Windchill Summer

by Norris Church Mailer

  Your friend,

  Carlene

  32.Cherry

  “Brethren, the Lord took ahold of Joshua and said, ‘Joshua, look down there at Jericho. It’s a fine city, and I’m going to give it to you as a city for your people, the children of Israel. But you have to do your part. What you have to do is take it away from the heathen that is already there, and it won’t be easy.’

  “And Joshua said to the Lord, ‘Lord, how can we take this big city away from these people? They have a thick old high wall around it that we can’t climb over.’

  “The Lord said, ‘Joshua, do you doubt Me now? After I brought you out of Egypt and got you this far, would I let you down now?’

  “And Joshua said, ‘Forgive me, Lord. I wasn’t thinking. What do I do?’

  “And the Lord said, ‘You and your people go and march around the walls of that city seven times, and on the seventh go-around, all of y’all shout with a loud voice, and the walls will come tumbling down. I guarantee. Then what I want you to do is go in there and kill every single living thing. I mean, I don’t want one chicken or donkey or child or old lady of those heathen left living. Then I want you to take all the silver and gold and iron and brass and put it in the temple of the Lord, and Jericho will be yours.’

  “So, brethren, the people marched around the wall seven times, and they shouted, and the wall fell down flat. The people went up into the city . . . and they took the city.

  “And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword. And they burnt the whole city with fire, and all that was therein.”

  —

  Brother Wilkins was preaching from the Old Testament again. It was my least favorite part of his sermons, except for the one on hell. I really hated that one. “Tonight, we are going to talk about . . . hell,” he would say in this voice like doom, and then go on for an hour about all the ways to sizzle and fry and all the things you can do that will send you there. Those hell sermons always give me nightmares—I’d dream I was out in a pretty field or someplace and all of a sudden the clouds would open up and there God would be, pointing His finger at me for something I had done and forgot to ask forgiveness for, and the ground would open up and I would drop into the fiery pit. I’d wake up screaming and Daddy would come in to see what was the matter. Somehow, he never put two and two together that it was Brother Wilkins’s hell sermons doing it to me.

  The Old Testament sermons were a close second in the nightmare category. I mean, don’t get me wrong—some of the stories were interesting, and of course it is all in the Holy Bible, but to tell you the honest truth, a lot of it really upset me. You know, think about it—God gave the children of Israel the promised land for their own, but there was one little problem: It was already settled with a whole country full of other people. So what did He tell them to do? Wipe out everyone and take it over. I just couldn’t reconcile myself to the fact that even if they were heathen, babies and women and old men were getting their heads lopped off and guts ripped out, and people were moving right into their houses and taking their jewelry and stuff and in fact God told them to do it. I mean, really. There must have been someplace else the children of Israel could have gone.

  But then you start thinking about all the wars and killing that have happened down through history from the beginning of time, when there were only four people on earth and one of them killed another one—Cain and Abel—and right on down through the Second World War, which was not all that long ago.

  My daddy was over in Germany during that war, and while he didn’t talk much about it to me, he was with the American troops who liberated the concentration camps.

  I don’t think Daddy was ever the same after the war, although obviously I didn’t know him before, but Mama said that’s when he got real religious. Once, she said he told her that when they came and opened those gates, the people were so starved that they looked like walking skeletons. He could put his finger and thumb around their arms and legs and still have room left. He actually saw piles of skinny bodies waiting to go into ovens, like you’d burn garbage in an incinerator. Before they put them in, the Nazis knocked out their gold teeth and cut off their hair to stuff mattresses with. He told her that a buddy of his found this box of leather wallets and each one of them had a tag that said Made from the skin of a Jew. The two of them took the box and buried it outside the barbed wire of the camp and said a little prayer over it, which might have helped in some way. At least it made him and Daddy feel like they had done some little something, but the whole thing just boggles the mind.

  And now, right at this very minute, there is Vietnam, with body counts and our boys getting killed and crippled when they ought to be playing basketball and going to the drive-in.

  Maybe by the time Jesus came with His message of love, it was already too late, because man had developed a dark and evil side that was so ingrained in the genes that it would never be erased, no matter how much love he was given.

  It was a scary subject, and if I thought too much about it, it made me anxious, like you get at three in the morning when you wake up from a nightmare with your heart pounding and realize that one of these days you are going to die.

  Better to just daydream when the preachers preached and then sing gospel hymns, which at least was a lot more fun.

  —

  Anyhow, I was sorry that Tripp was sitting beside me at church during this sermon. I had convinced him to come with me, maybe because I was feeling guilty about what we were doing. Daddy was thrilled that I had a boyfriend who was interested in the church. I’m not going to get into it, but we had seen each other a lot since that first time, and each time was better than the last. He gave me a real crash course, so to speak, in love-making, which I seemed to take to without much urging. My face burned when I thought about the things we were doing. (At least we took Mama’s advice and used some protection after that first time, so I wouldn’t get pregnant.) I had no idea I would be like this. Most of the time I felt like I was walking on air several inches off the ground. Mama noticed it right away, of course. I kept singing around the house, and couldn’t seem to wipe the smile off my face.

