Finger Bone

Finger Bone

THE YELLOW ROAD stretched far and beyond.

Where the road would lead, I could not say. Perhaps it would not deliver us to Salamaua. We had no choice but to press on.

I’d stopped walking some time ago. With my body propped against the base of a tree resembling a Japanese elm, I gazed at the husks of men shambling past. Hunched forward as if weighed down by a heavy burden, they dragged one foot, then the other, slowly across the yellow dirt, towing long shadows behind them. One shadow receded toward a pair of ankles, its owner listing forward. A thud. The human stirred no more. As the sun traced an arc across the sky, his shadow ticked around him like a sundial.

On my stomach rested a steel mass, which I gripped with both hands, as though it were my spirit. I thought of the finger bone tucked away in my rucksack. The one I’d stored in the bento box. I’d made a pinky promise with the bone.

Perhaps I should have died that night in the foxhole. Should have taken shrapnel in the belly and died. Perhaps it was because I’d failed to accomplish this, I realize now, that my fate became tied to the yellow road.

Pinned inside the foxhole, I had felt a searing heaviness in my left shoulder. I touched it, and something warm dribbled down my hand. The palm was caked with red mud. I took out a triangular bandage from my pack and wrapped the wound, starting at the armpit and over the shoulder several times. I bit down on one end of the bandage, held the other end with the right hand, and pulled with all my might. A whimper escaped my lips. A greasy sweat beaded my face. The searing heaviness gave way to the horrible cracking of bone. Waves of pain crested and ebbed in time with my heartbeat.

A grenade exploded nearby, raining red dirt, branches, and palm fronds around me. My schoolmate Furuya had died only moments ago. He lay on his side in the grass, half his head torn off. His blood streaked for several meters across the grass as if it’d been dashed by someone’s hand. Am I going to die like Furuya? I hunkered down in the hole, cradling my rifle.

The noise of guns and artillery ceased before sundown. The mountainside of Isurava turned quiet, and I sensed the presence of death, sensed it creeping toward the foxhole where I lay crouched. Holding the helmet on my head with one hand, I ventured a look out from the lip.

Two shots rang in my ears. It wasn’t me that was hit. I sighted Sergeant Tanabe slumped over the edge of his foxhole, clutching his bayoneted rifle. A red stain unfurled like a flower on the back of his uniform. Standing in the grass was an Australian soldier, his rifle aimed at the sergeant. He hadn’t seen me yet. I gripped the bolt handle of my rifle and pulled it back. I maneuvered to bring the muzzle out of the hole. The barrel snagged in the dirt and a pathetic sound of metal rang out. My left arm shuddered in pain. The young, pale-faced soldier stood blankly, his blue eyes staring at my head poking out of the hole. I squeezed the trigger. The bullet bore into the base of his neck. He squawked something in English, and with a hand pressed against his neck spouting blood, he fell over backward. Dead. Black blood spread across the grass in the setting sun. After ascertaining his end, I dropped back into my hole.

Dusk seeped across the jungle depths on the island which was located south of the equator. The foxhole, barely large enough for one man, was being overtaken by darkness, until I could no longer make out my hand. The moon rose above the palm trees soon after. I glimpsed the stained bandage on my shoulder in the pale moonlight. The blood on my hands had hardened and turned the color of iron sand. The air smelled of blood and steel. Gangly roots peeked out from the earth about me. The hole was littered with spent cartridges, cigarette butts, withered palm fronds, clumps of red dirt.

I tried crawling out of the hole once or twice but couldn’t summon the strength. I’d lost too much blood. I wasn’t able to lift myself up with the good arm alone. I prayed for some friendlies to find me, but the Australians were just as likely to find me first. In the event of my discovery by the enemy, I was to take my life there in the foxhole. Gripped in my blood-caked hands was the grenade, which had been saved for exactly that purpose. A Type 99 hand grenade detonates four seconds after pulling the firing pin and striking the head of the fuse. When the time came, I would draw the steel cylinder toward me and ball myself up like a pill bug. Don’t think about anything for four seconds. Imagine your warm belly being blown open and you’re likely to throw your only grenade out of the hole. The foxhole was one I dug the night before. If you die here, that would mean you dug your own grave, I thought, and had to laugh. With the grenade snuggled against my belly, I drifted into a shallow sleep.

The next morning, I was awakened by a flood of sunshine. The dark-blue sky expanded above me. At times, a shadowy figure peered in, hindering my view, then moved off, and the sky opened up again. Voices from somewhere in the distance. Where did the grenade go? I couldn’t move my body. I faded again.

Days later, I was sitting on a bed at a field hospital, rubbing the knob that had formed on the left side of my back. I felt something hard beneath the flesh and the bandage. A hardness not of bone, but of lead. It was to have the lead removed that I waited to see the doctor. That night in the foxhole, I had escaped being killed and from having to kill myself. A squad of friendlies had found me and pulled me out of the hole.

I wasn’t taken to the field hospital directly but to a facility in a palm grove near Isurava. Whether it could properly be called a hospital was debatable as it was nothing more than a Type 95 canopy tent tied to some palm trees, some stretchers placed on the ground. Men with critical cases of malaria slept on the stretchers, in still silence, their faces the color of earthenware. Some of them might have been dead already. The Army doctor applied iodine on my wounds. A couple of bullet wounds, he drawled. Looks like they went clean through. You’ll heal soon enough. Then he bandaged up the shoulder and gave me a shot to prevent tetanus and gangrene. The listless man with pouched eyes didn’t look much like a doctor, perhaps due to his impotence. With supply lines stalled, quinine had become hard to come by. The patients on the stretchers were not being treated but were merely waiting for death to take them.

Unlike the tent hospital in the palm grove, the field hospital to where I was eventually transferred had a proper roof, a floor, and walls. Three rows of wooden beds, which appeared to have been built hastily on-site, were arranged down the length of the infirmary. Grass shades hung in the windows and outside was a modest veranda. That a hospital of this size could be built so far inland was impressive. There must have been a number of carpenters in the detachment assigned to build it. Sometime after coming to the hospital, I began to feel an odd sensation in the back of my shoulder. Whenever I turned over in bed, something cold and foreign rolled beneath the skin. Soon a small knob formed, and it grew larger by the day. The flesh was trying to push the lead out of my body. The doctor back at the palm grove had left a