The Hearts of Men

by Nickolas Butler

  Nelson sidles close to Jonathan Quick, “What happened, Jon? Do you even know what Wilbur was talking about?”

  “Who cares?” Jonathan shrugs. “You mixed up in it or something?”

  “What? No—I just asked—I wouldn’t dream—”

  “Then forget about it, Bugler. All right? Anyway, everyone knows you’re too busy earning merit badges to do anything even slightly wrong. Probably never been in trouble in your whole life, have you?” Jonathan doesn’t even look at Nelson, doesn’t even break stride.

  Nelson feels his cheeks redden. He has never felt so acutely embarrassed by his own earnestness before. How stupid to have thought Jonathan might be impressed with his determination to reach Eagle.

  “I’m sorry,” Jonathan says, slowing his pace almost imperceptibly, “that was mean. You’re a good kid. No, I don’t know what Wilbur was talking about. I really can’t imagine. I mean, guys sneak in dirty playing cards, and I’ve heard of one counselor who has a stash of Playboys, but . . . I don’t know. Could be somebody’s smoking some mary jane or something.”

  Nelson stares up at Jonathan.

  “Marijuana, you dolt.”

  “I’m sorry, Jon . . . What’s marijuana?”

  “Never mind.”

  The doors of the mess hall swing open and Scouts file inside to sit at their troops’ assigned tables. Predictably, Nelson sits on the very end of his own troop’s table until his father joins him, sliding his thick, pale legs over the table’s bench and sitting down.

  “Sleep well last night?” his father asks, scratching at the mosquito bites on his hairy arms.

  “Yes.”

  “Wish I could say the same. Listened to an owl until damn near three in the morning. I would have shot it if I’d had a gun.”

  “I don’t think you’re allowed to shoot owls,” the boy mumbles.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  Nelson stares at the tabletop, mutters, “Scoutmaster Wilbur was sure angry this morning.”

  “Well, bear in mind, Nelson, Mr. Whiteside is of a generation that doesn’t believe in smoking cigarettes or whatnot—sipping a little brandy, a whole laundry list of other so-called sins. I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Probably some counselors gambling their paychecks away.” Nelson’s father peers at him strangely, through slightly squinted eyes. “See, it’s his job to put that fear in you.”

  The food platters are nearly bare by the time they reach Nelson’s end of the table.

  “Mind if I join the other fathers?” Clete asks at last.

  Nelson pauses as he bites into a blackened tongue of bacon. He does mind, does not want to be abandoned. “Okay,” he manages.

  “All right, then—I’m going to get more coffee, Nelson,” Clete says, rising. “Could I bring you a glass of orange juice?”

  “Yes, please,” Nelson says softly. And now he is alone, a space between him and the next boy large enough to accommodate three Scouts.

  All around the mess hall, boys are leaning into their tables, hunching over their plates, talking about Wilbur’s speech. There is a conspiratorial buzz to this great room, with its pennants hanging from the trusses, its taxidermied busts of deer, moose, and bear staring down at the Scouts from the upper reaches of every wall. With its rustic but grandly vaulted ceilings, the building has the dark atmosphere of a Norse longhouse. Time creeps achingly slow for Nelson as, yet again, making silent lonely work of his cold eggs, he feels his neck and face grow red with shame. Then, just as the weight of his own alienation is about to overcome him, a hand settles on his shoulder, warm and firm. He flinches.

  “We haven’t had a bugler with your tone in years, son. Keep up the good work.”

  Nelson looks up to see Wilbur’s pale blue eyes looking sadly down at him from above a mouth pursed into a woebegone smile.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “May I sit down?”

  “Uh, sure.” Nelson makes a small motion to indicate his father’s vacant position. Beyond Wilbur, the boys of his troop seem to have collectively contracted, moving even farther away.

  “Nelson, right?”

  The boy nods.

  “Where did that horn come from?” Wilbur asks. “Not likely purchased from any old downtown music store, I should think.”

  “Um, my grandfather.”

  “Get rid of these um’s and uh’s, my boy. It doesn’t become you. Now, I know you’re a young man—what—twelve, thirteen, but the thing is, you must answer a man of authority with force and confidence. If you need to hesitate, to gather your thoughts, that’s understandable. But hide your pause behind a steady gaze, and then speak when you’re ready and able. To me, these um’s and uh’s, they’re like a rifle misfiring. And what good is a rifle if it can’t shoot, I ask you?” The old man is grinning behind his mustache.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Was he in the First World War, your grandfather?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he still alive?”

