Read Online After This by Alice McDermott - Free Book Online Page A

appeared
among them, as if he had sprung from the dirt floor while they slept.
No more than nineteen or twenty. Anxious and poorly trained, the
way all the replacements were at that stage of the war. “Who the fuck
are you?” one of the guys said. (Although telling
     
the tale to his children—around the single flashlight—John Keane
said, “Who the blankety-blank . . .”) “Jacob,” the boy said. “Jake. From
Philadelphia.” Then he shook everybody’s hand, like he was joining a
poker game. Another Jacob.
    Michael turned to his brother whose eyes were large and dark at
the edge of the light. He had hoped until now that his father’s story
pertained to him.
    The two of them walked out of the cellar together, into the cold.
Jake seemed to think that John Keane, perhaps because of his age, was
of some superior rank, and it was possible that the kid was looking for
some advantage, sticking with him. Or it may have been only that the
other men, superstitious about replacements, had given him a wide
berth. It was a gray dawn, an overcast day, only the beginning of the
worst of it. There would have been the sound of boots breaking
frost—tramp, tramp, tramp. A smell of diesel fuel, which was
pervasive. Creak of army boots and canvas cartridge belts. Maybe
wood smoke somewhere. Jacob was dark-eyed and pale. He had a
young man’s beard, only potential, the hint of black whiskers along his
jaw looking like something black pressed under a thick pane of
smoked glass. At one point he pulled off a glove with his teeth and left
it dangling from his mouth as he, what?—opened a K ration? lit a
cigarette? The condemned man’s last. His bare hand was as white as
bone, as small as a child’s.
    At one point during that cold day John Keane had said to the kid,
the other Jacob, “We’re a regular Gallagher and Shean,” and the kid
had surprised him by knowing more choruses than even his brother
Frank did, humming them softly under his breath, carrying the tune.

Oh, Mr. Gallagher, oh Mr. Gallagher, if you’re a friend of mine you’ll loan
me a couple of bucks. I’m so broke, I’m nearly bent and I haven’t got a cent. I’m
so clean you’d think that I’d been washed in Lux.
Oh, Mr. Shean, oh Mr. Shean (how did it go? Frank would
know), to tell the truth I haven’t got a bean. Cost of living’s gone so high, why
it’s cheaper now to die.
Absolutely, Mr. Gallagher.
     
Positively, Mr. Shean.
     
He’d said to the kid (he’d shaken him off late that afternoon, in a
    frozen rain, and only learned he’d been hit after nightfall, when they
were pressed into foxholes, the taste of dirt and smoke like blood in
their mouths), What can I do for you? Not out loud, but in his mind,
like a prayer. Plenty of others had been killed, but this one had sprung
up out of the dirt floor, fresh faced and too young. He’d spent less
than twenty-four hours at his war. This other Jacob. What can I do for
you, John Keane had said in that foxhole in the Ardennes, in the
winter of ’44 or ’45, the worst yet to come—more death and the bitter
snow, shrapnel, three toes of his own lost to the cold. What can I do
for you? He’d said it like a prayer, it was a prayer, believing the kid
heard him because (he told his children) all of us are immortal or no
one is. You prayed to the dead or you let them go silent. What can I do
for you? he had said, in his mind, like a prayer, and later their mother,
in her hospital bed, their firstborn in her arms, grimaced and said,
“That’s a Jewish name.”
    Michael grinned, turning to his brother whose mouth hung open,
dark as his eyes behind his raised knees.
     
But their father had told her, “It’s just something I’d like to do.”
     
In the small circle of flashlight, with the sound of the storm
already seeming to fade—as if the tree’s fall (or perhaps her husband’s
story) had abated something—Mary Keane pressed her two sons
against her sides. It