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Volume 26, Number 1, 2002 reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum and Joyce Corrington* DECORATION DAY John William Corrington I Supper was in the boat. Half a dozen goggle-eyes, and a pair of red-ears running close to three-quarters of a pound. With that much done, I was considering how to spend my evening once the news was past and the sun gone down. I was halfway through Berlioz’ Memoirs and more than half through the sixth volume of Livy. I had in mind reading Berlioz and listening to Les Troyens. On the other hand, I could do any damned thing that pleased me. You see, in those fine autumn days, I was recently retired from the bench. I had had my day and then some. It was my plan to spend the balance of my allotted time in a determined assault, late and early, on the bass and perch in Wallace Lake. No one living had any claim on me, and if I decided later to skip the reading and listening and do some night fishing, I could do that, too. Well, I thought I could. But when I pulled into my little dock on the edge of a patch of punk cypress trees, I could see a car parked up by the house. It seemed to me I knew the car, but I couldn’t place it at first. I took my time tying up the boat, raising the motor, breaking down the fly-rod and packing my tackle box. I wasn’t in any hurry. Maybe whoever it was would get tired of waiting and go away. There was no one I wanted to see. All my bills were paid up. There was nothing I needed, and I couldn’t think of a reason why anybody would drive twenty miles out of Shreveport to come visiting. As I walked up to the house, I reckoned whoever it was could count on one hell of a lot shorter audience than he’d be likely to get with the Pope. But just then Loreen turned the corner of the house and started down toward the water to the east. She reached the grassy bank and stood looking out over the lake. I stood, arms full of fishing gear, looking at her. Loreen Wendell. Wife of my godson, Billy Wendell. Billy had never been what you’d call a ladies’ man, but he had got next to Loreen Shannon in grade school and never looked back. Loreen must have been thirty-five now, but with that late autumn sun playing around her like a glory, shimmering on her light brown hair, she looked a lot closer to eighteen. She still had a girl’s body and dark eyes a man could lose himself in, and she had the troublesome effect on me of bringing to mind that fishing was not the whole purpose of man. Maybe not even of worn-out, broken-down, early-retired man. I had known Loreen from the time Billy brought her home to his twelfth birthday party, but I had never gotten quite used to her. She didn’t mean to be disturbing. She just naturally was. –Hello, honey, I said, walking past her toward the house. –Albert, she answered, and came along with me. –Hardly recognized you, I lied. –Thought it was some young girl come out from town to read law . . . –That’s closer than you think, she said, looking grim, her eyes set dead ahead as if she’d come for some purely unpleasant task and had just as soon not look at me any sooner than the case required. We got inside, and I gutted and scaled and wrapped the fish and threw them in the icebox. There was good chicory coffee in a pot at the back of the stove, and I poured us each a cup. Loreen smoked one cigarette down and lit another off it. –Listen, Albert, she started, –I don’t want to get into anything with you . . . –Aw hell, I said. –When I saw you’d come over by yourself, I thought you and me might . . . –Not funny, she said, and began to cry. When you are nearing sixty years, you have surely had reason to feel like a fool often enough for it not to be a novelty. But watching her, I wondered just what I had said that caused her to cry. Loreen was, by and large, a happy person. Smart enough to value and enjoy the fabric, the texture, of her country life. Not smart enough to go probing, hurting herself on the slivers of anguish that anyone can find just under the surface of the very best kind of life there is. She tried to drink some of the coffee and damned near choked on it when another squall of tears came along just as she was swallowing. I handed her a cup towel. –I don’t expect you to represent me, she finally managed to say, still trying to hold off those gusts of emotion that blew through her every moment or so. –I just want the name of a good lawyer. –A good . . . –I hear tell divorce lawyers are the everlasting pits. They try to lay you when you walk in the door. I don’t need that. And if I was to get that, you’d have to find me a really good lawyer, because I’d murder the first sonofabitch . . . I said something. I can’t remember what. Most likely one of those bromides that every last one of us called to the bar fabricates to keep from accidentally saying anything true or useful, to serve in a hundred situations passably, and never well in one. I must have asked her had she really thought about it–it being obvious that she’d been thinking of nothing else. –Don’t start in. I never came over here to get in it with you. A name. All I want is a name. –Don Lorio . . . –Sounds greasy. He’ll try to lay me. –He’s a Catholic deacon. –He’ll tell me about Jesus while he tries to lay me. –No, Don’s all right. He . . . –Never mind. He’ll have to do if you say so. You wouldn’t send me to a shyster. Thank you. –Loreen . . . She shook her head, threw down her coffee, kissed me on the cheek and left before I could even get up and see her out. As I wiped down the table and threw away fish heads and tails, my mind kept slipping out of gear, and I would find myself thinking of Billy and Loreen. But I let that go. I was not in that line of work any more. I do not give advice, and I am not of counsel. I am not in any line of work at all. I am retired, I thought. Yes indeed, I still hold my Bar membership. Half sentiment and half mistrust in the worth of my investments. You never know. But just then I had no mind to do a damned thing but read Berlioz, listen to whatever struck my fancy when Brahms was done, and maybe stare at the beamed ceiling, planning an arcane legal history that had about one chance in a thousand of ever being written. After all, I was only six or eight months into the enjoyment of having neither kin nor clerk to vex me. I had retired from the bench in good order. Judge Albert Sidney Johnston Finch, First Judicial Court, Parish of Caddo, State of Louisiana. A man some judged to be of taste and refinement, decent reputation and good family. An owner of land south of Shreveport. Not a great deal of land. Only what my father had been able to pull through the wringer of the Depression, and a few more acres added in parcels of ten or twenty when they might come up for sale over that long half-century past. Yes, retired and well out of it. While my former colleagues heard axe-murderers explain why they had no choice and child-molesters argue their right to prepubescent romance, I fished most of every day. While my old friends sat listening to the crumbling of the structure of western civilization, I would sit out on my porch with a gin and tonic and a book and consider the longer view. And when those joys began to pall, I would think about getting down to it, gathering my materials, and writing my designedly impenetrable book. In any case, I was surely and adamantly retired. No more car thieves and pigeon-droppers, chicken-geeks and soft-tissue injuries. I was done with them and they with me. Not another eviction or foreclosure. Never a motion in limine or one more garnishment. If what I had was not the peace that passeth understanding, it would have to do till I was subpoenaed by a Higher Jurisdiction. When the kitchen was at least clean enough to pass Rowena’s muster the next morning, I mixed myself a light bourbon and water and walked out onto the porch to examine the quality of the evening. There is a gallery all around my house. I can choose my exposure–which is a great deal more than I could do as lawyer or judge. I can measure the shifting of the sun through the seasons as the Babylonians did, and seek there one of the great sources of order in the dream of our lives. I can fall asleep if I choose to, and sprawl snoring in my chair alone, untended, unconcerned. At least till the next morning when Rowena arrives to clean up the place and begins to raise hell. I would be rid of Rowena if I could. She is ancient, black, and wrinkled as an iguana. She is testy, impertinent, and armed with a tongue like a chain saw. This manner of hers is no late and sorry side effect of the civil rights debacle. By no means. The surly manner and impudent demeanor Rowena exhibits now was in place fifty years ago when she worked for my mother. Rowena was what she is today when she worked for Victoria and me after my mother died, worked for us through our whole married life. I remember that night years ago when Rowena came to me as I waited for word of the birth of my first child. She told me there was no child–no living child–and that there would be no other forthcoming. That Victoria and I would have to make do with our own love which, Rowena allowed, seemed good enough to her, considering the general state of things. Twenty-five years later, she had closed Victoria’s eyes when I could not raise my hand to do it. I believe Rowena would be shut of me, too, if she could calculate a way to manage it short of poisoning or allowing me to smother in my own refuse. But she cannot, and as she told me one afternoon drunk on kitchen wine after hearing that her grandson had been killed by police in Oakland, California, it is far too late for her to take on some other responsibility. At least with me, she said, all the vices were well known to her and none of such a character that a decent Christian woman could not ignore them. She had spoken favorably that afternoon of the fact that I had neither succumbed to drink nor filled the house with whores after we buried Victoria. And so, you see, Rowena and I are stuck with one another, both fearing what our people would say were either of us to betray that unspoken compact of half a century’s standing. Rowena and I believe in our quaint way that we will be face to face with those people of ours again in Glory, and we would both as soon minimize explanations for shameful conduct and get on with the Great Reunion when that latter day comes upon us. We are not fanatics about this. Rowena has her social security and I have my judicial pension. But the fact of the matter is that we would not know how to part, to say goodbye, to set ourselves on paths where we would never meet again. So we have tacitly decided to go along with one another and see if we can make it a century. Though she despises my habits and my loud music and my long silences, and I cannot bear her constant and exhaustive reports on the state of the parish and the climate of rural black opinion therein, we do the best we can. One may hope that this sort of thing continues down the ages to the judgment–if for no better reason than to set liberals’ teeth on edge. Still, Rowena goes home at night, and I have the run of the place. To read of the travels of itinerant musicians, the metaphysical dreams of the Greeks, the libido dominandi of the Romans. To listen to the living spirits of Haydn and Mozart. And to remember how it was little more than a year ago when Victoria was still alive. And so was I. That evening I was on the porch with my whiskey, a decent sunset, and looming out ahead, a fine empty evening to fill. It was my hope and intention in those days to go forward with the retirement thing until, one bright morning, Rowena would show up grumbling and cursing her aching bones, shut off my stereo, search the premises for me, and find me at last right there in my chair, on my porch, Homer or Ariosto in hand, smiling, and dead as a mackerel. I took considerable pleasure in imagining her chagrin when, checking me over and lifting my cold eyelid, she would be forced to the conclusion that I had beaten her out of this mean world and would be rendering my report to all the Departed before she could get in a word on her own. As I was drinking and idly pondering that conceit, I saw headlights coming up the dirt road toward the house. This is somebody wanting directions, I said to myself, knowing that I was a notorious liar. They have the wrong place, I essayed, and I will direct them on their way, bid them good evening, and then get on inside to Berlioz. Or Livy. –How you doing, Uncle Albert, Billy Wendell asked me, dropping into that other chair that I keep on the porch to save appearances, but regarding which I made a mental note to break up and burn as soon as I could get Billy out of it and gone home in his pickup. I smiled and said I was fine. –Reckon I could have a water-glass of that? Straight? –Sure. You looking for Loreen? –Shit no. And she ain’t looking for me, neither. We walked inside and I poured him a slug of whiskey that might have floored the Demiurge. He drank it down distractedly and set the glass back on the table. Convention dictated that I pour him another. –She come by here, didn’t she? –She did. –Told you all manner of shit about me. –Not a word. You want a chaser? –How come you ask me that? –Because you’re most of the way through a half pint of good whiskey, Billy. Some men would take a little water. How about a beer? –Sorry, Albert. It’s just that . . . that’s what she called