Blood: Packing Corn

29

...the exceeding brightness of military glory — that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood...

Abraham Lincoln

1950

My grandfather was a produce broker. He bought and sold the crops of the nearby counties and shipped them by truck and rail car to the cities — Chicago, Memphis, Kansas City, Tulsa, St. Louis. He shipped beans and tomatoes, spinach and strawberries, peaches and watermelons, cantaloupe and carrots, sweet corn and cucumbers. Whatever was planted and grown nearby. Whatever could be sold.

The drivers pulled their trucks on the scales in front of my grandfather’s office, got their tickets, and then drove across the street and backed up to the loading dock of the packing shed. Then they waited to be loaded. The drivers were friendly to me. They dressed as cowboys in boots, jeans, straw hats, large belts with larger buckles, shirts that had snaps instead of buttons, and had red bandannas hanging out of their hip pockets or tied around their necks on a hot day. One was known as “Kansas” and wore his straw hat tilted to one side of his head. He told me that that was the way cowboys wore their hats in Kansas, where he was from, and I believed him.

Kansas could do rope tricks in the manner of Will Rogers. Waiting for his truck to be loaded he would take the hemp lariat out of the cab, spin it in lazy circles, and step in and out of the loop. He’d toss the loop over my head and it would drop down around my shoulders. He’d tug it tight and draw me to him and ruffle my hair as he took the loop from around me. “Gotta be quicker than that to get away from Kansas, boy,” he’d say. “If I ever got me the right horse I’d go on the rodeo circuit, ’cause I’m the best man with a rope I know. Just ain’t got the right horse.”

Kansas, and almost all the truck drivers, did not sit like ordinary men. They squatted down on the platform of the packing shed. They hunkered on the balls of their feet, the cuffs of their Levi’s drawn up toward the tops of their boots. It was a posture like a catcher behind home plate, and not too unlike that of Vietnamese villagers and Montagnard tribesmen, although those peoples squatted flat-footed. Later in my life I was to do both, squat behind home plate for wild throwing high school pitchers and facing Montagnards in the highlands and Vietnamese village elders in the Delta.

Lounging this way, sometimes leaning back against the side of the packing shed, they whittled on scraps of wood. They all carried a pocket knife of some sort. Some rolled cigarettes made from sacks of Bull Durham carried in a shirt pocket with the red tag hanging out or from a can of Prince Albert. A rare few smoked tailor-mades, possibly Home Runs, or, if he had made a recent run to New Orleans, Picayunes, the famously strong cigarette from that part of the country. Or Lucky Strikes.

Kansas was particularly proud of his ability to tightly roll a cigarette from the flakes of Bull Durham and gummed paper. He made a trough of the paper with the thumb and first two fingers of his left hand and shook the tobacco from the pouch held in his right hand. When he had measured out enough tobacco, he caught the tag of the sack in his teeth, tightened the string, and put the sack back in his pocket. He then tamped the tobacco down with a finger and brought the paper to his lips, licked it, and then smoothed out the cylinder.

“See that, boy, as good as any tailor-made you’ll ever see.”

It wasn’t, I knew, certainly not as perfectly formed as my grandfather’s Pall Malls, but I didn’t say so.

Some of the drivers would let me puff on one of their cigarettes.

“Don’t do him no harm. Long as he don’t inhale.”

“Stunt your growth, boy,” another would say.

My grandmother once smelled the smoke on me and it was the occasion for yet another visit to the forsythia bush behind the house.

Inside the packing shed a crew prepared loads for the trucks. Depending on what was being packed, a configuration of conveyor belts, bins, cutting devices, wrapping machines, piles of crates and baskets, and work lines was established. The machines were all driven by arrangements of belts and pulleys that whirred overhead and led, if carefully traced, back to an electric motor with a great on-off handle in a back corner of the shed.

One day they were packing corn. Trucks filled with loose ears picked that morning in the river bottomland waited to take their turns backing up to the loading dock. At the dock a conveyer belt ran into a truck and the loose corn was shoveled onto the belt. The corn flowed into the shed and along the packing line. At the packing line people stood on both sides of the belt and grabbed the corn as it streamed past them. Alongside the conveyor belt in front of the people working the line was a cutting machine. This was something like a row of enlarged mechanical cigar cutters. In front of each worker was a row of holes that every second or so opened up for a moment before a cutting blade flashed across. What a worker did was grab two ears of corn and thrust the ends of the corn into two open holes. In a moment the blades flashed and chopped off the ends of the ears. Then the worker rotated the two ears, flipping them like small batons, and put the other ends into the holes. The blades flashed again. After that, the worker tossed the ears onto another conveyor belt that delivered the trimmed ears to packers. The packers took the flow of trimmed ears of corn, now all nearly the same length, and put them into boxes. The filled boxes then went down a set of rollers to a waiting truck.

Back at the cutting area the ends of corn filled great bins that were emptied out during breaks between the unloading of trucks. These bins had a sweet summer smell to them. The silage in them often moved with the struggling of corn worms and the sides of the bins were speckled with the brown juices of worms that had been caught by the cutting machines.

