First Papers (72 page)

His breathing grew a little harder.

The sergeant at the desk said, “Next,” and the man just ahead of Eli snapped out, “Yessir,” and gave his name and address.

“Is that you,” the sergeant asked jovially, “with the pneumonia?”

“Me, sir? No, sir.”

Behind him, Eli opened his lips to make his breathing less stertorous. Within him, a first faint hint of pleasantness made itself known, like the first rise in a barometer after clamped-in weather. Visions of the night before plagued him, of Webby and the spanking and the rest of it, but he switched out the light in his mind and refused to see them. He concentrated on the official blanks on the desk, the bottles of ink, the flag standing in a pedestal off at the side.

The sergeant called out, “Next,” and Eli took a slow hard breath. The next few minutes were the ones that mattered most. “Eaves,” he said as he moved up. “E-a-v-es, Elijah Lovejoy Eaves.” The sergeant’s pen stopped dead on the blank form before him, and Eli felt the hint of pleasantness again. His voice was thick now, rope-hard yet clothy too, and glancing down at the sergeant, his own eyes could see the flare of his nostrils.

“Then it’s you?” the sergeant asked, not making a joke of it this time.

“It’s not pneumonia,” Eli said. “It passes. My address is Two Twenty-nine—”

“You better get to a doctor till that’s over, and then come back.”

Eli shook his head. “It passes,” he said again, leaning on the edge of the desk. “It’s just an asthma attack. Sometimes I don’t have a bad one for months. Forget it.”

The sergeant looked at him, at the men in line behind him, and then back to him. “You can’t enlist with a condition like that, mister. They’d call me for wasting their time.”

“Fill it in,” Eli said slowly, “and let
them
decide.”

The sergeant finished printing his name. Now a paroxysm of coughing seized Eli, and behind him there was a scraping sound as a chair was pulled across the wooden floor. “Come on, better sit down,” a man said, and the sergeant came around from the desk, addressing the others, “Anybody a doctor?” Eli sat down and they drew up another chair for his legs, relieved him of his jacket and goggles and offered him a paper cup of water, chilled, from a large metal canteen hung on khaki straps. “You take it easy, hear me?” the sergeant said. “I’ll have to phone my captain.”

Eli closed his eyes. His breathing slowed and evened in rhythm again, but the clutching for air went on, though he did not care. His rising spirits hit a peak. He had done it. He had said he would, and he had. There would be some delay, the phone call to the captain, perhaps more delay while the captain passed the buck to one of the doctors in the Medical Corps. But it was done, and nobody in God’s green world could ever accuse him of just shooting his mouth off.

“Here, Mr. Eaves,” the sergeant’s voice came down at him, unnaturally clear and loud as if he were shouting. “A nice souvenir to show your grandchildren some day, how you wouldn’t let nothing stop you, but you tried to enlist in the war. A brave man, you tell them.”

It was the enlistment form of the United States Army. Nothing was written on it but July 2, 1917, EAVES, ELIJAH LOVEJOY. He folded it, got to his feet, and faced the sergeant. Then, with the snap and precision he had seen in the newsreels, he saluted and took his departure.

Fee took one fleeting glance at Eli’s souvenir and looked away. She couldn’t bear him when he got talking about himself and the war; she didn’t feel that way about one other human being in the world, but with Eli, she couldn’t stand it.

He didn’t notice; he had enough of an audience anyway. Mama hung on each word, every syllable, of what the sergeant had said, what all the people in line said, what they did about the chair, about everything that happened. Fran was rushing off to another Soldiers Dance at the Masonic Temple, but she let the soldiers languish without her while she heard it all, and even Papa found it fascinating; you’d think he and Eli were like a father and son in a book.

She looked at her father and wondered if she had ever forgiven him. Even though they talked again, about Liberty Bonds and things, was he still furious at her? They never, either one of them, said the word “college” out loud, as if there were no such thing, anywhere. But after her four exams in one day, he said, “Well, how did it go?” and even seemed pleased. And by now he must certainly know she had
not
registered for Training in September, but he didn’t mention that either, not even on Graduation Day when Barnett High was over and done with forever.

