William Lashner - Bitter Truth

I examined his mangled features and knew I should feel pity but felt none. “They blew off your nose,” I said .

“ Ahh, Christ. No eyes, no arms, no leg, no nose. The bastards.” He took a deep breath. “Don’t that beat it just to hell. Hey, buddy, can you do me a favor? Can you get me a glass of water?”

On the windowsill a pitcher and glasses were set out. I poured water into one of the glasses. I brought the glass to his swollen lips. He choked on the water and coughed as I poured it in. Much of it ran down his chin .

“ Thanks, buddy,” he said. “Hey, can you do me another favor and scratch my side, my left side? It’s like I rolled around in poison ivy down there.”

I put the glass down on a table by his bed and stepped toward him to scratch his side. He gave me directions, higher or lower, and I followed them. His skin was scabby and dry .

“ That feels great,” he said. “Hey, buddy, one more favor. How about it? Will you kill me, buddy? Will you, please? Anything I got is yours, buddy, if you’ll just kill me. Please, please, buddy. Kill me kill me kill me won’t you kill me, buddy?”

I backed away from him as he spoke. I backed into the wall. He kept pleading until a nurse came into the room with a pot of water and cloths .

“ What are you doing?” she asked .

“ Visiting,” I said .

“ Don’t,” she said. “Corporal Magee is very ill. He needs his rest.”

I went back to my cot as she began to wipe down Magee’s torso with a wet towel .

Corporal Magee was quiet for much of the day, sleeping. Later, when we were left alone by the sisters, he started up again. “Hey, buddy. Will you kill me, buddy, will you, please?” I told him to shut up, but he kept on begging me to kill him .

“ Why should you get to die,” I said, finally, “with the rest of us stuck here alive?”

“ What are you missing?” he asked .

I told him .

“ Just the arm, are you kidding?” he said. “I had just an arm gone I’d be dancing in the street with my girl, celebrating.”

“ Leave me alone,” I said .

He was quiet for another day, for two maybe. I couldn’t stop thinking about him lying there beside me like that. Even when they came in to cut some more off the mute soldier to my right I thought of Magee. When he started in again, begging me to kill him, I said, “Tell me about her.”

“ Who?”

“ Your girl. You said you have a girl .

“ I don’t got nothing anymore. The Huns they blew her away with the rest of my body.”

“ But you had a girl.”

“ Yeah, sure .”

“ Tell me about her.”

“ Why?”

“ Because I’m asking.”

He was quiet for a long moment. I thought he had gone to sleep. “Her name,” he said finally, “is Glennis. The prettiest girl on Price Hill.” He told me about her, how pretty she was, how kind, how gay, and in the telling he also told me about his life back in Cincinnati. He worked as a typesetter on the Enquirer. He went to ball games at Redland Field and himself played second base in Cincinnati’s entry in the Union Printers’ International Baseball Federation. He went to church and helped with collections for the poor. Nights he spent at Weilert’s Beer Garden on Vine Street or sitting with Glennis on her porch on Price Hill. As he spoke of his good and honest life before the war I felt a bitter taste. He told it all to me and then, after the telling, he complained that it was gone. Once again he asked me to kill him .

“ No,” I told him. “You don’t deserve to die.”

“ I don’t deserve to live like this.”

“ Maybe not, but I won’t kill you.”

“ Well, the hell with you,” he said .

Later that week the colonel came to give us our medals. There was a little ceremony in my room and I stood while an aide gave the colonel the box and the colonel extracted the cross with the eagle’s wings reaching high and pinned it onto my pajamas. “For outstanding gallantry in the battle of Cantigny,” he said. The sight of the dark metal and the red, white, and blue ribbon made me sick. Magee was given a written commendation from his commanding officer for his bravery at Cantigny. I learned there that he had been in the wave of soldiers following me in my mad counterattack .

Two nights later he began begging me again .

“ No,” I said. “We’re all stuck here, why should you break out and not the rest of us?”

“ I’d kill you if I could, buddy. I swear I would.”

“ But you can’t, can you?”

“ Blame me for that, why don’t you, you son of a bitch.”

“ You just have to suffer then along with the rest of us.”

“ Tell me all about your suffering, buddy. Tell me how terrible it is to see. Tell me how repulsive it is that you have a hand to feed yourself. Tell me how horrible it is that you are free to walk the corridors whenever you want. From where I’m lying, you’ve got nothing to die about.”

“ Shut up,” I said. I was angry. Bitter and angry and furious at him for his innocence. “Shut up and I’ll tell you what I have to die about and you’ll be glad as hell you’re not me.” And so I told him what I had never told another soul, and what I am telling you, my child, as a slap from the grave .

My family owned a fashionable store on Market Street in Philadelphia. We were always of money but while I was at Yale the store found itself in financial distress. My father died when I was an infant and it was up to my uncle and me to save the store. My uncle fought with the bank. I decided on an easier route and became engaged to a woman whose father was a vicious businessman but extremely wealthy. My fiancée’s father agreed that after the wedding he would buy a portion of the business, satisfy the banks, and save the company. The woman I was to marry was pretty and proper and harmless enough. It seemed to be an amicable enough business transaction .

While planning for our wedding, I surprisingly found myself in love. Unfortunately I fell in love not with my fiancée but with her younger sister and she loved me back. By then, of course, arrangements had been made and to explain my infidelity to the father would have ruined any chance for the family company to survive. I had no choice but to go through with the wedding. Even so I hadn’t the strength to give up my love and, inevitably, she found herself pregnant .

In the one truly brave act of my life I determined to run off with the younger sister and endure the wrath of both our families. It was but a few days before the wedding that we arranged to meet in the back of her house. But first, she told me, she needed to tell her sister, my fiancée, to explain to her everything. It was raining that night, and dark. I waited on the porch of the old caretaker’s cottage at the bottom of the hill, unoccupied that night, for my beloved to come for me with her suitcase. Finally, I saw a female figure descend the slope. My heart leaped with excitement, but it wasn’t the younger sister coming for me. It wasn’t the younger sister at all .

My fiancée stepped noiselessly toward me in the night. A rain cape was swept about her shoulders. She clasped her hands before her. In the darkness her face seemed to glow with an unearthly dark light .

“ My darling,” she said. “There has been a terrible accident.”

With utter dread I followed her up the hill. The rain streamed down my face. Water soaked into my shoes. My coat was useless against the deluge. I followed my fiancée to the spot on the rear lawn, beside a statue of Aphrodite, where she had planned that we would be married. There was a plot of freshly dug earth to be planted with flowers for our wedding. Atop the plot was the younger sister, my beloved, sprawled beside the suitcase she had packed only that night for our elopement. The blade of a shovel had sliced through her neck and into the soft ground. The shovel’s wooden handle rose like a marker from the bloody earth .