Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 102, No. 4 & 5. Whole No. 618 & 619, October 1993

Never Knew He Had It in Him by Simon Winchester

© 1993 by Simon Winchester

Simon Winchester is the Asia Pacific Editor for Condé Nast Traveler and the author of some notable non-fiction including Pacific Rising: History, Geology, and Politics of the Pacific Rim. His most recent work is fiction, a novel entitled Pacific Nightmare, published by Birch Lane Books. We are pleased to welcome him to EQMM with an offbeat tale about a posthumous hero...

They had gone at least ten miles down the turnpike, heading east, before Gwen first said something about the package. Until then everyone had kept a dignified, rather strained silence about it. Once in a while they had turned to look at it, not quite believing what they had been told. And the package itself had been sitting there on the backseat of the Ford, looking innocent enough, bouncing slightly on the Naugahyde.

Each time they went over a bump, and it jounced against the urn, it clinked in a dull metallic way. Otherwise, when the car was riding smooth, it just lay on the folds of the seat, its eccentric lumpiness softened a bit by the brown paper wrapping, but outlined in other parts by the tightly tied string. If they looked carefully they could see an old address label, but because of the creases all that was legible were some odd letters and numbers, “al Parlo,” said one line, then “3 Henre” and “sburg Pe.” Of course, had they the inclination they could have worked it out: Tate’s Funeral Parlor. 2133 Henredon Drive. Greensburg, Pennsylvania.

But frankly they were not so much bothered about the provenance of the wrapping paper. They knew that well enough, having driven from the selfsame parlor these fifteen minutes. What they were more concerned about — infinitely more concerned about — was what exactly was wrapped inside the paper. Which specific point Gwen addressed, more or less directly, with her first remark — one which students of the few recorded witticisms of the Morgan family would long remember as a classic.

“I just didn’t know he had it in him,” was what Gwen said. And then, as if remembering how lightly her words might be taken on any subsequent retelling of the story, added, rather breathlessly, “I mean — he never said anything. The doctor never told us. He never complained or nothing.” And then, the funeral of Gramps having been a customarily sad occasion, she burst into tears, and for the next few miles sobbed silently into her handkerchief. A thin snow began to fall, blowing from the east. Jerry switched on the wipers, and after a few more minutes, the lights.

Henry Allen’s death had been long and slow, though mercifully, he assured everyone, it was not very painful for him. He had been seventy-six, and had put up what Dr. Markham, in a gesture to Gwen, had said was a “good fight — as always.” There were a few relatives down for the funeral — Henry’s only son, Gwen’s father, had died long ago, and there were few others of that generational layer. Henry himself had been a widower for these past thirty years. There were just the two granddaughters, Gwen and Amy, and their husbands. Gwen’s mother had remarried and moved to New Zealand, and was rarely seen.

But that all being said, the service was far from being thinly attended. To underline Henry’s renown as a fighter, what with his Purple Heart and his battle ribbons, the entire 423rd Chapter — Greensburg, Ligonier, and Latrobe — of the VFW had been on hand at the ceremony. A hundred and three gnarled old combatants, men who had fought with Henry in the Pacific and, most notably, in Korea forty years before, had stood to attention in the cold outside the little Three Falls crematorium and saluted their farewells to a fallen comrade.

Gwen had been delighted. They had never called her to tell her they planned to send Gramps off in such style. The men had just turned up, in a couple of Bluebird buses. She had been almost moved to tears more than once during the service, and afterwards, as she said her goodbyes. Many of the old soldiers, she noticed, had dabbed their eyes throughout the ceremony, though as Jerry was to remark later that night, it was probably more because of the bitter easterly wind than for any special grief. Soldiers, he said, are case-hardened about death and dying: anyone, he said, who makes it out of the theater and into the streets dies luckier than most. The old boys of the 423rd saw in Henry an example of their common good fortune, relatively speaking.

In any case, her interest in the soldiers had been cut short by what had happened in the crematorium office. It had been a strange few minutes, which started when old Mr. Tate had come over to her in the parking lot. He sidled up, trying to be respectful and serious, but he had a strangely excited glint in his eye, and clearly had something urgent to say.

“I’m so sorry to interrupt, Mrs. Morgan, but could you come to the office for just a few moments? There’s something — well, something unexplained. Something I’d like you to see.”