me. –What? –A . . . chaser. –Ah . . . –Ah what? Look, I got business with you. I don’t need no hard time. I’m up to my ass in hard times. No reason not to believe him. Billy Wendell is what we call a planter here in North Louisiana. He owns somewhere between four and five thousand acres of prime land good for cotton, soybeans, corn, whatever. Still, there are more hard times than easy when a man lives off the land. It is old family land, and no one in this part of the parish can remember when a Wendell didn’t own it. Rowena reported to my mother years ago that old man Wendell, Billy’s grandfather, had told a local banker that he would blow his head off and follow him to Calcutta to do it if, in those hard times, the banker attempted to foreclose on so much as an acre of Wendell land. I expect that is true. And I expect the old man would have done it, too. Done it and, knowing Caddo Parish juries, walked out of court a free man. Why not blow a banker away? If you let them take your land, there’s nothing left to live for anyhow. Billy and I walked back out on the porch. It was full dark by then and a touch of autumn chill was in the air. Billy carried the bottle with him. –I’m not going to represent you, I told him. Maybe that would end it and I could get on with Berlioz. Or Livy? Not a chance. –You ain’t even heard what it is that . . . –You going to show me pictures of what you’ve been humping on the side? Boy, you work it out with Loreen. You can’t do any better. You all have three children . . . –Look, Billy blurted, a little desperately. –Would you just let that lie? I didn’t even know she was gonna come over here and air all the dirty wash . . . Look at this. He handed me a wrinkled, soiled letter that he must have been carrying stuffed into the springs of his pickup. It was on that peculiar 8 x 10 off-brand stationery that federal agencies like to affect just to spite us helots–or perhaps to show solidarity with their English bureaucratic brethren. It would be interesting to know what size paper they use for official documents in Moscow. It was from some office of a branch of a commission of the Department of Defense and, as you might suppose, it was written in pidgin argot with the consistency of molasses and the density of lead. As a lawyer, I had ruefully to admire it. If making certain that no unambiguous and forthright communication took place was its intent, it ranked with certain writs, petitions, and contracts I had read in which absolutely nothing was revealed. Another reading made probable that the document had some bearing on a military decoration and the Second World War and . . . Then I looked at the heading. It wasn’t addressed to Billy Wendell as I had assumed. –Gaspard Penniwell, I said. –What is this? –Just what it says. It’s to Uncle Gee. I took it over there to him when it turned up in my mailbox. He had me read it to him, then he told me to tell them to stick whatever it was up their ass. We went through the letter a few more times and even without a dictionary I was able to make out that the suboffice, et al., in the person of one civilian administrator named Waring, had discovered that Gaspard Penniwell was entitled to a decoration for gallantry in relation to a certain action which had taken place in Belgium in 1944. He would be given transportation (economy class) to Washington and the presentation would be made in a ceremony at the White House, etc. I put down the letter and poured a little more of my own whiskey. –That sonofabitch phoned me today, Billy said glumly, hopelessly. –Which sonofabitch? –Waring. Said he wanted to talk to Uncle Gee and I had better cut the shit. I told him it was half a mile or more down to Gee’s and that he didn’t walk very good. Then I told him what the old man said, and this here Waring started in on something about civil rights and how he could have the U. S. Attorney all over me and . . . What’s peonage, Uncle Albert? –Never mind. What’d you tell him? –I told him to fuck a stump. Then I hung up. But I think the old man ought to call him. I mean, even if he don’t want the Medal of Honor . . . That stopped me flat. –He said . . . the Medal of Honor? –Wasn’t much he didn’t say. Put it on me I was keeping an old black man from getting his due from his country . . . I don’t know what-all. Made me feel like homemade shit. Billy was slumped in his chair then, the water glass loose in his hand. He rubbed his jaw and shook his head. –Uncle Albert, I don’t need this. I don’t need it any time at all. But specially not now . . . In thirty and some-odd years, I have never known what to do with Billy. I suppose I love him. I know I am supposed to love him. He is my godson, son-in-fact of the best friend I ever had. Who died in a war I somehow lived through, leaving behind a wife to mourn and a son he had never seen. I do love Billy. But he is not his father. Not Will D. Billy does very well with his place. He loves the land, and what the land requires to prosper is almost exactly gauged to what Billy has to give. Not to put too fine a point on it, Billy Wendell is dumber than dogshit. Not stupid. Possibly not even ignorant. But cursed–or blessed–with a narrowness of focus as to the constituents of life that is awesome to behold. If Billy had ever been west of Dallas, north of Memphis, east of Vicksburg or south of New Orleans at that time, he had managed to sneak it past me. Once Loreen suggested that they should go on a visit to New York. Billy looked at her as if she had announced purchase of two first-class fares on the Tau Ceti Galactic Liner. If the problem was weevils or meal worms, leaf-rot or nigger-gone-wild-amongst-the-tenants, Billy was likely to do very well indeed. But his expertise seemed to fall away as he shifted to asphalt road, and to wilt utterly when he came upon a concrete highway. –Look, he said finally from within his slump, –I shouldn’t have come and dumped this mess on you. –You’ve got somebody better to dump it on? –No. But you know how it is with us. I mean we’re like kin. I ought to go on in town and find me some lawyer and . . . Billy was right about the first part, anyhow. We are like kin. My people have owned land next to the Wendells as long as there have been Finches in the parish. I have heard our tribe came south from Tennessee before the Purchase, but who knows? Who can tell? Wendells and Finches are autochthonous in these parts. My father and old man Wendell were good friends–in the old days when good friends might mean the difference between survival and going under. And Will D. had been my best friend–William Dunlop Wendell III. We had gone down to LSU together in the late thirties, he to learn modern agriculture, I to read the law. We had managed to have ourselves as good a time in Baton Rouge as we had had up home. There is no need to go into detail. The moral wretchedness of college men is well established as of old. Will D. had come back home a thoroughly modern farmer. I had come back a lawyer–in itself a vast disappointment to my father. We were landed people, never mind in how small a way. Such folks had no use for advocates who, they thought, generally improved the time sniffing away in musty parish records for the bones of a controversy, hoping to find a flawed title or a questionable succession–thereby to provoke a jactatory action or some other unpleasantness that might put a man in question of his land. Still, I put together a little practice in Shreveport, and since everyone took me to be of the same honesty and decency as my father, I did well. I extracted drunken negroes from the clutches of the Caddo Parish sheriff’s office and returned them to their rightful possessors who required them for planting or cultivating, and who, not only not reconstructed but not even defeudalized, took umbrage at any operation of law claiming power over their people or their land. I conveyed property and wrote up wills, saw to the interdiction of some few who had lost the delicate thread of sanity and had no one trustworthy to tend them, and sullenly processed such divorces as I could not head off by stern gazes or gentle repetitive diplomacy. But Will D. and I had hardly gotten ourselves launched on the waters of life when we were plucked out of our chosen puddles. I was crawling on my belly across the snow-chilled soil of France when Will D. went down over Germany with ten other boys in a burning B-17. I never even knew that he was dead until the same Germans filled my hide with pieces of metal, and sent me home to Caddo Parish. All was changed, changed utterly. Victoria had come down to the railroad station to meet me along with Alethia Wendell, Will D.’s wife–and a tiny sad-eyed boy who had never seen his father, and never would. I was still doped up and the medics were in a hurry to get me from the station to the hospital before whatever they were giving me and had run out of on the train around Little Rock wore off. But when Victoria whispered to me that Will D. was gone, I remember crying out in anguish so loudly that people on the steamy platform turned and stared and wondered at what they doubtless took to be my physical pain. Getting blown up is something you either live through or don’t. But there was no medicine or surgery for the wound that Will D.’s dying left behind. So, yes, I expect as the years went by, I was as near a father as Billy Wendell was ever going to have. We would hunt and fish and raise a little modest hell and buy horses and cattle for his land and mine, and when he came of age to do it, Billy Wendell farmed my land as if it were his own, giving me at the end of the year whatever he thought fair. I never had reason to question him on that. Probity is not at last a function of intelligence; it is an aspect of character. Billy and Loreen and Victoria and I had always been close. When it was clear that Victoria could not last much longer, Billy was desolate. He had gone out fishing alone and gotten drunk and fallen into the winter water and almost drowned. Because he could not stay close by without visiting her and could not stand to go into the room and see her wasting, moving quickly by then to the verge of time, and on like a thin chiseled arrow into eternity itself. It was only in the last year that things had changed between us. I believe I had let things slip after I retired. No, that’s wrong. That sounds as if I had just gone slack when I stepped down from the bench. It wasn’t like that. I had just moved away a little. Supper with Billy and Loreen less often, shorter visits both ways. Perhaps because whenever the three of us were together, there was always implied the presence of some other, and the bare implication was itself a pain and a mourning. Or perhaps even more because getting ready for Glory is mostly a matter of cutting loose, moving away, cleaning out cupboards and closets of the soul, letting things slip away. It is also selfish, isn’t it? Because the least of us matters in some way to hosts of others, and many of those others have claims on us. Don’t they? –The Congressional Medal? Hell, Billy, I didn’t even know Gee was in the war. –Oh yeah. Momma told me they come for him after you and daddy had gone. He come back before you did. –Even so, you reckon they’ve got the wrong man? –That’s what I told Waring. Then he started in on all that crap about how we treat niggers. Gaspard Penniwell. He came back into focus like a genie emerging from a bottle, misty and undefined. We called him Gee. He and his people had worked Wendell land for almost as long as the Wendells had owned it. Rowena, whose recollection is of the style of the Vedic Brahmins, and who has set to memory every rag and scrap and patch of story and tale having to do with anyone in the neighborhood–and who can and will cough it all up upon no provocation at all–maintained that a Penniwell, some white man from Pennsylvania, had come to Frierson, Louisiana, in the wake of the Confederate War to make his fortune on the ruin of the people hereabouts. He lasted long enough to father a child or two on some decent colored girl named Gaspard before he was waylaid and dispatched as was the custom then. I have no idea whether this is legend or fact. Nor, I am sure, does Rowena. Her critical standards for incorporating such material into her memory hoard seem to parallel Aristotle’s desiderata: better a probable impossibility than a possible improbability, and Lord knows the Penniwell story seemed probable enough. –I sort of remember when he came home, Billy went on. –I was just a little tad. They brought him out to the place in one of those brown ambulances from Barksdale field. You ever see his belly and legs? Fearless Fosdick. –What? –Fearless Fosdick. All them holes like he was a piece of Swiss cheese. My momma kept him at the house for the longest. She took care of him herself. Folks talked at the time. Lord, she even bathed him. You never saw anything like it. I tried to pay attention to what Billy was saying, but that genie was rounding off, filling out. Gaspard. Gee. Perhaps ten years older than Will D. and me. Tall, good-looking, strong. One of a handful of blacks that old man Wendell trusted all the way. If I remembered rightly, Gee had become a foreman just before I left for the service. And there was something else, but it wouldn’t come back into focus. Why did I think there was something important buried back there under almost fifty years of memories? Never mind. –All right, I said. –So he went and