Weeds in Bloom

  Sergeant Malliniak had a lot to say. I did whatever he ordered willingly, as he had become (his term) our Mother Hen. It took a while, but eventually I realized that our sergeant was married to the U.S. Army, and we were his only children.

  Side by side, Elliot and I crawled on our bellies beneath sagging loops of barbed wire, over field dirt, as live rounds of cadre-fired ammunition hissed and whined twenty inches above our steel-helmeted heads. It was here that Elliot met, head-on and face to face, his first Alabama scorpion. Elliot was the scorpion’s first Bronxite.

  Both parties appeared unprepared for a social.

  Elliot, who was a decent guy with all the practical intelligence of a crouton, decided that he’d best stand up and run. All I could think to do I did, smashing the butt of my rifle into Elliot’s brainless helmet, knocking senseless the only buddy I had in the entire United States Army.

  Somehow we survived.

  “You enlisted?” he kept asking me.

  Day after exhausting day, I managed to drag our unlikely warrior through swamps, up ropes, and over walls. On the rifle range I could be of little help. Elliot’s right cheek was bruised and discolored from the mule-kick recoil of his M1 Garand weapon. His feet were swollen from marching, soft pinky hands blistered by heat and close-order drill, his body purpled by bayonet practice. Butt strokes.

  He took it on the chin.

  Dear Elliot …

  Be sure to get to bed early, and sleep late. Are you taking the vitamins I sent you? Do not get your feet wet. Who is this Rob person you mentioned in your letter, the one who hunted back home and knows guns? He sounds like a gangster.

  Following our evening with Gene Autry, we shipped overseas. To where, we didn’t know.

  “Maybe,” said Elliot, “we’ll get to shoot Japs.” He paused. “I’d hate to shoot anybody like Mrs. Katayama. She’s on our block. Her name means Half Mountain.”

  It wasn’t the Queen Mary. It was the U.S.A.T. (United States Army Transport) Wilson Victory, accommodating one thousand corn-fed and homesick lads who hadn’t ventured across a body of water larger than a duck pond … or Central Park Lake.

  Belowdecks, in the bowels of the ship, our cots were tightly formed in units of two dozen each, four together stacked six bunks high. I drew a bottom bunk, underneath five of the most seasick G.I.’s in the Army. As our vessel rolled and tossed through the North Atlantic, we vomited into our steel helmets. But only when our aim was accurate.

  We docked at a somewhere called Livorno, in Italy, replacements for General Mark Clark’s Fifth Army, the 88th Infantry Division, the Blue Devils.

  Elliot and I started scouting for Japs.

  Because of my proven experience with weaponry, I was soon assigned to be a machine gunner—a .30-caliber light (air-cooled) automatic M1919A1 with a mount M2—and Elliot was one of my ammo bearers. Instead of Germans or Italians, we battled the Yugoslavians (Jugs, we called them), who, under Marshal Tito and backed up by Russia, wanted to invade and claim a hunk of a weakened and demoralized Italy.

  Our battlefront was the Morgan Line.

  The weather wasn’t sunny Italy. It was rainy, and cold. Food was sorry. A few among us received packages from home.

  I was lucky to be Elliot’s buddy.

  With one reservation. Salami. Back in the Bronx, in Mama Leftowitz’s spotless and busy kitchen, I’m sure her salami was fragrant enough. Already. However, due to distance and postal delays, by the time it caught up to the 88th Infantry her salami had ripened into a deadly weapon. It was unfit for human consumption, so naturally we offered it to Sergeant Malliniak, who, I by now concluded, could chew and digest artillery shell casings.

  Even he refused.

  Elliot and I devoured his mother’s macaroons (Passover cookies), which, I observed, arrived by the carload. Her salami remained virginal and untouched. Not even Elliot, whose prime instruction during childhood was to eat, partook. Instead, he briefly unwrapped the salami, inhaled its revered back-home aroma, and said, “Guys, that’s a breeze over the Bronx.”

  Our feet suffered.

  Due to being continually cold and wet (and a constant shortage of dry socks), our feet tended to turn blue, then black and crusty hard. With little or no feeling. It’s called trench foot. I held Elliot in my arms as a medic, with forceps, took off one of his toes. I was luckier. But my right foot is still scarred.

