“I can’t dig,” Rudy J. Chester says. “I am all worn out.”
Normally this kind of statement would earn sneers and taunts from the others, but the truth is Rudy J. speaks for all of them.
“Let me ask you something,” Rio says. “If the Krauts suddenly opened up on us, would you have the energy to dig then? Yeah? Then get up off the ground and dig!”
For emphasis she kicks the sole of Rudy J.’s boot. He looks as if he’s about to argue, but in the end he rises ponderously and unlimbers his entrenching tool.
“Geer!”
“Yeah?”
“I’m going to reconnoiter.”
“You want company?”
Rio shakes her head. “Make sure they dig in. I’ll get . . .” Her eye stops at Jack Stafford. Jack is a cheerful fellow normally, but he looks now to have had all the cheer drained out of him.
If anyone has to get shot . . . well, Jack is a veteran. Jack kills Germans. Whereas Molina has potential that might benefit from experience.
“Molina, you’re with me. Leave your pack. Dial and Chester will dig for you.”
Molina stands up, using her carbine as a stick. She wobbles a bit but does not complain.
“We’re going to recon that hedgerow,” Rio explains. “No talking, no bumbling around making noise. And don’t fire unless I tell you to.”
“Right, Sarge.”
They walk down the length of the platoon, passing Cat Preeling, who looks up and says, “Off to find another medal, Richlin?”
“Going for a little stroll, see what’s in that hedgerow.”
“Want company?”
“Nah, Cat, you rest up, you look like crap warmed over.”
That earns a genial raised middle finger from Cat, and Rio laughs. For the benefit of any watching Germans she makes as if she’s leaving the field, but instead she creeps along in the deep shadow of the right-hand hedge, the one separating the field from the road.
“Safety off,” Rio whispers to Molina. “But do not shoot me in the back. I will resent it.”
That last comment brings a smile to Rio’s lips. It is one of Sergeant Cole’s phrases. I will resent it. It occurs to her, not for the first time, just how much her job as sergeant involves mimicking Cole or Mackie. Perhaps that’s the way it always goes, she thinks. The art of war is learned in the doing, and the new and the untested learn from those who’ve gone before.
Just as Molina is now copying her moves.
Well . . . good. Molina had a bad start, but she recovered, and now she’s showing a willingness to learn. Probably because she embarrassed herself so badly on the beach.
They creep along, stopping to listen every few seconds when Rio raises a fist. There is distant artillery banging away somewhere. Bombers way, way up in the sky, a barely audible buzz. Is that Strand up there? She can’t help but wonder, though she is not sure she should care anymore.
Mrs. Strand Braxton, cooking and cleaning house and making sure the children wash behind their ears.
Is that even possible? Even if he still wants her?
Two pictures: Herself here, now, with her Thompson at the ready, sneaking around in the dark night of Normandy; and herself in some future life, apron around her waist, face and hair made up, pulling cookies from the oven.
Her father had gone to the Great War while her mother stayed home.
I’ve become my father rather than my mother.
No wonder Strand is troubled. What man would want to marry a woman who had cut nine notches into the stock of her now-lost rifle? What kind of housewife walked around with a koummya strapped to her leg? Was she going to have children and tell them bedtime stories of the time she spent the night shivering in a minefield with Jack Stafford? Would she tell them about Kerwin Cassel and how she had tried to hold the blood inside him and his last word was a simple “Oh?”
Did Mommy kill Germans? Yes, Mommy did.
They reach the far hedgerow and now Rio moves a few steps at a time, stopping to listen, sniffing the breeze for the smell of men hiding. But the only smells are leaves and grass and the oh-so-familiar scent of cows. And the mournful groaning of those beasts is the only sound.
After half an hour she stops and signals to Molina to come closer. “Hedgerow is clear. For now at least.”
Molina exhales as if for the first time in a long while.
“Let me ask you, Molina, where are you from?”
“Me? I’m from a little town in Northern California, you wouldn’t know it.”
