Other Earths Part 17

"I can only write what I hear. As you say, it's as if a chap next door is humming a tune. You can't dictate which tune he'll hum, you just have to go along with him and hope for the best." George paused and looked serious. "Did you ever write any of it down, old boy?"

"Transcribe it, you mean?" Ralph shook his head slowly. "I was too scared to. Scared that if I wrote it down, the music might stop. And that if I put that music down on paper and convinced myself that it really was something I'd come up with, I'd have to admit to myself that I was going quite insane."

"Or that the music's real," George said quietly.

"Now you know why I stopped working here, of course. No use to man nor boy if all I kept hearing was music instead of airplanes."

"I hear the airplanes as well. It's just that the music comes through when they're not there." He turned to me sharply. "Well, Wally, what do you make of it? Are we both for the nuthouse?"

"I don't think so sir," I said.

But in truth I wasn't sure. George might have been younger than Ralph, but they were still old men, and they had both had their share of unpleasant experiences in the war. So had I, in a smaller way, and I still felt that I had my marbles . . . but what kind of condition would my head be in twenty or thirty years from now if the war just kept on the way it had?

Perhaps I would start hearing secret music as well.

"Wally," Ralph said to me, "I want you to listen very carefully. We're Royal Army Medical Corps men. We have a patient here and a duty to protect him. Understood?"

I nodded earnestly, just as if I were still taking ambulance cla.s.ses in Dorking. "What are we going to do, sir?"

"You're going to take him to the shelter. George will use my gas mask, and you will use your own."

"And you sir?"

"I shall wait here, until you can return with a second mask."

"But the seals, sir . . ."

"Will hold for now. Be sharp about it-we don't have all afternoon."

"No," George said, more to me than Ralph. "He isn't staying here. It's his gas mask, not mine-he should be the one using it."

"And you're thirteen years younger than me, old boy. One of these days, for better or for worse, this war is going to be over. When that day comes, I'm not going to be much good for writing music-I'm worn out as it is. But you've still got some life in you."

"No one'll be writing much music if the Huns take over."

"We thought the world of German music before all this started-Bach, Brahms, Wagner-they all meant so much to me. It seems funny to start hating all that now." Ralph nodded at the still-flashing red light. "But we can discuss this later-provided we keep our voices down. In the meantime, Wally's going to take you to the shelter. Then he'll come back for me, and we can all sit around and joke about our little adventure."

"I'm not sure about this, sir," I said.

"RAMC, lad. Show some spine."

"Sir," I said, swallowing hard. Then I turned my attention to George. "I don't think there's much point arguing, sir. Perhaps it isn't such a bad plan after all, anyway. I can sprint back with another gas mask pretty sharpish."

"Take the mask," Ralph said.

Something pa.s.sed between them then, some unspoken understanding that was not for me to interpret. Time weighed heavily and then George took the mask. He said nothing, just fitted it over his head without a word. I put on my own mask, peering at the world through the grubby little windows of the mica eye-pieces.

We left the hut, closing the door quickly behind us. George could not run, but with my bad knee I was not much better. We started making for the first dish, with the promise of the shelter beyond it. Through the mask all the colors looked as yellowy as an old photograph, but George looked back at me and pointed out something, a band of darker yellow lying in the air across our path. Phosgene, I thought-that was the yellow one, not mustard gas. Phosgene didn't get you straight away, but if they mixed it with chlorine, it was a lot quicker. I pressed the mask tighter against my face, as if that were going to make any difference.

It took an age to reach the shelter, with the distance between the sound mirrors seeming to stretch out cruelly. Just when it began to cross my mind that perhaps the shelter did not exist, that it was some figment of George's concussion-damaged imagination, I saw the low concrete entrance, the steps leading down to a metal door that was still partly open. A masked guard, who might have been the same man Ralph and I had spoken to earlier, was urging us down the steps.

When the door was tight behind me, I whipped off my mask and said, "Give me yours, George-it'll do for Ralph."

