Sons (9 page)

I liked what he said.

It reminded me of something my father had once said when I’d been having a lot of trouble with a skinny kid who was a head shorter than me. I told my father I was going to knock the kid cold the next time he said anything nasty to me, and my father said, “What pleasure will you get from killing a cripple?” So I never did fight with that kid because after that I felt sorry for him whenever he picked on me. I
knew
I could beat him up, and I realized my father was right; there’d be no pleasure at all in taking him apart. I didn’t know whether or not the United States
could
beat Germany (the idea of going to war with people who were cutting off babies’ hands was frankly terrifying) but it seemed to me nonetheless that President Wilson was correct in saying there was such a thing as a man being too proud to fight. If we knew that war was wrong, then we were only compounding the crime by reacting to warlike acts in a warlike manner. If we
really
believed the world had gone insane, then behaving insanely ourselves was no way to effect a cure.

Later, when Wilson’s exchange of notes with the Germans got stronger and Bryan resigned as Secretary of State, I didn’t know what to think. I admired Wilson, but now he seemed to be saying that he was ready to risk war if respect for human life was at stake. This seemed to me contradictory. If you respected human life, if you were protesting so strongly against the drowning of the 114 Americans who had sailed on the
Lusitania
(even
after
the Germans had taken out a newspaper advertisement warning they would sink any vessel carrying the flag of Great Britain or her allies), then how could you risk sending
more
Americans to die in a war which was none of our business in the first place? Wilson said he was for peace. Okay. But when Bryan refused to sign the President’s second strongly worded note to the Germans, he said “I cannot go along with him in this note. I think it makes for war.” All right then,
Bryan
was for peace. But the Eau Fraiche
Record
reprinted an editorial from the New York
World
which said that Bryan’s resignation was “unspeakable treachery not only to the President but to the nation.” Meanwhile, Teddy Roosevelt, who was for preparedness but
also
for peace, mind you, said, “No man can support Mr. Wilson without at the same time supporting a policy of criminal inefficiency,” and in almost the very next breath said, “I am sick at heart over the actions of Wilson
and
Bryan.”

I’m telling you, it was difficult to know what to think.

And to make matters worse, we Tylers began having a few internal problems of our own along about then. My older sister Kate had run off with a drummer from Arizona, a swarthy slick-haired character who everybody said was part Indian. The local opinion was that he had made her pregnant during the month of July while trying to sell tractor parts in town, and whether this caused my father’s heart attack or whether the suspicion that he was part Indian did it, I can’t say. The attack came in August, a massive pain knocking him to the forest floor as he brought back his ax, six smaller pains shuddering through his body as he tried to call for help. They got him over to the hospital in Eau Claire just in time, the doctors said, because the next two spasms would have killed him if he hadn’t been in bed and close to medication.

I was only fifteen and still in high school, but I was the oldest of the two boys in the family, my brother John being four at the time, so naturally I had to take a job. The doctors said my father needed at least six months’ rest (turned out to be eight months after all was said and done) but that afterward he could once again lead a “healthy, productive life” — those were their exact words. They took me on at the lumber camp immediately, even though I couldn’t tell a bow saw from a pile of sawdust; my father had been working for them for twenty years, and they were more than willing now to come to his assistance.

In the midst of everything that was happening in America and in the world, there was a tranquillity to those woods, a calming regularity to the monotonous
chok
of ax against trunk, the rasping of the saws, the laughter of the men, the chittering of the forest animals. At night, I would sit outside on the steps of the bunkhouse and, deprived of my helpful newspaper battle maps, try to sort out what was happening over in Europe; but I found I could hardly even sort out what was happening over in Eau Fraiche. I think that at that point in my life, fifteen years old and going on sixteen, there were only two things of any importance to me: the fact that I could step in and support Mama and my brother and sisters; and the fact that a girl named Nancy Ellen Clark was madly in love with me.

