The Sentimentalists
Page 16
Q: Did the screams come from the same area as the shots?
A: Yes, sir.
Q: I know it is very difficult, but can you distinguish, was there a big volley of fire and then screams?
A: I can’t say.
Q: You don’t know.
A: Right.
Q: Can you think of anything else?
A: No, sir.
GC: We have no further questions, sir.
My first thought was that I’d missed it somehow: That if I read the transcript again, and more carefully this time, it would be there. Hidden somewhere in the text. But no matter how many times I read the transcript through, Owen appeared only as the nearly anonymous Carey. Injured, and evacuated early on from the story, as though he had been only a peripheral character, of no great significance to the account.
How was I to understand this?
Or in any way now recount the real events of that night, the twenty-second of October, 1967? Or understand my father’s relationship to Owen? Or to Henry? Or, for that matter, to my mother. Or Helen. Or me.
Several possibilities seem to present themselves.
1. That the events indeed occurred in the manner indicated by the transcript. That Owen had been injured and removed from the squad. That he died later, in hospital, as was indicated in the letter that was sent shortly after his death, and which Henry still keeps in a drawer. That the stories of my father, told to me in the summer before his death, muddled by morphine and beer, were only phantom images, resurfacing as in a dream, in shifting and often contradictory arrangements of circumstance and form.
2. That my father was not mistaken. That the events of the twenty-second of October, 1967, played themselves out more or less in the way that my father recounted to me. That Owen had not been injured, and had accompanied my father and Bean on patrol. That he had held up his hand as if to stop a bullet that did not stop; that my father had covered his body with his own. That it was only later that these events were retracted, eliminating themselves from the records. By Bean, perhaps, who in the laundry one day had whispered a warning that was not fully accounted for with the, “If you have anything to do with it …” which, in his testimony, my father recalled. Or, maybe it had even been the watery-eyed Michael Baird who inspired my father to the requisite caution; couching any offence in his words by adding, for the record, “Do what you think is right.”
3. That the puzzling circumstances surrounding Bright – that fine man, with the wife in the States – who took a man out one night and shot him, are of some greater importance to the story.
My father, questioned on this point still further in the cross-examination, was unable to give the counsel any further clues as to the identity of the man who was killed, or the reason for such an indiscretion – if that’s indeed what it had been. I suppose that it was assumed that the man had been a Vietnamese, suspected of Viet Cong ties, but no indication is given to this, or any other, effect.
“Do you know,” the cross-examiner had inquired of my father, “that at the time of the twenty-second of October, 1967, Lieutenant Baird had known Sergeant Bright for only about three days?”
“No, sir,” my father, to this question, replied.
“Now this concern for Sergeant Bright’s welfare is touching,” continued the cross-examiner. “And when he told you that Sergeant Bright took a man out and shot him, did he tell you he saw Sergeant Bright take a man out and shoot him?”
“I don’t think he said I saw, I think he said, just that Sergeant Bright did it.”
“Did you ask for any verification?”
“No, sir.”
“You just assumed that it was true.”
“I guess I assumed it as being true, sir.”
“You took his word for it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you bother to ask him where he was when this happened?”
“No, sir, I didn’t.”
“Didn’t it seem a little odd to you that this man, Lieutenant Baird, was coming to you and telling you on one hand, Do what you think is right, and on the other hand he was suggesting to you what he thinks is right? In other words, it is too bad, but after all they did kill people – did this strike you as being a little odd?”
“Yes, sir, it did. If he really felt it was wrong, why didn’t he do something about it?”
“Would you think it a little more odd if I told you that he testified here today that he had never even talked to you?”
“What, sir?”
“He testified here today that he never talked to you concerning Sergeant Bright or anyone else.”
“I’d have to say that is not the truth, sir.”
According to Parada, there had been no further interrogation into that particular event, and, after my father was asked to testify as to the moral character of Bright: “I thought he was a pretty good officer,” my father said, the issue seems to have been dropped entirely, and to such a depth that even my father did not mention it again; not even when he said to me, “I’ve never told this to anyone,” and spoke for the first time about the war.
I couldn’t help but wonder if the man who disappeared that night – that Baird may or may not have seen killed – was my father’s friend, and Henry’s son. That whatever events had transpired (unrecorded by my father’s version of things, said or unsaid, or by the transcript itself ) had caused a second conflict to erupt that night. That my father should later have remembered it differently (imagining that he himself had witnessed the event of the death – that he was, in fact, through his own action, or lack thereof, responsible for that death) could be understood as a trick of the memory. It could even be understood as a not-wholly-unimaginable desire to obscure the exact nature of the death itself; its equivalent helplessness. Perhaps my father had hoped to create for himself, in the retelling at least, the idea that things might have come out differently in the end. That he himself might have had some power over what did, and did not happen on that particular night. Securing for himself, that is, in the recollection of an actual moment, an object to which he could attach the immensity and permanence of his guilt, and his loss – just as, for Frank Higgins, that loss had been expressed by the precise figure of three hundred men.