  Dear Elliot …

  Pray God you receive this box of medicine. All kinds. You know your asthma condition, so try not to inhale any foreign air. At least here in New York we can see what’s to breathe. If in doubt, take two of every pill I’ve enclosed.

  At the time, I didn’t know what hypochondriac meant. Elliot, I’m now sure, invented the word. Along with thirty pounds of machine gun ammunition, Elliot also toted his personal pharmacy of assorted medication. As to diseases or disorders or distresses, you name it, Elliot claimed he had it and was pill-prepared. Our platoon’s physician-in-residence could, and did, dispense everything from dandruff shampoo to foot powder.

  He even carried Midol.

  In Italy, the mountains are steep, especially when foggy and wet. Machine guns and mortars weigh more than rifles. A weapons platoon becomes no more than mules.

  Dear Elliot …

  Don’t carry anything heavy. Hernia runs in our family, and your Uncle Isadore wore a truss, we later discovered. And for years we thought that dancing made him romantic.

  Elliot read me each of his mother’s letters. “I love her,” he explained. “And I want to share her with a friend. Even if you’re a gay.” He shrugged and then laughed. “So nobody’s perfect.”

  Every week we all received a free ration of beer and chocolate candy. Today I still pop a suds and enjoy chocolates by the box. The taste, in such combination, brings it all back as though it were yesterday and I was soldiering again with Elliot.

  He was killed.

  The Jugs used to string thin unseen wires across the rocky roads. All of our jeeps had wire cutters, like giant beer-can openers, uprightly welded to every front bumper. Except one jeep. Private Elliot Leftowitz was decapitated. I’m grateful I didn’t see it happen.

  Somewhere in New York City there’s a modest neighborhood of grit-caked brownstones or brick tenements, once the home of the best buddy any G.I. could have.

  My buddy.

  His soul now rests beyond the clouds.

  Regardless in which army or under which flag we serve, old soldiers and young soldiers deserve a bunk in Heaven. Because we’ve already seen Hell. So, for Elliot’s sake, I hope there are plenty of pills, Passover macaroons, and a fresh homemade salami.

  May he smell a breeze over the Bronx.

  Saw

  AT AGE NINETEEN I RECEIVED MY HONORABLE DISCHARGE from the United States Army. And three hundred dollars.

  Even during World War II there wasn’t much of a war boom in Vermont. If there was, nobody noticed. And after the war, when we veterans were home looking for work, there weren’t too many jobs.

  I was lucky. If you can call it luck, being hired at a local sawmill. Hours were long and the pay was short. The noise was deafening. The saws were large and powerful. My job was to be a sawyer’s helper, doing whatever was asked of me, obeying the older men I worked with, and shying away from the saw blade.

  The man who owned the mill was Mr. Ryan.

  Even though he had ample money, he was no stranger to hard honest work. He paid in cash, and never once was a penny short. Or a penny over.

  Working, he’d outsweat a horse.

  He would start early, way before dawn, getting the mill machinery ready for the day’s grind. After we left in the evening, Mr. Ryan was still there, cleaning up, sweeping, doing paperwork. But to me he seemed incomplete. The man couldn’t smile. He didn’t carry a single laugh inside his ribs. Not a one. He lived alone. Mr. Ryan was a widower. No children. Mrs. Ryan, so I’d been told, died before I was born. But for years prior to her death, she never left the house. Kept to home
. Aunt Carrie had heard that Mrs. Ryan wasn’t right in the head.

  Mr. Ryan had no housekeeper. No visitors came. Nor could anyone recall when he’d last attended church, a town meeting, or a village social. Ryan didn’t sing or dance, or play any manner of music.

  Men at the mill had a private joke about Mr. Ryan’s level of laughter: “If Ryan smiled, he’d break his legs.”

  He knew timber. That much I’ll grant him. Ryan was a master sawyer and could set a log into a bin so true that when it final got fed into the blade, the log would yield a maximum of plank, with little waste. Ryan wasn’t partial to wasting words or lumber. Use it, save it, wear it, make it do. He’d tallow the leather wheel straps every day—even on Sunday, some claimed, when the mill wasn’t running.

  My partner was a man named Yaw.

