“Brodie…” The first hint of apprehension.
His lips moved but no words came.
“Brodie,” she said, lowering her head a trifle, staring at him, her head cocked slightly to one side.
He touched her cheek and realized his hand was shaking.
“Something’s bad,” she said, and tears flooded her eyes. She put two fingers against his lips. “I don’t want to hear anything bad. Please.”
“Isabel… I’ve got to… I have to go away.”
“What do you mean, ‘go away’? Where? Where are you going?”
He looked at the ground. He could not stand to look at her face, at the tears edging down to her chin.
He shook his head. “I don’t know. But it’s not fair for me to stay here.”
“Fair! Fair! ”
“Look at me, Isabel. Please. I got nothing. All the clothes I own wouldn’t fill the corner of a closet. I got four hundred dollars in a cigar box and that’s all I got in the world…”
“Stop it!” she said.
“Ben loves you. He can give you everything you want.”
“I don’t care!” she cried, tears streaming down her cheeks. “I love you, and I know you love me.”
“I left a note for Mr. Eli and Miss Madeline, and one for Ben. I’m leaving, Isabel. I’m leaving San Pietro valley for good. It’s best for everybody. Especially you.”
“It is not best for me,” she said, anguish accenting every syllable. “You care about Ben, you care about the Gormans. Don’t you care about me?”
“We’re just kids,” he said harshly. “It’s puppy love.”
“That’s what you think? Puppy love? ” She was crying hard now. “Is that all I mean to you?”
He couldn’t stand the hurt. He reached out to her but she backed away, into the shadows at the back of the greenhouse. She sat down on the hard earth.
“You’re just throwing me away.” Her voice was like a whispered wail, a cry in the night, her grief so deep that Brodie did not know how to respond.
“I gotta go,” he said in a voice he didn’t even recognize. “It’s best for everybody.”
“How do you know what’s best for me?” she moaned. “I thought you loved me. I thought you would protect me and…” Her voice dissolved into more tears.
Jesus, he thought, why won’t she understand?
“My heart hurts,” she sobbed. “It will never stop hurting. You’ve turned my dreams into nightmares.”
“Isabel…”
“If you’re going, then go. Get away from me.”
He stood his ground for a few moments and then backed down the aisle to the door. He couldn’t tell her there was a crushing hurt in his heart, too.
As he turned the doorknob, her voice came to him from the darkness.
“I read a poem once,” she said in a voice tortured with misery. “It said ‘First love is forever.’ And I believed it.”
He ran from the greenhouse, ran to Cyclone, jumped on his back, and rode down the path, away from the Hoffman house and around Grand View and down the precipitous cliff road from the Hill to Eureka.
The town had gone crazy. It was like New Year’s Eve. The bars were full, men were staggering in the street, shooting their guns into the air. Some of the girls were dancing on the wooden sidewalk. The news was out about Riker.
Light from town spilled out on the beach, and Brodie leaned back and smacked Cyclone on the rump. He dashed off down the beach.
“Go, boy, go!” Brodie yelled, as the stallion galloped in and out of the surf as he loved to do. They raced past the town, and then Brodie wheeled him around, and they trotted back to the swimming beach. Brodie slid off his back and for the next two hours he talked to the horse, emptying his heart out, explaining to him why he was leaving.
He understands. I can see it in his eyes. He knows I gotta do this.
The wagon to end-o’-track left at 5:00 a.m. And the weekly supply train to San Francisco left at seven. The sun was a scarlet promise on the horizon when he led Cyclone up to the sheriff’s office and tied him to the hitching post. He threw a saddlebag over each shoulder and went into the office. The deputy was half-asleep at his desk.
“What you doin’ down here this time a day?”
“I gotta go out of town,” Brodie answered.
He laid an envelope on the desk.
“My horse is tied up outside and I got a note here for Buck. I’m asking him to take the horse back up to the Gormans for me.”
“Hope the hell nobody steals him,” the deputy said, looking out the window at Cyclone. “I’ll keep an eye on him.”
“Thanks.”
The wagon was loaded with hungover iron workers when Brodie climbed aboard. A few minutes later, the driver cracked his whip and they started up the hill. As the wagon reached the crest, Brodie looked back at the town where he was born and where his life had changed forever in the years since the death of his mother. A great sadness flowed over him. Then he turned his back on Eureka and dismissed it.
Good-bye forever and good riddance, he said to himself, and he knew he would never return.
Fate had other plans for Brodie Culhane.
1918
In the spring of 1917, a dispirited President Woodrow Wilson, the liberal idealist who had ardently resisted America’s intervention in the war in Europe, was finally forced to admit the inevitable: America was about to be drawn into the most savage conflict in the history of warfare. In 1914, nine European nations were embroiled in what would become known as the Great War, a conflict unparalleled in its brutality. On one side, France, Italy, Great Britain, and Russia, among others. Opposing them, Germany, Turkey, and the Ottoman Empire.
It quickly became apparent that World War I was to become a campaign of mud, trenches, barbed wire-and machine guns, the first time the deadly weapon was used in a major war.
By the time the United States entered the conflict, the trench war was approaching its grotesque and barbaric finale…
A thick fog laced with the smell of death lay like a shroud over the battlefield. Then there was a howl in the sky as a star shell arced and burst, briefly revealing a ghastly sight. Silhouetted in the heavy mist was a wasteland of staggering destruction. Trees, fragmented by constant artillery shelling, were reduced to leafless, shattered stalks. Fence posts wrapped in rusting barbed wire stood like pathetic sentinels over trenches that snaked and crisscrossed the terrain. Shell holes, surrounded by mounds of displaced earth, were filled with rancid rainwater. There was no grass, nothing green or verdant, just brown stretches of mud, body parts dangling from endless stretches of wire, abandoned weapons, and corpses frozen in a tragic frieze of death.
And there were the rats, legions of rats, scurrying back and forth in the no-man’s-land, feasting on the dead.
A few hundred yards beyond the haze-veiled scene, the Germans were gathering for another attack-there had been dozens through the years. The star shell burned out and darkness enveloped the shell-spotted battlefield.
Brodie Culhane was chilled even though it was early September. His boots and socks were soaked and he had removed his puttees, which were in rags. Damp fog wormed through his clothing and clung to his skin. The machine-gun nest he had set up had an inch of water in it from a rainstorm the night before. There wasn’t a spot of dry ground for miles in any direction. It made him think of Eureka. All around him was mud. Mud as demanding as quicksand, sucking a man’s legs down to the knees with every step. As he stared into the darkness, another star shell burst overhead, illuminating the grim no-man’s-land that lay between his machine-gun line and the
