I Remember The Mud And The Whistle From Before I Was Me

When I was small I had a dark birthmark high on my right thigh, an ugly puckered thing that the other boys stared at in the changing rooms. My mother said it was just how I came out. But I always felt it was a wound. Not a birthmark. A wound that had already happened to me somewhere else.

I did not have nightmares like other children. I had one dream, again and again, and it was not a dream so much as a place I went back to. There was mud. Cold mud that pulled at your boots. There was a long ditch dug into the earth and men sitting along it with their backs to the wall, and there was a whistle, and I knew, the way you know your own name, that the whistle meant you had to climb out of the ditch and walk toward the noise.

I was very young when I first told my mother about the whistle. I did not have the words for war. I called it the walking place. I told her that when the whistle blew you had to stand up even though standing up was the thing that killed you, and that I did not want to stand up but I stood up because the others did. She thought I had seen something on the television. We did not own a television then.

The mark on my leg was tied to it. In the dream, something hit me in the leg, high up, in exactly the place the birthmark sat, and I went down into the mud and I was warm all of a sudden which frightened me because everything else was cold. I would wake up with my hand clamped over my thigh. I did this before I understood what a bullet was, before anyone had explained what happened to a body when it was hit.

I never spoke about it outside the house because I could tell it made grown-ups uneasy. But when I was around eight my grandfather came to stay, my father's father, a quiet man who had been quiet his whole life. One evening he was looking through an old tin of papers and he laid a photograph and a name in front of me, testing something, I think. The name was his uncle, who had gone to the first great war as a young man and never come home. Missing, the letter said. No grave.

I looked at the name and my chest went tight and I said, before I could stop myself, the mud was so cold, and the whistle came twice, not once. My grandfather put his hand over his mouth. He said no one alive knew about the two whistles. It was in a letter from a man who had been beside his uncle, a letter the family kept but never read aloud. Two blasts, it said. The lad went on the second.

I am a grown man now with a family of my own. The mark on my thigh is still there, faded a little, and I still feel it is a wound. The dream comes rarely now, once a year, maybe less. I do not believe I am owed an explanation and I have stopped asking for one.

But I will say this. When my grandfather laid that name in front of me, something in me settled, the way a room settles when someone who was missing finally sits down. I felt, for the first time, that the walking place had let go of me a little. I told my grandfather his uncle had not been afraid at the end, that he had been thinking of the cold and then of nothing, and my grandfather cried, an old man crying, and thanked me for it. I do not know how I knew. I only know I did.