by Tim Sandlin
“Barnett said, ‘How’d the car come to catch fire?’
“She said, ‘Charley lit it so people would help us. He didn’t think y’all would stop this time of night. Had it been my choice, I’d of at least tried for a while. It’s not like we were fixing to die.’
“Barnett stared off in the dark behind the girl. I reckon he knew something bad was up.”
I couldn’t help myself. I said, “You reckon?”
Rowdy eyed me suspiciously and hit the beer before he went on. “Barnett said, ‘Where’s Charley now?’ and the girl said, ‘In your truck there.’
“We both of us turned to see the ugliest one human imaginable—looked like a thing slid out of slime—and he had the .280 Remington from Barnett’s gun rack in his hands, cracked open to see that it was loaded. He snapped the bolt to and more or less pointed the rifle Barnett’s direction. His voice was so quiet, I had to strain to make out the words.
“‘Join the other gentleman at the fire.’
“Barnett looked from the ugly man to me, then at the Monza on fire, then back to the ugly man.
“The girl talked fast. ‘Charley, I want you to do me a favor. I want you to refrain from killing these nice cowboys who stopped to help us.’
“I didn’t like the sound of that.
“The Charley character said, ‘I do not grant favors.’
“She said, ‘But they’re cowboys. You can’t go around killing cowboys. It’ll attract attention we don’t want yet. You kill strangers and you won’t get time to kill the folks you set out for. We don’t want that, now do we, Charley?’
“Barnett moved over by me. Charley said, ‘Take off your boots.’ I said, ‘Why?’ and he said, ‘You don’t want your feet in them when I start shooting.’ So me and Barnett hopped around to take our boots off, and as we finished, Charley hung each boot over the barrel and pulled the trigger. Those shots echoed off the mountains like rolling thunder. He blew our boots so far away, we never even bothered looking for them.
“Meanwhile the girl carried a big bag and a little bag to the truck, and she got in the driver’s side, then scooted over and sat there, looking out at us. She had extremely short hair, for a girl. What there was of it was this exploded orange like a Nehi.”
I started to say, Nehi? The sardonic way, like I’d said Reckon? but the kid wasn’t stupid. He would know I was mocking him. Catching condescension is a rare trait in bull riders.
Rowdy said, “After he’d disabled our boots, the ugly guy went into the dark and came back carrying a plastic grocery sack. I was scared Barnett might try something heroic and get us massacred, but Barnett just stood there. I guess he was like me, hoping this would end with us alive. Charley didn’t seem to care either way. He got in the truck and started it.
“Barnett showed his bit of gumption. ‘You don’t need my horse,’ he said. ‘It’d only take a minute to unhook the trailer.’
“The guy acted like he didn’t hear. He wrestled with the stick shift—it was tricky, and even trickier when you were holding a .280 on the rightful owner. Finally he got her in first.
“The girl looked straight at me and winked. She seemed real happy.”
Rowdy stopped the story and finished the beer while I waited for more. When I realized no more was forthcoming, I asked, “So what happened?”
“We walked all night in our socks, that’s what happened. No one else was stupid enough to stop till the highway patrol picked us up at dawn.”
14
The Great War changed it all. Not in the personal heartbeat like the earthquake, boiler explosion, or the Miller brothers, but it came out just as sure and complete. I went into that war such an American—such a Westerner, if you know what that means. Us Westerners believe in the sanctity of goodness—honesty, beauty, hard work, a man’s word, a well-broke horse. There was right and there was wrong, and the two stayed on their own sides of the fence.
A code of being died in those trenches, not just for me, but for all of Europe. The difference between right and wrong died. Christmas died. America was affected, but not transformed. Americans were too far away and came in too late for their code to be demolished beyond recognition. But after the war, Europe was not one bit like it was before the war, and neither was I. I went in a Westerner and came out a puff of air above a street grate.
