Tide King Read online

  “I would die for a stick of gum.” Johnson entangled himself from Stanley. The smoke cleared, briefly, and the hard marble of sun blinked through the treetops.

  “This might be your lucky day.” Stanley nodded. Before them, a formation of rock appeared in the trees with a low opening, two by eight feet. A bunker. The red-haired man stood off to the side of it. He tossed in a grenade as they turned, covered their ears. Then they waited for the smoke to clear before joining him at the hole.

  Stanley was the shortest, so he got on his knees and crawled in. He imagined a speckling of dead pale boys, boys with smooth faces and darting eyes, but it was empty with black. He tapped the inner mouth of the cave to make sure it was still secure. Then he pointed his thumb up, and the others joined him.

  “Now this is living,” red hair said in the darkness. He lit a cigarette and stretched. “We stay here until the war ends, okay?”

  “At least for a nap,” Stanley agreed, pulling his blanket out of his backpack. “We’ll take turns on watch.”

  They slept on ground that wasn’t wet and in corners that weren’t windy. They slept with their helmets off, their boots unlaced, oblivious to the shelling outside. When they woke, their stomachs were relaxed, growling. They wondered how to get back behind the line for rations, wondered where they were.

  “I say we stay in the hole,” the red-haired man said.

  “Yeah, and when one of our own boys throws another grenade in here, then what?” the blond said, tightening his laces. They were broken and did not go all the way up the boot.

  “That’s why we take turns on watch.” The red-haired man shook his head.

  “And when our whole company leaves us behind?” Johnson loaded his rifle. “We’ll starve to death in the woods.”

  “Moving thirty feet a day?” red-haired man sneered. “Not fucking likely we get left behind.”

  “My orders were to take the forest,” Johnson craned his head out of the hole. “I don’t know about yours.”

  Their mood was sour. They decided to follow the ravine that led from the bunker.

  “All aboard the Kraut trail,” Johnson laughed. “Think they’ll shell us here?”

  “I say we’re mighty close to something.” Stanley lit a cigarette. “Think we’re near the West Wall?”

  “By God, we should be so lucky,” the blond man said. “Then we can shoot the hell out of them and go home.”

  Stanley could not picture home. His mother’s face appeared vaguely, the smell of her, the sound of her. The hardware store where he worked on Eastern Avenue. His school, Baltimore Polytechnic. He could not be sure whether any of those things had happened or whether they were a dream. Whether he had always been at war and would always be. They walked along the ravine for hours. Sometimes they would come across a body of a German, always picked clean. One body was missing its fillings, the mouth open and exposing bloody stumps of gumline.

  “We need to find some Krauts so we can take their braut,” the blond man said.

  “I’d even eat the fucking Krauts,” the red-haired man said. “Maybe we should go back and find our men.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Stanley said. “Even if we find the Germans, they’ll probably outnumber us.”

  “Our men are probably ahead of us,” Johnson said, his head nodding forward. “That’s why we’re seeing so many dead. I told you we got left behind.”

  “Not likely,” the red-haired man said. “I’m going back. The whole month, I ain’t seen nobody get ahead of me. If there’s somebody ahead of us, it’s a different division. Which I’m more than happy for. Let them take some shots.”

  “I’m with him.” The blond turned in the slit trench.

  “Come on, safety in numbers.” Red gripped his rifle. “Let’s go back.”

  “What say you?” Johnson looked at Stanley. Johnson was the leader, but Stanley wanted to find their squadron, food.

  “Let’s go back.” Stanley didn’t look at Johnson.

  “The Pole has decided,” Johnson said, spitting in the trench, kicking at the snow-dirt with his shoe. “Let’s go.”

  They turned around and followed the slit trench back to the bunker. Then they climbed up the slope they had fallen down earlier.