  Mr. Earnest Yaw, a sawyer. I’d been to school with one of his eleven children, Calvin. Earnest was considered, even by other lumberjacks, a large man. Burly, barrel-chested, and balder than a round-top grave marker.

  A good worker, tough and knowing. He was Ryan’s type of man: taut, tireless, and taciturn. On the rare occasions that Earnest spoke to me above the noise of the saw, I listened up.

  Bull-strong, he’d strip off his shirt and then shoulder even the thickest log into the feeder bin, with little help from me. Even though, at the time, I measured six foot high and two hundred pounds of cement. It was admirable the way Earnest Yaw could work. He’d use a wood hook better than a hand, to prick the bark just deep enough to take a purchase on a log and hold weight. Neither too shallow nor too deep.

  Yaw wasn’t perfect.

  He brought whiskey in his dinner pail.

  If Ryan knew, he never mentioned it. Perhaps he didn’t know. I could never smell liquor on Earnest Yaw’s breath. For good reason. Following every swig, Earnest took a bite out of a large raw onion.

  The other men kidded him about it in a good-natured way, telling Earnest that his breath, if directed upward, could salt a heavy rain, or kill crows.

  Work in a sawmill is always the same. Our days went by, log after log and hour after hour, until the quit whistle blew. Every shift seemed identical to yesterday’s. Except for one particular day. It was a Monday, and Earnest Yaw refused to touch his noon meal, claiming his stomach had been turned.

  All day long, however, he drank.

  With no food in his belly to absorb the colorless corn, Yaw became roaring drunk, cursing the logs that we were hooking into the bin. His wood hook slipped a few times. Earnest moved unsteady. His big boots kicked things they ordinarily would avoid. He didn’t bother with eating an onion. Swallow by swallow, the whiskey began to warp him, twisting his body and reason into a half ox and half devil. Yaw had gone and Satan had come.

  His eyes became two burning red Hells.

  The giant silver circle of the saw cried extra loud that afternoon. A woman’s scream. I could hear her pain every time the blade bit into another crooked log. Twice the saw bucked. The blade’s cry climbed in pitch, higher, more frantic. The sound of a sick or a wounded animal, as if the mill had been cursed. And was dying.

  Oak.

  We worked oak that day. I know because even now I can close my eyes and smell it. Hard, like the wood. Many a log, settled improperly in the bin, would balk at the blade, hissing, spitting knots like shotgun balls. A lot of good oak ruined, fouled by temper. Even when a log was beyond correction, Yaw would swear, shouldering the log to push it. Yet the planks we were cutting weren’t worthy.

  Yaw’s answer was to turn up the power until the arrow pointed to a speed beyond safety. In the red of the dial.

  He was working closer to the blur of that whirling blade than any man ought.

  “Earnest,” I said, “please take care.”

  A man like Earnest Yaw rarely, if ever, hearkens to a boy of nineteen. He was in no mood for advice. Not from a lad young enough to be his son. Ignoring me, he stretched his wood hook across a butted end, his dusty arm between the log and the blade. He trued the log. But it rolled, pinning his arm beneath its massive moving weight.

  Dropping my hook, I leaped for the switch just as Mr. Ryan arrived.

  In less than a second, Ryan threw his body at the log, knowing that the emergency switch could never cut the power in time. Mr. Ryan and I moved the log just enough to free up Earnest Yaw’s arm from underneath. But as Ryan yanked the arm up, he lost his own hand against the slowing blade.

  I saw the silver circle painted red all around with specks of blood. The saw blade wore a red belt.

  A pair of heavy iron tongs hung on a nail in the nearby wall.

  Grabbing them in an instant, Earnest applied them to Ryan’s arm to stem the gushering blood. But the sawdust floor was darkening, a blacker and deeper red. The separated hand was draining white. Yaw’s fingers gently picked bloody grains of sawdust from the butt of Mr. Ryan’s arm. Then, striking a match with his thumbnail, he lit a torch to cauterize the wound. By the time, however, that he’d bound it tight with string, Ryan was breathing irregular and hard.

  He fainted on the sawdust floor.

  Later on, Doc Turner said that Mr. Ryan might’ve bled to death, but he lived. Yaw and I left Doc Turner’s place and returned to work the mill. There was no such thing as a spoken “Thank you” by either party. No one said a word.

  Earnest Yaw never touched another drink.

