Lay Down My Sword and Shield hh-1

by James Lee Burke

  “Wow, did your father know anybody else?”

  “Those were the best ones. And I’m all out of stories, babe.”

  “Your father must have been an unusual man.”

  “Yes, he was.” I bit the tip off a cigar and looked at the haze on the water and the line of willows beyond, and for just a moment, in the stillness and heat of the summer morning, in the time that the flame of my match burned upward in one sulfurous curl, I saw my father lying half out of the chair in the library, the circular explosion of gunpowder on the front of his cream-colored coat, with his mouth locked open as though he had one final statement to make. The pistol had flown from his dead hand with the weight of its own recoil, and his arm had caught behind him at a twisted angle in the chair. His eyes were receded and staring, and his gray hair hung down on his forehead like a child’s. As I stood in the doorway, unable to move toward him, with the shot still loud in my ears and Bailey running down the stairs behind me, I thought: It was his heart. He had to do it. He couldn’t let it kill him first.

  “Hey, come in, world,” Rie said.

  “The old man had rheumatic fever when he was a kid. All of the things he loved to do put his heart right in a vise.”

  She touched the back of my hand with her fingers and looked quietly into my face. Her strands of sunburned hair were gold in the broken light through the cypress tree.

  “All right, how about opening another beer?” I said.

  “You’re a special kind of guy, Hack.”

  “How did we get on this crap, anyway? Come on, girl. Get the beer open.”

  “Okay, kemosabe.” Her eyes went flat, and she reached inside the sack of crushed ice.

  “I mean, you’re hurting my badass identity.”

  She worked the opener on the bottle cap without answering.

  “Say, Rie. Come on.”

  “You kick doors shut real hard,” she said.

  “Look, I behave like a sonofabitch so often that sometimes I don’t think about who I’m talking to.”

  “You don’t like anyone to get inside you, and maybe that’s cool, but you ought to hang out a sign for dumb chicks.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s a swell day and you’re still a piece of pie.”

  I leaned over her and kissed her on the mouth. I felt her heavy breasts against me, and I slipped my arms under her back and kissed her forehead and her closed eyes and put my face in her hair. She breathed against my cheek and ran her hands under my shirt.

  “Oh, Hack,” she said, and moved her whole body into me.

  My blood raced and I could feel my heart clicking inside me. Each time I kissed her my head swam, my breath became short, and I felt myself dropping through her into the earth.

  She hooked one leg behind mine and held me closer and ran her fingernails up my neck through my hair. When she moved her body against me the dark green of the trees and the summer haze on the river seemed to spin in circles around me.

  “I felt you kiss me last night. I didn’t want you to stop,” she said. “All night I wanted to feel you around me.”

  “My southern ethic wouldn’t let me take advantage of a bombed girl.”

  “You have so many crazy things in your head, Lone Ranger.” She moved her lips over my cheek and bit me on the neck, and then I couldn’t stop it.

  I put my hand under her shirt and felt her breasts. They swelled out each time she breathed and I could feel her heart beating under my palm. I unzippered her white shorts and touched her thighs and her flat stomach.

  “I’m sorry for the woods. I should take you up the road, but you really got down inside me, babe,” I said.

  She smiled and kissed me, and her almond eyes took on all the wonderful color and mysterious light that a woman’s eyes can have when they make you weak with just a glance.

  That evening we drove back through the hills and the baked fields of string beans and corn, and stopped at a roadside restaurant and beer tavern north of Rio Grande City for Mexican food. On the broken horizon the sun was orange behind clouds that looked as though they had been burned purple. The sky seemed so vast and empty in its darkening light that my head became dizzy in looking at it.

  We finished dinner and drank bottles of Carta Blanca while two drunk cowboys played the jukebox and arm-wrestled with each other at the bar. We had chicory coffee, and I brought in my flask of Jack Daniel’s from the car and poured a shot into our cups. On the jukebox Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs rolled out a Blue Ridge song, in their mournful southern accents, of ancient American loves and distant mountain trains:

  Each year is like some rolling freight train

  And cold as starlight on the rails.

  I don’t know if it was the whiskey (I eventually drained the whole flask into my cup), the events and emotional fatigue of the past two days, or my need to confess my guilt of fifteen years ago, or a combination of the three, but anyway I began to talk about Korea and then I told her all of it.

  CHAPTER 8

  My legs were on fire as we marched the five miles along a frozen dirt road from the freight train to a temporary prison compound. The sky was lead gray, and the dark winter brown of the earth showed in patches through the ice and snow that covered the fields and hills. The few peasant farmhouses, made from mudbricks mixed with straw, were deserted, and at odd intervals across the fields there were old craters left from a stray bombing. Our Chinese guards, in their quilted uniforms and Mongolian hats, walked along beside us with their burp guns slung on straps at port arms, one gloved finger curled inside the trigger guard, hating us not only because we were Occidentals and the enemy but also for the cold and misery in their own bodies. When a man fell or couldn’t keep pace with the line or find someone to help him walk he was pushed crying (or sometimes white and speechless in his terror) into the ditch and shot. The Chinese were thorough. Two and sometimes three guards would fire their burp guns into one shivering, helpless man.