The deal began as a lark. Me, Bill, and Oly worked our way up to Calgary and joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force. Those folks didn’t give a hoot that we weren’t Canadian. They wanted men willing to fight, which was us. Mostly the American boys were from Montana. It’s a historical fact that Montana has lost a greater percentage of her youth than any other state in ever’ single war in the twentieth century. There could be two reasons: either (1) Montana boys love a fight, or (2) we’re not good enough at it to avoid death. I suspect number one.
They put us with a bunch of other states’ boys in tents out east of town, in the flats along the river there. We marched in ranks and learned how to affix bayonets on rifles. Most of us already knew shooting, except me. I never did catch on to the shooting.
To start, I’d say it was posturing. The boys bragged a good deal. At night, around the fires, they’d say they hoped the war would last long enough so they could get there to kill the Boche. Boche is what they called Germans. I never heard anybody say Jerries after Bill did that one time in the bunkhouse. Bill was the worst for bragging, of course. He was always going on about killing men and loving women. He looked forward to French women the way most men look forward to baseball season. Bill firmly believed all French women want it all the time and all French men don’t know the proper method of giving it to them. I wonder to this day on what information Bill based that opinion.
Then, in April, we got word of the Germans gassing the First Canadian Division at Ypres, and the casual braggadocio crashed overnight. You take a country with a population small as Canada’s, and you wipe out fifty thousand of her boys in a day, and almost every family will feel the grief. We were told of a yellow cloud that drifted across the mud and killed or prostrated the entire army, and how Germans in special masks came through the forest bayoneting our boys as they writhed helpless and blind on the ground.
It must sound silly now, but in those days, men believed there was an honorable way to conduct a war. You fought fair when you killed the enemy. Imagine that. We were raised to respect the other guys as humans who just happened not to be on our team. We treated them the way we expected them to treat us. Gas put an end to that ideal. Then, later on in the next war, after the atomic bomb, even civilians stopped believing in that nobility of the warrior bunk.
But in 1915, us boys in training were deeply offended by the foulness of killing people with poison gas. Suddenly, the Canadian army was frothing for vengeance. Before Ypres, most of the boys in my troop couldn’t have told you why they were fighting on one side as opposed to the other. We backed the English because they talked more or less like us. Beyond that, no one had much of a notion as to the politics involved.
After Ypres, the bragging turned mean.
***
The second fire combusted when our division was camped by Halifax about to ship out for England, and we got news of the Lusitania. Personally, the idea that Germans could float up and sink a boatload of humanity made me more nauseous than incensed. I’d never been aboard a boat would hold over four passengers, and from Nova Scotia, the Atlantic Ocean appeared to go on forever, with no place to run to or hide in. I stood on this windblown bluff top, looking over the gray water, feeling smaller than I ever felt in Montana or Wyoming. I’d seen the ocean before, in San Francisco, but I hadn’t been about to cross it amongst enemies with torpedoes. The troop ship seemed tiny and helpless in comparison to the Atlantic Ocean. A toy in a bathtub. A lot of boys used the Lusitania to whip themselves into another frenzy of Kill, Kill, Kill! But all I felt was shriveled.
Being on the boat it
self proved even worse than thinking about being on the boat. Now that I’m old and wise, I see throwing up saltine crackers for three weeks as a blessing. I realize at the time I felt so God-awful, my mind wasn’t free to fret over our exposed position. Drowning would have come as blessed relief.
Bill and Shad weren’t the least bit ill. They made sport of me—or Bill made sport, and Shad smiled my direction, which was almost worse—and I hated the both of them for the entire voyage. Bill got caught cheating at faro, and I figure those boys would have thrown him overboard if Shad hadn’t produced a knife. I didn’t feel an ounce of sorry. Had I been able to shout, I’d of shouted, Go ahead. Toss the bastard! Some of the sick ones improved after a few days, but I never. In a life of highs and lows, that ocean crossing must be listed as a low.
