But it was always weirdly sharp. This one, despite its mundane, even shabby appearance, had a will or destiny toward cutting. You could shave with it, or cut paper with it, and it had a lively quality unlike the heavier, duller sword that had been his first issue in China. It seemed to want flesh; it sought battle, destiny, fate. In some odd respect, he felt unworthy of it, though it was but military issue, presumably manufactured in a plant with thousands like it.
Yet it reassured him, and he drew it back in both hands, above his head, slightly separated for leverage, assuming position jodan no kamai, or “high-level stance,” or even “fire stance,” because his spirit was so strong it meant to burn the opponent, oppressing his resolve. He saw the next second perfectly: the downward diagonal between neck and shoulder (perfect kiroshi, cutting technique), the sword traveling straight without wobble, cutting cloth, skin, muscle, bone, the newly approved seventh kata of 1944, kesagiri, the preferred killing stroke of the diagonal cut, the clavicle stroke. Then the quick withdrawal, followed by chiburi, or that flick of blood removal before resheathing. The ritual was pleasing; it gave him comfort and brought calm to his tumultuous mind. He became one with the sword; he waited.
Earl killed the six men in the central chamber in a single second. It was just like the last: the tracers ate them up, tossed them up and down, and they fell, some mute, some twitchy. This was war: all the bullshit about doing your bit, about the team, about gung ho, semper fi, was forgotten: in the end, it was killing and nothing but.
He withdrew, aware that the gun was either empty or near to it. He diddled, unlocked the empty magazine, and it fell away. He inserted a new one, locked it in, drew the bolt back, slid down the weird hallway, low, burning yet more skin off his bare head, and came to the last chamber.
He knew they were waiting for him.
God help me, he thought, this one last time.
Then he plunged in.
4
A REQUEST
“I don’t know about that exact thing, Mr. Yano,” said Bob. “I do know that in fights things get all mixed up. You can never tell who’s done what. Official reports don’t usually come no place near the truth.”
“I understand that. It could have easily been a shell, a ricochet, a sniper, any of a dozen things, and it doesn’t even matter. I also understand that if he did, it was because it was his duty, because he had no choice, because it was war. But I do know for certain that he was there, that he actually penetrated the bunker. The medal attests to that, as do the witness reports.”
“That much is known, sir,” Bob said. “Battle is a terrible thing, as is killing.” Something drove him to rare confession. “I have been cursed to have seen and done a lot of it. For the Marine Corps, I hunted and killed other men in Vietnam. I’ve thought a lot about it. I can only say, It was war.”
“I understand. I’ve seen some battle too. That’s the way we chose, the path we followed.”
The sun was bright.
“But I am hoping so much that you will understand where my destination lies. I must ask one more question,” said Mr. Yano. “It’s only out of a love for my father as intense as the one you still feel for yours.”
“Go ahead,” said Bob. “I see that’s why you came.”
“There was a sword,” the Japanese said.
Bob blinked, not sure what he meant. Did he mean the miniature sword that he, Yano, had given Swagger just a few minutes ago? That sword? Then he saw: no, no, his father’s sword. His father had a sword that day, of course. The Japs called them “banzai swords” or something like that: he remembered them not from anything his father ever said but from the war comic books he had read religiously in the ’50s. He saw in his mind a wicked, curved thing, with a long, tape-wrapped grip with a snakehead at the end of it. “Banzai! Banzai!” some bearded, cavemanlike Jap sergeant in gogglelike glasses shouted in the comic books, waving it around, stirring his men to a human wave attack. Bob realized his idea of such a thing was probably crap.
“I know young soldiers in battle,” said Mr. Yano. “In the aftermath of survival, they want something to commemorate their triumph, something tangible, that speaks of victory. Who can blame them?”
“I’ve seen it myself,” said Bob. More memories stirred, forty years old, memories he had no interest in sifting through. But the man was right. It happened.
“I know,” said Mr. Yano, “that hundreds, thousands, possibly tens of thousands of swords were taken in the Pacific. Along with Nambu pistols, flags, especially flags, Arisaka rifles, helmets, souvenirs of a fight so hard.”
