You’re going home, Rol. The words echoed in his head.
“You never said it would be like this,” Roland whispered, opening his eyes. In the mirror they were green-gray and fading, the skin around them lined and wrinkled.
“What was that, Rol?” Patrick looked up, smiling.
“Nothing,” Roland murmured, and closed his eyes again. Behind the screen of his lids, the war went on.
The Great War, the Last War, the War to End All Wars; the war of glory and confetti and marching home to kiss girls for black and white photographs splashed across the front page. But that wasn’t Roland’s war. What he saw—flickering like an old film reel when he closed his eyes—was the dirt.
He could smell it, slightly scorched, shocked, and tainted with blood. It was everywhere—on his face, on his hands, in his eyes, and when he breathed it was in his nose and lungs. Absurdly, with shells breaking all around him, what had bothered him most was the dirt. No matter how often he washed with freezing cold water from dented metal basins, he could never get clean.
His mother had drilled it into him young; cleanliness was next to Godliness. It was always, pick up your socks, clean up your room, don’t track dirt onto my nice clean floors—and in the war it was everywhere. They camped in it, dug trenches in it, and hunkered down in it to wait and sleep. They lived and breathed dirt, and there was no getting away. His mother, God rest her soul, would have been spinning in her dirt-dug grave to know how far her son had strayed from that cleanly place next to God.
But the angel had promised him he would go home.
So let the bullets fly, let the dirt suffocate him, let the shrapnel sleep beneath his skin—Sgt. Roland Dymond was going home. Make way for the conquering hero, and to the victor go the spoils. Never mind how many of his buddies he had to watch die. No matter how many had been broken beyond repair. All Roland had was a few scars to show for his days in the mud—war wounds that wouldn’t heal—and it was all glory to him. After all, he was blessed.
Roland opened his eyes again, and looked down at his hands. They trembled above the porcelain sink. From beneath the sleeve of his uniform, blood dripped onto the clean, perfect white, following the curve of the basin towards the drain. Gingerly he pushed the material back to the show the scar, open anew, which ran nearly the full length of his forearm. Shrapnel from a blast—it had killed Pinky Carter and it had opened Roland’s vein. It was nothing Doc hadn’t been able to patch up though, because Roland was always going home.
“Good, you’re ready.”
Patrick’s face was suddenly too close in the glass over Roland’s shoulder. His smile was frozen for TV—a perfect aide, a perfect handler, the perfect companion for a Saint.
“They’re ready for you.”
Roland let his sleeve fall and let himself be led away.
His hip ached, and he leaned on Patrick heavily with his good arm—the one that didn’t bleed. It was difficult, though, because the hip on the other side was where he had taken a bullet on the second to last day of the war, and already the blood was soaking through the uniform’s thick, woolen green. He had to lean, but Patrick had to keep his distance as well, careful to save the blood for those who needed it most—those who were going off to war.
As they made their way up to the podium on the stage, a thousand other little injuries began to open up as well. Bloodied fingers from broken glass; barbed wire scratches that had scoured his back as he’d tried to pull Bobby Timmons clear and make sure he got home; a graze on the side of his throat where a bullet had come too close.
There were a myriad of cuts on his face, mostly around his chin, though he no longer remembered why. In his more cynical hours he suspected them of being nicks garnered while shaving—or rather clutching a communal straight razor, hunched against the cold of a packed dirt wall, holding a water-spotted and pitted glass in which he could barely see. It was almost impossible not to cut yourself when you couldn’t keep your hands steady, couldn’t stop them shaking with the cold.
But it didn’t matter—shaving cuts or shrapnel wounds—they were all holy as far as the masses were concerned. He was a miracle, a walking wonder that shouldn’t be, and when he stood on the podium before the gathered crowd they raised their faces to him in expectant awe. They were hushed for a moment, and then the crowd erupted in cheers.
“Good crowd,” Patrick murmured, his lips close to Roland’s ear. Roland looked straight ahead, and did not reply.
The faces were already blurred in his sight—a mass of colors swirling and melting like the world seen through a rain-streaked window. After a moment the crowd began to part, and a hush fell again, a slight murmur rippling outwards like waves from a dropped stone. The first soldiers were making their way to the dais where Roland stood.
When Patrick had come to collect him this morning, Roland had asked which war they were on, wanting to know just what he was blessing the troops for. Patrick had answered with his ever even smile, but Roland had already forgotten what Patrick had told him. After so long, they all seemed the same. They blurred and ran together like the faces in the crowd. What was the point in remembering anyway? The Great War, the Last War, the War to End All Wars…
The first soldier approached Roland, all fresh and bright and scrubbed.A knight in shining armor that reflected back the sun, leaving Roland blind. He could barely see the beaming face above the uniform. He had only the vaguest impression of slick blonde hair (cut to military standard, he was sure) and a reverent and eager smile. He couldn’t even tell if the soldier who approached him was a man or a woman.
