Melville Goodwin, USA

by John P. Marquand

  “Hi, Baby Face,” Joe said.

  “Hi, Joe,” Mel answered, politely and placatingly, because he could never be sure of Joe Stickney’s mood.

  “You’re a buffalo,” Joe Stickney said, “and I’m Buffalo Bill. Run for your life.”

  The switch struck Mel Goodwin’s calves, and he began to run obediently, trying to think it was a game and even pretending that he liked Joe and that they might be friends; and it could have been a game if Joe Stickney had stopped whipping him. He felt the humiliation of it, but then it was a part of life, being bullied by Joe Stickney, and curiously enough he felt no anger or resentment. It was not as bad as it might have been, being a buffalo, until they reached the school yard and the older boys. He remembered that he asked Joe to stop, please to stop hitting him, but he asked with no particular hope. He remembered that the older boys began to crowd around him as they often did before the school bell rang.

  “Hi, fellas,” Joe Stickney called. “He’s a buffalo and I’m Buffalo Bill. Let’s see you go for me, Buffalo.”

  Mel Goodwin had seen plenty of that sort of thing later—at the Point, for instance, on a more elaborate scale. It was a part of life, being able to take it, if you could not dish it out, although he was not aware of this at the time. He only remembered that he faced a hopeless situation as he stood alone in the center of the circle, wondering where Harry was because Harry occasionally broke up these episodes. He had discovered that if he did nothing, pretty soon they would grow tired, and he would have done nothing if Joe Stickney had not switched him across the face.

  There was a time and place for everything under the sun. He was not conscious of the pain of the switch across his face, but everything inside him stopped. He heard someone call to Joe Stickney to let the kid alone, and probably Joe had never meant to strike him there, because he saw Joe drop the switch. He had never known until that second that he was born with an athlete’s coordination of hand and eye. He only recalled that he felt cold and still, and he was no longer conscious of sound or faces around him. He only saw Joe Stickney, taller than he was and older. Mel Goodwin had never struck anyone before. He did not even know that he was going to strike, and he was even surprised when he did, but instantly he knew that he must hit again. The thing to do when you were in a fight was to get there fustest with the mostest. He did not have an Indian snake’s-eye ring that morning but he had luck. He heard Joe Stickney give a roar of pain and saw that he had landed square on Joe’s nose and that blood was streaming down Joe’s freckled face.

  You were either born with an instinct for fighting or else you weren’t, and he must have been born with it because he knew that the boy was off balance and that time was wasting. He had no acquired skill but he was on top of Joe before Joe got his balance, and he did not kick and claw. He knew enough to concentrate on Joe’s thin nose. He pounded on it with short, sharp blows as they rolled on the hard ground of the school yard.

  They were shouting to him to give it to Joe again, but he was cool enough to leave off when Joe began to cry. He was cool enough to reach in a dreamlike way into his trousers pocket for the clean handkerchief his mother had put there. He was cool enough to go to the pump for cold water to wash his face and hands, and by the time the school bell rang he had even brushed the dust off his clothes.

  When Harry said at supper that Mel had been in a fight at school, no one in the family took it seriously because Mel did not even have a bruise or scratch. No one was sure of what had happened until Dr. Byles knocked on the door that evening and asked if Mr. Goodwin would open up the drugstore. The Stickney boy had been hurt fighting. He had a broken nose.

  “Whoever did it kept pounding him in the same place,” Dr. Byles said. “They say Mel did it, but it couldn’t have been Mel.”

  Mel was studying his spelling by the lamp on the kitchen table.

  “If I hadn’t kept on hitting, he’d have got up,” he said.

  It was a childish little story, and he had dwelt too long upon it, and yet later whenever he studied decisive battles in which everything had moved correctly, as at Austerlitz, Mel Goodwin used to think that his battle with Joe Stickney was also a model of its kind.

