CHARACTERS:
AMANDA, An Artist from New England.
--Brave, courageous, sometimes aloof, poetic
MOUSE, Artist assistant, from the Mid-West
--Quietly assertive, shy but strong willed, compassionate
LIZ’BETH, Artist assistant, African-American
--Calm, dominant, patient, reserved.
THOMAS, American soldier, Texan. Nat’s brother.
--Bombastic, doesn’t hold his liquor well, physical
NAT, Wounded soldier, Thomas’s brother
--Broken, a darkness about him, seeking a place in the world
SPOONS, Supply truck driver, African-American
--Bold, exuberant, revels in his dreams for the future
Ensemble of three men play the following:
SHADOWMEN – visions of WWI soldiers
DRIVER
DOCTOR
ENGLISH PATIENT
BOY
CUMMINGS
AMERICAN PATIENT
FRENCH PATIENT
E.E.
THOMAS:
I ain’t got much time so I’m going to get out what I have to say and
then I’m in the wind. Start first things last, sorry for disturbin’ your
sleep—
You’re her aren’t ya? Canteen girl said you had a look.
Don’t know how to explain this other than say…I mean no harm. We
was on a raid, me, Nat, an’ four others. All of us volunteered by our
Lieutenant. Went over the top quick and was down deep in Their
trench an’ all I hear is “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb.” I was pushed ass-overhead into a Boche cubby hole. Bomb goes off leavin’ me horse
feathered. My brother Nat wasn’t fast enuff. Looked out an’…well.
Nat didn’t have a dog’s chance lookin’ at him. But he was better off
than those other four souls. Heard them Huns getting’ back their
senses, so picked him up best I could an’ went back over the Top,
again. And God as my witness I made war on them! On the very dirt
of that damn hole for what they done to us! For me, for Nat—for
those other poor sons of bitches. My brother went down the line, but
not for any good. Wrote my folks so they’d heard it from me. But
they write back—said he was only smartin’, and I has to plead wit’
‘em—“Damn you, God Damn You! I know. I saw. I was the one
carried him back.” Guess censors cut that out my letters. Blacked it
out like it never happened—even though we were there when it did.
AMANDA:
If your asking do I see myself doing “the Lord’s Work” or do I feel the
divine when I hold up a mask or apply acrylics or horsehair…I don’t
conceive of them that way. How does God see a tree when he’s seen
forests and green is only conceivable to him as a color. All of this is about
the five hairs at the tip of my paintbrush or proper amount of pigment and
oil and the air that bubbles into sacs that can not be seen, bubbling. If I
didn’t smooth them out, air would destroy the illusion of a jaw line or a
cheek or the other half of a soldier’s brow. There presence ghostly but
measured by my brush’s touch. I’m an artist, and this is not miracles but
only paint. God, green, paint. God who can not see these men—for surely
if God saw them, all this would stop. If God were aware of those that come
and Mouse gives tea or hot chocolate to on Mondays, to be turned into
molds by Sophia—Suffering…don’t you believe he would take away our
knowledge of gunpowder and bomb making? Do more than endow
someone like me with the care to burst all the air sacs and work a dab of
color on the end of a brush. Maybe it is divine to give me the will and the
skill to cover up those no one wants to know is there.
NAT enters AMANDA’S workshop. She has been having visions of the
Shadowmen
AMANDA: No, you’re not one of them. I know your living face…
NAT: Please.
AMANDA: …where are my hands?
NAT: Where they’ve always been.
AMANDA: They are…still here.
NAT: Reach to me.
AMANDA: No gloves. I can’t—
NAT: Reach.
AMANDA holds out her hand. NAT takes it.
NAT: Do you know what this is?
AMANDA: Touch.
NAT: There are clumsy names for this.
AMANDA: Remember
AMANDA pulls away from NAT.
NAT: You spend so much time here. It is so vast.
AMANDA: You are not allowed.
NAT: Been up here for days.
AMANDA: It is my way.
NAT: This house reminds me of my Grand dad.
AMANDA: In Texas, telling war stories.
NAT: My Grand…spend many of his days tellin’ stories about War from his
rockin’ chair. Bit of nobility claimin’ he was an Old Grey hat in the States’s
War. Tell about his time in the Cavalry durin’ the Wars with the Indians.
Tell about things he ate, about the girls back home, or amazin’ things
they’d seen from their saddles. Saved the war for the stump on the ranch.
Grand didn’t talk about the dying. He told me when a man tells a war story,
can’t help but call up all the ghosts of the men he served with. Told me,
when we talk about things like that, can’t help but sum up all their dead
memories in the tell.
AMANDA: You hear them—yes, in the Tell.
Beat.
AMANDA: (low) …I have to fix your mask.
NAT: Don’t know why my own brother would deny me.
AMANDA: You are not the same as you were before the War.
NAT: I know that difference now. Especially surrounded by the masks of
men who wear that change on their faces.
AMANDA: Just doing our part for the War. You should let us be.
NAT: Liz’beth doesn’t want me around.
AMANDA: I am the one who decides. Except for Mouse. Mouse was here
before us.
NAT: In a house that don’t know its dead yet. This is not living.
AMANDA: Maybe all the world is a trench. Maybe that is the reality, the
rest is a dream.
THOMAS is cleaning his pistol, NAT enters.
NAT: Thought Liz’beth told you never to come with your pistol.
THOMAS: None of you followin’ her rules.
NAT: Have you fired it recently?
THOMAS: Big’in, I ain’t fired my weapon since I got here. Even on
that raid we was on.
