“Help! Please help me,” Chauncey cried out. He couldn’t move. When he lifted his head, he could see the bloody, frayed ends of skin and bone where his legs had been. Every night, Chauncey prayed that he’d wake with both legs, back home in Poughkeepsie, and find that the past nine years of his life had been nothing but a terrible dream. Instead, he woke screaming, his face sweaty and his eyes wet with tears.
But not tonight. Just under the cacophonous symphony of gunfire and screaming, Chauncey heard something else—the sad, creaking tune of an old music box. Off to his right, the mission doors appeared between two barren trees. When they opened, the song drifted out from them, erasing the din of war.
Chauncey sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. His legs! With a small cry, Chauncey rested his hands on his knees, then moved them down the sides of his calves, feeling skin and muscle and bone. He flexed his feet, rejoicing in that small victory of motion. He stepped through the doors and plodded down the darkened corridor of the mission, past the beds of lost souls traveling in their own dreams: pushing a plow on the family farm, making love to the girl left behind, diving into a sun-dappled swimming hole in summer. He looked back at his bed, where what was left of his broken body slept on. That was what waited for him when he woke, so he pushed further into his dream until he came to an old subway station.
It was quite beautiful here; an amber glow suffused the entire place, warming the fancy brass sconces and floral oilcloth wall covering, making the tracks gleam. But if Chauncey turned his head just so, the whole picture seemed unstable, as if this lovely, warm scene were trying to write itself across a dark, decaying canvas that peeked through in spots. Chauncey could swear that he heard sounds deep inside the vast dark of the tunnel—sharp clicking noises and thready, low growls made by some nightmare beast he could not name or imagine. But then, just as he had the impulse to turn back, a voice whispered sweetly to him in overlapping waves, “Dream with me.…”
“Yes,” he answered. “All right.”
“Promise.”
“I promise.”
He stepped into the tunnel and found himself outside Le Bon Reve in rural France. He and his mates had gone drinking there one September evening before they’d been lost to the trenches along the Western Front. The saloon’s windows were alight. Chauncey put his face to the glass, but he couldn’t see anything. Hearty laughter erupted on the other side of the saloon door. And then a chorus of drunken voices took up a song that had been popular during the war. Chauncey could still remember the words.
“Over there! Over there!” came a strong tenor. That was Clem Kutz singing! He’d know that voice anywhere. Somehow, his old pal Clem was here.
Chauncey pushed through the door and went inside.
Seated around a long, rustic farmhouse table were all the friends Chauncey had lost during the war. Why, there was Teddy Roberts! Poor Teddy, whose mask had sprung a leak and he’d choked on mustard gas, dying with eyes bulged out, a hideous, unnatural grin stretching across his thin face. There was Bertie Skovron from Buffalo, who’d taken a bellyful of shrapnel and bled out, one hand still gripping the field telephone. Medic Roland Carey—funny old Rolly, who’d tell you a right filthy joke as he checked your gums for scurvy or poured stinging alcohol over a nasty cut. The same Rolly, cut down by influenza, was sitting right in front of him. And Joe Weinberger was there, too. Joe, who’d made it back home to Poughkeepsie after the war with a bad case of shell shock. He’d lasted eight months before he went into the barn on a fresh spring morning, threw a rope over a rafter, and hung himself. All of Chauncey’s friends were here, alive and young and whole. Brothers. They had their whole lives ahead of them, and the dreams they’d nurtured before the war—to be husbands, fathers, businessmen, heroes worshipped by a grateful nation—were still untouched and waiting to be used.
Clem sang out, “Johnny get your gun, get your gun, get your gun / Take it on the run, on the run, on the run.…”