The Guineveres (10 page)

In the Back Room, we saw the five soldiers already cocooned in their beds. Sister Connie and Sister Magda and Ebbie all tended to them, making sure their sheets were properly tucked, their pillows adequately fluffed. The old folks gawked toward them with slack jaws. We may have gawked, too, even if we tried our best not to. They looked so out of place with their scars and their bandages, with their lanky, youthful bodies and thick hair. Usually we took pleasure in stories of people less fortunate than ourselves—that's why we liked the tales of the saints, that's true—but there was nothing we liked about seeing these soldiers who had already brought with them a peculiar smell to the room, a scent both sour and sweet and ferrous all the same.

“What's wrong with them?” Ginny whispered. We didn't know, and we weren't sure we wanted to.

“Will we have to take care of them?” Win said. “I didn't sign up for this.”

“Nobody signed up for this,” I said.

“Where should we put these?” Gwen finally asked Sister Magda. Magda was short and round, and always wore a worried expression on her face, which caused permanent wrinkles on her forehead, three perfectly parallel squiggle lines. Her complexion was dark, and on occasion she muttered to herself in a different language. “It's their personal effects and uniforms. The officer asked for our help.”

“Sister Connie?” Sister Magda called out. “Their personal effects and uniforms?”

“Just find a place,” Sister Connie huffed. She was signing some papers now, directing the uniformed men toward the front of the Sick Ward, where Sister Fran waited to greet them.

The Guineveres were instructed to stow the duffels in the storage closet, and as we passed the soldiers' beds, we got a closer look at them. One had a bandaged face, covered almost entirely. A shock of blond hair and a pair of soft, pillowy lips were the only things that distinguished him from a mummy. Another was missing an arm; he had small scabs on his face that made it look like he had freckles. There was a big, stocky one, too. His legs were bound separately in two huge casts held together with a bar that extended from knee to knee. One of the soldiers was missing three fingers: his pinkie, his ring finger, and his middle finger, so his hand looked permanently shaped into a gun. The final one was not bandaged at all. Aside from the few cuts on his face and deep purple bruises beneath his eyes, he looked, not healthy, certainly, but not unwell. His eyelids were shiny like wax.

“His injuries are probably internal,” Ginny whispered.

“And that makes him the sickest of all,” Gwen added.

“What are their names?” we asked Sister Connie. On the clipboards at the end of each bed she'd written a number where a name should have been listed, a number that corresponded with the last two digits listed on each of the duffels.

“Nobody knows,” she said. “That's why they're here.” She took their pulses, nodded as she counted the beats in her head, then jotted notes on the clipboards.

“But what about their dog tags?” Gwen asked. She had seen her father's dog tags, which he'd kept hung on his bedpost long after he left the army. On them, in raised block letters, was listed his name, her mom's name, and an address she didn't recognize, since they'd moved so many times. In the bottom right-hand corner was stamped a
C,
and when she asked him what this stood for, he told her Catholic, though she'd never known him to go to church. “For your mother's peace of mind,” he had explained.

“No dog tags. No identification,” Sister Connie said. She didn't look up, didn't convey the slightest hint that she might have felt sorry for the soldiers. “It sometimes happens this way, unfortunately.”

“They're in a coma, girls,” Sister Magda reminded us, as though this fact weren't obvious. “That's very serious.”

“And we must help the helpless,” Sister Connie interjected. Sister Connie was no older than Sister Magda, but she was the captain of the Sick Ward. She was the kind of woman who claimed to hate being in charge, but at the same time, enjoyed exerting her authority. If she hadn't been a nun, one might have described her as brassy. “It's part of the War Effort. We must all do our part, and this is ours. Nursing is a vital and noble occupation, girls. Especially now. Not everyone has the stomach for it.” Sister Magda nodded.

The Guineveres didn't have the stomach for it, not like Ebbie, who tended to them unfazed, her expression not revealing a hint of repulsion. When she leaned over their beds, her bare arms skimmed the bodies of the soldiers, and she didn't rush immediately to wash her hands, as we might have. Though I hate to admit it, even now all these years later, at first those soldiers revolted us. We wanted nothing to do with them. Their seeping gauze made us uncomfortable, as did their missing limbs; their motionless faces made us think of funerals, of the gray pallor of some of our grandparents whom we'd seen buried in coffins far beneath the ground.