  “Let’s sweep out and move forward,” Stanley said. Stanley moved in front, Johnson in the back. The shelling shook and shredded the tree canopy above them, branches falling like swooping vultures, pelting their shoulders and arms, leaving welts. The raining wood and shells filled the air with the sound of sanding metal, and Stanley could not hear anyone, only see their jaws moving, their eyes flicking back and forth as they scanned the area for mines, for Germans, for secure ground in front of them. Stanley wished they had stayed in the bunker. He glimpsed a man running through the trees, white and red cross armband. A medic. They knew how to get back to the line. All they needed to do was follow him. Stanley motioned to the men and ran toward the figure.

  He had not gotten far when the ground swelled behind him like a wave, sweeping him off his feet. A shell. His body hit the dirt at angles—elbow, knees, ankles—before rolling. When he stopped, he felt for his legs, moved them, and stood up, crouched over.

  “Johnson?” he called back. The area from where he had been thrown was peppered with wood and metal. Blackened bark. Gray and red snow. Johnson’s helmet.

  He followed the trail to Johnson, what was left of him. Blood spread from the left side of Johnson’s groin, his left leg scattered around him, bone broken and carved like scrimshaw and strewn with strips of muscle and skin. Johnson shivered, coughed, and looked lazily up at Stanley, drunk with shock. Stanley called for the medic. The blond man staggered up and then off, shouting for help. Stanley tore a strip of cloth from Johnson’s backpack and made a tourniquet. Johnson’s big long face caved in from his cheeks to his chin. His eyes fluttered.

  “Johnson.” Stanley shook him. But Johnson was going. Stanley took off his helmet and scooped the herb out of the lining. He opened Johnson’s mouth and pushed it in.

  But Johnson didn’t chew. Stanley opened Johnson’s mouth and pulled a third of it between Johnson’s gums and teeth. He picked off another piece and put in the red, beating hole that was once Johnson’s hip, leg. Then he moved Johnson’s jaw with his own hands, pushing Johnson’s tongue aside, grinding the herb with Johnson’s teeth. Johnson’s mouth was dry as cotton, and the herb coated the soft pink insides. Stanley stuck his finger in Johnson’s mouth and pushed the flakes, the unchewed pieces, into Johnson’s throat. Johnson gagged, sitting up and coughing, hands at his neck. The green-brown flakes flew out, covering Stanley’s face and shirt. Stanley wrapped his arms under Johnson’s chest and jerked upward. Stanley jerked and Johnson coughed and the herb chunk flew into the snow.

  “Medic.” The man dropped his kit beside Stanley. Stanley moved back and caught sight of the spat-out herb. It glowed in the detritus, unearthly. Stanley’s heart jumped. He reached for the glowing orange saxifrage. The medic turned, shook his head, frowned.

  Johnson was dead. The medic tagged him, took one of his dog tags, and scrambled back in the forest. It seemed wrong to leave Johnson like this, any of them like this. Maybe Stanley wouldn’t fight anymore, stay here with Johnson, work the herb into his wounds, down his throat. He could stick his knife into Johnson’s chest and massage it into his heart.

  The trees shook around him. Men shouted in the distance, the trill of bullets, explosions. Small fires baked in pockets of black trees. When another shell landed to the left of Stanley, he could feel the warmth of it on his leg. He did what he later imagined any other person would do. He ran.

  1806

  They traveled in the highlands west of Reszel, Poland, Ela Zdunk and her mother, Barbara, like they always did, looking for rare species of flowers and roots. They walked miles in the mossy, swampy darkness, digging around the bases of beeches, spruces, and sycamores, bending under brushes, getting scraped by thorns and stickers and bitten by bugs. For as long as Ela
could remember, the villagers visited their one-room shack outside of Reszel, the bone house, as it was called, to buy tinctures for their ailments. They had probably visited her mother for longer than the nine years she had been alive, for her grandmother had served the villagers in this capacity as well.

  Witches, they were sometimes called. But as long as the tinctures worked, no one became upset. They overlooked, or allowed, out of supposed generosity, Barbara Zdunk and her daughter to live in a hut of mud and river rocks and animal bones on a little patch of hill near the edge of the woods, where the ground was barren and cracked and the coyotes howled and nobody bothered but the gypsies, and only then for a little while. From their spot on the unprotected hill, Ela and her mother could see the thick ring of poplars and willows that surrounded the city below, the dense maze of terracotta-tiled roofs protected within it. When the customers were particularly foul or rude, Ela stood on the hill and squashed their houses between her thumb and forefinger.

