“I’ve ‘liberated’ us some kegs of beer,” one of the sergeants announced, saying no one was to drink too much. The tankers and Walker’s men were enjoying it on the playing field of the village school. A football turned up and a game started, the players tackling each other happily before taking themselves out for more drink. Ty’s men were trying to get something going against the tankers, who were fast and flamboyant, pleased with the beer and the smell of food cooking.
Ty drank some beer as he watched the game. He saw no one was bothering to keep score and soon found himself in it, enjoying it just the way he had back in Missoula. He scored one touchdown, catching a pass thrown across the field and surprising them with his speed. They got the ball again, Ty running with a short pass when he ran into something so solid he thought he’d hit a boulder in the South Fork.
A tanker helped him up. “That was Otis Johnson.”The man watched Ty try to clear his head. “He’s regular army. Shouldn’t fuck with that man.”
Otis Johnson brought two canteen cups of beer over to where Ty was sitting. He gave one to Ty and they drank together. Ty was afraid all his men were a little drunk. He thought he might be too. But he knew he felt safe here, safer than he’d felt since Le Havre—and more relaxed.
Otis Johnson didn’t seem drunk at all.
“Hit you a little hard.” He looked at Ty somberly. “Didn’t want my men lettin’ you run around so quick. I make it a point for them to be quicker.”
“Gave me a thunk.” Ty was enjoying his drink. “Haven’t been hit like that since the hay bales landed on me.” He took a long swallow of beer. “It was fun playing again.” He laughed a little. “You reminded me you don’t always get to run where you want.”
Otis Johnson broke into a smile. “I try to teach my son that.” He shook his head. “But I don’t think he learns so good.”
Jeb Walker’s jeep pulled up and the colonel got out, looking around at the soldiers gathered in groups as they drank the beer, the football game diminished now to a few men throwing the ball around.
The sergeant who had found the kegs stepped up, saluting smartly.
“We uncovered rations in the town brewery,” he said, his arm snapping back to his side. Ty enjoyed how serious they were when reporting to the colonel. “It was provide some here or risk getting it requisitioned, sir.”
Jeb Walker returned the salute. “See you solved that problem.” He looked at the men, who were smoking, laughing as they drank and waited for the big dinner. He looked back at the sergeant, his face showing nothing.
“Just take it slow,” he said finally. “Don’t want them too sentimental.”
He turned and saw Otis Johnson, who had left Ty and was saluting the colonel himself.
“Is there anything the colonel needs?” Otis Johnson’s voice was so soft Ty could barely hear him.
“Otis Johnson!” Ty had never seen the colonel so pleased. “Sergeant Otis Johnson.” He was shaking Johnson’s hand now, smiling, Otis Johnson smiling too.
“Hardin,” the colonel said. “This man is the best horse soldier in the United States Cavalry.” He turned back, looking at Otis Johnson. “Hardin knows horses. Mules too. Might know more about mules than you.”
“It’s tanks now, Colonel,” Otis Johnson said. “Tanks at Riley.”
“Yes. And it’s infantry for Hardin. But what you two know best is shod and has four feet. Never forget that.”
Four days later Ty saw Johnson again. He was giving his rations to the half-dead skeletons reaching out to him at Gunskirchen Lager. Ty’s men had moved in on the camp fast, trying to feed and clothe what was left of the stick-figures who clutched at them. But Johnson’s tank was there first, Johnson speaking to them, telling them things were all right now, his voice gentle, his eyes unbelieving. The smell of the camp was everywhere—human waste and rot and death lifting from the ground, the buildings. Ty covered his nose and mouth with a hand and watched Johnson surrender himself to the clutching forms—his face tortured, baffled.
Two days later there was Johnson again. Ty’s men—the smell of Gunskirchen Lager still with them—were calling in their own artillery to disable a lone German tank fleeing the Russians and panicked into firing as Ty’s men blocked its retreat. But it was to the Americans the Germans wanted to surrender. Ty knew it, understood it. He was moving to call off the strike even as the round came in. He saw the German’s head poke up from the hatch, arms raised, saw him disappear in the blast as Johnson’s tanks rumbled in to capture what was left. Only then did Ty realize he was no longer standing, no longer could stand, the wet soaking his pants and running into his boot was his own blood—realize that he was not hurt so much as sick, sweating, and cold all at once.
And then Johnson was there, tightening a tourniquet across his thigh, swearing in a singsong, soothing voice as he pulled Ty free from the rubble around him. Johnson twisted the tourniquet still tighter, pressing on the ooze below it, pulling something away. Ty felt nothing, just the suck and the release of something coming free.
“Ours.” Johnson had it in his hand, the soft swearing stopping as he studied it, wiped away the blood. “I thought so.”
They took Ty to the field hospital, where they probed for more and sewed him up, the stitches neat and even. They gave him morphine and told him to sleep. That he would be all right.
When he woke a Red Cross volunteer was there. They’d brought his pack in and she’d found Alice Wright’s music box. He’d carried it all the way across Europe, keeping Fenton’s razor in it, using it when he had a chance.
