Once an Eagle

by Anton Myrer

  She tore her arms from his neck and pushed him away with a violent strength she did not know she possessed. She had staggered back against the fence, whose wrought-iron finials gouged her under the shoulder-blades; her breath was coming in thick little gasps and she could hardly see. He murmured something but she couldn’t hear him.

  “There,” she said, panting, filled with a wild defiance. That’ll hold him. There. She was inside the gate and moving up the walk with no knowledge of how she had got there. “That’ll hold him,” she breathed aloud. But turning now, watching his tall figure move quickly away under the elms, she wasn’t so sure.

  The lamp on the big round oak table was lighted when he came in. His mother was seated next to it, sewing. Uncle Bill was pouring old George Verney a beer from the big blue stoneware pitcher Sam’s grandfather had brought with him from the Werratal, and little Ty was playing on the floor, listening to them. Sam smiled, watching their faces turn toward him, swimming in the lamp’s golden aureole, as though he were some kind of magnet: his mother’s face lined and sharp-featured, her chestnut hair loose around her brows, the blue in her pupils so intense it seemed to fill up her eyes; George Verney’s expression remote, like some centennial statue; Uncle Bill’s face round and red and convivial.

  “Hello, Ma,” he said, and on an impulse—borne perhaps on the memory of the moment at the gate with Celia—he went up to her and kissed her on the forehead.

  “Why, Sam,” she said in surprise, smiling up at him. “To what do I owe that?”

  “A way with the girls, he has,” Bill Hanlon said. “It runs in the family. Will you join us in a bucket of suds, lad?”

  Sam shook his head. “I’ve got to go to work pretty soon.” He sat down on the bench at the far end of the porch.

  “And wants a clear head for his responsibilities.” Bill Hanlon tilted his stein toward George Verney, who boarded with the Damons. “Ever see the like of it? And just turned eighteen years of age.—That’s Carl, God rest his soul,” he said to his sister. “That’s the German discipline. He never got it from our side.”

  “And then what?” Little Ty broke in on him impatiently. “What happened then, Uncle Bill?”

  “Ah, then …” Bill Hanlon raised a short, powerful arm on which was tattooed a soaring eagle holding in its beak a banner that proclaimed For Mother, God & Country in red and blue letters. Sam couldn’t read the inscription at this moment but he knew that was what it said because when he’d been Ty’s age he’d been allowed to inspect it in detail. “Then the very heavens came crashing down around our heads. Old Barnard had just slapped a dipper full of hash in my kit and was saying something, I can’t recall just what, and I looked over his shoulder and there they were, thousands of ’em, the yellow devils.” Grinning, he glared down at Ty and his eyebrows went up at the ends, giving him the look of a malevolent Santa. “Pouring into the tent from all sides.”

  “Thousands?” George Verney echoed drily.

  “God’s truth!” Billy Hanlon spun around. “All trussed up in those gaily colored wraparounds of theirs, swinging their bolo knives as sharp as razors. Ripping and slashing and screaming like banshees. And the lot of us standing there half asleep and nothing but our mess kits in our hands. The most horrible sight you’d ever want to see on a steaming Sunday morning at the far end of the world.”

  “Caught napping, sounds to me.”

  “Napping! And so would you be. On an errand of pacification we were! Who was to know the bloody Googoos were plotting death and destruction—and from the heart of Holy Mother Church at that …”

  “Pacification.” The old man had pounced on the word. His eyes slitted with secret amusement; in the lamplight his beard was like a soft silver thicket over his collar. “I know all about your pacification. Tying the poor beggars down and putting a funnel in their mouths—”

  “Yes, and I’d do it again if I had to. Treacherous little devils, each and every one of them.” Billy Hanlon waggled a finger back and forth earnestly. “Your native has no morals, you know. He’s half animal, half child, half devil from hell.”

  “I believe that’s three halves, Billy.”

  “Yes, and that’s just about the cut of it. They’re something strange. I could tell you stories about island girls that would amaze you beyond all bounds—”

  “Well you won’t, Billy,” Kitty Damon said in her tart, clear voice.

  “Of course I wouldn’t. With innocent children present. That’s just as a mere figuration.”