  “What are you so happy about, Cherry? You’re lit up like a Christmas tree,” Mama said as she brought in a basket of clean laundry from the clothesline.

  “I think I’m in love, Mama. I really do.”

  “Well. I figured that was coming. Are you sure you know enough about this Barlow boy? You haven’t known him but a little over a month. We don’t know anything at all about his family.” She dumped out the clothes on the bed, and I helped her sort them.

  “How long was it that you and Daddy went out before you got married?”

  “We’re not talking about your daddy and me.”

  “Two months? Was that it? Or was it six weeks?”

  “It was seven weeks, but that’s different.”

  “How is it different? You weren’t even as old as I am. You were seventeen. You got your Mrs. degree before you got your high school diploma.”

  “We had gone to school together, even if he was a few years older than me. He was from here. We knew his people. Don’t change the subject. Are you saying you’re getting married?”

  “No. I don’t want to get married right now. I’m just in love. That’s all. Remember what you said? You’d rather I . . .”

  “I remember. You don’t have to remind me.”

  She got busy folding clothes. She didn’t want to look at me.

  “I don’t think I meant for you to run right out that minute, though, and . . . do anything. I was thinking maybe a few months down the road, if you got to know him, and the two of you talked about getting married and . . .” She sat down on the edge of the bed. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  “Mama . . . I don’t think so. I don’t think I can.”

  “That’s all right. I don’t think I really want to know, either.”

&
nbsp; “Keep a little mystery in the relationship, right?”

  “Right.”

  That was an old joke with us. Mama never would let Daddy or me in the bathroom with her or walk around undressed, and I was the same way. “Let’s keep a little mystery in the relationship,” she’d say. It worked for me. We all need a few things that belong to ourselves alone.

  This way, she knew, but she didn’t know for sure, so she didn’t really have to face what I was doing. And although I kept waiting for the mighty hand of God to strike me down, it didn’t seem to. I didn’t even feel all that guilty. Maybe the Devil had so completely taken me over that I was unaware he had done it. That was another danger of growing up in the Holiness Church. You found yourself thinking of everything as either being done by God or the Devil. In truth, if they spent as much time messing in our lives as we thought, they would never get another thing accomplished.

  —

  Brother Wilkins was not the greatest of speakers, as I may have already said, bless his heart. He was from the old school of preacher that danced around on the stage, slapped his hands together a lot, and spoke in a loud singsong voice with a lot of gasping and saying “Ah” between each word or two, like, “Brethren, ah, as we gather together here tonight, ah, hallelujah, ah, to praise Jesus, ah, we come with humble hearts, ah, and . . .” You get the picture. I counted once, and he said ah 133 times during the message. He let fly with spit, too, as he spoke, and if you were sitting on the front row, you had to watch it. Seeing him through Tripp’s eyes, I wished it was Brother Dane up there instead. There was just something about Brother Dane that caught you up, made you want some of whatever it was he had: life; enthusiasm; charisma.

  Brother Wilkins was going into great and gory detail about the Israelites killing every baby, old lady, dog, and chicken and not daring to leave anything breathing, because that would have gone against what God had said. Tripp started to fidget.

  “I’m going to go out and have a smoke,” he whispered.

  I didn’t blame him. I wished I could go with him, but Daddy would have killed me. We were sitting in the back row, though, so Tripp didn’t cause too much of a commotion when he left. He stayed outside until after the altar call, and when everyone closed their eyes for prayer, I sneaked out and found him sitting in the car out under the trees at the edge of the parking lot, with the windows rolled down, smoking.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. Sorry about that. I don’t know what happened. I all of a sudden got a flashback or something when the preacher started talking about what happened in Jericho. I had to get out of there.”

  “You mean about Vietnam?”

  “Yeah. That is not something you can just get on a plane and leave behind, you know? I’m afraid it might be with me the rest of my life. I never know when it will hit. Sometimes I’ll be doing the most mundane things—drinking a beer and reading a book, or cleaning the carburetor in the car—and I have to stop in my tracks because it all comes back; the enormity of it takes my breath away, and I can’t move.”

  I wasn’t sure he wanted to talk about it, but given what I saw on the news every night and what he had told me about Jerry, he must have seen some killing.

  “So, you actually saw a lot of killing? I mean, did you ever . . .”

  “Did I see a lot of killing? Yes. There was a lot of killing in Vietnam.”

  The way he said it let me know he wasn’t interested in answering any questions about who all he had killed any more than he wanted to tell me about the other girls he had slept with.

  “But I really don’t want to talk about it. If I talk about it, it will grow and get stronger. If I keep it tight inside my head, maybe it will finally shrivel and dry up.”

  “Okay. We don’t have to talk about it. I’m sorry. I wish Brother Wilkins hadn’t picked that subject. I didn’t like it much, myself.”

