Pride (17 page)

“Get back! Get back farther! Come on, let's go!”

He tried to stand but fell unconscious. His men hurried him and the man he'd carried onto a makeshift litter, and they all retreated before the billowing, sickening droplets of death.

Cap Modig woke in a bed. His eyes were bandaged. When he tried to breathe he couldn't suppress the scream. A hand out of nowhere held on to his. He struggled. He felt as if he were drowning.

“That's all right, lieutenant. Just try to relax. You'll be all right.”

It was a woman's voice. He felt the hypodermic needle slip into his arm and then a muffling thickness surrounded him until the fire in his chest quieted and he went to sleep again.

It was two weeks before Cap could stay awake more than two or three hours without morphine. But something in him knew he had to live with the pain; the soft rubbery weakness of the drug wasn't life as he wanted it. He gritted against the searing pains of breathing, suffered through the agony of fighting back coughing fits; often surrendering to the racking, rending pain when he couldn't stop himself from hollering out.

And he was still in the dark, a red-black haze, frightening because it wasn't the way he remembered things to have been when he simply closed his eyes. This was more: a wet, thick darkness, not restful, a blinding red of dark with spots of light like fireflies drifting or sparking across his eyes.

He lay there, day after day, losing some days to the needle, holding on to others. They never put him out unless he screamed. He felt gently with his arms and found a tube attached to one arm; there was another tube in his penis. He felt like one of the cows on his failed milking machines, or a tomato plant held up with stakes and strings.

Sture didn't have will enough to lift the tight bandages over his eyes. Twice he knew the bandages had been changed while he was asleep because the smell decreased. Complaint never occurred to Sture Modig. He knew this is the way life is; sometimes it's hard and you must wait, be patient, till you find out what's happening.

It was almost a month later when he knew there was someone standing beside him, talking to him.

“Lieutenant Modig!” He said the first part like the mo in eeny, meeny, miney,
mo
, rather than like the moo of a cow. “I'm going to take the bandages off your eyes. I want you to tell me how much you can see. Can you talk at all?”

Cap nodded his head. He hadn't tried talking because he didn't want to start coughing, but he'd screamed so he must be able to talk.

Slowly, with much unwrapping and clipping of scissors, the bandages were unwound from his head. At the end there were only gauze pads left over each eye. Carefully, the doctor lifted one pad and Cap opened his eye slowly until he felt a blinding pain. He closed his eye and then slowly squinted it open again. He could see blurs of light, couldn't focus, couldn't recognize anything.

“Can you see, lieutenant?”

“Blurs.”

Cap exhaled the word softly, quietly, delicately.

“That's good, you've still got some sight in that eye anyway.”

Cap for the first time realized how serious the chance of his being blind was. So many things he couldn't do if he were blind: couldn't ride a bicycle, couldn't help much on the farm, couldn't see the beautiful world. Tears started burning in the corners of his eyes as a new gauze patch was adjusted over the eye he'd opened.

The doctor started slowly lifting the other patch. There were areas of pussy mucus sticking the pad to the eyelids and to the lashes; he gently separated them.

“Now try this one, lieutenant. Can you open it?”

Cap was feeling a strong need to cough, to bring up another glob of thickness gathering in his throat. He held back. He opened his eye slowly to avoid pain from the light. There was no pain this time. Again he saw blurs, light movements, but it was not as bright as with the first eye. He didn't know the doctor'd had the shade drawn by one of the nurses.

Cap thought he might be even more blind in this eye. The doctor was flashing what seemed like a red light on his eyeball, pushing the lid up and away so the skin cracked. He closed it again, slipped the pad into place.

“Nurse, you can wrap him up again but less tightly this time. We'll have those bandages off in another week.”

“Well, lieutenant, you're lucky; you'll see, you might even see as well as you did before.”

Cap only nodded, trying to hold back the burning tears and the choking need to cough. He felt terribly alone. He wondered, as he had so often during the past weeks, what'd happened to his company, if any more had been killed, if they'd taken back the territory they'd fled before the gas, who was the new company commander?

“Well, you have two things to celebrate, lieutenant. You will see again, and the war's over. The armistice was signed three weeks ago. When you get out of the hospital you can go home. The Huns got themselves licked, thanks to brave men like you.”

Cap stayed quiet. He tried to smile, to bring forth one of his glowing smiles, but it wasn't there. He felt as if he'd missed the end of the party. He was glad the war was finally over, that no more soldiers would be killed, but he hated not being there with his good friends, his company.

Cap Sture Modig was sent to a hospital in France near a town called Contrexéville. It was a hospital specializing in seriously gassed patients. They were given curative waters, encouraged to eat much fruit and lie out in the sun when it wasn't too cold.

It was several months before he could breathe without pain and months more before he could do even the lightest exercise without bringing on spasms of coughing and retching. His eyes gradually improved until he had full vision, but this took almost nine months. Cap did eye exercises he'd devised himself, focusing near, then far, shifting his eyes from side to side, concentrating on making the fuzziness go away. The doctors were amazed. They didn't actually expect anyone with the degree of eye injury Sture suffered to totally regain sight.

Cap's gums had also been affected by the gas, so he lost most of his teeth except for four on top in front and six on the bottom. The roots had turned blue-purple and rotted out. He was fitted for a full mouth plate so he could chew food properly.

Also the bulk of his thick blond hair had fallen out, leaving only a thin, fuzzy coating over top of his head. The doctors were not sure if real hair would ever grow back. Cap's scalp was rubbed each morning and evening with hot oil to try stimulating some growth, but nothing helped.

He was truly Captain Sture Modig now. He'd been promoted to that field rank in recognition of his service. He was also issued a second purple heart and a distinguished service cross. He mailed both back to his parents in Wisconsin along with simply written explanations as to why he still was not home. He did not tell them the extent of his injuries. Cap Modig had learned to lie by omission.

