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Shrapnel
William Wharton


A previously unpublished wartime memoir from the acclaimed author of Birdy and A Midnight Clear.One of the most acclaimed American writers of his generation, and author of classic novels such as Birdy, A Midnight Clear and Dad, William Wharton was a very private man. Writing under a pseudonym, he rarely gave interviews, so fans and critics could only guess how much of his work was autobiographical and how much was fiction.Now, for the first time, we are able to read the author’s own account of his experiences during the Second World War, events that went on to influence some of his greatest novels.These are the tales that Wharton never wanted to tell his children. It is an unforgettable true story from one of America’s greatest writers.









William Wharton

Shrapnel










Contents


Title Page

Prologue

1. Basic Training

Birnbaum

Williams

Corbeil

Logan

2. Fort Jackson, South Carolina

Sergeant Hunt

Water

3. Shipping Out

Doctor Smet

Need a Body Cry

D-3

4. Invasion

Sergeant Billy Dan Gray

Hide and Seek

The Galoshes Caper

Mike Hennessy

Capture

Franklin

Sergeant Ethridge

Crossfire

Court Martial

Champagne Party

5. Men at War

Russian Roulette

Rape Rap

Rolin Clairmont

A Flight of Fancy

Downhill Slide

The Great Jewel Robbery

6. Aftermath

Celebration

Flame Throwers

Massacre

7. Homecoming

Fort Dix, New Jersey

Glossary

Other Books by William Wharton

Copyright

About the Publisher




Prologue


When we had little children, four of them, they always wanted me to tell them stories and I enjoyed the telling, but there were certain tales I never told. I’d developed the storytelling habit as a young boy, less than ten, making up scary stories for my younger sister.

Most of the tales I told to our children were about a fox named Franky Furbo. I told these stories from 1956, when our oldest daughter was four, until 1978 when our youngest was twelve. Mostly I told ‘get up’ stories in the morning while they were fresh and so was I, not bedtime stories.

We were lucky because, through most of my adult life, I did not leave home to work a job, and often, our children did not go to school. In a certain way, these stories were part of their schooling. Franky Furbo, among others, was a good teacher.

But sometimes our children wanted stories not about Franky Furbo but about other things, such as my childhood experiences, or fairy tales which ended with ‘and they lived happily ever after’. Our oldest daughter called these Ever After stories. Or occasionally, they wanted what they called ‘war stories’, tales about what happened to me during the course of World War II.

I generally didn’t want to tell those tales and tried to divert them, but children can be awfully persistent, so when I did tell tales about the war, they would be relatively amusing incidents, different ways of foraging for food, or evading various regulations, unimportant events of that nature.

In my book Birdy, in the penultimate chapter, I develop an important war experience, one of the types of tales I didn’t tell our children. The entire book A Midnight Clear revolves around another tale. I wrote A Midnight Clear because I thought we were about to re-establish the draft of young men, to send them off to kill or to be killed. I felt an obligation to tell something about war as I knew it, in all its absurdity.

One evening in New York I had dinner with Kurt Vonnegut. He asked me, ‘How was your war?’ I flippantly responded by recounting the number of court martials in which I’d been involved. It was not a good answer. War for me, though brief, had been a soul-shaking trauma. I was scared, miserable, and I lost confidence in human beings, especially myself. It was a very unhappy experience.

It was not a pleasant experience writing this book either. When dug up, the buried guilts of youth smell of dirty rags and old blood. There are many things that happened to me, and because of me, of which I am not proud, events impossible to defend now; callousness, cowardice, cupidity, deception. I did not tell these stories to my children. My ego wasn’t strong enough to handle it then, perhaps it isn’t even now, when I’m over seventy years old. We shall see.

I did write out many of these unacceptable experiences just after I came home when the war was over. I was fifty per cent disabled, and a newly enrolled student at UCLA. I cried too easily, made few friends, and couldn’t sleep. I’d stay up nights when I couldn’t sleep, trying to write the events, my feelings, my sense of loss, ineptitude. I had changed from an engineering major to an art major. I took a job as night watchman in a small notions store. I wanted to be a painter, but in the back of that store where I was night watchman, I was learning to be a writer and didn’t know it. Each dawn I’d read over what I’d written, tear it into pieces, and flush it.

There is written into Birdy one of the first really negative experiences I had in the military. It involved shovelling coal outside Harrisburg on a cold December morning. I hit a man with a shovel and was threatened with a summary court martial. Actually it was so summary, my only punishment was that I was confined to quarters until they shipped me out for infantry basic at Fort Benning, Georgia. It was the first in a series of my personal reactions to the constrictions and expectations of the military.

The conditioning of soldiers, so they will respond to command without question, was an abomination to me. Also, the rigid hierarchy on vested authority was an insult to my personal sense of identity, of value. I fought the military mentality with my meagre resources but to no avail. In the end they prevailed. They taught me to kill. They trained me to abandon my natural desire to live, survive, and to risk my life for reasons I often did not understand and sometimes did not accept.



1. BASIC TRAINING




BIRNBAUM


Basic training in Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1944 was a minimum of twelve weeks. During this time we suffered through thirty mile long hikes, rifle range, infiltration courses, crawling under machine guns firing over us, all the nonsense and misery the army can think up.

There is a young man in our outfit called Birnbaum (his name means ‘a pear tree’.) He is Jewish and really wants to learn how to be a soldier so he can kill Germans. He’s more aware of the horror and racism of Hitler’s world than most of us.

Birnbaum is a great clod, a real klutz, a zaftig, a baby-faced fellow with two left hands and two left feet. It seems he can never do anything right, buttoning his clothes is a challenge for him. Even with help, he can barely make his bunk up to pass inspection. He isn’t a goof-off on purpose; he’s really trying to do what’s asked of him. It is absolutely pitiful. His inept concentration on the simplest of tasks could bring tears to your eyes. He just does things wrong somehow, no matter how much we all try to help him.

At each Saturday inspection, poor Birnbaum has something wrong, his webbing will be dirty or tangled, his entrenching tool dirty, his canteen or mess cup filthy, coated with sugar, stained brown by coffee, or something critical is missing from his full field pack. The military punishes not just the individual. Birnbaum is given additional KP or some messy job such as cleaning the latrines, and they cancel weekend passes into town for the whole squad or platoon.

On one general field inspection, our entire company has its weekend leave revoked. So, it isn’t out of pure altruism that we all try to help Birnbaum – we’re going stir crazy. The non-coms and officers in charge just can’t seem to accept the obvious fact that Birnbaum is never going to be their kind of soldier. We do everything we can, but the more we try, the worse he gets.

For daily rifle inspection, we have an absolutely vicious Lieutenant. He’s part of the regular training group, called the cadre, pronounced not as one syllable as in the original French. Lieutenant Perkins is from Tennessee, a former member of the Tennessee National Guard, and he really takes it out on poor Birnbaum.

