Fandom: M*A*S*H.
Author: Epigone.
Pairing: None, really.
Rating: PG-13.
Warnings: Very dark. No, really -- very dark. Mild spoilers for "Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen."
Archivists: Ask first.
Summary: Hawkeye at home, December of 1954.
Date Written: August-October, 2003.
Author's Notes: Knowledge of the episode "Bless You, Hawkeye" is extremely helpful, if not outright necessary. Wild outpourings of gratitude to Am-Chau, Carmarthen, Raven, Minttown1, and Sabine for betas and read-throughs. Dedicated to Raven, because She Asked For It, and to Tobias Charity, because she bribed me. Blame them, not me! I'm just the poor, long-suffering writer.
Feedback: Can be sent to kmaru1701 [AT] hotmail [DOT] com, and is much appreciated.
Never Ask Why Build*
It's before light in a house tucked away in the elbow of Maine, and two shadows stir, an hour apart. Daniel Pierce awakens to a tentative rapping at the back door and moves silently through the house, picking up his old leather doctor's bag on the way out. There is no light in Maine, and Daniel leaves his son Hawkeye dead to the world in the next room. Hawkeye sleeps deeply nowadays: without sound, curled in on himself. The small noises of a boy fetching the doctor to deliver a baby do not reach him.
In time, the fine grain of dawn sifts over the horizon, and Hawkeye rises from his bed. There is no one at the door for him; still, he pauses on the cold tiled floor of the kitchen, listening. No one. He, too, takes a bag with him: a battered old war medic's satchel that he keeps stowed at the back of his closet. He leaves the house empty and dim, its vacant windows gaping out grotesquely at the road.
It is morning in Maine, because the Earth is still turning.
Hawkeye follows the familiar lane through the gray thatch of dead bushes on either side. Before him, the ground swells into a hill, a place of pale rock where he stood in 1950 and memorized the landscape with a letter from Uncle Sam crumpled in one hand. At the base of the hill, he hesitates and almost stumbles, but catches himself and moves on past the thing that gave him pause: a small, star-like cluster of mushrooms that has sprung up in the damp curve of the ground.
His stride is purposeful, but he is trembling slightly. At ten, he knew that his mother was killed by mushrooms. She was devoured like the earth from within; she grew thin and pale in her white bed; and one day, they took her down the train tracks to a hospital in Portland. She found what scant dignity she could in a private room, the curtains loosely drawn, Daniel and Hawkeye silent beside her.
At seven o'clock sharp -- a clock chiming down the sterile hall -- sunlight passed between the curtains and reflected briefly off of her drip bottle, a fragment of brightness swimming in the darkened glass. She died at a minute past seven, morning in Maine, beside the gleam.
Later, Daniel would explain cancer -- yes, it grew inside her, but it was something black and intimate, completely unlike the alien white mushrooms that thrust up their caps through the backyard grass. But Hawkeye would remember it only as a fungus that dropped its spores in secret, that spread through his mother and left traces in him as well; would remember death as a strange juxtaposition of light and dark, life cast in relief.
The memory has carried him up the hill and left him standing at its top, peering through the narrow trees. He could follow the road to familiar places and open sky, but he turns off and cuts across the frost-beaded grass. It is quiet in the early-morning forest, but as he walks he begins to hear the susurrus of water against sand. A few more steps, and he emerges from the trees onto the long, bleached bone of the swimming-hole beach.
Against all odds, it is actually larger than he remembers, as though he has shrunk into himself since he last visited. He pauses to idly brush the dirt from his feet and then starts forward again. The reeds part easily before him, and there is a boat lying slantwise on the shore beyond, left by a fisherman. It is not the boat, not the same; but then again, nothing is.
He has to wade into the water -- which must be frigid, though he can't seem to feel it -- in order to free the craft. Its curved prow swings out first, and then the entire sleek body glides buoyantly under his hands. He clambers out of the shallows, preparing to climb aboard, but abruptly he smiles, stops, and bends over, picking up a small stone at his feet. It rests smoothly in the cup of his fingers, and he remembers how it felt to skip one of these; how it felt to stand beside Billy -- who was a head taller and had a better arm -- and watch their stones fly out and sink in synchronization. Billy always won.
According to Daniel, Billy is still winning. He is now William Campbell, JD, Attorney at Law, who tries criminal cases with great aplomb and usually gets his man. It's funny... or that's how Hawkeye thinks of it, this idea with a core hard and bitter as an acorn, because sometimes you call things funny when there are no other words.
