Free They Came To Cordura by Glendon Swarthout Page A

whisky, and both bachelors, neither playing polo, the only sport appropriate for a cavalry officer, they might have drunk and talked of books and battles; Ben, so well read in antiquity, who knew the Stoics almost by heart. Bottle between them they might sit as they had in the nowhere of Columbus, New Mexico, desert-girt, the nearest tree seventy-five miles away at El Paso, the regiment asleep around them, the long hours forging their friendship. 0 rare Ben! He did not want to be with the surgeon now, nor anyone. He felt physically ill. ‘Paltz knows, Paltz knows.’ He counted cadence with the words. ‘That makes four—Pershing, Rogers, Paltz, Ticknor. There must be a fifth because I have five. Five I know about and five who know about me. Symmetry in art, order in war, Ben the classicist would say.’ Beside one of the outbuildings he found his blanket-roll and saddlebags and carried them through falling dark to the stone granary where he spread his blankets on a flooring of corn, yielding as a woman’s body yields, removed his boots and glasses and lay down longing for the execution of sleep.
    It did not come at once. What came was a memory of his mother. On nights when he had been spanked by stranger sergeants he would often have bad dreams, and crying in sleep would call his mother. She would lie with him and shelter him with her body, her long hair mantling him, and in the morning his hands would be so tangled in her hair, his clutch so tight that she could not rise without waking him. It had been she who told him how, since punishment was always scheduled in advance by his father, like Orders of the Day, to seal himself within himself; there would be time; then the blows upon his bared bottom would hurt another, not the one sealed. This, she said, was what the blind man did with his blindness, the lame with their affliction, the mother with her crippled child, and so braved the world with secret selves untouched. ‘This is what I have done,’ he thought. ‘Each man will respond to me according to his nature, some with anger, some with contempt, a few, it may be, with compassion. I have known it in advance; I have had six weeks to seal myself; I am my own crippled child. Let me be untouched.’
    He heard his name called twice. He answered. Hetherington’s voice entered the granary. He wondered if he could bunk with the Major. He didn’t know anybody in this regiment.
    “Besides, sir, they don’t make me much at ease.”
    “Why not?”
    “Well, they know about me getting the Medal of Honor. This morning some asked me what I was doing here, and I said that was why. They took it mighty odd, Major, all day looking at me the way the meeting people used to when I’d re-cite, like they couldn’t be comfortable with me around.”
    Off stone, the private’s voice was hollow, lonely. Major Thorn lay still with surprise. Hetherington, too. Men could not easily bear any extreme, then, of climate or of conduct.
    “All right,” he said after a moment. “You can bed down anywhere you like.”
    The officer listened to blankets being spread, leggings unlaced. He seemed to listen also to Ben Ticknor’s favorite quotation, the lines from Marcus Aurelius they had learned to say together, in alcoholic unison, when night and bottle were used up: “Of human life the time is a point, and the substance is in a flux, and the perception dull”—he could not remember here—”and the soul a whirl, and fortune hard to divine, and fame a thing devoid of judgment. And, to say all in a word”—here they would belch for emphasis—”everything which belongs to the body is a stream, and what belongs to the soul is a dream and a vapor, and life is a warfare and a stranger’s sojourn.” He closed his eyes.
    “Major?”
    “Yes?”
    “If you’re put in for the Medal and they give it to you—do you have to take it?”
    No sooner had he asked than Hetherington wished he had not. He did not understand the officer’s anger, but