Leah, New Hampshire

by Thomas Williams

  Mr. Caswell was our mailman then, in 1943, and he still is, though he’s near compulsory retirement. He’s very slow, so that when he delivers we don’t get our mail until five o’clock in the afternoon, when I’m home from work. Sometimes he drops a letter or two along the way, and the kids in the neighborhood call him “Old Butterfingers.” My son, Davy, is too young to participate in the business of Mr. Caswell’s nickname—and perhaps, with the unexpected tact of children, none of them says it in Mr. Caswell’s presence, for he is a kindly man, unobtrusive, tolerated even by the neurotic collies that have overrun our town in recent years. To Davy, Mr. Caswell is “Mr. Caswell,” and at our never diminished. I’m glad Davy likes to greet him, because I find myself hesitant, even a little embarrassed, to say much to him. It’s on account of Ben. We’ve never talked about Ben in all those years. Although Mr. Caswell might like to, I think he may sense my embarrassment, and himself feel hesitant to speak of his son. If there is only a little mail for us, Mr. Caswell promises to bring more tomorrow, then smiles at Davy, nods at me, and walks on carefully, yet lightly for a man of his age. It seems strange to me to see him in the new official uniform with the blue Ike jacket—as though he were a veteran of a war I know he missed.

  In 1943, both Ben and I were in love with that war. And suddenly, sitting at home after work today, I remember something that happened to me on a September night of that year. I stood on top of a crude tower made of pine logs. The tower was on top of Pike Hill, which overlooks our town of Leah. I had just turned sixteen, and I was armed, not with the antiaircraft gun I would have chosen but with my Winchester .22 pump. Shells were scarce in those days, and I owned ten of them—just ten—each a little jewel of power. At home in my room, I would play with them, line them up on their primer ends and shake each one at my ear to hear the smokeless powder whisper from inside. Now they were where they belonged, inside my rifle. Identical, anonymous, one in the chamber and nine in the tubular magazine, they gave to my rifle the proper weight of danger. I was alone on the tower. The only light was from above, from the stars, and soft darkness came in on me from the side, as though I stood on a submerged rock in a warm lake. If it hadn’t been for the war I might have been a little afraid. What nonhuman creatures might swim, with leathery flippers, out of the darkness to slide against my legs? But the war precluded such complicated, peacetime nightmares. The war was bright and official, like ballistics.

  My duties were official, too, and I carried my loaded rifle—half toy, half deadly weapon—because one part of me, at least, could believe in the possibility of an enemy invasion of central New Hampshire. Witness all that adult effort with huge logs, a ladder and platform of dressed lumber, even a telephone line strung up through the pines and birches of Pike Hill. From eight o’clock until eleven that night, when Ben Caswell would relieve me, I was the Air Raid Watcher. If I saw or heard an airplane, I was to write it down in a little book that hung by the telephone, and describe its course and whatever else I could determine about it. If something really suspicious occurred—a sky full of parachutes, perhaps, or the drone of a hundred black Heinkel transports crossing, as they did in movies, a sky whose stars jerked ominously from side to side—I was to call Mr. Bemis, our Town Clerk, who was also Chief Air Raid Warden.

  What did happen that night was just outside the realm of any possibility I might have had in mind, and that may have been why it left me so emotionless. It was a very warm night, and the warmth gave it an odd depth and clarity, as though I could have heard someone talking over in Vermont. The dark pines below me seemed every so often to breathe out wind. I could hear them receiving the wind and moving with it, and then a slow gust would come folding up over me, gentle and warm as bathwater. I leaned against the wooden rail and aimed my rifle at imaginary planes; I saw a meteor, and wished it were a burning Zero or Focke-Wulf. Below me, down the hill where the maples and elms began, the window lights of Leah were slowly going out. Then I must have decided to get the binoculars from the telephone box. I had my rifle in my right hand, and I must have cocked it fully, so that the hammer (it was a Model 62, which had a hammer) wouldn’t obscure the rear sight. I must have forgotten to set the hammer back on half cock.

