fic: the green grass stretches (band of brothers)
the green grass stretches
band of brothers. there are not real words to phrase how the savagery and things like battle make more sense than this; it is simple though. speirs; speirs/ofc. 2203 words. pg.
how dare i speak of trickery
when the wild things in me are pulling their sham
(magic vs. midas; sunset rubdown)
They’re all wrong, of course.
They’re wrong when they say that combat is confusion and the rattle and boom and great heat of artillery is something akin to disorientation, that it’s enough to make a man scatter, lose his head. For some men, perhaps it is true. But he would rather not know them. He would rather he was not generalized right along with their mess.
It is different for him. From the first burst of that first shot, it is a kind of complete coalescing of the world, the sounds, the colors, the tightness of his muscles all merging into a singular entity. It all makes sense. There is a finger and a trigger, there is the pull of it, the kickback dulled by parceled strength. There is a you and there is a me and there is nothing in between but empty ground, the grass overturned by incessant mortar rounds. There is the roll of dark soil and the clattering fall of broken shingles, that soft, unreal tinkling of glass, open windows watching. It makes sense, glorious in its simplicity.
He keeps his eyes wide, he keeps his eyes narrowed, but never - against starbursts above, along the branches, the noxious spray of blood and death - does he let them slip to closed.
Stark divisions like these - they all make sense.
The men all talk of the things they should have done, could have been doing instead of this - Europe and rifles and Krauts toeing the line. Speirs will point and call it empty rhetoric, if only in his head - there is nothing else out there beyond this.
His wife is British, and sharp, cutting in all the ways a person can come to be. There is her appearance, the prominent cheekbones and the almost overly large jawline. It lends her a sculpted physicality, the classic cliché of a face carved from stone, but it suits her.
She has elbows that poke through the fabric of her sleeves and a skinny collarbone, her hard, flat sternum ghosting under the skin; there are her small breasts and a beige silk slip.
Maybe it’s in the cold eyes of hers, the way the harsh curve of her smile never fully reaches them, and how the spark is kind of missing but the faint lines of crow’s feet are already present, stretching.
She is the same age as him, and neither of them are what one could reasonably classify as old.
But Speirs is like that, one to place a high currency on individual tools like stoicism and strength rather than the more conventional of feminine attributes.
There is a tight mouth that bites, too much cleverness and not enough kindness.
At first, he thinks, it suits them both.
It can be difficult for him, though he would be hard pressed to ever admit it.
Love lacks precision. It lacks order and is prone for the unexpected. It does not fit neatly.
He marries her.
Love, he tries to claim. Yes, love.
At this moment, this exact moment - his heart racing and full to bursting, the muscles of his thighs burning, his Thompson raised - there is nothing, nothing at all in his head, and if he were to look up, cast his eyes away as the bullets would pop, he would see the sky reflect the same.
From the very beginning, it was almost as though names never really had a place between the two of them. Rather than the personal implementation of things like proper nouns, clarification and capitalization, it was just you, me, us, him, her. She was never particularly impressed by him. But it didn’t matter.
Except for that it did. It really, really did.
There were prisoners once, but he steps far, he steps wide of denial and does not let himself skirt around its comforting edges.
If he wants to be honest, which, yes, he will insist upon it - and here he might casually light a cigarette, let the smoke drift lazy from his lips, the only action of his granted such latitude - it does not make a difference. The legend has been crafted, mutated, handed down and passed from one private to another. And maybe he killed a drunkard once and maybe he killed a German POW eight times, twenty times, thirty times over. Maybe Foy really happened and he hopped fences and breathed fire and stepped light past ricochet, speed on his side, grace on his side, never luck. There might have been eight, there might have been twenty, thirty, none.
He will let honesty prevail and eventually it all will give way to the complicated and the jobs and the cars and apartments and wives -
He will inhale, exhale, let the smoke dance, he’ll smile with his mouth closed; it’s like this - we’re all prisoners anyway.
It really doesn’t make a difference.
Eight, twenty, thirty, one.
Some men find faith in numbers.
“It frightens me the way you talk.”
“What else should I be saying then?”
“Nothing I suppose.”
He is noticing these things now: she has such a small, sour mouth. Her hands are thin and brittle.
The war comes to be embodied in a numb expectancy, a quiet restlessness for him. He doesn’t blink.
He finds out about the baby by post.
A letter arrives, a proper Lt. Speirs offered as the slip of the envelope is handed to him.
He can recognize the handwriting. He has not shaved in four days’ time, and if honesty compels, he has not thought of her in as equally long a stretch. Rationality does not explain; sometimes, she escapes.
He leaves the letter sealed for two days. He tells himself he is waiting for a quiet spread of time to enjoy it, enjoy her, but it’s really not the truth.
There is a tangible amount of dread attached to the idea of both opening and reading what she has written. It is akin to straddling two worlds, both as disparate from each other as earthly possible.
This one he can bear. It is cold, simple logic, the rule of the jungle - kill or be killed. Be ruthless yet judicious.
With her, it is something else.
“Don’t let your fear surprise you,” his mother used to say. “There is still so much out there left to you to learn.”
