Little Lost Lambs at the Post

by Harold Lamb

  Then I heard the voice in the open phone booth, “Information? Tell me, is this really Chicago?”

  That was this Johnny Calhoun. Thin and maybe thirty years old, with a twisted grin and a stained suit creased in the wrong places, as if he’d slept in it a lot. He looked as if he’d been hungry as well. He held the receiver to the ear of the boy he called David and the kid laughed. I’d noticed this David at the end of the line-up because he seemed dressed for outdoors not indoors, like the rest of us. He had a lambskin cap atop wide, excited eyes, and a squarish body in an odd sheepskin overcoat with the hide outside. He looked to be well over fifteen, but he turned out to be only twelve years old.

  "Drunk! Both of 'em!” The big man who would miss his conference snapped out the words. He’d taken the stuffed chair by my bench.

  Well, they did act queerly. The boy stared up at the ceiling, that had indirect lighting; he hunted around until he came to a heating vent, and took off his gloves to feel the warm air. Then the man took him to the machines in the corridor, where they fed in dimes to make music and get out chocolate bars and a small carton of milk. Calhoun came back to sit bow-legged on the floor near us, and the boy squatted down to extract milk from the carton—which isn’t easy if you don't know how.

  My knowledgeable companion watched him narrowly, and asked abruptly, "What's your name, boy?"

  The kid looked at him in silence and moved away out of reach.

  “His name's David now," explained the man over his shoulder.

  “Is he dumb?”

  "No, sir. he’s only counting his blessings.”

  That didn't make sense, of course. My companion grunted to me that this must be one of the Hungarian refugees coming over at the expense of American taxpayers. A holdup of a plane can make some passengers sour.

  My neighbor pulled papers impatiently out of a saddle-leather brief case stamped in gold with the name of a law firm. I suppose, being an attorney, he was used to pinning down witnesses to get answers out of them. He said he couldn’t see any blessing whatever in this weather.

  “There’s the light without candles," said Johnny Calhoun softly. “There's the music without a gypsy fiddler, along with warmth and no fire, not to mention milk without a cow."

  Then an odd thing happened. The boy stowed the chocolate bar Calhoun had got for him in a small bag at his belt. It was a skin bag, and in repacking it the kid took out a long leather thong with a leather patch strung on it, and a handful of smooth round stones, bigger than pebbles.

  “Let’s see one. kid," I asked, pointing at them. He didn’t pull away as he’d done with the big lawyer, but handed one over, watching me. Yes, it was a stone, worn smooth by water. And this leather sling of David’s was no rubber-band toy, but an operative weapon capable of knocking out a mountain lion or small bear. I said as much, because it stirred something in my memory, and all at once I knew where I’d read about it. “And he kept his father’s sheep," I added, looking at those queer clothes.

  “His grandfather’s," amended Johnny Calhoun, and laughed. “But how'd you know it, Mac?”

  “I read it in some book of the Bible,” I explained, and told him about it.

  This Calhoun wasn't tight; for some reason he just felt happy, like the foreign boy. Well, during that winter out beyond, we dogfaces used to read everything in hand, the Bible included. One thing struck me about the David of the Bible. I’d always supposed that he was no more than a simple shepherd lad who downed a heavyweight Goliath guy with a lucky hit from his slingshot. But it seems that the real David, who kept his father’s sheep, figured the fight out in advance. Saul or somebody wanted him to go out with body armor, complete with brass hat and shield and sword. That was the equipment Goliath had—the champion of the Philistines. But David took off all his equipment and went to face Goliath with only his sling and sheep staff. Well, then Goliath felt so sure of himself, he swore how he'd feed the boy to the birds—and he never dodged the water-smoothed stone that got him in the head.

  Johnny Calhoun listened carefully, and nodded. “That's how it happened with us."

  The attorney beside me slapped his papers, down on his briefcase and gave his opinion. “You don't expect me to believe that anything like that story of the Bible happened today!"

