the Onion Field (1973) (2 page)

The boy glanced at the tartan bag. It was a Campbell tartan, of course, for his clan. As always it stirred memories of the race, of fighting men with huge claymores, and the Campbells who sided with the English king against Bonnie Prince Charlie, and who slew the Macdonalds.

Then Ian discovered that he was unconsciously marching the twelve-foot square, caressing the ivory and ebony shaft, pressing ever so lightly on the tartan bag with his elbow. So he boldly threw the drones over his shoulder and without a moment's hesitation played "Mallorca."

It was good. The best he'd ever played it. And he tried "Major Norman Orr Ewing," the song which would earn him a medal in the novice class of the coming Winter Games. He played and played and marched the twelve-foot square, lost in the music.

His mother did not allow him to play his pipes in the apartment. But what did it matter? Living across the street from Hancock Park and the tarpits was perfect for a piper. What better place to march than here on the turf out in the open, under the stars and lights off Wilshire Boulevard, with no sound but distant tire hum, smelling grass and ferns, and the tarry air so thick you could taste it. The seventeen year old solitary piper sucked the tar-laden air, and blew it through the blowpipe, his fingers striking alertly, and imagined the bag would somehow be better if magically cured by tarry fossilized air from another age.

Chrissie Campbell sat outside on the porch of the apartment waiting for Ian and enjoying the evening. In the distance someone was playing the radio loudly and from time to time she would catch bits of music, and later the laughter when the debris inevitably crashed from the swollen closet of Fibber McGee and Molly. Then the station was changed and the dialer stopped for a moment on a program of classical music and she tried to identify the piece being played by the violinist. She was reminded of her husband, Bill Campbell, the tall, curly haired doctor who had also played violin and was now dead five years. She sighed and wished for him. It was easy to wish and remember on nights like this, bright and balmy, when something like Indian summer comes to Southern California.

They had met at Manitoba Hospital where she worked as bookkeeper, she born in Saskatchewan, daughter of a railroader, her family even more Scottish than his Highlander people because hers were originally from the Hebrides and spoke Gaelic. It was natural that these two Scottish Canadians should meet there in the hospital and fall in love, and that in the hard times they should emigrate to America where things were said to be better.

They had good years in Valley City, North Dakota, the small college town where they lived almost on the bank of the Cheyenne River, on flat land near wheat fields and homestead trees.

The Depression was almost as hard on a doctor as it was on farmers and other town workers, but it was a very good life until after the war began, when the physician began to die from cancer.

He was in fact dead for the year he continued to draw breath. Many of their talks, their secret talks, were of death because he diagnosed his own illness and they had to prepare for it. The Depression and the illness drained them financially and there were long serious conversations riddled with merciful lies from her.

"You're not afraid are you, Chrissie?"

"No, Bill, I'm not."

"You're a strong capable woman, you needn't be afraid about making your own way."

"I'm not afraid, Bill. Really I'm not."

"The more we talk about California the better I like the idea."

"Yes, so do I, Bill."

"The war has made things boom out there. There's a great need for people. You're certainly not too old to find a good job."

"I'll raise a strong son, Bill. I swear it."

"You're not afraid, Chrissie?"

"I'm not, Bill. I'm not."

And when she was alone with her thoughts during that year and for some time afterward, the fear would come. She never told him of the smothering fear which came always in the night and had to be defeated.

Chrissie believed she had some salvation in the inherited blood of dour and steely men. Her people were from the Isle of Lewis, the northernmost island of the Hebrides, tempered by the icy Atlantic brine which blasted their faces for centuries. She had their strength and she knew it. More than that, she had their capacity to endure.

It was Chrissie Campbell's theory that she could give Ian culture and discipline, and that these were two great gifts, perhaps all she could ever really give. After Bill's death the discipline was essential for them both.

"You're too strict with me, Mother. You're just too strict, and don't say someday I'll thank you."

"I won't say that, Ian."

"You're just too strict, Mother."

