The Hearts of Men

by Nickolas Butler

  “Dad?” he whispers finally. “You still awake?”

  “Go to sleep, Nelson. For Christ’s sake.”

  He decides to plow forward. “I miss Mom.”

  He can hear his father turn to face him.

  “Do you miss her, too?” Nelson asks.

  “Of course. Now go to sleep.”

  “Dad, why are you so . . . Is everything okay at work?”

  His father is quiet.

  “Dad?”

  “I told you to go to sleep.”

  “It’s just . . . Mom cries all the time.”

  He hears his dad sigh, smells his breath. Then feels a hand, this thick, heavy hand on his head, rubbing his hair. Nelson waits for his father to say something, anything, but he doesn’t. Just goes on touching his ears, his cheeks, his nose, his lips. It’s as if he’s a blind man, and Nelson some stranger, a new face to be memorized.

  “Dad?”

  His father’s hand retreats, and there is the sound of his shoulder turning.

  “Go to sleep, son.”

  Nelson closes his eyes.

  NOT LONG AFTER FALLING ASLEEP, the boy may have dreamed, or imagined, he felt a warm hand resting again on his head, his shoulders, and the soft sound of a grown man crying gently.

  8

  HE SWIMS HARDEST THINKING ABOUT THE BAYONETS. In his worst nightmares, he feels the stick of a bayonet, plunges the blade into one body after another, at one point breaking the tip off between one brown-eyed boy’s ribs. The machine guns sound like hell’s snare drums and the wet thwump of bullets ripping through the boys behind him is nothing he can ever forget, a kind of psychic shrapnel, lodged in his memory.

  Hardly an even match—entrenched artillery and machine guns versus bayonets and poorly aimed and sporadic rifle fire. At one point, Wilbur falls down into a bed of French wheat, and watches as his men, his boys, go screaming past him, their legs hurtling, their eyes far, far too wide, and the world so terribly loud, the air full of hot lead and blood and fire and the terrified bawling of soldiers dying, young men who are little more than children.

  He swims harder, faster, cutting his way through the cold lake water.

  How long did he lie listening as his men died all around him? Long enough for day to slide into night. Long enough for a flare to land not five feet away from him and begin to burn away at the wheat—that red-pink light, like a dragon’s eye, and the smell of sulfur, too. Then an epoch of thirst as the smoke drifted over him, hanging, and the sounds of men dying, their wounds sucking or scorched or leaking into the ground. How many of them tried to pull out crumpled sheets of paper and blunted pencils to scrawl out a few last words to mothers, fathers, sisters, or brothers? No stars to shine the path to some other world. No craggy-faced moon to study. No night birds or bats or nocturnal beasts. Just ragged coughing and shameful crying. Gunshots here and there, almost disinterested-sounding, and then silence.

  Wilbur pretended to be dead. Let dozens, perhaps hundreds of men run past him on that battlefield. Heard medics come toward him with their red crosses and white flags. They all died, too. Three days later—maybe more—delirious with thirst and hunger, he is discovered by some doughboys who proclaim him a hero, an uncommonly brave survivor. Every other member of his unit died, he learns, running forward while he survived on his back.

  BACK HOME, in Durand, Wisconsin, he is appointed the grand marshal of a parade that processes straight through the center of town. Young women toss him roses, blow kisses. Little boys plead for his autograph. Politicians slap his back. A tailor offers him a new suit. For two years before he leaves Durand, he cannot depart a bar without being thoroughly drunk; nor will anyone allow him to buy his own beer.

  He finds a job at Camp Chippewa, where it is quiet. Where his military background is considered a boon, though the boys he serves can have no real notion of what it is he is supposedly famous for.

  Each autumn, when the Scouts leave, he drives the camp pickup truck, a navy blue International, up to Hurley, where he pays to lie with women. He cares not whether they are young or old, or particularly beautiful even. What is important, everything else aside, is that they allow him, if only for ten minutes, to rest his head on their breasts, their stomachs or laps. Sometimes, they touch his head, or sing to him.

  He stumbles from bar to bar, drinking boilermakers, letting the miners up there take swings at him. Many of them fought in the war as well. Many of them lost brothers, uncles, cousins in the war. None of them, he imagines, rode down the main streets of their hometowns on a parade float.

