Cootie Scofield In The Belly of The Whale
By Will Barker
Smashwords Edition ©2010 Will Barker
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Dedication
To all the men who ran around the world trying to kill each other for their country in the 1940s.
Requiescat in pace.
Now or in the near future
Cootie Schofield in the Belly of the Whale
PROLOGUE
In the late Spring of 1941, Quincy Scofield was a Warrant Officer in the 2085th Field Artillery Battalion, training in the Deep South for whatever was going to happen in the way of warfare. He had lately become very dissatisfied with Army life and was initiating the scheme which would free him from it.
Susanna McBride was a co-ed at the university where her father was dean of the School of Religion. She was notably unattractive and she lived up neither to the Biblical heroine for whom she was named nor to her father’s profession. She had discovered boys and was enticing some of the less particular ones to the wooded bank of the river which bordered the campus. There, she frolicked with them in scandalous ways. But she was becoming discontented with their fumbling performances. She yearned for a man.
James G. Flynn was a skinny 16-year-old high school student spending his summer jerking sodas at a drive-in restaurant, memorizing the songs on the juke box and devouring the news about the war raging across the Atlantic Ocean.. He rather thought the United States would become involved and it might last long enough for him to become a hero. He longed for fame.
They were hundreds of miles apart. No one who was not omniscient would have dreamed that they would ever meet, let alone participate in events which would end in a romance of which troubadours might sing and which would make Quincy Scofield a national hero.
BOOK ONE
The Zone of the Interior (USA)
Chapter 1
Quincy Scofield had prepared for what he expected to be his first major victory over the U. S. Army. He had stayed in bed in his room in town instead of reporting to Battalion Headquarters. He was missed.
“Where’s Mr. Scofield?” Major Clinton asked Sgt. Major Peters.
“He’s on leave, Sir.”
“On leave? Who authorized that? There’s a whole bunch of new regulations from the War Department to be put into effect! I need him.”
“You authorized it, Sir. Here’s the order.”
He handed a paper to Major Clinton, who read it and found that the Sergeant Major was correct. Immediately, he remembered Warrant Officer Scofield handing him a pile of orders to be signed the day before. This one undoubtedly had been nestled among them. He had been had!
“That slippery son-of-a-bitch!” he shouted, to the suppressed glee of the clerks nearby in headquarters. “I’ve had enough of him! Sergeant Major, prepare an order reducing Mr. Scofield to Private and assigning him to Baker Battery as a Cannoneer!”
That evening, Peters found Scofield sipping beer at the counter in the Magnolia Café. Both were in civilian clothes in deference to the sign behind the counter which said:
“NO DAWGS OR SOJERS ALOUD!”
The semi-literacy of the sign was no problem to them. Misspellings were common on the local signs, as were prejudices against many groups, including soldiers. They were in the South, where memories of the Reconstruction and the occupation by Federal troops still rankled. Moreover, the United States Army had defeated its enemies in the Great War but had made several million others in its own ranks. Veterans hated the Army, the more so since General MacArthur had sent his bayonets to clear a large contingent of unemployed veterans from an encampment in Washington during the Depression. The veterans’ feelings had spread through the populace, helped by the low character of many who had joined the Army after the war. Soldiers were considered trouble-makers, apt to swing their wide garrison belts at the slightest excuse, gashing their opponents with the brass buckles.
“What’s new?” Scofield asked.
“You’ve been busted to Private.”
“Good!”
Until the previous January, Peters had been a clerk in an Indianapolis bank who earned a few extra dollars each month as a member of a National Guard Cavalry troop. Then his troop had been called into active service and converted to an Artillery unit. He was an honest man in his mid-30s who had lived a low-keyed life until the new Warrant Officer had appeared and opened his eyes to the twists and turns in Army rules that a truly creative and unscrupulous mind could devise. He had expected Scofield to fall off the high wire that he delighted in walking. This appeared to be that fall. But Scofield seemed to think he was still safe on the wire. Curious!
“What’s so good about it? Your Military Occupation Specialty is now Cannoneer! That’s about as low as you can go in this man’s Army.”
“No, it isn’t. I don’t have an MOS. I’m a civilian. You can’t bust a Warrant Officer; you can only kick him out of his Quincy Scofield had prepared for what he expected to be his first major victory over the U. S. Army. He had stayed in bed in his room in town instead of reporting to Battalion Headquarters. He was missed.
“Where’s Mr. Scofield?” Major Clinton asked Sgt. Major Peters.
“He’s on leave, Sir.”
“On leave? Who authorized that? There’s a whole bunch of new regulations from the War Department to be put into effect! I need him.”
“You authorized it, Sir. Here’s the order.”
He handed a paper to Major Clinton, who read it and found that the Sergeant Major was correct. Immediately, he remembered Warrant Officer Scofield handing him a pile of orders to be signed the day before. This one undoubtedly had been nestled among them. He had been had!
“That slippery son-of-a-bitch!” he shouted, to the suppressed glee of the clerks nearby in headquarters. “I’ve had enough of him! Sergeant Major, prepare an order reducing Mr. Scofield to Private and assigning him to Baker Battery as a Cannoneer!”
That evening, Peters found Scofield sipping beer at the counter in the Magnolia Café. Both were in civilian clothes in deference to the sign behind the counter which said:
“NO DAWGS OR SOJERS ALOUD!”
The semi-literacy of the sign was no problem to them. Misspellings were common on the local signs, as were prejudices against many groups, including soldiers. They were in the South, where memories of the Reconstruction and the occupation by Federal troops still rankled. Moreover, the United States Army had defeated its enemies in the Great War but had made several million others in its own ranks. Veterans hated the Army, the more so since General MacArthur had sent his bayonets to clear a large contingent of unemployed veterans from an encampment in Washington during the Depression. The veterans’ feelings had spread through the populace, helped by the low character of many who had joined the Army after the war. Soldiers were considered trouble-makers, apt to swing their wide garrison belts at the slightest excuse, gashing their opponents with the brass buckles.
