He turned from the sunrise and looked toward the little town in which he lived toward the little town in which he had been born. All of the rooftops were rosy with the dawn. Even the houses that were unpainted and square and squat and ugly were beautiful. He heard the lowing of cows waiting to be milked in back yards for the town in which he had been born was a very sensible town and each man had his cow. He heard the slam of back screen doors as sleepy householders went to the chicken yard or to the barn yard to take care of their animals. And he could see inside the houses where men were getting out of bed and yawning healthily and scratching their chests and groping for house slippers and finally getting up and going into the kitchen where their wives had sausages and hot cakes and coffee for them.
He saw babies squirming in their cribs and rubbing their eyes with tiny fists and maybe smiling or maybe crying and maybe smelling a little bad but looking awfully healthy as they greeted the sunshine as they greeted the morning as they greeted the dawn. He saw all of these things all of these beautiful homely things as he looked toward the town and he had only to turn from the town to look at the sun and the mountains.
Oh god god thank god he thought I’ve got it now and they can’t take it away from me. He thought I have seen the dawn again and I will see it every morning from now on. He thought thank you god thank you thank you. He thought if I never have anything else I will always have dawn and morning sunlight.
xii
New year’s eve. Snow flying in the air wet snow clouds sifting close over Shale City. Everything still with lights glowing inside warm houses. No confetti no champagne bottles no yelling no noise at all. The quietude of new year for ordinary people who worked and were kind and wanted only peace. Happy new year. His father kissing his mother and saying happy new year my dear we’ve been lucky the kids are healthy I love you happy new year I hope the new one turns out as well as the old.
New year’s eve at the bakery with guys saying goddam I’m glad it’s over the next one can’t be any worse happy new year hell let’s go out into the fog and get drunk. Walking out of the bakery on new year’s eve with the bins every which-way and the ovens empty and the conveyors stopped and the wrapping machines paralyzed and the dividers still and nobody but the crew going out of a strange silent place with their voices echoing flatly against dead machinery. The guys at the bakery going out to celebrate the new year.
The guys in saloons shoving free ones across the bar and saying happy new year and many more of them kid you been a good customer have one on the house happy new year and the hell with the prohibitionists some day the bastards are going to give us trouble. The girls from the hash houses and the girls from the hotels and the guys swarming out of dirty little apartment bedrooms and music and dancing and smoke and somebody with a ukulele and have another and the feeling of being lonesome that everybody has inside him and people bouncing against you and off you and have another one and a girl passing out at the bar and a fight and happy new year.
Oh god the happy happy new year he had counted three hundred and sixty-five days and now it was new year’s eve.
It didn’t seem like a year. It had gone by like a lifetime when you look back and think of a time so far away that you can’t clearly remember what happened yet a time that has gone so quickly it seems only a minute ago it started. Six visits from the nurse each day—thirty days to a month—and now three hundred and sixty-five days. It had gone quickly because he was doing something he was keeping track of time like other people he had sets of figures to remember he controlled a little world of his own lagging behind that on the outside but still nearer to it than before. He had a calendar in which the sun and the moon and the seasons had no place a calendar with thirty days for each month and twelve months in the year and now five extra days to make up the difference with the nurse’s next visit to make it new year’s morning.
He had been a very busy guy and he had learned a lot. He had learned how to check everything against something else so that he couldn’t possibly lose the grip he had gained on time. He could tell day from night without straining for the sunrise. He knew exactly what visit from the nurse would bring him a bath and a change of bedclothes. When the schedule was interrupted and the nurse was a visit late he grew disappointed and sullen and tried to imagine what she was doing but when she finally came he was always excited.
He could even tell his nurses apart. The day nurse was steady but the night nurses seemed to change. The day nurse had smooth slick hands a little hard like the hands of a woman who has worked a long while so he guessed that she was middle aged and he imagined her with gray hair. She always came directly to the bed from the door in four firm steps so he figured that his bed was about ten feet from the door. Her footsteps were heavier than the night nurses’ so he took her for a large woman. Her steps were almost as heavy as those of the doctor who came in once in a great while and poked around for a little time and then went away. The day nurse had a brisk way of doing things—flip and he was on his side whoosh and a sheet slid next to him flop and he was on his back swipe-swipe and he was bathed. She knew her business this old day nurse and he liked her. Once in a great while she came in at night instead of the night nurse. He always squirmed to let her know he was pleased to see her and she patted him on the stomach and ran her hand through the thin hair on his skull to tell him thanks and how are you?
The night nurses were irregular. Sometimes he would have two or three of them the same week. Most of them took more steps from the door to the bed than the day nurse and their treads were lighter. They closed the door softer or harder and they wandered around the room more. Mostly their hands were very soft and just moist enough to go bumpily instead of smoothly over his body. He knew they were young. When a new nurse came in he always knew what she would do first. She would pull the covers off him and then she would make no movements for a minute or two and he would know she was looking at him and probably getting a little sick. One of them turned and ran out of the room and didn’t come back. That way he didn’t get his urinal and so he wet the bed but he forgave her for it. Another one cried. He felt her tears on the chest of his night shirt. He got a little passionate because he suddenly felt she was very close to him and he lay in pain for hours after she left. He imagined her young and beautiful.
