“You have been the family I lost,” he finished. “I thank you for the offer of college, but I think we all know I am no student. It is time for me to find my true place in this world. I will miss you two and Ben and this house. I love you in my heart. Thomas Brodie Culhane.”
The letter to Ben was harder.
“You are the brother I never had and the best friend I will always have,” he wrote. “You and Isabel have your future planned out. Right now, I have no future. There is nothing here for me in Eureka. I will leave Cyclone at the sheriff’s office. I’m sure Buck will bring him home. Take care of him for me. He’s the first thing I ever bought with my own money that was worth a damn. I leave this place to take on the world, Ben. I know you will understand. If you ever need anything—anything—I’m sure you will find me and I’ll come running. Have a good life, and thanks for taking care of me all these years. Brodie.”
The letter to Isabel was impossible. He wrote and rewrote it a dozen times, crumpling each one and throwing it on the floor.
“Dear Isabel,” he finally wrote. “You and Ben will be going back East to start a new life in a few weeks. He is the man for you. He loves you dearly and will bring magic to your life. It is time for me to leave here and look for my future. I will remember you forever. Brodie.”
He rode down the pathway and tied Cyclone to a tree, gave him an apple to munch on, and looked up at the Hoffman house.
The light was on in the corner room.
She had sneaked out and was waiting for him.
He decided to wait until she went back to her house and leave the note for her in the greenhouse.
Then he thought better of it. Her mother or father might find the letter.
Even worse, it was a cowardly way to bow out.
But he approached the secret hideaway fearfully. Thirteen years of poverty and the loss of two parents he adored had left him emotionally barren. He had learned affection and self-respect from the Gormans, had found in Ben a brother figure in whom he had confided his fears and his joy.
But Isabel.
Isabel was different. Isabel had been his first love. She had awakened emotions he had never felt before. Each eagerly had surrendered their virginity to the other. She had revealed in Brodie a gentleness of spirit that both awed and terrified him.
How can I say good-bye, he wondered, when my heart aches at the thought?
He knew what he had to do, knew he had to dig deep down inside himself, to reach back four years, to search for and rekindle the cynicism, the toughness, the solitude of the kid who had grown up in Eureka and who, when his mother died, had cowered alone in his bed in the corner of the laundry until Ben had come and found him and taken him to the Gorman mansion and a new life that was far beyond his wildest dreams.
Payback time.
He entered the greenhouse resolutely.
She rushed from the darkness before he was halfway to the back. She was wearing a nightgown and a silk robe covered with tiny embroidered roses.
His throat closed. He couldn’t swallow.
“Daddy told me about Mr. Eli. Isn’t it wonderful! It turned out so perfectly,” she said joyously.
She threw her arms around him, hugging him, and her hair swept his face. He kept his hands at his sides.
She stepped back and looked up at him, and saw something she had never seen before. There were tears in his eyes.
“Brodie . . .” The first hint of apprehension.
His lips moved but no words came.
“Brodie,” she said, lowering her head a trifle, staring at him, her head cocked slightly to one side.
He touched her cheek and realized his hand was shaking.
“Something’s bad,” she said, and tears flooded her eyes. She put two fingers against his lips. “I don’t want to hear anything bad. Please.”
“Isabel . . . I’ve got to . . . I have to go away.”
“What do you mean, ‘go away’? Where? Where are you going?”
He looked at the ground. He could not stand to look at her face, at the tears edging down to her chin.
He shook his head. “I don’t know. But it’s not fair for me to stay here.”
“Fair! Fair!”
“Look at me, Isabel. Please. I got nothing. All the clothes I own wouldn’t fill the corner of a closet. I got four hundred dollars in a cigar box and that’s all I got in the world . . .”
“Stop it!” she said.
“Ben loves you. He can give you everything you want.”
“I don’t care!” she cried, tears streaming down her cheeks. “I love you, and I know you love me.”
