McPherson unfastened the strap of his Nambu automatic and drew the pistol out. “If you fell into the hands of the enemy, they could torture you and you’d give away our secrets.” He slowly raised the pistol and pointed it at Bosco. I hoped he remembered that it was loaded with real bullets.
“I realize that, sir,” Bosco said. “My only regret is that I didn’t get everybody to sign my cast.” He lifted his arm. The cast had been signed by a few of the men, but I hadn’t had a chance to inscribe it.
“Sorry about that,” McPherson said. “Thanks for landing us.” Then he fired. It was a terrible burden of knowledge, to be the only one who knew that McPherson’s automatic didn’t have blanks in it, and I must have jumped a foot or two. McPherson fired a second time, and then a third, and Second Lieutenant Bosco, glider pilot of the Army Air Force, clutched his stomach with his one usable hand and crumpled up on the ground. I looked around bewildered at the other men. Not one of them was betraying any emotion! Each one of them continued to stare straight ahead like zombies, as if this were something they hadn’t even noticed, or as if it were something they did every day right after breakfast. By contrast, Gypsy and Ella Jean and Rosa Faye were screaming their heads off and dancing around like they had to go to the outhouse badly, and then they were holding each other. Willard was trying to copy the impassive attention of the soldiers but he was doing a bad job of it, and was shaking like a leaf. Joe Don was the only one capable of speech.
“Hey!” he yelled at the lieutenant, “now what did ye have to go and do that for?”
“Can it, Dingletoon!” McPherson snapped at him, and pointed the pistol at Joe Don. “Do you want to be next, for making so much noise? You’re giving away our location.”
I was about to protest, myself, because I was the only one who knew the bullets were real. But I was too scared to speak.
McPherson put the pistol back in his holster. “Well, you men passed that drill. You kids flunked it. Why don’t you go back to town and play your Allied buddies in a game of baseball or something? My men want to use the washtub after they’ve buried poor Bosco.”
The girls didn’t need to be told twice, and they scampered away from there. But before they got very far, here came Doc Swain, carrying his black doctor’s bag. “Finally got my car fixed,” he said. “So I can take the corpse for an autopsy.” He gave the body a kick like kicking a car’s tire. “Looks like he’s pretty dead. Are you dead completely, son?” he asked the corpse.
“Yes sir,” Bosco replied, motionless. “I’m dead as a dodo.”
All the men started laughing. “FALL OUT!” McPherson said. Bosco got up off the ground, and some of the men started hugging him.
“Anybody else want to see the pitcher show?” Doc Swain asked.
“Doctor Swain has kindly consented to drive Lieutenant Bosco to the county seat, Jasper,” McPherson announced, “where he can catch a bus and eventually get back to Camp Chaffee. So any of you who want to sign his cast had better do it now.”
“I can take two or three more to the pitcher show tonight,” Doc said. “It’s The Mummy’s Curse with Lon Chaney.”
All of the men raised their hands. None of us Japs did. I personally couldn’t stand movies with Egyptian mummies who moved around, and anyhow I didn’t want to go to Jasper when there was more to watch in Stay More.
Gypsy said, “Us gals wants to sign Bosco’s cast, and then we’re gonna go fix a nice supper to bring for all of you’uns.”
Doc Swain said to me, “Dawny, you’ll miss the newsreel.”
“Those things are weeks old anyhow,” I said. “I’ll just use the radio.”
“Sorry, men,” McPherson said. “Jasper is off-limits to anybody except Bosco, and he’s dressing in civvies, thanks to the good doctor.” He turned to Gypsy and said, “We appreciate the offer of supper, especially because our supply of K rations is very low, and we’re sure that you girls are wonderful cooks, but I don’t see how you could slip some food past your mothers.”
“You just leave that to us, captain!” Gypsy said.
The girls each signed Lieutenant Bosco’s cast, and then they each gave him a kiss on the cheek, which caused the other men to howl and whistle and make remarks, and Rucker said, “Hey, Doc, my arm is broken too!” After the rest of us had signed the cast, mostly with expressions of “Good luck” and “Nice knowing you,” Bosco gathered up his gear and Doc Swain drove him away.
