Refiner's Fire Read Free

could not have guessed that in the bed nearest the window an unconscious soldier had the world opening to him anew.
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    B RIGHT SUN shimmered on the sides of the helicopter. Two nurses stood near him, leaning against the stretcher as the machine swayed. Compared to the intense light outside it was cool and dark inside the cabin. One of the nurses had an expression of terror; her eyes were wide but she worked nevertheless. The other was determined—incipient tears above a hardened beautiful face. Clenching her teeth, she changed Marshalls bandages. She was dark, with shining eyes. Marshall saw her in a diamond crown of sparkling sun. The engines roared. A soldier in the back screamed. As if in chain reaction two others moaned, and Marshall smiled like a dying young animal, numb and bewildered at the frozen light and color in the cabin enclosed within a great vibration. The colors pleased him so much, as they always had, and when the beautiful nurse crossed a floor littered with helmets and bloody bandages she fought to stay upright while the helicopter tipped. She grasped a handle above her, tightening her muscles to stay balanced. From the darkness in which men and women struggled he saw through the door down to the sea, which glowed in rippling light. Waves of deep blue light came in the cabin and filled his eyes.

1. A COAST OF PALMS
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    R IDING IN a new 1938 Ford through the March countryside of North Carolina, Paul Levy was astonished by the tranquillity and depth of the blue above. Every tree and field was sheathed in gentle, clear, warm light. Smoke from clearing fires rose straight and slow, and the speed and air were perfect as the car wound through the back roads, sounding like a perpetual chain of little firecrackers. He was sixteen, the son of a Norfolk ship provisioner, and in love with the Navy and its ships. His father saw them as delivery points for canned tomatoes and brass polish, but his father’s son was struck as if by lightning at the sight of one steaming up the roads, bent forward, pressing on—a squinting bridge, high black masts and angled guns, smoke, wake, urgency, and water pulsing off the bows. And when they turned, with claxons and bells, and the stern seeming to sweep like a skater over mottled ice, he saw in them the history for which his tranquil boyhood had been created. And in the North Carolina countryside, joyriding in his father’s car solo for the first time, he could not help glancing through the windows at the sky and thinking of the sea.
    By darkness when he returned to Norfolk he had decided to join the Navy, which, after a year or so of arguments and heated wanderings in and out of the dance places at Virginia Beach, he did. At first he went to sea as almost a child, and the little experience he had he used badly, awkwardly, making more mistakes than he could count. But at nineteen he was an ensign in the Battle of fire the Atlantic. He used to come home every few months or weeks, and each time he was more solid, stronger, wiser. Being on the sea was miserable, especially in winter, and it wore him down. But it developed into his calling and during the war he had been off Africa, Normandy, and Japan. Because he learned fast and loved the sea he became a lieutenant-commander by the end of 1946, taking a year’s leave of absence to rest and prepare: he intended upon a career in the Navy, but did not want to be entirely brought up in it. He thought that a year of peace—maybe some farming, a trip across the country to San Francisco, a month at home—would do it. His father had become prosperous, especially since the fleet had not been decimated and would not be dismantled as had been the custom after other wars. They lived in a big house and it was planned that the younger sister and brother would go to college.
    Paul, though, was lost to the Navy; he was an officer with Southern ways and a fighting man’s demeanor. They were proud of him, but having