  He had studied boxing like everyone else at the Point. He had learned the quick one-two, the swing, the side step, the uppercut and how to ride a punch. In fact, in his last year he had been one of the best lightweights at the Academy. He had always preferred at the Point to be knocked down attacking rather than to cover up when he met a stronger opponent. He had developed this taste, of course, from that first fight at Hallowell, when he had faced with tactical correctness a heavier, stronger boy. He liked to think, however, that if things had gone the other way, if Joe Stickney had smashed his nose, he would have gone on fighting without cry-babying. In fact he was sure of this because when he had been whipped several times later, usually by bigger boys, he had stayed on his feet as long as he had kept his senses, but these incidents had all occurred when he was bigger and stronger. At any rate, those few minutes in the school yard at Hallowell formed a sort of base line and a reference point which controlled him in the future in any kind of fight.

  As time went on he learned a number of simple skills at Hallowell—how to handle a canoe, how to hitch the family horse, how to milk a cow and even how to plow. He also learned how to make a banana split and how to measure and to use the balance when he helped his father in back with the prescriptions. He could still wrap a package beautifully and seal it with hot sealing wax if necessary.

  He wished he could see the people in Hallowell, including his father and mother, his sister and brothers, as an adult should, but unfortunately he was still an adolescent when he left. In memory his father would always be a mild, careworn man, whose problems were remote from his own. His mother would always be someone irrationally devoted to him. The last time he ever saw her, she had told him to be sure to button up his overcoat. In his few brief return visits with his parents his life and theirs had fallen into the old design and they talked about school and about the neighbors as though he had never left.

  “It always beats me,” his father had said on one visit, “what made you want to be a soldier. I always sort of hoped you’d be a doctor and take over old Byles’s practice. I saved up money for you to go to medical school. It must have been those confounded Decoration Day parades. I guess you’re doing all right, Mel, but I wish that you had stayed home.”

  His father had been right. He never had recovered from a certain Decoration Day when the family had gone to Nashua to visit his mother’s parents.

  The whole family had been asked to spend the day, and they were leaving at nine in the morning in order to reach Nashua in time for the parade. So many other families were leaving, too, for the day’s outing, that the square was very crowded. Mel Goodwin could remember the starched dresses and the big bow ribbons of the little girls, and the billowy sleeves and long skirts of their mothers. He could remember particularly how hot and uncomfortable his own Sunday suit was, and that his father had not wanted to go, and thus leave his clerk, Elmer Thomas, alone in the store.

  “It’s hot, and there will be a big run on the soda fountain,” Mr. Goodwin said, “and Elmer’s always dropping glasses.”

  “Now don’t be hard on Elmer,” Mrs. Goodwin said. “He can run the store for once, and you can have a good time with the children and me for once. They’ll be grown-up and gone before we know it, and besides it’s educational for the children.”

  “What’s educational?” Mr. Goodwin asked.

  “Why, the parade.”

  “What?” asked Mr. Goodwin. “Seeing a lot of old men out of step?”

  “The militia will be marching, too,” Mrs. Goodwin said, “and besides, Father and Mother want to see the children.”

  The boys were playing tag around the open trolley cars in the square, climbing on the running boards, whistling and yelling and getting ordered off again.

  “Robert,” Mrs. Goodwin said, “don’t you
think it would be nice to give the children a soda at the store before they start? They’ll all be thirsty before they get to Nashua.”

  As soon as she asked if it would be nice, Melville knew that his father would agree.

  “Well, all right, Mother,” he said, “but I don’t want the children thinking they can go in any time and get free sodas. I caught Harry yesterday behind the fountain helping himself to Moxie. They’ll have to have sarsaparilla today. We’re overstocked on sarsaparilla.”

  Melville still enjoyed sarsaparilla when he could get it, not root beer but regular sarsaparilla, although it was never as good as it used to be in Hallowell.

  The store was cool and shadowy that morning, full of the clean smells of perfume, soap and chemicals.

  “Sarsaparilla for everybody, Elmer,” Mr. Goodwin said, “and you can have one for yourself. Easy, Elmer, on that syrup. Here, I’ll fix these up myself.”

