nothing to see here, moving along
Boardwalk fic what I am posting here because it turned out way too long for the ficathon comments.
What place is this? / Where are we now?
Note: All quoted selections are from WWI-era poetry.
I.
And because we had courage;
because there was courage and youth
ready to be wasted; because we endured
and were prepared for all the endurance;
we thought something must come of it
-John Peale Bishop, "In the Dordogne"
Later, after his injuries have exiled him from the human race, he will realize the bitter irony: he joins the army because he'd never connected well to people, and thinks this might make it easier. His parents were quiet types, never wanting much company but one another. The Harrows never had much interest in church, and the twins learned to read and write and do sums at their mother's kitchen table. The nearest neighbor was ten miles away, over deep snow most of the year, and them with no car. Besides, there was too much work to be done for much socializing, especially with only two children and a couple farmhands for help.
It feels good to belong to something, to hold a real purpose for someone. He tells himself that every German he cuts short is a hundred of his comrades saved, and that it makes it all worth it, even as he can feel himself slowly, inexorably turning into a machine.
But then the deafening noise; he tastes metal and smoke and blood, and he knows he has been wrong all along. That nothing comes out of suffering but suffering itself.
II.
On the mountains he's begun his battle-dance,
Calling: Warriors, up and at them, now's your chance!
There's a rattling when he shakes his brute black head
Round which crudely hang the skulls of countless dead.
-Georg Heym, "War"
The first thing he remembers upon waking is the nurse. Most of them, who have been here since time immemorial, don't even blink at the sight; they move like automata around his bed, their hands sticky with his blood. But she is young and probably new, with wide dark eyes like saucers, and her fingers tighten around the basin as she stares at him in horror. And that is when he realizes the gravity of his situation, that he has passed beyond the realms of the human and become something else, something other.
The worst thing is the inability to scream. The pain is maddening, annihilating, and he wants nothing more on earth than to open his throat and unleash the horrors of hell. But he cannot scream. Bandages and wire hold closed his shattered jaw, and from beneath the layers of gauze comes only an endless animal moan. Months later, he will hear it still, in his sleep, that wounded keening.
III.
If you are not found,
In a little while your limbs will fall apart;
The birds will take some, but the earth will take most your heart.
-Harold Monro, "Youth in Arms"
There are strange hells within the minds war made.
-Ivor Gurney, "Strange Hells"
In the morphine haze, he imagines black dirt piled on his head, gritting between his teeth and stifling his breath. He is choked with the stench of blood and imagines an army of skeletons marching before his vision. Sometimes he looks at his hands and they are covered with squirming maggots. He laughs at the tickling sensation, and the stitches that hold his chin to his cheek give way again. He stares at his sister, searching for a vestige of his face in her own; but she looks two-dimensional, like a painting, and her fingers are cold as a ghost's on his fevered brow.
He thinks to himself, one of us is dead, and I do not know which.
IV.
Such, such is Death: no triumph: no defeat:
Only an empty pail, a slate rubbed clean,
A merciful putting away of what has been.
-Charles Hamilton Sorley, "Two Sonnets"
I speak not from my pallid lips
but from these wounds.
-Herbert Read, "Dialogue between the Body and Soul of the Murdered Girl"
The first time he looks into a mirror, he hears a dull roaring in his ears and a gray cloud obscures his sight. That night, in his dreams, it looms before his vision, a shapeless abomination of crimson and purplish-black, his socket a bottomless pit where monsters gambol. It is the presence of absence that horrifies: the shallowness of his cheek in three-quarter profile, the gaping hole where his eye should be, the five teeth missing from his upper jaw. Sometimes, he looks in the mirror--his hair uncombed and his chin stubbled, his scars livid in the stifling Chicago heat, and he thinks: I have become the thing that killed me.
V.
Now light the candles; one; two; there's a moth;
What silly beggars they are to blunder in
And scorch their wings with glory, liquid flame--
No, no, not that,-- it's bad to think of war,
When thoughts you've gagged all day come back to scare you;
And it's been proved that soldiers don't go mad
Unless they lose control of ugly thoughts
That drive them out to jabber among the trees.
-Siegfried Sassoon, "Repression of War Experience"
My fingers fidget like ten idle brats.
-Wilfred Owen, "Insensibility"
The train east rocks back and forth, sending Richard into a daze. He holds his pack on his lap, the German sniper mask in its neat wrapping balanced on top.
"Don't it make you crazy?"
He lifts his gaze to the man who somehow, in the space of a week, has become closer than any brother could have been. He doesn't speak in reply; already it seems unnecessary.
"Just sittin' there, like that. It would make me crazy." Jimmy flicks the ash from the end of his cigarette impatiently and bends back the cover on his paperback novel, and although Richard does not smile, he finds himself wanting to, for the first time he can remember.
