by John Sanford
“The Lusitania had no right with guns on,” Danny said.
“You know what I think?” Roger said. “Danny’s for the Huns.”
“Well, I ain’t for the Allies,” Danny said.
“If you ain’t for the Allies,” Morton said, “then you got to be for the Huns. You got to be for somebody”
“I’m in the middle.”
“You can’t be in the middle. How can you be in the middle?”
“I can be in the middle by not being on the sides. I don’t like the side of the Germans because they ravitch girls and cut off their hair, and I don’t like the side of the Great British because they impressed American seamen, and we had a Revolution.”
Roger said, “My cousin told me the Huns was so thirsty they drank blood.”
“The Great British are thirsty too,” Danny said. “They drink more blood than anybody in the world. That’s how they got the name of Redcoats.”
“I don’t care about thirsty or not,” Morton said. “Four of our fathers come from the Great British Islands, so we have to be for the Great British.”
“I’m for the Great British because they speak English,” Dewey said.
“I wouldn’t be for anybody that didn’t speak American,” Danny said. “Pew on the Great British!”
Roger, Morton, Paul, and Dewey looked at each other, and then they rose from the stringpiece. There was a moment’s silence while one of them elected himself spokesman. “You got to be for the Great British!” Morton said.
“You got to take the oath of alliance!” Roger said.
“You got to do whatever we tell you!” Paul said.
“Or else the four of us’ll kick the shit out of you!” Dewey said.
“Pew on all of you!” Danny said.
* * *
Half an hour later, Polly Johnson was swabbing Danny’s head with arnica. “What I can’t understand,” she said, “is why you were for the Germans.”
“I wasn’t for the Germans,” Danny said, “and I wasn’t for the Great British. I was just against those four guys telling me what I had to do.”
Dangerous Thoughts
“This one’s for you, Danny,” Polly Johnson said, and she handed the boy a letter. “It’s from Uncle Web.”
“Ah, the globe-trotter!” the hack-driver said. “Where’s he now?”
Danny examined the cancellation. “A place called C. Z.,” he said.
“C. Z.—where in hell is C. Z.?”
“Maybe it’s the City of Zanzibar,” Danny said, and he slit the envelope and removed a letter, a postcard, a photograph, and a pamphlet. “Look what he sent.”
“Read the letter first,” his mother said.
Putting the other enclosures aside, the boy opened a folded page. “Up at the top, it says, ‘June 17, 1917,’ and right under, it says, ‘Coco Solo, C. Z.’ There’s that C. Z. again.”
“Canal Zone,” the woman said. “Read.”
Danny said, “I will now read the letter.”
Dear nephew Daniel, the note you sent to Rancagua, Chile, was four months old when it finally caught up with me. As you can see, I’m not in Chile any more, so the note went all the way down there for nothing. Or maybe I shouldn’t say nothing, because after all it did have a wonderful boat-ride.
“A wonderful boat-ride,” the hack-driver said. “All tied up in a mail-sack and buried in some ratty hold.”
The woman said, “If that was the only way you could go to Chile—all tied up in a sack—you’d go.”
“Read on,” the hack-driver said. “Sure, I’d go.”
You’re probably wondering what I’m doing here in the Canal Zone. Well, Danny-boy, take a look at my picture. Old Webster Varner is now a Chief Yeoman in Uncle Sam’s Navy.
“In the Navy!” the hack-driver said. “Now, what do you know about that?”
His wife took up the photograph. “He looks good in uniform,” she said.
“Let’s see,” the hack-driver said, and the photograph was passed to him. “The same aimless slob.”
Even your father has likely heard by this time that our country is at war.
“As Danny used to say,” the hack-driver said, “that’s an insultment!”
