“Deep river
Your home is over Jordan
Deep river
You want to cross over into camp ground . . .”
Why were they singing that song, when he was already over in Camp Ground? And where was the man in Charge of Quarters? He had a couple of things to say to him. Tell him he wasn’t a murderer, tell him he never meant to be a murderer. I was fighting for democracy. And I just wasn’t strong enough to fight all those bastards who made the war is what. I didn’t even know who they were. I couldn’t put my hand on them or single them out. They were omnipotent and omnipresent and omniscient and a whole lot of other omni-things, and I should have told them to go to hell and should’ve taken off for some faraway place at the other end of nowhere. But I wanted to fight for my country and for freedom. I was tricked, St. Peter, but the point is, I meant well. And I love life and I love people, and I guess you understand that, and that’s why I’m up here where all is peace because I am a peaceful and a loving man. I love life and I love people more than anything else in the world. More than government more than success more than flags more than patriotism more than religion more than more than—more than family more than convention—more than dollars—more than bigshot—more than the great American Story—I love love and life and people. Can’t you understand, St. Peter? If God is not country, not religion, not superpatriotism, if God is love and God is life, then that’s why I’m here, St. Peter.
He was coming out of it again now slowly and with a rocking kind of a motion this time, back and forth, side to side, side to side and back and forth, and the rhythm strangely familiar and maybe not so Heavenly after all, and he heard “Deep River” faintly, growing fainter, and the water slapping against his boat, and everything made sense to him now, he knew where he was. He was on a boat, and that’s why they were singing “Deep River.” He was crossing the River Jordan and he would shortly be in Camp Ground. He felt his heart swell up with joy, but it was all mixed up with sorrow too. Where was Fannie Mae? Where was Millie and Mama? Where were Worm and Lanky and Scotty? And where was his new-born baby child? Where were Jimmy and Samuels and the rest? He didn’t like the motion of the boat, he didn’t like the rough waters of the Deep Deep peaceful River. God is love love love. He didn’t hear “Deep River” clearly any longer. They seemed to be singing just barely out of his reach over on the other shore. Receding instead of coming closer.
He began to hear speaking voices strangely accented, and he picked up odors his nostrils remembered from it seemed years and years ago in another world, and memories crowded in on him invading all of his senses, white-odored memories and brown odors and brownish-yellow memories and Listerine and disinfectant and antiseptic memories and odors and flesh and medicinal and rubbing-alcoholic odors, and maybe he was still in Georgia and all the rest had been one great big bad dream or one great big good dream, and now he was waking up, but what about that rocking motion?
He was afraid to open his eyes at first, but finally he opened them and into the face of a white-uniformed pink-faced woman with dark brown eyes that had lived with pain and tenderness. Who are you, his own eyes asked. Who are you with the brooding eyes and hair the color of just-cooled ashes? You’re no angel. Surely my angels are not your color. Take me back where I came from.
She smiled. “And how are you this afternoon, Sergeant?”
What a funny accent. It was un-American. Not even Southern-accentuated. But he was alive goddammit! He was alive! He was alive! Living! Living! He was breathing and smelling and hearing and tasting! And seeing! Seeing! He was seeing! He was feeling!
“The question is, Where am I?’” He had a talking voice. But why did she call him “Sergeant”? He was the buckest of buck privates.
“Well, you’re on a hospital ship, and you were wounded rawther badly and I’m informed, rawther heroically, and they made you a staff sergeant, and you’re on your way to Australia. Now how does that make you feel?”
“I feel much better, thank you.” I’m a hero. Whaddaya-know—
“Dinky die?”
“I feel better,” he repeated. I’m a staff sergeant. Going places—
She laughed. “You were supposed to say, ‘Fair dinkum.’”
He said, “I feel fair dinkum.”
She laughed and shook her head. “No, not quite—but you’ll get the hang of it after a while. Fair dinkum you will.” And she put the thermometer in his mouth and she took his wrist and looked at her watch, and he was alive, he was living! He had temperature and pulse and a burning pain in his chest and all around his heart, and the top of his head felt like hot lead was dropping onto the middle of it, and his left arm was like iron, but he was living. He opened his mouth to thank somebody, and she put her other hand on his mouth and brought his lips together again around the slender piece of glass.
When she took it out of his mouth she said, “You’ll live, thanks to the miracle drugs and to your very strong determination.”
He said “Dinky thingamigig?”
She smiled at him. “Dinky die—”
He said, “Dinky die?”
She said, “Fair dinkum, mate.” She pronounced it “myte.” She said, “Cheerio.” She had other temperatures to take.
That night she came and she asked him to turn over on his stomach and he painfully complied and she pulled up his nightshirt.
“What are you doing?” he shouted weakly.
She said, “Now I know you’re getting better.” And she wet a cheek of his bashful backside and let him have the needle tenderly.
The next time he came out of it, she wasn’t there, and he lay there for a couple of hours with the scorching agony around his heart glowing with the most frightening pain of all. He didn’t know how his heart could stand such terrifying pain. Sometimes he thought someone had set fire to the hair on his chest.
She came late at night and took his temperature and his pulse and hoisted his smock and gave him a bird bath and gave him the needle, and he was helpless to resist. She knew everything he had.