they shot him all to hell and he came home. Now, after over thirty years, they get in a sweat to give him a medal . . . ? Billy shrugged. –You know how they are, Uncle Albert. Maybe it’s an election coming up. All I know is this Warner or Waring or whatever said he was gonna get on my case. He wanted to know how I was fixed with the IRS and . . . –What exactly did Gee say when you went by with the letter? –You want it word for word? –That would be nice. –He said they could take their medal and put it where the sun don’t shine. Then they could kiss his black ass and bark at the hole. Then he said for me to get off his place or he’d take a stick to me . . . –Mercy . . . –Listen, Uncle Albert, that’s a mean old nigger. He’s as good as gold, honest. Hardworking man. But he’s mean . . . Billy got out of the chair then, as well as he could. He was tired and worried and whiskeyed up a little. I told him I’d see about the government business for him if he wanted me to. –Thanks, Billy said grimly. –That way I can study on going crazy about . . . Uncle Albert . . . ? –What? –Did she say anything else? I mean, besides I was . . . a chaser? –She didn’t even say that, I told him. –She didn’t say anything, and she wouldn’t let me say anything. She just asked for the name of a good divorce lawyer. That broke him down. He stood there wordless, doing whatever it was he did in the way of thinking. Finally he stepped off the porch and walked back to his pickup truck. It took him a little while to find the keys, then he pulled away driving slow. He wasn’t in a hurry to get home. If he was even going home. Then I went inside and found that I was standing around with an empty mind, considering which of the many delightful things I might do–none of which I was in any way obliged to do–that I wanted to do. It was a little unsettling to find that I was not eager to pick up Berlioz where I had left him, or to see what next the Romans did on their way to Imperium. No, Billy’s visit following on Loreen’s and all this business about Gaspard Penniwell had broken me loose from my routine. It wasn’t going to last, of course. I would get done with it as quickly as I could and get back to my books. And if worse came to worst, if I found I couldn’t get shut of involvements here in Caddo Parish, I’d pick up and move down south. St. Tammany Parish was nice. Good fishing and good people. I had set as an interim judge once down there in Covington. But with all that loose clutter passing through my mind, I found that below or behind or above it, I was still thinking of Gee. I could remember a time when he had not been mean. I could squint backward through that mist of time past and see him laughing, hands covered with blood on a cold winter afternoon. And Will D. and I were there, and we were laughing, too. What was it? I had been cold and frightened and exultant and . . . Lord, of course. It had been him, Gaspard Penniwell, who had taught us how to shoot, how to hunt. My first deer. I had shot it and gutted it and cleaned it, and we had eaten venison cooked over a fire of hickory branches in a cotton house on old man Wendell’s place with the November rain driving outside, and Gee telling us stories about the old days when there were still bear in the parish, and maybe even a few wild boar. We had been friends, the three of us. Old man Wendell had deputized Gee to teach us how to hunt, how to live in the woods–and how to minimize the mayhem, the dead cattle and possibly even dead field hands, as we made our uncertain way toward manhood. Gee was older than we were, but not enough older to take it as a chore to see to us when squirrel season came, or when it was time to move out on the big lake and wait for ducks flying south. He loved it all as much as we did, and he was a crack shot. He would let us take the first one, but if we missed, he always managed to do easily what we often could not manage to do at all. It should have been Will D.’s father or mine or both of them who taught us, but even then the old ways, the passing on of knowledge from father to son, were breaking down not from lack of love or interest in us, but because it was hard to keep things going then, most of all a big piece of cotton land when, cleaned and baled, you almost had to give your cotton away. But it had been all right. Gee had accepted the delegation and enjoyed every minute of it, and for a few years there, people were accustomed to seeing the three of us ranging the land from September, when dove season opened, until spring when everything shut down and we had to shoot at bottles or cans until the next fall. The memories kept coming. The time we were in Shreveport buying Will D. a new shotgun and got hungry and wanted to eat, but there was no place in town that would serve the three of us sitting at the same table. At least not until Gee thought of Freeman and Harris’s, a colored restaurant where a young black man and a pair of vouched-for white boys could eat together at a table in the kitchen. Ribs and neckbones, rice and gravy and cornbread. I believe the cooks took it up as a matter of pride to show those white boys what they were missing every day, not being able under Louisiana law to walk in the front door of that place, sit down, and order up any time they decided to do so. Stewed chicken and dumplings, hog lips and field peas with what tasted like cracklings broken up in them, all of it served hot from a stove not ten feet away, laid out on a fresh white tablecloth starched stiff and shining as if held back for certain honored guests like us. At the end of the meal, when the three of us were close to falling away from the table, there had been a sweet potato pie. Yes, we had been friends, the three of us, in that soft gray dawn of young manhood, which is simultaneously the twilight of childhood and possibly the very best time of all. We had been real friends with no hope of gain or advancement or social necessity or simple sycophancy. Before we came to know the intricacies and bland hypocrisy of living as adults. I sat there in the darkness and wondered at the tricks that age and memory and simple repetitive habit can play. Had someone offered me ten thousand dollars for the name of the French town where I had fallen to mortar fire in 1944, I would have had to pass. But I found myself evoking the details of that menu in an obscure black restaurant over forty years ago, and I thought to myself, Perhaps when we are pressed, we remember only the important things. She threatens a lot. For a while after Victoria died, she had taken to threatening to quit. I knew she wouldn’t quit, and she knew I knew it. But what was she to do? She had lost first my mother, who had very nearly raised her–or had they raised one another?–and then she had lost Victoria. All she had left was me. Not counting a daughter who had vanished in the wilds of Southern California and was on her seventh marriage the last time she had written to Rowena some six years ago. Threatening to quit was a form of mourning. Her way of letting go, or perhaps an attempt to stay the velocity with which I was going to seed. Men go to hell without women. Every woman knows that. Rowena knew that. But she was a little panicky because she knew she had not the levers of control that my other women had had, only the same responsibilities. What do you do with a man who only shaves once a week, eats a can of chicken soup on a Sunday, then for three days Ritz crackers and sardines? Then perhaps a week or so of nothing but pork and beans and canned pineapple? One who will not socialize or even keep up the appearance of doing so? One who, spurning all his old associates from the judicial estate, had willfully reduced his life to one which is, praise God, bare bones and the acrid air of old times, of history read and re-read and thought upon? Rowena, forestalled from direct action, too old to do much cooking, and recognizing (I think) some degree of disparity in our tactical abilities, began discussing the obituary columns with me over sacramentally shared morning coffee. Rather than place recent deaths at the back near the classified ads where more traditional criers might, reports of mortality were front page in Rowena’s monologues on the state of the parish. She was partial to stroke, seizure, aphasia, and massive sudden cardiac arrest. She also favored the occasional death-by-drowning-of- drunken-fisherman-falling-from-boat story. She was aware of Billy’s near miss and savored it as a Foreshadowing. She tended to keep especial account of men who died in their middle and late fifties, making of them, whenever she could, cautionary tales steeped in improper diet, alcoholic excess, untoward forms of exercise not intended for older men–and of course bare rumors vague and dank of shameful sexual proclivities which, developing late, were clearly oiled and polished fast lanes to the mortuary awaiting elderly gentlemen who, out of loneliness or from an untoward frivolity, lost their grip on sense and sanity. Beyond all that, Rowena was a mine of information, most of it lurid, tawdry, and nearly always true. Her inclination toward mythology aside, you could generally go for an indictment if Rowena deposed. –Before you get started with the casualty list, I need to know a couple of things, I told her that morning. –Started what? First then, I turned off that rackety record player of yours. I done the dishes already. One dish, a cup, and a soup bowl. Starving yourself like a fool. If I still had my hand in . . . –You’d be cooking all day for one man. It would kill you quick as strychnine, and I’d go off from overeating. Let well enough alone. –What you want to know? –Loreen came by. So damned mad she was past being mad . . . –Well, yes . . . –Yes what? –She’s mad. Ought to get on past it, but she can’t. Poor baby. –Billy’s chasing? Rowena gave me a withering look–as if I’d just asked her my own name. –Ummm . . . –That dumb bastard. –You got to expect it. It’s how they are. Dog’s gonna piss on a pole and scratch grass. Man’s gonna find himself something new now and again. Ain’t no big thing except she think it’s a big thing. Not like he’s fixing to go off or something. He ain’t about to leave that place. That’s all he knows. –You saying their marriage is shot? –Did I say that? If I’d of meant to say that, that’s what you’d of heard. Naw, Loreen just a white girl. She don’t know nothing. Time was ladies wouldn’t even let on they knew. Take your sainted mother . . . –Are you fixing to tell me something I don’t even want to know? –Hush . . . If your daddy had gone catting, your momma would of ignored it. I said if . . . –Well, Loreen’s not going to. –Naw, she gonna run that boy off and then spend her declining years looking for better. Anyhow, Billy simple as salad. It ain’t him. It that Terry Novis . . . –Huh? Judge Wesley’s secretary? –You ought to know. Rowena gave me a look as if to suggest that, in its day, my judicial chambers had been the best little whorehouse in Shreveport. I do not know why Rowena supposes that judges are libertines more than the run of men. But I know better than to try to rear a defense against her. Never do it. She will lay siege and you will be sorry as hell. She is incapable of forgetting or forgiving. Just when you think the matter in dispute is past and done, she will come upon you of a sudden, storm the barricades, and make a pyramid of skulls from your pretensions. Once I told her that garfish wasn’t fit to eat. Weeks–no, months–later at a dinner party Victoria gave, we had set before us from Rowena’s kitchen a fish entree richer, more delicate than anything Antoine’s or Galatoire’s ever conceived. That’s right. I made it a rigorous point thereafter never to observe in front of Rowena that horseshit was unpalatable. –It come out of all that tractor business, Rowena observed. I remembered something about it. A lawsuit in federal court months ago. A diversity action in redhibition. Billy had bought a couple of tractors which were prone to shed their transmissions and went to law. Which, I judged from Rowena’s sneering remark, was where Billy had come across Terry Novis. If you were a man who happened by good fortune or bad to have business in the United States Court for the Western District of Louisiana, and that business took you to Division H, you would most likely run across Terry. You might fall down mute, stone deaf, high gravel blind. But then you might count those afflictions as nothing just for the sight of her. I am a man of mature years, and I have tried to fashion my language as well as my thought in some mold less barbarous than that in which I was reared by other Caddo Parish men. But Terry Novis is a reagent. She dissolves the veneer of civilization with which we clad ourselves the way Strip-Ease cuts varnish from an old chest of drawers. I have heard descriptive phrases used of her that shocked the sensibility. I have heard men casually say what they would do to have one night with her, and their sayings chilled the blood. There are those who claim she took the job at federal court simply because it was the one place in town where she was least likely to have some otherwise harmless passing redneck go stark wild in nature, shred away his clothes and hers, and make the beast with two backs before a thousand witnesses in the courthouse square in front of the Confederate Memorial. Terry has red hair. She is superbly developed, and the sight of her legs breaks something