Bright's Passage: A Novel by Josh Ritter Page B

finding, once, of a lemon, or the unlikely discovery of a bottle of clear liquor standing untouched in an exploded bar, the thick white towels at the hotel where he had stayed in Paris during his leave from the front. He never told her about the church or the angel or Bert, and if he ever got too close to those things, he would stop mid-sentence. She, sensing something in him, would help him to steer his stories until the tension in his voice was gone and the pounding in his chest had slowed.
    “And where were you then?”
    “In Saint-Mihiel.”
    “That’s a pretty name. San Maheel.”
    “Yeah. In a graveyard.”
    “In a graveyard? You were in a graveyard?”
    “Yeah. And we were all on our hands and knees, and the one guy next to me, Ezra, he froze because he saw a gravestone with his last name on it.”
    “Really? What was his last name?” Her fingertips stroked at the thin hair on his chest.
    “I don’t remember what it was. Ezra Something-or-Other. He saw it and he just froze there, and all the rest of us, we crawled on and didn’t see him. Then someone noticed he was gone so I went back to find him and he was still there, down on all fours, staring at that gravestone like it was telling him something he didn’t want to forget.” Bright looked up into the ceiling rafters. “I said ‘Hey, Ezra, hey, hey,’ but he wasn’t listening to me, he was listening to the stone, so I reached over and I grabbed him and hauled him around in front of me so that I could get him going. After a bit I got him moving again. He was real young, younger than me. So we were crawling around the stones to join the others when a shell landed right next to me. Itshattered another gravestone and there was rock everywhere. I got some in my eyes and I was coughing on dust and for a second I thought that I was dead, but the shell didn’t explode.”
    “Why?”
    “I don’t know. I guess it was—” He broke off and she waited for him to continue. When he didn’t, she helped him finish the story.
    “It was because God saw you helping that man and he said, ‘Hmm! I like that boy Henry! I’m gonna keep him safe.’ ” She laughed quietly and held him and kept laughing to herself until she fell asleep. It was a playful laugh that bubbled up around them like a spring of freshwater. Sometimes he thought it was actually the child laughing inside her. He would fall asleep to that music, and some nights he would escape his dreams.

14
     
    He saw the horse caroming wildly about the small chamber as he rounded the final curve of the steeple staircase. Whoever had led the animal up these perilous spiral steps had finished cruelly by tying its tail to one of the ropes that rang the bells above. He stood still in the entrance of the room and allowed the horse to see him. More boots were coming up the stairs behind him. He waved a hand behind his back and the footsteps halted. The whites of the horse’s eyes sliced at the air fearfully, its mouth was specked with foam at the corners. Bright stayed at the edge of the room and did not move, and eventually the animal began to quiet. It stamped uncertainly in a pile of dung, but its huffing slowed and it focused on him, watching for what he was going to do.
    Bright moved slowly across the room toward it until he was close enough to reach out and rest his palm on the animal’s twitching flank. The bells above had fallen silent as it had stopped moving and the rope tied to its tail slackened. The horse whinnied a few times, but Bright kept his hand where it was, and when he judged it finally calm enough, he ran his palm down the length of the shivering body until he was holding the slack of the belfry rope in his hand. He slipped the rifleoff his shoulder and, holding it by the stock, sawed through the rope.
    Above them in the belfry, the bells jangled loudly at their sudden release from the horse’s tail. Hearing the dreaded things unexpectedly once more, the animal spooked clattering across