Drink for the Thirst to Come Read online

  Wouldn’t have been right. Señor Temoco’s by rights. Shit, he’d wanted to tell her about the jack stamp on the Walk; always wanted to tell someone but hell that was just an old folk’s tale. Sometimes you had to step back a little, see how much one thing or another… something to think on later when you couldn’t do nothing else. And maybe someday when he was old, he’d find that hole, the Big Hole where were lights and movies and…

  He was slipping, now. In his sleep, he fingered the cell. Keyed the number, the number. Home. What would he ask? If someone answered? What should… He almost couldn’t keep the days, the times he’d had, in mind—and he wanted to! No! Christ. That’s the thing. Close it all! Pray, maybe. The dead cell, the silence of home filled him. He held on. If he could remember something else about how he’d spent… He’d seen the Wet. Seen the Hollows… Seen Walkin’ Will… No, no. He jHeHust told of him. And he’d had a choice? Not so good that… He’d had a job. He’d said what? Old Will’d said, “Drink! Drink for the thirst to come!” What the hey? There was something else that could’ve meant! No, he thought, no. Don’t sleep. You sleep, you’ll dream. Those dreams of the living, of Dolph Station and Jaycee Dogton, Tex, Marty, the others, the living. By then, day had bled away and Chris Harp of Johnny’s Icehouse slept. The dream-day was bright blue and gold and went on, oh God, forever, a summer day and mild, mild weather, a day like no other…

  ROOT SOUP, WINTER SOUP

  Cordelia and trees. She saw in the still water of the pond her silly old face and no one else. That funny old face smiled up. She wiggled her finger in the cold water and Cordelia was alone, excepting the trees. Leaves floated lazy, half on top, half under the water, hardly drifting. Afternoon air was cool, heading to cold. Cold nights were coming.

  Soon them leaves’ll be cotched up and froze-in, she knew. Cotched good. The pond would be an ice sheet, then covered with fallen things, leaves, acorns and little branches, more leaves and other goods as fell. A person don’t know it’s there might could fall right in, she thought. Well, she knew it was there. The critters that wandered there for a drink knew it too. They would have to tap, tap by hoof or claw on the icy shell to water there. Soon after they’d eat snow or perish to the thirst. She knew that.

  The pond water stilled and there was that old Cordelia face again, minnows swimming through. Why, there she was. Couldn’t see the scars, not like when she looked in a peering glass. No. Could see how one eye was a little sagged, could see her funny crookback nose, could see…

  “Oh fuss!” she said. What’s the point? His season’s over. He is gone and done with and good riddance to him. He who’d given her that eye, that nose, that curly lip.

  She stirred the water again, chased the face away. Her minnies scattered. She laughed.

  Walking, Cordelia gathered the wooly hunting jacket around herself. Real cold coming. Time, indeed, for her root soup, her winter soup. She looked forward to the good smells as filled her cabin, winters. She wanted to run and do it quick, hug the comfort, the wonder of the forever pot, the pot going down with eating, the pot filled up again with bits added, an essence from the stock pot, more chopped roots and other pieces from the cellar. The forever pot of root soup, God’s good winter warmth.

  Another year and no one found her morel patch, where it lay sprouting. The season’s ’shrooms had been fine and plentiful, big headed, tender and clean-grown through the rot. And all hers for taking. A time gone, someone had felled a stand of tree where the morels sprouted now. Someone building, maybe. Someone who give up and moved on, she figured. Maybe a long time gone. New growth had sprouted since and filled around the wasted logs.

  Good. This season hundreds more morels had spread across the moldering stumps, between old cut-and-fallen logs. A thousand more had spread onto the damp forest floor where decay made a wet and fragrant bed.

  She’d shown that hunter, but none had found the place on their own, not a one. None would.

  The season was over. Cold come, picking done, she thought. Even these last smelled good as she added them to her sack. Long things, they were, thick-brained and heavy with wet.

  The roadway parsnips she’d cultivated another place back in the deep woods. They, too, had a good season. Each fat root had burrowed way down. Rich they were within the earth, their long finger-ends reached deep; deep hairy roots spread wide, held place in the ground. They didn’t want to come up and out, but up and out they’d come and she’d stocked her cellar.

