Special thanks to kslchen for translation assistance and to MrsVonTrapp for jump-starting this when it seemed irrevocably stalled.

Brigade Brothers

September 1918

(Jem)

"Come on, Blythe. Just a little farther. Gotta keep moving."

I open my eyes, and there's Sam, panting. He's half-carried me these last two miles, wading in the current of a shallow stream, hoping to disguise our trail. He even left me in the water once, leaning heavily on my walking stick while he dashed off to make a little diversionary path, then backtracked. Maybe the dogs will take the bait and waste an hour scouring the forest for us. Maybe not.

It doesn't matter. We've reached the river now, dark and rushing under a quarter moon. There's no way I can swim it. My leg is on fire from hip to knee, with bolts shooting up into my abdomen and scorching to the very tips of my toes. Useless. My left hand is no better, hanging inert at my side, clawed and stiff.

Last time, when they caught us, a soldier with hobnailed boots had lain my hand out flat against a rock and stepped on it, grinding his foot back and forth and back and forth until all the metacarpals popped one by one. When he released me, it was a ruin of splintered bone and macerated flesh, twitching as it dangled from my wrist. I spent my first week in solitary confinement setting a bones, fainting, setting another. No anesthesia, so I recited from Leidy's Anatomy, muttering under my breath. Pollex (that one was alright); digitus index (cracked, but straight); digitus impudicus (I'll dedicate that one to Hobnails forevermore); digitus cordis (a goddamn mess). I considered amputating the little finger and might have done, if I'd had a knife. God, what I would not have done for some of Dr. Parkman's morphine. What I had was my filthy undershirt and a piece of dense black bread that I moulded into a splint of sorts, letting it go stale around my fingers to keep them from curling in on themselves. I might starve, but I'd want the hand if I didn't.

Now it seems that I could have saved myself the trouble.

"I can't do it, Sam," I say, barely able to squeeze the words between my teeth as I collapse onto the bank. "Just leave me."

"Bullshit you can't," he spits, leaning down into my face. "You're the stubbornest son of a bitch on God's green earth and you will swim that river."

I try to rise and have to swallow a scream of pain that comes out as a grunt. I open and close my eyes hard several times, trying to clear my jittery vision, but to little effect. "It's no use. You've got to go on. Now, before they catch up."

"I'm not leaving you, Blythe."

"Yes, you are."

He'd like to argue with me, if only because he hates to lose. But he's not stupid.

"Well then, I'm coming back for you."

I would laugh if I had breath. "Go Sam. To Holland. To Blighty. To Canada."

He's done talking, but not done arguing. There's not much I can do to stop him when he seizes me by the shoulders and drags me up the slope, kicking leaves back over our tracks. Ten yards from the riverbank, there is a thick stand of blackthorn bramble, leafy and overgrown and menacing in the dark. Sam drags me under and deposits me in the thorn dense gloom beneath, patting down the branches as he backs away.

"Stay there," he says unnecessarily. "When I come back, I'll call for you. What's a bird they've got around here?"

"There's no need, Sam."

"How about a dove? The Huns must have some of them, mustn't they?"

He makes a gargling sound that's more grackle than dove and I smile in spite of everything. "Well, if their doves sound like that, no wonder they're militarists."

"You do it, then."

There was a time when I could mimic the call of any wild bird or beast in Four Winds. It's been a long time, but I shut my eyes and breathe out, turning heart and brain and body toward dove. My warbling coo has a few too many consonants hiding in its depths to fool a real dove, but it will do for humans.

"See now," Sam says, reaching down to ruffle my hair. "Can't let talent like that go to waste."

He can't really be serious about coming back for me. Not when he's got this chance.

"Just promise me something, Sam."

"'Course."

"You'll get word to Faith. And when you get home, you'll visit my parents and tell them how it was."

"No need for all that," he says, clearing his throat.

"Say it, Sam."

"There's no need."

"Please, Sam. Just say it so I know you have it in your mind."

"Alright." He takes a shuddering breath, then recites, "Faith Meredith Blythe. St. Mary's Hospital, Paddington, London, or else Glen St. Mary, Prince Edward Island. And Dr. Gilbert Blythe, also Glen St. Mary, PEI."

I lie back on the soft carpet of last year's leaves, satisfied.

"Now you say mine," he orders.

I have enough breath left to snort.

"Say it, Jem."

He never calls me that, never. It's always Blythe or Blockhead or sometimes You Goddamn Islander. I'll humor him if it will make him go away sooner.

