Real by Liz Fisher

I have not seen Lewis for some time. Over three years now, but somewhere along the way the time got warped in my head. Walking toward me, he is haloed by the sun, bright and blonde and barely sixteen years old, just the same as when he’d come in from the fields smelling like dry earth and corn husks. 

I blink hard. He is different, but not unrecognizable. He’ll be twenty-eight now. Or twenty-nine? His hair is darkened to the color of straw and he has a close-kept beard. With each step closer every detail of his face becomes more clear, blocking the setting sun behind him. He is grinning. My stomach drops and I adjust my grip on my bags, wishing I could fight the fear tightening like a vise across my chest. Wishing I could drop my bags and run, wishing I could turn around and shut Vera’s door in his face. Wishing I could move. 

Despite the grin, Lewis does not gain ground very quickly. His gait is stiff, ragged. He limps hard, favoring his right leg and sort of leaning to the side to balance. He had not mentioned being injured in his letter. But who wasn’t injured? I don’t know a single soul who came home from France without the signs to show they’d been there. If there aren’t signs, then their body is on the other side of the Atlantic, far from home and likely mangled beyond recognition. Still, it’s a shock to see him this way. 

He managed to find me somehow. When Vera picked up the telephone last month she turned to me with eyes wide and I could not misinterpret the shape of her lips forming Lewis. My breath caught in my throat. I saw him waving from the platform and boarding the train without turning back. I had to fight the vision away. He and Vera spoke a few times after that, and then a letter arrived addressed to me. His handwriting was just as illegible as it had been when we were boys. He had to write a letter, of course, because I wouldn’t talk to him on the phone. Vera raised hell about it, but I refused to listen. I couldn’t imagine going back even while they made the plans for me. His words have swum around behind my eyelids every night since. He said only: 

Howie, 

Pack your things. 

I’m coming for you, little brother. 

— Lewis 

I might’ve known Vera would get sick of me, pass me off to the next person. She and I were close when we were kids, the way cousins that are near in age usually are. Our uncle owned the farm next to ours, and when we were too young to work we’d spend all day together. Of course, seeing her after coming back was a different story. We were grown up, each with our share of stories which we left untold. She owns a flower shop outside of Chicago. I don’t know why. She was the only one I could think to call, so I ended up on this very front porch, only facing the opposite direction. 

I blink again, disoriented in the waning twilight, and Lewis is using the railing to pull himself up the step. His eyes are bright, the same grey I always remembered, and he wraps his arms around my shoulders. I stiffen and he pulls away, searching my face, trying to reconcile the scars seared over my jaw, cheek, neck, with the boy who played in the dirt and climbed trees, who sometimes slept in the barn with the cows and came in smelling like hay and dust and stale manure. 

“Howie,” he says simply. His voice is gentle, excited, so foreign in this city that I cannot convince myself he is actually standing in front of me.

“Hey, Lewis,” I rasp, try in vain to clear my throat and plaster a grin across my lopsided face. I’ve practiced in the mirror, and with the burn and shrapnel scars it looks more like a grimace. I stop trying when Lewis’ eyebrows draw together. His eyes drop to the scarring on my throat, the unfortunate consequence of which being that speaking is significantly more difficult. The fortunate outcome being that I can still talk at all. 

“Christ, Howie, I’m sorry,” he says, his voice rasping almost like mine as his eyes glimmer with moisture. I shift my weight uncomfortably. 

“Me, too.” I gesture with a bag toward his leg and he shakes his head a little, seeming to snap himself out of it. 

“Vera told me about your…condition. You could’ve come home, you know.” I shrug, not wanting to explain the months spent in the hospital in France, the hours agonizing over what to do when they told me the war ended, the decision to find Vera and no one else. The trip home hiding my face from children, their mothers steering them briskly away. Lurking in the back of Vera’s flower shop each time the bell above the door jingled. Maybe he’ll understand. Maybe he won’t and never will. Before the war, we could have had this exchange with no words. We could have sat on his bunk and merely shared brief glances, communicating everything important across the silence of a moonlit bedroom. I find myself there, listening to the crickets and frogs chirping outside the window and the wind in the tree, the branches filtering the light of night. The shadows play across the oak floorboards and rather than sleep, we sit with our knobby teenage knees brushing. Our father’s snores drift under the door from across the hall. 

Lewis clears his throat. “Well, if you’re ready?”