  Cordelia loved the burlap’s prickle on her shoulder, like a game bag swinging with her walk, heavy with her potatoes, onions, her carrots and ’snips. Near home, now, with the last of the season’s sweet things heavy in her bag, Cordelia couldn’t wait to make a start. The chopping was first, a long part of it, but the heart of winter soup. Scrubbing, making it clean for the stock. The careful scraping, paring and cutting, the pieces shaped just right for the pot, the broth, the savor of the thing, each thickness, just right to release its flavor.

  God loved good soup and Cordelia made a good, good winter soup.

  At home, now, she stoked the stove with seasoned logs, last year’s cut. She built sweet, laid the bed for slow, steady heat. She watched as the old logs, the large ones that had lain in porchway shade through summer and early fall, caught flame by their ends and barks. Daddy-leggers scampered into the fire’s winking hell, spiders twitched and ran, old cocoons opened wiggling. Not nice, maybe, but all those little lives, she figured, added to the savor, gave favor to the scent, the earthy scent of God’s good soup.

  She chopped into the dark of night; she scraped and parboiled, shaved, halved and quartered. The scrapings, the bits, heads and tails, thin parsnip fingers, she added to the stock pot. She crushed the herbs to free the essence and added them to the mix. Then one more thing.

  The black iron shears hung heavy on her apron tie. She held her lantern ahead. The picnic basket swung free, crooked in her other arm, the busted-withered one. A bottle of whiskey sloshed, safely nested in a mess of torn rag and sphagnum. Fall leaves hushed in the dark; the shush, shush, shush of her footsweeps spread among the trees. Night critters went quiet as she passed. She stepped off a hundred paces up the hill and counted a little more to pass the pond. Another count took her beyond her ’shrooming patch. Except for her, the forest was still.

  She didn’t need light for the walk. Light was needed for the work. Down the cellar, in the dark of the cellar, the root cellar, was where light was wanted.

  The oak plank door lay across the hole in the hillock. A Civil War lock hung cold against the boards and hasp. Covered with leaves, it was, and near invisible, days, part of the world at night.

  The lock snapped open. As she raised the door the earth smell from below breathed over her. Earth and more. She descended the four steps. The light led her, then came the noise. Iron against rock. The clatter cut the silence, a body moaned and rattled his iron bonds against his rock, his earthbound rock.

  She hadn’t known him, just a huntsman as came walking through the woods. Lost. Asking. She offered a drink of whiskey and pointed a way. He came back, still lost. She said she’d lead, then asked his help, A little thing, please. So good to be a help. God gave to those who helped. Some more whiskey and he was in chains. Like that!

  Those chains and more held him now to that rock below the world in her cellar.

  No man she knew. Her light caught him, now. He was white like a grub. And naked. She’d left him blankets, but no clothes to wear. He hung naked, hugging his rock. He looked up. He cried.

  Why, yes, oh Lord. Yes. He did live underground like one of them things as wiggled under the rotted logs that fed her morels. She had to chuckle.

  His head was long and thin. Not much face to him, narrow hook nose, a thin yellow beard she hardly could see in the yellow of her lantern. His head was flat on top. His teeth were busted, crooked. He cried and tried to stand. He stood and dangled. She laughed again. Up top on the world, he wouldn’t have cried.

  But she
had things to do. She rolled the whiskey jar to him then sat to watch. It took a time. He yelled. He cried. He made to throw the jar at her head.

  She laughed. Sweetly. Cordelia had a pretty laugh. Funny face, but a pretty laugh.

  The man blubbered. He shouted, “Why...?” Other things, but the heart of it was, “Why?”

  “Drink,” she said, “an’ it won’t hurt.”

  By and by, he drank. Long pulls, tears coming between gulps and runny-nosed blubbers.

  In less than an hour the screams were only hoarse bubbles. She clipped three fingers and some hand meat from him; a couple toes from his left foot. He screamed and bled. She caught the blood in a Mason jar and capped it. She wrapped his hand and foot with sphagnum and left more rags.

  She almost left, then returned and scissored off a rasher of fat from his gut, the flabby place. He screamed and bubbled but by then it was over. Leave the man-oysters for later, she figured. Take them now, he’ll lose spirit. Men, so silly and so sweet, she thought, believe in their hearts—way down—their lives, their God Spirit comes from there, down the root and sack between their legs.

  She left a few more rags and the bottle.