  By all chances I should have bought it somewhere along that five miles of frozen road. My pants legs were stiff with dried blood, and each step sent the flame in my wounds racing up my body and made my groin go weak with pain. I had never known that pain could be as prolonged and intense and unrelieved. I saw the guards kill six men and I heard them kill others behind me, and I knew that I was going to fall over soon and I would die just as the rest had, with my arms across my face and my knees drawn up to my chest in an embryonic position. But a Marine major from Billings, Montana, a huge man with lumberjack arms, caught me around the waist and held me up, even when I felt my knees collapse entirely and the horizon tilted quickly as in a feverish dream. His right ear was split and crusted with black blood, and his eyes were bright with control of his own pain, but it never showed in his voice and his arm stayed locked hard around my waist.

  “Stay up, doc. We’re going to need all of our corpsmen,” he said. “Just throw one foot after another. Don’t use your knees. You hear me, son? These bastards won’t march us much farther.”

  And for the next four miles we went down the road like two Siamese twins out of step with each other. That night the guards put us in a wooden schoolhouse surrounded by concertina wire, and in his sleep the major cried out once and tore open his mutilated ear with his fingernails.

  Several months later I heard that he died of dysentery in the Bean Camp.

  I was in three camps while I was a P.O.W. Whenever the complexion of the war changed or a new offensive was begun by one side or the other, the Chinese moved us in cattle cars or Russian trucks or on foot to a new camp where there was no chance of our being liberated, since we were an important bargaining chip at the peace talks. I spent two months at the Bean Camp, a compound of wretched wooden shacks used by the Japanese to hold British prisoners during World War II, and for reasons unknown to me, since I had no military knowledge worth anything to the North Koreans or the Chinese, I was singled out with twelve others, including two deranged Greeks, for transfer to Pak’s Palace outs
ide of Pyongyang. Major Pak conducted his interrogations in an abandoned brick factory, and each morning two guards led me across the brick yard covered with fine red dust to a small, dirty room that was bare except for two straight-backed chairs and the major’s desk. A rope with a cinched loop in one end hung from a rafter, and when everything else failed the major would tie the hands of a prisoner behind him and have him drawn into the air by the arms and beaten with bamboo canes. It was called Pak’s Swing, and the screams that came from that room were not like human sounds.

  Major Pak’s personality was subject to abrupt changes. Sometimes his eyes burned like those of a religious fanatic or an idealistic zealot who reveled in the pain of his enemies. His tailored uniform was always immaculate, as though he were born to the professional military, but the wrong answer from a prisoner would make his face convulse with hatred and his screaming would become incoherent. Then moments later his eyes would water, his constricted throat would relax, and his voice would take on the tone of a tormented man who was forced to do things to people who couldn’t understand the necessity of his job or the historical righteousness of his cause. The two Greeks suffered most from him, because he was sure that their insane, pathetic behavior was an act. Each night they were returned to our building streaked with blood and moaning in words that we couldn’t understand.

  The major also had fixations. He threatened to tear out my fingernails with pliers unless I told him where the 101st Airborne planned to drop into North Korea. I infuriated him when I answered that I was a Navy corpsman and that I had spent only six days on the line before capture. He believed that all Americans lied instinctively and looked down upon him as an Oriental of inferior intelligence. He struck me in the head with the pliers and cut my scalp, and as I leaned over with the blood trickling across my eye I waited for him to order the guards to draw me up on the rope. However, he threw a glass of water in my face and pulled my head up by the hair.

  “Americans are weak. You can’t accept pain for yourselves. You only expect others to bear it,” he said.

  Then I realized that it really didn’t matter to him whether or not I knew anything about the 101st Airborne. He hated me because I was everything that he identified with the young American archetype portrayed in The Saturday Evening Post: I was tall, blond, good-looking, unscarred by hunger or struggle or revolutions whose ideology was just rice. So Major Pak’s interest in me was personal rather than of a military nature, and he soon tired of interrogating me in favor of a British commando who had been caught behind their lines, and I was sent back to the Bean Camp in a captured U.S. truck loaded with Australian prisoners.

  But my recall deals primarily with Camp Five in No Name Valley, where I spent the greater portion of the war until I was exchanged at Freedom Village in 1953. Also, it was here that I learned that men can live with guilt and a loathsome image of themselves which previously they didn’t believe themselves capable of enduring.

  The Yalu River was north of our camp, and in the winter the ice expanded against the banks and rang in the cold silence at night, and sometimes we would hear it break up and crash in great yellow chunks at a turn in the current. The wind blew all the time, sweeping out of the bare hills across the river in China, and when there was no fuel in our shack we slept on the floor in a group, breathing the stench of our bodies under the blankets, the nauseating odor of fish heads on our breath, and the excretions of men with dysentery who couldn’t control themselves in their sleep.