in a man. One would, in a manner of speaking, settle for the legs alone. But there is much more. Feature by feature, one begins to conclude that Terry is the absolute prototype of what a woman should look like. Hands, eyes, lips, skin, and an unforgettable rear end. Yes, she passes down a hallway and heads turn as if they were wired to that fanny of hers. One loves his wife. One does not make concrete plans to kidnap Terry Novis and carry her off to Rio for one splendid week of worshipful continuous violation. But one considers it, in and out of season. –Well, that all you wanted to know? Cause I believe I got it in me to fix up some fried eggs and bacon this morning. What you say? –Would there be biscuits? Rowena nodded in mild disgust. Offer me a dollar and I’ll have your savings account. She went to work and I sat there over cold coffee still thinking about Terry Novis. And Billy. I could not believe it. By what peculiar tracery of fate had Billy gotten far enough along with her to shake the foundations of his family life? I did not have to ask why, just how. It seems one’s capacity to be astonished is never really played out. There is always another revelation around the next bend. Rowena was heating up the oven, slapping out dough, plucking skeins of bacon from a frozen pack. It was painful to watch her. She seemed to move in slow motion. Some small malevolent portion of oneself was always making book on whether she would manage to complete whatever action she was engaged upon. She was eighty-two then and gnarled as a live oak, but I suspected from time to time she exaggerated the weight of her years the better to keep me in my place. If one moves with efficiency and dispatch, demands are likely to be made. If one is not venerable, one is vulnerable. But behind that dark withered face is a mind like a roto-rooter, fast-moving and digging for dirt. In her time she has recounted stories that would gag a maggot. It was from Rowena that I first heard about the Fannin Street Cannibal–before the matter was raised in my court. Proper judicial procedure might have required that I disqualify myself from presiding. But how do you tell your colleagues on the bench that you know the sonofabitch is guilty as Sweeny Todd because your black housekeeper has told you so? –What about Gaspard Penniwell, I asked as casually as I could. –Ugh. Rowena was at the stove with her back to me, and she gave a shake with her shoulders as if I had recommended she take the bacon out of the skillet and substitute rat flanks. –You want to tell me what that means? She turned from the stove, hands on hips, and fixed me with her Now You’ve Gone Too Far look. –One thing in this world hadn’t anyone ought to put up with. A dirty nasty old man. For just the smallest portion of a second, I thought she was talking about me. A tincture of guilt for my thoughts about Terry Novis. –God must love them, I grinned. –He sure made enough of them. –That ugly filthy old nigger. Ought somebody put him out of his misery. –What’s he done? –Nobody cares. Listen, I prays of a Sunday that somebody gonna stand up and say it: this world right here is hell. –Why this is hell, nor are we out of it. For where we are is hell, and where hell is, there must we ever be . . . –What’s all that? Never mind. It’s true. –You going to tell me what hell’s location has to do with Gee? –Gee? Oh yeah, I forget now and again. You and that Will D. Wendell . . . Youall was thick as thieves with that nigger . . . Yes. Some forty years ago. Now time had raddled the fishing gear, and the shotguns and rifles had fallen away in rust. But time had not diminished nor changing custom blurred Rowena’s razor-sharp recollection of us then. She had complained once to my mother that the three of us together constituted a criminal syndicate. Gee was a dubious nigger and only God knew what he would lead Will D. and me to–but when led, we were certain to drink deep of whatever it was. For Will D., Rowena had specifically predicted a disastrous end. He reached too high and reckoned whatever he reached for belonged of right to him. He would fall. I remember thinking of those words I had overheard by chance when, still on a cane, I had first walked over our land after I got home and knew that Will D. was dead. He had been everything Rowena said. And he had fallen. Surely the prediction does not force the event, else our very lives would be theoretical. But I wondered if Rowena had some touch of second sight, if in some archaic manner she lived our deaths and died our lives. I was still mending then. Not only from the passage of shrapnel through my body but from what I had seen on the beaches at Normandy, in the roads and ditches where we had crawled and bled and died and murdered our way across France. I was still shaky and I could not stop dreaming that I was once again under that pale sun, hearing that flat distant vasty wail just as I dove headfirst into a hedgerow before earth and breath and consciousness and I parted ways. I did not want ever to be pierced with steel again, to lie in cold thick mud, a gasping St. Sebastian of alien country roads. I had not lost my guts. That metaphor should be used with surgical precision. I had not lost my guts. But they were still strung out from France to Louisiana, trailing, soiled, quivering. I remembered wondering if Rowena knew that. Or what else she might know. She dished up the eggs and bacon and pushed a plate of biscuits over to me to be buttered. Then she ladled out grits onto my plate and into her bowl and sat down across the table from me. –You might try a biscuit, I said mildly. –One biscuit isn’t going to kill you . . . unless you put rat poison in them. –Eat, she said gruffly, spooning her grits. –Can’t use no butter with this pancreas. Biscuit with no butter . . . ? –I’m still asking about Gee, I said. The food tasted better than it looked. –You’ve got something on your mind. –He got him a little girl over there. –All right. Folks do that nowadays. –Not like him. She just a child. –How old were you when you got married? –I was sixteen, Mr. Smart Alec. I was full-growed. That old man got him a baby . . . She maybe ten . . . eight more like it. Lord know where he got her from. Maybe they rents em nowadays . . . I went on eating. If it was true, it was scandalous. But I wasn’t going to add any fuel to the fire. Then it appeared I didn’t need to. –You know, now you brung it up, I believe I might call the high sheriff myself. Have em take that old devil away. Get that child a home. –I didn’t bring anything like that up. You did. And no, you won’t. Rowena glowered across the table at me. She can tell when I mean business. She can measure millimeters of intent at a glance. When she goes to studying you, watch out. –Still thick, huh? –I haven’t laid eyes on Gaspard Penniwell in over thirty years, I told her. –Uh-huh, but you remember. Never mind what’s right. Old times is worth more than what’s right. I tell you this, Mr. Man, I ain’t sitting in your place come judgment. –Fair enough, I told her. –And I’ll see to it you don’t trip into hell for the sake of a calumny. –A what? –Officious intermeddling. –That don’t help. –Sticking your goddamned nose into business that doesn’t concern you. Even if what you say is true. –Poor little girl. Colored people don’t care. White folks don’t care. Gonna be something else when she throw that old devil’s child and it got two heads and a tail and . . . In the law, we refer to Rowena’s manner of argument as the Parade of Horribles. Next to the Argument from Public Policy, it is regarded as the most contemptible form of expression known to a profession which has, since Cicero, gleefully won its cases on sleazy ad hominem points, and prided itself on sophistry, obfuscation, jesuitical turns and the lower reaches of hook or crook. –I’m going by to see him, I said. –Well, he ain’t going to see you, she said right back. –He don’t see nobody. All he ever do is sit out in that hickory rocker Miz Wendell give him. And watch that poor child play with her puppy. He don’t talk. He don’t pass the time of day. You wave, he look the other way. Rowena left off for a moment. –You do go by, you want to tell him something for me? –I doubt it. –You tell him he gonna fry in hell like Sunday chicken, hear? And not to go howling about being sorry when them wings close down on him. Too late then . . . I was not sure about the wings. Whether they were to be those of the Angel of Death or the Sunday Chicken. Either, I reckoned, would be past bearing. We went our ways then. Rowena to her cleaning and I out to the jeep, wondering just what it was I had to do. As I drove, I found myself trying to nudge that genie, still not yet formed up. I tried to remember what Gee had looked like. He had been big and dark, strong enough to live a black life as it was then, and still pick and choose between whites he loved and whites he hated. I had always expected Gee to have trouble. Not because he was fractious or given to fighting or smart talk, but because he lacked even the appearance of that fine oriental mask of duplicity his people had collectively fabricated over the centuries. Whom he cared for and whom he despised showed always and all too clearly. But Gee did not have trouble. One reason was that W. D. Wendell would have whipped any second-rate white man who thought to ease the discomfort of his status by fooling with Gee. The other, I do believe, was us–Will D. and me. We kept him too busy to find time for trouble. I can imagine the offer and acceptance when W. D. decided Gee was the man to start the two of us on our way. –You want the job or don’t you, W. D. would have asked him, that raw beefsteak face of his absent any expression at all. –I reckon, Gee would have answered quietly. –All right. Get all the ammunition and what-have-you at Fielder’s grocery. Take the little truck when youall go off. Gas it up at Ferds. Take what you need out of the stores. Don’t let em hurt anybody and kick their asses if they don’t mind. –You want they asses kicked? –No, goddamit. I don’t want their asses kicked. But I never seen a boy you could get to straighten up and walk like a man unless you did kick his ass. Them two ain’t going to be any exceptions. –Ummm . . . –Oh, I see what you mean. Don’t worry about that. I’ll tell em. If they ain’t willing to let a grown decent nigger kick their asses, they can go into town and sign up at Mrs. Stovall’s dancing school. A man’s a man, ain’t he? Gee would have nodded and smiled. The deal would have been struck, the three of us inextricably locked together then in that old time and beyond time. In recollection. There was that little thread of a road, and I turned up it for the first time I could remember since 1942. The genie was beginning to sort out now, and the mist was thinning. Out there beyond the cotton stubble was a stand of hardwood, and in the autumn you could hear the fox squirrels barking all the way up to Gee’s house. That piece of woods teemed with game because Gee would throw out grain even in the winter. A bird or a rabbit could find a square meal in those woods even when it snowed. I pulled the jeep over and looked out across the quiet narrow field that sloped toward the woods. In the old days, it was always planted with corn–still was. In the autumn, a portion of the crop was left to fall, and it would draw the doves as they flew south. Some days when we felt mean and full of piss and vinegar, we would shoot over the corn field with #8 shot, then change over to #6 and go for the squirrels down below. Now the field lay naked, covered with broken stalks and rotted husks. It was just short of nine in the morning and the sun was pale and thin, the air dusted with mist. The year was dying all around. I considered that every year was a lifetime. Every autumn when the guns came out of their cases, down from the walls, young men entered the fields for the first time, old men hunted their last. A finger of chill breeze reached through the open side of the jeep whispering about what was past and what remained. I sat there silent, almost seeing the three of us stalking the fields, pulling down birds from the crisp air, moving on wordless, intent on the next rise, each knowing where it would likely come, the precedence of shooting. I could remember the enforced looseness in my arms and shoulders, the hard blade of concentration in my mind as we walked. None of us liked to talk or fool around when we were hunting or fishing. We did not talk nearly so much as, later, the riflemen in my squad talked amidst hunting other men to kill. There, the drumroll of talk was ceaseless whenever it seemed unlikely to get us killed at once. We had all talked, talked against the darkness that lay in wait in the empty streets of the next village or in the invisible trenches and foxholes and ambuscades overlooked by artillery and air and armor. Talked baseball and women and jobs and dreams of escape and return. Talked especially of women, as if speech invoking women, their limbs, their hair, their secret places physical and spiritual, assured us of some further portion of temporality. As if talking on and on about that deepest drive that even the stupidest amongst us held in some way sacred was whole proof and evidence of our ongoing life, of the flat fact that it had not been one of us left behind back there in the last silent and abandoned village, dog tags festooned across the rifle butt, bayonet speared into the