Homeland

by John Jakes

  Next morning, the third of May, Shadow and Mary saw them off at the depot. Honey Fail came with Jimmy, which helped curb his anger, as did the new straw hat Mary had given him. He recognized that it wasn’t as fine and expensive as that of the chief operator, but he seemed mollified by someone showing him even the slightest generosity.

  Paul looked smart in a belted jacket and his new hat. On his shoulder he carried a canvas bag, homemade, containing a spare lens and a magazine of Eastman raw stock. Shadow didn’t like to trust expensive film to overheated baggage cars, though he had to take the risk with additional magazines that were being shipped to Florida from Rochester. Shadow had advised his helpers that he’d booked the smallest available rooms at the Tampa Bay Hotel, headquarters for the American expeditionary force.

  The colonel shot his linen cuffs and gripped Paul’s arm. He had to speak loudly because of the depot din. “Dutch, I’m counting on you and Jim to bring back tremendous pictures.”

  “Just don’t get in the way of those Mauser bullets,” Mary cried. “I read they buzz like bees.” Clinging to Jimmy’s arm, Honey Fail uttered a little squeal of fear. Jimmy patted her hand, looking wan.

  Shadow turned away to greet an Inter-Ocean reporter he’d wheedled into covering the departure of the only Chicago picture makers going to the war zone. Shadow looked very much the captain of a great enterprise in his tawny frock coat, tooled boots, and sombrero. Jimmy and Honey put their foreheads together, whispering and touching. Two older men, companionably drunk, wandered by singing, “Dewey, Dewey, Dewey, he’s the hero of the day. And the Maine has been remembered in the good old-fashioned way …” Mary took advantage of the distractions and flung her arms around Paul’s neck. She sweetened her farewell kiss by sticking her tongue in his mouth.

  The train conductor shouted his all-aboard. “Well, here we go,” Jimmy said.

  Honey hugged him. Excitement pitched her voice higher than ever. “Oh, you’re so brave. Go down there and thrash those dirty greasers.”

  “No, no, they’re only supposed to film them,” Shadow exclaimed. “I want pictures, not a couple of corpses.” Jimmy looked sick.

  The Atlanta-bound train departed a minute later. Jimmy was already inside the second-class car. Shadow ran alongside the steps of the vestibule and shouted at Paul in the billowing steam.

  “You’re carrying the expense money. For God’s sake don’t squander it, but don’t stint on the telegraph, either. I want regular reports.”

  “Right, Colonel.”

  The train gathered speed. Shadow ran faster. “I trust you, Dutch. You’re in charge. Keep your eye on Jim, keep him in line. Keep your head, bring back the goods, one day you might be my partner—”

  He stopped as the train rushed on. He raised his right hand high. Paul barely heard him cry one last word.

  “Luck.”

  Paul settled next to Jimmy on a thinly padded seat. Jimmy untied his four-in-hand, a concession to Honey’s presence, and stuffed it in his pocket.

  A vendor came through with a tray of fruit, packets of nuts, dime novels, and playing cards. Jimmy bought a Nick Carter and an apple. He attacked the apple with savage, crunching bites.

  Paul laid the canvas bag at his feet and pulled a Daily News out of his side pocket. A local politician had addressed a war rally at the Auditorium. With this noble crusade to expand our influence and extend the blessings of liberty to our suffering Latin brothers, America comes of age, and truly enters the world for the first time …

  I could say the same, Paul thought, buoyed up by the morning’s excitement, the noise and motion of the train, the mixture of anticipation and dread of the unknown awaiting them in Florida, and beyond.

  They slept, or tried to sleep, sitting up. They left the train for quick snacks in shabby station lunchrooms, sometimes bringing tin cans of strong black coffee back aboard. Jimmy complained endlessly.

  The train hurtled down through the midlands, imperiously clanging and wailing to announce its coming, streaming smoke as it passed. They crossed over the mighty Roebling suspension bridge spanning the Ohio at Cincinnati, where Uncle Joe had lived when he came to America. On white-fenced horse farms in Kentucky, blooded mares and stallions raced beside the train, outrunning it before galloping off again to sunlit pastures. Then came Tennessee; limestone cliffs, lacy waterfalls glimpsed in dark grottoes, timbered mountains seen from steep grades and occasional single-track switchbacks. As they chugged through the southern part of the state, Jimmy asked a peculiar question:

  “You think we’re gonna make any money on this trip?”