Once, we do get Birnbaum through barracks inspection. We’ve already missed two weekend passes in a row so we all pitch in. We scrub his webbing clean, polish his shoes, make him practise his manual of arms until he’s perfect, at least as perfect at that kind of dumb thing as Birnbaum is ever going to be. All that’s left is rifle inspection out on the drill field.

My job is to make sure his rifle’s clean. I break it down completely. I run rifle patch after rifle patch through the barrel until I’ve shined even the worst of the pits. I scrape out the ridge in the butt plate, oil the strap, even polish the firing pin. As a finale, I steal some steel wool from the mess hall kitchen. It’s strictly forbidden to pull steel wool through an M1 rifle bore but I’ve found this to be a sure way to get that ultimate sheen when an inspecting non-com, using his thumbnail as a mirror, peers down the rifle barrel. He wants to see the pink of his nail reflected along its full length with only the thin, graceful line of rifling showing.

So now we’re ready for the ultimate test. We closely examine Birnbaum for unbuttoned buttons, and set his field cap so it’s exactly straight, two fingers width above his right eyebrow as the army insists. We give him a brief review on how not to get his butt plate dirty when he’s at order arms or at ease. We review how he’s to let go of his rifle as fast as possible on ‘present arms’. We’re sure Perkins will pick on Birnbaum, he always does.

One of the crazy things about military inspection is the ritual of checking to see if our rifles are clean. We’ll all be standing in a line with our rifles at our sides. An officer will yell ‘attention’, then, ‘present arms’, followed by, ‘inspection arms’. We all, in a prescribed manner, hold our rifles out in front of us and snap the bolt open with our thumbs. The inspection officer then strides casually in front of us, looking us over, looking for something wrong, a cap askew, a button unbuttoned, a speck of dirt, etc. Then, at whim, he’ll stop in front of one soldier and stare at him. He can do anything, ask questions, comment on an article of clothing or a haircut, whatever.

Usually a non-com goes along behind taking notes on what the officer says and putting a soldier on report. Not good. When the officer in charge stops in front of you, he’s most likely going to inspect your rifle. That is, he’s going to snap that rifle out of your hands. If he does it correctly, from his point of view, wrong from yours, the butt will swing in and crack you in the groin. Our aim is to practise so we can let go of the rifle as fast as possible, ideally, so fast he’ll miss it, drop it.

We’re watching his eyes and shoulder for signals. He’s trying to fake us out. If we drop the rifle and he doesn’t swing out for it, we’re dead. We really only hope to let go in time so we won’t be hurt. However, in the back of our evil hearts we pray for that miracle of miracles when he’ll swing, miss, and drop the rifle. We’ve heard of it happening but have never seen it. The regimental rule is that if an officer drops a rifle it’s his responsibility to clean it to the soldier’s satisfaction.

Well, Birnbaum is never going to reach the point where an officer would drop a rifle. We work hard just to help him avoid instant emasculation. This I’ve seen often enough, the unfortunate soldier grovelling in the dirt, hands gripping groin, trying not to scream. Twice this has already happened to Birnbaum, once he vomited over Lieutenant Perkins’ shoes. But this time he lets go of it fine. A wave of pleasure can be felt along the entire squad. Perkins inspects the butt plate, the swivels, the action, and then he inserts his thumbnail in the bolt for barrel inspection. I’m feeling confident – I’d inspected that barrel just before putting it in the barracks’ rifle rack, before lights out. It was perfect.

Lieutenant Perkins continues to stare down the barrel. He shifts to get better light on his thumbnail, he peers with his other eye. His face goes white. Then red. I’m two soldiers to the right, and wondering what can be wrong. Lieutenant Perkins looks down at the ground then up at the sky. He hands the rifle to Corporal Muller, just behind him. Muller sticks his nail bitten thumb in and almost gets his eyeball stuck in the end of the rifle barrel he stares so long and hard. Muller’s hands start to shake. He looks over at Perkins, then down the barrel one more time. His jaw is stuck between hanging open and clamping shut in fury. He faces Birnbaum.

‘Private Birnbaum, what the hell have you done to this rifle?’

‘I cleaned it, Sir.’

Birnbaum squares his sloped shoulders. One should never call a non-com Sir, that’s reserved for officers, but at this moment this indiscretion is being ignored.

Muller takes a deep breath and then looks down the barrel again. Lt Perkins takes it from Muller, stares down the barrel as if to verify his worst fears.

‘Soldier, what the hell did you use to clean this rifle anyway, sulphuric acid?’

‘Steel wool, steel wool, Sir, steel wool!’

The whole rank can hear Birnbaum, I feel sweat trickling down my back. Lt Perkins turns to Muller.

‘Put this man on report, Corporal.’

He turns to Birnbaum.

‘Soldier, you’re confined to quarters until I can get together a court martial.’

For once our passes aren’t cancelled, but poor Birnbaum is left alone in the barracks.

Before I leave for town, I ask him what the devil happened, I can’t understand. It turns out, Birnbaum, in his eagerness, in his anxiety, his desire to please, had stayed awake all night, in the dark, running steel wool up and down inside that barrel.

Later, I get to peer down that now infamous rifle and it isn’t like a rifle at all. Birnbaum has been so industrious he’s worn out all the rifling and virtually converted it to a twelve or fourteen gauge shotgun. It’s clean all right; however, any ordinary thirty-calibre bullet would probably just fall or wobble out the end of that rifle when fired.

There’s a summary court martial, Birnbaum must pay eighty-seven dollars to replace the rifle. All his gear is removed from our barracks and he’s sent elsewhere. None of us ever sees him again. ‘Steel wool!’ becomes the rallying call of our squad.

I hope Birnbaum survived the war. He’d probably have made a good soldier. If there is such a thing.




WILLIAMS


A friend named Williams had been in charge of training Birnbaum for the daily rifle drill. After the court martial, he determines to exact revenge for Birnbaum by faking Perkins into dropping his rifle. The idea has a certain appeal, and so he manages to involve me. We stand by the hour, facing each other, practising, taking turns playing officer, feinting, trying to fake each other into making a false move. We both become better as officers than as enlisted men being inspected. But we also become fearsomely quick at letting the rifle drop. It comes to the point where we can read any slight signal of eye or body, I’ll swear Williams can even read my mind. Whenever either of us can get the ‘officer’ to miss, drop the rifle, he wins a quarter. After two weeks, I’m almost three dollars in debt. That’s a huge sum when your salary is fifty-four dollars a month.

Finally, basic training is behind us and we’re approaching final inspection, after which we’ll be shipped out. We’ll be going out to other infantry divisions being formed, or directly overseas as replacements. It’s beginning to look as if all the rifle snatching practice is going to naught, and Williams is fit to be tied.

