Ben shook his head. The soldier went rigid with fierce eyes.
‘You gotta get me a priest!’
Ben squeezed the boy’s hand.
‘Chaplain, you gotta hear me.’
Ben cut his gaze to the medic. Under his Red Cross helmet, the medic thinned his lips and shook his head.
Ben could not hear the confession of a Catholic, that was not allowed. The soldier’s hand began to quiver in his, and Ben thought, This is allowed, boys dying in a foreign field. What is not allowed after this?
‘Alright, soldier.’
The medic stuck two morphine spikes in Ben’s hand. He patted the downed soldier on the chest, and said, ‘Hang on, a litter’s on the way.’ Rolling to his heels, the medic glanced at Ben, then took off.
Ben lifted a flattened hand to shield his face from the GI. Behind his hand, he said, ‘Give me your confession.’
‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned....’
Ben stayed until the litter bearers found them. He could not be with the other three soldiers who died in the orchard. He remained with Private Eddie O’Kelley, who’d picked up VD from a whore in England three months ago and had not been treated, and lied to his parents and gal in letters. Ben stuck him with both morphine needles. He recited the Act of Contrition in Eddie’s silence, had crossed the soldier’s hands over his chest. On the boy’s forehead, with a bloody thumb he made the sign of the cross. Then he said the Shema, to thank God for allowing him to comfort this son.
The fighting at the far end of the orchard ceased. Ben rose when the stretcher bearers were gone. He walked through the apple trees to the far hedge, to see where the Germans had been. He saw tunnels scooped in the thick roots, where the enemy could hide from reconnaissance planes and weather almost any kind of bombardment. Machine-gun nests had been set in the corners with crossing firing lanes that peered even into other hedgerows. Ammunition, food, and medical supplies were stockpiled and abandoned, implying there was no German supply shortage. Empty shell casings spangled the ground and the leaves. Ben guessed the men defending this hedge had as many as five machine guns and a dozen submachine guns. The Germans left behind only five dead. The rest were gone, dissolved into the bocage.
A drizzle began. Trees stalled the first drips.
1st Platoon arrived through the hedge and assembled again into three rifle squads. The soldiers collapsed in the lane and lay in the ditch. Ben sat with the men and listened, assuring them he would stay. He prayed with some, until the flight of mortar shells overhead crashed into the far hedge and Captain Whitcomb marched past shouting orders, announcing the next hour, another hedgerow.
~ * ~
D+29
July 5
Joe Amos jabbed his shovel into the floor of the pit. He took his hands off the long handle and left it standing. McGee beside him did the same.
‘No, no, no, you keep diggin’.’ Joe Amos swept the back of his hand at the boy. McGee tugged his shovel out of the dirt.
Joe Amos climbed from the hole, waist deep now. He sat with legs dangling and wiped his brow on his sleeve over the sergeant’s patch, wondering how three stripes could not get him out of digging a latrine.
‘Man,’ he mumbled his disgust. ‘This ain’t right. “We get one damn day off in two weeks and we got to spend it diggin’ a hole. This is some shit.’
McGee chuckled, thinking Joe Amos had made a pun. ‘Got that right.’
Joe Amos watched McGee add to the growing pile of dark French dirt. The soil here was better than the stubborn red clay he split with a mule back in Danville. France was grapes and apples, Virginia was tobacco and beans. Joe Amos was a boy then, a man now, a college man, a sergeant, and this was a latrine. It was his day off.
McGee stomped his boot on the blade to drive it deepen then levered up a heap. ‘I thought the Major liked you.’
So did I, Joe Amos almost said. He bit the thought back, branding himself a dimwit for believing, for giving up his role of hero because Major Clay asked, trading his dignity for a stripe, and now a shovel, Someone had to dig this shithole, alright, but that someone shouldn’t have shot down a Messerschmitt.
Joe Amos watched McGee carving at the dirt, then cast his eyes around the growing bivouac area.
