Basic Training (3 page)

Haley and Mr. Banghart arose, and shook hands. “A pleasure, I’m sure,” said Mr. Banghart.

“Pleased to meet you,” said Haley. “Are you by any chance the man who was singing in the barn last night?”

“The same. Did you enjoy it?”

“You have an awfully good voice, I think,” said Haley.

Mr. Banghart, who had dropped Haley’s hand, startled him by grabbing it again, and squeezing it hard. “That’s the first kind word anybody’s ever had for me,” he said solemnly.

“That’s simply not so,” said the General, in a half-laughing, patronizing tone.

Mr. Banghart ignored him. “I’d be glad to sing for you any time,” he said to Haley. “What would you like to hear?”

Haley was startled by the reaction his pleasantry had started. He had never before set a man seething with gratitude, and the situation confused him. “
Rock of Ages
is very nice,” he said at last, recalling that Mr. Banghart had done justice to this hymn the night before.

Mr. Banghart’s lungs swelled like blacksmiths’ bellows, and the room was filled with his powerful singing voice. Haley took a step backwards. The General hammered on the table. “Not during breakfast!” he bawled above the singing, as though he were commanding a regiment.

Mr. Banghart stopped his singing immediately. “Now
you’re
against me,” he said reproachfully.

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake, I am not against you,” said the General irritably, “but I certainly will be if you do
that
again.”

“Sorry,” said Mr. Banghart, “but more for your sake than for mine.” He shrugged, and resumed his seat by the range.

“All right, all right,” said the General soothingly. He looked up at the clock and fidgeted. “Now Where’s that Kitty?” he said. “What time did she get in last night, Annie?”

“Three in the morning,” said Annie, handing Mr. Banghart his coffee. “She was out with that Roy Flemming again,” she added. Haley saw Hope glare at her sister.

“That’s the end, the absolute end,” said the General. “You can tell her, when she gets up, that every minute after six that she slept is one week-end night and she has to stay in. You can also tell her that Mr. Flemming and his motorcycle are no longer welcome at Ardennes Farm. Put that on the bulletin board,” he ordered.

Annie nodded in agreement. “Good,” she said.

“Know where the bulletin board is?” the General asked Haley.

“I think I saw it there in the sunroom. Is that it, sir?”

“That’s it, allrighty. You just watch the bulletin board. Annie keeps it up for me, and it’ll help you stay out of mischief. Your name appeared on it for the first time today.”

“What did it say about me?” asked Haley, with a trace of anxiety.

“You get up at 5 sharp, take a cold shower, brush your teeth for two minutes, pick up your pajamas and hang them on the hook inside the closet door; eat breakfast, go help with the haying, eat lunch, go out and hay some more; eat supper, listen to the radio for an hour, brush your teeth for two minutes, take a cold shower, hang up your clothes, and go to bed. Every minute’s accounted for,” said the General proudly. He looked again at the kitchen clock. “H-hour,” he announced, and D-squad marched out into the vermilion sunrise.

By 11 a.m. the wagon was stacked high with the day’s sixth load of hay. The hay, the General had explained to Haley, had been pounded and bound into bales by a machine that had passed over the field the day before. The dense bundles were as high as Haley’s chest, weighed about half of what he imagined Hope to weigh, and were as wide and thick as the General’s middle. There was room for three more bales on top. Haley hung his baling hook on a wheel spoke, swept away the sweat that streamed into his eyes, and begged for a rest.

“You just had a rest period, Haley,” said the General. “You’ll find you won’t get tired as quickly if you keep at it steadily. Breaking up your rhythm with rest periods all the time, no wonder you’re pooped. You’ll never get your second wind that way.” He was atop the load, reins in hand, with Hope seated beside him, her legs dangling over the side.

Haley shook his head wearily, and sat down on the ground, panting, wishing to Heaven that the nightmare of heat, creeping time, and lamed muscles would end. “I’ll be all right in a minute, I guess — soon as I get my breath,” he said. Mr. Banghart, who had been working on the opposite side of the wagon, walked over to him and told him to climb onto the wagon, that he would finish the load.

“Let him learn to pull his own weight, Mr. Banghart,” warned the General. “He can do it. Come on, boy, three to go.”

Limply, painfully, Haley sank his hook into a nearby bale. He worried it along the ground to the wagon. Hope waited, hook poised, for him to swing it upward to where she could catch it and drag it into place.

“Put your back into it, boy,” shouted the General, and Haley swung the bale. Hope made a grab for it, but missed, for it was a full yard beyond her hook. He staggered backwards under the weight, his eyes and lungs filled with the dust and splinters that showered down from the bale. His feet tangled, and he fell hard on the sharp stubble, the bale on top of him.

He was yanked to his feet at once by Mr. Banghart, who, with his mouth close to Haley’s ear, whispered, “Don’t you worry — we’ll take care of that old devil when the right time comes. Wait and see.”

Haley rubbed his smarting eyes, and brought into focus the face of Hope, who was rocking from side to side with laughter. He felt utterly humiliated standing before her, comical in his weakness, and in his clothing — cast-off work clothes of the General, too short, too wide, high on his ankles and wrists, bunched at his waist. Exhaustion and sudden loneliness billowed in his narrow breast. He sank to the ground again.

The General eased himself down from his perch, and stood over him, kicking gently at the soles of his shoes, and chiding, “Come on, boy, get up. All right, get up.” Haley stood. The General seemed more embarrassed than angry. “That’s enough of that,” he said. “Mooning and malingering will get you nowhere around here, do you understand? I’m ashamed of you.”

“Leave him alone,” Haley heard Hope call.

