Chemistry and Other Stories

Cold Harbor

She did not dream about him. Anna dreamed about the others, the ones who died. They came at night and lay beside her, crowding the bed, pressing their cold bodies against her. She’d wake trembling, turn her face toward the night-light that lit the lower wall. She would lie there, her eyes open, and this was when she’d think of Josh Triplett.

They had brought him in on a heavy day of fighting, the helicopter descending slow as a vulture each time it delivered a fresh supply of torn flesh and shattered bones. He was so slick with blood they used their fingers as much as their eyes to find the wounds. It was early in her tour of duty, early enough that she could still be amazed at how much blood a body held. She and the doctor found four wounds, one that mangled his arm, one in the neck, two lesser ones in his chest. They stanched the wounds, but his blood pressure still dropped.

Anna had been the one who unlaced his boots, the right one pouring blood when she pulled it off and found the fifth wound, a slashed artery above the ankle.

“This lady saved your life, soldier,” the doctor told him the next day as they stopped at his bed during their rounds. Private Triplett looked up from the cot and raised his hand and she held it. He squeezed her fingers, tears welling in his eyes. The throat wound kept him from speaking, but his mouth formed a thank you.

“I can write your family, let them know you’re okay. Do you want me to do that?” she asked.

Triplett nodded, freed his hand, and pointed to the pen in the doctor’s shirt pocket. Across the doctor’s pad he scrawled,

Mrs. Lawson Triplett

Aho Creek Road

Route 4

Boone, North Carolina

“I’ll write her tonight,” she said.

When she came back the next morning he was gone, helicoptered to the 311th station hospital, where he would begin his rehabilitation.

That was two years ago. Anna couldn’t remember what he looked like except he had gray eyes. It seemed so wrong to her that she remembered the faces of the dead more clearly than one who had lived.

Dawn filtered through the one window in her apartment, and though it was Saturday she did not try to drift back to sleep. She left the bed where she’d lain awake the last hour, the bed she’d slept in alone the last three months. She opened the dresser drawer and read the letter from Josh Triplett’s mother.

Dear Miss Bradley,

Thank you for looking after my son and thank you for letting me

know he is all right. God bless you and all others helping save

our boys.

Sincerely,

Edith Triplett

On the envelope was the address she’d memorized. She ate quickly and showered. Then came the hardest thing, deciding what to wear. She finally chose a navy blue skirt and blouse her husband had given her their one Christmas together. She already knew which roads to take, had mapped the route weeks ago.

There was one more thing to do before leaving. She found the note he’d mailed with the papers and dialed the number. The phone rang five times before Jonathon’s groggy voice answered.

“I’ve signed the papers,” she said.

“I’ll come by and get them or you can mail them back,” Jonathon said.

“I’ll mail them back.”

“Anna,” he said. “Call the VA. They’ve got doctors, psychiatrists. They might be able to help you.”

“So you think I’m crazy.”

“I didn’t say that.”

She hung up the phone.

Anna picked up her purse and the atlas. Midafternoon and I’ll be there, she guessed, glancing at the clock as she walked to the door. Whether Josh Triplett would be there she did not know. A phone call could have answered this question, but she didn’t want him to know she was coming. If they met again, it would be just like the first time — suddenly, with no time for calculated responses but instead a gesture from the heart, like that morning he’d raised his hand to hold hers.

SHE WAS OUT of Washington by six-thirty, passing through Alexandria, where she’d grown up. Few cars were on the road as she drove south into the hilly region where so many battles had been fought a century earlier. The blue and white signs raised at the highway’s edge listed them. Manassas, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Spotsylvania recalled wide, deep-green pastures she’d visited on school field trips, Saturday excursions with her parents. These outings had always been fun, the dead mere numbers on metal and stone. It was only after Korea that she found it obscene that people could picnic, play softball and football on ground where men had shed their blood.

She stopped outside of Richmond at a store across the highway from Cold Harbor, the battlefield where Grant had lost seven thousand men in eight minutes. While an attendant filled the Studebaker with gas and cleaned the windshield, Anna walked inside the cinder-block building. Paintings of gray- and blue-clad soldiers filled the wall behind the cash register, orange price tags taped to the corners. Raised sabers and tattered flags jabbed the tops of paintings, below them men gripping muskets. As she waited for her change, Anna remembered what she’d learned in high school about Cold Harbor, how the night before battle Union soldiers sat by their campfires and pinned names and hometowns on the backs of their uniforms, knowing better than their commander what the morning would bring. She wondered how many of these paintings would sell if they depicted men whose faces had been torn from their heads, men whose intestines spilled from their bodies like some pink stew. Things she’d seen and knew would have occurred in the 1860s as well, for though the weapons were more efficient now the results had always been the same.