Chrissie found work, first clerical, and then as an auditor and bookkeeper, and now with the war three years past, they were living in the Park La Brea Apartments, in what was certainly an upper middle class neighborhood. It was very hard to pay the rent, but what a marvelous neighborhood for Ian, who could spend every day across the street in Hancock Park. And he had to be near a park or he'd be arrested for the noise he made with those infernal pipes.

It had been disappointing to sell the piano for bagpipes, especially since she had started Ian on the piano at the age of four, and Chrissie had had a few of the passing dreams that mothers of young musicians have. The piano was the perfect instrument to help instill culture and discipline. The pipes were another matter, a wild, almost willful instrument which undeniably stirred your blood, but with a key (if you could call it that) which could never be duplicated on piano, so that she wondered what all the years of piano had really done for him except to win him a contest he cared nothing about, where he played Rachmaninoff so well.

But if he wouldn't be a piano playing doctor, at least he'd be a doctor, that was certain. And what a physician he would be! Chrissie imagined him ten years hence, a tall, curly haired intern like the one she married, but taller, even more intelligent, and sensitive, with a resolute mouth and classic jaw, one of the finest she had ever seen, and of which he was totally unaware. And that was another source of her great but secret pride-he was not aware of his considerable attractiveness. As though all teenage boys adored history and philosophy, had a wall full of serious books and read them over and over. As though all teenage boys had season's tickets to the Philharmonic Concert Series.

And there was the other thing, she thought even more important. His natural facility with people. Quiet and nonaggressive, an impractical boy, but with strength other boys seemed to sense.

For five years she had guarded against the possibility of a fatherless only child becoming a mother's boy. So she had always tried to conceal most of her pride in him.

Then she thought she heard the skirl of pipes in the distance and she listened and imagined the smell of tar from the pits. Chrissie placed her palms on her cheeks and slid her fingers under her glasses and rubbed her eyes for a moment. She smoothed back the dark hair just starting to gray, and waited for the solitary piper to march through the darkness.

Ian Campbell was disturbed when the Communists swept south of the 38th parallel, but he was not as disturbed as Chrissie. He wasn't quite nineteen then, a dangerous age for decision making. As always he and Chrissie talked about what was bothering him. He was in the Naval Reserve at this time and was making uncertain plans for his college education. The more he talked about what was happening in exotic places like Pyongyang, Taejon, and Taegu, the more secretly frightened she became. There was the Massacre at Hill 303, then Inchon, and Chrissie knew further argument would be pointless. Everyone who ever knew him well knew that when he finally decided a personal issue, further discussion was futile.

Some time later, on a freezing winter night in the Punchbowl, north of the 38th parallel, a bleary eyed marine corporal burst into a warming tent where a tall young marine radio operator sat reading an old stateside newspaper, drinking beer, and worrying the stem of a large curved pipe for which he could not seem to acquire a taste.

"Scotty, did you hear about the Scotchmen?" asked the corporal shaking the snow off his shoulders. "What?"

"You know, those Argyll guys."

"The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders?"

"Yeah. Well I heard they took a direct hit on their equipment trucks. I heard it was a mortar attack. Guess what? You probably got the only set of bagpipes left in Korea now. Whatcha think, Scotty?"

Ian raised the bottle of beer and drained it in three gulps. He had drunk several bottles already.

"Well, Scotty, you gonna let the friggin gooks get away with it?"

"Is it really true?"

"Hell, I don't know, but let's show them mothers they ain't friggin well gonna get away with it. Get your friggin pipes. For once I wanna hear em."

"Okay," said Ian, feeling light headed when he stood. Twenty minutes later the burly corporal, carrying half a bottle of bitter rice wine and an M-i rifle, and Ian Campbell, carrying only his pipes, were less than two hundred meters from no man's land on a moon- flooded rise of ground, marching a twelve-foot square in the snow.

"It's a bloody shame for a Scottish regiment to go into battle without their piper out front," said Ian, surprised at the thickness of his words.

