by John Hersey
Pretty soon the people she had called started coming, uncles, cousins, Mrs. Souczak’s neighbors, and friends of the family. Mr. Shaughnessy, president of the Onteoga Knitting Mills, where Joe had worked before the war, came, and he said never to worry about a job, just worry about getting well. “The factory is there waiting for you, Joe,” he said. “Come over this afternoon and see us.” Joe agreed to go at two o’clock.
At each knock at the door, Joe jumped up and went to see who it was. It was about ten o’clock before Mary Ellard came.
Joe reached out his hand. She couldn’t seem to say anything. Joe had decided to be cold toward her, for defensive reasons. He just said, “Hello, Mary,” and led her right into the living room. They couldn’t kiss because of all the company.
Everyone talked busily, but Mary just sat there looking at Joe. He pretended not to see her. After a while she stood up and said, “My brother, he’s in from the Pacific, only he has to go back this afternoon, his leave’s up. Three o’clock. I better go see him.”
Joe went out on the porch with her.
Mary said, “Our first meeting wasn’t too personal together, Joey.”
“It couldn’t be. Didn’t you see all those people?”
“I’m so excited, I been biting my fingernail right off.”
Joe said, “I’ll be seeing you,” and he went back in the house. He was trembling all over. He ran upstairs and looked at himself in the mirror: the sleeve was quite neat in his pocket, but his face looked sickly, and the uniform was too big.
At about two o’clock Joe reached the factory. He went up on the second floor, where he found the whole mill waiting for him in a large room. Mr. Shaughnessy said, “We’ve shut off the wheels of progress for thirty minutes, we want you to make us a little speech.”
Joe stood up and said, “I’m glad to be back, and I can say that I’m very lucky to be back. I remember a good many times when Mr. Shaughnessy used to talk to us on production, that if we didn’t produce, the soldiers wouldn’t have anything. That is so because I went three months without underwear over there. There wasn’t any. It was pretty wicked up there in those mountains.”
Then Mr. Shaughnessy and Joe presented each other with gifts. The factory gave Joe a twenty-one-jewel Lord Elgin wrist watch, plus $161 purse. Joe gave Mr. Shaughnessy a green French pocketbook. “On here,” Joe said, “is the inscription in silver thread made by the Ayrabs, it says ORAN. I carried this through all the battles, even the worst ones. I had you in mind, Mr. Shaughnessy.”
Afterward Joe went out and shook hands around the town. Everyone wanted to shake his one hand, and he felt like quite a hero. He stopped in at the barbershop and was very glad to see Charley the barber again, his old friend. When he got home late in the afternoon his mother asked him what he had been doing and he said, “People been patting me on the back and offering me lifetime jobs.”
After a couple more days of callers at 143 Front Street, a crowd of fellows came after Joe and said, “Let’s hit the road and do some hell-raising. Let’s have a doings among ourselves.”
So the boys began going out. The first night they planned to make all the rounds, but the first place was as far as they got. Joe had such a good time that he persuaded the crowd to repeat, night after night.
One day toward the end of his leave Joe went in to see Charley the barber, who was twice Joe’s age. Joe had always come to Charley for advice and sometimes Charley gave advice without being asked. Charley said, “You’re raising too much hell.”
“It’s fun, I earned some fun.”
“People beginning to talk.”
“Let people go to hell, they didn’t fight.”
“Why don’t you see Mary?”
Now Joe tumbled out the words that had been rolling around inside him all through his leave, “Hell, I’m no use to myself with the one arm. What use would I be to any girl?”
Charley said, “I’ll be glad when you’re discharged. What you need is the right job and the right girl.”
Joe did not have the courage, though he had plenty of desire, to see Mary before his leave was finished. He kept telling himself he would be home for good soon; that would be the time to see her. The film for his French camera came from the Rochester girl a couple of days before his leave was up, and he kidded himself that he would go collect that Sunday lunch.
* * *
—
When he reported back to Walter Reed the doctor said, “You look better. Want thirty days more?”
