The Nick Adams Stories Page 13

  On those nights I tried to remember everything that had ever happened to me, starting with just before I went to the war and remembering back from one thing to another. I found I could only remember back to that attic in my grandfather’s house. Then I would start there and remember this way again, until I reached the war.

  I remembered after my grandfather died we moved away from that house and to a new house designed and built by my mother. Many things that were not to be moved were burned in the back yard and I remember those jars from the attic being thrown in the fire, and how they popped in the heat and the fire flamed up from the alcohol. I remember the snakes burning in the fire in the back yard. But there were no people in that, only things. I could not remember who burned the things even, and I would go on until I came to people and then stop and pray for them.

  About the new house I remembered how my mother was always cleaning things out and making a good clearance. One time when my father was away on a hunting trip she made a good thorough cleaning-out in the basement and burned everything that should not have been there. When my father came home and got down from his buggy and hitched the horse, the fire was still burning in the road beside the house. I went out to meet him. He handed me his shotgun and looked at the fire. “What’s this?” he asked.

  “I’ve been cleaning out the basement, dear,” my mother said from the porch. She was standing there smiling, to meet him. My father looked at the fire and kicked at something. Then he leaned over and picked something out of the ashes. “Get a rake, Nick,” he said to me. I went to the basement and brought a rake and my father raked very carefully in the ashes. He raked out stone axes and stone skinning knives and tools for making arrowheads and pieces of pottery and many arrowheads. They had all been blackened and chipped by the fire. My father raked them all out very carefully and spread them on the grass by the road. His shotgun in its leather case and his gamebags were on the grass where he had left them when he stepped down from the buggy.

  “Take the gun and the bags in the house, Nick, and bring me a paper,” he said. My mother had gone inside the house. I took the shotgun, which was heavy to carry and banged against my legs, and the two gamebags and started toward the house. “Take them one at a time,” my father said. “Don’t try and carry too much at once.” I put down the gamebags and took in the shotgun and brought out a newspaper from the pile in my father’s office. My father spread all the blackened, chipped stone implements on the paper and then wrapped them up. “The best arrowheads went all to pieces,” he said. He walked into the house with the paper package and I stayed outside on the grass with the two gamebags. After a while I took them in. In remembering that, there were only two people, so I would pray for them both.

  Some nights, though, I could not remember my prayers even. I could only get as far as “On earth as it is in heaven” and then have to start all over and be absolutely unable to get past that. Then I would have to recognize that I could not remember and give up saying my prayers that night and try something else. So on some nights I would try to remember all the animals in the world by name and then the birds and then fishes and then countries and cities and then kinds of food and the names of all the streets I could remember in Chicago, and when I could not remember anything at all any more I would just listen. And I do not remember a night on which you could not hear things. If I could have a light I was not afraid to sleep, because I knew my soul would only go out of me if it were dark. So, of course, many nights I was where I could have a light and then I slept because I was nearly always tired and often very sleepy. And I am sure many times, too, that I slept without knowing it—but I never slept knowing it, and on this night I listened to the silkworms. You can hear silkworms eating very clearly in the night and I lay with my eyes open and listened to them.

  There was only one other person in the room and he was awake, too. I listened to him being awake, for a long time. He could not lie as quietly as I could because, perhaps, he had not had as much practice being awake. We were lying on blankets spread over straw and when he moved the straw was noisy, but the silkworms were not frightened by any noise we made and ate on steadily. There were the noises of night seven kilometres behind the lines outside but they were different from the small noises inside the room in the dark. The other man in the room tried lying quietly. Then he moved again. I moved, too, so he would know I was awake. He had lived ten years in Chicago. They had taken him for a soldier in nineteen fourteen when he had come back to visit his family, and they had given him to me for an orderly because he spoke English. I heard him listening, so I moved again in the blankets.

  “Can’t you sleep, Signor Tenente?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “I can’t sleep, either.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t sleep.”

  “You feel all right?”

  “Sure. I feel good. I just can’t sleep.”

  “You want to talk a while?” I asked.

  “Sure. What can you talk about in this damn place?”

  “This place is pretty good,” I said.

  “Sure,” he said. “It’s all right.”

  “Tell me about out in Chicago,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said, “I told you all that once.”

  “Tell me about how you got married.”

  “I told you that.”

  “Was the letter you got Monday—from her?”

  “Sure. She writes me all the time. She’s making good money with the place.”

  “You’ll have a nice place when you go back.”

  “Sure. She runs it fine. She’s making a lot of money.”

  “Don’t you think we’ll wake them up, talking?” I asked.

  “No. They can’t hear. Anyway, they sleep like pigs. I’m different,” he said. “I’m nervous.”

  “Talk quiet,’ I said. “Want a smoke?”

  We smoked skillfully in the dark.

