Once an Eagle

  It was the worst moment of his life.

  When he turned back to the members of his staff his expression was alert, composed. “Well. That will affect our operational planning. To put it mildly.”

  “Yes, General. It certainly will.”

  “Well, I don’t think we need to stand here, unhonored and unsung. Sherwin, would you convey my regrets to Miss Varden and her entourage.”

  Fowler blinked at him. “You—you won’t be returning to the party, sir?”

  There were times when the sheer bovine obtusity in the human cranium was utterly maddening. He clenched his fingers on the jade holder and said icily: “You have my permission to inform that pack of indecorous louts that I have work to do. Is that sufficiently clear, Sherwin?”

  “Yes, General.”

  “Very good.” He swung out of the G-2 room and hurried, almost running, down the dim corridor—and at the first corner came all at once against Master Technical Sergeant Hartje with an impact that nearly knocked the breath out of him. Hartje staggered back with a grunt, and several file folders slipped from his hands and spilled their contents on the floor.

  “—God damn it,” Massengale gasped. The shaking, vengeful rage had come back with the rush of nausea. “Will you look where you’re going—!”

  “Yes sir, General,” Hartje stammered. “I’m sorry, sir—”

  The Sergeant stood rigid in front of him; the skin was peeling high on his forehead and perspiration stood in a chain of tiny bubbles at the edge of his stiff black hair. I could kill this man, the thought thrummed into the Corps Commander’s mind like an arrow: he is mine, completely—I could despoil him, crush him with a word, a single act … And as he intently watched the pinpoint of naked fear in the center of Hartje’s eye, the old trembling exultation he’d first known as an upperclassman at the Point caught at him like the breath of fever; then it receded as swiftly, leaving a foul and empty wake. It wasn’t enough now: not nearly enough.

  “Carry on, Hartje,” he said flatly. “Don’t leave important papers lying on the floor, man …”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Later he sat, perfectly immobile, in his room, once the bishop’s quarters, and smoked. On his desk lay Burckhardt’s report on the Order of Battle and the forward- and rear-echelon replacement depots. He averted his eyes in a spasm of exasperation. All for nothing. That a crew of effete eggheads should have concocted a device that could destroy the very scale of his triumph, rob him of all sense of fruition—it was contemptible! And now the filthy Russians were going to get in on it. There must be some way to stop them, roll them back; didn’t they have any control of things back there? He would have to get in touch with Schuyler without delay.

  There was a shriek of soprano laughter, muted and faraway, as though issuing from deep underground; then silence again. Timing—is—everything. He realized suddenly he was very near tears. He drove his gaze around the room—the shelves of books with their slips for annotations, the rows of uniforms, the glass case of medals and decorations, the detail map of Honshu.

  In the far corner of the room stood Murasse’s naked sword.

  16

  The cottonwoods and willows had turned a rusty gold, and the river was low; it had been a dry summer. The corn was in—the big field behind Timruds’ looked barbaric and dense. There were curbs and a slab sidewalk now, all the way out to Gus Hormel’s place. Clausen’s Forge was gone, replaced by a Mobil Station, slick in reds and blues; three cars were up on the hydraulic lifts, but no one was working under them. A figure in the office caught sight of the little motorcade and waved once, and the car ahead of theirs, the one Sam Damon’s brother Ty was driving, sounded its horn. Damon waved back, though he didn’t know who it was.

  “That’s Dick Tupper’s boy Gene,” Ted Barlow said, turning back from the wheel to where Sam and Tommy sat together. “He’ll be along in a little while.”

  Banning’s Feed and Grain store was closed, and so was Nisbet’s Dry Goods Emporium, the shades drawn against the light and a placard in the window.

  “Place is certainly quiet,” Damon said.

  “Everybody’s at the Green,” his sister Peg said. “They’d better be, if they aren’t!” They were riding in Ted’s Buick convertible with the top down, and she had her hand to the back of her head to hold her hat on; its brim fluttered in the wind. “Civic ordinance. This is your day, Sam.”