“He doesn’t think of such things now,” her mother said. Then unexpectedly she reeled off a list of names. “The
Call,
the
Appeal to Reason,
the
Milwaukee Leader,
the
Masses
—do you realize that eighteen, twenty, newspapers and magazines are just about finished, with these new rules that cover anything the mailman doesn’t approve of?”

If it weren’t for Mr. Paige, she’d know this was another of her mother’s exaggerations, but the one time Mr. Paige had been over recently, he had talked about “omnibus bills that include everything in sight,” and he simply never exaggerated.

“I’m going to bed,” Fee said now, yawning largely, as Eli folded up his souvenir at last. “I’ll never catch up on sleep, I guess.”

“C’est la guerre,
Sis,” Eli said. “See you around Labor Day, if I don’t get drafted.”

Drafted, Fee thought as she undressed. Being married isn’t, but having two kids
is
a ground, all the papers say that. But he still talks as if, any minute now, he’ll be on his way to No Man’s Land. She used to feel all melty and happy when he called her Sis, but that was ages and ages ago. Maybe she was a “simpering Puritan,” as her mother called anybody who thought he’d been terrible about that girl in New Hampshire; it did disgust her to think about it. But even that was nothing to the way she felt when he opened up about the war or the draft or enlisting.

What is this, Eli, a military board of inquiry?
She could hear her father saying it angrily that night; it was about the only thing he had done that made her like him, since her own horrible fight. But now when the words sounded again in her mind, they suddenly brought back her fear about Garry. He was going to do something wild, she knew it. Wild and dangerous and frightening. She loved to think about the day he had waited for her in his car and taken her to the soda fountain, and it kept coming back over and over. But each time, the fear came back too.

Garry gulped the last of his coffee, eyed his letter and thought, So it’s today. He had foreseen this day a hundred times, yet he could not foretell the outcome of it. All he did know was that the letter was at last written, signed, ready to be delivered; he was going to deliver it by hand, not send it by mail. It had been twice as difficult as he had thought, ten times as difficult, and he had been writing at it for a long time.

“Writing at it” was exact; he kept making stabs at putting down what he felt ought to be put down, yet it never satisfied him. Weeks ago he had stopped imitating Dr. Holmes’ sermon, but he could not get his tone right; sometimes it sounded portentous, sometimes apologetic.

Last night it had come closer to what he wanted, and he had determined to let it stand. Even so he had stayed up half the night with it, and then had continued to write phrases during his five hours of sleep. He was excited in a strange subdued way, heavy, reluctant. After he saw his father, he would go and give it to the authorities and be done with it. Done with his part of it, the only part he knew about for sure.

It was being unsure that was so hard to manage; each case one read about or heard about was enough different from each other and from his own so that no “expectables” were being established, as to the range of discipline or punishment to be meted out. With the three Columbia students, the case had speedily gone to trial before a jury and been settled, at least for the one fellow old enough to register. He was found guilty of “conspiracy to interfere” with the Draft Act and his sentence, not published, could be two years in prison or a fine of ten thousand dollars, or both.

On the other hand, out in Ohio, where three men were arrested for anti-draft plotting on the same day, the charge was nothing less than Treason, and in the courtroom they were officially reminded that conviction might mean their death.

The pendulum could swing as widely when it came to lesser deeds, though to be an objector was not designated a crime at all. Garry picked up his letter and thoughtfully waved it to and fro, holding it only at one edge, so as not to smudge or soil it. Then he went to the telephone and called Barnett. “Dad, it’s ready at last, with a carbon for you, as per instructions.”

“When can I look it over?”

“I’d like to turn it in today, and get it over with.”

“How about coming to the office around lunch time? Can you get some extra time?”

“I’ll be there around twelve. Thanks.”

The promise to show it to his father before turning it in had been made the night he had registered, over a month ago. “I’m your attorney, Garry. No documents delivered without approval by counsel.” It had been a simple promise to give, a good deal simpler than the one to register. They had every right to establish their conditions for becoming involved, his father’s group, but beyond that, he had finally agreed that if they were right about what was coming, it would be foolish to fuzz over the main case with a preliminary one.