  There is a sort of instantaneous precision about accidents, especially accidents with guns. They start and they are over, and there doesn’t seem to be any middle part at all. There were sparks—the sky was full of sparks—but where was the explosion? I knew that I had been setting the rifle down, and then the explosion must have come, but it was like no shot I’d ever heard. It was more like one huge peal of a bell, a bell with no resonant aftertones to let me know that I had actually heard it, so that I wasn’t quite sure that I had heard it all. And all those sparks. I’d never shot a .22 at night before, and hadn’t known how much fire came out with the bullet. I just stood there for a moment, aware that my side itched—in the ribs on my right side. I don’t believe it ever occurred to me that I might have been shot, and in fact I wasn’t, but when I turned the flashlight on myself I found some interesting things. I say “interesting” because I’m sure it is the only way to describe my attitude then. There was a burned hole about as big as a fifty-cent piece—only elongated somewhat—in my shirt. My undershirt was dark at that place but not burned through, and the slight burn I received on my skin was no more than a vague red spot. I didn’t find out until later that night when I was home in my room that the bullet had actually gone beneath the folds of my shirt and come out near the breast pocket. Still, I did not tremble, nor did my pulse increase because of that discovery. In a way, I suppose, it’s useless to worry about a spent bullet, because by that time it’s got to wherever it was going. I did worry some about my mother’s ever missing that shirt and undershirt, which I put in the trash can, but if she did she never said anything about it to me.

  When Ben came to relieve me (our DeMolay chapter, a sort of junior Masonic order, had volunteered for this duty), we didn’t make much of my accident. I told him about it and showed him the hole in my shirt, but then we looked back at the sky, and soon I left for home. We were acting out bigger and better possibilities, and to have made too much of my little scrape with reality would have been to change the subject.

  We knew, both of us, that an airborne invasion of Leah was fairly unlikely. We both had National Geographic maps on the walls of our bedrooms, and we followed the war with little glass-headed pins. Sumatra, Java—the Battle of the Java Sea had been a frightening affair, even to us, because the Japanese seemed so invincible—Singapore, Dieppe. Gabriel Heater’s voice was as certain as God’s, and proclaimed doom to the Axis. We had been worried, but by September of 1943 we had no doubts about winning. We could forget the war for hours at a time, but we didn’t want to forget it, because I’m sure we believed that it would be through the war that we would grow up, grow into men who could have the experiences we wanted to have. How could we deserve the lovely girls we wanted until we had been to war and come back, like the heroes in The Saturday Evening Post? One had to have in one’s eye that virile gleam that looked across a peaceful garden and saw in memory the deaths of comrades. There was no civilian love in those days; “They’re either too gray or too grassy green,” sang the Andrews Sisters, and we believed what they sang.

  We didn’t have to man the watchtower; it hadn’t been taken seriously for a long time, and I’m sure Mr. Bemis had no desire to be waked up in the middle of the night. But he couldn’t say no to our patriotic gesture. He was a Mason, after all, and we were DeMolay. And this was a time when, upon the patriotic whim of the high school principal, the whole school might suddenly, in the middle of any day, have to march all around town behind the band, singing “God Bless America.”

  There was Eddie Kusacs, too, to remind us all that we should have been at war. Every once in a while—it could be a quiet school afternoon, and we’d be in study hall—there would suddenly appear outside the windows Eddie Kusacs’s great blue Marine F4U, its wicked radial engine screaming and
blatting in our ears, its inverted gull wings wheeling down between the trees. Then up and back and around he’d come, lower than some of the school windows, as though he were following the cinder driveway that led down around in back to the boiler room. The huge airplane seemed to be going too fast and too slow at the same time—too fast for anything in Leah, too slow for the noise it made. After a few passes, during which I’m sure we never breathed (we drank the sound; we were avid for that real noise), he’d come straight over the athletic field and drop a little yellow parachute about the size of a bushel basket. Then he was gone, flashing over a hill and out of sound, all that power suddenly gone out of the air.

