Forty Dead Men

by Donis Casey

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Gee Dub stood gazing out the one small window of the bunk room with his back to the people who were seated at the painted table. It seemed easier not to look at them, not to see judgment in their eyes. He had invited his parents to come to his room rather than bring Moretti to the house. He felt more in control in his own space, and he didn’t want other ears to hear.

  He could feel their eyes boring into his back. It was deathly quiet in the room, not even a spring breeze fluttering the curtains. He wondered if his parents were both holding their breath, waiting for him to begin. He had a feeling that Alafair knew what he was going to say. Moretti’s knapsack, the one Phoebe had found, was on the table in front of her. She had brought it with her.

  He clasped his hands behind his back and began. “Private Moretti was in my outfit when we first went over to France. I never saw anybody so clumsy in my life, but he sure aimed to please. He had a sweet nature, but he couldn’t hit the floor if he fell out of bed. The other boys figured he was their good luck charm, like a mascot. If somebody as useless as Moretti could keep from getting killed, then staying alive would be a piece of cake for the rest of them. Anyway, I knew how the boys felt, so I kind of made Moretti my project. I figured if I kept an eye on him and kept him from wandering into a bullet, that’d be good for morale, if nothing else.

  “It worked, for a while, anyway. We were behind the lines for the first few weeks, scouting, mostly, and running supplies up the line. Those French towns…The soldiers on both sides who had been in France for years, well, it does something to you. I saw both sides do things to civilians that I hope never to see again. It changed my boys to see what horrors men can do to one another. When the summer offensive started and we did get sent up, everybody in my unit managed to stay on this side of the ground for nearly two weeks—until in the middle of an assault, I sent Moretti back behind the lines to fetch something for me. I meant to save him, to get him out of harm’s way. He got ten yards before a Kraut machine gun opened fire and cut him clean in two. He was still alive when I got to him, but there wasn’t enough of him left to carry on with. He was screaming like a banshee. I unholstered my sidearm and put a bullet in his head.

  “That affected the boys pretty bad. I didn’t have time to ponder on it, though, what with the tanks coming and all.”

  His voice trailed off and his gaze wandered away from the window to a blank space on the wall. Alafair didn’t think he was looking at anything in this world.

  “We lasted another couple of hours. The Germans started shelling our position with one of those big guns of theirs, and the next thing I knew, I was waking up in a field hospital with a cracked head. I never saw any of my unit again, though I heard some of them made it out.

  “After the docs released me, I was temporarily assigned to a unit of English boys from Newcastle. They needed a sharpshooter, and I volunteered. They were just youngsters. England had been fighting a lot longer than we had. I reckon the older boys were all dead by that time. I was with the Tommys for some weeks. It was funny the way them boys looked at me. Like they half expected me to have spurs on my boots and six-shooters strapped to my hip. They were funny, though. Stupid, but funny. The way they talked made me laugh—that is, when I could get a handle on what they were saying at all.

  “Their officer was Lieutenant Nigel Anderson. He called himself a ‘Leff-tenant.’ He was about the same age as me but you’d have thought he was eighty by the way he carried himself. I can’t say we got to be friends. Nobody who had been in the trenches any length of time made friends. But we did have a bond. He knew what had happened to my unit. We never said it to each other, but we both were bound and determined to keep them English boys alive as long as we could. Neither of us thought there was much possibility of any of us getting out of that ditch, but we did our damnedest. I admired that ‘Leff-tenant’ for the way he cared about his troops. He didn’t have a high opinion of his generals. But he did his duty, even when some order came down that was downright suicide. That happened with some regularity. Orders would come down to go over the top at such-and-such a day and some hour or the other, and Anderson would go off by himself and cuss like the devil. He used words I’d never heard, but I found them a pretty handy way to supplement my own vocabulary. He’d ask me to creep out of the trench and shoot as many Huns as I could before X-hour. I’d find me a likely spot, up in a tree or somewhere different than I’d used before.