For some reason, since Birnbaum, no officer or non-com has stopped at either of us and gone for our rifles. But then, on the big day, full dress parade, it happens. Only it doesn’t happen the way it should. Lieutenant Perkins, with a Captain beside him stops at me. I should have known, they’d never stop at Williams. He’s so spic and span, real soldierly looking, they’d never bother. I’d never be his kind of perfect.

I don’t even have time to think – after so much practice it’s automatic. At a slight wince in Perkins’ eye I let go of that rifle. The rifle spins and hits the dirt, the front sight gashing Perkins’ finger on the way down. I know Williams must be excited, happy. At the same time, disappointed because they’d passed him by. I’m just scared. I stare ahead with my hands still in the present arms position, looking straight where I’m supposed to be looking, not down at the rifle. Perkins looks briefly at his gashed finger then holds it out from his side so no blood will drip on his suntans. He glares into my eyes.

‘At ease, soldier.’

I take the position the military calls ‘at ease’. That is, you spread your legs about eighteen inches apart, stiff-legged. If I’d had my rifle, I’d have gone into something called ‘parade rest’.

‘Soldier, deliver that rifle to the orderly room when inspection is over.’

‘Yes, Sir.’

He wheels away, still holding his hand out at his side. The Captain takes over the rest of the inspection. I know I’m on ‘private report’ and dread what is sure to come.

The rifle is still lying in the parade ground dust and dirt. I reach down and pick it up. I’m probably breaking at least five army rules doing this, but I don’t care. I love that rifle. I’ve carefully zeroed it in to ‘expert’ level for everything from two hundred to five hundred yards. I still remember the serial number of that rifle, 880144.

The crazy thing, among many crazy things, is when I finally do go overseas, they issue me a new rifle, one I didn’t get to zero in, don’t know at all. I feel nothing for that rifle. I kill human beings with that ‘piece’ but it’s never really mine. I feel I don’t actually do it. Maybe that’s the way military planners want it to be – nothing personal.

When we get back to the barracks, Williams is frantic with excitement. He pulls me aside and into the latrine. He has a paper sack full of coal dust and a tube of airplane glue. I watch, numb, as he mixes them into a gooey running paste and pours this mess down my rifle barrel and into the action. He’s trembling with a combination of fury and mirth.

‘Now that bastard’s really got something to work with. Birnbaum’s revenge. I’m almost tempted to include a package of steel wool.’

I decide that would be too much, they might stand me up before a firing squad.

I deliver the rifle, with Williams pushing behind me, to the orderly room. We dash back to the barracks. Next morning the rifle is delivered by the mail clerk, it’s like new. I check the serial number and it’s mine all right. I don’t know who cleaned out that mess, or how. Not a word is said. I hope it’s Muller, I’m sure it isn’t Perkins – I suspect it’s the mail clerk.

We ship out three days later. I’m sent to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, to an infantry division. I’m hoping I’ll never see Lieutenant Perkins again and I don’t look very hard.




CORBEIL


During basic I got to know Corbeil, the fellow who sleeps in the bunk below me. He’s one of the few in our group who has much education beyond high school. He’d been in the Master’s programme at Columbia when they drafted him and he hates the army even more than I do. He’d been a philosophy major with a special interest in existentialism, and considers the whole war an uncalled for, unjustified, interruption of his life. His name is Max and he reads books, half of them are in French, which he had sent from home. He considers the post library a literary garbage pit. I’ll admit I don’t even know where the post library is. One weekend he comes back from town with an alarm clock. Now the last thing in the world you need in the army is an alarm clock.

Regularly, before light, about fivethirty, the Corporal of the Guard comes through yelling. He makes sure everyone’s rolled out of bed, he’s kicking the beds as he goes along, yelling and hollering. If you pull your covers over your head he’ll rip them off the bed and dump them on the floor. This means starting the bed from scratch.

Most of us make the bed for Saturday inspection, and then slip ourselves under those blankets like letters into envelopes the rest of the week. We slide out the same way. These blankets are virtually glued to the frames. That way we can snatch a few minutes in the latrine before the thundering herd descends upon us.

By six we need to be lined up in the company street, dressed, shaved, clean, with our rifles and helmet liners. There’ll be roll call, the orders of the day, a few kindly words from Muller or Perkins about what rotten soldiers we are, then we go to mess hall for breakfast. The KP have already been rousted out at four.

I ask Corbeil, incredulously, ‘Why the alarm clock?’

Corbeil holds the clock next to his ear and smiles. ‘This little ticker’s going to get me out of the army.’

I figure all the reading has pushed him over the edge. My mother always insisted reading softens the brain.

That night I hear him wind his clock. I hang over the edge of my bunk and watch as he tucks it under his pillow. In the dark of night I hear it go off. I’m a relatively light sleeper. He lies still for a few minutes, then carefully slides out of his bed onto his knees. He pulls his top blanket off the bed onto the floor. Then, still kneeling, he starts peeing on the bed, spraying back and forth. Using a penlight, he resets his clock, pulls his still dry pillow off the bed and wraps himself in the blanket on the floor.

I again hear the alarm go off just before the Corporal of the Guard comes at five thirty. He jumps up, hides his clock on one of the rafters to the barracks, then curls up in his blanket again.

After roll call, he takes all his wet bedding to the supply sergeant and gets new ones. This happens every morning for a week. Muller becomes a raving maniac. He puts Corbeil on sick call. They give him some pills he doesn’t take. He offers them to me. After a week, the supply sergeant won’t give him any more clean bedding and they take his stinking mattress away.

Corbeil starts sleeping with just a blanket over the metal slats of his bunk. But the alarm keeps going off and, in the dark, I can hear the splash as he pees on his sheet. It begins to get awfully smelly around our bunk.

As far as I know, besides Corbeil, I’m the only one who knows what’s happening. After two weeks they send Corbeil to a doctor, then a psychiatrist. When he’s around with the rest of us, not on sick call or in the hospital, he does his work like everybody else.

Muller is all over Corbeil, calls him ‘piss head’ and even more vulgar names. Corbeil is very modest, sorry about everything. He even gets a bucket of hot soapy water and scrubs the saturated floorboards under his bed. He apologises to everybody, claims this had been a problem for him all his life. Far as I know, he didn’t have any trouble until he bought that damned alarm clock.

One day he doesn’t come back from sick call. He’s gone for almost a week. I borrow a few books from his footlocker. Even with the ones in English, I can’t understand them.

I begin to sleep through the night and things smell better under the bunks.

He comes back smiling. They’ve issued him a mattress, mattress cover, blankets. That night I hear the alarm go off again. I listen as he goes through his full routine. I need to hold my mouth to keep from laughing, and the whole double bunk shakes. Corbeil looks over the edge of my bunk.

‘Take it easy, Wharton, it won’t be long now. Wait till tomorrow.’