“Shall I give a shave?” The woman held the box, her face kindly. She looked solid and permanent in the blocky British uniform. “ Yo u’re a lucky one, y’know.You’ll be on your way home now.”
She opened the drawer for the razor. The tinkle of “Red River Valley” lifted and Ty found himself crying. He looked away, tried to stop it.
“There, there.You’ll soon be home.” Her voice seemed to bring more tears. She lathered and shaved him while he fought for control, talking to him cheerfully as he wept.
Ty couldn’t even thank her. He wasn’t sure what had started it. But he knew talking might start it all over again.
That afternoon Otis Johnson came in.
“Didn’t mean to treat you so rough when you got hit.” He stood at the foot of Ty’s cot. “Best to do things quick when you get a hurt like that.”
“That’s what Fenton claimed.” Ty was disoriented from the morphine. They’d given him a big shot after the Red Cross woman left.
Otis Johnson looked puzzled.
“Fenton Pardee.” Ty tried to clear things up, saw Johnson was confused but didn’t know how to explain.
“What did you say your son’s name was?” Ty wanted to get back to something simple, to talk about anything but the wound.
“I didn’t. But it’s Walker. Walker Johnson. We named him after the colonel.”
23
Healing
There was no way Ty could foresee the bond the war would would fashion for the three of them, though there was a hint of it in the letter Walker had waiting for him at the Fort Collins hospital. It was written in Walker’s careful hand, attached to the commendations his staff had submitted for the medals.
We should offer you something more tangible than medals, Hardin. But they will have to do. The truth is that men like you and Johnson are the ones who won this war. It was a war we had to win.
I am sorry about the wound, but I am thankful it was Johnson who brought you in. He knows how to care for men as well as horses. He is the best soldier I know. You are one of the best too, even though you hated doing what you had to do.
It was necessary. Never forget that the wound you’ll live with was suffered for the right cause.You were there because the world needed you. It gives thanks.
The colonel went on to say that if the urge to sleep on the ground ever came upon him again, he intended to have Ty take him into his mountains. “I want to see if
you handle mules in high country as well as you handled them in California mud,” he wrote.
He signed the letter “With admiration.” Ty slid it into the music box under the razor case, thinking he should write back. For a few days he even considered what to say. Though he never wrote that letter, it was weeks before he was free of what the colonel had written him. There was plenty of time to consider it as they put him through his rehabilitation, the nurses making him walk morning and afternoon, massaging his wound until the feeling began to come back, lifting his leg until he could lift it himself, easing him into the shiny whirlpool baths, the jets coming in above the wound, below it, the water hotter and hotter.
The cause may have been right, he would think, but wars end badly for anyone touched by them. He thought of the wounded he had patched, the dead he had waited with until the corpsmen came. He thought of the German tanker too, blown apart as he surrendered. And most often he thought of the starving wretches at Gunskirchen Lager.
He couldn’t get them out of his mind, even when the throbbing and itching would call back his own wound, making him worry about dragging a game leg behind him as he went out for his horses. He thought about the pack station every day—and about the mountains. When he couldn’t sleep he would let his imagination take him along a trail he knew, consider each camp: where to stack the saddles, put the kitchen tent, find wood and water, feed for his horses and places to sleep for his people.
And after awhile sleep would come, dulling the ache of his wound, sinking him beneath his pain. His dreams were mostly of the mountains, his biggest fears not finding his horses or being stopped by deadfall on the trail or by snow on a pass. But those things didn’t seem much of a worry now, not after what he’d just left. He didn’t like his dreams about that: Confusion and smoke. The rumble of the big guns. Explosions ripping open the night. Bone-thin arms reaching out to him.
He was in the hospital for almost three months. Cody Jo came to see him halfway through his stay, driving almost nonstop all the way from Missoula. He was walking by then, needing a cane but putting more and more weight on the leg each day.
“ Yo u’re so thin,” she said, as he limped into the sunroom. She hugged him, held him for a long time, looked at him again. “And you’re older.” She touched his face. “It’s in your eyes.”
“You look the same.” Ty saw she was thinner too, her hair shorter, the laugh-lines around her eyes deeper. But she was the same Cody Jo, laughing, asking him questions and half-answering them herself, making him feel important and entertaining all at once.
She arranged with the nurses to take him out for dinner, and they went to a roadhouse outside of town. It was there that she told him Spec had been wounded too, hit by a sniper’s bullet on Okinawa.
“We think he’ll be all right,” she said. “One of those marine officers called Tommy from Washington. Told him Spec had done something very brave. That Tommy should know what a good marine Spec was.” She made a face. “As though Tommy needed to know Spec would do something ‘brave.’ That was his problem every time he got to town.”
She got up and put some money in the jukebox.
“I hope that wasn’t your problem, Ty,” she said, sitting down again.
“I hope you didn’t try to do something brave.”
“I didn’t. Truth is I hardly remember what I did do.”
“Supposin’” was playing. Cody Jo drummed her fingers on the table
with the music, as though she were dancing as she sat there. “I can’t wait until you get well enough to dance.” She put her hand
in her lap. “These songs bring back so many things.”
