Fly, Fly, Little Dove

by PHILIP GARRIGAN

IN the dusk of the third day we were ordered out of the trucks beside a mass of tents, which bewilder the eye seeking analogies, for they resemble nothing but tents. Before it was altogether dark we marched off with the heavy bags on our shoulders and took our assignments, six men to a tent. We sat on the bare cots and waited to be called for blankets.

At just that time, which with its dark and stars and strange tropical trees would otherwise have been romantic, the Mexican with the guitar began to sing and play, and another sang with him. This second Mexican I had not seen, but the first I remembered by the guitar. On the bag he carried (with difficulty because he had also to carry the guitar) was a large tag with the childish lettering of the name Francisco Llorado. I saw him as we came down between the tents, and I remembered that llorado is Spanish for weeping or sorrowful or something like that. And now this Francisco was singing, and someone with him, and playing the guitar.

The song itself was sad, and that brought his name again to mind, so that I said I must look tomorrow and see the name of the other. I should have known after riding all day in the same truck; but the recruit is stunned by the Army, and sometimes his reactions are not normal for weeks. That is how it was with me, sitting there on that sagging cot in a tent with the fly ripped, thinking not of that but of home and my wife, because we were separated for the first time.

Thinking of this I might have had tears in my eyes, but nobody would have noticed in the dark. Yet the guitar itself could not be sad, no matter how Francisco might sing to it. So I sat there and filled my mind with the silly resolve to find out the name of the second Mexican. Soon after, a sergeant ran up and down the line bellowing, to herd us out for our bedding. He made it look as if he had to drive us, but we were glad enough to go.

When we got back and had somehow arranged the blankets in the dark, we took off only our shoes and hats and belts, and crawled into what little warmth there was. For a long time the two Mexicans continued their singing — how long I don’t know, because I fell asleep while they were still going on. That night and many others afterward their singing seemed like a lullaby, a little faint because it came from a distance of three tents to the left. But when I spoke to one in that tent, a Pennsylvania Dutchman called Uzzenfuss, he said it nearly drove them crazy and it kept them awake until two in the morning sometimes. They all cussed about it, but they understood that the Mexicans were lonesome. We were all lonesome.

The days that followed our arrival are painful to dwell upon. We were delivered over to drillmasters and instructors uniformly obscene and abusive, or humorous in a macabre way. Only the simplicity of the things they had to teach prevented us from absorbing their moronism along with their brutality. We became able to march in cadence, to carry a rifle and simulate the fierce rage of bayonet practice, to wear the ubiquitous gas mask. There were many other things, too, learned at great cost of standing or dog-trotting for hours in the sun, over the mud, or sitting until our legs went to sleep, or crawling on our faces through the thorny bushes. We learned them all and still know a little about them, some of us. Nobody could do anything, Uzzenfuss said. They just sat and watched him go; and behind him the guitar spat and crackled in the flames, and each string as its supports were burned out cried harshly once and for the last time. Juan did not say goodbye or look back. He went to the gate; and when the guards stopped him, he talked to them, gesturing toward the direction in which the sun had just gone down. Then there was a struggle as he tried to go by them; at first it was mild, but grew wilder as his efforts aggravated the guards. After all, as Uzzenfuss said, they have orders not to use any more force than they have to.

The Mexicans were not made happy by all this. I could sometimes hear their discussions in their own language; and now and then someone in a near-by tent would in the dark night call on Jesus Christ to witness what a trial they were to Englishspeaking people in need of rest. I passed them on my way to and from drill; and almost always they were sitting on their cots, with all the tent flaps rolled up, conversing loudly and at the same time sadly— for they often wept together, the sound of their voices choked by their sobbing. I wondered what they were saying, but I was already learning too much to take up Mexican. I had told my wife, before I left home, that I would surely learn Russian in the Army. There would be so much time.

Nevertheless, the sight of their devotion to one another, and the lonely melancholy of their life, were affecting. I am not myself inclined to meddle with anyone’s life, and very little with my own. But there were some who spoke of them with sympathy, feeling that these two were just a projection of all of us, a plaintive protest against the harshness of a climate supposed to be forever sunny, of petty understripers and their outhouse rhetoric, or perhaps against the separations of war, which we all felt.

In time we grew accustomed to the serenades, and I came rather to expect them. I would lie in the blankets, thinking of my wife and of the weeks of last summer in that New England seaside town, wondering if our child would be a son to shiver in the tents of the war after this one. Oh, this was not bitterness — only the searching fingers of music in the mind, probing for thoughts to cancel the aches of the body.

But not everybody was thus probed and canceled. Four or five times, this or that group of drunken tentmates returned from town with the same conspiracy, hatched in some scuffed barroom booth. They would gather before Francisco’s tent, as once I saw them do, and when all was quiet one of them would slip in to steal the guitar. Every time, they found the two friends awake, clutching it; and their clamor brought around the guard. One night, as I afterwards heard, the Mexicans made no noise — but the marauder came out swearing, with a sixinch scratch on his forearm. Because of the dark he only presumed this had been done with a knife. But that was the end of that idea.

2

WE WERE in a training camp from which large numbers were shipped every day to far parts of the country, and some overseas. It was another matter, however, that accounted for many of the gaps in the lines and names crossed off the rolls. Partly from the climate, new to most of us, and partly from the wind whistling through the tents, and the gray Florida sand sifted into us at every pore, we all suffered a peculiar irritation of the nose and throat, in which we had a high fever, a dry racking cough that doubled us up in pain, and finally bronchitis.