He hoped his father would have no changes to suggest. About delivering it before the official drawing of the draft numbers, he had never had any doubt at all. Only five or six men in a hundred, the papers agreed, would be summoned in the first draft—“twenty-to-one in the national lottery” one headline had said. But to deliver his letter before he knew whether his own number would be picked or passed over, this had never been open to question.

The drawing would take place in Washington at the end of next week; blindfolded, the Secretary of War would thrust his hand into a crystal globe containing ten thousand shiny black capsules, close his fingers around one, and draw it forth. In it would be a piece of paper with a number. That number would be flashed to the nation, and in each of some five thousand communities of the country, the man holding it would be the first man called up in his own small world. Then another capsule, another, another—

So simple. But they had put it off for all these tantalizing weeks since Registration because they could not devise equally simple machinery for processing the claims for exemption. Millions were expected, the papers said, for a dozen allowable reasons—including “Religious Objection for bona fide members of sects whose creeds forbid war.”

“Get a signed affidavit from your clergyman,” said the author of a feature article Garry had read somewhere, “and the chance is your claim will be duly allowed. You will then be assigned to non-combatant work, and remain a member of the U. S. Army in good standing.”

The partials and the absolutes, Garry thought now. The partials and the absolutes. There was a swing to the phrase. He realized that he was again waving his letter to and fro. He drew it out and began to read it, trying to see its words as if he had never laid eyes on them before, trying to imagine himself a member of whatever Exemption Board would be the one to act upon it.

July 10, 1917.

Sirs:

I beg permission to make these statements, to complete my claim for exemption on my registration blank.

There I wrote down only “Conscientious Objector,” I could not add “on religious grounds” for I am not a Quaker, nor a Mennonite, nor a member of the Dunkards, Molokani, Plymouth Brethren or other sects you listed. I am a Unitarian.

But as I understand my religion, I shall always hold it wrong to kill, in war as in peace, in this war or in any other. I shall not do it. I shall not fire a gun at any man with the purpose of taking his life.

Nor could I, in conscience, accept service in any of the non-combatant units of the Army, for these units are essential to the waging of war, and I could only interpret that service as becoming an accessory to war and killing.

I write this in full awareness of my position, and ask that I may have a hearing, with my father, Evander Paige, an attorney, as my counsel.

Yours most respectfully,

Dear God, Garry thought, it’s still not right. He slid it, together with its carbon, back into its crisp envelope, suddenly dejected. Why can’t a man say what’s in his heart? The tearing, ripping struggle between the love of God’s will, and that other love, My own, my native land?

He rose quickly, slipped the envelope into the outer pocket of his jacket, and started off in his car. Even though it was not yet nine o’clock, the heat hung low over the day, and the air blowing in limply across the water was steamy and sluggish. It had rained yesterday and the canvas top was still raised; if the ride were longer, he would have stopped and lowered it, to feel a breeze, such as it was. He did wriggle out of his jacket, while he drove, but to avoid crumpling his letter, he transferred it to the locked compartment near the speedometer. When he arrived at the plant, his shirt and collar were wilted, and as he reached for the compartment, his hands felt gritty as well as moist.

Let it stay there, he thought, until I get to Dad’s. Though he usually never bothered, he did lock the car before starting for the rear entrance of the building, near the loading-platform. He was no longer required to punch the time clock in the employees’ entrance by the freight elevators, but it was the shortest way in, and he always used it.

“It’s going to be a broiler, I’ll bet,” he said to the loading foreman on the platform.

“Better go in at the front door,” was the only answer.

“Me?” Garry asked, looking around to see if the foreman could have been talking to somebody else.

“That’s right.”

“What for?”

“There’s somebody there, been asking for you,” he said, gazing at the air above Garry’s head. “From the District Attorney.”

Garry’s heart hammered at his rib cage. He turned away, crossed the length of the lot to the street entrance, and then he saw a man in ordinary clothes, fanning himself with a straw hat. He was leaning against the building, standing on the single wide step that led to the front door. The man saw him coming but said nothing, simply waited and let him come on. Garry kept his pace even and unhurried, and he did not speak until he reached the wide stone step. Above, at almost every window, there were faces.