Chapter 8 #6
Without warning, the sapper lunges forward and seizes Tomás by the collar, yanking him down off the verge.
Tomás withdraws into himself, an animal under attack: he cannot defend himself, he cannot strike a redcoat, so his only hope is to make himself as small as he can.
He hears the seam of his jacket strain and tear, but his main concern is for the field book, for it not to fall, to keep all that carefully written ink out of the ditchwater.
“Do as I fucking say, Paddy,” the sapper is bawling, as he drags him along, “and put your fucking back into it.”
It comes to Tomás that the sapper is wanting him to help push the cart, and he hears one of the chainboys saying, “Ah, now, sir, you can’t be asking a man of his age, it wouldn’t be right,” and he tries to gesture frantically to the lad to stay quiet, if he knows what’s good for him.
Sure enough, the shorter sapper roars at the boy to shut his bloody mouth; he lunges forward and bangs both of the chainboys’ heads together with a sickening knock, just as the taller sapper snatches the field book from Tomás’s hands and tosses it aside, onto the verge, and shoves Tomás towards the cart, into the ditch, into the freezing muddy water.
For a moment, his boots resist the wet, as if taken by surprise, but then he feels it invade, via the eyelets, via the laces and the tongue, through the seams, up through the sole. He’ll never get them dry, not for the whole rest of this job.
“Right, lads,” he says, wading towards the two chainboys, who are sniffling and crying, swiping at their faces with their sleeves, and one has a bloody nose, his shirtfront scarlet with it, “we’ll need to wedge the wheels with a plank of some kind.
Can you see anything like that roundabout? Have a look, now.”
The boys stumble, dripping, out of the ditch, casting about for various sticks, at which Tomás shakes his head, saying, Something flatter, something stronger, until they come up with two squat lengths of wood. The one with blood down his front is still crying.
Tomás takes the wood, giving them both an encouraging nod. He leans down, pushing his hand into the ditchwater, up to the armpit, feeling his way, and wedging a plank under the first submerged wheel of the cart. He then wades his way around to the other side.
“When this one is in,” he says, seemingly talking to the chainboys, but actually addressing the sappers and their officers, who have come over to see what all the commotion is about, “we’ll count to three—”
Tomás bends over again, groping in the freezing water for the curve of the wheel.
“—then we’ll push from the back, and the donkey can pull from the front—”
He grasps at a spoke, then slides his hand towards the outer rim, following its orbit down towards where it rests in the mud.
“—and we’ll be out in no time. All right?”
He fumbles with the wedge, trying to slide it between wheel-rim and ground but the mud repels it; he has to lean forward to push it into place, the front of his jacket and the brim of his cap drinking up the water, the cold taking hold of his torso.
He tries twice, then three times. On the fourth go, he thinks he has it, almost, just another inch or two.
It would have been effective, Tomás’s scheme to free the cart, for he was always skilled in the way of practical solutions, in the business of angles, pressures and forces.
It might have worked; the cart might have rumbled, slowly at first, but then more easily, up out of the ditch and on its way; the division might have continued on to its destination and set up camp and kept at its work, assessing its distances, making its maps.
As it is, none of this happens, or at least not on this day. For just as Tomás is making the final adjustment to the angle of his wedge, in order to free the wheel from the mud, so that the cart may roll onwards, the taller sapper goes back to the donkey.
He reaches out to grasp at its bridle, and the gesture is impatient, it is rough, and the donkey, being a wise animal, senses this.
It also knows that this person is the same one who was yelling near its sensitive ears and slapping its rump not so long ago, so the donkey does what any sensible being would do when faced with so obvious an enemy.
It lurches away to escape the grabbing hand.
The cart, buffered by one artfully placed wedge, creaks and shifts. It jerks forward, pushed by the weight of two chainboys at the back, and hauled by a dissatisfied donkey and a furious sapper, who has triumphed after all and got hold of the bridle.
