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“All your best friends
Are people you’ve just met”
(“Three Angels,” Headstones)
I've been wrestling with angels
And I can show you the scars
(“Jacob’s Dream,” Noah Reid)
Radar doesn’t mind angels. They’re pretty neat most of the time, when they’re not in the way. Mostly they’re not in the way, once you get used to just walking on past them. And if you get used to the cold.
That’s the part that usually gets people all worked up, the cold, because nobody ever said about how angels can freeze your fingertips off if you touch them, and more if you hang on. That’s not in the Bible, that part. The kid in bed six in post-op, Bardofsky, he knows about that. He looks like he’s wearing big white mittens. He’ll probably keep the fingers, most of them. Captain Hunnicutt’s real good with hands and feet.
He worked on Bardofsky for half the night until Colonel Potter reminded him about the wounded coming in the next wave and about how they had to push on. Captain Hunnicutt talked while he worked putting the kid’s fingers back together, one by one, and doing grafts they didn’t have time for and Hawkeye stepping in when he had a break from massaging hearts and running bowels to help with the real fine stitching. Anyway, Captain Hunnicutt talked to himself, not so anybody but Radar could hear. Well, except maybe Hawkeye. Radar’s pretty sure Hawkeye can hear Captain Hunnicutt’s inside voice, too, because of how Hawkeye kept looking up at him across the OR and his eyes looked different each time, and sometimes there were tears but he just asked for a wipe and Kellye dabbed his forehead and the tears too without saying anything about that. Captain Hunnicutt’s voice inside him was quiet and the anger was sort of crowded up hard against that gentleness everybody loves about him.
It’s how Captain Hunnicutt does his anger, the real anger about real things like the war and the angels. The food in the mess tent he’ll yell about, or when they ran out of silk and had to use up all the sewing thread in the camp. That stuff he’s as loud as anybody about. But the angels and what they’re doing here in a war zone if not to help, and why they gotta wreck a kid for wanting to love them, for wanting some proof of heaven, he gets so quiet mad inside about it that it’s like someone turned the volume down in the OR, everybody talking quiet, too. Not like they’re scared of him, though. More like they’re in church. The church of righteous anger, Radar’s Uncle Ed would say.
It’s strange, sorta topsy-turvy, how seeing a for-real angel can make a guy lose his faith. Sometimes Radar thinks that, if Captain Hunnicutt could meet God face-to-face, it would be to tell Him he didn’t believe in Him anymore. Radar gets that, but it gives him a sort of heavy, lurching feeling, like when you’re in a chopper that’s taking off real fast and part of you hasn’t caught on yet that you’re flying.
Maybe that’s why the angels always look so sad.
* * * *
Sew a button on my shirt
Petition my heart don't go that way
(“Son of Dust,” The Grenaways)
Colonel Potter looks up from a chart when Winchester appears in post-op, seemingly materializing out of a snow-devil like some sort of elemental magician. At the bed to one side of the door, Kellye hunches over to shield the boy there from the blast of winter and then goes back to changing his dressing. The boy in the bed on the other side of the door is in coma and doesn’t respond to things like cold or pain. Potter calls Abel over to order an extra blanket for him.
Winchester follows Potter from bed to bed, blowing on his hands and updating his mental files on each of the wounded. Not much has changed in 24 hours. Wounds are mending themselves cell by cell. The boys lie still but their bodies are a fury of microscopic labour. For a moment, as he lifts the edge of a bandage to peek at the forty-five stitches he laced across Morris’s abdomen, Potter feels impossibly huge and lumbering, like a giant dragging whole wheatfields together while the tiny people run after, gathering and binding the wheat into sheafs.