  “Now, Robert,” Mrs. Goodwin said, “Elmer is fixing the sodas very nicely.”

  “All right, Mother,” Mr. Goodwin said, “but just remember we have to get a living off this store. Melville, take your drink right down, and don’t blow bubbles through the straw.”

  “Now, Robert,” Mrs. Goodwin said, “don’t worry over everything. Melville’s only trying to make it last.”

  “By jingo,” Mr. Goodwin said, “it’s lucky somebody worries in this family. What are you looking at over there, Harry?”

  “At the candy,” Harry said. “How about a licorice stick, Pa?”

  “Oh well,” Mr. Goodwin said, “seeing it’s a holiday, give them each three pink gumdrops, Elmer, and hurry with your sarsaparilla, Melville. It’s time the cars were starting.”

  Four veterans of the GAR were going to march in the parade, and everyone hung back to let them get on first. They were old men but still able to get around without canes, and their black felt hats and blue uniforms gave them a dignity which they completely lacked at other times of the year. Then Sam Jacques, the motorman, began calling to everyone else to get aboard, and he said the little ones could ride with him up front.

  “You, Melly,” he said, “you can get up front.”

  Melville found himself sitting next to Muriel Reece but he did not consider it a privilege. Muriel was a dumpy, fat little girl, with hair the same color as his own.

  “Melville Goodwin,” Mrs. Reece called to him, “you take good care of Muriel.”

  “Yes, Melville,” Mrs. Goodwin called, “you take good care of Muriel,” and then she said to Mrs. Reece loud enough for Melville to hear, “Don’t they make a cute little couple?”

  “What are you chewing on in your mouth?” Muriel asked.

  “It’s a gumdrop,” Melville said.

  “Well, give me one,” Muriel said.

  It was not fair, having to give up his last gumdrop. As far as he could recall, he did not say another word to Muriel all the way to Nashua. When she said it was nice riding up front, he did not bother to answer, and when she told him to stop squirming, he did not bother to answer. If anyone had told him that Muriel Reece would be his best girl someday, he never would have believed it; but it was nice riding up front in the trolley car to Nashua with the singing and the shouting behind him, with the soft May wind on his face, with the buds of the oak trees reddish pink and with the apple blossoms out and with a dizzying sense of speed. Trolley cars moved very fast in those days.

  He hardly recognized his Grandfather Allen in his GAR uniform. The old man had kept his figure and he looked tall and straight in it, and he had spent good money to have it tailored to fit him. Furthermore he wore riding gauntlets which were not regulation, but they were a part of his old cavalry equipment.

  “Well, well,” he said. “Melville, ask your grandmother to give you a quarter of a dollar, and take your hat off when the flag goes by. I must be getting down the street. Will you have a cigar, Robert?”

  “No thanks,” Mr. Goodwin said.

  “Well, I will,” Mr. Allen said, “and there’s a little something in the parlor cupboard if you’re thirsty, Robert.” He walked away down the street with his riding gauntlets stuck in his belt, blowing rank puffs from his Pittsburgh stogie.

  “Oh dear,” Melville heard his mother whisper, “I’m afraid Father’s started drinking.”

  If he had, Melville often thought, the old man knew how to hold his liquor and it had done him more good than harm that day in Nashua.

  Perhaps it was not a good parade according to later standards, but Melville had no basis for comparison that morning. It was the first time he had ever heard a military band—if you could call the Nashua band military, when it played “Marching through Georgia.” It was the first time he had ever seen the colors on parade. The beat of the band had put life into the wavering marching columns, even into the GAR. He had no way of knowing then that the volunteer militia company, sweating in their thick dress uniforms behind the veterans of the recent war with Spain, was an unimpressive outfit. He had never seen shouldered muskets. He had never heard an order given. The sight of that uneven marching company took Melville’s breath away, and before he knew it he found himself on the street following the parade with other boys from Nashua. The band was like the flute of the Pied Piper playing its tune to childhood. He would have followed the band anywhere and perhaps that band was playing for him still.

