To the End of the War (9 page)

The conductor came through the car hog-calling the name of the city. The car that had a moment before seemed asleep except for himself leaped into a sudden savage life. People jumped from sleep into quick movement like sprinters at the gun. Before Johnny had time to straighten himself and reach up for his bag, a stream of bodies was already moving past him, pushing him against the seat. He stood that way, an island buffeted by the river of bodies flowing toward the vestibule, until his growing anger boiled over into action. Powerfully, he pushed his body back from the seat and reached up to the luggage rack. He jerked his heavy black suitcase down from the rack into the moving stream of bodies. The blunt insouciant end of the bag collided forcefully with the squirming bottom of a shrewish young woman who was in the act of attempting to push past him. The force of the blow pushed her sharply off balance. She fell against the seat opposite and sprawled across a technical sergeant who was sitting in that seat, her face buried in his lap. The technical sergeant, who with his buddies had been imbibing of the dubious good cheer of a bottle of cheap rum, looked down at his lap with amiable amazement. Then he looked up at the ceiling with wide eyes to see if there was a hole in it. Punching the backs of his two buddies seated in front of him, he breathed, “Manna. Manna. And I never b’lieved that stuff about Moses and the power of prayer.”

The woman got to her feet unaided; none of them offered to help her up. She turned to Johnny with an indignant and hurt expression on her face; it was obvious that he had assaulted her, had offended her sacred right, as a woman, to be protected. He grinned at her maliciously over his shoulder and cocked an insolent eyebrow. “I beg your pardon, madam,” he said, “if I have hurt your feelings.” He looked pointedly at her resilient bottom. “Perhaps the next time you’ll take it a little easier.” He shoved his bag in front of him and stepped in front of the woman with deliberate rudeness. The tech sergeant and his two buddies broke into uproarious sarcastic laughter. The goddam little bitch, he thought; somebody’s wife or somebody’s mother. All you had to do was be born a woman and you had life handed to you on a silver platter. The women possessed what the men wanted, and they capitalized on it and flaunted it at every occasion. He detected something of the same feeling in the laughter of the three soldiers. They were getting even with the woman for being a woman. It was a hell of a situation, and they would get no boot-licking from him.

As Johnny climbed off the train, the fresh air of early morning smote him in the face, climbing from the noisy shoving badly lighted car was like climbing down into another world, a strange quiet pleasantly smelling world that he had been away from so long he had forgotten it existed. It was cool, and he drank the coolness in like a long drought of water. He walked away from the station and hailed a cab to take him out to the edge of town. He had decided to hitchhike from Evansville to Endymion.

He paid the cab and watched it disappear down the long concrete highway back to town, leaving him alone in a world that slept. He set his bag down and stood in the autumn chill of early morning waiting for a ride, a lonely figure that stood out sharply and rebelliously against a backdrop of shanty filling stations and short order hash houses.

It was cold with a penetrating chill of early morning. He hunched his neck down inside the collar of the officer’s topcoat and stood still by the side of the road . . . Waiting for a car that would stop and give him a ride.

The stories in
To the End of the War
are presented here as interrelated stories, similar to Sherwood Anderson’s
Winesburg, Ohio
. This story, “Back Home in Endymion,” is yoked to the next one, “Johnny Meets Sandy.” To put them together makes the story too long. Let the two be.

Wilson (Will) Carpenter is Johnny’s friend from childhood and had escaped a domineering mother just as Jones did. Will is suspected of being gay, but Johnny will have nothing to do with this gossip, defending Will as an artist.

Jones cleverly presents our first glimpses of Sandy through Fanny’s eyes, not Johnny’s, for he was soon to be bedazzled by outlier Sandy.

THE CARTER MANSION, NOVEMBER 1943

I
N THE TWO DAYS HE
had been home Johnny had already become a source of considerable annoyance to both his cousin Erskine and Erskine’s wife, Fanny. Erskine, who had been as far as Fort Dix in the last war and understood about war, could not find it in him to condone or to explain young Johnny’s actions because of having been in a war.