  “No, sir.” Nelson looks at his plate of scrambled eggs.

  Wilbur draws in a breath. “The world is a funny place. You would think a man must be invincible, immortal to survive a world war. But of course, that is ridiculous. We all die, in our time. If I may be so bold, Nelson, how did your grandfather die?”

  Nelson hesitates, then looks at Wilbur with doleful eyes, “I don’t know, sir. He just got sick. I went to visit him before he died, but—he wasn’t talking then. He could only communicate by squeezing your hand. I was very young. Five, I think.” Nelson remembers that hand, its coldness, the veins, his fingernails grown past their normal lengths, the cotton sheet drawn up to his grandfather’s chin, and then, later, over his face.

  His own father had never uttered a kind word about his grandfather, who, Nelson pieced together over the years, had been a bad drunk, and a failure at farming. Nelson’s father, suffering the indignities of his father’s flops, had apparently been forced to handle most of the farm’s most tasking and onerous chores. The farm was eventually foreclosed and bought by neighbors for a song. It had been a beautiful piece of land, too, from what Nelson understood: four hundred acres of rolling fields and ridges, clear cold-water trout streams, and sandstone bluffs. There was said to have been an Indian burial mound even, a bear, and in the spring furrows each year arrowheads rose out of the loam and were collected by Nelson’s father to be sold to a university professor for a nickel apiece. Rather than toil in the fields behind a team of horses, or even a tractor, Nelson’s grandfather had seen fit to drink away his family’s money at the taverns in Eleva and Strum.

  “Well,” says Wilbur now, his tone softening somewhat, perhaps as he observed Nelson’s downcast eyes and sunken shoulders, “I’m sure that if he could see you now, he would be proud of how beautifully you play that horn. People forget it, but the bugler in a cavalry unit was almost as important as the general. Without the bugler, there was disarray, chaos. Communication is essential on a battlefield.”

  Nelson sits trying not to fidget, too nervous to touch his food, hyperaware of the eyes of his troop mates, the absence of his father, whom he can still see, standing at the coffee urn, casually stirring sugar and cream into a white mug. My grandfather was a drunk, he wants to say. Dead far too young from drink. He stole this bugle from a dead German. He was a thief and a coward and a bad, bad man.

  “The other boys don’t like you much, do they, Nelson?”

  This time, something rises in the boy, and without the briefest hesitation, turning to look directly at Wilbur, he says, “No, they don’t.”

  “Do you understand why, Nelson?”

  “No, sir.”

  “It is because they see in you a challenge. You don’t belong in the rabble, that mob. Which is precisely why you will be a leader. Your troopmaster, believe it or not, has communicated as much to me. As have some of the counselors here, who are impressed with your acumen.” Whiteside scans the mess hall, exhaling deeply. “But, the truth is, not al
l of these boys will become good men, Nelson, good human beings. We do our best, try our damnedest to guide them, and instruct them. But in the end . . . Some boy in this room will become a murderer; another, a bank robber. Some of the boys in this room will cheat on their taxes, others, their wives. I wish it weren’t that way. But when I hear you play that horn, I hear more than just a boy blowing air. I hear something echoing through time. Something that is good. Don’t let them discourage you, Nelson.”

  The boy tries to process all of this, knows not what exactly to say, except, “Thank you, sir.”

  “When they are ugly to you, what they want most of all is to take that beauty from you, the beauty of that horn. They want to steal it, kill it. Don’t let them. Be stronger than they are.”

  Wilbur cups his hand again on Nelson’s shoulder, and this time the boy is aware of the hand’s small size, no bigger than his mother’s really, and in that instant, he longs for her. Longs for the one person who is always kind to him, always offering him something to eat or a book to read, always fluttering around their house, singing “Que Sera, Sera” or there again, sitting on their front stoop with the newspaper spread across her lap like a blanket, smoking her daily Pall Mall, hardly even drawing on the cigarette, but holding it just so, the smoke drifting over her face like a veil, and her beautiful fingers, peeling a small speck of cigarette paper off her lower lip. Closing his eyes for the briefest of moments, he feels Wilbur’s hand on his shoulder and smells his mother’s afternoon cigarette and the paper and ink smell of her newspaper and would give anything to be back home with her just now, even to be drying dishes or vacuuming the living room floor.