  But how real that airplane was, and how we wanted it! We would all be out of our desks and at the windows, and each time it happened we felt that we would never have to go back, that somehow our lives had changed. When that violent machine hung in the air, we knew how inconsequential were the too familiar trees and streets of Leah. After it had gone, everything around us seemed tired; the dust in the sunlight of our brown study hall turned with a golden slowness. Then one of the teachers would go out and get the parachute, and we’d all file into the auditorium to hear what Eddie had written—usually best wishes to Mr. Skelton, the principal, and Miss Dube and some of the other teachers, and come on, boys, join the Marines. We’d all known Eddie. We’d known him when he came to school in a ’35 Plymouth coupe, and here he was, godlike in his deadly blue Corsair.

  The war was close enough to us; we were sixteen, and you could join the Navy or the Marines at seventeen. But what were we to do in the meantime? At least to me, we were living in a sort of limbo, a place where nothing much mattered, where we couldn’t get hurt because we could not believe this limbo to be a place where one was really mortal. And this, I suppose, accounted for my indifference to the tiny bullet that so nearly entered my side. It was only a .22.

  If anyone had asked me who was my best friend that year, I would have said Ben Caswell, and yet I wonder how much we actually liked each other. There were friends of mine I think I liked better but didn’t see as often. In some ways, Ben and I were too much alike. We were both rather bossy, and so we were always a little irritated by each other. If I wanted to cross the street, or take a shortcut on my bike, chances are Ben wouldn’t, and you couldn’t make him change his mind. Quite often we would go to the same place by different routes.

  Ben was tall and skinny and hard; he could knock a hole in you with his elbow. His face was long and plain and pale—slightly gray, like dishwater—and his hair, the color of gunmetal, was flat and unhealthy-looking. He’d had undulant fever for a long time, back in the third and fourth grades, and I remember him bringing his special milk to school in mason jars. He was strong enough, though. I could get him down, mainly because I was a little more compact, and thus quicker, but I always got bruised in the process, and once I had him pinned I was afraid to let him up. It can be very boring just holding somebody down.

  Ben got better marks in school than I did, and I tried to discount the importance of this, feeling I was just “mentally lazy,” as Mr. Skelton had once called me. I didn’t consider algebra, for instance, to be a discipline that might prove my brain unequal to Ben’s. I considered those who were good at it to be slightly mad, and their concentration upon its rigid difficulties rather inhuman. In any case, Ben was very good at this sort of thing; his homework was always done. Most of us didn’t care very much about homework, but Ben always did whatever he contracted to do. I considered this a lack of a sense of humor, and the teachers themselves didn’t seem to care as much as Ben did. Sometimes we would study our algebra or trigonometry together at my house. These sessions were mostly for my benefit, because, whatever the reason, I could hardly cope with things mathematical. Ben was appalled at the shortness of my span of attention.

  “Look,” he’d say. “You take the sine minus the cosine…” and with his words, so sober and knowledgeable, I would feel a weakness setting in, a strange, highly pleasant weakness in my legs and arms—euphoric, because everything became hilariously funny—and I’d look at an equation made up of things called sines and cosines and see in it elaborate scansions. One, without its pluses and minuses, went, “Sine, cosine, cosine, sine = cosine, cosine, sine, sine.” This I sang to the tune of “Yankee Doodle,” while Ben looked stern and disgusted. I thought it hysterically funny, and my arms turned so weak from laughter I couldn’t even hold a pencil. “Sine minus cosine!” Ben said, and I fell out of my chair onto the floor, screaming, “I’ll sign! I’ll sign anything! Just let me out of here!”

  For some reason, I found it impossible to take those steps, those intermediate little steps, toward what I wanted to be. I wanted to be grown-up and powerful right now—to be part of the war, part of the world. Ben took each step as it came, and really mastered it. His head was full of equations and ways to factor them. I never took the time. But I was a little stronger than Ben. Yes, I was; I could take him in a fight. Out on the street, I could take him down, but always I was fearfully aware of the difference between us, and I knew that what I took down to the dirt and held there was somehow more intelligent, more valuable, than I was.

  Ben had many ways of being irritating. His bike, for instance, and his loyalty to that monster. It had thirty-inch wheels, and the tires were about as big around as your thumb. These were irreplaceable, of course, and not just because of the war—where could anyone have ever found such oddities? And the rubber, in the few places where it showed through the friction tape, was very old, actually sticky to the touch. The rest of us had balloon tires.

