1
Jacob was on guard duty, posted beside a river that separated the two armies. The night was colder than any he’d experienced back in Watauga County. This cold did more than seep into his skin. It encased fingers and feet in iron, made teeth rattle like glass about to break. No layering of wool and cotton beneath the pile-lined parka allayed it. For weeks Jacob had kept waiting for the cold to lift. Now it was March, but this place observed no calendar. The river was still frozen. Jacob envisioned ice all the way to the bottom—no current, fish stalled as if mounted. The river had a name but Jacob didn’t allow it to lodge in his memory. Since stepping onto the pier in Pusan, his goal had been to forget, not remember.
At Fort Polk he’d heard all manner of stories about what awaited him in Korea. Much of it was horsecrap: the NK ate rats and snakes raw, could see in the dark like cats. But some stories were true, including how they would crawl into an outpost, slit a soldier’s throat, then recede into the night. Even if you were on the opposite side of a river, they’d come across and kill only one man when they might have killed three or four. They were leaving a message: We’re saving you for next time.
Though the river was frozen, Jacob knew that didn’t matter. Two nights earlier, a North Korean had decapitated another unit’s sentry. Crawled over the ice to do it. Jacob scanned the flat, soundless snowscape before him. At least the moon was full tonight. A hunter’s moon, they called it back home. It silvered the crystals atop the river. If not wary of an enemy’s knife, Jacob would have taken time to marvel at such shimmering beauty. But even this small moment must be blocked. Jacob wanted Korea to be a house entered and then left, the door locked forever. He just had to survive. Twelve days ago, for the first time, his unit had been in a fight. Aubert, a Cajun from Louisiana, had been shot in the leg. The bullet shattered his kneecap, and the medic said he’d need a cane the rest of his life. That was fine, Aubert answered. He’d get home alive to his wife and children, and finally be warm.
Getting home was what mattered. According to Naomi’s last letter, Dr. Egan said the baby would come in May. That thought was the talisman Jacob carried with him. He could not die. God or fate, something, destined him and Naomi to have a life together. How else to explain that evening twenty months ago in Blowing Rock. At the exact moment he passed the Yonahlossee Theater, Naomi, a complete stranger, had been standing beside the ticket booth, coin in hand. If he’d looked up at the marquee, or if a friend had called from farther up the sidewalk, Jacob would never have noticed her.
She’d worn no earrings or bobby socks, no bright bows or bracelets like the other girls he knew. But such adornment would only distract from her face, the smooth skin and high cheekbones, striking blue eyes and long black hair. Love at first sight. But her prettiness was only part of what had held him there. As others went inside, Naomi rubbed a dime between her index finger and thumb, looking at the poster and then at the dime as people walked past her without a worry about the price.
So much in that instant was set into motion, including a shared life that ensured Jacob’s safe return. Even Naomi being in Blowing Rock that July evening was little short of miraculous, Naomi’s brother-in-law just happening to buy a copy of The Nashville Tennessean and noticing the ad: Seasonal Hotel Maids Needed. The Green Park Inn. Blowing Rock, North Carolina.Hadn’t that been fate too? Many soldiers brought something from home to help protect themselves, a rabbit’s foot, a lucky coin, a playing card, so why not a belief? Yet last week Doughtery, despite two crucifixes and a matchbox filled with four-leaf clovers, had stepped on a mine and been killed. So Jacob’s eyes did not leave the frozen river, his ears listening for the rub of cloth on ice, a scrape of fingernails.
Most nights the wind howled across this hard country, but tonight a rare, disquieting silence. The rest of the unit was encamped fifty yards behind him, the chosenia trees muffling snores and dream mutterings. Did the North Koreans ever sleep? Perhaps all they did was wait until you did. The silence was palpable as the cold. Villagers believed the ghosts of dead Americans wandered these mountains. Gwisin, they called them. Most men laughed at the notion, but because of where he’d grown up, Jacob could not.
He wished he could smoke, but the flare of a match or the glow of the lit tip might end your life. For an hour, Jacob had barely moved. A slight shift of his rifle, a slow turn of his head, but nothing more, as Sergeant Abrams advised. His fingers searched for the pack of gum in his parka pocket, until remembering he’d given it to a villager’s child two days ago. Jacob again looked up. Only the moon, not a single star. He had the sensation that both armies had quietly withdrawn, leaving him alone beside this frozen river.
Then, as if to signal otherwise, a movement on the opposite side of the ice. Jacob shifted his rifle, laid his gloved finger inside the trigger guard. He watched the far bank, the iced-over shallows. Nothing moved. After hours of guard duty, a soldier easily imagined things, could even hallucinate. Wind became whispers, shadows thickened into flesh. Jacob resettled his finger on the stock. On guard duty the only thing worse than being alone was the fear that you weren’t. Sentries had different ways to deal with that fear. What works for me is I tell myself that I’m not a man but a tree, and my heart is inside the first ring in the trunk’s center, Sergeant Abrams had told them. If you stay rooted they’ll look straight at you and see only a tree. They can walk right past and still not know.
Jacob imagined his and Naomi’s farmhouse encircling him. Beams and scaffolding first, then walls and floors and windows, roof and porch. Every nail and plank in its proper place, with Jacob in the center. Heartwood, sawyers called center wood, and that was what protected him.
Jacob’s eyes swept left to right. Back in North Carolina he’d seen good-sized creeks cauled with ice, but never a whole river. As he’d written Naomi, he hadn’t known what cold was until he’d come here. Or loneliness. He thought again of their starting a family. Naomi wouldn’t be eighteen until May. Although her sister, Lila, had her first child at seventeen, it still worried him. His parents could have helped. For a year after the elopement, he and Naomi had proven they could make a good life without any support from them. They’d saved enough money that when Dr. Egan said Naomi should no longer be lifting heavy objects, they could afford for her to quit the hospital laundry job. Then in December, with Naomi four months pregnant, the conscription notice came.