“See you in Okinawa!” McPherson called after him.
The girls each returned to their homes, where Gypsy told her mother that all the Dinsmores had took sick, and Ella Jean told her mother that all the Dingletoons had took sick, and Rosa Faye told her mother that both the Dinsmores and the Dingletoons were laid up with something awful, and the three girls got busy with their mothers’ help cooking up three large pots of, respectively, pork and beans, boiled greens (mixed turnip, mustard, collards, and poke salat), and enough chicken-and-dumplings to feed an army (or a small part of one).
Their efforts were hugely appreciated by the soldiers, six of whom proposed offers of marriage on the spot to the three girls, who declined on the grounds they couldn’t decide which one to marry. We had a real banquet. The soldiers had each taken a good bath in my washtub, and put on fresh clothes, and spruced themselves up a bit. After we’d made pigs of ourselves, and Willard was obviously in paradise, Sammy Coe furnished the dessert: he had persuaded his mother that he needed to take blackberry cobbler to both the Dinsmores and the Dingletoons, families with a total of thirteen sick members, all of whom would need seconds, and thus he needed enough to feed ’em all. Polacek claimed he’d never had chicken and dumplings before, which we found hard to believe, but I don’t think any of those men had had blackberry cobbler before. Willard brought the cream, and had three helpings himself. There wasn’t a speck of food left over.
The soldiers offered their cigarettes to us, and we accepted—or rather Ella Jean declined, so I declined too, but Gypsy actually smoked one, and so did Rosa Faye. By the time I had changed my mind and wanted one, it was too late to ask. We lighted a nice campfire, which helped a little to keep the mosquitoes away. All of these men had known mosquitoes before, but they hadn’t learned that there’s only two things you can do about mosquitoes, if the smoke doesn’t keep them off: one, you can be so alert, as in the General Alertness Drill, that as you soon you detect the faintest touch of one of them lighting down on your arm and hear the STINGER! command, you slap down and kill the bastard; or, two, you can be so tough that all those stings don’t bother you at all.
Stuffed as we were with all that good food, most of us didn’t mind the mosquitoes. We sat around as it grew dark talking about anything, even mosquitoes. Joe Don remarked, “Back when we’uns had our guns, it used to take two of us to have a squirrel hunt, one of us to fire off small shot to clean away the skeeters so th’other’n could see to shoot the squirrels.”
After the men had stopped laughing, Willard said, “Shoot, I never could get that far on a squirrel hunt, because three or four of these here skeeters would rassle my dog down and suck all his blood until he was dead.”
“I heard from Latha Bourne,” I contributed, “that when they finally got window screens on the houses, it got the skeeters flummoxed. But then the skeeters started in to carrying little bitty skeeters that they could push through the mesh, and then when the little skeeters got through and sucked the blood of those in the house and grew and grew, they’d come and unhook the screen door so the others could get in.” This little windy drew such appreciative laughter from my audience that I started racking my brain for other stories. But all I could think to add was, “Have you-all seen any lightning bugs yet? Well, those are just skeeters with flashlights!” This crack didn’t get quite as much response, and I decided maybe most of these men didn’t know what a lightning bug was, or hadn’t seen one.
“My Vermont grandfather,” McPherson himself put in, “used to tell one about being caught by a swarm of huge mos
quitoes, and he shot three or four with his revolver but had to crawl under a big iron wash kettle to get away from the others. But the mosquitoes began drilling right through the sides of the kettle. So he took his pistol butt and clinched over the beaks of any that penetrated. That held them for a while, but after a few more had been riveted to the kettle like that, they just flew off with the kettle!”
“Vermont grandfather?” said Sammy. “Heck, I heard the same story from my grandpa, only it wasn’t no kettle, it was a tent, and after he’d clinched ten or twelve of the skeeters, they just put too much strain on the tent-pegs and flew away with the whole camp.”
“Vermont grandfather?” said Joe Don. “Are you from Vermont?”