The men and women who worked the line were local people. It wasn’t steady work. It ebbed and flowed with the season and the harvest. But some, because of their skills, or because they could reconfigure the lines based on what needed to be done, or because they were some sort of kin somewhere back in time, were always there in the summers. They were all acquainted. One of them was named Joe.

As I watched (they would not let me get anywhere near them while the machines were running) they chatted and joked and told stories on each other as the ears of corn flowed down the line in front of them. Perhaps it was a particularly funny story, or perhaps he’d tasted a bit more than he should of the whiskey that came down out of the nearby mountains the night before, or perhaps his steel-toed boot stepped on a stray piece of corn —  but instead of an ear of corn it was the tips of two of Joe’s fingers that went into the cutters.

The blood spurted across the line and one of the women screamed. Joe’s truncated hand still clutched the ear of corn as he stood back from the line. He shouted to shut the line down. Someone ran back and pulled the big handle and there was a sudden quiet in the room.

Kansas came striding in from the loading dock, whipping his red bandanna from out of his pocket. He wrapped it around Joe’s hand, ear of corn and all, and said, “Let’s get you to the hospital.”

He turned to me. “Go get your grandpa and tell him the line’s been shut down and that we need to take Joe to get his hand fixed.”

He said to one of the other line workers, “See if you can find them fingers and we’ll take ’em along. Don’t think it’ll do no good though.”

I ran across the street and interrupted my grandfather who was talking on the telephone. Papaw took his hat off its hook and went out the door. Kansas was walking Joe across the street, carrying someone else’s bloody bandanna with the fingertips in it. My grandfather started his Hudson and he and Joe and Kansas drove off, leaving me behind to wait.

I told the story to my grandmother at the dinner table that night. Her only comment was not to me, but to my grandfather. “You keep him away from the machinery, Jim. You know that’s a dangerous place.”

Blood: Killer

It Was Dark and Wet, Tom Dunn, Bougainville, 1942

28

Varieties of religious experience; good news and bad news; a lot of men found their compassion in the war, some found it and couldn’t live with it, war-washed shutdown of feeling, like who gives a fuck. People retreated into positions of hard irony, cynicism, despair, some saw the action and declared for it, only heavy killing could make them feel so alive. And some just went insane, followed the black-light arrow around the bend and took possession of the madness that had been waiting there in trust for them for eighteen or twenty-five or fifty years. Every time there was combat you had a license to go maniac, everyone snapped over the line at least once there and nobody noticed, they hardly noticed if you forgot to snap back again.

Michael Herr, Dispatches

1969

The most dangerous man I ever encountered was an Australian. We never would have met, probably, except that we were fellow passengers on a flight through several province capitals, beginning at Nha Trang, dropping south to Phan Rang, then to Dalat, Ban Me Thuot and finally to Pleiku. It was an overly circuitous route for me since it was an easy direct hop from Nha Trang to Pleiku. I would not have taken it if it had been my choice, but I had been tagged with a courier task while at IFFORCEV headquarters. I carried thick sealed envelopes in a canvas bag at my feet on the deck of the Air America C-47 and got a receipt in exchange for an envelope at each stop we made.

Dangerous was the first adjective that came to mind when the Australian took the seat next to me in the nylon webbing that lined the side of the fuselage. The man dropped a well-worn kit bag on the deck and leaned a Belgian FN rifle against the bag. His floppy hat was down over his forehead shading watery blue eyes. He was a thin man. His tiger-striped jungle fatigues draped down from the points of his shoulders. He was also a still man. He glanced at me as he dropped his kit, mumbled a “g-day”, and settled into his seat seeming to notice everything and nothing.

He was quiet on the first leg, until we flew over the tracings of irrigation canals and squared dikes that marked the remnants of the Champa kingdom. “Know anything about those chaps?” he asked as we were both looking down at the ground.

“Only what I’ve read. Remnants of the old Champa kingdom who were defeated by the Vietnamese when they pushed down from the north a couple of centuries ago.”

“Smart buggers,” he allowed, “but no match for the Vietnamese. Something like you chaps, I reckon.” He said the last with what he probably thought was a friendly smile, a thin quivering of the corners of this mouth.

“Those chaps (he meant the North Vietnamese), aren’t any more comfortable in the jungle than you are. Ya got to make them fear the jungle, fear the night.”

He meant doing what he had been taught to do and had done as a young soldier in Malaya. The same skills he was now teaching to the Special Forces and their Montagnard allies in the highlands. 

On the leg from Phan Rang to Dalat, I, who’d read my Mao, Che, Ho, Giap, Sir Robert Thompson, and Magsaysay, pointed out that the Emergency had been different. They had had the advantage of exploiting ethnic differences. In Malaya it was much easier to separate the “fish” from the “sea.” The insurgency could be confined to a mainly Chinese sub-group. The Malay Peninsula was easier to isolate from sources of arms shipments. Vietnam, on the other hand, was inevitably part of the larger Cold War where Chinese and Soviet factors were much more important.