“Mostly it was guys in the rear who ate that shit up,” said Bob.
“My father had a sword. His death was part of your father’s greatest triumph. I’ve read the medal citation and the after-action reports in the Marine Historical Section and I know how brave he was.”
“My father was an extraordinary man,” said Bob. “I’ve tried my whole life and I ain’t yet come up to his waist. I imagine yours was as well.”
“It is true. But I must ask, Is there a possibility that this sword was part of your inheritance? That you now have it? It was the sort of thing a father passes on to a son. There are far finer swords. But that sword: it would have enormous meaning to me and to my family. I really came to America in search of that sword.”
Bob wished he had good news for the man. He understood that it was more than right that such an event might transpire all these years later, the sword returned to its place of honor with the family of the man who had carried it and died with it. The symmetry of the idea pleased him; it seemed to signify a final closing up of old, raw wounds.
But he had no good news.
“Mr. Yano, I would in a second, believe me. It would please me. For some damned reason, I have this feeling that it would please my father, and that would do me proud.”
“I feel the same.”
“But my father wasn’t a man for trophies. He had no trophies except a forty-five he brought back from the Pacific, and that was a tool, not a trophy. But no flags, no trumpets, no swords, no helmets, not even much chatter. He just put the war behind him and got on to the next thing. He never talked about it. He never wore the uniform again, until the day he died, not even on parade days when some of the other boys did. He wasn’t the sort of man who talked himself up, or tried to remind others of what he’d done. You don’t see that much no more.”
If the Japanese felt disappointment, he didn’t show it, and Bob realized it was not their way to show such things.
“I didn’t think I’d ever heard you say anything about a sword,” said Jenks, who’d been standing idly by while the two conducted business. “Bob’s not a showy kind, and I don’t believe his father would have been either.”
“No, I understand,” said Mr. Yano. “Well, so be it. That is what the gods have decreed. The sword is where it is and that is where it will remain.”
“You sure tried,” said Bob. Then he added, “Possibly there are still some men left in that platoon? They’d be in their eighties now. But couldn’t Marine Historical put you in contact?”
“There are two and I’ve actually talked to both. One in Florida, one in Kansas. But I came up empty.”
“That’s too bad. I’d really like to help. And—hmmm,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Oh, I don’t know. All this talk about so long ago. I am hearing something,” said Bob.
“Hearing something?”
“I’m getting a buzz on something. ‘Sword.’ You say that word, meaning World War Two Japanese sword, I get a little kind of image.”
“A memory, like?” said Jenks.
“Not even that. I don’t know why it would be or what it would be. Somewhere deep down, I have this little bug. Maybe it’s a mistake.”
“Still, it’s something.”
“Mr. Yano, because we’re connected in such a hard way, let me make you a promise. It ain’t much. It’s all I got.”
“I’m moved.”<
br />
“There’s stuff in my attic. It was in the house in Arizona; I moved it when I sold that place. I looked through it a couple or so years ago when some business about my father came up and I had to go on a little trip back home. But I didn’t look thoroughly. Obviously, I wasn’t looking for anything having to do with a sword. So, I’ll go back through that stuff over the next few weeks. Maybe get a sense of what’s there. Who knows, maybe there’s a lead of some sort. You came all the way out here to No Place, Idaho, I feel I owe you, soldier to soldier. Also, son of hero to son of hero.”
“You’re very kind. I know you’ll examine until there’s nothing left to examine. Here’s my card. Please accept it, and if there’s any news, you’ll be able to reach me.”