I had been wanting to find out where McPherson was from; in fact, I had asked him once but he’d ignored me. Was he ashamed of his birthplace or did he just want to keep it a secret?
McPherson nodded but we couldn’t see him in the dark. We waited, and eventually Joe Don said “Sir?” and finally McPherson said, “Yes, my hometown is Brattleboro, Vermont.”
“What do ye know?” Joe Don said. And then he told everybody about the old hermit Dan, who lived in the yellow house down the mountain, and everything he knew to tell about him: how he was a legendary fiddler and renowned marksman with a rifle, how he knew German even, how he’d stopped the Battle of Dinsmore Trail and everything. “He’s an old man now,” Joe Don said, “but when he wasn’t hardly no older’n me, he was a schoolteacher in Vermont.”
“Really?” said McPherson. “I wish I could meet him.”
“I’d be mighty glad to take you,” Joe Don offered. “His house is right down through the woods yonder, probably not more’n a mile. If you’re from Vermont, he’d likely hanker to talk your own language with you.”
“You know,” McPherson reminded him, “we can’t have any contact with the population.”
“He prowls these hills all by hisself,” Joe Don said, and looked all around in the growing darkness. “For all what we know, he’s right out there watchin us, right now.”
Chapter eighteen
When the Germans surrendered and V-E day was declared, Tuesday, May 8, it was a day too late for that week’s issue of The Stay Morning Star, which I had managed to bring out at the usual time on Monday morning by forcing myself to stay away from the bivouac all of Sunday. I thought of bringing out an Extra for V-E Day, and later learned that all of the other newspapers in the world except mine had brought out Extras for the occasion, but at least I had already, in the regular issue the day before, had a story, GERMANY SURRENDERS, which, while it didn’t exactly predict V-E Day, made it pretty clear that victory was at hand. That was my lead story; I deliberately played down on the back page a small article, FLYING CRATE’S LANDING NOT CERTAIN, which said, “Reports of some kind of flying apparatus floating down to the ridges east of town last Wednesday have not been confirmed. No one has been able to say they actually saw any landing, while others say they saw only some smoke which indicated the machine may have crashed and burned.” The rest of the issue was pretty dull. I hadn’t had time to get out on my usual rounds to gather news, and while eager Japs had left a few items about visits in my basket at Latha’s store, there wasn’t much of real interest to report. Thus, I wasn’t too happy about showing this issue of the Star to the soldiers as an example of my talents, but I printed up an extra dozen copies anyhow, and on my early Monday morning delivery rounds before school I gave the copies to the sentry at the camp and asked him to be sure the lieutenant got one.
“I’m proud of you, Donny,” McPherson said the next time I saw him. “The Star is a splendid little piece of journalism.” Maybe I got kind of damp around the eyes. It had been a long, long time since anybody had said they were proud of me. “I like the clever punning way you’ve incorporated the town’s name into the name of the paper,” he went on. “And of course I’m terribly appreciative and admiring of the way you handled—or deliberately mishandled—the news of our landing.”
I didn’t know what to say. “Thanks,” I said. “I figured you’d like that.”
“Have you thought about a career in newspaper work?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said. “I’ve always wanted to be the next Ernie Pyle.”
His expression saddened. “A great man,” he said. “A very great man.”
“All you soldiers loved him, didn’t you?” I asked.
“I loved him not as a soldier but as a fellow journalist.” When I lifted my eyebrows at this statement, he said, “I haven’t told you I belong to the same fraternity of Fourth Estaters that you do.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“I don’t suppose you’ve heard of the Columbia Spectator?” It sounded like the name of a ship, but I knew he must be referring to some newspaper. I shook my head. “It’s just a college paper, but one of the best. I had the privilege of editing it a couple of years ago, but then when I went into graduate school I switched from journalism as a major to Japanese literature, because one of my friends at Columbia—” He stopped and chuckled and said, “I’m boring you with all these things about me.” I shook my head vehemently, but he said, “Let’s talk about your career. For college, you ought to go to one or the other of the Two Columbias. Columbia University in New York City, where I went to school, has a top-notch journalism department, but the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, which would probably be easier for you if you couldn’t get to New York, has one of the best. So one or the other.”