"Reverend Robert Osbourne, First Presbyterian Church, Hamilton, Ontario."

"And?"

"And Miss Blanche Garfield, Filsham Road, Hastings, who you should have married when you had the chance."

"That's the ticket."

"Think she waited for you?"

"She better."

"You only knew her a month."

"It was a hell of a month."

I can hear the grin in his voice and turn over on my side to get a last shadowed look at him. I reach out my sound hand. "Godspeed, Sam."

He crouches, but doesn't shake it. Instead, he reaches farther and grasps my arm, up near the elbow, clasping around the girth of my forearm so I can feel his pulse beating through my sleeve. I grip back, arm to arm, more than a handshake.

"I'll come back with help," he says.

"Don't. Please."

He stands and backs away, the stubborn set of his jaw telling me he has no intention of seeing sense, damn him. He salutes lazily. Never going to make captain with form like that. But he's up and away, pulling off his boots and strapping them to a log with his belt. Then he's into the river and kicking for the opposite shore, drifting with the current, around a bend and out of sight.

I owe Jerry an apology.

Three years ago (God, three years? More than that now.) after the first time we fought at Ypres, he got knocked stiff by a shell and spent the night in No Man's Land. He told me that he had seen Nan that night. Not imagined her. He swore he saw her laughing and standing by the spring in Rainbow Valley just as plain as day, and that's how he knew it was all over with him. I nodded and said I believed him, but I didn't really. He'd had a nasty concussion and it wasn't all that surprising that he'd hallucinate, but he swore up and down that she wasn't a mirage but an honest-to-God presence (of course, not even a goddamn war could make Jerry say "honest-to-God," bless him, but that was the gist of it).

I didn't believe him then, but I do now.

I can't see Faith, not in the deep, velvet black of this dismal night. But I can feel her. Warm, solid body laid out against mine, the curve of her head fitted into the hollow of my shoulder. Stranger still, I can smell her. Not just the wild roses of her hair, but that clear, golden scent of her skin and even a whiff of our peppermints. Call it a hallucination (it certainly is). But as long as she'll stay here with me til the end, I guess I don't much care.

The clerk at the hotel in Bexhill-on-Sea didn't even look at our marriage certificate. I slapped it on the counter when I asked for a room, but I guess he'd seen everything by then. I'm sure Faith must have given me some exasperated look, but honestly I don't remember because she was holding my hand in both of hers and I was accepting a key from the clerk and I couldn't stop grinning like a fool.

I don't remember much about the room either, except that it existed and it had a door and a bed (there may or may not have been other furnishings but they were of little consequence). What I do remember is carrying Faith over the threshold and cracking her head against the frame. Which, in my defense, she had me by the ears and was kissing me for all she was worth, so how was I supposed to see where I was going? But it's bad form to crack your wife's head against the doorjamb, and worse form to grin about it (even if you're only grinning because you just thought the words "my wife" for the tenth time in an hour and it hadn't gotten old yet and maybe never would).

She took her hair down out of the pins and asked me to check to see if her scalp was bleeding (it wasn't). But then her hair was running through my fingers, all warm and tawny-golden and smelling of rose-water. She shivered when I kissed her on the axis bone and kept on going toward her collar and I realized (for maybe the dozenth time) that we were really married at last.

Faith turned in my arms and held me with those amber eyes that make her look like a red-tailed hawk. She was so close, after all this time, and I found myself just studying her, measuring memory against reality. I had photographs of her of course, but those were mostly for showing to other people. They were too still. When I wanted her, I closed my eyes and imagined myself back in our rosebushes, with her breath coming fast and shallow against my neck and hands twisted in the placket of my shirt. She had said it would be a memory to look forward to, which sounded like nonsense at the time, but she was absolutely right.

But now I had a marriage certificate in my pocket and she had a gold band on her finger and everything was different. It was stupid to feel shy, but I did. How many times had I kissed her in the hollow of her throat, along the pulse behind her ear, on eyelids closed over pupils gone wide and dark? All those kisses had been promises of someday, but the next one wouldn't be. The next kiss wouldn't be an apology or an ending, but a whole new beginning. I felt the weight of it.

Something playful twitched at the corners of her mouth. She reached up and took my face in her hands and kissed me so softly that I might have imagined it. And then she was just Faith again and we were just us and everything was going to be alright.

Smiling, I asked, "Have you always been this short?"

She cocked her head to one side and looked up at me with such adorable indignation I just had to kiss the tip of her nose, even though it made her scowl.

"I'm not short," she said shortly. "I'm average height. You're just notably tall."

