A Midnight Clear: A Novel

by William Wharton

  I’m trying to work out a fair guard schedule. Gordon, Shutzer, Miller and Mundy will want time off together in the daytime so they can play their crazy, four-man, cardless duplicate bridge. Also, I don’t want anybody getting stuck with straight-six overlapping day and night shifts. It’s almost as complicated’s making their handmade bridge hands; that’s another thing needs doing before tomorrow. Maybe Mother will help; he’s better at it than I am anyway and it’ll take his mind off things.

  Shutzer and Gordon come in. Mother’s kept chow hot, dishes them out some, then leaves for the bridge post while Father Mundy pulls the one up top. This squad practically runs itself; anybody trying to lead it only gets in the way. I probably don’t even need to make any guard schedule.

  Miller’s also found some empty wine bottles and is cutting up feed sacks from the stable into strips with his bayonet. He’s making flambeaux, using gasoline from a jerry can on his jeep. That way, we’ll have light tonight.

  It’ll get dark before five, so there’ll be one more turn before night double guard starts. We’ll stick it out for now; then tomorrow, if nothing’s happened, we’ll drop to one post. Nobody said we have to defend this place, just keep an eye on the road and bridge.

  I crack out new grenades and issue two extras all around; we’re each carrying bandoliers, plus the clips on our belts. Our fifty caliber is loaded with armor piercing, every sixth shell tracer. We can’t do anything against a tank, even with AP, but maybe it’ll slow down a weapons or troop carrier. Hell, nobody’ll be rolling through here with anything like that; I should relax.

  Miller comes in with a ring of rusty keys. He found them hanging on a hook inside the well when he took off the cover checking to see if it looked polluted. There’re about twenty keys, all huge and ornate.

  Gordon lights one of the flambeaux. He, Shutzer, Miller and I go on an exploration. We’re finally doing some recon; Major Love would be proud of us.

  We find stairs to the cellar outside on the back wall and work our way down winding eroded steps to a dirt floor. It’s warmer here but humid. The ceilings are arched in stone and festooned with dirt-heavy cobwebs. If it gets really cold, we could live down here, but we’ve had enough sleeping in cellars.

  I’m looking for another entrance from inside to use in case somebody comes charging through the front door upstairs, but there are only three small rooms, a dead end, and nothing but the outside stairwell we came down.

  Miller’s working out the permutations and probabilities for twenty keys and three doors; finally he gets them open. In one, there’re eight bottles of wine. From the straw and empty racks it looks as if somebody’s already ransacked most of it. In another cellar there are two crates of canned sardines. The last cellar is empty except for rusty old tools and some broken chairs.

  We gather up the wine and sardines; they’ll give some zest to the D rations. Miller hauls along three of the broken chairs for burning. We stash the cans of sardines and bottles of wine beside the hearth; Miller cracks the chairs and throws some rungs on our fire.

  Next we climb a stairway on the far wall from our fireplace. It curves upward to a landing, then turns back along the rear wall. We open a tall, wooden door onto a hall running the length of the château, almost like a hotel hallway. Miller’s fooling with his keys again. He’s marked off the cellar keys so he’s down to seventeen. It turns out one key opens all hall doors.

  The first room has three walls lined with books, including a recessed spot for a globe of the world. Most of Europe on it is German. The floor is carpeted and there’s oak wainscoting up about three feet. I pull aside the curtains on the fourth wall, open a window and push out the shutter. I’m looking down from the front of our château and see Mother by the bridge.

  Maybe I should make the upper guard post in here; be a hell of a lot more comfortable. But somehow it seems wrong, turning a beautiful room like this into a guard post. Wilkins probably wouldn’t let me anyway. Also, if anything happened, whoever was up here would be trapped.

  I go around looking at the books. They’re all French or German, no English. I’m not exactly sure which country we’re in; could be Belgium, Luxembourg, France or even Germany; we’re at a place where they more or less come together. I don’t know what time it is, what day or what country. I’m not even sure of my own name. Next thing they’ll be making me a general.

