Out of Your Pay

It was a Sunday, and it was cold, and I was mending a halter at the kitchen table, which my mother does not allow, because the barn was colder.

We had been to church in the morning and had our dinner at one, and after dinner my father went to sleep in his chair by the stove with the Sunday paper over his chest, the way he did every Sunday of my life until I went away. My mother was writing to her sister in Worcester. My sister Clara, who was thirteen, was doing her arithmetic at the other end of the table from me and sighing over it, and every so often she looked at the halter and then at my mother.

“He’s brought the vice in,” she said.

“I can see what he’s brought in,” my mother said, and went on writing.

“It’s colder in the barn,” I said.

“I said I can see.”

That was the end of it. It was Sunday, and the barn was colder, which was true.

The radio was on the shelf by the window, turned low. On Sunday afternoons there was a concert from New York, and my mother liked to have it on while she wrote, though she said she was not listening to it. I was not listening either. I was trying to get a rivet through a strap that had been riveted three times already and did not want a fourth.

The clock over the stove said twenty-five minutes past two. I looked at it because the music stopped in the middle, not at the end of anything, and I thought something had gone wrong with the set. Then a man’s voice said that the programme was being interrupted for a bulletin, and that Japanese aircraft had attacked the fleet and the bases at Honolulu, in the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, that morning, and that further news would be given as it was received. Then he said it again, the same words, as though he had them written down. Then the music came back. It was the same piece, from about where it had stopped.

My mother put her pen down.

“Where’s Honolulu?” Clara said.

“In the Pacific.”

“I know it’s in the Pacific. Where in the Pacific?”

It was ours, in the way that the King is ours: a kingdom with a crown of its own and a treaty with us. We had done the treaty at school, and I could not have told you one word of what was in it. Clara went and got the atlas out of the parlour and opened it on the table beside the vice, and the three of us looked: a little group of dots in the middle of a great deal of blue, a long way from anything.

“Where’s Japan?” my mother said.

I found it and walked my finger across the blue to the dots. It took a long time. I had thought of everything in the Pacific as being near everything else, and it was not near at all.

“Somebody came a long way to do that,” I said.

Nobody answered. Clara kept her finger on the dots, as if they might go somewhere.

My father woke when the music came back. It was the music coming back that did it, and not the bulletin, because he did not know there had been one.

“What’s the matter with you all?” he said.

My mother told him. He sat up and folded the paper and put it on the floor, and sat with his hands on his knees and listened to the concert as though it was going to tell him something, and after a while it did. They interrupted it again at a quarter to three, and then again, and then they gave up on the concert altogether and it was all news, the same news over and over with a little more in it each time. Battleships. The aerodromes. The harbour, which had a name I had never heard, and have heard so often since that I cannot remember not knowing it.

We sat in the kitchen until it got dark. Nobody turned the light on for a while. Then my mother did, and looked at the clock.

“The cows,” she said.

My father and I got up and went out to milk.

---

We had nineteen milkers that winter and some young stock, and the orchard, and hay, and whatever we could sell in Boston out of the garden in the summer, which was a good deal in a good year. The farm is on the Bedford side of the town. It has been in the family since a Wheeler bought fifteen acres of it on credit after the old war, and it has got bigger and smaller since, as farms do. It was bigger then than it had ever been, and my father had borrowed to make it so, and he and I worked it with a man from the town who came in for the haying and the apples and the rest of the time did not.

I had left school in the June of 1940. The teacher told my father I could go on, and my father asked me, and I said I would rather be on the farm, which was true. I could get a stuck wagon out of a ditch. I could tell you what a field would cut before we cut it, give or take a few hundredweight. I could do the farm accounts in my head while my father was still looking for the pencil, and I had done them for him since I was sixteen, because he hated them. I was eighteen. I had been to Boston perhaps a dozen times, to the market with my father and twice to the circus, and once to the sea at Revere Beach with the Sunday school. I had never been in a boat bigger than a rowboat. I had never been out of Middlesex for a night.

That night I milked with my head against the side of a cow called Bathsheba, and my father milked two stalls down, and for a long time there was only the milk going into the pails.

“They’ll want men,” he said.

“I expect they will.”

Bathsheba shifted her feet. I waited until she was still.

“What was it like?” I said. “Belgium.”

“It rained.”