I had never given a thought to the fantastic idea of going to college, and I told him that. I was just in the fifth grade. Nobody in Stay More, as far as I knew, had ever been to college. Anyhow, I said, I did want to hear about him and what he’d done. “Why did you get interested in Japanese literature?” I asked.
He made a dismissive gesture with his hand. “Oh, there was another Donald in my life then, Donald Keene, my classmate at Columbia, who was a fanatic about Japanese writing. Don introduced me to the work of a fabulous seventeenth-century novelist named Ihara Saikaku, and when I read his Koshoku ichidai otoko, which might be translated as The Man Who Spent His Life in Love, I was hooked. It was the first of a whole new genre of fictions called ukiyo-zoshi, or tales of the floating world, which are bawdy, some would say pornographic, yet more irresistible than sex itself…. But I’m rambling. Back to you. Do you keep all the back issues of the Star? You should. Don’t ever throw anything away. You’ll regret it when you get older. Anyway, I’d appreciate it if, next time you come up here, you bring me the back issue that has your story on old Dan, the hermit in the yellow house.” I told him I’d never written a story about ole Dan. He expressed great astonishment. “Possibly the most interesting person you could ever have interviewed!”
And then he told me some unsettling news: the evening before, while I was slaving to get out the issue of the Star, Joe Don had taken McPherson to the yellow house! Joe Don had first stopped at the hermit’s house to ask the old man if he would care to meet a fellow Vermonter and had tried to persuade the old man to go with him up to the bivouac. That was against the rules for Joe Don. He wasn’t supposed to tell any adults; he wasn’t supposed to show the bivouac’s location to anybody. But it didn’t matter, because the old man had said, politely, that he didn’t want to “intrude.” The old man revealed that, just as Joe Don suspected, he had known about the bivouac all along, and had covertly watched from the woods, and had even been present Saturday night for the banquet. Joe Don had asked the old man if it would be all right if he brought the Vermont lieutenant to meet him, and Dan had graciously agreed. Of course McPherson was rather put out with Joe Don when he heard about all this, but he really was so homesick for Vermont that he was eager to meet the old man, especially after Joe Don assured him that it was possible to hike through the woods from the bivouac to the yellow house without crossing any roads or trails or passing any other houses. In other words (as I knew myself), there was a kind of direct link between the yellow house
and the bivouac, topographically, and now there was a direct link between the two Vermonters, who had gotten along famously together.
“Good Lord, have you seen his daughter?” McPherson asked me. No, but I’d heard about her, I said, and I explained how she’d never been to school. “Yes, I know,” he said. “But she’s just as bright as you are!”
“Well, at least you don’t have to worry about either one of them telling anybody about you,” I said, “because they don’t talk to folks.”
“They talked to me,” he said. “Both of them.”
I began to suspect that the lieutenant, like Joe Don himself, had become infatuated with ole Dan’s daughter. There was nothing wrong with that, and I enjoyed the fantasy of Stay More providing a girlfriend for this smart, handsome hero of mine. But if McPherson was going on a suicide mission to Japan he didn’t want to leave any broken hearts behind. It was already bad enough that Gypsy was so goofy about the lieutenant that she seemed to have forgotten Mare.
There was another thing I had to ask McPherson. Apart from the thought of his hitting it off with the old hermit, I was dizzy from the discovery that he had been a journalist himself and a fellow admirer of Ernie Pyle, and I liked him more than ever, but sometimes he puzzled me. “When you shot Bosco,” I wanted to know, “did you want me to think that you had real bullets in your pistol? You told me you did. You said it was a secret just between you and me.”
“That was a situation, Donny,” he said. “I was testing your reaction, and I was testing my men.”
I pointed at the Nambu pistol in his holster. “But now you’ve put the real bullets back in?”
He nodded. “You never know when you might need them. These woods have bears and wolves and panthers in them.”
I shook my head. “Nobody has seen any of those for many years. I’ve never seen one. I saw a coyote once, but you don’t need to worry about coyotes.”
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2 Page 94