barracks cap still showing where the officer’s badge had been removed; someone said, “Howdy,” at his elbow. It was Albert and now he, Mink, recognised the Miss or Mrs Holcomb whose yard he had raked, and then he saw a big Negro woman—a woman no longer young, who looked at the same time gaunt yet fat too. He stopped, not quite startled: just watchful.
“You all take niggers too?” he said.
“We do this one,” Albert said. Goodyhay had already entered the house. The rest of them now moved slowly toward the door, clotting a little. “Her son had it too just like she was a white woman, even if they didn’t put his name on the same side of the monument with the others. See that woman yonder with the yellow hat?” The hat was soiled now but still flash, the coat below it had been white once too, a little flash too; the face between could have been twenty-five and probably at one time looked it, thin now, not quite raddled. “That’s right,” Albert said. “She still looks a little like a whore yet but you should have seen her last spring when she came out of that Catalpa Street house. Her husband commanded an infantry platoon back there when the Japs were running us out of Asia, when we were falling back all mixed up together—Aussies, British, French from IndoChina—not trying to hold anything any more except a line of foxholes after dark, fell long enough to get the stragglers up and move again tomorrow, including the ones in the foxholes too if any of them were still there by daylight. His platoon was the picket that night, him in one foxhole and his section strung out, when the nigger crawled up with the ammunition. He was new, you see. I mean, the nigger. This was as close as he had been to a Jap yet.
“So you know how it is: crouched in the stinking pitch dark in a stinking sweating hole in the ground with your eyes and ears both strained until in another minute they will pop right out of your head like marbles, and all around in front of you the chirping voices like crickets in a hayfield until you realise they aint crickets because pretty soon what they are chirping is English: ‘Maline. Tonigh youdigh. Maline. Tonigh youdigh.’ So here comes the nigger with his sack of grenades and Garand clips and the lieutenant tells him to get down into the hole and puts the nigger’s finger on the trigger of the Garand and tells him to stay there while he crawls back to report to the p.c. or something.
“You know how it is. A man can stand just so much. He dont even know when it will be but all of a sudden a moment comes and he knows that’s all, he’s already had it; he hates it as much as you do but he didn’t ask for it and he cant help it. That’s the trouble; you dont know beforehand, there’s nothing to warn you, to tell you to brace. Especially in war. It makes you think that just something no tougher than men aint got any business in war, dont it? that if they’re going to keep on having them, they ought to invent something a little more efficient to fight them with. Anyway, it’s the next morning, first light, when the first of the cut-off heads that maybe last night you split a can of dog ration with, comes tumbling down among you like somebody throwing a basketball. Only this time it’s that black head. Because why not? a nigger bred up on a Arkansas plantation, that a white man, not just a lieutenant but talking Arkansas to boot, says, ‘Take a-holt of this here hoe or rifle and stay here till I get back.’ So as soon as we finished fighting the Japs far enough back to get organised to spend another day dodging the strafing planes, the lieutenant goes around behind the dump of stuff we can tote with us and are trying to set fire to it and make it burn—It’s funny about jungles. You’re sweating all the time, even in the dark, and you are always parched for water because there aint any in a jungle no matter what you thought, and when you step into a patch of sun you blister before you can even button your shirt. Until you believe that if you so much as drop a canteen or a bayonet or even strike a boot calk against a root a spark will jump out and set the whole country afire. But just try Becauset one. Just try to burn something up and you’ll see different. Anyway, the lieutenant went around behind the dump where he would have a little privacy and put his pistol barrel in his mouth. Sure, she can get in here.”
Now they were all inside, and he recognised this from thirty-eight years back too—how the smell of Negroes remained long after the rooms themselves were vacant of them—the smell of poverty and secret fear and patience and enduring without enough hope to deodorise it—they (he supposed they would call themselves a congregation) filing onto the backless benches, the woman in the yellow hat on the front one, the big Negress alone on the back one, Goodyhay himself facing them at the end of the room behind a plank laid across two sawhorses, his hands resting, not clenched: just closed into fists, on the plank until everybody was quiet.
“All right,” Goodyhay said. “Anybody that thinks all he’s got to do is sit on his stern and have salvation come down on him like a cloudburst or something, dont belong in here. You got to get up on your feet and hunt it down until you can get a-hold of it and then hold it, even fighting off if you have to. And if you cant find it, then by God make it. Make a salvation He will pass and then earn the right to grab it and hold on and fight off too if you have to but anyway hold it, hell and high water be damned—” when a voice, a man, interrupted:
“Tell it again, Joe. Go on. Tell it again.”
“What?” Goodyhay said.
“Tell it again,” the man said. “Go on.”
“I tried to,” Goodyhay said. “You all heard me. I cant tell it.”
“Yes you can,” the man said; now there were women’s voices too:
“Yes, Joe. Tell it,” and he, Mink, still watching the hands not clenched but just closed on the plank, the coldly seething anchorite’s eyes—the eyes of a fifth-century hermit looking at nothing from the entrance of his Mesopotamian cave—the body rigid in an immobility like a tremendous strain beneath a weight.
“All right,” Goodyhay said. “I was laying there. I was all right, everything snafu so I was all right. You know how it is in water when you dont have any weight at all, just laying there with the light coming way down from up on top like them lattice blinds when they shake and shiver slow in a breeze without making any sound at all. Just laying there watching my hands floating along without me even having to hold them up, with the shadow of them lattice blinds winking and shaking across them, and my feet and legs too, no weight at all, nowhere to have to go or march, not even needing to breathe, not even needing to be asleep or nothing: just all right. When there He was standing over me, looking like any other shavetail just out of a foxhole, maybe a little older, except he didn’t have a hat, bucket: just standing there bareheaded with the shadow of the lattice running up and down him, smoking a cigarette. ‘Fall in, soldier,’ He said.
“ ‘I cant,’ I says. Because I knew that as long as I laid still, I would be all right. But that once I let myself start thinking about moving, or tried to, I would find out to buldn’t. But what the hell, why should I? I was all right. I had had it. I had it made. I was sacked up. Let them do whatever they.…ing wanted to with their.…ing war up on top.
“ ‘That’s once,’ He said. ‘You aint got but three times. You, the Top Soldier, saying cant. At Chateau-Thierry and St-Mihiel the company would have called you the Top Soldier. Do they still do that in the Corps on Guadalcanal?’
“ ‘Yes,’ I says.
“ ‘All right, Top Soldier,’ He said. ‘Fall in.’ So I got up. ‘At ease,’ He said. ‘You see?’ He said.
“ ‘I thought I couldn’t,’ I says. ‘I didn’t believe I could.’
“ ‘Sure,’ He said. ‘What else do we want with you. We’re already full up with folks that know they can but dont,
