The Convict and Other Stories

“I ain’t got your education,” Willard said, “but I know that feller in Memphis is a crook and that ain’t no picture of Jesus. You reckon he’d be looking down on a country full of heathens that tie up men with wire and machine-gun them?”

A week earlier we had found the bodies of sixteen marines frozen in the snow by the side of a railway track. We guessed that they had been captured in the south and for some reason taken off a prisoner train and executed. The baling wire was so tight on their wrists that we couldn’t snip through it without tearing the bloated skin.

Jace fingered his cheek again, pushing ice crystals from his mitten into his beard as though his jaw had no feeling.

“You remember that bunch of gooks we took prisoner about two months ago?” he said. “The lieutenant sent them to the rear with the ROKs. Do you think those guys made it beyond the first hill?”

“That’s monkeys killing monkeys. They been doing that to each other on this shit pile for hundreds of years. That don’t have nothing to do with us.”

“It has everything to do with the lieutenant, and with us, too, Willard,” Jace said.

“You better lay off that gin,” Willard said, and picked up his M-1 and walked farther down the ditch.

Jace took another drink out of the bottle and rested his head back in his helmet. He had turned down officers’ school at Quantico, which his education and good looks and career as a college lacrosse player should have made a natural extension of his life.

“Willard is not educable,” I said.

“Ah, but that’s it. He has been taught.”

“Don’t make a mystery out of a simple man.”

“You southerners hang together, don’t you? When it comes down to that choice between reason and blathering with a mouthful of collard greens, there’s something atavistic in you that makes you home in on the latter like a fly on a pig flop.”

“What is it, Jace?”

“That kid last night.”

“It was just bad luck.”

“My ass. He was only on the line one day. He shouldn’t have been put on patrol. I could hear him breathing in the dark behind me, the kind of breathing you hear when a guy’s heart is coming out his mouth. He must have wanted to prove something, because he worked himself up right behind the point. When we walked into the gooks, a potato masher came flying out of the hole. He just stared at it and poked at it with his foot, like it was something he didn’t want to touch but couldn’t run away from at the same time.”

In the rear someone was trying to start a cold engine in a tank. The starter ground away like Coke-bottle glass in the still air.

“I must have been looking at him, yelling at him, because I saw him light up like fire was painted on one side of him.”

“Give me the codeine and go to sleep.”

“No sleep today, Doc. We’re going to be stringing mines. Somebody said the First Division captured some Chinese at a reservoir up the road.”

“Chinese?”

“They probably grabbed some Korean mountain people who speak a dialect, and some dumb-ass translator didn’t know how to classify them.”

“You better sleep, anyway.”

Jace turned his face at me and squinted in the sunlight. His helmet cut a diagonal shadow across his eyes and made his face look as though it were sewn together from mismatched parts.

“What you got to understand is that I’m a practical man,” he said. “I have one foot solidly in this world. That’s because I come from a family that never got lost in the next world. We knew how to hold on to a big chunk of this one and deal with it.”

I didn’t know what introspection was taking him through a maze inside of himself or even if introspection was the word for it. His voice had a wired edge to it, and fatigue was an explanation that only civilians used. I had seen craziness come in many forms since I had been in Korea, but it usually got men when they first went on the firing line or after an artillery barrage when they became hysterical and had to be sedated with mo

rphine. But Jace had been on the line since Inchon and had had his ticket punched at every stop across North Korea.

“Let me explain it this way,” he said. “The first Bradford in Massachusetts was a ship’s carpenter, and the Puritans were building churches all over the place. But it takes a lot of time to build a church out of squared logs, especially when you got to stop and kill off all the Indians and press witches to death. The first Bradford, the carpenter, was a religious man, and he had an idea that would take care of the problem for everybody. He hired a bunch of guys like himself and built the church on contract. He paid the other guys out of his pocket, and all he asked from the community was a small piece of land set aside in his name. He built churches in Salem, Cambridge, Haverhill, anywhere he found Puritans and wood. This went on for thirty years, until some farmers figured out that he probably owned more land than anyone else in the commonwealth. So these manure slingers got together and had him tried as a witch, and they had some good evidence to use against him. He was as strong as a draft horse, and he could poke one finger in the end of a musket and hold it out at arm’s length. So the manure slingers said he was in league with Old Nick, and they tried to make him confess by ordeal. They staked him out in a field and put an oak door over his body and then added one stone to it at a time. You see, the deal was that if a witch confessed, all his property went back into the public domain. They crushed his chest and snapped his ribs like sticks, but he never let a word of guilt pass his lips.

“His sons inherited his property and they figured a way to protect it against the manure slingers. They incorporated under the name We Build Churches, Inc. You can’t try a corporation for witchery, can you? Those Puritans would deep-fry the balls of an individual, but they knew a business company was sacred.

“And my family has been building churches ever since, and we still own some of the land that was given to the carpenter. There’s a bank in Cambridge built right on top of where he used to keep a smithy.