Smoky Hill

It took three days and four trains to get to the middle of everything.

North out of the swamp to the pine country, and the last of the French at a station in the pine country where a woman on the platform was selling coffee and said merci to him when he paid; then west, all of one day and a night, across country that went from trees to fewer trees to no trees, with the train full of men from everywhere who had got on at every station and did not talk to each other much; then north again, and a change in the middle of the night at a junction in a town that was a water tower and a grain elevator and nothing else; and then the last train, slow, full, on a single track across a country he did not have a word for.

It was flat. That was the first thing. He had thought he knew flat. The lake was flat. The country round the city was flat, the swamp and the cane and the cypress. This was not that flat. This was flat the way the lake was flat on a still morning in June when there was no line between the water and the sky, except that it was not water. It was grass. It went away from the train on both sides to the edge of the world, green and gold and grey, with nothing on it, not a tree, not a house, not a fence for miles, and the sky over it was bigger than any sky he had seen, bigger than the sky over the lake, enormous, blue, with clouds in it the size of parishes going over very slowly with their shadows going over the grass under them.

And the grass moved. That was the second thing. There was a wind, all the time, steady from the south, and it went over the grass and the grass bent to it in long waves, one after another, going away from the train to the edge of the world, silver where they bent and green where they came up, exactly the way the wind went over the lake on a summer afternoon.

He sat by the window of the last train with the blue paper on his knee and watched it for four hours. He thought: it is the lake. They have made a lake out of grass and put it in the middle of everything where there is no water.

He did not say it to anybody. There was nobody to say it to who would have understood it in French.

---

Camp Smoky Hill had not existed in March.

Somebody told him that on the platform, a corporal with a list, a big red man from somewhere with a voice like a mule. In March it had been grass. In April the Army had come with five thousand carpenters and a railway siding and a contract for more pine lumber than had ever been cut in Arkansas in a year, and now it was a city. A city of huts. Raw pine, unpainted, yellow in the sun, in rows, hundreds of them, thousands, laid out on the grass in a grid of streets that had numbers instead of names and went away from the siding to the edge of the world, with water towers, and cookhouses with chimneys, and a hospital, and a church that was also a cinema, and parade grounds of dust the size of the whole lake shore, and everywhere men, in uniform and out of it, marching and digging and standing in lines, and the smell of pine resin and dust and horses and the latrines, and the wind going over all of it, steady from the south.

Behind it, on the edge of everything, the grass.

He stood on the platform with his bag and his card and looked at it.

“Prudhomme,” said the corporal with the voice like a mule, reading off the list, badly, Proud-home. “Second Kansas. C Company. Hut forty-one. That way.” He pointed down one of the numbered streets with his pencil without looking up. “Next.”

---

The Second Kansas was a regiment of the Kansas militia.

It had a name and colours and a history and a motto in Latin that nobody in it could translate, and a battle honour from the rebellion, and a march that the band played; and in peace it had been eight hundred men from the towns along the Kansas River, clerks and farmers and railwaymen, who drilled on Saturdays and went to camp in August and had a dance at Christmas. The polity had given it to the Realm in June of last year, the way all the polities had given their regiments, with its name and its badges and its colours; and the Realm had taken it, and taken most of the eight hundred men out of it, and sent them to other regiments, all over the Army, so that no town on the Kansas River would lose its young men in one morning; and then it had filled the Second Kansas up again, to war strength, three thousand, with the draft.

With men from everywhere. He found that out in the first hour in hut forty-one.

There were forty bunks in it, in two rows, double, raw pine like the walls, and a stove in the middle, and a sergeant’s room at the end, and thirty-two men in it already, in their own clothes still, with their bags on the bunks, and none of them was from Kansas. A Jewish boy from New York with spectacles and a cardboard suitcase tied with string. A big Irishman from Boston with red hair and a bruise on his face from somewhere. Two brothers from Ohio, which was against the rule and nobody could explain. A Swede from Minnesota. A cowboy from Montana, an actual cowboy, in boots, with a hat. A schoolteacher from Vermont. A coal miner from somewhere in the mountains whose accent nobody could understand at all. A German from Wisconsin with a round pink face who said ja and then corrected himself, every time, to yes.

And Lucien Prudhomme from the camps at the mouth of the Bayou Saint-Jean.

