Free Kaleidoscope by Darryl Wimberley Page B

languished in cots littered row upon row beneath a cathedral ceiling festooned with the limp standards of the Allies. The place was eerily quiet. No complaints from those martial beds. The muffled coughs of those able to clear their throats and chests, the sputum of those sequestered with tuberculosis. Murmurs in varying tongues of men dictating letters, or dying. Those soon to be discharged reading letters or playing cards. Sometimes you’d see a man sipping a malted milk or peeling a rare orange. Mulling over a copy of some hoarded magazine or newspaper or, of course, letters from home.
    “Over here.”
    Jack actually heard his wife-to-be before he saw her. She was petite, even for a French woman. Built like a pear. Hair tangled as a ball of yarn trapped beneath the peaked, starched hat. But the eyes were the thing. Green, like the kind of green reflected in a still stream banked by some brilliant forest. An emerald green.
    Her patient was muttering some gibberish in a language Jack could not identify. He was a soldier, that was clear enough, shrouded in sheets and bandages with tubes like tapeworms draining a lung. A leg had been amputated and was seeping. He clutched a medal like a rosary. A scrap of ribbon embossed with a star over a scrap of brass.
    “You can help me.” She spoke to Jack in passable English. It was not a request.
    “Is he a prisoner?” Jack had asked.
    “No. Arab. They left him here to die, but I’ve brought him back I think.”
    She made Jack wash his hands. “Hand me the instruments when I tell you,” and before you knew it she was in the guy’s guts, pulling out scraps of cloth and integument.
    “Jesus Christ,” Jack tried to hold his gorge.
    “It was worse before. Wasn’t it, my Muslim friend?”
    The man growled something.
    “Cheerful, isn’t he?”
    “He wouldn’t speak to me at all in the beginning,” she replied. “They don’t trust the French.”
    “And yet they fight for them?”
    “They fight for any reason at all.”
    “You need anything else before I go?”
    “We need everything. All the time.”
    The Arab died not long after that first encounter. Gilette was not sure what to do with his things. Usually there was a forwarding address, some next of kin. But for the Arab, nothing but a box in a hole in the ground.
    “He was awfully attached to that decoration,” Jack remarked. “Maybe you should bury the medal with him.”
    “No,” she shook her head sadly. “He thought it would keep him alive. Toward the end, when he knew better, he made me take it.”
    “What’s it for?”
    “Men who are wounded, they get one.”
    He saw Gilette perhaps half a dozen times in her hospital ward, always with supplies. She was a native of the area, turned out. Lived only a bicycle’s ride from the hospital. “‘Who would you choose for a husband’,” he read the question from a worn edition of The Spiker , “‘a Frenchman or an American?’”
    “A Frenchman,” she replied without hesitation. “He eats less.”
    Just before the 77t? moved on he managed one last trip to the hospital for the allowed excuse of visiting a wounded buddy. He brought chocolate instead of linens or morphine. Then he made Gilette promise that he might see her when, as he put it, the job was done. She seemed surprised, even a little amused, when a month after Versailles he arrived at her shepherd home. A cottage of wood and shingle. A small vineyard. Goats and sheep. She was much changed in her new setting, reduced from a position of competence and command to a peasant. He offered her New York and after only a moment’s hesitation she said he should speak to her parents.
    They married in the same sanctuary where she had labored during the war and honeymooned on the boat to America. They were pregnant less than a year later and then had come the terrible epidemic. Gilette directing her own care until the very end.
    “You are a terrible nurse, mon cher .”
    “And why is that?”
    “You care