  The other rooms are bedrooms, five of them. There are furniture marks on the floors but the rooms are empty. The biggest room has full-length mirrors along one wall, the wall away from the windows. God, we’re ugly; dirty, gangling, baggy; shuffling in a hunching crouch like animals. We’re walking, talking Bill Mauldin cartoons or van Gogh potato eaters. We look as if we’re holding things in, at the same time, keeping things out; a permanent state of negative expectation.

  I stop in front of one mirror, straighten, try to recognize myself; who is this, who am I?

  Gordon’s up close to another mirror, inspecting his teeth. Miller and Shutzer are laughing, posing; pointing at each other. Shutzer gives himself the finger. I don’t think we’ve been seeing ourselves the way we look in these mirrors; it’s hard to accept. We look like the enemy.

  At the end of the hallway are two doors. One opens onto a gigantic bathroom with more mirrors along the walls. In the center of the room is a strange-looking copper bathtub shaped like a giant shoe. It looks something like the house for the old lady who didn’t know what to do. It also looks like the kind of bathtub Claudette Colbert would use to take a bath with lots of bubbles, steam and Clark Gable. She knew what to do.

  Miller wants to make a bucket chain, haul water from the well and take a bath. But it’s so cold there’s frost on the insides of windows and the mirrors are steaming up with our breath and the heat of our bodies. There are closets behind the mirrors, all empty; and in one corner is a sink without water. There’s also something like a footbath, which I now know was a bidet.

  We go out and open the other door in the hall. It leads onto a narrow turning staircase. We tromp up in a row. At top is a small door; Miller gets it third try.

  The attic’s divided into small rooms and these rooms are stuffed full with furniture. Things are piled King Tut tombstyle, helter-skelter. It’s fantastic: musical instruments, rugs, satin-covered chairs, beds, paintings in big gilt frames. We poke our way around. Wilkins is going to go ape exploring all this. He’ll probably be cataloguing the whole shootin’ match before he’s finished.

  But we have some needs right now. We carry down four mattresses and satin quilted covers. The second squad of the regimental I and R platoon, Umpty-eleventh Infantry, Eighty-tenth Division, will be living in luxury for a few days.

  Downstairs, we square our mattresses around the fire and spread the quilts over them. We put fart sacks on top. We’ll always have at least two on guard so this should work fine. I spread out on one and enjoy the softness; it’s been a long time since I’ve slept in an honest-to-God bed.

  Shutzer, our kosher gourmet, hungering for the smell of fish, opens a sardine can with his bayonet. Miller, the man who has everything, even a corkscrew, works the cork from a bottle of wine. This could well be the coup de grace for my stomach, perhaps my entire digestive system, top to bottom. We pass the wine and sardines around; wine’s sour but cold, sardines float in thick oil; some writing on the can’s in German. Maybe this is the German secret weapon; maybe we’ll all wind up in some nice American field hospital with a gaggle of Purple Hearts, victimized by the terrible Huns and their secret weapon, poisoned sardines.

  I sit there trying to work out bridge hands for the maniacs. Soon as I’m on duty, it’ll be Gordon, Shutzer, Wilkins and Mundy locked in mortal combat. Concocting hands is more fun than playing. Sometimes I watch and count tricks. For me the game is guessing what the contract will be and if the hands will make. Each day, I’m getting better at playing this inside-out, bass-ackwards kind of bridge. The secret is making the hands as Machiavellian as possible.

&nbs
p; Before that Saar patrol, the squad usually played ordinary duplicate bridge. Once a week at Shelby, we’d nominate a team to play against the first squad, Edwards’s squad. We always won. If you don’t count Wilkins, Morrie and Gordon were our best players. At Shelby, Wilkins would never play; now he only plays once in a while to make an emergency foursome. Morrie, Fred and Jim were regulars, too. Max Lewis would play sometimes. Now, when the maniacs want a really good game, they beg Wilkins to sit in; but poor Mundy’s stuck with it most of the time. He never played before he joined the squad and he’ll never be any good. He’s not devious at all, and doesn’t care enough about winning. It drives Shutzer mad.

  When we lost half the squad, we also lost our only decks of cards. They were on Morrie, and he was back with the medics before he could pass them to any of us. We weren’t thinking much about bridge right then.

