From Away

The ship came into Boston on the eleventh of October, a Thursday, in the rain.

They kept us two days in a camp outside the city, being counted and paid and given papers and asked whether anything hurt, and on the Saturday morning they let us go. Brandauer’s train went west at ten from the other station. We stood on the pavement outside the camp gate with our kitbags, in a crowd of men going every direction, and we wrote our addresses on the inside of each other’s cigarette packets.

“Write and tell me what hay is in Massachusetts,” said Brandauer.

“You tell me Wisconsin.”

“It will be cheaper.”

“It always is.”

He shook my hand. Then he did not let go of it for a moment, and looked at me, and his face did the slow thing it did before he laughed, and he did not laugh.

“Jim,” he said.

“Karl.”

He picked up his kitbag and went off down the street towards the trolley, a big slow man in a uniform that did not fit him, and I watched him till the crowd closed up behind him.

---

I did not send a telegram. I took the train from North Station in the afternoon, the Lexington train, the same one, and sat by the window with my kitbag between my knees, and watched it go by: Somerville and Arlington and the backs of the houses and the washing on the lines, and the trees all turned, red and yellow, the way they are in October and nowhere else.

The depot was the same. The same bench, the same stove, the same man in the window, who looked at me through the glass and did not know me, and then did, and opened his mouth, and I went out the other door before he could say anything.

It is three miles. Walter Gaines had walked it in the cold the November before, with his arm in a sling, to see whether my socks were dry. I walked it with my kitbag on my shoulder.

The road goes past the Common. I had walked past it ten thousand times. There were children on it, and a dog, and two old men on a bench, and the leaves coming down off the trees onto the grass, and the light going yellow. The old men looked at the uniform and then at the kitbag and then went back to what they were saying. Eli had stood on that grass in 1775, fourteen years old, with no gun, and carried water to a man who had been shot. I knew where. Everybody in the family knew where. I did not stop. I went on past it, and out along the Bedford road, and the houses got further apart, and then there were the fields.

---

It was milking time when I came up the lane. The light was on in the byre.

My father was on the stool beside Bathsheba with his cheek against her flank and the pail between his knees. Lyons had gone home; you could tell, because the yard was swept. I stood in the door of the byre with the kitbag. The cows turned their heads, one after another, down the row, the way they do, and my father saw them do it, and looked up.

He did not get up at once. He sat on the stool with his hands still on her and looked at me in the door.

Then he got up. He stood there by the cow with the pail, a little bent, with one hand at the small of his back.

“Well,” he said.

“I didn’t drop it,” I said.

“No,” said my father.

He looked at me for a while longer. Then he put the pail down by the stool.

“She’s half done,” he said. “Finish her. Your mother’s in the kitchen.”

I put the kitbag down by the door, and took my tunic off, and hung it on the nail where the halters go, and sat down on the stool, and put my cheek against Bathsheba’s side, and finished her.

My father stood behind me and watched. He did not say anything. When I had done he took the pail.

“Your hands are all right,” he said.

“Yes.”

He took the pail out to the dairy, and I heard him stop in the yard on the way, and stand there for a while, and then go on.

---

My mother was at the sink. She turned round with the dishcloth in her hands.

She did not say anything. She put the dishcloth down on the draining board and came across the kitchen and held on to me, the way she had in the kitchen the morning I left, for a long time, and then she let go and straightened my collar.

“You’re thin,” she said.

“The army’s cooking.”

“Well, it’s over now.” She went back to the sink. Then she stopped, and reached up to the shelf over the sink, and took down a letter. “This came this morning. It’s from you.”

It was mine. From Cherbourg, the week before we sailed. I had written that the ship was going on Wednesday and that I would be home some time after.

“I was going to read it after supper,” said my mother.

She put it back on the shelf.

Clara came in at six from somebody’s house, seventeen, taller than my mother, with her hair done in a way I had not seen before, and stood in the kitchen door and screamed, and then was embarrassed about it, and then did not care, and asked me whether I had seen the Eiffel Tower.

“From a long way off,” I said.

“What was it like?”

“Black. Smaller than in the pictures.”

“Did you go up it?”

“No.”

“I would have gone up it,” said Clara.

After supper she took me out to the barn with a lantern to show me Normandy. Normandy was seven months old and red, with a white face, and she put her nose into the lantern light and blew at it.

“She’s the only one in the house who’s been anywhere,” said Clara. “That’s what Mother said.”

“She’s never been anywhere. She was born here.”

“She’s been named somewhere,” said Clara. “That counts.”

---

In the morning I went up into the mow.

It was full. Right up to the beams on the far side, packed down, the first cut and the second, the smell of it coming up round me as I climbed the ladder, sweet and dusty, the smell of summer that you get in a barn in October and no other time. My father and Lyons had made it without me. I stood in it up to my knees.

My father was at the bottom of the ladder.

“It stayed dry,” he said. “Both years.”

“You wrote.”

“I did.” He looked up at me in the mow. “You can tell him about this one too, if you see him.”

“I won’t see him.”

“No,” said my father. “Well. It stayed dry anyway.”

---

Boston Day was the Friday.

