The Thrown-Out Dinner

Eddie Brennan knew Christmas was ruined the moment the battalion cook came out of his hut with the turkey in his arms, the way you carry a sick child, and threw it in the garbage can.

It was Saturday, December 23, 1944, around four in the afternoon, in an English camp where it hadn't stopped raining since they got there at the end of November. The light was already going. Behind the cook came two helpers, each carrying a kettle of potatoes, and they dumped them on the black ground in front of the door without even looking for a clean spot. The steam hung over the pile for a while, and then there was only the smell.

“They're crazy,” Eddie said.

“They've got orders,” Tommy said.

Tommy Malloy always had an explanation. He'd had one at seven, on Fernwood Street, when the glazier came around to complain about a ball that wasn't his, and Tommy had explained very calmly, hands behind his back, that it was Eddie's ball, but that Eddie hadn't meant it. He was the calm one of the two. Eddie was everything else.

The orders had come at noon. Nobody knew any more than what was going around in the line at mail call: the division was leaving tonight, for France. There was talk of Belgium, of the German breakthrough in the Ardennes, of whole regiments wiped out up there in the snow, regiments that would have to be replaced. The K Company sergeant had said he didn't know a thing and didn't want to hear from anybody, and that was how you knew it was bad.

“Three weeks they've been talking about this dinner,” Eddie said. “Three weeks. There was cranberry sauce. I saw the cans.”

“You'll get cranberry sauce in France.”

“In France they eat frogs.”

“Then you'll eat frogs.”

Eddie started laughing, because it was easier than the rest, and two guys from the platoon who were going by with their packs started laughing too without knowing why. He had that gift, and red hair that announced him from a block away. His mother said he'd been born talking and hadn't finished the sentence yet.

---

The trucks came after dark. They drove for a long time, blackout lights on, through country nobody could see, the men sitting face to face on the benches, rifles between their knees, packs under their feet. Nobody slept. Somebody at the back was smoking, though it wasn't allowed, and the cigarette glowed and faded like a tiny lighthouse.

And then there was Southampton.

All Eddie saw of Southampton was the docks. Endless sheds, cranes standing still against the sky, railroad tracks where you had to watch your feet, and soldiers everywhere. He had never seen so many soldiers at once, not even in training down in Alabama. They came in by the truckload, got unloaded, got lined up, got forgotten. Companies had gotten lost on the way. Platoons were waiting for a lieutenant who never showed. The wind came in off the sea and went through his overcoat as if it were made of paper.

They were kept waiting six hours.

Six hours standing, or sitting on their packs, on the concrete, beside a locked shed. They'd been told: you don't move. So they didn't move. Some slept sitting up, helmets over their eyes. Others played cards by the light of a flashlight with a handkerchief over it. A guy from Texas told the same story about a mule three times, and it wasn't funny the first time.

Eddie would have liked to play his harmonica. He could feel it against his ribs, in the inside left pocket of his overcoat, where he always kept it, a Hohner Marine Band his father had given him for his sixteenth birthday, with a card that said: Go make noise somewhere besides the house. But an officer came down the line every so often, and Eddie knew the kind of officer who takes harmonicas away.

So he talked.

He talked about Fernwood Street, about the school ball field, about the Kowalski girl who'd married a sailor from Cleveland, about Mr. Hennessy's Packard, which only started if you talked to it nicely. Tommy listened, looking at the black water between two ships. He hardly said anything. Now and then he smiled, and Eddie knew that smile meant: keep going.

Around one in the morning, Tommy said:

“My mom's going to set a place for me tomorrow.”

“Why would she do that?”

“Because she does. Ever since I left. Peggy wrote me. She puts my plate out, she catches herself, she puts it away.”

Eddie couldn't think of anything to say, and that didn't happen often.

---

At two o'clock, things started moving.

There was no order that anybody really heard. There was a stir at the end of the dock, men getting up, others following them, and soon the whole mass was shuffling toward a gangway lit by blue lamps. They didn't go aboard by company. They went aboard the way they'd come in. A sergeant Eddie had never seen before was counting out loud and cutting the line at random with his arm: you, over there, you, the other way. There were two ships. Part of K Company went to one, part to the other, and Eddie watched faces he'd known since Camp Blanding disappear into the dark without a chance to say goodbye.

