'Ya'll git me a cord or a rope or something. We have to tie off that artery.'
Someone went to improvise one, but the blood came so fast, Earl was afraid it was too late. Gently, he pried the wound open.
'Git a light down here so I can see!'
The lantern was lowered and Earl could make out the pulsing, severed artery. He had no clamp at all, so he reached in and plucked the little spurting tube between his two fingers and closed it.
'He's got to stay still like this till medical help comes.'
'Won't be nothing till the morning.'
'Well, if we can hold him still and keep him calm, now that I got this hose shut down, he may make it.'
'Fo' what?' somebody asked. 'Come back here?'
'You got a point, man. But still, I say keep this young man alive for better times. Whyn't ya'll do some of that singing you're so damn good at. Maybe that'll keep him with us an extra minute or two till the doc comes.'
The men began to sing.
Well, sweetheart, it isn't pretty and it's primitive, but after Africa and Asia, it's certainly comforting to be in one's own country, although Mississippi has a long way to go before it joins the rest of the U. S. A.
Sam sat in a leather chair in a study. He had before him a cup of coffee and a pile of letters on the thin paper that marked the V-mail of the war, a large sheet folded many ways to make it a small and efficient package for delivery. victory it said at the top of every fold.
This was the earliest one, marked January 9, 1943.
'It's so odd,' the doctor went on, you expect Mississippi to be hot and swampy and to see men in chain gangs working in dust and heat. You expect to run into Walker Evans images everywhere. Now Let Us Praise Famous Men. Well, it's not at all like that. It is squalid, of course, and underdeveloped, but it's both cold and wet and of course dreary as well. Everything is muddy and the forest or jungle or whatever it is is impenetrable. I certainly can see why they put this prison here on this old plantation site; the question is, why did they put the plantation here in the first place?
Sam was a thorough, disciplined man. He read each letter completely, occasionally taking notes on his yellow pad. He skipped nothing, he tried to prejudge nothing, and he willed himself to pay no attention to the emotional content of the letters, which was none of his business.
Yet that of course, particularly in the early going, was the only thing he could notice. As a couple, Dr. and Mrs. Stone seemed so… well, damned perfect. He had censored his own men's letters during the same time period, as he moved his artillery unit across up Italy, then over to England, then to invade France and roll toward Germany. He therefore had a reference point, but quickly found it of no use. For while the average soldier's letters were full of sentences like, 'You tell Luke he still owes me that $300, and I am not forgetting it when we finally win this thing' and 'Who is this Bob you keep writing about.
Shirley I am sleeping in cold dogshit every night and these German fellows are trying to blow me up and I DO NOT appreciate hearing about Bob taking you to the church supper.' But the Stones were like a couple in a movie: 'Miss. you darling, dearest, and am so proud of the work you are doing at the U. S. O.'
'Thanks, sweetness, for that last wonderful letter, and it doesn't surprise me that flower club politics are so rough. All politics are rough, from the Medical Corps to the flower club. You will become treasurer in the next election, I am sure of it.'
Unable to help himself, Sam wrote the words 'emotional authenticity lacking' on his yellow pad, unsure himself quite what he meant.
Occasionally, he'd look up when the sentiments grew too cloying and Hollywoodesque, pinch the bridge of his nose, take another sip of coffee, and glance around the study, with its wall of photographs taken in obscure foreign places where the great humanitarian had gone in his quest for a disease-free universe. The photos were the same and seemed in bright color, even though they were black and white: the great man, in a white coat or a pith helmet, standing among a coterie of little people of differently hued skin and differently configured wardrobes, enjoying their adoration and his own sense of centrality. His wife was in some of the photos as well, always a beautiful woman of classical posture and self-possession, the of a dozen or more native cultures.
The little people were brown, black, yellow, in a variety of fabulously interesting garb: feathers, loincloths, ceremonial gowns, animal skins, black pajamas, sometimes in just the pale dowdy uniform of colonialist lackeys in some empire's far-flung bureaucracy.
Among the pictures, of course, were the testimonials, some even in English. They spoke of the same thing: the doctor's commitment, the doctor's love of people, especially children, the doctor's courage. It was a fabulous cavalcade, and it made Sam himself feel a little banal and worthless. He'd blown up some German tanks and put some bad fellows in a little county in nowhere, U. S. A.' in prison or in the electric chair. What was that in comparison to a life lived so grandly, so heroically?
'Would you care for more coffee, Mr. Vincent?'
'Yes, ma'am. I was just looking at the photos and tributes on the wall.
I wish I'd known the doctor during his lifetime. It would have been an honor and a privilege.'
A dreamy look of assent flew across the woman's face, which itself was her reply, and off she fled to get more coffee.
'The engineers have at last finished the levee,' the doctor wrote, 'and we can therefore count on uninterrupted work. No more floods, no more lost documents and protocols, no more horror stories terrifying the 'natives' around here.'
Hmmm. Army engineers had built a levee to protect the doctor's project from flood damage? This in the middle of the war July 6, 1943, Sam was in Sicily then when engineers were in high demand in the world's combat theaters. That suggested how important official Washington considered his project or how much private influence a mere major could wield even in the military, if he were charming, famous, charismatic, well connected. Sam remembered the crumbly bridges his guns had traveled as they crossed that rocky island, and how he'd lost one, and two men, both maimed for life, when in some nameless village the truss bridge built by the Romans had given way, and collapse had ensued. They could have used more engineers in the Sicily of 1943.
'My spirits are high, darling, and we are making progress. I must say even the ' are taking this in good cheer. They want to do their part too! Everybody wants to win the war, so they can go back to their loved ones proud of what they've done to put Herr Hitler and Tojo-san out of business!'
Sam wondered about those innocent quote marks around 'volunteers'; to a sophisticated man such as Dr. Stone, punctuation could express a whole range of subtle irony and camouflaged meaning; was it some reflection of ambivalence on his part, a whisper of cynicism, a subconscious projection of contempt?
It all began to change by the spring of 1944. Evidently the early days of great progress had run into a wall and, medically, whatever it was the doctor was working on now resisted his efforts.
Darling, I'm afraid I won't see you next weekend as I had promised.
There's so much to do here and so little time. Now that the invasion is imminent, I'm losing personnel to go to Europe. It seems I've slipped a little in the priority department. It's as if they expect miracles, and when I can't produce them overnight, they lose confidence in me and the project. It's so damned unfair, but then, I keep reminding myself, that is the way the military works. It's very much like it was at the Hopkins with batches of us competing for attention, and first this project and then that looks the most rewarding and gets the lion's share of the funding. But I soldier on, darling, and will see you as soon as possible. Love and kisses, your ever-loyal David.
David canceled his next leave, too; that was August of 1944, and in December, he was even sharper.
Darling, I love you truly, but I cannot in good conscience have you coming even to New Orleans. There has been a shift in the direction our program is taking us, and I feel I must be here constantly to supervise our reconfiguration. Moreover, in these momentous times, darling, we must discipline ourselves and give all to the immense task at hand, especially when the end is so near and we are so close to victory and to a return to our way of life. To have you taking up valuable railroad space to see someone as insignificant as me is simply wrong; best give that seat to the war widow, the kid on last pass before hitting some godforsaken Pacific atoll, the fellow on compassionate leave over a sick and dying mother. Meanwhile, in my way, I struggle on, fighting for what I believe and doing my damndest to eradicate the ancient enemy.
Sam thought he was getting a little florid and over melodramatic the woman's passage to New Orleans by December of 1944 certainly wouldn't have counted a bean's worth against the war effort. Again it felt emotionally
