by Bill Mesce
I understood the premise; not the current application. I shook my head, confused. “It almost sounds like you’re saying you don’t have a defense.”
“Is that how it looked to you, Mr. O?” Sisto said, as if chiding Harry for false modesty. “Sure as hell didn’t look that way to me!”
“Aye, Harry, you did seem to be mounting a rather spirited non–defense!” I seconded.
“Smoke,” Ricks commented flatly.
“Eh, laddie?”
Harry turned self–consciously away and began to pace the room. “Courie’s right about that. I’ve been throwing in everything and the kitchen sink to distract the jury. I keep hoping if I can get enough out there, maybe one or another of them clicks with one or another of the jurors. If I can do that and turn one or two of them…”
“By a couple of things, I take it one avenue is all this verbiage about Porter having given the withdrawal order.”
He nodded. “It’s not fun digging up a dead man and tagging him as…”
“‘Unexceptional,’” cited Ricks.
“Don’t feel too guilty, Signor,” Sisto said. “Even that was putting it nice! The only reason Porter ever gave a shit about casualties was he was afraid how it’d make him look on the daily report! So I say, fuck him!”
Harry’d seemed not to hear a word of it. “Because Courie is right – again – that there’s no definite way to prove or disprove the order was given, that point’s going to come down to who the jury wants to believe.
“I’m not crazy about my other route, either.”
“Which is?”
For this, he stopped his pacing and turned to Ricks. Without turning his concentration from his smoke artwork, Ricks seemed to be aware of the cue. “The Army may say obeying orders is up there with the Ten Commandments when it comes to laws of God, but the ugly little secret is that you do not have to obey every order.” With a grunt, Ricks drew himself up to a seated position. “If Harry there orders Dominick to jump off a roof, Dominick can tell him to fuck off. No offense, Harry.”
Harry nodded.
“But,” I objected, “he can order him to charge into the blazing muzzles of enemy guns. It’s done all the time, aye?”
“That’s the trick,” Ricks observed. “There’s a place where the line between a gallant – if doomed – charge into the enemy guns, and the tactical equivalent of jumping off a roof gets a little fuzzy. I don’t think the jury – or any officer in the Army – wants to get into any discussion that puts command authority into question. Hell, if I was still on the line I wouldn’t want my subordinates second–guessing my orders just because they don’t like ‘em! They buck me, I bring charges, and their excuse is going to be, ‘Isn’t this just like that case with that Sisto fella?’ The Army would rather just publicly hold forth on obedience as a cardinal virtue and deal quietly with the exceptions as they come up.”
“But I have to throw it out there,” Harry concluded.
“You just keep throwin’, Signor,” Sisto said. “You’re pitchin’ a hell of a game!”
Sisto’s insistent optimism was beginning to grate on Harry. “This isn’t a quantity game, Dominick,” he said a bit roughly. “I’ll go on and on about how Porter was gunshy, and there was no way you guys were going to take that hill, and any other thing I can think of to throw into the mix. I’ve got this whole mess of things to have them think about, and Courie just has one! But it’s a goddamned big one and you better respect it and you better respect the way he makes sure it gets hammered home because it’s something else he’s right about. In the end, this trial is about one thing: Joyce gave you an order and you told him to go scratch. We can mitigate that, but we can’t make it go away. And no matter how much sympathy I get for you out of that jury, they’re officers; they won’t ignore what you did. Even with all the breaks, kiddo, there’s no way you walk away from this clean.”
Go scratch. It echoed. Then I remembered: it had been Avram Kasabian’s phrase.
Finally, Sisto seemed chastened. His smile, his airy bounce…all faded. “What’re we talking about?”
“My best hope is they’ll let you skate by one charge, recommend leniency in sentencing on the one they stick you with.”
Sisto sat heavily at the foot of the bed, forced a grim smile. “Boy, Signor, you really know how to bring down a party.”
“I just want you to be ready, Dominick.”
“So Andy Thom stays out in the cold?”
“Andy Thom stays out in the cold and keeps looking for anything we can use. Tomorrow, they bring out Big Bertha.”
“Joyce,” Ricks explained to me in an aside.
“Speaking of Andy, Pete, why don’t you send a message to Wiltz and see what the skinny is on that kid? We haven’t heard a peep out of him in a while.” Harry noted the ruminative demeanor that had overtaken me. “Something on your mind, Eddie?”