“What’s new?” Scofield asked.
“You’ve been busted to Private.”
“Good!”
Until the previous January, Peters had been a clerk in an Indianapolis bank who earned a few extra dollars each month as a member of a National Guard Cavalry troop. Then his troop had been called into active service and converted to an Artillery unit. He was an honest man in his mid-30s who had lived a low-keyed life until the new Warrant Officer had appeared and opened his eyes to the twists and turns in Army rules that a truly creative and unscrupulous mind could devise. He had expected Scofield to fall off the high wire that he delighted in walking. This appeared to be that fall. But Scofield seemed to think he was still safe on the wire. Curious!
“What’s so good about it? Your Military Occupation Specialty is now Cannoneer! That’s about as low as you can go in this man’s Army.”
“No, it isn’t. I don’t have an MOS. I’m a civilian. You can’t bust a Warrant Officer; you can only kick him out of his job. Have a beer! Let’s celebrate! I’m out of the Army!”
Peters was skeptical. Scofield was an Army Brat, the son of a Regular Army officer, and had imbibed Army regulations with his infant formula. There could be no doubt that he was right. But did he know civilian law?
“You’ll have to register for the Draft,” he said. “You could be back in the Army real quick.”
Scofield became thoughtful. This was a factor he had overlooked, as had happened occasionally in his life of scheming. He’d have to give it some thought. He paid for the beers.
“See you later, Soldier,” he said and went back to his room.
Thinking was one of his favorite occupations and he was good at it, although his thinking sometimes brought unintended consequences. He had learned early that an agile mind and a ready tongue were better weapons than fists, feet, knives or guns and he had honed those skills during a childhood and youth at various Army bases.
He had learned this tactic, mutated somewhat, from watching and listening as his father attempted to handle his mother, an artistically-inclined, neurotic woman who definitely needed handling.
In public, Carrie Scofield was a kind and gracious lady, admired by all who met her. In the privacy of her home, she was a virago.
Captain (as he was during Quincy’s childhood) Scofield was a brave and expert soldier, who had been a gentleman by the American definition well before Congress granted him the title along with his commission. He was respected personally and professionally both by his superiors and his men.
It was a different story at home, where he was one of his wife’s two whipping boys, constantly harangued and verbally abused. He accepted this henpecking patiently, becoming not exactly a yes-man, rather a “yes, but...” man.
His son tried to adopt the technique, then formalized and reinforced it after eavesdropping on preparations for one of the dinner parties held by his mother at Fort Riley.
“You have to invite Gaylord Nation, Dear,” his father had said.
“But he’s a boor!” his mother had replied.
“Yes, but he’s going to be an important man in the Army.”
“And he’s also the most blood-thirsty, flamboyant maniac the Cavalry has seen since George Custer. He will not talk of music or painting or books; he never thinks of anything but war and the ‘calvary.’ That’s all anyone will be able to talk about.”
And it was. From behind the door to the dining room, little Quin Scofield listened as his mother attempted to steer the conversation to books. Nation promptly directed it to a new book about tanks, in which he had developed a passionate interest. It was his belief that tanks would entirely replace horses in the “calvary.” This touched off a polite argument between him and the horse-lovers.
“Tanks need roads,” one officer submitted.
Roads helped, Nation said. But they would be surprised at some of the places in which a tank could operate.
“It can go places where a truck would be stuck and it’s a helluva lot faster than a horse. Plus it has more fire power. Speed, mobility and firepower! Give the Calvary tanks with cannon and machine guns and you’ve combined the Calvary with the Artillery! Get some of them through an enemy line where they can operate in his rear and you can raise bloody hell!”
Young Scofield could almost feel his mother wince at the word “hell”, which was not used in polite circles. There was worse to come, of course. Nation was known throughout the Army for his coarse talk.
It was generally accepted that the newly-invented tanks had ended the bloody stalemate on the Western Front and brought victory to the Allies in the World War. The horse-lovers withdrew from the argument without bringing up the real reason they objected to the change: you can’t play polo with tanks or take a lady on long, romantic rides in them. The talk turned to military tactics.
Nation loved frontal assaults. He had fond memories of Cavalry charges against Pancho Villa--bugles blowing, pistols cracking, sabers swinging, men and horses falling, blood flowing... He regaled the company with descriptions of slaughter and disembowelment, killing several appetites around the table.
Scofield’s father had been at the Battle of the Marne. He had watched a German Army fling itself to destruction against the Americans, who held an easily defensible position. He expressed deep misgivings about frontal attacks in modern warfare.
Nation, it seemed, was not a complete maniac. Much as he loved bloodshed, he agreed that frontal attacks were not always the best tactic. When possible, a flank attack was much more effective since it dodged the enemy’s main defenses. Best of all was a break-through which allowed troops to rampage in the enemy’s rear, where he had few defenses and could be stabbed in the back. Tanks, he said, were ideal for both purposes.
For his father, vainly supporting his wife’s attempts to steer the conversation away from Army matters, it was an uncomfortable evening. It became much worse when the guests left and his mother was able to vent her feelings about Gaylord Nation and his disastrous effect on her genteel dinner party. She had a treasury of remembered slights and insults, real and fancied, dating back to the time she had met the dashing young Jack Scofield. Now, she opened the vault and displayed each of them to him. Far into the night.
Young Scofield, on the other hand, considered it a most profitable evening. He was not interested in tanks, but he gave much thought to the theory of the flank attack. This was his father’s “yes, but...” defense and it was a valid strategy both in peace and in war. Never, he decided, would he meet a serious problem head-on.