Joe said, “No thanks. My friend told me, he said, ‘Joe, I seen you twenty-seven days and I seen you drunk twenty-seven days.’ I could use thirty days to rest, doctor.”
After a few days they brought an artificial arm and strapped it on. From the first Joe disliked it. He told the nurse, “It hurts my—the upper part of my arm that’s left.” He never could learn to say stump. But they taught him to use the arm.
In January his honorable discharge came. This time Joe got a uniform that fit better, and he thought he looked pretty well as he started out on the train. He had left off his fake arm, because he liked the empty sleeve in his pocket. The arm was in his suitcase. He had on his ribbons—African Theater, Purple Heart, Before Pearl Harbor. On the way a second lieutenant came over to Joe’s seat. You could see the lieutenant had just won his bars and was full of authority. He apparently did not notice Joe’s empty sleeve.
“Private,” the lieutenant said, “what do you think you’re doing, wearing all those ribbons? Do you think you’re some kind of a lousy hero?”
Joe stood up and controlled himself. “Sir,” he said, “I served eighteen months’ foreign duty, I given my left arm, they told me I earned these ribbons.”
The lieutenant, horribly embarrassed, stared at Joe’s limp sleeve and said, “I’m awful sorry, fellow, I didn’t realize.” Trying to make it all right, he said, “What’s that end ribbon for?”
Joe said in the politest tones, “Sir, I think if you want to go around and make remarks about people’s ribbons, you ought to know what the ribbons stand for.”
Joe sat down. When the lieutenant went away the man sitting next to Joe said, “Lousy shavetail.”
Joe expressed the enlisted man’s universal complaint. “They’ve made this into a two-man army,” he said. “They’ve made it an officer’s army and an enlisted man’s army. The two of them eat in different pots, bathe in different pots, and pee in different pots. Now the looey don’t want me wearing my rib bons. Aw, let him go to hell, I’m out of uniform in a few days anyway.”
But when he first got home, Joe found that it was not at all easy to get out of uniform. He was authorized to wear the uniform for ninety days. He felt better in uniform. The khaki sleeve in the khaki pocket was very neat, and his stump felt a lot better in a uniform sleeve.
For a long time Joe just lay around the house. He told his parents he figured he’d earned a month’s vacation, and that when the month was up he would choose one of these high-paying defense jobs. “In the meantime,” he said, “don’t bother me, I’m all geared up ahead of everyone else around me. I’m looking for a slowdown.”
But the more Joe tried to rest, the more restless he got. He got feeling disgusted with himself, and he began to think he was not worth anything and never would be again. He tried walking out in the town, but he felt like a beaten dog; he would not speak to a civilian.
He tried working around the house, but whatever he did, he ended in a rage. His father had been a frequent fisherman once, and Joe got out some of his tackle one day, but trying to oil the reel and feed the line through the little leader holes on the rod with one hand made him more and more nervous, and he wound up putting his fist through his closet door. That was the way it went.
About ten days went by before he took Mary out, and then he persuaded two other fellows to take their wives along as cover-up for his embarrassment a
nd uneasiness. They went to Charter’s and ate steaks and tried to talk above the jukebox noise. Mary was pathetically eager to please Joe, but on the way home he said, “I don’t want you to be nice to me just because you’re sorry for me.”
“It doesn’t matter, Joe, I’m just glad to see you.”
“I don’t want nobody sorry for me. Nobody.” And when they got home Joe shook hands coolly and drove right off, leaving Mary crying.
The vacation was not panning out. One day he found he was getting low on cash, and at lunch he asked his family, “Where’s my allotment money I sent you? In the bank?”
Joe’s father and mother looked at each other, and his mother said, “We had to spend it when your father was in the hospital having his hernia.”
Joe said, “You spent it. All I can say is it’s quite discouraging to think you can’t trust the ones you ought to trust most. Jeepers, you spent my lifeblood savings.” He got up from the table and left the house in disgust.
He went down to the barbershop. There were no customers. Charley the barber said, “How’s it go, Joe?”