  “Are all his sermons like that? I kind of enjoyed the other preacher, you know, the night you washed feet. Brother . . . what’s his name?”

  “Brother Dane.”

  “Yeah. That was a guy I could relate to.”

  “I bet. You seem a lot like him. Well, who knows? Maybe you’ll be a preacher one day.”

  He laughed. “I don’t think you would like that. In my religion, to be a preacher means you have to give up women.”

  “You mean become a priest? You’re a Catholic?”

  “I was raised a Catholic. I’m not anymore.”

  “You’re the first Catholic—ex-Catholic—I ever went out with. What were the services like at your church? I bet at least you didn’t have the sermons about hell and Jericho, did you?”

  “No, but we had the saints crammed down our throats from the time we were infants. Pretty bloody and vicious, the way they killed most of them. Like Saint Apollonia, the healer of toothaches. They tortured her by pulling all her teeth out and then burned her at the stake. Becoming a saint was not a great career choice. It seems like every religion is full of killing, doesn’t it?”

  He lit another cigarette off the butt of the one he was smoking. This sure wasn’t the time to mention it, but that was the one thing about him I could have done without, the amount he smoked. At least the windows were rolled down.

  Church had let out and people were standing around on the porch, talking and smoking. A lot of Holiness men smoked, and even a few women. If I was going to pick something that was a sin, I would pick smoking over a lot of other things, but most of them didn’t feel that way, probably because they liked to smoke.

  Mama came out and stood on the steps looking around for us. Then she saw us and waved, came on out to the car, and leaned down to look in the window.

  “Cherry, is everything all right? Tripp’s not sick, is he? You’re not sick, are you, Tripp?”

  “No, I’m all right, Mrs. Marshall. I wasn’t feeling too well, but I’m better now. It was probably just too hot in there.”

  “Is there anything I can do, or get you?”

  “No, Mama. Maybe we’ll go get a Coke at the Freezer Fresh. That might make him feel better. Don’t worry. I’ll be home after while.”

  We waved to her as we took off. Neither of us mentioned the war again, and it seemed like, at least for now, I left God and the Devil back at the church.

  33.Vietnam

  Christmas Night, 1967

  Dear Carlene,

  You know we can see each other and talk when I get back. I don’t think things will ever be like they once were, but who knows? Don’t worry about it. We have a lot of time until then. It is eleven months until I get home. We don’t have to decide anything now.

  How was your Christmas? We’re here in a place called Gilligan’s Island, just for a few days. (A lot of jokes about the Skipper and company, of course.) It is a small island that is a fishing village on the South China Sea, still in Quang Ngai.

  Our captain somehow managed to get us a Christmas tree, and we had a big dinner tonight, but it sure wasn’t anything like I would have gotten at home. We sat around singing carols, though. Old favorites like “O Little Town of Ban Me Thuot,” “God Rest Ye General Westmoreland,” “Deck the Halls with Victor Charlie,” and a few others I can’t mention in mixed company.

  As far as contact with the enemy goes, there hasn’t been much. The guys before us pretty well searched and destroyed everything around this area. I would estimate that ninety percent of the houses were burned, and most of the people have relocated. What we have been mostly doing is guarding bridges and practicing our search-and-destroy in the deserted villages that are left. A lot of the guys are real unhappy that they haven’t had any gooks to kill, but I’m not. In fact, I’m not so sure I could kill a man, gook or not, if it came right down to it. I mean, I think I could if he was coming at me and it was self-defense, but what if I just saw one minding his own business? Could I shoot him in cold blood? That, I don’t know.

  The hardest thing to get used to over here is the living conditions of the people. They h
ave nothing—I mean literally nothing—and live almost like prehistoric people. They squat by the fire and eat their little bowls of rice, scooping it into their mouths with their fingers, but to them it is as good as steak and potatoes. When they need to go to the bathroom, they just drop their drawers and squat right wherever they are—on the trail, in the field, anywhere—in front of God and everybody, and don’t even wipe. I dread like heck to step in a pile of it, but you can’t avoid it. A lot of the guys hate the Vietnamese, but I feel sorry for them. The kids are the most pitiful. They are wormy little beggars, all the time wanting gum or candy or C rations. “Numbah-one GI!” They have learned to say. “Numbah-ten VC!” Our lieutenant hates it when we give them anything and runs them off, but I sneak them something once in a while. It’s funny, this attitude most GIs have about the Vietnamese, like they are all worrisome dogs or something. The whole purpose of this war is supposed to be to save them from the Communists. They are supposed to be our allies, but the lieutenant is scared of all of them—even the kids—because there’s no way to tell where their loyalties lie. The Cong use them to set booby traps. The kid you give a Hershey bar to today might be the one who sets a trap that gets you killed tomorrow. This area around here is supposed to be a bad booby-trap area, but so far, so good. It won’t be long, I think, until we go out on patrol for real. Then we’ll see what we are made of. I am almost looking forward to it.

  Take care of yourself. Say hi to Baby, and tell her and everyone else to write to me. Letters from home mean a lot.