I had met Nancy on the Fourth of July, just about when my sister was getting herself pregnant, I suppose. The occasion was the opening of the first Dodge car agency in Eau Fraiche, on Buffalo Street. Anthony Clark, Nancy’s father, had moved his family to town in the middle of June, and then had spent the next two weeks getting his showrooms ready for a gala opening. And a gala it was! We had all heard about the new Dodge car, of course, and had studied pictures of it in the newspapers and magazines, but this was our first opportunity to actually
see
it. Mr. Clark had hung bunting over the entire front of the building, and three young girls wearing red, white, and blue in keeping with the spirit of Independence Day, were serving doughnuts and coffee at one side of the showroom. Mr. Clark himself was giving what amounted to an automotive lecture near the right front fender of one of the two new cars on display, a bright green beauty. The girls serving refreshments ranged in age from thirteen to seventeen; the one who caught my eye was the little blond in the middle, about my age, with eyes the color of the touring car Mr. Clark was describing.

“She’s a four-cylinder automobile,” Mr. Clark was saying, “with an L-head engine and a bore stroke of three and seven-eighths by four and a half inches...”

The blond girl with the green eyes looked at me.

“... thirty-five horsepower,” Mr. Clark was saying.

I looked back at her, and she blushed and dropped a doughnut.

“The piston displacement is two-twelve point three cubic inches, and she weighs twenty-two hundred and fifty pounds. The wheelbase is a hundred and ten inches...”

I walked over to where the three girls were serving. The stand had been decorated with red, white, and blue bunting, the same as the outside of the showroom. The girls were all wearing ruffled white hats on their heads, like Revolutionary ladies, white blouses with red silk sashes at the waists, and blue skirts.

“Is the coffee free?” I asked.

“Yes,” all three of them said together.

I looked directly at the one with the green eyes. “Is it free?” I asked her.

“Yes, it is,” she said, and again she blushed.

“... tire size is thirty-two by three and a half. Now here’s something you may not be able to discern with the naked eye...”

“My name is Will Tyler,” I said.

“I’m Nancy Clark,” she answered.

“Nancy
Ellen
Clark,” one of the other girls corrected.

“She’s my sister.” Nancy said, and smiled into my eyes.

“... first car in the history of America, in fact, the history of the world, to have an all-steel body. Now let me show you the upholstery...”

I thought of nothing but Nancy Ellen Clark all that winter and through the next year. Mr. Wilson’s policy with the Germans seemed to be working, and even Bryan supported him in the election of 1916, saying, “I agree with the American people in thanking God we have a president who has kept, who
will
keep, us out of war.” I myself favored Hughes, but I wasn’t old enough to vote, and anyhow I was in love. The election seemed remote, the war seemed remote, only Nancy danced through my head as I felled trees in those silent woods. In December, the Germans made a peace offer to the Allies, and the war seemed all but over. Besides, like a baseball game that had run into far too many extra innings, it had lost all interest for me. Even when President Wilson disclosed his plan for aiding the belligerents in securing peace, I couldn’t have cared less. Peace would be nice, yes, I certainly wanted peace — but more than anything else in the world, I wanted Nancy Ellen Clark.

And then, I don’t know what happened — it had all seemed so close, it had all seemed within reach — I don’t know what suddenly happened to change it. The Germans weren’t interested in Wilson’s assistance, it seemed, nor were the Allies interested in Germany’s peace offer. A few weeks after my seventeenth birthday, Wilson told the Senate all about his League for Peace and while in Wisconsin we were still talking about what he’d called “peace without victory,” in Berlin the Germans announced that beginning February 1, they’d once again pursue a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare.

