Page 110 of The River We Remember

“You’re here in Black Earth County, but I’ve never got the feeling you came home, not completely. There’s some part of you that you left somewhere else. It must have been real bad.”

“What?”

“The war.”

“Yeah, Mom, it was real bad.”

“I wish you’d tell me about it. I’ve asked you again and again, but you always say the same thing, that it’s something I don’t really want to hear. When you hurt, Brody, I hurt. That’s the way it is with people you love, especially your children.”

Brody looked down at the creek, at the rivulet of reflected sky. “I’m not who you think I am, Mom.”

“Oh, I know who you are, Brody. I know things about you that you think no one does.”

He glanced at her, wondering what she meant exactly.

“I know, for instance, there never was a woman in Worthington. No schoolteacher named Lilah.”

Oh, God, he thought. This was about Garnet and him. She knew. She knew everything.

“I’ve wanted to ask you something for a while,” she went on. “Are you…?”

She hesitated, and he tensed, afraid that all those lies on which his life was built were about to come tumbling down around him.

“Are you homosexual, Brody? Because if you are, it’s all right. I’d still love you with all my heart.”

“Homosexual?” He laughed, laughed in relief. “No, Mom, I’m not homosexual.”

“Then why don’t you have a girl?”

“I just haven’t found the right one yet.”

“What about Angie Madison? I hear you’ve been seeing her. I’ve always thought she was a nice girl.”

“Could we talk about something else, Mom?”

“All right.” She put a hand gently on his leg. “Tell me about the war, then.”

Which was something he wanted to do. He wanted to tell someone. Wanted to let go of the crushing weight of all those memories that Jimmy Quinn’s death had dredged back up. Wanted to be done with it. Wanted it known to everyone exactly what he was. A liar. A coward. A murderer.

“Tell me,” she said again, so quietly it could have been the wind speaking.

THE WORST HAD begun long after he’d entered the war itself. He’d already fought his way across North Africa and become inured to the sight of bodies and half bodies and burned bodies lying beside the roads like things discarded in thoughtless haste. He’d seen men whose names and stories he knew well torn apart by hot shrapnel or machine-gun fire and all that they were and all that they’d hoped to be spilled out there with their blood and entrails on sand and stone for the desert scavengers to feast on. He’d moved beyond the point where he thought of pulling the trigger of his BAR as the slaughter of other human beings. He was good at what he did, and what he did was kill. But the worst began after his second wounding, when he was convalescing in an Allied hospital near Constantine, Algeria. He’d already been awarded a Silver Star and now his second Purple Heart.

Whatever it was that had driven him to take so many chances was still eating at him inside when he heard about a call for volunteers for a new outfit that was going to fight the Japanese in Southeast Asia. He knew about desert heat and fighting on bare sand and rock. He wondered what it would be like to fight under the cover of jungle in a place where water was plentiful. He knew what it was to fight the Germans and the Italians. Were the Japanese a different kind of enemy? In the end, he thought, what the hell, did it really matter? He was there to fight.

He trained in India, in northern Assam near the town of Nazira, at the base camp for what was called OSS Detachment 101. Their mission was to infiltrate Burma, gather intelligence, organize resistance, and in general, do all they could to harass the Japanese, who’d easily taken control of that country and were threatening the vital links between the Allies in India and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government in southern China. By the time he was sent into Burma in the last week of December 1944 with William “Mac” McMillan and a Kachin Ranger who called himself Ho, he’d been on a dozen missions. Their objective this time was to assess the Japanese strength in the Hukawng Valley, in preparation for an objective to further clear the way for construction of an important overland link with China, what would come to be called the Ledo Road.

Things went horribly wrong from the beginning. Three days out, deep in jungle near the Torung River, the Kachin Ranger, their guide and interpreter, was killed in a skirmish with a small Japanese patrol. McMillan was wounded badly in his right thigh, but Brody managed to get him safely away. Over the course of the next week, as they tried to navigate their way back toward India, they encountered increased enemy patrol activity and were forced time and again to alter their route. Worse, McMillan’s leg wound became gangrenous. Mac could barely walk, and they both knew that if he didn’t get treatment soon, there was no hope for him.

Their last night together they huddled under an overhang of rock along a small river. In his lucid moments, Mac urged Brody to leave him and go on alone. But Brody would have none of that. Mac pointed out that if they were both captured, he’d be killed anyway and Brody would probably be tortured for information and end up dead or in a Jap POW camp, which was maybe worse than dead. The poison in Mac’s blood caused him to burn with fever, and he’d begun lapsing into periods of delusion in which he cried out to people Brody could not see. It was in one of these periods that Brody heard the voices of a Japanese patrol moving along the far bank of the river. Horrified, he watched as the soldiers set up camp for the night almost directly across from the overhang. They built a fire, and Brody could see their faces in the flickering light. He tried to keep Mac quiet, but the man was out of his head, beyond reason. Brody lay on top of him and clamped his hand over Mac’s mouth, pressed himself hard against his comrade to silence him. Mac fought desperately with what strength he had left. Brody pushed harder and harder, and finally Mac went limp. But still Brody didn’t let up on that killing press, hating himself for what he was doing even as it was done.

When it was over, he cradled Mac’s body a long time in his arms. He listened to the soldiers across the river, talking and laughing in a language he couldn’t understand. They didn’t sound like monsters. But because of them, he’d done a monstrous thing, and he hated them for it. In the early hours, as the jungle filled with the noise of birds and the sky hinted at gray, he left Mac’s body beneath the overhang and sneaked back into the jungle, away from the river and the soldiers camped there.

He was lost. Absolutely. For several more days, he stumbled through jungle and struggled up high hills, heading west toward India. He had no food, and though he’d been hastily trained to live off the land, he wasn’t, as it turned out, very good at that. His water purification tablets were gone. It was the dry season. There was no rain. He sometimes drank from stagnant, foul-tasting pools, and he began to be sick in every way.

He wasn’t sure how long he’d been lost and alone when he woke one morning to find a young girl standing above him. He was too tired and too weak to be afraid. He smiled and said, “Hello.”

She was small, Asian in her features. She smiled back at him and spoke in a language that Brody assumed was a local dialect. She beckoned him to follow her. With some difficulty, he rose, and she led him a short distance to a tiny village. The people there took him in, gave him food and water, made gestures for him to lie down on a mat in one of the huts. He thanked them and, for the first time since he’d left Nazira, slept soundly.