The Australian would have none of that, or so it seemed — in those still blue eyes it was hard to read anything like anger. He had no sense of politics, only war, his kind of war. He rapped the wooden stock of his rifle and then gave a contemptuous look at the plastic of my M-16.

“That’s not a real rifle,” he said. “Ya can’t trust it. Wouldn’t have one. My chaps,” meaning his Montagnards, “have some of your old M-14s and it’s a better rifle.”

He was quiet for a long time as the plane droned over the textured mountains. “Ghurkas, that’s what you need here.” 

Ghurkas had been his mentors in Malaya, and they seemed to be the only soldiers he really respected. They hadn’t understood the jungle either, not when they first came down out of their mountains. But they understood soldiering and stealth and terrorizing their enemies. Put Ghurkas on patrol in a region and pretty damn quick you didn’t have any living opponents.

It was the cold stillness that marked the man, not the words. There was no real emotion in his voice. Nor was there any connection between him and the people he talked about. He was telling  stories he’d told before. He didn’t expect anyone to care or even understand. He was isolated and self-contained. A pure assassin. It was easy to imagine him on the edge of some jungle trail west of Ban Me Thuot, his hat down over his eyes, his rifle in his arms, just waiting for a target. He was a hunter, a killer. He was no longer part of an army.

That man had long since separated himself from any purpose larger than his own narrow satisfaction in killing, if it can even be said that he was moved by anything like an emotion. Even on the airplane in his washed-out tiger-striped fatigues he seemed to fade into the background. On the ground he would drift like morning fog through the elephant grass and bamboo groves, like smoke from a Montagnard cooking fire, like one of those spirits they propitiate with bowls of rice wine set into bamboo tripods erected on the edge of their villages.

That kind of man was not created by a training program. He was born to it. What shaping had occurred was done by forces outside the drills and rituals of ordinary soldiering. He did not seem to be a man who could be comfortable in a city. He did not even seem to be a man who could be comfortable in a foxhole with other soldiers. He was a ghost, a ghost that one could only hope was on our side, because people like him did not seem to be bound by ordinary rules.

I shivered as the aircraft flew high over the plateau. The distance between me and the man beside me was uncrossable, and neither had an interest in crossing it. I would like to have his respect, his acknowledgement that we were fellow soldiers, but I knew that was impossible. And when I thought about it later I knew that I would never want to walk the path that had made that man whatever he was.

The Australian left the plane at Ban Me Thuot. A battered jeep driven by a Montagnard in loose fitting jungle fatigues and a bush hat was waiting.

Blood: Serpent

27

The Copperhead According to Mother Ruth

Get him with a hoe
but don’t step on the head
He’ll bite you
even dead.
Look in brushpiles
circle them wide
he’s their color
and he’ll hide.
He’s God’s creature
but it’s also true
you must do unto him
before he does unto you.

James A. Autry, Nights Under a Tin Roof

1951

My grandmother was a small, tough lady. She was a Brinkley, a name that didn’t seem to mean anything in the town and wasn’t in the graveyard. I came to understand her people migrated from somewhere in the Carolinas after the war and settled farmland along the Arkansas River bottom. Her family claimed some kin to Stonewall Jackson, the soldier beloved of Lee who was killed by his own men.

She kept a garden behind the house on the hill and by the time I arrived for my summers it was well established. She grew a little bit of everything there. Bush beans and pole beans, sweet corn, okra, radishes, field peas, spinach, squash, cucumbers, a couple of watermelon vines, onions, lima beans, black pendulous eggplants, and others. She worked in the garden almost every day, wearing an old-fashioned bonnet to keep the sun from her skin and wielding a hoe she sharpened with a file.

That’s how I knew she was leaving the house to work in the garden. I’d hear the screen door screek and slam and then the rasp of the file across the edge of the hoe.

I helped some of the time, but the too long handle of the hoe was difficult for me and I could easily end up doing as much harm as good. She didn’t seem to want me to help. Perhaps it was her own personal time that she didn’t like to share as she bent over along the rows, chopping out the weeds, testing for ripeness.

The garden was a great place to find a beetle to torment; or to watch an ant lion in the bottom of its small pit waiting for an unwary ant to trip and slide down the slippery side of the trap; or to watch a spider craft a web from one leaf of a corn stalk to another. It was in the garden that I found the most beautiful creature of all basking in the sun at the end of a row of corn. It was just resting there with its slit eyes watching from within its wedge-shaped skull, its patterned skin a dusky orange and black, its tongue flickering out to taste the world.

“Git back!” Mamaw said, loudly, forcefully.

With her sharpened hoe she diced the copperhead as if it were a carrot on her chopping board. In just moments with a chop, chop, chop, the same motion she used for a recalcitrant patch of weeds, the snake was dismembered before me.

“You stay away from them. They’re pizen, you hear?”

What could I say, but “Yes, ma’am?”

But the twitching remnants of the serpent fascinated me. They kept on moving long afterwards. Juanita told me some folks believed that, if the moon was right, the pieces could join back together. That was why, when she heard about the killing, Juanita came out with a shovel and buried the pieces in different places around the garden.