Joe said, “Like hell. In the money department I’m worried, Charley. The family spent my allotment money. Looks like I worn my welcome out with my folks. I’ll get the hell out, I guess.”
“That doesn’t sound right, Joe.”
“Well, you don’t wear your welcome out with your folks, they’re dear to you, I guess, but you wear your welcome out with yourself. I feel funny as heck, it makes me nervous and twitchy around their house, you get thinking too much when you sit down.”
“You better get a job.”
“Maybe you got something there. Seems like the more I stand fast and wait, the more nervouser I get. I tell you, Charley, you put yourself on a pedestal when you first come home, you figure you’re a kind of hero, you feel proud of yourself, you’ve accomplished something, you feel good about fighting for your country. But after about two weeks you know you’re just another fellow, only you haven’t got your left arm below the elbow.”
“You better get a job,” Charley said. “And I know just the one, if we could only work it. You know Seraviglia’s Bakery? Well, the old man died a couple months ago and the shop’s idle. You’d make a good baker, Joe.” Joe said, “With one arm?” Charley said, “Why not?”
He decided to try a war job. Out in the field he had heard all about the high wages in defense industries. Now it was his turn for some of the gravy. No more Onteoga Knitting for him.
He went first to the Principo Company—small makers of safety razors before the war, aircraft self-starters now. He was introduced to a Mr. Fenner in the personnel department.
Fenner said, “We’d be glad to take you on, Mr. Souczak, any day you can start.”
Joe said, “What do I get?”
Fenner said, “We’ll start you at seventy-three cents an hour, that’ll come to about $48.50 if you work a good week.”
Joe said, “That don’t sound like a lot of tin to me. I read in Stars and Stripes over the other side about these $150 a week positions in defense plants. I don’t go for that $48.50.”
Fenner said, “That’s our starting rate, Mr. Souczak.”
In the following days Joe tried three other small war shops and got the same story at each. Then one afternoon he came home and found a telegram waiting for him. It was from Mr. Shaughnessy of Onteoga Knitting. It said:
HEAR YOU ARE LOOKING FOR JOB. REPORT TOMORROW MORNING FOR PHOTOGRAPH AND INTERVIEW PLANT NEWSPAPER AND GO TO WORK EIGHTY CENTS HOUR PLUS FIVE CENTS EXTRA FOR NIGHT WORK. REGARDS.
Joe knew he would take his old job back, but he did not bother to show up the next morning, nor for four mornings after it. “Let the damn job wait for me,” he said, as if it were an imposition to ask him to go to work.
* * *
—
On the fifth morning he strapped his artificial arm on for the first time in two weeks and reported at the plant. All the people there were very kind to him. The personnel manager said, “We start most at sixty-five cents an hour and five cents extra for night work. We’re going to make an exception in your case and start you at eighty and five.
Joe said, “I don’t want any personal favors.”
The personnel man said, “It’s not because of your handicap, Mr. Souczak. After all, you’re one of our old hands around here.” He gave Joe an advance on his first week’s wages.
Joe could not handle his previous job at the yarn-winder with one arm, so they put him on oiling and cleaning the machines.
At the end of the first day’s work Joe was very tired but also happier than he had been for a long time. The advance payment felt nice and crisp in his pocket. He joked at supper, and his family was glad to see him perked up.
The job seemed to go well, and day by day Joe felt more and more like himself. He went to work in khaki pants and shirt, with an old basketball sweater on top. After a few days he discarded his artificial arm. The men in the plant fixed up a special harness for him to carry the oil can and waste around with, so he could leave off the arm.
He felt like going out with Mary again, and he did. They went the rounds and ended up at The Siding. It was like old times for a change. They laughed all night.
On the way home Joe stopped the car. He said, “I don’t know what to say, Mary, I’m kind of stumbling in my words.”
She said, “That’s all right, Joe.” Then she added, “In case you’ve been wondering, it doesn’t matter to me.”
He knew that she meant about the arm. He was able to say, “I’m not much use to a girl, I only got one hand.”
“Love comes from the heart, not from the hand, Joe.”
“Yeah,” Joe said, “that’s right, I never thought of that.”