He chuckles and shakes his head hard. He’s tired and gone a furlong too far into whimsical, brainwise. While Winchester gets settled at the desk, his white coat pulled tight over his three sweaters, Potter pours himself a cup of joe from the pot on the stove. It’s sludgy and boiled down to the essence of coffee, as good a substitute for a night’s sleep as is to be found in these parts. He sips and does a last scope of post-op. He should be heading for his tent and some Zane Gray, soak his bunions awhile before the forecasted wounded roll in, but he’s arrested by the sparks and rainbows flickering across the corrugated ceiling.
Turning in his chair, Winchester follows his gaze. “Ah,” he says.
“Tell me, Major, when did you first know about the angels?”
Winchester chuckles too, not in his dismissive way, though. As his time here drags on, he’s developing a new chuckle, like they all do, something like stones scattered in the direction of the mine field. “Colonel,” he answers, “I’m quite sure I don’t know about the angels even now.”
“Fair point.” Potter’s shrug makes the coffee in his mug tilt and settle, more slowly than physics should allow. It used to give him the willies, the way the rules of the world would bend around the presence of angels, but that’s been worn out of him like the heel of an old sock.
“Sure didn’t expect to find ‘em in Korea. Thought I’d seen my first and last in France in doubleya doubleya one, a little town called—” Potter casts around inside the attic for the name, but it’s gone. “Well, anyway, we were reconnoitering the town, Saint Something, looking to set up a supply post, and it, the angel I mean, was in a bombed-out library. The roof was blown clean off, all the books tumbled everywhere. A real mess.
“There was a librarian in there, sorting books one-handed into piles. Her other hand had been crushed in the barrage, y’see, was all wrapped up in an apron. I cleaned and dressed it best I could, which wasn’t great in my green days before medical school, and me with only half a canteen of water.”
Potter puts a hand on Kellye’s shoulder as she’s leaving. He points at the burn victim, Kanzakis, who’s thrashed his pillows onto the floor, and watches while she gets the boy settled again and sits next to him to re-read aloud his letter from home.
Potter follows along for a bit and then picks up his own story again, although it’s clear that Winchester is only half-listening. “She had this long, red hair all done up in braids around her head like a crown, except one had come loose and was trailing down her back. I don’t know why, but I asked her if I could fix that for her, too.” He makes scissor motions with his fingers. “Coupez, she said. Coupez, coupez. So I sat her back down on a stack of books and took out my knife and gave her a haircut right there. Made it real short so she wouldn’t have to ask anybody for a good while.” His smile feels sad on his face, so he erases it with a slug of sludge. “You look like Joan of Arc, I told her, Jean d’Arc. She gave me one of the braids, put the other in her pocket, and went back to work.”
Kanzakis is weeping, now. Kellye strokes his arm, the only part of him besides his face not swaddled in bandages. Outside, the night is pressed against the post-op windows. Potter can’t see the angels from this vantage, but the sparks on the ceiling have gone still now that the wind’s died down. and everything feels keen enough to cut, sharp as an angel’s glass feather or the scimitar of moonlight slicing through the shreds of clouds. Not bright enough for choppers, though. It’ll be ambulances, and the poor beat-up kids battered some more by the frozen ruts on the road.
“And the angel?” Winchester prompts against expectation.
Potter rouses himself and decides against the rest of the coffee. “Oh,” he says as he puts the mug on the corner of the desk, “it was there, reading. Me and the boys decided not to use the town, after all, so we bivouacked on the hillside. We sat out half the night watching the sparks and rainbows dancing as it moved around inside that burned-out library. Keep an eye on Morris. I got a feeling about sepsis. There was a wagon-load of mud in the wound.”
As Potter’s pushing through the door to the clerk’s office, Winchester says, “One wonders, what does an angel read? Let me guess: Milton. Paradise Lost.”
“Nope. Cookbooks.”
That surprises a laugh out of Winchester. “Angel food cake, I surmise.” He turns with a bemused quirk of his lips back to his charts.
* * * *
Can I know you?
Like these words say?
Can I place my trust,
In what I can’t see?
