Once an Eagle (3 page)

The bell in the steeple of the Congregational Church on Main Street began to strike with measured care, and Celia jumped to her feet. “Oh! Eight. I've got to go home. I promised Mother I'd help her sort for the rummage. Walk me home, Sam. It's still early.”

“All right.”

Holding hands, they crossed the lawn and went out through the wooden gate and along Merivale Street; the elms made a still, lush canopy in the twilight. Lamps were coming on at kitchen windows, on porches, shining inside their frosted globes like tender yellow blooms of light. The town—its name was Walt Whitman and it had been incorporated only a bare sixteen years before—lay on the great south bend of the Platte River between Kearney and Lexington. Good farming country, the land ran back into gentle hills to the north or petered out in the cottonwoods along the river, where the Union Pacific switchyards were. A farm wagon went by, its two occupants sitting on the buckboard, swaying with the easy rocking motion of the axles. The driver, a heavy, red-faced man with a big nose, nodded to Sam, who murmured, “Good evening”; and the wagon creaked evenly away into the deepening dusk.

“Who's that?” Celia asked him.

“Cyrus Timrud. I've helped him with the harvest for years.”

That made her think of Isobelle Timrud and she clucked in irritation. Miserable little red-haired tomboy hussy. At her own Halloween party the year before, Sam had spent so much time ducking for apples with Isobelle the front of his hair had got soaked and stuck up like a rooster's comb; and when they played that game of eating the licorice she could swear he'd deliberately held back so he and Isobelle got to the knot at the same moment. Well, that was silly, everybody did that a little; but the
point
was, Sam should only have done it with her …

At her front gate they stopped, and she turned toward him. “Do you want to come in?” She watched him run his eyes over the huge white structure with its two slender columns flanking the front door, the high hip roof of slate, the greenhouse on the southeast corner. It was the only house with a slate roof and a greenhouse for miles around.

“I guess not,” he said. “There are a couple of things I've got to do.”

She swung his big hand back and forth, her fingers interlocked in his, wishing it weren't quite so dark out—twenty minutes ago she would have looked more alluring, and she would have been able to read his expression better. She raised her eyes to his. “You think about it, Sam. I meant what I said. About not waiting. If you go cartwheeling off to some palm-tree island somewhere …”

“Of course you meant it.”

“Stop laughing!” she said, peering up at him.

“I'm not laughing.”

“Yes, you are. Honestly, you're incorrigible.”

“I tell you I wasn't, Cele.” But his voice still seemed to her near laughter.

In her most imperious tone she declared, “I fail to see where humor is involved … Don't you want to—become somebody,
be
somebody?”

“—You bet I do,” he answered, and now his voice was as serious as it could be. “You just watch my dust.”

He stood staring down at her. Big and lithe, capable of standing the world on its beam ends and giving it an extra spin if he chose, he looked immeasurably romantic and wild in the near dark. He's so handsome and intelligent and he won't do what I want, she inwardly wailed. He's so stubborn!

“… Oh, Celia,” he murmured all at once, “don't you see—life is so many things, it can roll out in so many ways from what you expect, what you plan on …” He threw out one hand, a rare gesture for him. “My God—there's all of
life,
over there somewhere—” He stopped, said: “That isn't what I mean.”

“Destiny,” she answered slyly, drawling out the word. But this time he didn't laugh or reach out to grab her. A train down at the switchyards started up—a series of swift, chuffing bursts, stopped abruptly; and a child shrilly called to end a game of hide-and-seek. “All-ee—all-ee—in freeeeeee …” She sighed; she found herself gazing up at Sam, half-mesmerized. All at once he seemed part of the town, the very measure of it—slumbering, wide-flung land of cornfields and prairie, reaching west under a bold, starry sky, rooted and restless both; the sense of certainty, of unalterable promise hovered around him like heat in forged iron … He will be great and grand, she thought, rapt in the very contemplation of it; he will do something fine and noble and earth-shaking, and I will be standing there behind him while they all cheer.