  “But what did you do, Uncle Billy?” Ty cried, and Sam, watching the boy’s eyes, smiled faintly. Wild Bill Hanlon hadn’t been home in four years and the story was new to him.

  “Do? I acted with the speed of light. In a situation such as that, lad, one moment’s cerebination and you’re a corpus delict-eye. I threw my hash in the first devil’s face, kit and all, scalding him nicely, grabbed up a stool and swung it like a ball bat and laid out the hellion behind him. By now the tent was full of Googoos, screaming and howling. My God, what a din! Somebody, I think it was Sergeant Markley, kept yelling, ‘Get to the racks, boys! Get to the racks!’ It was awful. There was Hutch, my old buddy from Peking, holding onto a bolo blade in his bare hand, and his throat squirting blood like a full head on Pumper Number Five—”

  “Billy,” Kitty Damon said warningly.

  “God’s truth. Holding a bolo blade in his bare hand while he jabbed his mess fork—unh! anh!—into his man like a kid punching his jackknife into a barn door. And then the far end of the tent came down with a crash, the devils had cut the ropes. Poor lads, they were butchered like pigs in a sack. Well, I says to myself, another few bars of this waltz and they’ll have our end down too, and I lit out for the squad hut. And there were two of ’em rushing at me like wolves, thirsting for my very blood. I busted one in the noggin with my stool and dodged around the other and kept going, with a banshee horde of them hot on my tracks.

  “Now your nipa hut is up on stilts because of the terrible rains they have, and you reach the door through a bamboo ladder. Well, there I was three steps up the ladder and climbing like a St. Jago’s monkey and whomp! one of the Googoos hit me with a club and then another one jumped on my back—and the ladder broke and down we all went. And I couldn’t move a muscle. Flat on my back, all the wind knocked out of me. Paralyzed within an inch of my life. And right above me was one of the infernal devils, a scrawny little joker with his face all jungle sores and damp rot, with a naked bolo in his two hands …”

  He broke off and took a drink of beer.

  “And what happened then, Uncle Bill?” Ty cried in a frenzy.

  “Then?” Billy Hanlon took another sip of beer and wiped his mouth, watching his youngest nephew out of one eye. “Ah, it was a bad moment, lad. I raised my arm, foolish as it was, and up that bolo went, up, up like the great, blue scimitar of Mohammed and all his prophets, and I could see it, the words clear as if you’d read them on a pallodium: Wild Bill Hanlon’s marked for death, his Sligo luck’s run out at last—and all at once that scru-ofulous-looking Googoo’s eyes opened wide as a newborn babe’s and over he went and gone. Vanished into thin air. And I looked straight up and there was Sergeant Markley, big as a bear and twice as hairy, standing in the squad-room door with his smoking rifle in his hands. ‘Get in out of that, Hanlon!’ he says, or words to that effect. And up I got, all over my paralysis, and shinnied up one of the posts and crawled inside and got my Krag, which was loaded in chamber and magazine …”

  Idly watching his uncle’s fiery face, half-listening to the many-times-told tale, Sam Damon frowned, thinking of the talk with Celia. He had surprised himself. The decision to apply for West Point had never been that clear to him: he was mildly astonished that he had said it right out, plain as day. That was Celia: she’d always been able to make him say things he’d never intended to voice to anyone. Now it’d be all over town. Winnott’s Spa, Clausen’s Forge, the livery stables behind town hall. Did you hear? Sam Damon thinks he’s goi
ng to West Point. No! That’s what I heard. Well of all the nerve. Everyone knows the Damons haven’t got a pot to piss in. Scowling, he scratched his chin, gazing at Ty’s rapt, eager face, his mother bent over her sewing. Well, they might be wrong, all of them. They just might be wrong. All a good man needed was one opening, one solid chance to show what he could do: if he was any good he’d make it the rest of the way on his own … But the amusement, the incredulity in Celia’s face troubled him. Yes, and she just might be wrong too, he thought crossly, fretting. What did she know about the world?