(“Am I Jonah?” The Grenaways)
“This is the way of faith, though, isn’t it?” Francis smiles, feeling sad and elated at the same time.
BJ tugs on the Father’s sleeve to pull him aside and guide him in a wide arc around the angels. Nobody knows what would happen if someone were to walk through an angel and no one wants to find out. They need some sort of real-time mapping system to locate no-go zones.
“Seems kind of cruel to me,” BJ observes, defensive on Francis’s behalf.
“Not at all, not at all,” Francis assures him. “I am sorry, though, that it’s so bothersome, someone having to guide me around camp like a blind man. I’m sure it’s unnecessary. I don’t imagine they’ll be here long, do you?”
“It’s necessary, Father. And it’s not a bother.” BJ casts a dark look behind them that says all Francis needs to know about his feelings regarding angels and how long ago they wore out their welcome. “Besides, it’s not like you’re bad company.” His smile is wide and genuine under the mustache.
Francis blinks up at him through the smudged lenses of his glasses and then ducks his head shyly. “That’s kind of you to say, BJ. I wish that sentiment would translate to better attendance on Sundays.”
There were three angels in the mess tent the last time he said Mass. Or so he’s told. It’s just as well he can’t see them. Imagine the nerves! Worse than giving a sermon before the bishop. He’s considered doing a poll to see which denomination draws the most angels, but that seems unnecessarily small and competitive. They don’t seem to wear any team colours, so to speak. No two people describe even the same angel the same way. He suspects the angels are mirrors of some kind. He’s also told that often there are half a dozen angels hanging around the motor pool, so angelic attendance is probably not a reliable endorsement of any one, true faith, in any case.
At the mess tent, BJ hands him off to Klinger and continues on toward showers with a wave good-bye.
“Right this way, Father! You’ll be happy to know the mess is 100% angel-free this morning.” Klinger looks suddenly stricken, his face falling, his heavy brows making downturned parentheses of sorrow around the dark soulfulness of his eyes. “Or maybe you’re not. Happy, I mean. Sorry, Father.” He picks up a tray for Francis and ushers him ahead into the chow line, as though Francis is actually blind and not just angel-blind.
“It’s all right, Max. Believe it or not, being in the presence of angels isn’t so much about seeing them. In some ways, they’re more with me when they’re not with me, if you get my drift.”
“If you say so, Father,” Klinger says. But then the understanding grows in him and he nods solemnly. “Like my Uncle Habib.”
Francis laughs. “Yes, just like your Uncle Habib.”
He waves off the dubious grey slab that Igor, hand-on-heart, swears is sausage. There’s only so much faith even a priest can muster before 6 AM.
* * * *
You're as loved as you were
Before the strangeness swept through
Our bodies, our houses, our streets—
(“Isn’t That What Friends Are For?” Bruce Cockburn)
Sidney finds Margaret in the remains of the Officers’ Club, just as she’s commandeering a pair of work gloves from one of the enlisted men on the clean-up detail.
“Come on!” she barks at them. “This mess isn’t going to clean itself!”
Without waiting for them to hop-to, she starts shifting broken planks and sheets of corrugated metal, lifting and tossing them into what is probably meant to be orderly piles but resembles more a palisade around the open space she’s making. The work detail hangs around at the periphery of the demolition zone, mostly trying to sidestep flying debris and looking uneasily at Sidney. The head nurse is never one to avoid hard work, but this furious piling and unpiling is irregular and they don’t know what to do. With a sympathetic smile, Sidney waves them off. They drift to not-quite malingering distance, kept closer than they’d like by Major Houlihan’s orders on one front and a trio of angels at their back, near the Swamp. The men share a cigarette, carefully not paying attention to anything in particular.
“Permission to enter?” Sidney calls from the safe side of the work zone.
Pausing, Margaret shoots him an impatient look and bends to pick up the necks of two broken gin bottles. “Oh. You. I guess it’s my turn.” She tosses the bottles into a pile of other broken bottles. “Watch the glass.”