harsh rich lumped soil of France. A mist, a fog of aimless conversation, even monologue. Some of us died talking. I walked out into the field and gathered up some fragments of broken cornstalk and soil in my hand. The pieces were stained and bleached gray with tracks of black mold. Scattered piles of shucks lay here and there where ears had been thrown and stripped in the field. They say the old Indians believed there was but one paradigmatic beaver and one ideal possum, a single bear, but one great deer, and that, when Beaver or Possum or Bear or Deer had fed an Indian family, the bones had to be returned to the place where it had been killed. Otherwise, when next they came to hunt, bellies empty, there would be no beaver, possum, bear or deer. I dropped the remnants of that last harvest, seeing already behind the cool sterile autumn sky that next July with stalks tall and tassels rayed out against a new sun, warm and yellow?green, burgeoning, moving fecund toward harvest once more. I walked back to the jeep and made ready to start off again. Somehow I found I was uncomfortable, taken suddenly with a sense of dread. I frowned, my hand arrested on the ignition key. Then I found the root of the feeling. It was a vague inchoate yet absolutely certain sense of bad faith. As if I were on my way to Gee’s place with the intent of lying to him, taking advantage of him. I could penetrate no deeper. The feeling was absurd. I shrugged within myself, started up the jeep, and pulled away. The road dipped down a little farther on. Almost always the dirt there was wet and sometimes, in the spring or after a summer shower, it was impassable. Now it was bone dry, dust spiraling upward in my path, a physical shadow of that genie still swirling, trying to find its proper form, concrete and detailed, in my mind. I remembered when our friendship bad begun to shade away. It had not ended, stopped, come to some discernible conventional halt. It had simply ceased to be convenient, ceased to be in the forefront of those things Will D. and I had in mind. We had gone to the University, down to Baton Rouge. Will D. had spent four years in an extended and debilitating spree at the Deke house. I had started going with Victoria. Gee had kept on doing what he had done since he had come of age–virtually running the Wendell place singlehanded, answerable mostly to Mrs. Wendell since W. D. was lying sick at Schumpert Sanatorium by the time we graduated. And that thought, like a locomotive plunging through a wall of memories dismissed, carried with it a remembrance of W. D.’s death–a day I had as soon not called to mind. It had been cancer, and it had wasted him as if that dread name stood indeed for some pernicious invisible thing that fixes on us, tearing, clawing, shredding away our substance as quickly as we swallow it, leaving us fearsome scarecrows, thin brittle envelopes of skin and bone. Will D. and I had made it a point to visit him separately each day. We were both in service then, waiting to be called to duty. We had asked for time to stay with him, but W. D. would not hear of us waiting to fight until he had done with this, his last. We would bear witness to more than enough of dying as we went along, he told us, and since one dying lay before every man, his only absolute and indisputable debt to the world, there was no sense in making much of it. Treat death as a nuisance to be gotten past. Like jock itch, W. D. had said. But that had nothing to do with our separate visits. We had tried once to go and see him together, but we had found that we could not, for some reason, bear up if we were together. One or the other of us would begin to weep–not cry: no sound would come from us. We knew better than to let that happen. But we could not control our tears, and W. D. would become enraged. We were forbidden to weep for him. –When it’s over and past, youall can snivel for a little while if you can’t find anything better to do with your time. Then I expect you to get back to your purposes, whatever the hell they may be . . . As it happened, we were in Fort Polk when it ended. We rushed back, Will D. to see his mother who was with mine over at our place. I went to the hospital, proposing to make what are called Final Arrangements–just as if I knew what I was doing. When I got there, the room door was open, nurses and attendants moving in and out in the bustle that follows upon death. I thought they might have already sent W. D. over to Wellman’s Funeral Home, but they had not. In there he lay like the most fragile of dolls, his head thrown back, his hands awkwardly folded by someone else, his eyes closed, his mouth partially open as if in a wide and final yawn at the fundamental banality of death–or life. He had lost almost all his hair. What was left was thin and wispy, an iron gray mist hovering over his parchment skull. I fixed my eyes there, on his hair, because I needed at least another moment before I looked down at his face. It was then that I saw a black hand gently brushing that hair down, arranging it as tenderly as a woman might have done for one she loved well. Gee looked up at me as I stood there in my uniform, trying to bring myself to lower my eyes to W. D.’s face, to study it, to confirm beyond question that a fixture of my own life had gone on, to stand as honest witness that the sum of reality itself had been diminished by the measure of this strong jovial hard-driving whit called William Dunlop Wendell II. Then my eyes met Gee’s. His living anguish was worse than the spectacle of death that lay stretched between us. I felt more pity, more compassion for Gee than for W. D., whose travail was done. I wanted to reach out to Gee, put my arms around him and say that the anguish was one that pierced us all three, him, Will D. and me the same. But I did not. I couldn’t. Something had happened. Something had changed in me without my even knowing it. Before, I would have been comforting one of my dearest friends. Now I would be embracing a negro. Just then I knew for the first time that I was, God help me, an adult. I do not have the slightest notion how it happened. It is easy enough to say that the climate of opinion in the parish–indeed, in all the South–took innocent children and made them come to believe that Great Distinction fabricated by their fathers in order to enjoin obedience and enforce dominance at the cost of democracy and equality. There are times when I wish that the churnings of creation were as simple as that. If the world-knot could be unraveled by application of such comic-book formulae, we might all be wise and happy. Mightn’t we? But it is not so, and positivist babblings will not make it so. Standing by the emptied body of an old man I had loved, across from a black man I loved still, I was not confronted with a problem, either social or personal. There was no problem at all. Rather a mystery had befallen me. A mystery as profound and embracing and irreducible as that which wrenched our first parents from their dream when, in their awful new wisdom, they looked and saw that they were naked. I had turned and walked away then, leaving behind, from an appropriate distance, some words neither better nor worse than I might have used in good faith rather than bad. I told myself that Will D. and his mother might need me, and that I must do what had to be done at the funeral parlor as quickly as I could. The war was waiting and we had so little time. I had believed it at that moment, and I had gone on believing it up to that very day I found myself driving toward Gee’s place with Billy Wendell’s business on my mind. Then Gee’s house rose up out of the woods before me on the left, and I promptly put out of my mind for the moment what I had just remembered for the first time in over thirty years. To see the place that way, bands of thin sunlight cutting through the permanent green domes of live oak and magnolia, was a shock. It had not changed. Nothing had been added. Nothing had been taken away. I had been ruminating since the night before on time past, on what had been good and what had been lost. On Victoria and Will D., on old W. D. and my mother–on the very structure of my own life, chipped and cracked and falling away into the abyss of time with each day passing, with each other life impingent on my own moving from this world into the mode of non-existence. Now I sat facing a palpable chunk of my past, glimmering in autumn sunlight as if it had been lifted up, translated, from the mere accidental plane where weather and the worm and the heaviness of time claim, and deposited into a realm in every way identical to that past save for its lastingness. It was a wide shallow rough-planked house of cypress with a long low porch on the front and windows tall enough for a man to walk through. Broad enough to allow a transient breeze into the house on a summer evening. The porch was built of long thick cuts of heart-of-pine and the roof slanted down so that an exceedingly tall man had to bow to avoid its edge. The shingles were cedar. So far as I knew, aside from the shingles, nails, and a metal sink, everything in the house had come from this land. I was parked then, still staring at the house I had helped to build. It took a moment before I realized that the single difference I could make out was the trees. The oaks and magnolias, the sycamores and gums were forty and more years old. Towering now, craggy branches interlocked, a good century of growth and struggle still before the hardiest of them, because two seventeen-year-olds and a twenty-seven-year-old had somehow not realized how large they would become, and had planted them too close. I was stupefied, bewildered, to see what those boys and that man had done so long ago. He came out to the porch then. Walking slowly, carefully, deliberately, as if each step required an infinity of exact calculations. He stopped at the top of the broad pine steps and gazed out at the jeep and at me. I met his gaze as best I could, knowing that I must speak first. I who was breaking this morning’s peace must explain why by breaking the thirty years’ silence between us as well. But I had come unprepared. I had dawdled and dreamed on my way, harking back to the past–all for the sake of the genie who now stood only yards away on a plank porch with substance and form, looking into my eyes noncommittally as if he suspected that I might be a drummer about to alight from his car with a valise full of medicines good for all the ailings of man or beast. But I was a drummer who had not prepared his spiel and who, along his way, had come to wonder if his wares were such to tempt this customer’s trust in the virtue of what he had to offer. I was given a moment longer. From behind the house, a feist came running, yapping, falling and rolling in the dry autumn grass, and after him a little black girl in a blue dress. The dog had but three legs. A clumsy bandage was bound around the stump of one hind leg, but the loss seemed to hamper him not at all. The child’s hair was carefully tied up in those small gatherings clenched with strips of cloth that one used to see more often. She ran past the tumbling dog, waved at the silent presence on the porch, and made off under the oaks down toward a pond from which, ages ago, I had drawn my supper time and again. It was time then, and past. I got down out of the jeep and started toward the porch. It was perhaps thirty yards away, but as I walked, for some reason I became conscious of aches and pains and muscles pulling, all of which had been with me for so long that they were ordinarily no longer even objects of cognition. Anyhow, I strode across the bare yard as quickly as I could. I had no intention of raising my voice, of calling out to Gee from a distance. Perhaps he did not recognize me. I was not even sure that I would have recognized him had I not known that this was his house, were he not standing there now in such a way as to announce wordlessly that he was standing on his property awaiting someone who had chosen to come there, to interrupt his morning and whatever he was accustomed to filling it with. –Gee . . . –Albert Sidney . . . No one had called me that in thirty years. It was what my mother called me when she was displeased. Will D. had called me that because he was saddled with a double name, too. And Gee. I was on the steps of his house then, the brown and white feist having discovered me, squeaking and wheezing from a distance, hysterical in his small way that a stranger had come upon the place and that he, as usual, was not large enough to challenge him. The girl, at a distance, laughed at the dog’s anger, his feints toward me, his rapid backings-away. She paid me no mind at all. As for Gee, he was looking at me with mild disinterest, as if I were a swatch of cloud in an otherwise clear sky or a dust devil in the road stirred by a passing car and sure to fade as quickly as eyes set upon it. I put out my hand and Gee took it, shook it absently in that soft uncommitted grasp that elderly blacks, unaccustomed to being offered white hands, almost invariably use. –Billy come by last night. Said you be along, Gee said, standing in front of his doorway now, offering neither hospitality nor discourtesy. Neither acknowledging nor denying my right to be standing on his land, his porch. His. Not rented or leased or held in a sharecropper’s precarious possession. His. –Well, I said. –We need to sit down and talk. You want to sit out