He resets his alarm and goes to sleep. Corporal Muller screams, hollers and curses Corbeil. Non-coms aren’t allowed to touch enlisted men, but he comes close, nose to nose, spittle flying. This is an insult to the whole US Army, he claims. He rants and raves, makes Corbeil wash the blankets, the mattress cover, air out the mattress.

But nothing is going to stop Corbeil. He’s removed from the barracks again. The alarm clock is still in its hiding place. I wait. About three days later, we come in from field exercises and there’s Corbeil. He’s emptying his footlocker into his duffel bag. He’s wearing his dress uniform, not fatigues. He smiles at me. I wait until nobody is close by. Everybody’s in the latrine washing up. We’d just spent the day in a dusty field learning the difference between creep and crawl. You creep like a baby and crawl like a snake. I think, or it could be the other way round.

I put my rifle in the rack. I’m covered with mud, a combination of dust and sweat.

‘So, what happened.’

‘I did it. I’m out. I’ve got a medical discharge, honourable. In three days I’ll be home. I’ll just have enough time to enrol in school on a late registration. I’ve got “enuresis”. The US Army can’t use me. Isn’t that too bad?’

He smiles and jumps up to where he keeps his clock. ‘Here, take this. It’s a gift for keeping quiet and not giving me away. I’m sorry to have wakened you, and for the stink, but I don’t want to be dead. Bodies smell worse.’

So, he gets out of the army. In a few days we have a replacement from another company named Gettinger. Gettinger goes down with us to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and we go through a lot together. He’s killed outside Metz. One thing I learn is it pays to have a university education.




LOGAN


About two weeks after the alarm clock business, we’re hanging around the bulletin board outside the orderly room. I’m with a fellow named Logan. He’s from Steubenville, Ohio, and is the only one of us who receives money from home in addition to his monthly pay.

Logan receives one hundred and fifty dollars monthly. Logan has good reason to hate the army.

He’d been an air cadet. He’d become battalion commander of his cadet class. They were preparing for graduation, after which they would all become Second Lieutenants. Logan was drilling his battalion in close order drill, marching, high stepping smartly, backward down the company street when he was hit by a jeep from the rear. He spent three weeks in the hospital with broken ribs and a cracked collarbone. When he came out, he was classified as unfit to be an air cadet and was transferred to the infantry.

He still, illegally, has a complete Second Lieutenant’s uniform, tailor made, down to the gold bars. He’d had them ordered before he was clobbered. Officers, because they are officially gentlemen, need to buy their own uniforms. Even now, as an enlisted man, he still has his shirts and fatigues tailored. He has them dry cleaned and pressed, off post. Except for the missing bars he looks more like an officer than most of our real, so called, officers and gentlemen.

One day there’s an announcement on the bulletin board telling about two openings as ‘cook’s helpers’ and asking for volunteers. ‘Cook’s helper’ is the army’s way of saying KP pusher. We’ve just had a miserable day in the field making a march wearing gas masks, through waves of tear gas. Anything looks better.

Logan stuffs the notice in his tailored pocket. We go up the steps to the orderly room and officially volunteer our services to Reilly, the company clerk. He tells us we’re the first to volunteer; we know we’ll be the last. The next day, at roll call, we’re told to report to the orderly room.

Lieutenant Gross, the executive officer, tells us we are taken off the regular roster and temporarily reassigned to Sergeant Mooney, the cook, as helpers. We are to report right away to the kitchen and Sergeant Mooney. We salute our way out and start to worry. It all seems too easy – generally, volunteering in the army is a dumb idea.

But it turns out to be really great. Mooney is fat and sloppy. He likes to eat and likes to drink, but he doesn’t like to cook. Whenever I read the comic, Beetle Bailey, I think of Sergeant Mooney.

Our job is to wake the KPs at four am, get them down to the kitchen, assign duties, and have things ready for breakfast at seven. Theoretically, we aren’t supposed to do anything ourselves, just make sure the KPs get the work done. We stay on at night until the kitchen is clean and the dining hall ready for the next day’s breakfast.

The thing that makes it great is we’re on a day, and off a day, taking turns. If the company clerk and executive officer agree, we can even have passes to town on our days off. Also, even when we’re on duty, there’ll always be a few hours after lunch and before dinner when we can take turns going back to the barracks and resting. We’re living in luxury. That alarm clock Corbeil gave me in basic comes in handy.

Now, in general, KP pushers are loved just about as much in the army as trusties are in jail. They’re considered finks. They’ve sold their souls to the devil. Logan and I decide to change this around. One of the prime power plays of KP pushers is the assignment of jobs. Those go all the way from the easiest, that is serving and setting tables, to the worst, ‘pots and pans’. We immediately let it be known that it will be first-come, first-serve from now on. Whoever gets there first gets the first choice of jobs. I even rent out my alarm clock a few times when I’m not on duty.

Then we begin getting more and more done in the evening before we shut down the kitchen, so we can wake the KPs later in the morning. We have a good breakfast made for the KPs with eggs, scrambled or fried, four or five strips of bacon, orange juice, cereal, milk and coffee. Nobody else is eating like the KPs except us. It turns out that Logan, besides liking fine clothes, likes good food and can cook, a real Epicurean.

As long as things get done in the kitchen, the cook couldn’t care less. He never comes in till O six hundred anyway. We begin waking KPs at O five hundred instead of O four hundred. Because neither of us is a particularly aggressive or hostile type, we gradually bring the KPs onto our side, or, maybe, we go over to the side of the KPs, whichever way you want to look at it. We’re friends to everybody.

The cook is satisfied because we’re getting the work done, so he has hardly anything to do. We develop all kinds of short cuts, more efficient ways to do things, not a particularly difficult task.

Logan and I work out a system to keep the stove burning overnight by feeding it just before lights-out and wrapping the coal in wet newspapers. So now the KPs come into a nice warm kitchen, with the tables set and most of the work already done. We begin to think being cooks would be great. The cook even recommends that we be sent to cook’s school. Also, our company is the only one where everybody is begging to be on KP. Logan figures if we can gain control of the KP lists, we can even charge!

We gradually find out that the food being served is so terrible because of the way it’s cooked. Nobody in the country is eating the way we’re supposed to be being fed. It’s actually food fit for kings. These great big beautiful pork chops come in, at a time when meat rationing is tough for civilians, and this cook takes those hundreds of pork chops and dumps them in a big pot of boiling water. Then he pulls them out dripping wet and gives them a little frying on the griddle with greasy oil so they’ll look better, as if they’d been fried or roasted. But they taste like cardboard and are as tough as shoe leather. They only look like pork chops. We talk the cook into letting us do more and more of the cooking while he sinks slowly into his private stew, alcohol.

Logan is teaching me how to cook. We start making things like Beef Stroganoff instead of stew, chipped beef in garlic sauce instead of ‘shit on a shingle’. We even get so we can do a fair job of broiling steaks, giving a choice: rare, medium or well done. That’s quite a trick with two hundred people to be fed in less than an hour. The KPs get into the spirit. The Captain promotes the cook from staff to tech.