  “You don’t smoke much, Signor Tenente.”

  “No. I’ve just about cut it out.”

  “Well,” he said, “it don’t do you any good and I suppose you get so you don’t miss it. Did you ever hear a blind man won’t smoke because he can’t see the smoke come out?”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “I think it’s all bull, myself,” he said. “I just heard it somewhere. You know how you hear things.”

  We were both quiet and I listened to the silkworms.

  “You hear those damn silkworms?” he asked. “You can hear them chew.”

  “It’s funny,” I said.

  “Say, Signor Tenente, is there something really the matter that you can’t sleep? I never see you sleep. You haven’t slept nights ever since I been with you.”

  “I don’t know, John,” I said. “I got in pretty bad shape along early last spring and at night it bothers me.”

  “Just like I am,” he said. “I shouldn’t have ever got in this war. I’m too nervous.”

  “Maybe it will get better.”

  “Say, Signor Tenente, what did you get in this war for, anyway?”

  “I don’t know, John. I wanted to, then.”

  “Wanted to,” he said. “That’s a hell of a reason.”

  “We oughtn’t to talk out loud,” I said.

  “They sleep just like pigs,” he said. “They can’t understand the English language, anyway. They don’t know a damn thing. What are you going to do when it’s over and we go back to the States?”

  “I’ll get a job on a paper.”

  “In Chicago?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Do you ever read what this fellow Brisbane writes? My wife cuts it out for me and sends it to me.”

  “Sure.”

  “Did you ever meet him?”

  “No, but I’ve seen him.”

  “I’d like to meet that fellow. He’s a fine writer. My wife don’t read English but she takes the paper just like when I was home and she cuts out the editorials and the spo
rt page and sends them to me.”

  “How are your kids?”

  “They’re fine. One of the girls is in the fourth grade now. You know, Signor Tenente, if I didn’t have the kids I wouldn’t be your orderly now. They’d have made me stay in the line all the time.”

  “I’m glad you’ve got them.”

  “So am I. They’re fine kids but I want a boy. Three girls and no boy. That’s a hell of a note.”

  “Why don’t you try and go to sleep.”

  “No, I can’t sleep now. I’m wide awake now, Signor Tenente. Say, I’m worried about you not sleeping, though.”

  “It’ll be all right, John.”

  “Imagine a young fellow like you not to sleep.”

  “I’ll get all right. It just takes a while.”

  “You got to get all right. A man can’t get along that don’t sleep. Do you worry about anything? You got anything on your mind?”

  “No, John, I don’t think so.”

  “You ought to get married, Signor Tenente. Then you wouldn’t worry.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You ought to get married. Why don’t you pick out some nice Italian girl with plenty of money. You could get any one you want. You’re young and you got good decorations and you look nice. You been wounded a couple of times.”

  “I can’t talk the language well enough.”

  “You talk it fine. To hell with talking the language. You don’t have to talk to them. Marry them.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “You know some girls, don’t you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, you marry the one with the most money. Over here, the way they’re brought up, they’ll all make you a good wife.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “Don’t think about it, Signor Tenente. Do it.”

  “All right.”

  “A man ought to be married. You’ll never regret it. Every man ought to be married.”

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s try and sleep a while.”

  “All right, Signor Tenente. I’ll try it again. But you remember what I said.”

  “I’ll remember it,” I said. “Now let’s sleep a while, John.”

  “All right,” he said. “I hope you sleep, Signor Tenente.”

  I heard him roll in his blankets on the straw and then he was very quiet and I listened to him breathing regularly. Then he started to snore. I listened to him snore for a long time and then I stopped listening to him snore and listened to the silkworms eating. They ate steadily, making a dropping in the leaves. I had a new thing to think about and I lay in the dark with my eyes open and thought of all the girls I had ever known and what kind of wives they would make. It was a very interesting thing to think about and for a while it killed off trout fishing and interfered with my prayers. Finally, though, I went back to trout fishing, because I found that I could remember all the streams and there was always something new about them, while the girls, after I had thought about them a few times, blurred and I could not call them into my mind and finally they all blurred and all became rather the same and I gave up thinking about them almost altogether. But I kept on with my prayers and I prayed very often for John in the nights and his class was removed from active service before the October offensive. I was glad he was not there, because he would have been a great worry to me. He came to the hospital in Milan to see me several months after and was very disappointed that I had not yet married, and I know he would feel very badly if he knew that, so far, I have never married. He was going back to America and he was very certain about marriage and knew it would fix up everything.

  A Way You’ll Never Be

  The attack had gone across the field, been held up by machine-gun fire from the sunken road and from the group of farmhouses, encountered no resistance in the town, and reached the bank of the river. Coming along the road on a bicycle, getting off to push the machine when the surface of the road became too broken, Nicholas Adams saw what had happened by the position of the dead.

