A Special Providence (8 page)

“… How
much?”

“Vanty-sank, he says. That’s twenty-five francs for the pack. Go ahead, what the hell.”

“Shit
no; don’t be an idiot – that’s only half a buck. Make him give you a buck a pack.”

“Comby-ann for the wine, hey kid? Hey! Buster! You with the runny nose – yeah, you. Comby-ann for the veeno?”

“Pardon, M’sieur? Comment?
”

“I said comby-ann cigaretty do you want for the veeno? No, damn it, the
veeno
!”

Then they were moving again. Prentice would gladly have spent the rest of the day talking with Quint – they could have discussed the countryside and tried to figure out what part of France this was – but Quint said he felt lousy and stayed deep in the straw, either sleeping or trying to sleep. Sam Rand was there to talk to, but he showed no interest in the passing scene. “I just want to get where we’re goin’,” he said, “wherever the hell it is.”

The phrase “replacement depot” had a comfortingly solid sound – it seemed to promise at least a semblance of garrison life, a place with decent accommodations and decent food and medical attention – but the First Army’s replacement depot proved to be a jumble of bams and hastily pitched squad tents around a badly shelled Belgian village. Prentice’s group got a barn to sleep in instead of a tent, but it leaked wind and snow; the only way to make it bearable was to walk half a mile to where a Belgian farmer sold armfuls of straw for packs of cigarettes, and straw soon became a matter of furious importance:

“Hey, you’re takin’ all my
straw
!”

“Fuck you, buddy – this is
my
straw.”

In the morning they were marched out to a makeshift target range to zero-in the sights of their rifles, and in the afternoon they were given overshoes – ordinary black civilian galoshes which bothered Prentice a little because they looked so unmilitary. Then they were loaded into open trucks and driven away toward an uncertain place from which, it was said, they would be assigned to combat divisions within twenty-four hours.

“Why the hell don’t they have covers on the
trucks?
” Prentice demanded in the wind, and Quint, who seemed to know a good deal about the First Army from his reading of
Time
magazine, explained that open trucks had been a regulation since the outbreak of the Bulge: the idea was to enable men to get out of them faster in case of enemy attack. The trucks let them down into an encampment of frozen squad tents, and they spent a coughing, sleepless night there before convoys of other open trucks began to arrive from various First Army divisions to claim their men. Prentice, Quint, Rand, and several hundred others went into the trucks whose drivers wore a shoulder patch of a design worked around the numerals “57.”

“Is this supposed to be a good outfit, the Fifty-seventh?” Prentice asked.

“How the hell should I know?” Quint said. “Am I supposed to know everything?”

“Well, Jesus, you don’t have to get sore. I just thought you might know, is all.”

“Well, I don’t.”

And there was no more talk in the truck for a long time, as they drew deep inside their snow-encrusted overcoats and tried to expose as little flesh as possible to the wind.

“I wonder if they’ll put us out into line companies right away,” Prentice said, “or if they’ll keep us at division headquarters a while first.”

Quint’s round, stubbled, wind-chapped face turned slowly to stare at him as if at a tiresome child. “God
damn
it, Prentice,” he said without opening his teeth, “will you quit asking
questions
?”

“I wasn’t asking a question. I just said I wondered.”

“Well, quit wondering, then. Try shutting up for a while. You might learn something.”

They learned all they needed to know about the division that night, against a distant boom and rumble of artillery fire, when they were assembled in a barn to hear a welcoming talk by an earnest, pulpit-voiced chaplain. “You men are now members of the Fifty-seventh Division,” he said, standing with his thumbs in his pistol belt and his paunch sucked in, “and I think you’ll soon find you have every reason to be proud of that fact.” He went on to say that the 57th was not an old division, even by standards that measured a division as old if it had served in Normandy last summer. The 57th had still been in the States last summer. It had come overseas in October, taken advanced training in Wales, and been committed to action here in Belgium a little less than a month ago. But the chaplain pointed out, with a righteous
quivering of his cheeks, that in the past month the boys of the 57th had become men. They had “engaged in some of the bitterest fighting yet known in the Second World War, and in some companies the casualty rate has been as high as 60 per cent.” He then said a number of other things, using phrases that could have been lifted whole from
Yank
magazine or
Readers Digest
, and Prentice paid more attention to the sound of the artillery than to his voice.

