Free Burning the Days by James Salter Page A

old brick houses to which I would one day be invited for Sunday lunch.
    My new roommates were from Texas and Michigan, the one wide-jawed and springy-haired, the other handsome and Teutonic. Bob Morgan was the Texan. I am trying to recall if he smoked but it was surely the other roommate who taught me that. Morgan came from a small town, Spur, a dot on the map, and the sun and dust of Texas had paled his eyes.
    We had clean slates. All demerits from the summer had been removed and we were as men paroled. Demerits were a black mark and a kind of indebtedness. The allowance was fifteen a month. Beyond that, there were punishment tours, one hour for each demerit, an inflexible rate of exchange. The hours were spent on the Area, walking back and forth, rifle on shoulder, and with this came a further lesson: at the inspection which took place before the tours began, demerits were frequently given out. For shoes with ascuff mark accidentally made or brass with the least breath of tarnish you could receive more tours than you were there to walk off.
    We had learned the skills of a butler, which were meant to be those of gentry. We wore pajamas and bathrobes, garters for our socks. Fingernails were scrubbed pink and hair cut weekly. We learned to take off a hat without touching the bill, to sleep on trousers carefully folded beneath the mattress to press them, to announce menus, birthdays, and weekend films with their casts. Like butlers we had Sunday off, but only after mandatory chapel.
    There was an exception to this. On Friday evenings in an empty theater, twenty-five or so of us sat on folding chairs in Jewish chapel, including one of the most respected men in my company, a yearling named Sohn. After an hour of services, eternal and unconnected to the harsh life we were leading, we marched back to barracks where everyone was studying or preparing for the next morning’s inspection. I felt uncomfortable about having been gone. Though no one ever said a word, I felt, in a way, untrue. In the end I dropped out and went to chapel with the Corps.
    Of course, you cannot drop out—you may perhaps try—and I became part of neither one group nor the other, but it seemed to me that God was God, as the writings themselves said, and what essentially distinguished me was an ingrained culture, ages deep, which in any case I wanted to put aside.
    Three times a day through three separate doors the entire Corps, like a great religious order, entered the mess hall and stood in whispery silence—there was always muted talk and menace—until the command “Take seats!” With the scrape of chairs the roar of dining began. Meals were a constant terror, and as if to enhance it, near their close the orders of the day were announced, often including grave punishments awarded by the regimental or brigade boards. At the ten-man tables upperclassmen sat at one end, plebes at the other. We ate at attention, eyes fixed on plates, sometimes made part of the conversation like an amusing servant butmostly silent or bawling information. At any moment, after being banged on the table, a cup or glass might come flying. The plebe in charge of pouring looked up quickly, hands ready, crying “Cup, please!” It was a forbidden practice but a favorite. A missed catch was serious, since the result might be broken china and possible demerits for an upperclassman. It was better to be hit in the chest with a cup, or even in the head.
    “Sit up!” was a frequent command. It meant “Stop eating,” the consequence of having failed to know something—passing the wrong dish, or putting cream in someone’s coffee who never took it that way—and might result in no meal at all, though usually at the last permission was given to wolf a few bites. Somewhere, in what was called the Corps Squad area, the athletes, plebes among them, were eating at ease.
    Like a hereditary lord’s, the table commandant’s whim was absolute. Some were kindly figures fond of teasing and