Gwen followed old Mr. Tate up the steps and into his dim little office. She thought it might be the bill, though in truth it seemed somewhat ungracious for Mr. Tate to be talking about money at this point. The firm had a good reputation, after all. The hospital had said they would handle things with the utmost sensitivity, and even though she lived down in Washington, so far away, Tate’s could be trusted to handle everything with great discretion.

Then she saw a small gray vessel on the blotter on the partner’s desk, and realized instantly that she was being dense. It was the ashes, of course — Mr. Tate was going to give her old Gramps’s ashes. She grinned inwardly. She had never been to a crematorium before, but had always wondered idly how long an interval there was between the process and the product, as she preferred to think of it. There must be a period of cooling, surely. Anyway, here was the answer: old Grandpa Allen, laid out on a bed in Westmoreland County Hospital on a Wednesday morning, his ashes in a six-inch-high pewter jar on Friday lunchtime.

She reached down to touch the urn. The grayish metal, with its skinlike hammered texture, was as warm or as cool as you expected pewter to be. It was sort of neutral, like the color. No more than that.

“Everyone likes to touch the urn when it’s holding their loved one,” said Mr. Tate. “It’s a very kindly gesture, I always think.”

Gwen nodded. “These — it’s for me, yes?”

“It most certainly is, Mrs. Morgan. But there is something else I have to give you. I am a bit puzzled, to be candid. I was wondering if something had gone wrong here.”

He leaned towards her, so close she could read the name on his spectacles.

“Tell me, Mrs. Morgan — your grandfather. I hope you don’t mind my asking. But was there anything, well, odd about the way he — the way he moved, let us say? I’m sorry to ask. But something’s come up. Something — and we didn’t know if it is our problem or his.”

Gwen must have looked puzzled, for Mr. Tate stood up in a decisive sort of way and strode over to a table on the far side of the room. For a moment he had his back to her, and she could see he was picking something up. Something large and gray and lumpen that he carried back to her inside his spread fingers. He brought it back to the table and then, with an exhalation of relief, released it next to the urn of Sergeant Henry Allen’s ashes.

It was a large piece of gray metal, twisted and deformed by heat. It was about as big as a fist — Tate had had to spread his bony fingers right around it. It must have weighed five pounds. She looked up at him.

“Pick it up,” he said.

She did so, not without difficulty. It was warm — a good deal warmer than the urn. In fact, as she held it longer it seemed to get hotter, and she dropped it on the desk and it rolled to one side. She fingered it gingerly and turned it this way and that. It was an excessively ugly thing, in parts sharp and irregular and glassy like obsidian, in other places smeared with a rust color that seemed to have been sintered into the mass. There were little gobbets of once-molten metal standing out from the main body of the piece like warts. Mostly it was irregular, though along one side there were three straight furrows with folds of metal alongside. For the moment she discounted their appearance and recalled pictures she had once seen at an exhibition in Arizona.

“Meteorite?” she asked wanly. But she knew what Mr. Tate was going to say.

“No, Mrs. Morgan. Your grandfather. There’s no other explanation. I’ve spoken to Mr. Mawby — he’s the engineer around here. Had him for thirty years. Knows the oven better than any man around. He’s seen everything — gold teeth, titanium plates — we always give them back, of course. Scissors, bits of molten glass. We had a man here had a Parker pen, the tortoiseshell all eaten up. But it could write as well as the day it was made.

“But this — this thing.” He gestured with distaste at the malevolent chunk of ironmongery. “Mawby and I can’t think of any other explanation for it. Oven’s clean as a whistle. We always check. So there’s only one solution. Only one. It had to come out of the body. This dam thing was inside Mr. Allen, and he must have known.

“You’ll forgive me for saying so, I’ve never seen anything like it. Five pounds of iron inside a man, and he carries it around all his life. That’s why I asked you — did he move funny or something? He must have been all off balance. It must have been something terrible. How’n hell did he ever get into an airplane? He’d be setting off alarms from here all the way to Katmandu.”

