Once an Eagle

by Anton Myrer

  “Or Hermes Perps. Maybe he’s sold the place.”

  “He does sound flighty … The names!” she cried. “Listen to this: Ask condition of bridge at Whoopingarner’s Feed Store, center town.”

  “You’ll never find him. They’ve incarcerated him by now.”

  “What’s incarcerated?” Donny wanted to know. He had turned into a wiry, intense little boy dominated by an insatiable curiosity.

  “That’s when they sick the law on you,” Damon answered him, “and throw you in the calaboose.”

  Singing a song about the calaboose they rolled on, running west by north, through pine forests and savannah. In the early morning meadowlarks shot down the sky in wild abandon and deer danced away through the woods, their scuts swaying like tasseled white plumes. The country seemed to swell before them, fanning out beyond the tarnished Indian on the radiator cap, in wave on wave of wonders. Sometimes, driving into the setting sun, or lying in his bedding roll with Tommy and the children fast asleep and the stars pouring like luminous dust across the heavens, he felt as if they were the last family traversing the virgin earth and he their sole and vigilant protector. When they reached the Platte, its feathered fringe of willows and cottonwoods crouched against its sandy banks, the sienna-and-blue strip of water under a cloudless sky, he felt his heart leap with recognition.

  The family was still further dispersed. Uncle Bill had given up farm work and opened up a hardware store, which was doing fairly well; Ty was clerking for him. George Verney had died of pneumonia and been buried in his Grand Army uniform, as he’d requested. His mother looked thinner, but her manner was as crisp and vivacious as ever. Peg had married; she came over with her brood, and everyone sat around eating too much food and drinking lemonade or Uncle Bill’s homemade beer, and talked about crops and the heat.

  “Ah, the money’s all in the hands of the eastern banks,” Bill Hanlon declared. “Bloodsucking monsters. They don’t care …” After a year of venting his spleen on quaking recruits from Oregon and California he had finally shipped overseas—only to arrive at St. Nazaire on the fourteenth of November, 1918—a defection from paths of glory Mr. Verney hadn’t failed to remind him about when he got home. Now, his Philippine exploits eclipsed by this newer, greater war, and George Verney dead, he railed at the government. “A pack of tinhorns and thimbleriggers. And that Coolidge!—dried-up husk. Run a pin into him anywhere and you know what you’d get? Liquid ice, colder than Greenland’s icy mountains. You know what we called his kind in the Old Army?”

  “Billy,” Damon’s mother said.

  “It’s the truth! And this Hoover—a sweet-talker, a pussyfooter with the face of a baby … What we need is a soldier, a fighter—another TR to bust ’em up, the conniving, slippery, pork-barreling grifters …”

  “Maybe Sam ought to run,” Peg offered slyly. “He’s a soldier-hero—and a man of destiny.” She made a face at Sam who smiled at her, pleased that his favorite sister had kept her spirit. She’d lost her first child in the big flu epidemic, and her husband was a gaunt, colorless farmer named Jellison.

  “Sam!” Bill Hanlon crowed with amazement. “They’d eat him alive! They’d serve him up on a platter, garnished with mortgages and their cheating, nefarious stock certificates. What does Sam know about farms and farming? No, what we need is someone tough as rawhide, wily as a lynx on the prowl, and with the courage of a regiment of lions…”

  Damon laughed with the others; but he was ill at ease. It was pleasant enough sitting here in the ladder-back rocker sipping beer, but he couldn’t escape the sense that they all felt he was evading the issues of life, which were palpably farming and putting in gas ranges and refrigerators; that he had chosen to slip away into a remote and unnecessary world. On Main Street Fritz Clausen called out to him, “Not still playing soldier, are you?” His tone was congenial enough, but that seemed to epitomize the town’s attitude. Sam Damon? Oh sure, a regular fire-eater with the AEF in France—they named the plot in front of the town hall for him. Used to be smart as a button, too. What in hell is he doing roaming around army camps for, now it’s over? About time he stopped fooling around and settled down to business, isn’t it? Can’t bear to take off that uniform, I suppose. Well: no accounting for some folks …