“Go scratch.”
“Excuse me?”
“Nae, sorry, just something there caught my fancy I guess.”
“Developing an appreciation for Yankee doggerel?” Ricks commented.
“It doesn’t quite have the lyrical ring of, ‘There once was a young man from Nantucket,’ but it does have a certain je ne c’est quoi.”
A befuddled Dominick Sisto considered the exchange, looking from Ricks to me. “I gotta start readin’ more books,” he said.
*
She had found a wicker basket, packed it with victuals from the kitchen, and we dined in something of a picnic manner in the library, sitting in a window seat overlooking the courtyard, surrounded by the empty shelves. From down one of the stone corridors I could hear the echo of a phonograph record, a scratched disc rendering up Harbor Lights.
La comtesse had been in reverie, talking about the days before the war; the proverbial “old days.” Summers in Cannes, winter in Biarritz. “Curious,” she said on reflection. “I look to it now and much of it seems silly. Petite.” She saw that my attention was elsewhere. “Q’uest–ce–que–sais?”
“Hm?”
“What I am saying is to bore you I am afraid.”
“Nae, pardon, nothing like that.” I tapped my temple. “Something’s stuck. Going round and round in the ol’ noggin, eh? Like a name I can’t quite remember.”
I tried to retrieve the threads of the conversation, but we both saw the shame of it. A part of me was still holding another thread, trying to follow it off to some distant, unseen place.
Perhaps it was the inclemency of the weather. Or that Dominick Sisto had much to discuss with his counsel in preparation for the morrow. In either case, I found I had the walk along the castle wall to myself that night.
The snowfall had tapered off that afternoon and three inches of untouched white stuff blanketed the walk. It seemed almost a shame to muck it up with my boots.
The clouds were still clearing, leaving the sliver of sharp–edged moon to peep through and imbue the covering of the freezing, glittering snow with a blue–tinged iridescence. If the chateau and its environs had seemed to have been sculpted from clouds that afternoon, now they looked carved out of glacial ice.
I heard the muffled pad of hooves shuffling through the snow along the wall below me. I followed the cloaked figure along the wall, until la comtesse reined her mount out across the virgin snow on the list in front of the chateau. But unlike the previous nights, she turned and wheeled about in place. She saw me atop the wall, without seeing my face knew it was me. I raised a gloved hand, and I saw her arm rise slightly in acknowledgement. Then she turned, gave the gray her heels and the horse galloped off toward the woods.
I envied her just then. I wished that, like her, I could find some simple action that would erase the last few years; that – even for a moment – could clear toxic remembrances away as easily as the Hun had cleared the chateau’s library shelves.
“Go scratch,” I said and my voice sounded small and feeble out alone atop the chateau’s walls. I could not fathom why the absurd little
phrase nagged at me so.
There was an icy wind now coming across the open ground, stinging, bringing tears to my eyes. I received none of the cleansing benefit from the chill that la comtesse had drawn. I bleakly thought no horse could ride fast enough, no wind could blow chill enough to clear way the years I found myself dragging about behind me on my one good leg; a weight that grew heavier with each orbit of the sun.
*
It was late when I came down from the walls. The chateau had gone somnambulant, except for that far–off phonograph, it’s echoing strains a blurred sound as they caromed about the maze of corridors. The new mess staff had been in the habit of keeping an urn of coffee on throughout the night and I stopped by in the hopes of warming myself before turning in. As I passed through the main dining hall I saw Harry slumped in a chair pulled up to one of the fireplaces, its logs now a crumbled pile of glowing embers. Across a goodly portion of the long dining table were arranged dozens of Harry’s note cards, and at his feet, forgotten, lay his foolscap pad. A coffee cup sat on one arm of his chair, and his elbow was propped on the other, his forehead cradled in his hand. I thought him asleep at first.
“Harry?”
I don’t know if I woke him or simply surprised him. His head bobbed a moment. “There’s more in the kitchen,” he said, indicating his cup. “It’s still hot.”
I returned with my own steaming cup and pulled up a chair alongside Harry’s. I nodded at the display of note cards on the table. “I think you should put that away for a bit and get some rest.”
“The problem,” he said with a sad smile, “is that I haven’t been able to work on that at all.”
