Author: James Jones
Category: Literature
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Dupree stalled for two weeks, until Johnny threatened to quit, right here and now, unless the furlough papers were made out and signed. He pointed out that his work was all caught up and that the company would not lose any ground if he had his furlough. Dupree made out the papers and signed them, but he withheld them until Johnny had made out the Payroll for the month of February, Johnny worked one whole night and all the next day to get it done, turning the daily work over to his two assistant clerks. He finished it the second night and left camp immediately afterwards. He was tired and had had no sleep the night before, but he felt if he spent ten more minutes around Dupree he would desert and go over the hill for good.
By the time he argued Dupree into the furlough and made out the Payroll, he had only six days left before the company would leave to go on maneuvers. Consequently, he only got a four-day furlough with one-day travel, instead of the usual fifteen that Dupree had been handing out so munificently. He suspected that Dupree had deliberately arranged this, but he couldn’t prove it, and if he could have, there was nothing he could do. He did not know why—unless it was just Dupree’s nature to be like that. But it was also probable that Dupree had seen that Johnny’s sympathies were with Weidmann and was exacting payment for it.
Johnny had been writing to Sandy Marion. When he mentioned to Sandy that he was getting a furlough, she had written back and invited him to spend it as hers and Eddie’s guest. He had not declined her offer, but he decided to go to Miami Beach to his brother’s—the only relative he had left now, discounting Erskine. Five days was hardly enough time for the round-trip bus ride to Miami. So he made up his mind to brave Endymion again, a place he had meant never to return to.
He took a camp taxi up to Service Club No 1, which was also the bus station. The bus for Evansville was just loading. After it finished loading, there were at least fifty men left milling around the outside of the bus for whom there was no room until the next bus, in the morning.
The greatest percentage of the camp was shipping out to maneuvers with orders to proceed direct to a POE after the maneuvers were over. It was February of 1944, and there was a heightened activity about the whole camp that left a pall of suspense over everybody. The camp was emptying fast, outfits were shoving off every day. There was the rush and noise of moving out, followed by a sense of emptiness that was like a vacuum; silent empty buildings, unused lightless streets, whole sections of the camp had that sense of desolation that comes to manmade places when the men have gone, almost sinister, like a medieval city from which there had been a great exodus to escape the plague. Trucks rolled every night, leaving behind them a hollow sound like the inside of an empty tank. There were big things in the wind. All the rumours said England—which could mean only one thing; the invasion of France.
Johnny had been through it all once before, and he knew the impending frenzy. It disheartened him and left him a little cold inside. He had seen men throw away valued possessions before, because they had no place for them in their crammed “A” and “B” bags: “What the hell? I won’t need this stuff where I’m goin.” It disheartened him more when he looked at the dejected shoulders and lowered heads of the men who had missed the bus. The next one wasn’t till morning. Twelve hours lost! Many of them turned silently away and started back to their barracks. Many of them walked away cursing loudly in futile voices. Many of them went silently into the PX nearby to expand their stomachs with 3.2 slop; it made him think suddenly of the rumoured Japanese torture where they shoved a garden hose down a man’s throat and turned on the water full force until they ruptured his stomach with water.
A wild unreasoning rage rose up in Johnny. He picked up his little canvas furlough bag and commenced walking on toward the Main Gate. The four-lane highway was dark and far ahead up a gradual rise were the lights of the sentry box at the gate. He trudged along and the rage ate into him like acid. It was too late to catch a ride with anyone driving out, and he walked all the way to the gate, limping along in his low quarter issue oxfords.
When he went out the gate, he walked across the highway and stood waiting in the dark, hoping to catch a ride. To hell with this hanging around for twelve hours, dejectedly waiting for the next bus and maybe then not being able to get on! It was Highway 41, a truck route, and it ran all the way to Florida. There might be some tourists on their way home from Florida who would pick him up. It was strange, but there still seemed to be tourists in this savage insanity of a world. A way of life may crumble, but the individual bricks like tourists always remain undamaged and are fitted and cemented into the new wall.
It was cold and he turned his officer’s topcoat up around his ears. Dupree had warned him that he must get rid of it, send it home or sell it or throw it away. The topcoat collar, tall as it was, was not much protection from this February wind, and Johnny set down his canvas furlough bag and put his gloved hands up over his ears. He stood that way, his hands over his ears, his breath a mist that wafted away on the steady wind, and he looked back into the camp where lights were beginning to wink out.
From across the highway, Johnny looked past the brightly lighted sentry box with its two shivering MPs, looked down the long hill that met the camp and then rose again, undisturbed, on the other side. The camp with its bleak buildings and abortive amusements lay sprawled along the narrow little valley that ran along the road. It covered an immense amount of ground and the lights ran along, becoming smaller and smaller until they faded into sightlessness on either end. Behind each light lived men, each group in its own little vicinity, its own PX and its own movie, almost unconscious of the other groups beside it. In each group lived men whose lives were being decided every minute. Men like Big Red who had been a staff sergeant then a first sergeant and now was a private in another company, men like Weidmann who were making changes of terrific import every day, men whose lives—infinitesimal but none the less important to them—were being affected tremendously; things of great importance were happening to their personal lives. Things that could not be seen from the highway looking down the hill. From where he stood, he could see it whole. He was like a man who has been transported into space to look down upon his planet objectively. He could not see from the moon the wars and murders and things that were important to the people of his planet.