George nodded and dragged the mask from his face, which was slick with sweat and dirt where the rubber had been pressing against his skin. "Good man, Wally," he said, between breaths. "You're a brave sort."

But the guard would not let me leave the shelter. The red light above the door was telling him that the gas concentration was now too high to risk exposure, even with a mask.

"I have to go!" I said, shouting at him.

The guard shook his head. No arguing from me was going to get him to change his mind. We had been lucky to make it before they locked the shelter from the inside.

Looking back on it now, I'm sure Ralph knew exactly what would happen when I got to the shelter-or he had a pretty shrewd idea. What he said to George kept ringing in my head-about how the younger man would still be able to get some of that music down when the war was over. It was like one runner pa.s.sing the baton to the other. I don't think he would have said that if he had expected me to come back with another mask.

Because there was no wind that day, the gas alert remained high until the middle of the evening. When it was safe, I went out with two masks and a torch, back to the hut, just in case there was still a chance for Ralph. But when I got to the hut, the door was open and the room empty. Everything was neat and tidy-the box back on the shelf, the headphones back on their hook, the chair set back under the desk.

We didn't find him until morning.

He was sitting in one of the seats attached to the steerable locator we had driven past on our way in. He must have known what to do because he had the headphones on, and one of his hands was still on the wheel that adjusted the angle of the receiver. The other chair was empty. The flattened disk was aimed out to sea, out to France, a few degrees above the horizon.

The thing was, they never did tell me what what killed him-whether it was the gas, or being out all night in the cold, or whether he just grew tired and decided that was enough war for one lifetime. But what I do know is what I saw on his face when I found him. His eyes were closed, and there was nothing in his expression that said he'd been in pain when the end came. killed him-whether it was the gas, or being out all night in the cold, or whether he just grew tired and decided that was enough war for one lifetime. But what I do know is what I saw on his face when I found him. His eyes were closed, and there was nothing in his expression that said he'd been in pain when the end came.

Now, I know people'll tell you that faces relax when people die, that everyone ends up looking calm and peaceful, and as an ambulance man I won't deny it. But this was something different. This was the face of a man listening to something very far away, something he had to really concentrate on, and not minding what he heard.

It was only later that we found the thing he had in his hand, the little piece of pink paper folded like an envelope.

Four days later I was able to visit George. He was in bed in one of the wards at Cranbrook. There were about five other men in the ward, most of them awake. George was looking better than when I'd last seen him, all messy and bandaged. He still had bandages on his head and arm, but they were much cleaner and neater now. His hair was combed, and his moustache had been trimmed.

"I'm glad you're still here, sir," I said. "I was frightened you'd be transferred back to Dungeness before I could get to see you. I'm afraid we've been a bit stretched the last few days." I had to raise my voice because Mr. Chamberlain was on the wireless in the corner of the ward doing one of his encouraging "one last push" speeches.

"Pull the screens," George said.

I did as I was told and sat down on the little stool next to his bed. The screens m.u.f.fled some of Mr. Chamberlain's speech, but every now and then his voice seemed to push through the green curtains as if he were trying to reach me personally, the way a teacher might raise his voice to rouse a daydreaming boy at the back of the cla.s.s.

"You're looking better, sir," I offered.

"Nothing time won't heal." He touched the side of his head with his good arm, the one that wasn't bandaged. "I'll be up on my feet in a week or two, then I'll get my new posting. No use for me in Dungeness anymore, though-my hearing's no longer tip-top."

"Won't it get better?"

"Perhaps, but that won't make much difference in the long run. They're getting rid of the sound mirrors. We always knew it was coming, but we thought we'd be good for another year. It turns out that the new system won't need men listening on headphones. The new breed will stare at little screens, watching dots move around."

Mr. Chamberlain said something about "over by Christmas," followed by "looking forward to a bright and prosperous Nineteen Thirty-Six."

"And the music, sir?" I asked.