“Try me.”
“It’s called Petaluma. We—”
“Petaluma! Hah. Well, I’ll be,” Rio says fondly. “I know Petaluma well. I’m from Gedwell Falls!”
The two hometowns are just an hour’s drive apart.
“Well, gosh, we’re practically neighbors,” Molina says. Then, feeling she’s being overly familiar, she adds, “Sarge.”
“What do your folks do?”
“My father is a farmhand, my mother, well, she takes in wash and bakes pies for a diner.”
“Is that so?” Rio says. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever milked a cow? Because those cows are in a bad way. I was thinking, maybe . . . since the hedgerow is clear . . .”
She sees Molina’s smile in the dark.
Most of the milk is squirted onto the grass as Rio and Molina squat beneath the cows and perform the job so familiar to both women. But both also fill their helmets with the fresh liquid and carry the warm, cream-rich goodness back to the squad.
The helmets are passed around like a communion chalice, and what’s left Rio gives to Cat. Molina immediately acquires a nickname: Milkmaid. The name could as easily be applied to Rio, but there are some things you don’t call your sergeant with the big, scary knife. At least not in her hearing.
And then the artillery barrage comes, and Rio’s squad cringes at the bottom of their freshly dug holes, praying to their various gods for deliverance, licking cream mustaches from their faces, and thinking of home.
14
FRANGIE MARR—OMAHA BEACH, NAZI-OCCUPIED FRANCE
“Hey there, short stuff!”
Frangie sits on dry sand with knees raised, head hanging down. Daylight has come in the form of filtered sunlight and intermittent soft rain. She is surrounded by the detritus of battlefield medicine: torn paper packaging from bandages, bloody gauze, syringes, and the discarded weapons and gear of those men and women who had no further use for them.
The field aid station has been set up. Doctors and nurses are ashore. And newer, fresher medics have followed the infantry breakout and are now up past the bluff.
Frangie looks up wearily, wondering who is calling to her and at the same time feeling the vague sense that she knows this voice. Then she breaks out in a wide smile.
“Well, if it isn’t Sergeant Walter Green of Iowa,” she says.
“Don’t get up,” he says. “I’ll sit.”
He’s a bit taller than Frangie and quite a bit broader, a young black man with an older face and spectacles that have earned him the nickname Professor. And some new stripes as well.
“They made you a master sergeant?” Frangie wonders.
He flops beside her, turning toward her with unmistakable pleasure, though she’s pretty sure she’s never looked more of a mess. Her sleeves, lower trouser legs, and chest are stiff with dried blood. Her boots are crusted with human excrement. She is covered in sand and dust. There is sand in her socks, her underpants, her bra, her ears, her nose, and her mouth.
“You are a sight for sore eyes,” Walter says.
“Your eyes must not be working right.”
She has the oddest feeling that she should lean forward and hug him. But that is not done, not in the army, not amid the fresh proof of carnage, and in any event not with the restrained, churchgoing Sergeant Green.
“You’ve been busy,” he says, soberly surveying her surroundings.
“I didn’t even know you were landing here,” Frangie says.
; “We weren’t. We were supposed to be about half a klick east of here, and instead they landed us two klicks west. We’ve been pinned down until now.” He shakes his head. “What a foul-up.”
That is the kindest thing Frangie’s heard anyone say about Omaha Beach. Graves registration teams are hauling bodies out of the surf, taking notes, attaching identity tags, lining the bodies up in neat rows for the trucks that will follow. The dead will be sent back out to the ships as space becomes available. And that might be a while because the beach has gone from a scene of battle to a great snorting, rumbling, clanking circus of men and matériel and vehicles. More LSTs and Higgins boats arrive with fresh soldiers, fresh tanks, food, fuel, and ammunition.