Their food came and they talked and she told Ty about Fenton, that
he didn’t seem to have the energy he used to have, that he’d had to get
Buck and Bump to come over and do the shoeing that spring. “He’ll raise hell if those shoes come off.” Ty couldn’t imagine Fenton
as anything but the big unpredictable presence he’d always been. They laughed about that, and then they heard “Daybreak” playing.
Cody Jo got him on his feet and coaxed him into moving along with
the music. They stayed pretty much where they were as they danced,
the other couples giving them room. After awhile Ty leaned his cane
against the table and kept moving to the music, using his wounded leg
for balance.
It came back to him what a marvelous dancer Cody Jo was the
moment he put down the cane. They hardly had to move their feet,
but the music was in both of them. They swayed and hesitated and
swayed again as though the music came from some hidden place only
they shared.
“You haven’t lost it,” she said when they finished. “That rhythm.”
She watched him, then smiled. “That’s why those nurses told me to get
you well. I bet they want to take you dancing!”
The next night she drove him to the big hotel in Colorado Springs to
hear the dance band. They were playing on a terrace, tables arranged
around a dance floor. The musicians were wonderful. It was easy to tell
how much they liked the swing tunes they played. It wasn’t long before
Cody Jo was making friends with them, asking them to play her
favorites, his favorites too: “Green Eyes” and “Frenesi,”“Have Mercy”
and “Perfidia.”
They played all the songs that had kept Ty’s men going too. Every
time they’d found a radio they’d gathered to listen, memorizing every
word, each intonation. It was hard to believe that he was hearing those
songs now, played by a live band while they ate elegant food, used
napkins and had wine. Knew they were safe in the soft summer night. Cody Jo coaxed him into dancing to each slow number they played.
Before long he was moving much more easily than he had the night
before. They even stayed on the dance floor for some of the faster
songs, Ty shuffling in place as Cody Jo moved around him, came into
his arms and swung out again—as though they’d danced that way
forever.
They stayed on the terrace long into the night, dancing, drinking
more after their dinner. Some of the musicians joined them between
sets, talking about how much they liked watching Cody Jo dance, even
asking if Ty wanted to sit in at their drums. Ty refused, embarrassed to
realize they were serious and drinking more than he should. He was
surprised when they played “The Sunny Side of the Street,” saying it
was their last number. It seemed the wrong song to end with, but he
loved dancing to it, the musicians smiling, Cody Jo and he the only
dancers left on the broad terrace. The song was almost over before he
realized his leg hardly bothered him at all.
Cody Jo gave him the car keys. “I might take a nap,” she said,
tipping a little. “I don’t think I danced that last brandy away.” Ty was pleased he was able to work the clutch and startled by how
quickly Fenton’s Buick picked up speed. He hadn’t driven a real car in a
long time, and he slowed to make sure he had control....He hadn’t
danced away his last brandy either.
He wished they were headed back for the pack station now. Dancing
with Cody Jo had brought so much back to him that he felt a little
dizzy. She tilted against him and he shifted around to make her
comfortable. They drove that way back to the hospital, Ty thinking
about when he’d met Cody Jo and Fenton, recalling his first day:
Fenton setting Bob Ring’s leg, Ty leading Ring out across snow while
Ring drank and sang hymns, going back that same day to ride all the
of the country he would call home.
Fenton had fixed Ring’s leg, he thought, and Cody Jo had fixed
his—made him dance so he’d know he could walk. He understood why
she’d made them stay late. It didn’t bother him. He wished she’d worry
that much about him after his leg got better. Besides being in the mountains, he couldn’t think of anything he’d rather do than dance
with Cody Jo.
The nurses had cleared their late return and the M.P.s waved them
through with no questions. Cody Jo didn’t wake up until he slowed the
car, stopping in front of his ward.
“Home again, home again.” She lifted her head. “Jiggedy jog.” “I don’t call it home. But it’s sure improved since you arrived.” “ Yo u’ve been drinking.” She smiled at him. “I like that.” “Can you drive?” He lifted his leg with his hands to clear the door.
“The nurses could find you a bed here.”
“I can now.” She slid under the wheel. “After resting up from the
dancing.” She ran a hand through her short hair. “You improved. Bet it
didn’t hurt your old leg at all.”
“Your dancing fixed it.” He looked at her through the window. “You fixed it.” She kissed her fingers and held them to his cheek.
“People who dance like you just self-repair.”
She looked at him with only the hint of a smile. Then she was gone,
the car not even swerving as she headed for the gate.
Ty didn’t see her again for six weeks, not until Horace drove him out to the pack station in his pickup, though he got two letters from her. The first thanking him for their night of dancing.
The second telling him Spec was dead.
24
Indian Signs
“Like one of them Indian signs of Tommy’s. Finds its own way to come true.” Horace was driving carefully, worried about how thin Ty looked. “Special Hands was all patched and on that hospital ship home when the plane mashed itself right into them. Killed Spec and three others.” He turned to Ty, unbelieving. “Barely hurt that ship.”
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