Fields of Fire Read online

  Since he was the last it had become perhaps the most important thing in her waning life that he should know of those who went before him. All the campfire stories and the front-porch chronicles, of the wilderness days and the Hodges who had fought and fallen, had dwindled down to him and her. And these tales, these forgotten pieces of history, would be passed to him or die. All the pain and misery and minor successes and major sacrifices would be learned by him or forgotten by the entire world. She was intent, compulsive: she would not let them be for nothing.

  So she taught him all the Ghosts, over the years of Sundays, inside the shadows of her kitchen. And this is what he learned, under the patient drone of a suffering voice grown old and dry.

  THEY took Abednego, he was a Hodges same as you, Scotch and Irish, mean as a curly-haired old dog, and he went to Buford's regiment. He was a private there, in Woodson's company, they say. He was a mountaineer already and this was only the Revolution, but you see we always been out here, since the first days when we took the wilderness, all the low blue mountains from Cherokee and Saponi and Tutelo. Those were some fights, what I mean, when it was just a man and his family against them Indians.

  But they took Abednego and he was a private and when Buford fought the British over at Greenspring, Abednego was took a prisoner and they marched him and some others off to Richmond and kept them there. But finally they traded for some Redcoat prisoners so he was let go and he come on home. Then after the war they give him some land out in the mountains but then they took it back with something called a mortgage. You never could keep a Hodges out of debt, you know that. And when they got him with this mortgage they asked him if he didn't want one of them soldier's pensions but Abednego he didn't want to burden the government with no pension, said he didn't fight for no pension. So they put him in the debtor's prison for two years. And him a man of sixty-eight by then.

  Then Isham, that was his son, he was in the militia for that War of 1812, but after it was finished he moved on over into Tennessee. Said they done killed off all the British in Virginia, and maybe there was a few left over in Tennessee. He married him a half-Cherokee gal named Polly Long and they had themselves a brood of kids.

  One of them was Welcome, your great-great-grandaddy. He was the fifth man down. When they were hardly teenagers, him and his brother Mibau went up into Kentucky. They say Mibau killed a man down in Tennessee for trying to smooch his sister, and Isham sent Welcome with Mibau up into Kentucky because Mibau was hardly more than a boy and hadn't never been away from kinpeople. Well, they settled in the ridges here and they took up with some local gals. Welcome, he married a Hargrove, as I recall. Had more childrens than they could rightly count.

  Then that terrible war come and old Welcome didn't hardly have him a boy left, time it was over. He lost three of 'em just in Pickett's Charge. You know, up to Gettysburg. Oh, he had him some fighting mean boys, ain't no doubt. They come down from the ridges, they were in the Ninth Kentucky, they wore just some old rags and called it a uniform. But they were fighting mean.

  When the others finally come back they told old Welcome of it. They talked about a dusty, summer heat, and all of them sweating. Fifteen thousand of them in the field! I can hardly picture it, boy. They said that the dust come up from the ground like wind, blowing from their feet up to their eyes, straight inside their noses. And they walked inside it, couldn't even wipe it or keep from breathing it or even see beyond it. And they said you couldn't hear a thing but people stomping and swearing and horses snorting from the dust, like all fifteen thousand of them were so choked from fear and dust that they couldn't laugh or cry or even talk to the man right next to them.

  Oh, but it was glory in them fields! Fields of fire, boy! They walked right into that cannon, all those Yankee guns and the guns ripped at them, all the smoke and fire and cannister and case shot, and they never lost a step! The ones who made it back to Welcome said whole rows of men were felled—whole rows, boy!—and they kept up their walking, stepping over and around mounds of men and horses lying there in that field like they'd stopped to take a nap or set them up a camp.

  But then the whole row with those Hodges boys was ripped up and three of Welcome's fighting boys dropped down in that field. The ones that made it back said those Hodges never even got to fire their guns, that they'd walked a mile in all that heat and dust and they'd almost made it up to them damn Yankee cannons, but then the cannons beat them to it. They faced the cannons, though! Died on a day of glory!