“Mr. Destiny,” she said, but softly this time, almost entreatingly, and raised her cheek to his. His lips brushed it solemnly, as though he were almost afraid to touch her. And then to her own great surprise—for she had never done anything like this before—she reached up and locked her arms around his neck and gave herself to him in a passionate kiss. But instead of captivating him as she had intended, she herself was swept with a delicious, singing tension that tightened and released and tightened again in fiery golden bands; she felt as if she were falling backward through a hundred miles of capering, streaming stars. She was slipping away, melting like wax in fire …

She tore her arms from his neck and pushed him away with a violent strength she did not know she possessed. She had staggered back against the fence, whose wrought-iron finials gouged her under the shoulder-blades; her breath was coming in thick little gasps and she could hardly see. He murmured something but she couldn't hear him.

“There,” she said, panting, filled with a wild defiance. That'll hold him. There. She was inside the gate and moving up the walk with no knowledge of how she had got there. “That'll hold him,” she breathed aloud. But turning now, watching his tall figure move quickly away under the elms, she wasn't so sure.

 

The lamp on
the big round oak table was lighted when he came in. His mother was seated next to it, sewing. Uncle Bill was pouring old George Verney a beer from the big blue stoneware pitcher Sam's grandfather had brought with him from the Werratal, and little Ty was playing on the floor, listening to them. Sam smiled, watching their faces turn toward him, swimming in the lamp's golden aureole, as though he were some kind of magnet: his mother's face lined and sharp-featured, her chestnut hair loose around her brows, the blue in her pupils so intense it seemed to fill up her eyes; George Verney's expression remote, like some centennial statue; Uncle Bill's face round and red and convivial.

“Hello, Ma,” he said, and on an impulse—borne perhaps on the memory of the moment at the gate with Celia—he went up to her and kissed her on the forehead.

“Why, Sam,” she said in surprise, smiling up at him. “To what do I owe that?”

“A way with the girls, he has,” Bill Hanlon said. “It runs in the family. Will you join us in a bucket of suds, lad?”

Sam shook his head. “I've got to go to work pretty soon.” He sat down on the bench at the far end of the porch.

“And wants a clear head for his responsibilities.” Bill Hanlon tilted his stein toward George Verney, who boarded with the Damons. “Ever see the like of it? And just turned eighteen years of age.—That's Carl, God rest his soul,” he said to his sister. “That's the German discipline. He never got it from our side.”

“And then what?” Little Ty broke in on him impatiently. “What happened then, Uncle Bill?”

“Ah,
then
…” Bill Hanlon raised a short, powerful arm on which was tattooed a soaring eagle holding in its beak a banner that proclaimed
For Mother, God & Country
in red and blue letters. Sam couldn't read the inscription at this moment but he knew that was what it said because when he'd been Ty's age he'd been allowed to inspect it in detail. “
Then
the very heavens came crashing down around our heads. Old Barnard had just slapped a dipper full of hash in my kit and was saying something, I can't recall just what, and I looked over his shoulder and there they were, thousands of 'em, the yellow devils.” Grinning, he glared down at Ty and his eyebrows went up at the ends, giving him the look of a malevolent Santa. “Pouring into the tent from all sides.”

“Thousands?” George Verney echoed drily.

“God's truth!” Billy Hanlon spun around. “All trussed up in those gaily colored wraparounds of theirs, swinging their bolo knives as sharp as razors. Ripping and slashing and screaming like banshees. And the lot of us standing there half asleep and nothing but our mess kits in our hands. The most horrible sight you'd ever want to see on a steaming Sunday morning at the far end of the world.”

“Caught napping, sounds to me.”

“Napping! And so would you be. On an errand of pacification we were! Who was to know the bloody Googoos were plotting death and destruction—and from the heart of Holy Mother Church at that …”

“Pacification.” The old man had pounced on the word. His eyes slitted with secret amusement; in the lamplight his beard was like a soft silver thicket over his collar. “I know all about your pacification. Tying the poor beggars down and putting a funnel in their mouths—”

“Yes, and I'd do it again if I had to. Treacherous little devils, each and every one of them.” Billy Hanlon waggled a finger back and forth earnestly. “Your native has no morals, you know. He's half animal, half child, half devil from hell.”

“I believe that's three halves, Billy.”