I settled my hands around her waist. "It's just that, when I remember you, I remember looking you in the eye."

"Eye-to-eye?"

"Yes."

Her eyebrows went all wiggle-shaped and she frowned. "You remember me being six feet tall?"

I laughed. "No, I guess not."

"We would have won a lot more basketball games," she said, hilarity twinkling in her eyes, though she nodded soberly.

"I suppose so. I just remember you . . . bigger somehow."

Without warning, she hooked a foot around my ankle and shoved me in the chest at the same time so that I sat down heavily on the bed. She came to stand between my knees and leaned in so that our foreheads touched and there was nothing in the world but her eyes on a level with mine.

"Better?"

"Much."

She kissed me then, and not the stopping sort of kiss.

Mouth soft and searching, breath hot and quick, and her fingers busy at my collar. She hesitated over the third button, caressing it, pushing it gently into my chest.

"It's all yours, Mrs. Blythe," I whispered, then let my eyes flutter shut as she popped it free.

I blink away a shaft of morning light, entertaining the possibility that I might not be dead. I don't know much about heaven or hell, but I don't think either looks like a stable.

Someone bends over me, a man I don't recognize. He's filthy, his khaki in tatters, some sort of soiled bandage wadded in the trapezoid muscle between neck and shoulder. It looks to be made of paper.

He brings a canteen to my lips and I sip eagerly, the metallic tang of the water masking some duller flavor underneath that I consciously decline to parse.

"Morning, sunshine," he says, with easy familiarity.

I search his features and feel the vaguest sense of recognition, but I can't come up with a name or even a place where I might know him from. God, do I have a head injury? He's grinning at me like I'm supposed to be pleased to see him. I am, don't get me wrong, but only because he might be able to explain what the hell is going on.

"I'm . . . alive?"

He laughs, offers me more water.

"Yeah, it's a big fuckin' mystery. Guess you're just too damn stubborn to die."

So I've had a close shave, I guess. Probably could have figured that on my own. I try to lift my head to look around, but I'm weak as a baby and just as helpless.

"Where am I?"

He corks the canteen and props it against my camp bed. "Sorry to break it to you, pal, but you're not in the Astor House Hotel or anything. The Huns are calling it a hospital, but it's a barn that smelled better when it was full of pigs."

"We're prisoners?" I sift through vague memories. Arching flares. Barked orders. Slimy mud against my cheek.

"Yep. They brought you in oh, a week and a half, maybe two weeks ago. You already had a fever and have been in and out ever since."

A rumbling boxcar. Huns in our trenches! Go, boys, go! A sledgehammer slamming into my thigh . . .

Abruptly, I try to sit up, but am arrested by a bolt of pain so hot and sharp I think I must know what a lightning strike feels like. I squeeze my eyes shut until they crackle with their own little pops of light, purple and yellow, behind the lids.

"Whoa, whoa," the man says, forcing me back down onto the straw tick. "Easy there, pal."

The bright pain is subsiding into a horrible ache. Another swig from the canteen rinses the bile from my mouth. I have to know.

Slower this time, I prop myself on an elbow and look at my thigh.

It's a goddamn mess.

More of those paper bandages (a lot more). One trouser leg has been cut away, but the other is still khaki, at least beneath the bloodstains. Quite a lot of blood, considering it's the uninjured side. I try to wiggle my toes and gasp at the pain.

"How did I survive this long with that?"

The man shrugs. "Like I said, it's a mystery. There are at least a thousand men in this place and exactly four doctors. Russian prisoners. They don't speak a word of English and their supplies are rubbish. But they do what they can when someone gets their attention."

My leg's a disaster, but it has been treated. There's a splint. It seems to have been cleaned at some point. The bandages have been changed, maybe not as recently as I'd like, but within the last couple of days at least.

"You got their attention for me?"

"Yeah, well, you owe me a pack of cigarettes. It was my last one."

I stare. "Why?"

He grins again and slaps the patch on my shoulder, a green half-circle over a red rectangle.

"You're Second Battalion." He taps his own shoulder and I notice the similar patch there, except that his green circle is whole. "I'm First Battalion. We're brigade brothers."

I look him over, trying to place him. Tall, maybe as tall as me, though it's hard to tell sitting. Eyes so dark as to be featureless and fine brown hair cut short, but sticking up at odd angles. He has freckles over the bridge of his nose and when he grins again, it comes to me.

"I remember you! You beat me in the pole pillow fight after the brigade sports meet in . . . God . . . 1915?"

"Sure did. Ducked you good."