  Johnny Calhoun looked around the crowded room at all the people sitting, waiting, and at the boy, David, watching us; he moved his thin head to the rhythm of the faint music. "It was a different country from this, mister." he said. “You can judge for yourself.”

  It began to snow that night in the Caucasus Mountains, Johnny told us. So after supper he started packing his kit in the guesthouse room. As a medico and captain in the United States Army, attached to AMAT—American Mission for Aid to Turkey—he had taken the post at Suyun, a mountain town on the eastern frontier, far from the plush hotels of Ankara. Suyun was a Turkish regimental H.Q. high up in the pine forests beneath the red cliffs of the Russian border, and pretty well isolated in the winter freeze. Captain Calhoun was probably the only American within a thousand miles just at that time. In two days he would leave his post to drive his jeep back to Erzurum, division H.Q., where he'd get air transport to the States.

  Most of his Turkish officer friends had told him good-by at the supper in the club. He noticed the snow coming down, and he’d turned up the kerosene stove, when he had a caller. This was a young woman, about the only one he knew in Suyun—Miriam Thavad. the district nurse, for the Red Crescent. A smart young lady with slant gray eyes and a way of keeping her own counsel. Usually, being overworked, she was out of sight in the distant villages. Now she had a going-away present for him, a nice Caucasian knife with a gold inscription on the blade. She said it would bring him comfort if he was ever lonely. “Because sometimes I think you are lonely, doctor.” It was a good knife, old and well used. Johnny thanked Mary—as he called her—and presented her with all his old American magazines, which she’d borrowed from time to time to read. But it turned out that Mary, as district nurse, had something else on her mind. Would (he doctor please make one last visit to a patient who couldn't come to him?

  Now Captain Calhoun had specific technical duties connected with the study of the effects of altitude and cold on soldiers, but the citizens of Suyun believed that a doctor, especially an American, had the know-how to cure all ills of the flesh. Accordingly, and largely by Mary’s persuasion, Johnny had pulled teeth, diagnosed pyemia, and extracted a necklace from a baby.

  "Not this night, Mary," he said hastily. “Not even for your beaux yeux."

  "For my what, please?”

  Mary had learned English the hard way, at school. She used her words carefully.

  “For your lovely gray eyes,” said Johnny and looked into them. “No. Sit you down and thaw out."

  Instead Mary smiled at him. She had her own way of persuading. And this evening she had added a touch to her getup. The edge of an embroidered veil showed against her dark hair, tucked into the upturned karakul collar of her coat. “I know it will not be safe to drive,” she confided. “But you see, it is something special.” Her eyes slanted up at his face. “It is in my home. You do not know my home, but it is comfortable, with a fire. You do not want me to tell them how you would not come.”

  So it happened that against his better judgment Captain Calhoun drove away from his quarters that evening in his jeep, with chains on all wheels and Mary in the seat beside him. and a basket of two pigeons deposited by her in the back. It was odd but true that he had no idea where she lived, yet the prospect of spending the end of the evening alone with the eye-filling young nurse by a heart-warming fire stirred his blood and slightly affected his judgment. This conditioned reflex was not helped when the girl pressed close to him to peer at the gleam of the headlights through the gusts of hard snow and point out the turnings. It did not occur to him that the girl might have counted on this reflex in him.

  He had to concentrate on driving. In this higher Kavkas—as the inhabitants called the Cau
casus Mountains—all roads climbed ridges or dropped into ravines, and the roads were made for cattle, not cars. Before they had gone a dozen miles, Mary was snuggled against him, praising his driving, while Johnny trusted altogether to her direction.

  The road leveled off as they came abreast a lighted shack. A soldier, well muffled, swung a lantern, and a young officer appeared to exchange some words with Mary Thavad. Captain Calhoun failed to catch any Turkish words he knew, but he thought nothing of that. Along this closed frontier area, the industrious Turkish Army maintained guard posts at all intersections and bridges. Then the lieutenant, who seemed to know Mary, saluted Johnny and said, "Shabuk g'et!" That meant to go on. quick.

  The jeep slid across a stone bridge, and Mary exclaimed in his car, “Go quick, now. It is steep, up.”