  Then the hand is gone and Nelson opens his eyes.

  “What did Mr. Wilbur want?” his father asks, standing over him, holding out the glass of orange juice he promised before.

  Nelson accepts the juice, and drinks it down. Ordinarily, his first reaction to his father’s voice is to glance down at his own feet, or the back of his own hands, but this time, he decides to employ Wilbur’s advice. He looks directly at his father’s face. Only, his dad is looking into his cup of coffee, then out the window, around the mess hall, anywhere but at his son. Nelson says nothing, almost as a kind of experiment, to see if his father really sought an answer at all. He stares up at his dad until finally the older man’s eyes glance down and meet his. “What?” Clete asks.

  I miss Mom, Nelson wants to say. “He was keeping me company.”

  “Who was?”

  “Scoutmaster Wilbur.”

  “Oh, yes, of course.”

  “Dad?”

  “What, Nelson?”

  The boy wants to ask, Do you love me? “Thanks for the orange juice.”

  “Think I’ll get myself another plate of eggs,” his father says, before moving off again, striding toward the kitchen, plate held before him like a man begging alms.

  3

  THAT NIGHT, NELSON LIES IN BED READING HIS HANDBOOK for Boys by the light of his lantern. A moth bangs against the lantern’s glass globe. Nelson rests the book down against his pale chest. Outside his tent are the sounds of laughter and of campfire flames sizzling and popping, of zippers yapping and outhouse doors clapping shut, the sounds slowly diminishing until the silence is punctuated only rarely by a cough, perhaps, or the long, low, wet note from a recently purchased dime-store whoopee cushion. The moth bounces again and again and again off the globe until reaching out a hand, and careful not to harm the creature, Nelson captures it in his fist. He feels the tiny thing, the hair of its legs, the tickle of desperation in its wings, the curiosity of its antennae. Opening his fingers he examines the moth resting in the palm of his hand.

  For all his knowledge of knots, the constellations, poisonous mushrooms, rocks, minerals, and the trout streams of northern Wisconsin, Nelson knows next to nothing about moths. He blows a jet of air at the little creature and it alights from his hand, only to return to its fascination with the lantern. What instinct is this? he wonders. Does it think it has touched the moon? The sun?

  Then: the sound of boots moving fast through the forest. Nelson’s heart quickens. More footfalls, branches breaking, leaves tossed aside. Shrugging into a shirt, wrestling into trousers, and slipping on his boots, he readies himself. Then, calmly closing his eyes, he blows out the lantern, and counts to five. Slides his eyeglasses onto his face. When he leaves the tent, his pupils are wide, wide open, drinking in the light spilled by the moon and the stars. He holds his breath and listens. Far off he hears them, other Scouts, he supposes, crashing through the forest. He follows, moving low to the ground.

  Thrilling it is, this night chase, and, Where are their flashlights? Their lanterns, even some crude torch? Why the cloak and dagger? Then he realizes, These must be the deviants, the ne’er-do-wells Wilbur is in search of. He moves all the faster for it.

  How he navigates the wind-fallen sentinels, fuzzy with their thick green carpets of moss. Through groves of ferns, patches of raspberry canes sharp as concertina wire, and through aspen slash so young and tight it might as well be bamboo. And every few minutes, just to be sure, Nelson sinks to one knee, cups his hands around his ears, wills his own heart to slow, and focuses on the night sounds all around him. Only the flow of his own blood is nearly deafening: in the smallest veins of his ears, in his swollen hands and feet, but most of all his forehead and chest, where he feels his own circuitry sizzle with excitement.

  But no sounds come to his ears. Not so much as a hoot from an owl, a tree frog chirping, not a single cicada rasping and rattling against the night. Nothing. And now, Nelson realizes, he is very far from his tent in a very dark forest, no path beneath his boots, no flashlight against the cold sweat of his hand.

  His heartbeat seems to double in time now. With no idea even of what time it is, his first thought is the next morning’s reveille. He cannot disappoint Scoutmaster Wilbur. And so, ever so silently he turns, hoping to retrace his steps, picking his way back the way he came.