  He became restless, without knowing exactly why. He took the children to a ball game—Ted Barlow was still coaching the Warriors—and then swimming at Hart’s Island. He passed a weary, commiserating hour with Mr. Thornton, who was bedridden with dropsy. Pop Ainslie, now demoted by prohibition to caretaker of the Grand Western, pressed on him a bottle of genuine Canadian scotch for old-times’ sake. Big Tim Riley had been killed in a lumbering accident up in Minnesota right after the war. He did not see Celia Shurtleff; she was now a grand lady in the upper echelons of Chicago society—Peg showed him a clipping in the Rotogravure …

  Sitting on the old porch, rocking idly, he watched the great apple tree where the children were playing. That was his daughter swinging up and away, shrieking, her dress in a feathery billow above her fat little knees: his daughter … Tommy was telling about Donny’s birth at Hardee and Tweaker Terwilliger, and he watched the others’ eyes on her. They didn’t know how to take her—she was too volatile, too high-strung and sophisticated for them. A woman who had been brought up in the Army, of all places … He thought with a little shock: And they don’t know how to take me, either. It was true. He had run off to Mexico and France and won all those tin medals, there was the picture of Black Jack Pershing decorating him for valor cut from the Omaha Herald and framed, hanging above the chiffonier in the parlor; and here he was, silent and preoccupied, in slacks and a faded old shirt, an emissary from this unfathomable world of violence and punctilio. Time changed people; time and experience estranged them irrevocably. The realization was like a chill wind. He wasn’t needed anymore … He was glad when they left two days later for Lake Erie, where Tommy’s uncle had offered them the use of the untenanted gardener’s cottage for six weeks.

  They rolled east along the Platte, across the fierce green seas of Iowa cornfield, the red earth. They crossed the Mississippi on the new bridge at Davenport, where they caught sight of a riverboat downstream, its stovepipe stack pouring black smoke, side-wheels churning silver water; they woke up the children who bounced up and down, their eyes wide with excitement. In Kentucky they camped in lush meadows where slick brown horses grazed and nickered at them, cut back across Ohio and ran up along the French-blue sweep of the lake, and reached Erie late on a blazing hot afternoon, after radiator trouble and two punctures.

  The Downings’ house looked unbelievably splendid. It was set back from the road behind a majestic sweep of lawn—a stone pile three stories high, with two cupolas and slender white columns flanking the big front door. The verandah was cool and deep, framed with wisteria and morning glories. A brand-new green Packard stood on the neat graveled drive.

  “Momma, are we going to live in that?” Donny inquired.

  “No, dear. We’re going to be in the gardener’s cottage. I told you.”

  “That’s bigger than General Murrow’s quarters—that’s bigger than anything!”

  “Yes, dear. It’s a very spacious house.”

  “They must be rich!” Donny had his head between theirs, peering forward through the windshield as they approached. “Are they rich, Momma? Aunt Marilyn and Uncle Edgar?”

  “They’re quite well-to-do, yes. And see?—there’s the lake. It’s lovely! All so cool and green.” She put her hands to her hair, pressing at it.

  “Will we have a sailboat?” Donny asked.

  “I don’t know, dear,” Tommy said. “We’ll have to see.”

  Marilyn Downing came out to meet them. She was a tall, capable woman with iron gray hair and a quick, pleasant smile.

  “What courage!” she called. “To drive all the way from Nebraska. In this heat!”

  Inside it was cool and still, the reflected light from the lake muted by the heavy curtains. There were
carved mahogany chairs upholstered in petit point, marquetry tables resting on an oriental rug of the softest indigo and magenta hues. A grand piano, its wing up, stood at the far end of the living room, a silk shawl thrown across one end; there were glass cabinets with coil cloisonné vases and figurines and in the dining room a handsome rosewood sideboard where serving silver lay gleaming against a blue velour cover.