  We were always cold during the winter. Even when we had fuel to burn in our small iron stove the heat would not radiate more than a few feet, and the wind drove through the cracks in the boards and would drop the temperature enough to freeze our jerry can of water unless we kept it close to the fire. During the day the sun was a pale yellow orb in the sky, and the light was never strong enough through the gray winter haze to cast a hard shadow on the ground. Three men were taken out with a guard once a week to forage for wood, but the landscape was largely bare and the sticks and roots that hadn’t already been picked up were now covered by ice and snow. We had one pair of mismatched knitted mittens in our shack, and when the wood detail went out one man would take the mittens and be responsible for gathering the largest share of fuel, as our fingers would often be left cut and swollen or discolored at the tips from frostbite after a day of ripping frozen sticks out of the snow.

  There were oil stoves in the camp, but these went to the progressives, those who had signed peace petitions, confessions to participating in germ warfare, or absurdly worded statements denouncing Wall Street capitalists. The progressives were kept in two oblong buildings on the far side of the compound, separated from the rest of us by a barbed-wire fence and a wooden gate that stayed locked with a chain. Many of them were informers, or “snitches,” and they would have been killed had they been forced to live with the rest of the prisoner population. In the morning they exercised in the yard behind the wire fence, their faces averted so they wouldn’t have to look at the rest of us. They received the same diet as we did, bean cakes, millet, and boiled corn, but much more of it, and occasionally they were given some greens and hardboiled eggs, and they didn’t have to worry about beriberi and diarrhea that left your entrails and rectum burning day and night. I should have hated them for the weight on their bodies and the flush of health in their faces, the Red Cross packages they were given by the guards, but I was always too sick, cold, or afraid to care what they did on their side of the fence. Like most of the others I didn’t believe that we would ever be liberated or exchanged. New prisoners told us that the Chinese had poured into South Korea, the R.O.K.’s had thrown down their weapons and run, and our forces were being pushed into the sea. So even the most optimistic and strong knew that freedom was probably years away, and our death rate in the camp averaged a dozen men a day.

  Some died quietly in their sleep under their blankets, and in the morning we found them white and stiff, the skin hard as marble, and we dragged them outside the shack like pieces of stone and left them for the burial squad. Others died delirious with agony, their eyes feverish and rolling white in their heads, their inflamed entrails bulging out the colon like inflated rubber. There was nothing to do for them — no medicine, no priest, not even the option of killing out of mercy.

  There were fifteen enlisted men in my shack (the Chinese kept the officers, N.C.O.’s, and enlisted men separated from one another so there would be no system of military order or authority among us). We spent our days in boredom or listening to ridiculous lectures by Colonel Ding and a “group monitor,” one of the progressives whom Ding always brought with him. Ding was a small, thin man, with a harelip and a face that was as lifeless as wax. There were spaces between his front teeth, and when he ranted about imperialism and the American bombing of Pyongyang his disfigured mouth gave his face the appearance of a lunatic’s. He was fond of telling us that he had attended the University of California for a year in the thirties, and also that he had been with Mao on the Great March. Many times he would digress from his tirades on the evils of the Western world and slip into a history of his own career, which seemed to give him a special pleasure. Sometimes he would ask where each of us was from, and then show the knowledge that he had of that area, although he often referred to such places as “San Antonio, Missouri.” The group monitor was usually even more pathetic. He would stand behind the colonel, embarrassed, his gloved hands never able to find a pocket more than a few moments, and sometimes he would light a cigarette nervously, then pinch it out and put it back in the pack when our eyes looked into his. After the colonel had finished, the monitor would read to us from his journal, his self-deluding confession of guilt, and tell us that American troops were waging a war against innocent people and that we were as much victims of the defense industrialists as the people whom we killed. But his face always stayed buried in the notebook, as though he couldn’t read his own handwriting, or he stared above our heads at the distant hills. Many times his words faltered a
nd he would look helplessly at the colonel, who would only nod for him to go on. I suppose that I felt more pity toward the progressives than anger. They were cared for and would live, and eventually they would have to face some of us after the peace came.

  However, our classes weren’t merely an exercise in Marxist buffoonery. The Chinese knew a great deal about the effect of compromise on the individual. The progressives did not end up on the other side of the wire fence simply because they knew that the rations were better there. It was a gradual process, much like the irreversible stages of seduction portrayed in a stag movie. Most of us knew that it was a matter of time before we died of hunger or any of the diseases that accompanied it, and if we volunteered for Ding’s classes, although it was never stated, we knew that the guards would put extra bean cakes in our shack’s food bucket at night. And once we were in the classes all we had to do was sign a nonpolitical peace petition, asking in the most general terms for an end to the war (supposedly these were sent to the United Nations), and our millet would include fish heads, which we could boil into broth with roots and give to those who had the worst cases of dysentery. Then if we wanted an occasional hardboiled egg or a package of tobacco for the shack, we could say a couple of sentences against war into a tape recorder without identifying ourselves. Many nights we sat close to the small stove in silence, the honey bucket reeking in the corner, and thought about the next stage in the progression. Sometimes we would discuss the morality of signing a peace petition or whether or not it was all right to do it if you misspelled your name or gave your serial number incorrectly, since someone would surely know that you didn’t mean it after all and you had beaten the Chinese at their own game, and I thought of Chaucerian monks debating the virtue of their fornication.