Sometimes he had nightmares of standing on this very dais, his hands raised in blessing before an endless line of soldiers stretching back towards the horizon. When he raised his hands, though, instead of waiting for the benediction he would give they ran to him, in his dream they fell upon him, and lapped at his blood. He would see their faces in a blur like a broken mirror, carnival-turned, one blood-soaked visage after the other swimming up before his eyes and falling away again. They were animals, disembodied, scarcely human and their eyes were as hungry as their mouths.
He woke in a cold sweat from these dreams, and sometimes his wounds would bleed, alone in his bed, with only his sheets there to receive his benediction. The first few times, to hide his shame, he had burned the sheets in the hearth and shivered before the flames. Now he didn’t bother anymore. He left the bloodied linens there for Patrick to find, and took secret bitter pleasure in the shadows that flickered in the other’s eyes when he saw them, even though he never faltered in his perfect smile.
Roland’s lips moved as the first soldier approached him. He mumbled numb-lipped words that had lost all meaning—a blessing for war that sounded like a hollow buzzing in his ears. Whether the soldier touched him and gathered his blood, or whether Roland made a line with his thumb across the other’s forehead as he whispered the words, he could not say.
The sun beat down, roasting him where he stood. Outstretched, his arms ached. His old fingers, despite the heat of the day, felt cold and tingled at the tips where the circulation of his heart couldn’t reach.
Inside his uniform he itched. Sweat stung in the scoured lines on his back, salt finding salt, and irritating his skin. The uniform’s weight dragged at him, and the blood soaking from his hip began to stink in the heat. Roland imagined that he was beginning to attract a buzzing cloud of flies.
At last the line ended. Patrick brought a chair, and Roland was allowed to sit. Dazed, drained, and numb he obediently sank down and watched as the line of soldiers blessed by his blood filed like shining silver ants towards the other side of the field. As one the crowd turned and watched, oohed and aahed, as the brilliant glinting rockets were shot up into the sky.
Roland tried to shade his eyes against the glare and track the course of those falling stars, or at least mark their shadows against the light. Once a rocket was up, though, he lost sight of it at once. For all he knew they fell back down to earth around the curve of the globe, somewhere unseen. For all he knew they went nowhere, up into space, into the airless cold between the stars, to spin forever in the dark. It didn’t really matter where they went, he supposed; it gave people hope to see them go up, just like he gave hope by the fact that he had come home and that miraculously, even now, he hadn’t died. Saint Rol, the living reliquary, the blessed.
“I want to go home.”
Roland tugged at Patrick’s sleeve, feeling like a petulant child, hating the way his old hand trembled. Roland’s part in the ceremony forgotten, Patrick turned as if surprised to find the old man still there. Was that distaste, for a moment, marring the perfect smile? The ghost of a frown turned down Patrick’s lips, while a shadow flickered in his eyes, his nose wrinkling as with the memory of an unpleasant smell.
“Yes, Rol, we can go now.”
“Please, don’t call me Rol,” Roland murmured, wearily standing. “My friends called me Rol.”
But Patrick was no longer listening.
From his balcony Roland could still hear the people cheering. The last rocket had wisped its way across the sky—a shining legacy written for a moment against the clouds, and then fading into the blue. Through the open glass doors, a breeze stirred the curtains and caressed Rol’s cheeks where tiny crystals of salt clung, invisible to the naked eye. Among the echoing sounds drifting in from outside, Roland listened for one familiar voice among the many, one whose face he had never seen, but who had whispered a promise to him so long ago.
“You said I was going home,” he told the wind-stirred drapes and nobody. “This isn’t home. I want to go home.”
His body was stiff and ached as he rose and limped slowly into the bedroom. The memory of blood, stirred by movement, soaked a small crimson patch through his pajama pants. All the other wounds had closed once again, obediently waiting for another day.
Slowly he made his way into the bedroom and sat heavily on the edge of the bed. With trembling hands he reached into the space between the bottom of the mattress and the floor and found the wooden cigar box, saved from the old days. He opened it to the smell of his father, the ghost of smoke and an age long passed. For a moment he was dizzy, overwhelmed, and his vision blurred.
He fumbled blindly until he found the service revolver that lay inside, with its single bullet—more memories, tangible and cold, more relics left over from another time. With shaking hands, deft with old memory and not needing to see, he fit the single bullet into one chamber and spun the barrel, snapping it closed.
“Make a wish,” Roland whispered. He placed the gun against his temple, closing his eyes.
He pulled the trigger, and the revolver clicked, an empty chamber lining up with the barrel of the gun. Slowly and methodically he removed the bullet from the chamber, and stored both in the box, which he slipped back under the bed.
“Better luck next time.” He smiled a hollow smile.
The single bullet was as old as the gun, as old as he was—a souvenir brought back from the war. He had lost count of the number of times his fingers had caressed its cold surface, fit it into the chamber, spun and let go. Years and time had lost their meaning long ago.
Somewhere between here and there an angel had whispered a promise, and the law of averages had broken down. There was less chance than one-in-six every time he pulled the trigger that the bullet would find its way into his skull. It would always stay just where it was, in the gun, to be taken out and put away again for another day.
After all, Sgt. Rol Dymond had survived the Last Great War. He had come home. He was meant to survive. He was blessed.