by Mark Dunn
I found Cantwell hunkered down in the shadows, tears streaming down his boyish face.
I looked up. Against the hazy blue of the morning sky tufts of smoke hung here and there. A black, acrid-smelling blanket of gloom settled upon us.
We shook it off. Some of the boys made jokes. I took a moment to look at faces that, when the order to don gas masks came around, I wondered if I would ever see again.
Cantwell put on his gas mask with difficulty, his hands fumbling, his fingers tremulous. I fought the urge to go to him and help him. There were things that soldiers in the Great War did for one another: heroic things, acts of fraternal self-sacrifice. Helping a shell-shocked kid put on his gas mask was not one of them.
It started with a whistle singing shrilly above the din: the “follow me” signal. The moment had arrived. The captain waved the men of our company forward, and we climbed in slightly disordered fashion up the assault ladders to the top of the sandbag parapet, a place in which every fear found justification and in which death was a permanent companion.
No Man’s Land.
Yet it was not a place that I would see on this foray, because a German bomb—delivered right to our doorstep—sent me, along with those men who climbed next to me, back into the arms of those behind us. These men shook us off and clambered up and out as I felt myself falling in slow motion to the bottom of the trench. I was still conscious, though dazed, the clouded eye-glass of my mask making it difficult to see anything—not that there should be anything in that moment to see but a blur of legs and arms and swinging bayonets: men on the move, men following the orders of other men as I lay helpless and suffocating.
After the trench was emptied of all able-bodied men—only the dead and wounded remaining (and I wasn’t sure for those first few moments exactly which group presently claimed me as member), I tore off the mask with my blood-spattered hand so that I might breathe. Even mustard gas, I thought in that crazed, head-clouded moment, had to be better than dying in this face vise. I saw a soldier that I knew lying next to me, still and lifeless. The muddy duck boards of the trench were carpeted with the bodies of others whom fate had kept from going over the top.
Among them was Cantwell. He wasn’t moving. I crawled over to him, wondering if taking a fatal concussive blow before facing his ongoing living nightmare was a better thing than that which awaited him over the bags. Had circumstances—in cruel irony—been merciful to the frightened young man? I removed his gas mask to discover a place in his temple where a bullet had entered—a small spot, really, almost surgically produced.
There was a wounded man lying next to him, the khaki of his uniform darkened at the shoulder by fresh blood. He was fumbling for a cigarette.
“Was he a friend of yours?” the soldier asked between grimaces.
I shook my head. “I didn’t know him. Not really.” I touched my left arm and winced from a sudden stab of pain. Something—shrapnel perhaps—had imbedded itself in the crook of my arm. I wondered where else I had been hit.
“I’ve been watching him. We’ve all been watching him,” the young man said in a voice raised to be heard over the roar of battle, “wondering what would happen when the time came. He didn’t disappoint.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean, when we all moved forward, he just sat down, fixing himself to that spot. Lieutenant Lyster had apparently been watching him, too. When he refused to advance any further, the lieutenant took out his pistol and drumheaded him.”
I swallowed, didn’t speak.
“Hell, I probably would’ve done the same. A soldier who doesn’t fight is a risk to every man who does. Say, is somebody gonna come get us, or do we have to get ourselves to that fucking field station under our own steam?”
I shrugged, shook my head. The sounds of war made it difficult for me to speak below a yell. My bloodied companion was having no difficulty, but I didn’t have the strength. I looked at Cantwell. The fear that had lived upon his face was now gone. It had been replaced by an expression of eerie contentment. Even peace.
Wherever the young man was now—the pavid young man who had curled up beside me—it had to be a better place than where he had been in those moments that preceded his summary execution.
In a war so nonsensically cruel, there were special cruelties meted out that made this conflict even harder to understand. And one was this: that a young soldier had been killed for the crime of not wanting to die.
It’s pretty funny when you stop to think about it. But you’d never catch me laughing.