Jimmy can't stay still or silent or sober, can't bear to be alone with his own thoughts; and in the early days of their friendship, he finds Richard's reticence infuriating. They are not so alike, not really, and so they fit together like puzzle-pieces. He did most of his killing from far away, and the stillness and silence of that time hollowed him out like a shotgun shell or a deep trench-scar in the dirt. It was different for Jimmy, who grasped his knife in his fist and felt the blood running into his boots as he slit men's throats. And so they returned: Jimmy feeling too much of everything, all at once, and Richard feeling nothing at all.
VI.
I shall be mad if you get smashed about,
we've had good times together, you and I
-Edgell Rickword, "The Soldier Addresses his Body"
He has been hungry long enough that he doesn't notice it so much anymore. In the trenches their rations had been scant and poor, their stomachs tied in knots. Then came pain-nausea and morphine-nausea, when every attempt at opening his jaw even the slightest made his gorge rise. Then the humiliating, dribbling mess he made as he learned to eat again, like a child. It was a bit easier in Chicago, as the pain waned and he was mostly left on his own, but he has become accustomed to eating only enough to keep hunger at bay. His cheek is hollower than it was before the war, his hipbones sharper.
But now there's Jimmy. Jimmy with his endless appetites; Jimmy who never wants to be alone, or without a drink in his hand. Always fidgeting and always ravenous. And Angela, constantly trying to prove that she can cook, although her husband has confided otherwise. Some days there's just food everywhere, the smell stifling him, and he goes twenty hours or more without a chance to steal away, to rip a piece of bread into tiny pieces and coax his jaw into cooperation.
"Don't be embarrassed to eat in front of us," Jimmy says, as if he's ever been embarrassed by anything. Love and fury rise in Richard's throat in equal measure, and he chokes both down again.
VII.
Do they matter? -- those dreams from the pit?
You can drink and forget and be glad,
And people won't say that you're mad;
For they'll know you've fought for your country
And no one will worry a bit.
-Siegfried Sassoon, "Does it Matter?"
Nevertheless, except you share
With them in hell the sorrowful dark of hell,
Whose world is but the trembling of a flare
And heaven but as the highway for a shell,
You shall not hear their mirth:
You shall not come to think them well content
By any jest of mine. These men are worth
Your tears. You are not worth their merriment.
-Wilfred Owen, "Apologia Pro Poemate Meo"
"Over there" means something entirely different to men who once answered to Alphonse, Salvatore, Mieczyslaw, Suchowljansky. But they have been through wars of their own, in a way--back-alley wars, streetcorner wars, wars of homeland and birth-name--and it separates them from Jimmy as much as his education and moneyed (if illegitimate) pedigree separates him from them. Richard can sense it when they all assemble, their ragtag band of six. The two Italians don't like each other much, and no one likes Mickey, but they understand each other in a way that excludes Richard and Jimmy.
Sometimes he is glad of the ruin of his face. It warns them away, like a sign on a condemned building, the floor about the cave in and impale the visitor on a pile of sharp sticks. But Jimmy's bright eyes are like nicely dressed store windows, and these unsuspecting civilians think they're talking to a real person--until he cracks a sick joke or flourishes his skull-crusher, or goes hard and dead about the eyes and mouth, like the lidless eye of a gun. And then the New Yorkers cut their eyes to one another in silent communication and Doyle emits that uneasy giggle of his, and he knows they will be rid of Jimmy as soon as they are able.
VIII.
Manly move among
These ruins, and what you must do, do well;
Look, here are gardens, there mossed boughs are hung
With apples whose bright cheeks none might excel,
And there's a house as yet unshattered by a shell.
-Edmund Blunden, "Preparations for Victory"
He doesn't dream badly often, as Jimmy does; but he also does not sleep much. It's the days that plague him; the war is like a series of landscapes drawn with charcoal on the thinnest parchment, laid over the surface of things. When he least expects it, a street, a storeroom shifts, becomes something dark and horrid.
He's able to keep those gray-smoke images at bay with new ones. He searches for bright colors and graceful lines, the glint of his scissors and the sheen of glue on the back of a page of newsprint, the way a crinkle in the paper goes smooth under his fingers. Sits at the Darmodys' kitchen table and watches the sun sparkling on the waves, or wet paint glistening on a half-finished canvas. Tunes out the tedious undercurrent of frustrated ambition and filial anger that fills any conversation between Jimmy and the others by focusing on the peach-rose hue of Lansky's suit, the delicate curls of smoke from Luciano's cigarette, the glossy shine of Capone's shoes.
And the eyes: always Jimmy's eyes, like a guttering flame.
IX.
Also, they read of Cheap Homes, not yet planned,
For, said the paper, When this war is done
The men's first instincts will be making homes.