South of Petersburg she turned west, passing through Appomattox and Roanoke and Radford, the land growing less inhabited, more stark and mountainous as she turned south again, following the New River deeper into the Appalachians. The oldest mountains in the world, the road atlas claimed. She soon passed a green sign that said WELCOME TO NORTH CAROLINA.

She stopped in Boone, refilled the Studebaker with gas, bought a Coke and plastic-wrapped sandwich for lunch. She asked the man who took her money for directions to Aho Creek Road, and the man took out a pen and scribbled on a napkin.

“That’s a far-back place where you’re headed,” the man said, handing her the napkin. “You got kin up there?”

“No,” Anna said, “friends.”

Twenty minutes later she turned onto Aho Creek Road, plumes of dust rising in her rearview mirror as she drove up the mountain, slowing to read the names on the mailboxes — Hampton, Greene, Watson — then a white clapboard church, a few dozen tombstones jutting out of the ground like snaggled teeth. A hundred yards farther was a dented mailbox brown with rust, the red flag leaning like a semaphore. Triplett. Anna turned in to a rutted driveway that did not so much end as fade into a front yard.

She glanced in the mirror, decided not to put on more lipstick, then got out, walking across the yard and up the farmhouse’s stone steps. Her hand shook as she raised it, paused, then rapped her knuckles against the wood. No sound came from inside. She knocked again, harder.

Anna heard footsteps and caught a glimpse of a gray eye behind a curtain.

“What do you want?” a woman’s voice asked.

“My name is Anna Bradley.”

The door remained unopened. No muffled reply came from the other side.

“I wrote you two years ago, Mrs. Triplett. I was your son’s nurse.”

The door opened halfway, but the woman did not step out, half of her face hidden as she spoke.

“What do you want?” Mrs. Triplett asked again.

“I came to see Josh, to see how he’s getting along. I thought you could tell me how he’s doing, where he is now.”

“He’s out yonder,” Mrs. Triplett said, nodding toward the pasture, the church spire that rose beyond it.

For a terrible moment Anna thought the old woman meant the cemetery.

“He’s got him a trailer in the pasture there,” she said and opened the door a little wider, jabbed her finger out. “Down there in the hollow. You go down there. You’ll see how he’s doing.”

She waited for Mrs. Triplett to say something else, but the old woman offered no more words, so Anna turned and stepped off the porch. It was windier and colder here than it had been in Washington, the air stingier, like Korea. She straddled the barbed-wire fence carefully so as not to tear her skirt. Anna wished she’d worn pants and a coat as she followed a creek through the pasture and into the hollow, her breath rapid though the land sloped downhill.

After a hundred yards the decline steepened. A scarecrow dressed in a helmet and camouflage rose up before her, a Purple Heart pinned at the center of the empty chest. The scarecrow’s seed sack face was featureless except for an unlipped grin and two black, filled-in circles where eyes might have been, its arms stretched wide as if to embrace her. For the first time in her journey she thought of turning back.

Beyond the scarecrow’s arms Anna saw the trailer’s roof and skinny chimney, wisps of smoke rising from it. She stepped around the scarecrow, more of the gray Airstream trailer visible with each step into the hollow — first the uncurtained window, then the door with no steps leading up to it, finally the rotting tires sagging into the ground.

The metal door swung open before she could knock. A tall, gaunt man filled the doorway. He wore overalls and a flannel shirt the same color as his eyes, the empty sleeve’s cuff pinned to the shoulder. He loomed above her, the look on his face unfathomable. Wind rustled the empty sleeve. Like a flag, Anna thought. She saw the stoma where the laryngectomy had been performed. The only sounds were the whisper of the wind in the trees, the gurgle of the creek as it flowed past the trailer.

“Do you remember me?” she asked.

He nodded. His neck quivered, a quick gulping of air into the esophagus, then a low, harsh burp of words.

“Why are you here?”

“I wanted to see you, to see how you were getting along.”

He swallowed.

“Now you’ve seen me.”

Anna did not move.

“What else do you want?” Josh Triplett said.

