Some of Your Blood (2 page)

All the same some lieutenant who should have known better, well, he did know better but he did it anyway, he got very puzzled at one of the letters he was supposed to censor. He took it to a friend of his who happened to be a major in the Medical Corps, but this major was not just a doctor, he was a psychiatrist. He looked at the letter and told the lieutenant he had no business worrying himself about it, it was not military, which the lieutenant already knew. And that did not do any good because the major had the letter now and it bothered him just as much, so he sent for the soldier who wrote the letter.

The next day the major cleared up his desk and went and opened the door to the little room outside where this soldier was waiting. The major had a file in his hand turned around back to back with a lot of papers. He said “Come in uh,” and looked at the papers, “uh Smith.”

The soldier came in and the major closed the door. The soldier was at attention but he looked around when he heard the door close. The major did not look at him yet but walked past him looking at the papers and he said “It’s all right, soldier. At ease.” And he didn’t seem to be so tough. He sat down and put the papers on the desk and squared them away and finally he leaned back in his shiny brown swivel chair and took a good look at the soldier.

What he saw was a big fellow with yellow hair and a pink kind of skin and the shoulders and chest that make the shirt look like it grew on him, it was so snug. He had thick arms and thick legs and he kept his face closed.

Up to now the major did not tell the soldier he had the letter. So the soldier did not know why he was there.

The major said, “The company clerk tells me you’re something of a loner, Smith. Don’t run with a crowd much.”

The soldier just said, Yes sir. He always liked to let the other guy do the talking as much as he could.

“What do you do for amusement?”

“I like to walk around. At home I fish some. Hunt.” The major did not say anything to this so the soldier had to say, “There isn’t much of that here. Coons and chucks, I mean. Rabbits.”

The major looked down at his papers and said, “Miss that a lot?”

“Well, yes sir, I reckon.”

“Got a girl at home, George?” The Major called him George this time.

“Sure do, yes sir.”

“Go in town once in a while, do you?”

George knew just what he meant and he just shook his head no.

The major picked up a paper and looked to see if it had anything written on the other side, which it had not. It was blue paper and had two lines written on it. It was only then that George began staring at it. He stared at it as much as the major did for the rest of the time he was there but from farther off. The major seemed to be going to say something about the paper but he did not. He said, “What do you hunt for, George? I mean, just what do you get out of it?”

He waited, looking down at the paper, and when he did not get an answer he looked up to the soldier’s face. Then he said, real soft and long, “Hey-y-y …” and got on his feet. He went to the far corner of the room quickly but sort of sidling, watching the soldier’s face the whole time, took down a glass, filled it from a cooler, came back and passed it to the soldier. The major said, “Here, you better drink this.”

The soldier’s face was bone-white and little drops of sweat were all over it and he was shaking and his eyes were half-way closed and what they call glazed. He took the glass but he did not seem to know he was taking it. He did not drink out of it but just held it out in front of him. He was staring down at the paper. The major looked down there too and that was when there was the explosion.

The glass, it seemed to explode but that was really because the soldier squeezed it. The next thing would be to jump the major and the major knew that because he turned just as white as the soldier. But what saved the major’s life was the hand still out. First it was dripping water and then it was dripping blood. The blood dripping was what saved the major, because when George Smith saw it he like forgot there was anyone or anything else there. Slowly he brought his hand up to his face. The fingers opened and pieces of bloody glass fell out. He closed the fist and brought it close and began to smell it. He opened it and along the outside edge of the hand under the little finger, blood was pulsing where a little artery was cut. George put his mouth on that part.

The major must have pushed a button under his desk or something because the door banged open without knocking and two MP’s ran in and grabbed George. After a while the major had to come and help, and then two more MP’s came and that did it. The major had a bloody nose and one of the MP’s just lay there on the floor without moving. George got his hand back to his mouth and stood breathing like a bull through his nostrils and watching the blood on the major’s face.

“Wait a minute,” the major said when the MP’s started hustling the soldier out, and they stopped. He looked George Smith straight in the eye and spoke to him kindly. He was breathing hard and bleeding but he really was kindly. He said, “What was it, soldier? What did I say?”

George looked at the file folder on the desk and then he looked at the major bleeding and he sucked at his bleeding hand, and he did not say anything. For three months he did not say anything because he figured he had said much too much already.

