The Life and Death of Lizzie Morris

Chapter One

When Bradley Morris was ten years old, his father told him he could do anything he set his mind to. “If you want something bad enough,” Randall Morris declared, “and you work for it long enough and hard enough, you can make it happen. Just don’t ever give up.”
He had never forgotten those words. They were the counsel of a man whose wisdom he respected, and over the years he’d generally tended to have a good deal of faith in his father’s advice. Some things, of course, were well beyond one’s control—the war had taught him that, early in life—and had anyone asked if he truly believed he could command his own destiny he would have been quick to say no. But he wasn’t a man who gave up easily, which was exactly why he and Lizzie found themselves in this strange place, driving a treacherous Sicilian highway in a cramped little Fiat they’d rented at the Catania airport just a short while ago.
So far, Sicily was much the same as he remembered. The landscape was harsh and barren, uninviting. What might have been patches of green in the spring and early summer appeared now as hardly more than scorched brown spots on the rocky slopes, mute testament to the long, hot Mediterranean summer. There were scattered small fields of grain and parcels of arid pasture that looked barely able to sustain the little herds of sheep that turned up here and there. Alongside the road, a steep bank dropped off to a dry stream bed fifty feet below.
Bradley Morris drove slowly. He respected the challenges of the unfamiliar, winding road, and he was finding it hard to concentrate on his driving. Carson Streator was on his mind.
Decades ago, he and Streator had been thrown together by fate, and Streator had become the closest friend Bradley had ever had. Streator’s short life ended on a bleak Sicilian hillside when his heart was nearly ripped from his chest by jagged steel shrapnel from the same artillery shell that left Bradley gravely wounded—their blood pooling collectively on the hard ground, the smell of their seared flesh indistinguishable, one body from the other. He had grieved over his shy, loyal comrade during the early months of his own recovery and vowed to visit Minnesota one day and look up whatever family Streator had, imagining that such a visit somehow might restore a vital connection that had been brutally severed. But getting back on his feet had taken what seemed forever. Then he and Lizzie were married and quickly found themselves facing the struggles of everyday life. They always had too many other things to do.
On the whole, life after the war had been good, thanks mostly to the love and companionship Bradley shared with Lizzie. Had he been a praying man, he would have thanked God every day for the gift of a perfectly matched soul-mate. But he was still haunted by a sense that Carson Streator had been cheated by fate, snatched away at such an early age that there was hardly a trace of his existence. Why had others, including himself, been spared to pass life on to future generations when Streator had not?
There were men in his rifle squad that he hadn’t come to know nearly as well, and he tried to recall them now as a way to conquer the melancholy reminiscences of Carson Streator. He thought about the two boys from New Jersey, Potter and Mathieson, who didn’t like one another, and a hulking Georgian whose name he could not remember. And Potter’s bitterness toward women: “You go ape over the end of a gut and think you’ve got a lifetime deal. Forget about it. Some other guy’s shoes’ll be under her bed when you get back.”
“But you don’t know my Elizabeth,” Bradley had argued, and he could tell that the other men hoped he was right.
He thought about Greer, who thrived on the regimentation of army life, and the big, boisterous Raynor from Louisiana. Raynor claimed the biggest dong of any man in Pointe Coupee parish and told fanciful tales about drunken brawls and passionate women and hunting alligators in the swamps. They all knew that his stories were exaggeration at best, and in many instances outright lies, but Raynor had offered entertaining diversions to routine barracks life and merely played the role they’d cast him in to the best of his ability.
And he thought about Sykes, the first among them to die.
Streator, Sykes, Greer, Raynor, Potter and Mathieson, the dull Georgia boy—all of them had learned to depend on one another when survival was at stake. They’d been joined through a spirit of allegiance such as Bradley Morris had never experienced since.
And he remembered Caldwell, who stood out because he was different. Caldwell was a fellow Kentuckian, a coarse mountain man from the east. Others in the squad had never trusted him, considering him malicious and sneaky, and nobody complained when Potter dubbed him “the goat-fucking hillbilly.” Nor had anyone shed a tear when he disappeared during their rough Atlantic crossing. Knowing Caldwell, they assumed he’d challenged the wrong man and got himself thrown overboard.
Bradley had tried briefly to be Caldwell’s friend but was coldly rejected. Now he wished he’d tried harder. Lizzie had taught him that there was good in everyone. Sometimes you just had to dig deeper to find it.
All this had happened more than a half-century ago and Bradley Morris himself found it hard to understand why it still mattered. But besides his life-long grief over the death of Carson Streator, he couldn’t help but wonder what had become of Greer and Raynor and the others who were still alive the day he was hit. There probably were more who didn’t make it, but at the time he’d been in no condition to find out; all order had disappeared from his life in the explosion of a single artillery shell. He’d been carted from the battlefield in a state of semi-consciousness, a morphine Syrette pinned to his collar, and then he was on the hospital ship and eventually on his way home.
Some months later, he’d heard through the army grapevine—usually reliable, but not always—that Potter had been charged with the rape of a teenaged Italian girl in Palermo. He never knew if it was true.
“I should have tried to track them down,” Bradley muttered, as if speaking to himself.
“I’m sorry, Brad,” Lizzie said softly, “what did you say?”
“I was wondering about some of the men. I should have tried harder to track them down after the war.”
“But you had no way to do that.” Lizzie’s tone was sympathetic. “How many do you suppose are still alive?”
“It’s hard to say. We’re all old now. And I expect there were other guys I knew who didn’t make it back. The day I was hit I would’ve said anybody that lasted till sundown was lucky. We took a pretty good shellacking.”