To the Last Man - Jeff Shaara [246]
“Oh, dammit! Dammit! Dammit!”
The voice came from outside, and Temple heard laughter, the other greeting a shadowy form as he stumbled into the barn. The man’s face caught the moonlight now, and Temple saw it was Ballou.
“Son of a bitch! I did it again, stepped right into that manure pile!”
The odor drifted over all of them, and Scarabelli pulled his blanket over his head, said, “Aaaagh. I told you. Damned savages. Every house I seen, a big damned shit pile by the door. Get the hell away from me, you damned stinking cowboy!”
Ballou kicked at the ground, then scuffed his feet against the side of the barn.
“For once I agree with Jersey. What the hell these people saving their manure for? They use it for money? Seems the bigger manure pile a man’s got, the more important he is to his neighbors. This ain’t horse manure either. I been kickin’ that off my boots since I was a kid. I don’t know what the hell this stuff is. This is one damned weird place.”
The voice came from under the blanket again. “I don’t want to know what it is, Cowboy. Damned savages. Go throw your boots in a river somewhere.”
Temple watched as Ballou continued his strange dance in the moonlight, rubbing and scuffing his boots against any surface he could find. Temple began to laugh now, said, “Won’t do much good, Henry. It won’t come off. It’s like back home. Cow butter. Soaks right in.”
Ballou exhausted his efforts, sat down in the hay, causing another groan from Scarabelli, who said, “Cow butter? You are all sick bastards.”
Ballou rubbed hay on his boots, one last attempt to clean them, said, “I hope it’s just cow butter. Not so sure.”
Ballou was Temple’s age, but he looked older, dark, with sunburned skin. He had come to the Corps from Montana, inspiring all manner of questions from the rest of them. Temple wasn’t even sure where Montana was, had thought it was some fictional place, the stuff of dime novels about Indians and mythical heroes, the land of Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull. Henry Ballou was proof that someone actually lived there.
Ballou did not talk much of home, had joined the Marines for reasons he seemed reluctant to explain, a young man escaping from something he kept to himself. Temple had liked him immediately, appreciated Scarabelli’s nickname, Cowboy. It perfectly suited the young man with the angular walk, Temple imagining Ballou to be as comfortable on a horse as he was in uniform. But for the long weeks they had been together in training, Temple had learned that Ballou had never been on a horse at all, knew very little about Indians. Despite Temple’s hopes for stories of the Wild West, Ballou was just another young man from a strangely foreign place who, like Temple, had joined the Corps because it was the right thing to do.
Scarabelli was the talker, the most nervous man Temple had ever met. He spoke long and often about Jersey City and Bayonne and Hoboken, and especially New York, places as foreign to Temple as the mysteries of Montana. When their squad was preparing to sail from New York, Scarabelli had been met by a vast crowd of smiling and teary-eyed relatives, a cluster of small round women in plain dresses, dark-haired men in ill-fitting suits, children who stared in wide-eyed respect at the young man’s uniform. For days afterward, Scarabelli had told anyone who would listen how proud his family was, that he was the first of this immense flock of Italian immigrants to serve their newly adopted country. Days before they had embarked, Scarabelli had bragged about the grand tour he would give his new friends, and Temple had felt a fire of curiosity for New York, nervous reluctance to glimpse the temptations that so terrified the people back home in Florida, especially his mother. But the Marines had been hustled quickly from train to ship, and the tour could not happen. The only taste of that very different place was the sweet sadness from Scarabelli’s family, one very vocal part of a large crowd of onlookers, held back by a line of guards as the young men boarded the ship.
“All right, enough talk! Breakfast