The chirping and snores are replaced by songbirds. Lewis jerks his head toward the slightly beat up Ford waiting on the road. I nod. He reaches for one of my bags and I pull it away, but he snaps his head up and his gaze is hard. Let me do this, he is saying, so I pass him the bag. 

He can hardly get down the stairs, and when he reaches level ground he leans even more violently to the side. Admittedly, my bags are heavy. I packed everything into just the two and told Vera to get rid of whatever wouldn’t fit. 

Watching him struggle is a unique sort of torture. I have half a mind to snatch my bag back and carry him to the car myself, take care of him the way he used to take care of me, the way he probably has never been cared for in his entire life, being the older brother. 

I feel momentarily weightless. I’m ten years old, being swept into Lewis’ arms, my foot dangling at a funny angle. That twilight was much the same. A humid summer evening, the tree from which I’d fallen looming stoic above us. I couldn’t feel the pain yet, even as I stared at my foot. Only Lewis’ arms squeezing me as he ran, stumbling, to the house, screaming for our mother. 

I’m yanked back to the ground. A different moment, on my hands and knees in the mud east of Reims. A body caught in the barbed wire, twisted like he struggled, probably days-dead. My eyes fixate on his ankle snapped grotesquely to one side. A fly lands on the toe of his boot. “Howie. Hey, Howie!” 

I tear my eyes away and Lewis comes into focus. We’re standing in front of his car and he’s already thrown my bag into the back seat. Concern is written all over his face. “Hey, you okay?” He asks, his gaze searching. 

My breathing is shallow. “Yes,” I say quietly.

Gently, Lewis takes my other bag and places it in the car. The door slams shut. I jump a little and ignore his frown. I glance at Vera’s house over my shoulder. She’s out today, tending her shop in town. She couldn’t keep it closed to see me off. She told me to give her a ring when we arrive at Lewis’ place in Milwaukee. 

Lewis breathes in deep, runs a hand through his hair, pushes the air out through pursed lips. 

“Right, then. Let’s go. Rachael is dying to see you.” 

I watch him limp around to the other side of the car. He opens his door. I look behind me one last time. Something worth looking back at. I’m not sure I’ll visit Vera. I get in the car. The dash has not been dusted recently. 

“I told Jack about the time you ran away, only to come back in the middle of the night, standing in my doorway all covered in dirt. How I screamed, thought you were a ghost.” He chuckles as he gets the car started. We move down the drive. “I told him about when you climbed that great tree in the yard and broke your ankle falling out of it. I was stupid when I was thirteen. Thought you’d never walk again. I was mad that you didn’t have to do your chores.” He laughs again, filling the silence. 

It’s funny how he remembers it. The longer Lewis talks, the more vivid the image of the soldier in the wire becomes. I’d thought he was one of ours, nearly lost my mind running through the list of which of my friends he could be. But when I got close enough I saw his uniform through the mud and dried blood, saw his stahlhelm fallen through the wire, saw he was German. Cursed myself for my cowardly relief. Crawled away like the trench rats. How easily we might have traded places.

“Anyhow,” Lewis continues after I don’t respond, glancing between me and the road, the laughter gone from his face. “He’s excited to meet you, is all.” 

I want to ask if he’s warned the poor kid about me. If Jack knows that people like his dad and uncle went to war and came back, but mostly we left ourselves in the trenches, couldn’t gather the strength to bring all of ourselves home. Or maybe it’s that we only went there to die. Or we were just left there and most of the time there’s nobody to take you back, not really. If you can’t do it yourself, neither can anyone else. If he could remember his father before the draft, he’d know he walked tall and strong, but more importantly, he hadn’t been afraid. Getting on the train, holding his shoulders straight and smiling the whole time. 

Lewis is afraid. He talks when he’s scared. 

“Lewis?” I say finally, looking out the window and seeing only torn and pockmarked earth. Low humming, rumbling, makes me scan everything beyond us. But it is only the car. The front is far, far away. Empty by now. 

“Yeah, Howie?” 

“Do you mind if I sleep?” 

The house is quiet. Lewis and I sit on the front porch, gazing out into the yard. We went to church this morning and Rachael took Jack to the park. I’ve been here for a week. The memories flood in with no remorse, worse than before, being in Milwaukee again. 

Now I am small, but too large to be sitting in Ma’s lap. I do anyway. She rocks us gently in her porch chair, humming something, the melody unclear, picking burrs from my hair.

