The Mark of Merlin

CHAPTER SIX

“Sir, shall we break out the bottle?” I heard Turtle suggest as I left.

“Indeed!”

They followed me into the kitchen.

“Oh, man oh man, that smells like prime eating,” Turtle ground out in a full bellow, rubbing his hands together in anticipation.

“Neat, water, or soda?” asked the major, getting out ice and glasses as I mixed dumplings.

“Neat oh, that’s when, sir. I want to taste that chicken.”

“Soda for me,” I put in.

The major hesitated briefly, the bottle poised over the glass. I saw Turtle’s hamlike hand tilt the bottle generously into the glass. He gave it a courtesy dash of soda and some ice and handed it to me. Then his heels came together, his shoulders snapped back as he came to rigid attention, glass raised.

“The colonel

God bless him!” His voice made it more of a supplication than an invocation. I blinked the sudden tears from my eyes, raised the glass to touch theirs, and swallowed a stiff jolt.

“Did you hear what Timmerman said when he was told to cross that railway bridge at Remagen?” Turtle growled with suppressed amusement. He twisted a chair, its back towards the table, and seated himself, propping his heavy arms on the curved back of the chair.

The major, a smile twitching at the good side of his mouth, moved a chair catercorner from the table, stretching his long legs out just where I’d have to walk over them to get to the sink and back to the stove.

“Tell me,” he urged.

I’m not sure if it was Turtle’s voice that made the story or Turtle’s unusual vocabulary. Probably both plus the added fillip that both men knew the personalities involved and could enjoy an “inside” that I didn’t have.

This Lieutenant Timmerman had discovered that although the railroad bridge at Remagen had been a target of the Allied air forces and had suffered some damage, it was back in commission. The Germans were flowing in retreat over it. When the enemy with their own curious logic decided the Americans would strike somewhere else, they withdrew the considerable strength at the Remagen bridgehead. Timmerman consequently found the bridge intact. Later that day the units supporting him controlled enough of the town to turn their attention to the bridge. The Germans were frantically preparing to blow it up. Timmerman was ordered across it before the Germans could succeed.

“And, Major, get this. The lieutenant says to the general, ‘What if the bridge blows up in my face?’ Get it, blows up in my face? A lieutenant says that to a general! That’s your - new army for you,” Turtle remarked with trenchant disapproval.

“Did it blow up?” I asked. After Dad’s death I hadn’t paid much attention to the First Army’s advance.

“Naw, not then. It got shook up some, that’s all. We crossed it. But I knew it wasn’t the same army or the same war and I got out as soon as I could. Charlie Company was five men by the time we got to Coblenz. I’d had it.”

I didn’t for a minute doubt that once Turtle made up his mind to it, he could get sent home. He was such an old hand at such red-tape cutting, I’m sure it was ostensibly legitimate. It just didn’t sound like the Ed Bailey I knew.

I served their dinner and there was no more talk of war or any talk at all. Turtle paid me the compliment of eating with great concentration and gusto, passing his plate back three times. I had to whip up a second batch of dumplings as the major, though a more elegant trencherman, was equally hungry. Turtle’s capacity had been a private joke for years but after three helpings of chicken ‘n’ dumplings, I hardly expected him to find room for three pieces of cake, too.

Merlin, who had napped on the far side of the stove while we were eating, woke. He stretched, walked majestically first to thrust his nose under Turtle’s hand, then the major’s, and then sat down expectantly by the kitchen door.

“Say, didn’t he get volunteered for the K-9 Corps?” Turtle inquired, indicating Merlin with a cake-filled fork.

“He didn’t make it.” I grimaced, filling Merlin’s bowl with what was left of the noontime stew.

“Naw!” Turtle’s eyes went round with amazement. He hitched his chair around to get a full view of the shepherd. “You don’t mean it. Him? I’d’ve thought he’d be a good kraut killer.”

“I did pull rank on them,” I explained, “and made them give him an honorable discharge. But the fact remains he was considered of ‘an insufficiently aggressive personality’ for the Corps.”

Turtle made a rude gesture. I giggled because the major glared so fiercely.

“If you were regular army,” I told Laird, “you would know that army brats like me can’t be shocked by mere sergeants.”

“I don’t get it,” and Turtle shook his head sorrowfully, “he had half the rookies and two thirds of officers’ row at Riley scared puking.”

“Particularly Warren,” I chortled nastily. “I swear, Turtle, he poisoned those other pups when he found out base families were going to take them. You know as well as I do that he made the Downingtons put Morgan away. She never bit him. She had more sense.”

“Didn’t I go to the C.O. myself?” demanded Turtle, his eyes wide at the implication he hadn’t helped.

“That you did. Honest to God though, why couldn’t it have been Warren who got killed?” I cried angrily. Turtle looked away.

“Any coffee?” the major asked, breaking the uncomfortable silence.

I slammed across the room for cups and back to the stove for the pot. The major’s raised eyebrows cautioned me to get a hold of myself. I poured carefully.

“Warren’s back, too, you said?”

“As a matter of fact,” drawled Turtle, stirring spoonful after spoonful of sugar into his cup, “he came back on the same ship I did.” He put his spoon very carefully down, right next to the knife he had not used. He straightened both so they were precisely aligned and then looked the major in the eye.

The major sipped his hot coffee, his eyes never leaving the sergeant’s. His left eyebrow arched slightly.

“He joined his missus in Boston day before yesterday. I believe he planned to pay a courtesy call on Miss James Carlysle Murdock.”

“Of all the insufferable, patronizing, condescending, ridiculous, hypocritical, vicious, egregious, inconsiderate, vile, contemptible, despicable,

” I spluttered, rigid with indignation, unable to categorize what I felt from my guts about Lieutenant Colonel Donald Warren.

“I think that’s very interesting,” the major remarked when I momentarily ran out of appropriate adjectives. He didn’t, however, mean my descriptive venom. He meant that Warren was in Boston and proposing to call on me. “I’d very much like to know why he felt constrained to call on you.”

That drew me up short for I had been about to launch into another tirade, having recovered my eloquence. I glanced at Turtle and then did a double take on him. The look on his face was a killing one, a hating one, far more expressive of what I felt for Warren than any word fashioned by man to express inner violences.

“You do think Warren killed my father, don’t you, Ed Bailey?”

Turtle’s head turned sharply around to me and I saw the deadly hatred in his eyes, and something else, unfathomable and unfamiliar.

“He only thinks so,” Major Laird interposed in a steely voice. “But I want to know why first. There is more to this whole goddamned mess than a fine man’s death. I want to know what. Is that clear, Bailey?” The major spaced those last words out very carefully, as if cutting the orders of the day ineradicably on Turtle’s consciousness.

Turtle swung his head slowly back to face the major. “Yes, sir,” he grated out softly. “Very clear, sir.” Merlin, sensing the aura permeating the room, looked up from his dinner and growled deep in his throat.