1919
VESTAL IN NORTH DAKOTA
The war was over, but where one might have expected celebration in the streets, there rose up, instead, a chorus of acrimony and dissent. The thoroughfares of America were crowded with strikers of every stripe and hue. Inflation was running rampant and wages weren’t keeping up. In Gary, Indiana, steelworkers picketed; in Boston, policemen ripped off their badges. Even actors in New York City refused to go on the boards.
1919 was the year America got dyspeptic.
It was also the year that life lost even more of its intrinsic value. This trend toward human depreciation had started in the death-trenches of France and continued even after the killing machines had been decommissioned. 1919 was a year in which contempt for one’s fellow man became especially fashionable. There were race riots in twenty-six different American cities. Anarchists protested recent laws against sedition and deportation by being violently seditious and subsequently getting themselves deported. The industrial and political power brokers found package bombs in their mailboxes. Arsonists set fire to factories.
Archie Hawke had seen what fire could do. Shortly before moving with his wife and young daughter from northeastern Minnesota to his new job in Jamestown, North Dakota, he and residents of several Minnesota counties had watched with collective horror as over one quarter of a million acres outside of Duluth burned to ash in a massive fire—the worst natural disaster in the history of the state. Thirty-eight communities had been destroyed, 453 lives lost, 52,000 Minnesotans injured or displaced by the conflagration.
Archie and his wife Cathy and their little girl Janie lived with Archie’s mother in the Duluth rooming house Mrs. Hawke ran. For several weeks the three were crowded into a small bedroom to make room for all those soot-covered refugees who had come into town from the charred countryside with nowhere else to go.
Archie was pleased when the company for which he worked, Bridgeman-Russell, transferred him to the new creamery it had opened in Jamestown the summer before.
Jamestown was a picture-postcard sort of town, comfortably situated upon the arcadian James River. The town’s many elms and elders did a fine job of shading the bucolic cinder-and-gravel drives meandering through its lovely green parks in late spring, summer, and early fall (the remainder of the year—unspeakably cold—being seldom evoked in service to Jamestown boosterism).
The new creamery was the pride of the town. All of its equipment—the large capacity churns, the capacious refrigerators, the coiling steam pipes and warming vats, the modern Pasteurizer—reminded Archie that, in spite of his good head for business and his can-do entrepreneurial spirit, there was a lot he had yet to learn about the nuts and bolts of American industry, and working for a company that had its eye on the future wasn’t such a bad way to crank-start his own professional life. Archie was thirty. He had a wife, and he had a daughter who would soon be turning four; for now, a dependable weekly paycheck was what mattered most.
Archie liked everything about his new job as director of payroll and personnel. A special aspect to his job very much appealed to him: taking groups on tours through the factory’s top-notch facilities. He especially enjoyed spending time with all the schoolchildren. Machinery fascinated the little ones—the whirring, booming, chugging sounds of a large, fully operational food plant thrilled and delighted his young visitors. Sometimes the operations manager, Waldo Spraig, came along on tours to answer the questions that Arch
ie could not.
Archie didn’t like Waldo. He was a textbook know-it-all. Waldo sometimes made Archie feel unprepared or under-informed. Archie was well-versed in company operations; it was the new creamery and its modern hardware that tripped him up. Waldo knew this and he seemed eager to help Archie out. This came with a price.
Waldo had a daughter of his own. Her name was Angeline and she was six. Angeline, aptly named, was Daddy and Mama’s little angel. Archie had never met the girl. She wasn’t among any of the grammar school children who tramped in strepitous tandem through the factory during those first weeks after Archie’s arrival.
“Does she go to school?” he’d asked Waldo. “My little Janie is champing at the bit to start school and she isn’t even four.”
“Your daughter’s very pretty.”
“You’ve seen Janie?”
“Last week when your wife met you here after work—didn’t she have Janie with her?”
“That’s right.”
“She has beautiful curls. My little Angeline has natural curls of almost the same color.”
“What school does Angeline attend?”
“She doesn’t go to school. She doesn’t belong with other children.”
