Bible Stories for Adults by James Morrow Read Free Book Online Page A

detested the fact that I wasn’t a gorilla like him—I’d flunk out, but the sergeant just winked at me and said, “Stand on our toes, Bill.”
    I did, stretching to the minimum height.
    â€œYou probably skipped breakfast this morning, right?” said the sergeant. Another wink. “Breakfast is good for a few pounds.”
    â€œYes, sir.”
    My keeper turns: click, click, left face. Thock, thock, thock, he transfers his rifle from his right shoulder to his left. He pauses for twenty-one seconds then marches north down the black path. Click, click, he spins toward the Potomac and waits.
    It’s hard to say exactly why my plans changed. At Camp Sinclair they put me in a crisp khaki uniform and gave me a mess kit, a canteen, and a Remington rifle, and suddenly there I was, Private Bill Johnson of the American Expeditionary Forces, D Company, Eighteenth U.S. Infantry, First Division. And, of course, everybody was saying what a great time we were going to have driving the Heinies into the Baltic and seeing gay Paree. The Yanks were coming, and I wanted to be one of them—Bill Johnson née Wilbur Hines wasn’t about to risk an AWOL conviction and a tour in the brig while his friends were off visiting
la belle France
and its French belles. After my discharge, there’d be plenty of time to show Harry Hines what his son had learned in the army.
    They’re changing the guard. For the next half hour, an African-American PFC will protect me. We used to call them coloreds, of course. Niggers, to tell you the truth. Today this particular African-American has a fancy job patrolling my tomb, but when they laid me here in 1921 his people weren’t even allowed in the regular divisions. The 365th, that was the nigger regiment, and when they finally reached France, you know what Pershing had them do? Dig trenches, unload ships, and bury white doughboys.
    But my division—
we’d
get a crack at glory, oh, yes. They shipped us over on the British tub
Magnolia
and dropped us down near the front line a mile west of a jerkwater Frog village, General Robert Bullard in charge. I’m not sure what I expected from France. My buddy Alvin Platt said they’d fill our canteens with red wine every morning. They didn’t. Somehow I thought I’d be in the war without actually
fighting
the war, but suddenly there we were, sharing a four-foot trench with a million cooties and dodging
Mieniewaffers
like some idiots you’d see in a newsreel at the Ziegfeld with a Fairbanks picture and a Chaplin two-reeler, everybody listening for the dreaded cry “Gas attack!” and waiting for the order to move forward. By April of 1918 we’d all seen enough victims of Boche mustard—coughing up blood, shitting their gizzards out, weeping from blind eyes—that we clung to our gas masks like little boys hugging their teddies.
    My keeper marches south, his bayonet cutting a straight incision in the summer air. I wonder if he’s ever used it. Probably not. I used mine plenty in ’18. “If a Heinie comes toward you with his hands up yelling ‘
Kamerad
,’ don’t be fooled,” Sergeant Fiskejohn told us back at Camp Sinclair. “He’s sure as hell got a potato masher in one of those hands. Go at him from below, and you’ll stop him easy. A long thrust in the belly, then a short one, then a butt stroke to the chin if he’s still on his feet, which he won’t be.”
    On May 28 the order came through, and we climbed out of the trenches and fought what’s now called the Battle of Cantigny, but it wasn’t really a battle, it was a grinding push into the German salient with hundreds of men on both sides getting hacked to bits like we were a bunch of steer haunches hanging in our barns back home. Evidently the Boche caught more than we did, because after forty-five minutes that town was ours, and we waltzed down the gunky streets singing our