Out to sea the battle wagons still fire salvos that roar overhead like runaway subway trains, to explode on targets beyond the beach. But the imposing bluff has been taken, the pillboxes flushed out with grenades and bazookas, and the German guns at both ends of the beach have been taken. A gaggle of German prisoners marches past, disarmed and unhappy, guarded by a swaggering, gum-chewing PFC.
Frangie’s own LST has been jerry-rigged to allow the battalion’s tanks to come ashore. Soon they will form up and head inland and Frangie will follow. Her jeep has survived, as have Manning and Deacon.
“Omaha is FUBAR,” Frangie mutters, then winces because within that mordant acronym is a word she can’t imagine Walter ever saying.
But Green nods silent agreement. “I’m happy to see you’re okay.” Then, in a lower voice, like he’s saying something improper, adds, “Miss Frangie.”
“Likewise, Walter.”
Silence falls, and Frangie wonders if it is as comfortable for Walter as it is for her. She has no desire to go anywhere; that will come soon enough. She has no desire to be with anyone at this moment other than Sergeant Walter “Professor” Green.
Of Iowa.
“Wonder how long it’ll take for mail to get to us?” Walter wonders.
“You expecting something?”
He dips his head, bashful. “My mother will be sending me her homemade fudge and some socks.” He looks away. “For my birthday.”
Frangie laughs. “Birthday boy, huh?”
“June fourth, actually, couple days ago.”
“I don’t have a gift. Unless you’d like some sulfa powder.”
He grins and shakes his head. “Oh, that’s okay, Miss Frangie.”
She wants to ask him how old he is. He might be a year or two older than she is, but he might also be in his late twenties, or even early thirties. Which really doesn’t matter at all, him being just another soldier. Not even slightly her business.
How old is too old?
Too old for what, Francine Marr? Too old for what?
“I reckon mail will catch up in a week or two,” Frangie says.
“Mmm. Yeah, that’d be about right. Do you hear anything from Tulsa?”
He remembers where she’s from? Okay, maybe that’s not a big deal, maybe he just has a good memory.
“I guess it’s all still there where I left it. Obal—my baby brother—has a summer job collecting metal scrap. My dad’s still not all-the-way healthy, but I guess he’s in less pain. My mother . . .” Her mind goes to her mother and inevitably to what Harder, her big brother, told her about the conditions of his own birth. Images of her mother, practically a child at the time, a newlywed, being held down and raped by white men amid the flames of Tulsa’s black neighborhood rise unbidden but hard to dismiss.
Walter waits patiently. Frangie smiles crookedly. “I guess they’re all fine. And how is Iowa?”
“A long way away,” Green says softly. He jerks his chin. “That’s my lieutenant coming. I best stand up and look soldierly.”
“A colored officer?”
Green heaves himself up. “Yep. Unfortunately he figures he needs to win the war all by himself. Whatever color, an officer’s an officer.”
He offers his hand and helps Frangie to her feet.
“Well, I hear there’s a war on,” Walter says.
“That’s the rumor,” Frangie says.
For a long, awkward moment they look at each other, and then with a frustrated snort Walter walks away to intercept his lieutenant.
The tank battalion forms up and begins to rattle toward the draw. Rosemary Manning pulls up in the jeep. Deacon is perched on the back, legs dangling.
“You get more two-inch compresses?” Frangie asks.
Manning is a cheerful beanpole, one of those people who through no fault of their own make one think of a fish. Her eyes bulge from a narrow face. “Got it all, Doc.”
Frangie swings herself into the passenger seat, twists and surveys her goods as Manning steers in the tracks of the tanks.
White soldiers line the draw, many asleep hunched over, some playing cards or rereading old letters. Frangie is used to hearing at least a few slurs and insults, but these soldiers are exhausted and shaken up, and anyway, it doesn’t take a foot soldier long to develop a deep appreciation for any tank with a big white American star, regardless of who is driving it.
Then someone does call out, “Hey, Marr!”
It’s Rio’s friend, Jenou Castain. She’s leaning against a piece of broken concrete and writing in a tattered journal.
Frangie waves. “How you doing?”
