I saw the judge that Tuesday after Armistice Day. Getting locked up on a holiday weekend meant an extra night in jail. The courthouse was closed that Monday, but the parades had come close enough for us to hear the marching bands. That music was worse than the waiting and the silence in the jailhouse, waiting to see what they gave me. Wondering. Praying.
Every man in that corridor that Tuesday morning was quiet, because the deputies watching us demanded as much. We waited our turns, lined up along the windows. It was the first decent light I had seen in three days, so I stole a face full of whatever I could see. Down on the courthouse steps, a growing line of soldiers stood with their wives-to-be. More of them gathered on the narrow lawn, all ready for their turns before some other judge. It had become regular business downtown, the courthouse weddings. A marriage license was free for a man in uniform. Because so many came, a clerk would draw names from a hat, and a little bit of whooping would come after she read each one. They all brought flowers, and petals covered the courthouse grass the same as the leaves did. Newlyweds left in cars with ration cans tied to the bumpers, and that tapping on Ripley Street cobblestones carried farther than the voices.
Bunting covered every bit of courtroom wood and railing, upstairs and down. The judge had his picture on the wall, and his chest was poked out and swollen. Every lawyer in the courthouse had come home with a medal on him, it seemed. The colors that lined every street between Paris and home were meant to make us all feel victorious. I had carried that bit of pride, too, before they dressed me in jailhouse colors. They had taken my uniform from me before they snapped my picture, turned me sideways and snapped again. They lied to the world and acted like I had never fought, but Lord knows I had. And in those moments when I did my cold and heavy remembering, I was again in that place.
I had made it up Utah Beach with the Battery D boys of the 333rd. After Brittany I spent that last winter of the war in Bastogne. I saw Europe from a truck with our gun towed behind. We’d named ours Joe Louis, and if somebody asked why, we’d say, “Because he was quick to put a German on his ass.” I had eleven men in my crew, and we could get all six tons turned, loaded, and fired in five minutes flat. It was a dance we learned in Camp Gruber, Oklahoma, like that two-stepping the black folks did out west. We fought our way through France and into the Ardennes Forest, and in the winter of 1944, we took our place in that line of American guns, eighty-five miles’ worth.
Big-gun fighting was a different kind of war. From that far away, I heard the battle before I saw it. The boom of howitzers had become a sweet sound to me. Our guns talked back to Hitler, getting the last word in when we put our shells on a man’s head. It was a certain kind of screaming, outgoing fire, that told us that our lines were still holding.
But by December, so close to Christmas to have me thinking about home, the Germans had made it through the lines. “The Bulge” was what they called it. The Nazis had gathered a quarter million men in the woods. Coming at us that fast, the big guns couldn’t do much. Batteries A, B, and D were ordered to retreat and make a new line ten miles back. The four guns of Battery C stayed behind to cover us. When they followed, we planned to do the same and cover them. Each rumble of their guns was good news that told us they were still fighting. The quiet told us they’d been overrun.
People talk about peace and quiet like they’re kindred. The Ardennes Forest was the quietest place I’d ever known, and quiet was where the SS waited for us. Quiet was where those boys from Battery C ended up. I learned that quiet was not really quiet at all. It’s the sound of friends tortured and dying too far away for anybody to hear. I prayed for them the same thing I’d prayed for myself. I hoped to die quickly and that whatever cut through me came like lightning without enough time for me to shake my head.
But I knew better when we saw the bodies of the eleven men who died at Wereth. The townspeople said a family had hidden them in their barn, but a neighbor had told the SS. The eleven soldiers, not a gun among them, did what they were taught and gave themselves up for surrender. The Nazis marched them toward a field, and that was the last the people in Wereth saw of them.
When the spring came and the snow thawed, we saw the ugly show the Germans had made of the killing. The folk said it had just looked like another mound in the snow. A drift, or a gun position covered over by the winter. When we heard about the bodies, we drove as fast as we could. An army chaplain looked for tags so he would know what name to call the men when he prayed. When I saw the bodies, I couldn’t even close my eyes to pray on them, because I searched their faces, trying to recognize one friend from the other.
The Germans had taken their time, bayoneting them and cutting off fingers. Those spared the knife were beaten. Maybe the marks had come from rifle butts or boots, but whatever the weapon was, they’d struck them over and over. My mind filled up with that sickest kind of wondering, thinking about who had to be the first to feel it coming down. I wondered who was the last and had to see the rest die before he did.
