Some trust fund kid is paying you to dig up ghosts.
You’re in Pas-de-Calais, in one of those thin strips of forest still uninhabited a hundred years after the German guns fell silent. The zone rouge, they call it, red zone, on account of all the metal and chemical poisons and unexploded bombs buried deep in the earth. Ancient, lethal. Every time you sink your shovel into the dirt you think this is it for a split second, and it feels like relaxing long-weary muscles. Feels like letting go.
So far, though, you haven’t dug up your own death, or the old U.S. Army dog tags that trust fund grandson wants you to find. Just a couple of ghosts.
So you keep digging. And you try not to think about it, because—
In 1915, right where you’re standing, one boy ran a bayonet through another boy’s heart.
Both of them are here with you now—the one, still bleeding, the other, grey, leaning on a cane. The rain runs right through them. You study their uniforms: one American, one Austrian. They can’t meet each other’s gaze. The Austrian, holding the rifle and the bayonet, weeps silently.
End of one life. Maybe both.
No dog tags, though. You look at the ghosts. You shrug. Sorry to bother you, boys.
You keep digging.
How far down could they be? You’ve been out here for days, digging among the overgrown craters. Even a century can’t hide those ancient wounds, not completely, and it makes you think of scurvy, the way a sickness can open up old scars again. Back in the war—your war—you once saw a malnourished old man ravaged by disease, and now you can see his face swimming in every muddy puddle.
Keep digging. It’s your job.
So some trust fund kid wants grandaddy’s dog tags to hang on the mantle. Kind of guy you hated when you were in the service. But a job’s a job, and you’ve been out of the military twenty years, and for a decade now you’ve been doing work like this, finding closure for pay. The last two, you were even sober.
These last two years, without the drink to distract you, you just keep thinking: twenty years ago, in 2006—
No. You drive the shovel back down into the wet earth, waiting for a metal thunk, for the hiss of a mustard gas canister, and you get nothing.
In 1415, not far from where you’re standing, there was a battle at Agincourt. Listen close, dig deep enough, and you can hear the horses screaming, the arrows whistling down on them. The squelching of the mud. The Austrian ghost is on alert, head swiveling back and forth. The American is hiding behind a tree that was probably planted eighty years after he bled out.
A knight slithers over the lip of a crater, breastplate dented in. Mud pouring out of his visor. You keep going on like this, digging deeper, maybe you’ll find Gauls and Roman legionaries cutting each other up. You wish you had a cigarette. Probably cavemen clubbing each other before then. Probably drones doing it now.
Why are you really here, in the zone rouge? You really think you’re going to find those dog tags?
In 2006—
No, you think. Keep digging.
In the 1970s, when Nam was wrapping up, American sportscasters started calling the last twenty yards of a football field the red zone to imply heightened intensity there. Because everything, even a game, has to claim the trappings of war. Because the term wasn’t already taken. Didn’t already mean something.
Your dad was in Nam. Made it home, but also didn’t. After he got out, he never left Illinois again.
Which is why it’s a surprise when his ghost comes up next.
He looks older than he really was. His craggy face is jaundiced in some places, ruddy in others. Comes crawling out of that mudgrave you’re digging like you’ve broken through to hell beneath.
How could he be here?
You should know by now. Ghosts don’t always just stay where they died. Like water, they pool in the low places. The scarred battlefields. They collect where the world never healed right.
That’s how your dad—who drank himself to death while you were in high school, who never knew you were going to follow him into the military, who knew you only as a boy who always wanted to become a historian—ended up here.
And he isn’t the only one.
You didn’t think you were going to get out of this without a confrontation, did you?
In 2006—
Don’t look away.
Listen.
In 2006, very far away from here, in a desert city on the banks of the Euphrates, one boy ran a bayonet through another boy’s heart.
You keep digging.
Look at me. I’m the last one out. Dragging myself out of the pit with sunburnt arms. You can still see the blood pumping out through the hole in my chest. You haven’t seen me in twenty years.
You’re sorry. It was the heat of battle. You were so far from home, so scared.
Of course you’re sorry. Everyone knows you’re sorry. There have been movies made about how sorry you are. Is this the terminus of your life’s arc? Last in a long line of men who are sorry?
You bring the shovel down, one last time. And this time, you hear it; a little metallic tink that means you’ve either found the dog tags or a hundred-year-old land mine waiting for you. Closure for the trust fund kid, or closure for yourself.
Your dad is watching you. The infantrymen, too. The knight takes off his helmet. How long have we been doing this to each other?
The moment passes. Nothing erupts below the earth. You’re still here.
In 2026, right on this spot, you don’t get closure.
In 2030, or 2036, or 2043, or 2050, though, maybe—
Maybe—
* * *
Ⓒ Parker M. O’Neill