A Special Providence

by Richard Yates

  “Who ain’t, buddy? You know anybody who ain’t?”

  “… shit, though, why not go over the damn hill? What’s the worst they’d give a man? Ten years in Leavenworth, and then get it commuted to six months when the war’s over? That ain’t so bad.”

  “Leavenworth, my ass. You’d never see no Leavenworth, buddy. M.P.’s ‘ud shove your ass on the next boat, that’s all they’d do.”

  “… fella over in the next barracks, he was tellin’ me they got this one ole boy over there put his foot up on a stump? Just like ‘at? Put his foot up on a stump and commenced askin’ fellas to hit his leg with a rifle? And you know, that’s pretty smart? Get your leg broke here, you’d sure as hell save yourself a mess of trouble later on.”

  “She-it. Put your foot up on a stump, Reynolds! I’d like to see you have guts enough to let me hit your leg with a rifle.”

  “I never said I would! Damn, you get things twisted around! I never said I would! …”

  Everyone seemed determined to outdo everyone else in boastful claims of cowardice, and Prentice found it disheartening. He stayed as close as possible to Quint and Sam Rand, who avoided the talk, and he spent most of his time trying to finish the letter to Hugh Burlingame. But he couldn’t make the paragraphs work out right, and in the end he tore it up and dropped the pieces into the coal stove.

  On the second day a harassed little buck sergeant came storming into the hut to announce that he personally didn’t give a pig’s shit whether anybody paid attention to him or not, but that anybody who didn’t, and who missed the boat, would find his sweet little ass up for a general God damned court-martial. He then chalked numerals on each of their steel helmets and told them all to stand by because they’d be moving out any minute. But they didn’t move out until long after dark; when they did, it was to become part of an endless column slipping and sliding down an ice-covered hillside that seemed to fall away for miles, and despite the cold they were soaked with sweat by the time they filed into another train that took them to the Weehawken ferry slip, from which they were borne out into the gentle midnight silence of the Hudson. They floated downtown, heading east across the river, and the ferryboat drew up beneath the enormous gray hull of the Queen Elizabeth. Then they labored up into the pier and onto the ship, where tired British voices guided them down curving, tilting corridors and stairways until they found the impossibly small canvas bunks, hung in vertical tiers of four, whose numbers matched the numbers on their helmets. And when they woke up in the morning – when they struggled out half seasick to stand with their mess kits in the freezing wind of the open deck, waiting for breakfast – there was no land in sight.

  “Only you don’t call it the Clyde River,” Quint explained as they stood at a railing of the stilled ship, six days later. “You call it—” and here he broke into a prolonged coughing fit. Both he and Prentice had chest colds that were getting worse. “You call it the Firth of Clyde,” he said when he’d recovered. “I don’t know what the hell ‘Firth’ means, but that’s what you call it. It’s supposed to be the biggest shipbuilding center in the world, or something.”

  “Don’t look like much,” said Sam Rand. “Them hills is real pretty, though.”

  It took them all night and most of the next day to ride through Great Britain on a train that pleased Prentice because it was exactly like the trains in British movies, a series of cozy compartments with a connecting corridor. He had a window seat, and long after the other men were asleep he stared with fascination at the dark passing landscape of Scotland and then of England. Being in England made him think of a man whose name hadn’t crossed his mind in years – Mr. Nelson, Mr. Sterling Nelson; a man who had once said, “I’ll expect you to take good care of your mother while I’m gone” – and for a little while he could almost feel his mother riding beside him (“Oh, isn’t this exciting, Bobby?”) so that it came as a little shock when the person who slumped heavily against his shoulder, groaning in sleep, turned out to be John Quint.

  In the morning, along with the passing out of cold K rations, bright rumors flew up and down the corridor to the effect that this particular trainload of replacements wasn’t heading for combat at all. The battle of the Ardennes, which everyone by now had learned to call “the Bulge,” was virtually won. The war in Europe would soon be over, and there were enough men now on the Continent to finish the job. Their own destination was to be a camp in the south of England, near Southampton, where they would join a new division in training for service as occupation troops in Germany. All afternoon there was a holiday mood on the train as they sped through the English countryside – there was talk of English girls and English beer and furloughs in London – but there were several skeptics, too.