“Maybe they'll wake up,” one of us said. We tied aprons over our uniforms, filled basins halfway with water, and carried them sloshing to the beds of the soldiers. We grimaced as we pressed the dampened rags onto their hands and their necks, to their foreheads or any skin exposed to air. Sister Connie's oft-repeated dictum: Blessed are the pure of heart and the free of dirt and bacteria.

“Hopefully they'll wake up,” the rest of us said, sour-faced, dropping our rags into the water, where they landed with plunks. We wiped our hands on our aprons. We listened to our stomachs grumble. We waited for Sister Connie to release us from our duties.

A couple of weeks later, one
did
wake up. No. 14, according to his charts, the one with the missing fingers. He awoke in the middle of the night, calling out for help in a brittle voice. He woke most of the old folks, too, who began yelling for help themselves, as though they were all trapped on a capsized ship. No. 14 half dragged himself out of bed, but he couldn't control his limbs, which had already begun to atrophy. During Checks Sister Magda found him upside down, draped like a blanket over the foot of the bed, his head tipped backward, his mouth still contorted in the shape of a scream.

His name was Jack Murr. He went by Junior. That's all we learned of him, mostly because he was too stunned to talk. He couldn't convey much else, couldn't tell Sister Connie where he was from, and couldn't identify the other soldiers in the ward. Sister Connie had brought him a blank sheet of paper, a clipboard, and a pencil, and he'd written his name, barely legible, in shaky block letters. When asked if the other soldiers were his friends, he shook his head slowly, then closed his eyes and tears welled up beneath them. The Guineveres watched him from a measured distance while we were on Sick Ward duty, while we emptied bedpans, changed sheets, or read the daily passage from the Bible to the dull-eyed old folks who cared to listen. Junior would lie propped up in bed, his lids half drooped like midday window shades, his mouth slack from the constant drip of morphine he received. Sometimes he'd run his good hand over the bandaged nubs where his fingers once were, his lips silently counting his missing digits. On occasion, Sister Magda and Ebbie would help him sit up in bed or stand with assistance, his legs quivering beneath him. Gwen swore that once, while Ebbie was changing his bed shirt, he broadened his chest and mouthed “hello” over Ebbie's shoulder and in her direction, but the other Guineveres didn't believe this. “Do you think I'm prettier than Ebbie is?” she asked.

Sister Fran took to the phone in her office, and only a day later she had located Junior's family. By the end of the week they were there, two spindly parents weeping over their son's bed as if they had seen the image of Jesus Himself. His mother wore a thin brown dress, patterned with leaves that could have been mistaken for upended fish. Her eyes were deep pits, and she smelled thickly of cigarettes. “They said you were gone. They said you were gone,” she kept repeating, rocking at the edge of his bed, peppering his face with wet kisses that left behind smears of red lipstick that could have resembled blood had we not known better. And yet, there he was, her injured, shell-shocked son, right before her very eyes. They were ready to take him home.

Home. We thought of our own homes as we watched the scene unfold from our hands and knees, scrubbing the floor of the Sick Ward. Our sleeves were rolled up to our elbows, and our hair was pulled back by the same kind of rags we were using to spot clean. Our own parents knew exactly where we were. Our mothers didn't weep joyously over us, soaking our skin with grateful tears. Our fathers didn't stand with bent heads, like the statue of a withered Eve after her banishment from paradise.

“I'd give three fingers to go home, too,” Gwen whispered. She leaned back on her haunches and tucked her fingers into her palm, mimicking the soldier's missing digits.

“Don't be mean,” replied Ginny. “It's more than that.”

“He sacrificed,” I said. “They all did.”

“It must be nice,” Win said. And we knew what she meant. We were happy for the soldier, true, but we felt sorry for ourselves. We wanted to go home. We wanted our parents to come get us. Because we had sacrificed, too, we felt. We had sacrificed, too.