***
We stayed in England for two months, only I don’t recall many details, so that nation must not have been impressive. It was cold, for summer—I remember that—and the food was boiled. We marched and packed our kits and unpacked our kits and cleaned our rifles. My dream was a dry firing pin. I don’t recall attaining my dream.
I wrote Agatha Ann a letter every evening, no matter how bushed I was. She wrote me. My interest in the mail exceeded my interest in reality on a day-to-day basis.
***
My awareness of immediate surroundings returned in earnest when we arrived in France. A man can’t live solely for the postal system in a place where you’re likely to be shot. Or blown up. I’d have to say more boys were blown up than shot, although it was fairly even.
All that comes later. First we had to march down a long road with poplars on either side. The land was domesticated and pretty at the same time. The locals were supportive without being chummy. I guess they knew better than to get close to men on that road.
Troops going to war sang as they marched back then. That’s one of the many habits the Great War put an end to—singing soldiers. The French were especially likely to burst into what I took as a show tune as they walked along in their coal blue jackets, red trousers, and black boots. This was before the Army made them cut off their hair, on account of lice, so they looked individual and dashing, marching along, singing. When they were ordered to get haircuts, a bunch of French battalions mutinied, which wouldn’t have happened in the Canadian Army, but that’s neither here nor there. I’m not about to judge a soldier by his vanity.
***
We spent the night outside this town that had been bombed to tatters, in what I guess you would call huts. They weren’t canvas, more like slapped-together clapboard. A stiff breeze would of blown them and whatever was in them into the river. Soon as we got settled, Bill left, looking for French women, and Shad went off for food. I was too worn-out to do much but write Agatha. I told her about the quaint pony carts and hunched-over people we’d passed. I left out the bombed farmhouses. I fell asleep with my boots on.
Shad woke me up an hour later. He’d found turnips, I guess. Some Europe version of turnips, anyway. We didn’t have salt, so they weren’t worth waking up over. Bill showed up around two in the morning and said he’d found two sporting houses. The one with a blue light out front was for officers only, and the one with a red light was for enlisted men. Bill said the red-light house had too long a line outside the door, so he snuck in the window of the blue-light house. He said the blue-light hussies were more enthusiastic than the red lights. I don’t see how he knew this for a comparison. He hadn’t been in a red light, and for all I knew, he was lying about having been in the other. Bill lied so much, you couldn’t tell when he was telling the truth.
Next day we marched for many hours. It was sunny and pleasant, so I didn’t mind. I was young then. Late afternoon, with the sun behind our backs, we walked down a ramp into the communication trench. It stopped being pleasant from there to the first line. We must of walked six miles in the trenches. Some places it was wide enough to pass men carrying equipment, and some places it wasn’t. Wires were strung crossways, so you had to pay attention or risk a bad fall. Being from the Western U.S., where folks rarely spend time in a ditch, I didn’t care for the closeness of it. Felt like a long grave to me. It smelled of rot. A multitude of rats fed on things I didn’t want to look at.
The big guns boomed all day, both ahead and behind. I couldn’t tell ours from theirs, but every so often there’d be a whistle a different pitch—I only learned later—and the sergeant escorting us hurled himself face flat into the dirt, and a moment later we hurled ourselves, and somewhere close the earth exploded. The sergeant would stand up, look at us in disgust, and mutter, “Skoda 75” or “Whizbang.” I still don’t know how he could tell which was which.
I wasn’t scared so much as I should have been. We’d been told most of us would be dead in a couple of months, and those who weren’t dead would be wounded or crazed, but I didn’t believe that. I thought about Agatha and her freckles and what we’d do after we married—where we might live, how I would make a career, names for the boy and girl children. I thought about the surviving Miller brothers and the likelihood of their forgetting me and going on with their own lives. I didn’t put much trust in that. I wondered if being in the war would make me such a hard case I could go back and shoot both Millers. As a rule, I wasn’t one to pretend I might shoot people. Not like Bill. But if Roy and Ephir Miller were sworn to keep after me, it would be self-defense to shoot them any way possible, even if I didn’t call them out in a fair gunfight. Nobody had fair gunfights anymore. I’m not certain they ever did. That whole fast-draw, face-off-in-the-street story might have been made up by dime novelists. They made up so much malarkey. Ninety percent of the Indian lore that was agreed to by all writers wasn’t true. The odds figured to hold up for gunfighters also. I’d be better off using my Army time learning how to bushwhack.
