The first thing Lucien noticed inside the hospital was how warm it was. The Americans did not have to stint on coal. The second thing he noticed was the smell. Part of it was sharp and medicinaclass="underline" the top layer, so to speak. Under it lay faint odors he knew from the barnyard-blood and dung and, almost but not quite undetectable, a miasma of bad meat.
“You wait here,” the nurse told him, pointing to a bench. “I’ll get the doctor to see you.”
“Merci,” he said, his injured leg stretched out straight in front of him. A couple of soldiers, young men hardly older than Charles, his older son, sat there, too. The wounded man who’d been brought in on the stretcher wasn’t in sight. They were probably working on him already.
One of the soldiers asked, “You speak English, pal?” At Lucien’s nod, the youngster asked, “You get that from a shell?” He pointed to the wound.
“No, from to chop the wood.” Lucien gestured to eke out his words. The American nodded in turn. Seeing him polite, Lucien asked, “And you-what have you?”
“Flunked my shortarm inspection,” the young soldier answered, flushing. That didn’t mean anything to Lucien. The Yank noticed. “This hoor up in Riviere-du-Loup, she gave me the clap,” he explained. Lucien had heard that phrase in his own Army days. Inside, he laughed. He had a more honorable wound than the American.
“Well, well, what have we here?” That was good French, from the mouth of Dr. Leonard O’Doull. He wore a white coat with a few reddish stains on it. Looking severely at Lucien, he said, “Monsieur Galtier, if you want to visit me here, it is not necessary to do yourself an injury first.”
“I shall bear that in mind, thank you,” Lucien said dryly. “It was, you must believe me, not the reason for which I hurt myself.”
“Of that I have no doubt,” O’Doull replied. He undid just enough of the bandage to see how big the wound was, and whistled softly when he did. “Yes, you were wise to come.”
“It was my wife’s idea,” Galtier said.
“Then you were wise to listen to her. As long as one in the family is wise, things go well. I shall have to show you how neatly I can sew.” He turned and spoke to a nurse in English too rapid for Lucien to follow. She nodded and hurried off.
“I am glad you are the one to help me,” the farmer said.
“I speak French,” O’Doull answered, “and you are the father of my friend.” Did he hesitate a little before that last word? Lucien couldn’t tell. O’Doull went on, “This is a duty and an honor both, then.” The nurse came back with a tray full of medical paraphernalia. The doctor went on, “It is an honor that will be painful for you, though, monsieur. I am going to give you an injection to keep you from getting lockjaw. This will not hurt much now, but may make you sore and sick later. We must roll up your sleeve-”
Next to the fire in Galtier’s leg, the injection was a fleabite. Then O’Doull said, “And now we must disinfect the wound. You understand? We must keep it from rotting, if we can.” Lucien nodded. He’d seen hurts go bad.
O’Doull poured something that smelled almost like applejack into the wound. Galtier gasped and bit his lip and crossed himself. If the wound was a fire, O’Doull had just poured gasoline on it. “’Osti,” the farmer said weakly. Tears blurred his vision.
“I do regret it very much, but it is a necessity,” O’Doull said. Lucien managed to nod. “Now to sew it up,” the doctor told him.
Before O’Doull could get to work with needle and thread, another nurse came in. That was how Galtier thought of her till she exclaimed, “Papa!”
“Oh, bonjour, Nicole,” he said. He’d seen her in the white-and-gray nurse’s uniform with the Red Cross on the right breast before, of course, but here he’d looked at the uniform instead of the person inside it. Embarrassed, he muttered, “The foolish axe slipped.”
“Nothing that can’t be fixed,” O’Doull said, fitting fat thread to a large needle. “Do hold still, if you’d be so kind. Oh, very good. I have seen soldiers, M. Galtier, who gave far more trouble with smaller wounds.”
“I have been a soldier,” Lucien said quietly. He counted the sutures: twenty-one. O’Doull bandaged the wound thicker and more tightly than Marie had done. Lucien dipped his head. “Merci beaucoup.”
“Pas de quoi,” O’Doull answered. “I will give you a week’s supply of sterile wound dressings. If it’s still oozing after that much time, come in and see me and we will disinfect it again. Let your sons do the work for a while. They think they’re men now. Work will show whether or not they are right. We’ll take you home in an ambulance, if you like.”
“No,” Lucien said. “Marie will think I have died.”
“Ah. Well, let me get you a proper walking stick, then.” O’Doull did that himself. The stick with which he returned was so severely plain, it was obviously government issue. That the U.S. government manufactured large numbers of walking sticks for the anticipated use of wounded men said more plainly than words what sort of war this was.
But, as Lucien made his slow, hobbling way home, he despised the Americans less than he had before. Almost everyone at the hospital had been good to him, even though he was a civilian, and an enemy civilian at that. No one had asked him for a penny. He was not used to feeling anything but scorn for the occupiers, but he prided himself on being a just man. “It could be,” he said, slowly, wonderingly, “that they are-that some of them are-human beings after all.”
“I wish Pa would come home again,” George Enos, Jr., said.
“Me, too!” Mary Jane said loudly. She didn’t say no as much as she had when she’d first turned two, for which Sylvia Enos heartily thanked God. Now her daughter tried to imitate George, Jr., in everything she did. Most of the time, that wasn’t bad at all. Every so often-as when she piddled standing up-it proved unfortunate.
“I wish he would, too, dears,” Sylvia said, and wondered just how much she meant that. No time to worry about it now. “Come on, both of you. We have to get you to Mrs. Coneval, or I’ll be late for work.”
They followed her down the hall to Brigid Coneval’s apartment. Several other children were in there already, and making a racket like a bombardment on the Maryland front.
“A fine mornin’ to you, Mrs. Enos,” Mrs. Coneval said after she’d opened the door. “I’ll see you tonight. Come in, lambs.”
Sylvia went downstairs and headed for the trolley stop. Newsboys hopped up and down on their corners, trying to stay warm. The sun wouldn’t be up for a little while yet, and the air had a wintry snap in it, though Indian summer had lingered till only a few days before.
Nobody was shouting about great naval battles in the Atlantic, nor about a destroyer lost at sea. With the war now in its third year, Sylvia knew how little that meant. A sunken destroyer was the small change of war, hardly worth a headline. Anything might have happened to the Ericsson, and she wouldn’t know about it till she found the paragraph on page five.
If she bought a paper at all, that is. These days, she didn’t do that every day, as she had when George was serving on the river monitor. She walked past the newsboys today, too, and stood waiting for the trolley without a Globe.
“Men,” she muttered as the streetcar clanged up to the stop. She threw a nickel in the farebox. An old man stood up to give her his seat. She thanked him, hardly noticing he was of the sex she’d just condemned for existing.
She wished George had been either a better person or a better liar. She would have preferred the first, but the other might have done in a pinch. For him not to have the need to visit a whore (and a nigger whore at that, she thought, appalled by his lack of taste as well as his lack of judgment) would have been best. If he had gone and done it, she wished she’d never found out.