The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  “Old Jarhead,” whispered Gypsy.

  Miss Jerram turned back to the grave and said, “Old Jarhead was a beast of burden but not a dumb beast. I never had the privilege of living with a mule but I hear tell they are just about the smartest animal there is. Smarter even than pigs. For all what we might know, Old Jarhead might be smart enough to go on hearing us as we say some words over him. If he can hear us, I want him to know how very sorry we are about what we’ve done to him.” Miss Jerram sprinkled her handful of dirt into the grave.

  “Her,” Willard said. “Old Jarhead was a female. Not that it makes no difference.” He reached down and got a handful of earth and held it out over the grave. “Mules is sterile, male or female. Mules can’t breed, maybe that’s why they’re such good workers. She was smart enough, like all mules, to know what she could do and couldn’t do. On a real hot day of work when a horse would wear itself out, a mule will just coast and become lazier to save itself. Mules may seem lazy but they know what they’re doing. Old Jarhead would never’ve fought with other mules the way horses fight among themselves. Mules has the sense not to fight.” He opened his hand and dropped the dirt into the grave.

  Joe Don stepped up. “I never knew a horse as smart as you,” he said into the grave. “Horses will pull a load for all their might; mules’ll only use as much of their strength as they have to, and not a pound more. A mule will quit if the load is too heavy; a horse won’t have the sense to. Mules do everything the easy way. Old Jarhead, I wish I could be as easy as you.”

  Joe Don’s sister Gypsy was beside him with her handful of dirt, although the tears were streaming down her face. “Good-bye, Old Jarhead,” she said. “I sure did enjoy having you as long as I could. Your little feet were handy in the garden ’cause they never trampled the plants. You got your small feet from your daddy, who also gave you your sure-footedness and your long ears and skinny legs and that silly bray of yours I could hear a mile off. Your momma gave you your shapely body and shapely neck and hard muscles and your height. When your daddy the jackass and your momma the mare got together, they never could’ve imagined that we’d be here right now pining over your death.” Her dirt fell into the grave.

  “Anyone else?” Miss Jerram asked. I wanted to say something, but I felt it had all been said. Miss Jerram let her expectant glance fall upon the ringleaders of the Allies and then called them by name. “Larry? James John? Sugrue?” Larry and Jim John hung their heads and avoided her eyes.

  Sog’s jaw and lip were still trembling, but he managed to say defiantly, “I never done nothin in my life that I was sorry for.” He looked around at all of us as if challenging anyone to defy that assertion. Then his voice broke. “Until now,” he added. “I wish this hadn’t never of happened. I wish I hadn’t let my pure meanness get the best of me. I wish that mule was still alive. But since she aint, I hope she will excuse me for what I done.” He reached down and lifted a handful of earth to scatter into the grave.

  “Thank you, Sugrue,” Miss Jerram said. “Now class, how many of you’uns know the words to that good old hymn, ‘Farther Along’?”

  Most of us raised our hands. We had recently sung it at the memorial service for Billy Bob Ingledew. People had been singing it at funerals in Stay More for as long as anybody could remember. So now we sang all the verses and repeated the chorus at the end of each one:

  Farther along we’ll know all about it,

  Farther along we’ll understand why;

  Cheer up, my brother, live in the sunshine,

  We’ll understand it, all by and by.

  There was something about the words and music of that hymn, about its rhythm and accents, even apart from its message that promised us some ultimate comprehension of all these senseless deaths, that was truly of the country, truly rural, even pastoral: death too thrives in Arcadia.

  The last “by” of that chorus is held, it endures almost in fermata: you can sustain it as long as you like. All our voices, charged with the emotion of the scene and the moment, were still holding the sound of that final note when suddenly its prolonged hum was overridden by another sound: from somewhere high up in the air, far off, came a peculiar drone.

  Our mouths still open in the holding of that note, we turned our faces upward and beheld the first airplane that we had ever seen.

  Part two

  What a piece of work is a man!

  How noble in reason!

