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Richwood, West Virginia October, 1942
Above them the sky is the color of nothing, sepia washed, the color of flesh behind the ears. A bone sky. He peels the sweater from her shoulders, watch from her wrist, socks from her feet. He wants to unlayer her like sheets of shale rock, like the thin skin of snakes. Beneath them are the razor edges of gravel, a coarse path of mining dirt grating her skin and elbows, the backs of her legs. He leans over her and lights a cigarette then kisses her with the grit of tobacco on his lips and tongue. It is so quiet she is sure she can hear the air glittering, the ember of his cigarette burning orange
to red.
“I didn’t have any rations for gasoline,” he tells her. “So I drove here on kerosene. Two hundred miles on kerosene. I didn’t think it was possible.”
He laughs and sits back on his heels. “The car, my car, is ruined, I’m sure of it. Ruined.”
He is suddenly serious, his breath measured. “I ruin things for you, do you understand?”
He doesn’t wait for her answer, but rests his head on her collarbone. Their bodies curve and rise against each other, coupling angles of arm and leg, hollows of hip and stomach. The proximities of love.
An hour passes in silence. Darkness rolls the sky to night. Mist rises like flocks of angels, settles on their breathing bodies like a second skin.
This is what it’s like, she thinks. To be ruined. This is what it is to crack the bone sky.
Later, when he is gone, his car disappearing over the last visible hill in a shudder of smoke, she will touch her hand to her face and breathe the scent he has left with her, in the folds of her blouse, the crook of her arm. The burn of kerosene from his hand to her skin. Her blouse ruined, the elbows stained with blood, oily streaks of kerosene across her breast and arm. And the sound of a car engine backfiring in the distance, past the mountain pass. The first slivers of daylight knitting the sky.
Richwood, West Virginia August, 1943
An empty greenhouse. Abandoned. Clay pots, rusted spades, trowels. A scattering of dry soil dusting the cool ground. In the far corner, a boy and a girl, and outside, a summer rainstorm. He leans against the dark glass, lighting a cigarette in the damp night. She reaches for him, her thin arm in dark reflection around the glass room, reaching for him everywhere, again and again. Lightning rips a seam in the sky and somewhere in her a hem is unstitching itself, falling free. Touching him, collarbone, shoulder, she pulls herself to his rain-touched body. The night blinks and the room is light again, glimmering, brilliant in white heat. She is saying something about lightning, she is saying something about distance. She falls against him then, only a film of rain between their two skins.
Already he is leaving her, is arcing toward a place where he will touch the window of a train that is rushing away. Now she will understand lightning as the tectonics of their two bodies together, the friction of his hand against her thigh, her hair sweeping his face and neck. She falls to him in the pulse of a storm and knows they are as irretrievable as a single drop of rain falling to wet asphalt, inseparable as thunder and rain, lightning and heat.
Naval Training Base, Tallahassee, Florida April, 1944
They stand in washes of sunlight together. The angles of her body rise and fall beneath her dress in ways that are familiar to him; the crease of his uniform is still stiff with the press of her hands on the iron. It is April and they can feel the wind turning to something sweeter, they have slept beneath the open window of their rented room and felt the night air on bare shoulders and knees, in the tangles of their hair and in the spaces between them. She has knelt at this window in the early shadows of morning as rain fell in long arcs across the sky.
But now they stand for a picture. He leans into the casual stance of a young man, the sure-footed posture of a soldier. She touches him lightly on the shoulder and does not pose. Instead she reaches for him, she watches him, she cannot look away from him. Not for the camera, not for anything else.
They are laughing at some shared joke, they are thinking of other things, the breakfast he burned this morning, the faint waltz that came through the open window, into their bedroom the night before. She is remembering how he stood at their bed, at the pale stretch of her naked body as if it were a white cliff he was balanced upon, a jagged edge, a line drawn in chalk. She is remembering his body, the protrusion of bone, the skin, the even cadence of ribs. She is remembering how she reached for him in the half light, how he came to her like a boy in the darkness, how they moved together in this landscape, so sure in their young bodies, so unafraid. But now they stand on the porch together, the slatted boards a glaring white in the sun, the swing still moving slightly in the still air. Then the moment is gone, the picture taken, the camera put away on a cupboard, a shelf.
Later in the gray evening they will sit together on the porch swing, their knees touching, their feet brushing the floor in the same rhythm, the air between them warm and still. They will not talk about tomorrow or the next day or the many days to follow when he will not touch her collarbone, eyelid, wrist. She will not tell him what she already knows, what she already feels as a flutter growing beneath her heart. Instead they talk about the Cranberry River, they talk about mountains, they talk about home in a way that makes her turn from him with a sadness he cannot understand. When she turns back to him, he touches her face and sees an emptiness there that he recognizes as loss.