But I do not pretend to understand these events, or the holes in the stories, or the implications of what was said and unsaid in the two times (first at the trial, and second to me, shortly before his death) that my father spoke of his experiences on Operation Liberty II, and throughout the rest of the war. When I questioned Parada about the incongruencies between my father’s stories and the documents to which I was later able to compare them to, he had little to offer by way of explanation. And though he did not seem to infer that my father had misconstrued, either mistakenly or otherwise, the nature of Owen’s death, it was clear that he was no longer terribly concerned with the details of the thing, and that, having exhausted the resources with which he had planned to uncover the truth, it was as good as if the event had never occurred.
But I think differently. Think that the emphasis has been, through the wrong-way-round field glasses of time, reversed somehow. And that the actions that did or did not take place that night are somewhat sideways to the real story – just as the events of my father’s life have been, I believe, somewhat sideways to himself. To the true story, that is, of his life: the one that I would have liked to have written. Because this, neither, is the real story. Still, the details get in, and still, everything is left out.
I believe, for example, that for my father and for the rest of my family, what remains now of this particular story is not the story itself, but something underneath. Because, even at the very end, there remained in my father’s life, and now in my own, that possibility, always. A promise of something. And although now that promise – which I have been trying for some time now to put into words – happens to be at this moment trundling its way along Highway 70, somewhere East of Columbus, on its way to Fargo, North Dakota, only just now disappearing
from the limit of the story, it will continue to remain. Underneath everything. Etched in our minds. And not in its rough and unfinished form, either. As it existed in Roddy Stewart’s, or my grandmother’s, or Henry’s garage. But as a real and honest-to-goodness boat, sailing up the coast of Maine from Booth Bay Harbor. Past Halifax and Chedabucto Bay. All the way to St. John’s.
REMEMBER ME
Keith Douglas
Remember me when I am dead
and simplify me when I’m dead.
As the process of earth
strip off the colour and skin:
take the brown hair and blue eye
and leave me simpler than at birth,
when hairless I came howling in
as the moon entered the cold sky.
Of my skeleton perhaps,
so stripped, a learned man will say
“He was of such a type and intelligence,” no more.
Thus when in a year collapse
particular memories, you may
deduce, from the long pain I bore
the opinions I held, who was my foe
and what I left, even in my appearance,
but incidents will be no guide.
Time’s wrong-way telescope will show
a minute man ten years hence
and by distance simplified.
Through the lens see if I seem
substance of nothing: of the world
deserving mention or charitable oblivion,
not by momentary spleen
or love into decision hurled,
leisurely arrive at an opinion.
Remember me when I am dead
and simplify me when I’m dead.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I gratefully acknowledge the support of the citizens of Canada and Nova Scotia, through the Canada Council for the Arts and the Nova Scotia Department of Tourism, Culture and Heritage, for their financial assistance during the completion of this book. Many thanks are also extended to Mikhail Iossel, Stephanie Bolster and Gary Blackwood for their help with this manuscript at its various stages, and to Kate Kennedy and Andrew Steeves at Gaspereau Press, for their thoughtful editorial suggestions and continued support. Finally, I would like to thank my father, Olaf Skibsrud (1946–2008), who shared with me his experiences on which parts of this novel are based, and whose “warmest heart” is – I hope – one of the true subjects of this story.
The lines from “I sing of Olaf glad and big”. Copyright © 1931, 1959, 1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. From E.E. Cummings’ Complete Poems: 1904–1962, edited by George J. Firmage. Copyright © 1979 by George James Firmage. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.
The William James quotation is taken from Chapter V of Pragmatism (1907).
The excerpt from no. 114 of John Berryman’s The Dream Songs is copyright © 1969 by John Berryman; copyright renewed in 1997 by Kate Donahue Berryman. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
The Gary Lane quotation is from I Am: A Study of E. E. Cummings’ Poems, published by the University Press of Kansas; copyright © 1976. The complete text of Keith Douglas’ “Remember Me When I am Dead” is reproduced by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
I would also like to acknowledge the use of material from the 1942 film production, Casablanca, directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid.
Although all the names and some of the details have been changed, the transcript included in the epilogue is based on a real document produced during the Article 32 investigation of the incident at Quang Tri, South Vietnam, on 22 October 1967.
A NOTE ON THE TYPE
In 1928, the British sculptor, wood engraver and type designer Eric Gill (1882–1940) moved to Pigotts in Buckinghamshire and set up a workshop. Among his ventures there was the establishment, in 1930, of a printing business with René Hague. As he had done for the Golden Cockerel Press the previous year, Gill designed a proprietary typeface for use at his press, naming it after his daughter Joanna – who later married Hague. The H.W. Caslon foundry cut punches for the roman in 1930, in time for its use in the production of Gill’s An Essay on Typography, which appeared in June 1931, one of the first books produced by Hague & Gill. A second edition, published by Sheed & Ward in 1936, introduced Joanna’s italic. In 1937, the Monotype Corporation released a version of Joanna for their composition casters. A digital version appeared in 1986, with semi-bold and bold weights added by the Monotype drawing office.
Table of Contents
COVER PAGE
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT PAGE
DEDICATION
CONTENTS
FARGO
1
2
3
4
5
CASABLANCA
1
2
3
4
CASABLANCA 1959
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
VIETNAM 1967
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
EPILOGUE