They packed up the file folder and the soldier and sent both back Stateside.

This George Smith was twenty-three years old at the time. He came from Kentucky, back in the hills. It was hills with woods and hills with farms and every once in a while these little towns that grow like you know, hair, around something, crossroads or a hole in the ground like amine.

George came from a mine town. His mother and father came from the old country. They got married on this side. The father was working in Charleston, South Carolina when he met the mother. Probably the only reason he married her was she was the only girl he knew who could talk to him. There sure was nothing else worthwhile between them. Lonely. People get lonesome by theirselves and then get hooked up and go off and be lonesome together.

When they went to Kentucky so he could work in the mines they were always set apart from everybody because they never did learn much English. Whatever it was he wanted, friends or some place to belong or to be a big shot, he tried to find in a bottle. About the earliest thing George could remember was the father bellowing drunk and the mother screaming and sometimes George screaming too. This was not the kind of memory like a thing happens and you remember it. This was no special one time, but like a colored light or a smell that you live in all the time. And hungry. Practically all the time hungry. Hungry waiting for the father to come home and sometimes he didn’t and sometimes he came late and one single word to him about it and he’d start slugging. You found out that when the mother yelled you didn’t feel hungry any more.

But all the same it was nice. Like the woods. You could walk in the woods and know where you were, first a little way away from the house, then more, finally, anywhere. The woods in the rain, in the snow, the woods even when you were hungry, they couldn’t hurt you the way you might get hurt at home. You might die in the woods or get killed, but the woods did not drink, the woods did not punch your mother in the face. You’re always all right if you can get away into the woods. The woods are smooth, you might say, towns are rough. You can lay up to the smooth woods and drink, but not towns, not people, all split halfway up and prickly. Also you know where you stand in the woods. Animals, now, they never stay mad. You go to club a rabbit and you miss, or hurt him and he gets away, he’s not going to get sore about it. Maybe he’s learned something and maybe he’s more careful after that, more scared, but that’s all. But if you hit out at a person you never know what’s going to come of it, from nothing at all all the way down to a stretch in the Big House. Also if a squirrel should see you cut a squirrel, it makes no never mind. But if a person sees you cut a person, look out. Even years later.

When George was old enough to walk he was old enough to be in the woods. No matter what happened they were there waiting for him. From the time he was eleven there was something as good, even better, because the father’s sister married a man who had a farm in the south part of Virginia and although it was a long way away he got to go there once in a while. And he found out years later that as farms go that farm was pretty nothing, but at the time it was heaven. And for a while he lived there permanent. But that was later after everyone died.

The only really bad thing that ever happened to George in the woods was when he was five and he heard voices and crawled up a ridge and looked down and saw a guy giving it to a girl. It was not the first time he had seen it but this was different from what happened at home because the girl was not crying. What he always remembered most about it was this girl’s ankles, they were in the air and every time the guy lunged they wiggled like putty. George was watching this not thinking one way or the other about it when the other guy—there was two of them taken this girl out in the woods and the one was hanging around waiting—well this second guy come up behind George and whupped him with a tree trunk. It was not a very big tree and it was a long time dead and punky or I guess George would be dead but it hurt a lot and also scared him very bad, the guy running after him whupping him eight or ten times till George got away the brush being so thick around there and him so small, it was like clubbing a rabbit in brambles, you just can’t do it.

They say that these things affect you in late life but it never bothered George. I mean if it was supposed to scare him away from the woods it did not. Even at five years old George could understand that it was not the woods done it to him.

Well George had to go to school like everybody else and that was where he first learned to let other people do the talking because they all did it so easy. George could talk all right, his father made him do it like in the store and all, but for a long time that hunky talk lay in his mouth and put a stink on every word that came out and they laughed. Of course after a while George could talk American as good as anyone but by that time the whole town was calling the father the town drunk which he was and any time George opened his mouth he was like to get somebody’s fist in it. And besides the other kids in town used to run together all the time and go to each other’s house, but nobody ever came to George’s house because that was the one and only place they were scared of the father. And besides the mother was always too sick and too tired. She had the arthritis at first in her hands and it hurt her to do the wash and clean up although she did as much as she could and George helped her when nobody was watching. But one thing he would not do was hang out the clothes because the kids one time saw him do it.