He was an only child, living on Army posts with few other children in his age group. What companionship he found consisted of his shrewish mother, enlisted soldiers, and the classmates at whatever school he attended between his father’s frequent transfers. His mother had hated her pregnancy from the cause to the result, which made her someone to be avoided whenever possible. The soldiers were the most enjoyable; they fed him cigarettes and occasional sips of beer. The classmates were the worst after his mother. Scofield was always a stranger in their midst, never staying long enough in a school to form any friendships, only sharpening his skills at evading schoolyard combat.
For a while, he was a reader and thus discovered “Tom Sawyer,” “Huckleberry Finn” and, finally, “Peck’s Bad Boy.” The three books suggested other forms of amusement. He became a prankster. He was heartily cursed and occasionally cuffed by soldiers. who found he had sneaked into their barracks and short-sheeted their beds. and buglers, who looked over their instruments to see him sucking a lemon, which caused their mouths to water and played hob with their music. He was screamed at by female classmates who rose to recite and sat back down on a thumb tack. The girls had heard their fathers’ stories of life in the trenches with the tiny pests which added to the misery. They dubbed Quin Scofield “Cootie.” The soldiers picked it up and the nickname spread but never quite reached his parents.
Scofield learned quickly that tormenting other boys would lead to lacerations and contusions, so he gained some status by involving male classmates in his escapades--playing hooky, overturning outside toilets, raiding orchards and various other forms of mischief. Sometimes, the miscreants were caught but young Quin was artful and often one or other of his companions was blamed as the ring-leader.
When he was quite young, his mother had been inspired with the ambition to have him become a concert musician. A series of music teachers had despaired of teaching him any instrument and declared him tone deaf, so she had more or less given up that idea but used him as a target for her venom when his father was not around. She was puzzled, though, when he grew older and showed interest in the records and radio programs of the immensely popular singer, Bing Crosby. Possibly, she thought, he had outgrown the aural handicap, but it was too late to resume a musical career.
His father had dreamed of his son, undoubtedly a bright boy, graduating first in his class from West Point and becoming the next Pershing or Sheridan or Sherman. To prepare him for this, he had spent long hours with him on various firing ranges. The results had been excellent. Quin became an expert with both pistol and rifle, an “instinct shooter” who hardly had to aim even though he was left-handed. The West Point dream also had evaporated, however, after a talk with Quin’s teacher left the father convinced that, while the boy had all the brains anyone needed, he had no sense whatsoever. The teacher had not said Quin had no sense; he had said that Quin was resolutely insubordinate. Major Scofield, a good soldier, considered that senseless. He went on to wonder if Quin really was his son but then he remembered his wife’s attitude toward her conjugal duties and decided that she could not have been unfaithful to him. She was a cold woman, incapable of love. He wondered if that was the reason for his son’s rebelliousness. Was it inherited from his mother? Or was it her rejection of him?
Whichever it was, young Quinn seemed to have no conscience. His father had known men like that and they usually ended up behind bars.. Thankfully, Quinn was too small to be a bully and had too good a sense of self-preservation to risk imprisonment.
Just as Quin finished high school, his father escaped from the mother via a coffin, leaving his son a fairly new Ford V8 coupe. Quin had had enough of his mother and military life. He loaded a few belongings into the car and joined a survey crew working in the West. When that bored him, he drifted around the Country, doing sales and various other jobs, most of which involved scheming and none of which involved heavy lifting. The Great Depression was ending and there was a little money around to be spent buying Bibles and oil stocks. A good, not very scrupulous, salesman could do well, especially when war started in Europe. The factories began reopening to produce arms for the British. Men found jobs and money began to circulate again.
At first, it was called the “phony war”, but suddenly it became a real one. The Nazi armies rolled through Belgium into France, outflanking the formidable Maginot Line. The British Army fled to Dunkirk, where the British and French Navies and an impromptu fleet of civilian craft ranging down to rowboats rescued them. The French stood alone for a while, then they wee attacked by Italy and were forced to surrender. Hitler now controlled virtually all of Europe. His submarines began to attack merchant ships in the Atlantic.
The United States was largely anti-war. The World War was only a couple of decades back. Most grownups had memories of it, especially the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Both had members who were quite bitter that they had suffered and lost comrades in a “War to End All Wars” which obviously had not achieved its aim. There still were sons and brothers slowly coughing their lives out of mustard-gas damaged lungs in the Veterans Administration Hospitals around the Country. There were men in their 30s and 40s walking the streets who were crippled physically or psychologically from that war.
Allied with the service organizations were a great many Midwesterners who wanted no part of “foreign entanglements”, and factions of the large German and Italian populations of the Country. Most Americans were descended from European refugees and there was a strong feeling that those who had remained in Europe deserved what they got. Few wanted their sons or brothers sent across an ocean to be maimed or killed, although some of those young men had other ideas and went to Canada to get in on the action.
The pro-war faction was probably smaller but it was powerful. Jews quite naturally were for immediate entry into the war in the hope of saving some of their relatives from the death camps. Anglophiles also were interested in intervention to save Mother England. Both of these factions were important constituencies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt..
Communists were anti-war until Hitler turned on Russia and attacked. One story was that Communists had been picketing the White House with signs saying, “We didn’t raise our boys to be soldiers” when they received news of the German march on Russia. Supposedly, they immediately sat down on the sidewalk and rewrote their signs to say, “Open Second Front Now!”
Whether or not that incident actually happened, the Communist Party certainly became pro-war and the tide of sentiment changed somewhat. Communists were influential in intellectual circles and the news media.
Beneath the anti-war sentiment, though, there was a deep uneasiness. Scofield first heard it as “You can’t do business with Hitler.” This Babbitt-like slogan was a statement, couched in Yankee commercial terms, which meant that Hitler simply could not be trusted to keep his word. Later, he heard people saying, “Hitler’s mistake was going after the Jews.” Sometimes, this sprang from an anti-Semitic conviction that Hitler had aroused Jewish wealth against him, but often it was an expression of revulsion against Nazi genocide and a nagging suspicion that other religions and races would be placed on his agenda of destruction.