I noticed a message form from the chateau’s communications room sitting atop his note pad. “Does that have anything to do with your sense of distraction?”
“From Wiltz. Andy Thom is gone.”
“Gone?”
“He left Wiltz in a jeep some time this afternoon. Didn’t leave any word about where he was going. If he was coming here, he should’ve been here by now.”
“Worried?”
“Concerned. I’d just feel better if I knew where he was.”
“I’m sure he’s all right.”
He agreed.
“But that’s not it,” I said.
He nodded again. “Thirty–seven men,” he sighed. “That’s what Schup said. Thirty–seven men. Dominick went into the Hurtgen Forest as part of a full company – that’s what? one hundred and twenty, a hundred and thirty riflemen? – and he came out with 37. Dominick told me that the first time I sat down with him, and it still…” His voice faded, his face wrinkled into something part frown, part pained wince. He patted at the pockets of his blouse. “You wouldn’t happen to have a cigarette, would you, Eddie? I seem to be out.”
“You’re in luck,” I said passing over a packet. “American.”
He drew one, crossed to the fireplace, poked at the embers trying to rouse a flame. “God willing, Dominick will go home. His mom’ll hug him, kiss him, be happy he’s home in one piece. She’ll think, ‘Good, now everything can be the way it was.’ But after a while, she’ll…” he looked for the word “…feel…that things aren’t the same. Something’s going to be wrong.” Harry couldn’t get a flame. He bent over and touched the edge of the fag to one of the glowing bits until the paper curled and smoked, then quickly put it to his mouth and took a draught to stoke the cigarette. “He’ll know she feels it, but he won’t talk to her about it. Sooner or later, she’ll come to me…she’ll ask me about it. But I won’t talk to her about it, either.”
He was talking as much about his own past as Dominick’s future. He kicked at the charred logs in the fireplace, almost with disgust, a quietly violent thrust of his shoe that kicked up a small cloud of ash and sparks. “Thirty–seven men. That’s what he’ll be carrying around inside him. How the hell do you tell anybody about that?” He noticed the smudge of ash on the toe of his shoe, tried to shake it loose with gentle taps on the flagstones of the hearth. “I don’t have half as much to carry inside me as Dominick…” a rueful smile “…and I won’t have to carry it as long. And I don’t know how I’m going to do it.” He turned to me looking for…help? Counsel?
“Some men don’t,” I said, feeling out of my depth. I considered my own recurring despondency and felt hardly qualified to offer Harry helpful hints on his own. “But you should know, my friend, that it seems to me most find some way to put it away somewhere. Like a box put away in the attic. Always there but…away.”
“How do they do that?”
“I wish I knew, mate.” I studied him a moment. In all my travels I’d never met a more decent soul. It was the measure of his character that his trials – petty when measured against a world awash in blood and fire – so dragged at his soul. He did not deserve this self–inflicted pain. “You didn’t kill Woody Kneece, Harry.”
“I gave the orders. He died. I went home.”
“You didn’t kill him.”
He shrugged as if to say I was entitled to my wrong–headed opinion. “There was a dream I had… A long line of ships, end to end, like a train, stretching out over the horizon. Heading away from home. The decks are full of GIs. Kids. I see my kids on those decks, Eddie. There’s another line of ships coming back the other way, coming home. There’s nobody on the decks. I see blood dripping down the sides, getting kicked up in the wakes.” He closed his eyes – to refresh his memory of the dream? To push it away? They opened again, looking soft and desperate. “I keep thinking, maybe if I get Dominick – …” A helpless smile. The words were there but they embarrassed him. “Sometimes I envy you, Eddie. That you never had kids.”
“Why were you in Italy, Harry?”
His hand rubbed across his face tiredly. “I’m not sure. I’m really not.” He realized he’d been ignoring the fag smoldering between his fingers, took a long draught and re–settled himself in his chair.
“Ryan said something to me about you being in Rome putting together a case – I think his phrase was – ‘a case you’d never try.’”
Then he told me about Rome and about the Ardeatine Caves. “I keep thinking,” he concluded, “that I’ve – I suppose Joe would say, ‘grown up’ – enough to where things don’t surprise me any more.”
“‘Surprise’ being a polite way of saying ‘disappoint’?”
He smiled. “Disappoint. But they do.”
