The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  McPherson grinned. “Shooting off my mouth, mostly.”

  “Lady,” said Sergeant Harris, “the tank hasn’t been built that he can’t destroy.”

  “Sergeant,” said the lieutenant.

  “So when is this contest supposed to start?” Latha asked.

  “Who knows?” McPherson shrugged. “I expected it to begin soon after we landed, but our opposition may have lost their way trying to find us.”

  “Well, there’s no sense in you boys starving to death up here and making all these kids into storytellers,” Latha said. “Come on down to our fair hamlet and get you some decent food.”

  McPherson glanced at his men, each one of whom was eagerly nodding his head. Jarhead the mule was nodding his head. All of us kids were nodding our heads. McPherson sighed again. Then he said to Harris, “All right, Sergeant.”

  “FALL IN!” Sergeant Harris said. We all lined up. “DIS—” added the Sergeant, “MISSED!”

  Everybody headed for town, Gypsy riding Jarhead at the front of the column. The mule seemed happy to get away from the confines of the bivouac, and his step was lively. The soldiers weren’t marching at all, but sauntering. McPherson carried the large wooden beribboned “key to the city” that Willard had given him, as if he might be able to use it to unlock something in town. He walked not as if he were the commander but just one of us, and from time to time he would walk alongside one of us, talking to us. When my turn came, he simply said that we ought to continue to keep the location of the bivouac a secret. Later he might need my advice on a new location for a bivouac. I said I knew he was going to like Stay More.

  The first house we reached down the mountain road was Latha’s own, and she pointed it out to the soldiers and told them that was where she’d be serving supper as soon as she got the store closed. Dulcie Coe said she was awfully sorry but the supper this evening was going to be at her place, whereupon Gladys Duckworth, Selena Dinsmore, and Bliss Dingletoon each claimed that they were each going to serve the supper to these soldiers. McPherson solved the dispute by suggesting that the men could be divided into groups of two or three each to dine at the available eating places.

  At Latha’s store (which she hadn’t bothered to lock up, trusting anyone during her absence to help themselves and leave the money for it), she sold the soldiers smoking tobacco and cigarette papers. Most of them twisted a dizzy and, Latha’s post office still being open, they bought postcards and V-mail stationery and composed notes or letters to distant mothers and lovers. Then they sat on the edge of the porch to loaf and smoke and take a good look at the town. They were glad to be looking at architecture again after looking at nothing but trees. I appointed myself tour guide and I indicated the empty stone building across the road and explained it had been a bank that had never reopened since being robbed many years before. I thought it best not to get into the complications of just how it was that the robber of the bank was the same Every Dill who years later would come back and marry Latha. Next door to the old bank, I pointed out, was Doc Swain’s house and clinic; directly across from it the house and clinic of Doc Plowright, who was retired. Just beyond Doc Plowright’s was the big old Ingledew General Store, still in business, but losing most of its business to Latha’s. That woman yonder sitting on the store’s porch by herself was Lola Ingledew, who kept it open. Behind the Ingledew store rose the hulk of the old gristmill, four stories of red tin in imitation of brick. Behind that, across Swains Creek, was the old sawmill and wagon-bow factory, where they used to make bows for the Conestoga wagons that had headed west. I pointed out the little canning factory, shut down for the duration of the war’s tin shortage, and, in the far distance, the schoolhouse. That was all of Stay More, not counting the Jacob Ingledew house across from the Ingledew store, which had once been a hotel, and in a sense still was, because it had rooms that were never used. Up the hill behind the hotel was the Coe blacksmith shop.

  “What are those pits or craters all over the place?” McPherson asked, gesturing here and there.

  “Those are our foxholes,” I said proudly. “The Jap foxholes. We have to defend the village from the Yanks. You ought to see their foxholes.”

  One of the soldiers pointed and asked me if that river was safe for swimming. I told him it wasn’t a river, just a creek, which emptied, miles downstream, into the Little Buffalo River. The soldier and a few others asked McPherson for permission to run down there and take a dip.

  “When we’re off the bivouac,” McPherson said, “you don’t need my permission for anything.” He himself abandoned the others and took a stroll down the main road, looking at the houses and buildings and our network of foxholes and other defensive emplacements. I followed, telling him if there was anything he wanted to know about anything, just to ask me. He said he thought it was a nice little town, although it was much smaller than he had been thinking it was. He said that the town and the countryside reminded him a lot of Vermont. He told me that the old hermit Dan had told him that was one of the reasons Dan had settled here, because it reminded him of Vermont. He asked me if it was true that Dan and his daughter never came into the village. I said I’d never seen them here.