Billy is far across the Mississippi River now, milking life for all it's worth in Oregon, and Hawkeye is standing in the growing dawn by a pond in Maine, letting a stone slip from his fingers.
He stoops again and digs deeper into the sand, where the larger rocks lie half-buried. He stores a few beneath the boat's wooden seat, like a row of dusty skulls, and drops his satchel atop them. It is only now, as he shoves off and steps lightly into the boat, that he notices the blood.
His palms are wet with it, and when he glances down, he sees why: his feet have been cut cleanly and efficiently by the ice and gravel on his way. A vague smudge of red is just discernable on the receding beach, and the wood beneath him is darkly stained. It is so slick that he nearly falls, but he manages to catch himself against the seat. The wounds on his feet are already starting to clot, and he knows that they will heal soon. He wipes his hands on his white nightshirt, smearing it scarlet.
He has only to wait as the boat drifts lazily out into the pond, toward the spot where he and Billy found the best fishing. The smell of blood lingers, and, looking down at his soiled clothes, Hawkeye allows himself to think of the O.R. for the first time since he left it. He remembers very little, except in dreams; he hardly even remembers BJ, and when he does, it is only BJ's voice ringing in the silence, hollow with understanding.
It is the morning of July 6th, 1953, and Hawkeye is sizing up his first patient of the day, a young soldier with a lacerated belly. The anesthesiologist is waiting wordlessly, and Hawkeye wants to tell him that the gas won't be necessary, he's already quite numb. Potter says something from the next table, and the anesthesiologist is moving, lifting the mask -- his arm casts a shadow over the patient's face, and then it falls away and the overhead lights flicker in the boy's eyes. Hawkeye is caught between here, the perverse brightness of the O.R., and there: July 5th, an evening in Korea with the moon sliding through the bus windows to catch, spark-like, in a dead infant's eyes.
He tries to explain that the mask will do more harm than good, but Potter gives him a stern glance and orders him to follow procedure. It is only BJ, BJ in the shadows of the corner table, whose voice means anything at all when, unsettled, he asks, "Hawk?" Hawkeye is silent until the operation is finished, and then he strips off his gloves with a sound like a muffled exhale, and in a child's wondering voice he says (because there are no other words), "It shined."
He doesn't have to turn around to know that BJ's head has come up sharply, or that BJ's hands tremble before he puts it from his mind and asks the nurse for a clamp. BJ knows; Hawkeye knows that BJ knows; it's all a dizzying spiral in which individual identity dissolves; and when Hawkeye drives a tank through the wall of the officers' club that evening (July 5th or July 6th, he can't recall), BJ will have already known.
BJ, in the end, knows more than he ever wanted to. Hawkeye regrets this on some level, but at the same time he is grateful. No one will have to explain to BJ.
The long, tremulous cry of a loon comes to Hawkeye from far away. He has reached the center of the pond, and as he gets to his feet, sound fades. Fluidly, he retrieves the rocks from beneath his seat and loads the satchel with them. As he hefts it, he notes that it weighs a good forty pounds, heavy for something so small, and yet disconcertingly light when he thinks of what it must counterbalance: eternity condensed into three years.
His movements now are swift and sure, and they don't mean anything at all. The Earth goes on turning, and he with it, stepping forward onto the seat as if gravity compels him. He ties the satchel's strap around his ankles in a rough, oversized approximation of a surgeon's knot and stands on the wooden plank, outlined by the sky. There is a moment of exquisite balance: his arms rise above his head, his back arches, a few drops of blood fall from his hands and diffuse over the pond's surface like the image of stigmata, and then he falls a third and final time, into the blue oblivion.
* * *
Daniel will return at nine-thirty to a house where morning light blazes in the windows. He will step inside, momentarily blinded by the glare, and stand at the foot of the staircase, calling his son's name. The echoes will be his answer.
In just under an hour, it will be dawn in San Francisco, and BJ will wake cold, with the acrid aftertaste of nightmare on his tongue. An hour late, because somehow the Earth is still turning, and it waits for no man.
But for now, it is early morning in Maine, December 25th, 1954. A lone boat skims restlessly over the white-bellied waves of Crabapple Cove's prized swimming hole, and a loon is calling softly. It's early morning, except beneath the surface, where the world is deep and dark and intimate, and the fish twine clandestinely through the weeds, and all things come to rest; where the black water, in silence, shines.
~Fin~
*A note on the title:
The phrase "never ask why build" comes from a stanza in Anne Sexton's poem "Wanting to Die":
"But suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build."
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