I had been around my kin out in the country, and I had seen enough hog killing to know the propriety of such things. The particular way that we got quiet when the knife went in, because hog or not, it was still blood.
Two of the dead, George Davis and William Pritchett, came from Alabama. George talked about Montgomery like it was a country boy’s metropolis. I told them they ought to visit when we got home. George said, “If I go back.” At first I thought he was talking about dying, but he was talking about the opposite, living like a man who could go where he pleased. He thought about Detroit, New York maybe.
“Can’t say for sure,” he told me. “At least not yet, but somewhere.”
Standing in that field, I tried so hard to remember their voices, but all I could hear was that wartime quiet, how the world sounded to a dead man’s ears. My mind always went back to the worst of it. Victory had not been enough, and neither had the time that passed. They were resting beneath the crosses in the Henri Cemetery, but I still saw them in that mud.
So when I saw that man jump onto the Empire Theater’s stage, heard the weight of his pipe on that hardwood, and then saw him swing for Nat Cole’s skull, I thought of other friends ambushed by men who’d been hiding and waiting. The dead quiet that came over that room when Nat Cole stopped the music was enough to stop my heart. And then came the ruckus and the screaming and me right in the middle of it. All I did was stand between a friend and his trouble.
My lawyer wore an Air Medal on his chest and one of those Tuscaloosa bow ties worn by the courthouse crowd. Johnson was his name, and he called me Sergeant Weary. He looked at a man in the back of the room. Johnson had a look on his young face like he himself was scared of getting put on that prison jitney with me.
“Attorney general’s here, and, well—” he told me in a grave sort of whispering. “Seems like they want to make a show of it. They gave the other man three years.”
I figured I might get thirty days’ labor, but if the white boy got three years, then, Lord. When the months in my mind turned to years, the chain between my feet got twice as narrow, because balancing was all that I could manage. I put my knuckles on the corner of that table and tried to breathe and swallow. No wind wanted to come into me, and that jailhouse breakfast was about ready to come back up.
“How many they got in mind for me?”
“Like I said. Seems like they want to—”
He was being so careful with the bad news, which made it all the worse.
“The state’s attorney,” he said, nodding toward the man at the table across from us, a Bronze Star on his lapel, “he wants to give you ten years.”
He laid it out. Inciting a riot. Five years. Aggravated assault. Three years. Reckless endangerment. Two years. Consecutive terms that added up to ten. I had turned twenty-six years old in a field in Belgium, two weeks after V-E Day. I would turn thirty-six, if I made it, in Kilby Prison. The number got my head to shaking inside and out.
“I need to fight it, then,” I told him.
“Sergeant Weary, I’d be doing you a disservice if I let you in front of a Ripley Street jury. They’ll give you twenty years just as sure as I’m standing here.”
The lawyer said he couldn’t keep me out of Kilby, but he said he could save me some years if I took his advice. If the judge asked me a question, I should say “Yes, sir” or “No, sir.” Don’t say a word unless His Honor invited me to. Invited. I had heard the story of a boy who had talked after the judge told him not to speak, and he got an extra year for every word. So I stood in the middle of all that quiet, waiting for His Honor to say how many years he was taking from me.
“Son,” the judge said. In the wrong man’s mouth, that word came at me like venom. “Son, you got anything to say for yourself?”
“No, sir.” Calling that man “sir” was one of the biggest lies I’ve ever told.
After he took those years, that judge kept on talking, about honor and service and whatnot. But my ears were filled with my wartime hearing, that ringing that came in the middle of everything I heard. Some days all I heard was that thin, sharp sound that was like something drilling a little deeper into my ear each time. It was on account of my gun, six tons’ worth that I had learned to use like a razor. Some called that sound an affliction, but I had learned to love it, because that was the sound of me killing men, Germans, hell-bent on doing to me what that judge had done.
I didn’t know what came of that howitzer, but it was probably being dragged down a street somewhere on Armistice Day. I was unarmed when I jumped onto that stage. It was a fair fight with me standing between a friend and his trouble. When that judge took my years, all my hands could do was keep shaking, not from fear, but from all the fight that was still in me with nowhere to go.