  Our stroll and conversation was interrupted by an encounter with a group of the Yanks, who surrounded us but kept a respectful distance from the man in a lieutenant’s combat uniform. I wasn’t about to introduce McPherson to Larry or Jim John or Sog; I simply whispered to him that those were Yanks, formerly Allies, and he nodded his head as if acknowledging that I had pointed out a species of poisonous snake. And they weren’t going to introduce themselves. They scattered in three different directions, probably to alert their friends and families to this “invasion” of Stay More.

  In pointing out the various parts of town to the soldiers, I had neglected to identify Miss Jerram’s little cottage, across the road from the schoolhouse, within sight of the very place on Swains Creek where the soldiers had chosen to go swimming. Of course none of them had bathing suits, and they seemed oblivious to the woman standing on her back porch observing them as they frolicked naked in the water, diving and bullfrogging and splashing.

  News traveled faster than the Star could ever do, and before nightfall everybody in Stay More knew that we had a dozen soldiers in our midst. At school the next day, Miss Jerram practically canceled the usual order of lessons in order to have everybody who knew anything report on whatever was going on. Ella Jean told about the soldiers who went home with her and Willard so that Selena Dinsmore could feed them. Gypsy told about the three who went to the Dingletoon house, Rosa Faye reported on the three who came to the Duckworth’s, and Sammy on the two, Lieutenant McPherson and Sergeant Harris, who ate at the Coes. I suspected they hadn’t chosen Sammy’s house out of favoritism toward him, nor because his late brother had been an Iwo Jima hero, but because the Coe house overlooked the village and was more centrally located. Still I was jealous, and I considered asking my aunt if she would be willing to feed a few soldiers that night, or the next night. None of the Japs reporting on our affiliation with the military (of which the Yanks were obviously insane with envy) revealed that the soldiers were Japs like ourselves or that they were destined to invade mainland Japan. But it was made clear that “our” soldiers were going to be involved shortly in a simulated battle with an invading force that would include big tanks and artillery and maybe hundreds of additional soldiers. Miss Jerram said she wanted to remind us that there were just a few days of school remaining and that she hoped none of this warlike activity would distract us from our studies.

  I never did learn (as if I could have used it in the Star anyhow) just how Miss Estalee Jerram, our nice schoolteacher, met Sergeant Rodney Harris of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Most people thought it probably happened at the pie supper, but at least I did know that they had already met somewhere, somehow, before the pie supper, and that it was a sheer accident of destiny that the pie that Sergeant Harris successfully bid on was the pie that Miss Jerram made. Some folks said that
the idea for the pie supper started with Miss Jerram herself, but I know it was Latha’s idea.

  Pie suppers didn’t happen very often, and we’d had only two of them since the war started, both as fund-raisers for a War Memorial when a Stay More boy was killed, most recently Boden Whitter in that kamikaze attack on his ship. Pie suppers always appeared to be for the purpose of raising money for some worthy cause, but the real purpose is to promote friendship between male and female, who pair off together (not too privately) for the eating of the pie. Each of the women and girls of the town would bake a pie, their favorite kind, and wrap it fancifully, in a pretty box or a woven basket (some girls could even make baskets out of cornstalks in the shape of log cabins), and these would be auctioned off to the highest bidder among the men and boys. Whoever bought your pie had the privilege of sitting with you while he ate it; he would give you a piece, or two, or three, but you were supposed to flirt with him or at least listen sympathetically while he courted you. It was chancy, because there was no way of knowing in advance which girls had done which pies. That was the reason I’d been stuck with Rosa Faye Duckworth in the previous pie supper.

  A pie usually went for not more than fifty cents, but with all these soldiers bidding on them (Doc Swain agreed to serve as auctioneer), the winning bid sometimes got as high as two or even three dollars! Sergeant Harris paid two seventy-five for Miss Jerram’s pie. None of us realized that she even knew how to bake pies. Did he betray any disappointment when he discovered that the baker was not one of the younger ladies but a schoolteacher? No, maybe because Miss Jerram had for the occasion dolled herself up so much she looked like, as Willard put it, “a ten-dollar whore,” although I doubt Willard had ever seen a whore of even five dollars. Anyhow, Miss Jerram and Sergeant Harris went off to sit on a rock together and eat that pie, and that was the beginning of their beautiful romance.