  Between the girls’ entrance and the boys’ entrance to the high school was a cement sidewalk, and frost had heaved up one of the blocks so that it was canted at about a twenty-degree angle. Before school and after school, while the girls stood at their entrance and watched, we’d get on our bikes, head down the walk away from the building, and hit that ramp. Pete Kelly had the record jump—a good fifteen feet, marked in chalk with his name. Mine was nowhere near that, and Ben’s was less than mine; his excuse was that crazy giraffe of a bike. I always tried to get him to use mine—it was a prewar Elgin—but he never would. Once, when it was his turn to go, I tried again. “Here, take mine,” I said, in a rather unpleasant voice that was an insult to his bike. The other jumpers were standing around impatiently, making airplane noises, and I didn’t hear his answer. I reached for his bike and at the same time pushed mine toward him by the handlebars.

  With a short, violent move, he shoved my hand away.

  “Mine!” he said. “I’ll use mine!”

  “Okay, hammerhead,” I said.

  Sometimes his loyalty to that bike…No, the way he could bring up out of nowhere something that sounded like principle—this would enrage me. At the same time, I had to respect it, and that made it even more irritating. Here he was, with his narrow, washed-out face and lank, washed-out-looking hair, and he could be as recalcitrant as a rock. I kept thinking he should have been more like his father, who looked like him but was a shy, friendly man who had to say hello a thousand times a day on his mail route and still seemed to enjoy it. For a moment I felt like kicking out a few of Ben’s spokes, but I didn’t, and he went ahead and made his usual short jump. I don’t think he really approved of the jumping, but we all had to do it. This was in lieu of being Eddie Kusacs in his Corsair, I suppose.

  On the way home that afternoon—it was a Friday—Ben and I ended up fighting, our bikes in a pile on the sidewalk. I had Ben pinned, as usual, but in the process he’d hit me in the nose, and it felt like a wedge driven between my eyes. My poor nose; I couldn’t comfort it because I needed both hands and all my strength to hold Ben down. My cheekbones ached, and I seemed to taste the metal fillings in my teeth. I had Ben’s head halfway under somebody’s barberry hedge, and one of the little thorns had come off its branch and was sticking in his cheek.

  “There’s a thorn sticking in your cheek,” I said. “I can see it sticking right in there.
”

  Convulsive movements on his part. His arm rose, and for the space of an inch it was invincible; I couldn’t stop it. But his strength was like a pump working upon my tiny but real center of fear, and this forced strength into me so that I could push him back down again. His bony wrists gave my fingers pain as I leaned on them.

  “Sticking right into your flesh,” I said. “Must be in a quarter of an inch.”

  He’d never say a word while we were fighting. For him it was all beyond words, it was all power. He had no need for talk because what he wanted to do to me was clear enough. I had to talk. I was always talking at his face, which was as unforgiving as a bird’s. I dreamed of it, that smooth, blank face. I’d talk and talk while he despised my arguments.

  “Will you give up? Will you give up? Can’t you see I’ve won? I’ve got you pinned, you bastard! Hey, Ben, will you give up? I’ll spit in your eyes, you bastard!”

  I felt him waiting, letting his strength return. I was always just barely surprised by his sudden strategies. He tried to butt my face with his forehead, and almost did. When I fought him, it was always to contain, to immobilize him. Though I may have bragged that I was deadly, any blow of his that was really meant to hurt stayed with me for days, frightening yet admirable.

  Even when his father came along, I didn’t dare let him up.

  “What’s going on here?” Mr. Caswell said mildly. He was smiling, which shocked me.

  I hardly dared look away from Ben, but I had to glance up at Mr. Caswell’s thin yet somehow droopy face.

  Since Ben wouldn’t talk, I had to answer. “We’re wrestling,” I said.

  Mr. Caswell shifted his leather mailbag from one thin shoulder to another, then pulled his lapels straight. He just stood there in his baggy uniform, and it seemed strange to me to see a face so like Ben’s yet so mild. “Why don’t you come along home?”