  And the ones who made it back had to fight up to the Yankee guns and then battle there with them Yankee cannoneers, hand to hand. Can you picture it, boy? But they got beat. There were too many Yankees. So they had to come on back across that wide dusty dead-man field of fire with them Yankee cannonballs a-chasing them, all the way back to the starting place.

  Then General Lee himself come out to meet them. They all said he was crying, riding on his white horse from group to group, that white beard of his just soaked with tears. Told them he was sorry. Told them they were God's bravest creatures, that they'd earned a glory spot in heaven. Told them it was himself who lost the battle. That's the kind of man our General Lee was, son. They's why you and your daddy both were named for General Lee. He was a man of honor and he cried the day three Hodges died on the glory field.

  And then Alec, Welcome's youngest. They come to get him when he had the fever and he left his sickbed, strapped over a horse. He told them he wasn't afraid. They left Alec hid underneath a low bush along the road to Corinth when the retreat began, sicking up into Shiloh's fresh spring grass, too weak to take another step. But Alec, he was hard. He made it all the way to the prisoner camp at Alton and the records said he didn't die until he caught the smallpox. Alec was a right fine boy. We're stretching it some, but we'll say he died on the fields of glory, too …

  IT was a continuum, a litany. Pride. Courage. Fear. An inherited right to violence. And the pride accumulated, even as the reasons themselves grew more amorphous.

  Grandpa, who breathed the gas for Pershing, who almost died not for the honor of Old Glory, but for this vestige of lost hope he called the South. Who advised persistently that one had to leave it to understand and truly love it, that one had to sit in isolation and yearn for it, and that once one experienced the yearn he understood it more and loved it with a proper awe. And she (Grandma) accepting vicariously the truthfulness of Grandpa, who left the South for those two years and embraced it upon returning, but never ceased to ruminate on the glory of the two years he spent believing he was defending it by killing off Germans in France.

  And she having to voice Grandpa's insistence for him because he had died short months after learning of his own son's death, giving up (Bob Hodges was to later surmise) under the crushing realization that, somehow, losing a son to the Germans in France was his own payback for having helped do away with a legion of Germans there in his youth. And, both times, the landscape of the South escaped unmarked, while its cemeteries burgeoned.

  And finally his father. He was like his father. Hard and stubborn, Grandma would say fondly. And he looked like him, she would recall, smoothing down his topknot and remembering. She filled him with all his father's boyhood exploits, trying to make a dead man come alive in his son's mind. And, she would remind him, he died in glory. He fought with them across the whole of France, to save them Frenchmen from the Germans. And it was the Battle of the Bulge—you go read about it, boy. You find you some books in the library and look it up. We'll talk about it next Sunday. Your daddy died right there in the front lines, a combat soldier, staring cold into them Nazi eyes, knee-deep in the snow at the Battle of the Bulge.

  In a town in France he could not pronounce, much less spell. With a vague, propagandized knowledge of who Hitler was, but without ever having heard of Munich or Chamberlain. After having joined the army with the rest of his contemporaries as if the whole backlands had been challenged to a pickup softball game.

  Oh, but he faced them Germans. He h
ad a nerve of steel, your daddy. And he could shoot. Once I seen him drop a squirrel that just peeked one eye around a tree trunk. Your daddy shot him right in the eye. And he was only twelve. Oh, you got to be proud of your daddy. He died standing up and fighting back.

  AFTER fifteen years of it, it was ingrained. It was the fight that mattered, not the cause. It was the endurance that was important, the will to face certain loss, unknown dangers, unpredictable fates. And if one did it long enough and hard enough, he might happen upon a rewarding nugget. But, in any event, he was serving, offering himself on the altar of his culture.