  “It isn’t an expedition to make money. Well, perhaps for American National Luxograph it is, but not for us. Unless you count our pay.”

  “Count it? Most of the time I can hardly find it. Down in Florida I aim to pluck up some extra. Fellow on the Levee said there’d be plenty of hicks in an army camp. Fair game.”

  Jimmy leaned back and crossed his arms. “And fair warning to you, Mr. Chief Operator. Once in a while I may not be around when you need me.”

  “Look here, we have an assignment to—”

  “Ah, dry up with that crap. I’ll do my job. But I’ll take care of a few others on the side. You keep quiet about that.” He punched Paul’s shoulder, feigning friendliness. “Be a pal.”

  Disgruntled, Paul looked out the window.

  “Jesus, you Dutchmen are pious bastards.” Jimmy pulled his straw hat over his eyes and stretched out to sleep.

  In the early dawn Paul woke up suddenly when the train stopped with a jerk. He’d been dozing with his head against the glass, and the window raised a couple of inches. Outside he smelled a cool fresh morning. He heard crickets and frogs. He saw a small depot.

  Then he heard shuffling feet, voices shouting orders. A lantern hanging above a signboard showed the name of the stop. CHICKAMAUGA STATION.

  Soldiers from Camp Chickamauga piled aboard the train; young recruits in tall khaki hats, blue cravenette blouses, red bandannas tied around their necks. They wore clean leggings and carried clean white blanket rolls. About twenty of them came into Paul’s car and found seats among the half dozen civilian passengers. A runty sergeant with a leather patch over his left eye was in charge. He settled his men, then took a seat by himself. He was asleep when the train pulled out.

  Morning brought them to Atlanta. Bright sun shafts speared down between the roofed platforms. Paul yawned and scratched at the stubble on his cheek while taking note of swags of red, white, and blue bunting wrapped around the wrought iron roof pillars.

  He heard music. A brass band playing “A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.” A small crowd had come down to see the troop train pass through. An idea clicked in his head. In the vestibule, he cornered the conductor.

  “How long is this stop?”

  “Forty-five minutes.”

  In the coach he shook Jimmy to wake him. “We’re going to shoot here. Wait for me.”

  He ran back to the sleepy sergeant, who listened to him and immediately said no. But Paul insisted.

  “You must accommodate us, we’re the American National Luxograph Company. Surely you’ve heard of the biggest name in the moving pictures?” The sergeant didn’t dare say he hadn’t. “This is for the war effort. Hundreds of thousands will see you and your men on theater screens. You will all be proud.”

  Twenty minutes later, Paul and Jimmy created a sensation by setting up their camera on the platform. They filmed the recruits marching past, then reset the camera to photograph them boarding the cars. Paul wasn’t sure he had enough light in the platform area, but if the pictures came out, they would be marvelous.

  Jimmy said he’d rather be sleeping.

  In a switchyard near the depot, the coaches were transferred to a locomotive of Florida’s Plant System. Soon surprising new landscapes were flowing past the window. Great oaks bearded with Spanish moss, fields, and raw hillsides of rust-red dirt. Ragged farmers paused behind their plow mules, tiredly staring at the soldi
ers who waved from the train.

  One young recruit took out a mouth organ and began to play “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” The music made Paul forget how long and tiring this journey was. It buoyed his spirits.

  This will be a fine experience. I’ll learn a great deal, and when I’m safely back in Chicago, then I’ll worry about what comes next. But not before.

  Lord, how he wished that future could involve Julie. Well, nothing to be done there, she was lost to him. He could move on. Probably he should. As always, the Germans had a proverb for the situation. Andere Städtchen, Andere Mädchen.

  Other towns have other girls.

  The train chugged on, scribing the sky with sooty smoke. The soldiers complained about the rifles they would be issued. Old Springfield carbines that used conventional black powder. The standard rifle of the Spaniards, a German-made Mauser, was designed for the new smokeless powder.

  “Hell, that’s a death sentence,” one soldier said. “If a sniper don’t show smoke from his muzzle, how do you know where he’s at? He can get you ’fore you can say jack robinson.”