-Wilfred Owen, "Smile, Smile, Smile"
He clips pictures from one page and pastes them over another, writing stories in his head. His dexterous hands braiding a daughter's hair instead of cleaning guns. A Thanksgiving dinner where he can finally eat his fill. The sun in his eyes, a girl's gentle fingers on his cheek.
He knows it will never be real, and not just because of the gaping tragedy of his face. He is a hollow ghost full of knives, a killer of men; and as much as he envies Jimmy, he knows his friend is only deluding himself. There's love, she had said, and then there's everything else--and that is what they have become, everything else, everything loveless and hurtful. A grim necessity, a scar upon the surface of the earth. He has nothing to give anyone anymore.
He thought Angela would think him a monster when he told the story of how he left Emma. Hoped she would, on some level; it is exhausting, this business of being flesh and blood, and he wants done with it. So much easier to let what lies on the surface of his face take over bit by bit, until he is nothing but tin at last, hard and numb and cold.
X.
These flowers have no sweet scent
no lustre in the petal no increase
from fertilising flies and bees.
No seed they have no seed
their tendrils are of wire and grip
the buttonhole the lip
and never fade.
And will not fade though life
and lustre go in genuine flowers
and men like flowers are cut
and wither on a stem
-Herbert Read, "A Short Poem for Armistice Day"
Jimmy tosses his jacket into Richard's lap when they get in the car, and Richard notices the poppy still pinned to his lapel. There's an absurd irony to it: flowers that sprung forth fertilized by corpses, a memory of blood. Armistice: the cessation of hostilities, as if anything ever really stopped--and them on their way to cut down an old man over an insult. He chuckles as well as he is able. "You sure--you want to wear this? When we kill him?"
"Ugh. Get rid of that fucking thing," Jimmy sneers. Richard plucks it off and drops it out the window, into the road. And when he cuts Parkhurst's skull open, it blooms like a flower.
XI.
War has victims beyond the bands
bonded to slaughter. War moves with armoured wheels
across the quivering flesh and patient limbs
of all life's labile fronds.
-Herbert Read, "Dialogue between the Body and the Soul of the Murdered Girl"
I have paid my price to live with myself on the terms that I willed.
-Rudyard Kipling, "Epitaphs of the War"
It was never about the money, this feud with Horvitz, although it's true that Jimmy didn't have the five thousand. It was the "boychik" jokes, the barely concealed contempt, the way he looked at Gillian. The broken places inside Jimmy and the butcher's uncanny way of taking his long sharp knife and worrying the wounds.
"What did he say?"
"That I should get the money from my father." The answer grits out from between Jimmy's teeth, and that's when Richard knows that things will end badly. He is oddly grateful for the flu pandemic that took both his parents only weeks before Richard's injury. His own father was a hard-working man, stern but fair, and Richard bears him no ill will. It's one less thing to be haunted by, these days.
He is shattered by the fallout of Horvitz's anger, but not surprised, and it never occurs to him that anything could have been done to prevent Angela's death. He's well aware of Jimmy's foolishness, but Richard doesn't worry much about the things he's done anymore, or the things the two of them continue to do. Cause and effect seem pointless now, much less providence or fate: he merely exists from one unpleasantness to the next. He can only march where Jimmy leads, and will march with him until the inevitable end.
XII.
God knows 'twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down . . .
But I've a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.
-Alan Seeger, "Rendezvous"
He was never comfortable at the Commodore's. Richard's parents had always kept their heads above water, but farming was hard and thankless work and there were few luxuries: oranges and a stick of candy at Christmas, a new pair of shoes. He is discomfited by the gleam of mahogany, the endless knickknacks, the dead animals that stare at him around every corner--and, of course, Gillian, who even in her more charitable moods eyes Richard like some strange breed of insect. And it's worse now, too quiet, without Jimmy's noises: the clink of glasses, the click of boots in an uneven tattoo, the sardonic chuckle. But with Jimmy's business gone, his connections broken, Richard can no longer afford his bedsit. He could rent himself out as a hired gun, but to whom? Those pricks in New York? Nucky Thompson? And so he agrees to take one of the rooms at the mansion--servant's quarters, under the stairs, far away from the furnished parlors where he sipped whiskey or mopped up blood.
He returns to the rooming-house one last time to pack up his clothes, his scrapbooks, his guns. But the sniper mask he leaves wrapped up under the bed.
XIII.
And we recall the merry ways of guns--
Nibbling the walls of factory and church
Like a child, piecrust; felling groves of trees
Like a child, dandelions with a switch!
Machine-guns that rattle toy-like from a hill,
Down in a row the brave tin-soldiers fall
-Robert Graves, "Recalling War"
I suppose
Little I'd ever teach a son, but hitting,
Shooting, war, hunting, all the arts of hurting.
