The Things They Carried. Tim O’Brien
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The old man shook his head as if to tell me it wasn’t worth the bother.
‘Dinner at five-thirty,’ he said. ‘You eat fish?’
‘Anything,’ I said.
Elroy grunted and said, ‘I’ll bet.’
We spent six days together at the Tip Top Lodge. Just the two of us. Tourist season was over, and there were no boats on the river, and the wilderness seemed to withdraw into a great permanent stillness. Over those six days Elroy Berdahl and I took most of our meals together. In the mornings we sometimes went out on long hikes into the woods, and at night we played Scrabble or listened to records or sat reading in front of his big stone fireplace. At times I felt the awkwardness of an intruder, but Elroy accepted me into his quiet routine without fuss or ceremony. He took my presence for granted, the same way he might’ve sheltered a stray cat – no wasted sighs or pity – and there was never any talk about it. Just the opposite. What I remember more than anything is the man’s willful, almost ferocious silence. In all that time together, all those hours, he never asked the obvious questions: Why was I there? Why alone? Why so preoccupied? If Elroy was curious about any of this, he was careful never to put it into words.
My hunch, though, is that he already knew. At least the basics. After all, it was 1968, and guys were burning draft cards, and Canada was just a boat ride away. Elroy Berdahl was no hick. His bedroom, I remember, was cluttered with books and newspapers. He killed me at the Scrabble board, barely concentrating, and on those occasions when speech was necessary he had a way of compressing large thoughts into small, cryptic packets of language. One evening, just at sunset, he pointed up at an owl circling over the violet-lighted forest to the west.
‘Hey, O’Brien,’ he said. ‘There’s Jesus.’
The man was sharp – he didn’t miss much. Those razor eyes. Now and then he’d catch me staring out at the river, at the far shore, and I could almost hear the tumblers clicking in his head. Maybe I’m wrong, but I doubt it.
One thing for certain, he knew I was in desperate trouble. And he knew I couldn’t talk about it. The wrong word – or even the right word – and I would’ve disappeared. I was wired and jittery. My skin felt too tight. After supper one evening I vomited and went back to my cabin and lay down for a few moments and then vomited again; another time, in the middle of the afternoon, I began sweating and couldn’t shut it off. I went through whole days feeling dizzy with sorrow. I couldn’t sleep; I couldn’t lie still. At night I’d toss around in bed, half awake, half dreaming, imagining how I’d sneak down to the beach and quietly push one of the old man’s boats out into the river and start paddling my way toward Canada. There were times when I thought I’d gone off the psychic edge. I couldn’t tell up from down, I was just falling, and late in the night I’d lie there watching weird pictures spin through my head. Getting chased by the Border Patrol – helicopters and searchlights and barking dogs – I’d be crashing through the woods, I’d be down on my hands and knees – people shouting out my name – the law closing in on all sides – my hometown draft board and the FBI and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. It all seemed crazy and impossible. Twenty-one years old, an ordinary kid with all the ordinary dreams and ambitions, and all I wanted was to live the life I was born to – a mainstream life – I loved baseball and hamburgers and cherry Cokes – and now I was off on the margins of exile, leaving my country forever, and it seemed so impossible and terrible and sad.
I’m not sure how I made it through those six days. Most of it I can’t remember. On two or three afternoons, to pass some time, I helped Elroy get the place ready for winter, sweeping down the cabins and hauling in the boats, little chores that kept my body moving. The days were cool and bright. The nights were very dark. One morning the old man showed me how to split and stack firewood, and for several hours we just worked in silence out behind his house. At one point, I remember, Elroy put down his maul and looked at me for a long time, his lips drawn as if framing a difficult question, but then he shook his head and went back to work. The man’s self-control was amazing. He never pried. He never put me in a position that required lies or denials. To an extent, I suppose, his reticence was typical of that part of Minnesota, where privacy still held value, and even if I’d been walking around with some horrible deformity – four arms and three heads – I’m sure the old man would’ve talked about everything except those extra arms and heads. Simple politeness was part of it. But even more than that, I think, the man understood that words were insufficient. The problem had gone beyond discussion. During that long summer I’d been over and over the various arguments, all the pros and cons, and it was no longer a question that could be decided by an act of pure reason. Intellect had come up against emotion. My conscience told me to run, but some irrational and powerful force was resisting, like a weight pushing me toward the war. What it came down to, stupidly, was a sense of shame. I did not want people to think badly of me. Not my parents, not my brother and sister, not even the folks down at the Gobbler Cafe. I was ashamed to be there at the Tip Top Lodge. I was ashamed of my conscience, ashamed to be doing the right thing.
Some of this Elroy must’ve understood. Not the details, of course, but the plain fact of crisis.
Although the old man never confronted me about it, there was one occasion when he came close to forcing the whole thing out into the open. It was early evening, and we’d just finished supper, and over coffee and dessert I asked him about my bill, how much I owed so far. For a long while the old man squinted down at the tablecloth.
‘Well, the basic rate,’ he said, ‘is fifty bucks a night. Not counting meals. This makes four nights, right?’
I nodded. I had three hundred and twelve dollars in my wallet.
Elroy kept his eyes on the tablecloth. ‘Now that’s an on-season price. To be fair, I suppose we should knock it down a peg or two.’ He leaned back in his chair. ‘What’s a reasonable number, you figure?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Forty?’
‘Forty’s good. Forty a night. Then we tack on food – say another hundred? Two hundred sixty total?’
‘I guess.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘Too much?’
‘No, that’s fair. It’s fine. Tomorrow, though…I think I’d better take off tomorrow.’
Elroy shrugged and began clearing the table. For a time he fussed with the dishes, whistling to himself as if the subject had been settled. After a second he slapped his hands together.
‘You know what we forgot?’ he said. ‘We forgot wages. Those odd jobs you done. What we have to do, we have to figure out what your time’s worth. Your last job – how much did you pull in an hour?’
‘Not enough,’ I said.
‘A bad one?’
‘Yes. Pretty bad.’
Slowly then, without intending any long sermon, I told him about my days at the pig plant. It began as a straight recitation of the facts, but before I could stop myself I was talking about the blood clots and the water gun and how the smell had soaked into my skin and how I couldn’t wash it away. I went on for a long time. I told him about wild hogs squealing in my dreams, the sounds of butchery, slaughterhouse sounds, and how I’d sometimes wake up with that greasy pig-stink in my throat.
When I was finished, Elroy nodded at me.
‘Well, to be honest,’ he said, ‘when you first showed up here, I wondered about all that. The aroma, I mean. Smelled like you was awful damned fond of pork chops.’ The old man almost smiled. He made a snuffling sound, then sat down with a pencil and a piece of paper. ‘So what’d this crud job pay? Ten bucks an hour? Fifteen?’
‘Less.’
Elroy shook his head. ‘Let’s make it fifteen. You put in twenty-five hours here, easy. That’s three hundred seventy-five bucks total wages. We subtract the two hundred sixty for food and lodging, I still owe you a hundred and fifteen.’
He took four fifties