Tents and mess kitchens sprouted over a dozen adjoining fields. Trucks waited for maintenance crews to peel off flat tires, change oil, belts, brake pads, and plugs, lube trannies, fill radiators, or cannibalize the most worn trucks and toss the sucked-out hulks into a spreading junkyard. Jimmies and tractors pulled in, drivers stumbled out, blind from wheeling so much. They snagged food and collapsed on hard cots under humid canvas. Coffee poured everywhere, the liquid admission of fatigue. Word went around that a movie projector was coming soon. This new tent city held over ten thousand drivers and support crew, flowing and mingling by race far more than any military base in America or England. Exhaustion and a schedule thinner than a Petty pinup poster kept the men occupied, enough to prevent most trouble.
A half mile away, the ruined town of Ste. Mère-Église rumbled day and night with comings and goings, fresh vehicles and soldiers from the beaches reporting for duty, bulldozers plowing fallen bricks into red piles. Non-stop work was putting Ste. Mère-Église back in order and setting up this COM Z bivouac on the outskirts. But so much labor without a break was tearing the drivers down, Joe Amos Biggs included. His back and arms blamed him for their ache. Joe Amos blamed white officers who figured a Negro didn’t need a day to himself.
He pushed off the rim of the hole and yanked his shovel out of the earth.
Before he could ram the blade down, four German POWs rounded the corner of a tent, guarded by two GIs with M-1s in hand. McGee quit digging. He and Joe Amos looked up out of the hole, heads level with the soldiers’ knees.
A dirty sergeant raised his hand to halt the prisoners beside the pit. The soldier looked haggard, with several days of beard, and a crust of dirt on his uniform. The GI with him wasn’t much cleaner.
Joe Amos had not seen a living German until now. The four prisoners didn’t look like what he’d imagined, a blond and icy-eyed race. These men were young, like him. Two were pale and two were ruddy and dark-haired. Each of the Germans was neater than the GIs, and shaved. Joe Amos figured if you rolled them around in the mud for a few days and changed uniforms, they’d look just like the two doughs guarding them.
The sergeant glanced down to Joe Amos. His eye snagged on the three stripes on Joe Amos’s sleeve.
‘ ‘Scuse me there, Sarge. I need to borrow your hole for a sec.’
Joe Amos set his shovel against the dirt wall.
‘For what?’
The sergeant snorted. He made an indulgent grin.
‘Well, what do you think?’
Without waiting for a reply, the sergeant stepped behind his two prisoners. He set a hand to the shoulder of one and walked him to the lip of the trench. The other guard shoved his own prisoners forward. The fourth POW stepped to the ledge on his own. This one, the darkest of the four ami seemingly the youngest, looked ready to weep.
McGee dropped his shovel and sprang out on the opposite side of the pit.
Joe Amos stayed put.
The young Kraut whimpered. Joe Amos flung his gaze at the sergeant.
‘What the hell you think you’re doing?’
‘Don’t mind him,’ the sergeant said, ‘he’s been whining since St. Lô. Fucking crybaby. Thinks we’re gonna shoot him.’ He narrowed his eyes at Joe Amos. ‘You might want to come out of there now, boy.’
The sergeant undid his fly and shook his penis into his dirty hands. Joe Amos backed against the dirt wall and jumped out before the man’s piss stream struck the bottom of the pit.
Joe Amos stood across the hole, glaring. The sergeant lifted his streaked face and moaned over his yellow arc.
The three older Germans undid their own trousers and joined the sergeant just as his urine was waning. Joe Amos stood beside McGee, staring into the soaking, smel
ling floor of their hole. The young, sniffling prisoner blew out a breath of relief. He swallowed and color returned to his features. He turned around and unbuckled his pants to slide them around his ankles. He squatted and hung his bare ass over the hole. The sergeant and the three prisoners buttoned their flies after their piss had made a disgusting mud, then the first turd from the squatting Kraut smacked the dirt.
