Tears in the Darkness by Michael Norman

Author:Michael Norman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374272609
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

BEN STEELE hated going near Zero Ward. The moans and cries of the dying, the stink of the sick, the morgue with its stacks of the dead. But he’d been assigned to the burial detail by his barracks chief and, thinking the work worthwhile, he went willingly. The next day he volunteered for the duty again, same thing the day after that.

Some days his detail would get to the graveyard only to discover that ravenous dogs had gotten to the bodies, and the diggers would have to scrape a new hole and reinter the corpses. At that point, the third week in May, burial parties might put thirty bodies in one hole, put them down in layers, walk on each layer to compress it, then toss dirt on top and stomp the dirt down.

Ben Steele, gravedigger, buried two friends, Bob Schope from Billings and Walter Mace, a married man from Spokane. Mace was an Air Corps buddy, and when he came down with dysentery and was taken to Zero Ward, Ben Steele went to see him and was shocked.

Doctors had been giving their patients charcoal (an absorbent) from the kitchens to try to control their diarrhea, and poor Mace had soiled himself so often his legs and lower torso had turned black.

“Listen, Ben,” he said, “I’m not going to make it out of here, so when you get home, if you get home, go see Peggy. Talk to her. Tell her. You promise?”

“I will, Walter.”

Then Ben Steele helped bury him.

He’d been on the detail two weeks, and he thought he should volunteer for some other work, work that might get him out of camp and perhaps something to eat.

“Work parties were leaving camp all the time now, a hundred, two hundred men in each group, working in nearby fields cultivating crops, doing one kind of labor or another. And often when they returned, the men smuggled back vegetables or extra rice or even a bit of meat.

On the afternoon of May 21, word spread that a large work detail, three hundred men, would be leaving the next morning. To where and for what, no one could say. Ben Steele didn’t care.

“There’s got to be a better place than this,” he thought. “If I can get on that detail, I’m going to go. I’ve got to get some food, some water. I’ve got to get away from all this shit.”

In the barracks that night he convinced Q. P. Devore to join him.

“We’ll get something to eat,” he said.

Early the next day, the two men signed up, and when the trucks rolled in they climbed aboard together. From the truck bed, Ben Steele could see the men already queuing up for the water line. And he told himself, anything would be better than that. But Q.P. had this queer look on his face. He seemed nervous, unsure. And now he was getting off the truck. He couldn’t say why exactly. Just a feeling. He didn’t like the look of it.

“That’s okay,” Ben Steele said.

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