He had gone to Belgium in 1917 with the Expeditionary Force, when he was twenty-seven, and come back in 1919, and that was the one thing I had ever heard him say about it. He said it to anybody who asked, and people stopped asking. I stopped asking too. My mother knew more. I never asked her what it was, and I have not asked her since I came home.

---

On the Monday the Prime Minister spoke in the Commons at noon, and they carried it on the radio.

I heard it at Hartwell’s, the grain store, where I had gone in with the truck for a ton of middlings that could have waited till Wednesday. There were perhaps a dozen men in the store, farmers and the men who worked there and two or three from the town, and Mr Hartwell had his radio on the counter between the scales and the till, turned up as loud as it would go, and nobody bought anything for half an hour.

Roosevelt did not sound angry. Everybody in the store had been angry since the afternoon before. He sounded tired, and very definite. He said what had happened, and he said what he was asking Parliament to do, and he did not say anything about how it would turn out. When the Commons cheered, the sound came through Mr Hartwell’s set like rain on a tin roof.

An old man by the stove, Fiske, who must have been eighty, said, “Well, that’s that,” and spat into the coal scuttle.

“Not in the scuttle, Fiske,” Mr Hartwell said.

Then everybody talked at once.

“We should have been in it two years ago. With the Germans.”

“We’d no business being in it at all.”

“Well, we’re in it now. It comes to the same thing.”

“The Japanese never did that on their own. The French put them up to it.”

That was not true, or not the whole of it, but a lot of people said it that week.

“Over by the summer, you’ll see.”

“Not by the summer of 1950, it won’t.”

A man I did not know, from Burlington, who had come in for seed potatoes he could not plant till April, was standing by the window with his hat in his hands.

“My boy went into the Navy in the spring,” he said. “He’s at Honolulu.” He said it very calmly. “I don’t know anything.”

Everybody stopped talking for a moment. Then they started again, a little quieter.

The two Munroe boys from the farm next to ours were over by the feed sacks, Ed and his brother Frank, who were twenty-one and twenty.

“I’m going in to Boston Wednesday,” Ed said.

“I’ll go if you go,” Frank said.

“You’d better tell your father first,” Mr Hartwell said.

“Pa can come too, if he likes.”

Everybody laughed, because old Munroe was sixty and had one leg shorter than the other from a threshing machine.

Ed looked across at me. “What about you, Jim?”

I did not say anything. I paid for the middlings and loaded them, and drove home, and at the bottom of the hill by the brook I stopped the truck and sat in it with the engine running for perhaps five minutes. The brook had ice along its edges. The wall along it had come down in two places in the November rain, and I had been meaning to see to it. I sat and looked at the gaps.

Then I put the truck in gear and went up the hill.

---

The King spoke on the Wednesday, in the evening.

I had never heard him speak. I had heard his coronation on somebody’s set when I was fourteen, the guns and the cheering and the organ, but he did not speak at it that I remember, and his father had never been on the radio at all that anybody in our house could recall. My mother had his picture in the parlour, the one from the coronation that everybody had, cut out of a magazine and put in a frame, and I knew his face better than I knew most of the faces in the town. I had no idea what he sounded like.

We all listened in the kitchen. My father turned the set up and sat by it, and my mother sat with her hands in her lap, and Clara sat on the floor with her back against my mother’s knees, which she had not done since she was eight. It was dark outside and very still, and you could hear the stove ticking.

I had expected something like the Prime Minister, only grander: a voice for a King. What came out of the set was a quiet man, speaking slowly, as though he was in the room and did not want to wake anybody. He sounded English, but not the way the English sound in the pictures. He sounded careful, as though every word had been chosen and addressed to a particular house. He said that a great wrong had been done to the men of the fleet, and to a sister kingdom that we were bound by treaty to defend. He said that the Union was at war and that his ministers would tell us what that would require. He said that he was thinking of the families who were waiting for news, and he named Honolulu, and he said he would be thinking of them every day until they had it.

It was over in about five minutes. When it ended they played the Battle Hymn, and then God Save the King, and my father stood up for both, which he did not usually do for the radio, and so we all stood up, the four of us in the kitchen, and Clara got the giggles in the Battle Hymn and my mother put a hand on her shoulder and she stopped.

When the set was off Clara said, “He didn’t say we’d win.”

“No,” my father said.

“Shouldn’t he have?”

My father looked at the set for a while. “Everybody else is saying it,” he said.

