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

cabin’s roof. The hardware man had measured out the nails, offered his condolences, and then asked Bright if he’d considered signing up to go to the War. The hardware man had been made a registration officer with the responsibility of signing up men to go across the sea to avenge the women and children of the
Lusitania
, to make the world safe for Democracy, to defend France, and, lastly, to aid England. With his mother dead, there was nothing really to stay for. Bright had signed his name, listened wordlessly to the instructions the man gave him, and then headed back to the cabin with an extra portion of nails for being the first to sign up in the book. It had been as easy as falling in a river.
    In early March 1918, he hid his mother’s rifle in the rafters above the bed, used the extra portion of nails to cover the door frame against the weather and wilderness, and then walked to the train depot in Fells Corner. He was mustered at a camp in Virginia with a company of gangly and goosenecked men and boys. By late April they were on their way to France.
    Feeling for the War was high, as was excitement over the ocean voyage. Men showed it in different ways. Some told stories of their valor in advance. Others prayed and gave up vices. Most wrote letters of some kind to be mailed home upon their arrival, and a chaplain assigned to their unit tried to get everyone’s soul in order. He was most concerned about the Catholics of France. “You stay the hell out of those churches, boys,” he would shout as they went to sleep. “You just walk the other way. There ain’t nothing those Catholics can give you except fleas and the clap. You need anything, you want to unburden your soul, you come to me or you go to the YMCA.” He was naturally red in the face and, according to Sergeant Carlson, accidentally shot himself during a training exercise, only two weeks after their boat had landed in France.
    They entered the War like men stepping out from beneath an awning into a torrential thunderstorm. The first man that Bright saw die fell back down into the very trench from which he’d just climbed. His uniform was still fresh and the tops of his boots had been shined. Only the soles looked muddy.

5
     
    Bright rode on throughout the next day, following the stream and keeping to the hug of a range of foothills where the canopy of hickory was thickest and there was less chance of being seen. He took short breaks to water the horse and to feed the child from the thin skim of goat’s milk in the bucket tied to the saddle pommel. As the sun began to slip behind him, he tethered the horse near an ess in the stream. A few deep-brown trout grazed fatly in the dark holds beneath a stretch of half-submerged hemlock trunk that had fallen across the water. He unswaddled his son, walked out on the trunk with the boy, and knelt down as he had done the previous night to dunk the boy’s naked hindquarters in the water. The child meeped and mewed up at him as he laid it on the ground. He walked out onto the trunk once again to wash the diaper, but this time as he stooped to the stream he lost his balance and toppled headfirst into the water. He stood up spluttering, thoroughly soaked, and, reaching into his pocket, found the matches ruined.
    He stood there, waist-deep and dripping, looking down into his palm at them. Then he let them fall from his hand to float away like tiny boats in the current. He sloshed through the churned silt to the steep lip of the bank and pulled himself up next to his boy. The child’s feathery red hair fell thinly across itsknobbled head in the style of a middle-aged auctioneer or feeds tore man. The same coppery color gave the boy a pair of sharp little eyebrows that scrunched and relaxed and then scrunched again as if, behind those tightly locked eyelids, he was figuring a sum of arithmetic. The intricacy of the boy’s ears and the translucence of his tiny nostrils already bore the stamp of Rachel’s beauty. His