***
We had us a Scotch Presbyterian sergeant named Dell McDell who was a son of a bitch. He didn’t like me, on account of I wasn’t Presbyterian or a true Canadian of Scotch descent. Hardly any in the company were, but that didn’t matter none to McDell. He took offense to me on sight.
The sergeant met his end at Somme, only a week before I endured my wound. Mostly when fellows get killed, all hard feelings are off, and it shows how hard my feelings were that to this day I cannot speak with respect of the man.
That first night on the line, after we’d marched fourteen hours hauling fifty-pound kits, he says, “Private Pedersen, sentry duty.” We’d been folded into a depleted company, so it’s not as if he didn’t have rested choices. He just didn’t know who among the new bunch to hate, so he fell back on me.
And he stuck me at number nine, which was up the trench, at a dead-end closer to the German line than our own billet. I had no notion what to expect. When I said good-bye to Shad and Bill, I figured the odds of seeing them again at even.
I scooted bent over through all the posts and clutter that accumulates in a trench, until I finally made number nine, where the sentry on duty, who was from Halifax and had an accent I could barely fathom, said, “The Boche, they’re too quiet tonight.”
I said, “I thought we wanted quiet.”
He shook his head. “They stop firing when they have patrols out, for fear of hitting their own men. Likely as not, they’ll come over and cut your throat while you’re taking a piss.”
I resolved not to take any pisses. He watched as I affixed my bayonet and clicked off my safety. He said, “This is your first day.”
I said, “How did you know?”
He laughed, but not in a funny way. “Don’t attract attention to your post.” Then he was gone.
I don’t mind saying, eighty-four years after the fact, that I was more frightened alone there in the middle of France in the blackest darkness than I have been since—not even later, when we went over the top with little chance of survival. Especially not then. By the time we got around to doing something stupidly dangerous
I was to the point where being dead was nothing special. It doesn’t take long in a trench to reach that conclusion.
But that night on sentry duty, I still hadn’t lost the cloak of civilization. I was more human than animal, and as such, I didn’t want to get hurt.
I crawled up on the firing platform and peeked over for my first look into no-man’s-land. It was so dark I couldn’t tell where the German parapets started, even though they were less than a hundred yards out. I could see ghostly forms kind of waving. I shot one of them. Maybe I missed, or not, because my bullet had no effect. I fired again, and suddenly the land between me and the Boche line was lit by a flare and bang, something cracked into the sandbag beside my head. In the light of the flare, I saw the waving stakes that supported our wire, then another crack hit, and I pitched backwards into the trench.
I didn’t look back over for six hours. They could of walked up and shot me in the trench, for all the guarding I did.
***
The night was long and miserable, and I was never so glad as soon after dawn when Jacob Wibberley scooted up the trench in my relief. Jacob came out of Kamloops, British Columbia. I’d known him since our first camp and even met his mother and fiancée when they traveled over to see us off on the train when we left Calgary. He was a tall, slim boy whose goal was to be a schoolteacher. His fiancée was not as pretty as Agatha.
Jacob slapped me on the shoulder and said, “How goes the show?”
I said, “Quiet,” not letting on I’d been frightened to pieces all night and might have run back to Billings if he hadn’t shown up when he did.
“Kill any Boche?” he asked.
“No, but I gunned down a couple of wire stakes.”
He chuckled at my funny and crawled up on the firing platform to take a peek. A moment later, his foot slipped, and he fell back, bouncing off the earthen wall.
I laughed aloud and said, “Same thing happened to me first time I looked over.”