  A litany, an inheritance of coursing, unreasoned pride. It pulsed through his own dark veins. That one continuous linking that had bound father to son from the first wild resolute angry beaten Celt who tromped into the hills rather than bend a knee to Rome two thousand years ago, who would hold out in an icy marsh by standing for days with only his head above water, and who would chew the bark off a tree, fill his belly with wood rather than surrender from starvation and admit defeat to an advancing civilization.

  That same emotion passing with the blood: a fierce resoluteness that found itself always in a pitch against death, that somehow, over the centuries, came to accept the fight as birthright, even as some kind of proof of life. Even there on the ridges, two thousand years and a continent removed, transplaced from mountains to mountains as if it were as natural for them to live in rural poverty as it was for a bird to nest in a tree. Glorying in the fight like unmuzzled sentry dogs, bred to it, for the benefit of the ravishers who owned and determined the reasons.

  It became a religion to him. He believed in God but most of all he believed in his father and the other Ghosts. God was all the way in heaven, but the Ghosts were with him everywhere he walked. He could cross a field and come up with a handful of arrowheads. He would go to bed and know he slept above Shawnee bones.

  And he could scoop out history in a spadeful of mud. Through his childhood summers and later on his off days and vacations he and his friends would dig around the creek beds where the Yankees and Rebels had alternately made their camps. He would bring back a metal button or a spent bullet or an old spoon or a belt buckle and he would keep it in his bedroom for a week or month, contemplating unremembered agonies and glories that had left the item buried in the creek's mud. Then he would take it into Salt Lick or Hillsville and sell it to a gunsmith or an antique dealer for enough money to buy a soda, or a ticket to the movies.

  And the movies. They were their own communion. If John Wayne wasn't God then he was at least a prophet. Hodges and a half-dozen friends would walk the five miles into Hillsville on Saturday afternoons and sit in awe through The Sands of Iwo Jima, The Bridges at Toko-Ri, The Guns of Navarone, Anzio, The Battle of the Bulge, and dozens of others. It was all there on the screen. Standing up and fighting back.

  Then, after the movies, they would stand shyly at the outer fringe of the gathered farmers who had come to spend their Saturdays in the courthouse square. The men would sit in gaggles, chewing slowly on cuds of tobacco or rolling their own cigarettes, talking of their wars and scratching fading scars. There were monuments in the square: a stolid Confederate soldier peering south toward Tennessee, one of the few in a Kentucky town. A large stone marker commemorating those who served in World War I. A similar one for those who went to World War II. Hodges used to stare at the new stone marker: there was an asterisk by his father's name: *Robert E. Lee Hodges.

  If there had been no Vietnam, he would have had to invent one. He often wondered if that hadn't been what old Mibau had done: finding an issue of honor in the war-less mountains of Tennessee, because if there had not been an issue involving honor, then there would have been no honor. Killing a man in defense of his sister's purity and having to flee to Kentucky, so that, for the rest of his life, he could feel vindicated by his very isolation.

  But there was Vietnam, and so there would be honor. It was the fight, not the cause that mattered. He would have his place in the town square and his name on a large stone monument. Perhaps he would have a scar somewhere to scratch as he chewed a tobacco cud on Saturday while young boys watched in awe. And he would be one with the Ghosts.

  He had done well in Marine officer training. He was quiet, but his shyness masked an unrelenting stubbornness, and when he spoke his words were spare, but authoritative. He had spent his life preparing for the Marines, although he had never comprehended that until he viewed some of the others. He knew the woods and he could shoot and he did not mind hot weather. He did not quit on the long runs or the terrible conditioning hikes because endurance involved pride and pride was honor and he was nothing if he did not retain his honor. And he knew tactics. Tactics were personal to him, much as the achings of a sick man would be to a doctor's son.