"You have a name, brigade brother?"

"I'm Osbourne. Lieutenant Sam Osbourne."

Another morning and I'm still alive (another mystery). My limbs are leaden, my hand inert, and there aren't anymore roses, only the blackthorn bush above me and the rushing of the river in its bed. Somewhere, a dove coos, but badly.

I shimmy to the edge of my shelter, unbelieving, peering out toward the river. Sam didn't really come back did he?

He did. He brought a boat. A little clinker-built dinghy (where did he get it?) that he pulls up onto the pebbles and stashes under a bit of overhanging bank.

Something hopeful lurches to life in my chest. I could get to it. I really could.

Sam climbs up the slope from the river and stands in the shade of the trees. He coos again, seeming to know that he's close, but not knowing exactly where he left me. Everything looks different in daylight. It's difficult to coo back because I'm grinning and doves have a quieter sort of joy. I relax my throat, allowing myself to think for one single second that I may be on my way home to Faith after all.

I coo.

Sam turns his head, but not toward me. He's heard something alright. His body tenses, crouches, and then he begins to run.

I hear them now, too. Shouting. Blundering. Dogs.

Instinct drives me to shrink back under the blackthorn, though it's foolish. Nothing will stop those dogs if they catch my scent (they will; it's their job).

Sam sprints flat-out, but the Dobermanns are on him before he reaches the slope, not twenty-five yards from where I lie concealed. One at his throat and another at his knees and I can't watch this.

But there's a whistle and a shout and the dogs leave him on the ground, still alive.

There are two German soldiers on foot and an officer on horseback. One of the men (a kid really, with blonde peach fuzz and narrow shoulders, can't be more than fifteen) holds the dogs' empty leashes and congratulates them, offering them treats from a pouch at his belt. The other man puts a knee in Sam's back and delivers a couple of thunderous blows. I recognize him . . . well, I recognize his boots. Hobnailed from heel to toe.

When he's sure Sam is subdued, the Hun pulls him to his feet and frogmarches him to the officer. He keeps a bayonet pointed in the small of Sam's back, the tip cutting through his jacket.

When the officer speaks, I recognize him, too: Hauptmann Lorenz. I guess I should be encouraged that they've sent an officer who's known for speaking some English, rather than one who's known as a marksman.

"Your comrade," Lorenz demands. "Where is he?"

My heart must be audible to them, pounding away as it is. I lie perfectly still, knowing full well that concealment is nothing to those Dobermanns.

"Sorry, fellas, you must have run right past him," Sam says, spitting a gob of blood onto the ground. "He didn't make it more than two miles."

"We did not see him," Lorenz says, his voice clipped and precise.

"I left him under a bush by the stream, then doubled back to make a new trail away from him. Looks like it worked."

Lorenz turns to his men. "Der andere Gefangene hatte eine Verletzung am Oberschenkel. Ist das korrekt?"

"Ja, Herr Hauptmann."

With a nod, Lorenz gives Sam an order. "You will lead us to him."

"I will not."

I wince as Hobnails sinks a fist into Sam's belly. He doubles over, spluttering, but rights himself.

Should I give myself up? Crawl out of this bush and let them take us back to the compound? I doubt I'd make it, but at least they wouldn't have to beat Sam into giving me up. I close my eyes for just a moment, one last moment of stillness before I hoist myself up through the thorns.

Sudden barking, yelling, commotion, a shriek. What happened?

I open my eyes to see a scuffle I can't quite decipher until the morning sun glints on metal and Sam plunges Hobnails's bayonet into Lorenz's gut. Blood blossoms. Lorenz slumps as the horse rears away from the sudden movement. As Lorenz falls, Sam reaches for his sidearm.

There's a crack, but not gunfire. Sam goes down under the butt of Hobnails's rifle. It's all I can do to keep from screaming as the Hun presses the barrel to Sam's temple.

He fires.

Blood floods my own mouth.

The two soldiers hurry and shout at one another, dragging Lorenz from the frightened horse and tearing open his jacket. The dogs yelp and whine, prancing back and forth (not helping the horse much), but I only have eyes for Sam. He lies face-down in a pool of spreading black.

"Is er tot?" the young dog-handler asks Hobnails.

Tot. I know that word. He must be dead, of course. Can't they see all that blood?

But they don't mean Sam.

"Nein. Er atmet. Herr Hauptmann, können Sie mich hören?"

Lorenz groans and moves a little.

"Wir müssen ihn sofort zum Stabsarzt bringen!"

"Was ist mit dem Gefangenen?"

