Vaccaro was just about the only one who knew the truth, which was that Cole was illiterate. Anybody else who figured it out and made fun of Cole for being a dumb cracker risked having his teeth bashed in.
He’d never had much of a chance for book learning back home in the mountains. The nearest school was miles away, and it always seemed like there were more chores to do. Besides, Cole had always preferred spending his free time wandering the woods and hills, usually with a rifle in his hands. The woods had provided the only education he’d needed.
He could read signs in the woods the way most men could read a newspaper. Words just looked like so much chicken scratch on the page to him. Hell, he could pick out the shapes and patterns of the constellations in the clear night sky better than he could make sense of a jumble of letters.
His parents hadn’t put much stock in book learning, especially his pa. Cole’s old man had been what folks called woodsy, in that he scrounged a living from the hills and forests of the Appalachians by cutting firewood, trapping, and making moonshine. Unfortunately, his pa had been a bit too fond of his own product. He was a mean drunk, and it was best to keep out of his way if you didn’t want to get your head busted by his hard fists.
But when he was sober, Pa had been a good teacher in the ways of the mountains, showing Cole and his brothers how to shoot, hunt, and trap. Being a good shot meant the difference between meat for supper — or just some eggs and potatoes fried up in lard.
Cole reckoned that some of his best memories were of his pa — along with some of his worst. He supposed that was like most people in that there was often good with the bad, like a tiny vein of silver running through rock.
Pa’s hardscrabble occupations meant that the Cole family had been dirt poor, living in a shack near Gashey’s Creek on land they couldn’t rightly say they owned except by the fact of living upon it. They were just squatters when you got right down to it. A lot of mountain people didn’t rightly know if they owned the land they lived on, but it was mostly land nobody much wanted anyhow.
The shack was hammered together out of discarded lumber with a roof made from scrap metal. That roof leaked when it rained, but Cole still missed the sound of the rain drumming on the sheet metal as he slept under the eaves with his brothers.
When he hadn’t been hiding out from his drunken pa, sharing the space under the porch with the hound dogs.
This war had been an escape from that life.
He might return to it someday and build himself a little cabin all his own back in the mountains where he could live off the land.
Something to think about after the war.
If he survived.
Lieutenant Mulholland returned with hot grub. He’d found a pot full of what was purported to be stew. As the icing on the cake, he had somehow procured a couple of bottles of red wine — just enough for each man to have a cupful.
Mulholland didn’t say how he had come into possession of the stew, and nobody asked. For all they knew, he had taken the stew and wine from one of the town residents at gunpoint. It might not have been Mulholland’s style when he had come ashore on D-Day, but long months of combat had hardened the young officer.
The food cheered the men. It had been a long time since they had eaten anything other than cold rations.
“Now this is the way to fight a war,” Vaccaro said, taking a healthy slug of wine.
But not everyone was as convinced.
“What is this?” somebody asked, peering with suspicion at a chunk of meat on his spoon. “I hope to hell this isn’t horsemeat.”
“Don’t matter if it’s horsemeat or filet mignon — it’s warm, ain’t it?”
Nobody could argue with that. The stew was quickly devoured. For the first time in several nights, the men went to bed with full bellies, warmed by the wine.
The distant thump of artillery lulled them to sleep.
By the gray light of a winter’s morning, what they found when they ascended from the cellar was a battered town under siege. The slush-covered streets were churned up from the passage of vehicles and pockmarked with shell holes. Both the commercial and residential buildings were mostly covered in stucco, but the intermittent bombardment had opened spiderweb patterns of cracks across their facades.
Hasty defenses had been set up to stop the Germans if they did make it into town. Side streets were blocked with overturned wagons, dining room tables and sofas, even the carcasses of burned automobiles. Household goods and debris from bombed houses were strewn across the sidewalks. The overall effect was as if there had been a riot at a rummage sale where a fire had broken out.
“I’ll be right back,” Cole announced.
“Where you going?”
“Shopping.”