“Your turn?” Sidney asks, picking his path carefully.
“For the interrogation. It’s all in my report, you know.”
Margaret writes meticulous reports. Particulars of dates and times, personnel, and interventions both pharmacological and physical. All the boxes ticked. Everything said that needs to be said. Not a single crack to let anything messy leak out.
“I know it’s in the report. Can’t a guy climb over a mountain of debris to say hi to a friend?”
She snorts, not a laugh, but not not a laugh, either. “Please, Sidney, just get to the point. I have work to do.”
She tugs at a piece of posterboard pinned under an overturned table, stumbling back as it tears in her grasp. After slapping it a few times to knock off the sand and dust, she turns it over. It says: BEST CARE ANY. She drops it beside the cache of broken bottles and then, like she’s just suddenly made the decision, drops down to her knees and stays there, head bowed in a most un-Margaret posture of exhaustion and defeat.
The enlisted men shuffle around so their backs are turned, skittish, waiting for the sky to fall. Sidney crouches down beside her. Under his arm is a thick file of papers, reports and interview notes, a jigsaw puzzle of eye-witness accounts, faulty recollections and deliberate, well-meaning obfuscations. The picture on the puzzle box, which he does not have, is of Hawkeye Pierce in the wild, surreal interval between beach volleyball and a locked ward.
Before he can speak, Margaret draws her spine straight and her shoulders back, still sitting on her heels, but somehow at attention like the most disciplined penitent, eyes on the middle distance. “He wasn’t aiming for the O Club,” she says flatly. “It was the angels he was aiming for.”
Sidney already knows about the angels.
“Angelorum caedes,” Hawkeye said while the sun angled through the chain link over the window and pricked light from the watery cisterns of his eyes. “The murder of angels. I bet there isn’t even a law.”
“He wasn’t tilting at windmills,” Margaret insists and then shakes her head at herself. The reality or unreality of angels isn’t the fault line of Hawkeye’s break.
“What would it take, Sidney?” Hawkeye said from the shadowy corner of what he insisted on calling his cell, his voice mild and conversational like he was doing inventory in the supply room or chatting about the latest gossip at the bridge club. “Outrages in every shape and size, insults to the human body, violations, degradations, bone shards and shrapnel, bowels like fish nets, and beardless boys flung at other beardless boys and all of them dying for a hill, for an acre of blood-soaked dirt nobody can take with them, and from the angels we get… what? Nothing. Homicide doesn’t move them. Genocide doesn’t.” Then, venom-soaked rage: “What would it take?”
Sidney looks over his shoulder at the angels. They haven’t moved since he first noticed them and could easily be carved from some fine, grey stone. Father Mulcahy heads obliviously toward them and one of the nurses runs to intercept him, redirecting him around the other side of the Swamp. An ambulance rumbles in, Winchester coming out of post-op to meet it, BJ arriving moments later from the mess tent. Only two stretchers today and one kid on his feet, arm in a sling. The young soldier pauses, gaping at the angels until Winchester points him toward pre-op. The angels return his attention impassively. As always, their faces are difficult to make out, as though there’s a mist, not in the air but in the observing eye.
“The angels are the vocabulary of that particular break, but not its source,” Sidney tells Margaret. “And we both know that the real break came before, on the bus.” She opens her mouth but he holds up a hand. “Yes, I know what’s in the report. I need to know what’s not in the report.”
Eyes front. Eyes front. Eyes front. Sidney can almost hear the mantra playing in Margaret’s head. She’s remarkable in a very familiar, human way, Sidney thinks as he watches her. She will not hide from the truth, but she won’t quite let it in, either. Order and discipline thrown up against the unfathomable rules of metaphysics and the intolerable convolutions of her own love and fear. He angles his head a little and can see her eyes filling with tears. Still, though, she doesn’t break. He waits.