They talked about it all the way home. The weather was closing in as they passed over Chestnut Ridge, and near the mouth of the Allegheny Tunnel the state police had lit flares because a truck had gone off the turnpike and was hanging dangerously over a stream-bed. The snow was heavy here and the road slick with wet ice. The traffic crawled along with muffled-up policemen flagging the motorists, warning them of the dangers. It was, in other words, a typically diverting December night on the Pennsylvania Turnpike when most drivers would be white-knuckled with concentration and fear. But in the Morgans’ Ford the urn and the neatly wrapped chunk of iron knocked heavily against each other in the back, and in the front seat Jerry and Gwen tried to make some sense out of one of life’s more bizarre discoveries.

They both knew a little of the old man’s war stories. They knew he had been in the infantry, had seen some service on Okinawa and in Japan; and they knew, most intimately of all, that he had been at the Battle for Old Baldy, that infamous hill in Korea. That was where he had won his Purple Heart. He had been hit in the left arm, he had told them over not a few Thanksgiving dinners; once in a while he’d roll up his shirt and show them the scar, faded now. It was part of Gwen’s childhood — seeing Gramps’s bad arm.

The injury had never caused him much of a problem, by all accounts. When he came out of Korea he had gone to school, courtesy of the G.I. Bill, but he was never graduated. He was thirty-five, set in his ways, had no aptitude for study, he said. Instead, after a year of doing odd jobs, he had joined the United States Postal Service. His wife — they had married during the Second War, and Gwen’s father was born in 1944 — had left him around this time. He was not especially grief-stricken, by all accounts. First, for a decade or so, he had done the obligatory rounds duty in Pittsburgh and Wheeling and some smaller iron cities like Uniontown and McKeesport and Monroeville — and no one that Gwen could recall ever complained of him limping, or walking funny, or anything like that.

Then he was made up to inspector during that momentous time in 1963 when the postal service introduced the Zone Improvement Plan Code, the Zip code, and he worked to see its implementation in Punxsutawney 15767 and Indiana, PA 15701 (where there were, not unnaturally, some few problems, just as there were in California, PA, and in other confusingly named communities). He was very proud of that: forty-six years old and a part of history, however so small. Finally he was promoted to Senior Inspector of Mails in the office in Greensburg 15601 and had retired in good enough health, so Gwen remembered, two years later. They had given him the senior’s job just so as to help with the pension, for which he was eternally thankful.

And so his life entered its long and slow decline. He went off to California once, to see Amy and the children, and in 1988 he came down to Washington to see Gwen married to Jerry. But — and now they were trying to remember, as they sat in a truckstop at the Breezewood Interchange — he had never seemed, well, weighed down by anything like this. “Five pounds of solid metal?” Jerry kept saying, gazing out incredulously at the snow, now turning to rain. “How did he ever keep it such a secret?”

When they got home Gwen put the pewter urn on the mantel. They would know in a week or so, once the will was read, where the ashes should be scattered. Gramps had never said anything. Perhaps, Jerry said later, there would be something in the will about the shrapnel. If that was what it was.

They unwrapped the brown paper and put the thing on the dining room table, where there was a strong light. God, it was an ugly thing to have had to carry around. It had a coarse, brutish look about it. The heat of the furnace had distorted it, of course — the three furrows on one side must be the imprint of the bars, the moly-steel fireproof bars inside the oven itself. This chunk of metal had melted itself around them until they turned off the gas jets and raked it out. So it wouldn’t have looked quite as bad as this all those years it was inside the old boy. But even so, it was ugly. You only had to think of muscle moving around that. Jerry winced.

“Hell, I remember playing basketball with him, out in California. You remember — out in front of the garage, with Phil. Amy was pregnant at the time, and you and she were in the kitchen yakking about something or other, and we all went out to the front of the house. Gramps started shooting baskets. He couldn’t have done that with this thing inside him, surely. Not unless he was one hell of a lot tougher than I thought he was.”

He squinted more closely. On one end — if the thing could be said to have ends — was what looked like a screw thread. There were some regular grooves, half a dozen or so, all parallel. They formed an approximate annulus around what, for the sake of this inspection, he would call the upper end. The lower end was narrower, almost pointed, but it was here that the metal had melted into dozens of small blisters and it was barely possible to see an outline of what the thing might have been.

But over that evening, and then again over the weekend, Jerry began to work out what the object was. He weighed it on Gwen’s Braun kitchen scale — five pounds, two ounces. He measured it carefully — from end to end, five inches, from side to side, four. He found an old physics textbook and measured the volume by seeing how much water it displaced, measuring it in cups, using one of the kitchen milk jugs. He found out the density and worked out that what he had was probably an alloy of steel and nickel.