  Then: a sound—the snap of a branch.

  It is not far off. Nelson ducks down, his head even with the fronds of the bracken. More sounds, breaking twigs, plants pushed aside. He lowers himself flat to the forest floor, where the salamanders and snakes and snails squirm, he knows, against the cool rot of the soil.

  Whoever else is in the forest at this moment will not be his friend. Only now he cannot cry for help. Cannot expect his troop’s leaders to protect him, or Jonathan Quick, or even his father.

  Whispering. Two boys, perhaps three. Then, “Buuu-gler. Oh, Buuug-ler. We know you’re out there. Should’ve stayed in your tent, Bugler . . .”

  He holds his breath, dares not move so much as a centimeter.

  “Tell us, Bugler. Do you know the way back to your tent?”

  The beats in Nelson’s chest intensify, even as his heart sinks. It is the strangest, saddest feeling. He imagines it is what a gambler must feel when the cards he has bet on don’t stack up. When he realizes they’ve failed him.

  “Because, Bugler. We do know the way. And, well, wouldn’t it be a tragedy if poor Bugler’s bugle were buggered before daybreak. Boo-hoo.”

  And now the woods erupt with snide laughter and sudden movement. For they are flying away from him. He can see their vanishing shoulders glowing white-blue with the moonlight filtered down through the leaves above, like epaulettes.

  He rises to take chase.

  This time, though, the woods seem to conspire against him. Every tree reaches out a sharp set of branches to scratch at his face. Each half-rotten log seems to roll toward his shins and knees and toes. The forest floor is now littered with dozens of glacial erratics: boulders and rocks, some as big as automobiles, looming up and out of the dark forest floor to impede his progress.

  They would destroy his horn! His grandfather’s horn! The only redeeming memento of the man!

  Now he is out of breath, bleeding, sweating, and desperately afraid of his bugle being stolen or vandalized. Ahead of him, the boys seem
to be opening a distance. Tears begin to craze down his face, but when he wipes at his cheeks, the backs of his hands brush no eyeglasses, no metal frames, nothing but the wet, raw skin of his hot, hot face. Stopping short now, he blinks out at the indistinct world, terrified, and sadder even than he’d been a moment before. His eyeglasses are lost then, too.

  I want to go home, is all he can think; and: I want my mom.

  He stops and sits down. There is no urgency now. They will beat him to camp, slink into his tent, find the bugle, and by the time he arrives, he will be lucky to ever touch the instrument again. He imagines them throwing it into the lake, or worse yet, taunting him with it, hanging it from a tree so that he’s publicly humiliated into retrieving it. His grandfather’s bugle, stolen off some dead soldier on a bloody battlefield and taken all the way home from Europe aboard a steamship in 1917. All the horrific nightmares it has already survived—mustard gas, trench warfare, cavalry versus machine guns—before being brought back across the ocean, and clear across America, all the way to Wisconsin and somehow not destroyed by Nelson’s father or his aunts or uncles. Only to be presented to Nelson, who has now managed to lose it in this disgraceful fashion, stupidly leaving his tent in the dead of night to chase rule breakers through the forest. What was it he even hoped to achieve—or, more shamefully yet, to observe?

  He sits there, swatting the hundreds of mosquitos that have by now descended upon him, and thinks of Wilbur, the old Scoutmaster who all but predicted this evening’s happenings, told Nelson what to expect and why. I have to be smarter, I have to be smarter than them. I can’t fight all of them at once. Finally, resigned to whatever it is he’s going to find, he stands, and begins walking slowly in the direction he believes the camp might be.

  4

  IT IS AFTER MIDNIGHT AND THE HOUSE IS ABLAZE with light—every lamp, every bulb, every sconce—burning against the loneliness. The radio is on, loud. Having tuned the dial to some big-band music and at the kitchen sink, Dorothy whistles along to “In the Mood,” makes a cacophonous clatter of washing and drying the few dishes she has dirtied. Her mother and father liked to dance to big-band music back in their day, and she has always felt a nostalgic pull toward Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Count Basie. She can see them—her parents—dancing in a crowded town hall, impossibly wide smiles on their faces as they swung and lurched, bopped and kicked.