  Bob Hodges stood in the chilled winterdust of the road, preparing to say good-bye to his grandmother, and could not avoid remarking to himself that this moment was completing a lifetime of preparations. There was no thought in his life that spanned beyond what he was about to do in Vietnam. He would fight his war, force his body through the lightless conduit, and worry about what was on the other side when he returned. He was not anxious to save Vietnam from itself and he did not relish facing North Vietnamese guns for a year, but he reasoned that, after all, a man cannot choose his country's enemy. Had Grandpa really hated the Hun in 1917, until told he should? And besides, Vietnam was something to be done with, a duty. Not for Vietnam. For honor (and a whisper saying, “for the South”). And mostly for the bench seat in the town square.

  He walked into the house and greeted his grandmother with a big squeeze and a warm kiss. She fussed over his uniform, obviously proud, her old eyes filled with memories. She had fried him more chicken than he could possibly eat, and had made him an apple pie. She waited on him, doted over him as never before. She would not even allow him to help her clear the dishes.

  Slowly, he realized she was afraid. He had not expected it. When the outside shadows deepened and he finally rose to leave she moved slowly to him and gave him an aching, too-long hug. Her eyes were wet. He hadn't noticed it until then.

  “Sometimes I wish I'd never told you those stories, Bobby. I just wanted you to remember your daddy. Now, you be careful. Hodges never had a lick of luck at this.”

  Ghosts and glory. It stunned him to hear her say it. He hugged her back. “Now, don't you worry, Grandma. I'm coming back, if that's what you mean.”

  “Don't take no chances. That's what I mean.” She gathered herself. “We're proud of you boy. All of us.”

  All of us. He did not know how she meant the statement, but it scared him. He suddenly felt pulled along, out of control. Afraid. The reality of what he was about to do shook him for the first time, as if all the years of considering it had somehow made the prospect of actually doing it a novel one. He managed a smile and kissed her, the old-skin of her cheek like a brush of velvet. Then he joined his ghosts in the cold black night. Every dead rock mocked him as he trudged along the railroad tracks to home.

  II

  It did not seem right that he be transported in such style to the desolation that awaited him. He watched a first-run movie as the jet streaked west and he mentally screwed each stylish stewardess a dozen times, as did the other two hundred khaki-clad fellow prisoners on the flight. He ate TV-dinner meals and slept. It was his first jet ride.

  They stopped at Hawaii for an hour and he marveled at the Polynesian and Oriental mixes of people at the airport. They stopped again at Wake Island in the dead of night and he remembered Deveraux and the other madly brave Marines who had taken on a world of Japanese to defend that tiny crumb of island in the middle of nothing. He sent postcards of the island to his mother and grandmother and a girl he had dated in college.

  They arrived in Okinawa, at the huge airstrip of Kadena Air Force Base, and were whisked away in shuttle buses to the Marine transient facility at Camp Hansen. He sat silently on the bus, chuckling occasionally at the humorous
remarks of some of his friends from Basic School, absorbing the packed streets and the closely built stores and steambaths and bars, the swarms of smallish golden people. That's it, he thought amazed. Golden. They are the color of gold.

  He was given a room in a transient BOQ, which he shared with two friends from Basic School. They were all told that it would be a week before they would process into Vietnam. In spite of his growing fears, it had frustrated him. He felt uneasy walking around the camp in the presence of hundreds of red-booted dirty long-haired deeptanned men who were finally free of Vietnam and were on the way home. They stared at him derisively. They kidded him that he would be sorry.

  He took to drinking, along with his other friends. It seemed that the only proper way to deal with his transitory state was to be so alcoholically obliterated that he could not recognize it. The Officers’ Club bar opened at ten in the morning, and for the first two days he and his friends had been waiting on their stools. Once inebriated, they would shoot pool in the game room, or take taxi tours in the nearby villages.

  He tried a steambath once. He paid his two dollars and walked the stark hall to the designated room. The walls were painted government green, compliments of a bucket of stolen paint. The girl was stocky, and dressed in high-waisted cotton underwear. She seemed bored. She worked on his muscles like a mechanic tuning a car: perfunctorily, without interest. She offered him a hand job and he hurriedly declined.