Blushing and apologizing in half-soliloquy, he clambered atop the wagon, unable to look at Hope. Mr. Banghart swung three more bales up to Hope, and the wagon moved, jolting and creaking, toward the barnyard.

In the still, dry heat of the loft, under a tin roof too hot to touch, Hope, Haley, and Mr. Banghart dragged bale after bale from the wagon, over the splintered floor, to a growing stack deep in the shadows of one end. The General remained on the wagon to steady the horses. Tormenting himself, Haley tried to imagine what the others were thinking of him. Hope was the only one he really cared about. The two of them worked together, their hooks driven into the same bale. She said nothing, and concentrated her attention on the hard work to be done. He was bewildered by the effect her presence had had upon him since the first instant he had seen her. He now found her more beautiful than ever, with her hair lightened by dust, and with heat bringing her loose clothes into conformity with the lines of her young figure.

Mr. Banghart rolled a cigarette, politely excused himself, and went out into the barnyard to smoke it. The General joined him with a cigar, leaving Haley and Hope alone in the barn. Haley sat down on a bale next to Hope. “Don’t worry about it. You’ll get used to farm work after a while,” she said. “We all did. Takes about a month.”

For want of a rational comment on this message, Haley changed the subject. “Mr. Banghart is a funny one,” he said. “I never knew anyone to talk to himself so much.”

Hope giggled. “He’s got a screw loose, all right, but the General says he’s the best worker we ever had on the farm,” she said. “Try and hear what he talks to himself about sometime. It’s all about what he’s going to do to people he thinks are out to get him — which is practically everybody. You’re lucky; he liked you right away, and that’s unusual.” She became more thoughtful. “I shouldn’t laugh. It’s kind of sad about him, I guess.”

“Has he ever done anything to anybody?” asked Haley uneasily.

“Oh, no, he just talks about it. He has one of the tenant’s houses all to himself, and he spends most of his spare time there. He never goes into town, and the General has him working by himself, or with us, so there isn’t much chance for him to get into trouble with anybody.”

“Is he married? What does he do with his money?”

“As far as we know, he’s a bachelor, but he keeps that house cleaner than a woman would. The General thinks he’s got his money hidden in the house somewhere, because he never goes anywhere where he could spend it. We do all his shopping for him, and he never buys anything but food and tobacco and padlocks,” Hope explained matter-of-factly. “That’s the really funny thing about him — the locks. If you make a trip into town, chances are he’ll ask you to get him one. He’s got padlocks all over that house. There were four on his front door the last time I counted.”

The General called from below, “Lunch time!” To Haley the announcement was incredible. At 9 a.m., after watching four rural hours inch by, he had concluded that the clocks of Ardennes Farm were lubricated with molasses, and that noon was still a century away in terms of time as he had known it in the city.

Noon brought with it the solid blessings of strong coffee and whole milk, of strawberry jam and biscuits, of ham and gravy. It was an hour of peace and plenty, reminding Haley of a medieval custom he had read about — whereby a condemned man was hanged and skillfully revived several times before being permitted to expire completely. The analogy did not spoil his appetite. He wolfed his food, excused himself, and lay down on the sunroom couch.

Bits of conversation from the kitchen infiltrated his consciousness. He stored them away, too weary to think much about them. Kitty, who, Annie had said, had slept until 11, was defending her relationship with Roy Flemming, her beau of the night before. She seemed agitated, punctuating her replies to the General’s poignant assaults on Roy’s character with nose blowing. She declared that she loved Roy, and that this was one romance her father was
not
going to break up. There seemed to have been plenty of cases where the General had succeeded in doing just that.

“Until you’re twenty-one, young lady, let me be the judge of who your associates should be,” Haley heard the General say. “After that, you’re free to marry anybody, simply anybody — Flemming, Mr. Banghart, or the next bum who stops for a handout. Until that happy day, however, I am very much in charge. Do we understand each other?” Kitty hastened past Haley’s aching form, and hurried up stairs to slam her bedroom door on a loveless world for lovers.

“H-hour!” shouted the General, and he harangued his flagging troops into the field once more.

In an eon came evening, to cool, and to displace the sounds of daytime with whispers and croaks and sounds like rusty hinges from grass-tuft sanctuaries in woods and pastures, and from lily pads a quarter of a mile away.

Annie had prepared supper an hour ago, and, from the small window at the end of a long corridor between bales in the loft, Haley could see her putting it into the oven to keep it warm. He, Hope, and Mr. Banghart, meeting a quota set by the General, were stacking the last wagonload in the barn. The General had returned to the house, leaving the three of them to handle what remained without his supervision. It was much cooler, and, with him gone, an element of playfulness came into the business of lugging bales. Haley found his burdens miraculously lightened. Mr. Banghart sang a medley of rhythmic spirituals, setting a tempo by which they tugged and lifted. The work was done.

They sat down in the corridor between bales to get their breaths, and to shake the dust and straw-bits from their hair. Bad as his first taste of rural life had been, Haley found himself looking with pride at the results of their labor, stacked bales rising like skyscrapers on either side of them. Mr. Banghart sat still for only a minute, arising again to feel along the upper surface of a rafter until he found what he wanted, a flashlight. “We can show Haley our secret, can’t we, Hope?” he asked.

“I suppose so. It’s really kind of silly, though.”

“I’d like very much to see it. I wouldn’t tell anybody,” Haley promised.

They led him down the corridor to within a few feet of the window at its end. The bales had been stacked here before Haley’s arrival at Ardennes Farm. Mr. Banghart pointed his flashlight at a bale in the bottom row. “Notice anything different about that one?” he asked.

“Well, there’s a piece of cloth tied around the baling wire,” said Haley.