‘I ain’t gettin’ back in there,’ McGee told Joe Amos.
‘Shut up,’ Joe Amos snapped.
Quickly he regretted speaking to McGee that way, but he couldn’t express his anger at the sergeant. There was nothing he could say or do. These soldiers—even the captured Krauts—were fighting men. Joe Amos had dug them a latrine. Watching the Kraut’s crap plop, humiliation swamped his heart.
The sergeant stepped in front of the squatting German.
‘All done?’ the sergeant asked. ‘Kaput?’
Without standing, the boy nodded up to him.
‘Good.’ The sergeant backed a step and raised his rifle. The German boy stiffened when the sergeant laid the barrel against his forehead. Joe Amos froze, unbelieving.
With the gun, the sergeant pushed the boy backward into the pit. The German landed awkwardly, his pants still strapping his ankles. He missed the shit pile but landed in the damp urine muck. The sergeant laughed. The other guard backed the three Krauts away from the hole while in the foul bottom of the pit the boy struggled to get to his feet and raise his pants.
McGee took a step forward. Joe Amos gripped his sleeve and held him back.
Joe Amos moved to the edge of the hole. He reached down a hand to the soiled boy. On the opposite side, the sergeant, still laughing, called out, ‘Leave him alone. He’ll be alright.’
Joe Amos ignored him, reaching for the German. The boy’s face had gone crimson, hot with shame.
‘Come on, man,’ Joe Amos said over his extended hand, ‘I’m sorry.’
The boy finished with his belt, tails untucked. His knees and elbows were stained with the foul mud. He glared at Joe Amos’s hand. Then he spit at it and clambered out of the hole. The sergeant gathered him in.
‘Sorry to interrupt your day,’ the GI called across the pit. ‘Sarge.’
Joe Amos watched the six walk off among the tents and shifting trucks.
‘Don’t that beat all,’ McGee said, beside him. ‘You was just tryin’ to help that boy.’
Joe Amos wiped the Kraut’s spit off his palm.
‘Get cleaned up,’ he told McGee.
~ * ~
Joe Amos walked along a line of Jimmies outside a maintenance tent. He knew by instinct to leave most of the trucks alone, they’d been driven to shreds. He studied wear on the tire treads, some slick, some with holes showing the fiber belt under the rubber like in a hobo’s shoe. Some he skipped over by smell, catching the stink of overheated blocks and dried-out radiators. He strolled past thirty trucks until he found the one he wanted. The front grille was twisted, the cat’s eye plucked out, the bumper missing. Joe Amos hopped on the running board and glanced in. The key hung from the ignition.
He slid into the driver’s seat and turned the key. The engine cranked, three-quarters of a tank of gas registered. To the rising needles in the gauges, he said, ‘Perfect.’
Careless of being caught, he pulled the Jimmy out of line. The sound of the motor and feel of the suspension told him he’d chosen well. In a minute of dodging through the bivouac, he stopped in front of the latrine. McGee waited there, his uniform brushed of dirt and his face and hands washed.
Joe Amos said, ‘Get in.’
McGee ambled, plainly tired, to the passenger door, inspecting the wrecked front end. He climbed in. Joe Amos shifted to first and rolled.
‘Where’s Lucky?’ McGee asked.
‘We’re not driving Lucky today.’
‘How come?’
‘ ‘Cause if Lucky’s gone, they might figure we’re gone, too.’
McGee worked with this and came up empty.
‘Ain’t we gone, Sarge?’
The road lay a hundred yards off. jimmies limped in; others, refreshed, pulled out. Joe Amos put this dented, running truck in line with the others heading back to work.
‘Nope. We ain’t.’
McGee settled in on the bench. An MP waved Joe Amos onto the road. The Jimmy was in third gear and in the heart of an empty convoy returning to OMAHA before McGee asked, ‘We gonna get caught?’
