Emmetsburg: Forty-one

John lay in bed, still clothed, staring at the ceiling. Anna was sitting beside him, her legs curled under her buttocks. The long hair fell down across one shoulder and over the breast. Leaning on one hand, she gently stroked his stomach. John frowned out of frustration of not knowing where to begin, and feeling the fool for ever considering any aspect of all this. He finally looked over, feeling even more foolish for her sympathetic smile.

“You must think I’m losing my mind,” he said.

“I think maybe we should call someone.”

“Whom?”

“Someone who can better care for Louis,” she replied. “It’s all too much for us, with your hand, and God forbid he hurts himself or someone else.”

John’s brow furled in thought. He took a deep breath and looked to the ceiling again. He was quiet, struggling with a thought, and then struggling with the words.

“If,” he paused again, “if something happened to me, what would you…”

She cut him off quickly, quite upset at even the suggestion.. “John, I won’t hear another word.”

John’s eyes moved wildly, searching the air, fighting thoughts and emotions not easily framed by mere words. He tried to think of Anna without him, and he tried not to think of such things. Both threatened to tear the heart from his chest. His mouth fell open in a silent lament. He took a deep breath and forced tears back, then looked to Anna again.

“I would want you to be happy if…”

“John, where is all this coming from?” She stroked his chest reassuringly. It tortured her to see him this way. “John, I intend to grow very old with you, whether you like it or not. We can’t predict what will happen today or tomorrow or five years from now, but I love you and while we are together on this earth that isn’t going to change.”

He nodded, though hardly satisfied with the answer. John chose not to press it any further. It only made him feel more foolish at believing any of this. As Anna laid her head upon his chest a single tear escaped. It ran from the corner of one eye, cool and slick, and into his hair. John closed his eyes tight, glad she couldn’t see any of this. He stroked her back and shoulders and gave a long deep sigh that drained away his heartache. Anna was already asleep against him. John held her close and kissed her hair, breathing her in as if his very life depended upon it.

Emmetsburg: Forty

“Jesus!” John exclaimed. Anna recoiled, finding, for just a moment, the strangest expression she'd ever seen in John. It was the way he looked at her, as though he hardly recognized her. Believing she had imagined the whole thing Anna reach to him again, but John threw up a hand, as if protecting himself.

“John?” she said. He seemed to snap out of the moment. Instead of coming to her he sat in the grass, washing a hand through his hair.

“I'm sorry,” she shook his head. His thoughts spun wildly. He recalled Louis' words, that Anna would get along without him, that she would find another love and marry again. John knew it was all foolish, but couldn't help himself.

“John, are you...?”

“I'm...its just...” he looked up at her, almost in judgment. Suddenly he felt so foolish and ashamed for it. “You'll help me get Louis back to bed?”

“John, what's going on. I'm getting scared?” she fell to his side, stroking his hair.

He searched her eyes, finding the world and eternity in them. More than that he found truth and love. He reached for her cheek feeling like a child before her decency and beauty. He supreme commodity of that moment, that simple touch rushed through him like warm electricity. The precious nature of that moment, one that would not again be repeated in all eternity filled him with a sudden sense of light and loss all at once.

“I'll explain everything inside,” he said. He could not keep any of this to himself any longer, yet he had no clue to what he might say to Anna.

Anna lifted Louis to a sitting position. He was limp and peaceful, as though he was in a very deep sleep. John knelt beside him and stretched one of Louis’ arms across his shoulders. With a slight groan John hauled the man across his back and stood. They went into the house and up the stairs. The crickets returned in their wake, filling the noght with their eternal song of summer.

Emmetsburg: Thirty-nine

John knelt in the damp cool grass, With his good hand he gripped Louis by the collar. Instantly Louis took hold of John’s arm, using it as leverage to pull himself close. Taken aback John tried to pull free, but again Louis and that impossible strength held him fast.

“Poor babies, John,” he sobbed in that far away voice, “All burned up. All burned up.”

“Who?, what are you talking about.”

