Frostbite

 

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The old man had fought in the trenches in Europe in World War I, where he received a wound that would kill him fifty years later. After the war he became distant, drifting off for progressively longer periods of internal journeys, sometimes spending an entire day rolling Bugle cigarettes and staring into a distant space.

His youngest son, Gerald- whose birth had resulted in the death of the mother- lived with the old man, assuring he was warm and well-fed when he went off into the distance. With the father fed and wood and coal stocked up for the iron stove, Gerald was free to spend his time outside of school as he pleased. That freedom was curtailed, though, when the pain and weakness in his legs was diagnosed as polio; father and son became housebound together. The task of caring for the two fell upon the married daughters.

The weekly Sunday afternoon drive in the country was a tradition in Brady’s family. They drove deep into the shadowed and forested hollers, into the world of shanty-shack farmhouses and pig plantations to visit various aunts- rarely uncles, almost always aunts. Those trips generally resulted in a stop to “look in on Daddy and Gerald.”

The weekend following Christmas Brady’s father, mother and her sisters and their children met at the old man’s shack to care for him as he drifted in and out of reality, and to salve Gerald’s crutch and leg brace sores. The odor of iodine, Merthiolate, and Noxzema blended into the aroma of a stew aging on the back burner of the big iron stove in the kitchen and worked together to mask the clean smell of coming snow.

The first falling flakes took them by surprise.

“We’ve got to get going,” Brady’s father said as he closed his book and rose to get his coat. “It’s going to be a bad one. Look at the size of those flakes.”

“Not yet,” the mother answered. “We’ve got time. I want to wait until Daddy has come out of it. I can’t leave him like this.”

The father made a display of his exasperation and resumed his reading.

Toward evening the old man began to stir. He wrapped himself against the cold and went to the outhouse. Back inside, he ate the stew the daughters prepared for him. They brought him up on the latest family news and spent the evening watching television with him. The younger children played on the floor, where they made vroom-vroom sounds for their toy trucks and imitated the rat-a-tat stutter of a machine gun for their rubber soldiers. The old man retreated again into his interior world and had to be manhandled into bed. Brady’s mother proclaimed the roads too dangerous to drive, and the extended family spent the night on pallets of thick quilts and wool blankets arranged in a semi-circle around the pot-bellied stove.

The next morning the earth had transformed into a winter wonderland. A thick blanket of snow covered the ground and clung to trees and shrubs. Iron pans and iron doors clanged in the iron stove.; trays of biscuits made grating sounds as they slid into the oven. Eggs and Bacon aromas wafted into the air. Brady ate a big breakfast prepared by the sisters.

He raced outside at the earliest opportunity to disappear into the wood, a magical place now, eerily quiet in the sound-absorbing snow. Brady was Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, alone in the pristine snow in a vast, silent wilderness awaiting his exploration. The hills rose higher around him as he wandered deep into the holler. He came upon a creek, its rushing water babbling deliriously, forced into the center of its bed by ice choking its flow. Brady put his hand into the rushing water to feel the tremendous pressure. He climbed a nearby hill, plunging his hands into the snow for handholds. Tiny avalanches spilled down the hillside with a whispered “swish.” At the top he surveyed his domain: hills peeked over each other’s shoulders, covered with snow and bare trees under a gray sky- a study in white and gray. The creek babbled incoherently to itself when it wrapped itself around a knob and disappeared.

An ache in his left hand progressed to an uncomfortable pain. Brady tried to ignore it as he scampered in the virgin snow.

The pain would not be ignored and grew more intense. Alarmed, Brady turned back on his tracks to follow them back toward the shack. The pain heightened with each step, and by the time he returned he was sobbing uncontrollably. There was no awareness of anything but the excruciating pain on his left. Then, there was no left, no right, no anywhere but here, the heart of agony and its shrill, monotone scream. Some part of him escaped that white-hot place for a moment to feel someone (his father- he could smell his tobacco) forced him to the ground and plunged his hands into the snow. Brady fought, screamed, and returned to that red place, the center of pain, unconscious of all else.