After that, and with the memory of all those good old boys of the 423rd VFW standing to attention back up in the cold of western Pennsylvania, the conclusion was simple enough for Jerry Morgan, amateur engineer and military history buff, to draw. Sergeant First Class Henry Drewman Allen, Ninth Infantry Regiment, Second United States Infantry Division, a wounded hero of the Battle of Old Baldy, had been taken from the field bleeding from a wound in the left arm on the evening of Thursday, November 13, 1952. A small piece of shrapnel had been removed by surgeons at the field hospital, and Sergeant Allen had been flown to a hospital ship in the sea of Japan and then, eventually, back home to Pennsylvania.

What the doctors never knew, and what the stoical Sergeant Allen never bothered to inform them, was that the nose casing of a Chinese 82mm M-41 mortar, fired during the battle, had somehow not only fragmented and smashed his arm, but had also embedded most of itself in his shoulder. He was to live the rest of his life in pain, with the burden of a fist-sized chunk of iron and nickel inside him, with a memory far more potent than that of the simple scar with which he’d frighten his granddaughters and shock the Thanksgiving guests. He was even more of a hero than they had thought.

One or two nights later, Gwen telephoned Amy, who was now back in San Mateo. They talked for twenty minutes, and afterwards Gwen reported to Jerry.

“They agree. They think we should tell the VFW chapter. And the papers. It has the makings of a really great story. And she said what I said. We never knew he had it in him. A good line, don’t you think?”

Captain Kruzscinsky of the Ligonier and District Branch of the Veterans of Foreign Wars was as excited as one would imagine. Of course, he said, a special citation would be prepared, honoring Henry’s memory, his courage. “It was his grace under pressure,” the captain said. “Just the sort of thing we like.”

The piece of metal would go into the VFW museum on Main Street. They would bring it out on Memorial Day and on the Fourth of July to show what Pennsylvania fighting men were made of. It would be like the wooden hand, the prize trophy of the French Legionnaires, which they still kept in a glass box in Marseilles and paraded once a year, held by a soldier wearing white gloves.

“We’ll take good care of it, Mrs. Morgan, have no fear. We’ll only handle it with white gloves. You have my word on that, as a soldier.”

And good to his word, Captain Kruzscinsky was in touch with the Tribune-Review in Greensburg the next day and a freelance photographer turned up at the Morgan’s front door in Chevy Chase the following week. So far as they heard, it was the front-page main story the following Saturday. “Postal Worker Died a First-Class Hero,” read the headline. “Carried a secret package all the way home from Korea.” The story was written by a woman whose father hadn’t been born when the Battle for Old Baldy had been fought.

The story made the Pittsburgh TV stations next day, by which time the captain already had the “Korean meteorite” as people had dubbed it and was preparing a new home for it. An honor guard was filmed taking the UPS Next Day package up to the Main Street VFW museum, and there was footage of the ceremonial unwrapping and the placing of the object in a glass case which had previously held a Junior League bridge trophy.

The coverage was respectful, if faintly amused. It didn’t make the lead, but it was well enough placed. It featured blurred black and white photographs of the young Sergeant Allen at Inchon, a picture of the Purple Heart he had won, the reminiscences of a buddy named Mack Kamovitch who Gwen had thought was long dead but who was in fact in a retirement community in a town called Mars, and who had fought with a Pennsylvania-raised infantry unit on either Old Baldy or Pork Chop or one of the great Korean mountains. “Old Henry was a great battler. A great battler,” he declared shakily.

And then came the pictures from Ligonier, with the ceremonial guard, the case, and the piece of metal.

“So old Henry Allen was a bigger hero than we ever knew,” said a young man in a blazer, a man with a voice far too deep for him. “He was a bigger man than we ever knew. Everyone knew he was a good man. But seeing this — they all said simply: We Never Knew He Had It In Him...

“For WGBG News Hour this is James Sneed reporting, in Ligonier.”

