Ten years from now, I won’t be.’ And he said, ‘You mean ten years from now it wont be true?’ And his uncle said, ‘I mean that ten years from now I wont say it because ten years from now I will be ten years older and the one thing age teaches you is not fear and least of all more of truth, but only shame. — That spring of 1919 like a garden at the end of a four-year tunnel of blood and excrement and fear in which that whole generation of the world’s young men lived like frantic ants, each one alone against the instant when he too must enter the faceless anonymity behind the blood and the filth, each one alone’ (which at least proved one of his uncle’s points, the one about truth anyway) ‘with his constant speculation whether his fear was as plain to others as to himself.
Because the groundling during his crawling minutes and the airman during his condensed seconds have no friends or comrades any more than the hog at the trough or the wolf in the pack has. And when the corridor ends at last and they come out of it — if they do — they still have none.
Because’ (but at least he, Charles, hoped his uncle was right about the shame) ‘they have lost something, something of themselves dear and irreplaceable, scattered now and diffused and become communal among all the other faces and bodies which also survived: I am no more just John Doe of Jefferson, Mississippi; I am also Joe Ginotta of East Orange, New Jersey, and Charley Longfeather of Shoshone, Idaho, and Harry Wong of San Francisco; and Harry and Charley and Joe are all John Doe of Jefferson, Mississippi too.
But that composite is each still us, so we cant repudiate it. And that’s why American Legions. And though we may have been able to face and lie down what we had seen Harry and Joe and Charley do in the person of John Doe of Jefferson, we cant face down and lie away what we saw John Doe do as Charley or Harry or Joe. And that’s why, while they were still young and had faith in breath, American Legions got mass-drunk.’
Because only the point about the shame was right, since his uncle only said that twelve years ago and never again since. Because the rest of it was wrong, since even twelve years ago, when his uncle was only in the late thirties, he had already lost touch with what was the real truth: that you went to war, and young men would always go, for glory because there was no other way so glorious to earn it, and the risk and fear of death was not only the only price worth buying what you bought, but the cheapest you could be asked, and the tragedy was, not that you died but that you were no longer there to see the glory; you didn’t want to obliterate the thirsting heart: you wanted to slake it.
But that was twelve years ago; now his uncle only said, first: ‘Stop. I’ll drive.’
‘No you won’t,’ he said. “This is fast enough.’ Within a mile now they would begin to pass the white fence; in two they would reach the gate and even see the house.
‘It was the quiet,’ his uncle said. ‘At first I couldn’t even sleep at night for it. But that was all right, because I didn’t want to sleep; I didn’t want to miss that much of silence: just to lie in bed in the dark and remember tomorrow and tomorrow and all the colored spring, April and May and June, morning noon and evening, empty, then dark again and silence to lie in because I didn’t need to sleep. Then I saw her.
She was in the old stained victoria with the two mismatched plow-horses drawing it and the plow-hand on the box who didn’t even have on shoes. And your mother was wrong. She didn’t look like a parading doll at all.
She looked like a little girl playing grown-up in the carriage-house, but playing it in deadly seriousness; like a child of twelve say, orphaned by sudden catastrophe, upon whom has devolved the care of a whole litter of younger brothers and sisters and perhaps even an aged grandparent, supervising the diet and changing and washing out the garments of infants; too young to have a vicarious interest in, let alone the conception of and kinship with the passion and mystery which created them alive into the world, which alone could have made the drudgery of feeding them bearable or even explicable.
‘Of course it wasn’t that. There was only her father, and if anything, the situation was reversed: the father who not only farmed the land and supervised the household, but did it in such a way that a plow-team and its driver from the field could be spared always to draw those six miles back and forth to town, the old carriage against the tremendous expanse of whose cushions she could resemble an archaic miniature, sober and sedate and demure ten years beyond her age and fifty years beyond her time.
But that was the impression I got: a child playing house in that windless and timeless garden at the red and stinking corridor’s end: and so one day I knew suddenly and irrevocably that just silence was not peace.
It was after I saw her the third or the tenth or the thirtieth time, I don’t remember which, but one morning I stood beside the halted carriage with the barefoot nigger on the box and she like something preserved from an old valentine or a 1904 candy-box against that faded soiled expanse of back seat (when the carriage passed, all you saw was just her head, and from behind you couldn’t even see that though obviously the hand and the team wouldn’t have been taken from the plow just to give the plowman a ride to town and back); — one morning I stood beside the halted carriage while on all sides rushed and squawked the bright loud glittering new automobiles because the war was won and every man would be rich and at peace forever.
‘“I’m Gavin Stevens,” I said. “And I’m going on thirty years old.”
‘“I know it,” she said. But I felt thirty, even if I wasn’t quite. She was sixteen. And how could you say to a child (as we said then): “Give me a date?” And what would you (at thirty) do with it? And you don’t just simply invite the child: you ask the child’s parents if it can come. So it was just dusk when I stopped your grandmother’s car at the gate and got out. There was a garden then, not a florist’s landscaping dream. It was a good deal bigger than even five or six rugs spread side by side, with old bushes of roses and callicanthus and paintless collapsing arbors and trellises and beds of perennials re-seeding themselves without outside meddling help or let, and she standing in the middle of it watching me as I entered the gate and went up the walk until she couldn’t see me any more.
And I knew she would not have moved from where she stood, and I mounted the steps to where the old gentleman sat in his hickory chair with the setter pup at his feet and the silver cup and the marked book at his elbow, and I said, ‘“Let me be betrothed to her” (mark how I put it: me to her). “I know,” I said. “I know: not now. Not now. Just let us be betrothed, and we wont even have to think about it again.”
‘And she hadn’t moved from where she stood, not even for listening. Because it was too far for listening, and besides she didn’t need to: just standing there in the dusk the twilight, not moving: not shrinking, just not anything at all; it was even I who tilted up her face though it took no more strength than to raise a strand of honeysuckle. It was like tasting sherbet.
‘“I don’t know how,” she said. ‘You’ll have to teach me.”
‘“Don’t learn then,” I said. “It’s all right. It doesn’t even matter. You don’t have to learn.” It was like sherbet: the rest of spring, and summer and the long rest of summer: the darks and silence to he in, remembering sherbet: not retasting it because you don’t need to retaste sherbet; it doesn’t take much sherbet because you don’t forget it. Then it was time for me to go back to Germany and I took the ring out to her. I had already looped it onto the ribbon myself.
‘“You don’t want me to wear it yet?” she said.
‘“Yes,” I said. “No,” I said. “All right. Loop it over the bush here if you want to. It’s just a little piece of glass and colored iron; it probably wont even last a thousand years.” And I went back to Heidelberg and every month the letters would come, talking about nothing. Because how could they? She was just sixteen; what can have happened to just sixteen to write about, even talk about? And each month I answered, talking about nothing too, because how could just sixteen have translated it if I had, translated it to? And that’s what I never did understand, never did find out,’ his uncle said.
Now they were almost there; he was already slowing the