If he did not know what was going on inside this camp, he would not suspect the existence of so many important things. He might be a tourist or a truck driver passing by the camp in several seconds and saying to himself: “Here is a camp with many soldiers inside of it. Many soldiers live inside this camp, sprawled out over the countryside, its lights winking on and off.” But the words would have no meaning, no significance. “This camp has no relation to me. I drive by this camp and I see a camp with many soldiers who are part of my country’s army. Then I drive on, I pass, I do not see this camp, I go about my life which is foreign and unrelated to this camp. Then this camp is gone. I have driven by. But it is still there. I am not gone, because I’m always here. They are only soldiers in a camp, and my here must go on by this camp; it must go about its travel and its living.”
The third truck that passed glimpsed the soldier standing with his hands over his ears in the flickered glare of the passing headlights. The driver applied the air and stopped and picked the soldier up.
“Where you going, Bud?”
“Endymion, Indiana.”
“Going to Evansville, then East.”
“I’ll ride along. To Evansville.”
“You just come from the camp here? You stationed here?” A jerk of the thumb.
“Yeah. Just come. I live here.”
Pause. “Pretty big camp, this one. Ain’t it.”
Pause. “Yeah. Pretty big.”
From Jones’s poem “The Hill They Call the Horse,” the dead pass by:
Set Lechessi—
Belly ripped wide open, still gasping:
Help me. Help me.
Can’tcha see? I’m gonna die!
Memor
y will not allow Jones to forget the scene of the steady march of the dead.
The poverty-stricken Lechessi family remains in Massachusetts. Johnny cries for them. He cries for Set, for himself, and for humanity.
Sandy tries to console Johnny, but she is rejected. She didn’t see the line of the dead. As Johnny says to her, “You don’t know anything about it. What do you know about it?”
HE WAS A WOP
THE MARION HOME, ENDYMION, EARLY FEBRUARY 1944
STANDING IN THE CENTER OF the room, he told her the whole story about Weidmann. Sandy listened sympathetically, nodding every now and then. He stood motionless in the center of the floor and talked and talked.
“There was a guy in my old outfit named Set Lechessi,” he said. “He was a wop. He was a wop and he was from Boston. Cambridge, Mass. He was a curly-headed wop and he had the most magnificent physique I ever saw. He had to have a wonderful body. He needed it. He worked with it all his life. He didn’t go to high school because he had to work. All he ever did was work with his muscles. Railroad gangs. Cement gangs. Stuff like that. That was all the work he ever got a chance to do.”
Johnny’s voice was choked and there were tears threatening to overflow from his eyes. His mouth was open and he worked it spasmodically to keep himself from breaking down and crying.
“I don’t know anything about economics,” he said. “I don’t know the first thing about economics, or philosophy, or psychology, or history. But I know Set Lechessi worked all his goddam life with his hands because he didn’t get a chance to do anything else; he couldn’t get any other kind of work, and he didn’t have an education, he was dumb. He wasn’t one of these examples of the Great American Success Story. He didn’t rise out of the slums to become president or a great financier. He was too honest for that; he was too innocent; he was naive. When people told him things, it never occurred to him to doubt that they were telling him the truth. He was just plain dumb; he believed everybody was as honest as he was. He was dumb, but if he’d had a chance to go to school, even to high school, he might have developed the brains he had so he could have gotten a clerking job. That was his greatest ambition in life: to have a white-collar job as a clerk or an accountant.
“Set wasn’t bitter or hard, although Christ knows he should have been. He had plenty of reason to be. His was the kind of life to make a ‘Public Enemy of Society.’ Society makes its own enemies, and then calls them ‘criminals.’
“Set had to quit school in the eighth grade and go to work because his father got crippled on a construction job. He was fifty years old and working as a laborer. And then he got smashed up, and Set had to quit school to support his two kid sisters. All the older kids were already married with their own families beginning to grow, and they couldn’t help much.
“So Set had to work to try to support all four of them on what he could make as a kid laboring on construction jobs and railroad gangs. That was during the depression and they were laying off men everywhere. Everybody’s forgotten all about the depression now. Everybody’s working in defense plants now. And they all say a man can always get a good job if he’s got the stuff. ‘No man ever needs to go hungry, if he really wants to work.’ People forget things awful easy.
“Set kept getting laid off one job after another. And finally he got a job digging and cleaning cesspools. He cleaned cesspools under the ivy-covered walls of Harvard; that’s as near as he came to an education. He didn’t like it much. I don’t guess anybody would like working with his hands in shit all day, with the smell of it in his nostrils all day long. He didn’t like it; but he did it, he did it because at least he got some money to feed himself and his father and sisters. He could have gone on the bum and done better than that, but he didn’t want to. He could have got in the CCCs, but he wouldn’t get enough money to feed them all. And besides, he was a wop, a dago. His family meant everything in the world to him. And finally, he got laid off the cesspool job even. And he couldn’t get any work at all, no matter how hard he tried. His crippled father and two sisters were hungry all the time. They never had enough to eat.