I heard that voice again two and a half years later, across a square in a town in Normandy, and knew it before I had properly looked to see whose it was.

---

It was at supper on the Friday that the musket came up. It always comes up, in my family. You only have to wait.

Clara knocked over the milk jug. It was not full, and she caught it before it rolled, and there was nothing much to wipe up. My father did not look up from his plate.

“That’ll come out of your pay,” he said.

“Oh, Pa.”

“Tom,” my mother said.

I laughed, because I always laugh. It is what the Wheelers say. You drop anything, a jug, a hammer, a pail of feed, a forkful of hay off the top of the load, and somebody says that’ll come out of your pay. My grandfather said it. His father said it, my father says, and so on back as far as anybody can tell.

It comes from Eli. Eli Wheeler was the one in the old war, the Four-Year War, the one we call the old war in the family as though the others were somebody else’s. He was my father’s father’s father’s father’s father, which I have had to count on my fingers to get right, and he was from this farm, or from the farm this farm came out of. The story is that when he was fifteen he lied about his age and went off to New York with a regiment, and that at a place called Kip’s Bay the British came ashore under the guns of the fleet, and everybody ran, Eli included, and Eli dropped his musket in a field, and the army made him pay for it out of his wages. Then he joined up again, in the artillery this time, on the grounds that it is harder to drop a cannon. That is how my grandfather told it. It is the only thing most of the family knows about Eli, except that he was a millwright afterwards and that there is a paper of his in the tin box in the parlour.

Clara mopped at the milk with her napkin.

“Was it ever paid?” I said. “Eli’s paper.”

I had seen it. It is a paymaster’s certificate, saying that the army owes him two hundred and eight dollars and a third, which were the money then, for twenty-five months’ service, with interest, to be paid at such time as Congress should appoint.

“Your grandfather thought not,” my father said.

“What do you think?”

“I think if it was, Eli didn’t leave the money in the tin box.”

“It calls him a matross,” Clara said. “What’s a matross?”

“A gun hand,” my father said. “The lowest kind.”

“Grandpa always said he was a gunner.”

“Then the army got that wrong too,” my father said, “along with the money,” and went on eating.

I have been a kind of gun hand myself since then, and the army gets that sort of thing wrong all the time, so it may well be.

Clara finished with the milk. Eli had been fifteen. In the stories he was always old, because people in stories are old, and he had been three years younger than I was. He had dropped the musket in a field with the whole army running round him, and gone home, and then gone back. Nobody in the story ever says why he went back.

I had decided at the bottom of the hill by the brook, on the Monday, with the engine running, before Eli ever came into it. But that night I dreamed about a field in New York that I had never seen, and I have dreamed about it on and off ever since. In the dream I am never the one who drops anything. I am always looking for somebody else’s.

---

I told my father on the Sunday, a week to the day after Honolulu, in the barn, at the morning milking.

I had thought about how to say it, and in the end I said it badly, from the other side of a cow, the way he had said they would want men.

“I’m going in to Boston after Christmas to join up.”

He went on milking.

“Army or Navy?” he said.

“The Army.” I had never been in a boat bigger than a rowboat.

“Your mother.”

“I know.”

“I’ll tell her.” He stripped the last of the milk out. “After.”

I did not ask after what.

“Eli told his father before he went,” he said. “It’s in the family. His father didn’t say yes and he didn’t say no.” The milk rang in the pail. “I’m not saying either.”

“All right.”

He finished the cow and stood up with the pail and looked at me over her back. He was fifty-one that winter and as strong as any man in the town, and he had been to a war, and he had never told me one thing about it except that it rained.

“You’d be called up by the summer anyway, I expect,” he said. “Everybody will.”

“I expect so.”

“Then it comes to the same thing.”

“Not quite.”

He nodded, and went to empty the pail.

---

Christmas was quiet. Nobody had told my mother yet. She had knitted me two pairs of socks out of grey wool that winter, which was more socks than I had ever needed, and she gave them to me on Christmas morning without saying anything about them, and I said thank you without saying anything about them either. Clara gave me a pencil with my name stamped on it in gold, which she had bought with her own money at the drugstore.

“It’s real gold,” she said. “The man said.”

“Then I’d better not lose it.”

I still have it.

On the Monday after Christmas I took the early train in to Boston.

“I’m going in to the market,” I told my mother.

“On a Monday,” she said, and that was all she said.