Well, that's what I learnt
-Wilfred Owen, "A Terre (being the philosophy of many soldiers)"
The night Jimmy didn't come home, Gillian took the dogtags from Tommy's neck as he slept and hid them. She has a talent for forgetting, and Richard can't begrudge her that; but he also can't lie, least of all to a child with Angela's dark eyes who asks for "Daddy's medals." So he digs them out of a drawer and gives them back to their rightful owner.
When she tries to take them away, Tommy screams like a banshee, grabs Gillian around the ankle and kicks, and Richard feels something inside him snap. He strides over and snatches the tags out of her fist and casts them at Tommy's feet. The child picks them up and toddles away, muttering about "mean old Meemaw" and "Uncle Richard," and retreats to a corner. Gillian stares up at him, shaken but clearly impressed.
Sometimes she has to visit Whitlock, or one of the others, and cannot take Tommy along. There's no one else to watch him--other women, he suspects, do not like Gillian much. "Just play with him," she says crossly, because she was still a child when she had one and he must admit, whatever else her shortcomings, that she's very good with Tommy. But Richard is at a loss. He was a quiet child, by nature as much as by necessity; but Tommy is his father's son through and through, eyes and hands always active. It turns Richard's stomach when he knocks over his tin soldiers with those clumsy little hands, makes exploding noises with his mouth. Surely the child doesn't want to have a story read to him in that machine-gun voice. And he's never been able to get the sound of Emily screaming out of his head.
The first time the boy falls asleep in Richard's lap, though, dogtags clutched in a chubby fist, he realizes that he's a lot more afraid of Tommy than Tommy is of him.
XIV.
Now all roads lead to France
And heavy is the tread
Of the living; but the dead
Returning lightly dance
-Edward Thomas, "Roads"
The dead are all on the same side.
-Rene Arcos, "The Dead"
Things ended between Nucky and Jimmy as Jimmy chose them to, and Richard will leave it at that, though the sight of the man on the boardwalk sickens him. Manny Horvitz is another matter.
This one he wants to kill close up, but he knows he must be cautious. Horvitz has proven hard to kill, and the apartment Thompson has set up for him near the Ritz would be considered well-defended from anyone but Richard. From his vantage point across the street he takes out Horvitz's arms and legs with careful precision, and leaves him there until nightfall; he knows the old man is too stubborn to die quickly.
Richard's face is like a mask on both sides when he stands over the injured man, and Horvitz looks surprised. "You know I'm not the one who killed your boychik," he croaks.
He cocks his head to one side in that way that he knows most people find unsettling. "I know," he replies. "Angela Darmody."
"Ah," Horvitz responds with the breathy sigh of one who has accepted his fate. Gives a noise that might be meant as a chuckle.
"She wasn't like us," Richard says. "She was a nice person. And you shouldn't have hurt her."
After he sticks the gun in Horvitz's mouth, but before he pulls the trigger, he grimly recites the names and addresses of the butcher's wife and daughter. He won't kill them; there's no tactical advantage in that. But Horvitz doesn't know that, and Richard does it to see the bottomless horror in the old man's eyes before he dies.
As he leaves, he thinks he can hear Jimmy's mad laughter in the back of his mind; and if it's cold comfort, at least it's company of a sort.
XV.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep
-John McCrae, "In Flanders Fields"
They left this dead with the older dead,
Stretched at the cross roads.
-Isaac Rosenberg, "Dead Man's Dump"
He corners Nucky's man behind Babette's one evening, where he waits behind the wheel of the garish blue limousine. His pistol is drawn before Richard can blink, and he holds up his empty hands, a sign of truce.
"I just want to know what you did with the body."
He lowers his weapon and side-eyes Richard. 'There's no point trying to get to it now."
"I know." He's too aware of what the rain and heat would have done to that sordid angel's face, those restless hands. "I just need to know where he is."
The Irishman considers him for a moment and flicks his cigarette out the window. "Under the War Memorial."
It's a fitting burial site. Because really, Jimmy is just another casualty, as he himself would have been if things had ended in the woods last May. He takes Tommy there sometimes, now that Labor Day is past and the crowds have dissapated. The names on the monument are rough on his tongue, but he reads them for the child all the same: Montdider-Moyon, Ypres-Lys, Cambrai, Aisne-Marne, Meuse, Vittorio-Veuetto, St. Mihiel, Lys, Oise-Aisne, Champagne-Marne, Somme, Argonne.
Some days he still wants to end Nucky and most days he wants to end himself--but he promised. And each day he heads slowly towards home, and finds himself a little closer, although he's still not sure where he's going.
XVI. Postscript
My mind is a corridor. The minds about me are corridors.
Nothing suggests itself. There is nothing to do but keep on.