Finally, she looks at him, belligerently miserable, like she knows she’s failing an inspection. “I don’t know what you want me to tell you!”
Sidney shrugs. “Just tell me about Hawkeye Pierce, the view from Houlihan Hill.”
With an exasperated growl, she returns to her former posture. “Hawkeye Pierce,” she begins and stops again, presses her lips together, pulls in a steadying breath. “Hawkeye Pierce is the most infuriating human being I have ever known. He’s angry and impatient and judgmental and inflexible. He can be cutting, cruel, sometimes. And condescending and arrogant. Flippant. Self-involved.”
Sidney can’t help smiling as she warms up, the hint of tremulousness in her voice quickly replaced by that ringing brass pipe quality that he most associates with Major Houlihan in her righteousness. He ducks his head into the shelter of his arms for a moment until he can get his expression smoothed out again. When he looks up, she’s looking back at him, poised on the edge of something.
“Am I wrong?”
“No,” he says. “That sounds about right, so far.” There’s more, though. Hawkeye and Margaret are more. “And?”
“And he’s so beautiful.” A whisper, a tear breaking free, her face softening for a moment before she hardens, finds her firmness again. “The fierceness of his compassion. The way he uses his hands. The way his mind works, flywheels and clocking gears, tick tick tick tick. He talks in his sleep, which you know. Cries, shouts. Which everybody in the camp knows. He never gets a break from it.” Ah, and here it is, the paradox that really infuriates her: Hawkeye, both her friend and that which harms her friend. “His mind moves so fast, so relentlessly, I want to etherize him sometimes, just to see what his face would look like.”
Her voice catches on the memory. It was Potter who gave the order, but Margaret was the one, Sidney knows, who sedated Hawkeye, who sat with him while Klinger and Igor brought the litter and then later in the VIP tent while BJ prowled and prowled and didn’t sleep the whole night and Charles took on the double shift in post-op. It was Margaret Hawkeye stared at, unmoored and betrayed, when Sidney came to load him onto the ambulance. Hawkeye wouldn’t let BJ hold his hand, but BJ took the ride with him, anyway.
Margaret shifts to settle onto her hip and doesn’t wipe away the tears that are smudging her mascara. Scanning the detritus around her, she sighs. “He’s not always a nice man. But he’s a good man, among so many good men.” Now she nods, as if some test result has confirmed a diagnosis. “And he’s a liar.”
Sidney’s eyebrows shoot up. “He is?”
She lifts her chin as she looks at him, defying him to challenge her. “He says he’s an atheist, but he has religion. It’s not them, though.” Jerking her head backward toward the angels behind them.
“Then what?”
“Life. Blood doesn’t wear a uniform, he says. Salvation isn’t in the sky or in a church. It’s in our hands.” Turning up her hands, she assesses the grime on her gloves. “He loves hands.” Her fingers curl into fists in her lap. “Life, above all else. That’s why he drove a jeep through the empty O Club instead of the angels.” Her smile is crooked with self-censure and the brass comes back into her voice. “But what do I know? I’m not the psychologist or a priest and I’m definitely no philosopher.” Clapping the dust from her gloves, she pushes to her feet. “I’m just here to do the work.”
Sidney watches her survey the junk for something that can be salvaged. After a few moments, when it seems she’s not going to say more, he gets up too, tucks his folder back under his arm.
“And?” he asks gently.
Bending to sift through the dirt, she plucks up shards of glass, a cognac snifter and its broken stem, holding them carefully for a long moment before tossing them into the pile with the rest. “And what?”
“The bus?”
Margaret flinches, then talks while she works at digging out the toppled bar so that her words come out tight and packed down by the effort of shifting rubble. “When that Korean woman, that poor mother, made her choice, when Hawkeye realized what she’d done for us—” She falters, a flick of her gaze at him like a flash of an SOS and then gone. “He loves life too much to stay sane in a place where choices like that make sense.” She waves at the camp, or maybe the world in general, and pushes the hair out of her eyes, leaving streaks of dirt across her brow. “We should all be so wise. Maybe the world would be different.” She still hasn’t wiped away the tracks of her tears. “So he had a choice, too: lose his religion or himself. He chose to lose himself.”