  The blood smelled rich. The thick warmth pillowed the earthy scent of the cellar. She hoped he’d be all right. She liked the blood-aroma of this one.

  Later that night the cries came all the way to her cabin. Sobs and curses. She heard even as the pot came boiling, even later, so much later, the screams. Long far’way echoes, as from a mountain across a valley, all the world’s trees between.

  Must hurt, she thought, stirring soup. Aww, hurt don’t last. She knew that.

  Night was over and light was through the trees, God peeking white through black, He touched His ground with His Mighty Eye.

  The pot had bubbled night-long. The perfect heat she’d made had concentrated the liquor of the soup; thin soup was now thick soup, rich soup, winter soup, dark and earthy. Smelled so pretty now.

  Cordelia took another swipe with her spoon. Dark broth swirled among the roots and other things. She breathed its rich essence as she stirred. Turnips, potatoes, the spinning joint-bones made dull taps against the iron pot, the carrots and parsnips swirled. She tasted with her nose. Mmmm.

  The cabin air had gone winter. Just that one night. Imagine. Fire warmth, and blessed-God quiet filled the place. Her room was fragrant with chopped wood, spices, and the bite of soup and winter.

  Excepting the morning whippoorwill, the woods were quiet. The cries were gone, all gone.

  She added the morels last, fried up in the fat. She tasted the tip of the spoon. She sucked a hot spray of broth, her first savor of Winter Soup.

  It was good.

  After dark she’d maybe take a jar to him in the cellar. A little. She wanted him to last. It was going to be a long, long winter. She felt it in her bones.

  WIND SHADOWS

  “We owe respect to the living; to the dead we owe nothing but the truth.” —Voltaire

  2:50 Ack Emma. Crickets. Finally, morning birds among the crickets’ stillness.

  3:10 Ack Emma. General Plumer said, “By damn.”

  Bill thought of the shamblers in the dark as he and Welly groped for the tunnel lift.

  Then, someone closed the electric gap, a spark gasped. Off went nineteen charges, one voice, a million and more pounds of HE. In friendly trenches up and down the lines, nine and a half miles along, the ground shivered, compressed, shattered. Men fell to earth, the earth quaked, collapsed, ears burst. A half-mile across No Man’s Land, a ridge nine and a half miles long rose slowly—or so it seemed, so vast was it, horizon-to-horizon—and rose and rose and rose.

  “The mouf of hell!” someone said.

  Beneath the German lines, nine and a half miles of them, nineteen mouths of hell opened wide and the 3 a.m. dawn darkness vaporized in roaring light.

  Across the Channel, 130 miles from the Messines Ridge, windows rattled in Maida Vale and Mayfair. In Downing Street, tables set for breakfast quivered, crystal tinkled against crystal. The shiver of silver against silver was deadened by thick white linen. Eyes opened.

  3:10 a.m. and some moments. Along nine and a half miles of British lines, whistles blew and the men were over the top advancing through the still shattering dust. Fifteen seconds after zero, the cloud continued to roil upward. Germans, parts of Germans, machines, weapons, and other things began to rain among advancing troops. There were casualties. A blockhouse big as a railcar fell among them. The creeping barrage leading the men toward the blazing craters faltered here and there, shells fell short. There were casualties. It was the beginning of the day. Some men never remembered dying.

  The man remained on deck for the Channel crossing, Dover to Calais. He might have been Old Bill of the cartoons, Old Bill himself. He had been, thirteen years before. They all had been Old Bills, all of them decrepit, stinking beyond belief, scratched raw, sucked by louse, dined on by rat. Old Bills by the hundreds of thousands, 1914 to 1918, citizens of those temporary lands: Verdun, “Wipers,” Passchendale, the Argonne and the Somme and others, worlds without end, amen.