“Everything’s the same.”
Joe put his arm around her and kissed her. After a while he said, “I don’t want to rush into anything.”
“You haven’t been in any rush so far. I been waiting so long for this.”
“Hugging you with one arm is kind of strange,” Joe said, “but the kissing is just the same as it ever was.”
She said again, “Everything’s the same.”
Joe said, “Yeah.”
After that it was one good day after another. The days just flew.
Joe got all his appetites back. He couldn’t seem to get caught up on food. He was always buying an ice-cream cone on the way home from work or stopping for a hamburger late at night. He found he wanted to do many of the old things, and found he could do them. He joined the plant bowling team. He went roller skating. He even went swimming in an indoor pool and found he could pull himself along lying on his right side in the water.
One night he walked with Mary down to Seraviglia’s Bakery, and they put their faces against the plate glass and looked in. They saw the mixer, a long table, some racks, a roll-top desk, and, in the back, the big oven.
“Looks nice, don’t it, Joey?” Mary said.
“Yeah,” Joe said, “but not for a one-arm man.”
Three weeks after he went to work he heard about a badge for honorably discharged soldiers—a little gold-plated plastic button with an eagle on it, for the lapel buttonhole. He went over to Camp Prestley with his discharge certificate and got one. That helped with getting out of uniform, and for a while he wore khaki pants and shirt and a civilian coat with the badge on it. No one knew what the badge meant, but he was glad to explain.
Then he bought a whole new set of civilian clothes. He blew a lot of money on the outfit: a suit for $42, topcoat for $50, shoes for $10.50, and a hat for $10. The things were just made to his taste. Everybody made remarks about his showing up in civilian clothes. His brother Tony said he looked like a preacher. Charley the barber said he looked like an undertaker. Mary said, “You look like Joey.” Joe passed off the remarks with a joke which was only half a joke, �
��I got me a spruce outfit in case opportunity comes my way.”
One night when he was out at Charter’s with Mary and the gang, he was introduced to a boy who was just about to be drafted. Whoever brought the boy up said, “Joe’s an old veteran here. You better get some low-down.”
Joe laughed and said to the boy, “When you’re over there, don’t believe nothing of what you hear and half of what you see, and you’ll be O.K.”
The boy said, “They told me you was sore about the whole thing. They told me you was sorry you went.”
Joe might have answered bitterly in his first ten days at home, but now he said, “Who told you that? To me, it was a privilege to fight for my country. I didn’t go in for sergeant’s stripes and dough to save up, or a pension. It was and it always will be a privilege, the biggest privilege and honor a man will ever get.”
“I guess it is,” the boy who was about to be drafted said.
“I figure you and I and every other American, we got a lovely home, haven’t we, we got a nice girl or maybe a wife, we got our mother and dad, we got complete freedom to shoot our mouth off, haven’t we?”
“Yeah,” the boy said.
“There always comes a time, the same as if you’re out with a crowd on a party, it’s the same thing, there comes a time when you got to pay the check, and in the world of today, in the things we’ve had in the past, I don’t think the check’s too high, even if it comes to giving your life for your country. That’s the way I’m always telling ‘em at the plant, they’re always squawking about how they have to do so damn much, that’s what I tell ‘em.”
Joe had fun that night at Charter’s, and he had fun many nights with Mary. And Sundays especially were fine as springtime came on.
Joe and Mary discovered the countryside together. They would drive out in the Souczak car and then leave it and walk across the farmlands. They would take off their shoes and socks and wade in streams, and Mary would pick bunches of violets, snowdrops, and arbutus. They would lie on their backs in the grass and play cloud games and funny-name games. And Joe would point at a blossoming tree and say, “What’s that? I forget the name of that one.” Mary would say, “That’s the shad tree, Joey. That’s the one the farmers say, ‘When the shad blows, bullheads will bite and time to plant corn.’ ” They went fishing a couple of times, and Mary was very good about hooking the bait and taking the fish off the barb. And sometimes they kissed until it was hard to stop. Those were very happy days.
