will recognize that the courageous one of them was Wesley, brave enough at least to take each action with full knowledge of his remote chances. Percy will recognize he had simply run away in the only way that he could.
They have been here a long time and life down in the ground makes each hour and day crawl by with brutal exactitude. Percy is nineteen, Wesley eighteen, and they’ve found an affinity that traces itself back to nothing more complicated than their bottomless preoccupation with card games. Whist, in particular. They are forever hunting for thirds and fourths when they can be off-duty in their funk holes cut into the sides of the trenches, and from time to time, some of the Highlanders Regiment clamber down the boards in their kilts and tam o’ shanters to join a game and try to steal away some biscuits or a tin of marmalade. Beyond, the earth is turned and cratered, the trees are stripped of their leaves, the only birds they see in the sky are the lurching homing pigeons, in their low trajectories, carrying messages on their legs.
The word has circulated down the way: When the order comes, they are to climb the steps that have been shovel-carved into the front of the trench and begin advancing, shoulder to shoulder. They have on their fifty-five-pound packs, all the equipment they will need to set up in forward positions.
“Last time in this bloody trench,” Wesley whispers, his voice quavering.
“Indeed.”
“I hope they find higher ground for us to dig the next one.”
“I suppose,” Percy says, for it is he who is not keen on the idea of getting out of this trench, despite its fetid mud, its stink, and its complement of slithering rats.
Now they hear the relayed shouts from down the line, and they begin to clamber up. It’s a cool morning, and the sun is just beginning to peek through after so many days of rain. They have been told that the bombardment of the last three days has all but wiped out the Germans. They are to now take that easy ground. Percy is bracing himself for the sight of the mangled remains, the silent witness of the enemy bodies. The general mood, however, is of relief. Far down the way, one of the brigades has a football, that they kick out ahead of them, the ball bouncing ahead and coming to rest to wait for them. Boys move forward, working through their own defensive wires with long-handled cutters, through to open ground. Percy has his gun barrel forward. He grasps the otherworldliness of being up on the top, moving without constriction, regarding the world from its surface rather than from its gashed insides. He feels the momentary sensation of being unbound. And when the machine-gun fire opens up from the other side, from the trenches that they have been told will be full of dead men, he is almost unable to understand.
Men are being hit all around him, instantaneously, and he goes down, the great pack slamming on top of him as if in emphasis. The machine-gun fire is hard and steady, and he can hear the bullets humming just above him. Ahead, the front lines have been brought down completely. The ones of them still alive are trying to drag themselves back. His own face pressing the mud, he still sees their wild eyes. If there is shouting, it does not register. A shell comes down not twenty feet from him, but it makes a weak bang—a seeming dud, no concussion, no hail of dirt or hot shrapnel. He is completely frozen in his indecision. To turn back, unwounded, will have consequences; he’s heard no order to pull back and to do so on one’s own is to return to a firing squad. But ahead, the bodies are toppled like a long chain. He watches the wounded, coming back, crawling, terrified. Everyone is shouting, but he understands none of it. He turns to locate Wesley, but he cannot make out any shape in the suddenly rising fog. And it is only then that he realizes he is enveloped in the gas.
6. The thing in which one finds some long-embedded fact
At his mid-fifties, his breathing has become the metronomic, a register above unconscious effort. The lungs, shrunken by the gas to about half their capacity, benefit from his work, the outdoors. He has left the mill to earn what he can cutting grass, shoveling snow, fixing roofs, attending to the gardens of more wealthy people in the more monied towns. Their English Gardener. He is sometimes introduced that way. This is Percy, my English Gardener, often followed by a giggle—he is, in some way, quaint to these people, with his clipped talk and his clipped hair and starched white trousers and shirt.
Martha works at the phone company now, in Information, the second shift. She took the work because the mill had become too much for Percy with its dank recesses and veils of dust. He works more hours now, out in the air, but the money is less and the seasons can conspire against him. So his wife also works, and makes no complaint, but after days outdoors he comes home and cooks for himself and sits reading, missing his wife.
In the evenings, after days in the sun, his fair skin is hot with the warmth of his burn. The muscles have the easy ache of a day working in fresh air, and it is late in the day especially that, alone, he must consciously think through the push and pull of inhalation and expiration. It’s when he is tired that the breathing is most labored, most begrudging.
They have a dog now, a Corgi named Pierre. Pierre spends most nights curled on his small hooked rug, staring at Percy as he rustles through the newspaper. The dog’s shallow pants are like an accompaniment to his own deep draws. The dog also seems wary of the newspaper itself, although Percy has never used a newspaper as discipline. When Percy finishes his reading and folds the newspaper over, the dog often scurries out of the room.
Most nights, Martha calls Percy at the beginning of her nine o’clock break, the ritual of the brief chat. But tonight it’s ten o’clock and Percy can feel those low butterflies that come with a missed call, even though he knows she sometimes has to work through the break if someone has called out sick, or if it’s an especially busy night—holidays and so forth.
“You want to . . . ?” he says to Pierre. The dog peeks around from the corner. It is likewise their habit that he takes Pierre for a walk as soon as he has hung up with Martha. Pierre is looking nervous. But Percy wants the phone call. He breathes more deeply, trying to settle himself. If he finishes his sentence, if he says the word, walk, Pierre will become so agitated that if the walk doesn’t commence forthwith, the dog will urinate on the floor within moments.
“Ring,” he says to the phone.
“Do you . . . ?” he says to Pierre, the dog’s ears pricked at attention, his ears searching for the leash. Percy knows he shouldn’t be teasing the dog like that.
The phone finally rings. Only a half-hour from the end of her shift.
“Hallo,” Percy says, a hint of annoyance seeping into his voice.
“Percy?”
“Yes . . . who’s this?”
“Percy, it’s Eleanor. Well, something’s happened. Martha’s had a stroke, dear.”
7. The fascinating glimpse into the life of a mature gentleman much unlike himself
After his morning walk on the palm-lined golf course, it is Percy’s habit to return to his apartment, draw the shades, turn the air-conditioning unit on High Cool, and sit watching television, often with the sound off. Nothing on television interests him all that much. But other than the regimented segments of time in which he prepares meals, attends to his hygiene, or keeps his household in basic working order, it seems now, even as time grows ever smaller, that it is a fundamental struggle to simply bridge those hours. Nothing awaits him, particularly.
In the evening, when the sun drops and there is the notion of cooling in this tropical haze, Percy will loose himself from the four walls and go for another walk, in the dusk. The cocktail hour has arrived, and through many lighted windows he can see people, alone as he is, sitting in their chairs with tumblers in their