They read the names on the Common at eleven, the way they always have. The whole town comes, or most of it. My father wore his good coat, which he wears for that and for funerals, and he and I stood at the back, under the trees, with our hats in our hands, and my mother and Clara stood a little in front of us with the Lyons family.

The minister read them. He read the old ones first, the way it is done here: the eight men of the town who were killed on that grass in April 1775, and then the soldiers of the King who died that day on the road, as many of their names as anybody has ever found, read out the same way, in the same voice, without anything between them. Then the names from the wars after, a few from each, and then my father’s war, eleven names, and my father stood beside me and did not move.

Then ours.

There were fourteen. I knew nine of them. One of them was Dick Munroe, who had been in the queue at the recruiting office in front of me in 1942 and had told me that the artillery was where they put the farm boys because the farm boys could lift. He had gone to the Navy instead, in the end, and he had been killed in the Pacific on an island whose name the minister did not pronounce the way the newspaper had.

When the minister had finished there was a long silence, the way there always is, with nobody coughing and the leaves coming down, and somebody’s baby, and a truck going by on the road and slowing down for it, and going on.

Then it was over. People put their hats on and started to talk. My father put his hat on.

“Cows,” he said.

We went home and milked.

---

I went into the grain store on the Tuesday for feed. Mr Hartwell was behind the counter, the same as always, in his apron, with a pencil behind his ear.

“Jim Wheeler,” he said. “Home.”

“Home.”

“You were in Paris, they tell me.”

“I was.”

“Well?” He leaned on the counter with both hands. “What’s it like?”

“I was asleep for most of it,” I said.

He laughed. He laughed a long time, and slapped the counter, and when the next man came in he told him, “Jim Wheeler was in Paris and slept through it,” and they both laughed, and I paid for the feed and carried it out to the truck.

---

Walter Gaines came out on the Sunday, on the train, and walked from the depot.

I saw him from the yard, coming up the lane in a brown overcoat and a hat, with his hands in his pockets, walking the way he had walked in Devon along the lanes there, as though he had somewhere to be and would get there in his own time. His arm was out of the sling. He stopped at the gate.

“Well, Wheeler,” he said. “Are your socks dry?”

“They’re dry.”

“I came to check.”

He stayed to dinner. My mother gave him the good chair. My father took him round the cows again afterwards, all nineteen of them and Normandy, and told him the history of the bull again, the whole of it, and Gaines listened to the whole of it again as though he had never heard it, and asked two questions about the bull that my father had never been asked, and my father answered them and looked pleased.

Afterwards Gaines and I walked down to the brook, where the wall was down. Four or five rods of it, where the frost had put it down two winters before, and my father had left it lying.

“He wrote that he was leaving it for you,” said Gaines.

“He told you that?”

“Your mother did. Last November.” He looked at the stones lying in the long grass. “Are you going to put it back?”

“This week.”

“It’ll come down again.”

“Somewhere,” I said. “Every winter.”

Gaines nodded. He stood and looked at the brook for a while with his hands in his pockets.

“The French boy,” he said. “Did you write?”

“Before I sailed.”

“Will he answer?”

“I don’t know.”

“No,” said Gaines. He did not ask anything else.

I walked him back to the depot at four. He would not let me drive him. At the depot he shook hands, and got on the train, and sat by the window, and as it pulled out he lifted one hand, once, and put it back in his pocket.

---

I put the wall back that week.

It took five days. I did the big stones and my father did the small ones, when his back let him, and on the days it did not let him he sat on the top of the part that was still standing and told me which stone went where, and was right more often than I was. The big stones were the same stones. Some of them had my grandfather’s marks on them from the last time, and some of them had marks older than that.

On the Friday afternoon it was done. We stood and looked at it, the two of us, the whole length of it along the brook, straight, the top stones set, nothing out of place.

“That’ll hold,” said my father.

“Till the frost.”

“Till the frost,” said my father. “Then we’ll see.”

---

The post on the Saturday had three things in it.

A letter from Peter, from Columbus, two pages, in his small careful hand. He was the oldest student in the class by six years and the only one who had been anywhere, and the professor had given him Gibbon to read again, all of it this time, and he had argued with the professor about the Christians in the first week. He says the General warned him. He says he’s glad of it. I’m called Mr Mercer here. Nobody has said Professor. I find I miss it.

A postcard from Ridley, from somewhere in the north of France, with a picture of a cathedral on the front. On the back, in pencil, in capitals:

GUN’S FINE. DUNNE’S FINE. IT’S RAINING. A. RIDLEY.

And one sheet, folded twice, in the small uphill hand, from Paris.

Wheeler. The committee tells me your letter reached Saint-Martin in the second week of October. That is all I know. L.

I read them all at the kitchen table after supper, after my mother had gone up and the radio was off, and then I read them again.

Then I took the paybook out of my shirt, where it had been since Fort Sill, and opened it at the back. The towns, one under another, with the question marks. Lanier and Harold Fisk. Vincennes with the line through it. Peter’s address. The second letter to Lucien, folded small, the one I had not sent.

I sat with it a long time.

Then I got up and put it on the shelf over the sink, with Lucien’s old letters, and my own from Cherbourg, where my mother puts anything that comes from away, so that it will not get splashed.

In the morning it was still there. My mother had dusted round it.