  They traveled so far west in the highlands that they passed through the forest and came upon a clearing, burned to black chalk by a lightning strike, and nothing grew in this grave save for a plant with three to four long stems, little white bouquets of flowers topping them. Burnette saxifrage. Ela remembered her mother talking about such flowers. They were part of the old folklore, when the goddesses purportedly roamed the earth. Her own mother did not pay much attention to the stories except to pass them along to the older, more superstitious villagers in order to sell them her tinctures.

  “There were once three scythe-wielding goddess sisters,” she told Ela as they picked the flowers. “Who brought death. One of the sisters, Marzana, hurt her leg and lagged behind them as they moved through the towns, lusting for blood. But no matter how much she begged for them to wait, they went on without her. So she sought revenge. She limped through the villages the sisters had not yet visited and told the townsfolk to eat and drink saxifrage to protect themselves from her sisters of death. They did, and they survived.”

  “Is that why these flowers survived the white heat?” Ela asked, rubbing her hand in the coarse soot. How anything had survived, had grown here after the lightning strike, she did not understand. In the past, she’d seen trees halved, rock blackened by the swords from the sky. “Marzana gave them the blessing?”

  “It’s not likely, the lightning, my sweet. The saxifrage is hardy, like weeds. It needs not much love to prosper.” But in truth, Barbara did not know why they grew in the dead soil or why they did not succumb to the lightning. She caressed her cheek with the petals from one of the flowers and felt a tickle, a surge down to her feet, as if the herb had captured the electricity from the strike. But when she brushed her cheek again, the sensation did not return.

  “Matka, do you believe such a thing?” Ela smelled the flowers, running her thumb and forefinger down their long stems.

  “Believe what?”

  “In magic.”

  “Of course not—but the roots and leaves we find have healing properties, some by themselves and some mixed with others. And maybe we’ll be able to help Antoniusz. Would you like that, Ela?”

  “I would.” Ela skipped around in a circle. “Maybe when Antoniusz is healed, you will love him?”

  “Come.” Her mother Barbara gathered the herb in the apron of her skirt, and beckoned. “Time is not to waste.”

  There were two men who loved Ela’s mother, Bolek and Antoniusz. Bolek was sixteen, a farmer’s son, one of many spit in Reszel, Poland, hard like rock and yet soft with youth, a sheep’s head of blond hair that would probably thin as had his father’s, eyes like river water, the brain of a squirrel. For years, he had visited Barbara, to get tinctures for his father’s gout, his mother’s headaches. Barbara had watched the sweetness of his boyhood, when he had fawned over Ela and confided that he wished men could have babies, shrivel into the erect swagger of manhood. And yet he could still charm them, bringing grapes and cheeses he had filched from the village, his angled jaw and easy smile reminding Ela of a jackal. When Bolek came, Ela’s mother sent her outside to play far from the bone house. The first few times she heard her mother screaming, she ran home and tried to pull away Bolek, who lay on top of her mother on the straw bed, by his knobby toes. I am feeling pain in a good way, Ela’s mother explained, shooing her away. Because Bolek is helping me with my back.

  Antoniusz was the other man who visited. Although Ela’s mother talked with Antoniusz for hours, she did not let him help with her back. A friend of Ela’s father, Jan, who had died in one of Poland’s many uprisings, Antoniusz still led the underground resistance. Although Ela did not understand most of it, Antoniusz and her mother often talked about the continual partitioning of Poland among the Russian, Prussian, and Austrian empires as the gentry of Poland, who favored political alliances over a strong state, sold out to the highest bidders. The resistance, mostly peasants who were tired of both sides and who yearned for freedom most of all, had survived in pockets under Antoniusz’s leadership, who had too many connections in the village gentry to be killed.