  After two weeks of this, he drives to the Porcupine Mountains in northern Michigan and wanders those virgin hemlock forests, drinks freshwater from streams, startles black bears. For the first five years or so, he chooses a high escarpment that overlooks a winding river that leads to a long, narrow lake. Beyond the lake are hundreds of miles of primordial forest. Behind him, Lake Superior. On that escarpment he places a pistol in his mouth and wraps a finger around the trigger. He closes his eyes. But he can never squeeze it, that sharp comma of metal.

  Once, he opened his eyes and there before him sat a hawk with a freshly killed rabbit in its talons.

  That was the last year he tried to kill himself. The first year he reconciled to start living a decent life, a life without vice, without debauchery or violence.

  9

  NELSON SITS FOR SOME TIME ON THE ROCKY BASE OF the flagpole, just after the sun has risen. The lanyard and rope ring against the metal pole intermittently, but otherwise, there is no sound, not even from the counselors’ camp. He holds the bugle, still dented. He tries his best to push the dimples out of the metal, but his fingers are sweaty and small, and mostly slip right off the bugle’s coils. Much of the pride he always felt in being the camp bugler has dissolved, and holding his grandfather’s horn now feels like a farce. The merit badges on his sash, the uniform on his back, all of it—a charade he has so passionately enacted, only for someone to pull the curtain so that: there he is, alone. And for what?

  “Can I sit with you for a while?” asks Wilbur, already ten paces away but closing in.

  Nelson glances up, his face threatening to crack into that all-too-eager smile of thankfulness. He tries to keep his lips in check, the corners of his mouth from running toward his ears in relief, if not true happiness. “Please,” he says, motioning to a space on the rocky base beside him.

  Wilbur sits down with the ease and grace of a twelve-year-old boy. His legs are well muscled, the skin tan, the fine hair on his shins a downy white. He smells of pine-tar soap and another scent that Nelson can’t quite identify, but which seems to emanate from the corners of his mustache—some kind of wax perhaps, that even now, Wilbur is twirling through the whiskers there, as he stares off over the parade ground through the lifting fog.

  “And how is your week going, son?” Wilbur asks. “Couldn’t help but notice that yesterday’s reveille was a tad . . . balky.”

  With Wilbur, a boy certainly wishes to put his best foot forward. There is the sense that whining, bellyaching of any kind, would not be tolerated. Partly, this is because Wilbur clearly sees the Scouting movement as essential to a young man’s growth, and as such, how can any sort of negativity be allowed to intrude? A week at a Boy Scout camp in northern Wisconsin? What could be more beneficial, more therapeutic to a young boy’s soul? Nelson expects little sympathy, then, from Wilbur. This, after all, is a man who served in the First World War, and though he rarely speaks about his time in that war, there is the sense that he must have endured a bit more than Nelson’s indignities at the hands of his fellow Scouts.

  “My bugle . . . ,” Nelson begins. “It got—well, it was damaged, sir.”

  Wilbur takes the instrument in his hands, turns it over, as if it were an ornate and alien seashell, these coils of brass, this instrument.

  “This bugle has seen some action,” Wilbur says.

  “Yes, sir. Like I told you before, it was my grandfather’s. He was in World War One.�
� He does not mention the pillaging of the dead German.

  “I see.” He spins the bugle slowly in brown, veined hands; no wristwatch, no wedding band, no class ring. Fingernails perfectly trimmed, cuticles curtailed.

  “Sir,” Nelson says, “I . . . I appreciate what you told me earlier this week, in the mess hall, in regards to leadership and all—”

  “Nelson,” Wilbur says, not waiting for the boy to finish, “almost without fail, my body has served me well. That is because I have trained it to be strong. Not to give in to gravity or to the common complaints of so many other men my age, or younger.

  “Every morning, I wake up early and swim across that lake. When I first began swimming, I could barely make it a hundred yards without drowning. By my fifties, I could do as many as five full crossings of the lake—down and back—without much thought.

  “Each day, I perform two hundred push-ups and three hundred sit-ups. Ten years ago I was doing double those numbers. I’m embarrassed to say that I may be slowing down.

