Sarah said little, but Johnny felt her brilliant eyes on him – an uncomfortable sensation, but somehow not unpleasant. A little sad, maybe.
The liquor at the reception flowed freely, and Johnny went two drinks beyond his usual two drink stopping point – the shock of seeing Sarah again, maybe, this time with her family, or maybe only the realization, written on Charlene’s radiant face, that Vera Smith really was gone, and for all time. So when he approached Hector MacKenzie, father of the bride, some fifteen minutes after the Hazletts had left, he had a pleasant buzz on.
The old man was sitting in the corner by the demolished remains of the wedding cake, his arthritis-gnarled hands folded over his cane. He was wearing dark glasses. One bow had been mended with black electrician’s tape. Beside him there stood two empty bottles of beer and another that was half-full. He peered closely at Johnny.
‘Herb’s boy, ain’t you?’
‘Yes, sir.
A longer scrutiny. Then Hector MacKenzie said, ‘Boy, you don’t look well.’
‘Too many late nights, I guess.’
‘Look like you need a tonic. Something to build you up.’
‘You were in World War I, weren’t you?’ Johnny asked. A number of medals, including a Croix de Guerre, were pinned to the old man’s blue serge suit coat.
‘Indeed I was,’ MacKenzie said, brightening. ‘Served under Black Jack Pershing. AEF, 1917 and 18. We went through the mud and the crud. The wind blew and the shit flew.
Belleau Wood, my boy. Belleau Wood. It’s just a name in the history books now. But I was there. I saw men die there. The wind blew and the shit flew and up from the trenches came the whole damn crew.
‘And Charlene said that your boy … her brother.,.’
‘Buddy. Yep. Would have been your stepuncle, boy. Did we love that boy? I guess we did, His name was Joe, but everyone called him Buddy almost from the day he was born.
Charlie’s mother started to die the day the telegram came.’
‘Killed in the war, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes, he was,’ the old man said slowly. ‘St. Lo, 1944. Not that far from Belleau Wood, not the way we measure things over here, anyway. They ended Buddy’s life with a bullet.
The Nazis.’
‘I’m working on an essay,’ Johnny said, feeling a certain drunken cunning at having brought the conversation around to his real object at last, ‘I’m hoping to sell it to the Atlantic or maybe Harper’s.,.’
‘Writer, are you?’ The dark glasses glinted up at Johnny with renewed interest.
‘Well, I’m trying,’ Johnny said. Already he was beginning to regret his glibness. Yes, I’m a writer, I write in my notebooks, after the dark of night has fallen. ‘Anyway, the essay’s going to be about Hitler,’
‘Hitler? What about Hitler?’
‘Well … suppose … just suppose you could hop into a time machine and go back to the year 1932. In Germany. And suppose you came across Hitler. Would you kill him or let him live?’
The old man’s blank black glasses tilted slowly up to Johnny’s face, And now Johnny didn’t feel drunk or glib or clever at all. Everything seemed to depend on what this old man had to say.
‘Is it a joke, boy?’
‘No. No joke.’
One of Hector MacKenzie’s hands left the head of his cane. It went to the pocket of his suit pants and fumbled there for what seemed an eternity. At last it came out again. It was holding a bone-handled pocket knife that had been rubbed as smooth and mellow as old ivory over the course of years. The other hand came into play, folding the knife’s one
blade out with all the incredible delicacy of arthritis. It glimmered with bland wickedness under the light of the Congregational parish hall: a knife that had traveled to France in 1917 with a boy, a boy who had been part of a boy-army ready and willing to stop the dirty hun from bayoneting babies and raping nuns, ready to show the Frenchies a thing or two in the bargain; and the boys had been machine-gunned, the boys had gotten dysentery and the killer flu, the boys had inhaled mustard gas and phosgene gas, the boys had come out of Belleau Wood looking like haunted scarecrows who had seen the face of Lord Satan himself. And it had all turned out to be for nothing; it turned out that it all had to be done over again, Somewhere music was playing. People were laughing. People were dancing. A flashbar popped warm light. Somewhere far away. Johnny stared at the naked blade, transfixed, hypnotized by the play of the light over its honed edge.