Hobnails retrieves Lorenz's pistol from the ground where it fell. Point-blank, he empties the magazine into Sam, the body jerking with every impact.

"Er ist tot."

"Was ist mit dem anderen?"

"Der ist wahrscheinlich auch längst tot."

They argue back and forth until Lorenz moans again and settles things. I can't get a good look at his wound from here, but there's enough blood that it seems a tossup whether he'll make it back to camp at all.

There's no way Lorenz can ride on his own, so Hobnails mounts the horse and pulls his commander into the saddle in front of him. The horse doesn't like that at all and for one foolish moment I'm afraid that the animal will step on Sam. As if it matters.

Then they're off, with Peachfuzz and his dogs jogging to keep up, back the way they came. The quiet forest closes around them, swallowing even their sounds.

I'm lightheaded, my fingers sunk deep in the litterfall. Consciously, I breathe, only to catch the bright, hot tang of blood on the breeze.

Hand stiff, leg stiff, I claw my way out of my shelter. I clutch my crutch, dragging a deep furrow in the leaves until I reach his side.

There's no need to check for a pulse. Not with his head caved in like that. But I check anyway.

Why did you do it, you stupid bastard? Why did you come back? Why did you go for the bayonet? Why did you save me in the first place, when you could have been better off alone?

For one dizzy moment, I imagine myself lying down beside his body and never getting up. It wouldn't take long, not starved and exhausted as I am. There's a good chance I might not last another night exposed.

But I can't. For one thing, there's Faith. She'd never forgive me (though how would she know I'd given up? She would, somehow.). For another, there's Miss Blanche and Rev. Osbourne. We gave one another burdens to carry and I'll be damned if I'll let him down now. That settles it, I suppose. If I'm going to die, it's got to be after I've passed on word of Sam and what he did for me these past few months. I guess that means Holland, though the how of that is as much a mystery as anything.

But first, I need to dig a grave. Easier said than done. I have a spoon and a mess tin and one good hand, but I'd dig it a thimbleful at a time if I thought I could last that long. I can't leave him unburied, to be picked apart by crows, scattered by dogs or pigs. He deserves better. Scanning the riverbank, I conjure the idea of some sort of cairn, but I'll never be able to carry enough rocks up the slope.

The slope. He hid the boat under an overhanging bit of bank. Maybe . . .

I ease my way down the declivity to the river, bracing myself with my stick. Yes, the boat is drawn up under a crevice where the roots of a fallen tree have kept the soil from collapsing onto the encroaching beach below. It will make a poor grave; like as not, his bones will be washed downriver in the next spring floods. But it's something. It's respectful. And it's all I can manage.

More than I can manage, I think, as I pull Sam down the slope toward the little hollow. I drag the boat out into the open and place Sam as far back under the roots as possible. I arrange him as best I can, arms folded over his chest, his handkerchief spread over the ruin of his face.

A prayer should come to me, but the only thing I can think is that he shouldn't have died. He should be halfway to Amsterdam by now, stubborn goddamn idiot. He should be alive and I should be dead at least twice over and would be if not for him. With my stick, I pull the rocks and dirt down over him, a sprinkle of protection, then a miniature avalanche as a bit of bank gives way and slides over his body. I bring more rocks and pile them on top, as many as I can manage, knowing it's nowhere near enough. But my fingers are raw and bleeding now and my leg is dragging and I barely have the strength to stand propped against my stick.

I have to say something.

"Well, I guess you've been to enough funerals as a minister's kid," I say. "Jerry would know what to do. He'd have some scripture about laying down your life for a friend. Walter, too. He could have prayed you a bully prayer. But I guess you're stuck with me."

I pause because there's nothing I can say that will make this right. He shouldn't have been here, none of us should, and now he's dead and there's nothing to say about that.

"I'll find your father," I say because I will, if I can manage to go on breathing long enough. "And Miss Blanche. I'll write to her if I can't get back to Bexhill."

From somewhere in the woods, a dove coos (a real one). I look but can't see it, so I coo back. It answers me, hesitant at first, but with increasing fluency. I feel absurdly grateful that I won't be leaving him utterly alone.

"Goodbye, Sam."

I'm sure I'll faint, but somehow I manhandle the boat into the water and collapse over the gunwale. With my stick, I push off from the bank, poling til I can't reach the bottom anymore. Then I lie back in the bilges of this fragile little craft, thinking absurdly of the old story Mum tells of Avonlea and Camelot and other sorts of make-believe. The current lifts me and away I go, wherever it takes me.