"There won't be any more music. Wherever it came from, whatever it was that let us hear it . . . it's gone now, or it will be gone by the time they tear down the mirrors. Even if it's still coming through to Dungeness, there won't be anyone there who can hear it. Best to forget about it now, Wally. I've no intention of speaking about it again, and with Ralph gone, that only leaves you. If you've an ounce of common sense-and I think you've rather more than an ounce-you'll say no more of this matter to any living soul."

"I'm sorry about Mr. Vaughan Williams, sir." I'd called him Ralph all the time I had known him, but sitting next to George I found myself coming over all formal. "He was always kind to me, sir, when we were doing our ambulance duties. Always treated me like an equal."

"He was a good man, no doubt about that." George said, nodding to himself. Then he patted the bedsheet. "Well, thank you for coming to visit, Wally. Knowing how busy you ambulance chaps are, I appreciate the gesture."

"There's another reason I came, sir. I mean, I wanted to see that you were all right. But I had something for you as well." I reached into my pocket and withdrew the folded piece of pink paper. "We found this on him. It's one of your transcriptions, I think."

"Let me see." George took the paper and opened it carefully. His eyes scanned the markings he had made on it, the scratchy lines of the staves and the little tadpole shapes of the notes. There were lots of blotches and crossings-out. "Did you see him do this?" he asked, looking at me over the edge of the paper.

"See him do what, sir?"

"He's corrected me! You wouldn't have noticed, but not all of those marks were made by me! The beggar must have sat down and taken the time to correct my my transcription of transcription of my my music!" music!"

"When we were on our way to the shelter, sir?"

"Must have been, I suppose." George shook his head in what I took to be a mixture of dismay and amus.e.m.e.nt. "The absolute bare-faced effrontery!" Then he laughed. "He's right, though-that's the galling thing. He's b.l.o.o.d.y well right!"

"I thought you ought to have it, sir."

He began to fold the paper away. "That's very kind of you, Wally. It means a lot to me."

"There is something else, sir. When we found that sheet of paper on him, he'd folded something into it." I reached into my pocket again and drew out a small bra.s.s key. "I don't know what to make of this, sir. But I've a personal effects locker, and my key looks very similar. I think this might be the one to his locker." I felt as if I were about to start stammering. "The thing is, there is is a locker, and no one's managed to get into it yet." a locker, and no one's managed to get into it yet."

I pa.s.sed the key to George.

"Why would he put his key in that piece of paper? Anything personal, he'd have wanted it sent on to Adeline."

"He must have known what he was doing, sir. You being a composer and all that . . . I just wondered . . ." I swallowed hard. "Sir, if there was music in that locker, he'd want you to see it first, wouldn't he?"

"What makes you think there might be music, Wally?"

"When you asked him if he'd written any of it down, he said he hadn't."

"But you wonder if he was telling a fib."

"It's a possibility, sir."

"It is indeed." George's hand closed slowly on the key. "I wonder if him correcting my music was a sign, you know? A way of giving me permission to correct his if I saw something in it I didn't think was right? Or at the very least giving me permission to tidy it up, to put it into some kind of order?"

"I don't know, sir. I suppose the only way of knowing would be to open the locker and see what's in it."

"And you haven't already done so?"

"I thought that would be a bit impertinent, sir, as he'd clearly meant for you to open it."

George pa.s.sed the key back to me. "I can't wait. Go and see what's inside now, will you? I a.s.sume they'll let you?"

"I was his ambulance mate, sir. They'll let me anywhere."

"Then go to the locker. Open it and find his music, and bring it to me. But if you don't find anything . . . I should rather you didn't come back. I wouldn't like to see your face come through that door and then be disappointed. If there's something in there I must have, correspondence or suchlike, then you can have it sent to my bedside by one of the orderlies."

My hand closed on the key. "I hope I'm not wrong about this, sir."

"Me too," George said softly. "Me too."

"I won't be long."

I opened the curtain. The key was hard against my palm, digging into the flesh. Mr. Chamberlain was still going on, but no one seemed to be listening now. They had heard it all before.

A FAMILY HISTORY.