Around this time, some of us are given a chance to take our first furlough. I go home to California where my folks have moved from Philadelphia while I’ve been gone. Logan will take his furlough when I come back. He’ll double up and handle both ends of the job, do all the cooking. I have twelve days travel time. This plus the ten-day furlough comes to twenty-two days. With a little manoeuvring on the weekends at each end, I have twenty-four days altogether. I feel paroled. I’m going to be out of the army, on my own, after almost six months as a prisoner. It seems like a dream come true.

For the first time I visit my parents in California. I meet the woman who becomes my wife six years later. We dance a lot. There are great bands, big swing bands in Southern California then. We dance at the Casa Manana and the Casino Ballroom. Jimmy Dorsey, Harry James, all the big ones play. Most of the men dancing are in uniform. It’s a great furlough. When I come back, I find I’ve been put onto the duty roster again! I can’t believe it.

Logan is at cook’s school and the cook had been broken to private. There’s another cook who doesn’t want cook’s helpers, KP pushers. I’m back on the line in a line outfit. I feel I’ve been rooked. I have been!

Much later, I learn that in the battle of the Ardennes when everybody, truck drivers, clerks, cooks, even the regimental band are put up on the line, Logan shoots himself in the arm with a carbine. If you do a thing like that you’re supposed to hold your hand over the rifle and shoot through a cloth, between the bones. I thought he’d have done a better job of it. Or maybe it really was an accident.



2. FORT JACKSON, SOUTH CAROLINA




SERGEANT HUNT


Before we’re shipped overseas, I’ve been reassigned to Regimental Intelligence and Reconnaissance, called I&R. Somebody scanned my records and found my AGCT score. I move from K Company to Regimental Headquarters company.

It’s even better than being a KP pusher. We’re given special training in patrolling, using high tech (for the army that is) phones and radios, we get to drive jeeps, trucks and weasels. Weasels are a kind of personnel carrier that has tracks and can go through water. We’re even sent back to Benning for parachute jump training. In two weeks we make five jumps. They won’t let us make the sixth because then we’d be eligible for paratrooper jumping wings, which would have given us fifteen dollars extra a month.

The Master Sergeant of Regimental Headquarters is a special kind of person. He could well be one of the meanest people I will ever know, but he is always smiling and laughing. He has small eyes and a big stomach. He’s ‘regular army’ and a southerner. I don’t know how smart he actually is, but when it comes to running an infantry company he’s a genius. He runs a company as if it’s his own private army, set up for his personal profit. We privates, and everyone else, are his serfs.

The Company Commander and other officers love him because they don’t have to do anything. The Company Commander is just decoration in this company. Twice Sergeant Hunt is offered a commission and refuses. He lives better, eats better, and makes more money with all his schemes, than the Regimental Commander.

But he makes one mistake. He gets too greedy; and somebody, somewhere along the line, discovers that Hunt’s been having marital allotment cheques sent to three different women in three different states. He’s a trigamist. He could get away with this because he signs the allotments himself. He has one wife in Alabama, one in South Carolina and another in Mississippi. There’s a court martial and he’s broken all the way down to Private. He has to make up for the fraudulent allotments and he does. I think he’s a rich man by that time, anyway.

Anyone else would have wound up in Leavenworth, but he can call in some of his chits, and officers like him. He’s moved into the regular barracks like the rest of us, and we have a new Master Sergeant shipped in.

Now everyone who’d ever been given a hard time by him jumps on Private Hunt. His life isn’t worth living. Shaving cream is squeezed into his toothpaste tube, he’s short-sheeted every night and has to remake his bed before he climbs into it. There can be anything, spiders, scorpions, snakes, condoms full of water, anything, under those blankets. But he never says anything, he just smiles, crinkling his eyes; throws these things on the floor, and puts everything back together.

He has all the shit details; latrine duty, KP, and pulls hard guard. Even lousy PFCs try to make his life miserable. He only smiles his fat smile with flesh bunched up around those small eyes. To me he looks more dangerous this way, his shirt sleeves showing where his old master stripes had been when he was top kick. I make a point of staying away from him.

He’s older than any of the company officers, including the new CO, by far. Probably in his late thirties, he seems like an old man to us. He just keeps his mouth shut, does whatever he’s told, no matter what, even things he doesn’t have to do, like mop the barracks floor every morning before reveille. And nobody knows arm regulations, word and verse, as Hunt does. I’m convinced something bad is coming.

It doesn’t take long. He somehow manages to be transferred to ‘C’ Company. Then, nobody ever went up through the ranks the way Hunt does. He stitches each new rank on with big loose stitches until he’s finally back to three up, three down, with the diamond of a Master Sergeant. These he stitches on tightly.

Starting right then, he begins arranging transfers from Headquarters to C Company of about twenty non-coms and PFCs. These twenty are those who had given him the worst time. We all go down to look at the bulletin board every morning with dread. We never hear from any of those soldiers again except to see their names on the demotions list, if they had any rank. He wears them down, one at a time. Since then, I’ve harboured a fear of big, smiling, fat, southerners. It’s a form of personal bigotry.




WATER


At Fort Jackson, the last part of our training is a series of thirty-mile ‘water hikes’. We hike thirty miles in one day, camp overnight, then come back thirty miles the next. We do this on one canteen of water, so we go sixty miles on a quart of water, which isn’t much, because it’s hot and humid.

Right away, a friend of mine, named Pete, decides he’s going into business. He solders, or tapes together, three number ten cans with the bottoms and tops cut off of them; I don’t know how he does it, but he does. He even builds in a small plug. I watch him do this after field duties, in the dark, and I begin to think he’s going crazy.

We normally carry a full field pack on those hikes, along with our M1s, ammo and bandoleers. The rest of the pack is our mess kit, blankets wrapped around a tent, a tent pole, tent pegs and underwear. We carry it vertically sticking up higher than our heads, and it weighs about sixty pounds with everything in it.

Now Pete has several gallons of water in his contraption, but no shelter half, no blankets, no tent pole, no tent pegs. I know a cubic foot of water weighs about seventy pounds, so it’s heavy. When we go out on the hike, he straps his water on his back. I admit, it looks like a regular field pack.

At the end of the hike, at the bivouac, everyone is dying of thirst. It’s very difficult not to drink water on the way, and there’s no water out there. The officers make the trip in jeeps, blowing dust in our faces as they go by with Jerry cans full of water. The idea is for us to fill up with as much water as we can before we start, then keep our water drinking down. But everyone is perspiring and urinating, so we’re lucky if we can save half a canteen for the night and the next day.

My mouth starts sticking to itself, my tongue to the top of my mouth, my teeth to my lips, my lips to each other. After a few hours our tongues are hanging out of our mouths.

