We feel them coming, the low vibration of their wheels, a dark convoy descending upon us, pitching north like a swarm lobbed from the fist of a spiteful deity. The military cortege moves toward us up the new toll road from Fort Campbell. Each black hearse with a small flag fluttering from its antenna, each containing a flag-draped coffin. See him, in front, the driver of the lead hearse? He no doubt finds the wide, flat road boring and wonders momentarily whether he needs to keep his eyes open at all, the thing is so damn straight.
We have wondered the same thing—some of us have tried it out, closing our eyes and keeping the wheel steady, the gas pedal to the floor, our tires singing as we plunge headlong down that smooth, perfect surface. The lead hearse driver, let’s call him Corporal So-and-So, stares ahead at this unswerving trail of asphalt and hears the smoky voice of his great aunt, quoter of Scripture: Wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leads to destruction, and many there be who go there. He glances in the rearview at the long shiny box behind him. He did not know the kid in the box, not being from around here. One of the other drivers told him about the bad luck of the boys from Cementville.
Corporal So-and-So’s car is the only one to also include a passenger with a pulse, and he wishes this fact did not make the road all the more lonesome. He glances sidelong at the newly saved POW hero in his dress blues, with his big square jaw clamped in pain, the single leg restless, shifting around like it’s looking for the gone one. Only thing spoken so far is moans. Finally So-and-So says, “You alright, sir?”
But the hero’s eyes trace the passing cliffs, sheer limestone walls weeping rust-colored water from deep in the earth.
“Were you with the dead boys?” So-and-So asks. He knows better. The POW is a commissioned officer, not from the Guard like the boys who bought it. The driver is just trying to make conversation, only wishes to make the ride less tiresome. “Bet you’re looking forward to the parade. All that home-cooked food,” he tries.
We don’t have to be in that hearse to know there will be no response. The cells of us are familiars of the cells of him, and the cells of the dead boys degrading even now in their seven individual boxes. We know their lives and their deaths as we know our own. We know our own.
Some distance behind the line of hearses rolls a Greyhound, wherein GIs stretch in various states of repose and disengagement. Some sleep, a few pass a pint of Heaven Hill. There is an air of half-hearted celebration. Two GIs warily eye another soldier who sits off by himself, faking sleep.
One says, “He don’t look old enough to even be in the army, much less getting out.”
The second GI says, “They say he kilt a man.”
First one says, “It’s war. Ain’t that the idea?”
Other says, “Kilt one of us. And it wasn’t friendly fire.”
What feeds Corporal So-and-So’s relentless yammering all the way to the end of this road is the dread of contagion. Our television screens flicker nightly with images of death in a steamy jungle. Walter Cronkite delivers Cementville its first shot in the national spotlight.
Soon the convoy will pass under the tattered banner at the town’s northern mouth welcoming the rare visitor. CEMENTVILLE, the banner reads, Solid through the Hard Times. Someone long ago thought the pun clever and strung it between two stone bluffs on galvanized aircraft cable, all that remained from the soured dream of an airport. Our valley stretches between knotted parallels of knobs, making a fecund lap in which rest tracts suitable for pasturing or rose gardens, for webbing with snug lanes bordered by dry stone walls cobbled two centuries ago from cleared bottomland. We are little more than a handful of stores and a clutch of sound old houses, protection from the storms that howl across the floodplain as if fighting the grip of the river.
Our town’s reputation had been built upon the production of two things: passable cement and remarkable whiskey. And now it will be remembered by this new catastrophe. Along with a profusion of wreaths and baskets of lilies, out-of-town relatives have been sending clippings from the national papers, articles that wonder at war’s appetite for plucking up farm boys and returning them home in wooden boxes.
Tiny Cementville, people all over the country are saying, population a thousand and three, suffering a loss out of all proportion to its size. Seven local boys, gone all at once in one horrific night. Boys whose parents thought they were safe, having signed on with the National Guard to protect the homeland. Not to be shipped out to some faraway place we never heard of.