“You’ve got to be more careful, Howard,” she chides. Beyond the porch, the grass is long and golden, like Lewis’ hair. Like Ma’s hair. I have the urge to turn around and lift my hand to her face, take a lock of her hair and let it fall through my fingers. But I’m too old for that now. 

I blink and it is gone. The farm, the rocking chair, Ma and her humming. I would go back and act on my impulse, feel her hair in my hands again. Touch the lines on her face. Forget the burrs in my hair, Ma, they’ll come out. There is something else I cannot get rid of, a stench following me even here. Surrounded by Vera’s flowers, it was covered up. But just outside of Milwaukee, I cannot get away from it. The tang of gunpowder itching my nose, sweat and blood and the rats, rot, mud, all swirling together like some fetid marsh. Invading, invading, never clearing my nostrils. 

I glance at Lewis. He, too, is far away. He stares at a distant treeline, probably beyond, probably across Lake Michigan, across the Atlantic. Ma is long gone. She was ill even before Lewis was drafted, before I enlisted a few months later. She was gone before either of us got on the train. No one has been able to find dad, Lewis told me. He sold the farm, probably didn’t look back. I would have. It is worth looking back on. 

“Jack will come around,” Lewis says suddenly, startling me out of my musings. I turn my head and meet his gaze. “He’s a good boy, I swear. He’s just never seen…” he trails off, sighs. I nod, wanting to tell him it’s fine, really. Jack is just a kid, barely five, he can’t help clinging to his mother’s leg when I’m in the room. I understand. Shit, I’ve done it to myself. I’ll pass my reflection, widen my eyes in shock. Sometimes even I forget what I’ve become. I want to laugh, wave my hand, act nonchalant. I want to reach out and press my fingers to Lewis’ shoulder, not have to say anything, have him understand so simply, have him understand me. But it is becoming increasingly difficult to say anything most times. I know he is

trying to yank me out of whatever shell I’ve crawled inside, trying to catch a glimpse of the brother he once knew. The problem is, I don’t know how to tell him I am trying to do the same. Trying to sift through these memories and reconcile them with the broken men we’ve become. Trying to figure out if the boys we were were ever real. If this is all we are. “I know,” is all I say. 

As the weeks pass and autumn looms nearer, it becomes easier to see Lewis’ particular brokenness. He is trying to forget. Some days his eyes are full of light and when he comes home from work he lifts Jack into the air. Some days I watch him approach Rachael from behind, wrap his arms around her middle and whisper in her ear, making her tilt her neck and giggle softly. Some days we go for walks and I slow my pace for him. He’ll talk and gesture with his hands, always walking on the outside while I hide my face when we pass others on the path or in the park. Other days I find him at the kitchen table, fingers wrapped around a glass of whiskey, massaging his knee and staring into the distance. Those nights I wish I had the courage to join him, to speak and say something meaningful. I am tired of watching him fight. I am tired of fighting. 

Meanwhile I help Rachael around the house, play with Jack or sometimes read to him. Every once in a while he’ll ask for me to tuck him in at night. Lewis was right, he only needed time. 

I check my face in the mirror every night, touch the scars and feel the skin twitch. My brain must think the flames still dance over my body. In places my touch feels like fire. In others it feels like nothing, only the suggestion of pressure. I try to give myself time, let the days and

weeks do their work, search for any change, any healing. And still I see the farm. And still I see violence, fear. 

I test my voice, see if it will grow stronger, see if I can shout, if I can sing. The constant, pressing soreness becomes a tearing pain if I push beyond my rasp, hardly more than a whisper. I try to hum Ma’s melody. It does not come. 

My dreams are more real than my waking hours. I crawl behind Lewis under barbed wire, gripping my M1903 in my fist, yanking it each time it gets caught, wishing I could lose its weight. I run through the crowded trench, push aside my friends, stumble over bodies, clutch shrivelled daisies to my chest, searching desperately for Vera. I crouch over Jack, cover his body with mine, feel splinters and shrapnel pierce my back. 

Waking, I swear my sweat is blood. The only thing that is real is the mirror. I pass by it without looking. 

I go downstairs, thinking a glass of water will help. Or maybe I’ll step outside into the cooling night, listen for the crickets and frogs. With my hand still on the banister, there is Dad at the table staring out the window. The bottle of whiskey sits out. He has not bothered to get a glass. It’s Lewis, you’re losing your damn mind. Of course it’s Lewis, of course it’s Lewis. My hand shakes. I clutch the banister. And then it is Lewis. I breathe a sigh of relief and hover there. 

