Amber Sparks - The Unfinished World - And Other Stories

Sometimes the blackness descends, months and years later, and we find ourselves back there again. We are floating above the earth, or no, we are the earth, we are grass and trees, we are England and Germany, we are the Italian Alps and the Turkish Dardanelles, we are boys and girls, parents and grandparents, sorrow and anger and joy and bitter, bitter hearts. It is a very strange way to see, through the all of it, and it feels heavy as a blanket made of iron. We are riding in a dense, dark wood. We ride with the dead and with the living. We ride hard the hounds and show no mercy to the fox.

We ride hard to forget, but the dead ride with us.

Edmund, drowned in the mud at Passchendaele. Stuck and sinking for twenty minutes, while his helpless lieutenant watched him go.

Lettie, dead of the Spanish flu, carried by a cargo of sailors to her port town. Her small sisters followed, one by one by one.

All the Giordano boys, fallen in France, and not one proper grave between them.

Blair, gassed at the first Ypres, kept his life but lost his sight and lungs and laugh. Lost the color in his hair and face.

Mrs. Winthrop’s old husband, the Major, sunk off the coast of Africa.

Katarina, finished with food after she lost Paul. She wouldn’t eat, she wouldn’t eat, and eventually she grew so thin she wore wool in high summer. And then she wore nothing at all, and the land claimed her little white bones.

Soon the night patrols will come back, the sentries will stand down, and the men will start exchanging insults and songs with the soldiers across the bombed-out No Man’s Land. In broken French and broken German and a little broken English, they’ll swap opinions on the local estaminet — the beer is swill, the eggs rotten, the chips just edible — and on which French women to bed and which to avoid. There’ll be a few jokes about that, too, and calls for names, names, please, because after all the VD will land an infantryman in the hospital just as well as a piece of shrapnel .

After the Stand-To, then inspection, then rum with breakfast on this chilly morning. The men will gather at the largest shell hole to wash and shave, cheerfully saying good morning to their dead German soldier as they file past. They inherited Fritz, as they call him, when they arrived a few days ago, and they’ve been watching him turn colors ever since. White then yellow then red then blue, and now he’s got a greenish cast. There are bets on when the black will set in, though they all hope they’re back behind the lines before then. The panic and boom of the Salient will sound in the distance soon, too. The rat hunting will begin in earnest, rodent corpses strung like grotesque necklaces over the trench throats. The whole jagged mess of war and life will make a sharp wound against the brightness once more .

Tom, the happy warrior, shot in the neck while leading a charge. It took him four days to die. He called out for his mother but the veil came first.

When Valentina’s brother died in the Alps, she shipped out as a nurse to France and her father died of grief a month later.

When the Carthaginians made sacrifice, they played loud music near the fires so no one could hear the little children screaming. Said Georges to everyone when he returned from Siberia.

Davis, mad in a quiet way; he sat alone on park benches and wept.

Mary needed a false set of teeth but there were none left — they’d all gone to the soldiers. She ate oatmeal and mashed potatoes for years while dreaming of bacon.

Rory’s face, blown off in Sardinia. The doctors gave him a new one. It was called a great miracle. Either it broke all the mirrors or he did.

Sometimes we find a little of what has been lost. Sometimes it is a comfort, sometimes a nightmare. Sometimes it is a mystery, a thing so far removed from now it appears like an alien artifact, singing in the wild of unimaginable kindnesses. These things are written in a language we no longer need, that we no longer believe in. Pages with dog-eared corners, letters dressed with pieces of ribbon and lace, pressed leaves and flowers from earlier walks through woods. Souvenirs of another kind of silence.

Now we spill down through the forest, now we ride into human crowds and there are fevers for us, wild jazz and absinthe dreams, garters and girdles and stockings rolled down. Raucous piano and jitterbugging and casual sex in the park, in the plaza, in the piazza, in the backseat of the Rolls. Everywhere there is fever and passion, everywhere a need to burn, burn, burn out the hurt. We write, we sing, we paint, and still the blackness follows, still the dead are there in every note, every brushstroke. We ride and ride, farther and faster and still, still the ghosts ride with us, keep pace behind us, mock all our efforts to smoke and sweat them out.

Now the inky sky and the stiff-armed sentries and the breathing of sleepers further down the trench. Uneasy, shallow sleep, made restless with wounds real or imagined. Night here has a way of spreading fear like a contagion, making men who hate violence long for the sudden rough burst of it. Something decisive, something solid, something other than this half-life of sickness and waiting. Most of the men are sick with something: trench foot, dysentery, flu, fever. Fear. Nightmares. A trench full of sick men breathing in hope and dreaming about home. The cleanse before dawn. Before they wake tired and sore, remembering the bombardment starts today. The relentless sound of the artillery guns their only music for the next week. The air they breathe will hum and vibrate with it; the light itself will bend and waver and blacken with the endless shower of shells. Then they’ll explode the mines, finally, take out the Boche guns, then rush their lines. After the attack, they’re going behind the lines again, what’s left of the company, of course. Once the relief comes .

Delia, married to a steel magnate who made a killing off of the war. But she secretly went to the toilet every night and cried for a boy buried in Flanders.

Danny, the poet, devoid of poetry now. Instead of words he dreams of cave-ins and close fights in a tunnel of earth and water.

All the pictures flung past, the living only half of what’s missing. If you look closely, you can just make out the outlines of the dead peering over our shoulders, as we dance, as we sing carols, as we mark the holidays off with ticks on a calendar and births and deaths in Bibles. As we ride, ride, these woods are full of the gloom of the ghostly riders behind us. As we ride, and years wear on, these ghosts never change, never age, always stare glumly at the camera, as green and ungainly as they were at twenty-one. These riders still burn with the fire of the western heavens.

Davy, gassed, drowned on dry land. His nightmare face stuck in his mates’ minds for years, green and gasping, eyes rolling and red like a dying bull’s.

Jack, pulverized in the heat of the Dardanelles, nothing left to ship home.