The Heavenly Table(38)
“Place called Veto, sir.”
“Is that in Ohio?” Bovard said, as he tried not to stare at the sweat dripping off the boy’s smooth handsome chin onto the crotch of his brown pants.
“Yes, sir, over near Belpre. It’s just a little place.”
Bovard was about to ask the boy about his family when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Malone start walking toward him. “Keep up the good work, Private,” he said instead. Then he stood and jogged effortlessly across the field to meet the sergeant as several of the men lying nearby watched him with hatred in their eyes.
“I think that’s about all they can take this morning, sir,” Malone said. “Looks like you wiped ’em out.”
“Whatever you think best, Sergeant. I guess maybe I did go a bit overboard.”
“Not at all, sir. Not at all. There won’t be anybody holdin’ their hand when they get to the Front.”
They waited silently for the men to recover, watched a crew push a borrowed French SPAD out of an airplane hangar and point it toward the gravel runway. Bovard thought again about what Malone had told him in the bar last night. Of course, he knew that most of it was nothing but lies and bullshit and myths perpetuated by soldiers who were bored or superstitious or terrified, but hadn’t Homer and Virgil once sought inspiration out of the same bloody timeworn cloth? Standing in the early morning sun, relaxed by the run, he felt his eyelids growing heavy, and then…and then…and then he and Wesley are pinned down in a funk hole in the middle of No Man’s Land near a section of the Hindenburg Line. Night finally falls and they sleep in each other’s arms, exhausted and smeared with other men’s blood and guts and skin. An ugly, jaundiced-looking moon casts a sinister glow over the smoking landscape. Just as dawn breaks, a whistle sounds a long, paralyzing note from a sector of the German trenches, and, in what seems like no more than a few seconds, he and Wesley are overrun by a company of enemy soldiers, screaming savages with pointed helmets and fat, piggish faces. Though they put up a valiant fight, and Bovard imagines it as the most glorious few minutes a man could ever hope for in this world, the two don’t stand a chance against such overwhelming odds. After the Huns shoot and hack and bludgeon their bodies beyond recognition, they quickly become food, first for the swarms of flies and rats, and then, a few hours later, for the tribe of deserters that Malone claimed live in the tunnels and caves beneath No Man’s Land and prowl the battlefields under cover of darkness, robbing and cannibalizing corpses. The sergeant swore—this was sometime around whiskey number eight—that he and another stretcher-bearer had come across such a group of ghouls one night while out searching for the wounded after a particularly bloody skirmish, English and French and Russian and Italian and even a Turk, all banded together, mad as hatters and feasting on a cadaver, gibbering in some new language they had formed underground. The lieutenant was just beginning to imagine Wesley and himself being eaten, bones and all, by some nefarious monster dressed in a slop-encrusted uniform of many colors, when he became aware that someone was talking to him. His eyes flew open. Malone was looking at him curiously. “Are you all right, sir?” he repeated.
“What’s that?” Bovard said, looking a little dazed.
“I asked if you were all right, sir. You seemed—”
“No, no, I’m fine,” the lieutenant said, quickly regaining his composure. “In fact, Sergeant, I don’t believe I’ve ever felt better in my entire life.”
21
TEN DAYS OR so after Ellsworth returned from Meade, Eula told him that she wanted to go see Mr. Slater, the teacher at the schoolhouse in Nipgen. “Why would you wanta do something like that?” he asked.
“Well, if Germany’s where they’re a-sendin’ Eddie, I’d like to have an idy of where it is, and I figure if there’s anyone around here who could show us, it will be him.”
Ellsworth frowned. Ever since the embarrassment with the stolen magazine six years ago, he had done his best to avoid Slater, but he couldn’t think of a good excuse not to take her; the man didn’t live but a couple of miles away. It was only after he’d agreed that Ellsworth began to see it as an opportunity. He could let him know that the boy had turned out all right after all, that he wasn’t locked up in a hoosegow somewhere for larceny or something even worse. It was the first time in ages that he actually had something to be proud of when it came to Eddie, and by the time they left for the teacher’s house the next afternoon, he was actually looking forward to doing a little bragging.
They found Slater, a pale, skinny man with wiry red hair, lounging in a hammock tied between two chestnut trees in his front yard. He was playing a wooden flute, one much the same as a shepherd stuck with his flock on a lonely hillside might have passed the time with in olden days. A wide-brimmed straw hat covered his rather small head.
When he saw them approaching, he rolled out of the hammock and set the flute atop a rusty overturned washtub. “Mr. and Mrs. Fiddler,” he said, taking off his hat as he walked up to their wagon. “What a surprise.” Ellsworth noted a little disdainfully that he was barefoot and had a yellow dandelion stuck behind his ear. Not only that, he didn’t appear to have on any underclothes beneath the baggy nightshirt he was wearing.
“I hope we’re not botherin’ ye,” Eula said.