  “Son, I know when a mutiny is afoot, when I’m losing my men to some kind of perverse rebellion. I can see it—something in their faces. Their eyes won’t meet mine in that same way. Something is up, only I can’t figure what it is. Oh, on the surface of things, everything is in order. The camp continues to operate like a very efficient ship. And yet . . .” He shakes his head. “I wish I could root it out, but I can’t seem to.”

  “Could I, do you think?” Nelson asks. “Could I help root it out?”

  “Son, you help me locate this evil, I’ll make sure you are promoted to camp counselor next year. I’ll personally supervise which cabin you are assigned to. You can select another counselor to be your roommate, or, if you so choose, you can sleep alone. I’ll be honest, Nelson, you are not just on a highway to Eagle Scout; you may be on a fast track to Harvard or Yale—who knows—maybe even the U.S. Congress. I’ve known such men, son, and you are of their ilk, their caliber. I see them in you. In the burden you carry. You don’t think I know how the others tease you? I told you in the mess hall, and don’t you forget it: they tease you because they’re afraid of you.

  “Well, we’ll give them something to be afraid of. Mark my word.”

  “Yes, sir,” Nelson says, nodding.

  “And, Nelson,” Wilbur says. “I hope this will make it easier and not harder, but: this bugle here isn’t military issue.”

  Nelson looks into Wilbur’s face, locks on to the old man’s sad, thoughtful eyes.

  “There would be an insignia here of some kind,” Wilbur says, holding the instrument for Nelson to see, “an army insignia, most likely, right here.”

  “Well, sir, to be honest, the story I heard was that my grandfather took it off a dead German. See, I don’t think it’s an American bugle, is what I heard. Sir.”

  Wilbur nods, still examining the horn. “Then we should expect to find some German engraving somewhere on the horn, you know? Some kraut manufacturer, some dour super-eagle or somesuch, but I don’t see that, either. Son, this may very well be nothing more than a good ol’-fashioned Sears and Roebuck horn, if that makes it any easier. Something out of a catalog, or off a traveling tinker’s wagon.”

  “So it’s not my grandfather’s?”

  “Well, I’m not saying that,” Wilbur says. “No, no, no. I’m just telling you, this particular horn probably didn’t see any fighting in World War One. My guess is, your grandfather bought this for your dad, a long time ago, and cooked up that story so that your father would take care of the horn. And, look, it worked. The real bugle, though, if there was one, is probably somewhere much safer than this camp.”

  “Oh,” Nelson says sorrowfully. “I suppose that’s a good thing.” He probably pawned the real one, the boy thinks.

  Wilbur hands him the horn back.

  “Don’t despair, son.”

  The old man’s small hand finds Nelson’s shoulder, gives it a firm squeeze, and his eyes are bright as stars.

  “Would you like to borrow a horn that is less damaged, son?”

  The boy nods thankfully.

  “Come to my cabin. There is time yet before your regular reveille. We’ll get you fixed up.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  10

  AFTER BREAKFAST, AS THE BOYS ARE MARCHING BACK to their campsite, Jonathan Quick approaches Nelson.

  “Hey, Bugler, better get ready, old chum. We’ve been challenged by Troop 16 to a game of capture-the-flag. Right after lunch. Should be a good match . . . We’ll need you, old man. All hands on deck. Can I count on you?”

  Nelson generally hates the games played at camp. Football, crack-the-whip, baseball, basketball, water polo. In almost every circumstance, his smallish frame, poor hand-to-eye coordination, and feeble athletic ability betray him, and he becomes a hindrance to the troop as a whole. A target for opposing teams. Imagines himself a lame impala on the Serengeti Plain. Capture-the-flag, though, he has always loved. Of all the camp games his troop participates in, it is surely his favorite.

  “Of course,” Nelson says. “Absolutely.”

  In capture-the-flag, a playing field is generally imagined out of a forest or grassland, and borders agreed upon. In the case of Camp Chippewa, it is best to play the game in the forest between the waters of Bass Lake and the road snaking through camp that leads out to Birch Road. Between the lake and the road are countless acres of forest, swamp, highland, trails, and then the broad, flat plain of the parade ground.