  “No, it’s not,” he corrected her amiably. “But I’m glad to be here just the same.”

  “Oh, don’t be so stiff and modest!” She turned to Tommy, “Honestly—can’t he be maddening, though?”

  Smiling faintly, Tommy nodded. “Yes. He can be maddening.”

  Her glance rose to his, held an instant and slipped away again; and he clasped his hands in his lap. She was disappointed in him: his appearance. As well as the other thing. She on the other hand looked as lovely as ever—her chin up, her green eyes sparkling and wide; she was wearing her hair shorter, swept up on one side in a pleasing little effect of curls. He started to say something and stopped himself. Peg’s daughter Nancy, seventeen now and full of the devil, looked back at him through the rear window of Ty’s Pontiac and stuck out her tongue at him, and he grinned back. They glided along the shaded streets, turned up Merivale, then along Lincoln. There were people now, a lot of them, all moving toward the center of town, the kids running in and out around their elders, playing tag. Flags were hanging from the staffs, from the second-story windows above the front doors. Sheldon Kimball, in a gray linen suit—Damon recognized him instantly—raised both arms and shouted: “And there he is now!” and he waved and called, “Hello, Shelley …”

  Homecoming. They turned right onto Main Street, and now he could see the signs in the shop windows, the blown-up photographs. His face stared back at him, trebled, quadrupled—younger, rather stern and forbidding, full of confidence; the picture Tommy’d got him to have taken when he’d made bird colonel, back at Ord. So terribly, unreachably long ago. The old Grand Western was now the Whitman Arms, with two modern plate-glass doors and a little marquee, and on one side a discreet neon sign that said coffee shop in lower case script.

  “I suppose they’ve moved the second-floor reception desk,” he said.

  Ted Barlow laughed. “Hell, yes—it’s all modernistical: formica counters and Muzak piped in on weekends. The old bar’s a snazzy cocktail lounge where the drinks cost seventy cents a throw. Thoroughly renovated. I don’t know what you’d do about Big Tim Riley now …”

  “Oh, now I’d get out a Special Order.”

  The two men laughed together and Tommy said: “Who is Big Tim Riley?”

  “Didn’t he ever tell you about that?” Ted demanded. “Why, Tim Riley was the biggest man in the county, a hell-raiser and tough as nails. He dared Sam to throw him out of the hotel and Sam knocked him all the way down the stairs, through the front door and across the street. With one punch.”

  “Legends,” Damon murmured. “How legends get born. Honey, you don’t want to believe everything you hear around here.”

  “Oh, I won’t—I never do!” She laughed, and as their eyes met again his heart caught at him with that quick, delectable pain; but he could not tell what she was thinking. They were together again—but as strangers, with a thousand questions there had been no time to answer since he’d stepped out of the C-54 at the field at Kearney and seen her standing on the asphalt, a little apart from the others, her feet together, looking small and trim and lonely and unflinching. He still loved her, he knew it even at that moment of greetings and confusion; he wanted her, he needed her … But you couldn’t go back. Once certain things had happened, certain kinds of calamity, there was no returning.

  And yet he was conscious of her nearness as a very bright, almost stultifying thing, like a beacon; she added to the strangeness of the day, this leisurely procession through the streets of his boyhood where old faces, on catching sight of him, brightened and called hello. He could think of nothing to say—
his mind picked up snips and scraps of vanished moments and dropped them like a magpie, without reflection. He was still in Kobe—no, worse, he was still on Luzon glancing at routine patrol and operations reports and planning for the terrible Honshu assault … It came too fast, he thought; the peace. I wasn’t ready for it, wasn’t prepared for homecoming.