5
THE OLD BREED
The young faces stared out at him. They were so thin, so unmarked, in many cases so unformed, with eager eyes and knobby cheekbones, tan in the tropic sun. Each man clutched a vicious KA-BAR knife, or a Garand or a carbine or a BAR. They were revving themselves up for war, this young marine platoon somewhere in the Pacific, somewhere in World War II. Finally one face in the back row materialized and Bob knew it to be his father’s. It was thin too, but if you looked hard, you saw the pure animal confidence. His father wore the NCO’s weird combination of foreman’s savvy, father’s sternness, mother’s forgiveness, teacher’s wisdom, and coach’s toughness beautifully, and the picture somehow captured a professional at the apex of his game, with a crushed boonie cap pushed back on his head, his teeth white and strong as he smiled, his utility sleeves rolled up, showing strong forearms that seemed to be curled on what Bob thought was maybe (most of it was hidden behind a man in the row in front of him) a tommy gun.
He had no idea when the picture was taken. Maybe before Guadalcanal—no, not with M-1s and carbines—maybe before Tarawa, maybe before Saipan, maybe before Iwo. There was one other too, Bob couldn’t remember, but he knew his dad was one of the few marines who had hit five separate islands and lived to tell about it, though the wound on Tarawa from the Jap sniper would have killed a lesser man.
The photo, old and curled, was one of a few that remained testifying to the war adventures of Earl L. Swagger of Blue Eye, Arkansas, who entered the war a corporal and got out a first sergeant even if wounded seven times. It was a real hell-and-back story. Audie Ryan didn’t have anything on Earl. He fought hard, he almost died; somehow, like little Audie, he came back. He never became a movie star, but instead became a police officer and he got ten more years of life out of the deal.
But that was all. Bob was alone in the attic and it hadn’t been easy digging through this stuff, which had been hastily moved from a house in Ajo, Arizona, never categorized, never examined, just lumped together as junk from the past and shoved up here. The cardboard box—“Buster Brown. Size C7, Dark Brown Oxfords,” inscribed in his mother’s script “Daddy’s Things”—contained little else. The medals, even the big one, were nested together, the ribbons faded, the metal tarnished. Bob thought maybe he should have them polished and mounted, a display to the man’s courage. But his father would have been embarrassed at such show. There were police marksmanship medals, and yellowing newspaper clippings from the month of his death in 1955.
Well, I tried, Bob thought.
He thought of Mr. Yano’s card in his wallet.
Dear Mr. Yano, he imagined the note he’d write, I went through what remained of my father’s effects and found nothing that would help you in your quest. Maybe if—
And then yet another possibility occurred to him.
This here was the stuff his mother had gathered, after the funeral, before she launched into the land of drunkenness. But there was another three years when her sister, Agnes Bowman, a schoolteacher and spinster who had not yet found a man good enough, had come and stayed with them, and Aunt Agnes had raised him, sternly, not with love or tenderness, but out of a grim sense of family duty while Erla June drank herself to death and died before reaching the age of forty. Aunt Agnes was not a giving woman, which was all right. Aunt Agnes did the things that had to be done and didn’t have a lot of time for nursing boys like Bob, who in any case retreated into someplace dark for a few years after his father’s death, and so never made contact with her. Perhaps she was in her own dark place. That was okay; Aunt Agnes provided and guided and paid the bills and fed him; compared to that a squeeze or a hug wasn’t much of anything.
But then Bob gravitated toward Sam Vincent and his big, rambling, loud, smart, funny, competitive, welcoming family and eventually, through high school, lived with Sam, almost as a Vincent. Aunt Agnes saw no purpose therefore and moved away, sending a Christmas card every year.
Bob had visited her after his first tour in Vietnam in 1966 and as an adult discovered a decent, quiet woman, finally married to a widowed schoolteacher, living in Oranda, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley. It had been a nice visit, though not much had been said and damned if he could remember—
Goodwin!
Agnes Goodwin, her married name.
He didn’t know why, he hadn’t thought of it in years, but somehow it flew at him out of some lost file in his brain.
On Anywho.com he couldn’t even find an Oranda, nor on any map; he found an old map with the town located next to Strasburg, and identifying the town as Strasburg finally turned up a Goodwin. He made the blind call and located a cousin who knew other branches of the Goodwin family and guided him toward a Betty Frawley, of Roanoke, whose maiden name had been Goodwin and was that person’s uncle Mike Goodwin’s daughter.
