Last Night - James Salter [38]
— Can you hear what he’s saying?
— Nobody can, the man in front of Newell said. It was Bressi, he realized, Bressi with his hair now white.
— Are you going to the cemetery? Newell asked when the service was over.
— I’ll give you a ride, Bressi told him.
They drove through Alexandria, the car full.
— There’s the church that George Washington attended when he was president, Bressi said. A little later, he said, There’s Robert E. Lee’s boyhood home.
Bressi and his wife lived in Alexandria in a white clapboard house with a narrow front porch and black shutters.
— Who said, “Let us cross the river and rest in the shade of the trees”? he asked them.
No one answered. Newell felt their disdain for him. They were looking away, out the car windows.
— Anybody know? Bressi said. Lee’s greatest tactical commander.
— Shot by his own men, Newell said, almost inaudibly.
— Mistakenly.
— At Chancellorsville, in the dusk.
— It’s not far from here, about thirty miles, Bressi said. He had been first in military history. He glanced in the rearview mirror. How did you happen to know that? Where did you stand in military history?
Newell didn’t answer.
No one spoke.
There was a long line of cars moving slowly, going into the cemetery. People who had already parked walked alongside them. There were more gravestones than one could believe.
Bressi extended an arm and, waving lightly toward an area, said something Newell could not hear. Thill is in that section somewhere, Bressi had said, referring to a Medal of Honor winner.
They walked with many others, toward the end drawn by faint music as if coming from the ancient river itself, the last river, the boatman waiting. The band, in dark blue uniforms, had formed in a small valley. It was playing “Wagon Wheels,” Carry me home . . . The grave was nearby, the fresh earth under a green tarpaulin.
Newell walked as if in a dream. He knew the men around him, but not really. He stopped at a gravestone for Westerveldt’s father and mother, died thirty years apart, buried side by side.
There were faces he thought he recognized during the proceedings, which were long. A thick, folded flag was given to what must have been the widow and her children. Carrying yellow flowers with long stems they filed past the coffin, the family and also others. On an impulse, Newell followed them.
Volleys were being fired. A lone bugle, silvery and pure, began to play taps, the sound drifting over the hills. The retired generals and colonels stood, each with a hand held over his heart. They had served everywhere, though none of them had served time in prison as Newell had. The rape charge against Dardy had been dropped after an investigation, and with Westerveldt’s help Newell had been transferred so he could make another start. Then Jana’s parents in Czechoslovakia needed help and Newell, still a first lieutenant, finally managed to get the money to send to them. Her gratitude was heartfelt.
— Oh, God. I love you! she said.
Naked she sat astride him and, caressing her own buttocks as he lay nearly fainting, began to ride. A night he would never forget. Later there was the charge of having sold radios taken from supply. He was silent at the court-martial. Above all he wished he hadn’t had to be there in uniform, it was like a crown of thorns. He had traded it and the silver bars and class ring to possess her. Of the three letters to the court appealing for leniency and attesting to his character, one was from Westerveldt.
Though the sentence was only a year, Jana did not wait for him. She went off with a man named Rodriguez who owned some beauty parlors. She was still young, she said.
The woman Newell later married knew nothing of all that or almost nothing. She was older than he was with two grown children and bad feet, she could walk only short distances, from the car to the supermarket. She knew he had been in the army—there were some photographs of him in uniform, taken years before,
— This is you, she said. So, what were