frangie cuts the old, yellowed bandage with a pair of blunt-tipped scissors. The wound was a through-and-through on Frank’s right arm, with the bullet managing to pass between the ulna and the radius, chipping the ulna but not breaking either bone.
Frangie uses gauze, alcohol, and distilled water to carefully clean the wound, teasing away dried blood and shreds of cotton.
“How’s it look?” Frank asks.
“How’s it look to you?” Frangie teases. Frank is a staff sergeant, a tough soldier by all accounts, but he does not like the sight of his own blood, not even a little. He keeps his head averted, arm propped on the little tray that Frangie carries from bed to bed. “Looks good to me,” Frangie says after he refuses to respond. She leans close and sniffs the wound. “Smells good too.”
This is a trick she’s picked up from one of the doctors, a pacifist from Cincinnati with too much experience with gangrene. You’ll smell it before you see it, he’d told her.
Having long since become stiffly ambulatory, Frangie has begun to help out on the ward, replacing bandages, taking temperatures, doling out medication, and holding hands and offering reassurance.
Her broken leg still aches when she stands or walks for too long, but she is long past the need for morphine. There’s a new, smaller cast on her leg, but aside from that, and the missing finger, and some shrapnel scars scattered around her body—little arcs or twists or dimples of pinkish flesh against the black—she shows no obvious signs of her near-death experience. She has lost fifteen pounds—quite a lot on her small frame—but paradoxically this makes her seem larger, somehow, harder and stronger.
In fact she has taken advantage of the sketchy rehabilitation equipment to begin a regime of strengthening her arms, legs, and back. Her wounds, and the subsequent illness, have left her feeling vulnerable. Her experience has also had two seemingly contradictory effects on her thinking: on the one hand she feels the pain of her patients with exquisite sympathy, sympathy so deep it almost seems to make their wounds hers.
But on the other hand, she now knows the difference between serious pain and the mere discomfort Frank is feeling. And while she is patient, she is not above teasing the less stoic patients.
“Yep, looks fine. Should be no problem now having Dr. Stuart saw that thing right off.”
“What? What are you . . . Oh, dang it, Miss Frangie! You’re trying to get under my skin.”
She grins as she finishes winding a new bandage around his arm. “There you go, you big baby.”
They call her Miss Frangie. She’s not a nurse, she’s not a doctor, nor is she an orderly like Harder. She has no official position in the hospital and is essentially a volunteer, but far more capable than the barely trained British women who so generously volunteer. Somehow “Miss Frangie” has become her title, position, and name, all in one.
Every day she checks in with the officer on duty to see whether her orders have come through. But day after day the answer is the same, “Nope. Nothing for you, Miss Frangie. Guess you’ll just have to stay here.”
Here is not a bad place to be. She follows the war news on the BBC and in the papers, and between the official reports and the rather less optimistic tales she hears from wounded soldiers, she knows what’s happening in Italy. It does not sound like anything she wants to be a part of, though she worries about Sergeant Green. And the rest too, but mostly Walter Green.
Here she has a nice clean bunk in an overheated room she shares with three American nurses and a Polish anesthetist, all female. Every morning there is a hot breakfast followed by a hotter shower. Her uniforms are professionally laundered and pressed and contain no lice. She has no gear to haul, no trucks to unload, no paperwork to fill out, and aside from the occasional air raid warning, no reason to be afraid.
Best of all, she is getting to know Harder better. He is fire to her soothing balm, but once she lets him have his rant about the oppressed workers and the valiant comrades in the USSR, he can be great fun. They talk, they play board games or cards with patients, they work, each in their own function, and they take walks into the village.
And they talk about Tulsa, Oklahoma, in June of 1921.
They talk as well of the lynchings that used to happen several times a week, but have died down a bit since the twenties, though Harder of course had a long list of more recent atrocities. He’s doing that as they walk—slowly, given Frangie’s leg—through the little village. It’s cold, but not miserably so, except when the breeze freshens and cuts through their field jackets, and even through the very welcome scarves knitted and donated by British women and folks back home.
“They lynched a soldier out of Fort Benning. Lynched him in full uniform!” And his stories are not limited to lynchings and burnings. “They promoted three colored men at a Packard plant up in Detroit? Just three. Twenty-five thousand white workers went out on strike. Know what they said, those patriotic white boys? Said, ‘We’d rather see Hitler and Hirohito win than work alongside a Nigra.’”
“Maybe all this”—she waves in a way meant to encompass the village, the hospital, the air base beyond, and the entirety of the war—“will change things.”
Harder laughs cynically. “Nothing is going to change, Frangie. Nothing changes without revolution, a socialist people’s revolution.”
Frangie steers the conversation onto safer ground by pointing to a flight of bombers passing by overhead, on their way to Germany.