  Buck Dillard

  “HOLD HER STEADY,” SAID BUCK.

  A crowd had gathered to watch.

  Nobody I knew had ever seen it done, what we were about to see, but if anybody was strong enough to actual do such a trick, it was Buck Dillard.

  Mr. Dillard was easy to identify. There couldn’t have been two lumberjacks like Buck, even though he appeared to be almost two people. He measured six and a half foot in height and weighed close to three hundred pounds. Across one side of his face ran a wood-hook scar. His right hand was slightly crippled from when it had been crushed beneath a log. A double-bitted ax usual hung from his belt.

  Some local citizens (especially those who worked, drank, and fought with him) said there was little good in Buck.

  Others claimed none at all.

  Years ago, when a boy, I had seen Buck Dillard but never dared to speak to him. Few did. Now I was nineteen, home from my military service and working for Mr. Ryan at his sawmill. Buck showed up there once in a while, bringing logs. I still didn’t say a how-do to him, nor he to me.

  Buck and his wood cords weren’t cordial. But we all had to credit Buck Dillard because whenever he was only half drunk, he could entertain a crowd of fire hydrants. Or even preachers.

  “Hold her,” Buck said again.

  With his big logger boots near to a yard apart, Buck bent himself down to position his shoulders underneath Mildred, the mule. She kicked, but didn’t hurt Buck any. Hooking a mighty arm around a foreleg, his other around a hind, Buck now locked Mildred into a no-struggle hold.

  Buck grunted.

  Yet nothing happened.

  Behind me, I heard another wager being agreed on, in polite whispers. A bet of five dollars against ten that Buck could heft up a full-growed mule.

  Buck’s face was normally a ruddy color, a result of outdoor logging in northern Vermont’s wind and bitter cold. Now, as he strained, his cheeks reddened to the shade of an embarrassed beet. Mildred still refused to defy gravity.

  I heard Buck say a shameful word.

  Hauling in a deep breath, Buck strained again. This time, all four hoofs lifted up off the ground. Inch by inch, Buck’s tree-trunk legs began to straighten, and Mildred became elevated to free and clear. Knees locked, Buck stood up tall and proud, turning a complete circle, possibly to allow Mildred a good look at a crowd of doubters. She seemed unimpressed.

  Everybody made some sort of a noise: a sigh of relief or a groan of disappointment, depending on how a person had wagered.

  Mildred brayed, a sound that sawed through the air, so Buck set her gently down and then gave her a hug and a pa
t. Buck Dillard wasn’t a man who’d smile every decade, but he certain was doing it now. All it did was make his scar appear to be deeper, meaner, and more painful.

  His real name wasn’t Buck.

  It was Maurice.

  Buck didn’t favor his given name, not from a neighbor or a stranger. Just hearing “Maurice” seemed to sour his soul. And double his good fist. In fact, there was only one citizen in the entire county that ever called him Maurice and survived it. She was my teacher, Miss Kelly, the smallest and most birdlike little lady in our community.

  There was a rumor that persisted about those two. Seems that Buck and some other loggers were in town one evening to sign on with a new timber company to skid rough spruce down off the mountain to the pulp mill. All the men signed the work docket except for one. Buck didn’t know how to sign his name.

  So he didn’t get hired.

  That was the very night, so the story goes, he pounded on Miss Kelly’s door, apologized, then begged her to teach him how to use his left hand to write his name.

  Maurice Dillard.

  He’d balked at writing the Maurice part, so Miss Kelly told him that signing on as M. Dillard would do. And if this proved inadequate, she personally would speak to the company foreman on Buck’s behalf.

  Buck, fortified by his newly acquired talent (plus a few swallows from a jug), signed the docket the very next morning when the crew was being assembled. With a bit less ease than he’d lifted the mule, using his good left hand, he picked up the pencil stub, wet the lead tip in his mouth, made a few warm-up circles to be fancy, and signed:

  M. Dillard

  It took him over a minute, but Buck completed his scrawl, slapping the pencil down with triumphant finality.

  The foreman, a stranger in these parts, eyed Buck’s messy signature and then promptly made a major mistake. “What’s the M stand for?” he asked.

  “Mildred,” hooted a lumberjack, a fellow of wit and the brains of a Chiclet.