He was twenty-two years old and was growing up the hard way. He was also growing restless in the hospital. The handsome, blond, blue-eyed youth with so much promise was now a sallow, sad, unsmiling man who'd lost confidence in promises.

Finally, just a year after he was wounded, in late 1919, he was discharged. He was declared seventy percent disabled on a permanent basis. For the rest of his life he would receive a monthly disability check from the U.S. government.

His parents cried when they saw him. It was almost impossible to recognize him as the smiling, always helpful, almost saintly boy who had gone away. He was no longer innocent. In his heart he felt a deep, unresolvable guilt. Cap suffered from what in those days was called shell shock, a combination of a sense of loss for the comradeship he'd known in the midst of battle and a guilt for still being alive.

The farm was in deep trouble. The prices of milk, butter, grain were so low his parents couldn't meet the mortgage payments on their acreage. During the years, they'd paid off the second mortgage by hard work, but now had loans on the $10,000 first mortgage. The combination of interest payments owed on the mortgage at $3.60 per acre and taxes of $1.90 per acre were greater than could be earned. Sture's father was fast becoming a renter farmer, with an insurance company holding the loan on his property; he was in grave danger of losing his equity on the whole farm, a lifetime of hard labor. This was happening at that time to farmers all over the region: Minnesota, Idaho, Wisconsin, the Dakotas.

Sture decided he could make the farm pay if he invested in a tractor. He had all his back disability money and pay from the time he was in the hospital as well as his discharge bonus. He put it into an International Harvester tractor.

This tractor became the joy of Sture's life. He had reason to live again. He'd work it all day in the field, breaking virgin territory into meadows, pulling stumps, plowing. Then, at night, he'd work on it in the barn, taking it apart, learning all its mechanical secrets, designing improvements. Often, he'd stay awake all night, breaking down, studying, analyzing the function of his machine. He began to regain something of his innate confidence in life, in living.

But the farm still couldn't make enough money. Cap was fighting something beyond him, an economic tragedy in the making that finally disintegrated into the Great Depression. Sture was also beginning to be restless on the farm.

Cap, who now wore a cap all the time to hide his premature baldness, wanted to be around motors. He was convinced he could get a job as a mechanic in Detroit, then send home money to help his mom and dad hold on to the farm: There was good money to be made in Detroit if one had mechanical skills, and Cap was convinced he was as good as anybody could be with machines, almost as good as he was with animals.

His parents were not happy, but they knew it was the only way they could keep the farm, their life dream of being independent. They also saw that Sture was not himself any more. He didn't get the same joy from animals. He rushed through milking to tinker with his tractor. He was a grown man and had to make his own life.

Cap walked to Detroit from the farm. He carried extra socks, two extra shirts, extra underwear, and a second pair of pants, all wrapped in a large red bandana at the end of a stick. He looked like a hobo in a comic strip. He also carried a small leather satchel with his tools. Cap didn't see anything funny in it; this was the way he could carry his things with the least bother; it was like carrying a rifle and an ammo case.

It didn't take Cap long to get a job in Detroit. It had become a center for manufacturing automobiles. Cap quickly was recognized as a natural. This bland-faced bald man knew machines as if he'd invented them.

Within the year, Cap was picked as mechanic by a racing team racing competitively all over America.

The great boom in auto racing, especially board-track racing, was just then coming to the fore. Cap worked with a team racing the durable and popular Dusenbergs.

Cap began to travel with them. He went to the two-mile oval board track in Maywood near Chicago. It was here he first had a chance actually to drive one of the cars in a tryout. He was electrified by the experience. Here was a chance for speed in which his damaged lungs and bum leg didn't hinder him. Cap had tried running at the farm, slogging up hills, drifting down, coughing all the way, struggling for air. Even a mile run was more than he could manage, with his shrapnel-damaged leg.

Next they raced at Omaha, a mile-and-a-quarter track. Cap began to get a reputation as a mechanic who could also drive. The drivers and other mechanics watched how his natural quickness, his fearlessness, his ability to think under stress gave him control of cars at high speeds. Cap began to enjoy his double reputation as mechanic and potential driver.

It was at Des Moines, a one-mile track with steep bankings, some steep as forty-five degrees, where Cap got his chance. The driver of the second car was too drunk on the day of the race to drive. The decision was to let Cap try it.

This car was a “blown job,” a souped-up 1922 model. Cap took his qualifying heat and then came in second in the main event. The main event was twenty-five laps, and there were sixteen cars running. Cap pushed his high-powered job to the maximum but it wasn't the best car. Cap was the best driver, but he came in second.

From then on, Cap was a major driver. He made more money each year. In three years he'd paid off the mortgage on the farm. But he wasn't ready to go back milking cows. The speed, the superlative design of these machines had him captivated. He began to learn that, even more than in the war, here his fearlessness was exceptional. It was what he had to sell.

Cap raced in Kansas City, Tacoma, Playa Del Rey, Indianapolis, Omaha, Santa Monica road races, the Atlantic City Speedway board track. He won on boards at Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, and came back to Detroit to win again on the tiny half-mile track there.

After that race he took off two weeks to go visit with his parents at the farm. This wild-eyed man with the tight-set jaw was even more unfamiliar to them than the hurt and wounded boy who'd come back from the war. Cap's mother and father didn't know how to treat him. To them, he was still Sture, although he hadn't been called that in over three years. He wore a leather cap now with a short bill. He turned it around on his head when he raced; the bill protected his neck from flying splinters on the board tracks. Because of this habit, his racing name was Cap, as much from his headgear as from his former military rank.