  Accelerating, Johnny sped up a grade. He was aware of passing a lighted window, and of something else—the flash of an electric torch swinging behind them. A shout cut through the whine of the wind. Johnny wondered briefly if there’d been two controls at the bridge.

  Then he wondered about some other matters. Their road did go up, steep; it didn’t go down any. The snow flurry ceased and white cloud wreathed around him. When it cleared for a moment he saw a stone church with boulders piled against the door and shrubs growing out of cracks in the walls. Johnny had not seen any such church in Turkey, nor had he climbed any such height around Suyun. When he added up those facts, he felt a sharp suspicion. Mary had certainly picked a dark and snowy hour for their ride. “Was that bridge by any chance the frontier control?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  That meant they were climbing a mountain of the Caucasus, within the Georgian Republic of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Johnny reflected that all officers of AMAT had been cautioned to keep away from the Soviet border.

  The girl looked at him quickly and exclaimed, “It is all right. It is all arranged."

  Johnny reflected again that he really knew nothing about her, except that she seemed to be different from the other Turks. “Sure,” he told her, "even to the fast talk about the patient who couldn't come to me.”

  Mary’s head went up. “Every word,” she said carefully, “was true. We have a proverb: do not go ahead of a wise person, and do not follow a fool. How could you come, doctor, if you knew the truth? This is my country. Look!”

  Ahead, in the maw of a canyon, a torch of fire danced. Wind swooped upon the car, and Johnny braked to a stop where the trail ended in steps cut into a face of rock. Down the steps the torch danced in the hands of a boy who seemed to be all shining teeth and eyes.

  Glancing around, Johnny found no sign of a Red Army guard post or anything that looked Russian. “Now, young lady"—he started to have it out with Mary.

  But Mary switched off the headlights, caught up her pigeon basket and slid out of the jeep's canvas. “Follow Arg," she bade him. “His name means eaglet."

  The boy wasn’t named David then. He grabbed up Johnny’s first-aid bag, and ushered him up the steps, keeping the sparks of the pine torch carefully clear of him. They climbed to a stone house set into the canyon slope. On its flat turf roof some sheep milled and blatted. Inside the door, the boy Arg pushed a cow away and led Johnny up a wooden ladder through a trap into glowing warmth on the upper floor. From a chair like a throne by a roaring log fire, an aged giant of a man rose up, his whitehead bending under the roof beams. "Gumarabo!" he shouted.

  His caftan was belted in with silver-decked leather; his lean flesh was hard as ancient wood.

  “lssachar gives you greeting," explained Mary, who was also there. “It means, ‘Be victorious.’”

  “Arg!” breathed Issachar, and the stone walls echoed. The youngster stepped up from the hearth with two horns of mountain sheep. Seizing one, Issachar drank from it and turned it over, empty. Doing as he did, Johnny felt steaming, pungent liquor flow into his vitals.

  "What ——”

  "They call it lion's milk,” said Mary. “Technically, it’s raki, made from our grapes.” She took a tray from a woman at the fire and offered it to Johnny. “You’d better cushion it with barley cakes, and then you’ll have a chaser, as you say."

  Johnny had only bit into a bread cake when Issachar intoned again. This time, Arg came up with full copper bowls, inlaid with turquoise. This drink was cool, and tasted of wine and honey. Two years in Suyun had conditioned Johnny to accept everything offered him as a guest. With the greeting over, the patriarch took notice of Mary, and the girl pulled off her lambskin hat. An embroidered veil hung over her shoulder-length bob, a silver band shone on her forehead. Peering at her, Issachar brushed his mustache over her forehead in approval.

  “He says you have a good heart to come so far in a storm,” explained Mary. “He is sorry indeed his house is so bare, but these are hard times.”

  “What’s bare about this?" demanded Johnny. More pigeons roosted under the roof, and a chained falcon drowsed in the smoke of a corner. On a turning spit, haunches dripped fat into the fire, and the scent of roasting boar mingled with the aura of lion’s milk. Embroidered quilts spread comfortably before the hearth. The ache of windy cold diminished within Johnny, and he slipped off his parka. This party, he thought, was set up for me, but why?