“Why is that, Waldo?” The two men were walking through the vat room to meet a group of third graders waiting with their teacher in the front office. Surrounding them were great holding vats and warming vats with tortuous coils of steam pipe and a vat in which the Pasteurized cream sat undisturbed, sufficiently heated to kill the last errant bacterium that might be lurking there.
“I don’t think that the other children would treat her very well. She’s a very special little girl. Children can be injurious to fragile, beautiful little creatures.” Waldo halted, as if the statement necessitated a physical pause. “The world has gone mad, Hawke. We must draw those we love ever closer. Do you ever fear for your little girl?”
“Of course I do. Life is precious. I lost my younger brother in the influenza epidemic last year. One day he was perfectly healthy; four days later my mother was picking out his coffin. But I think you’re taking a rather extreme position with your daughter. A parent must strike a balance between mindful caution and—”
“Utter suffocation? The kind of suffocation that may lead to asphyxiation of the spirit? And yet I’m certain that Angeline is content to be so thoroughly loved and protected.”
“There are schoolchildren waiting.”
“Yes.”
The two men resumed their walk to the office.
The tour began outside at the loading dock. “It is here,” said Archie to the two dozen young boys and girls who clustered closely around him, “that the cream is taken from the wagons of our local dairy farmers. See those milk cans over there?” Nearly all of the children nodded. “We weigh the cans and then take a sample of the milk and test it. Why do you think we must test the milk that comes here?”
One little girl raised her hand and when acknowledged replied, “To make sure that it’s clean and pure?”
“That’s right. What’s your name?”
“Louise.”
“Very good, Louise. We will make the cream even purer as we turn it into butter, but we cannot use cream that hasn’t been properly handled by the farmer to begin with. Only the best cream for Bridgeman-Russell!”
As Archie signaled the children’s teacher to take her pupils inside so that the tour could continue, Waldo leaned over to Archie and whispered into his ear, “Louise is too beautiful for this world. The world can be injurious to fragile, beautiful little creatures.”
Archie pushed Waldo away. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
Archie found out what was wrong with Waldo. He spoke to Mr. Kibbee, who answered to the president of the company at its headquarters in Duluth. The meeting took place after work that day, after Waldo had gone home. Mr. Kibbee’s office smelled slightly of sour milk, though it was kempt.
“If you ask me,” said Archie, “the man should be residing at the Hospital for the Insane. If you like, I can drive him over there myself.”
“You’re jumping to conclusions, Hawke. Spraig is odd, I’ll grant you—very much the eccentric. He took time off from his job to serve in the war. You weren’t in the war. There are things you see, things you experience on the battlefield that change you.”
“He is obsessed with protecting little girls. But I wouldn’t want him anywhere near my daughter.”
The old man flattened down the hair that encircled his prominent bald spot. He got up from his chair and walked over to his bookcase. It was filled with volumes about dairying and the creamery business. “Have you tried our ice cream? It’s very good.”
“I have. And it is.”
“We make advertising plates for our ice cream. Have you seen them? Spraig came in here not so very long ago, quite worked up about the children—the little ones whose photographic images grace our plates. ‘Why do you pick only the sweetest, most adorable little girls to help sell our ice cream?’ he shouted at me. ‘Now they’ll be marked women. Certain men will see their faces and go looking for them.’”
“Mr. Kibbee, you’re proving my point.”
“Now hear me out, Hawke. It goes to what I’m saying. He’s very protective, that’s a fact. It’s strange the way he goes on about it, but there is, actually, a logical explanation for his behavior. Would you care to know it?”
Archie nodded.