Pete starts charging two dollars for a canteen cup half full of water. He must have twenty canteens full in that pack, which is a lot of money. But he winds up with no shelter half, no blankets, no tent pole, no tent pegs. He has no place to sleep.

Luckily for him, it’s a hot night and he camps out behind my tent. We pile a bunch of brush and pine needles around him so nobody will see him.

Now, the way you build a tent in the army is this. Each GI carries a half tent called a shelter half. Then two GIs get together, button the shelter halves together, and using two tent poles and all the tent pegs, have enough for a tent. Pete’s tent buddy, who isn’t in on the water ploy at all, has half a tent. All he can do is hide, along with Pete, trying to sleep under his shelter half. He definitely isn’t happy about this whole shenanigan.

But Pete pulls this nutty thing off. He divvies the water out until he has over forty dollars. He gives five of this to his deprived tent mate to shut him up. But he makes one mistake, he forgets to save any water for himself. However, this looks good in terms of his alibi if he needs one. He’s as thirsty, or thirstier, than any of us. He’s almost outfoxed himself. The good thing is that his full field pack is empty and doesn’t weigh more than ten pounds on the way back. But Pete’s problem is he likes to gamble. Within a week, he loses his thirty-five dollars, plus a bit more.

Of course, something like this can’t be kept quiet; the whole squad thinks it’s so incredible. The platoon leader finds out and calls Pete in. He asks if he’s really done it. Pete denies everything and insists somebody made it up. He shows he has no money, and by this time, he’s gotten rid of the cans. There’s no evidence whatsoever.

I’m sure the officers think it’s a pretty good scam, too, because no one ever does persecute or prosecute Pete, or even try to make his life miserable. But they check everybody’s full field pack after that. From then on, our ‘water marches’ are for real.



3. SHIPPING OUT




DOCTOR SMET


Well, finally we’re getting ready to ship out. We’ve been prepared for sixteen months now, to go to the South Pacific. We’ve been doing mock beach landings, jungle survival and those water marches. They issue special equipment and uniforms for fighting in the South Pacific. That’s a place we don’t want to go.

Then, at the last minute, we’re issued new equipment. Overcoats, galoshes, wool knit caps, olive drab long johns with trap doors. After a long train trip with the blinds down, we’re packed into the biggest damned boat I’ve ever seen in my life. Going up the gangplank it looks like a wall with round windows. It turns out it is the biggest ship in the world at that time – the Queen Elizabeth. We dash across the Atlantic at twenty-three knots per hour in five days, without escort. We’re supposed to be faster than submarines can shoot or something like that. But I doubt it, I rarely take my life jacket off. There are fifteen thousand of us packed into that ship, most of us are seasick after the first day. I spend as much time as possible floating in an old bathtub I find. The water sloshes over the sides with each lurch, but I stay more or less steady, waterlogged but not sick. Simple physics.

Eight of us pack a tiny third class cabin built for two. The mess lines are so long, one can just finish one meal in time to stand in line for the next, but most of us aren’t into eating much anyway.

We land in Scotland, and are then shunted from train to train. European trains, all darkened, shades drawn, with little cabins, chock full, smothering in full field packs and new uniforms. Finally, in the middle of the night, we arrive at what had been an old textile mill in the town. We’re supposed to be hidden here, for who knows how long. But this is impossible. You can’t really hide a whole division and there’s division after division hidden all over England waiting for the big moment.

We’re virtual prisoners in that smelly mill. Then somebody finds out that a black transportation unit had stayed in this mill just before us. So, without asking anybody, the goofy southern crackers throw all the mattresses out the window, into the courtyard, and burn them. After that, we sleep on the woven canvas straps of the bunks. Max Corbeil would have felt right at home.

One day I’m picked for a detail moving officers’ footlockers out of some trucks. I don’t know what these officers store in these footlockers, but they’re heavy enough for dead bodies. There are too many officers and not enough enlisted men in a Regimental Headquarters Company.

Pushing a heavy one up onto a truck, I really hurt myself. I’m sure I have a hernia, I hope I have a hernia. I’m transported to a hospital in a civilian ambulance. It turns out what I’ve done is develop a varicocele. I don’t know what it is, but hope it’s serious. It turns out to be a varicose vein in one of my testicles. It’s tender and I can feel it, like little worms, but it’s not what the doctors call ‘disabling’. We’re within weeks of the big move, nobody knows anything for sure, and if they do, they’re not telling.

I spend as much time as possible complaining, writhing, moaning, groaning. They give me a little canvas bag to wear on my balls. It’s like a cross between a G-string and a jock strap. They even give me an extra for when one gets too smelly. Two days later a doctor stands at the foot of my bed. He smiles.

‘I guess we ought to operate on this, but it’s not going to kill you and you won’t need to do any heavy lifting.’

I can tell he’s never carried a full field pack or an officer’s footlocker.

‘You just stay in bed here and I’ll have you back to your outfit in no time. Don’t you worry about it.’

He says this as if ‘getting back to my outfit’ is my fondest dream, like going home.

After he leaves, I’m really in pain; mental anguish. This could have been the chance of a lifetime for me to stay in England, practically like a civilian for the whole damned war.

My prime qualification is as rifleman. That’s the worst MOS you can have. The second worst is scout, that’s my second MOS, but my third is typist. I’d learned to type in high school and had gotten a good score on the army typing test. It’s my ace in the hole, a deep hole, unfortunately probably a foxhole. I know that if the outfit leaves without me, they’d need me in England. I’ll volunteer to type out forms, or maybe some Major’s personal war novel. Anything. My fingers itch to type.

The next time Doctor Smet comes around I’m curled up in agony out of habit more than anything; but he’s written off that varicocele. Yes sir, he’s going to do me a big favour and get me back to my outfit. He’s my friend. He’s going to save me from that nasty operation. I think he expects me to kiss his hand.

But now, of all things, he becomes interested in my right foot. I’ve always had a bump sticking out on the back of my right heel, since I was a kid. Whenever I buy new shoes I develop a blister there. It’s one of those things you learn to live with. He probes it with a finger, then a needle. He tries jiggling it back and forth. He keeps asking me if it hurts and I yowl. Tears come to my eyes. He writes on his little clipboard.

He brings another doctor over to look at it. I scream some more, pretending to be brave. He tells me I have what’s called a calcaneus spur. He asks me if it hurts when I walk.

’Well, yes Sir, it does. It gets all red and swells up on marches and I have blisters it’s so sore.’

He writes some more on his clipboard. Maybe I have a second shot at England.

I’m in the hospital four more days. Every time I have a chance, and nobody’s looking, I bang that calcaneus spur on the metal siding of the bed. I start limping when I go to the bathroom. It begins to hurt so much I need to limp. I stay awake and moan at night a lot. The nurses give me aspirins to shut me up.