No matter what you’ve read in books, war is not a noble thing. You blow your enemy’s brains out, and they load you down with medals, but it’s murder all the same. I suppose you’re asking yourself what I’m doing in the Navy if I don’t believe in killing—and I’m going to tell you. A lot of funny things have happened in that wonderful land of ours since the Revolution—damn funny things. Somehow or other, a pack of crooks have managed to gobble up everything in sight—by force, by trickery, by just being there first—and it’s gotten so’s the average man nowadays is lucky if he dies with enough in the bank to cover a forty-dollar funeral.
“That’s God’s own truth,” the hack-driver said. “A guy has to save up to die.”
But it won’t always be like that, Danny. The day will come when us poor stiffs—me, you, your old man, and the rest—snatch back what belongs to us. We won’t always be owned lock, stock, and barrel by Wall Street, and you can take my word for it—or rather the word of a better man than I’ll ever be, Eugene V. Debs. There’s a great one, kid, and the older he gets the greater he grows.
“You want to know something, Polly?” the hack-driver said. “That brother of yours is a Socialist.”
“You must be joking,” the woman said.
But that isn’t what I started out to say. I joined the Navy because it’s my Navy, even if the crooks don’t think so, and it’s my country more than it ever was theirs, even if they’d only laugh if they heard me say it, and it’d be the loveliest place on earth if only it was free in fact, the way it is on paper. And that’s why I’m in the Navy—to make the paper things come to life, to fight for freedom wherever it isn’t. Democracy is contagious.
The boy looked up. “What’s democracy, pop?” he said.
“A thing we’re supposed to have here in America,” the hack-driver said. “Only the crooks went and grabbed it off for themselves.”
“What do they want with it?”
“Nothing special. They just didn’t want us to have it.”
“Didn’t they leave us any at all?”
“Oh, some. About three bags full.”
“I never seen a bag around here.”
“It’s a thing you can’t exactly see.”
“Then it must be camelflagged, like a transalanic boat!”
“Write that to your Uncle Web—he’ll like it. I like it myself.”
“You still haven’t explained what democracy is,” the woman said.
“It’s an idea, son, like ‘All men are created equals.’ You know where that comes from?”
“The Decoration of Independence,” the boy said.
The hack-driver looked at his wife. “You know,” he said, “this kid might get somewhere on nothing, after all.”
“He might,” the woman said, “but it happened to be the Gettysburg Address.”
“It happened to be both,” the boy said.
The hack-driver laughed, saying, “Read us more, boy.”
I send you several things in this letter. I’ve already mentioned the snapshot, and the postcard is simply a map of North and South America—or is it? Look at it carefully and see if you can learn how I swam in two oceans on the same day.
The boy took up the card. At first glance, as his uncle had written, it appeared to be only a map, but held at an angle, it revealed the surrounding waters as faces, one of a man and one of a woman, with mouths joined at the Isthmus. “I know!” the boy said. “The Alanic and Pacific Ocean kissed Panama so hard that it broke in half and made the Canal!”
“That wasn’t a kiss,” the hack-driver said. “It was a bite.”
The pamphlet is something for the future. Put it away till you’re thirteen or fourteen, and then take it out and study it. It was gotten up by the Government, and the Navy issues it to ev
ery man in the service. It deals with the prevention of certain sicknesses that men get when they.…
“I’ll put it away for you, Danny,” the woman said.
“How will I know when I get to be thirteen?”
“I’ll remind you.”
Favorite Sport
The woman brought cups and a coffee-pot from the kitchen, and setting them among the strewn paraphernalia of homework, she said, “Danny, be a good one and run up to the corner for a bottle of cream.” The boy rose, went to the hatrack, and put on his cap. “Hurry those fat little legs of yours,” she said, and as the door began to close, she fired three more words at the narrowing crack. “But don’t fall!”
[“Hurrah!” the crowd was cheering. “Hurrah for Christy Mathewson, the Big Six! He is the Big Six because he is the best pitcher! Look at Matty with the baseball! Hurrah because he will win the game!”
[“What is the score?” said Christy Mathewson.
[The catcher told him the score. “The score is three balls and two strikes, and you are now down in the hole.”