Also, the Japanese Army was rampaging in China and threatening the rest of Southeast Asia. Japan’s Navy was large and formidable. The United States was protected by oceans from both Eastern and Western powers but the thought of being isolated from both Europe and Asia was worrying. Reluctantly, the Nation decided it was time to rearm.
The Army had been terribly neglected after World War I. It had to be rebuilt. The day came in 1940 when Congress passed the Selective Service Act. Scofield was 21 years old and unmarried. This made him a very ripe candidate for the draft, and he knew it. He also suspected that he would receive better treatment as a volunteer than as a draftee. President Roosevelt’s campaign slogan in the recent election had been “He kept us out of war.” Older people noted that Woodrow Wilson had used the same slogan when running for his second term. So the United States probably would enter the war. The best way to dodge the draft, Scofield decided, was to enlist in the Army for a year---a sort of inoculation.
He could type. This got him a job in the reception center for a month before he was shipped out to a newly-activated and under-manned National Guard Field Artillery battalion as a replacement. Again, typing came in handy. He was sent to Headquarters Battery, where his agile mind and encyclopedic knowledge of Army rules and regulations, along with his knowledge of how to circumvent them, won him advancement to corporal, then sergeant and, finally, Warrant Officer. This, the soldiers of his youth had told him, was the best job in the Army. A Warrant Officer was neither a commissioned officer nor an enlisted man. As a civilian, he had no command duties and was not under military discipline. But he wore an officer’s uniform, which brought him automatic respect, and was better paid than the junior commissioned officers. Also, because of his privileged status, he had been able to avoid life in the jerry-built barracks and Bachelor Officer’s Quarters where the rest of the Battalion was housed. He had rented a room in town and commuted by car to his duties.
It had been bearable, even enjoyable, for a while. Then Major Rogers, the easy-going Battalion Executive Officer who was his boss, was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel and transferred to command a newly-formed battalion. The Baker Battery commander, Captain Clinton, was promoted to replace him.
Major Clinton had done a hitch as a Cavalry trooper and then had joined the National Guard, where he wangled a commission. He had seen and greatly admired Gaylord Nation, but his postings had never brought him near the Scofields, so he had not heard of Cootie. That Scofield not only had known Nation but was the son of people who had been on dining terms with him filled Major Clinton with awe.
Scofield accepted the respect uneasily. He disliked both Nation and his admirer. His principal memory of the former, surpassing even that of the dinner party, stemmed from an experiment he had conducted as a small boy to see how cavalry horses reacted to gunfire. He had used firecrackers. Nation had caught him at it. Every mention of the name caused Scofield’s buttocks to wince at the memory of the swagger stick applied to them. He considered Gaylord S. Nation Jr. to be literally a pain in the rear.
Eventually, the bluff old ex-trooper noticed Mr. Scofield’s lack of enthusiasm for his hero. At the same time, he noticed that the Warrant Officer’s tinkering with the regulations often worked to his own advantage and sometimes to the disadvantage of his commander. Gradually, Major Clinton lost his warm feeling for Mr. Scofield and things became decidedly less amicable between them. More from megalomania than anything else, he had ordered Mr. Scofield to live on the base.
That had brought about the scheme to leave the Army.
Now, though, there was a problem. He had performed a successful flanking operation against the Army only to find his own flank threatened. How to keep from returning to it as a private...
Chapter 2
His first move was to seek out Colonel Rogers to see if there was any chance of renewing their association. With deep regret, the Colonel told him that he not only had no opening for a Warrant Officer, but it would be extremely bad Army politics for him to take on one who had been fired by a neighboring battalion.
So, how to avoid the draft?
Scofield studied the list of occupations that were exempt from the draft. A position in the War Department could be draft-proof. He knew most of the higher-ups in the Army who could provide such jobs. Unfortunately, they knew him. So that was out. Farming...defense worker...fireman... None of those had much appeal for him. Divinity student! That could be it!
He had no qualms about his qualifications. He had gone through a phase in his life when he doubted the existence of God, but he had finally decided that there was simply too much evidence of intelligence in the operation of the Universe to doubt that Someone operated it. As for morality, he obeyed most of the Ten Commandments most of the time. He never killed anybody. He did not actually steal things (that could lead to troubles with the law and only fools courted legal troubles; smart people used trickery to get what they wanted from others). He was single and did not covet or consort with married women. He had not testified against anybody under oath. He did not swear or worship golden calves. Admittedly, he was a little shaky on coveting his neighbor’s goods, keeping holy the Sabbath and honoring his mother and, to leap forward into the New Testament, he did not always treat others as he would be treated. On balance, though, he thought he qualified.
The elder Scofields had not been particularly religious but they had seen that he was christened and had sent him to various Sunday Schools on a regular basis as they moved from camp to camp during the 1920s and early ‘30s. He had paid attention and usually won prizes for his Biblical knowledge. Better than those prizes was the evident reluctance with which they were handed out by teachers who knew him and his activities.
Thus, he had absorbed differing brands of Protestant theology, but had been bored by religion until he drifted to New Orleans. There, he had wandered into St. Louis Cathedral and been much impressed by the splendor and majesty of the Catholic Church. He had attended Mass several times and was quite taken with the solemnity and silent devotion of the ritual.
Go to a Catholic seminary? Reason told him that he would have to convert to Catholicism first and that the Catholics were not unwary enough to admit him to a seminary immediately after conversion. Besides, from what he had heard, discipline in such institutions was even stricter than in the Army. Catholic seminaries demanded celibacy! That, in itself, was all right with him, but it indicated a demand for a dedication which he was not prepared to give. Even Army discipline did not go that far. He’d have to stay Protestant.
