Chapter 3 The Ninety-First Name

The rain came in the fourth week and stayed, and with the rain came the worst of the push, and the road to the Warren became a churned brown river that pulled at the wheels like a hand. Milly drove it six, seven, eight times a day. She learned to read the sky for the lulls and to read the guns for the truth about the lulls, because the guns lied in both directions: a quiet spell could mean a withdrawal or a regrouping, and a burst could mean nothing at all. She learned to sleep in twenty-minute pieces on a bench in the tannery, and to eat standing, and to stop noticing the smell, which frightened her more than anything else, because noticing the smell had been the last thing that made her feel like a woman from a farm and not a machine for moving meat. Her notebook was at ninety entries when the rain was at its worst. She knew the number the way she knew her own age, because she had a habit of counting backwards from the last page while she waited for the loading to finish, and because ninety was a round number and she was superstitious about round numbers, the way her mother had been superstitious about magpies. The ninety-first came up at dusk on a Thursday, out of a party that had been caught in the open by a shell on the Brolincourt track. There were five of them, and two were dead before they reached the Warren, and one was walking and would not hear of a stretcher, and one was a boy with his jaw gone who would not last the night. The fifth was a man laid flat on a groundsheet with his tunic cut away by the dressing-station orderly, and he was the one she took, because the card said abdomen and the card said red. His field card was clean, which was rare. In the lamplight she read it twice, because clean cards had begun to interest her: Private H. Ryecroft, a number in the low four thousands, a battalion she knew by its badge and not by its name, wound, abdomen, penetrating, the hour, and the signature of a medical officer she did not recognise. No crossings-out, no fresh hand over an old one. It was the most honest card she had held in a month. She wrote him in. Ninety-one. She wrote the hour and the place and the wound, and she wrote his name, and then she put the notebook away and drove. The road was bad and the lamps were worse and she drove slowly, and for the first mile the man on the stretcher behind her was quiet. Then he began to talk, in the way men talk when the morphia has them and the fear is coming up through it like water through a floor. "Don't take me to the school," he said. "That is where the surgeons are," she said. "The surgeons are all right. It is the other one. The one with the stores." She glanced back. His face in the dark was the colour of candle wax, and his eyes were open and bright, too bright. "Which one is that?" she asked, keeping her voice level, because a driver learned to keep her voice level the way a nurse learned to keep her hands still. "The one who keeps the lists," Ryecroft said. "He keeps the lists and he sells the names. You are new, so nobody has told you. There is a market in names, and the men who buy them walk away, and the men whose names they take are already dead, so nobody misses them, except the ones who loved them." "You are talking nonsense," Milly said. "You have had too much morphia." "I have had just enough," he said. "I am going to die in this cart and I want one thing written down that is true." "Then give me a true thing," she said. "Give me the name of your friend. The one who—" But she did not know why she said it. It came out of her the way a name comes out of a drawer you had forgotten you had. He was quiet for a moment. The Ford missed on the hill and she nursed it, and behind her the man breathed the way a man breathes when each breath is a piece of work. "Denbigh," he said at last. "Roly Denbigh. Tell him I did not sell anything. Tell him I was going to write to him. Tell him it was Boyle who—" And then he stopped, because he had begun to bleed again, or because the morphia had taken the sentence, or because a man on the edge of dying sometimes chooses his moment to stop and will not be argued with. Milly drove the last mile faster than she should have. She did not know why she was hurrying. She knew, in the way you know a tyre is going down before the steering tells you, that he was not going to reach the school alive, and yet she chased the tail-lights of the ambulance ahead of her and cursed the Ford and the road and the war, and came into the yard at Argentonne with her engine boiling and her hands shaking on the wheel. Dr. Lanning came out himself. He looked at the stretcher and he looked at Milly, and something in her face told him what she had already understood. He put two fingers to the man's throat, and held them there, and then he closed the man's eyes with the flat of his thumb, the way you close a book. "Time?" he said. "Eight minutes past nine," Milly said. "Write it in your book," Lanning said, and went back to the living. It was very decent of him, and it was also very convenient, because a man who is written in and then written out, in a private book nobody audits, is a man who can be made to disappear twice. She did not think that then. She thought it much later. She did not go to the mortuary. She stood in the yard with her hand pressed flat over her tunic and listened to the guns, and she said his name over twice, and under the place where his name should have gone she wrote the three fragments he had left her: *the market is real*; *find Denbigh*; *Boyle*. A farmer's daughter learns young that a promise is a debt, and a dying man's last sentence is a promise made without paper, and by the time the second ambulance came in she had decided that she would keep it, whatever it cost her, because she had heard the truth in his voice the way you hear a coin ring on stone. She had lost men before; you did not drive that road for a season without losing men, and she had learned to carry the losing the way a nurse carries a dressing, close to the body and out of sight. What was different about this man was that he had not been given back to her. Men who died in an ambulance were set down at the school and written into the register as dead, and the register closed the account, and the closing of it was, in its cold way, a mercy. This man had told her a thing on the road and had died before he could finish it, and an unfinished thing is the one kind of thing a person cannot put down. It follows you home. It sits with you at supper. It lies down beside you on the bench in the tannery and waits for morning. The orderlies lifted Ryecroft onto a hand-cart for the mortuary, and in the shifting of him something slipped from the ruin of his tunic and dropped into the mud by her wheel. A small thing, flat, half of a photograph, torn down the middle so that only one man of the pair remained, a thin man in civilian clothes with his hand in his pocket and a dog at his knee. Milly bent and picked it up. She meant to give it to the man who took the effects. Then she saw who came to take them, and she kept it. ---