"That's tellin em, Scotty," said the corporal, and tossed Ian the wine which was brackish but warm.

Ian deeply breathed the five below zero air and raised the bottle, the glass clicking against his teeth. Then he blew the first blast of a quick march, "Scotland Is My Ain Hame." It deafened the corporal for a moment. Then they both marched the square while Ian played "Campbells Are Coming," and soon Ian was sitting in the snow, shivering so hard he couldn't play. Then they heard Red bugles, and following the bugles, sporadic small-arms fire.

"Let's get the hell outta here, Scotty!" yelled the corporal.

"Right!" said Ian, scrambling to his feet and they ran back to camp, the corporal falling drunkenly every ten meters or so. The next day the story of the pipe and bugle war spread through the battalion and Ian's company commander told him to knock off agitating the gooks with his pipes.

Chrissie's favorite marine pictures of Ian were those he sent from Hawaii, one where he was standing in the center of an open, grass roofed PX. Young marines-shirtless, dungaree clad-were sitting around playing cards, gesturing wildly in exuberant youthful conversation. In the center of the picture and the pandemonium was Ian -tall, broad shouldered and bony in his dungarees-eyes closed, oblivious to it all, playing the pipes serenely, while no one listened.

Ian decided not to take his pipes the second time he volunteered to go overseas, but finally after many weeks, at the conclusion of a letter, was the line: "And Mother, could you please send me my pipes?"

A bug-eyed ketch, the folly Roger, twin masted, shining in the sunlight. The Pacific, calm and blue. The horizon fiery. Knifing through the glossy isthmus under full sail, the crew of the tiny thirty-five footer was excited and happy.

The captain, Earl Schultz, a new friend, was a salty ex-merchant seaman, who looked like Popeye, a man partially crippled from a fall down a cargo hatch. The two crewmen were younger men, childhood friends: Wayne Ferber, the smaller one, eyes deep and close set, sharp chin, ears and mind. The other, a tall, twenty-five year old student of zoology and pre-med, a Korean vet, his short curly hair flashing auburn in the white sunlight. He was atop the bowsprit piping in celebration whenever the ketch tacked or changed course, each successful maneuver calling for a drink of wine from the goatskin bag they dragged behind the boat in the cold water.

And when they approached the harbor that fourth of July weekend, knowing Avalon would be jammed with tourists, the piper shouted: "Let's go in first class!"

And no schooner crew ever passed the isthmus more proudly than this scaled down bug-eyed ketch with the young man on the bowsprit piping "Campbells Are Coming."

"Ian's having a whale of a time up there," said Wayne to the captain, who was letting him steer the little boat. "When he first came back from Korea he just wanted to sit around the apartment and play the bagpipe chanter. His mom would needle him a little and say, 'Drowning in your own sorrow again, Ian?' Finally he snapped out of it.

"It's been a great outing for us," Wayne continued. "It's like our kid adventures, when we rode bikes clear to Lake Elsinore, and when we used to ride the Red Car to Santa Monica pier, or bicycle to Griffith Park and hike up to the observatory. I guess you could call us dreamers with these crazy schemes we've got to build our own boat and sail to Australia."

Ian piped them into Catalina grandly and they had to anchor loose. The ketch had no radio, no engine. Schultz called her "a real seafarin boat." The three of them swam off the dinghy that day and hiked over the island, then joined a yacht club party at the harbor, almost sinking the dinghy on the way back. Ian piped in the hangovers the next morning. They considered it a real South Sea sailor's holiday.

It was at the yacht club party that Ian heard the story of the shark. A portly suntanned yachtsman in a navy, gold-buttoned jacket and immaculate white trousers was telling about it over a wet martini. "They're stupid creatures you know," he said, sucking a stuffed olive off a green plastic toothpick and shifting it from one side of his mouth to the other. "They're incredibly stupid. You gut one and throw him overboard on the starboard side of the boat. And then throw the guts on the port side, and he'll swim around following the spoor and bite at his own guts. Savage and disgusting!"