The Second Son

He was sitting in a cool meadow, with the sound of flapping wings overhead. He saw a baby lying in the grass, its tiny feet kicking at the sky. Hoffner tried to stand but his legs were too heavy. He pulled at his thighs, and his hands were filled with a thick, wet tar, the smell of it like camphor oil, and he was suddenly holding flames in his hands. Mila pulled him back from the fire, and Hoffner saw her against the night sky. She was older and her body had been burned, her arms peeling in thin flakes of flesh. He reached for her, but she stepped back. He reached for her again and his eyes opened.

They were at an outpost. Twenty Republican soldiers stood off in the distance, each with a rifle and a cap. Mila was talking with a man who was holding their papers. Hoffner heard the sound of mortar fire somewhere in the distance, and he watched as each of the men ducked his head. The sound was too far off to pose any danger, but these were men not yet tested by battle. They flinched and gripped their rifles.

Hoffner pushed himself up and opened the door. His hand had stiffened, and his eye felt as if it had been squeezed shut. He could barely swallow. He forced his legs out, and he stood.

Mila and the soldier looked over while a second barrage erupted. Hoffner made his way to them, his stride unsteady, with the booze in his stomach and a scorching sun to contend with.

He drew up and thought to say something, but his mouth was too dry. He spat, and the man offered him his canteen. Hoffner drank.

“The prison in Coria,” the man said. “You’re lucky to be alive.”

Hoffner nodded and finished the canteen.

“You don’t want to go south,” the man said. “I’ve been trying to explain it to the senora.”

“The doctor,” Hoffner corrected, and spat again. “The senora is a doctor.”

“Yes. The doctor. Yague has half of Africa marching up from Seville. They’re already pressing in from Merida. It’s not going to be good in Badajoz. It won’t be good here in a day or so, but we’re not going to think about that.”

If Hoffner had any inkling who Yague was or where Merida might be, he might have known enough to show some concern. Instead, he told himself not to vomit in front of the soldiers.

Another explosion rattled behind them, and Hoffner nodded his thanks.

“We’ll take our chances.”

He took Mila by the arm and walked with her back to the car.

An untamed terror now lived in the towns and hillsides surrounding Badajoz. Hoffner had felt tremors of it in Teruel, isolated echoes in the screams behind Coria’s prison gates, but it was only here that it penetrated the smallest of gestures: a backward glance from a woman on a cart, the sudden silence from a flock of birds perched penitently in the trees, the grinding of tires on a ground too slick and too beaten down by hooves and trucks and rain to be passable. The men who walked along the roads strode with more purpose than was warranted. It was the surest sign that they meant to meet death on their own terms. Fear makes a man cower. Terror gives him strength.

Like a pouch bag, everything was getting pulled in, barricades and guns and horses to ring the approach from the south and the east. Yague was well beyond Merida. It would come tomorrow or the next day. That was what they were saying. No one was permitted to pass after sunset.

“I have to get through.”

Hoffner tried to show his papers again, but the man with the thick beard and the rifle shook his head. It was a gentle shake, one reserved for overeager children.

“If there’s still a road to be taken,” the man said, “you can take it in the morning. No one moves after dark.”

They were in a village called Villar del Rey, thirty kilometers from Badajoz. The man motioned to one of the houses along the square. It was two or three rooms, one bare bulb, the rest lit by candles, with a whitewashed courtyard in front. The sky had streaked into strips of pink and deep blue, and there was a boy of thirteen or fourteen leaning against its front wall. He was long and pale, and he held his rifle in arms taut with new muscle.

The thick beard shouted over. “Julio. Your mother needs to make a bed for these two tonight. The woman is a doctor.”

The boy pushed himself up and nodded, and Hoffner followed Mila across the mud.

Inside, the house was old stone, the ceilings too low for a tall man to stand upright. Pots and pans hung from hooks and shelves, and a drinking trough of wood stretched along the back wall. Two young girls sat at a round table, with a few photographs in frames hanging behind them. One showed a man with a mule and a rifle.

The man was seated across the room on a low stool. He was rubbing a cloth along the rifle’s barrel. He looked up when the son called for his mother.

There was silence, and then the sound of an aeroplane from somewhere above. The man set his rifle against the wall and crossed to the doorway. He stepped outside, stared up for several seconds, and then looked out across the fields to the men in their caps and their uniforms-each of them staring up-before he returned. He took the rifle, sat on the stool, and began to rub it again with the cloth.

The mother appeared from the back room in an apron skirt and green blouse of coarse cotton. She was slender, and her hair fell from its ties in thin wisps of brown and gray. In any other place, she and Mila might have been sisters.

She spoke to the boy in a kind of Spanish Portuguese, only a few words making themselves known to Hoffner. The voice was deep and quiet, and she turned to Mila and continued to speak. Hoffner heard the word “frango” several times and thought she might be referring to the general, until Mila said, “She wants to know if we’ll eat chicken. I told her yes.”

Hoffner nodded, and the woman motioned to the two girls. They followed her out into the courtyard, and the boy sat where they had been. He found a cloth and began to rub his rifle in the way his father rubbed.

Hoffner said to Mila, “Tell him the boy is too young to have a gun.”

She knew why he said it; and she knew there was no point in repeating it.

The father, still focused on his rifle, said, “Will they make such distinctions in who they kill?”

Hoffner watched as the man continued to clean. “No,” said Hoffner. “They won’t.”

“It was a German plane,” the father said, “or Italian. Hard to tell in the dark. He was lost. Tomorrow or the next day he’ll drop his bombs here. For now he saves them for the city.”

“Then you should send your family east.”

“You have a car. You’re more than welcome to take them east if you like.”

“And you’d let me?”

“No.” The father looked over. “If you want to make it to Badajoz, you need to go tonight.”

Hoffner was struck by the sudden candor. “The captain outside thinks otherwise.”

“The captain wants to herd us into trucks and send us back to where you came from, or into Portugal. He’ll take my wife and daughters tomorrow. He’ll get them somewhere safe.”

“But not the boy.”

“If Badajoz falls, a boy with a rifle sitting here won’t make any difference. Neither will his father. So we go to Badajoz with you.”

“You’ll have to talk to the captain about getting me my car.”

“Your car is already halfway to the city,” the man said. “It’s loaded with rifles and ammunition and food. The captain probably drives it himself. He’s very brave. He’ll make three trips tonight, and he’ll hope the fascists choose to sleep before they make their full assault. At dawn he’ll tell you your car was needed, and that you can’t go south, impossible now with Yague only twenty kilometers from the city. He might ask the doctor if she can stomach the war, but you-he’ll tell an old man not to think beyond himself. Do you want to get to Badajoz?”