  At a country depot in Georgia, eight young girls jumped out of buggies and farm wagons and swarmed into the train, begging for souvenirs—brass buttons, rifle cartridges. Many of the young soldiers obliged.

  Into Florida, the hamlets became fewer, poorer. Shanties of scrap lumber built right beside the tracks housed whole families of Negroes who stared at the train with dark and melancholy eyes. Longhorn cattle grazed on weedy land in pitiless sunshine. Paul had long ago rolled up his jacket and thrown it on the wooden rack above the seat. He stank from a lack of washing. The whole car stank. His skin was slick from humidity. Wiping it with a soggy handkerchief did no good; he felt slimy again right away.

  The sergeant with the eye patch had commandeered a double seat at the front end of the car. With the conductor’s help he’d found a piece of wood for a card table. Playing poker, he began to relieve his young men of pocket money.

  The mouth organ started up again. A soldier with a strong baritone voice began to sing in a maudlin, mocking way.

  “Just before the battle, Mother,

  I am thinking most of you …”

  A Chicago song, Paul remembered. Fritzi played it on the piano on one of those happy evenings soon after he arrived, when he sat contentedly by the fireplace, the melody drifting in from the music room. Uncle Joe said a Chicago man had written the song at the time of the Civil War, when Uncle Joe rode a cavalry charger, and thousands of boys as young as these boys in blue, as young as himself, perished.

  Others joined the singer, all of them loud but not mocking the sentiment as the first man had.

  “While upon the field we’re watching,

  With the enemy in view.”

  Scowling, Jimmy pulled off his straw hat and fanned himself.

  “Comrades brave are ’round me lying,

  Filled with thoughts of home and God,

  For well they know that on the morrow,

  Some will sleep beneath the sod.”

  Jimmy jumped up, leaned over the back of his seat. “Shut the hell up. Let’s have some quiet!”

  Paul said, “Jimmy, sit down.”

  The soldiers broke off. A couple of them stood. Jimmy whacked his straw hat against the seat cushion. “I’m trying to get forty winks, I don’t want to listen to a lot of shit about death.”

  “Sir, your language,” said a commercial traveler across the aisle.

  The one-eyed sergeant rushed back from his seat and braced Jimmy. “Mister, these brave boys are goin’ to war, they’ve got a right to holler. I can’t say you’ve got the same right, I don’t see any sojer suit on you.”

  “Fuck you, runt.”

  The sergeant whipped his fist up. Paul flung himself past Jimmy and spread his arms, a barrier between them. “It’s hot in here, everyone is tired, we don’t want trouble.”

  All the soldiers were on their feet, ready to fight. Jimmy turned pale as the foolishness of his challenge sank in. The sergeant swiped his mouth with his hand. To Paul he said, “Awright, but he better keep still.” He thrust his chin in Jimmy’s face. “Hear that? Keep still, or you’re liable to leave the train real sudden. Ass first out one of them windows.”

  Off he went, shooing his men to their seats and clucking like a fretful mother. The few civilian passengers looked scornfully at Paul and Jimmy. Paul felt hot with shame. “My turn to sit by the window,” Jimmy growled. Paul didn’t argue.

  Late at night, with the oil lamps trimmed low, Jimmy snoring lightly, the coach quiet save for the repetitive clicking of the trucks on the rails, something compelled Paul to dig into a pocket of his coat for one of the cheaply printed business cards. By tilting it toward the swaying lamp at the front, he could read it.

  PAUL (“DUTCH”) CROWN

  —Chief Operator—

  So once again he was a new man. Once again he was reborn.

  And once again he was hurtling into a darkness whose boundaries, whose heart, whose secret traps, he couldn’t see or even imagine. Once again there were wonderment and eagerness, a sense of inevitability, and more than a trace of dread. The Americans had an expression for going to war, facing its dangers. They said you were going to see the elephant.

  He slept fitfully on the bumping, jerking train. He kept the card, the proof of this newest sea change in his life, protectively curled inside his palm. Once or twice when he awoke, he drowsily recalled who he was, and where, and marveled.

  Dutch Crown.

  Age twenty; twenty-one next month.