His wife is one year younger than he is.
Combined, collected, they have yet to equal fifty years.
Ronald, the letter reads when he finally opens it. The war is still early on, everything etched with the sharp edge of adrenaline. There is a hum to the air, felt more so rather than heard, a thick tangibility to it.
Ronald, it reads.
There is to be a child.
He refolds the letter, slips it back into the smudged envelope.
Later, he thinks, and listens, impatient, for distraction.
It will come.
Nixon is speaking of ladies in Aldbourne, searching for them elsewhere. He cuts his way across Europe with a compass in hand, a flask in the other and forgotten flirtations left in his wake. Speirs does not try to understand; he will stick to the games of cards and practiced things like strategy and trickery while he leaves the rest to men like Nixon, men like Harry Welsh.
“You coming, Speirs?” he bothers to ask.
He shakes his head. “I’m married,” he says on accidental impulse. It is foolish, and he regrets it immediately. There is a silver platter he needs to have prepared for post. He allows his mind to light on that instead.
“Yeah? No shit.” Nixon shakes his head. “Don’t see a ring.”
Speirs stares at him, and it is odd, the silver platter slipping from his mind and a soft blue shift dress and pale knees take its place instead. He does not have an answer prepared for the question. Her skinny knees would sometimes knock, he imagines they had the morning she said yes, Ron, yes and the ring slipped over and past her knuckle.
This is a weakness, he thinks, the distance closing and he fears words like tangling. He tries to disregard it with a cough.
“I’m married too, you know,” Nixon says with a laugh, a weird hint of nerves there, and chances are he’s already a little drunk. “Ain’t stopping me.”
He does not say anything, but his eyes level him with a parting glance. And while Nixon may cheat, bloat with his choice of booze and babe alike, Speirs will envision a line.
You stick to the ropes. You stick close. Deviation is the almost clever implement of disaster.
Yes, almost -
Keep your wits about you, and one can always see it coming.
There is a skitter of laughter from Harry, Welsh, Harry Welsh - he is unsure how to think of the man, his first name seeming to fit better than the last. The front window to a butcher’s shop is missing, a couple storefronts down from where they stand. There is a man trying to nail wooden slats across the gaping space. Speirs thinks it futile, assumes the man is the butcher himself, and for a second his face almost opens in a smile as he wonders if there is even any meat in this ruined town to slice and dice, if there any customers to be attended to. He doubts it. It is futile, maybe a kind of hopeful bordering on the ridiculous. He does not care for it much and the temptation to smile is lost.
“No idea you were married, Sparky!” he says, a flat palm pounded against his back. Speirs scowls, just a little, enough to get the point across without resorting to melodrama, his jaw still set. Harry waggles his eyebrows. “You never mentioned the broad.”
Speirs’s eyes wander for a moment, scanning the distance.
“She doesn’t belong here,” is all he offers, a shrug, and then he walks away. The conversation ends with the crunch of boots on broken stone.
He can hear Harry’s low whistle, and the golly he mutters to the other men. They laugh.
He does not think he missed the joke.
They met in the gaps - his nervous anticipation for war embodied in the tight tremble to his fingers and her quiet, solitary, resigned grief carried on stiff shoulders and unforgiving posture.
She called him a Yank, and he liked that, or perhaps, he liked her, the click of her accent, the way every word from her spoke of an upbringing strange and distant from his own.
He liked the big eyes and the long eyelashes and the way they would drift, from his own, to out and past him, along the pane of glass, a careful, cursory catalog of the street beyond.
The depth of her eyes was both empty and limitless, betraying nothing of her.
His tea had run cold; “my husband,” she said, self-assured grace and an embroidered handkerchief in her lap, “is dead.”
The house is quiet. A clock is ticking out in the foyer and every now and again either his breathing or hers seems to dominate the room.
The silence is strange to him. It should not feel as foreign as it does now; Austria was characterized more often than not by the quiet stretches, no chorus of artillery, the anguished shouts, grunts, screams to punctuate it. No gun shots to be spoken of, both feared and waited for on a regular basis.
It is different here.
“I always thought he was dead,” she says.
“No you didn’t.”
It is a spark in the quiet.
Her fingers are light against a crystal goblet. They skim down the edges of the sides and she is watching her hand carefully, her eyes following the line up and down.
When he looks back on it, later, in the night, he imagines that is why he married her in the first place. Despite it all, the cold eyes and the pale hands, her resolute acceptance of fact instead of fancy, she still radiated an unspoken yet calm hope.
At the time, he might have envied her for it.
Now, he most certainly does.
She does not argue with him, and it is almost beautiful.
It is the war and it is that great and vapid void. It waits. It frees one from connections, cuts loose, allows for the grace and the descent of flight.
Blades of green grass had tickled his chin, a blemished field in Normandy, dotted with friend and foe alike. He had stilled, if only for a moment, his parachute still catching on an invisible breeze, trying to travel its way across and along feathery blades of grass.
For a moment there was nothing. The tether of it all does not even try.
It is a you and it is a me and it is simple - there is all that empty ground between an us that will someday cease to be.
fin.