“Like a saint.”
Margaret’s laugh is sharp, punctures the grey, late-summer day. “He’d rupture himself laughing if you said that to him.”
“Never saint a man who thinks he deserves it.” She stares at him, incredulous, until he relents with the breath of a laugh, “No, he’s no saint. He’s just a man who’s misplaced some crucial pieces of himself.”
“Then go find them,” Margaret says, matter-of-factly, turning back to the trash. “We need his hands.”
Sidney squeezes her arm as he turns to go and she pats his hand absently, already kicking a piece of broken stool out of her way.
Sidney takes the long way round the Swamp. The three angels are pewter shapes against the dry hillside and the white sky, their glassy feathers dull in the directionless light like shingles of aluminum layered against their backs. One of the enlisted men flicks a cigarette butt in their direction and the other slaps him on the back of his head hard enough to knock his hat off.
Margaret shouts at them, “You there! Enough R and R! Get to work!”
* * * *
We’re the insect life of paradise
(“Isn’t That What Friends Are For?” Bruce Cockburn)
“Father? Father Mulcahy, are you okay?”
Hawkeye goes down on one knee in the damp green grass at the edge of the pond. Beside him, Father Mulcahy is also kneeling, his eyes closed, his face slack, tears on his cheeks, his palms pressed to his heart.
Around them, the 4077 is being reassembled. The air is creased by smoke from the fires over the ridge and scored by the shouts of the enlisted men heaving the poles up under the heavy canvas of the OR tent.
Hawkeye’s still holding the ball of wool he was unsnarling from his hairbrush when he saw Mulcahy fall. He’s not exactly sure why the sight of a priest kneeling should send fireworks of alarm shooting along his limbs. Maybe it was the way that Mulcahy had dropped straight down, almost bonelessly, midstride that made Hawkeye’s brain, his sludgy, narcotically serene brain, scream sniper and he’d been running before he was aware of moving. Now, he looks up, trying to catch someone’s eye, but everyone is too busy temporarily taking the mobile out of MASH to look his way. No one is too interested in looking his way in general, he’s noticed, since Sidney sprung him, but the priest should merit more attention than the resident embarrassing crank case.
“Father?”
When Hawkeye touches his shoulder, Mulcahy starts and opens his eyes. They are feverishly bright behind the lenses of his glasses. “Oh, Hawkeye,” he says, a quaver in his voice. “My son.”
Suddenly, Hawkeye feels foolish. He’s interrupted some private communion. The light in the Father’s face, the pure wonder there— “I’m sorry, Father, I thought—” I thought you were shot through the spine. I thought they finally got you, too. I thought no one is safe, no one is ever safe, even the best, most innocent of us. I thought it should be me. I thought. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think.”
As he’s pushing himself up, Mulcahy grabs his arm and pulls him down again. “Wait. Tell me, are they near?”
Hairs rising on the back of his neck, Hawkeye turns to scan the hillside for some tell-tale glint, then the road and the bushes for quilted uniforms and the silence of rubber-soled shoes. When did he become this, he wonders. Was there a particular moment when he became someone who knows how late-summer sunlight reflects off of a sniper’s sight? He must have gone to bed one night, not knowing. He can’t remember. When did the sight of a pious man kneeling start making him think of the way a bullet can sever a spinal cord clean?
“It’s okay. It’s just us friendlies today,” he says, squinting at the hillside, at the cloudless blue of the afternoon sky.
“Are they near?” Mulcahy repeats and tugs at his sleeve to make Hawkeye turn his face toward him.
“Nobody here but us chickens.”
Hawkeye notes how the Father’s eyes track the movement of his lips closely, and the confusion swimming up into his gaze.