The place they were assigned to sleep in was the second floor of an abandoned grain mill, an ice-cold room with wind humming steadily through its broken windows. Prentice and Quint went on sick call and received a supply of aspirin and some dark, foul-tasting pellets that were the size and texture of rabbit turds.

“Actually they’re damn good medicine if you can stand the taste,” Quint said. “Hold it in your mouth till it dissolves; let it coat your throat.” But Prentice couldn’t. He would swallow the thing after a minute and go on coughing, with the awful taste still in his mouth and nose.

On the second night Sam Rand found a farmer down the road who agreed to let the three of them sleep in his kitchen in exchange for three packs of cigarettes, and it was unbelievably warm. They sat with their socked feet on the fender of a great iron stove, drinking K-ration coffee and listening to the artillery. But Quint said they’d better stay here only for the one night: it was risky because they might miss their orders to move up to the line. They had drawn their company assignments that day, and it pleased Prentice to know that they would all three be in the same unit – “A” Company of the 189th Regiment.

“What are the other regiments again?” he said.

“One ninetieth and One ninety-first.”

“Right. And there’s only those three, right?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Prentice. Yes, there are three regiments in a division.” And Quint went on in the chanting, singsong tone of a grammar-school teacher, closing his eyes. “There are three battalions in each regiment, three companies plus a heavy-weapons company in each battalion, three platoons plus a weapons platoon in each company—”

“I
know,
” Prentice said.

“—three squads in each platoon, and twelve men in each squad.”

“I
know
all that.”

“Well if you know, why do you keep asking half-assed questions?”

“I
don’t
keep asking. I
didn’t
ask.”

“And for God’s sake don’t start forgetting where you belong. You’re in ‘A’ Company, First Battalion, One eighty-ninth Regiment. You’d better write it down.”

“Goddam it, Quint, you don’t have to talk to me that way. I mean I’m not exactly an idiot, you know.”

“I know you’re not—” and Quint went into a violent spasm of coughing. When it was over he said, “I know you’re not. That’s why it’s so goddam depressing when you keep acting like one all the time.”

“You know what’s even more depressing? The way you keep acting like a real, royal, first-class little pain in the ass.”

“Now, now, children,” said Sam Rand. “Quit your fussin’.” And there was a long, simmering-down silence around the stove, until Rand said, “How old’re you, Prentice? Eighteen?”

“That’s right.”

“Damn. My oldest boy’s half your age. Don’t that seem funny?”

And Prentice said he guessed it did. “How many kids do you have again, Sam? Three, is it?”

“Three, yeah. The girl’s seven, and then we got another boy four.” He eased one buttock off his chair and reached tentatively for his wallet. “You seen their pictures?”

“No, I don’t believe I—”

And out came a snapshot of them, blond and serious, lined up against the side of a bright clapboard house with the sun in their eyes.

“Then this here’s my wife,” Sam said, and turned the plastic frame to reveal a thin, pleasant-looking girl in a flowered dress and a new permanent wave. Prentice examined both pictures long enough to make approving comments and then passed the wallet to Quint, who scowled at it, mumbled something agreeable, and handed it back.

“And then look at this here,” Sam said, probing carefully in another part of the wallet. He pulled out a piece of ruled school paper, many times folded and stained brown from the sweated leather. “Somethin’ the oldest boy wrote in school.”

It was an essay, written in pencil with many erasures and with periods that were almost as big as the letters:

The teacher’s red pencil had corrected the spelling of “cultivator” and written “A” at the top of the page.

“Well, I’ll be damned, Sam,” Prentice said. “That’s pretty great. I mean, really, that’s great.”