The old man gazed into the middle distance. He saw himself, not as a disembodied observer, but through his own eyes as a younger man. He was in an earthen trench with wood ramps leading up to ground level. Metallic sounds clanged and clicked around him as men in green-brown tunics snapped ammunition clips, grenades, and survival gear onto Sam Browne and grenadier belts. He was holding a long single action rifle at port arms; a gas mask lay strapped to his chest. The air was soiled by the rancid odor of fear. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of men pressed against each other at the bottom of the cleated ramps. They were lined four deep with more at the flanks, waiting to fill in the spaces when they went over the top.

A whistle sounded, then another, and another. Men were yelling, “Attack! Attack!” “Over the top, Boys!” “Charge!”

He was pushed forward, up the sagging ramp. Some of the men faltered, stark terror transparent on their faces. Officers raced forward, aimed .45-calibre handguns at their foreheads, and the fear-stricken scampered up. One man fell to his knees, dropped his rifle, and began praying. A fresh-faced lieutenant shot him in the temple.

He was on open ground now, running, as fast as mud and heavy gear would permit, toward a gun emplacement across the field. The sky burst into fire with flares and aerial explosions lighting the pre-dawn gloom. The earth erupted into a thousand volcanoes of mud, rocks and body parts. His nostrils burned with cordite. He hurled himself over torn limbs and men screaming with the pain of their broken bodies. Spinning bullets, whistling artillery shells, and tumbling razor blades of shrapnel made each their own signature cacophony as they whirred past his head. Smoke covered the field, but the young man was close enough to see the fat gunner who was decimating the rushing tide.

Almost there! Almost there! He stopped, took aim at the piggish eyes squinting over the gun sight. And….

He flew through the air, landing face down in the mud. An unbearable pain radiated from his leg into the far corners of his body. He was disoriented and confused. Oddly, through the pain and the noise, confusion, and terror of battle, a serenity overcame him, and from that calm came an urge to stay alive for an important reason: to pass on to others what he had learned here; that a gun fired at you makes a different sound than one fired by you; and that a large caliber bullet does not merely make a painful hole in the skin and shatter bone, but sends shock waves through the body, through skin, blood, muscle, tissue, and bone with such force and velocity that each wave slams with the density of iron against anything it encounters. The entire body is pummeled from within. The brain, unable to process devastation at such scale, shuts down all processes except those vital to assessing and repairing the damage. Without the ability to think rationally the victim falls into a torpor that gives rise to brief, intermittent flashes of nonsensical insight. In that state, the old man felt that the world needed to know.

His mouth was filling with mud and something was crawling around in the muck. Blood flowed in rivulets from his wounds and the wounded and dismembered bodies around him. He tasted its metallic smell. His head was turned toward a blood-soaked body near him. The lower half of the man’s body was not seen. The severed soldier grinned at him with death’s own face. The young man laid there, no will to do any other, until a blessed cloak of unconsciousness folded over him.

Brady heard a buzzing sound, then a sound like that of the ice-bound creek as it babbled around its bend. The pain in his left hand had soothed to a heightened sensitivity as if it were made of fine crystal that would shatter into fragments at a tap.

The babble was the sisters- chattering, gossiping, revealing secrets and admonishments the way only people who love each other do. The buzzing sound- Brady’s mother was cutting her father’s hair with electric clippers. He stared into empty space, not flinching even when his hair scraps were thrown into the stove, producing an awful stench that sent everyone else out of the room.

No, not empty space. Brady knew the old man was focused on a muddy field in France, long ago.

They ate lunch- stew from the big iron pot. One of the kids, carefully mittened to prevent another frostbite, was dispatched to the highway a quarter-mile away. He returned to announce with childish drama that snowplows and ash trucks had cleared the road. Plans were made, goodbyes said, who would call whom and when, and who would stay to take care of the old man and the boy.

On his way out, Brady noticed that the old man’s blanket had slipped from his shoulders. He was always cold, even when sitting here next to the red-glowing stove. Brady replaced the blanket. With his hand resting on the man’s shoulders, he said, “Goodbye, grandpa.” He startled himself. Had he ever called this strange, distant man “Grandpa” before? Indeed, had he spoken to him before this moment? A pale, bony hand arose and laid on his, patted twice, and returned to rest. He stared into a distant place.