In his travels, he had visited a small town in the Bible Belt which had a university run by a fundamentalist church. It had a school of religion. This probably would do. He boned up on the epistles of St. Paul, memorizing some chapters and verses which he knew were highly favored in the theology of fundamentalist churches, and applied for admission to the School of Religion at George Eden University.
Dr. Barnabas McBride, dean of the school, welcomed him. Most of his students were Southerners who had heard the Call while plowing or performing some kind of manual labor. They were not intellectuals beyond their Biblical knowledge and were considered terrible nuisances in the liberal arts classes they attended to get their degrees. Scofield was reasonably well-educated, smart and likely to raise the reputation of the divinity school. As a further qualification, he had sold Bibles in rural Texas for a while, which had acquainted him both with the Bible and the psychology of the people who read it zealously. He was enrolled for the summer session. He hastened to the local draft board to register and obtain his deferment. This would last him for four years and, if the danger was not past by then, he could obtain ordination with a lifetime deferment.
* * *
Scofield’s leave had been for 30 days. At the end of that time, Major Clinton started asking about his whereabouts.
“I think he considers himself discharged, Sir,” said Sgt. Major Peters.
“What?!!!”
Peters explained Scofield’s reasoning.
“We’ll see about that!” the Major said and hurried off to camp headquarters for a legal opinion. He came back in a foul mood.
“We’re notifying his draft board,” he said. “He’d better report to them!”
Everybody in Headquarters kept a low profile for the rest of the day.
* * *
But Scofield, now draft-exempt, had become the star of the School of Religion. Dr. McBride called him into his office and asked about his career plans.
“I thought I might become an evangelist,” Scofield said after a moment of reflection. “I like the idea of holding camp meetings and bringing the Word to people in remote places. I think the Holy Ghost could work through me to get them to turn over their lives to the Lord.”
The Dean was pleased. Like all religious people, he wanted to believe those who professed to share his beliefs. He encouraged Scofield in his plan and congratulated himself on having such a student.
After the conference, it occurred to him that there was another student in whom he was even more interested. His 20-year-old daughter, now enrolled in the Liberal Arts College, was the cause of some of those grey hairs which were multiplying on his head.
Unlike most Protestants, Dr. McBride had read the Book of Sirach in the Catholic Bible and had been deeply impressed by the ancient priest’s attitude toward daughters.
“A daughter is a treasure that deprives a man of sleep,” had struck a sympathetic chord within him, as had Sirach’s advice to try to keep the daughter from becoming pregnant while still at home and to get her married to a good man as soon as possible. He was not aware that his daughter was in danger of pregnancy, but marriage to a good man seemed like a safe course.
Could Quincy Scofield be that man?
He brought up his name at supper that night and Susanna reacted.
“There’s a Scofield in one of my classes,” she said, toying with the teaspoonful of vegetables on her plate.. “Could that be him?”
“It must be. There’s only one Scofield in the University.”
“He’s smart,” she said. “And not bad looking. He has a car. He reminds me of Bing Crosby.”
Scofield was one of many young men who imitated more or less successfully the easy-going, affable manner of that day’s most popular star of music, radio and movies.
“He’s certainly smart,” the father said. “And he has a very bright future ahead of him. He’ll make some girl a very good husband.”
He noted a gleam in Susanna’s eyes and the glance she exchanged with her mother. The hint had been taken. She had marked Scofield as her prey. Whether she would bring him down was another question. Dr. McBride was a realist in the matter of his daughter’s looks so he had to concede that she was no Ann Sheridan or Lana Turner or even Martha Ray. She was a tall girl who seemed to have only one dimension–height. Her width and breadth were negligible, consisting almost entirely of bones. Her face was cadaverous and her posture as limp as her neglected hair. He loved his daughter dearly but he could not imagine her snaring a man until he remembered that her mother, who had been almost as skinny in her youth, had roped and hog-tied him. All women eventually captured a man if they really wanted to, he reflected.
Maybe she could do it with her cooking. Although she ate practically nothing, she was an excellent cook. Invite young Scofield to dinner? The old saying was that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. Dr. McBride could not know that Susanna thought that route began a few inches below the stomach.
Scofield, now two months into his new college career, was beginning to wonder if he had made the best choice. He was thirsty. The sect to which he now belonged was adamantly opposed to alcohol and tobacco, among other things. The other things did not bother him much but he did like his relaxing drink and a smoke. Sometimes he wished he could have gone to a Catholic seminary. Wine and cigarettes were allowed there. Maybe even beer.
Also, the company he kept was not stimulating. He lived in a dormitory with earnest men whose conversation seemed to consist mainly of quotations from St. Paul, including chapter and verse. Scofield had nothing against St. Paul, but he yearned for other topics of conversation.
There were illegal bars in town, where his kind of refreshments and companionship could be enjoyed. There was too much risk in visiting them, though. If word got back to the campus, he would undoubtedly find himself back in the toils of Selective Service.
He had resigned himself to a life of austerity and had formed the habit of spending his evenings in the library, away from the Holy Joes and finding, if not stimulating conversation, at least silence. Besides, he had discovered something called “grading on the curve” which was practiced by the professors at Eden. Under this system, the person who did best in the class, no matter how mediocre a student, received an “A” and the one who did poorest, no matter how bright, flunked. He did not think much of the system and had seen a way to defeat it–by getting in a class of dummies–but he had learned about it too late and had wound up in a room full of girls and boys wearing thick-lensed spectacles and earnest expressions. So it was a good idea to spend some time grinding in the library. He was not aiming for an “A” but he did not want to flunk out. There was his draft status to consider.