  He thought of the bank, her father’s square white face, the steel-rimmed spectacles, the dark suit and high starched collar. He’d been enraged when Wilson beat Hughes, Sam had heard him on the steps of the town hall. “This country is in a bad way when we’re obliged to trust our future to a college president.” It had been a dazzling fall day, northwest, the sky an aching deep blue and the elm leaves on Main Street a million shimmering flakes of gold; and Mr. Harrodsen had looked like a stand of pine in the dead of winter. He always seemed to move in shadow …

  It was a lot pleasanter dwelling on Celia. That kiss. That kiss! She’d never done anything like that before. The time at the Hart’s Island picnic when he’d sneaked up behind her and grabbed her she’d let out a yelp and shot off like a yearling deer. What had got into her tonight? Idly he wondered if he was in love. She was beautiful, she was lively, she had a will of her own—it was fun walking and dancing and drinking cherry phosphates with her at Winnott’s Drug Store. He tried to imagine himself married to her, sprawled on the lawn in front of their own home on High Street—but there the vision abruptly ended. There was nothing more. There rose in its place those dreams of foreign lands, piling one upon another like monsoon thunderheads—a cascading diorama of alabaster cities and jungles and gaunt castle towns, of moments lurid with crises so desperate the very stoutest hearts would blanch; and finally, pressed beyond endurance, overwhelmed, all would quail but Samuel A. Damon of Walt Whitman, Nebraska, and the 6th Cavalry Regiment …

  “… Ah, it was a sight to wake the dead.” Billy Hanlon’s voice was louder now, and hoarser. “There was Voybada with his throat laid open like a butchered calf, the blood running in a Niagara between the cots, and little Jerry Driscoll on his hands and knees, his head split open like a cassava melon and his brains—”

  “All right, Billy,” Kitty Damon said in the sharp, forbidding tone none of them ever disputed. “That’s more than enough of such sights.”

  “That’s war, my girl,” he retorted, and rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. “What are you suggesting—that I boodle-ize it all for the boy? That’s what war is …”

  “…War.” Old George Verney clucked softly in his beard. “War … Why, you don’t know what battle is, Billy Hanlon. You should have stood on the bluff at Shiloh, with the Johnny Rebs coming at you thick as Spanish needles in a fence corner, with their Yip! Yip! Ya-hoooo! war cry that would freeze your blood in your bones. First time you heard it, that is. After that you paid it no mind. And the minnie balls coming overhead in a sleet storm, and the canister whizzing and whining till you could hardly think or feel or see … That was war, Billy Hanlon.”

  The younger man nodded, irritated and out of countenance. “Ah, well. Shiloh …”

  “You bet, Shiloh. None of this skulking around in swamps flushing little brown-skinned boys out of their bamboo huts and giving them the water cure—”

  “Brown-skinned boys—they were devils incarnate, slashers and stabbers born with a machete in their hands … millions of ’em, I tell you, deep in a thousand miles of Godforsaken jungle and living by the light of your wits and a good Krag-Jorgensen rifle and a Hail Mary, full of grace. And malaria and yellow jack, don’t you forget that, the hot-and-cold chills—we walked in the rain and heat until we dropped …”

  But the old man wasn’t listening. Tilted dangerously far back in the slat-backed rocker he was launched now, living it again. “Why, at the Peach Orchard the Johnnies—”

  Hanlon rubbed his eyes, exasperated. “You going to tell us about that Peach Orchard again?”

  “You wouldn’t have lasted long at the Peach Orchard. Bushwhacker. Like to see you try to give the Johnny Rebs the water cure.” George Verney emitted a high, dry cackle that was like retching, and chewed hard at the edge of his beard. Saliva lay in little foamy chains at the corners of his mouth. “They came on and they came on, as though no power on earth or under it was going to stop them. And Johnston riding out front of them, whipping them on, couldn’t none of us hit him, with a shiny bright mess cup in his hand.”

  “A cup, Mr. Verney?” Ty asked. “A drinking cup?”

  “That’s right, boy. That’s what he was waving. He’d picked it up in the tents of the Fifty-third Ohio when they came through.”

  “But didn’t he have a sword? Why wasn’t he waving his sword?”