How many times have I stood here, debated with myself, and ultimately turned silently to retreat upstairs? I don’t want to let Lewis fight alone anymore. I don’t want to fight alone. Swallowing, I lift my hand from the banister, take a step forward and pause. It is not too late to retreat. But I have crossed a threshold, I think. I can no longer turn back. I pull out the chair next to Lewis and turn it toward him, sitting so that I block his view of the stars out the window.

Lewis looks up and watches me suspiciously, but after a moment the corners of his mouth lift slightly. “Want a drink, Howie?” I nod, but he’s already standing up to grab a glass. He returns to the table and pours two fingers, three, then stops, waiting for me to pick it up. “To coming back,” he says dryly, raising the bottle. 

I mean to say something, to repeat the phrase at the very least, but suddenly he is dark-haired and pale, hollows under his eyes, an ever-present impish grin. Collins, tapping his Rainbow patch and raising a bowl of whatever slop Cook has stirred up, waiting for me to lift my own. Out of the reserves and on the front a week later, I lose his terrified face in the gas and chaos. Reach for him, fight him to the ground while he claws at my mask. Yank his own mask over his face. Too late, too late. Listen to him choke. I do not see him after they take him away. 

All I manage is a hoarse “Mm.” I clink my glass against the bottle, concentrate on steadying my hand, and watch Lewis through the bottom of my glass as he takes a swig. I let the silence settle, strain to hear the grandfather clock in the living room, the one Ma used to dust with a rag. She’d scold us if we even got too close. Is it too late? Finally I ask, “Where do you go?” I know, this time, I don’t have to explain further. Lewis takes his time before responding. “France, of course. Same as you, I guess.” He takes up rubbing his leg again. I say nothing, wonder about the type of pain that manifests there. Is it fiery? Maybe piercing? Maybe it’s tight, like a hand has reached in and gripped the muscles, twisting them into knots. Is it constant and aching, deep in the bone? But you don't ask another man about his pain. At least, not in those words. You ask him where his mind goes when his clear eyes glaze over. 

“Do you relive the moment?” Lewis asks, breaking the deep silence. 

“I— don’t remember it…very well.”

A flash of light, just one among so many others. The sky grey and yellow. The trench dark and not deep enough, never deep enough. Pressing one side of my body to the cool dirt wall. Focus on the cold earth. Tell myself it is the only thing that is real. Shivering. Or maybe just shaking. Praying. I’m lucky I was found. Lucky I was dragged out. Not many can say that. How many times have I told myself this? How many times has it worked? 

Lewis nods. “I know I’m lucky,” he starts, echoing my thoughts. I begin to think we may still know each other after all. “Which is why I have to keep trying, every day, to come back. For Rachael, for Jack. For you, now.” He looks at me, trying desperately to communicate something to me with his eyes, reaching for the connection we once had. 

I swallow, feel something welling in my eyes, try to blink it away. My throat tightens and I squeeze my eyes against the pain. Once again, Lewis’ arms gripping my body close to his chest, the cornfield in the distance flying past. His heartbeat wild and strong. Focus on his warmth. 

“I’m glad you’re home, Howie.” 

“To coming back,” I croak, and Lewis breaks into a smile. He chuckles quietly, the air rushing out of him like he’s been holding his breath. 

I let my face warp into a smile. Close my eyes, feel a strange, real warmth in my chest. 

This week I have opted to go to the park with Rachael and Jack. Lewis stayed home, said his leg was bothering him too much for a walk. Rachael and I sit on a bench and watch Jack scamper around on the humble playground. The breeze is cool for a sunny afternoon. The days are shortening. Rachael talks about what Pastor John said during his sermon today, something from the gospel of Mark about how evil comes from within man. I’ve already lost the verse and

the words, can’t quite grasp the purpose or even the meaning, really. I am mostly quiet, not fully listening, inserting small, intermittent noises of agreement. 

Jack seems to have grown bored with the swings and slide. I watch him search the grass at the base of the trees lining the park. He picks up a stick, whacks the ground with it and stumbles, drops it, and moves on to the next stick. I watch him lean down and find a particularly good stick, which he waves in the air, shouting “Mama, Mama, look. Look!” 

Rachael stops speaking to squint at the stick he holds in the distance. “Wow, that’s a good one!” 