“I left a note for Mr. Eli and Miss Madeline, and one for Ben. I’m leaving, Isabel. I’m leaving San Pietro valley for good. It’s best for everybody. Especially you.”
“It is not best for me,” she said, anguish accenting every syllable. “You care about Ben, you care about the Gormans. Don’t you care about me?”
“We’re just kids,” he said harshly. “It’s puppy love.”
“That’s what you think? Puppy love?” She was crying hard now. “Is that all I mean to you?”
He couldn’t stand the hurt. He reached out to her but she backed away, into the shadows at the back of the greenhouse. She sat down on the hard earth.
“You’re just throwing me away.” Her voice was like a whispered wail, a cry in the night, her grief so deep that Brodie did not know how to respond.
“I gotta go,” he said in a voice he didn’t even recognize. “It’s best for everybody.”
“How do you know what’s best for me?” she moaned. “I thought you loved me. I thought you would protect me and . . .” Her voice dissolved into more tears.
Jesus, he thought, why won’t she understand?
“My heart hurts,” she sobbed. “It will never stop hurting. You’ve turned my dreams into nightmares.”
“Isabel . . .”
“If you’re going, then go. Get away from me.”
He stood his ground for a few moments and then backed down the aisle to the door. He couldn’t tell her there was a crushing hurt in his heart, too.
As he turned the doorknob, her voice came to him from the darkness.
“I read a poem once,” she said in a voice tortured with misery. “It said ‘First love is forever.’ And I believed it.”
He ran from the greenhouse, ran to Cyclone, jumped on his back, and rode down the path, away from the Hoffman house and around Grand View and down the precipitous cliff road from the Hill to Eureka.
The town had gone crazy. It was like New Year’s Eve. The bars were full, men were staggering in the street, shooting their guns into the air. Some of the girls were dancing on the wooden sidewalk. The news was out about Riker.
Light from town spilled out on the beach, and Brodie leaned back and smacked Cyclone on the rump. He dashed off down the beach.
“Go, boy, go!” Brodie yelled, as the stallion galloped in and out of the surf as he loved to do. They raced past the town, and then Brodie wheeled him around, and they trotted back to the swimming beach. Brodie slid off his back and for the next two hours he talked to the horse, emptying his heart out, explaining to him why he was leaving.
He understands. I can see it in his eyes. He knows I gotta do this.
The wagon to end-o’-track left at 5:00 a.m. And the weekly supply train to San Francisco left at seven. The sun was a scarlet promise on the horizon when he led Cyclone up to the sheriff’s office and tied him to the hitching post. He threw a saddlebag over each shoulder and went into the office. The deputy was half-asleep at his desk.
“What you doin’ down here this time a day?”
“I gotta go out of town,” Brodie answered.
He laid an envelope on the desk.
“My horse is tied up outside and I got a note here for Buck. I’m asking him to take the horse back up to the Gormans for me.”
“Hope the hell nobody steals him,” the deputy said, looking out the window at Cyclone
. “I’ll keep an eye on him.”
“Thanks.”
The wagon was loaded with hungover iron workers when Brodie climbed aboard. A few minutes later, the driver cracked his whip and they started up the hill. As the wagon reached the crest, Brodie looked back at the town where he was born and where his life had changed forever in the years since the death of his mother. A great sadness flowed over him. Then he turned his back on Eureka and dismissed it.
Good-bye forever and good riddance, he said to himself, and he knew he would never return.
Fate had other plans for Brodie Culhane.
1918
In the spring of 1917, a dispirited President Woodrow Wilson, the liberal idealist who had ardently resisted America’s intervention in the war in Europe, was finally forced to admit the inevitable: America was about to be drawn into the most savage conflict in the history of warfare. In 1914, nine European nations were embroiled in what would become known as the Great War, a conflict unparalleled in its brutality. On one side, France, Italy, Great Britain, and Russia, among others. Opposing them, Germany, Turkey, and the Ottoman Empire.
