THE LIGHTER

There is a lighter on this desk. Silver, English, older than most of the men who admire it; visitors pick it up, because it asks to be picked up, and I light their cigarettes and say "Santa Fe, 1945," and that is all the story they ever get. Every other disgrace in these Papers I have sold across some dinner table, dressed for company. This one I have never told.

The war quit in the middle of August, and the Hill spent the rest of the month finding out what an Army post is with the war subtracted, which is an inventory. The Technical Area ran half-days. Men who in July had been handling the innermost articles of the age sat out on the barracks steps computing discharge points aloud, like housewives over ration books. The typewriters that had built the gadget now typed lists of what it had been built from. And I, who had spent the war keeping other men's records, was kept on to count what the records referred to — a corporal going about with receipt books, wanting signatures.

The lighter I had won in the spring at stud, off a captain of the British mission — a Dunhill, silver, the one article about my person that had ever cost anybody real money. I got more work out of it than the Army got out of me. A man who can put up a good flame at the right instant is remembered as open-handed by men he never bought a drink, and I have lit cigarettes with it for two Presidents since. It has never once missed on the first stroke, which is a record nobody else in my acquaintance has kept.

The twenty-first was a Tuesday. My receipt book wanted a signature from the canyon — my old canyon; I had put in my Saturdays at the far end of it in '44, and the reader has had that story — and the sergeant who could sign it had gone up to supper, so I waited in the wing office with the door ajar and the last light going off the rim. Two doors down the corridor, one of the young civilians had come back from his own supper to finish something before morning. I knew him the way you know a man on a small post: by sight, by section, by his being polite to enlisted men without working at it. An Eastern boy, out of Connecticut by way of an engineering school, with an Armenian name I never once got right; the crew had shortened it to something American, and I had let the shortening do for me.¹

He stopped at the office door going in, patting his pockets, and I stood him a light.

"That's a handsome article," he said.

"A British officer's. He overvalued a pair of jacks."

He laughed, said he had an hour's work he wanted squared away for the morning, and went along the corridor; a door shut; the guard sitting by the far room turned a page of his magazine. I set the lighter on the table beside the receipt book and settled in to wait for my sergeant.

What happened two rooms away I did not see and will not invent; the notes may carry the mechanics, which were never my department. What reached me was this. The light in the corridor changed. It did not flash; it turned — went blue through the frosted pane over the connecting door, the way a lamp changes when the current falters, except that no lamp ever burned that color² — and with it came one short cry, a single syllable, and then the sounds of a man moving heavy things fast.

I have given the reader the inventory of my gifts. The third had no work to do that night — there was no two days' notice; there was no notice at all — but the legs it had trained for twenty years were on duty. They had me through the screen door while my head was still at the table, and I came to myself on the duckboards, walking fast and correctly, a man with an errand, the receipt book still in one hand. The lighter stayed on the table. There was no choosing in that; the hand kept what it held. Behind me a hand bell started up inside the building, and the siren took it from the bell, and before the siren had finished its first rise I was through the wire and going up the road, and the sentry ran past me the other way, toward it.

From up the road I saw the door open and the young man come out of it on his own legs. He walked into the yard and stood still, holding one hand away from his body, the way a man holds something he does not want against his clothes. The guard came out behind him. Somebody went back in for the telephone. A car came down inside the quarter hour and took him up to the post hospital, sitting up.

I rode back on a maintenance truck that had heard the siren and knew nothing else, and I told the driver nothing. There was no warning left in the thing to give — it had been over in less time than it takes to set down — but I will be exact: I did not know that when I climbed aboard, and I said nothing anyway.

The barracks had it by eleven, in the pieces such news travels in. A T/5 off the canyon crew sat down uninvited on the end of my bunk — the war being over, discipline had gone conversational — and said, "You were down there."

"Two rooms off."

"They're saying it's his hands. They're saying they waked every doctor on the post and they're flying a man in besides."

"I'd believe it."

He wanted the light told — the color of it, what it did — and I would not tell it, not out of delicacy; I was tired of owning it already. He carried his questions off to the next bunk, and I lay there wanting a cigarette, and lit it off a borrowed match, because the Dunhill was lying on a table in a building that men were walking through slowly with instruments, their trouser cuffs taped shut.

I will give the sequence plainly, because the sequence is the whole of it. I thought about the boy for as long as the T/5 sat on my bunk. I thought about the lighter from then until I got up. The building was sealed and would stay sealed, and sealed buildings are emptied sooner or later by inventory details, and a man on inventory is honest about everything except small silver. Whatever had been gathered and carried out of that place had gone up the hill with the men. At half past eleven I put my shoes on, went along to the day room, and asked the switchboard for the post hospital.

A woman answered low, with a quiet hallway behind her. "Post hospital."³

"Corporal Klipspringer, T Division. Regarding what came up from the canyon tonight."

A small pause with handwriting in it. "Nothing's being given out tonight, Corporal."

"I'm not asking after the men. When they were brought up, there'll have been articles brought in along with them — what was gathered. I left a cigarette lighter in the building. Silver, English make. It was on the table in the wing office."

The hallway stayed quiet behind her. "You're asking about a lighter."

I had heard this call before. I had heard it all my life, told from the mother's side of it, in a cold-water flat in Astoria. In the first week of September, 1922, my father telephoned a house in West Egg where the man who had kept him the better part of a year lay murdered upstairs, and asked for his tennis shoes; he was, he explained, in some inconvenience without them. He did not go to the funeral. He gave my mother, then or ever, not a dollar, not a name, not the tennis shoes. I was on the way myself when he made it. Standing at the day-room telephone with the receiver warm against my ear, I heard whose call this was, in my own mouth, at the halfway point of it. I did not put up the receiver.

"It will have been gathered with the rest," I said. "I'd be obliged if it were held for me."

"If it's turned in, there'll be word left with your orderly room. Give me the name."

I gave it, and spelled it, unasked. I heard her write it down. Then she put up the receiver without saying good night, and I stood a moment with the line dead against my ear, and went back to the barracks, and finished the cigarette off the borrowed match, and slept until the whistle.

The boy was twenty-five days dying. The post hospital stood a quarter mile from my barracks, and I passed it most mornings on the courier round; in twenty-five days I did not go in, or send a word up, or learn to say his name. The men of his section went up in twos in the evenings and came away not talking. The doctors knew inside the first week what they were attending, and the Hill knew soon after, the way a post knows — off the laundry, off the faces. He did his dying politely, by every account I did not go looking for.

The lighter came back on the eighth of September, through the post mail: a manila envelope, my name typed, a chalk mark on one corner where somebody's instrument had passed it, no note. It lit on the first stroke. He died on the fifteenth, and by then the lighter had been riding in my pocket a week, throwing its good flame for half of T Division. It is on the desk as I write this. Visitors still pick it up.

The Hill by then had gone back to the peace. The same week the envelope came, word came down through Pomeroy that the photograph from the July dawn — the corporal flat in the open with the government's records under him — had been seen in Washington, and that Washington was pleased, and that there would be a ceremony, with a citation read out and a camera present. The notice said dress uniform.