  “Marilyn, it’s lovely,” Tommy exclaimed. “It’s what you just dream about …”

  Carrying Peggy on his hip Damon watched Tommy’s eyes as they roamed over these hundred and one appurtenances, these things of wood and cloth and metal that bespoke wealth, permanence, grace—the good life. She would have had all this if she’d married another man: someone like Poindexter. She would have a stable full of horses, and a home of her own crammed with Renaissance furniture and a yacht out on the Sound; just as he’d said. She could be living more elegantly than this, and not chained to an infantry subaltern of twelve years’ service who didn’t have a pot to piss in—

  “Ed couldn’t get away early,” Marilyn was saying. “There was a meeting he couldn’t leave. He’ll be home in an hour or so—we’re having some friends in for dinner. I imaging you’d like to get cleaned up and settle in.”

  The caretaker’s cottage was built like a Swiss chalet, with a high-peaked roof and fieldstone fireplace. It was modest enough, but compared to what they’d lived in over the past ten years it was palatial. There was a little flower garden and a porch, the kitchen was fully equipped and there were porcelain set tubs in the cellar, part of which was decorated as a playroom, with a hobby horse and dart board and a jungle gym painted in red and yellow. The children were ecstatic. They unpacked and took turns bathing—there was a huge built-in tub in the bathroom surrounded by blue tile—and later they went over to the main house and sat on the wide flagstone terrace sipping Tom Collinses and gazing at the broad plate of the lake, glaucous and remote now in the late summer evening haze.

  It was still another world—as strange as Walt Whitman had been, but in a different way. Here the atmosphere was nervous, exciting, crammed with wealth and appetite. Everyone kept interrupting everyone else. Damon was anxious to hear their opinions on Briand’s treaty draft or the three-power naval conference at Geneva, but nobody seemed to be interested in any of these things. They were in the market. Everybody in America was in the market. The men talked casually of brokers’ loans and market pools and automotive shares and eight percent income on ten percent margin. He understood very little of it. They spoke of someone named Bruce Barton, and someone named Raskob; they laughed uproariously about a little old cleaning woman in Teaneck, New Jersey, who had invested fifteen dollars a week and ridden it into a cool million.

  “You ought to come up here and settle down, Sam,” Edgar Downing told him. He was a pudgy man with reddish gold hair; when he talked he moved his hands in quick, short, chopping motions. “You’re missing out on a barrel of fun.”

  “Not to mention the happy wampum,” a man named Headley said.

  “Why don’t you take yourself a leave of absence? six months or so, see how it works out?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Mr. Downing.”

  “What’s the matter, can’t they spare you down there?”

  “It’d mean resigning from the service,” Tommy explained.

  “Is that a disaster?” Headley inquired innocently, and there was general laughter.

  Dinner was vivid with old silver and Burgundy in slender stem glasses and the still glow of tapers. Downing was still excited about Lindbergh’s flight. “The nerve that took! The raw, unbridled daring … it’s what’s made this country the greatest place on earth.” His eyes were snapping with enthusiasm; he looked like a man who ran on impulse, on momentary excitements, and stopped to think afterward. “Why didn’t you take up flying, Sam? That’s where the future is.”

  “You may be right, there. I certainly plan to learn how to fly if I get the chance.”

  “What branch are you in, Damon?” a man named Nickerson asked him; he had served with the field artillery during the war, and they talked for a few moments about some wet, weary villages in the Argonne.

  “Sam received the country’s highest decoration,” Marilyn informed her guests. “The Medal of Honor. And several others, I believe.”

  “Is that right?” Headley inquired. “What did you get it for? Invent a new filing system for the seventh and eighth carbon copies?”

  Damon watched the shiny round face, the broad, thin smile. “Nothing as intellectual as that,” he said quietly.

  Headley’s face sobered; apparently he realized he’d gone too far. “No, really? What was it for?”

  “An action near the Marne.”

  “Oh, blow your own horn a little, Sam,” Tommy protested. Her face was flushed with holiday gaiety and the wine; she was wearing the sky blue dress she’d bought in Columbus before they’d left Benning, and she looked slender and young and vivacious beside the other women. “You’re so reticent!” To the others she said, “He rescued some of his men that had been captured by the Germans, and attacked two machinegun positions and took them single-handed; and then he repulsed a counterattack by a whole company of German infantry and held the position until the regiment came up and recovered the lost ground.”

  The women gave exclamations of uneasiness and wonder. Headley said: “That fellow York captured a whole battalion, didn’t he?”