“Them three pretty little girls up at Spirit Lake,” said Louis. “Nothing to be done, John. Nothing to be done. All burned up...” his words trailed away.

John shook him hard, feeling himself at the end of his patience. He growled, fighting emotion and not wanting to worry Anna, still standing in the door. “What the hell are you?”

“You'll be next, John. Go to meet your maker. Anna will get on. Be all right. All for the good.”

“What's for the good? I don't understand.”

“World goes on without us John,” said Louis. “Fills in the gaps. Sun rises and the sun sets. A new day comes. The dead are forgotten, but their actions and deeds live on in all the rest.”

John shook Louis again. He felt pushed to the edge. The blood charged madly through his veins, exploding in his temples.

“What if I break your neck?”

“You'll go, John Perkins.”

“Go where?”

“You'll go to save that boy. You'll go for Anna. You'll go.”

“To die?”

“Of course, John!”

“When? How?”

“One week's time, no more. You'll go, John Perkins, shot by your own hand.”

Louis released him and went limp, as if someone had simply flipped a switch. John pushed away, coming to his feet and backing away to regard Louis Stanton from a distance. He was sleeping, though John might have wished far worse for the man at that moment.

This was all so absurd, he thought. Either he was had or Louis was. Maybe both of them were mad. A shiver ran through him for just a moment as he entertained the thought that all this was true. He shook the thought away instantly. John was still languishing in the aftermath of that dark thought when a hand upon his shoulder startled him.

Emmetsburg: Thirty-eight

Green. Sins. These sins that echo constantly in the soul, like a whisper in the night. How many lifetimes would it take to outlast those echoes? Are they a fair burden, the price exacted for pain and treachery inflicted upon others? They accumulate like locusts on the wind, eventually devouring everything good and redeemable. These sins, small and large, the negotiations with ravenous egos piloting the soul to ruin.

And is religion and the permutations of fleeting morality, bled through the prism of ramshackle ethics, the means of escaping these sins? Not as an absolution by God, but as merely a cloak spread upon that blighted ground. The ground beneath remains ravaged and blighted, but must it remain that way forever? Is there any redemption, any return to the beauty and purity (if it was ever pure) of that original heart? Was God the redeemer, was choice, or is it death(or insanity)?

John weighed that question as he stood at the top of the trench, hidden from snipers by the glare of the setting sun. He looked back across the no man's land. He wasn't sick or exhausted or in pain any more. He was numb and empty. His brow was a ragged line, his eyes fixed upon movement in the distance, a figure moving near the German lines. The German stumbled towards his trench cradling that injured arm. At the edge he turned and looked back for John before disappeared forever.

Were sins something that could be weighed in the balance? For instance, what was a life worth? He hadn't killed the German, though it would have been an easy thing to do. No man would have judged him. War erases all pretentions of humanity and crumbles any construction of civilization. But a man's life was not his to take. It wasn't anyone's to take, which perhaps defined murder as a sin. In that regard, no sin could be undone. The only thing remaining was atonement. As John climbed back into the trench there was much he needed to atone for.

Emmetsburg: Thirty-seven

A moan awakened him. It was long and low, trailing to a pathetic whimper, not unlike that of a small child. John awake3ned with a start, believing for a moment that it had come from him. His body was a conspiracy of knots and bruises, his painfully empty stomach twisting with dysentery. Mud had hardened on his face and hands, tightening the flesh there. He sweltered, dripping with sweat as the caked earth and heavy wool uniform became an oven beneath the afternoon sun.

John's mind spun, fighting to grasp hold of the world once more. Had John fallen asleep, or had he slipped into unconsciousness. It seemed a subtle distinction, and one that John wasn't sure he could answer.

The crater was drenched in deep shadow, mostly. The white gold disk of the sun fell oblique across the shoulder of the crater, carving the far rim in bright day light. That light retreated steadily as the sun teased the crater's edge. Something in that disk drew John's attention. He squinted into it, struggling to make out something moving it its light. Undefined and barely discernable it fluttered and moved excitedly, hovering in that light like an angel. John's mouth opened partly in disbelief and partly that he felt compelled to say something. The angel grew and came nearer until he could make out the blurred and still undefined motion of the wings. His heart rose to meet it, as though it was being rescued from the misery of the crater and the war. When it set down upon the rim of the crater as a small sparrow it was almost too much for John to take.