Junior's father tried to help him out of bed, but he didn't have a good grip, and his son fell limp like a sack of flour, his arms above his head. Sister Magda took over, expertly hooking her arms beneath his armpits and easing him into a wheelchair that Ebbie held in place. Then Ebbie swung the chair around and wheeled him out of the Sick Ward. Sisters Connie and Magda walked ahead with Junior's duffel, his parents following. Junior's mother turned back every now and then to kiss her boy or to whisper something into his ear.

The Guineveres formed a convoy behind Ebbie. We'd never seen anybody leave the Sick Ward before. At the door, Ebbie turned to face us, then struggled to ease the wheelchair, back wheels first, through the raised doorframe. Her bangs had grown just past her brows, and every so often she'd blow them out of her face with a puff of air. Junior didn't make a sound as his wheelchair landed with two small thuds on the graveled ground of the courtyard. Ebbie gazed toward the sky, then leaned her long arm in to shut the door. She smiled at us in this moment, the corners of her mouth betraying her otherwise inscrutable expression. And then, for the first time, she spoke to us. “You know, don't worry so much about not getting letters,” she said. “They never say anything important anyway. Who needs parents, really? You'll be fine.” The door closed and clicked. Then silence.

We didn't know it at the time, but we would never see Ebbie again after that. She'd been sent home with Junior and his family, who couldn't afford to hire any help and who refused to send him off to yet another institution now that they had found him. Sister Fran might have called it Christian Charity, but The Guineveres raged silently in our loafers, scrunched our toes until they ached. “Nurses are indispensable on the home front, girls. You're learning invaluable skills,” Sister Connie said that afternoon when Ebbie left.

Yet we were incensed. We didn't know why. “She's not eighteen yet,” we said in a fit of pique, as though this explanation would somehow force Ebbie's return. “Rules are rules.” On the day any girl turned eighteen, she was released into the world with a change of clothes and lunch in a paper satchel. But not a day before.

“Just a few months shy. And anyhow, we must make exceptions during times like these,” Sister Connie said, scratching something onto the clipboard attached to one of her patients' beds. “She's part of the War Effort. We all are.”

“Will she stay with Junior until he recovers?” one of us asked.

“He's a long way from that.” She set down her clipboard. “God willing, though, he'll overcome this earthly obstacle. We are but bodies that contain souls, and the soul is the most important part.” Sister Connie must have noticed the look of dejection on our faces: pouted lips, droopy eyelids, arms crossed at our chests. “We should be thankful for these boys fighting over there so that we can live peaceful lives right here. Next time you can't sleep, count your blessings instead of sheep.” She handed us a stack of clean pillowcases and instructed us to begin changing the beds.

We certainly didn't feel thankful for these injured boys, nor for Ebbie's absence, the effect of which only seemed to double our workload. In addition to our usual duties, Sister Connie taught us how to monitor blood pressure by pumping an armband full of air, and how to administer pills, then check to be sure the old folks had swallowed them. Nothing felt more punitive than seeing the pink slug of an old person's tongue wagging in his mouth.

*   *   *

We slumped in the pew during Wednesday's chapel service, Sister Lucrecia's organ a pained cat's meow. These masses were long and tedious, though much different from the masses some of us had been to in our Unholy Lives. For one, some of those services had been said in Latin, a language none of us understood anyway, and for two, no women were ever allowed on the altar, not even to deliver the gifts. We always thought this was odd—that grown women couldn't step foot past the altar rail, while young boys could. That we were commanded to recite the Hail Mary, but if Mary were present, in flesh and blood, she'd be required to stare at some old priest's balding head or sit on a pew so hard, her bottom numbed. Meanwhile, altar boys pranced around the altar at will, as though being born with male bits entitled them to light candles and carry crosses and help the priest prepare communion. It all seemed unfair. Especially to Mary.

At the convent, however, the Sisters helped Father James prepare the Liturgy. They gave readings and assisted with the bearing of the gifts and stood behind Father James as he blessed the sacrament. The presence of women on the chapel's altar might have seemed progressive, except for the fact that the Sisters didn't dare impugn the sanctity of the convent with the presence of young, red-blooded testosterone. They were guarding their territory, more than anything, exerting authority over their small, protected domain. At least, that's what The Guineveres guessed.