here? That did not recall him to his manners, because he had none. He knew well enough what manners were, had always known, and had eschewed them almost as he had put aside talking. Whatever small obeisance he had made in the direction of such things had vanished long ago. From years, decades, of living alone. –Come on in, he said, and turned slowly to go ahead of me. As he entered the darkness of the house, I paused for a fraction of a moment to look out toward the distant trees where the child was playing with the feist I could not judge her age. She was not the infant Rowena had conjured up, but she was no woman, either. She was surely within the protection of the Statute. I went on inside. There was first and at once the smell of coal oil. I had not smelled anything closer to that scent than diesel fuel in years. Gee was turning up a lamp that barely flickered, and as he leaned over it, I tried to complete the figure of my genie. I saw an elderly black man, hair the color of morning frost. He was deep in his sixties. He looked much older. I could tell that his teeth were mostly gone and the sly indifferent desiccation of age had hollowed his cheeks, rheumed his eyes. Still, when he was done with the lamp, he stood erect, his shoulders squared and strong as if he had just heard something threatening and was about to turn and meet it. His hands were too large for his arms, thin now like those of a boy, muscles gone to twine, the skin wrinkled and puckered and blotchy, insignia of age. –I got coffee or a little bit of handmade liquor. –Whatever. –Mostly I leaves it alone till it comes dark. But today . . . –All right. He went over to a large rough-hewn hutch and took down one of five or six Ball jars, uncapped it, and poured a clear fluid into coffee cups. Then he went over to the sink and pumped two jelly glasses full of well water. While he was at the sink, I looked around the place. It was spare and clean with the feeling of a refectory. There was a long table built of the same heart-of-pine that made up the flooring of the porch. It sat parallel to an enormous fireplace of rough red bricks that was big enough to braise a hog in. Over the hearth there were ranked half a dozen guns. I could make out the bottom piece, an old Browning over-and-under with silver chasing around the receiver and trigger guard. I did not need to read the worn initials engraved there. I knew what they were: W. D. W. The other guns were just as fine. Clean, old, worn smooth, each bearing the patina of age and frequent use. Gee came back to the table and set down the cups and the jelly glasses. His eyes met mine and I saw that he had mastered over the years an expression of equanimity that as a young man he had lacked. Now his face was indecipherable. His contempts and his affections, his hopes and plans, if he had any, were not there. Nothing was revealed. He sat down in a chair across the table from me, his face just beyond the steady cone of light thrown by the coal-oil lamp. I took a drink of the whiskey. It was too early for that sort of thing, but Lord it was fine. You could tan a coonskin in it. I wanted to reach for the cold well water, but Gee wasn’t having any. If he wasn’t neither was I. –That letter from the government, huh? –They’ve been calling down here, worrying Billy. –They got no cause to trouble him. It ain’t got anything to do with him. If they got to fret somebody, they ought to be talking to me. –I expect they will be. One way or another. Gee drank more of his whiskey and stared out the door. The cur was going for an ancient guinea hen out near the road. It would not catch the bird. The girl was watching the chase, showing neither concern nor disinterest. –Reckon you could just cut em off? I don’t need em and I don’t want em. They ain’t got nothing for me. If it cost something, I’ll pay you. –Gee, it’s not going to work that way. They think Billy’s doing you something. –Shit, he said after a moment. –Them lowdown sonsabitches. –Look, all you’ve got to do to get shut of them is take some medal they want to give you . . . They’ll pay your way up to Washington city, and . . . He almost jumped to his feet. I must have flinched in surprise to see him move so quickly. He paced back and forth, up and down the length of the room. I could see why he had moved with such measure and deliberation before. As he paced so rapidly, he staggered, swaying from side to side, each step appearing to be the last before he sprawled on the floor. I started out of my chair to keep him from falling, but his voice kept me in my seat. –Sonsabitches. I hadn’t ought to of gone when they sent for me. I knew it then. I knew I hadn’t ought to of gone. I could of made off in them woods and they’d never of found me . . . –Well . . . –I knew it. Just as sure as I set my foot out of this parish, it was gonna go bad and get worse. Long as I was here, it was all right . . . –You want to tell me what . . . – . . . but Will D. was gone, and you was gone. Everybody I knew was gone. Your daddy was passed on and Mr. W. D. had went and died on me, and it was all that talk about the Germans and the Japs . . . seemed wrong to just hang around. –I know . . . –No you don’t. It wasn’t no war of mine. Hell, it wasn’t even yours and Will D.’s I didn’t give a shit what them Germans did to them Frenches. I don’t know that I even cared . . . His voice trailed off, but I could finish the thought. He wasn’t sure he gave a damn about the U.S., either. It was Egypt. It had always been Egypt for a black man. The place where he was, where he had come to himself, where he had been born and would most surely die. But not his place. At least not a millimeter beyond these acres, this parish–if he could even stretch it that far. I could understand that. – . . . but youall was out there in it, and it didn’t seem right to . . . –I never asked you what happened over there. He looked at me as if he couldn’t believe the question. –That’s right. You never did, he said at last. –What happen over there? I tell you what happen. They kill Will D., they hurt you, and they did for me. That’s what happen over there. Now the velocity of his pacing had increased. He would reach the end of a circuit down at the far end of the dark room, beyond the reach of the light. Then he would stumble forward into the light again, off balance, failing to sprawl only because he was falling in all possible directions at once. –Did for you? I asked. –What . . . ? –Sure, he grated. –Maybe you could just write it up and send it off to that sonofabitch in Washington city. Listen, Albert Sidney, you write that motherfucker to stay clear of me . . . I ain’t killed a man in over thirty years. But he hadn’t ought to try me, hear? I said nothing, and he made one more circuit and sat down. He was tired, sweating even in the cool autumn morning. He finished his whiskey and poured us both some more. –I don’t want to see em. I don’t want to talk to em. Can you see to that for me, Albert Sidney . . . ? –I don’t know, I said honestly. –They seem uncommonly anxious . . . Billy said they were talking about the Congressional Medal. Gee, what the hell did you do over there? What happened? Even with all this civil rights horseshit, they’re not going to reach down into Caddo Parish and hand that medal out to the first . . . – . . . first nigger they set eyes on? Bet your ass they ain’t. Not this nigger. He was calmer then. He leaned back in his chair, his ice-white brows knitted as if he were trying to discern something that lay in the darkness behind me, something that I could not have seen even if I had turned–something I could not even have guessed at. It occurred to me that I had seen his eyes, his face like that before, searching the barren branches of winter trees, scrutinizing a cut-over field of grain. He had always seen the game before Will D. or me. Not usually. Always. I wondered at that moment what the game might be. Gee began talking then. Not especially, not even necessarily to me. I believe he was reciting it all to himself again for the thousandth time just to refuel the anger, the fury. To justify once more his isolation, his turning away from the course of ordinary life. He wanted to feel again that tincture of acid in the blood that he had held–or that had held him–imprisoned for so long. Or perhaps he was telling it aloud this time as he had told it voiceless over and over before, no Will D. or Albert Sidney to hear it. Telling it loud and clear enough then for Will D. to hear it amidst that long slumber from which only Christ Jesus will awaken us; declaiming it so fiercely that even a sleepwalker such as I had to hear it amidst my living slumber. –They took me in and we done all that basic. Running around and climbing up walls and marching up and down. It was all of us colored in the company, see, and after they had done run us to death, they let us shoot. I come up expert first time out. I could of done it with a rag tied over my eyes. Highest score in regiment. So they called down the captain and I done it again. And twice more. Captain asked me, Boy, where did you learn to shoot like that? Louisiana, I told him. Caddo Parish. Shit, he said, and walked off. I reckon it was gonna be a rifle company for me. Maybe even a sharpshooter, sniper. He sipped some more whiskey and laughed. –Yeah, well, so they go and put me in commissary. They got me cutting open boxes of pears and stacking cans of cling peaches and lima beans. Shot every white boy at Fort Benning out of the box, and they go and set me to keeping stores. He got up and walked to one of the tall windows and threw back the heavy canvas he used for drapery. –I was a shot, he said musingly. –It wasn’t anything I couldn’t do with a gun, was it? –No. –And they go and put me on as help. You hear? Help. Niggers cook and clean up. White men shoot. You don’t want to trust no nigger with a gun, and if you was to, he shoot off his own foot either to get out of service or cause he couldn’t help it. Ain’t that so? –You’re not asking me that. –No, Gee said. –I ain’t asking you. But I thought about it all the time. Couldn’t get it off my mind. Till we come into Belgium. I done thought over it on the boat. Let them bastards do what they want. Send all the white boys out there to get blowed up and gunned down. It was a favor to me. I was in the rear eating good and cleaning up and serving an officer’s mess. I wasn’t no soldier. I was help. Yessir, some more coffee? No sir, I don’t believe we got no Antony and Cleopatra. How about a Dutch Master? Wasn’t nothing I could do about it. If they was gonna hand me a white jacket and a long-handled spoon instead of a rifle, it was their army. Surely wasn’t mine. There was a sound at the door then. It was the girl. She came in with some kind of tray. There were plates on it covered with foil. –Miz Loreen say youall be talking the whole day away and ain’t put nothing on the stove. Gee nodded. –Miz Loreen sends something down most days. You go ahead, baby, he said to the girl. –Fix you something off that tray and go eat on the porch. Judge Finch and me got to talk. Did you want a bite of that food, Albert Sidney? –No, but you better haul down another one of those fruit jars, I told him. –You like that? Imported. Lee Polk’s stuff. Come from over by Mississippi. Couldn’t do better myself I know. I used to try. –Compliments to Mr. Polk. –Best pain killer in the world. I know about that, too. He brought over another jar. This time he didn’t bother about the water. Outside, the sun was well past noon, beginning its long fall toward east Texas. Gee drank, and his eyes drifted away. –I got myself up early that day, he said, still talking as much to himself as to me. –They had me on the breakfast shift, and I had chipped beef going. You remember chipped beef? –Shit on a shingle . . . –Nicest thing they called it. I been trying to come up with some kind of a sauce for it. Standing out at the flap of the tent thinking about it. Snow coming down like you never seen it around here. Lord, cold and dark. Right outside Losheim, where it was. Losheim . . . I ain’t thought of it in thirty years. It was maybe six o’clock in the morning and the other help was coming in and somebody seen we done run out of powdered eggs, so the beef was it, and when the troops started coming in, it was gonna be hell. But I had got this barbecue sauce in mind and I went back inside and reached up for a big bottle of Tabasco. –Which is when the first shell landed out in the mess area of this great big tent we was in. Blowed all the tables and benches to hell. People was trying to climb under the stove, metal racks full of canned goods and all was falling over on top of folks. Somebody tump over a forty-gallon can of hot cooking oil and one of em who’d crawl under the stove come up with his shirt and hair on fire. Then the next round come down over by the motor pool, and after that here come one after another about every thirty seconds or so. All of us kitchen help run outside, and here come all these white boys hauling ass as fast as they could from the lines to the east. Said the whole damn German army coming right behind em. Said it was old Rumstead with all the panzers you ever saw, coming down full tilt and loaded for bear . . . He was grinning then, remembering those broken rifle companies running across the snow, terrified by the sudden resurrection of an army supposedly too far gone to mount an offensive, presumed to be hardly more than a