Chapter XIV
XIV
and she’s right there, Bagger could touch her if not for the wire sickles between them, the forest shakes so wildly from mortar-shell punches that the whole nest of spikes bounces like bedsprings, the pain must be indescribable, that’s why she shrieks, it’s this woman who’s been the shrieker all along, and Bagger’s guts flop, she lay here in agony while he and the boys sat around playing Rochambeau,
and then the shrieker writhes, a sinuous ripple from upturned face to pointed toe, and the beam of light over her ripples, too, and Bagger’s struck stupid, the beam isn’t pouring down onto the woman, it’s coming from the woman, specifically her exposed skin, the dewy face, the extended arms, the bared ankles and naked feet, every inch cascading like Veck’s flamethrower unleashed,
and she ought to be a latticework of charred bone, but only soft perspiration beads her closed and quivering eyelids, an expression that mixes pain and purpose, the look Bagger imagines on women giving birth,
and Arno arrives next to him with wire clippers in hand, a tool that comes with implications, you don’t euthanize someone with wire clippers, which means Arno agrees this woman isn’t to be taken care of in the way Reis suggested but rather taken care of, rescued at all costs, and the begrudging warmth Bagger feels for the kid leaps to a furnace burn,
and Arno rises to a kneel, a height that puts him in view of German sharpshooters, and though Bagger wants to yank the kid back down, he, too, takes to his kneecaps and pretends he’s protected by this thicket of wooden posts and fist-sized knots of barbed wire so tortured Bagger sees faces in them the way he does clouds, except all these faces do is shriek, shriek, shriek,
and Bagger gets out his M1910 cutters, too, and he and Arno get working, finicky snip-snip-snips, like trimming a dragon’s hair with tweezers, it’s taking too long, killing her would have been easier, and so when a sugar maple a hundred yards to the left explodes into tangerine fire, a sure sign Jerry sees them, Bagger drops his wire cutters and uses his rifle bayonet to fight down the wire’s rusty hedge no matter how many punctures he takes,
and he threshes loops of wire low, then stomps them lower and thicker, which allows Arno to start cutting two, three, four layers at a time, and suddenly Bagger’s got fingers closed over the woman’s wrist, though he can barely feel it, it’s like dipping his hand into a pitcher of warm milk,
and he thinks how the blue cape must be snared by hundreds of barbs, which brings to mind the 43rd’s nickname, the Butcher Birds, an embarrassment compared to the Red Arrows, the Buckeyes, the Cyclones, divisions that came to their nicknames honestly, instead of having a peacock like Major General Reis force it upon them because he liked the sound of it, butcher bird being a colloquialism for shrike, a bird that impales insects, vole, lizards, mice, and other birds on twigs, thorns, and yes, barbed wire, a means of keeping its kill fresh till the shrike wishes to eat it, a sadistic thing to call your division, if you asked Bagger,
and, oh, how things change, at last he feels like a Butcher Bird, this helpless woman impaled before him, his prerogative to nibble her, or eat her whole, or leave her for later, all options he discards, for he only wants to help her, so he pulls her arm upward in hopes he can rip her dress free of the barbs,
and the arm comes right up, not in fact snagged to anything, which seems impossible, but it’s a gift Bagger won’t question, he bends the arm around his neck, light as a scarf, and as he leans to get her left arm, accepting the fanged attack of wire into his crotch, he gets his first clear look at her face,
and hold on, what the fucking hell, he knows this woman, Bagger’s mind starts spinning, could it be Marie-Louise, lovesick and pursuing him all the way to the trenches, no, he’s known this face longer than that, perhaps a devout woman from his father’s church who followed her preacher’s footsteps across the Atlantic, or maybe a celebrity on the level of Mary Pickford, shipped abroad to inspire her fighting boys, only to get lost in the chaos,
and then her eyelids part, soft as a daub of honey,
and her shriek severs, abrupt as a rubber sole,
and gone with the shriek, Bagger realizes, is the undertone that had been buried in it since he awoke from the minenwerfer blast, Bagger, it had said, Save me, it had said, the words had come from this feminine effulgence, she had cried out to him, specifically Private Cyril Bagger, long before he could have possibly heard her, it’s so outlandish an act he wonders if he died in the mortar blast after all, and this blazing oracle is a creature dispatched to drag his stubborn corpse to the hereafter,
and her eyes are brown, no surprise, because he knows her, and while he’s transfixed, the whole pile of wire rollicks, it’s Arno blundering into the thorny mesh, wire cutters abandoned, and the kid grabs the woman’s ankles, the light from her skin so intense it functions like Rontgen’s X-ray machine, Arno’s hand flesh bright pink, each finger bone defined,
and the kid’s weeping, which makes Bagger realize his eyes are leaking, too, and it’s not like getting gassed or getting soot in his eyes, it’s like the tears of the devout he used to see at his father’s church, moved by some vision incomprehensible yet gorgeous,
and with Arno in the wire, Bagger gets moving, placing the woman’s other arm around his neck, turning her over, the red dress as impervious to being snagged as the blue cape, and he rolls the woman into his arms, and in accordance with that roll, the tower of light falls hard as an axed tree and Bagger’s abruptly eye to eye with the coruscating dazzle,
and it ought to blind him but doesn’t, it’s like being suffused in the sunlight of some arcadian glen, pollens and danders and seeds and fluff newly visible, an invisible world of wee floating things revealed, the October chill stoked to a cozy snug, the slaughterhouse reek sugared into a bakery bouquet, the gravel crunch of war muffled by a calming rustle of leaves,
and then the woman’s chin notches over Bagger’s shoulder and her lighthouse beacon blazes toward the Allied trench, and the screech and talon and stink of the Great War resumes, nothing in front of Bagger but Bois de Fays smeared into the gray-purple of a flayed trout, and Bagger’s chest pangs with the loss of beauty, like the last time he saw Marie-Louise, applying woeful wartime cosmetics, mascara of vaseline and charcoal, rouge of dampened red crepe, lipstick of red cake coloring, when Bagger was dragged from her bed by a corporal under orders of a bugle call, no basking one last time in the sarcastic curl of her lips, or kiss her nipple, or admire the arrowhead of hair pointing between her thighs,
and now that beauty’s back, watch what you wish for, asshole, the sedentary murk of the northern forest blossoms into spectacular magnolias of Maxim fire, the Germans having seen the steeple of light topple and decided they’d had enough of the mystery, time to shoot, and it’s the closest Bagger’s ever been to machine gun fire, bullets coming in shiny ropes like spittle, like semen, everything in war is the residue of men,
and Arno tackles Bagger, that’s a new one, all three of them splatted to the mud as the uppermost yard of concertina wire is sawed off by a chugging chain of bullets, individual barbs flung from the wire and embedding into Bagger’s right hand, which protects the back of the woman’s head, and Bagger pushes away from the wire with his boots but hardly moves, heels going nowhere in the loose mud,
and Bagger thinks, this is it and it serves me right, Reis was spot-on that the shrieker should be killed, you learn pretty quick out here, especially on burial duty, that there are ideas humans shouldn’t have and tools they shouldn’t build, and to allow a being of such purity to live within such sloppy Armageddon is wrong, even if she survives this assault, it’ll ruin her, war isn’t merciful, no matter if he and the kid were handed a mission of mercy,
and so Bagger, under darting sparrows of bullets, shifts his hands to the woman’s throat, tender and slim as one of those pretty French poppies, so easy to admire, so simple to pluck,