I watch Jack run around with the stick, pointing it at birds in the trees, smiling slightly to myself until I realize he is pretending it’s a gun. 

“Howie,” Rachael’s voice is suddenly firm, yanks my gaze to her serious face. “All this talk…I have to ask, when you were, you know, over there, did you ever feel— well, did you ever feel evil? Inside?” 

I stare at her, look back at Jack, shouting incoherently, shooting his stick gun viciously. Where did he learn such play? Where did any of us learn to play like that when we were little? He runs around shooting invisible enemies, looking for all the world like an escaped lunatic or an unbroken horse. I squeeze my eyes against the droning, against the gunfire, against the shouting and crying. 

“I’m sorry to ask. It’s just that…you know, I worry. Lewis isn’t really the same since coming home, but it doesn’t seem like something to talk about. I know he would talk if he wanted to, but I…killing is wrong, and can it be justified? I just…wondered if you ever thought about it.”

Once, after training and before our division saw any action, I gave a younger French private on reserve my bread ration. Tears, actual tears, filled his eyes. He had smudges of dirt on his cheeks and a splatter of blood, probably someone else’s, on the cuff of his overcoat. I thought, this isn’t a game anymore. Days later, training at the front in Lorraine, it was true. Sitting in the trench picking at my cuticles, pistol in hand and rifle at my side, thinking of food and home, of my father alone in the farmhouse, it was real enough. 

Jack goes down the slide, pretend-gun hoisted over his head. My fingers twitch. I look down at my shaking hands. 

When I bathe I sit in the scalding water, sometimes for an hour, scrub at my unscarred skin until it is raw. Drain the water and fill the tub over and over again. The trench mud doesn’t seem to wash off. The grime and the stench. All of it is evil, Rachael. Being told we were fighting for something right, for justice and democracy and whatever else. Being drafted or enlisting, it doesn’t matter. 

It didn’t feel right when I pushed Collins’ desperate hands off my mask or when I listened to him choke. It didn’t feel right when I watched men fall under my gunfire, or when I squatted elbows to knees, covering my neck with my hands, while shells dropped my friends down the line. It didn’t feel right when I backed away from the German in the wire, or when I sat idle for hours in the broad daylight. Hell, it didn’t feel right when I gave away my piece of bread. And it sure as hell doesn’t feel right that Lewis is at home trying to sleep off his pain. 

Jack has grown bored of the stick, left it forgotten under the swing. He tries to climb a tree with low branches. I suck in a breath, knowing I am too far to catch him if he falls. We took orders. We fought for America. And Lewis and I, in some capacity, came back.

I don’t think Rachael wants my answer, and I don’t think she’s really waiting for it. She watches Jack, a soft, contented smile on her face. I lean back against the bench. I don’t know how to get rid of it, any of it. I might have listened in service today had the pastor offered any solutions, a way to wash it off for good, or a way to tell Lewis I’m sorry for all of it. To not feel simultaneously overcome by who I am and completely separate from my knowledge of myself, unable to claw out of my isolation. 

But I am not alone now. At my side sits Collins, quiet in the afternoon sun, smoking a cigarette he got by trading a few shells to an older private. I tell him it wasn’t a fair trade, but he says it doesn’t matter because he doesn’t take a shot if he doesn’t have to. He passes me the cigarette and I turn to him when I reach for it. It’s Vera, looking at me expectantly, waiting for me to call and tell her I am fine. I open my mouth, but Rachael’s hair lifts slightly in the breeze and her face looks so serene. 

She starts humming, so light it could be my imagination. I can’t place it right away, but then I recognize the tune to John Meyers’ On a Sunday Afternoon. I think it’s funny at first, sitting in the park on a Sunday, until I realize it is Ma’s tune, the one she loved to hum while she cooked or sewed or picked burrs from my hair, even though she could never recall the words. 

I couldn’t find it in France, in the hospital or at Vera’s, or even here, waking from my dreams. I feel suddenly, with a weight on my chest, that I have come home and found something. I turn away from Rachael, watch the boy climbing the tree, the leaves trembling under his slight weight. I think, almost tentatively, that he will be fine, that he won’t fall, at least not today.

Liz Fisher is a Minnesota poet and writer. After spending four years in the North Woods, she is particularly interested in examining the complex relationships that connect her to a larger constellation. Liz finds fulfillment in exploring memory, nostalgia, inarticulate emotion, and how these are present in all things great and small. Her work has been published in Milk Tooth student literary magazine.