  McPherson pestered me in advance for tips on how to identify or even guess the baker of the pie, but he didn’t tell me his motive: his heart was set on making the successful bid on a pie by hermit Dan’s daughter Annie. I could have told him there wasn’t any chance in the world that Annie would show up. And she didn’t. Everyone nodded in sympathy and understanding when McPherson’s pie turned out to have been made jointly by the twins Helena Doris and Jelena Cloris, Ella Jean’s older sisters, just recently widowed when their joint husband Billy Bob Ingledew was shot in the siege of Berlin. Come to think of it, according to the stories, Doris and Jelena had first met Billy Bob when he had bid on and won both their pies at the War Memorial pie supper held when the first Stay Moron was killed early during the war. Now, the town was divided between those who thought Doris and Jelena ought to remain in mourning and seclusion during this pie supper, and those who felt it would help them overcome their grief to get out and be sociable. Willard had already told McPherson the story of his twin sisters. McPherson had suggested to me that I ought to start keeping a journal to record such stories for future reference, and I had got myself an Indian Chief tablet from Latha’s store, writing on the first page “Article Ideas,” and had already recorded two: (1) an interview with the old hermit Dan; (2) the strange story of Jelena and Doris Dinsmore. I knew very little about either of those subjects, and was determined to find out more.

  Whatever gods there be who manipulate our luck and our lot were having themselves a party the night of the pie supper. Not only did Sergeant Harris wind up with Miss Jerram, but Gypsy, who was nearly overcome with disappointment when the lieutenant bought Jelena’s and Doris’ pie instead of the egg custard pie she’d hoped he would bid on, wasn’t too unhappy when the lucky bidder on her egg custard was Willard, who, according to rumor (I didn’t see them), got not only a pie but eventually a kiss for his money, thirty-five cents. Best of all, I myself had not bid on any of the pies until a certain one that had been wrapped or concealed inside what appeared to be a girl’s nightdress still bearing a faint stain resembling a question mark: “?” I don’t know what made me bid my quarter (which was all I had) on that pie. Destiny maybe. I wouldn’t have got the pie in competition with the soldiers except for the fact that all of them had already obtained their pies. My pie turned out to be a sweet potato, of which I was not awfully fond, but the baker of it turned out to be Ella Jean Dinsmore, of whom I was uncommonly fond.

  It was a good thing I had taken to carrying that Indian Chief tablet with me everywhere because Ella Jean, once we both had overcome our shyness toward each other and had eaten that pie (or at least a piece apiece, perfunctorily), began to talk about her sisters Doris and Jelena, and I needed to take notes. We watched them sitting on either side of the lieutenant, who was doing all the talking, and we imagined that he was charming them just as he had charmed us, and Ella Jean was happy about this, because her sisters, she said, were totally heartbroken over Billy Bob’s death. She did not see them much, since they kept to themselves in the house that Billy Bob had built for them, where they were raising the baby, named Jelena too. Ella Jean herself did not know which of the twin sisters was the actual mother of Jelena the baby. But every time Ella Jean had stopped by her sisters’ house, she had found the gloom to be so thick it frightened her.

  “How come you’re a-writing down ever thing I say?” Ella Jean asked me.

  “Every word you say I want to keep,” I said. There wasn’t any coy flirtation in this, and I went on to explain the lieutenant’s recommendation that I keep a journal of ideas for articles.

  “Would ye care if I worked on the Star for ye?” she offered.

  I was overcome with joy. “I haven’t never had nobody helping me with it yet,” I pointed out.

  “I caint write stories,” she said. “But they’s bound to be some ways I could help ye.”

  “Oh, I’m sure there is,” I said.

  Before the evening was over, we had, ever so briefly, held hands. I don’t mean shook hands over my decision to hire her as assistant editor of the Star, but held hands in the romantic sense, if only for a few seconds. I had got up my nerve and asked her to explain the wrapping the pie had been in. Was that really her nightdress? What was the significance of the “?” dimly stained into it? In answer, Ella Jean took my Indian Chief tablet, and on the page where already I’d written down ideas for stories on ole Dan and on Jelena and Doris, she wrote: “(3) What’s the picture on Ella Jean’s nightie?” And left me to think about that.