Rand’s face was stiff with shyness as he stared at the stove, fiddling with his cigarette, picking a shred of tobacco from his lips with his social finger. “Well,” he said, “I mean, it’s pretty good writin’ for a nine-year-old. Or eight, I guess. That’s all he was when he wrote that, was eight.”

“Very
good, Sam,” Quint said, handing the paper back. “That’s really very good.”

All the tension was dissolved; they were ready for sleep, and as Prentice settled into his bedroll on the floor he began to draft the opening lines of a letter he might one day write:
Dear Vernon: I want you to know that your father was one of the finest men
I
have ever …

On the following night both Quint and Rand were assigned to guard duty on the divisional headquarters perimeter, which left Prentice with nothing to do but sit cold and alone in the grain mill until a man named Reynolds came over to squat beside him and to confide, in a half whisper, that he knew a nice warm house down the road that was “bigger’n Dallas.” That was Reynolds’s favorite phrase: having gotten a laugh with it several times among the strangers at Fort Meade and Camp Shanks, and having found that it won him goodwill in all the ensuing disorders, he had grown addicted to it. He had shrilly announced that the
Queen Elizabeth
was bigger than Dallas, that the water power in the toilet bowls aboard ship was bigger than Dallas, that the space left by the removal of somebody’s duffelbag from under his feet in the boxcar would be bigger than Dallas; and he was still saying it even now, after more than a few men had told him to take Dallas and shove it up his ass.

Don’t tell nobody else,” he said, “ ’cause we don’t want to louse it up. There’s this real nice lady lives there, her husband’s a prisoner in Germany. She’s got these two little kids and this old granny – the granny’s real nice too. They let us sleep there last
night, me and a couple other boys, and we aim to do it again tonight. Plenty of room for one more.”

“Well, thanks,” Prentice said, “but I don’t know. Don’t you think we ought to stay here, in case they call us out?”

“Shit, I ain’t worried none. They say the One ninetieth ain’t movin’ till tomorra night. You’re in the One ninetieth, ain’tcha?”

“No. One eighty-ninth.”

“Well, suit yourself. Real nice house, though. They give you wine to drink and everything.”

And Prentice decided to go, though he wouldn’t take his bedroll. He would stay for the wine and get warmed up, and then he’d come back here to sleep. The house was some distance farther away than the one he had stayed in last night, and he took careful note of the journey in order to find his way back.

The ladies were, as Reynolds had promised, real nice: the grandmother, tiny and toothless and wearing many sweaters, kept saying something about his being
un grand soldat
, rolling her eyes upward in disbelief at his height, and the younger woman urged a glass of wine on him even before he was out of his overcoat. She was plump, brisk, and competent-looking, clearly used to keeping order in her house. A tinted photograph of her husband, in uniform, was displayed on the wall along with other family pictures that included one of a priest; and the children, girls of five or six who looked enough alike to be twins, were seated in the laps of Reynolds’s two friends, whom Prentice knew only by sight. Soon they had all formed a quietly jolly party around a big table, and despite the language barrier they had managed to agree on certain basic issues: that it was a fine thing to be in a warm house on a cold night, that the wine was good, that Roosevelt and Churchill and Stalin were good, that Hitler was so bad as to be worth describing only in facial
contortions of disgust, and that the buildings of New York were extraordinarily tall. The ladies kept laughing and nodding and pouring more wine, and there was rivalry among the men to prove that each knew best how to behave in a decent home: they frequently reminded one another to use the ashtray, to watch their language, whether it mattered or not, and not to tilt back in their chairs. At the children’s bedtime their mother urged them to sing an American song for the soldiers, and they were shy but willing. Holding hands and standing very straight in the middle of the room, they sang:

There was great applause, and nobody had the heart to point out that it wasn’t really an American song. Then another bottle of wine was brought in, and another. Other friends of Reynolds’s friends came in to drink and spend the night, until the whole downstairs of the house was so crowded that Prentice couldn’t have slept there even if he’d wanted to. By the time he got up to leave, with many thanks and goodbyes, it was well past midnight.