The Voice

Baca came back on the twentieth of December, in the back of a ration truck, with a stick.

He got down off the tailboard into the snow very slowly, one leg and then the other, and stood in the farmyard leaning on the stick and looking round at the gun and the byre and the church tower, and at us, coming out of the hayloft one after another.

“Well,” he said. “It’s snowing. Of course it’s snowing.”

“Eddie,” said Brandauer, and went across the yard and picked him up.

“Put me down, you Dutchman. Put me down. They’ve just stuck me together.”

Brandauer put him down, very carefully, as if he might come apart, and stood back.

“You smell like a cow,” said Baca.

“I have been milking.”

“I know. I can tell from here.” Baca looked at Brandauer’s face and his own face did something, and he hit Brandauer on the arm, hard, and Brandauer let him.

Szabo and Dunne hung back. They had never met him.

“Who are these?”

“Szabo,” said Szabo. “Cleveland.”

“Dunne, Corporal. Rhode Island.”

“Two more from places it rains,” said Baca. “Wonderful.” He looked past them. “Where’s Gaines?”

Nobody answered at once.

“England,” I said. “Then home. He’s not coming back.”

Baca stood with the stick in the snow.

“He’s all right?”

“He’s all right. He kept the lung.”

“Good.” Baca looked at the gun for a while. “Good. That’s good.” Then he said, “Who’s had my book?”

Ridley was standing by the gun. He had been standing there the whole time, with his hands at his sides. He reached into his shirt and took out Baca’s book, the one he had wiped the earth off in the pit in July and carried ever since, and held it out.

Baca took it. He opened it, and turned the pages, slowly, looking at the figures in Ridley’s hand, page after page, July and August and September and October and November.

“You kept it,” he said.

“Somebody had to.”

Baca turned back to the first page in Ridley’s hand. The twelfth of July. He put his finger on it.

“The second number,” he said.

“I know,” said Ridley.

---

The letters came on the twenty-second, a great sack of them, with parcels, and the hayloft was full of brown paper and string and the smell of fruit cake.

My mother had sent the fruit cake in the tin. The same tin. I would have known it anywhere; there was a dent in the lid from 1942, when Clara dropped it on the kitchen step. Inside the cake there were two pairs of grey socks, and a letter, and a card from Clara with a drawing on it of a cow wearing a Santa Claus hat, labelled BATHSHEBA in capitals.

The letter was three pages.

“What’s the news?” said Brandauer, from the next blanket, with his own parcel open on his knees.

“My father’s back is better. Lyons is still talking to the cows.”

“About politics?”

“About baseball now. My mother says it’s worse.”

I turned the page and stopped.

“Jim?”

I read it again.

On the Sunday before Thanksgiving we had a visitor. A Mr Walter Gaines, from Boston, in his uniform, with his arm in a sling. He came out on the train to the depot and walked from there, three miles in the cold, and knocked at the kitchen door, and asked whether this was the Wheeler place. He said he had served with you in France and that you had asked him, if he was ever near Lexington, to go and see whether your socks were dry. Your father did not understand this, but I did, because you had told me about the socks in your letter in June, so I laughed, and then he did too.

He stayed to supper. Your father took him round the cows before it got dark and showed him Bathsheba and told him the whole history of the bull. Mr Gaines said he had never stood that close to a cow in his life and would be obliged if we did not tell Private Brandauer. Clara asked him a great many questions about you and he answered all of them politely and told her nothing at all. Your father drove him back to the depot in the truck. He did not say much on the way back. When he came in he said, “That’s a good man,” and went up to bed.

I put the letter down on my blanket.

“Jim?” said Brandauer again.

“Gaines went to the farm.”

“Your farm?”

“In November. He walked from the depot.”

Brandauer looked at me for a long moment. Then he looked down at his own parcel.

“Did he milk anything?”

“No. He says not to tell you he stood close to a cow.”

Brandauer began to laugh, slowly, the way he did, from somewhere down in his chest, and went on until he had to put his parcel down.

I had never asked Gaines to go to the farm. I had never asked him anything about Lexington at all. I read the letter a third time, the part about the socks, and then I folded it and put it with the others in my shirt.

---

Peter’s answer from Columbus came in the same sack.

He did not say anything about it. He read it on his blanket by the hayloft door, where the light was, and then he put it back in its envelope and sat there with the envelope on his knee.

“Peter,” said Szabo, who never missed anything. “That from a girl?”

“No.”

“From your mother?”

“No.”

“Then who?”

“A professor,” said Peter.

“What’s he want?”

Peter looked at the envelope. “He wants me back. In the autumn. When it’s over. He says the General wrote to him.” He turned the envelope over. “He says the General said I was the only man in Normandy who argued with him about Joan of Arc and was right. He says he would like to meet a student who argued with Lawrence and was right.”

“Were you?” said Dunne.

“About Joan of Arc,” said Peter. “Yes. About everything else, he was.”