Sick call was well attended, but heavy as it was, most of us stayed away from it as long as we could. it was not wise to tempt any Fate in this place. I nursed my troubles along for two whole weeks on remedies bought in town. When at last I had to report myself, it was not so bad as I had expected. It was strange that the stripers kicked us around sick or well; but the medical officers (except when they disliked a man’s face or remarks) were as solicitous of us as if we had all been private patients at customary prices. From a straightforward interview with a major, I drew an assignment of a week in quarters, and some foul potion which seemed to be mostly menthol.

That week I spent in writing long letters to my wife and in lying on a cot in the tent of the Charge of Quarters, who had a small radio. At home I had more than two hundred records; but I had not heard any good music except on one afternoon when the officer in charge of the swimming pool tuned in a Mozart program and was too busy to change it. Nobody else dared. I lay there in the midst of the naked sunbathers, and listened so long I could not move without pain for the next three days.

The Charge of Quarters swept the dial for hillbilly music; and though opinion was divided as to whether it was better than no music at all, I listened hour after hour.

I was sitting there of a Friday in the late afternoon, when the second Mexican ran in, crying that Francisco was dying. His name was Juan Fernandez, and he spoke English on occasion. It was only that he and Francisco preferred to use their own language. It was for the same reason that I sometimes thought to myself in French — because nothing was farther from that life than French. But, as I said, this Juan Fernandez ran in saying that Francisco was dying.

All of us went to the tent; and there it seemed that he was indeed dying, so the Charge of Quarters ordered Lambroso to go for the ambulance. Now Lambroso was quartered with a bad knee, and it was twenty minutes before the ambulance arrived. Meanwhile there was nothing we could do but stand there while Juan addressed his friend urgently, grasping him by the shoulders and shaking him as if he were a small child who would not wake up. Francisco seemed to be in a stupor, breathing with difficulty and great noise. I usually cross the street to avoid the sight of a dead dog; but I could not leave there, so my mind put off its horror by speculating with all its strength on the appearance of these two beings.

The moving pictures had accustomed me to handsome Mexicans. But these two were not so; they were ugly in the sense that they did not look like the rest of us. Short and squat, they had round heads, high cheekbones, and protruding lips. Their noses were flattened, their faces closer to black than to olive, and their hair coarse and unruly. On the back of Juan’s neck it flowed over the collar in a jagged line of bristles. Francisco’s mouth was open on a thick tongue and yellowed teeth, some of them broken. He lay there with his eyes shut, running with sweat, and struggled to breathe.

When the ambulance finally came, the driver and attendant brought in a litter and set it down. They pulled the blankets off the Mexican and rolled him expertly on the litter, throwing one of the blankets over him. Except for a hat, he was fully dressed. When they slid him in, Juan tried to go along. They took him by the arms and threw him out. Then he tried to put the guitar in with Francisco. The attendant pushed it back at him. I was surprised that he hadn’t thought it simpler to throw the instrument on the ground and break it. He closed the doors at the back, went to his seat, and they drove off. We felt relieved to be able to go then, and only the Charge of Quarters remained. He told us later he had felt sorry for Juan, so he had taken him to the lieutenant.

3

BEFORH this tribune it came out that Francisco had been sick for three weeks without medical attention. In the morning Juan would get him something to eat and they would slip out into the fields of Spanish Sword to hide until we had gone to drill. Then they would come back and Francisco would lie down. At the approach of anyone of official appearance, Juan would give warning and they would slip away again. At night in the dark Francisco still played the guitar, however poorly; and in the face of this, nobody knew there was anything wrong. Only, this particular day when Juan tried to rouse him he had not even waked. They were not afraid of the doctor, Juan insisted, only of the sergeant. The sergeant had said (all the sergeants said it as a matter of course) that if any relative of the dog as far as his eye could see was crazy enough to go on sick call, thus avoiding drill, he personally would double-time him from hell to breakfast or until his legs were worn off right up to the knees and beyond, whichever took longer.

The lieutenant was a humane man, but I have no report of his conversation with the sergeant. For infractions of discipline the lieutenant put Juan on the rock pile, but promised he would be told how Francisco was progressing. Twelve times in the first half hour he had to lead Juan back to the rocks and assure him that there was no change, that everything was all right. After retreat, in an unsatisfactory state of mind, the lieutenant left camp and stayed in town overnight.

Francisco died. He had been moribund when we saw him, and he did not regain consciousness. I never found out how they told Juan, or who it was who carried the word. Shortly after that. I was shipped, and so far I haven’t met anyone who was at that camp with me.

Only, as I was standing in the doorway of my tent that evening, Juan came down the street from the direction of the hospital. He was crying. He went into his tent, and I heard him trying to play the guitar and sing. His fingers, unlike Francisco’s, were not apt; the music stumbled awkwardly. His voice, though passable in accompaniment, was broken and choked with sobs. I had not listened half a minute when I decided to go to the Post Exchange for a bottle of beer, which ordinarily I do not like. I had four.

Uzzenfuss told me about it afterward. He was shipped out with me, but went to a different place. Having nowhere to go, those in his tent had to sit and watch Juan as he tried to sing and play. Finally, Uzzenfuss said, the Mexican took the guitar outside and filled it with toilet paper (we all carried it — for we never found it. where we might have expected to) and grass. Then he set it on fire; and while it burned he went into the tent and came out again with a heavy silver bracelet no one had ever seen before, and a large bandanna handkerchief. These were all he owned in the world. Everything else belonged to the Army.

In the end they had to hit him over the head a few times. It wasn’t a nice thing to see, Uzzenfuss said, and I knew he meant not just because of the clubbing. These details he told me as we sat on our barracks bags in the back of the truck, going away.

I was going to write my wife about it. But I decided not to. From her letters I think she worries about what is likely to happen to me so far away. At this station, when we arrived, I sent her three little bottles of wine to put in her shadow box on the dining-room wall. That brings her collection up to twenty-three, all different.