Over in a studio apartment in Pittsburgh, Dan Harris saw the story that same night. He blinked, then pinched himself. This, for ten miserable days, was what he feared might happen. It was his personal nightmare come true. The piece of metal in that poor innocent man — it was all his fault. Poor Mr. Allen — yes, that was his name, he remembered the tag on the toe — had nothing to do with it at all. The explanation was no less bizarre, but it was a great deal simpler than that which Mr. Sneed had just told half of the folks in the Monongahela Valley.

Dan Harris was a freshman at Penn, a biology major, and he came from Akron. His girlfriend, Carol, was a Canadian medical student, currently doing an internship in London. The two had met at a science fair in Saskatchewan three years before and were desperately in love. He had vowed to see her in London at Christmas, but to buy a ticket he needed a good, well-paying job. Then there had been the ad in the Gazette: “Hospital worker wanted, Westmoreland County Hospital, Greensburg. Applicants with strong constitution and rudimentary anatomical skills preferred. Piecework rates. Write John Utton, Box 545.”

Harris had been the only serious applicant. Utton said he had managed to screen out all the necrophiliacs over the phone. He had liked Harris’s remark that “humans are just like big dogfish, really — or rabbits, I guess,” and reckoned he would have no problem with the work required in the autopsy lab around the back of the county morgue. The pay, he told Harris, was twenty bucks a body. Prep them for the autopsy, clean them up afterwards, stitch them up, and hand them over to the funeral home. Strong stomach needed, but other than that, good money.

“Only don’t make a career out of it,” said Utton, looking more than usually lugubrious. “Else you’ll end up looking like me.” And he gave the kind of laugh you’d expect from a Charles Addams cartoon.

The first days on the job, in early November, had been easy enough. Yes, Harris had gagged on his first corpse, but Utton had been there, and had showed him that by smoking a small cigar he could ward off the effects of the formalin and the other less savory aromas of the morgue. And the chief mortician, a big German woman with the name Fleischaker, who everyone not surprisingly called Flesh Hacker, was a jolly woman without the slightest tendency to the macabre. She was actually interested in the biology of death, and moreover had a cousin at the University of Montana who was writing a Ph.D. thesis on a little-known branch of the rhythmic sciences coming to be known as Thanatomusicology. “Muzak to Die By,” Utton called it until he saw the cousin concerned and was astonished by her beauty and her brains and began to take all of her utterances with total seriousness.

It was sometime during his second week at work, the first week of November, that Sergeant Henry Allen presented himself, at horizontal attention, for Dan Harris’s services. The toe poking from beneath the shroud had a small label on it, written by the consulting physician. “Marrow test required,” it said. “Suspected leukemic disorder.” At the head of the trolley was the patient’s name, sex, age, and date of death: H. D. Allen, it said. Male, 76. 11/4/92. To be fair, Harris didn’t remember all of this, but he did remember the surname, and the request from the doctor. The standard operating procedure required that he remove a femur and send it up to the pathology laboratory. They would perform the necessary tests later that day and determine — Harris guessed the insurance had an interest; or perhaps it was just a Pennsylvania statistical requirement — if Mr. Allen had died of leukemia or from something else, like weariness, or old age.

It was simple enough work, preparing a body for Dr. Fleischaker’s explorations. A long incision on the ventral side, removal of the digestive tract, opening of the brain pan — well, for the squeamish, perhaps not too graphic at this point. Not, in any case, that work on the torso or the cranium is particularly relevant to this story. Nor is it relevant to mention the fact that Harris routinely removed the patients’ pituitary glands to send them off — at a bounty of $100 for a tub of ten — to a friend of his at Case Western Reserve who was doing some dark work on male growth hormone, which the innocent-looking little pituitary manufactured.

The relevant moment on this particular day came when Dan Harris took out the femur. He broke it away from the pelvis and the tibia and fibula and pulled it away, tearing the great wads of connective tissues that make the thigh so bulky a part of the body. Mr. Allen’s muscles were somewhat wasted, as you’d expect of a man of seventy-six, but it was still something of a tussle to get his thighbone out, after which he scrubbed it clean and put it in a Ziploc bag for the folks upstairs.

Dr. Fleischaker came and did her thing, smoking and grunting as she inspected all the viscera. Then, with a Wagnerian flourish, she tore off her green rubber apron and said: “Lunchtime. Sew the old man up, will you? Tate’s are taking him off. They need him by two.”