“There were stories told by the men and women of a particular village in France. Who knows if any of them were true. You never knew if the Boche were actually capable of committing any of the atrocities of which they were accused. We’ve all heard stories, but these stories represented a particularly diabolical brand of depravity. I won’t give the details. It isn’t necessary to make my point. I should simply say that the stories had largely to do with the most beautiful young women of the villages in that part of France, and how the German soldiers had their way with them, as if the girls’ beauty gave the men special license. It’s madness, this human propensity for the infliction of so much pain on others, Hawke, but it is nothing new through the course of history, and it goes on around us still, right in this country, even as we try to make some sense out of that war—out of what it was supposed to have done to make us all better human beings. Don’t get me started or one of the Palmer men will pop in here and deport me to wherever it is my forebears came from. My point is that these stories had a profound impact on Spraig. And so he worries. He sees a pretty little girl and he imagines her as a lovely young woman and then the sad sickness that has taken hold of his artillery-pounded brain sends his thoughts to a very dark place. No, Hawke, it isn’t necessary for Spraig to ever meet your lovely daughter, though—” Kibbee smiled warmly. “Though I do hope that you and your wife and daughter will pop over to have a slice of pie with us at Thanksgiving. Jamestown isn’t Plymouth Rock, but our name isn’t all that slouchy as historical monikers go.”
“I will do that, Mr. Kibbee,” said Archie, returning the smile. Archie liked Mr. Kibbee. He liked nearly everybody at the creamery. Nearly everybody.
The Spanish flu had returned.
No, not really, but rumors of its reoccurrence and the fears ignited by those rumors took hold at Jamestown’s Bridgeman-Russell Company Creamery. What was probably nothing more than a galloping seasonal cold epidemic sent half of the employees of the “butter factory” to their beds.
Including—or so it appeared—the creamery’s operations manager, Waldo Spraig. In fact, Spraig had been out for a whole week, and his absence had begun to worry Mr. Kibbee, since Waldo was seldom off from work so long due to illness. Mr. Kibbee called Archie into his office. He asked his director of payroll and personnel to go to Waldo’s house and check on him.
It was nearly six thirty in the evening when Archie arrived at the Spraig house several blocks north of the creamery. It was Mrs. Spraig who opened the door. Archie identified himself and was asked to step inside. Mrs. Spraig, a woman
in her late twenties, spectacled and pleasant but slightly halting and rather vacuous in her demeanor, stood with Archie in the front hall, saying nothing. Just waiting.
A moment later, Waldo emerged from the front parlor off the hall. He was accompanied by a man in his sixties, who wore a clerical collar. “Hello, Hawke,” said Waldo. “This is the Reverend Peacock. Pastor Peacock, this is one of our factory men, Mr. Hawke.”
“Good to know you,” said the minister, cheerlessly. Then, turning to Spraig: “I’ll be waiting in the parlor.”
As the minister was returning to the other room, Waldo turned to another man who had just stepped out of a room that appeared to be the kitchen. The man was casually gnawing a turkey drumstick. His eyes were on Waldo, who was wearing a sweater and trousers. The man wore the uniform of sheriff ’s deputy.
Waldo said to the law officer, “I won’t bolt, deputy, if you want to have a seat in the kitchen while we wait for the sheriff. The doctor isn’t here yet, either. It’s going to be a long night.”
The deputy sheriff nodded and went back into the kitchen.
“What’s going on, Spraig?” asked Archie. “What’s happened?”
“Sit, please,” said Waldo, pointing to the wooden bench behind him. Underneath the bench was a tidy row of boots and galoshes. The two men sat down. “Now, this is what you must tell Mr. Kibbee: I won’t be returning to the creamery. At some point this evening the sheriff and my doctor will arrive. They will confer. They will decide whether I am to be taken to the jail or to the Hospital for the Insane.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Of course you don’t. I’ll explain. Earlier this week I went to the house of the little girl, Louise. You remember the girl who asked all those questions during our last school tour? I went to the home of that beautiful little girl and tried to see her, but her father and mother wouldn’t permit it. I persisted. They telephoned the sheriff. My request was a simple one, Hawke: I wished only to make sure that Louise remained safe, to see that she would be properly protected from those who would later seek to harm her—to violate her as the mademoiselles were so terribly violated, their womanhood sullied by the evil that is man in his true, carnal, sadistic nature. Mignon, my wife, and Pastor Peacock have made me see that my quest has gone to extremity—has become a sickness of its own that must be healed. Either that or I should be put into a jail cell—it is not my choice to make. We have discussed the matter at length and I have agreed to tell my story to those who will either help me or at least prevent me from doing any further damage.”