“Father, can you hear me?”
“The angels,” Mulcahy says. “Are they near? Hawkeye, it’s important.”
Obeying the urgency in his voice, Hawkeye pivots to look back over the priest’s head at the skeleton of the camp taking on canvas flesh, olive drab corpuscles flowing along paths that aren’t paths yet, latrine to mess, mess to post-op, post-op to supply shed. The traffic seems to part around an island and converge again past the two angels standing together in the middle of everything. He can’t see their faces. In the angled sunlight, they’re blank silhouettes framed by the glow and sparkle of ice-glass wings. He thinks of sniper’s sights again and looks away with a low sound of protest.
“Yeah, yeah,” he reports. “There’s two in the compound. If you need a guide back, I can cut my break short and take you through Central Park, but I gotta charge you a premium for the local colour.” He tries to think of a crack about how he’s terrific angel repellant. With or without a jeep, he’s a legend among the heavenly host for his angelicidal tendencies.
Again, that careful attention to his face and then Mulcahy’s brow creasing with the effort to understand.
Hawkeye nods, points over Mulcahy’s shoulder and then holds up two fingers. “Two, in the camp.” He redirects his pointing finger at his own ear. “Wanna tell me something, Father?”
Shaking his head, Mulcahy takes Hawkeye’s hand, the one still holding the tangled skein of wool, and folds it between his own. He’s weeping again but his expression is elated. “Oh, Hawkeye,” he says, his voice breathless with reverence. “I can hear them!”
Puzzled, Hawkeye looks away from the fervid glow of Mulcahy’s gaze and up at the angels. They’re doing what angels always do, which is nothing, or, at least, nothing that he can see, unless standing around inscrutably counts as an activity. No one’s ever heard them make a peep. Even when he tried to drive a jeep through them, they made no sound at all, not so much as a gasp of fear or outrage as he careered past them into the wall of the O Club, so close that the razor edges of a wing sliced the jeep’s front tire into frozen shreds.
“I don’t understand. How? What?”
“It’s glorious! Like the celestial spheres! The chiming of Creation!” Mulcahy laughs with delight and transcendent joy.
He holds Hawkeye’s hand crushingly tight against his breast. Hawkeye can feel his heart beating there, fast and constant and so alive that it stirs his own sluggish blood and he laughs, too, until suddenly he’s weeping and he has to put his hand over his mouth to keep from braying out his pain like a child.
Pulling him into his arms, Mulcahy holds him and murmurs, “There, my son, there you are” until, after a long while, Hawkeye’s jaggedness smooths out again, like water flowing from rocks to pebbles to sand. “Listen,” the Father says softly, his cheek against Hawkeye’s crown. “Can you hear them?”
Pulling away and sitting heavily on the grass, Hawkeye closes his eyes and listens.
Close by there’s the water, a lapping of small waves on the gravel and the repeated chuck-chuck-chuweeee of some wading bird hidden in the reeds. The breeze shuffles the leaves of the willow on the bank and the grasses hush hush dryly together. Behind them in the camp, he can hear the grinding of jeep motor refusing to turn over, the clatter of cutlery from the mess tent. The nurses ferrying boxes of supplies from the transports are singing Auf Wiederseh'n Sweetheart, Margaret barking orders and then taking up Vera Lynn’s part, “This lovely day has flown my way….” and Klinger harmonizing for a moment before his voice is damped by the falling of a tent flap. If Hawkeye holds his breath, he can hear Sophie huffing a greeting and Potter’s affectionate reply. If he stills his pounding heart, he can hear the thrum of propellers on the plane carrying a sleeping BJ over the Pacific and, farther on, the muted roar and hiss of the steel gray Atlantic beating its ancient rhythm against the shores of Maine.
The sun shines magenta through his eyelids. Father Mulcahy holds his hand.
Hawkeye nods. “Yeah, Father,” he says. “I can hear them.”
The End