‘Nobody knows what the hell’s goin’ on half the time. No, McGee, we ain’t getting caught.’
The convoy, with no loads in its beds, sped away from Ste. Mère-Église. Joe Amos shifted into fourth gear, a rare treat.
‘Besides, yesterday was Independence Day. We’re just a day late, you and me.’
At the first opportunity, Joe Amos swung the wrecked-faced Jimmy south. He drove past emptied convoys heading the other way, back to OMAHA. At Isigny, he turned off the main road. A loadless truck should not be going this direction, toward the fighting around St. Lô, but he trusted the ruined grille of the Jimmy to be some sort of explanation, something out of the ordinary. He figured there was enough traffic on these roads to go on without curiosity. He found a loaded column and closed ranks.
McGee Mays did not ask where they were headed. Joe Amos let quiet fill the cab, enjoying it with the breeze and the blue-and-green world. The latrine was mostly finished. Garner would come along to check on them. He’d see just the shovels and the crap; he’d wonder about the crap but figure the two Negroes had decided the hole was deep enough. Garner would go off to tend some other business, thinking Joe Amos and McGee were probably sacked out somewhere in the sprawling bivouac, they weren’t on duty until tomorrow noon. The business of their trucking battalion was huge and disorganized, moving far faster than records and files could keep up. The cracks to slip through were big.
With the wind whizzing in the windows, McGee began to hum ‘Amazing Grace.’ Joe Amos let the boy go for a verse, then listened while McGee sang the second. On the third verse, Joe Amos joined in, and their voices blended with the engine drone and the road.
‘Through many dangers, toils and snares,
I have already come;
‘Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far,
And grace will lead me home.’
‘McGee,’
‘Yeah.’
‘We’re AWOL. You know that, right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You okay with it? I mean, I didn’t ask you first or nothin’.’
‘Where’d you get the Jimmy?’
‘Out of maintenance. She was in line.’
‘We gonna put her back?’
‘Yeah. Tonight.’
‘Alright.’
‘We’re going to Couvains. I got a friend down there. Says he’s got a big house and all.’
McGee nodded, looking out the windshield. Joe Amos glanced at the boy who seemed to like and trust everything Joe Amos said. McGee stretched his arm out his window and made a wing of his hand, rising and dropping on the flowing wind. Elation hit Joe Amos, rose like a wind in him. He’d taken a truck and left his unit, he was out of bounds, breaking rules, thumbing his nose for the first time at the Army’s command of him. That asshole sergeant had embarrassed him, having those prisoners use his freshly dug hole before it was ready, before Joe Amos had even climbed out of it. But right now Joe Amos was in a truck flying down the road, free and breezy, while that sergeant was still filthy and under somebody’s orders. Not Joe Amos. No, sir, he was doing what he wanted this morning. He wouldn’t get caught. Disobedience felt good. It was easier than he’d imagined.
‘I grew up in Southside Virginia,’ he told McGee. ‘Town of Danville. We got a small farm. Papa left when I was a young’n. Mama says he was a no-good.’
McGee said, ‘Uh huh.’
‘Got four sisters, too. Brenda, Linda, Glenda, and Edna.’ Joe Amos laughed. He loved saying his sisters’ names out loud. McGee tried to repeat them and fouled up. H
e laughed, too.
McGee asked, ‘How’d your mama come to have five chir’ren with a no-good?’
‘Don’t know. Never asked. I guess a fella can just become a no-good after a while.’
‘I reckon.’
Joe Amos drove, contemplating his long-gone father and McGee’s question, resolving to ask his mama point-blank when he got home. The query hung in front of him but the warm air rushing in his window blew it away.
‘All my sisters have husbands. Everyone’s got their own farms, but they go over to work Mama’s land, too. She’s growing tobacco on half, soybean on the rest.’
David Robbins - [World War II 04] Page 18