It quickly became apparent that World War I was to become a campaign of mud, trenches, barbed wire—and machine guns, the first time the deadly weapon was used in a major war.
By the time the United States entered the conflict, the trench war was approaching its grotesque and barbaric finale . . .
A thick fog laced with the smell of death lay like a shroud over the battlefield. Then there was a howl in the sky as a star shell arced and burst, briefly revealing a ghastly sight. Silhouetted in the heavy mist was a wasteland of staggering destruction. Trees, fragmented by constant artillery shelling, were reduced to leafless, shattered stalks. Fence posts wrapped in rusting barbed wire stood like pathetic sentinels over trenches that snaked and crisscrossed the terrain. Shell holes, surrounded by mounds of displaced earth, were filled with rancid rainwater. There was no grass, nothing green or verdant, just brown stretches of mud, body parts dangling from endless stretches of wire, abandoned weapons, and corpses frozen in a tragic frieze of death.
And there were the rats, legions of rats, scurrying back and forth in the no-man’s-land, feasting on the dead.
A few hundred yards beyond the haze-veiled scene, the Germans were gathering for another attack—there had been dozens through the years. The star shell burned out and darkness enveloped the shell-spotted battlefield.
Brodie Culhane was chilled even though it was early September. His boots and socks were soaked and he had removed his puttees, which were in rags. Damp fog wormed through his clothing and clung to his skin. The machine-gun nest he had set up had an inch of water in it from a rainstorm the night before. There wasn’t a spot of dry ground for miles in any direction. It made him think of Eureka. All around him was mud. Mud as demanding as quicksand, sucking a man’s legs down to the knees with every step. As he stared into the darkness, another star shell burst overhead, illuminating the grim no-man’s-land that lay between his machine-gun line and the Germans.
From Switzerland to the English Channel, the French had lined their border with trenches and barbed wire, four rows of each separating them from Germany. Now, almost four years later, the grim sight before him defined what had become known as the Western Front.
He was dying for a cigarette. And in the deadly silence, a song suddenly echoed in his head.
K-K-K-Katy, K-K-K-Katy,
You’re the only g-g-g-girl that I adore . . .
It was their first day on the line. They were marching down a road past a park on the outskirts of a French town called Château Thierry, heading north toward a game preserve called Belleau Wood. One of the squads started singing, as if it were a parade. One platoon singing one song, a second company answering with another.
K-K-K-Katy, K-K-K-Katy,
You’re the only g-g-g-girl that I adore,
When the m-m-m-moon shine’s, over the c-c-c-cowshed,
I’ll be w-w-w-waiting at the g-g-g-garden door.
Answered by:
You may forget the gas and shells, parlay-voo,
You may forget the gas and shells, parlay-voo,
You may forget the gas and shells,
But you’ll never forget the mademoiselles,
Hinky-dinky parlay-voo.
They were still singing when the Germans fired the first volley. Machine guns. His men went down like string-cut puppets.
Barely six months ago.
Baptism day.
Behind him, the radiophone buzzed, its ring muzzled to prevent the enemy, a few hundred yards away, from hearing it.
The radioman, a clean-cheeked youngster, answered it, cupping the mouthpiece with his hand. He gave the receiver to Culhane, who could feel the youngster’s hand shaking as he took it. The nineteen-year-old had developed the shakes after only two weeks on the front.
“Culhane,” he whispered.
“Brodie, this is Jack Grover. The major wants to have a chat. I’m on the radiophone by the five-mile post.”
“Stay where you are,” Brodie answered, “I’ll come to you. You’ll never get that tricycle of yours through this damn muck.”
“Appreciate that,” Grover answered with a chuckle, and the radio went dead.
“Relax, kid,” Culhane’s voice was calm and deep as an animal’s growl as he handed the phone back to the radioman. “Nothing’s gonna happen for three or four hours. Think about something else. Think about your girl back home or Christmas or something. Fear’s worse than the real thing.”
He checked his watch in the masked glow of his flashlight. It was three-fifteen.