[“Well, I will climb up, then,” Matty said.
[“Hurrah !” the crowd was cheering. “Matty said he will climb up out of the hole! Oh, if only the hole is not too big! Do not be afraid, Matty will climb up! Hurrah!” the crowd was cheering.
[The catcher was serious. He said, “I will now go in back of the plate, and you will have to pitch the ball.”
[Matty said, “I will pitch with all my might.”
[“Hurrah !” the crowd was cheering. “Matty will pitch with all his might!”
[The catcher croushed down in back of the plate, and the batter croushed and swang his bat very mean because he was going to hit the ball. Matty wound himself up and croushed. There was no noise on the Polo Ground. Everybody was too excited.
[They said, “He will throw a spit-ball! That means he will spit on the ball! Throw the ball! We are too excited!”
[Matty stood up on one foot. The other foot was on his shoulder. He threw the ball. …]
A bottle of cream spun end-over-end through the air and smashed against a hydrant knee-high from the sidewalk.
[“Strike three, and you’re out!” said the empire. “Matty has win the contest!”
[“Hurrah!” the crowd was cheering.]
When the boy entered the parlor, empty-handed and late, the room seemed so actively silent that he paused near the door and lowered his head to weather the storm, but after many seconds of waiting, he risked a raising of his eyes and saw that his entrance had gone unnoticed, and even on joining his father and mother at the table, he knew that for them only two people were present.
The hack-driver sat looking at the map, and for once its legend of numbers and lines, its symbols and shapes and colors, detained his mind not at all, and his gaze moved in a smooth and idle journey over what had shrunk to a mere drawing called the United States. His wife, staring at the upper half of a window, saw nothing in the darkening sky.
“I wonder if you know why I’m doing it, Polly,” the hack-driver said. “I wonder if I do, even. All I’m sure about is, there ain’t a thing in the world I wouldn’t sooner do than die, not a thing—and still I ride around in the old Pope-H day after day, and every minute I’m asking myself, ‘Should I go or stay? Should I go or stay?’ I couldn’t tell you a single place I drove to, or if I paid the fares instead of the people paying me, but I can tell you what I was thinking, all right, because it was always the same: ‘Should I go or stay?’”
“And you finally decided to go?” the woman said.
“I’m no red-white-and-blue hero, Polly. I’m only an ordinary guy, but like all the rest, I’m quite a ways from being a chump, and I know there’s damn little in this patriotism-business for me and my kind. Web has it down cold: we’re not out to make the world safe for anything but Wall Street. The big words are what we hire street-cleaners to sweep away. All the ordinary guy is going to get is shot at.”
“They can’t make you go, Dan.”
“No, but they can clap you in prison, and that’s even worse. Who wants to sit around in the jug while everybody else is taking a chance? How could I show my face to myself if I done that?”
“Are you going, then, because you’re ashamed not to go?”
“I’m going for twenny reasons,” the hack-driver said, “and not one of ’em’s worth a snicket. Mostly, I guess, it’s a matter of being afraid—afraid to claim exemption, afraid to enlist, afraid to get drafted, afraid to dodge, afraid to be killed. More than anything, though, I’m going because I’ve got to prove that I ain’t afraid at all.”
“Going where, Pop?” Danny said.
“To France,” the hack-driver said.
“You will have to go on a transalanic boat.”
“I was thinking of swimming, only them uniforms shrink so fast they’d choke me before I got to Sandy Hook.”
“What uniforms, Pop?”
“The uniforms of the United States Army.”
The boy rose, wide-eyed and open-mouthed.
“Yes, sir,” the hack-driver said. “The United States Army.”
“Then you’ll be like George Washington!” the boy said, and he came to a salute. “George Washington, the man with the determine face!”
“In a way, son, in a way,” the hack-driver said, and he went to the window and looked out at the darkness for a long time—until the hand on his throat let go.