Anna wanted to tell him what she felt the night Jonathon, who’d never been in a war, asked “Why can’t you just be happy, happy that a bad time in your life is over with?” Anna wanted to tell Josh Triplett she once believed that after a while the world would return to what it was before Korea, that time could fade what she’d seen the same way it faded a photograph left out in light. She wanted to tell him that she’d once saved his life and now she needed him to help save hers.

“I have dreams,” she finally said. “Dreams about the men I saw die.”

He spoke, each clot of words followed by a quick swallow.

“I have dreams too, I dream of before, when I had two arms, when people didn’t, look away when I spoke.” He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, wiped spittle from the stoma.

“But you’re not dead,” she said, her voice quivering.

“Sometimes I wonder if I really am alive,” he said.

“You’re alive,” she said.

“Then maybe I shouldn’t be.”

Anna leaned against the trailer, tried to blink away the tears as Josh Triplett looked down at her, his gray eyes unblinking as a hawk’s.

“You saved my life,” he said. “I know that. Maybe I’ll be glad you did. Someday.”

His words passed over her like cloud shadow, a cloud whose color is unknown. There was no inflection to tell if his words were sarcastic or compassionate.

AS ANNA WALKED out of the hollow she remembered the note left on the bed the day Jonathon left.

“I want a future,” the note said.

Mrs. Triplett waited on the porch.

“Come inside and warm up,” she said.

Anna was too weary to say no, so she stepped onto the porch and followed Mrs. Triplett into the front room, whose only light came from the fireplace. The old woman dragged a ladder-back chair in front of the fire and led her to it, then disappeared into the back of the house. She brought back a tin cup filled with coffee.

“Drink this,” Mrs. Triplett said.

Anna shivered so violently she held the cup with both hands, afraid to raise it to her face lest she spill it. The cup warmed her palms as she closed her eyes, leaned her face toward the fire and let it bathe her in its heat. The old woman stood close by, saying nothing. When Anna quit shaking she brought the cup to her mouth, her eyes still closed, imagining the coffee a warm glow as it moved down her throat into her belly. She sipped and listened to the crackle of the fire, the ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece. Warm now, she leaned back in the chair and for a few minutes slept without dreaming as the fire’s heat covered her like a quilt.

The clock chimed five times and Anna opened her eyes. The cup was still in her hands, but all that remained were a few grounds sloshing the bottom.

“You want more?”

“No, no thank you,” Anna said. “I’ve got to be going.”

“How far you got to go?”

“Washington,” she said.

“You could spend the night here. I’ve got an extra bed.”

“No, I need to go,” Anna said, getting up from the chair.

The old woman looked into the fire, her palms held out to its warmth.

“My sister’s son, he got polio when he was eight. Somehow they got through that. My brother, he fought the Japanese during the World War. He come back home and you’d not know he’d left. He went back to farming and got on with his life. It made me believe people could endure about anything. I don’t know that to be true anymore.”

“I don’t either,” Anna said.

“Some grief is like barbed wire that’s been wrapped around a tree,” Mrs. Triplett said. “The longer it’s there the deeper the barbs go, the closer to the tree’s heart.”

Mrs. Triplett took the cup from Anna’s hand, placed it on the mantel.

“It’s kind of you to come,” she said. “I should have been friendlier when you first showed up. What’s happened to Josh, it’s done made me bitter.”

“I understand,” Anna said.

“Do you have children?”

“No.”

“That’s a shame,” Mrs. Triplett said, her hands held again to the fire. “You have a good heart. You’d be a good mother.”

Anna shook her head.

“No, I wouldn’t be.”

Anna turned and walked on out to her car. Through the windshield she saw Mrs. Triplett’s face in a window. The old woman raised a hand in front of her weathered face, her palm open as if offering a blessing.

Anna backed out of the driveway and started down the mountain toward Boone, the sun already sunk behind the mountains. She would drive as far as she could. When the road began to blur and she was too tired to go on, she would stop at a motel.

By then she would have crossed the Virginia line, driven through Pulaski and Roanoke and Lynchburg, the land leveling out as she skirted the lower Shenandoah Valley. Somewhere among the old killing fields between Appomattox and Manassas she would find a crossroads or hamlet with a name drenched in history. She’d be too exhausted to eat or take a shower. She would take off her shoes, blouse, and skirt and slip on her nightgown. Anna would turn on the bathroom light and pull back the covers, close her eyes and remember the warmth of fire and coffee as she lay down again with the dead.