She could easily remember the feeling. One afternoon long ago it had overcome her when she happened upon an American soldier. It was one of the final days of the war. She had been on her feet for three days and nights, having eaten nothing but chrysanthemum leaves and wild onions, sleeping a few anxious hours at most in a ruined, roofless cottage, and at the sight of the American down the road, a couple hundred meters away, she managed to leap down off the road and run into the gaseous knee-high muck of the rice fields where he wouldn’t bother to pursue her. She was certainly delirious and half mad with thirst and her vision had been hinging and unhinging for a couple of days and when she looked back to the road he had transformed into a scouting party and turned toward her. The lone man raised his hands to show he was unarmed but she saw him instead as the herald of death, finally come to embrace her. She slipped then and fell and her mouth filled up instantly with the mud and as she tried to raise herself from the muck it only drew her in. She could not die. She was utterly, miserably wretched and her body was acceding to the darkness but she would not now let anyone else have dominion over her.
But then she could breathe; he’d plucked her up from the mud by her shirt, ripping a sleeve at the shoulder. She hit him in the chest and tried to scratch his eyes but in a flash he struck her back; when she came to she was lying in the shade of a rusted truck carcass that had been pushed off the road, some thirty meters from where they had been. The side of her face stung. But her shirt was still on, and her trousers were as well, and the American was sitting on the metal frame of the seats, torn out of the truck cab, chewing on a stalk of hay. She began to crawl away and was trying to get up on her feet when he rattled a yellow object in his hand; it was a pack of Chiclets. He tossed it at her feet and before she could open the end fold of the flat box, her mouth watered so fulsomely that she had to cough before she could stuff in all the pieces. Their hard shells cracked and then burst with sweetness.
“Take it easy, sister,” he said. He told her his name, and asked hers.
She knew English well enough that she could have answered him, but the deliciousness of the mass was so overwhelming she couldn’t help but swallow, the sticky strings of it catching at the back of her throat. She gagged, reaching into her mouth with her fingers, and then finally threw it up. When she picked up the shiny clot from the dirt to try to eat it again, he told her there was food where he was going. Other children, too. It was an orphanage, in fact, ten kilometers ahead. He had risen and stepped up onto the embanked road, his rucksack hitched over his shoulder. She could come with him if she liked.
She waited until he was well down the road, a full fifty meters ahead of her, before she began to trail him. She was chewing the gum again, now gristly with dirt. He turned and saw that she was following him and beckoned her forward with a wave as he walked slowly in reverse. She slowed as well to keep her distance, stopping when he stopped. He shook his head and resumed his march. But then a sudden swirling wind kicked up dust into the dry, hot air, swathing him in an obscuring cloud, and for a moment her heart skipped wildly with the fear that he was gone. Or wholly imaginary. But the dust cleared and his form became visible again, and she quickened her stride to follow him.
THREE
WAR IS A STERN TEACHER, his father would sometimes say to him, quoting Thucydides, the sodden, light-boned man slung over Hector’s shoulder in their typical end-of-Friday-night lurch. Hector always helped him limp home from the workingman’s pub in their town of Ilion, New York, the normally sweet Jackie Brennan having drunk too much and turned a late night bitter-sour. Hector, fifteen years old in 1945, was still as sober as a ghost, despite having drunk a half-dozen grown men into stammering idiots, sleepers on the barroom sawdust.
“What did I say?”
Hector would repeat it, flatly and dryly.
“Good. Never go to war, son. Please never do.”
By the end of those evenings, with his father loaded up on the rye he had won on bets taken against Hector in drinking bouts, he would have to gird him all the way home, his father’s breath earthy and spiced with the cheroots he smoked all night and the pickled pearl onions he popped like almonds, both of which he swore counteracted the liquor.
His father might sing a protest ballad like “The Dying Rebel,” but on particularly long nights he grew sweaty and pain-faced and had to stop a couple times to retch into the gutter or the thickets of some Remington Arms Company manager’s manicured boxwood hedge, and then in mumbles berate Hector for his “righteous silence,” or for the “boyish piety” of his soberness. But by the time their footfalls played on the sagging plank steps of the Brennan family porch, the boy bearing most of his father’s weight, he would sometimes say his son’s name aloud, over and over, in a kind of monkish ecstasy: Hector, my Hector. And then, if consciousness still graced him after Hector let him fall upon the parlor room sofa, he would look up and ask if he wished to hear again why he’d named him so, to call him thus instead of, say, Achilles, a more glorious appellation?
“Okay, Da, tell me.”
“Because a man wants a son for a son, and has no use for a champion.”
After reading the epic in school, Hector pointed out to him that his namesake was killed, his city doomed to ruin, his father eventually slaughtered as well.
“No matter, boy,” his father told him. “They tell us stories not to live by but to change. Make our own. Look at you. You’ll live forever, anyone with eyes can see that. Just never go to war.”
Jackie Brennan, of course, could never go to war; unlike Hector, he was a wisp of a man, and had a right foot turned permanently sideways at birth, his right hand unnaturally angled as well, while smallish and stunted besides, like that of a tiny, elderly woman. But he was cleverer than most, and had he been born to a family of greater means and aspiration he might have been a state’s attorney or college professor, as he was well spoken and quick and had firm notions (for better or worse) of what people should hear. When World War II broke out and legions of Ilion’s sons signed up, his was one of the few mutterings of skepticism, if not dissent, though at first Jackie mostly kept his feelings about the war to himself, or else lectured to his weary-eared wife and daughters, and to Hector, who in fact didn’t mind listening to him make his roundabout arguments in his bright, resonant baritone. He loved him, but unlike most other boys whose love for their fathers was predicated on fear and misplaced idolatry, his was as for a favorite uncle, if deeper, a love that recognized the man’s foibles and numerous failings and saw them as distinctive rather than sorry and pathetic.
But there was a limit to that view, and it came at the pub; after Jackie Brennan got his belly wash of beer and whiskey he grew overly voluble, his voice taking on a higher, more insistent pitch. The war was ever weighing on his spirits. In the pub, he might warmly address a group of young men in uniform, after not paying them any attention all night: “Permit me to buy you fellas another round of drafts, that I might hold up my head and know I did my part!”
The servicemen would raucously accept and make room for him while the regulars miserably eyed one another and Hector, wise to what would happen next. Hector would sit on the periphery until his father cajoled him to come in the circle when the mugs of beer went round, with Jackie serially playing prosperous gentleman, the boastful older brother, and, finally, the knowing comrade in arms. But he had other agendas.