wrecked hulk bled white by casualties and troops sent to the eastern front. Gee had not been good enough for one of those American rifle companies, and now there they came, running past him in terror and disarray. –I thought they was bullshitting. You know how they was about a little artillery. Except here come another shell right in on top of us. Hit the CP. And it wasn’t no .88 neither. It was a tank round. Then all of a sudden it got real quiet. You could hear the snow falling in them tall larch trees, branches breaking under the weight of the snow falling. The big stuff had stopped coming in, and them fine front line boys had passed on by us. All you could hear was a moan or a cry from where them shells had landed. –Then you could hear em coming. Them big treads rattling, them engines. Out on the edge of Losheim. Lord, it was a panzer brigade coming right at us with infantry behind. You could look down the slope from where we was and see the snow covered with em. I counted sixty, maybe eighty tanks. Sweet Jesus, I thought. It ain’t no brigade. It’s a armored division. Lord knows how many troops, but I know they darkened the snow. And I recollect thinking to myself, Here I am nothing but help and they gonna send the whole entire German army right down the pipe at me. So I look around and everybody had done cut out by then. There wasn’t nothing left in the motor pool. What the help hadn’t made off with, the white boys had stole. Everybody was on the road to Malmédy, and there wasn’t no officers could do anything to slow em down. Them white boys done seen the Wehrmacht up close, and they was convinced. They was what did they say? –withdrawing to a more easy to defend line. Hell, running like sonsabitches what they was doing. –I watched the last of em go, and I said, Well, son, you purely on your own now. You can run, but it ain’t no place to hide. They gonna go through what’s left of this regiment like shit through a goose. Wasn’t no sense to stand there, so I reckoned to light out for the woods behind. Them panzers wasn’t going through there, and maybe that meant the infantry would kind of ease past em too. Then, about half-way out, it come to me I didn’t have no rifle. They hadn’t issued us no rifles over there. Reckoned we wasn’t gonna fight, and how you gonna carry a M-1 when they got you stacking cans and mixing sauces? Next thing you know, I was back by the CP where one of the .88’s had landed. Tent shredded, snow red and pink and black, bodies all over. I could still see some of our folks running in the distance ahead of the first wave of panzers. I could see some of em dropping, too. Them tanks was maybe a half a mile away and coming on like a grass fire. And there I was. With a long-handled spoon in one hand and that damned bottle of Tabasco in the other. –Up shit’s creek, I said. –With a long-handled spoon. He couldn’t help laughing, shaking his head at that old-time predicament of his. For a moment it was as if we had been enjoying days like this for all the years past. Then that damned dismal feeling of bad faith closed in again and I drank some whiskey to push it away. –That CP looked like chipped beef, Gee said slowly. –I knew some of em had worked in there. Couldn’t see nothing I recognized. Looked like chili sauce. Blood with lumps in it. One radio receiver blowed all to hell but still running on. Traffic from down around Echternach all the way north to Monschau about fifteen miles away. Some fool captain had got hold of the mike somewhere and kept asking wasn’t it a local feint, could they get some armor over there to turn it? While I was listening, I believe it come to em this wasn’t no kind of feint at all. Them Germans was betting it all on one throw, and they had done put our asses in a sling. –Lord, I said. –What? –You were smack in the middle of the Bulge. Battle of the Ardennes. Close to Christmas, 1944. –I was sure as hell in the middle of something. I didn’t know they had give it a name. I pitched around that CP, trying not to step on the dead, looking for any damn kind of gun to carry off to them woods. And back of a desk with a dead man lying across it, I come on a BAR. Lord knows what it was doing there. Maybe some poor bastard out of a weapons company had wanted him a cup of coffee with a buddy at CP. Nice safe place. Whoever got hisself killed in a regimental CP? Never mind. I had me a BAR then and a bag of ammunition. Did wonders for my spirit. Piss on them Germans. After so long a time in the army, I had me a gun. I was all right. Now all I had was to pick me out a nice place to die. Gee leaned back, his eyes closed, his hands on the edge of the plank table as if the effort of recollection itself was draining him. But after a moment, his voice came back, warm and strong. –I had done give up on them woods. The tanks was down in the streets of the town, and I couldn’t make it halfway. And that was all right, fine. Cause the worst was past. I wasn’t gonna die like no damned help. You know what I mean? –Yes. –So I come out of that wrecked tent and it was strange. The snow had started in again and it was already filling up the shell holes and covering the blood. Wasn’t a soul around. Nobody. Where I was, I could look right down into the streets of that town. Here come a Tiger with troops all around it, some riding on it, all of em going like they had to make up time. Quick marching through the town square, some moving right, some going left. Not a voice to be heard. Just them tank motors and treads and them jackboots hitting cobbles. Maybe twelve tanks down there now. The rest had cut north and gone around to cut off and catch whatever was running and walking and crawling up that Malmédy road. Then six or seven of them tanks went south and some angled off toward the northwest. And I saw what was gonna happen. One Tiger tank and a couple of squads bearing right up the slope at me. It was gonna be that tank there and them troops. And me. You know what I thought? Right then I thought, These is long odds. But if Will D. and Albert Sidney was along . . . I remember nausea sweeping through me, but the whiskey held it down. I got up casually and stretched, bemused at the hollowness of my own voice. –You reckon we could have done em? –Hell, done em and walked away. I done em by myself. I just . . . didn’t walk away. Then Gee paused, looked up at me past the soft light of the coal-oil lamp. –Now I think about it, I don’t know. I reckon you better hear the rest of it. Then you can decide. –Decide what? –You’ll see. I nodded and let it pass. I had surely not come over here expecting to spend the day, but that was what it was coming to, and that was all right. It was thirty years late, but it would have to do. And anyhow, I was a retired man. I could go where I pleased and stay just as long as I liked. –Fore them Germans come in, I had done gone over every foot of that place. Looking for a hide-out, looking for something that would do a tank. Truth is, I didn’t know what would do a tank. They hadn’t taught us nothing. This here was regiment. Cook house, communications, motor pool, and operations. All of it blasted to hell. Radio men, mechanics and cook-house niggers, and what wasn’t dead had done run off. –I believe I would have got me a bed sheet for camouflage and made out for those woods. Gee laughed at that. I wondered afterward if he was laughing because he knew better–or at the notion of me under a white sheet. –Forget it. Time I’m talking now. They was in the perimeter. Point men with them Tommy guns of theirs looking this way and that, then that panzer come rolling right on in, parked next to the CP. Me, I’d found me a blowed-up half-ton truck and slid under it with my BAR. Wait and see. Well, they poked all around till it come broad daylight. Then I guess it was tea time or whatever Germans have, cause they come up with boxes of C-rations and stuff out of what was left of the cook tent and lit em a fire and sat down to breakfast. Seemed like the tank commander was in charge and he wasn’t nothing but a sergeant. He was loafing around, taking the air, watching em brew up our coffee. –You mean the tank crew had . . . –You got it. Unzipped and stepped out. Just like snails out of the shell. Didn’t even post no guards. They reckoned the Amis had high-tailed it and was halfway to Malmédy by then. –I’ll be damned. –You ain’t heard nothing. They had got hold of my big pot of chipped beef and put it over a fire, and they was dishing it out and slopping it down like it was prime gumbo. Wasn’t nobody complaining, neither. I just laid in the snow under that truck watching em put away my breakfast. I thought, Hell, if I was out to be a damned cook, I’d go on over and switch armies. Maybe I could get some appreciation. But then I come to think, Well, they white, too, and I can’t even understand a word they saying, and if they was fixing to do me something ugly, I wouldn’t know it. He paused then and looked past me out of the door. In a few minutes the sun would be far enough down to illuminate the interior of the cabin. The space around us was already beginning to glow and the shadows were separating out, revealing themselves as presences. A photo on the pine mantle of an anonymous old black couple–Gee’s parents, I supposed–and another one of Gee, young and strong, standing behind, above, two boys whose expressions suggested some part of the delirium they must have been feeling at that moment as between them they held up the head and rack of a twelve-point buck. One of the boys was Will D. The other, it seemed, was me. There were the three of us posing beside a biplane, an old crop-duster Will D. had bought and learned to fly. In the picture, we have just come back from our first flight over Caddo Parish. I am exultant. Gee looks amazed, bewildered. At a corner of the mantle, framed in a five-by-seven world, we stood almost lost amidst the stringers of perch we had caught nesting in the shallows of Wallace Lake. And the largest photo of all: we sit around this very table plucking doves. My fingers sought and found in the table’s smooth worn surface the initials we had all carved in it that same day. But Gee wasn’t feeling nostalgic. His jaw was hard and his eyes stared unblinking out into the glow of the falling sun. –Way it turned out, maybe that’s what I should of done. Just walked out and yelled Kamerad and seen what would of happened . . . That irked me. –I expect I can tell you what would have happened. What happened that same day to a hundred paratroopers who surrendered on the road to Malmédy . . . Gee raised his hand. –Don’t say too much. Wait till you see the bottom of the bowl fore you go to praising the soup. I shut up. It was his story. I had waited too long for the hearing to go glossing it along the way. –I didn’t mess around. Them panzer boys looked nervous out of their box, and I figured they was going back in just as soon as they got done with my chipped beef. So I come out from behind that truck and run real quiet over to where they had some broke-down troop carriers. Been waiting out by the motor pool for a week for new parts. Thing was, they had a little armor on em and a firing slit here and there. One of em was broadside to that tank, maybe fifty, sixty yards away. Too far to chunk grenades, but close enough. Yes Lord, close enough for that big heavy clumsy BAR. I could see what he saw then. I could see that hulk of gray-green steel with a white-trimmed black cross on the turret. I could see the crew and infantry outlined against the vast silent woods behind, squatting around the fire, watching the failing snowflakes melt in the air above it. I could even see Gee climbing into the troop carrier inch by inch with cold numb hands, hefting the BAR with surgical care lest metal touch metal and he be discovered. I could feel the chill inside the carrier, see the old brittle snow drifted up in its corners, initials scratched into its brown paint, initials of men who had died or been wounded weeks, months ago in our murderous grand tour across Europe. I seemed to be sitting in that powerless ruin staring out at the little gathering of enemy troops, thinking, There must be a hundred and eleven good reasons to let them pass unhindered and then hit out for the woods and search for an American unit. Gee smiled at my sigh. Now his face was illuminated by the evening sun. For a moment, he looked much younger. –Wisht you been there, huh? When I got up in that carrier and threw down on them chumps eating my beef, I thought, Well, it took all kinds of particular hell, but here I am finally got to be a soldier. I wasn’t help no more. He fell silent then, still savoring it. Even at this remove, it still belonged to him: a memory entered into the flesh, carried to the heart to lodge there in its fullness as deeply and as permanently as love or hope or the dubious certainty of glory, salvation, itself. –I took out the panzer crew first. See, I had it all figured out. The troops were in them white winter coveralls and them tankers stood out like squirrels in an empty tree. Black Panzer Grenadier uniforms. Real pretty. First burst took all three of em down and holed that big pot of chipped beef. Rest of em froze for just a second, but I didn’t. I had waited too damn long to be a soldier to go wasting time. I just emptied that first magazine across em. Took down eight to ten. You know that BAR. Man hated to carry it, but when push come to shove, there he was: a one?man army. The rest