  …in action how like an angel!

  —Hamlet

  War and everything to do with it remains fast in the daemonic and magical bonds of play. Only by transcending that pitiable friend-foe relationship will mankind ever enter into the dignity of man’s estate.

  —Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens

  Chapter thirteen

  When we had determined that it was indeed an airplane and not just one of the several buzzards circling overhead, it was Ella Jean who first voiced what we were looking at: “There’s two of ’em! And one’s chasing the other!”

  “Lord have mercy!” Miss Jerram commented.

  “Hot ziggety!” said one of the littluns.

  “That front’un’s a B-29!” said Sammy Coe, who, like many of us, had seen those superfortresses in the newsreels at the Buffalo movie house, or in one of the movies we’d seen there, like Aerial Gunner or Practically Yours. But the many of us present who had seen those pictures shook our heads.

  “That aint no B-29,” Larry Duckworth declared. “That’s some kind of a Jap bomber!”

  “Is it Americans a-chasing him?”

  “I sure hope so.”

  “What if he drops his bomb before the Americans shoot him down?”

  “Heck, if he was a Jap he’d have one of them big zeroes on his wings.”

  “I don’t see no zeroes.”

  “Looks like some kind of a star to me.”

  “Hot ziggety.”

  We stood, craning our necks, shielding our eyes with our hands, secretly hoping that the pursuit plane would catch the big plane and blow it up before it could drop its bombs. But again it was Ella Jean who first voiced what we had suddenly detected: “That second’un aint a-chasing the first’un! It’s just a-follering it.”

  I had a chance to put in my two cents. “Look!” I said. “The second one doesn’t have any engines!” The first airplane had two big engines, as opposed to the B-29, which everybody who had seen one knew had four engines. The first airplane looked like a whale, with a sleek, rounded body. Not that I had ever seen a whale, either. But the second plane, though smaller, and not sleek at all, but clumsy, like a wooden crate, had much longer wings, huge wings, and no noticeable engines at all. It looked almost like a boxcar. Not that I had ever seen a boxcar, either, since there weren’t any railroads running through Newton County.

  “What’s holding it up there?” someone asked.

  “Maybe it’s one of them newfangled jet planes,” someone else speculated.

  “Goodness gracious,” observed Miss Jerram, “I do believe the first airplane is pulling the second airplane.”

  Sure enough, she was right. The second plane was not a jet. The whale was pulling the boxcar. There was a towrope strung out between them. I had once seen a newsreel of airplanes refueling in the sky, of a bomber attached by a gas line to a tanker, and I was about to offer that as a theory, but neither of these planes was a bomber or a tanker.

  No sooner had we detected the towrope than it broke. Or rather the end attached to the boxcar-like plane became unattached. The whale-like plane kept on going, but the boxcar-like plane banked and began to circle. It slowed and drifted.

  “It’s gliding!” said Ella Jean.

  “It’s a glider!” said Sammy. “I’ve heared tell of them.”

  “It caint go nowhere but down, now,” Willard observed.

  “Where’s it gonna land?”

  “Right here, maybe!”

  “No, it aint. It’s fixin to try to land down in the valley.”

  “Hot ziggety!” />
  “Boy-oh-boy!”

  “Will wonders never cease!”

  “Maybe it won’t land in Stay More. Maybe it’ll decide there aint nothin here worth landing for.”

  “But it caint go nowheres else! It’s got to land, because it don’t have no engines!”

  “Probably,” offered Miss Jerram, “it will have to land in that field above the schoolhouse.”

  “Let’s go watch it land!”

  We scattered ever which way. Some of the littluns took Miss Jerram’s hands and they started off at a trot back in the direction of the schoolhouse. Miss Jerram was a pretty good runner.

  But some of us formerly called Axis did not follow, because our leader, Willard, wasn’t following. “I got a hunch,” he said to Joe Don, “that it aint a-lookin for a meader down in the valley. It’s lookin to land somewheres up high, maybe right over yon hill.”