The next day, Doctor Smet comes around with another doctor. This one seems to be a specialist. He turns me on my stomach, bends my knee up, twists my ankle in all directions and starts hitting the back of my foot with a little rubber hammer.

Of course, I’m screaming, howling, the whole time. I don’t need to fake it much because with all my thumping on the bed, that foot’s practically a piece of hamburger meat. The two doctors step back from the bed, ‘consultation time’ I figure. Maybe they’ll decide to discharge me, give me a medical discharge. I’ll have a disability pension. The second doctor comes up to the side of the bed. He has his clipboard at his side.

‘You’re in Headquarters Company, Regimental Headquarters, isn’t that right Soldier?’

‘Yes sir, I&R.’

‘Well, you won’t need to march much then. Just take care of that foot.’ He writes on the clipboard. He looks down at me and winks. Doctors, especially military doctors, should never wink.

‘I’m assigning you back to duty. The nurse will give you some Band-Aids for that foot. Nice try.’

And so the future painter, engineer, teacher, psychologist, writer is condemned to death, with a wink!




NEED A BODY CRY


When I come back to our mattress-less mill, I flop out on the canvas strap bed, trying to get it into my mind that I’m still in the army, the same army. All I have to show for my medical malingering is two dinky ‘ball holders’ and a sore Band-Aided foot. It isn’t an hour later when Diffendorf, our balding mail orderly, comes in. He’s the one who first announced to me the happy fact that I would be balder than he is before I reach thirty. Perhaps it was a classic example of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Anyway, from then on, I’m aware of my constantly expanding forehead. I now have a forehead that goes practically all the way down the back of my neck, a fore and aft affair.

This time Diffendorf gleefully announces to me that the regimental S2, Major Love, wants to see me, and on the double.

I change shirts, check buttons, brush the fronts of my new combat boots on the back of my pants. This is just dumb habit. The boots are clean, and the shiny leather is inside, the outside is rough like suede, ‘All the better to absorb water with, my dear.’ Blotter boots.

I hustle up the street of this small English town called Biddulph in the middle of the Midlands of nowhere. The S2 has his headquarters in the city hall. It’s one of the few buildings in town that still has the ornamental iron fence in front of it. All other gates, fences, grilles have been ripped out and contributed to the war effort, melted down and turned into shrapnel, I suppose. I dash past the sentry at the ornamental gate. His name is Thompson, he plays trumpet in the regimental band. As I dash by, he tries to hide a cigarette.

Inside, Taylor, Love’s assistant, is sitting at a desk. I salute; go through the whole military routine.

‘PFC Wharton we think we have an assignment for you.’

‘Yes Sir.’

We’re playing the whole thing out. He reaches down into a drawer and pulls out a portfolio filled with papers and plastic overlays.

‘I understand you had top marks in map reading and map making back at Jackson.’

He smiles at me and lights a cigarette. Damn, I’m still at attention, he hasn’t even put me at ease. I wonder if I should just go into ‘at ease’ by myself. This jerk probably wouldn’t even notice. Then again, maybe he’s got a message from that bone doctor at the hospital and he’s about to pull some kind of wild bamboozle on me. I keep my mouth shut. I stay at attention. He must have read my mind.

‘At ease, Soldier.’

I slump appropriately.

’Major Love feels we ought to have a map of this town and the surrounding territory. It’s good military procedure to be prepared. One never knows. Those Nazis are capable of anything, look at that guy Hess who practically jumped down the queen’s chimney. He had to give himself up; these Limeys could never have caught him.’

I don’t say anything. To be honest, I don’t even know about Hess. I’m not very political. This war to me is something like whooping cough or measles you try to get through, or maybe more like chicken pox where you aren’t supposed to scratch or you’ll have big craters all over your face and body. I’m trying my damnedest not to scratch.

He reaches across the desk and hands me the portfolio. This is about to be one of the weirdest things to happen to me so far. Little did I know how weird things can get in the army. I can feel it in my bones, especially in that calcaneus spur. Does he expect me to go out and make little drawings of all the houses in town? I tuck the folder under my arm and come to attention again, half way.

‘What we need is a complete map showing locations of all buildings, and what they’re being used for. Indicate the mills we’re living in as barracks, show where the motor pool is located. Get in all the important roads and even the little paths. Show the distance from one place to another in yards. Try to do the whole thing to scale. If there are some details, make detailed maps of those parts. If possible, indicate the topography with elevations. You can work out the scale, too, but be sure to have a legend so the Major can quickly have an idea of the terrain. I’ve taken you off all other duties and here’s a pass to get you around town without any trouble. Try to make yourself as inconspicuous as possible. If you need a map table, you can get one from supply, also anything else you might need.

‘You got all that?’

I hardly know what he’s talking about. However, having a pass to go anywhere I want to in town without being locked inside that mill is just fine with me. I nod vigorously.

’Yes Sir. I’ll do my best.’

He salutes and I whip him back a good one and spin on my heels with the portfolio under my arm. I’m going to need some pencils and drawing pens but I don’t want to screw anything up.

I stop outside at the orderly’s desk and he has the pass. He also lets me have two 2B drawing pencils and, after some convincing, a black fountain pen. I figure I’ll stroll around town and look for any kind of a stationery store with a real drawing pen and some India ink. I’ll also need a ruler and maybe a T square. I’m deep into the map making business.

More than that, I’m now practically a tourist. I stroll up the hill to look at the town church, it’s something I’ve wanted to see. On the way, two MPs jump out of doorways and start hassling me. I show them my magic pass and do everything but salute. I could be a Nazi spy who just counterfeited that pass and I’ll bet those idiots’d let me by anyway.

Maybe Williams is right, nobody’s doing much of a great job running this war. Hey, maybe I can do all these drawings and sell them to the Germans. They might give me a German discharge in exchange. I could work on my German, disappear in the Alps somewhere and nobody would know the difference. No, they’d get me. With my luck, some hot-shot American skier would discover me in my little hut on the side of the hill and turn me in.

The church door is locked, but just down the hill on the other side is a little combination newspaper stand and stationery shop. There’s an old lady and a very pretty girl running it. As I move toward the pretty one, the old one blocks my way. She’s surprised to see a soldier walking around in broad daylight. All these people must know we’re here but there’s some kind of agreement that we’ll all pretend we don’t see or know anything.

I try to explain what I want. The old lady is confused, but the young one steps forward. She has very dark hair and beautiful violet eyes. She pulls down some dusty boxes and there are crow quill pens, and engineering pens, great for map drawing, but I’d have bought split goose feathers from her. She also has some quality pink pearl erasers. This master spy does make mistakes once in a while.

She also brings out some rulers, wooden and thick, twelve inch jobs and, miracle of miracles, a transparent T square.

All the time, I’m trying to work up a conversation. I can’t tell them what I’m really doing, although they’ve probably figured it out faster than I did. So, I tell them I’m an artist and will be doing drawings around town to pass the time.