Days passed in which he lived most of the time in that never-never twilight world between unconsciousness and reality and he could not tell the difference between dream world and real world, and sometimes he lived in the gone-by days of his boyhood and other times in New York playing handball and sometimes on the college basketball team and other times with Fannie Mae and at his desk in law school and with Millie and with his mother and a boy in Georgia again and in the Army overseas and a soldier in the Georgia jail many many times, and the scene at the Red Cross kept reappearing, reappearing, but he was never really in any of these places, excepting in the place wherever pain lived every minute—a throbbing head which seemed to have been converted into a busy rifle range, and a pounding heart in which blockbusters were continuously exploding. And his left arm always burning. He lived in fear of the veins in his head bursting open, of his heart muscles, which always felt like they were constricting or expanding like they were playing tug of war, and one day they would rip his chest wide open and tear his heart in two. His arm would never hold a woman.
One day the nurse came and took his temperature and pulse and then sat down awhile to talk. She told him she knew quite a bit about him, which he thought was an understatement. She had talked to a friend of his who was also wounded and on the ship.
He said, “Where is he?” He was scared to say, Who is he?
Boom! boom! boom! boom! His heart sounding off like thunder rumbling in the summer heat.
She said, “He’s in another department. He was shot up pretty badly, but you were one of the critical cases. For four or five days we didn’t know whether you would live or die. But you have vastly improved.”
He said, “Dinkie die?”
She said, “Fair dinkum, myte.”
He wanted to ask her who. What friend? But he was afraid she would say So-and-so died and So-and-so lost his leg and arm and So-and-so and So-and-so and So-and-so, and whatever she said, it would be final an
d irrevocable and everlasting. A sentence of capital punishment. A Supreme Court decision.
She said, “Lieutenant Samuels asks about you every day and so does Private Taylor and Corporal Larker and Private Scott and Banks.”
He said, “How are they doing?” Thank God they were alive and asking.
She said, “Everybody’s making progress. You were the worst off and you are mending nicely.”
She stood up and held his hand for a quick brief moment and told him, “Cheerio,” and she was gone.
Every time she came after that she would tell him something about Australia and she would also have something to say about Lieutenant Samuels, and her face would give out quick pink flushes, and he would feel little short stabs of loneliness. Solly told her about his family, his mother and his beautiful wife and the baby who was due in a few weeks’ time. She said, “No wonder you fought so hard to live.”
One afternoon she came and told him that they were off the coast of Queensland, which was her home state. They were in the Coral Sea and they were moving now through some of the most beautiful treacherous waters in the world. She wished he were able to go up on deck. They were passing between the Great Barrier Reef and the mainland. She had made the trip many times, a couple of times in glass-bottomed boats, but each time for her it was a brand-new experience. The perspiration above her mouth on the slightly mustached curve of her lip and the excitement in her voice as she told Solly about the thousands of fish of different families and denominations with so many hues they made a poor rainbow seem colorless. And likewise the coral, white, red, orange, and lemon-yellow, and the huge clams and the pearl oysters and octopi and color color color and everything color and motion and rhythm and the struggle for survival in the most beautiful most treacherous marine wilderness the world had ever known. An oceanic paradise and jungle rolled into one. She made it all come alive for him.
She stopped to catch her breath and then said, “You’ll get a chance, to see it on your way back up north. There’s so much to see, it’s a bit of like they say of your New York. You could spend an entire lifetime seeing and seeing and being spellbound.”
He said, laughing weakly. “You’re a poet and don’t know it, and I’m glad you showed it to me first with your eyes instead of mine.”
She said, “I wish I were a poet. I’ve always wanted to be a writer more than anything else in the world.”
He looked into her eyes and changed the subject, and they talked about Bainbridge, Australia, which was her home town, and ultimately the conversation got around to Lieutenant Samuels, as it usually did, and she blushed painfully, and soon afterward she left him.
That night he wrote Millie a long letter telling her how much he loved her and how much he wished he could be with her as she approached her moment, which was “their” profoundest moment. He forgot the pain in his heart and he felt warm all over as he wrote her of his love for her. He described the Great Barrier Reef to her in all of its raging beauty and rhythm. And he loved her loved her loved her. With his purple heart he loved her.
A couple of mornings later Celia helped him to dress up in his khaki uniform and get ready to disembark. She gave him her address in Bainbridge.
“I want you and Lieutenant Samuels to visit with me after you’re up and about.”
He said, “Swell.”
“Dinky die?” she demanded with a serious smile on her face and the perspiration always amidst the little peach-fuzzed mustache over her roundish mouth.
He said, “Fair dinkum.” In a strange and husky voice.
She said, “Good-o. This is the last time I’ll see you before we debark. Good-bye and get well quickly.” And she kissed him briefly on his cheek and left the dew of her warm lips on him.
They disembarked around noon with bands playing from the docks and flags and banners waving and people warmly cheering, and even from his stretcher he could see some of the natural beauty of the harbor. This was Celia’s home and he felt not exactly as a stranger.