  The next issue of the Star was an Extra, you may be sure (McPherson told me that in Japan for years the newspapers liked to bring out Extras, and “Gogwai! Gogwai!” was the cry of newsboys). The masthead had a new name, the only one after my own. There was even a little story on the back page, “Star Staff Doubles,” with the announcement of her taking on the responsibilities for “society news,” “births and deaths,” “page layout,” “punctuation,” and “drinking water.” The latter was her idea: she kept us both supplied with cups of cool well water while we worked on the paper. That Extra, with her help, was twice as long as usual, what with the full story on the soldiers, the pie supper, and so on. I cleared the copy with McPherson, who made only a few minor changes to censor information on the soldiers that he didn’t want revealed; he thought I was very clever to write “their bivouac is in a farmyard, and since the word ‘farmyard’ encloses the word ‘army’ they are safely enclosed there,” but he didn’t want even that much given away about their location. He also objected, in my story about the pie supper, to my sentence, “The lieutenant cheered up Doris and Jelena enormously.” He said he hadn’t been able to cheer them up at all.

  I was glad later that I had cut any mention of Doris and Jelena from that Extra of the Star. Private Macklin, on a detail to reconnoiter the terrain west of Swains Creek, came upon their bodies lying together holding hands on the blood-stained earth hundreds of feet beneath the crag known as Leapin Rock.

  Chapter twenty

  When we buried Doris and Jelena Dinsmore, an airplane flew over. Much later, I would ask McPherson if there wasn’t
some kind of word or expression for such a thing happening that seems somehow to have already happened. He would tell me the words, which I would have occasion to use again and am using now: “day shave you” it sounded like, not Japanese, meaning “already seen.” The only time an airplane had ever flown over Stay More previously, we had been burying a mule, and we hadn’t finished the job. Now the job was not only finished, but had honors: McPherson’s seven best riflemen lined up smartly at the graveside and pointed their weapons at the sky and fired. Blanks, of course, or else the volley might have hit that airplane. McPherson told me that military funerals are often accompanied by aviation, but this airplane wasn’t part of the plan. He said it was a Piper Cub, and it was “obviously a scout, for aerial reconnaissance.” It could fly very slowly, around and around, so that the cameraman could take many photographs.

  McPherson was plunged into disconsolate sorrow by the suicides of Doris and Jelena, feeling (wrongly!) that he might even have said something to them that drove them to it. I couldn’t say anything to make him feel better. Even though I put in my Indian Chief another article idea: “(4) The History of Leapin Rock,” and interviewed Latha on the subject and tried to explain to McPherson that Jelena and Doris were by no means the first persons to avail themselves of that crag’s lofty lethality, he was not comforted. Sweet Ella Jean, even though racked with sorrow over her sisters’ deaths, tried to explain to McPherson the circumstances of her sisters’ having already been plunged into hopeless despair by the death in Berlin of their joint husband Billy Bob Ingledew, but her words could not relieve McPherson of whatever horrible guilt he was feeling. At the funeral, when everybody usually sings “Farther Along,” wherein we try to tell each other that we’ll understand it all by and by, Doc Swain (who had signed the death certificates and listed cause of death as “broken heart”) stopped the singing before it could begin and protested, “Farther along, hell! We done already understood it.” But McPherson did not understand it, and farther along he was still so disconsolate that the situation, according to Sergeant Harris, had degenerated from a SNAFU into a FUBAR (Corporal Rucker offered a translation, from “Situation Normal All Fucked Up” into “Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition”). His men became concerned that McPherson was ready to call it quits, to abandon the bivouac and “resign” from the forthcoming maneuvers, and maybe even go AWOL (which Rucker claimed stood for “Absentmindedly Walking Out Legless”). All pretense of being in an orderly bivouac was dropped; the men were permitted to come and go as they pleased, and it pleased them to feel that they were on some kind of furlough, free to go fishing or just to loaf, free to pursue the girls or women whose pies they’d eaten and whose hearts (and beds) were emptied by all the able menfolk going overseas to fight the war. There was a rumor that Sergeant Harris was even staying overnight at Miss Jerram’s house! The discipline of the daily calisthenics under his direction was lost, and the men began to get fat from what they were fed by the ladies.