“Yes, and that's just about the cut of it. They're something strange. I could tell you stories about island girls that would amaze you beyond all bounds—”

“Well you won't, Billy,” Kitty Damon said in her tart, clear voice.

“Of course I wouldn't. With innocent children present. That's just as a mere figuration.”

“But what did you
do,
Uncle Billy?” Ty cried, and Sam, watching the boy's eyes, smiled faintly. Wild Bill Hanlon hadn't been home in four years and the story was new to him.

“
Do?
I acted with the speed of light. In a situation such as that, lad, one moment's cerebination and you're a corpus delict-eye. I threw my hash in the first devil's face, kit and all, scalding him nicely, grabbed up a stool and swung it like a ball bat and laid out the hellion behind him. By now the tent was full of Googoos, screaming and howling. My God, what a din! Somebody, I think it was Sergeant Markley, kept yelling, ‘Get to the racks, boys! Get to the racks!' It was awful. There was Hutch, my old buddy from Peking, holding onto a bolo blade in his bare hand, and his throat squirting blood like a full head on Pumper Number Five—”

“Billy,” Kitty Damon said warningly.

“God's truth. Holding a bolo blade in his bare hand while he jabbed his mess fork—
unh! anh!
—into his man like a kid punching his jackknife into a barn door. And then the far end of the tent came down with a crash, the devils had cut the ropes. Poor lads, they were butchered like pigs in a sack. Well, I says to myself, another few bars of this waltz and they'll have our end down too, and I lit out for the squad hut. And there were two of 'em rushing at me like wolves, thirsting for my very blood. I busted one in the noggin with my stool and dodged around the other and kept going, with a banshee horde of them hot on my tracks.

“Now your nipa hut is up on stilts because of the terrible rains they have, and you reach the door through a bamboo ladder. Well, there I was three steps up the ladder and climbing like a St. Jago's monkey and
whomp!
one of the Googoos hit me with a club and then another one jumped on my back—and the ladder broke and down we all went. And I couldn't move a muscle. Flat on my back, all the wind knocked out of me. Paralyzed within an inch of my life. And right above me was one of the infernal devils, a scrawny little joker with his face all jungle sores and damp rot, with a naked bolo in his two hands …”

He broke off and took a drink of beer.

“And what happened
then,
Uncle Bill?” Ty cried in a frenzy.

“Then?” Billy Hanlon took another sip of beer and wiped his mouth, watching his youngest nephew out of one eye. “Ah, it was a bad moment, lad. I raised my arm, foolish as it was, and up that bolo went, up, up like the great, blue scimitar of Mohammed and all his prophets, and I could see it, the words clear as if you'd read them on a pallodium:
Wild Bill Hanlon's marked for death, his Sligo luck's run out at last
—and all at once that scru-ofulous-looking Googoo's eyes opened wide as a newborn babe's and over he went and gone. Vanished into thin air. And I looked straight up and there was Sergeant Markley, big as a bear and twice as hairy, standing in the squad-room door with his smoking rifle in his hands. ‘Get in out of that, Hanlon!' he says, or words to that effect. And up I got, all over my paralysis, and shinnied up one of the posts and crawled inside and got my Krag, which was loaded in chamber and magazine …”

Idly watching his uncle's fiery face, half-listening to the many-times-told tale, Sam Damon frowned, thinking of the talk with Celia. He had surprised himself. The decision to apply for West Point had never been that clear to him: he was mildly astonished that he had said it right out, plain as day. That was Celia: she'd always been able to make him say things he'd never intended to voice to anyone. Now it'd be all over town. Winnott's Spa, Clausen's Forge, the livery stables behind town hall.
Did you hear? Sam Damon thinks he's going to West Point. No! That's what I heard. Well of all the nerve. Everyone knows the Damons haven't got a pot to piss in.
Scowling, he scratched his chin, gazing at Ty's rapt, eager face, his mother bent over her sewing. Well, they might be wrong, all of them. They just might be wrong. All a good man needed was one opening, one solid chance to show what he could do: if he was any good he'd make it the rest of the way on his own … But the amusement, the incredulity in Celia's face troubled him. Yes, and
she
just might be wrong too, he thought crossly, fretting. What did she know about the world?