Paul Park

Sailing to Egypt in the spring of 1798, General Bonaparte and his army pa.s.sed within two miles of the English fleet, northeast of Malta in the middle of the night. What would have happened if Horatio Nelson had set a different course and had captured his enemy at sea?

Of course everything would have changed, instantly and for the better. Its revolution unchecked, France would have become a paradise on Earth, where free men and women raised their eyes from the dirt and stood up straight as if for the first time. Pigs would have learned to speak, donkeys to fly.

Colors would have been brighter, smells sweeter. The weather would improve. G.o.d would smile on France and all the French dominions. In June of 1815, gentle breezes would caress the empty fields of Waterloo. A system of high pressure would extend to the New World, and a midsummer hurricane would not rip apart the small, vulnerable French towns of Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana.

It would not destroy the farmhouse of Franois and Marie Louise de Fontenelle in Pointe a la Hache, a sliver of land between the swamp and the Mississippi River. It would not orphan their children, Amelie and Lucien, and force them to abandon the only home they knew and ride north along the makeshift levees from which, years before, they had hailed the flotilla of barges carrying General Bonaparte to New Orleans, when he took up his duties there as governor.

Disconsolate, the two orphans would not have found refuge with an aunt and uncle on the Rue des Dryades in the capital of New France. They would not grow up sullen and resentful in the grand house of their relatives, treated like servants' children. At age sixteen, Lucien would not steal his aunt's jewels and run away. He would not join the crew of a flatboat heading north, past the indigo and sugar plantations, and then the cotton after that, and then the wilderness. Still shy of his seventeenth birthday, he would not come to rest in the territory of the Omahas, at Fort St. Jean on the west bank of the Missouri River, penniless, his money spent.

Two years later, he would not send the following letter: "Ma Chere Soeur, my heart bleeds when I think of you still in the clutches of that madwoman and her nine-times-cuckolded husband. If there is anything that mars my current exultation it is that. But let me tell you what has happened here in this great country that is as fresh as if G.o.d made it yesterday-no, as if this is still the first morning of creation.

"I think of it that way even as I lie here on my deathbed, too weak almost to raise my pen."

(In New Orleans, Amelie de Fontenelle would not wonder at the crude, small, unfamiliar printing on the envelope, the cherished hand inside. "Ah, is it true?" she would be spared from thinking.) "My sister, it is true. I have received a sword's thrust, but the wound has festered. Yet even so I would change nothing of that glorious afternoon when Colonel Bernadotte broke Jackson's lines, unless it were to spare you unhappiness or to see my son Logan weaned from his mother's breast, take his first steps. But like one of Captain Ney's horse-soldiers at the top of the bluff, or like a p.a.w.nee warrior with his coup stick in his hand, my thoughts have ridden far ahead of my story. "My dear, I beg you to forget your pride and not turn your heart away from my infant son. I a.s.sure you, his blood is better than our blood. His grandfather is Big Elk, great chief of the Omahas, and his mother is Bright Sun-Me-um-ban-ne-oh, I would like you to meet her so that you might cherish her as a sister for my sake. Let me explain to you the method of my courtship, for even after everything I can't believe my luck or regret anything that has occurred. You must imagine me friendless and unhappy, hunting deer along the juncture where the Elkhorn meets the Platte. This was when the corn was small, and I came in through the fields of maize and beans. I left my horse and continued, finding the place deserted, or so I thought, because the tribe was hunting in the Sand Hills. I counted three-score lodges, which were mounds of raised earth, thatched with bluestem gra.s.s. I wandered among them. All their doors faced east, and all were blocked with an arrangement of dried sticks, so that the men could see if anyone had entered in their absence-all but one, thank G.o.d, and it the largest. I entered a low corridor in the earth and soon found myself in a dark s.p.a.ce formed by a circle of wooden posts joined overhead by wooden rafters and a cage of willow wands. Light came from an opening in the gra.s.s roof, and I could see her sleeping on a raised platform like the princess in the story. Oh, she is so fair! It was in the afternoon, and the air was hot. I learned later she had hurt her foot, which was why she was sleeping in the middle of the day. She was not with the others in the fields, the old women and young children who kept the village while the tribe was hunting buffalo in the west. In this and everything I see the hand of Providence, for she was scarcely awake before we were man and wife, according to the simple ceremonies of her people. We scarcely had a word in common, but even so she begged me to stay, or else she begged me to leave before her mother returned-I would have pursued either course! But I was anxious to find the black-robe at the mission on Council Bluff and to prepare everything our sainted mother might have asked. And though my wife clung to me, and though she wept, I asked her to be patient, as I would come back the next morning with the priest.

