Home Fires Burning

by Robert Inman

  It had snowed heavily at first, just after the attack, and the drifts had nearly covered the tank and the big rock, blocking the ends and leaving them a den under the tank’s belly with a narrow opening at one corner, next to the rock, for air. Henry remembered the first night, the snow, the terrible cold, the pitiful warmth they shared with each other, Mazzutti moaning and crying until Henry stopped him, but since then time had folded back on itself and he had lost track of days and nights. He marked the passing of time only by the deaths of the others — first Mazzutti, then the one with half a face whose name they didn’t know (a refugee from another shattered unit), now Bobby Ashcraft. Henry was the last of the string. He would die soon without Bobby Ashcraft’s warmth.

  He was already beginning to feel the numbness creeping through his body, spreading from his leg, which had long since ceased to hurt. When he touched his leg he could feel only crust, a great scab formed by torn flesh and congealed blood and cloth midway between his left knee and hip. It was a clean wound, he thought. The bullet had entered the front of his leg and creased the bone and exited the back and there hadn’t even been a lot of bleeding, as if the blood vessels had been fused by the impact. A man could live for days with a wound like that. But he couldn’t run. He could crawl, but you didn’t crawl in snow like that piled up outside, as he had found the one time he ventured out. A clean wound. Nothing like the deep slash across Mazzutti’s chest that had sucked and wheezed, or the blasted mass of pulp and gristle that was left of half the nameless man’s face, or the big hole in Bobby Ashcraft’s gut. A million-dollar wound, that’s what Henry had. If you could cash it in. But he was freezing to death because all the warmth was gone and he was the end of the string. It was an easy way to die, though, and Henry was thankful for that. He had seen how badly a man could die and he was frightened by the thought of going with the agony of unbearable pain squeezing the life out of him. This would be like drifting off to sleep. The numbness would simply take more and more of him until there was only numbness and no Henry. But it was for keeps, and a man ought to make preparations for something this final, get his affairs in order. He was still rational enough, calm enough, to do that.

  He decided first there would be no amends, no groveling and begging forgiveness. No more guilt for Old Henry, thank you. Old Henry had had his bait of guilt. He had worn it like a dead chicken around his neck for a lifetime, and it had made him, at thirty-four, old and stoop-shouldered. Folks had dumped guilt on Old Henry for a long, long time. Guilt was a way folks had of making you pay for being different. And he had paid enough. So you could take Old Henry, all thirty-four years of him, his tired bag of flesh and bones with the hole through his leg — you could take him as he was, damaged goods and all — but you wouldn’t get any more guilt out of Old Henry, by God.

  Still, there was a lot of garbage, a lot of rancid rot festering down there in Old Henry’s gut, some of it the fear and shame of the past few days, but most of it ancient stuff, a graveyard of garbage, the burying place of all he had done and failed to do.

  So. If there weren’t going to be any amends, what else? A man couldn’t just pass out of this life having existed as a graveyard run riot with weed. What then? Well, you could dig it all up and then just forget it, he decided after a while. So he set about forgetting. He did it methodically, one step at a time, working his way back as far as possible before his time ran out, closing out the books before shutting down the store. It might be, he thought, the only neat thing he had ever done in his life.

  Last things first, and first was the battle. It was unfair. Old Henry knew a lot about unfairness; it was a second cousin to guilt. Green troops, unbloodied, four months out of the States, moved into position along a quiet sector of the front to get eased into the business of killing and being killed. The big action was up north, where Montgomery edged grandly into position for another set-piece battle, or to the south, where Patton, the wild sonofabitch, was revving his engines and straining to leap across the border into Germany. And it was winter. Just before Christmas. It was quiet in the Ardennes, almost civilized. There was hot food in the kitchen, girls in St. Vith if you were randy and bold enough. They patrolled, there were a few brief firefights. But the Krauts were battered, hunkered down behind the Siegfried Line, waiting for spring and the inevitable end.