All of these things were interesting they were important they kept him a very busy guy. He had made a new universe he had organized it to his liking and he was living in it. And this was new year’s eve although on the outside it might be the Fourth of July for all he cared. He named the days of the week Monday through Sunday and he named the months so he could celebrate the holidays. Each Sunday afternoon he went for a walk in some woods that were just outside Paris. Once in springtime when he was on leave he walked in them so now it was springtime every Sunday afternoon as he walked through the woods in his uniform with his chest way out and his legs pumping and his arms swinging free. When July came and the trout were biting he went up to Grand Mesa and talked things over with his father. They had lots to talk about they had learned lots since the last time they saw each other. It’s much better than worrying his father said you worry so much you don’t enjoy life death is better only I wish I knew how your mother was.
Each night summer and winter week in and week out he went to sleep with Kareen whispering to her god bless you Kareen darling god bless you. I don’t know what I’d do without you here beside me every night the others have all gone and I’m alone except for you Kareen. They slept with his arm around her or her’s around him and they always turned together. They nestled tight against one another and he kissed her in his dreams all night long.
A year—what a hell of a long time a year was. Kareen was nineteen that day a minute ago when he said goodbye to her at the railroad station. He was four months in training camp and eleven months in France so that made her over twenty. Then the time he had lost completely would probably even it up to another year. And now another. And others to come others and oth
ers. Kareen must be twenty-two by now. She was at least twenty-two. Three years. It would go on that way as long as he lived. Ten more years and Kareen would have lines. A little later and her hair would be gray and then she would be an old woman an old old woman and the girl at the station would never have existed.
He knew it wasn’t true. Kareen would never grow old. She was still nineteen. She would be nineteen forever. Her hair would stay brown and her eyes clear and her skin fresh like rain. He would never let one line mark her face. That was something he could do for her that no other man on earth could ever do. He could keep her safe beside him young and beautiful forever safe from time in the world he had built where time moved according to orders and every Sunday was spring. But where would she be—the real Kareen—the Kareen out in the world out in time? While he slept with the nineteen year old Kareen every night was the real Kareen with somebody else a woman now perhaps with a baby? Kareen grown up and far away having forgotten him…
He wished he could be near her. Not that he could ever see her not that he wanted her to see him. But he would like to feel that he was breathing the same air she breathed that he was in the same country she was in. He remembered the funny excitement inside him when he used to start out for old Mike’s house for Kareen’s house. The closer he got the sweeter the air seemed. He used to tell himself although he knew it wasn’t true that the air around her house was different because it was near to her.
He had never cared particularly where he was where they had taken him—but thinking now of Kareen he got homesick. His mind was wailing I wish to god I was in America I wish I was home. It seemed that an American any American was a friend compared to any Englishman or Frenchman. That was because he was an American himself America was his home he had been born there and anyone outside was a stranger. Then he would say to himself what do you care you’ll never be able to see or talk or walk you won’t know the difference you might as well be in Turkey as America. But that wasn’t true. A guy liked to think he was home. Even though he could do nothing but lie in blackness it would be better if the blackness were the blackness of home and if the people who moved in the blackness were his own people his own American people.
But that was too much to hope for. In the first place a blast strong enough to tear his arms and legs off must have blown all identification to hell and gone. When you have only a back and a stomach and half a head you probably look as much like a Frenchman or a German or an Englishman as an American. The only way they would have of telling what country he was from would be by the place they found him. And he was pretty sure he had been found among Englishmen. The regiment had been stationed right alongside a Limey regiment and when they went over the top both the Americans and the Limeys went together. He remembered very clearly that the Americans shifted to the left among the Limeys because there was a little hill just in front of the American position. The Germans on the hill had all been wiped out two days before so there was no use of the Americans puffing their way up it. They all shifted to the left as they went over and they were all mixed up with the Limeys. He remembered looking around when he dived into that dugout and seeing only two Americans and all the rest Limeys. Just a flash of them just a thought of them then blackness.
So he was probably in some crummy English hospital with people all taking him for a Limey and on the report sent home about him there was nothing except missing in action. Maybe it was just as well he was eating through a tube that English coffee was so stinking bad. Roast beef and pudding and soggy pastries and bad coffee. It was just as well. Only he wasn’t any American any longer he was an Englishman. He was a Limey and probably a citizen at that. It gave him a lonesome feeling just to think about it. He’d never had any particular ideas about America. He’d never been very patriotic. It was something you took without even thinking. But now it seemed to him that if he were really lying in an English hospital he had lost something he could never hope to get back. For the first time in his whole life he felt that it would be a little pleasant a little comforting to be in the hands of his own people.
