Chapter 19: The Broken Book

Churchill had the line for it, and nobody has done anything with it since: no permanent friends, no permanent enemies, only permanent interests. I have heard it used as an excuse and I have heard it used as a warning, and I have never gone and looked up whether he said it. The Army took it as a supply problem and went back to work.

That was the fall of sixty-eight, and I had a rifle company, which is a louder job than it sounds. What a rifle company does in a fall is train. The same range on Monday, the same road march on Thursday, and the same three classes every week on the same three weapons — classes the men could have taught better than the lieutenants. Once a month a major came up from division and walked the company area with a clipboard, counting everything we owned down to the padlocks on the arms room. We had a dayroom with a television that worked when the wind was right, a motor pool that ran on the parts we stole back from battalion, and a mess hall that turned out one good meal a week and the rest of the time a baked slab the mess called the loaf.

The war was on the front page most weeks, in the same three paragraphs under the same map, and I read it the way a man reads mail addressed to somebody else. At division they talked about it in a language I had learned to copy exactly — readiness, posture, the big picture — and down in the company area the same war came out as a question about the roof over the dayroom and whether there was anything to eat that a man would recognize.

That Tuesday the mess was doing pork chops, one to a man, the way they did once a week, and every company on the post knew it by noon. The first sergeant came back from the bus with thirty-one replacements and stood them in what shade the arms room had, and handed me the note from the orderly room. The exec was away at a school. Somebody with rank on his collar was going to take the new men through the company, and the somebody was me.

I walked them down the street and put them in the little room off the orderly room. There is a glass case in it and not much else. In the case is the guidon, folded; a photograph of the company in the snow, sixty-odd men with their hands wrapped in whatever they had; and the pot.

The pot is black and older than the post. There is a crack down one side of it you can lay your thumb in. I gave them Korea. I gave them the winter of fifty and a hill above a reservoir, and a morning when the company went up that hill behind bayonets because there was nothing left on the hill worth shooting with, and how they held what was left of it when it came back at them — and it came back more than once — and how they were still up there at dark.

Part of that is in the battalion history on paper and part of it is mine. I know which parts are mine. I gave them mine, because mine is better, and because not one man in that room had come in off a bus to hear a footnote.

Then I took them to the pot and gave them the chili mac: what the cooks made in it the night before the hill, and how the crack in it came out of a mortar round that same winter, and how the men who ate out of it went up the hill in the morning, and how the pot has stood in that case ever since.

One of the thirty-one put his hand up when I finished.

“Sir — the chili mac. Beans in first, or the meat?” He had a way about him already, the way some men come off the bus already sure of their welcome. “My mother put the beans in first, and she was wrong about most things.”

He was nineteen, maybe. His haircut had already grown out of regulation and he had no idea yet what his hands were for. The room laughed the way new men laugh when they are not sure whether the man who asked is in trouble.

I put my knuckle to his forehead, which is a thing you can do to a private and not to much else, and told him to get to the mess before the rest of the post got in the line and bring our chow back up here. He had the door open before I remembered the only part of the whole afternoon that mattered.

“And get the big ones,” I called after him down the walk. “Mine especially.”

Out of all of it, that is what stuck with them: a black pot with a crack in it, and what came out of the pot.

There was a letter from home on the bunk by my boots and I read it twice. The second time was to see whether I had missed anything the first time. I had not. Everybody was fine.

Then I got out the book.

It came from my grandfather, Elias Hollis, and it does not say on the outside what it is. The name is written inside the front cover in a hand that is not his: The Book of Hollow Ground. Hollow ground. I have never heard the two words said out loud by anybody but me.

It is a book about the ground. What is left of it is about where things are under the ground and how a man finds out before he digs. Veins, it calls them. Veins of water, veins of metal, and how a man reads them with a forked stick, or a rod, or a bob of brass on a length of string, and how he writes down what he finds so that the next man has it.

I never believed much of it. I have stood in front of men who said they could find water with a stick, and I have watched their hands while they said it, and I have never seen one of them do it. It made no difference.

It came to me with one volume and no second one. The back half of the volume is torn out at the stitching, so when you turn to where it belongs you get the tear itself — an inch of paper, and then the next page starts in the middle of somebody else’s argument, and you go on from there, if you go on at all.

I had been at it years by then. I could follow about a third of it, with a geology text and the county water reports from home spread out on the floor beside me, and a third of a book is a lot when the book does not stop to explain itself. It is the only book I have ever owned that I could sit down with for an hour and come up out of knowing less than when I sat down. I sat down with it most nights.

The bugle went, and it was not chow, and it was not any formation I had a name for. Three long and three short, twice through, and I was up and looking for my shirt, and by the time I got out to the street the men were coming out of the dayroom at a walk that had gone to a run without anybody in the chain of command saying a word about running.

We fell in. The company fell in, and then the battalion, and then we stood on the parade ground with the whole regiment on it, in the wind, with the band not playing, which is how you know.

Nobody told us anything. I stood on the right of my company and watched adjutants go by with maps they did not open, and there was not a man on that field under the rank of major who knew where we were going. I asked twice. The two answers I got did not agree with each other and neither one of them was an answer. The order was to draw what we needed, turn in what we did not, move the company to the railhead, and wait. It was one page. There was a date at the top of it and a number in the corner, and nothing else on it a man could take home to his wife.

At the siding there were more men standing in one place than I had ever seen in one place, and behind the men the cars, and more of both still coming up the line. Whatever it was, it was not a flood and it was not a fire. Somebody up the line said the Airborne was going. Somebody said the Airborne had already gone in the spring. Nobody knew, including, I am fairly sure, the men with the maps.

Meanwhile the thing was said out loud in Washington with a number in front of it, and the number went up, and the papers carried it above the same map they always used. I have never been able to keep that number straight from the other numbers that were going around that fall. None of it came as far as the siding. What came as far as the siding was a movement order with no name on it and no number on it, and it was addressed to me.

They put us in boxcars. The doors were pushed shut from the outside and the bolts went home, car by car down the line, and it got dark in a way that one bulb in a wire cage on the ceiling does not fix. There was straw on the floor and a bucket in the corner and a tin of water.

That was when the new men understood it, all thirty-one of them at once, the way a carful of men understands one thing without anybody standing up to say it. The old hands did not talk and did not look at them, and that is the courtesy you learn, and two of the new men cried and did not hide it, and one cried and did it where nobody could see him, and that was worse, and everybody in the car knew that too.

When the train started, I got the book out of the inside pocket of my jacket, where it had been since the bugle, and I held it flat on my knee in the dark, where nobody could see that I had it.