Miracle at St. Anna (Movie Tie-in) Read Online Free PDF Page A

pain hit the boy, it hit him so hard he felt like he’d been jerked into a fire and flung into the jangled glass of his own memories. It washed over him with such force that he couldn’t contain it. He felt himself being lifted, high, toward the sun, and he heard the solder cry out, “Hey, Bishop! Bishop!” and then the Negro colossus stuck his ear to the boy’s mouth to see if he was breathing.
    The boy could not resist. Chocolate. A giant chocolate face. He reached out to touch the man’s face. Then he licked it. It tasted terrible. But then sweet unconsciousness came, and it was as sweet as anything he could imagine.

3
    THE CHOICE
    The Germans came down to the Cinquale Canal from the mountains in a pincer movement, going around the barn on both sides as they rushed forward to meet the American attack. Lying behind the wooden beam with the boy, Train could see them through the jagged ruins of the barn, which was completely open on one side. The beam and stones of the wreckage covered them somewhat, though any of the Germans who ran by could have looked in and seen them if they had wanted to. They didn’t seem to have a mind to.
    In his invisibility—Sam Train felt it coming and hoped he was right—Train marveled at how tiny the Germans were. He expected them to look like the ones he’d seen in the newsreels back in training camp at Fort Huachuca, Arizona: straight-backed, strong, fit, neat, with starched uniforms and shiny helmets, high-stepping by the thousands as they marched past in formation, arms outstretched in that funny salute as they greeted the biggest white man of them all, Hitler. Instead, he saw soldiers that looked like skeletons, some without hats or helmets, boys and old men, with torn and ragged uniforms, emaciated, exhausted, panicked, stumbling past and yelling at one another as if their hair were on fire. One lurched by laughing madly in a high-pitched voice; another ran past sobbing like a child. Some were dressed like Italians he’d seen everywhere—in fact, he could’ve sworn he saw two Italian mule skinners from Fifth Battalion that were in camp the day before—and right as he was thinking how unfair it was that they could switch sides anytime they wanted, being white and all, a few more Italians appeared from another direction and shot the two Italian mule skinners he had just seen. “Lord,” he murmured to the boy. “I don’t know who’s who.”
    The boy paid no attention to this, largely because he seemed to be dead. Train squeezed himself farther behind the beam, moving the child’s body a little closer to it to keep him out of sight of the open end of the barn, and examined him closely. He laid his own head flat on the ground behind the beam, facing the kid, their noses almost touching, his face just inches away. He nudged the boy gently to see if he was breathing.
    Train had never touched a white person’s face before, even though, he thought glumly, this one looked dead. He had met a white child in his hometown of Mt. Gilead once—Old Man Parson’s little grandson. The boy had come out to the field to watch him pull his mule one afternoon and had even held Sam Train’s hand, but his ma had seen him out there and shooed him back into the house.
    Train took his hand off the boy’s face and regarded him as the shouts and machine-gun fire began to head down the mountain away from him. The boy, even catatonic, was beautiful. He was dark, olive-complexioned, with smooth skin and soft black hair that glistened. His head was shaped like an onion, giving him an almost dowdy look, set off by eyes that were wide apart and a rounded chin that was shaped like an O. He was skin and bones, his pants cut off at the ankles, sliced off with a knife, no hems, and his bruised feet were blistered and swollen from malnutrition. His swollen feet looked as if they belonged on a man, and if he hadn’t been so