  “After what happened with Moretti, with my own boys, I felt nothing. I killed people. I filled my clips and I killed people’s sons and husbands and brothers and never felt a thing. When the first cartridge box was empty, I put it in my kit bag and started on the second.

  “I was with Anderson’s sergeant major, a career soldier named Connor, hard as nails. We were assessing the Germans’ strength and getting the lay of the land before the next assault. With all the shelling on both sides, you never could tell from day to day what the ground was like. It was a nice day. I remember that because it was so unusual. Most of the time it never did anything but rain. Sergeant Major Connor was maybe ten yards ahead of me. I was crawling along on my belly in the brush, getting all filthy and scratched but glad to be out of that stinking trench, when Connor ran across a German soldier who took off from his hidey-hole like a quail flushed out of the brush. He ran right toward me, so I tackled him and brought him down. He was hollering some gibberish and I stood up and unslung my rifle. He was probably scouting our position just like we were doing to him. I had every intention of finishing him off until he flipped over and looked up at me.

  “He couldn’t have been more than twelve years old. He was crying like a baby and his face was all streaked where the tears had washed away the dirt. He was blue-eyed and his hair was the color of cotton, but all of a sudden his face changed and I was looking down at Private Moretti. I nearly passed out. Sergeant Connor had got to us by then. Judging from the way Connor gaped at me, I must have looked mighty strange. He didn’t say anything, but he drew his sidearm. He aimed to finish the boy off if I wasn’t going to do it. I grabbed the young’un up by the collar and said I was taking him back to Anderson for interrogation.

  “That night when I cleaned my weapon I found one bullet still in the chamber. It was the last one from the second cartridge box. It should have ended up in that child’s head.”

  Gee Dub turned around. Alafair’s eyes were brimming and Shaw looked like he had been punched. Gee Dub was relieved not to see an expression of revulsion on either face. He reached into his breast pocket and held up the cartridge between his thumb and forefinger.

  “But I kept it instead. The boy was the first German I could have killed, but didn’t. I don’t know what Connor told Anderson later. The next morning before the assault, Anderson shook my hand and said ‘thank you very much’ and shipped me back to the Americans. The war ended three days later. I don’t know what became of Anderson or his Newcastle lads.

  “I think of Moretti a lot. I talk to him, too. He helps me make sense of things sometimes. Moretti kept me from killing the German boy. He kept me from killing Dan Johnson, too. I saw Holly come out of Johnson’s house. She was so sad, so wounded. I waited until she was out of sight. I didn’t have it in mind to kill him when I went up the porch steps, but he took one look at me and took off. He didn’t even know who I was. Guilty conscience, I guess. All of a sudden I was on war footing, back in France. I got him by the hair before he could get away and took him down. I must have looked like a madman, because he started bawling and I swear he wet himself. I straddled him and grabbed for my sidearm. I’d have shot him between the eyes, but I had forgot I wasn’t armed. Besides, he was crying. He was pathetic. That’s when instead of Dan Johnson, I saw Moretti, all blown up, telling me he didn’t want to die. But when I pulled him to his feet, he was Johnson again. I was still wound up. I punched him in the face a couple of times and he ran back into the house. Then I left t
o find Holly. Me and Dan Johnson never exchanged a word.”

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Alafair and Grace accompanied Gee Dub when he went into town to see Holly off on her long trip back to Maine. Holly took her leave of Alice and little Linda at their house and rode to the train station in Alafair’s buggy with Grace on her lap and Gee Dub following behind on his chestnut mare, Penny. Alafair said farewell at the station, wishing Holly a pleasant journey and a pleasant life and loading her down with so many cans and jars and bags of homemade food that Holly thought she might get all the way back to Maine before she had to spend a dime to eat. Grace cried a little when she said her good-byes, which made Holly feel a combination of regret and gratification. She didn’t like to see her young friend unhappy, but it was nice that someone besides Gee Dub cared that she was leaving. She expected the rest of the Tuckers would be glad to see the back of her.