  “Hell, it’s the old story,” said Sam Rand. “Don’t believe anything you hear and only half of what you see. I say we’re goin’ straight to Belgium.”

  “Sam, old man,” said Quint, “I hate to say it, but I’ve got a feeling you’re right.”

  And he was. When they walked heavy-laden through the streets of Southampton it was still possible to believe the rumors – their camp was supposed to be near Southampton, wasn’t it? – but no Army trucks were there to meet them and no jeep drove up with orders to turn them away from the waterfront. The hike went on, past numberless English civilians whose stares made it plain that they were bored half to death with the sight of Americans, and it didn’t end until they had filed aboard a British troopship that smelled of fish and vomit. And the ship, under conditions of strict blackout and radio silence, crept out into the Channel that night.

  Then they were in Normandy, rolling eastward in a train of shuddering French boxcars, the floors of which were thickly embedded with straw that caused a good deal of sneezing and complaint until it proved to be comfortable. Prentice woke up coughing and feverish soon after dawn and squirmed around to lie with his head near the partly opened door, even though he knew it probably wouldn’t be good for his cold. He wanted to see the snow-covered fields and hedgerows where all the fighting had taken place last summer. Again it seemed that his mother was riding with him – “Oh, look at the colors, dear; aren’t they lovely?” – but he fell back to sleep and awoke much later to sounds that would certainly have baffled and distressed her: the clamor of commercial bargaining. They had come to a stop near some town, and a number of ragged men and boys were swarming under the boxcar with offers of money and wine in exchange for cigarettes.

  “… How much?”

  “Vanty-sank, he says. That’s twenty-five francs for the pack. Go ahead, what the hell.”

  “Shit no; don’t be an idiot – that’s only half a buck. Make him give you a buck a pack.”

  “Comby-ann for the wine, hey kid? Hey! Buster! You with the runny nose – yeah, you. Comby-ann for the veeno?”

  “Pardon, M’sieur? Comment?”

  “I said comby-ann cigaretty do you want for the veeno? No, damn it, the veeno!”

  Then they were moving again. Prentice would gladly have spent the rest of the day talking with Quint – they could have discussed the countryside and tried to figure out what part of France this was – but Quint said he felt lousy and stayed deep in the straw, either sleeping or trying to sleep. Sam Rand was there to talk to, but he showed no interest in the passing scene. “I just want to get where we’re goin’,” he said, “wherever the hell it is.”

  The phrase “replacement depot” had a comfortingly solid sound – it seemed to promise at least a semblance of garrison life, a place with decent accommodations and decent food and medical attention – but the First Army’s replacement depot proved to be a jumble of bams and hastily pitched squad tents around a badly shelled Belgian village. Prentice’s group got a barn to sleep in instead of a tent, but it leaked wind and snow; the only way to make it bearable was to walk half a mile to where a Belgian farmer sold armfuls of straw for packs of cigarettes, and straw soon became a matter of furious importance:

  “Hey, you’re takin’ all
my straw!”

  “Fuck you, buddy – this is my straw.”

  In the morning they were marched out to a makeshift target range to zero-in the sights of their rifles, and in the afternoon they were given overshoes – ordinary black civilian galoshes which bothered Prentice a little because they looked so unmilitary. Then they were loaded into open trucks and driven away toward an uncertain place from which, it was said, they would be assigned to combat divisions within twenty-four hours.

  “Why the hell don’t they have covers on the trucks?” Prentice demanded in the wind, and Quint, who seemed to know a good deal about the First Army from his reading of Time magazine, explained that open trucks had been a regulation since the outbreak of the Bulge: the idea was to enable men to get out of them faster in case of enemy attack. The trucks let them down into an encampment of frozen squad tents, and they spent a coughing, sleepless night there before convoys of other open trucks began to arrive from various First Army divisions to claim their men. Prentice, Quint, Rand, and several hundred others went into the trucks whose drivers wore a shoulder patch of a design worked around the numerals “57.”