-T.E. Hulme, "Trenches: St. Eloi"
What place is this? / Where are we now?
Note: All quoted selections are from WWI-era poetry.
I.
And because we had courage;
because there was courage and youth
ready to be wasted; because we endured
and were prepared for all the endurance;
we thought something must come of it
-John Peale Bishop, "In the Dordogne"
Later, after his injuries have exiled him from the human race, he will realize the bitter irony: he joins the army because he'd never connected well to people, and thinks this might make it easier. His parents were quiet types, never wanting much company but one another. The Harrows never had much interest in church, and the twins learned to read and write and do sums at their mother's kitchen table. The nearest neighbor was ten miles away, over deep snow most of the year, and them with no car. Besides, there was too much work to be done for much socializing, especially with only two children and a couple farmhands for help.
It feels good to belong to something, to hold a real purpose for someone. He tells himself that every German he cuts short is a hundred of his comrades saved, and that it makes it all worth it, even as he can feel himself slowly, inexorably turning into a machine.
But then the deafening noise; he tastes metal and smoke and blood, and he knows he has been wrong all along. That nothing comes out of suffering but suffering itself.
II.
On the mountains he's begun his battle-dance,
Calling: Warriors, up and at them, now's your chance!
There's a rattling when he shakes his brute black head
Round which crudely hang the skulls of countless dead.
-Georg Heym, "War"
The first thing he remembers upon waking is the nurse. Most of them, who have been here since time immemorial, don't even blink at the sight; they move like automata around his bed, their hands sticky with his blood. But she is young and probably new, with wide dark eyes like saucers, and her fingers tighten around the basin as she stares at him in horror. And that is when he realizes the gravity of his situation, that he has passed beyond the realms of the human and become something else, something other.
The worst thing is the inability to scream. The pain is maddening, annihilating, and he wants nothing more on earth than to open his throat and unleash the horrors of hell. But he cannot scream. Bandages and wire hold closed his shattered jaw, and from beneath the layers of gauze comes only an endless animal moan. Months later, he will hear it still, in his sleep, that wounded keening.
III.
If you are not found,
In a little while your limbs will fall apart;
The birds will take some, but the earth will take most your heart.
-Harold Monro, "Youth in Arms"
There are strange hells within the minds war made.
-Ivor Gurney, "Strange Hells"
In the morphine haze, he imagines black dirt piled on his head, gritting between his teeth and stifling his breath. He is choked with the stench of blood and imagines an army of skeletons marching before his vision. Sometimes he looks at his hands and they are covered with squirming maggots. He laughs at the tickling sensation, and the stitches that hold his chin to his cheek give way again. He stares at his sister, searching for a vestige of his face in her own; but she looks two-dimensional, like a painting, and her fingers are cold as a ghost's on his fevered brow.
He thinks to himself, one of us is dead, and I do not know which.
IV.
Such, such is Death: no triumph: no defeat:
Only an empty pail, a slate rubbed clean,
A merciful putting away of what has been.
-Charles Hamilton Sorley, "Two Sonnets"
I speak not from my pallid lips
but from these wounds.
-Herbert Read, "Dialogue between the Body and Soul of the Murdered Girl"
The first time he looks into a mirror, he hears a dull roaring in his ears and a gray cloud obscures his sight. That night, in his dreams, it looms before his vision, a shapeless abomination of crimson and purplish-black, his socket a bottomless pit where monsters gambol. It is the presence of absence that horrifies: the shallowness of his cheek in three-quarter profile, the gaping hole where his eye should be, the five teeth missing from his upper jaw. Sometimes, he looks in the mirror--his hair uncombed and his chin stubbled, his scars livid in the stifling Chicago heat, and he thinks: I have become the thing that killed me.
V.
Now light the candles; one; two; there's a moth;
What silly beggars they are to blunder in
And scorch their wings with glory, liquid flame--
No, no, not that,-- it's bad to think of war,
When thoughts you've gagged all day come back to scare you;
And it's been proved that soldiers don't go mad
Unless they lose control of ugly thoughts
That drive them out to jabber among the trees.
-Siegfried Sassoon, "Repression of War Experience"
My fingers fidget like ten idle brats.
-Wilfred Owen, "Insensibility"
The train east rocks back and forth, sending Richard into a daze. He holds his pack on his lap, the German sniper mask in its neat wrapping balanced on top.
"Don't it make you crazy?"
He lifts his gaze to the man who somehow, in the space of a week, has become closer than any brother could have been. He doesn't speak in reply; already it seems unnecessary.
"Just sittin' there, like that. It would make me crazy." Jimmy flicks the ash from the end of his cigarette impatiently and bends back the cover on his paperback novel, and although Richard does not smile, he finds himself wanting to, for the first time he can remember.