A few evenings after his conference with the Dean, Scofield was in the library, reading the Confessions of St. Augustine. His rebellious nature gave him a natural interest in what his school considered The Opposition. Dr. McBride’s curriculum did not include much Christian literature between the Acts of the Apostles and the writings of Luther, Tyndale, Calvin, Knox and other pillars of Protestantism but the College of Liberal Arts had occasional use for the old Fathers so Augustine was in the library..
Scofield was deeply impressed by St. Augustine. He was just reflecting that the Catholics certainly took sin seriously and that he would never have made it in one of their seminaries when Susanna McBride plopped down beside him at his table
He had noticed her in class and had seen smirks and nods indicating that she was what acquaintances in California called a Ready Freddy, in spite of or maybe in rebellion against her father’s piety.
This reputation did nothing to endear her to Scofield. He was heterosexual but fastidious. The idea of inserting part of his body into another person’s was repugnant to him. This objection was based on hygienic rather than moral grounds. He had had a few sexual experiences while in his cups but the usual hangover had been worsened by a sense of shame (very unusual to him) and was followed by several days of worry that he might have contracted a loathsome disease. The disease had not materialized, but once he had suffered an infestation of body lice which had been very troublesome and embarrassing until Blue Ointment had rid him of the problem. He had come to appreciate the soldiers’ song about the medication.1
All in all, he despised the way mammals reproduce. He had no urge for progeny. The human race could die out as far as he was concerned. His idea of romance was to sit on a beach under a full moon, crooning while he and Dorothy Lamour embraced and exchanged occasional kisses, keeping their respective tongues in their respective mouths. Since he had never met Miss Lamour, this ideal had never been realized and he did not expect it to be.
And then there was his dislike of women. The first woman he had known was, of course, his mother, who had ruled him with an iron hand and an active tongue. If we learn about love by being cuddled and kissed as infants, he had missed that class. Next were her friends among the officers’ wives, who reported faithfully on his activities, bringing her tongue and, often, her slapping hands into play. Then, there were her sisters whom he visited on summer vacations and who were very active ear-scrubbers, accompanying their assaults with scathing remarks. (“You could plant potatoes behind those ears!”) At school, there were the teachers who had, as was the custom of the day, made this left-handed little boy conform to the right-handed world by whacking his knuckles with a ruler. And, of course there were the screeching little pig-tailed classmates who were responsible for most of his trips to the principal’s office and subsequent beatings, this being the age of “spare the rod and spoil the child.”
Nothing had changed his boyish conviction that females were scolds and snitches who were bent on dominating, exploiting and abusing males. They were often soft and submissive but that was only the bait for a terrible trap. Once you were entangled in their webs, they whipped out the guilt and flogged you mercilessly with it at the least sign of disobedience.
As soon as he was on his own, he made sure that women never realized how he felt toward them. In the first place, there was no revenge they would not take if offended. Second, as he had learned while selling Bibles and household gadgets, they could be charmed out of other things than whatever virtue they had. Such as money and influence. And Susanna was the daughter of Dr. McBride, on whose favor depended his deferment. Best to have her on his side. And certainly best not to offend her.
She was very friendly and charming, enough so that he dropped the caution he ordinarily used on meeting a girl.
They left the library together, Susanna chattering amiably, and strolled across the grounds of Eden University. A manicured lawn, dotted with shrubs and flower beds and bordered with trees, stretched before them in the light of a full moon. You could almost believe that you were in the original Garden of Eden.
“Have you been down by the river?” Susanna asked. “There are some very interesting things down there.
“We could have a smoke.”
Scofield shot her a surprised look. She displayed a pack of Camels, the cigarette for which the ads claimed many would walk a mile. Scofield was one of the many.
Bait! He recognized it immediately and knew it concealed a hook. But he was confident that there was no hook strong enough for him to be landed by this fisher woman And his lungs screamed to be filled with tobacco smoke.
She smiled triumphantly when she saw his interest. She linked her arm to his and they were off to the river side, strolling sedately. It occurred to Scofield suddenly that she was several inches taller than his five-foot-six and much stronger than she looked. Resistance would have been useless.
When they reached the river bank, Susanna pulled him into a patch of woods and offered him the cigarette pack with a book of matches. Scofield lit a cigarette for each of them and sat back for a peaceful smoke. Susanna was leaning against him. He leaned the other way. She leaned harder. He was almost prone on his side when she sat up and started rummaging in the roots of an oak tree.
“There’s something here!” she said in apparent surprise, then “Look what I found!”
She held up an earthenware jug with a corncob in its opening.
“Moonshine!” she exclaimed. “Want some?”
She handed it to him with a broad smile. Scofield would have much preferred beer, but this would have to do. He had never tried this “white lightning”. Well, better late than never. He took the jug, uncorked it and raised it with both hands to his mouth.
It was liquid fire, fresh from a volcano. He coughed and handed the jug back to Susanna, who slung it expertly over her elbow. She raised it to her lips and took a long draft before she handed it back to him.
Scofield was already feeling a little fuzzy but he gamely took another swig. It went down much easier, his mouth and throat having been anaesthetized. He took another, longer swig. Susanna quickly took the jug back, corked it and stowed it in its hiding place. She seemed to have shed some clothing. Scofield blinked, trying to focus his eyes. The night seemed to have turned very foggy, but he could see a long sliver of white flesh and articles of feminine apparel on the ground. Was that a girdle? What would this skeleton need with a girdle? To hold her bones together?
Suddenly a long arm had him in an iron grasp. The moon seemed to be falling into his face and a yard of tongue was exploring his teeth. It wasn’t the moon, he realized, it was Susanna’s face which pressed against his. Scofield struggled feebly as it dawned on him that he was being unbuttoned. A female voice said “Wow!” In his disoriented state, Scofield assumed that he was having one of those nasty dreams which relieve the reproductive pressures in celibate men every month or so. His body knew otherwise, though, and responded with enthusiasm. He was frigid, not impotent.