  “Yeah,” Joe Don agreed, “he’d need to land at a high place in case he ever took a notion to take off again.” None of us disputed the logic of this; a glider won’t ever take off again without a tow.

  The group formerly called the Allies had a different idea. The glider would land in the vicinity of their sycamore tree clubhouse, the meadow known as the Field of Clover, now part of the hayfields of the Whitters. Jim John was convinced that no other field in Stay More would accommodate the landing of an aircraft, and he wanted to be there when it did, and he persuaded Sog and Larry to light out in that direction.

  So the funeral cortege was split up into three or more groups, each heading in a different direction, everyone keeping their eyes on the sky, where the big glider endlessly circled over the whole countryside from edge to edge. Sorry to tell, we forgot all about Old Jarhead and never finished her funeral. “Thataway,” said Willard, and five of us followed him—Joe Don, Gypsy, Ella Jean, Sammy, and myself. He led us not far away from the funeral site, up over the next hill, through a thicket of trees to the edge of a long but narrow meadow that ran along the ridge of the mountain. “Here,” Willard said. “If I was lookin for a good place to land that thing, this here’s where I’d do it.” I trusted Willard but I was uneasy. What if his hunch was wrong? I didn’t want to miss the landing of the glider. I was already rehearsing my interview with the pilot for an Extra to appear this very afternoon.

  The glider continued to make several slow circlings of all of Stay More, as if it knew that we were waiting for it at several possible landing sites and it wanted to decide which group of us was most favored. Then the big crate with its enormous wingspread began to lose altitude, and sure enough it looked as if it were straightening out to land in our meadow. “Told you,” said Willard, not boastfully but matter-of-factly. But as the glider began to descend toward us, we suddenly realized that a forest of tall trees was blocking the approach. Suddenly the glider nosedived, and we gasped and held our breath in anticipation that the plane would crash headfirst into the ground. The speed of its acceleration, however, enabled the pilot to use gravity to give the plane the extra push necessary so that, by yanking back on whatever yoke he was steering by, the pilot was able to hedgehop over the highest trees and set his course for our meadow. The big crate was close enough that we could see how it was covered not by aluminum but by some kind of fabric, and it did indeed have painted on its side a big five-pointed star inside a circle, an insignia of the United States of America. “Well, it’s one of ours, that’s for sure,” Joe Don remarked as it came in for its landing.

  It was quite a show. The huge glider had two small wheels on struts sticking out from its belly, and another wheel on its nose, and this tricycle didn’t seem to be large enough to support the landing of that heavy body. The problem, though, was stopping the whole thing before it reached the end of the long meadow and the thick trees beyond. The glider touched down, hopped a few times with decreasing bounces like a rock skipped across the creek, and then kept on skidding down the meadow-runway. Did it have brakes?

  “Aint it got brakes?” Willard wondered, using one foot to pump an imaginary brake pedal.

  Whether it did or not, the glider couldn’t stop short of the treeline. Some of us (not me) covered our eyes with our hands as the big blunt front end of the glider smashed into the trunk of a walnut tree with a terrible rending, crashing sound, and the plane twisted so that one of its long wings slammed into other trees and splinters flew everywhere. The shuddery sounds of the crash were over in a second, but they seemed to explode on and on as the fragments settled and dust cleared. Those of us who had covered our faces (not me) slowly peeked through our fingers (not mine) to see if anything was left of the aircraft.

  The nosewheel had been driven up through the fuselage, which was totally wrecked, and the flat floor of the plane was crumpled and buckled. There was a huge gaping hole in the side of craft, where the fabric had been torn asunder and the wooden structure splintered, and through this hole tottered the pilot, dressed in a shock helmet and a strange outfit, holding one arm as if he’d broken it. After him stumbled another man. And then another. And another. These men, each dressed in full combat uniforms with helmets and shoulder packs and bedrolls and gas masks and rifles and everything, were so formidable that the six of us as one dropped to the ground in the tall grass and tried to hide ourselves from their sight. The leader of the group made some motions and silent commands to his men, and two of them set up a machine gun pointed in our direction, while two others dropped to the ground with their carbines aimed our way, and two more stood beside the opening of the glider through which, one by one, more and more of these soldiers came lurching and limping out with their carbines ready for firing.