All this could of been worse because George just naturally grew big, sixteen pounds when he was born, his mother used to say that’s what gave her the arthritis, then from the time he was eight or so he really grew and what with getting left back in school two years he was always bigger than the kids he was thrown in with. By the time he was twelve he was six feet and a hundred and seventy pounds.

About the hunting. He was only about seven or eight when he started to get anywhere good at it. A sling shot was all right but it took a long while to get good at. Sometimes he could bean a rabbit with a club. You go out in the early morning when it is dark and be there at the edge of a field by the woods when the first light comes. You have a club about two feet long and thick as your wrist, green maple or hickory is best, green because it is heavier that way. Pine is easier to cut but it gets that pitch on your hands and clothes and you cannot get it off. You get yourself set in thick brush but near the edge so your arm can swing clear. You stand with your arm back and the club resting in a tree crotch or some place that takes the weight of it and you make up your mind you will be there without moving for a good long time. Pretty soon it begins to get light and then the rabbits come out and eat the clover and timothy or whatever, and jump around and lay flat and rub their stomachs on the wet grass and all that. You pick out your rabbit and you make up your mind no other one will do. No matter how close another one comes you leave it be. Pretty soon your rabbit will get just where you want him and no matter what he does, roll over, wave his feet in the air, squat down and nibble, sniff around another rabbit or whatever, you leave him be. But when he holds real still with all four feet on the ground and his chin down and his ears floppy, because when his ears are up he’s on lookout, then you let fly with your club. You want to scrape it away from the tree it is resting on because that makes a little sound, just enough to bring him straight up on his haunches. He’s sticking up out of the ground like a boundary peg. You scrape your club off the tree and throw it all at once, no waiting, and you throw it low and fast, level with the ground and no higher than the middle of his ears and you throw it so it spins like an airplane propeller (but the airplane would have to be flying straight up) and you jump out and dive on that rabbit as soon as the club leaves your hand. Now if the club hits right it likes to tear his head plumb off but if it knocks him going away, or if it gets him on the shoulder it just like stuns him and you better be there to grab him because he can be stunned and back on his feet and gone before you can blink. And if he is stunned you can grab him and you take hold of his two hind legs in your left hand and pick him up and when you do that to a rabbit he straightens right out and throws his head back, so with your right hand you chop straight down with the edge of it and it breaks his neck and he never moves and blood runs out of his nose. But if you do that to a rat or a chuck or a coon or a squirrel it will not straighten out and throw up its head but instead it will curl up the other way and bite you. A squirrel can bite you nine times before you can say ouch and it has big yellow teeth an inch long. A rat that looks dead can get you if you hold it even by the end of the tail, it can climb up that tail with its front feet hand over hand and cut you good before you get sense enough to let go. A squirrel bites straight down and leaves holes as big as his teeth but a rat has a way of slashing, the hole is always much bigger than his teeth, you can not figure out how he does it. A rat if he is stunned you want to grab the end of his tail and put your foot on it crosswise so the tail is under the arch of your foot and then pull him up close to the shoe on the other side of the foot. That way you got him up tight where he can’t but lash around some and you have one hand free to club him or pick up a rock or your knife or stomp him with your other foot. A ground squirrel, what they call back East a chipmunk, is not worth your trouble, he has a tail comes off if you grab it, well it does not come off but it skins off and he gets away and the rest of the tail shrivels up and drops off later. A chipmunk can bite worse than a rat almost and you would not believe anything that size could get his mouth open that wide, and once you got him what have you got? He has no more juice than a stewed prune. A skunk is not worth your trouble, although they are easy to get because they are not afraid of nothing. A possum all you have to do is lift him clear of the ground. A coon you want to have a good club for and you do not do nothing but club him and keep it up till you are sure, if he ever gets his back against a tree or a rock and he is not dead yet you will think somebody threw a buzz saw at you spinning. George got a bobcat throwing a club once but never again. All cats got the same taste, you breathe outward through your nose and there’s a taste there like cat pee smell. For hours. You wouldn’t believe it but snakes taste all right, maybe a little fishy but there is nothing wrong with fish, the only thing is it is not warm. Birds are a waste of time they are mostly feathers, except a couple of times George saw wild turkey but he never did get near enough for even a big sling shot. Except ducks. Ducks are fine.