They rode through the city on a train with him propped up and staring out of the window, and it was just as she had described it to him, with its forever shrubbery and its winding river and the wooden suburban houses built on stilts to keep the white ants from devouring them and with their inevitable verandas running around the fronts and sides of the houses like decks on an ocean liner. And forever again the flowers and parks and foliage and the trees of every nationality, every color, every aroma, and a long wooden fence bordering on a vacant lot with a large crude sign written in lime or whitewash
“OPEN SECOND FRONT NOW!”
His face filled up. He laughed and cried inside of him. The Second Front—Open the Second Front NOW! SO many months ago the Second Front had opened. So many thousand men ago. So many thousand thousand boys . . .
He closed his eyes and he thought about Millie and he wondered how she was doing so close to her time. Maybe it had already happened. You always had to allow for miscalculations. It might be happening this very minute. Mama was there and she would look out for Millie, and she had her own family out in Brooklyn. She would not be alone. It was he who was the lonely one.
The train took them through Bainbridge to an Army hospital located at a famous race track which had been converted into an Army camp for the duration of the war.
The next morning he was visited first by Worm, then by Samuels, and late in the afternoon by Jimmy and Scotty and Baby-Face Banks. From what these disabled veterans told him he pieced the story together about the battle of the airstrip. They had captured ten of the Japanese soldiers, killed fourteen, and the rest had escaped into the village. The 913 had fought and died heroically for their country and democracy. The dog-tag fellows included Lanky Lincoln and Calvin “Lover Man” Potter and Hopjack and First Sergeant Anderson and seven others. Thirty-nine were wounded and most of them were in this same hospital. They were being recommended for the Distinguished Service Cross. They were heroes. They were bigshots of the colored race. Even Samuels.
He didn’t sleep one restful hour that night. Against his will all night long he imagined Lanky and the Topkick dead forever more. He couldn’t believe it. The versifier who loved life so much and feared fear so fearlessly, he would make no concessions with fear or death, not even build a foxhole to guard against them. He would never laugh again, bending his long body and slapping his thighs, and he would never write another lyric. A man who could learn a foreign language in two weeks! And Topkick dead! Easy-going Topkick who would not kill a mosquito if it were biting him on the tip of his nose. Buried in the cold white unfriendly earth so many thousand miles away from home. He saw them all night long and he saw Hopjack, scat! Scat! And Calvin Potter, and all the rest of them, and he felt guilty because he was glad he wasn’t one in that number. He was glad and they were dead and he felt guilty and he was glad and they were dead and he was glad to be alive. And he felt sad and he felt guilty.
Two days later his mail caught up with him, and he got six letters from Millie and two from Mama. Millie’s letters were so full of love and brimming over with happiness and plans for the future for them and Junior and missing him and wanting him and loving him and remembering Fort Ord and Pittsburg as the happiest times of her life. He read her letters and warm feelings moved through his body and soothed the burning pain in his chest, and he was glad to be alive, and when he went home to her he would make up for everything. For not being with her at this time when she needed him most of all and for the anxious times he’d given her when he’d given love to Fannie Mae. He would make it all up to her. He would give her so much love she would overflow with love and she would never doubt his love again.
He had everything to live for. Day by day the pains eased in his head and chest, his arm almost completely healed, and one day he could eat real food, and a couple of days later he could get up and walk around and go to the toilet and take a B.M. like it was supposed to be taken, and bathe himself and shave himself and look into a mirror. The first time he saw
himself he did not recognize himself. He looked around and behind him and stared back at the mirror. He looked like a skeleton with skin stretched tight around it. His eyes were so deeply sunken he could hardly see them. His face was thin and long and gaunt. He looked like death A-W-O-L.
The fellows visited him every day and now he visited the fellows and the letters kept coming and he kept gaining strength. Then one week Worm and Samuels and Scotty and most of the rest of them left the hospital and were given thirty-day furloughs into Bainbridge, and Solly was as lonesome as a man could be.
Fannie Mae’s letter finally caught up with him. She had a new job teaching school in the public school system of Ebbensville. She loved her job, she said she loved her job, but he could tell it was not enough for her. She was so very much more than an Ebbensville schoolteacher. She was a hundred times more than that, a hundred thousand more than that.
She told him that sometimes when she is sitting in the classroom feeling sorry for herself, she falls back on his love, and even though she knows it has come to nothing and will never come to anything, it helps her in her hours of deep despondency to say to herself, “I’m great—I feel good, and I must really be somebody, because Solomon Saunders loves me” Her letter ended with: “Love you always, Fannie Mae” And made him feel a sense of greatness and at the same time like a lowly bastard.
Next day he received a book from Fannie Mae. Twelve Million Black Voices, by Richard Wright. And after he experienced this book, he knew he could never be the same. It was the most beautiful and the most lucid book he had ever experienced. The photography by Edwin Russkam together with Wright’s awesome overpowering word images awoke inside of Solly emotions long asleep and almost forgotten. Sometimes he would be reading a passage, or sometimes a face would stare at him from the pages, and he would hear the voices, and he would feel a trembling in his stomach and a fullness in his own face, and he would feel his own blackness deeply, and be proud to be a black man.
And Then We Heard the Thunder Page 42