  “Is this supposed to be a good outfit, the Fifty-seventh?” Prentice asked.

  “How the hell should I know?” Quint said. “Am I supposed to know everything?”

  “Well, Jesus, you don’t have to get sore. I just thought you might know, is all.”

  “Well, I don’t.”

  And there was no more talk in the truck for a long time, as they drew deep inside their snow-encrusted overcoats and tried to expose as little flesh as possible to the wind.

  “I wonder if they’ll put us out into line companies right away,” Prentice said, “or if they’ll keep us at division headquarters a while first.”

  Quint’s round, stubbled, wind-chapped face turned slowly to stare at him as if at a tiresome child. “God damn it, Prentice,” he said without opening his teeth, “will you quit asking questions?”

  “I wasn’t asking a question. I just said I wondered.”

  “Well, quit wondering, then. Try shutting up for a while. You might learn something.”

  They learned all they needed to know about the division that night, against a distant boom and rumble of artillery fire, when they were assembled in a barn to hear a welcoming talk by an earnest, pulpit-voiced chaplain. “You men are now members of the Fifty-seventh Division,” he said, standing with his thumbs in his pistol belt and his paunch sucked in, “and I think you’ll soon find you have every reason to be proud of that fact.” He went on to say that the 57th was not an old division, even by standards that measured a division as old if it had served in Normandy last summer. The 57th had still been in the States last summer. It had come overseas in October, taken advanced training in Wales, and been committed to action here in Belgium a little less than a month ago. But the chaplain pointed out, with a righteous quivering of his cheeks, that in the past month the boys of the 57th had become men. They had “engaged in some of the bitterest fighting yet known in the Second World War, and in some companies the casualty rate has been as high as 60 per cent.” He then said a number of other things, using phrases that could have been lifted whole from Yank magazine or Readers Digest, and Prentice paid more attention to the sound of the artillery than to his voice.

  The place they were assigned to sleep in was the second floor of an abandoned grain mill, an ice-cold room with wind humming steadily through its broken windows. Prentice and Quint went on sick call and received a supply of aspirin and some dark, foul-tasting pellets that were the size and texture of rabbit turds.

  “Actually they’re damn good medicine if you can stand the taste,” Quint said. “Hold it in your mouth till it dissolves; let it coat your throat.” But Prentice couldn’t. He would swallow the thing after a minute and go on coughing, with the awful taste still in his mouth and nose.

  On the second night Sam Rand found a farmer down the road who agreed to let the three of them sleep in his kitchen in exchange for three packs of cigarettes, and it was unbelievably warm. They sat with their socked feet on the fender of a great iron stove, drinking K-ration coffee and listening to the artillery. But Quint said they’d better stay here only for the one night: it was risky because they might miss their orders to move up to the line. They had drawn their company assignments that day, and it pleased Prentice to know that they would all three be in the same unit – “A” Company of the 189th Regiment.

  “What are the other regiments again?” he said.

  “One ninetieth and One ninety-first.”

  “Right. And there’s only those three, right?”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Prentice. Yes, there are three regiments in a division.” And Quint went on in the chanting, singsong tone of a grammar-school teacher, closing his eyes. “There are three battalions in each regiment, three companies plus a heavy-weapons company in each battalion, three platoons plus a weapons platoon in each company—”

  “I know,” Prentice said.

  “—three squads in each platoon, and twelve men in each squad.”

  “I know all that.”

  “Well if you know, why do you keep asking half-assed questions?”

  “I don’t keep asking. I didn’t ask.”

  “And for God’s sake don’t start forgetting where you belong. You’re in ‘A’ Company, First Battalion, One eighty-ninth Regiment. You’d better write it down.”

  “Goddam it, Quint, you don’t have to talk to me that way. I mean I’m not exactly an idiot, you know.”