  Then suddenly there were Krauts all over the place, raging through the forest of towering firs, shredding the snow with their Tigers, flailing madly with a vicious, fanatical force they weren’t supposed to have anymore. Ike and the others had made an incredibly stupid miscalculation, and it was unfair. Some ran like crazy — like the 14th Cav over on the left. Cut and ran, they did, and left the whole flank of the division bare as a baby’s ass, and the Krauts went storming through the hole. Then while the rest of the division should have been pulling back, regrouping and reforming its lines, some brass hat scratched his fanny and hemmed and hawed until it was too late, and then they had Krauts on all sides and there was the devil to pay. The Germans had launched the assault before dawn, and by nightfall Old Henry and his boys were doomed men. They fought because they had absolutely no place to run. They began to hear during the day, as other units fell back upon their position, how the 14th Cav had collapsed and how the brass hat had scratched his ass and how the Germans were taking no prisoners. They fought then because they believed it was the only way they could stay alive, and it turned out they were wrong about that.

  It had ended for them, finally, on this little flat place on the side of a hill, a thirty-four-year-old lieutenant and perhaps thirty men, exhausted and terrified.

  Henry could feel their eyes on him as they crouched and waited, all these kids who looked to him simply because he was older. Older, hell. He was ancient. They could curse like grizzled men because they had learned to curse to cover their youth, but some of them didn’t even shave yet. All right, old man, they said with their eyes, what now? Up to now, they had liked him because he didn’t hassle them, because he listened to them out of the ancient tiredness of his age and they took that for wisdom. No sweat, he tells them. It’s his favorite expression: no sweat. Get the job done, then take it easy. No sweat. Until now. Now, there is plenty of by-God sweat. Now, in their agony, they want him to tell them what to do, and he can’t. Die? He can tell them that, but he won’t. No, he had no answers. Never had, really. And in that he was as guilty as Ike and the ass-scratching brass hats.

  The Germans came boring in on them from all sides and cut them to pieces. They were very efficient about it. A few of Henry’s men tried to throw down their guns at first, but they were shot where they stood, and then the rest of them stopped trying to surrender and backed up against the hillside and fought.

  There was one brief moment when Henry had a flash of hope, when the American tank came rumbling around the hillside with its gun whumping away at the Germans. But then one Panzerfaust ripped away its left tread and the tank slewed sideways up on the big rock and jammed its gun muzzle in the snow, and at the same time another round pierced the armor plate on the front and blew everything inside to a searing hell, and the tank died there on the rock.

  The Germans swept through them then, killing and wounding and then killing the wounded, and went on, leaving heaps of crumpled men in the deep snow. Henry was the only officer, but he was not in command. There was no command, only pitiful little clumps of men crouching in the snow and popping away with their carbines and cursing because there was nothing else to be done. He had been kneeling behind a fallen tree with two other men when a grenade, a mortar round, an artillery shell — he couldn’t tell what it was — landed almost on top of them. There was a great, blinding, roaring flash and Henry felt himself lifted up and then slammed back on the ground. It had knocked the wind out of him and dazed him, but otherwise, he realized, he wasn’t hurt. Then he looked and saw that the others had been torn to shreds, pulverized into shapeless lumps. He bellowed in terror and jumped up to run, to escape. The next moment he was sitting on h
is butt again, staring at the neat hole in the front of his left pants leg halfway between knee and hip. It calmed him. There was something almost comfortably familiar about it, this feeling that he had blown it again. “Shit,” he said to himself. He was filled with pity and self-loathing because he was about to die on a worthless snow-covered hillside near St. Vith, Belgium, because he had gotten drunk in 1941 and joined the National Guard. He was sick at his own stupidity, his own weakness and helplessness — not just now, but always. His great encompassing capacity for screwing up.

  There it was, as he thought back on it, trying to remember it so he could forget it and put it to rest. Guilt. Had Old Henry by the balls, it did, it did. Try to shut it out of your mind and it would sneak in through your ass like ringworms.