They cannot know what we do, this boy and girl in the picture, this husband and wife in black and white. He cannot know about the vast deserts of North Africa, the dry sands and the orange skies. She cannot know about the months of waiting while a living body moves inside of her, rolling like a tide. They cannot know that this will be their last image together, this day in April on a sunlit porch. And they could not know about this last night together, his fingers in her knotted hair, the rusty imprint of the swing chain in her palm as she lets go and stands up, as she turns away from him and goes inside to bed.
Richwood, West Virginia September, 1944
Now, if her sense of direction is sharper, her grasp of geography stronger it is because of him, his dotted existence across continents, the world. His broken path like pins on a map, planning strategies, the possibilities of place and time. She imagines herself spinning wildly through an empty parking lot, eyes closed, arms stretched into a wingspan, gravel scattering, her balance a practice in perfection until she can sense him, locate him like an ache on the axis of her body, its proximities. In the space of a moment her body will form a faultless halt of motion before him, toe to toe, faces less than inches, their separate breaths forming a single breath. She finds his face in crowded pictures of rowdy squadrons, his voice in noisy poolhalls, his letters among stacks and piles arranged on the post office floor. He writes: I smashed things up terrifically today darling–a train nearly a mile long and full of Italians. I hit every mark like a star. To her there is no longer an atlas that can be trusted, no longer concerns of north, south, longitude, miles. Now there is only vicinities of him, shades of nearness, of distance. A measurement of time and space between their separate skins. Nothing else occurs to her. Years of geography lessons erased.
The Italian Coast October, 1944
There is a roar here. Even beyond the makeshift camp to where the countryside is a dull blur of green and glimmering heat, the shiny sky betrayed only by distant crafts approaching their place of landing; even here there is the clamor of fear, the creak of its gears shifting toward hatred. Deafening.
Some days he can scarcely hear his own thoughts. Noise beneath his skin, resonating, at all times. A racket. He notices all things that reveal this nation of silence, the black eyes of its people following the arc of his arm reaching across the soda shop counter for a salt shaker, a spoon; the precise and measured movements of a woman crossing the street toward him; light footsteps of children following him through the invaded town, toward the American base where they are not allowed. Things that reveal this blister of rage, hot and liquid beneath a thin flesh of fear. Wrinkles of suspicion. The raised scar of shame.
In the officers club there is always music he cannot quite hear. Laughter too, and jokes, stories about anything but the war.
“Aww, I love this song,” someone says.
He can only smile and nod over his drink. For him there is the percussion of silence, a trembling frequency beneath the noise all around him, beneath the words of the officers and the jagged English of the women that dance with them, beneath what is being said and what will never be said, beneath the subdued laughter and music and the drone of aircraft that can be heard in the distance as they circle, searching for the lights that will guide them from their place in the sky, in flight.
Richwood, West Virginia November 8, 1944
She picks up the phone and there is only the empty stretch of a dial tone; on the radio, static. Outside her window she can see the mountains and the sky, gray and flat. She has only memory and it is unreliable and beyond her grasp. She knows he is far away and she imagines him sailing above the flat, ruined landscape, the endless sand arranged in shadow that mimics the pale rise of mountain ranges and hills, the contours his life before now, before the war, before these last days of flight.
The Italian Coast November 8, 1944
I can hardly believe I’ll be spending another Christmas away from home. I probably won’t even get to go to church. I guess I don’t know how lucky I am to be walking around today. I think of how my buddies got it. Every night I dream about one of them how I saw them go down in flames and how close I came to getting it the same way. And how we used to sit around at night and talk. I can remember all the things they wanted to do when they got back home. One of the boys wife is having a baby. Well honey don’t know much to write. I know I should write every day but now every time I start writing I get to thinking too much about the past. Don’t worry I’m ok.
Tunisia, North Africa November 18, 1944
If her body is aware of this distant event she does not know it. She is not intimate with this death, but with his memory. The pointed visions of walking among his living wreckage. The crumple of his pants on the cold floor next to the bed, the ragged rise of his chest in sleep. Crooked line of his smile tearing her heart to halves. This desert, this bleached sand, the absence of footprints, of life, all this will remain foreign and untouched by her memory. When she learns of his death she will imagine fire, burning, smoke. She will not see moments of his slow descent, the curve of his arm over his face, the quiet slide of his heart to a place far from her reach. And finally the flames, a heat so great it burns the sand to glass.
Richwood, West Virginia December, 1944
This is to notify you . . .
She cannot read on, has read it too many times already. She crosses out the words, angry black marks across the page. She writes: Have you ever loved a man? Like death, like the very bones that walk you over this earth? Have you ever? Could you?
She signs the paper, addresses it simply “War and Navy Departments.” Walking to her mailbox she feels a storm tugging at the air. Placing the envelope in the mailbox she pauses only slightly then turns. Her heart is a muscle now. The size of a fist, defending the new life beneath it from this fierce grief. The first streak of lightning breaks the afternoon. The screen door flaps behind her. Inside, she puts a waltz on the record player and sets to closing windows against a sky that is nearly endless.
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