Dr. McBride had glanced out of his office window a few minutes earlier and had seen Susanna and Scofield strolling through the moonlight toward the river. To the eye of a loving and innocent father anxious to marry off a daughter, they made a charming picture. He decided to stroll after them. Possibly he could further a romance.
He had not gone far when he heard moaning and thrashing. No need for furthering this romance. A few steps in the direction of the sounds and he found his daughter writhing beneath Scofield. He uttered a loud, scandalized gasp.
Susanna’s eyes had been closed in ecstasy but opened wide at the sound. She was a fast thinker.
“Daddy!” she cried. “Save me! This beast is raping me!”
The preponderance of evidence, including the recent ecstatic moans, was against this. If there was a rape victim in the vicinity, it was Scofield. But the cry sounded good to Dr. McBride. Better to believe your daughter a rape victim than a slut. He grabbed Scofield’s shoulder and rolled him off his daughter. Scofield was left flat on his back with a bewildered mind and an embarrassing part of his anatomy protruding. Dr. McBride was voicing his wrath
“You scoundrel!” he roared in a voice trained for revivals. “You snake in the grass! You, who profess to want to lead people to God, dare to defile this innocent girl! Well, you’re going to do right by little Susanna! You will make an honest woman of her!”
Rape? Honest Woman? The words opened a horrifying vision of the future to Scofield. Terror tore the fog aside and spurred his mind to thought. What action to take? Talk his way out of it? Hopeless! Strategic withdrawal? No! Retreat? No! Headlong Flight? The only possible answer! He managed to get to his feet, then he vanished quickly into the gloaming, holding up his pants as a barrage of cliches from 19th Century melodramas whizzed around him. Behind him, a girlish voice pierced Dr. McBride’s thunder: “Daddy! He’s getting away!”
A middle-aged scholar-father has no hope of catching an absconding young fornicator. Dr. McBride hastened back to his office, where he used the telephone.
Scofield was delayed slightly by his stomach’s rebellion against the moonshine which had been poured into it. When he finished retching, he found his mind was a bit clearer and he sprinted the rest of the way to his dormitory. He did a fast wipe of his face, then packed up his belongings and opened the door of his room to head for his coupe.
Two faculty members were standing outside the door, blocking his way. He inspected them quickly and was relieved to see that there was no weapon visible. He guessed why they were there but, if he was to participate in a shotgun wedding, there would have to be a shotgun.
“Brother Scofield! Dr. McBride has asked us to escort you to his residence and be witnesses at the wedding,” one of them said.
These were college professors and rather weedy ones at that, but there were two of them and a disturbance would bring reinforcements from the other rooms in the dorm, some of which would be very muscular indeed. This was no time for a frontal attack. Maneuver to the flank or, possibly, the rear. Think quick! They were honest men, not accustomed to dealing with the devious.
“I was just packing some things for the honeymoon,” Scofield said. “Come on to my car. We can drive over to the residence.”
Closely escorted, he went to his car, threw his things in the trunk and opened the driver’s door, then waited for the two professors to go around the car to the passenger door. Once they were clear, the engine roared and he was gone.
Straight to the State line. He stayed at the maximum legal speed. It would be most unwise to attract police attention when people were yelling “Rape!” Some of these Bible Belt States punished rape with the death penalty. True, he was more victim than perpetrator, but a jury composed of local people defending a local girl against a furriner could not be trusted to see it that way. An alternative was to marry Susanna, which did not look much better than dangling by the neck from a rope.
Across the State line, he checked into a motor court, shaved and showered, then headed for a recruiting station.
Much as he disliked the Army, it was preferable to being the husband of Susanna McBride and the son-in-law of Dr. McBride. For one thing, Susanna undoubtedly would have many children and there would always be doubt about their paternity.
The Recruiting Sergeant’s suspicions were aroused when Scofield said he wanted to report for active duty immediately.
“Are you runnin’ from the law?” he asked.
“No, Sergeant!” Scofield answered quickly.
“Must be a woman then,” the Sergeant said with satisfaction.
It was a few days later that Scofield discovered the infection. Who would have thought you could get gonorrhea from the daughter of the dean of a school of religion?
Chapter 3
Colonel Charles Osborne dismounted from the Jeep and started up the sidewalk to his residence. A couple of recruits from the Reception Center were working on his lawn. They snapped to something approximating Attention and saluted, one of them as though he had had practice. He returned the salutes as he walked, but one of them remained at Attention.
“Colonel Osborne, Sir!”
Irritated, the Colonel stopped and looked at the yardbird. There was something familiar about his face.
“I’m Quincy Scofield, Sir. I’m sure you remember me.”
He certainly did! His insides contracted as his mind flashed back to that time when, as a young lieutenant, he was in flagrante delicto with the wife of his troop commander, who was away at a school. It had been a soul-searing experience to glance at the window and see the leering face of young Cootie Scofield, brattiest of the camp’s Army Brats. It also had been an expensive experience. The boy had never threatened to tell but he leered every time they met, which seemed often, and only went away when he had been given a quarter. Later generations might not consider that much money, but it had been agonizing in those hard times when the Army was not being paid.
None of this memory showed in his face as he stopped to talk to the bane of his youth. Quin, it seemed, was back in the Army after previous service in an Artillery Battalion. He was anxious to get a good posting, preferably in the Quartermasters or Finance. He especially did not want to be in the Field Artillery or any other branch of the Ground Forces. He wondered if Colonel Osborne had seen Captain Miller lately, a question with implications that Osborne well understood. Miller had been widely-known for the jealousy he felt where his wife was concerned.
“What outfit were you in before?” he asked.
“The 2085th Field, Sir.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” the Colonel said.
The next day he made some calls. Apparently, Cootie did not know that Captain Miller, by then a Colonel, had been killed recently in a bombing raid in England, where he was an observer.