  He was still “Marching through Georgia” when he sat on the steps of his grandfather’s front porch later listening to the old men talk. There was no doubt by then that old Mr. Allen and his contemporaries had been drinking. Their coats were unbuttoned, their hats were off and their tongues were very loose. One of the old men was talking about Malvern Hill and another was speaking of Fredericksburg, and his grandfather was saying that he had personally seen General Grant.

  “Well now, Melville,” his grandfather said, “maybe you’ll go to a war sometime yourself—but maybe you’d better run inside now.… Wait a minute. Here’s a twenty-five-cent piece for you.”

  “Melville,” his grandmother said to him in the kitchen, “leave those old men alone. They’re only telling stories.” And then she said to his mother, “They ought to be down at the Hall where they’d be out of the way.”

  The next Saturday, when there was no school, he went alone to the Rowell Memorial Library, a small musty building in spite of its large Romanesque windows, and he asked Miss Fallon, the librarian, if he might take out a book.

  “The children’s shelf is over there,” Miss Fallon said. “I suppose you’d like a nice boys’ book.”

  He had never been in the library before. He walked timidly to the children’s shelf, and in this manner he encountered Under Otis in the Philippines by Edward Stratemeyer and the rest of the Old Glory series and also Bob Raeburn at West Point.

  “Can I sit here and read one now?” he asked.

  “Why, yes indeed,” Miss Fallon said.

  She did not know that she was talking to General Melville A. Goodwin or that she was directing his first steps on the road to war.

  X

  Time to Call Him “Mel”

  The time was close to half past eleven. We had sat listening for the last three hours while Melville Goodwin searched through the memories of his childhood, and when he paused we all remained attentively and respectfully silent. Our respect, I think, stemmed more from the complete honesty of his effort than from its picturesqueness.

  Melville Goodwin pushed himself out of his chair, squared his shoulders, glanced at his wrist watch, and the folds disappeared instantly from his blouse.

  “Twenty-three twenty-eight,” he said, but the spell he had cast over us was not entirely broken. His distinct and occasionally monotonous voice was still with us. A part of General Goodwin had not yet returned from Hallowell, New Hampshire.

  “Of course,” he said, “there was plenty of time to think back there in Hallowell. Do any of you like ballads?”

  A sudden authority in his voice snapped us all to attention.

&n
bsp; “Ballads?” Phil Bentley asked. “What ballads, General?”

  Our minds were still snared by Under Otis in the Philippines, and it was an effort to follow the General’s new train of thought.

  “Macaulay,” the General said, “Lays of Ancient Rome.” He cleared his throat, and I glanced at Phil Bentley, who appeared bemused. He obviously could not believe that Mel Goodwin was about to give us a recitation, but this is exactly what was happening.

  Then out spake brave Horatius,

  The Captain of the Gate:

  “To every man upon this earth

  Death cometh soon or late.

  And how can man the better

  Than facing fearful odds

  For the ashes of his fathers,

  And the temples of his Gods?”

  The General paused as though he expected that some one of us would make an intelligent comment, but no one spoke.

  “You know,” he said, “I was able to recite the whole thing once. Of course, whoever was handling the Rome defense perimeter shouldn’t have depended on Janiculum, and it wasn’t true that a thousand could well be stopped by three. Cavalry could have cleared the bridge, and Lars Porsena had cavalry. We had the same situation at Remagen—but there’s real thought in that poem.”

  “I’m afraid I haven’t read ‘Horatius at the Bridge’ for quite a while,” Phil Bentley said.

  Mel Goodwin smiled in a bright chilly way.

  “It was just a stray thought,” he said. “I’ve never had orders before to pour my ego all over the place, but you asked for it—I didn’t.”

  Phil Bentley laughed nervously.

  “It is getting late,” he said, “and I don’t want to get you tired, sir. We might close up now and start again tomorrow morning if you don’t mind. All this material is really very useful.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind,” Mel Goodwin said. “This is like a prisoner interrogation, isn’t it? And you’re pretty good at it, too, Mr. Bentley.”