  He died in the field hospital. With his right hand gone and his face the way it was, I don’t think he tried hard to stay on. I wouldn’t. Gordon and I wrapped him; it looked as if his eyes were empty; the side of his head was spongy soft.

  We’re continually writing home for playing cards, candles, pencils and dictionaries but not one of us has gotten any. We get warm, hand-knit socks, too thick for our boots, or boxes of cookies mashed into crumbs. Corrollo used to get hot Italian peperone sausages and hard Italian cookies uncrushed. Corrollo also would steal sausage off dead Germans. He said it was good but not so good as he got from home.

  Father Mundy’s mother packs each of her cookies in a separate wrapping of waxed paper, then stuffs shredded newspaper tight around them. She’s been sending packages to relatives in Ireland for years, so she knows how.

  Father considers those cookies an act of love. They are. He’s the one guy we never hound for seconds but he passes them out anyway. It’s almost as if he’s giving communion; one at a time, carefully unwrapped and handed to you directly. They’re usually tollhouse, with lumps of real chocolate and deep in butter. One of Mundy’s mom’s cookies is something to be eaten slowly with much concentration, almost worth reconverting for.

  Maybe the folks back home are actually sending us dictionaries, pencils, candles and cards. Maybe the military considers these subversive objects and confiscates them. It could be Love has a whole duffel bag filled with bridge decks, dictionaries, pencils, pens, thesauri and bundles of candles, even blessed ones for Mundy.

  I work out four hands in standard bridge annotation on separate cards. I make these cards from the turned edges of my K ration boxes when I cut them off with my bayonet. We thought of making a deck with these pieces but Miller calculated fifty-two of them would be over three inches thick and they’d get battered in no time. I put the finished hands face down on top of the phone battery box; they’ll find them. It’ll be Gordon-Mundy versus Shutzer and an unwilling Wilkins, so I don’t have to think much; with that set of baroque minds, any distribution of cards becomes a drama. They can stretch out a single three no-trump bid to over half an hour.

  We’ve been playing this new way three weeks now; sometimes it seems like three years. Gordon invented the game; it’s titled “compact, cardless, replay duplicate bridge.” They’ll each choose a chunk of K box and that’s their hand. I’ve asked to assign hands but they don’t trust my impartiality. As Shutzer put it:

  “For Christ’s sake, Won’t, you’re already playing God; what else do you want!?”

  When playing a hand, they draw a line under each card as it’s played. Mel insists they all go through the motions of placing the phantom cards empty-handed on the table, dirt, blanket, mud or wherever they’re playing, calling out which card is being played. Miller complains this is one more stupid atavism, but goes along. What else? If Mel doesn’t play; no bridge, everybody down. By the way, Miller is one reason we need a dictionary. He also creates crossword puzzles which make The New York Times Sunday puzzles seem simple as tic-tac-toe.

  When a hand’s finally played out, the cards are given to me. At my discretion, I then, in the future (of which there sometimes doesn’t seem to be much), give back the cards with clockwise rotation for replay. My upper-left field jacket pocket is stuffed to bulging like Mae West on one side with these sets of bridge hands. Maybe someday a piece of shrapnel will bury itself in there and save my life the way Bibles always seem to save the lives of religious Protestants. I’ll be saved by bridge hands rather than the hand of God.

  Pencils are pure gold in our squad. If one pencil has arrived for each pleading request, Love must have enough to start a stationery store after the war, no one duffel bag could possibly hold them all.

  I cherish my trusty 2B and a 4B, wide lead, carpenter’s pencil. I bought the 4B in a hardware store at Shelby and have carried it all the way. It’s more than half worn down. It’s a race to see which ends first, my 4B, the war or me. Pencils like that are ruined if you drop them, because they break inside the wood; I keep it wrapped in toilet paper and tucked under the bandage in my aid kit. I use those pencils exclusively for drawing. That 4B might be the one thing that’s holding me together. I won’t lend either pencil to anybody for anything; some things are private even when you’ve just been kicked up to sergeant.