  “I know you’re not—” and Quint went into a violent spasm of coughing. When it was over he said, “I know you’re not. That’s why it’s so goddam depressing when you keep acting like one all the time.”

  “You know what’s even more depressing? The way you keep acting like a real, royal, first-class little pain in the ass.”

  “Now, now, children,” said Sam Rand. “Quit your fussin’.” And there was a long, simmering-down silence around the stove, until Rand said, “How old’re you, Prentice? Eighteen?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Damn. My oldest boy’s half your age. Don’t that seem funny?”

  And Prentice said he guessed it did. “How many kids do you have again, Sam? Three, is it?”

  “Three, yeah. The girl’s seven, and then we got another boy four.” He eased one buttock off his chair and reached tentatively for his wallet. “You seen their pictures?”

  “No, I don’t believe I—”

  And out came a snapshot of them, blond and serious, lined up against the side of a bright clapboard house with the sun in their eyes.

  “Then this here’s my wife,” Sam said, and turned the plastic frame to reveal a thin, pleasant-looking girl in a flowered dress and a new permanent wave. Prentice examined both pictures long enough to make approving comments and then passed the wallet to Quint, who scowled at it, mumbled something agreeable, and handed it back.

  “And then look at this here,” Sam said, probing carefully in another part of the wallet. He pulled out a piece of ruled school paper, many times folded and stained brown from the sweated leather. “Somethin’ the oldest boy wrote in school.”

  It was an essay, written in pencil with many erasures and with periods that were almost as big as the letters:

  MY DADDY

  I love my Daddy because he is so kind to us. He gives us rides on the cultavater and takes us to the Fair and hardly ever gets mad. Now he is in the Army and I pray he will come home soon. He is a very good man. He is very fair. He is smart. This is why I love my father. Vernon Rand Grade 3.

  The teacher’s red pencil had corrected the spelling of “cultivator” and written “A” at the top of the page.

  “Well, I’ll be damned, Sam,” Prentice said. “That’s pretty great. I mean, really, that’s great.”

  Rand’s face was stiff with shyness as he stared at the stove, fiddling with his cigarette, picking a shred of tobacco from his lips with his social f
inger. “Well,” he said, “I mean, it’s pretty good writin’ for a nine-year-old. Or eight, I guess. That’s all he was when he wrote that, was eight.”

  “Very good, Sam,” Quint said, handing the paper back. “That’s really very good.”

  All the tension was dissolved; they were ready for sleep, and as Prentice settled into his bedroll on the floor he began to draft the opening lines of a letter he might one day write: Dear Vernon: I want you to know that your father was one of the finest men I have ever …

  On the following night both Quint and Rand were assigned to guard duty on the divisional headquarters perimeter, which left Prentice with nothing to do but sit cold and alone in the grain mill until a man named Reynolds came over to squat beside him and to confide, in a half whisper, that he knew a nice warm house down the road that was “bigger’n Dallas.” That was Reynolds’s favorite phrase: having gotten a laugh with it several times among the strangers at Fort Meade and Camp Shanks, and having found that it won him goodwill in all the ensuing disorders, he had grown addicted to it. He had shrilly announced that the Queen Elizabeth was bigger than Dallas, that the water power in the toilet bowls aboard ship was bigger than Dallas, that the space left by the removal of somebody’s duffelbag from under his feet in the boxcar would be bigger than Dallas; and he was still saying it even now, after more than a few men had told him to take Dallas and shove it up his ass.

  Don’t tell nobody else,” he said, “ ’cause we don’t want to louse it up. There’s this real nice lady lives there, her husband’s a prisoner in Germany. She’s got these two little kids and this old granny – the granny’s real nice too. They let us sleep there last night, me and a couple other boys, and we aim to do it again tonight. Plenty of room for one more.”

  “Well, thanks,” Prentice said, “but I don’t know. Don’t you think we ought to stay here, in case they call us out?”

  “Shit, I ain’t worried none. They say the One ninetieth ain’t movin’ till tomorra night. You’re in the One ninetieth, ain’tcha?”