Travel
The woman and the boy sat in one of the open-end day-coaches of a Jersey Central local as it rocked across the Raritan River bridge south of Perth Amboy. Below them, the tan silted water was iced-coffee, floating here and there a muddy frozen block of itself, and on the hills beyond and the branches of barren trees lay skiffs of gray snow that merged with the soiled towel of the sky.
“What’s the next station?” the boy said.
They had taken a ferry to the west shore of the Hudson, and there, through the dock-arcade, the woman had led the boy to the train-shed and shown him the ten-wheeled camel-back that would haul them on their journey, and for many moments, mute before this softly-breathing wonderwork, he had gaped at its separate cabs, its steam-chests and fat sand-domes, and its poised rods and perforated drivers, and it was these last that his mind had retained through a world of track and other trains, tanks and gantries, and frozen fields and thawing rivers, and now, his face flattened against a window, he was between the Amboys.
“The next station is Jamesburg,” the woman said.
“And after Jamesburg?”
“Prospect Plains, and then Hightstown. That’s where we get off.” “Is that the end of the railroad?”
“No, but we change trains there. This one doesn’t go where we want to go.”
“I thought trains always go where you want to go. What’s the good of a train that goes where you don’t want to go?”
“There are other people on the train, and it goes where they want to go—to Philadelphia.”
“Where do we want to go?” the boy said. “A little place called Pemberton.”
* * *
“Pemberton! all out for Pemberton!”
The hack-driver was waiting for them on the platform, and the boy looked at spiral puttees, a brass-buttoned overcoat, and a hat like a paper boat, and he looked long, for his father and mother had lashed themselves together with arms and become one at the face, and the train was only a last car drawing back surprised when they came apart and turned to their son.
“Danny!” the hack-driver said. “Danny-boy! I’m so glad to see you I could take a bite right out of your apple-face!”
“If you bite my face,” the boy said, “I will bite your face, because you are George Washington, the man with the determine face.”
“A hard guy. Been in any more fights?”
“Five. I lost four, but I finely won.”
“Hurray for the Johnsons!”
“Us Johnsons finely won.”
“You’re the one with the d
etermine face,” the hack-driver said.
“How’d you like to push it against a bowl of soup?”
* * *
After eating, the Johnson family walked out along a dirt road winding with Rancocas Creek as it gargled under a broken vault of ice. A few days of warmer weather had run off most of the snow, but a sudden freeze had once again set the crumpled earth like stucco, and hoofprints and tire-tracks, stone-hard now, stumbling-blocked the way. Among grooves in the fields crawled paper-stiff leaves of last-year’s corn, and now and then, from dead weeds near the rail-fences, pheasant opened and whistled away.
“How do you know, Dan?” the woman said.
“In the Army, you never know anything,” the hack-driver said. “You go along week after week, sleeping, eating, drilling, kidding with the guys—and then some morning you turn out, and you’re in a different world. All of a sudden everybody’s just a little bit quieter, and it seems like whatever you say sort of hangs in the air, like your breath on a winter’s day. I’ll bet there isn’t a man at Camp Dix doesn’t know some outfit’s due to move.”
“Maybe it won’t be yours,” the woman said.
“Well, whichever, as soon as I got the feeling, I put in for an overnight pass. The best I could finagle was a noon-to-six, and I had to lie my life away to get that. Nobody was getting nothing. The M. P. at the depot said the only soldier on the up-train today was laid out in a box. Ah, the hell with the war! How’re you? You working hard?”
“Not very, Dan, and I feel fine.”
“I’ve seen you look better in bed.”
The woman smiled. “Ten years ago, maybe.”
“The older you get, the more I like you. I’ll like you when you’re eighty. After that, I might give you a full night’s sleep.”
The woman watched her son for a moment. He was down off the road now, in a grove of pines at the creek-bank, and his feet were deep in needles that hissed as he plodded through them, hunting for cones to kick into the water. “I thought of leaving him home,” she said. “I thought you might want to go somewhere, and he’d be in the way—and then I thought you might be angry.”