Jimmy can't stay still or silent or sober, can't bear to be alone with his own thoughts; and in the early days of their friendship, he finds Richard's reticence infuriating. They are not so alike, not really, and so they fit together like puzzle-pieces. He did most of his killing from far away, and the stillness and silence of that time hollowed him out like a shotgun shell or a deep trench-scar in the dirt. It was different for Jimmy, who grasped his knife in his fist and felt the blood running into his boots as he slit men's throats. And so they returned: Jimmy feeling too much of everything, all at once, and Richard feeling nothing at all.
VI.
I shall be mad if you get smashed about,
we've had good times together, you and I
-Edgell Rickword, "The Soldier Addresses his Body"
He has been hungry long enough that he doesn't notice it so much anymore. In the trenches their rations had been scant and poor, their stomachs tied in knots. Then came pain-nausea and morphine-nausea, when every attempt at opening his jaw even the slightest made his gorge rise. Then the humiliating, dribbling mess he made as he learned to eat again, like a child. It was a bit easier in Chicago, as the pain waned and he was mostly left on his own, but he has become accustomed to eating only enough to keep hunger at bay. His cheek is hollower than it was before the war, his hipbones sharper.
But now there's Jimmy. Jimmy with his endless appetites; Jimmy who never wants to be alone, or without a drink in his hand. Always fidgeting and always ravenous. And Angela, constantly trying to prove that she can cook, although her husband has confided otherwise. Some days there's just food everywhere, the smell stifling him, and he goes twenty hours or more without a chance to steal away, to rip a piece of bread into tiny pieces and coax his jaw into cooperation.
"Don't be embarrassed to eat in front of us," Jimmy says, as if he's ever been embarrassed by anything. Love and fury rise in Richard's throat in equal measure, and he chokes both down again.
VII.
Do they matter? -- those dreams from the pit?
You can drink and forget and be glad,
And people won't say that you're mad;
For they'll know you've fought for your country
And no one will worry a bit.
-Siegfried Sassoon, "Does it Matter?"
Nevertheless, except you share
With them in hell the sorrowful dark of hell,
Whose world is but the trembling of a flare
And heaven but as the highway for a shell,
You shall not hear their mirth:
You shall not come to think them well content
By any jest of mine. These men are worth
Your tears. You are not worth their merriment.
-Wilfred Owen, "Apologia Pro Poemate Meo"
"Over there" means something entirely different to men who once answered to Alphonse, Salvatore, Mieczyslaw, Suchowljansky. But they have been through wars of their own, in a way--back-alley wars, streetcorner wars, wars of homeland and birth-name--and it separates them from Jimmy as much as his education and moneyed (if illegitimate) pedigree separates him from them. Richard can sense it when they all assemble, their ragtag band of six. The two Italians don't like each other much, and no one likes Mickey, but they understand each other in a way that excludes Richard and Jimmy.
Sometimes he is glad of the ruin of his face. It warns them away, like a sign on a condemned building, the floor about the cave in and impale the visitor on a pile of sharp sticks. But Jimmy's bright eyes are like nicely dressed store windows, and these unsuspecting civilians think they're talking to a real person--until he cracks a sick joke or flourishes his skull-crusher, or goes hard and dead about the eyes and mouth, like the lidless eye of a gun. And then the New Yorkers cut their eyes to one another in silent communication and Doyle emits that uneasy giggle of his, and he knows they will be rid of Jimmy as soon as they are able.
VIII.
Manly move among
These ruins, and what you must do, do well;
Look, here are gardens, there mossed boughs are hung
With apples whose bright cheeks none might excel,
And there's a house as yet unshattered by a shell.
-Edmund Blunden, "Preparations for Victory"
He doesn't dream badly often, as Jimmy does; but he also does not sleep much. It's the days that plague him; the war is like a series of landscapes drawn with charcoal on the thinnest parchment, laid over the surface of things. When he least expects it, a street, a storeroom shifts, becomes something dark and horrid.
He's able to keep those gray-smoke images at bay with new ones. He searches for bright colors and graceful lines, the glint of his scissors and the sheen of glue on the back of a page of newsprint, the way a crinkle in the paper goes smooth under his fingers. Sits at the Darmodys' kitchen table and watches the sun sparkling on the waves, or wet paint glistening on a half-finished canvas. Tunes out the tedious undercurrent of frustrated ambition and filial anger that fills any conversation between Jimmy and the others by focusing on the peach-rose hue of Lansky's suit, the delicate curls of smoke from Luciano's cigarette, the glossy shine of Capone's shoes.
And the eyes: always Jimmy's eyes, like a guttering flame.
IX.
Also, they read of Cheap Homes, not yet planned,
For, said the paper, When this war is done
The men's first instincts will be making homes.