  If that was how Alafair felt about Holly’s departure, she did not show it. “Well, Grace-pie, let’s you and me run some errands while we’re in town and let these two young’uns have some time on their own before they have to part forever.”

  She clucked at the horse and turned the buggy back toward the main street, leaving Holly and Gee Dub alone on the platform.

  Once they were out of sight, Gee Dub said, “You expect Mama is right?”

  A gust of wind tugged at Holly’s hat and she put her hand on her crown to keep it in place. “About what?”

  “That we are parting forever.”

  A smile lifted the corners of her mouth and she shrugged. “There’s no way of telling what the future will bring, is there?”

  “I reckon not.” He led her to the long bench by the station wall and they sat down side by side.

  She reached into one of the food baskets that Alafair had given her and lifted out a small pan covered by a kitchen cloth. “I made this for you.”

  Gee Dub recognized his mother’s pan. “You made me something?”

  “I did. Back in Maine, in blueberry season, in the summer when they are ripe on the bush, Mama and me would come home with peck baskets full of big fat berries that dripped juice and dyed everything they touched. My mother would put up quarts and make pies, and dry some berries to last the winter, but my favorite thing was when she’d make a blueberry buckle. It’s just a plain white cake with berries in it and a sugar topping, but I love it. This one doesn’t have blueberries, but your mother let me use some of her canned blackberries. It isn’t quite the same, but I think you’ll like it. Your mama said something to me that made me want to make it for you. She said that when you cook for someone you love, it transfers right into the food.”

  He looked up from the pan in his lap, taken aback.

  “Did you tell anyone what happened after we left Council Hill?” Holly didn’t look at him when she asked the question.

  “No.”

  “Why not? It would have given you an alibi for that night.”

  “I might have, if it had come to it. I didn’t have to, as it turns out.”

  “I did tell Sheriff Tucker, you know. Not everything, but enough that he figured it out, and I’m sure he told Mr. Meriwether. You never had to worry about my reputation, Gee Dub. It is not like anyone thought I was a pillar of virtue, anyway.”

  Gee Dub laughed at that. “Who is? There is not a soul living who isn’t full of shame and regret. Or ought to be. But even if I’d tried to weasel my way out of trouble by spilling my guts, it wouldn’t have done any good, anyway. There was still that unaccounted time between when you left Dan’s house and met up with me at the cafe.”

  “Well, no matter. You’re an honorable man and I thank you for all you’ve done for me, from the minute you spied me walking all miserable across that field to this very minute here.”

  “I could say the same about you, Holly. I think we helped each other.”

  He had been so solicitous. Her knight, her guardian angel. It had seemed like ages since Holly had plunked herself down in the middle of that muddy field, at the end of her rope and determined to sit there until something happened or she died. Then Gee Dub Tucker had appeared out of nowhere to save her and bring her back to life. Not that she deserved to be saved. Since the day she left Maine, she kept rushing headlong into a viper’s pit of trouble. Since the day he found her in the field, Gee Dub kept reaching in to pull her out. She didn’t know why.

  She had not meant for anyone to know about the night they reached across the long chasm of despair and found each other. She had told him about her nightmare of a father, how her desperation to escape her pain had led her off a cliff and into Dan Johnson’s arms. Gee Dub had listened quietly and did not judge her. Then he told her about France.

  They had comforted one another that night. Maybe they had even rescued one another. But they both knew that was all it would be. Holly could go back to Maine now. Gee Dub…well, who knew what he would do? But at least he might have a chance to live.

  “I don’t expect we’ll ever see one another again,” she told him. “But it’s all right. I’m not sorry about anything.”

  He smiled. “Me neither.”

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Grace was most unhappy that she wouldn’t be allowed to wait for the train, so Alafair took her to the Boynton Mercantile and let her pick out a licorice stick to suck on while her mother shopped for thread. Afterwards, they went to the office of the McCoy Land and Title Company to say hello to Martha, then walked the two blocks down Second Street to visit Alice and play with Linda for half an hour. They could have stayed at Alice’s house until after the train to Muskogee left Boynton with Holly Thornberry on it and Gee Dub was free to start his life again. But Alafair had a task that she wanted to complete while she was in town.

