When they got back to the CP, the captain didn’t even say anything. He just grabbed a couple of boxes and started to the lines. “They were pretty heavy,” Johnny would say. “It seemed like the right thing to just grab a couple myself and follow him.” Ed never talked about it.
Carrying the boxes, they moved up into a haze of gunsmoke and a stench of sulfur. There was an opening in the trees, and they could see one of the guns.
Katie was Irish, of course. Katie Kelly, what else would she be? Not Boston Irish: she was from Pennsylvania and California and New York. Katie liked the Boston Bruins, though. She liked to drive cars, and she liked to drive them fast. She was a fashion-design student, tall and glamorous, with a mass of dark brown hair. Her letters came in Kelly-green envelopes, so he always knew right at the beginning of mail call whether he had gotten anything from her. Sometimes she would send packages, brownies or chocolate-chip cookies, direct to the jungle from Dorchester, Massachusetts.
His mother, rest her soul, had never met Katie, but his father liked her, his brother liked her, his little sister liked her. If he didn’t make it out of the library, maybe he would get to see his mother: he had been to Mass last Sunday, every Sunday, even in the jungle. He had to get to Mass again. Just needed to keep crawling.
You can know only your own pain. This ought to be obvious. You know what’s hurting you, and you try to keep quiet about it — or maybe not. Maybe you wince, maybe you yell — maybe you make a big fuss about nothing. But it’s your own pain, it starts inside you, it is part of you. Only you know what it really means, what it says to you when nobody else is around. You know it like a friend, like a member of your family, like a fraternal twin.
Somebody else’s pain, you’d think you’d have enough sense to know that you don’t know it. But almost everyone has an idea of the appropriate display of someone else’s pain. You say, “You’re being very brave.” Or, “You’re making an awful fuss about nothing.” You say, “That doesn’t hurt so much, now does it?”
For no reason Ed could figure out, he was lying in bed, an ordinary bed in a nice house. No jungle, no rain, no library. He smelled ether. A blonde woman was rubbing ether on his left foot. It was icy cold where it hit the skin, and the heavy, sweet smell of it cut into his head. It hurt like hell, or maybe it was his leg in the jungle that hurt like hell. That’s Katie! he thought, looking at the woman. That’s Katie, but she’s blonde. A thin little boy and a round-faced girl were watching silently. He was not in his proper body: he had only one leg. Why is Katie rubbing ether on it, he wondered. What happened to the other one?
Ether is an antiseptic. Maybe Katie was cleaning some wound he didn’t have yet. Ed was pleased at the thought that there were wounds he didn’t have.
The medic was dead, killed by the same shrapnel that had shredded his leg, and Katie had taken the medic’s place. If he died here, he would just sink into the mattress and feed the trees and the bugs. Mud thou art, to bugs thou shalt return. Ed was muddy, but he would not return to bugs, at least not as long as he could crawl.
When you’re shot, you might feel the pain or you might not. If you need to move quickly, to jump out of a burning plane, for instance, you might not even notice that you are injured until you are, fortunately, safe. Maybe you are so busy trying to survive that you are pain-free until you’re dead. Or maybe not.
If you survive, the cause of your pain will migrate as your condition changes. Before your leg is amputated, your pain is caused by trauma or disease in the part that will be cut off. Afterward, your pain, at first anyway, is caused by the new damage to your flesh and bone that is the amputation. Your body quickly gets to work to repair itself. It knows what to do: local pain first, then a widespread area of pain and tenderness, to keep you still while you heal. Barring infection or gangrene, the inflammation recedes, the wound and stitches heal, the stump forms properly, and the rest of your body gets on with its life. But the major nerves that served your leg have been cut, and they don’t heal in the same way as muscle and skin.
When you have a leg amputated, you may sometimes feel that your missing limb is still there. At first, the sensation may not be painful. It may tingle or tickle or itch. Then it may start to hurt. Your missing toes may be twisted or cramped, and you can’t uncramp them. Your brain is looking for sensation from your foot, and it turns up the volume in search of it. It picks up noise and tries to make sense out of it.
At first, this doesn’t hurt, but as time goes by, the cut nerves in your stump try to grow back down into your leg. They send out tiny fibers, and these fibers have nowhere to go. They get all tangled up. They send impulses to your brain: an itch here, a tingle there. For the rest of your life, your nerves will try to grow into your leg, and will be unable to, because it’s gone. You may interpret these commendable efforts as pain.
The jungle ahead looked as though something heavy had been dragged through it. There was a gunner, Ed remembered. The guy had been covering Ed, running right alongside of him. He had been hit first, before Ed, and that must be him, dragging himself through the jungle, crushing leaves into the mud. Ed was following his path. Where are we headed, he wondered.
The funniest thing about the jungle was that it was made up of giant houseplants. Ed’s mom had worried over her philodendrons, pinching them, watering them, feeding them, and here they were all over the trees. The damn philodendrons had trunks, for Pete’s sake. They were holding him back as he tried to crawl forward. Houseplants holding him back. You had to laugh, really.
You also had to keep your head down. Keep moving. It had been so hard to start crawling, mustn’t stop. Get rid of anything that keeps you from crawling. Ed unhooked his cartridge belt and pushed it to one side. Pack long since gone. He had had it that morning, hadn’t he? He had dug himself a foxhole last night, and he was still covered with mud from that, and mud from crawling, and mud from mud.
He still had his canvas wallet, with his pocket sketchbook and a colored photo of Katie. Yesterday he had lost the silver Sacred Heart medal that Katie sent him. He and his buddy Dick were washing at the beach: a salt-water bath, but better than none. He noticed right away that the medal had slipped off, and he and Dick dived for it for an hour. No luck. It was just a piece of silver, it held no protection in itself. But he had felt awful about losing it, and here he was, shot. He could feel the wallet still buttoned into his pocket. He was not going to lose that picture. He was not going to lose his sketches. He was going to crawl out of there.
Ed wasn’t crawling now, though. He was sitting at a table in a big, warm kitchen, eating dinner, and his leg, the one he didn’t have, was acting up. It seemed to have a life of its own, but it wasn’t even there. When he needed the leg — to run, to jump, to dance, to play football — it wasn’t there, but when it hurt and gave him trouble, it was all there, hot as molten metal, and it wouldn’t hold still. It jumped, it ran, it danced by itself. He grabbed it and tried to hold it quiet. The table shook.
None of the other people at the table looked at him, as he shook and held onto the stump of his leg. Was he even there? Katie was sitting at the table. She was blonde: maybe she was coloring her hair. She kept getting older. She must have been nearly forty. Still beautiful, he thought, but she looked… weathered. There were children, four of them now: the two older ones that he’d seen before, plus a little girl with a dutchboy bob and a baby in a high chair. Mrs. Kelly, Katie’s mother, was there, too. They were aware of him, he knew, but they looked elsewhere — at the baby, at the dog, at their plates. One of the kids had her nose buried in a magazine. At the dinner table. Times change: his dad would never have allowed that.