  “Sam’s unit was fighting a crack Prussian regiment,” Tommy said, and her eyes glinted in the candlelight. “Sergeant York’s exploit was carried out against reserve troops.”

  There was a little silence. Damon smiled to himself: well, there was old Butch Batchelder’s loyalty from the bottom up, all right. Aloud he said, “Anyway, it was long ago and far away.”

  “Amen to that,” Nickerson agreed; there was laughter and the conversation ran along again. Damon saw Tommy’s eyes flash at him once in rebuke, but it was true: what difference did it make? This Headley was a fatuous clown, that was all.

  “George—that’s my sister’s husband, Tommy’s father—told us Sam was the ablest officer ever to serve under him,” Marilyn offered.

  “What else could he say?” Tommy retorted gaily; she’d recovered herself in a trice. “He couldn’t very well admit I’d made a mistake, could he?”

  “Is that so?” Edgar was looking at Damon with sudden interest. “But you’re a lieutenant, aren’t you?”

  “First lieutenant,” Tommy said. “And very senior.”

  “That doesn’t seem right—you’d think the Army would brush off some of the barnacles and reward individual initiative, the way business does. Look at Hank Farwell—he was a clerk at Macomber fourteen years ago. Now he’s a vice president, making better than twelve thousand. It beats me how you can put up with it—the sheer waste of talent, of ability …”

  Presently the women rose and went into the living room. Edgar got out the brandy and a box of cigars and the talk turned again to business, but this time their own. The factory Downing owned made containers of all kinds, for food and toys and utensils; there was much discussion about the merits of a new machine that had recently been installed.

  “I want you to come down to the plant and see it, Sam,” Downing told him. “Does everything in one operation—surfacing, cutting, folding, gluing. One continuous process. It’s a dandy.”

  “I’d like to see it, Mr. Downing.”

  Downing waved one of his chunky hands above his head. “Oh come on, call me Ed. Let’s not have any of that Army formality.” He grinned. “There’s no rank around here, you know.”

  Damon smiled back, but made no reply. No, they didn’t wear bars or leaves on their collars, they didn’t rise at mess or stand to for officers’ call; but there was certainly rank here. He kept out of the conversation, listening, intent, studying the four men. Forst was fat and voluble and eager to please; Headley was waspish and shrewd—a clown with a purpose, relying on charm.
Nickerson was the interesting one: a tall, bony man, silent, a bit dour, given to pessimistic reflections. Tommy had told him a little about Nickerson; his father had been wealthy, with his own firm, then had lost it in the panic of 1907—which might account for the scornful reticence of the son, his faintly injured air. But he was solid; he would gripe and drag his feet on the little things, but in the pinches he would be the best of the four. Freer of self-deception than the other three, he would see the important thing and battle for it. Damon bit at his thumb, amused at the course of his thoughts—that compulsive Army habit of reading men as though you were about to lead them in battle …

  “I still say the problem lies with shipping,” Nickerson was saying now.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t want to stir up Karl over nothing, Bill,” Headley replied.

  “It isn’t over nothing.”

  “Besides, what would you find out if you did? My God, that place is a labyrinth. One of my kids was fooling around down there Saturday and got lost, and I had to practically call out the fire department.”

  They talked on, and Damon listened. A decade of training manuals and classes and the brusque tutelage of men like Marshall and Stilwell and Bradley had taught him to cut through extraneous detail to the heart of a thing; and surfeited with food and drink and the long day’s drive he watched the night sky beyond the long windows and entertained himself by trying to analyze the problem.

  Part of the trouble was that they had only one eye on the plant. The other was on the stock market, where the big money was being made, in an atmosphere of risk and excitement and vanity he could only guess at. They were constantly taking trains east, they were on the phone to their New York brokers; their minds were on Wall Street, and Erie was running a very poor second. The talk was desultory, and at cross-purposes. Nickerson harped on the loss of customers’ firms, Downing on the expense entailed in reshipments; Headley and Forst defended the yard and talked of rail foul-ups and confusion in the office. Sam gathered it was a question of organization, of timing; but there was something else the matter, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on …