Erskine was forty-four or -five and Fanny was thirty-nine and a half, or as she would explain it to herself: something under forty. Erskine was the son of Johnny’s father’s eldest brother, and both he and his wife were considerably removed by years and outlook from their cousin. Although they had sent Johnny an invitation to visit them several months before, they had not really expected him to accept it, and in the intervening months they had nearly forgotten about the invitation. They were surprised when Johnny showed up unexpectedly, and the surprise took on an additionally unpleasant cast when they found that he was AWOL. They had expected, if he came at all, that he would come up for a three-day pass or at most a ten-day furlough. When they learned that he had spent his convalescent furlough with Tom in Miami, they felt that he was only using his visit to them as a means of evading military authorities while he was over the hill, and they did not like this aspect of the situation. They were right in feeling that he was using them, of course—to a certain extent—and when he freely admitted his reason for visiting them, they were more upset.

They were proud of him, however. Johnny was one of the first boys to come home after having been wounded in combat. They were proud of him, and they naturally wanted him to meet people and associate with their numerous friends. The second evening he was home they had a sort of little open house to which Erskine’s business friends were invited.

Erskine had taken a degree in law at the University. However, being a lawyer was more or less a side issue; Erskine ran a branch insurance and had a chattel mortgage and loan business. He used his law as a sort of lever for his other businesses. Having these businesses, a good part of his work was entertaining business associates and friends who could aid him in extending and furthering his influence. It was both a lucrative and very pleasant way of conducting business.

The old Carter home with its large high-ceilinged rooms was enlivened by this party Erskine and Fanny gave for Johnny. The only blot on the whole evening was due to the guest of honor, who was inclined to be asocial and uncivil with a sort of sarcastic humor, and who got so drunk early in the evening that he had to be stacked on the shelf, letting the open house get along as best it could without his presence. Both Erskine and Fanny, who were inclined toward a little indecorous drinking themselves at times, if the occasion warranted, were astonished at the prodigious amount of all kinds of liquor that Johnny drank.

The whole situation was not to Erskine’s liking, and he expected the worst. Johnny seemed sure to make a public spectacle of himself, and he made no bones about telling anybody who asked that he was over the hill.

Now Fanny sat wearily at the table in the sunroom of the over-big Carter house wondering what to do with him. Johnny had phoned her from next door and informed her that he was at Wilson’s. In three days, she was already at her wit’s end. She had suspected that Johnny would be different from the boy she had known, but she had not realized or even, guessed at the magnitude or the direction of the change. It had not taken her long to discover it however. She liked Johnny personally, and as it was her duty to like him, because he was a part of the Carter family she had adopted by marrying Erskine. The Carter family was her family, and she had been taught, partly by her parents as a child (she was a Southerner) and partly by Erskine after she was married, a pride in family that amounted to a religion. As Erskine’s wife, she felt the same fierce unbending pride for all the Carter family, good or bad, living or dead. Fanny, like her spouse, felt deeply the fact that her name was Carter, and she felt deeply the responsibility of the name and that as a Carter she had a certain position to live up to. Some of the Carters may have been bad, Erskine would say, but they were always bad in a good sort of way. Then, too, Fanny liked Johnny with the feeling of maternity that women usually feel toward the wayward sons. For some inexplicable reason, the black sheep seem to hold a higher place in the hearts of their mothers and all the other womenfolk of their families. And Johnny was already catalogued as a black sheep.

In the two days he had been home, he had hardly drawn a sober breath. Fanny had had no experience with returned-from-overseas soldiers, nor had she heard much talk about them in the Endymion gossip mart, for Johnny was one of the first to come home. She had read, though, a number of articles by both male and female war correspondents and statesmen which stated that the young men who were fighting the war were not taking it any more to heart than they would have taken an unpleasant job in the next county, that they were all very stable young men, down to earth, feet on the ground, who would return to their old lives easily by casting off their war experiences like a locust casts off its dead shell; in other words they were not losing their perspective of American life and their place in it. Fanny believed the articles faithfully. Consequently, she could not figure out what had come over Johnny, could not understand what made him change so radically. There was a wild light that came into his eyes at times which Fanny could only attribute to some quirk, of bad blood.