-Wilfred Owen, "Smile, Smile, Smile"
He clips pictures from one page and pastes them over another, writing stories in his head. His dexterous hands braiding a daughter's hair instead of cleaning guns. A Thanksgiving dinner where he can finally eat his fill. The sun in his eyes, a girl's gentle fingers on his cheek.
He knows it will never be real, and not just because of the gaping tragedy of his face. He is a hollow ghost full of knives, a killer of men; and as much as he envies Jimmy, he knows his friend is only deluding himself. There's love, she had said, and then there's everything else--and that is what they have become, everything else, everything loveless and hurtful. A grim necessity, a scar upon the surface of the earth. He has nothing to give anyone anymore.
He thought Angela would think him a monster when he told the story of how he left Emma. Hoped she would, on some level; it is exhausting, this business of being flesh and blood, and he wants done with it. So much easier to let what lies on the surface of his face take over bit by bit, until he is nothing but tin at last, hard and numb and cold.
X.
These flowers have no sweet scent
no lustre in the petal no increase
from fertilising flies and bees.
No seed they have no seed
their tendrils are of wire and grip
the buttonhole the lip
and never fade.
And will not fade though life
and lustre go in genuine flowers
and men like flowers are cut
and wither on a stem
-Herbert Read, "A Short Poem for Armistice Day"
Jimmy tosses his jacket into Richard's lap when they get in the car, and Richard notices the poppy still pinned to his lapel. There's an absurd irony to it: flowers that sprung forth fertilized by corpses, a memory of blood. Armistice: the cessation of hostilities, as if anything ever really stopped--and them on their way to cut down an old man over an insult. He chuckles as well as he is able. "You sure--you want to wear this? When we kill him?"
"Ugh. Get rid of that fucking thing," Jimmy sneers. Richard plucks it off and drops it out the window, into the road. And when he cuts Parkhurst's skull open, it blooms like a flower.
XI.
War has victims beyond the bands
bonded to slaughter. War moves with armoured wheels
across the quivering flesh and patient limbs
of all life's labile fronds.
-Herbert Read, "Dialogue between the Body and the Soul of the Murdered Girl"
I have paid my price to live with myself on the terms that I willed.
-Rudyard Kipling, "Epitaphs of the War"
It was never about the money, this feud with Horvitz, although it's true that Jimmy didn't have the five thousand. It was the "boychik" jokes, the barely concealed contempt, the way he looked at Gillian. The broken places inside Jimmy and the butcher's uncanny way of taking his long sharp knife and worrying the wounds.
"What did he say?"
"That I should get the money from my father." The answer grits out from between Jimmy's teeth, and that's when Richard knows that things will end badly. He is oddly grateful for the flu pandemic that took both his parents only weeks before Richard's injury. His own father was a hard-working man, stern but fair, and Richard bears him no ill will. It's one less thing to be haunted by, these days.
He is shattered by the fallout of Horvitz's anger, but not surprised, and it never occurs to him that anything could have been done to prevent Angela's death. He's well aware of Jimmy's foolishness, but Richard doesn't worry much about the things he's done anymore, or the things the two of them continue to do. Cause and effect seem pointless now, much less providence or fate: he merely exists from one unpleasantness to the next. He can only march where Jimmy leads, and will march with him until the inevitable end.
XII.
God knows 'twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down . . .
But I've a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.
-Alan Seeger, "Rendezvous"
He was never comfortable at the Commodore's. Richard's parents had always kept their heads above water, but farming was hard and thankless work and there were few luxuries: oranges and a stick of candy at Christmas, a new pair of shoes. He is discomfited by the gleam of mahogany, the endless knickknacks, the dead animals that stare at him around every corner--and, of course, Gillian, who even in her more charitable moods eyes Richard like some strange breed of insect. And it's worse now, too quiet, without Jimmy's noises: the clink of glasses, the click of boots in an uneven tattoo, the sardonic chuckle. But with Jimmy's business gone, his connections broken, Richard can no longer afford his bedsit. He could rent himself out as a hired gun, but to whom? Those pricks in New York? Nucky Thompson? And so he agrees to take one of the rooms at the mansion--servant's quarters, under the stairs, far away from the furnished parlors where he sipped whiskey or mopped up blood.
He returns to the rooming-house one last time to pack up his clothes, his scrapbooks, his guns. But the sniper mask he leaves wrapped up under the bed.
XIII.
And we recall the merry ways of guns--
Nibbling the walls of factory and church
Like a child, piecrust; felling groves of trees
Like a child, dandelions with a switch!
Machine-guns that rattle toy-like from a hill,
Down in a row the brave tin-soldiers fall
-Robert Graves, "Recalling War"
I suppose
Little I'd ever teach a son, but hitting,
Shooting, war, hunting, all the arts of hurting.