  “How does it look to you, Sam?” Ted was asking him. “Now you’ve been to all those places and done all those things …”

  “It looks pretty good,” he answered, watching the familiar homes slide toward him, letting the warm, dense, dusty odor of mown hay and burning leaves and sage sweep over him again. Ted had never been east of Chicago except for a summer’s drive to the New York World’s Fair in ’39; while he had marched down the Champs Elysées, stood in the courtyards of Rhenish castles, watched the feathered dawn creep over La Napoule; he had walked through the palm green isles and the gaunt blue mountains of far Cathay … I was right to go, he thought, encountering the diffident, wistful eyes of his old friend in the driver’s mirror, I could never have stayed here, I’d have gone half crazy; and yet you could do a lot worse than pass your days in a little tank town on the Platte. “It looks pretty wonderful,” he amended. “Pretty damned wonderful, let me tell you.”

  “I’ll bet it does.”

  There ahead of them was the Green, and the big painted sign hanging across Main Street from Snow’s Bakery to Winnott’s Drug Store, now renamed the Paramount: WALT WHITMAN WELCOMES HER FAVORITE SON. And beyond that, WELCOME HOME SAM DAMON. And there was the town hall, set back at the far end of the Green, with the parking spaces all cleared and Ed Herkenthaler, now Chief of Police, standing there in full regalia, motioning them briskly past. There was a bandstand draped in bunting, the sidewalks were crowded thickly, and now everybody was calling to him, waving and pressing toward the car.

  “For God’s sake, stand up, Sam,” Ted said. “What do you think they picked my convertible for?”

  “They can see all of me they want to,” he replied; reaching out now, taking hands, recalling with a slow surge of recognition the names and faces, while the cars eased around the square. The square they’d named for him so many years ago. They stopped, he helped Tommy out. There was a pleasant confusion; everyone was shouting, laughing, gripping his hands and arms. Ty had come up, and Peg’s husband Frank with his slow, puzzled grin; and then his mother, who hadn’t been at the airport, looking small and birdlike and very calm. Her body felt strangely puny when he hugged her.

  “Sam,” she said in her firm, musical voice; her voice hadn’t changed. “It’s good to have you back home.”

  “It’s good to be home, Ma.”

  Her quick, dark gaze passed over his six banks of ribbons. They meant absolutely nothing to her and that pleased him; they never had. Her oldest boy was home safe. Her eyes searched his face. “Is it better now? Your arm?”

  “Oh, sure, Ma. All fixed up.”

  “I wish your Uncle Billy could be here,” she said. He could scarcely hear her. “It would have meant so much to him.”

  “So do I,” he answered. “And Mr. Verney. And Pa.” He embraced her again. Someone thumped him on the shoulder and he turned. Old Man Harrodsen, looking not a day older than he had in 1929, cried: “How does it feel to be back in God’s own country, boy?” And behind him, wonder of wonders, stood Celia Shurtleff in a handsome low-cut lemon yellow dress and a big hat, stout now but very pretty all the same. And Fred beside her in a raw silk suit.

  “Couldn’t miss this day!” Celia was calling through the tumult of voices. “Fred had to be in Council Bluffs, and when Daddy said you were coming home—”

  And then she had embraced him, laughing, and he thought of that evening by the gate when she’d reached up and kissed him, and then had broken away and run into the house. When she’d teased him about his destiny. He introduced her to Tommy, watching them both, still bound in strangeness; it was impossible to think in the midst of the hooting and hollering and well-wishing going on all around him. He wanted to put his arms around Tommy, hold her to him until they could hear their hearts beating. He turned away.