  Now, remembering again, he saw himself sitting there on his butt in the snow, bleeding, a tremendous roaring in his ears from the concussion, watching Jerry storming in on their position. He didn’t even look for his rifle. He just flopped over on his belly and buried his face deep in the cold snow and tried to shut it all out. At the end, he thought, he had cut and run. Through the roaring noise he could hear an occasional pop-pop that was the Krauts walking among the Americans, shooting the wounded. But they hadn’t touched him. Maybe he looked dead. Maybe they were in too much of a hurry to be thorough about it.

  The Germans moved off around the edge of the hill and after a while the roaring in Henry’s head went away and left only the awesome silence of the snow and the towering firs and the death all around him. He waited a long time to make sure they were gone and then he crawled around the position, checking the shapeless heaps turning the snow red with their blood, and found the other three men still alive and dragged them up under the tank, where he had covered the snow with ponchos. After that they hugged each other unashamedly and died one by one while the passing of time became a glaze of pain and cold in Henry’s mind.

  There were long hours of delirium that Henry lost, hours when fever made him crazy and his dreams and reality ran together.

  Once, he found himself kneeling in the snow outside, trembling violently with chills, holding a handful of dogtags from the dead and dying and his silver lieutenant’s bars. Something powerful had driven him out in the cold, something terribly insistent that told him it was a matter of life and death to collect the dogtags. When he came to his senses he could remember nothing except the feeling of great urgency. He dropped the dogtags and the silver bars in a pile in the snow and crawled back under the tank, wondering why he did it.

  Bobby Ashcraft lasted a long time and Henry lived like a parasite, sucking the warmth out of Bobby’s young body. There was incredible strength in the slim frame, like a steel rod bent to the breaking point, and a quiet dignity in the smooth-cheeked face that made Henry ashamed of his own weakness. Bobby didn’t talk much. He didn’t want to talk. He was from some little hick town in Illinois, and Henry supposed there was a family back there, a mother and father and some other kids, maybe a doe-eyed girlfriend. But Bobby didn’t talk about them. If he had things to forget, if there were scores to settle, he kept them to himself. Bobby just quietly held on long after he should have given up and then he, too, drained out of himself into the snow and left Old Henry shivering and dying. The end of the string.

  So, that was the battle. And having remembered it and catalogued it, Henry forgot it.

  He could feel the numbness growing in him now and so he hurried back through the corridor of his mind, leaping over the gulf of time since they had left the States, back to the camp where they had trained — the sea of eight-man tents sprouting like drab mushrooms in what had been farm fields, the roiling clouds of dust always hovering in the air, kicked up by the swarming-about of men and machines in mock anger, learning the posturings of war. In the summer the land had been parched and brown, lifeless, choked on its own dust, fevered. Texas in agony. A miserable town nearby, slack-jawed in the heat, red-eyed from summer and soldiers. Ivie Anderson and Duke Ellington moaning from the jukebox:

  … like a lonely weeping willow, lost in the wood,

  I got it bad, and that ain’t good …

  and the rancid tang of spilled beer on an earthen floor. Sweat-stained khaki. The oldest lieutenant in the whole damned Army, the fool who got drunk and joined the National Guard in 1941. But he didn’t fight it, because it was the first time he could remember when he was anywhere near coming to grips with himself. There were times when the heat and the dust and the swarming-about left him spent, emptied, and he sank back into the sweet soft luxury of not caring at all. He did what he was told, but he was not a very good lieutenant because he didn’t really give a damn one way or the other and there was really not much they could do to him. No sweat, he told the kids. Get the job done and don’t get your ass all puckered up about it. No sweat.

  Henry stands before the company commander’s desk, looking down at the man — another kid, really, eager and full of himself, starched and correct, a straight arrow, Jack Armstrong with captain’s bars. What drives him? Henry wonders. He’s not a West Pointer. You can figure them okay. But this one — Henry can picture him one day as an overly earnest young business executive, clawing his way up somebody’s ladder with whatever it is inside him clawing at his gut. For now, spoiling to get to war. He makes Old Henry feel very tired. And this young captain is no respecter of age. War has made it irrelevant.

  “Lieutenant, how is it that your platoon finishes dead last in everything? Tell me that.”

