She laughed and said, “They haven’t any drugs either, much. As for their medical officer, I fancy he will be wondering how to cure himself.”
Still, seeing her on the other side of the water, I felt strong as three men, and I shouted to the Ox, “What are we waiting for?”
Thomas said, “Talk is cheap, Ox. The enemy will be here in an hour. I vote we scatter and hide.”
The Ox said, “They know we’ll have come here. There wasn’t any other place we could come to. The woods are too thin hereabout. We’ve got to get across.”
Big Steve said, “Ambush ‘em—fight it out!”
The Ox said, “And the dynamite, the detonators, the fuses? I am going to blow up the transportation bridge.”
All the time his eyes were darting here and there. He was getting everything into one simple picture in his mind—the river, the distance, the piles, the trees and the scattered timbers of the old footbridge on the bank. The clouds were gathering. More heavy weather would break again soon.
“Axes,” the Ox said. “Axes and machetes.” We each carried one or the other. “And rope, rope!” Every one of us had a length of strong cord tied around his waist— generally, that is. But on this fast raid most of us had traveled light. Among us we had no more than thirty feet or so of tough cord.
“Now,” the Ox said, “we want a few long light logs. Martin, take my ax. There’s something I’ve got to do.”
He picked up John and carried him up the bank. There he put him down again. It took only a second. Then he ran back, snatched away Big Steve’s automatic rifle and took it to John, and said, “Have you strength enough left to watch the woods?”
“Yes.”
But John was dying, his back against a tree and his knees bent up to support his wounded body. His eyes were in black hollows, as if they had burnt their way in.
Then I forgot about him. There was wood on the bank. I picked out a young spruce that the water had carried down from the mountain. The ax was a good one. I took off the top of the tree, and it cut like cheese. Then the lower part above the roots. I may be young, but I was bred hard. Still, when I tried to lift the trunk it was too heavy for me, although I was working the way some men pray. But then the Ox was with me. He picked up the log all alone and carried it to where one of the piles of the bridge stuck out of the mud on the bank.
“The water is rising,” Steve said.
Thomas said, “And the enemy is coming.”
The Ox simply said, “Oh, shut up!”
I wish he were here to tell you what happened then. I know, I saw; but I was working with all my heart and soul. A man is made to work only at one thing at a time. The only people who look left and right are those who weren’t there. John told me once that all the world loves a bridge. In ancient times “Bridge-builder” was one of the highest titles the Romans could offer a man. He told me that there have been steel bridges that spanned oceans. But I shall always believe that the most wonderful bridge ever built or even attempted was the bridge we started to build across that flooding stream with a few bits of line and some fallen trees, with less than an hour to spare and the enemy on our heels.
The Dumb Ox said to me, once, “Actually, son, my name is Clem, but I don’t mind if you call me Ox.”
“I suppose they call you that because you are strong and patient,” I said.
“And dumb, and slow. Also, because I am always chewing on a bit of grass or a straw. I can’t see the things smart people see. I’m not sensitive—a goad in the ass is about as much as I can feel. I am brainless. I know what is right and I know what is wrong, but the whys and the wherefores are not for my thick skull.”
And so it seemed until there was this problem. The cleverest among us couldn’t foresee a cloudburst up on the mountain. But it had happened, and nobody knew what to do about it except the Ox. Later, when there was time to talk, he said to me, “Well, we had to get across and keep the stuff dry. What must be done must be done, with whatever comes to hand. If you have years of time and millions of money and thousands of workmen, build with steel and concrete, and good luck to you. If you have only got a bit of rope, a few sticks and sixty minutes—do what you can with them, boy, and be thankful. There is always a way to deal with things. Despair is for the enemy. To hope on and manage yourself, that is to be one of the free men.”
He seemed to have room for only one thought in his head at a time. Now it was to find a way across the water before the enemy came up. “It was all very well for Thomas to say scatter and hide,” the Ox said. But, as he pointed out, there was no place to hide. Downstream were the rapids, gone wild in the flood. Upstream, water that was dangerous even on a quiet day. We had counted on going back the way we had come. But there was no more footbridge. “To stay and fight it out would have been all very well,” the Ox said; we might have killed a few dozen of the enemy and then died ourselves. But we had a responsibility. Dead men carry no fuses. “The enemy would have started out with a rush,” the Ox said, “but they couldn’t know our woods the way we do, with all their maps and their spies. We could move fast over the trail we took. They would go slower and slower, suspecting an ambush ...”
He stood there scratching his head and looking about him like a workman who is being paid by the hour. “Ambush, ambush,” he said, and went up the bank again to where John was watching the woods. What he did there was like this: He tied two machine pistols to two trees about thirty yards apart. He fastened a length of twine to the trigger of each, and lashed the loose ends to John’s elbows, saying, all in a breath, “If you see or hear them, John, bring your elbows together. Those guns are cocked. There will be a burst in their direction from two sides.”
John whispered, “And hit what?”
The Ox said, “Nobody. But they’ll think the woods are full of us on two sides. When they come forward, you use your own gun.”
“Yes,” John said.
Then the Ox came running and showed us what we had to do. First of all we had to make fast a log to the pile at our bank. This had to be done quickly, because the pile would be under water any minute now. This log had to lie from the pile on the bank to the first pile in the stream; one of us had to crawl out and lash it down. The man who lashed down the end of the first log to the second pile would have to stand there, balancing himself like a tightrope walker and catch one end of a second tree trunk. Holding this, he would have to drag it toward him so that the farther end of the log rested on the second pile in the stream.
There is a game we used to play with tiny slivers of wood—spilikins. You pick your spilikins one by one out of a jumbled pile. Make one false move and you lost the game. Now we were playing with logs, and the game was a matter of life and death.
Let me make it clear. Here is twenty feet of white water. You must lay three tree trunks across it, supporting them on balks of rotten wood, one on each bank, sticking out of the mud, and two in mid-current. At any moment there will come a wind strong enough to blow you off the earth and a downpour of rain to swell the stream. You have three-quarters of an hour, a bit of rope, and nobody to work with you on the other side but an old cripple and a girl.
As the Ox said later, “Actually, you know, you can take an interest in a problem like that. Thank God I am an odd-jobman! . . . Make no hero of me, my boy. There is nothing heroic in doing a job in an emergency.”
I said, “Ah, but what if you hadn’t?”
He said, “I should have been a bungler, don’t you see, a failure. I won’t be made a hero of. I don’t believe in heroes —I’ve met too many of them. You must do what you can as well as you can. That’s your duty as a free man. Son, there is only black or white—meaning, there is only one alternative to bravery, and that is cowardice. If you do less than your utmost you are a coward. You must put into your work all God gave you. The only alternative to crossing the water would have been to stay on the wrong side of it. Which would have been wrong.”