Each man has his limit and his precipice. Each man has a load beyond which he cannot bear. It is a crushing moment when that limit has been reached, for nothing so defines the soul as that limit. Indeed, nothing defines a soul as much as the way a man comes to that limit. The catalyst plunging a man over the edge may be miniscule or profound. The supreme disappointment that the bird was not an angel come to same him drove Kohn to the very edge of sanity.

The moan returned, this time louder and more sustained. It was all John could do to lift his head to discover the origin. The muscles of his neck had grown stiff, pulling at the back of his skull and sending burning tides of pain through his head. Behind the muddy little wall John had constructed, Roddy writhed and dug at the mud with his fingers, as though that might divert or stem the terrible pain from which he prayed to almighty God for relief or for death. Roddy’s moan evolved into a cry that John knew for certain would bring the Germans down upon them. John pushed himself to a kneeling position, still leaning on his arms and mustered the strength to reach Roddy.

Suddenly the man arched his head skyward and gave the most unholy and painful cry John had ever heard. Roddy's eyes rolled back in his head and his body shuddered unnaturally. With that he began to thrash and sob, repeating again and again, “Kill me!”

John fell upon him, turning him over and clamping a hand across the man's mouth. But Roddy twisted and convulsed so hard, biting down hard enough on John's hand to draw blood, that it became impossible. Frantic and terrified, fully expecting German soldiers to appear at any second, John drew a rag from his pocket and quickly stuffed into Roddy's mouth to quiet him.

There was no doubt the German's had heard Roddy's wailing. The air had stilled. The sound would carry to both lines. John drew back the hammer on the revolver with one hand, and with the other covered Roddy's nose and mouth. John leaned over the suffering man, pressing down with his entire weight.

A German soldier appeared at the lip of the crater. John leveled the revolver and put a bullet neatly through the man's neck, killing him instantly. Another appeared, and John shot him too. A third appeared. John fired again, but the German, a towering powerhouse of a man rolled under it, coming up again with his rifle and bayonet within thrusting distance.

John was ready, and parried away the bayonet with the pistol. In the mud and slope of the crater wall both men lost their balance, abandoning their weapons and ending up in a heap on the far side of the pit. They were instantly teasing and slugging at one another.

John was clearly outclassed against the German. He was nimble and quick despite his size. John was stunned by the man's strength, and the man seemed almost to delight in even the best placed of John's punches. For a minute, as they grappled half submerged in the pool at the bottom of the crater, John almost thought the guy was toying with him. As if to make that point, he turned john around and hook an arm around his neck to strangle him. The fight was running away from him. John had reached his precipice. He'd gone over the edge, clinging to the world by a tenuous hand hold.

John dropped his chin as the German hooked the arm around his neck and bit down. The man's flesh stretched under his bite, then broke gushing warm into his mouth. The man screamed and clawed at Johns eyes, the ragged finger nails drawing deep troughs across John's cheeks and forehead. Finding bone john twisted until part of the man's arm came loose in his mouth.

With that the German pulled away stumbling backwards and falling over Roddy, now still and lifeless. The man froze, a horrified expression coming to him as John rose over him and spit out a piece of the man's arm, blood dripping from his lips. It wasn't fear of death, but more that John had crossed some threshold. It was as though john had uttered some forbidden obscenity beyond what the so-called civilized conventions of warfare allowed. John had become a demon, and that was fully reflected in the German soldier's expression. For him that was the precipice; that was the limit. As John picked up the trench knife the man shook his head once, as if asking the demon to reconsider. John fell to his knees straddling the man's legs and grabbed him hard by the collar. The man closed his eyes and turned his head aside.

