Abide with Me: A Novel - Softcover

Sabin Willett is a practicing lawyer and the author of three novels: The Deal, The Betrayal, and Present Value. He lives in Natick, Massachusetts.

Abide with Me ONE

July 10, 2009

After midnight, the kids in Hoosick Bridge and Williams-town were on their cell phones.

“Were you there?”

“That cemetery—you know the old one down Route Seven at Indian Massacre Road? Off to the right? Anyway Maggie saw it. Her and Blake and Robbie and Annie B. and them were down there to go drinking and walked in and saw the body. Dumped on the grass in front of the headstones.”

“A soldier in his uniform. Annie screamed and ran out of there pretty fast.”

“A soldier? Who?”

* * * *

The day began chilly and damp, and in the predawn blackness the fog massed like smoke against the windows at Toni’s Lunch. A set of headlights poked feebly through, and the first of the pickup trucks came into the lot, its tires crunching over the gravel. Toni set Mel’s coffee on the counter and put the corn muffin on the grill. He came in and took his usual stool and sipped on the coffee awhile to wake up. She was in the kitchen getting things ready for the morning, clattering pans and spatulas and chatting with him through the cutout where she put the orders up.

“That’s a helluva fog out there,” Mel said. “Couldn’t see one side of Route Seven from the other. Cold, too.”

“After all the heat this summer, I’ll take it, Mel.”

He took another sip. “Funny business last night on the police monitor.”

“What?”

“About that body down in Lanesborough.”

“I didn’t hear,” said Toni, coming to the cutout.

* * * *

Toni’s Lunch was a squat, flat-roofed brick building, the lower courses blackened with time. It stood near the tracks and the river, on the west side of Route 7. The name notwithstanding, Toni paid rent each month mainly by selling breakfasts.

The fog lightened to a dark wool as the regulars began to arrive, workmen, construction guys, contractors, retired men who’d reached the age where sleep after 5:00 a.m. was impossible. They climbed down from their trucks to take their usual counter or booth seats and have their usual eggs and sausages and home fries and coffee.

Toni was bringing breakfast to Pete Mallincrodt, telling him Mel’s news about the body down at the cemetery on the way to Lanesborough.

“Lots of bodies in the cemetery, Toni.”

“Smart guy,” she scolded. “A new body. A soldier dumped there.”

“I heard it, too,” someone said. “Kids seen it, they were all talking about it last night.”

Ernest Gillfoyle looked up from his breakfast. “Dead soldier? Down Lanesborough way?”

“That’s what Mel told me.”

“Well, the body come to life, then,” he said.

The breakfast chatter fell quiet. “Because I seen him just ten minutes ago. Walking up Route Seven. Damn near killed him myself as I come along in all this fog.”

* * * *

He liked to be walking before the sun was up. He liked to be seeing not seen, hearing not heard—and this meant being awake while others slept. Occasional headlights loomed suddenly in the early morning darkness, and he remembered obscure shapes outside the line—green figures in the NVG, and the captain, catlike, slipping over a rock into the dark.

It was still chilly. Wan light penetrated the fog from the restaurant windows across the road. The old guys in baseball caps were sitting with their coffee—they looked like ghosts through the mist. It seemed like nothing had changed in Toni’s, nothing at all. The same guys who had been eating in there the morning he took the bus to Basic were still eating the same eggs off the same plates.

Coffee would have tasted good, but he didn’t stop. His business wasn’t with them.

* * * *

The morning warmed. Wisps of blue began to peek from the top of the sky, and in Hoosick Bridge the wool was whitening. The fog would lift. At about 8:30 Jane Herrick turned the aging Mercedes wagon off of North Hoosick Road into the post office lot. She’d come to collect any last RSVPs from the mailbox—she hadn’t quite accustomed herself to the idea of responses on the Internet.

Lucy was in midconversation with Francine McGregor, the town clerk, as Jane walked in. “ . . . strangest thing as I was driving up—oh, hey, Jane,” Lucy said, using the soft tone some of them had for her now. On her face was that sad, sorry look that now passed for friendship—from the ones who still talked to her.

“Good morning.” Slim, erect Jane Herrick walked with a subtle lean now, favoring the hip bothered by arthritis, but unbowed nevertheless, her voice still just slightly too loud—not overpowering, but with that hint of command, despite all that had happened. Her hair had gone white during the winter of ’04–’05, but she was still a handsome woman. She had never been arrogant, never condescending, but she had been a Morse and was a Herrick, and even now a patrician reserve was steadfast in her. For the most part she was alone at the Heights now—the girls were rarely home—but in that house, it had always been the women who were strongest.

