An Address

The list came down in June.

We had been in a camp in the woods west of the city since the middle of May, in tents, in rows, with the guns parked in a line at the end of the field under their covers and nothing to do but clean them. We cleaned them every day. Ridley saw to that. We played baseball in the evenings on a field the engineers had flattened, with a bat Szabo had got from somewhere and a ball that was mostly tape, and we slept, and we waited.

Then the list. It went by service, and by wounds, and by children, and by some other things that nobody could explain, and it was pinned on a board outside the battery office, and everybody read it with their finger, the way the families had read Baca’s.

Baca was first. Two wounds and four years.

“Arizona,” he said, standing in front of the board on his stick. “Arizona in July.” He shook his head. “I’ve been wet since 1942. I’m going to stand in the yard at home and let it dry me out like a shirt.”

---

He went on a Tuesday, in the back of a truck with eleven others, to the train.

Before he got up into it he took the gun book out of his shirt, the one he had kept since Fort Sill, and that Ridley had kept for him from July to December, and held it out to Ridley.

“It’s yours, Sergeant.”

“It’s the gun’s,” said Ridley.

“Then give it to the gun.”

Ridley took it. He did not open it. He put it in his own shirt.

Baca shook hands with all of us, one after another, round the section. When he got to me he held on.

“If you’re ever in Arizona,” he said.

“I won’t be.”

“Nobody is. That’s why I’m asking.” He let go. “South of Phoenix. Ask anybody for the Bacas. There are a great many Bacas. Ask for the one with the leg.”

They lifted him up into the truck by the arms, Brandauer and Hollis, and he sat down on the bench with his leg out straight and the stick across his knees, and the truck went off down the track through the trees, and he did not wave. He held up the stick, once.

---

The guns went in July.

An ordnance sergeant came with four tractors and a clipboard, to take them to a park somewhere near the coast where they would be overhauled and greased and stood in rows until somebody needed them. He went down the line with the clipboard, gun by gun, and at each one the sergeant of the gun signed.

When he got to No. 3, Ridley did not sign at once. He took the cover off the muzzle and checked the gun. The breech, the block, the sight, the trails, the spades. Once, the way he always did. Then he put the cover back on and tied it, and took the clipboard, and signed.

They hitched it to the tractor. It went off down the track behind the other three, on its own wheels, with its trails up on the hook and its barrel pointing back at us, and we stood and watched it go till it was in the trees.

“Well,” said Szabo. “That’s that.”

Nobody else said anything.

Peter was standing beside me. He had his hands in his pockets.

“I never once saw where it went,” he said. “Not one round. In three years.”

“No,” I said.

“Give or take,” said Peter.

---

The General came at the end of July, in the car, with Harris, to say goodbye to Peter.

He was staying in Paris through the summer, he said. The Council had more paper than it had people who could read it, and the Tribunal would want all of it read before the autumn. He sat on an ammunition box outside the tents, because there was nothing else to sit on, and Brandauer made the coffee, which had got better since Paris, because there was real coffee again, and the General drank it and said nothing about it at all, and Brandauer stood there with the pot for some time, waiting.

Peter was going home in August. His name had come up on a different list from ours, for men who were going back to their universities in the autumn. Nobody in the battery had heard of such a list before. Peter had not asked for it.

“I think the General wrote to somebody,” he said, the week it came.

“Do you know who?”

“No. I think probably everybody.”

Now the General looked at him over the mug.

“Columbus, Mercer.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Read everything. Believe about a third of it. Argue with the rest, and when you’ve argued with it, go and find out whether you were right.” He put the mug down. “And write to me. Every month. I’ll tell you why you’re wrong.”

“Yes, sir. Where?”

The General took the notebook out of his pocket and wrote, and tore the page out.

“That will find me,” he said. “Most things do.”

Peter took it in both hands.

Then the General went over to Ridley, by the place at the end of the field where the guns had been, and they stood there a while with a cigarette each.

“Don’t get killed, Ridley.”

“There isn’t a war, sir.”

“They’ll find one,” said the General. “They always do.”

Ridley looked at the empty place in the grass where No. 3 had stood.

“They’ve made me battery sergeant-major,” he said. “For the occupation. New battery. New men. Boys.”

“You said you’d rather have a gun.”

“I’ll have four.”

The General laughed, the short laugh, and dropped his cigarette and stood on it.

Then he came across to me.

“Wheeler.”

“Sir.”

“Nothing,” he said. “I’ve been through the battalion’s papers again, and the division’s, and what the French left, which is nothing. I’ll go on. It’ll be from a long way off now, and it’ll be slow.”

“Yes, sir.”

He looked at me a moment longer.

“I wrote down everything I found, and everything I didn’t,” he said. “It’s in a file in Paris with your name on it. If anybody ever asks you, it’s there. If nobody ever asks you, it’s still there.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Don’t thank me,” said the General. “I didn’t find him.”

He held out his hand. I shook it. It was a small hand, and dry, and very hard.

“Keep asking,” he said, and went to the car.

---

Peter went on the eleventh of August, a Saturday, in the back of a truck to the train, the way Baca had.

The news about the bomb had come on the Wednesday, from the radio in the battery office, a new kind of bomb, one bomb, on a Japanese city. Nobody had understood it. Then more news, and then more, and then on the Friday night somebody fired a flare over the camp and everybody came out of the tents and stood looking up at it, and Szabo said, “Not Japan, then,” and sat down on the grass.

Peter packed his kit on the Saturday morning. He did it the way he did everything, carefully, with everything rolled. When he had finished he took his pad out of his pocket, the one he had carried since Devon, the one my letters to Lucien had been written on, and the notes to the committee, and the names of the towns, and he held it out to me.