  I don’t even use them to make up bridge hands; I use an ordinary 2HB for that. I’m the only one in the squad with three pencils. I’d rather leave off a bandolier than be without them.

  Most times I draw on the inside of torn open K ration boxes; the whole squad saves these K boxes for me. I can’t carry the drawings with me, so I roll and bury them ten at a time. I have a list of burial places. It’s in my duffel bag on the kitchen truck. I also have ten or twenty of the best drawings in that bag.

  I’m thinking then how maybe after the war I’ll come back, use my maps and dig the drawings up. I didn’t think they’d rot; I hoped not; K ration boxes are waxed on the outside.

  I draw everything. I have good drawings I did of Morrie and Max, Jim and Fred, Whistle and Louis. I draw our equipment and different places we’ve been. I draw trees and pinecones, farmhouses, scenes, mess cups, bottles; anything. It makes things more real; at the same time, not so real.

  Actually, my duffel bag with maps and drawings—everything I owned—got lost when I was wounded on the Moselle. Even so, twenty years later, I did go back with my wife and kids. I didn’t find anything; it’d all changed so much and I couldn’t remember any exact places.

  It’s getting to be four o’clock. Miller and I are on from four to eight. I’m counting it a day guard with only one of us in each hole but most of it will be dark. I put myself up on the hill to have a good look at things. I’ll especially be watching for smoke or fires. Maybe I can catch them cooking dinner, figure out where they are; if there is somebody; there must be.

  On the way out, I ask Bud to listen for any vehicle traffic while he’s down there. Hell, I should tell him. I crank up the phones to let Mundy and Wilkins know we’re coming. I have a horror of being shot by somebody on guard when I’m coming out as relief. It’s the way I’m liable to go, a friendly useless casualty.

  Miller and I check rifles, hook grenades in our pockets. I’m hoping the damned hole is finished up there. With both Shutzer and Mundy digging over the past four hours, it should be. Digging at dusk through roots is miserable. You get yourself sweaty, then have to sit out in wet cold as the dark comes on.

  Going uphill, I can feel the temperature dropping. The sky’s an even, low white; if it drops a few degrees more, we could have snow; that’s all we need. I go back for my shelter half. If it snows, I’ll need to work out a less visible path for climbing to this post.

  Father’s about frozen. He’s standing up out of the hole stamping his feet. The hole’s finished but the dirt’s still in a pile. Shutzer and Mundy should know better.

  “Wow, Wont, is it ever getting cold up here.”

  “Yeah, well it’s warm inside. Bud put some hot water on the primus before we came out; there’s even a fire and comfortable beds, with quilted silk covers.”r />
  “Aw, come on, Wont. Don’t kid me.”

  “No kidding; you’ll see for yourself.”

  He slings his rifle on his shoulder, takes off his helmet. I sit on the pile of dirt.

  “By the way, Father, I forgot to give the password. Tell them it’s ‘cold—witch.’ Have Gordon phone it out to Miller.”

  I’m wondering if Mundy will catch on. He was already in junior seminary at thirteen, so things like that can pass right over his head. Normally we get our password from division but they can’t give it on the radio so we’ll make up our own.

  “Don’t forget, Father; ‘cold—witch.’”

  He’s started down the hill.

  “Yeah, I got it, ‘cold—witch.’ ”

  I watch him pick his way downhill, his shoulders hunched, his woolknit cap on his head, his helmet hanging in the crook of his arm, rifle sliding off his other shoulder. Mundy hates wearing a helmet more than anybody I know. He might also be prime contender as squad’s sloppiest soldier.

  Then I’m alone. I sit there on the pile of dirt; I’ll spread it in a few minutes. The scope’s on a bed of leaves beside the hole. I tuck it into my belt inside my field jacket; it’s best to keep a scope warm; then the lens doesn’t fog up next to your eye.

  Father’s not careful enough; he isn’t as afraid of dying as the rest of us. If I could believe the same things he does, or says he does, I wouldn’t be afraid to die either; I’d walk around playing hero, bucking for paradise. It worries me he’ll make some dumb mistake from not thinking and get himself killed.