“ . . . when I drove up this morning,” Lucy continued, “there was this soldier . . . ”

“Yes?” asked Francine.

“ . . . walking along Route Seven toward town.”

“Where?”

Jane’s fingers had stopped working the mailbox key.

“Coming out of Williamstown.”

“Just one by himself?”

“In his uniform, and with a big pack on his back, marching along the northbound lane, wearing that, you know, that what do they call that uniform?”

“Camouflage?”

“That camouflage uniform like you see them in.”

“Strange to find just one soldier out by himself, walking,” Francine said. “You see the Guard go by sometimes, a dozen of them in trucks.”

The post office door opened, and quickly closed again.

“Did you recognize him?”

“Hardly got a look. But he’ll get to town soon enough—he was headed this way. Jane, you don’t suppose . . . Jane?”

But Jane Herrick didn’t hear. She had already left the post office, and at that moment was sitting in the driver’s seat of the Mercedes, her knuckles white against the steering wheel.

* * * *

Step, step, step. With a little water to stay hydrated, he could walk forever. The captain said only a selfish man, only a small man wouldn’t hydrate. A man was at his peak only when hydrated, and if he wasn’t at his peak, it would cost the squad.

Why had he left the bus at Pittsfield and begun walking again? You’d think he’d walked enough for a lifetime. Maybe it was the watchfulness of the passengers across that narrow aisle, looking like they wanted to ask him things but were afraid to. Maybe it was the ones behind him. He liked people where he could see them. All those eyes close upon him brought him back to patrols down to the village in Komal, the way the Afghans would stare, and if you looked back and caught their eyes, they would smile in a false way. He remembered the village elder, Ramitullah, wearing the same smile the day he was in the headman’s house, where he and the captain argued over tea about snipers and wells, and all the while, as the mutarjim rendered the Pashto, the old Afghan wore that false smile.

Walking alone was better. The pack did not trouble him. He was used to monstrous packs weighted with weapons, ammunition, water, MREs, entrenching tools. He had humped an entire M240 up Sura Ghar. He’d carried packs up staggering goat trails in the stinging, airless cold that made a man suck for breath, packs so strapped with ammunition that if a guy stumbled and fell to his back he just lay like a bug with its legs whirling, lay there sucking on that nothingness, until someone pulled him to his feet again. He’d carried them up and down those mountains until his lungs expanded, or some other magical thing happened—he was never sure what it was that changed after that first six months—that let him at last get air, and spring from stone to stone as light-footed as the enemy themselves.

He was all hard edges, all lean muscle and bone. His thighs were roped, his calves and arms corded, hardened, his elbows and cheekbones and knees sharp, his back a machine. He could carry a pack for eighteen hours a day, with just a catnap for an hour here or there, and even then be wakeful enough to reach for the knife at the sound of a car door. He walked with that inclined posture he’d always had from the age of eight. It looked like he was in a hurry, leaning toward his destination.

Sergeant Brown said, “Murphy, you walk like you trying to beat your own self there.”

Pockets of thick cotton still blanketed the low places. On Route 7 there were more cars and trucks now. He didn’t like sudden noises behind him, but these he recognized well enough—just civilian vehicles on a road. There were no explosives weighing down the rear suspensions.

The green peaks of the Taconic Hills were jutting clear from their white skirts. Each landmark along the road, each shop, fence, house, each farmer’s field presented itself for his inspection. He listened to the metronomic beat of his boots on sand and gravel, and remembered.

* * * *

Boots crunching on sand and gravel. Crunch, crunch, crunch, and turn. Crunch went the footsteps outside, punctuating shrieks of wind, keeping time to it. And inside Second Squad’s sandbagged hooch at Firebase Montana, one of the guys was asking, “The fuck’s he doing out there?”

They lay on their plywood bunks calculating the minutes until their next watch, listening to the wind whip and moan and beg and scream and whisper and then fall silent, hearing in the brief lulls the captain’s boots pacing the gravel, and now and again a snatch of his words over the wind.

“You know what he doin. Give a little education, in case Haji listening.”

His first night up there. The small hooch was hammered together like a kid’s fort from two-by-fours and plywood and buried, cave-like, in sandbags. It would be his home for twenty-one months. It was crammed with bunks, thick with the smell and sprawl of men, crowded with Kevlars and ammo belts and IBAs hanging from nails, and boots jammed between the bunks. And socks—everywhere socks hung from lines. A diesel heater warmed the little den, cooking the stink of sweat and bad feet and cigarette smoke, and now and then with the waft of MREs: of cold turkey Tetrazzini or Swiss steak. He lay on his stomach and listened.