  They lay alone or in clumps in the high grass of the field and along the road, their pockets out, and over them were flies and around each body or group of bodies were the scattered papers.

  In the grass and the grain, beside the road, and in some places scattered over the road, there was much material: a field kitchen, it must have come over when things were going well; many of the calfskin-covered haversacks, stick bombs, helmets, rifles, sometimes one butt up, the bayonet stuck in the dirt, they had dug quite a little at the last; stick bombs, helmets, rifles, intrenching tools, ammunition boxes, star-shell pistols, their shells scattered about, medical kits, gas masks, empty gas-mask cans, a squat, tripodded machine gun in a nest of empty shells, full belts protruding from the boxes, the water-cooling can empty and on its side, the breechblock gone, the crew in odd positions, and around them, in the grass, more of the typical papers.

  There were mass prayer books, group postcards showing the machine-gun unit standing in ranked and ruddy cheerfulness as in a football picture for a college annual; now they were humped and swollen in the grass; propaganda postcards showing a soldier in Austrian uniform bending a woman backward over a bed; the figures were impressionistically drawn, very attractively depicted and had nothing in common with actual rape in which the woman’s skirts are pulled over her head to smother her, one comrade sometimes sitting upon the head. There were many of these inciting cards which had evidently been issued just before the offensive. Now they were scattered with the smutty postcards, photographic; the small photographs of village girls by village photographers, the occasional pictures of children, and the letters, letters, letters. There was always much paper about the dead and the debris of this attack was no exception.

  These were new dead and no one had bothered with anything but their pockets. Our own dead, or what he thought of, still, as our own dead, were surprisingly few, Nick noticed. Their coats had been opened too and their pockets were out, and they showed, by their positions, the manner and the skill of the attack. The hot weather had swollen them all alike regardless of nationality.

  The town had evidently been defended, at the last, from the line of the sunken road and there had been few or no Austrians to fall back into it. There were only three bodies in the street and they looked to have been killed running. The houses of the town were broken by the shelling and the street had much rubble of plaster and mortar and there were broken beams, broken tiles, and many holes, some of them yellow-edged from the mustard gas. There were many pieces of shell, and shrapnel balls were scattered in the rubble. There was no one in the town at all.

  Nick Adams had seen no one since he had left Fornaci, although, riding along the road through the over-foliaged country, he had seen guns hidden under screens of mulberry leaves to the left of the road, noticing them by the heat waves in the air above the leaves where the sun hit the metal. Now he went on through the town, surprised to find it deserted, and came out on the low road beneath the bank of the river. Leaving the town there was a bare open space where the road slanted down and he could see the placid reach of the river and the low curve of the opposite bank and the whitened, sun-baked mud where the Austrians had dug. It was all very lush and over-green since he had seen it last and becoming historical had made no change in this, the lower river.

  The battalion was along the bank to the left. There was a series of holes in the top of the bank with a few men in them. Nick noticed where the machine guns were posted and the signal rockets in their racks. The men in the holes in the side of the bank were sleeping. No one challenged. He went on and as he came around a turn in the mud bank a young second lieutenant with a stubble of beard and red-rimmed, very bloodshot eyes pointed a pistol at him.

  “Who are you?”

  Nick told him.

  “How do I know this?”

  Nick showed him the tessera with photograph and identification and the seal of the Third Army. He took hold of it.

  “I will ke
ep this.”

  “You will not,” Nick said. “Give me back the card and put your gun away. There. In the holster.”

  “How am I to know who you are?”

  “The tessera tells you.”

  “And if the tessera is false? Give me that card.”

  “Don’t be a fool,” Nick said cheerfully. “Take me to your company commander.”

  “I should send you to battalion headquarters.”

  “All right,” said Nick. “Listen, do you know the Captain Paravicini? The tall one with the small mustache who was an architect and speaks English?”

  “You know him?”

  “A little.”

  “What company does he command?”

  “The second.”

  “He is commanding the battalion.”

  “Good,” said Nick. He was relieved to know that Para was all right. “Let us go to the battalion.”

  As Nick had left the edge of the town three shrapnel had burst high and to the right over one of the wrecked houses and since then there had been no shelling. But the face of this officer looked like the face of a man during a bombardment. There was the same tightness and the voice did not sound natural. His pistol made Nick nervous.

  “Put it away,” he said. “There’s the whole river between them and you.”

  “If I thought you were a spy I would shoot you now,” the second lieutenant said.

  “Come on,” said Nick. “Let us go to the battalion.” This officer made him very nervous.

  The Captain Paravicini, acting major, thinner and more English-looking than ever, rose when Nick saluted from behind the table in the dugout that was battalion headquarters.

  “Hello,” he said. “I didn’t know you. What are you doing in that uniform?”