  One time before the war I had gone to Jasper with Doc Swain and some others, not to watch a movie but to see the circus. A traveling circus had come to the little county seat, two nights only, and among all the other wonders of the spectacular show had been the unforgettable sight of a little automobile driving into the ring and no less than a dozen clowns climbing out of a vehicle that couldn’t possibly have held that many.

  Now there were not merely a dozen clowns emerging from this glider, but, all told (as a newspaperman relishing the thought of the next Extra, I took the trouble to count with my finger), counting the pilot, there were thirteen combat-ready soldiers aboard that glider. And the last of these was leading a mule. I’m not kidding. A four-legged mule.

  It was the handsomest mule any of us had ever seen. It was not old and gray like Old Jarhead—not until this moment did we realize how casually we had abandoned the funeral back down the hillside in Butterchurn Holler—but young and powerfully built, and if, as the eulogists at that funeral had claimed, the mule is the smartest of all animals, this mule was ready to graduate from college. Maybe he had already graduated from a service academy. He was wearing a bright brown horse blanket that said US ARMY on it, and he looked as if whoever was in charge of him had to spend a lot of time brushing and grooming him. Or even as if, like a good soldier, he was in the habit of keeping himself neat and clean and kempt.

  For a moment there, some of us must have thought that this was Old Jarhead returned from heaven, or Old Jarhead reincarnated, but if so, she had been reincarnated as a male, for that was clearly what he was. This mule was the only creature on that plane who had not been shaken up by the crash. The twelve soldiers and the pilot looked as if they couldn’t believe their good luck in still being alive, and they could hardly stand straight, but the mule acted as if this whole experience were just another joyride, and he looked around at the terrain as if he didn’t really mind being here or at any rate was ready to take whatever orders were given him.

  But as soon as the soldiers got their heads cleared and their bearings straight, the leader made some more sign language with his hands and pointed our way, and some of the soldiers ran out across the field in our direction, then dropped to their bellies in the grass with their carbines constantly pointed toward us.

  “Maybe we ought to surrender,” Willard whispered. “Anybody
got a white handkerchief?”

  No one did. “Do you want my panties?” Gypsy whispered. I knew it was a rhetorical question; she didn’t wear panties.

  Willard blushed scarlet. I was sure his color would give us away if any of those soldiers were looking directly at the clump of tall grass in which we were trying to conceal ourselves.

  “I aint skeered,” declared Ella Jean, and she suddenly stood up. A rifle fired, and she dropped to the ground again, unhurt but terrified.

  A voice yelled, “It’s just a girl, you fatheads! Hold your fire!”

  The leader came running very close to our hiding place. We could see the silver bar on his collar. “Where are you, sweetheart?” he called. “Come out. We won’t hurt you.”

  But Ella Jean had the sense not to show herself again. The leader was still holding his rifle as if he might want to use it. Two of his men came up beside him and those three began stomping around through the grass until they were right on top of us. Willard raised his two hands in surrender, so the rest of us imitated his gesture, and then the six of us got to our feet with our hands behind our heads.

  “They’re all just kids,” the leader said. Then he asked Joe Don, perhaps because he was oldest, “Did we land in your pasture?”

  “If you can call that landing,” ‘Joe Don said.

  The men laughed. “You can put your hands down,” the leader said. “You’re prisoners, and you won’t try anything.”

  Willard pointed east and said, “Germany’s a few more miles that-away. Aint you fellers in the wrong place?”

  The men laughed again. One of them said, “We’re not bound for Germany. We’re getting ready to go to J—”

  “Knock it off, Polacek!” the leader said to the soldier, then he said to Willard, “It’s just about all over in Germany. Haven’t you heard?”

  “We’ve heard,” I said. “We’ve got radio, you know.”