Emmetsburg: Thirty-six

Pearl-white. The fog fled the no man’s land quickly now. With the lifting fog came the obsessive German guns, chasing the rest of the squad back across the no man's land. Bullets chopped at the rim of the crater and at the body of the German boy. They tumbled the body backwards, where it slid limp and lifeless and shattered. The bullets were like stones into a murky puddle. John laid across Roddy and contented himself that the shooting wouldn't last forever. He knew, though, that what would come would be far worse.

It was unlikely the Germans knew he and Roddy were there. The fire swept a broad stretch of ground. Even as it chopped the air overhead John wasted little time. He set to work, covering Roddy and them himself with dark French mud from head to toe. That done he quickly piled and packed mud into a small barrier to one side of the crater should a German grenade come flying. It wasn't much, hardly more than a yard long and a foot or so high. John hoped that it would offer a modest bit of protection, which was about as much as he could hope for.

When the barrier was done John hauled Roddy behind it, careful not to poke his head above the edge of the crater. From a laying position John turned the man on his stomach. So that he might appear dead John moved Roddy’s arm and leg away from the body. The effort, from this position and in his weakened state left John utterly and almost catastrophically exhausted.

He paused a moment and looked to heaven, each breath burning in his chest. Black smoke drifted lazily overhead. The German fire had all but ended now. John said a small prayer and began to cross himself, pausing when he noticed a small silver crucifix around the dead German boy's neck.

John crawled a few feet away and lay on one side, facing the German lines. The Enfield lay nearby, with the long bayonet attached and ready. Under his body John clutched a revolver and trench knife. There was nothing more to do now but feign death(which was more than death itself) and wait. With luck they would survive till dark, when John would have a better chance to get them back to friendly lines.



The heat of the day rose quickly. It was a steaming, stifling heat that choked the sweat and life from John. With it rose the stagnate rot of the crater, like a sewer or morgue. John's throat burned with thirst, the sun baking him beneath the heavy steel helmet. Flies buzzed and swarmed, over the German boy and flitted upon the pool of water reflecting the clear blue sky.

John stared into the pool trying in vain to see Anna's face. What else was there to do but go mad? It was as if she had never been real and his whole life had been a mirage. That he could not see her, or adequately recall anything of his life beyond that corrupted crater seemed to betray that it had all been an illusion.

How he longed to run his fingers through Anna's buttery-soft sunset-red hair. He would have given all eternity just to hear her peacefully warm voice once more. He prayed to god for nothing more than to see her once more, even if it was a fleeting glimpse as his soul fled this world. And if he should survive? John resolved that each day beside her would be a blessing, and he would give thanks for as long as breath filled his lungs.

Another voice contradicted that hopeful and contrite voice. It told John he would not survive, and that he would die in that ignominious hole. It only served to remind him that predicting tomorrow was a fool's exercise. It was arrogant to expect anything of tomorrow. He squeezed back tears threatening his eyes. John's heart was so heavy that it almost compelled him to cry out.

Emmetsburg:Thirty-five

Cold gray. The morning sun was somewhere beyond the shroud of fog turning the tortured no man's land into an abstract of ghostly silhouettes. The bullet and shell-stripped hulks of trees reached out as strange creatures among tangles of rusted concertina wire. The ground was tossed by overlapping shell craters, fading to a broken horizon and the German lines hidden behind that merciless fog.

The fog brought a silence, like that of a funeral. It was the silence of loss and exhaustion and of loneliness; a void in which all things once believed clear and immovable where now d ark and uncertain. The scent of death was in the air, but it was a different evolving scent from the strangling putrefying stink of the recently killed. It was a musty scent, not unlike upturned moss, wet earth and sickness. Bodies not collected or claimed, and those beyond collection were being reclaimed by the earth. Bodies not picked over by rats appeared as poorly conceived mud sculptures blending with the French soil.

Still groggy from a cold uncomfortable sleep, curled with his Enfield upon a stack of ammunition crates, John climbed from the trench. He stood straight for a moment, as if tempting German snipers. They couldn't see him, lost to the fog as they were, but the nature of trench warfare was not tactics or strategy, but simple survival. A cough, a sneeze, any errant sound could bring a brutalizing reply from German gunners who were every bit as jumpy and frightened as their allied counterparts.