“So finally, he joined the goddam army. Joined the army at twenty-one bucks a month. So he could get some money for them to eat.
“This makes a mighty dull story, doesn’t it? There wouldn’t be much to write a novel about there, would there? People want to read adventurous exciting things like Ernest Hemingway writes, and they don’t want to hear about this. It’s depressing to read about drunks and failures and bums—unless they’re romantic and adventurous. ‘Why do writers want to write about the poor in life and those of low estate?’ they say. ‘There are too many happy things to write about.’ They don’t think working in shit all day is exciting enough, and they don’t want to hear about it; it offends their good taste.
“I don’t know a damn thing about economics or tariffs or world trade or any the rest of that crap. But they sure don’t seem much good to me, when guys like Set Lechessi have to live like they are forced to live—and die like they are forced to die.”
Johnny was crying now. His sentences were punctuated with long racking sobs and great sighing intakes of breath as he tried desperately to keep himself from crying. Four drinks on an empty stomach; but this was no crying jag. Any spring released from heavy pressure will bound out, expand, recoil upon itself. The liquor was just enough to loosen the bonds he had clamped down tight over Al, and Weidmann, and Isaac Rabinowitz, and over Set Lechessi. That much liquor is usually necessary, even when the pressure is released; it is taught to men that it is a woman’s prerogative, and therefore unmanly, to break down, even when your soul is begging you to cry. This was the first time he had allowed himself to tell about Set, about all that had been festering in his soul for a long time.
“The third man in the company to die. He got hit in the belly with a burst of machinegun fire. It tore his belly wide open. A bunch of guys were going downhill and they got ambushed. Everybody got back over the top of the hill except Set and one other guy. Johnson. He was killed outright—but Set wasn’t.
“We laid on the back of the hill and listened to him yell for three hours, before he finally died. Our company had only been on the line for three days; we hadn’t had time to get numb yet. We could still feel. And we lay there scared to death with our faces pushed down into the grass and the heat and dust and seeds choking us and listened to Set yell. Guys who’d lived together for three years. Guys that used to get drunk together and go to whorehouses together. In a company like that, everybody gets to know all about everybody else’s life and family and plans, everything about a man. And we had to lay there and listen to Set yell and call on the Virgin Mary and think all the time we were glad it wasn’t us—and then feel ashamed. We even begged the company commander to let one of us go down over the hill after Set. He wouldn’t do it because he said we wouldn’t have a chance. There were tears in his eyes when he said it.
“A couple of guys even squirmed out into the fire and tried to get in position so they could shoot him. But nobody could do it.
“Finally, he bled to death.”
Johnny stopped talking and dropped into a chair.
“That’s a fitting epilogue to a life like he had, ain’t it? There’s an epilogue for him, and for Weidmann who got kicked out of his command because he was a Jew and some son of a bitch had a brother-in-law. They’re all in the same boat. It ain’t so much that they died or that they lost out. It’s the injustice and the waste and the uselessness and the indignity. It makes you sick to your stomach. It makes you hate. But you don’t know what to hate. It’s rottenness, just plain goddamned rottenness, and nobody you can put a finger on. It’s not that we owe them a monument or a revered memory. That don’t do them any good. That don’t mean a goddam thing. We owed them a life. Society owed them a life.
“He laid out there for three hours, three whole hours, I tell you. And all the time he was screaming and yelling for someone to help him, please somebody help him. He kept yelli
ng he couldn’t die because he had to take care of his father. He sounded like he expected God and the Virgin Mary to miraculously heal him as soon as they understood they’d made a mistake; God hadn’t meant to kill him because he had to take care of his father. I guess he forgot about his ten thousand insurance.”
He buried his face in his hands, and great choking sobs shook his body. Sandy got up from the divan and went to his chair.
“There, there,” she said helplessly, trying to quiet him somehow. “Go ahead and cry; it’ll do you good. You’ve had it coming a long time.”
“You don’t know anything about it. What do you know about it? It’s easy enough for you to say there, there.”
“Go ahead and cry; it’ll do you good. You’ve had it coming a long, long time.”
To the end of the war. There was no end to the war. Worse than that, there was no beginning to the war. The war was not yet begun.
NOTES FOR THE INTRODUCTION
Jones to Maxwell Perkins, March 16, 1947, is quoted in George Garrett, James Jones. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984, p. 89.
General biographical information about Jones is from Garrett, James Jones; Frank MacShane, Into Eternity: The Life of James Jones American Writer. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985; George Hendrick, ed., To Reach Eternity: The Letters of James Jones. New York: Random House, 1989.
Helen Howe and Don Sackrider provided information about Robinson.
Jones on Thomas Wolfe is from MacShane, Into Eternity, p. 32.
Jones on the possibility of being dead within a month is from MacShane, Into Eternity, p. 149.