  Henry shrugs.

  “I’ll tell you what it is.” The captain smacks his fist into his palm. It’s not an angry gesture, just earnestness. God, this man is earnest. “You’re not pushing the men. You’ve got to stay on their butts, Tibbetts. Push, push, push. My God, man, they’re winding up the war over there.” It sounds like a personal affront.

  “There’s always Japan,” Henry says.

  “Japan, hell. Europe is the cradle of modern civilization, Tibbetts. Alter Europe and you alter the course of history. Ten years from now, nobody will give a damn about some piddly-ass islands in the Pacific. Japan has nothing but fanaticism, Tibbetts. Europe has destiny. Hitler’s a maniac, but Christ, you have to be impressed with the man’s sense of history. Japan could never produce a Hitler.” The captain is agitated, his face all screwed up with earnestness. He senses that Henry is not with him, not at all. “How did you get to be an officer, Tibbetts?” There is despair in his voice.

  “I think I am what you would call a failure of the system,” Henry says. He feels sorry for the captain. Henry thinks the man will probably never have close friendships. People will always stand back just beyond the edge of his earnestness. He will probably never get drunk with the boys.

  There was the captain, and there was the woman. Henry didn’t really know what to think about that, remembering it now so that he could forget it. He wondered about her. She would be okay, he thought. She was a survivor. You could see it in her eyes. She had hard eyes, a street fighter’s eyes, unbecoming to a woman. She was tough and she traveled light. No, Old Henry had no amends to make for the woman. She had extracted no guilt from him, demanded no amends. No sweat on her part.

  She is Colquitt’s woman, everybody knows that. But Colquitt is dead now, killed in a jeep accident out there in the Texas misery, and Henry has been sent to tell her — a bit of perversity on the part of the company commander, the earnest young captain for whom Henry feels sorry.

  She and Colquitt aren’t married, but she is Colquitt’s woman and she has to be told. Henry has seen her with Colquitt at the Quonset hut they call an officers’ club, dancing listlessly by the jukebox. They cling together in the heat, she and Colquitt, swaying like broom-straw in a fetid breeze. Henry associates her somehow with Artie Shaw’s clarinet, the smooth lilt of “Moonlight on the Ganges.” She is Colquitt’s woman, not Colquitt’s wife, and therefore unapproachable. You can ask a man’s wife to dance with you, but not his woman, not unless the man offers her, and Colquitt doesn
’t. It is not something you talk about with Colquitt, either, and so nobody really knows who the hell she is or where she came from, only that she has followed Colquitt to this heat-blasted armpit of Texas. That tells you something about both of them. Now Colquitt is dead in his jeep and here is Old Henry come to make amends and feeling his asshole puckering up with the uncomfortableness of it.

  It is a single room upstairs over a dry goods store, reached by an outside stair. When he raps on the door she says, “It’s open,” and he steps inside and blinks in the dimness. As his eyes adjust, he sees her sitting in a straight-backed chair by the single window that looks out over the tin awning of the store to the parched dirt street. She is smoking, ashtray on windowsill, arm cocked to the side with the cigarette dangling between two fingers. It is a spare room — double bed with paint flaking from the metal frame, chest of drawers with plain wooden knobs, table with hotplate on top and beside it a few cans of food. And the single chair, in which she sits. Henry feels a sudden rush of despair, seeing the awful crushing boredom of it. At least out there in the dust and heat there is something to do, even if they move like automatons. But here … It is midafternoon and the day seems leaden, mugged by the stifling heat. And she sits by the window with an ashtray full of butts waiting for Colquitt. Henry looks at the bed, imagines them on it, their bodies slick with sweat. Beyond that, his imagination stops. He can’t hear their conversation, their small movings-about in the tiny room, the way they spend the long hours between sundown and sunup. He can’t imagine the routine, the million tiny details, of living with a woman. It has been too long. Is it different with a woman who is not your wife? In the ways of unmarried women he is untutored. Wives, he knows about. Wives, he knows in spades. But it has been a long, long time — long enough to forget what it’s like to cohabit with one.