“Then why press on?”
The smile grew warm. “Why don’t you quit?”
“Oh, mate, don’t think I haven’t considered it! Inertia, I suppose. One needs to pay one’s pub bill, eh?”
He didn’t believe that, wanted to think better of me I think. “That simple?”
“No,” I said grimly, “it’s this simple: it’s all I know. You see, Harry, the godawful thing about dedicating yourself to some grand…thing…is that, should it fail you, should your dedication falter, you find yourself – …well, Harry, you have nothing. Nothing. It – the Job, the Trade – it has it all.”
He nodded. “Maybe that’s what it is for me, too,” he said mordantly. “I don’t know how to do anything else.”
“Nae, I’ll not let you off that easily. You could’ve stayed home for the duration, busied yourself with whatever it is Judge Advocate lawyers busy themselves with at a posting in the States. But Italy…”
Was it possible he’d never asked the question of himself? His eyes darted about as if he, too, were now seeking an answer somewhere amid the files of his consciousness. “Maybe…faced with doing nothing or doing something…” He turned to me, his own uncertainty appeased, it seemed. “When the day comes to talk about all this, it’s going to be easier for me to look my kids in the eye and say I did something.” But never one comfortable with solemn introspection, he suddenly cracked a lop–sided grin. “Aw, hell, I should’ve stayed home and told the Army to go scratch!”
“Aye, go scratch.” That nameless buzzing reasserted itself in my head.
“Wha
t’s the matter?” he asked, catching my distracted countenance.
“Maybe,” I said, holding up my coffee cup in salute, “maybe I should have had kids.”
*
As I lay in my four–poster that night, I came to find myself – as I usually did – envying poor old Harry. I envied him his dowdy, earnest wife, his bratty tykes, his dreary walk–up tenement flat with its nosy–Parker neighbors: all those things I had spent years considering myself above, too involved in matters of import to become enmired with.
We were both, in the end, on fruitless quests. We both knew that despite our best efforts, the world would not be much better after our passing than before our coming. Yet in his humdrum little life back home he found motive to press on. But I…well, there you have it, aye?
Go scratch. The ridiculous little phrase ran absurdly round and round in my head. What was there about it that refused to let go?
I lay there some time, listening to the phrase whir: goscratchgoscratchgoscratch…
Harry saw a son in each young soldier. That was why Woody Kneece’s death haunted him so. It was why he so doggedly sought to free Dominick Sisto. The faces of his own sons left some ghostly afterimage on the faces of the dead and the doomed, whether they stood in the dock or lay anonymously piled beneath a marker in the Ardeatine Caves. Even if he could not articulate it himself – even if he could not understand it in himself – he applied himself in these instances driven by the idea that, in his absence, he’d want someone to do as much for his boys.
If something of use lay buried in that goscratchgoscratchgoscratch then I would divine it and deliver it to him. I would help him in any way I could find, as I always did. It was one thing for the likes of me to sink into hopelessness and despond. But it could not be permitted for him.
In as much as I could prevent it, I would not allow it.
*
Major Whitcomb Langham Joyce affected the same erect bearing, the same firm step, and mantle of authority as had General Terry. Yet there was an odd, subtle air to it of…I want to use the word inauthentic. “Whit” Joyce was the 26–year–old son of a mill worker in one of those Something–bury towns in Connecticut. He had aspired to be something more than the son of a mill worker and had poured great energy into doing so. But like his attempt to subdue his tightly–curled hair beneath a sheen of pomade, his efforts were only half–successful: the forced lowering of his pipish voice, the overly careful diction and modulation of tone, the heavy–handed application of high–station vocabulary and phraseology. Whereas with Terry, all the elements came together as facts of being, in Joyce, they remained unfulfilled aspiration. Certainly, it didn’t help that as cleanly as Terry’s uniform had fit his athletic form, Joyce’s almost frail–seeming body was lost in his. The cuffs of his jacket and shirt drooped across the backside of his hands; his collar swam about his thin, graceful throat; the shoulders of his jacket sagged past the cut of his shoulders, and its rear bunched where the belt cinched across his narrow back; his thin legs seemed lost in his billowy trouser legs. One could almost feel pity for him, his doll–like looks fragile in appearance, looking so out of place in that chamber of cold stone and hard–faced men.