NAT: I ain’t seen a Hun ‘round here for you to need to have it out.
THOMAS: I was thinkin’ of Spoons. Laying on the road. Lookin’ up
at me like he was hopin’ I could do something. Thinkin’ about his
eyes and the scar on Sophia. And I just sat here and broke out my
pistol an’ started cleaning it. Don’t feel sad, don’t even feel a lick of
somethin’ wrong. Break out my little can of oil and take apart my gun.
Clean it even though it is probably the cleanest thing I got on me.
Clean it as if there is something that can be made clean about it.
NAT: That’s trainin’ is all.
THOMAS: Experienced now. Experienced to sit quiet, to talk with
my pals an’ when one of them gets blown up…One of ‘em gets hit by
a sniper or a cannon and can’t find no piece of them to bury…I find a
place I can sit. I pull out my revolver. And I start to clean with oil and
a rag.
NAT: You know this is what Grand used to talk ‘bout.
THOMAS: Grand never said nothing ‘bout any of this. Never said
any of it would be like this.
NAT: Maybe we didn’t have the ears for it. Did, but maybe we
colored it way young ones do.
THOMAS: Well I didn’t hear no talk like that.
NAT: It was the silences Tom. You remember them? When Grand
sit lookin’ off into the distance. Didn’t you hear the shootin’? If you
think on it, I’m sure you can hear them now.
THOMAS is pensive. He rises uncomfortably in an attempt
to break the memory.
THOMAS: Don’t know what I had in mind, but that mask—sits right
now.
NAT: This mask looks like my old self?
THOMAS: Yah, sure does.
Looks plenty fine now.
NAT: Don’t know how it can since she ain’t fixed it yet.
LIZ’BETH appears wearing a coat and carrying a bag. AMANDA
appears with her.
AMANDA: You don’t even know where she’s gone.
LIZ’BETH: I heard you the last time.
AMANDA: Where did Sophia get the idea to leave?
LIZ’BETH: From me.
AMANDA: I took her in. I treated her like…
LIZ’BETH: We all treated her the same. Someone to tend the garden, do
our work.
AMANDA: I trusted the running of this house to you Eliz’beth.
LIZ’BETH: I ain’t ever been good at family. Ain’t ever had the excuse to try
an’ make one. Lost the way of how one is suppose to work.
AMANDA: No one was askin’ you to make this a family.
LIZ’BETH: You should have. We lived like one, but none of us acted like
it.
AMANDA: That would not have been right.
LIZ’BETH: Not right for us to make one or not right to be one here?
AMANDA: Nothing born of this will last.
LIZ’BETH: Maybe it is more important that we try.
AMANDA: You can wait. I’m sure she’ll come back.
LIZ’BETH: I’ve been thinkin’ to myself, why would any of us come back.
Think of that father and his dead daughters. Of that Doctor an’ Mouse with
that saw. All of us stayin’ in here outta fear. That we bury what is so good
about us so deep. That when this war’s over, we won’t find it again.
AMANDA: You don’t have to go.
LIZ’BETH: I know I don’t. That’s why I have to.
AMANDA: You believe you can find her.
LIZ’BETH: I got hope I can.
AMANDA is next to LIZ’BETH who is ready to leave.
AMANDA: Nat’ gave me this. Wrapped up in one of your kitchen towels.
Dug it out of Spoons’s bag.
LIZ’BETH: Lookin’ for his Morphine.
AMANDA: You think I don’t know that?
LIZ’BETH: I guess I know you did.
AMANDA: At least he has some way of makin’ the war right in him.
AMANDA produces a ring.
AMANDA: Whose ring is it?
LIZ’BETH: I don’t know.
AMANDA: It don’t matter now does it.
MOUSE recalls her work in an army hospital
MOUSE: The doctor tried to do what he could. Yelled at us to help and we
tried too. Then there was a shot and the doctor fell, his arm barely holding
on to his body. Thought he was dead. It was only me and the boy. He
asked
BOY: Can you do this
MOUSE:
“Can you do this.” I said
BOY: What do you mean you’re not a nurse?
MOUSE: I’m not. I am only a canteen girl.
BOY: I don’t think I can cut on them.
MOUSE: I can’t cut
BOY: They will die if you don’t.
MOUSE: They will die if I do.
BOY: And that sniper just shot the doctor.
MOUSE: I can’t do this.
BOY: Someone has to.
MOUSE: I’m just a volunteer.
BOY: I’m just a volunteer.
MOUSE: No one taught me.
BOY: Is this something you can teach?
MOUSE: Someone will come.
BOY: Yes, they keep stacking the dead and the dying outside.
MOUSE: Someone else
MOUSE recalls.
MOUSE: The doctor started to wake up again. He told me what to do.
Told me I had to. Instructed me how to do the first. Then I did. Then
another. Then the doctor says I got to do him next. An’ the boy holds him
down. And I do him next. Boy grabs hold. Sometimes Boy just pulls. And
I’m the one who has to work the saw. Saw makes a funny noise between a
hum and a prayer when cutting through the skin. Cutting through bone it
scratches like a devil at the door. And I tried to clean them an’ tie them off
like I had seen. Like what the doctor told me. Sometimes I tell the boy to
burn ‘em. And we can hear the shooting. And more of them keep coming.
More bodies and we’re looking at piles of arms and legs like he said…then
I start to forget. I think I forget? Which are the ones I’m suppose to be
cutting? Arms and legs. Boy looks out his eyes, but they don’t see no
more. Some scream, some moan, but they are mostly quiet. The boy
holds. The boy burns an’ I cut.