of em took to running behind the tank except for one big old boy who come right at me. I blew him on back across the fire, and then I watched that tank turret. They had em a machine gun mounted on it, and if any of em got to it, I reckoned them slugs would go through the troop carrier like a hot knife through butter. But it stayed quiet awhile. I wasn’t in no hurry. Where was I gonna go? And they didn’t have no idea how many of me there was. Sure enough, just waiting, I got me two more. He was excited then, evoking that long-gone winter day that was slipping away from us at unimaginable velocity to join with all the other distant conflicts that we glorify simply because we have survived them and because to remember them as anything but heroic would make the remembrance of freezing cold and death and mutilation too awful to bear even at this distance, even when their last echoes sounding across the foreshortening of history place them nearer to Fredericksburg or the Somme or the retreat of the Grand Army from Moscow than to us. As I watched, that damned gift of the hormones that makes us men and makes us do what men all yearn to do whether we are honest and introspective enough to admit it or not, transfigured the old man they called Uncle Gee. That careful distracted distant oriental expression of his was gone, and all the rest–gray hair, stoop, wrinkles–seemed mere accretions, accidents generally put upon old men. For our injustice. According to the ordinance of time. As if still, even now in the midst of this glowing autumn of our lives, our reality, what was real about us, remained our youth, our courage, our willingness to make payment of our puny uncertain lives in advance if only we could believe, imagine, that the prize we would never see would have been worth it. –From then on, old son, it come to be root hog or die. I whacked me one behind the CP tent and right about then another one got me in the leg from behind. I kind of dropped like in the movie shows, twisted around in the snow and caught him coming in to finish me. Blowed off his white hood and his head sprayed all over the snow. I had to roll then, cause another one was shooting from the front of the tank. I got in close and put the BAR under the tank, and when I seen his legs, I cut em off and gave him a couple more when he fell. Then I thought it was done and like a fool I stood up to see just what I had got done. One of em hit me in the back from all the way to the woodsline. I believe I got him too. I had got fifteen, maybe twenty of em, and the rest lit out. So I leaned up against that tank to see what they’d done me. –Much pain? –Naw. More scared than hurting. You know how it is. When you really hurt, you don’t feel nothing for a while. I was bleeding, but the blood froze as quick as it run. The one in the back worried me. It had come out under my arm, and I couldn’t hardly move it. I thought, That’s all right. I done what I was supposed to do, what they wouldn’t let me do before. It’s over now. Army’s gonna come back and they’ll fix me up and I’m gonna be dishing chipped beef again. But, Lord, I did have my day. I leaned back and sipped some whiskey. Somehow I had thought it would be worse. Gee had the medal coming. Men had gotten it for less. It was absurd that he had had to wait so long but, as he said, he had been help. Maybe it had required the passage of time and some form of general enlightenment for the country to recognize what help could do when the kitchen was blown away. The whole thing was simple. I would counsel Gee to put aside his resentment and fear, go to Washington, accept the medal and whatever belated fustian and panoply might go with it. It was surely his due, however late. I could make no correlation between a bit of bronze hanging on a ribbon and twenty German lives on a freezing winter morning in Belgium over thirty years ago, but it is what we have always done and I suppose it is all right. It seemed I was going to be able to do a service for him and for Billy as well, and send the bureaucrats back to their musty files to determine who else they had lost in the course of the years. But I made a mistake. I said: –You didn’t come out too bad. I’ve got a skinful of good Krupp steel myself . . . Maybe it was what I said. Maybe it was my tone of voice. –Haw, Gee rasped, the failing sun shining back at me out of his crimson eyes. The humor, the youth had vanished utterly. His face was that of an old man again. Not that of a careful distracted old man already studying on his last end. Rather that of an old man bereft not only of youth and strength and future, but of hope, belief, any kind of faith at all. It was the face of an old man shot through with fury and hatred as adamantine and unalterable as that ordinance of time that brings us here and takes us hence. It was a face to fear and turn from. But I couldn’t turn, you see. Not then. Not again. I had turned from him once in that hospital beside that bed that had borne the poor remains of one we had both loved. I had turned then and left him there with the dead. To have done it once was an infamy; to do it twice I reckoned must be the death of the soul. –Haw, he laughed again harshly, dragging himself to his feet as if in the next instant he would throw himself across the table at me. But instead he turned up the wick of the lamp to its fullest even though the fading sun still filled the room. –You want to see? I’ll show you. I’m gonna show you . . . He stood up straight and began to unbuckle his belt. He unfastened his trousers and let them down slowly, turned a little to the side as if he were determined not to let me see what he had to show bit by bit. Then, trousers on the floor, he opened his shirt and turned back into the unrelenting shameless light. –Christ, I heard myself say. There was nothing more to say and, if there had been, I could not have choked it out. There before me pitted and scarred, puckered and broken and poorly sewn, was the body of a man who had no business being alive, much less walking, functioning like the rest of us. His belly was warped and twisted, ribs broken and badly healed, the dark flesh indented, gouged out and piled like refuse from craters on the shadowed side of an alien moon. Not a single hole turned glossy and given the patina of years, but ten, twelve, maybe more–any one of them seeming surely a death to nature. And that was the least of it. His thighs were barely thicker than the bones encased in that riddled skin and torn muscle. Whole chunks of flesh were gone. There were obvious grafts and overgrafts, results of countless operations. There were stitches, tiny light patterns like the delicate bones of small fish running in rich profusion line by line, line over line, across skin of no certain color rendered an awful simulacrum of pale pink healthy tissue by the glow of the lamp, the faltering light of the setting sun. There were patches, lumps, hillocks, and ridges of bright purple, veins and arteries erupting toward the surface of that tortured skin, making along with the rest an explicit relief map of agony so detailed that it numbed the senses more surely than Roy Polk’s whiskey. I must have uttered some sound, some mumbled word of compassion. –Hold up, Gee cut me off, his voice cold and ancient and metallic. –Hold up. We wasn’t raised to be soft. We killed in our time. And cleaned what we killed and looked straight at it, huh? That’s what kind of people we been. Then, before I was even able to manage what I had seen, bring myself back within the ambit of that control Gee was demanding, requiring of me, he lowered his shorts. I looked, because I had no choice. As he said, That’s what kind of people we’ve been. And when, in the streaming golden light of that October sun, I had done my duty, looked upon what he insisted I see, I fainted. –I’m sorry, I heard Gee saying from a long way off. –I just got myself carried away. It wasn’t no excuse for visiting it on you . . . You didn’t . . . I was back in the room then, lying on Gee’s bed. The bed he had been lying on night after night for thirty years and more. He was dressed and leaning over me with a wet cloth in his hand. –Listen, he was saying, anxiety, some tincture of guilty fear in his eyes, –You ain’t got no trouble with your heart, do you? I can walk up to Billy’s and use the phone and . . . I sat up, staring at him. –No, I said. –Nothing that I know about. Nothing yet. You walk up to the Wendell house? What I want to know is how in Christ’s name you got me onto this bed. –Carried you, he said frowning. –I ain’t no cripple. I stood up and found my way back to the table. As I did so, I saw the child lying asleep on an old cot or rollaway bed in the corner, the feist curled at her feet. I poured some whiskey and sat down, not looking at Gee, feeling the liquor so full and strong that I had to speak slowly and carefully in order to speak at all. –I’ll tell you this, I said, abashed by my voice’s quaver. –If they want to give you the goddamned capitol building and Fort Knox, I’m going to see you take them. I’m going up there with you, hear? And Billy’s going too because if he didn’t Will D. would whip his ass. And everybody with eyes and ears in Caddo Parish is going to know . . . –No, Gee said evenly. Not loudly or even argumentatively, just commandingly, finally. –You ain’t going to do anything like that. Not just because I say no, but because you ain’t gonna want to. You still ain’t seen the bottom of the bowl. I stared at him, my hand bearing the cup of whiskey still shaking. What else could there be? What else could he have to tell me? –See, it wasn’t the Germans done me this. –What, I started. –You said . . . –I said one in the leg and one in the back. The rest of it an American done . . . I turned off my key and shivered a little. I would have put the cloth top on the jeep had I expected to be out driving in the hours before dawn. But sensible older men are asleep then, not out on empty autumn roads half-drunk and despondent and cold. I could see a light on down at the far end of the house where the kitchen was. Loreen would be up already fixing breakfast for the children. I took a deep breath that seared my lungs. Chill fall air. The somber trees and vast vacant harvested fields were darkest gray. Some bird muttered in a nearby pin oak, and a ragged breeze picked up from the east. I climbed out of the jeep slowly and found myself walking across the empty fields as if I were on my way to meet Will D. and Gee before sunup on a hunt morning. Then I recalled myself, my time, my situation. I doubt I will ever be that tired again–until just before I will be tired no more. For some reason it occurred to me that Rowena would find I had not been home and would worry. Despite all, I did not want that. I made a note to call her. I did not want anyone, least of all someone entitled to my best love, to feel the isolation, the fear, the sorrow with which I had spent the long night. –Good Lord, Loreen said. –Youall have talked all day and all night too. Maybe you better not wait so long for the next visit. She kissed me and sat me down at her table and poured good hot fresh coffee. The children were not yet up and Loreen, in a blue terry cloth robe, went about her routine. She seemed neither happy nor sad. She was doing what she always did. –Is it all that serious? she asked me after a while. –What’s that, honey? I asked, trying to focus my attention. Loreen turned from the big eight-burner stove Billy had bought her years ago. It was enormous, but nearly lost in that cavernous kitchen that you almost had to yell across. She looked suddenly exhausted, and I noticed her robe hung on her as if she had lost weight. I believe I had never given serious thought to their marriage before that moment. A marriage in my time was like the weather. Within bounds, it might shift and change. It might be better or worse from time to time. But it was a fixture, a foundation for the lives of all of us. I had not known of a divorce among the men and women of my generation. No, that’s wrong, there had been one. An old friend at the bar who had, it seemed, lost self-control and given way to some strong strange passion. He had left his family, divorced his wife, and married his first cousin. After that, no one knew him, and his wife was treated with great tenderness and respect as a widow, one whose husband had passed away under a cloud. As I recall, he had moved to Gladewater across the Texas border where no one had heard of what he had done, where he might live something like a life. Billy’s and Loreen’s marriage was one of those that everyone took for granted. They had always made it seem as if neither of them would ever consider setting it down on some lawyer’s desk and walking away. They knew the cost of such a thing. There were the children, and deep habit too. They surely loved each other well enough. They fished together and went down to LSU football games with their friends and tended the place they both loved, and that was what their life was about. I say life–not lives. But not anymore. Now it seemed Billy Wendell had something else in view. And even professed to an orderly life, a sense of country decorum, the thirst for a predictable and decent way of doing things myself, I could not quite bring myself to damn him for looking at Terry Novis. Perhaps Loreen knew that, and it was such knowledge that had her drinking before dawn. She saw my eyes on the glass. Her smil |