Those Limeys were a funny bunch of guys. They were more like foreigners than the Frenchmen. A Frenchman you could understand but a Limey was always twitching his nose and you couldn’t understand him at all. When you were stationed right next to them for two months you began to understand just how foreign they were. They did some funny things. There was a little Scotchman in the Limey regiment who threw down his gun and quit the war when he heard that the Huns on the other side of Nomansland were Bavarians. The little Scotchman said that the Bavarians were commanded by Crown Prince Rupert and that the Crown Prince was the last Stuart heir to the throne of England and the rightful king and that he would be goddamed if he would fight his king just because some Hanoverian pretender told him to.
Now in any ordinary army they would take you out and shoot you for a thing like that. But that’s the way Limeys were funny. This little guy caused a hell of a stink. Two or three of his officers argued with him very politely instead of shooting him and when they couldn’t get him to see things their way they called the colonel. So the colonel came and had a long talk with the Scotchman and everybody seemed puzzled and the Scotchman got tougher and tougher and dared them to shoot him because he said his court martial would bring out the truth that everything was a fraud and King George would have to resign and how would Lloyd George like that? The colonel went away and the Scotch-man stayed sitting down on the bottom of the trench and pretty soon there came an order from G.H.Q. transferring him back of the lines for six weeks or until the Bavarians went away so he wouldn’t have to fire in the direction of troops commanded by his king. That was how funny Limeys were and that was how both the Americans and the Limeys knew there were Bavarians across from them.
Then take Lazarus. He showed up one gray morning when nothing was happening. All of a sudden out of the fog loomed this big fat Hun coming toward the British lines. Afterwards there was a lot of talk about what he was doing there all alone in the first place. Probably he was on patrol duty and had lost his way or else he was trying to desert or maybe he had gone a little crazy and was just wandering around out there among the barbed wire and the shell holes for the hell of it. He had a kind of aimless way of pitching from side to side. He would hit a line of barbed wire and stumble and try to feel his way along it for a minute. Finally he would climb it awkwardly like a drunk and come jerking on toward the Limeys.
It was a pretty dull morning and the Limeys were cold and uncomfortable and sore about the war so somebody took a shot at the Hun. The poor guy stood stock still peering through the fog like he was surprised anybody would want to shoot him. Then the whole Limey regiment began to pop off at him. Even as his body sagged he had a kind of hurt and puzzled look. They let him lie out there with one arm hung over the barbed wire like a sentry who was pointing the way for someone else.
Nobody paid any attention to him for several days and then both the Americans and the Limeys began to notice that when the wind was right that Hun was raising quite a stink. But it was only when the wind was just so and nobody cared much until one day when the colonel who had sent the little Scotchman back of the lines came through on inspection. The colonel was a great guy to stand on form. Corporal Timlon who came from Manchester always swore that in a pinch the colonel would execute nine men to keep up the morale of the tenth. Anyhow the colonel was walking along with his moustache waxed and his bony old nose high in the wind when all of a sudden he got a sniff of the Hun.
That’s a very strong odor he said to Corporal Timlon. He’s a Bavarian sir said Corporal Timlon they always smell worse. The colonel coughed and blew his nose and said very bad for the morale of the men very bad take a squad out tonight and bury him corporal. Corporal Timlon started to explain that things were pretty fidgity out there even at night but the colonel interrupted him. And corporal he said stuffing his handkerchief back into his pocket don’t forget—a word of prayer. Corporal Timlon said yes sir and then loo
ked hard at his men to see who was grinning so that he could figure who to take out on the burial squad.
So that night Corporal Timlon took a detail of eight men. They dug a hole and pushed that Bavarian into it and the corporal said a word of prayer like the colonel told him and they filled the hole and came on back. The air was pretty well cleaned up next day but the day after that Heinie got a little nervous and began dropping shells all around the Limey regiment. The Limeys weren’t hurt any but one of the big ones happened to catch the Bavarian. He leaped into the air like in a slow motion picture and landed high and dry on the wire again with his finger pointing toward the Limey regiment exactly like a stool pigeon. That was when Corporal Timlon started calling him Lazarus.
Things were pretty busy that day and all through the night. Every time the Limeys had an idle half hour they would shoot at Lazarus in kind of a lazy way hoping they might knock him off the wire because they knew the nearer he was to the ground the less he would smell and that Bavarian was getting awfully gamy. But he managed to hang onto the wire and the next morning the colonel came through again. First thing he did was sniff the air and get a strong flavor of Lazarus. He turned to Corporal Timlon and said Corporal Timlon when I was subaltern an order was an order and not just an interesting suggestion. Yes sir said Corporal Timlon. You will take a full burial squad out tonight said the colonel and you will bury the corpse six feet deep. And just so that you will not take orders so lightly in the future you will read the full service of the Church of England over the body of our fallen enemy. But sir said Corporal Timlon you see things have been pretty heavy here and——
Johnny Got His Gun Page 12