“Ms. Frawley?”
“We don’t want none, if that’s what this is all about.”
“No, ma’am, it’s not. I am Bob Lee Swagger, a retired marine, calling from Crazy Horse, Idaho, on some family business. I am trying to locate my aunt, whose name was Agnes Bowman and who late in life married a Virginia man named Goodwin—”
“Aunt Agnes!”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, she was a good soul, bless her heart. She married Daddy after Mother died and although I would never be one to criticize Mother, I will tell you those may have been the best years of his life. And she nursed him through to the end.”
“She was good at that.”
“Her end followed shortly after, I’m sorry to say. You were a marine?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“In nineteen sixty-six, did you come and visit Agnes? I was eleven at the time and I have a very distinct memory of a tall, handsome young man who set all the hearts aflutter. He was just back from Vietnam, where he’d won some medals. He was Agnes’s nephew, I believe. Would that be you?”
“Yes, ma’am, though I’m far from handsome these days, if I ever was. I remember that day in Oranda well. It was the last time I saw her. She helped raise me after my father died and my mother—her sister—had some problems.”
“Families in those days pitched in. That’s the way it was. It’s not much like that anymore, but in those days, families helped out.”
“Ma’am, I’m just playing out a long shot here. My father died in nineteen fifty-five, and that’s when Aunt Agnes came and stayed with us, through ’fifty-eight or ’fifty-nine. As I say, it was then my mother’s decline began. Agnes ran the house for a time. I’m trying to gather up any mementos that might remain of my father. He was a marine too, and a law officer who died young. I thought that she might have had some effects, that you might have them, that something there might somehow relate to my father, something I missed or never knew about.”
“Sounds like a man trying to recover his father’s memory.”
“It may be that, ma’am.”
“Well, I think there’s a box somewhere. I’m not sure it made the move with me. It was all such old stuff, but I hated to just throw it out. It was somebody’s life, you just can’t throw it out.”
“Do you have it?”
“If I do, it’s in the basement and I’d have to look for it.”
“Ma�
��am, I’d be happy to come on out there and help you.”
“Well, I don’t have much to do these days, so I may as well go look for you. You leave me your address and we’ll see what we can find.”
And so, three weeks later, three weeks he’d spent alone on his property swinging that scythe every day, cutting down the brambles and thorns, a big envelope arrived from Roanoke, Virginia.
He opened it that night.
Oh, Christ.
First thing out was a picture of himself, his mother on a rare sober day, and stern Aunt Agnes, at a picnic table somewhere, ’57, ’58. He wore a Cardinals baseball cap, a T-shirt and jeans, and had scrawny arms and legs. “Bob Lee, Erla June, and Agnes, Little Rock, June 5, 1958,” the inscription read, in fading purple ink.
It brought back nothing, nothing at all.
Then came his mother’s death certificate, some yellowed insurance forms, her driver’s license, a bank book with NULL AND VOID stamped across it, a few Christmas cards from neighbors whose names meant nothing, Erla June’s obituary from the paper up in Fort Smith, a small gold crucifix with a pin that his mother had evidently worn, a few more photographs, mostly of strangers, a few more official forms and a few letters, most of them unopened.
There were eight in all. Evidently they’d arrived over the three years Agnes had lived with Bob and Erla June, some addressed to Mrs. Swagger, some to the Widow of Sgt. Swagger, some to Erla June by name.
He opened them, one by one. A former platoon member wanted to express his sadness and talk about the time Earl had saved his life on Guadalcanal. Then there was a schoolmate of Erla June’s, inquiring as to her health and welfare and expressing gratitude. There was a tax bill from Garland County and Bob realized he had finally paid it in 1984. The daughter of Col. William O. Darby, another Arkansas war hero, famous for having led “Darby’s Rangers” in Italy before he died in France, wrote to express her sorrow and offer moral and even financial support in case of family emergencies. Boy, Bob thought, talk about class.
The 47th Samurai Page 4