From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [401]
So many years. So many scars. Where the hell they all go to anyway?
There was the scar he got in the fist fight in Washington, from an uppercut right on the point of the chin, and he went all fuzzy and then he was on the ground, and the other guy was gone, and the scar turned coal black afterwards and he never could understand why unless it was because of his beard but he had another scar in his beard where Koleman’d knocked two teeth through his lower lip when Koleman beat him for the Class I Championship and that one never turned coal black. Maybe when he fell he got dirt in it maybe, the one on his chin.
The lights were on in the house. That was good. That meant he wouldnt have to use his key and he couldnt remember if he’d brought his key or not. You see, he hadnt meant to go over the hill and come up here tonight. He had meant to go right back to the Post. That was what he had meant to do.
He knocked with the brass knocker and Alma opened the door in person, Georgette right behind her.
“Oh my God!” Alma said.
“Jesus Christ!” Georgette said.
“Hello, Baby,” he said; “Hi, Georgette. Long time no see”; and fell in through the door.
Book Five
The Re-enlistment Blues
Chapter 45
THE PAIN DID NOT really start until the next morning. The next morning, of course, it was worse. The stiffness had come by then, and with it the soreness and dull pain of healing that was always worse than the sharp clear pain of getting it. He was a pretty sick boy for a couple of days.
But then pain was a thing he knew about. Pain was like an old friend he had not seen for a long time. He knew how to handle pain. You had to lie down with pain, not draw back away from it. You let yourself sort of move around the outside edge of pain like with cold water until you finally got up your nerve enough to take yourself in hand. Then you took a deep breath and dove in and let yourself sink down in it clear to the bottom. And after you had been down inside pain a while you found that like with cold water it was not nearly as cold as you had thought it was when your muscles were cringing themselves away from the outside edge of it as you moved around it trying to get up your nerve. He knew pain. Pain was like ring-fighting; if you kept going back in there long enough you finally got an instinct for it; you never knew just when it came, or where it came from, but suddenly you discovered you had it and had had it a long time without knowing it. That was the way it was with pain.
Pain was like with a village at the foot of a mountain that had a cathedral built on its shoulder high up over the town and the bells in the cathedral never stopped playing “The Old Rugged Cross.”
He had come to on a divan about five-thirty, rising fighting up out of exhausted sleep with the impression that they had him back in the Stockade and Major Thompson was branding him under the left arm with a large capital P for the killing of Fatso, thinking it was the same as the stencil they used on the fatigue jackets except they were branding him for life with it but every time he tried to jerk away from it the brand only burned that much deeper.
Then he had seen Georgette sitting in the big armchair watching him unwinkingly and Alma lying back in the wicker chaise-longue with her eyes closed above the dark circles. They had undressed him and cleaned him up and put a compress over the cut and bandaged it on with gauze around his chest.
“What time is it?” he said.
“About five-thirty,” Georgette had said, and got up.
Alma jerked upright wide awake, her closed eyes coming wide open staring at nothing without sleepiness, and then followed Georgette over to him on the divan.
“How do you feel?” Georgette said.
“Pretty sore. This bandage pretty tight.”
“We made it extra tight on purpose,” Alma said. “You lost quite a bit of blood. Tomorrow we’ll take it off and put on one not so tight.”
“How does it look?”
“Not so bad,” Georgette said. “It could have been a lot worse. The muscles isnt severed. You owe a great debt of thanks to