I think of an old film with Ronald Coleman where he wanders through the English countryside with a portable easel on his back singing, ‘When a body meets a body coming through the rye’; I romanticised over that one for six months. It could be one of the influences that made me want to be an artist. Of course, he meets the most beautiful girl in his wanderings and she thinks he’s ‘God’s gift to earth’ because he can draw and paint.

I wonder if I can talk Taylor into letting me buy a portable easel instead of hauling a map table around. He said I should make myself inconspicuous. Maybe I could even wear civilian clothes, some old tweeds and a Sherlock Holmes cap with a bill. The English would never shoot me as a spy, or maybe they would. I’ve lost a lot of confidence in the people who make those kinds of decisions.

There’s a great wooden combination paint box and easel in the window. I ask the price. It’s just under ten pounds. Taylor could never get a requisition through even if he’d try. But I act as if I’m seriously considering it, all in the interest of security. I ask the young girl her name and she tells me its Miss Henderson. I look at her, pretending I’m Ronald Coleman.

‘Might I call you Violet?’

She blushes and turns around. I figure I’ve blown it. What would Ronald Coleman have done?

Luckily I have a bit over ten pounds in my pocket, more than enough. I ask for a receipt. I’ll need it to get my money back, if that’s remotely possible. Then I remember, I forgot India ink. I ask. Without a word she turns and takes a bottle from one of the shelves. She twists the top open to check if it’s dried up. It is. She opens three before she finds one that’s okay. India ink is like that. It goes to seed or something and you have bits of black grit in ink plasma and there’s no way you can make it flow through a pen, especially a crow quill pen or an engineering pen. It’s very nice of her to check.

‘Thank you, Miss Henderson. There’s nothing worse than having black sand for ink.’

She looks at me with those violet eyes.

‘My name is really Michelle. It’s a French sounding name isn’t it?’

‘My name is William. I’m called Will by my friends. I hope I’ll be seeing you again.’

She smiles, gives me my change, looks me in the eye.

‘Perhaps William, you might need some more India ink.’

I begin walking around the town, measuring distances, counting buildings, taking notes, humming ‘Coming Through the Rye’, thinking about violet eyes. This is going to be one terrific assignment. I’m pacing from the church to the mayor’s office, trying to keep count, when I see Michelle coming up the street. She has a small cloth basket with packages in it. I know, from my wandering around, that today’s market day, the day when the farmers come in to sell the few things they can sell that aren’t rationed. I look up and lose count. Michelle stops in front of me.

‘What are you doing William? I see you marching up and down the streets marking things on your papers. You don’t look to me as if you are doing any drawings.’

So, I confess. I’m probably giving away state secrets to an enemy spy who’s been posted in this town for almost twenty years and has a secret radio in her bedroom. I like to meditate on her bedroom.

‘I’m trying to make a map of the town. My officer thinks it would be a good idea, in case any Germans come charging over the hill we’ll all know which way to run.’

She swings her bag around so she’s holding it with two hands in front of her. She looks at me, inquisitively, the same way she did in the shop.

‘Well, William, I’m quite sure there are maps in the council archives. I think they would let you use them for your work, if you asked. In fact, if you want, I’ll ask. My uncle is a council member.’

She smiles and turns away. She’s about five steps back up the hill when Ronald Coleman asserts himself.

‘How can I find out if this would be possible. Where should I go, Michelle?’

‘Come to the shop this afternoon. I will know by then.’

She continues on up the hill. I’m totally confused. I can’t even come within a hundred of how many paces I’d done when we met. I wait until she’s out of sight, then sneak up the hill to the church again. I start pacing anew. At the bottom of the hill (the whole town is on the side of a hill) is a wooden cattle fence with a cattle gate. I go through it and I’m out in open country. Everything is deep green. We have some fair-to-middling green in Pennsylvania, but this green is the kind you expect to find in Ireland.

Taylor’d said I was supposed to give some idea of the surroundings for this town so I go through the gate, turn and march across fields to another rolling hill beside the town, from which I have a great view of the entire area with the church on top of the hill, the line of streets and all the little side streets crossing it and down to the fence. There are sheep in the fields. I figure the fence is to keep the sheep out of town. There are the same kinds of fences at the end of each side street. I spend the afternoon drawing the town, then inking in my drawing. I don’t even go back to the mill for chow. I’ve bought some hard rolls and soft cheese at a shop and nibble on them as I draw. Boy, I’m really into being Ronald Coleman now. I keep repeating that part, ‘if a body kiss a body, need a body cry’.

At about two thirty, I have my drawing done. There are some things I don’t like about it, especially the big brick mill in the middle of the town on the other side of the street. It really stands out like a sore thumb. I probably shouldn’t have put it in. But then that’s what Taylor wants. This will show I’ve been working seriously if he asks to see what I’ve done.

I head back to the stationery store. Michelle is there alone, without the older lady. She smiles when I come in. She holds out a paper with old fashioned writing.

‘Show this to the woman at the desk in the public library. She’ll be expecting you.’

‘Where is the public library? We’ve all been looking for things to read but no one knew of a library.’

‘Do you know where the chemist shop is?’

‘You mean the drugstore.’

‘Yes, that’s right, what you call a drugstore. Well, just before you go into the chemist’s, beside his door is a smaller door. It doesn’t have any sign over it. You go up those stairs and knock on the door at the top. As I said, she’s expecting you. There should be no problem and I think you will find all you want.’

I want to show her the drawing I’ve done in the field but instead buy another pink pearl eraser I don’t need. I do make a lot of mistakes but not enough to wear out an eraser in one afternoon. She smiles her magic smile again.

‘Thank you for everything, Miss Henderson. This could certainly save me much measuring and pacing around town.’

She looks quickly over her shoulder.

‘You may call me Michelle or even Violet whichever you prefer, when we’re alone. Mama is always afraid I’ll become too close with our American friends.’

Another smile. I try a ‘knowing’ Ronald Coleman smile of my own and back out of the store, almost knocking over a whole stand of fountain pens in the window stand by the door.

I find the library just as she said. The lady is waiting for me there. I show her the note from Michelle. She looks at it briefly, smiles, then turns back into the room. The library couldn’t have more than a thousand books plus some periodicals, also what I guess one could call the ‘archives’. It’s to this part she goes, pulls out three cardboard folders and comes back to the small narrow, shelf-like counter separating us. The counter is hinged so one can lift it to go in and out of the ‘library’. She unties the small string on the portfolio wrap around ties, and opens it. I know this is it, all right. I’ve struck gold. Somebody in the past has done beautiful topographical maps of the town and surrounding area. It even has contour lines and is all to scale. I stare appreciatively at the drawing. It is done with more loving care and skill than I could ever manage, but is exactly what I need. I smile up at the librarian.




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