In the woods, the days were short, the sun glared through leafless branches, glazing the crusted snow. Word trickled back to us day by day. The wagon crew would return from Eau Fraiche to report that Wilson had severed diplomatic relations with the German Empire; Wilson would soon ask that America arm its merchant vessels; a note from a German minister named Alfred Zimmerman had been intercepted and decoded, and it proposed to give Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona to the Mexican people if they accepted alliance with Germany in a war with the United States — stories we half-believed, like the atrocity talcs back in 1914. But then the wagon came back one Friday with a story we knew was true, a story we did not
want
to believe because it was far worse than the sinking of the
Lusitania
had been: the Germans had sunk
three
American ships, and Wilson had asked for a special session of Congress to discuss “grave matters.”

We declared war against Germany on April 6.

I was seventeen years old and in love.

I wanted no part of it, I truly did not. And yet, less than a year later, I enlisted in the United States Army. If you’d asked me why at the time, I couldn’t have told you. Oh sure, I’d given Nancy a big patriotic recital that night of the Grange dance in January, man’s duty to his country, do my bit, make the world safe for democracy, all that, but I really hadn’t known
why
I was so anxious to get to where the lighting was. Now, not four months later, in the hold of a ship that would be sailing for Brest within hours, I thought I knew.

There’s a killing time.

There’s a time when you need to kill and must therefore kill.

That time had come for me early in 1918, and I had acted impulsively on the burning itch inside me, the desire to move into action, to strike, to hurt, to kill. Now, in April, the bloodlust was all but gone, and I knew only that I was leaving Nancy for God knew how long, maybe forever, and I wanted to weep.

Timothy Bear found me in the darkness and put his huge hand on my shoulder.

“How goes it, Bert?” he asked.

“Lousy,” I said.

“Ever think you’d see this day?”

“No,” I answered honestly.

There was comfort in his presence beside me in the darkness. I had known him all through sixteen miserable weeks of preliminary training, weeks of repeating the manual of arms, weeks of formation drills and setting-up exercises and recruit instruction, lectures on the care of clothing and equipment, military discipline and courtesy, orders for sentinels, personal hygiene and care of the goddamn feet, Articles of War, the obligations and rights of the soldier (all obligations, no rights!), weeks of inspections, drills, and more inspections. I had suffered with him through courses on rifle sighting, rifle nomenclature and care, rifle aiming, and trigger squeeze; I had endured first-aid drills with him, gas-warfare drills, grenade and bomb drills, waking at 5:45 each and every day of the week, eating swill my mother wouldn’t have allowed in her garbage can no less her kitchen, and tumbling exhausted into bed at ten each night, already dreading the sound of the bugle the next morning,
damn
Irving Berlin and his rotten song!

I think the company would have fallen apart in those sixteen weeks if it hadn’t been for Timothy Bear (his last name was really Graham, but somebody had dubbed him “The Bear” in the first few weeks of cantonment at Camp Greene, and the name had stuck). He was six feet four inches tall in his naked toenails, as wide across as any tree I’d ever felled in the woods north of Eau Fraiche, the Army uniform fitting him like a sausage skin strained to bursting across his powerful chest and shoulders. He could lift the rear end of a weapons carrier with his bare hands, unassisted, and his endurance was equally phenomenal; returning once from a twenty-mile forced march with full pack, Timothy Bear had wanted to go dancing in town. He never complained, not about anything, nor was his attitude faked — his face was as open as a child’s, his brown eyes totally guileless. He had blond hair which he’d worn straight and long back on his father’s Indiana farm, but which the Army barbers had cropped close to his head, heightening his resemblance to a big, affable grizzly. Lumbering, genial, inexhaustible, he became the kind of man and soldier we all wished we could be. He was eighteen years old.

Now, sitting beside me in the darkness, he understood my gloom, and reached into the pocket of his tunic for a folded sheet of paper which he handed to me. Shielding a flashlight with his cupped palm, he threw a beam of light onto the paper and said, “Have you seen this yet, Bert? A clerk from B Company ran some off on the ship’s mimeo. It’s from the
Dodger.”

“The
what?”
I said.

“You know, the Camp Dodge newspaper.”

In the light of Timothy’s shielded flash, I unfolded and read the mimeographed sheet: