“Because it probably is bone,” he said, “but not mine. Mike’s.”
In December, he explained, he’d been with a company south of the city, holding part of a riverbank along with British, French, and Russian troops. If someone actually was in charge, the men on the ground couldn’t tell. One day they’d get orders from the American colonel at headquarters in Archangel and the next those would be contradicted by the British commander who visited the front. One day they lost four men while fighting to hold a little bridge and the next were told to retreat and burn the bridge behind them; a week later, ordered back again, they’d had to cross on homemade rafts. They slept in the peasants’ small homes and ate their food and grew friendly with some; then moved on to a camp in the woods and were told that the peasants were Bolshevik sympathizers. In icy weather, they returned and, so the Bolsheviks would be without shelter, cleared out the families and burned the houses to the ground, watching women who’d fed them a few weeks earlier wail over little mounds of household goods.
Their biggest battle had taken place on what people elsewhere called Armistice Day. For air support they’d had a few Allied planes, Sopwiths fitted with big skis and piloted by former members of the czar’s air corps, trained by RAF flyers. One of those Russian pilots, mistaking a group of American and French troops for Bolsheviks, had dropped two 112-pound bombs directly on their position, wounding several doughboys and killing their cook outright.
“I was standing right near Mike,” Boyd said. Eudora, who’d listened to all of this without comment, put down her pen.
“The blast tossed me ten feet away but I landed in the snow and at first I thought I’d gotten away with just the cuts on my face and hands. There wasn’t anything left of Mike but some little pieces, which we gathered up in a blanket and buried in the crater. That night my leg started killing me and the next day, when I went to the latrine, I found a little hole in my thigh, which wasn’t bleeding much but which seemed deep. I cleaned it out, bandaged it, and didn’t think more about it. We were so mad about Mike that for a couple of days we wouldn’t talk to any of the Brits. Their commanders had trained those pilots, and given them the crummy information — but then the real fighting started up again, skirmishes every day. A patrol went out and lost two men, three more were wounded trying to move supplies across the river. I didn’t have time to worry about my leg and anyway the surface scabbed over and the opening began to close. A few weeks later—”
He stopped abruptly and she waited. When he showed no sign of continuing, she said, “Why don’t you get dressed?”
He nodded, slid off the table, and disappeared behind the screen. When he returned he looked like a soldier again, whatever else he’d wanted to tell her folded up in the brown wool robe. He tapped his right thigh and said, “So this is from Mike, is all I meant to say — you don’t need to know the rest of it. I was standing right next to him and part of him must have blown into me.”
“From a long bone, would be my guess,” she said without thinking. “Femur, humerus, tibia maybe …”
He looked her over and shook his head. “A cold one, aren’t you?”
She blushed, something she hadn’t done in months.
“That’s Mike,” he said, gripping her arm above the elbow and thrusting his face so close she could see his pale lashes. “My friend. I want that fucking thing out of me, I want him out of me. I want the surgeon to fix this and then put me on the sick list and send me to the convalescent hospital and let me work there until I can be shipped home. No fucking way am I going back out there.”
Eudora tugged her arm free. “You know it’s the surgeon who has to decide that.”
“But you can tell him what you saw. That it’s infected or whatever it is, and how I’ll be crippled if it’s not removed.”
His eyes were a clear light gray, hard to see because so deeply set. She promised him she’d see what she could do.
SHE SPENT THAT evening loading film in cassettes, replenishing solutions in the darkroom, and filing two weeks’ worth of forms, but despite those dry satisfactions she still felt unsettled when she went up to bed and, although her room was warm and her nightgown was clean, she remained too angry with herself to sleep. When had she stopped seeing below the surface of events, or stopped hearing, beneath what was said, what was really meant? If her hands and eyes, so experienced now, conjured images from the X-ray apparatus, and if the surgeons had come to rely on the accuracy of her readings, that didn’t make what she’d lost less crucial. The part of her that had once intuited feelings and responded appropriately had grown as coarse-grained as film meant for use at night, everything delicate sacrificed to speed. Nothing surprised her anymore, only the details differed. This battle, that battle, these wounds, those; shells, shrapnel, airplane crashes, railroad collisions, bombs. Here, they were somehow fighting the Bolsheviks, not the Germans, with the British, not the French, in charge: so of course it was a British-trained soldier, in an RAF plane, who dropped the fatal bomb, and the friendly cook — why was it never the pig-eyed sergeant who cheated at poker? — who was killed. And of course the sliver of bone lodged in Stan’s, Constantine’s—Boyd’s thigh (after all, she couldn’t use his first name) wasn’t his own. As that was one of the things that could happen, so it did happen, as did everything sooner or later: but she might have remembered what her speculation would sound like to him. Oh, it must be from a femur …
She folded her limp pillow beneath one ear and pulled her blanket over the other, which muffled but didn’t block the sound of the nurses snoring in the cubicles around her. Once she would have thought it odd for one man to be carrying inside of him bone from another, who was dead. But everything here was backwards, including her own presence, which had come about by a chain of events so implausible that she omitted most of them when she wrote to her family back home. Even when she wrote to Irene Piasecka, who had first taught her, she touched only on the surface of her last year. She left out locations, events, the ridiculous journeys between events; Irene, who had made her way from Poland to New York to Colorado, from Colorado to the sanatorium in the Adirondack Mountains where they’d both worked, knew all about sudden, improbable change. Writing to her, Eudora had skimmed over her stay at the mobilization station in New York, her voyage to London, and her shipment to France a few weeks later with a group of Red Cross nurses who, looking on her as a lowly aide, had been consistently unkind. She wrote still less about the British hospital in Paris, where she’d ferried blankets and bedpans through the corridors, brought trolleys of food from the kitchen, held basins while nurses unwound long strips of iodine-soaked gauze — tasks that, she couldn’t help thinking, any breathing creature might have done equally well, although she was glad to be able to do them.
And after that — what was the point of describing what she’d seen and heard and done? Searching for something her family could bear to hear, she mentioned that the excellent French she’d learned in high school had finally been put to use when, after the start of the Picardy offensive, she was sent to a French hospital near Beauvais and found, scattered among the French soldiers, wounded doughboys who couldn’t communicate with the French doctors and nurses treating them. Couldn’t explain that the weights and pulleys holding a shattered leg in traction needed adjustment; longed to write their wives and couldn’t ask for paper; hated liver but found it on their trays. They’d been glad to have her interpret for them and to fix what she could.