“You’ll need it more than me,” he said.

I took it.

“There’s a few pages left.”

“I’ll get another.”

“In Columbus they’ll give you one,” said Szabo. “Professor.”

Peter went red. He took the pad back out of my hands, and opened it at a clean page, and wrote on it with his pencil, and tore the page out, and gave me the page and the pad together.

Peter Mercer. Care of the Department of History. Columbus, Ohio.

“That’ll find me,” he said.

“Most things do,” said Szabo.

The truck was waiting at the end of the line of tents. Peter put his pack on his shoulder. He shook hands with Szabo and Hollis and Dunne and Brandauer, and when he got to Brandauer, Brandauer put both arms round him and lifted him off the ground, pack and all, and put him down again.

Then he got to me.

He held out his hand. I took it.

“Write and tell me what you find out,” he said.

“There isn’t anything to find out.”

“Write and tell me that, then.”

He let go. He went down the line of tents to the truck and got up into the back of it, and sat down, and took his glasses off and cleaned them on his shirt, and put them back on. The truck started.

That was all. There was nothing else.

I put the page with the address in the back of my paybook, with the towns and the question marks, after Vincennes.

---

Szabo went at the end of August, and Hollis in September, to Pennsylvania. Dunne was staying. He had not been in long enough to go anywhere, and Ridley had asked for him for the new battery, and Dunne said that he did not mind, and that Ridley had said that the occupation was mostly cleaning, and that he was good at cleaning now.

Brandauer and I went on the same day, the twenty-sixth of September, on the same list. Farmers, Brandauer said. Somebody at home wanted the farmers back for the winter. Nobody ever said so on the board, but it was the farmers.

Ridley walked down to the truck with us.

“Brandauer.”

“Sergeant.”

“Thank you for the coffee.”

Brandauer stood very straight. “It was terrible, Sergeant.”

“Every cup,” said Ridley.

Then he looked at me.

“Wheeler.”

“Sergeant.”

He did not hold out his hand. He looked at me for a while.

“That book of yours,” he said. “Keep it.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Write it clear.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

He nodded, once, and turned round and walked back up the line of tents to where Dunne was waiting for him with the new battery’s roll in his hand, and did not look back.

---

The train to the coast went through the Cotentin.

Nobody had said it would. It went along the edge of the sea for a while and then inland, slowly, stopping at every station, through Caen, which was mostly not there, and Bayeux, which was all there, and then into the hedges.

It was the end of September. The apples were on the trees in the orchards behind the hedges, red and yellow, and in some of the orchards there were people up ladders picking them, and carts, and in one a man shaking a tree with a long pole and the apples coming down round him like rain. There were cows in the fields. The flooded fields behind the beach were not flooded any more. They were green, and there were cows standing in them up to their knees in grass, brown and white, the Norman kind.

“The cows are back,” said Brandauer.

The train stopped at a station in a market town with a square and a town hall with a clock, and I looked at the town hall for a long time, at the steps, and I could not tell if it was the one. There were a great many towns with town halls with steps.

Somewhere off to the south, beyond the hedges, twelve miles or fifteen, there was a little hill with a church on it and a square with the holes filled in, and a shop that would have its roof on before the winter, slates on the street side and tarred paper at the back, though I did not know that yet. I did not know which way it was from the train. I looked out of the window on that side all the way to Cherbourg anyway.

---

The camp at Cherbourg was on the hill above the harbour, huts and tents and a canteen and a post office, and four thousand men in it waiting for ships.

On the first evening a man in the canteen said there was a truck that went to Saint-Lô every morning for the hospital, with room in the back, and that nobody asked where you were going if you were back by night.

I went and stood at the gate of the camp the next morning at six, where the truck went from. It was there, with its engine running, and the driver smoking on the step of the cab. I stood at the gate and looked at it.

After a while it went.

I went back to the hut and sat on my bunk and took out Peter’s pad, and wrote to Lucien.

I wrote it three times. The first time I wrote two pages and tore them out and tore them up. The second time I wrote one page, and read it, and put it in my pocket. The third time I wrote this:

Lucien.

I am going home. The ship goes on Wednesday from Cherbourg. I came through the Cotentin on the train on Thursday and the apples are on the trees and the cows are back in the fields where the water was.

The battery is finished. The gun has gone to be greased. Peter has gone back to his university, and Brandauer is coming home with me on the same ship, and Sergeant Ridley is staying.

This is the address of the farm. If you write to me there, I will write back.

There is a new heifer. She was born in March. My sister has called her Normandy.

Jim.

I read it. I did not know if it was the right letter. I took the second one out of my pocket and read that, and I did not know if it was the right letter either. In the end I put the third one in the envelope and wrote the address on it, the house of Madame Hébert in Saint-Martin, and walked down to the post office at the end of the camp, and bought a French stamp from the woman at the counter, and gave it to her, and she put it in the bag behind her with the others.

The second one I still have. It is in the back of the paybook, with Peter’s address, and the towns.

---

We sailed on the Wednesday, the third of October, in the afternoon, on a grey ship full of men, from the long jetty in the harbour.

Brandauer and I stood at the rail. The town went away behind us, and the hill with the camp on it, and the breakwater, and then the whole coast of the Cotentin, green and low and grey, with the hedges on it like the lines on the palm of a hand, getting smaller.

Brandauer watched it until it was a line.

“Well,” he said.

He went below. I stood there a while longer, until there was nothing to look at, and then I went below too.