DOC MOO BENT OVER the shrapnel-pocked thigh of a miner, forceps raised, about to go in. The man had been hit two days ago. Bomb blast. His friend said he’d been too scared to come at first, afraid he’d be charged for visiting the doctor. He didn’t want the company to dock his pay.
The wound had begun to pucker and Doc Moo was concerned of gangrene setting in. They had no anesthesia and the man was writhing white-bellied beneath him, eyes glued to the forceps, whispering prayers in Polish. Moo nodded to the nurse, who set a stretched leather belt between the man’s teeth. At the touch of the forceps, the man bucked and roared through the leather bit. Doc Moo felt the stainless steel tips touch something hard, foreign. He prodded the area, feeling for the best way in, the man juddering beneath him as if shocked.
It didn’t help to focus on a patient’s suffering, so Moo had learned to tune out the screams and pleas. Push them to the periphery. Like someone who lived next to train tracks, who could sleep while the house threatened to shake right off its pilings. Still, it was a relief when the man passed out, his body falling limp. His tortured spirit gone to another place, at least for a time.
A story had been circulated during the Great War that God would give you no more pain than you could bear, that you’d pass out before it became too much. Doc Moo knew that wasn’t strictly true but he could imagine what comfort it might give. That simply believing such a thing might make it true.
He got hold of a shell fragment and began to work it from the wound. People thought of butchery as crude work, even brutal, but it was so much neater in fact. No screams, no fear of death or dismemberment. Smooth, practiced cuts on flesh far beyond feeling. Not so with surgery. He dropped the fragment into a porcelain bowl at his elbow and began to prod the next wound in the man’s cratered thigh.
The nurse touched his arm. She was the same square-jawed miner’s wife who’d served with the Red Cross in the War—a blood-soaked godsend. She pointed to the dish.
Moo retrieved the bomb fragment and held it higher to the light, rotating it in the forceps. Beneath the blood and tissue, the fine threads of a machine screw.
The nurse swallowed. “Christ, I never seen that in a bomb. They wouldn’t load it with those, would they?”
A shiver ran up Moo’s spine. “I don’t know.” He tapped the dish. “Let’s not throw this away. Someone ought to see this.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
Over the next hour, he pulled fragments of nuts, bolts, screws, and nail heads from the man’s pockmarked thigh. Hardware intended for construction and assembly, for the shelter and so-called progress of mankind, turned to the violent disassembly of the human body. Moo began to feel unwell as he worked, weak. His blood running thin. His faith. Each fléchette chipping at some utter part of his spirit. Nicking and scoring his insides. Whittling his bones.
He was cleaning the last of the wounds when the floorboards began to thrum beneath their feet. Soon the bomb fragments were rattling in the dish. He and the nurse looked at each other.
“Cover!”
Moo threw a canvas sheet over the man’s exposed wounds as dust shook down from the rafters and aero engines roared overhead, loud as whirlwinds. It seemed the schoolhouse roof would be ripped shrieking from the joists. They looked through the blown-out windows to see a flight of Army fighter-bombers crossing the camp in echelon, Liberty planes with V-12 engines and forty-foot wingspans, each bristling with machine guns. The warplanes peeled away in formation, the starry roundels flashing on the undersides of their wings.
One of the wounded men turned from the sill. “Eighty-eighth Aero Squadron out of Langley, Virginia.” He sniffed. “Telling us they’re here.”
Doc Moo set his hands on the desk and closed his eyes. He wanted to pray but the words wouldn’t come. So his prayer was just a vision. A shield of light cast over the mountain, sheltering the men upon its slopes, on both sides, and he down at the bottom, inside this very schoolhouse, small but tireless, with iron bones and chainmail nerves. A man who could wade blood for days. He prayed to be that man. To remain so, for however long he must.
Come dusk, the dead and wounded were brought down in throngs, carried on men’s shoulders or makeshift litters, some wrapped in blankets or coats. So many it seemed the mountain itself was bleeding.