Erskine had suggested forcefully that Johnny take it easy around Endymion, because he, Erskine, had built the family name up to its former position of respect from which Johnny’s father had previously dragged it down, and because the townspeople were too prone to say like father like son.

That Johnny would laugh at Erskine’s advice was a shocking thing. He was over twenty years Erskine’s junior, and he did not seem to care about family, or he surely would not have done such a thing as laugh. Fanny could not see that he cared about anything. He would not listen to what either of them said; he went his own way regardless of advice or of how many people he might hurt.

Fanny did not know what to do, and Johnny and Erskine were fast approaching a crisis. She got up from the chair and walked up and down the room in indecision. Fanny was a member of the Endymion Underground. This unsung unofficial organization was composed of the wives of various businessmen of the more respected types. Of course, the Endymion Underground had its various factions who were out to subtly dig and cut the throats of the enemy factions; and of course, these factions were continually breaking up to form new factions. But each woman was always a member of one faction or other, so that when she or her man got in trouble (usually it was the man), the woman could turn to her underground faction for aid. When a husband got in some kind of business or personal trouble, the wife would go to the phone and, via this secret weapon, organize a resistance. The other wives would put pressure to bear upon their own husbands, using the various methods at which they were so deft, and the troubled husband would suddenly find his troubles evaporated. He would come home patting himself proudly on the back and tell his wife the good news, and the wife would go to the phone and give the all-clear signal to the rest of the Endymion Underground.

Fanny continued her indecisive walking. This did not seem to be a job for the underground. She could see no one else to turn to then but Sandy Marion. Sandy Marion did not play at politics with the rest of the underground factions, but the wives secretly considered her their expert on children’s affairs. She seemed especially to have a way with the children of whom the mothers seemed to have lost all contact.

Fanny went to the phone, picked it up, and asked for a number.

“Hello?” she said anxiously into the phone. “Hello? Is that you, Sandy? This is Fanny . . . I’ve got something bothering me and I was wondering if you would help me out. . . .

“Well, young Johnny is here; Joe’s boy. He’s in the army and he’s been in the hospital since he got back: from overseas. . . .

“Yes. Guadalcanal. . . . Well, I know how all the kids in town like you and how you’ve fiddled around with them. And I wonder if I could bring Johnny down to see you. Just like it was a social call, you know. . . . I thought you might do something with him. . . .

“Oh, no. I wouldn’t do that. I didn’t know you had a guest. . . . When did he get in to town; I hadn’t heard a word about it. . . .Yesterday? . . . Well, maybe it would be a good thing if they got together, both being overseas and all. . . . I always liked George. I hate to hear about his leg. . . .

“To be honest with you, Sandy. I don’t know what to do with him, really. He won’t listen to anything Erskine and I say to him. He’s been drunk ever since he got here. We just can’t handle him; honestly, he’s a problem. It’s nothing on the surface. It’s something I can’t just put my finger on. He just looks at you, you know? I’m terribly worried, and I’m afraid he and Erskine are going to have trouble. I really wouldn’t be surprised to see them come to blows. Seriously, I . . . I’d like to bring him down this afternoon. . . . I know it’s an imposition, but it might be good for George. Surely. . . .

“He’s over next door at Wilson Carpenter’s now. Could I bring him and Wilson down this afternoon? . . . In about an hour or so, yes. Thanks a lot, Sandy.”

Fanny put the phone back and sat looking out the window, waiting for Johnny and Wilson to come in. She felt as if a great load had been lifted from her mind. There was some intangible thing about Sandy that inspired great confidence. Fanny considered herself one of Sandy’s best friends, although Sandy had become an enigma to all the women of Endymion. Sandy was eccentric, to say the least. But Fanny liked her. Sandy had been one of the leading women in Endymion for a number of years, and then she had just suddenly dropped out of everything. She had been a wonderful bridge player, but now she never played anymore. She had run the Country Club for a couple of years and then she had quit that. She never played golf anymore, and she never even went out to the Club. She went to a few of the dances at the Caribou and she went down to the Caribou Club’s Grille to eat now and then with Eddie. But outside of that, she might as well not have been in the town. She preferred to stay home, she said, and read.