Henredon Drive was only ten minutes away, and the man from Tate’s Funeral Parlor dropped in all the time, picking up customers, as he called them, in his black Lincoln hearse. He was called Millinship, and he was tiresome, Dan thought — always wanting the specks of dried blood wiped off the faces, always wanting the eyes to match even if the lids were closed.

“I know you guys take them,” he said. “And I really don’t care what little side orders you get from all those smart-ass university pals of yours. But you put glass ones in their place and you make darned sure they’re the right color, okay? Otherwise I spill the beans. You got it?”

It was in anticipation of Millinship’s hostility that Harris knew he had to put something in Allen’s leg. In all other respects the body was now fine: a decent blanket stitch had closed all the wounds. The eyes had been left untouched. The hair was combed neatly over the back of the head. The hands had been scrubbed. But the leg — now that the femur was gone, it had nothing supportive in it between hip and knee. It was a bit of an embarrassment. It kept dropping off the side of the table as Dan worked tidying up the rest of Mr. Allen’s appearance.

Millinship would never accept it, that was for sure. He would be truculent about it, and if he was in a foul temper again he would probably threaten to tell everyone about the eye scam, and the pituitary scam, and one or two other little favors that Harris had been asked to perform for his friends back at school. So he had to finish Mr. Allen off and leave him in good condition, acceptable to Tate’s. He had to stiffen up that leg. But what, pray, to use?

It was cold outside, the beginning of an easterly wind whipping the garbage around in the yard. There would be snow by tomorrow, Harris told himself. But then as he mouthed to himself, “It’s an ill wind...,” so, suddenly, a gust blew away a sheet of cardboard to reveal a short length of drainpipe, lying unwanted on the ground. The pipe, galvanized steel by the look of it, was eleven inches long, two inches in diameter, and had a small angled screw-end to it. It must have weighed five or six pounds, heavier than he would have liked. But in all other ways it looked perfect.

He brought it back out of the cold and placed it against the great wound on Allen’s thigh. It was a bit too long. He found a bone saw and hacked away for ten minutes or so, not very efficiently, but eventually reducing the pipe by an inch. He jammed the milled end into the concavity of the hip joint and then, straining against the old muscles of the infantryman’s leg, pushed the other end against the knee joint.

At first it refused to go in. He pressed and pushed, twisting this way and that until suddenly, with a loud click, the pipe went home. The lower leg shot out like an arrow, the foot straightening up so hard that the hospital slipper that had been half tied to it shot off and landed near the sink. Harris gave a cheer. Perfect, he said to himself, and hurriedly blanket-stitched the wound closed, each turn of the thread removing the dull grey gleam of steel from human sight. There must’ve been five pounds of iron in the old guy’s leg. Just as well he wasn’t planning to go swimming. But no one would ever know.

He had just finished and was tying off when Millinship arrived.

“Who’s this then? Name of Allen?” He looked at his list. “Got him. Eleven tomorrow. Important one. War hero, you know.” He wheeled the corpse out through the glassine doors. “Done a good job on this guy, Harris,” he called. “Bit of a waste, though. We’re cremating him. All your handiwork up in smoke. Nothing’ll be left.”

Of course, Harris realized in an instant. He was going to call out, but never did. He said nothing, then or later. In fact, he only ever told one other person, and that was on the day of the newscast. He called Utton at home.

Had he seen the news? Yes, Utton said, and he had particularly liked the story about the great unsung hero from Greensburg, the soldier with that mortar shell in him, carried it for forty years and didn’t tell a soul. Great story. What a guy.

And then Harris confessed, swearing Utton to silence for eternity. Utton laughed like a drain at first, threatening to call the station, to tell them what really happened. But then, after Harris asked him who he supposed might benefit from such truth, Utton agreed. “Guess you’re right,” he said, chuckling. Then he cleared his throat and sounded authoritative. If such a thing should ever happen again — if a body came in with a tag on a toe, a request for a thighbone, and a pushy creep like Millinship calling for the body — then, Utton said, there were a bunch of chair legs in the hut outside, ready and waiting for such a purpose.

“They’re the perfect size for a thigh,” said Utton. “We always use them. Biodegradable and all that. And there’s no danger of one of them ever turning someone into a hero. You should use one next time. Far less complicated. You know what we always say? They’ll never know he has it in him.”