Bright's Passage: A Novel by Josh Ritter

tell her, Bright? I ain’t gonna say I sat in a ditch by the side of the road in the middle of the whole German army, am I?” He reached to light a cigarette. Bright pushed the match down once more.
    “I told you, no fire.”
    “Fuck it, Bright. Fuck you.” The match flared and Bert began to smoke his last cigarette. When he was half through, he turned toward Bright and said, “You know—” and was shot in the head from somewhere in the dark. Bright rolled over and flattened himself in the ditch, pulling Bert down on top of him. “Whew!” said Bert. “Jee-roosh!” he sighed. Finally he said, “Well,” and that was the last he said of anything.

17
     
    The car carrying Margaret and her children moved down Main Street, past the coal-company office and a church to where the trees took over and the large houses lulled in the shade of the overhanging elms. Bright watched it until it was gone, then he sagged in the heat. He recognized the kind of smile the girl Margaret had given him. It was the kind of smile that people give to children, and he surely knew what it meant when she gave it to him. Rising up from the sling on his chest now came the smell of his son dirtying his new diaper. He yanked a fresh rag from the sack hanging off the saddle pommel.
    “You are a coward, Henry Bright.”
    “Goddamn it! Why you always got to talk to me when I’m covered in shit? You know I ain’t a coward! And, anyways, why didn’t you jump in and give me something to say when she was smiling at me like that?”
    “Coward,” the angel said again.
    Bright spit on the ground. “You’re a big one to talk,” he said. “If you’re so brave, why didn’t you stay in France? You didn’t go and find another church to go be an angel in because you were afraid of getting bombed again, weren’t you? That’s it, isn’t it? You were scared just like everyone else.”
    “The Future King of Heaven needs his swaddling changed.”
    “I’m getting to that, so be quiet, ’cause I’m talking now.” Bright whipped the white rag in the air before the horse’s face. “What about when I needed you on the field after I got shot? Where were you then? You were hiding is what. Scared is what you were! You’re the coward, not me.” He shook his head as he knelt and spread his jacket on the hot pavement, then laid the new diaper on the jacket.
    “Henry Bright, you are so blinded with fear that you refuse to see that I am trying to help you now, just as I helped you then.”
    “How are you trying to help me?” Bright took his son from the sling and rested him gently on the jacket. As he waited for an answer, he began hesitatingly to tie the new diaper as the auntly woman had taught him to do in the store. “Exactly how you’re helping is what I don’t know,” he said again, looking up once from where he knelt near the horse’s hooves.
    “I am trying, despite all your best efforts to the contrary, to find you a mother for your son, the Future King of Heaven. As I was telling you before you allowed the girl Margaret to escape, the boy needs a woman who will claim him as her own. You cannot care for him by yourself. Now we must follow her. She must take the boy or all is surely lost.”
    “What do you care if he’s safe anyhow, angel? You weren’t so careful with me when I got shot in the War. I lay there for hours and called for you, but you didn’t come. And you didn’t care any when Rachel was dying either, did you? She was screaming—
screaming!
—and you didn’t care. You just stood out there under that chestnut tree like you were asleep.”
    “You survived. I knew that you would. And Rachel lived long enough to fulfill her destiny as the mother of Jee-roosh. I never assured you of her well-being past that point.”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “What’s what supposed to mean?”
    “Jee-roosh?” Bright replaced his son in the sling. The baby cooed up at him. “What are you saying ‘Jee-roosh’