"I wish I had never left her. But even in this tragedy I see Fortune's hand. I would not have been able to prevent, by my presence, what occurred. That night the village was attacked by the vengeful and blood-thirsty Sioux, led by their chief and an American named Benjamin Burgess, also called 'the lion of Missouri. ' 'The devil' would have been a better name-Captain Ney had already told me about him, when I saw him at the fort. Burgess was a spy in Jackson's pay. Always he was searching for a means to bring the tribes to warfare on both sides of the river, an excuse for the Americans to intercede. Life and property meant nothing to him. If he could steal away the favorite daughter of Big Elk while the camp was undefended . . .

"Once more I have charged ahead. That afternoon, when the shadows were longest, I reached the mission at Council Bluffs. I was looking for the black-robe, Father de Smet, whom I knew. But he had gone to baptize children in the Ponca villages along the valley of the Wolf River. Instead I found another, a Jesuit named Mylecraine.

"He has given me kindness, and with my wife he is tending to me now, and so I will describe him, a small man, even smaller than Governor Bonaparte when I saw him at the fort with Captain Ney. During the time I have known him, I have never seen him shave his beard, and yet his face is soft, his hands childlike and delicate. I say this to emphasize by contrast the courage he has shown. He is from Brittany, and he studied music before turning to G.o.d. Even now he takes his wooden flute and flageolets among the tribes, and I have seen the battle-scarred warriors of the Omaha sit round him in a circle, their faces soft with wonder and delight.

"That evening when I came to him, he packed up his flute first of all. He had seen Bright Sun that winter, when he was a guest in her father's lodge. And though he scolded me for the precipitateness of my wooing, he was smiling as I was, without any notion or thought that at that moment already Bright Sun's mother lay dead, as well as four of the old braves who had not ridden with the others, and several children also, because of the savagery of the Sioux chieftain, Goes-to-War, as well as Burgess the American, whom later I shot down.

"By that time it was dark, and Father Mylecraine and I stayed in the mission. Early the next morning we set off, as joyful as you please. Because he was fluent in all the tongues of the Indians, I was eager, with his help, to explain my wife future to her, how she would accompany us to Bellevue and take up residence. Alas, I was full of plans. Before noon we reached the site of the catastrophe. All was in chaos, and I spent more than an hour helping Father Mylecraine attend to the wounded, while at the same time searching for Bright Sun. There were no horses at the village, so I let one eight-year-old boy take the pony I had brought for my bride and her possessions; he started off along the Platte to discover Big Elk's camp, a distance of a hundred leagues. With the priest's help, another boy told me what I wanted to know, how he had seen Burgess with his fringed coat and beaver hat-the lion, as he called him, but I knew who he was: a huge man with yellow hair down his back, his yellow beard high on his cheeks-there were not two like him in the territory. Even though she could scarcely walk, he had taken Big Elk's daughter across his saddlebow and ridden north into the land of the Oglala Sioux. Anyone could see where the war party had pa.s.sed. Furious, I rode out after them, following the track, even though Mylecraine begged me to wait while we fetched the soldiers from the fort-there was no time for that! Nor could the captain have left St. Jean to intervene in a dispute between the tribes, not with General Jackson ma.s.sing on the other side of the Missouri; beyond question, it was Burgess' plan to drive a wedge between the French and the Omahas, to force Captain Ney to choose between disappointing his allies and abandoning his post.