My father drove me to the depot in the truck.

“Looks like snow,” he said, on the way. It did. When I got out he leaned across the seat.

“Keep your feet dry,” he said.

The recruiting office was a big room on the second floor of a building near the Common, with long tables and benches and a stove at one end that did not reach the other. There must have been a hundred men in it when I got there, at nine o’clock, and more on the stairs, in a queue that went down to the street and along the front of the building. The Munroe boys had been in on the Wednesday before and said it was like the market on a Saturday, and it was. It smelled like the market, of wet wool and tobacco and people who had come in early on the train. There were men in good overcoats and men in no overcoats.

The man in front of me in the queue was about forty.

“Were you in the last one?” I said.

“I was,” he said. “And I’ll get into this one if I have to lie about my age the other way.”

The boy behind me could not have been more than sixteen. When we got to the tables a sergeant asked him his age.

“Eighteen,” the boy said, very loudly.

The sergeant looked at him for a long moment, and wrote it down.

I was at a table myself at about half past one. My sergeant had a cold and a pen that did not work properly. He asked me my name and my age and where I lived and what I did, and whether I had ever been convicted of anything.

“Can you read and write?”

“Yes.”

He gave me a printed sheet with some sums on it and a pencil and pointed at a bench. They were the kind of sums you do at twelve. It took me about four minutes. I took the sheet back and he looked at it, and then at me.

“Farm?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Can you lift?”

“Most things.”

He wrote something on the corner of my papers that I could not read upside down, and sent me through a door to the doctors.

The doctors were the same for everybody that winter. It was cold, and there were a great many men in a small room with nothing on, and a doctor listened to my chest and said, “Good,” as though I had done something.

At about four o’clock I stood in a line of perhaps thirty men in front of an officer, a captain, I think, though I could not have told you then, and held up my right hand and swore the oath. We said it after him, a line at a time. It was to the King and his heirs and successors and to the Charter, and to obey the lawful orders of the officers set over us. Then there was a second part, about orders that were not lawful, which said that we were bound not to obey those, and that this was as binding as the rest. I did not follow it at the time. My voice came out higher than I meant it to.

“And successors,” said the man beside me, a beat behind everybody else.

The captain waited for him, and then went on.

Then we signed, and they told us we would get a letter, and the letter would tell us where to report and when, and it would be soon, probably the middle of January, and to be ready, and to go home.

So I went home. I had been gone since seven in the morning, and I had been further than Boston, by my reckoning, by about the width of a room.

It was snowing when I got off the train. My father was there with the truck, which I had not asked him to be. He did not ask me anything, and I did not tell him anything, and we drove home in the snow with the wipers going.

When we got to the farm the kitchen light was on, and my mother was at the table. She had found the papers I had been given in the morning, which I had been told to bring and had left on my bed by mistake. She had put them on the shelf over the sink. She did not say anything for a long time.

“Supper’s on the stove,” she said at last. “You’d better eat it.”

Then she went upstairs.

My father told her, after. I do not know what he said. When I came down the next morning she was making breakfast.

“Good morning,” she said.

She had made me eggs, which we did not have on a Tuesday.

---

The letter came on the ninth of January, a Friday. I was to report on Monday the twelfth, to a camp in a part of the Province I had never been to, with a list of things I could bring, which was short, and a list of things I could not, which was long. My mother read both lists twice and packed the first one into my father’s old valise from the last war, and put the two pairs of grey socks in on top, and the pencil from Clara, and a fruit cake in a tin.

“That’s not on the list,” I said.

“It is now,” she said, and shut the valise.

My father drove me to the depot on the Monday, before light. Clara came, in her coat over her nightgown, and was not allowed out of the truck. My mother did not come. She said goodbye in the kitchen. She held on to me for a while, which she had not done since I was small, and then she let go and straightened my collar.

“Write,” she said.

“I will.”

At the depot my father got the valise down out of the back of the truck and handed it to me, and stood there a moment in the cold with his hands in his coat pockets. The train was coming. You could hear it on the rails before you could see the light. He did not shake my hand. He was not a man for that.

“Well,” he said.

The light came round the bend.

“Don’t drop it,” he said.

I laughed, because I always laugh, and got on the train. I looked out of the window as it pulled out, and he was still standing there by the truck, with Clara’s face in the cab window behind him, and he lifted one hand, once, and put it back in his pocket.