Well, that's what I learnt
-Wilfred Owen, "A Terre (being the philosophy of many soldiers)"
The night Jimmy didn't come home, Gillian took the dogtags from Tommy's neck as he slept and hid them. She has a talent for forgetting, and Richard can't begrudge her that; but he also can't lie, least of all to a child with Angela's dark eyes who asks for "Daddy's medals." So he digs them out of a drawer and gives them back to their rightful owner.
When she tries to take them away, Tommy screams like a banshee, grabs Gillian around the ankle and kicks, and Richard feels something inside him snap. He strides over and snatches the tags out of her fist and casts them at Tommy's feet. The child picks them up and toddles away, muttering about "mean old Meemaw" and "Uncle Richard," and retreats to a corner. Gillian stares up at him, shaken but clearly impressed.
Sometimes she has to visit Whitlock, or one of the others, and cannot take Tommy along. There's no one else to watch him--other women, he suspects, do not like Gillian much. "Just play with him," she says crossly, because she was still a child when she had one and he must admit, whatever else her shortcomings, that she's very good with Tommy. But Richard is at a loss. He was a quiet child, by nature as much as by necessity; but Tommy is his father's son through and through, eyes and hands always active. It turns Richard's stomach when he knocks over his tin soldiers with those clumsy little hands, makes exploding noises with his mouth. Surely the child doesn't want to have a story read to him in that machine-gun voice. And he's never been able to get the sound of Emily screaming out of his head.
The first time the boy falls asleep in Richard's lap, though, dogtags clutched in a chubby fist, he realizes that he's a lot more afraid of Tommy than Tommy is of him.
XIV.
Now all roads lead to France
And heavy is the tread
Of the living; but the dead
Returning lightly dance
-Edward Thomas, "Roads"
The dead are all on the same side.
-Rene Arcos, "The Dead"
Things ended between Nucky and Jimmy as Jimmy chose them to, and Richard will leave it at that, though the sight of the man on the boardwalk sickens him. Manny Horvitz is another matter.
This one he wants to kill close up, but he knows he must be cautious. Horvitz has proven hard to kill, and the apartment Thompson has set up for him near the Ritz would be considered well-defended from anyone but Richard. From his vantage point across the street he takes out Horvitz's arms and legs with careful precision, and leaves him there until nightfall; he knows the old man is too stubborn to die quickly.
Richard's face is like a mask on both sides when he stands over the injured man, and Horvitz looks surprised. "You know I'm not the one who killed your boychik," he croaks.
He cocks his head to one side in that way that he knows most people find unsettling. "I know," he replies. "Angela Darmody."
"Ah," Horvitz responds with the breathy sigh of one who has accepted his fate. Gives a noise that might be meant as a chuckle.
"She wasn't like us," Richard says. "She was a nice person. And you shouldn't have hurt her."
After he sticks the gun in Horvitz's mouth, but before he pulls the trigger, he grimly recites the names and addresses of the butcher's wife and daughter. He won't kill them; there's no tactical advantage in that. But Horvitz doesn't know that, and Richard does it to see the bottomless horror in the old man's eyes before he dies.
As he leaves, he thinks he can hear Jimmy's mad laughter in the back of his mind; and if it's cold comfort, at least it's company of a sort.
XV.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep
-John McCrae, "In Flanders Fields"
They left this dead with the older dead,
Stretched at the cross roads.
-Isaac Rosenberg, "Dead Man's Dump"
He corners Nucky's man behind Babette's one evening, where he waits behind the wheel of the garish blue limousine. His pistol is drawn before Richard can blink, and he holds up his empty hands, a sign of truce.
"I just want to know what you did with the body."
He lowers his weapon and side-eyes Richard. 'There's no point trying to get to it now."
"I know." He's too aware of what the rain and heat would have done to that sordid angel's face, those restless hands. "I just need to know where he is."
The Irishman considers him for a moment and flicks his cigarette out the window. "Under the War Memorial."
It's a fitting burial site. Because really, Jimmy is just another casualty, as he himself would have been if things had ended in the woods last May. He takes Tommy there sometimes, now that Labor Day is past and the crowds have dissapated. The names on the monument are rough on his tongue, but he reads them for the child all the same: Montdider-Moyon, Ypres-Lys, Cambrai, Aisne-Marne, Meuse, Vittorio-Veuetto, St. Mihiel, Lys, Oise-Aisne, Champagne-Marne, Somme, Argonne.
Some days he still wants to end Nucky and most days he wants to end himself--but he promised. And each day he heads slowly towards home, and finds himself a little closer, although he's still not sure where he's going.
XVI. Postscript
My mind is a corridor. The minds about me are corridors.
Nothing suggests itself. There is nothing to do but keep on.
-T.E. Hulme, "Trenches: St. Eloi"