  Going to see the elephant …

  87

  Ilsa

  ON THE NIGHT BEFORE JOE went to war, Ilsa ironed his underwear.

  She worked in a room high in the house, under the eaves; a room set aside solely for ironing. Normally two laundresses who had been with the family for years came in every Saturday to do the week’s work. This batch Ilsa felt compelled to do herself. As if the act could imbue the garments with some protective magic.

  That very afternoon she’d rushed to Elstree’s to buy the underwear. Seven suits, each with shirt and ankle-length drawers. The underwear was made of summer balbriggan, dyed gray and vented all over with small drop-stitch openings. Although it was expensive, the clerk assured her it was the finest, and coolest, gentlemen’s underwear available. He pointed out the ribbed cuffs of the shirt and drawers, the fancy collarette neck, and the small pearl buttons.

  Ilsa feared for her husband in the dews and damps of the tropics, and she felt partly responsible for driving him there. She would do anything to protect him, to bring him back safe and whole.

  The granite facade of Elstree’s was decorated with patriotic bunting, as were most of the businesses along State Street. From a five-and-dime came the music of a piano. Sousa’s “El Capitán.” She peered through the window and saw a man in suit and vest hammering the keyboard on a dais at the front of the store. A dozen adults and several children stood around the dais, clapping and marching in place. Much of Chicago, and the nation, was infused with a patriotic fervor, as if the war would be a great lark. Joe acted that way, fairly skipping around the house, humming and singing to himself.

  But not every American cheered the pronouncements from Washington, the recruiting leaflets and posters, the bands and parades—in one of which Joe had marched with his G.A.R. unit. Pro-war feeling was strong in the Middle and Far West, less strong in the East. There, a few professors, artists, writers, editorialists, were beginning to speak against the jingoes, in and out of the administration.

  Ilsa knew of this opposition because Joe had received a long letter about it from Carl Schurz. Joe’s friend was vehemently against military adventurism in Cuba, or anywhere else. He was trying to organize formal resistance of some kind. Which disgusted Joe. He had a large file box of Carl’s letters he’d saved over the years. This latest one he threw away.

  Ilsa’s friend Miss Addams was deeply concerned about the war. She’d dis
cussed it at Hull House last week, during one of her informal teas with Ilsa and like-minded women who supported the settlement house.

  In 1896, Miss Addams had reminded her friends, she’d taken another of her spiritual pilgrimages, this time to an estate called Yasnaya Polyana, located some hundred miles outside Moscow. Here lived the celebrated literary genius Count Leo Tolstoy, who had abandoned the world’s luxuries and amenities to don peasant garb every morning, work in his own fields all day, and, through this spartan program, strengthen and expand his Christian vision of a better world.

  “Count Tolstoy absolutely believes the state, any state, to be anti-Christian,” Jane Addams said. “Therefore the true practitioner of Christianity must reject the state and all its policies. Follow the count’s doctrine to the limit, and you must inevitably conclude the Spanish war is immoral.”

  She shook her head gloomily. “The count’s a saintly man, few would question that. Still, saints can be too high-minded for the day-to-day realities. Fine principles and preachments sometimes aren’t enough when evil winds are blowing. In this very neighborhood, the jingo talk is doing something bad to the children. They used to play simple games. Now they play war. They don’t ‘free Cubans,’ they ‘kill Spaniards.’ The count could lecture on a soapbox down in the street and they wouldn’t stop. And their parents wouldn’t stop buying all that bunting—all those little flags. War can have a beautiful, seductive face. People revel in the passions it permits. One can understand it easily enough. It’s the predatory spirit in all our natures. It lies so near the surface, ready to burst forth, spread its destruction—”

  She stopped. The women were glancing uneasily at one another. Ilsa said, “My husband’s friend Carl Schurz writes of wanting to organize a formal opposition. If such a group was created, I don’t believe I could join it, for personal reasons. Could you join?”

  Miss Addams seemed smaller all at once. “I don’t know. My reputation as a radical is bad enough already. And the work of Hull House must go on. My becoming a member of Mr. Schurz’s group might create so much new enmity, hostility, that our income here, the contributions that support us, could be reduced to nothing. So I don’t know,” she repeated in a bleak way. “I tend to think that, like you, I would hold back.”