I looked at Janna, then back to the old woman. “I’m trying to escape conscription. They’re with me,” I said, nodding at the girls. Janna looked surprised by my confession, but I kept my eyes on the old couple, who, to my surprise, decided to let us stay. The first night they fed us beans, potatoes, and cognac, which warmed me and I could feel the blood start to circulate, but also made my feet throb. The old couple let me change in their bathroom, and when they saw my feet with my three curled-up and blackened toes, they both covered their mouths.
Mevi stared without flinching.
“Maybe take her to the back,” the old woman said to Janna, motioning to Mevi.
“You have to do something about those toes, boy,” the old man said.
He had been a soldier in the Great War. He said he’d seen frostbite before and knew how bad it could get if not dealt with.
“He can’t go back to town. There are too many soldiers, and there will be questions,” the friar said.
“We’ll help you. But this won’t be pleasant.”
They got me drunk that night. The liquor was sharp and sour and felt like acid in my gut, swishing over my ulcers. I sat in a chair until I could barely hold my head up, and mumbled about Janna and Mevi, the old man dying in the woods, and a giant stepping on me. The friar grabbed my chin and poured more liquor down my throat. Then they put ropes around my upper legs to cinch off the arteries, and then more around my upper calves until my legs felt like sausages in casings. Then the friar laid his giant body across my chest so I couldn’t move. The old man had his wife pour alcohol all over my feet. A giant metal pot of water boiled nearby. She had bandages, a jigsaw, a mallet, and a flat-mouthed screwdriver with a sharpened tip that would slice through bone when her husband hit the handle with the mallet.
The old woman put a wet rag in my mouth, and the water seeped down my throat and choked me as I bit into it. It was under these crude conditions that the old man amputated three toes on my left foot and one on my right. Thick, phlegm-green pus oozed out of each, followed by black blood. When he cut, my toes made a soft thud against the porcelain plate. More black blood drained from the dismembered toes, and then turned pink and normal-looking again, as if I was making my feet sick. My blood soaked into the wadded cloth until he cauterized the wound with a knife his wife had kept on the stovetop burner until it throbbed bright orange. Strange smells filled the room. The friar’s face was bright red from straining to keep me from bucking loose.
The friar pulled the rag from my mouth, held his scored face close to mine and whispered, “Were you sent to find out the escape routes?”
I bit down on the inside of my cheeks.
“Tell me,” he said, slipping a free hand from my shoulder and pushing it on my throat.
“Please, don’t do that,” the old woman said, putting a hand on the friar’s arm.
“We have to know for sure,” the friar said. “Who sent you?” he yelled into my face.
Pain pulsed through my body. My teeth sought each other through the skin of my cheeks. The room moved at an angle. The asthmatic red face interrogated me, Colt revolvers that were looped into the friar’s cassock dug into my gut.
“No. Let him go,” I heard Janna scream as she rushed into the room. Her sleepy little half of a shadow followed behind her, taking it all in.
The friar easily held Janna back as I shook my head no, pinched my eyes shut, and whatever ghastly expression the friar saw on my face said enough. He let go of my throat and resumed pinning me down.
Soon after, they placed the burning metal against my third toe stump, and I passed out.
I don’t remember anything that happened after that. I didn’t dream.
I awoke startled, disoriented, my heart booming. The deep thrumming of my own pulse and short breaths let me know the urgent force of life hadn’t left me. I was still drunk and had a horrible fever. Hot blood pooled inside my stomach.
In the distance a calf bawled. Folds of cloth and quilted blankets were wrapped around my body. My hands began groping at the blankets to feel my legs, to run my palms down my shins, over the ankles, and along the fanned-out bones of my feet to the thick padding around my toes. The two white wads of my bandaged feet bobbed up from beneath the blankets. I stared at the gauze but could not yet imagine the obscene gaps between my toes.
Fear came to me in shuddering, breathless gulps. My clearest thoughts fluttered off like gypsy moths. My body sank back into the sweat-soaked bedding and darkness.
When I woke again, everything seemed far away. Or I was far away, like being pulled out of a photograph. Yanked away from a woman talking. Janna. Janna in the center of the room, far away. She was saying something. It seemed urgent. I wanted to be near her. To walk up to her but everything between us wavered.
Nothing felt real.
Then I felt her hand pushing on me. On my chest. Her fingers splayed, each resting with a gentle force. Her hands touched my chest the way I’d pushed on the tombstone Ludo carved for Edwin. Then there was nothing again.
I woke a third time and there was the girl. Mevi. Her face close to mine. I willed my mind to rise up from the fog pinning me down, but then she was gone.
My eyes opened and closed in a blur. The old woman who helped cut my feet came in with a steaming cup of hot coffee and a bowl of beef broth, and laid them on the small nightstand next to the bed. She walked heavily and wore a thick, tweed skirt and gray sweater. She wiped her hands on her brown smock and then placed a palm on my forehead, then against my cheek, cupping it, which eased some of the desolate feelings that had come to me in the night. She tapped her crooked finger against my collarbone, and smiled with blackening teeth.
“You had me worried for a while, boy.”
When I came out of my stupor the next afternoon, a crochet counterpane was tucked over me. My stomach burned, and both of my feet throbbed all the way up to my hips. The old woman was there. Behind her was a radio tuned to an illicit English station. I heard snippets of news while tossing in bed.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“It’s better we don’t share names, dear,” she said.
Half asleep, and half awake, I lay and stared out the window and thought of going to summer camp with my brother and Ludo years before. There, we had tossed one another up and chanted our names. It shocked me now how casual we were about marching in our uniforms, aiming guns, and lobbing grenades. How all that we had been training for unfurled before us, how easy all that had come.
The memory faded, and I became lucid for a moment. I faced the old woman.
“Where are they?”
She shook her head no.
“Where are they?”
“They left.”
“What. To where?”
“They told you when you woke. The woman told you. She thanked you. You were awake.”
“When will they be back?”
The woman shook her head no again.
“Why? How long have I been sleeping?” I pushed myself up in the bed, but lay back down when the weight of Janna’s hands on my chest felt real again, felt like something very serious and not a dream at all, but stones pushing me down.
The old woman rubbed a rag over my forehead, and the feel of it on my skin, of someone tenderly reaching out to me when I felt so alone, brought wracking sobs up my spine. I choked. “No. Where? No. Where’d they go?”
“It’s best not to know.”