Bright's Passage: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

the plate beneath. He tied the horse to a chokecherry and the goat to a peeling ninebark near the water.It was muggy, but he unpacked his greatcoat anyway and, sitting on the ground, wrapped himself and the child in the garment, more for relief from the mosquitoes than from any cold. With his finger, he fed the boy from the milk and with his other hand ate a piece of the chicken that he’d wrapped in a few pages from the Book of Jeremiah. Then Henry Bright lay back and thought about Rachel, the delicate shells of her ears, the pinkness of her tongue, the way she laughed in her sleep. The tiny body of his son slept silent and warm in the crook of one arm, and he kept very still lest he should wake the boy.

4
     
    With the tree gone, the world went aimless for the next several days. Shots were taken at whatever happened to rise above the bags that lined the trenches, but even the bodies of the men who were hit seemed bored by the tedium of the killings and fell to the ground with more listlessness than violence. Of course there were always the punctual, workmanlike exchanges of shelling, shooting, and maiming, called “the hate,” at the beginning and ending of each day, but by now these were ritual, and no one paid them much mind.
    Bright’s company was relieved and went to sit in the dirty basements of eviscerated villages under the watchful eyes of old women. Everyone had fleas. Bert argued with whoever would listen to him, mostly about whether chickens could get the cooties. Finally someone had gone out in the yard and killed a bird, brought it in, and inspected it. There had been no fleas. Behind a basket of onions in a nook that served as a kitchen, Bright found a small patch of plaster wall so white that it seemed supernatural, a solitary untouched thing in the whole wet and muddy world. He stared hard at it while the others smoked cigarettes and slept around him. They were moved from the basement back to the reserve trenches, and he resumed watching the treeless early October sky with the same intensity as he hadthe wall in the old woman’s house. Shells burst around him, but they burst around everyone. Many had caught the flu, and there was coughing at all hours. Some suffocated in the night from the infection in their lungs. Men came back from the field hospitals looking sicker than when they had left for them. They died of fevers in the cold, their bodies shivering so violently beneath sodden blankets that it seemed their bones might break. It was not unusual to wake and find the man sitting next to you dead; the War had become something so powerful that it could kill without wounding. On occasion even Henry Bright smoked, but not often.
    Back he moved to the front line, and, one morning, the hate was louder and longer than normal, and he began to clean his rifle with his toothbrush and then fix his bayonet in preparation to go over the bags. The word being passed around was that the village in front of them had been relinquished in the night. Some speculated that it was a trap, that this portion of the line was playing possum, luring in as many as they could in order to surround them in one last, desperate attempt to turn the tide of the War. Farther south, another rumor had it, an entire German company of starving old men and young boys had surrendered en masse. Some held that this would be the final push, that the Kaiser had had it and the German army was collapsing. Still, if this was the case, no one in charge was saying so, and until they did say so, the only thing that mattered was the village that lay before them a little ways distant, close enough that the white steeple of its church could be seen peeking out above a small rise of hills.
    His mother had died during a windstorm that made the trees bow to one another like ballroom dancers. He had buried her in the whipping rain and then trudged through the mud to Fells Corner for nails with which to patch the holes where the singleshad blown off the