The Heavenly Table(17)

The corporal stared off into the distance while pulling at his chin, looking as if he were about to make a momentous decision that could affect the entire outcome of the war. His name was Alfred Zimmerman, and he had paid a flunky draft-board doctor ten dollars to overlook his flat feet so that he might finally escape his father’s print shop in Akron and embark on what he truly believed was going to be a glorious career in the military. He wasn’t sure yet what special talent he possessed that would pave the way for his advancement, but in his view, compared to the two imbeciles he’d been stuck with on gate duty, he was virtually another Napoleon Bonaparte. “What’s his name?” he finally asked the farmer with a deep sigh.

“Eddie.”

“What about his last name?”

“Same as mine,” Ellsworth said.

Zimmerman’s face began to turn red, and the other two soldiers elbowed each other and chuckled. “So what the hell might that be?”

“Fiddler.”

Turning to one of the others, a stocky man with a head shaped like a bean can and thick, sun-bleached eyebrows that birds occasionally mistook for a pair of dead caterpillars, Zimmerman said, “Private Ballard, you’ll be responsible for the gate while I run this down. Just remember, like Lieutenant Bovard told us the other day, the enemy could be anywhere.” Then he wheeled around and marched off, his nose pointed skyward like a rudder and his back ramrod straight, toward a group of canvas huts off in the distance.

“Jesus, Ballard,” Ellsworth heard the third soldier say, a thin, bookish-looking man with wire-rimmed spectacles and a pale, triangular face who went by the name of Crank, “that Zimmerman needs to ease up a little. What’s his problem anyway?” An only child, he’d lived with his elderly parents in a neat, ivy-covered brick house in Martins Ferry, and had made a comfortable living keeping the books for several businesses before being called up. He had many quirks, among them an absolute rigidity when it came to the manner in which his food was laid out on his plate, and a maddening inability to sleep anywhere but in his own tiny bedroom. Because of the sloppy ineptness of the mess-hall workers, he hadn’t eaten anything but candy bars in over a week, and the insomnia he had suffered from since his first night in the barracks continued unabated. The fervent desire to make it home and never have to eat a chicken leg that had accidently brushed up against the mashed potatoes, or sleep in the same room with another human being ever again, was the only thing that kept him going.

“Don’t pay him no attention,” Ballard said. “The Jew got him a stripe, and now he thinks he’s Colonel Custard.” Unlike Crank, Ballard, a local boy who had been born and raised in a shotgun shack at the bottom of Porter Holler, considered his draft notice the luckiest thing that had ever happened to him, chiefly because it allowed him to escape the clutches of a pie-faced country woman whom he had managed to impregnate two years in a row behind the makeshift bandstand at the annual Lattaville Coon Hunters’ Dance. The way he saw it, even getting ground into mincemeat on a foreign field was better than playing daddy to a couple of hillbilly bastards and hubby to a floozy who didn’t think twice about spreading her legs for a glass of cider and a cake doughnut.

“You mean General Custer, don’t you?” Crank said.

“Shit, what difference does it make?” Ballard replied. “He’s a prick, that’s what I’m saying.”

Ellsworth stood waiting for a long time in the hot sun. The guards ignored him and he studied their brown uniforms and campaign hats out of the corner of his eye, trying to picture Eddie wearing one. He overheard Ballard tell a joke about a queer who set up house in a cucumber patch, but he couldn’t make heads or tails out of it. He wondered if either of them knew where Germany was located.

When Zimmerman finally returned, his spine was even straighter than before. Unfortunately, in the time it took him to reach the office where the records were kept, he had allowed his mind to drift for a minute or two, first daydreaming about his next promotion and then worrying about what Ballard and Crank were saying behind his back, and he had forgotten the name the farmer had given him. “Who are you looking for?” the private behind the desk asked. Zimmerman had shut his eyes for a moment and strained his memory. The last name started with an “F,” of that he was sure. “Franklin,” he guessed. The private scrolled through several pages, then said, “Don’t see any Franklin, but we got a Wesley Franks signed in two days ago.” “That’s him,” Zimmerman said, and out the door he went.

“Well, you were right,” he told Ellsworth. “They got a new one on the list goes by that name.”

“Good,” the farmer said. “How do I get him back?”

“You can’t,” Zimmerman said, shaking his head. “He’s already been inducted.”

“But he’s only sixteen years old. That’s too young to be fightin’ the Germans, ain’t it?”

“Too young!” Ballard spoke up. “Ain’t you heard? Them Huns got newborn babies chained to machine guns. They either fight or get dumped in the stew pot with the horse apples. Don’t worry, your boy’s plenty old enough.”

“Good God, Ballard,” Zimmerman said, “you’ve been talkin’ to Sergeant Malone again.” The sergeant he referred to was a great spinner of horrific war stories, and much admired among some of the new recruits at Camp Pritchard. As a youth, he had fought in Cuba in 1898, and then, ever nostalgic for what he considered the “best three weeks of his life,” had quit his job in a glove factory in upstate New York and joined up with the Red Cross in the summer of 1915, it being the only way an American could get to the war at that time. Although he soon found out that the conflict in Europe was no horsey lark in the tropical boonies, to his credit he endured eighteen months of hell with an ambulance crew around Verdun before he began to go haywire and ended up in a loony bin down near Marseille. Despite his protestations, he was judged unfit for further service and sent home just a few weeks before the United States entered the fray. By then he was twitchy and gray and thirty-eight years old, a mere shell of the boy who once rode with Roosevelt, and though he didn’t think they would take him, he showed up at the recruiting station in Albany anyway. To his surprise, because of his experience at the Front, the whiskey on his breath had been ignored and he’d quickly been offered a sergeant’s rank. Now he was training doughboys how to take a shit in the mud without getting their heads blown off, and practicing a self-prescribed form of controlled drinking that kept him from diving to the ground every time a bird flew over.