  But the same gentry weren’t afraid to send a message to lesser men and women, especially witches, fox dung like Barbara Zdunk, and drove her off her land shortly after Jan’s death. In their new home at the top of the hill, Ela’s mother had collected branches, thick as wrists, and the bones of boars and bears to build the skeleton of a shelter and packed it with mud from the forest. At one end, she tunneled out a chimney, which she lined with river rocks and the bones of bats and rabbits and birds. She collected wisps of straw that had traveled outside her neighbor’s barns and made a mattress for her and Ela, then a baby, to sleep.

  Although he had survived the uprising through the fortune of his connections, the indifference of fate had thrown Antoniusz from his horse years later. His leg had been broken in so many places that he walked with a limp and could no longer work in the fields, forced to whittle pipes and other objects, relying on his sister’s care. Barbara was convinced she could strengthen the bone, soften the scars of muscle that were his calves. After they dried the leaves and roots of the burnette saxifrage they had collected, Ela’s mother seeped them in potato vodka. She added other ingredients—a Chaga mushroom tonic she had used to rid the villagers of consumption, dandelion root for liver sickness, some extracts of amber—and seeped them as well, some for a few days, others for a few weeks. Some jars grew dark and cloudy while their secrets brewed, and others stayed clear. She also set aside a second batch of ingredients Ela recognized as those her mother sold in her “love” potions to the younger women of the village.

  “Are you making Antoniusz my father?” Ela asked as her mother set some unused burnette saxifrage on the window ledge to continue drying.

  “Antoniusz can never replace your father, in your heart or mine.” Barbara bent toward her, brushed a lock of hair from her forehead. “But perhaps we, or I, can grow our hearts larger so that there is room for Antoniusz also. Would you like that?”

  “But who will help with your back, Matka?”

  Her mother laughed, her head arched backward, and Ela put her hand on the creamy trunk of her mother’s neck, felt the vibration of enjoyment in her throat without understanding.

  “Don’t be mad, little one.” Barbara grabbed both of her hands and kissed them. “My back is better. Who knows? I may not need Bolek after all.”

  “I don’t believe it was Bolek who helped your back, anyway.” Ela sat back on the straw, and Barbara rubbed her feet. They were little, smaller than Barbara’s hands, smudged with dirt.

  “You don’t?” Barbara kissed a big toe. “Why not?”

  “Because Bolek’s too stupid. Yesterday, he even left with his shirt on backwards.”

  “Well, he was in a hurry.” Her mother smiled. “There is still a war to fight, and he may not come back. Let’s pray for his victory and safety.”

  “Don’t worry, Matka—I will protect you while Bolek is gone!” Ela took Barbara’s face in her little hands, probin
g her eyes until Barbara looked away. Ela’s eyes were the same color as Jan’s, and his memory lived in them, green lichenous orbs that made Barbara shiver. Ela’s hair fell heavily, like a shawl over her back, almost to her bottom, rich chestnut like a horse’s mane. The memories of him flared in Barbara’s gut, like sour goat’s milk, his broad back, his flat hands and soft voice, the way he held her in bed, and some days burned more than others. She knew there would never be an herb for this.

  “You will get married someday, to a brave soldier.” Barbara pulled away and began to straighten the bed. “And where will I be then?”

  “I’ll marry a king, Matka, and you can live in our castle!” Ela bounced.

  “You don’t really believe you will marry a king, Ela, do you?” Her mother bit her lip. “We are peasants. You and I are considered worse than that. It is enough that we are allowed to live. Do not let the fire of your pride burn a target on your back.”

  “But if Poland becomes free like Antoniusz says it will, I can marry anyone I want.” Ela shook her head. “Is that not right, Matka?”

  “Yes, you’re a smart girl.” Barbara stood up. “You will be as wise as your father some day. Come, help me pick some horseradish for dinner—Antoniusz will come soon.”

  “It is a fool’s errand,” Antoniusz agreed. “For Bolek, surely, but Dąbrowski especially. Does he think Napoleon won’t double-cross him again?”

  “Maybe he thinks a defeated or weak Prussia is the best hope for everyone,” Ela’s mother answered.