  Thirteen years on, Old Bill stood on the deck of a Channel ferry. France rose from the morning ahead. He was old, but who could tell? Bill was old at seventeen, he was. He was old from waiting, from seeing too much or burning too brightly. At eighteen, his eyes were craters in his face, sun-creases radiant from them, a walrus mustache curtained a grin going toothless. That was a boy’s grin grown too sure of death and worse. At nineteen his skin was waterlogged and scabbed, hands cracked, feet shocking. But ah, those cheeks, scraped to the skin by razors two-years dull, morning stubble softened by cold water and equal parts mud, old bone, blood, piss and shit, those bright red child’s cheeks put the lie to his age. All their sweet young faces, plucked whisker-by-whisker for morning turnout to quarters: inspection on the firing step, heads down facing No Man’s Land, rifle at the ready. Ready for the Hun (should the Hun come today) and, worse, the Lieutenant (who came every day). Worse yet, the Sarge, who was always there, taking names (“You two! I’M LOOKING AT YOU! You and you shall walk the Dixie down to ’Bert today and fetch the water back! Chop-chop!” Sarge screamed. “Can’t the niggers hop it, Sarge?” Welly’d said. “Their turn, I’m sure…” Sarge’s mouth engulfed Welly’s nose and he give him what for: “The Nig-gers? Them Niggers ain’t yours to detail. Sing me not that hopeful song, you horrid little man! Them nig-nogs got another job, a task of never-you-mind, you dirty bugger! Now you two ’op it, you and you!” And Welly and Bill made the two-mile saunter from the front, down the zigzag to the reserve, guessing all the way—this time lucky—where and when to duck and wait the sniper’s eye, then another mile rearward along the muddied duckboards and into Albert. “Whatcher fink, Old Bill?” Welly said, pumping water at the well. He pointed at Albert’s pocked and potted steeple. The Madonna sagged, barely hanging on, her arms raised, baby God held at 9 o’clock in the shell-singing sky. “Fink she’s gonna topple or fink she’ll stay? What say ther, Bill?” And Bill, he’d had no idea except to reckon if the steeple fell one day, it would fall on him, a cert. Him, detailed by the Sarge to sit beneath and “wait for it, wait for it!” Then, with pranged and tinkered Dixie full, Bill and Welly made the same miles back to the line, ducking snipers at the crossroads of their luck/his skill and, slipping on the muck-soft duckboards—Welly remembering at one place along the way, “I sawr him go, Bill. Ol’ Ned. One minute there, then zing he scratches at a rabbit in his pants and orf the boards he slips and down he goes into that ther shellhole—that’n ther—and thas the last anyone seen Ol’ Ned, drown he was wiff all his kit. You remember Ned?” And Old Bill laughed and laughed remembering Ned. Welly, too. And returning with the Dixie barely half sloshing full of water. “GOD Damn you two! I’m watching you!” Sarge says at the nearly empty Dixie can.)

  Ahead, in France and beyond, more memories. Inspection mornings: faces scraped, clothes dried and brushed as mudless as could be, their weapons
ready.

  “Wait for it. Wait for IT!” Waiting for the Sarge’s whistle and the call to stand down. (“You there!” Sarge yelled, plain and simple this time, no trench poetry to color it. “Munger! Keep away from that Loop, you! Hans’ll have you in his sights and I’ll be down another fool!”) Waiting for it. Waiting for it.

  Then the call, “Staaand. DOWN.”

  Morning. Each morning: cold water tea and the bouquet of shit, of all things redolent of the body, life steeped in piss and blood. Trench life, a heady marinade of rotted corpse brewed in No Man’s Land.

  “It’s between,” Welly said. He was peeking with Munger through the sniper’s loop toward the German lines. “Between is what that is,” he whispered, looking at the sea of bloodied khaki that stretched from here to there. “No shelter, no trench, just holes and holes and holes blown in holes.”

  Bill peeked. Some khaki bits moved but never for long. Sometimes the bodies were blown and buried by artillery, then resurrected from the muck and water-filled holes, their parts pounded, mixed and buried again by the shells. Over it all a spreading mist of night and death, gassy, gangrenous, heaving or jostled by amyl nitrate and steel. Here and there, tiny sparks of life flickered, or here and there they screamed. There was that. Since One July, screams licked day and night. The screams were of men and (he still had to laugh) horses. Horses! Mud-drowned horses. The cavalry, up for one last charge, for the old century’s sake, don’tchaknow? Haig’s urge, “Soften the Hun with HE and steel, pound ’em week upon week, then a steady walk ’cross the green to the German’s lines. Who’d survive that barrage, eh? Punt a football, why don’t you lads? A prize to the first goal in Otto’s trench, eh. And, oh yes, let’s have horses. Big push, eh? Cavalry to drive through the hole, enfilade the Hun and crush him, what?”