“What are you going to say?”

Peter put the envelope inside his shirt, with the General’s address. “Yes,” he said. “When it’s over.”

Nobody said anything for a moment. Then Baca, from the corner where he was sitting with his bad leg out straight on a box, said, “Professor Mercer.”

“Don’t,” said Peter.

“Professor Mercer of the College at Columbus. Who laid number three gun.”

“I said don’t.”

“I’m going to call you that till the end of the war,” said Baca, “and you’re going to hate it.”

“Yes,” said Peter, “I expect I am,” and went red to the ears and did not stop smiling for the rest of the afternoon.

---

Ridley’s letter from Cairo came in the same sack. He read it standing by the gun, as he always did, and put it in his shirt, as he always did.

“He coming back?” said Baca, who had been gone five months and still knew everything.

Ridley looked at him.

“Spring,” he said. “He says to have the coffee ready.”

“Brandauer’s coffee?”

“He says it was terrible.” Ridley went to check the gun. “He says he misses it.”

---

On Christmas Day we had the afternoon off. The battery had fired at dawn, as it did every morning, and then the telephone was quiet, and the cooks had done something with the tinned turkey that was nearly the same as Thanksgiving, and the farmer had sent over a jug of something from his cellar that Brandauer said was made from pears and that put Dunne to sleep under the cart in the yard.

At about half past two Szabo came across the yard from the ammunition truck with a box in his arms.

“Nobody ask,” he said.

“What is it?” said Dunne, waking up.

“I said nobody ask.” He put it down on an ammunition box in the byre, where it was warm, between the cows. It was a radio. A French one, in a brown wooden case, with a cracked dial and a little badge on the front with a word on it I could not read, and a battery the size of a brick wired to the back with telephone cable.

“Where’d you get it?”

“Off a Frenchman,” said Szabo. “A dead one. Back in October, at the slag heaps. It was in his dugout.” He started turning the dial. “It works. Mostly. I’ve been saving it.”

“For what?”

Szabo looked at his watch. “Three o’clock,” he said. “London. He does it every year.”

Nobody said anything. Then Ridley, who was in the doorway, came in and sat down on an upturned bucket by the radio, and took his cap off. And one after another the rest of the section came and sat down in the straw of the byre, between the cows, round a dead Frenchman’s radio, and the farmer’s daughters stopped milking and stood at the end of the stalls with their pails, and nobody said anything, and Szabo turned the dial through the hissing and the music and a man talking fast in Dutch, and found it.

There was an organ. Then a man’s voice, an announcer, English. Then a pause, a long one, with only the hiss of the set in it and a cow shifting her feet.

Then the voice.

I knew it at once. I would have known it anywhere. The same slow quiet voice, from the kitchen in Lexington and the shelf behind the bar in the Plough and the steps of the town hall in the Cotentin, as if he did not want to wake anybody.

He talked about the families. He talked about the people who were waiting for news, and the people who had had it, and the ones who were far from home this Christmas in every one of his realms, and he said their names, the realms, one after another, and when he said America I saw Baca’s head come up. He talked about the cities that had been bombed and the people who were cold and hungry in the countries that had been freed and the countries that were not free yet. He did not say anything about winning. He did not say how long it would be. He said that he was thinking of every one of us, by name, and that he hoped to God we would all be home before long, and that he could not promise it, because it was not his to promise.

It was over in about six minutes. Then God Save the King, thin and crackling, out of the dead Frenchman’s set, and Ridley stood up off the bucket, and so did everybody, in the straw, between the cows, and the farmer’s daughters stood with their pails and did not know why, and stood anyway.

When it was over Szabo turned the set off. The byre was very quiet. A cow pulled at her chain.

“That’s him,” said Brandauer, softly. “That is the one who spoke German to me.”

“That’s him,” I said.

Dunne was looking at me. “You met him?”

“In June. In a town. He asked about the hay.”

“What did you say?”

“I said my father’d be at it without me.”

Dunne thought about that. “Was he?”

“Yes,” I said. “It stayed dry.”

Baca, on his box with his leg out, had his head down. He did not look up for a while. When he did, his eyes were wet and he did not do anything about it.

“He said America,” he said. “In with all the rest of them. He said it like it was the same as the others.”

“It is,” said Peter.

“I know it is,” said Baca. “I know. I just never heard him say it.”

---

I wrote home that night, by the candle in the tin.

I told my mother about the fruit cake and the socks and Clara’s cow in the hat. I told her that Baca was back. I told her that we had heard the King on the radio, in a byre, between forty cows, and that Brandauer had stood up for God Save the King with a pail in his hand, and that I had not laughed.

Then I wrote: Thank you for having Walter to supper. Tell Dad he was right.

I sat for a while with the pen.

Then I wrote: His socks are always dry. He’s the one who taught me.

I folded it and put it in the envelope and went down the ladder into the yard, where it had started to snow again, and stood by the gun for a while in the dark before I went back up.