“I gotta run back to HQ,” he told the kid. “Cover the stutter gun.” He grabbed his rifle, crawled out of the nest, and headed east in a crouch toward the dirt road four hundred feet away, mud snatching at his boots with every step.
Grover was waiting on the motorcycle when Culhane emerged from the dark. His clothing and face were caked with mud, he was unshaven, and his eyes were dulled by lack of sleep.
“Jesus, you look like hell,” Grover said as Culhane clambered into the sidecar.
“Haven’t you heard, this is hell,” Culhane answered. Grover wheeled around and headed back down the muddy road.
Temporary HQ was a two-room bunker a mile from no-man’s-land. It had wood-plank floors, sandbags for walls, and the ceiling was made of fence posts and logs. The first room was occupied by the top sergeant, a beefy old-timer named Paul March. Wooden planks stretched between upended ammo boxes substituted for a desk. A radioman named Caldone was huddled over his equipment and a runner was catching a nap on a cot in the corner. A tattered piece of burlap served as a door to the other room, the major’s office.
“How’s it going up there?” March said to Culhane.
“Wanna take a guess?”
“No thanks,” March said. “Let me be surprised in a couple of hours when we join you for tea and crumpets.” He walked to the burlap curtain and knocked on the wooden frame that supported it.
“Yes?” The voice from inside the room was deep, with the soft roll of the South in it.
“Sergeant Culhane’s here, Major.”
“Good, show him in.”
They entered, saluted, and Major Merrill walked around his desk to grab Culhane by the arm.
“Good to see you, Brodie,” he said.
“Glad I’m still around.”
The major was a big man, broad-shouldered and muscular, his hair trimmed almost to the scalp, his dark blue eyes dulled by too many attacks and counterattacks and too many “regret” letters written to mothers or wives or sisters. He was a year younger than Culhane, but the war had put ten years on his face. Culhane had served under him for two years, starting when the battalion was formed in South Carolina. Merrill was a compassionate man in a business where compassion was a liability.
“Jesus, you’re a wreck,” he said to Culhane.
“So I’ve been told,” Culhane answered. Haunted eyes
peered out from his mud-caked face.
Major Merrill looked Culhane over.
“Sergeant March,” the major called.
“Yes, sir,” March answered, peering through the burlap curtain.
“Do you think you can find me a pair of dry boots, ten-and-a-half C, and some dry socks and puttees?”
“Yes, sir. Right away, sir.”
To Culhane, the major said, “I could hear your boots squishing when you came down the steps. A soldier has a right to go into battle with dry feet, damn it. Sorry I can’t get you a fresh uniform.”
“I’ll be up to my ass in mud two minutes after I leave here, anyway,” Culhane said. “But it’ll be nice to have dry feet for a little while. Thanks. Okay if I smoke?”
“Of course.”
Merrill watched Culhane’s mud-caked hands as he took out a pouch of tobacco, papers, and matches wrapped in tinfoil to keep them dry. Not a tremor, he thought, as he watched Culhane roll the cigarette and light it.
Culhane took out a roughly sketched map and spread it out on Merrill’s table, but Merrill pointed to the other curtain in the room.
“There’s a makeshift sink and some clean water in there. Why don’t you wash up before we talk. My razor and strop’s in there if you want to grab a quick shave. I’ll get us some coffee.”
March came back with fresh footwear, and Culhane put on the socks and boots. When he returned to Merrill’s office, there were two tin cups of coffee sitting on the table. Merrill took a silver flask from his back pocket and laced both with brandy while Culhane rolled another cigarette.
“According to our intelligence, whoever the hell they are, the Germans are lining up to take another crack at us,” Merrill said.
“What a surprise,” said Culhane. “When?”
“Dawn.”
Culhane looked at him for a moment, then asked, “What’s the weather look like?”
“We’re supposed to pick up some wind about sunrise. That’ll clear the fog, then it’s going to be a bright, sunny day.”