***
Scofield’s heart sank when the train stopped and he saw the station sign. He joined the other men loading on trucks, sure he had been betrayed even before it reached the camp. He fell back on his divinity training and began to pray, but in vain. When the truck stopped, he saw the red guidon with yellow crossed cannons and letters that said “2085 FA BN” in front of the headquarters building. He wondered what unforeseen factor had torpedoed his latest scheme. He had been betrayed by Colonel Osborne. He thought briefly of reprisal but he was not really a vengeful man when there was nothing to be gained by it.
Sergeant Major Peters ducked out to look at the new group of replacements being unloaded outside Headquarters. He saw a familiar face.
“Major!” he shouted. “Mr. Scofield is back! He’s a replacement, Sir!”
Major Clinton’s heart--in fact his whole body--filled with joy. He jumped from his chair and rushed outside straight to his former Warrant Officer.
“Scofield! So you decided you wanted to be a Cannoneer after all!”
“There are worse things, Sir,” Scofield said, bravely.
In the Baker Battery Orderly Room, First Sgt. Albert Hill was almost as joyful as the Major. He examined Scofield’s file with gleaming eyes. His men were nearly all high school dropouts with hardly any intellectual accomplishments or aspirations. Scofield was a gem.
“This Scofield is a fine one, Sir,” he told Capt. Warren, the Battery Commander. “General Classification Test score is 150 and he has worked in survey! Perfect for the Instruments Section!”
“He’s a Cannoneer,” said the Captain glumly. “Major Clinton’s orders. Put him in the First Section.”
Enough said.
Chapter 4
His erstwhile religious environment provided the framework for Scofield’s thoughts as he carried his gear into Baker Battery’s barracks.
“God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
No, that was sacrilegious. His mind brought up a fragment of a psalm:
“Why do I go sorrowful whilst the enemy afflicteth me?”
He became even more bitter when the Battery came flooding back at the end of the day. The barracks filled with loud curses, obscenities and exchanges of insults as the Cannoneers shed their fatigues, crowded into the latrine to clean up and then donned dress uniforms in preparation for Retreat. “He descended into Hell,” he thought, then decided that, however appropriate, this also verged on sacrilege. He couldn’t seem to win.
A Staff Sergeant came into the room and spotted him.
“Hey, aren’t you Mr. Scofield? What are you doing here?”
“I’m a cannoneer in the First Section,” Scofield answered.
“I want to hear all about this! I’m Sgt. Fowler. You’re in my section. I’ll see you after Retreat. Fall Out!”
Scofield joined the crowd as the barracks emptied for the ceremony that marked the lowering of the flag at the end of the day. Fowler caught him as the Battery was dismissed. Several of the men clustered around them.
“What happened to you?” Fowler asked. “I heard they tried to bust you and you told them that made you a civilian.”
“That’s right,” said Scofield.
“So how come you’re back?”
That was a secret Scofield intended to take to his grave. He had thought up a lie while standing retreat.
“The only jobs I could find were in defense factories and I’d rather be in the Army than working in a factory,” he said.
Hoots of derision! The men around him would take factory work over the Army any day--or any night, for that matter.
“My brother’s working in a factory and he made $250 last month,” said one of them. “That’s more than 10 times what I made. He has to fight off the women! They swarm around him and his money!”
“Well, I grew up in the Army. It’s my home. I missed it!”
Actually, he had studiously avoided all things military from the time he left home until he decided to dodge the Draft by enlisting, but the Artillerymen swallowed this whopper and hooted again. The National Guardsmen around him were counting the days until Jan.1, 1942, when their year would be up and they would be freed from the military. Scofield answered them with an Army cliche:
“Aw, you never had it so good!” he said.
There was more hooting, but several recognized truth in this. They had grown up in the miserable 1930s and this was the first time in their young lives that they could be sure of three meals a day and a roof over their head most of the time.
The food, he found, was well enough prepared, but there wasn’t much of it. Scofield and most of the rest of Baker Battery headed for the Post Exchange after chow. Most would have obtained passes and gone to town if it had not been almost the end of the month and their pay of $21--less laundry and insurance premium--exhausted.
Ten replacements had been assigned to the Battery. Scofield saw Matt Weiss, a burly blond who had shared a seat with him on the train. After he had bought a beer and some peanuts, he sat down beside Weiss at a table.
“What job did you get?” Weiss asked.
“Cannoneer. What did you get?”
“Instruments section. We man the observation post. It’ll be dangerous if we go to war, but there’s no heavy lifting.”
The last two words revived Scofield’s depression. His father had been transferred from the Cavalry to the Field Artillery, where he commanded a Battery in the 1930s. Quinn had seen Cannoneers at work. They did heavy lifting. He gulped his beer and went for another one.
Weiss had graduated from a Catholic university in the Spring and had enlisted partly from patriotism and partly because he would be drafted pretty soon anyway.
“Why didn’t you apply for a commission?” Scofield asked.
“I’d have to stay in longer. If there’s no war, I’ll be out in a year.”
Scofield decided he had found someone he could buddy with. So far, Weiss had not spoken a single one of the words which were considered unprintable in those days. He was intelligent and educated.
“What do you think of the outfit?”
“The instruments section is all right, but most of the rest of them belong in cages.”
Weiss had not spoken loudly but a man at the table behind him apparently had very sharp ears.
“I heard that, you German bastard!” he shouted. “Let’s see you put me in a cage!”
Weiss rose and turned to meet the challenger, a tall, rangy, dark-haired man with a savage grin on his face. A slow smile spread across Weiss’ face.
“Well, now...” he said, happily.
He didn’t raise his fists, but his elbows bent slightly, his feet spread apart and his shoulders came forward.
Scofield grabbed his beer and started edging away from the scene of impending carnage.