They looked at him when he came in with his bag, the way men look at the next man into a room, and looked away, and he found an empty bunk, a top one, near the stove, and put his bag on it.

The bunk below it was taken. There was a man lying on it, on his back, with his hands behind his head and his boots on, looking at the slats of Lucien’s bunk above him.

He was very tall. That was the first thing. His feet in their boots hung off the end of the bunk. He was fair, very fair, with hair the colour of the grass outside and a long face burned red across the nose and the cheekbones, and pale blue eyes, and big hands, and he was perhaps twenty, and he was looking up at the slats of the bunk above him, where Lucien had just put his bag, with an expression of patient interest, as if he were watching weather.

He looked at Lucien.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello.”

“I’m Harlan,” said the boy on the bunk. “Lindgren. From Nebraska. Near Kearney.” He did not get up. He put out one big hand, from where he lay, sideways, and Lucien took it, and it was dry and hard and enormous, and the boy shook his hand lying down, slowly, once, the way you would shake a hand over a fence. “That’s your bag on my ceiling.”

“Lucien. Prudhomme.” He said it the way it was said, the way his grandmother said it, Lu-syen Prü-dom, with the French in it.

Harlan Lindgren looked at him from the bunk for a while.

“Could you say that again,” said Harlan, “slower.”

---

Sergeant Cutter looked at feet.

He came in at four in the afternoon and stood in the door of the hut and they all stood up, without anybody telling them to, because of the way he stood in it. He was a short man, very brown, very lined, forty, perhaps, with a moustache cut close and small pale eyes and a campaign hat with the brim flat, and on his sleeve the stripes and on his chest a ribbon that Lucien did not know, faded. He had been, they found out later, nineteen years in the Army, eleven of them in the Philippines, where he had been shot twice and had malaria four times and had learned to say come here and don’t move and I will kill you in Tagalog and nothing else.

He walked down the hut between the bunks, slowly, and looked at feet.

Not at faces. At feet. At each man’s feet, his boots or his shoes, standing on the raw pine floor, one man after another, all the way down one side and back up the other. The schoolteacher from Vermont’s polished shoes. The cowboy’s boots. The coal miner’s boots, which were old and split. The Jewish boy from New York’s city shoes, thin. Lucien’s, which were his only pair, the ones he wore to Mass, black, and which he had done the night before he left at the kitchen table with his father’s tin, and which had been on the trains for three days.

Sergeant Cutter stopped in front of Lucien’s shoes. He looked at them for a long time.

“Where are you from, son?”

“La Nouvelle-Orléans, Sergeant.”

Sergeant Cutter looked up from the shoes, at his face, for the first time.

“From where?”

“New Orleans,” said Lucien, in English. “Louisiane. On the lake.”

“You’re a Frenchman.”

“I’m a Louisianais, Sergeant.”

Sergeant Cutter looked at him for a moment longer, with his small pale eyes. Then he looked back down at the shoes.

“Those are church shoes,” he said. “In four days you’ll have boots. Until then you’ll march in those, and they will be ruined, and you will not complain about it to me.” He moved on to Harlan’s feet, which were in boots, farm boots, enormous, cracked across the toes. “Where are you from?”

“Nebraska, Sergeant.”

“Can you walk?”

“I’ve walked behind a plough since I was nine, Sergeant.”

Sergeant Cutter looked at the boots for a while.

“Then you can walk,” he said, and moved on.

---

They could not say his name.

He found that out at supper, in the cookhouse, at a long table of raw pine with forty men at it and tin plates and a stew that was not stew. Nobody could. Not Lucien, not Prudhomme. They tried. The Jewish boy from New York, who was called Sol Weintraub and was very polite, tried four times and got Lucian, like the saint, and Prude-ome, and gave up and apologised. The Irishman from Boston, Danny Kerrigan, did not try; he called him you, Louisiana and then you, Frog, and Lucien looked at him across the table and Kerrigan stopped. The German from Wisconsin, August Brandt, with the round pink face, said it almost right, Lüsjän, and looked pleased with himself, and nobody else could hear the difference.

It was Harlan who fixed it.

He was sitting beside Lucien at the end of the table, with his long legs folded under it and his elbows on it, eating the stew that was not stew with the steady patience of a man who had eaten worse in a February on the plains. He had been listening to the others try. He had not tried himself. When Kerrigan said you, Louisiana for the third time, Harlan put his spoon down.