You swore you’d never come near this house again, his father had said as Jacob stood on the porch. His mother’s footsteps echoed in the hallway. His father’s hand remained on the knob, but he opened the front door wider so she saw who it was. On the mantel behind his parents was the prom photograph of Jacob and Veronica Weaver, the sole picture of him that hadn’t been removed. Spiteful, but also as if to declare nothing could change unless his parents allowed it.
I know things haven’t been good between us, but I want it to be different.
We told you how you could do that, his father answered, and you chose not to.
You’re still my parents and I’m your son, and soon enough you’ll have a grandchild.
His father’s features altered into the cold smile of confirmation Jacob had known all of his life.
So this is about your inheritance.
No sir, it’s not about that.
What then? his mother asked.
He hesitated, prepared himself for what would have to come first, the chiding certainty that if Jacob had only listened to them. But Jacob already saw in his mother’s face another kind of confirmation, that whatever Jacob was about to tell them would be bad.
I’ve been conscripted.
His father’s hand slipped free of the doorknob. He appeared neither gloating nor aggrieved but stricken. His mother shook her head, kept on shaking it as she spoke.
Aren’t two children enough to have lost? his mother implored, voice breaking as her arm gestured toward the cemetery where stones marked Jacob’s sisters’ graves. I will not hear this, she said, raising an open palm in front of her face. I will not. I will not.
She walked down the hallway to their bedroom and closed the door.
His father looked ready to follow her, then turned back to Jacob.
You can blame me for marrying, Jacob said. Maybe I should have waited like you told me, but being conscripted isn’t my fault.
If you’d done what we told you, you’d have a college deferment, same as Doyle Brock’s son, his father seethed, but like everything else you wouldn’t listen, would you?
Jacob wanted to say no one, including his father, could know there’d be a war, but that would only make him more furious, more self-righteous and vindictive.
My being here, Jacob said as conciliatory as possible, it’s not only about the conscription.
What, then?
It’s about helping Naomi and the baby while I’m gone. However I’ve disappointed you, it’s not their fault. I need you and Momma to check on Naomi, let her stay with you when her time nears. Despite all that’s happened, it will be your grandchild, your blood.
What makes you so certain it is? his father answered. With that girl, I’d as likely it not.
Jacob had left then, driven down to Middlefork Bridge and parked. After a while, he’d turned around. Blackburn had been raking leaves in the cemetery. Alone, but his hat brim pulled low, as if even the dead might be frightened by his afflicted face. No one else will help us, he’d told Blackburn, so I’ve come to ask you.
Letting the M1 dangle in the crook of his right arm, Jacob clutched the parka’s hood tighter. He bared a gloved wrist to check his watch, found comfort in the second hand’s slow but steady circling, the tick of passing time. A few minutes more and Murphy would replace him. It was midafternoon in North Carolina. He imagined Naomi in front of the fireplace, half a world away.
As cold as he was, the enemy across the river was colder. Jacob had seen what their dead wore, the tan jacket with, at most, a sweater underneath. The jacket’s material was as soft and pliable as the quilts that had covered Jacob on winter nights. He could see how some GIs believed the enemy tinctured themselves with quicklime and coal oil. How else to survive wearing so little?
On the edge of Jacob’s vision a shadow shifted. He thumbed the rifle’s safety and slowly turned his head. From the darkness a form lunged, a knife blade tearing through Jacob’s parka, the tip raking his rib cage. He grabbed the man’s arm, dropping the M1 as they fell to the ground, Jacob rolling on top. He reached out, felt his rifle’s barrel and grasped it, only then realizing he hadn’t fixed the bayonet. As Jacob’s hand found the stock and then the trigger guard, the enemy soldier clasped Jacob’s waist. They tumbled off the bank and onto the ice. It did not break and the landing knocked them apart. The M1 slipped free and skittered out of reach.
The North Korean wore only a sweater. He was shorter than Jacob but square-shouldered like a wrestler. His hand still gripped the knife. Both men panted, each breath whitening the air between them. Once their breathing steadied, they listened. Both banks were silent. Jacob jerked off his gloves, pulled his bayonet from its scabbard. Neither man tried to stand. They crawled closer, stabbing at each other, but the ice allowed little force in their thrusts, Jacob’s even less so because of the parka. Then the other man crouched and sprang forward. His knife blade glanced Jacob’s neck, drew blood. The North Korean’s free hand slipped and he fell face-first, rising to his knees as Jacob’s bayonet slashed his left cheek from ear to mouth, molars glinting white where the skin flapped open. One hand on the ice for balance, they swiped and jabbed, everything slow and unrelenting as a nightmare. Again they came together, arms entangled as they rolled onto their sides. Mid-river, they broke apart, each gasping for breath, each knowing a shout would bring fire from both shores.
On their knees, less than a yard apart, they saw each other clearly, the bright moon stage-lighting their struggle. The man’s hair was long for a soldier’s and he had to sweep it from his face. Dark smears marked their path across the ice. Most of the blood was Jacob’s. The blood on his left hand had frozen, sealing the fingers together. Jacob flexed and unflexed a fist to free them. As the men watched each other, their breaths slowed. Jacob noticed a mole on the North Korean’s chin, a bit of wool unraveling on his sweater. All seemed charged with significance. The soldier lunged, not to stab but to knock Jacob off balance. Jacob fell and the ice crackled. ...
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