  Emil Clausen, Fritz’s brother and now mayor, looking very German and important and sweaty in a dark suit and white shirt and broad-striped maroon tie, was guiding him through the crowd to the bandstand, where twenty-odd GIs were standing in a row, wearing their uniforms. The ones who had come home. He moved along the line, repeating the names as Emil introduced them, fixing faces and rank and branch the way he’d done ever since France, catching resemblances now and then. There was Dick Tupper’s oldest boy Harold, and John Stacy, a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne, and Otto Skorny’s son Bill, a sergeant with the silver star and the Red Arrow of the 32nd Division; and an Air Force T-3 whose name he didn’t know, and a lieutenant with one arm and the Tropic Lightning patch, and Peg’s boy Alan who had been a corporal with the Third Marine Division, and Ted Barlow’s nephew Ralph Lyons, a gunner’s mate in the Navy. He shook their hands and spoke with each of them briefly. Here they were—pilots and boat handlers and riflemen and signalers: they had done what they had been asked to do—some of them a good deal more than that—and that was why they were all here on this bright new bandstand, with the country—this wonderful, precious, erring, troublesome old republic of theirs—free to go on being what it might be, if given half a chance …

  Ed Herkenthaler was asking them to please be seated, if they would please be seated, please. Below them on the Green the townspeople were settling into the bamboo-yellow folding chairs borrowed for the occasion, Sam knew, from the Congregational Church basement and the VFW hall; rustling themselves into silence. The new minister was a plump, round-faced young man named Eckert. He composed his face in dogged, earnest lines and talked about the last full measure of devotion and keeping faith and treasure heaped in heaven. Its sole virtue was its brevity, and the Green rustled in relief when the concluding prayer was ended. Damon raised his head and looked down at the new memorial, covered now in white muslin. Then Emil Clausen was speaking again, nervously and unsurely, and Walter Harrodsen walked to the edge of the platform as though it were the portals of his bank, and pressed his bulk against the bunting-draped boards.

  “We’re gathered here today to unveil the new memorial tablet honoring our sons who’ve fallen in this war,” he began. His voice was still full and powerful at seventy-six, without the trace of a tremor, and his hair was thick and blond on the top of his head. “This is a solemn day for us, and an important day. And there’s no one we’d rather have here for this ceremony than the man I’ve been asked to introduce—the most illustrious of Walt Whitman’s sons, who left his home over on Merivale Street some years ago and went out into the world and made it his very own. I knew this boy when he was that high, when he was a schoolboy, a brilliant athlete and a fine student; when he worked sixteen hours a day for Cyrus Timrud, and as night clerk at the hotel. He was a good field hand and a good night clerk, too—kept the books straight and got folks the rooms they liked, and he even kept order down there when it was needed.”

  There was a low, appreciative murmur from some of the older members of the audience and Walter Harrodsen grinned and shoved his hands in his coat pockets. “There was even a time when my Celia was just a mite sweet on him, as we used to say. But then she changed her mind. I told her she was making a terrible mistake, but you know what Walt Whitman girls are like.” He waited until the laughter died away. “Yes, he seemed pretty much like the rest of us—maybe a mite quicker, a mite stronger than most boys his age. But under this easy, quiet exterior lay something none of us knew about: a sense of sacrifice, of love and devotion to this great country of ours, a burning patriotism that wanted nothing more than to uphold the honor of these United States in a time of trial …”

  Sitting behind and to the right of Harrodsen, Sam composed himself, letting the big round words bowl on through his head. Why couldn’t people steer a little closer to reality, especially at times like this? Stan
d a man up before his fellows and let him open his mouth—and God alone knew what would come tumbling out. He remembered Donny one evening back at Beyliss, during dinner, when they’d been talking about crotchety old Colonel Statts.

  “But Dad, if it’s not the truth, why does he say it?”

  “—Because he’s a silly, pompous, vain old man,” his mother had interjected.

  “Yes, but if he knows he’s telling a lie …”

  “It’s not quite as simple as that,” he’d said to the boy. “Sometimes your memory plays you tricks. Often when we think back on something we change it around to the way we wish it had been, rather than the way it really was.”

  “But why do we do that? if it’s wrong …?”

  He had put down his knife and fork. “Well, for one thing, men don’t like to remember times when they were inadequate, or miserable, or frightened; they’d rather remember times when they were brave and resourceful and good. So they—sort of swivel things around a bit. It’s a human failing, and we’re all human beings.”