The khaki-green wool uniform was filthy, blood-stained and damp from the morning dew. It stunk of the dead, of piss and shit, wood smoke and goat meat they'd cooked the night before. It hung loosely on John's gaunt frame. Four exhaustive months and successive bouts of dysentery and diarrhea had taken a terrible toll. Like the dead, he felt himself disappearing steadily from the world. John lifted the Enfield to his chest, unconsciously gripping the cold wooden stock hard enough to cramp his fingers.

John glanced back into the trench, and the five expectant faces of his squad. One of them was a tough as nails Irishman named Roddy MacAllister, with thick bright red hair and deep blue eyes. John thought he was a bit of a loud mouth, but he was keen with a knife and a good man in a fight. When John was asked by the Sergeant to pick his squad, Roddy was the first on the list. John nodded and the men rose quick and quiet. Without a word they formed a skirmish line, separated by three yard intervals. From where John stood the last man was almost lost to the swirling mist.

The mission was as much one of security as revenge. German sappers had cut the throat of a French sentry that night before beheading two of the sentry's sleeping comrades. The objective was to sweep the area between the lines, but each man entertained his own fantasy of what he might do should they run into the enemy. The squad drew a long slow arc that would take them mere yards from the German guns before turning back towards friendly lines.

They went cautiously, rifles at the shoulder, barrels angled towards the ground. To John it remind him of stories of the Indian Wars he’d heard from old veterans as a child. Like those Indians John stepped lightly at the edge of his foot, judiciously choosing each footfall, sliding forward to make as little noise as possible. His finger hovered across the iron trigger guard. John had to remind himself to breathe from time to time. Every eight steps the squad came to a halt and knelt, looking back along the line for John’s signal to push forward.

They were near enough the enemy lines that John could faintly make out a German soldier's snoring as he slept. It made him smile, breaking a strain that grew exponentially by the second. The sound tore at his conscience. It was upsetting to think the enemy was a man like him. John brushed away the thought, content that the wind, light as it was, was in the American's favor. Roddy heard it as well and smirked in John's direction. John pursed his lips and with a wave of the hand motioned the squad forward again.

Nearing the German lines John spied movement at the edge of a crater a grenade throw away.. Roddy came up beside him. He'd spotted it as well. As if by one mind they separated, intending to flank their prey from either side. Ten yards out both men rose, aiming their rifles from the shoulder as they closed the gap. John was there first, taken suddenly aback by the unexpected sight.

It was a young blond German boy, fighting to drag himself to the lip of the crater. His blue-gray uniform was in tatters and scorched on one side. Blood had matted and darkened along the back of his neck and into the neatly trimmed blond hair. The boy’s legs were gone below the knees. He turned slowly and peered over one shoulder at John, his eyes wide with fear. With that he only pulled more desperately at earth that slithered through his fingers.

At the edge of the crater, opposite the struggling boy, John lowered his rifle to watch the pathetic spectacle. He took a breath and guessed the wounds were more than a day old. It was quite certain he wasn't one of the sappers. John figured he'd been left behind from a half hearted assault two nights before that had been stopped cold by an artillery barrage. A few feet away Roddy smiled cryptically, and drew a trench knife from his belt. John scrambled down the side of the crater stopping Roddy just as he was about to dispatch the boy.

“What's the matter with you?” Roddy complained, at barely a whisper. The two men struggled. Roddy fought to pull free, staring into John’s eyes., grimacing as John forced the knife from his hand. Neither of them noticied as the boy reached the top of the crater.

“Deutsche Comrade!” he cried. Roddy shoved John away and dove on the boy just as a burst of machinegun fire erupted from the German side. John slipped and tumbled awkwardly, splashing into a pool of water at the bottom of the crater. The boy's head exploded. Another round banged off Roddy's dough boy helmet, flinging him into a heap across the trench. John crawled over, bullets ripping at the air above the trench, and turned Roddy over. He was limp. A trickle of blood ran from one ear and down across his dirt streaked neck.