  Across the middle of the capture-the-flag field, a center line is agreed upon, though here, as in the exterior borders of the field at large, the line remains invisible. On one side of the line, your territory. On the other, theirs. Somewhere hidden on your side of the center line is a flag, though it may not be hidden in such a fashion as to make the game impossible for the opponent; that would not be sporting. Generally, the flag is hung in plain sight from a tree branch, or staked atop a large pole in the middle of a clearing.

  The object or goal of the game is to cross into enemy territory, steal their flag, and return it to your side of the field without being tagged by an opponent. For Nelson, this last bit is crucial. For once you’ve been identified as the flag thief, the opposing side is not apt to tap you politely on the shoulder to indicate that you have been caught. No, you are tackled brutally to the forest floor, there to be fed handfuls of twigs and leaf rot until you cry uncle.

  NELSON’S MORNING IS UNEVENTFUL. For most of the other Scouts, camp is a week’s worth of time to schedule sessions in which they will work with counselors to earn merit badges. But since Nelson has already earned so many merit badges, it is more difficult for him to find sessions that are useful. This summer, he is enrolled in: Ham Radio, Cooking, Canoeing, Woodcarving, and Archery.

  Mornings, he and a dozen other boys meet at a small lakeside fire ring to practice their cooking skills. Early in the week, this meant demonstrating their acumen in building small yet sufficiently hot cook fires. As the week progressed, they learned about properly using a cast iron skillet, a Dutch oven, and cooking a piece of meat over an open flame. For the most part, Nelson’s been bored, only feigning curiosity or attention. His mind keeps wandering to Wilbur’s mystery—what could trouble him so deeply? Who was behind those supposedly dreadful acts? And what about the antics of Monday night?—were they related to all of this?

  “That’s a nice-looking peach cobbler there, Nelson,” his cooking counselor says. “Very evenly cooked. Scouts, take a look at Nelson’s cobbler here. See the brown along the cobbler’s sides? Now, watch: say I poke at the center of the cobbler here with a clean stick, or toothpick. If the stick comes out dry, you know the cobbler’s done. But if it comes out with some batter on it, well, then you’ll know to cook it a bit longer.”

  “Goddamn, Bugler, you’re a better cook than my ma,” mutters an older Scout to a group of snickering and snorting others.

  Later, most of the boys sit at a picnic table eating Nelson’s cobbler. A few others crouch n
ear the diminishing campfire. Nelson kneels within inches of the lake’s placid waters, where cattails crowd the shore and pebbles congregate like millions of beautiful little eggs. No one’s thought to bring their canteen, except him, and he passes his to the younger Scouts, who drink greedily, water sloshing down their faces. He could go for a tall, cold glass of whole milk, but of course, camp isn’t the place for those sorts of conveniences. Even a sip of his father’s coffee would be nice right now.

  “Heckuva cobbler, Nelson,” his counselor compliments him again. “Moist, rich, heck—I don’t know if a centimeter of it was even burnt. Hard to do, cooking over a campfire.”

  “Thanks,” Nelson says quietly.

  “Would you talk to the boys about what you did, how you got it to turn out so beautifully?” The counselor’s face is earnest and kind. A college boy, he is just far enough removed from the cattiness and immaturity of middle school to miss the faces of derision and contempt now greeting Nelson. The counselor is just keenly impressed with his camp proficiency. “And what are you doing over there, for crying out loud? Come be by the fire. The mosquitoes aren’t so bad near the smoke.”

  “Thanks, Counselor Tim, but trust me, they don’t want to hear me talk about the cobbler. They’d rather hear from you.”

  The counselor casually lets the moment pass, then hands his dishes to some tenderfoot to wash before walking over to Nelson and dropping down to a knee beside the boy. From the shoreline he sifts through the pebbles and rocks, as if looking for something he dropped there, a ring, perhaps, or a valuable coin. Then his hand rises from the water and still kneeling, he flicks a flat rock out across the smooth waters of the lake where it skips: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine—times.

  “Wow,” says Nelson, “pretty good.”

  “How old are you?” Tim asks.

  “Thirteen, sir.”

  “Thirteen. You’re going to be running this place someday, you know that?”