“Time of my life,” Jenou calls back.
Frangie laughs, and they drive on.
“Who’s that white girl?” Manning asks.
“Friend of a friend,” Frangie says.
Manning glances at her. “You got white friends?”
“One or two.”
“On account of you being a medic and all.”
“Nah, I met her best friend, Richlin, when we were at basic side by side.” She smiles. “We hid in a tree from a wild boar.”
Manning clearly finds this hard to believe. “You must be from the north.”
“Tulsa, Oklahoma.”
“Tulsa! Well, I’ll be.” Manning frequently says “I’ll be,” but she has yet to say what she’ll be. “You fixing to be a nurse after the war, Doc?” There’s a distinct tone of disbelief.
Frangie is not in the mood to have anyone tell her she can’t be a doctor. It might be a pipe dream, but it’s part of what keeps her going. She deflects. “How about you?”
“Me?” Manning sighs and shifts gears with a grinding sound. “I haven’t thought about it. I suppose I’ll get married, have maybe three . . . no, four . . . little ones.”
“Are you engaged?”
Manning laughs as if this is the funniest question ever. She laughs till tears fill her eyes and she’s in danger of driving off the side of the road they have now reached. Finally she says, “Me, engaged?” She shifts gears and the transmission sounds like it’s full of gravel. “No. No, no, no. Not yet. Maybe never. I’d like to be, but boys don’t like girls taller than them. See, that’s your advantage, Doc, if you don’t mind me saying so. There aren’t many menfolk shorter than you.”
“True enough,” Frangie allows, and thinks of Walter who has a few inches on her, but would have to tilt his head back to make eye contact with Manning.
“What you might ought to do is marry that sergeant with the spectacles. Men with glasses are smart, and smart men don’t beat on their women.”
Has Manning read her mind? “Sergeant Green is just an acquaintance.”
Manning is silent for a full minute before finally saying, “If you say so.” It comes out singsong.
The column is moving uphill away from the beach, and Frangie looks back, seeing just a wedge of Omaha Beach framed by hedges. From this distance she does not see bodies, just a confused mess of trucks and boats and ships. Overhead, P-47s, their wings heavy with racks of missiles, zoom by, the whine of their engines a counterpoint to the rumble and clank of the tanks.
The road is paved here, but narrow, made to feel narrower still when they pass through hedges that rise ten feet or more on either side, nearly turning the road into a
tunnel. The column stops and starts every few minutes, but they are off the beach and definitely in France.
“I suspect we are part of history,” Frangie says, meaning it as a self-deprecating remark.
“Oh, I don’t have to suspect,” Manning says. “This is the biggest thing this old girl has ever been even close to. Before this the biggest thing I ever did was come in second in the third-grade spelling bee.”
“What tripped you up?”
Manning’s long fingers tighten on the steering wheel, and she glares. “Prestidigitation. It means something like a magic trick.” She looks sharply at Frangie. “Can you spell it?”
“I don’t think I’ll try,” Frangie says. She’s wondering how much conversation she can manage with Manning. Wondering if she should cut it off. But Frangie does not have the capacity to ignore someone, and Manning is looking at her instead of the road, so Frangie says, “P-r-e-s-d—”
“Hah! It’s ‘t.’ P-r-e-s-t-i-d-i-g-i-t-a-t-i-o-n. You’d have missed it too. Well, I’ll be. How about you, Deacon?”
“All I can spell is tired,” Deacon says. “T-i-r-e-d. I can use it in a sentence if you want.”
Up ahead, far up the column, an explosion. Frangie fidgets, not sure what to do, not sure what her duty is. But no call comes for a medic, and after a few minutes the column begins clanking forward again. They come to an area where the narrow path between hedges opens up into a low-lying field. And there she sees the Sherman with its left tread spooled off and a smoke scar up the side.
“Anyone hurt?” she asks a sergeant.
“Nah. Fool went driving off into a minefield. Just lost a tread.”