“Lucky,” said Harlan.

The table looked at him.

“It’s near enough,” said Harlan, to the table, in his slow flat voice. “Lu. Lucky. He doesn’t mind.” He looked sideways at Lucien. “You don’t mind?”

Lucien thought about it.

Nobody had ever called him anything but his name. His father called him nothing, mostly; garçon, sometimes, boy; once, on the platform, through the side of a railway car, what he called the boat. His grandmother called him Lucien in full, every time, with the French in it. Achille called him Lucien and toi and once, at the station in July, nothing at all, only pointed. On the lake shore he was le petit à Octave, Octave’s boy, and had been since he was born.

Nobody on the lake shore had ever called him lucky.

“Non,” he said. And then, in English: “No. I don’t mind.”

“Lucky,” said Danny Kerrigan, trying it, and it seemed to suit him, because he could say it.

“Lucky,” said Sol Weintraub, relieved.

“Lucky,” said August Brandt from Wisconsin, with the German in it, and grinned.

And that was his name in hut forty-one of C Company of the Second Kansas, at Camp Smoky Hill, on the prairie, in the middle of everything.

---

He went out of the hut that night after lights out.

You were not allowed to. He did it anyway. He went out of the door at the end, past the sergeant’s room, where Sergeant Cutter was snoring in a voice like a saw, and down the step, and along the numbered street of huts to the end of it, where the camp stopped.

It just stopped. One hut and then nothing. The grass.

He stood at the edge of it in the dark. There was a moon, nearly full, low in the south, and the wind was still coming from the south, steady, warm, smelling of grass and dust and a long way, and it went over the grass in front of him in the moonlight in long waves, one after another, silver where they bent and black where they came up, going away from him to the edge of the world, exactly, exactly, the way it went over the lake.

He stood there for a long time. He could hear it. The grass. A long low hiss, like the lake on the shell beach at the end of the camps, going on and on, never stopping.

Somebody came and stood beside him.

He did not have to look. He knew by the height, the way you know a man by the shape of him against a lit window. Harlan Lindgren, from the bunk below, with his boots on and his hands in his pockets, looking at the grass.

They did not say anything for a while.

“That’s the prairie,” said Harlan, at last. As if Lucien might not know. “It’s like that all the way to home. Four hundred miles. Like that. My father says when he came from Sweden in ‘eighty-one he got off the train at Kearney and looked at it and cried, because he’d never seen anything so empty in his life, and my mother says he was lying, he cried because he’d left his girl in Sweden, and she was the girl, so she’d know.” He looked at it. “I used to think it was the most beautiful thing in the world. Then I went to Omaha once and saw a building with six floors.”

Lucien looked at the grass going away from them in the moonlight in its long silver waves.

“It is like the lake,” he said.

He did not know he was going to say it. He said it in English, because there was nobody to say it to in French.

Harlan was quiet for a while.

“I don’t know what a lake looks like,” he said, at last. “Not a real one. There’s a slough by our place, a pond, my brother and I swim in it. You can see across it. You can throw a stone across it.” He looked at the grass. “Is it like that?”

“No,” said Lucien. “You can’t see across it. It goes away like that. To the edge. And it moves like that, when the wind is on it. Like that. Exactly like that.”

Harlan looked at the grass for a long time, in the moonlight, as if he had never seen it before.

“Huh,” he said.

Then, after a while:

“I’ve never seen the sea, either. I keep thinking about that. They’re going to put us on a boat and take us across the sea and I’ve never even seen it. I’ve never seen water you can’t throw a stone across.” He took his hands out of his pockets and put them back. “Is it like the lake? The sea?”

“I don’t know,” said Lucien. “I have never seen it either.”

Harlan turned his head and looked down at him, a long way down, in the moonlight, with his long red-burned face.

“You haven’t?”

“No. The lake. The Gulf, once, at the mouth of the river, from a boat, with my father, when I was twelve. Not the sea. Not the real one.”

Harlan looked at him for a moment longer. Then he laughed. Not loudly. A slow low laugh, through his nose, the laugh of a man who has found out that a thing he thought was only his own trouble is somebody else’s too.

“Well,” said Harlan. “That’s two of us.”

They stood at the edge of the camp, at the edge of the grass, in the middle of everything, and watched the wind go over it in the moonlight, until Sergeant Cutter’s snoring stopped, back in hut forty-one, and they went in.