And the last she would ever have.
Sunday was a better day.
He rose early, venturing outdoors for the first time in two days. There was an ominous ground swell running, with waves breaking over the bar and banking up in their eagerness to strike the shore, the outer ripples of some distant Caribbean storm.
He stripped off and fought his way through the break, struggling against the pain in his ribs. It had diminished little in the past week, though the bruising had lost some of its lividity, dulling to a grayish purple tinged with yellow. He still welcomed the injury inflicted by Ellis Hulse’s boot. It had offered him the perfect excuse to lay off the fishing for a while, to be alone, no need to keep up appearances of normality.
That changed a few hours later, when Rollo showed up fresh from church in his ill-fitting suit and clutching a Bible. He had brought some aspirins with him to speed along Conrad’s recovery.
Rollo had spent the past week crewing for his father on the
No doubt they’d had him working the winch, or below decks in the engine room manning the old Fairbanks- Morse, awaiting instructions from the pilothouse. Nothing too challenging. Never anything too challenging.
Conrad announced that he’d be ready for action by Wednesday, and Rollo visibly came to life, rolling a smoke and demanding a coffee.
‘We’ll be into them Wednesday, get us a bunch, you’ll see,’ he said when he finally left, taking off towards the beach.
Conrad watched him all the way.
Rollo turned as he crested the frontal dune, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. ‘Looks fishy to me!’ he yelled.
Conrad waved, and he was gone.
Wednesday was pushing it, but it would force him to dig himself out of the irremediable gloom into which he had sunk. Something needed to change, and fast. He’d taken to muttering to himself as he shuffled around the house like a soul in limbo.
Maybe things would be different once he’d visited her. He felt ready to. That in itself was something. He checked his watch. Still too early. The cemetery would be milling with people paying tribute to their dead.
By midday they should all be gone, driven indoors by the building heat.
He parked on Three Mile Harbor Road and walked the last couple of hundred yards. He was wearing fawn twill pants and the white shirt reserved for special occasions. He had even dug out some lace-up shoes.
He felt foolish in the clothes, and no doubt he looked it too. He knew Lillian would have laughed at him, but somehow he didn’t care. In fact it brought a smile to his lips, picturing the glint of playful mockery in her eyes.
The cemetery was deserted except for a scrappy-looking dog loping about, forlornly nosing the ground as if aware that all those bones were down there but far beyond its reach. Bouquets of fresh flowers laid that morning studded the ground like colorful pins in a green felt board. The sun was high, intense, and it cast his shadow black on the ground at his feet.
Her grave was buried beneath a deep blanket of wreaths and other flowers, and it struck him that even now they were shielded from each other. He clamped his eyes shut in the hope of blotting out the scene. But dim shapes took form in the darkness, coalescing to produce her features, set in repose, a low, gloomy light cutting across them. Her wide-spaced eyes doomed to collapse in on themselves, her lips to draw back into a hideous rictus grin, her tongue to protrude, the flesh of her barely freckled cheeks predestined to blacken, blister then liquefy, consumed from within by the very organisms that had struggled so hard to ensure the body’s survival.
He knew what happened to the body after death, he knew that decay was in fact life for a multitude of other creatures. He knew that the deeper you buried a corpse, the slower the process of decomposition. He knew that in the heat of summer it raced ahead, and in the bitter chill of a mountain winter it ground almost to a halt. He knew all this because he had gone out at night to recover the bodies of his fallen comrades.
They were rarely whole. Often days would have passed before any attempt at recovery could be made, time enough for the scavengers that inhabited the dense Italian macchia to feast away at leisure, to drag off the limbs, or bits of limbs, cleaved away by a mortar blast or a burst of fire from a German 88.
Had his unit not been operating behind enemy lines for so much of the time, there would have been others to perform the grisly task. But the boys from the Grave Registration Service were deemed lacking in the necessary skills to move around undetected in enemy territory, and only one of their number had been assigned to Conrad’s Company. He was a young corporal from southern Illinois by the name of Harold Bunt, although everyone called him the Professor because he’d broken off his studies to go to war.
The Professor’s orders were to co-ordinate the retrieval and dispatch of the dead from the safety of their own lines, assembling the bodies as best he could, then shipping the canvas-wrapped packages back down the mountain on mules. He soon ignored his orders, though, extending his remit to assist in the recovery of the dead. He did this selflessly, aware of the terrible toll it was taking on the soldiers.
To the Professor, those weren’t his buddies out there, they were just KIAs, brave men killed in action who’d earned the right to a decent burial and a small white cross with their name on it. Circumstances permitting, he extended the same respect to the enemy, burying their dead in shallow graves where they’d fallen, to be recovered at some future date by either side, depending on which way the territorial pendulum swung. This courtesy was the cause of some surprise to the fighting men, boiling over into anger on a couple of occasions. But the Professor assured them it was customary practice for the men of the Grave Registration Service and he saw no reason to abandon it now.
He kept to himself, eating alone, wary of forming friendships, conscious that his role made him a figure of some suspicion. As a scout, Conrad came to know him better than most, guiding him over the hostile terrain on nocturnal forays whenever there was a lull in the fighting. Nothing pleased the Professor more than sneaking past an enemy foxhole—hearing the voices, smelling the cigarette smoke—in order to bring a KIA home. It amused him to imagine the look on the Germans’ faces the next morning when they discovered the body was gone.
For Conrad these missions were a welcome change from the normal demands of a night patrol. It was a relief to just slip by in the darkness, no obligation to draw his knife, drop into the hole and silence the enemy’s