He grabbed Tommy by the sleeve and didn't let go.

The ship was called the Léopoldville. Eddie heard a sergeant at the foot of the gangway shout it, reading off a sheet, and he thought it sounded like the name of a pastry. She was a big gray ship, probably older than he was, smelling of paint, cooking, and fuel oil. A sailor in a knit cap who didn't speak English showed them the way with his hand, always down.

They went down.

Iron stairs, narrow and steep, where the packs caught on the railings. One deck, then another. A smell that got thicker with every level. And finally a big low room toward the stern, under yellow light, that somebody called Hold No. 4, and that must once have carried something besides men. There were benches bolted to the floor, tables, and hooks in the ceiling with canvas hammocks hanging from them, rolled up.

“Hammocks,” Eddie said. “We're in the British navy.”

“Belgian,” a guy said.

“Same thing.”

“No,” Tommy said.

The hammocks were gone in three minutes. The smart ones had figured out right away that there wouldn't be enough to go around, and that whoever was left would sleep on the benches or on the floor between the packs. Eddie fought for two hammocks side by side, in the compartment a stenciled sign marked F-4. He really fought: he pulled on a piece of canvas somebody else was pulling on too, they looked at each other, the other guy was bigger, Eddie made a crack about his mother, and the other guy, stunned, let go. Tommy took the hammock next to it without a word while the others were still arguing.

“It's always me doing the fighting,” Eddie said.

“It's always you enjoying it.”

They hung the hammocks. It took three tries to climb in. The canvas closed around you like a pea pod. Eddie took off his overcoat and rolled it under his head, then took it back, because it was cold, and put it on again. He patted it twice, flat, with his left hand, over the inside pocket. That was his habit. He'd done it every night since Camp Blanding, the way other men cross themselves: the harmonica was there.

All around them the hold was still filling up. Men were looking for a spot. Some lay down on the tables. Others sat against the bulkhead, hugging their packs. More kept coming. Eddie tried to count heads and gave up at a hundred.

---

He didn't sleep.

He wrote a letter in his head. He did that a lot. He wrote letters he never sent, to people who weren't expecting them, and sometimes he actually wrote them out in a notebook and then tore out the page. Tonight's was for Mrs. Malloy.

Dear Mrs. Malloy,

I'm writing you from a ship I can't tell you the name of, but it's named like a cake. Tommy's asleep in the hammock next to mine. He snores, I'll tell Peggy. We're going to France. I don't know where after that. I wanted to tell you not to worry. I'll bring him back to you in one piece. I promised my dad and I'm promising you too, even if you didn't ask me to.

He stopped there. He thought it was a good letter. He wouldn't send it. Mrs. Malloy didn't like people promising her things. She said promises were for people who had the time.

Tommy wasn't snoring. He wasn't asleep, either. Eddie could tell by his breathing.

“Tommy.”

“What.”

“Nothing.”

“Go to sleep.”

Around four, Eddie needed to take a leak and had to climb out of the hammock. He went all the way up the stairs to the top deck, because the latrines below were already past using. Outside it was dark and it was cold, a dry cold that stung the inside of his nose. On the dock the loading was still going on. Columns of men were still coming aboard, and at the foot of the gangway other men were doing the work: Black soldiers in fatigues, loading crates, paying out cables, calling things to each other Eddie couldn't make out. He knew they were there, in every port. He had never talked to one. In Alabama you didn't talk to the Black soldiers. You didn't talk to them in Akron either, come to think of it.

He stayed by the rail a while with his hands in his armpits, shivering.

One of the Black soldiers was coming up the gangway with a stack of gray blankets on his shoulder for an officer waiting higher up. He passed Eddie, stopped, looked at him for a second. Eddie must have looked like a lost kid. He was nineteen and looked sixteen.

The man pulled a blanket off the stack and held it out to him.

Eddie took it. He meant to say thanks and didn't, because the man was already talking to him, low, a single word, or two, in a Southern accent so thick that all Eddie caught was the music of it. He shouldered his stack and kept climbing.

Eddie went back down into Hold No. 4 with the blanket around his shoulders. He spread it over Tommy, who didn't say anything, and he kept his overcoat.

For a long time, in the dark, he wondered what the man had meant.