  She pried Grace away from Linda and together they walked back downtown and to the jailhouse. Scott Tucker took his feet off the desk and sat up when the door opened. A wary expression passed over his face when he recognized his visitors.

  “Hello, Miss Grace,” he greeted, before Alafair could say something to complicate his day. “What brings you to town?”

  Grace gave him a grin. Her new teeth were halfway sprouted by now. She was going to have the same wide, toothy smile as the rest of her siblings. “Mama and me and Gee Dub come to take Holly to the train. She’s going home to Maine, and that’s a long way away. She’s going to go to work for her uncle. She said she’d write to me.”

  “Is that right?” Scott picked up the girl and set her on his knee. Grace was not quite seven, but half her body seemed to be legs. Scott didn’t think she’d be sitting on his lap much longer.

  Alafair took a seat in one of the bentwood chairs in front of Scott’s desk. “Scott, do you still have Harvey Stump’s photo, the one that Dan Johnson glued to his own identification card? Can I look at it again?”

  Scott had not expected that. He blinked at her. “I suppose you can. What do you want to see it for?”

  “I was just thinking about him. From everything I hear, poor old Harvey was a kind and helpful fellow who just had the real bad luck to cross paths with Dan Johnson.”

  Scott lifted Grace off his lap and stood up to rummage through his file cabinet and retrieve the little photograph of Harvey Stump. He handed it to Alafair.

  Harvey looked as young as he was, a little bit surprised to find himself dressed in an Army uniform and sitting in front of a camera. Most of his dark hair had been shaved off except for a bit of unruly frizz on top. He was looking straight at her, his clear pale eyes innocent of his future. The photo had been removed from Dan Johnson’s military ID card and clipped to a piece of paper upon which Scott had written the scant known facts of Harvey’s life. “Age 20, height 5’10”, weight approximately 145 lbs. Parents Sidney and Carlotta Stump, deceased. No siblings. No known relations.” A few words about his service were scribbled at the bottom. Harvey had been at Châ
teau-Thierry. Alafair wondered if he and Gee Dub had been stationed anywhere near one another.

  Grace put an arm over her mother’s shoulder and leaned in for a good look at the picture. “Who is that, Ma?”

  “That’s a poor boy who has gone to his reward, sugar.” For an instant Alafair thought she might cry. No one missed Harvey Stump. No one even cared that his young life had been cut short. If Harvey hadn’t died of influenza would he have made it home and started a new life, perhaps found a nice girl and married, had children of his own?

  She looked up at Scott. “No kinfolks at all have come forward?”

  He shook his head. “His mother came over on the boat from Italy all by herself maybe thirty years ago. His daddy was an orphan.”

  “What’s going to happen to all that money Harvey’s folks left him?”

  Scott shrugged. “It’ll end up going to the state of Oklahoma, I reckon.”

  “Maybe he has kin still living in Italy.”

  He smiled at her hopeful expression. “Maybe.”

  “Until y’all find out if that’s so, I was thinking that it’s a shame that he’s lying out there in a pauper’s grave without even a marker to show that he ever lived. I talked to Shaw last night and if you think it would be all right, we’d like to pay to have a stone put on his grave.”

  “I think that Harvey would like that a lot.”

  Alafair’s Recipes

  Cornmeal Mush

  Makes enough for 4-6 servings

  4 cups water

  1 tablespoons salt

  about 1½ cups yellow cornmeal.

  Bring the water to a boil, add salt. Then add cornmeal slowly to boiling water, stirring constantly, until it reaches desired consistency.

  Alafair would not have measured the ingredients. She would have brought a pint or two of water to a boil, added a little salt, then taken a handful of cornmeal in one hand and a wooden spoon in the other and drizzled the cornmeal into the water while stirring constantly.