Someone asked, “What he readin tonight, Sarnt Brown?”

The squad quieted down to hear it. And the disembodied voice came in and out, with the wind.

“ . . . this batter’d Caravanserai

Whose Portals are alternate Night and Day . . . ”

A howl of wind cut it off, and someone said, “He doin Omar again.”

“Battered caravan be this hooch and no doubt.” It was the big private stretched out in the upper bunk across from him. He was a kid from Mississippi, doughy and soft and large, with a grin that never left him, not when eating, complaining, shitting, under attack from Taliban RPGs, not ever. His name was Billy Hall Jr. Grinning Billy Hall Jr. was a stone killer with the .50 cal. He was stretched out on his back, his hands folded behind his head, staring at the rafter twelve inches above, grinning. “This here the number one poetry base in the US military. I Googled it and there’s an official top-secret report the Pentagon done at taxpayer expense. Northern liberals decided we gon rhyme the sonsabitches into surrender.”

“Omar Khayyám, he call this one,” Sarnt Brown was explaining. “Montoya—give me the glories of this world!”

Montoya had an iPod with twenty thousand songs, and he could rap or sing the lyrics of all of them. Montoya was a walking library of lyrics. “They stick to my brain, like Velcro, you know?” he once explained. He piped up from a bunk near the back:

“Some for the Glories of This World; and some

Sigh for the Prophet’s Paradise to come.”

The hooch sang out in unison now, loudly enough for the captain to hear outside.

“Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go

Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum!”

“Welcome to our world, cherry,” said Billy Hall Jr., rolling to his side and grinning at him. “On a side of a fucking Afghan cliff, with mortars raining down your ass from all over this valley, the Army put a poetry school. You get your poetry school in Basic?”

He answered: “Mechanic school.”

“Well, we could give you a truck to work on, except you’d have to carry it up here.”

“Nothing here but wind and Haji ghosts,” someone added.

Billy Hall Jr. rolled back onto his back, grinning that big, sly grin from his biscuit-from-the-oven face, with a cigarette hanging out of one corner. “And a fifty cal.”

“Jamming when you most need it—maybe he can fix that,” someone said.

“And fucking goats.”

Someone asked, “Get your goat school, dude?” And then they were laughing, and the talk fell to which one of them would first have carnal knowledge of a goat, or of his sister, or of a goat’s sister.

* * * *

Later that night, someone was asking, “Prophet’s Paradise—whatsat mean anyway, Sarnt? Is that, like, Bagram? Or this shithole?”

“Firebase Burnshitter!” someone said.

“Y’all crackers go to school instead of poppin your sisters with Billy Hall up in them barefoot counties, you might read better,” said Master Sergeant Theodore Brown. “You might know what it mean.”

“Shit, Sarnt, your sister busy most nights . . . ” said Billy Hall Jr.

Laughter.

“Sarnt a eddikated man,” Billy Hall Jr. went on, “so eddikated he ended up here!”

“It mean, enjoy what you can, when you can,” Brown said. “It mean, take the cash. Spend the cash. The future all bullshit.”

Montoya sang out: “Take me away from the hood, like a state penitentiary / Take me away from the hood in the casket or a Bentley . . . ”

“Shut the fuck up, Montoya!”

“Fuck alla y’all inbreeds,” Brown said. “I like old Omar.”

Listening to this, stirring it now and again from his upper bunk with a crack about this one’s sister or that one’s stink, grinning Billy Hall Jr. was regarding the cherry, whose face had betrayed him.

“ ’Smatter?”

Roy Murphy shook his head.

“Ain’t no secrets in Firebase Montana. Up here, you jack, three other guys get off.”

And so carefully, quietly, Roy Murphy asked whether the CO of a US Army Airborne unit in the dead center of Taliban country, as a standard kind of thing, liked to wander around in the dark with a headlamp, reading poetry.

“To be fair, you ain’t exactly got a poetry reader for a CO,” said Billy Hall Jr. “You got a poet.”

Montoya said, “Poet of death, dawg. Poet of life and death.”

Sizzlecrack! The knees like Emma’s marionette. Report! All fall down.

He stopped on the roadside, shivered by the memory. And then a sun shaft popped through the fog and reminded him that when you hear it, you’re alive, and he started again. Crunch, crunch, along the highway. When those memories got hold of him, he might walk straight out on the pavement and into the grille of an eighteen-wheeler and see nothing but Billy Hall Jr.’s sunburned face, grinning the way to his seventy virgins.

* * * *

She knew. She knew it was him. She parked in the drive and hurried up the porch steps, because she knew. She tried to ca...