  Issachar seemed to note with approval the service stripes—put on for the farewell shindig at the officers’ club—on Johnny's blouse. “Gumarabo!"

  “Be victorious," said Johnny politely, and they emptied the horns again.

  The boy Arg watched every move from the hearth. Shy as any youngster, he had picked up something that he wanted the visitor to notice. It was an American magazine, and by the picture of a farm on the cover Johnny recognized the magazine as one that he'd lent Mary. He felt more than a faint suspicion that this party had been arranged by the Red Crescent nurse for a purpose undisclosed as yet. These mountain folk might be glad enough to see him, but this girl had not slipped him across the frontier to drink lion's milk.

  "And where’s your patient, Mary?" he asked mildly.

  She pointed at Issachar, and said, “Sh-h—please.”

  Wiping his mustache, Issachar waved his guest to a seat on the hearth quilts, and lowered himself into the lofty chair carved with a design of lions’ heads. Except for his age, he showed no trace of any ailment as he rumbled into speech.

  “He says," explained the girl quickly, “how once the Georgians grazed their horse herds on all these mountains, and their sheep on the valley streams. Now, since the war, times are bad. The Soviet soldiers took Issachar's horses and his rifle-gun. leaving him only his knife.”

  Johnny remembered how pictures of these same Georgians had revealed some fine upstanding women with floating veils, and tough tall hombres all with Bowie-type knives in their belts. He noticed that Issachar had no such knife—and Mary had bestowed a fine old Caucasian blade on Johnny very recently.

  “But Issachar still had four blessings of the Lord,” she went on interpreting the rumble. "Four grandchildren, three boys and one girl. Their father, his son, became killed in the war, and then his son's wife died of a sickness of heart.”

  “The last world war?”

  “Not the German war, doctor. The Germans came only to our Mount Elburz, but at that time the Kuban Cossacks revolted in their regiments, and all the Chechens and many Georgians. Now, please listen. Issachar says how he was not old-fashioned. He wanted all the grandchildren to go to school. You see, he had their fate in his hands. But Georgian boys who went to the Russian school in Tiflis did not come back to the mountains.

  The oldest grandson or Issachar had a head for figures, and ho went off to school out of the mountains in Turkey, and now he does figuring in a bank at Ankara and rides in an automobile. The next, Turgot, swore he would go where someday he might turn his rifle on the Red Army. So in the Turkish infantry he is now an officer."

  A lieutenant," suggested Johnny.

  “How did you know? Yes, and he sent a message that there was an American sc
hool actually for girls in Istanbul."

  “And so you, the granddaughter, Miriam Thavad, went there to study for a nurse's certificate." It may have been the glow from the lion’s milk that made Johnny's mind so clear and outgiving. Glancing up at the roosting pigeons, he nodded. "Messenger pigeons can carry messages across any frontier."

  "But it was not so easy after the priest was taken away, and our church closed. You see Issachar can write very little except only his name. And now he has no rifle, so Arg must do the meat hunting with his—I do not know how you call it.” Mary swung her slim arm over her head and snapped her wrist.

  “Sling-shot.”

  “He uses it also to keep the wolves and other beasts from the sheep, who are few now. He sows and reaps in the barley because no women are here to do it for Issachar. You see Arg is very much the youngest of us.”

  All the others were quiet, watching Johnny expectantly. More heads of Georgians, men and women, appeared in the floor door. Johnny thought that the cow, secure on the ground floor, provided the milk, while the roasting meat must be from wild boar and venison. And he was aware of something more. The custom of the Caucasus country. Hereabouts a man gave back a blow for a blow and a gift for a gift. For this evening banquet, the Georgians would expect something from him But what?

  Mary seemed to track his thoughts. “Arg knows that now American soldiers are in Turkey," she explained without her usual assurance. "Issachar says that the Americans won the war in Europe even without cavalry, and if they did that, their schools must be best of all for boys. He wants Arg to go to an American school."