Tomás’s hand, however, is at that very moment between road and wheel. When the cart moves, he is trapped, by the fingers, by the palm, and then the cart rolls on, the momentum carrying it forward.
By the time everyone has realised that something is amiss with their civilian assistant, who is near face-down in the filthy water, cursing and screaming in his native language—no one thinks to rebuke him this time—it is too late.
Tomás’s hand, the right, the one that can draw coastlines and marshes and castles and contours, the one that grasped Phina’s to lead her off the ship, the one that can conjure a landscape in inks and pictograms and lines and calculations, can wield a loy and a spade, can dig and slice turf, is no more.
Where once there was a hand is now a mere mess of pulp and bone, useless and crushed, a bloodied stump, dripping with ditchwater.
Tomás is taken, in the very cart that crushed his hand, to the nearest town, where the sappers are dispatched by their commanding officers to find a doctor to treat the poor blighter.
They are gone for several hours. The corporal and his lieutenant disappear into an inn, leaving the cart with the chainboys, telling the unfortunate man to keep his chin up.
The cart stands in the middle of the town square, the donkey dozing in its harness. As the sky above Tomás turns, shade by shade, to purplish-black, the chainboys sit by him, damply, telling him it’ll not be long now, and Tomás acquaints himself with the pain.
So large and unwieldy is it, like a creature lashed to his back, a hulking ghoul with harsh furnace breath that it blows on Tomás’s forearm, up his sleeve, into his shoulder, down his neck.
It has a bruising, tendonous grasp on his wrist. It shifts itself into many forms: it is throbbing, it is darting, it is aching, it is cold, it is scalding.
He cannot shake it off, he cannot free himself.
He tries to keep silent, to still the tongue in his head, but as night comes and a dour drizzle starts to fall, he’s aware of a shameful and intermittent groaning that he’s sure is coming from himself.
It is almost entirely dark by the time the sappers return. They smell of smoke and whiskey, are full of good cheer, and they have a doctor with them, a portly country man in a three-piece suit, whose speech is slurred and whose touch, when Tomás feels it on his sleeve, quivers with drink.
“You see his hand?” one of the sappers says. “What can be done for it?”
“Can I see it?” the doctor repeats, squinting, his soft and shaking fingers easing back the sleeve. “Can I me hole. How can I possibly see it when there’s nothing left to see?”
He tells the sappers that Tomás must be taken to the hospital in the next town, and quickly, before infection sets in. He doses Tomás with laudanum, gives them the bottle, charges them several shillings, and goes on his way, into the night, whistling to himself, his pockets jingling.
Laudanum dreams, Tomás discovers, are both real and unreal, breeze-filled, their edges frilled with light.
He floats just above fields of corn, of barley, his feet grazing the wavering tips.
He stands on a strand, up to his ankles in pale foam, tiny waves dragging the sand out, grain by grain, from under his feet.
He sees Phina coming towards him along a road, and he stops, holding out his arms towards her, filled with longing and happiness at the sight of her, and although she smiles at him, she keeps walking.
I thought you were gone, he calls to her.
I am, she says, over her shoulder, but you know where to find me, and as she walks away, he sees that she carries under her arm a small wooden boat with tall masts and tiny sails.
But I don’t know, he shouts after her, I don’t know where to find you, where do I find you, where?
As he dreams, and sleeps, acts are performed on his body.
At the hospital, doctors in gore-stained aprons saw through the bone and gristle of his arm, removing the mess of his crushed hand.
They amputate just above the wrist, stitching the skin closed in a kind of envelope seal.
After a day or so, as Tomás lies insensible in his hospital cot, red lines, like border-demarcations on a map, begin to appear from under the bandages, to crawl up his arm.
He is sent back to the operating room, and this time they amputate at the elbow. They re-stitch. They re-bandage. The two surgeons glance at each other. One of them shrugs. They are not very hopeful.
Tomás, however, begins to rally. He is nothing if not resilient. As he lies unconscious, his stump strapped up, his body starts to gather its resources, musters its troops.