  “I don’t know, boy … The bravest of the brave. I could hear him plain as day, swinging his big horse Fire-eater back and forth along the line. We were in two lines, first row prone, the second kneeling, the way they did in Wellington’s army long ago. And on they came again, and we shot them down as though every bullet was a scythe blade at haying time, and still they came. And then they were on us and we rose up to meet them. I remember a short man with a black beard and a broken nose there in front of me, and we locked weapons, and I struck him down with the butt and bayoneted him through the heart … and right behind him was a slim young fellow with a handsome face and golden hair, he’d lost his cap somewhere along the line and his mouth was smeared with powder, he looked like the villain in a vaudeville show, comical with all that blond hair and that black powder mustache … he raised his rifle like a club and I couldn’t get my weapon free of the other one. I kept twisting and yanking, twisting and yanking, and I couldn’t take my eyes off that bayonet of his … and then, I don’t know why, I let go my weapon and grabbed him around the waist and we wrestled around like two schoolboys quarreling over a fishing rod. And all at once I felt him sink against me soft as a cow’s muzzle, and when I stepped back he fell dead at my feet …” He paused; his eyes were so narrowed it was impossible to see the pupils.

  “What happened, Mr. Verney?” Ty pressed him.

  “I don’t know,” the old man answered with sudden indifference. “Somebody shot him, I suppose. Old Hurlbut told us to fall back then, and we did, what were left of us, and tried to re-form. And on they came. It wasn’t five minutes later I got my wound. No more Shiloh for me.”

  “How did you get wounded, Mr. Verney?”

  “I don’t know, boy. I don’t rightly know. I’ve often wondered about it. Later I asked some of the boys and none of them could tell me.” George Verney wagged his head. “There’s an old saying you never see the ball that’s marked for you, and there’s a lot of truth in it. I remember I’d stopped to reload, I was tumping away with my ramrod—and next thing I knew I was laying on the ground without rifle or cartridge belt either, and everything was ringing and gray and faraway feeling. It was right near the Bloody Pool.”

  “Why’d they call it the Bloody Pool?” Ty asked him.

  “They called it that, boy, because that’s what it became. That day and night and most of the next day, too. The sun beat down on us hour after hour and we crawled to the pool, those of us that could crawl, friend and foe, and we put our heads in it and drank in the heat. And the water of that pool turned red …”

  He paused. The night breeze seethed again in the trees on the lawn. Sam Damon was aware that he was scarcely breathing. The crucial moment, with the fate of the Northwest at stake. But Hurlbut had held beyond the Bloody Pool; Sherman had kept the lines from cracking open; and Grant had massed his cannon on the high ground near the Landing and made his plans for an attack at dawn on the 7th …

  “That was the elephant and no mistake, Billy Hanlon,” George Verney went on, his voice clearer now, as though the recollection had roused him. “You could have
walked all over the Peach Orchard on the bodies of the fallen and never once touched ground. Not once … Whiskey and chloroform, that was all we had for wounds.”

  “Tell us about Sherman, Mr. Verney,” Sam heard himself say, with the eagerness of ten years past.

  “Old Cump,” George Verney said, and smiled. “Well, we’d never cared much for him before that day—there were all those stories of his having lost the knot in his thread, pure unadulterated drivel put out by good-for-nothing journalists but we didn’t know that, of course … but that day he was a marvel. I remember him once leaning against a tree right under the cannonading, smoking one of his ragged cigars, his wild red beard black with powder and smeared with his own blood, the brim of his hat torn to tatters by a ball and his wounded hand wrapped in a crazy blue rag. Cool as a cucumber in deep shade. Couldn’t nothing faze him. That was his greatness, Sam: the critical moment. He could feel it the way you can feel weather breaking. And he never flinched, even after he was hit. Just to look at him was to have all your courage back again. And there were braver men than he who threw down their rifles and ran away that day. Yes, and repented of it and found themselves a weapon and came back and fought like lions. Because of Sherman … I recall a skinny preacher who’d euchered the governor into giving him a uniform and a commission, came up to us waving his long arms and calling, ‘Rally for God and country, oh rally, men, for God and country!’ and old Sherman ran into him and roared: ‘Shut your mouth, you God damned old fool! Shut your mouth and get out of the way!’”