A Spoonful of Vinegar

Thanksgiving began with a fire mission at a quarter to seven, in the dark, with the frost on the trails so thick that the spades rang when we kicked them.

“Charge four,” said Ridley, from the pad.

“Four,” said Hollis, in the ammunition pit, breaking ice off a box lid with his fist.

Peter set the numbers and checked them twice and said “Set,” and his breath went up white in front of the sight. Brandauer handed me the round. It was so cold it burned, and I could feel it through my gloves, and I put it in and closed the block.

“Loaded.”

“Fire.”

The flash lit the farmyard and the byre and the church tower, all at once, white on white, and then the dark came back, darker. We fired six rounds. Then the telephone, and “End of mission,” and the barrel ticking in the cold, faster than it did in summer.

Dunne was blowing on his fingers. “Do the French know it’s Thanksgiving?”

“They know,” said Szabo. “That’s why they started.”

“They don’t have Thanksgiving.”

“Then they’re jealous,” said Szabo. “Wouldn’t you be?”

Brandauer came across the yard from the byre with frost on his shoulders and a can of milk in each hand, and stopped, and looked at the gun.

“I missed it,” he said.

“Six rounds, Karl,” said Hollis. “You didn’t miss much.”

“I was milking. The guns go off and the cows jump.” He put the cans down. “Every morning they jump. Forty cows. One day one of them will kick the elder daughter and it will be the fault of the Royal American Army.”

“Write to the Prime Minister,” said Szabo.

“I will,” said Brandauer, picking up the cans again. “In German. He will have to get somebody to read it.”

---

The village school had been shut since the summer. The schoolmistress had gone south to her sister’s when the fighting came near, and the mayor gave Captain Kettering the key, and on the morning of Thanksgiving the cooks carried the battery’s dinner across the frozen square from the cookhouse in dixies and set it out on the children’s desks.

“They’re very small,” said Dunne, looking at the desks.

“So are the children,” said Szabo.

“Where do we sit?”

“On the benches,” said Hollis. “With your knees up round your ears. Like a grasshopper.”

We sat on the benches with our knees up round our ears. There were maps on the walls, of France and the world, with the French empire in pink, and a row of pegs with nothing on them, and a blackboard at the front with the last lesson still on it in chalk, sums, long division, in a round clear hand. Over the blackboard there was a pale square on the wall where a picture had been taken down.

“Who was that?” said Dunne.

“Le Chef,” said Peter. “Every school had him. They’ll have burned it in the square.”

Dunne looked at the pale square for a while.

“What’ll they put up instead?”

“Nobody knows yet,” said Peter. “That’s what the vote’s for.”

---

The turkey came out of tins. It was turkey, more or less, in slices, in a gravy that the cook had made from something, and there were potatoes, and tinned peas, and a thing called cranberry sauce that came out of a tin in the shape of the tin, with the ridges on it, and stood on the plate like a red jelly cathedral.

Brandauer looked at his for a long time.

“In Wisconsin,” he said, “we have the real cranberries. From the bogs.”

“Eat it, Karl,” said Hollis.

“I am eating it. I am only saying.”

Captain Kettering stood up at the front, by the blackboard, and everybody stopped.

“I’m not going to make a speech,” he said. “It’s Thanksgiving. Some of us have more to be thankful for than others, this year, and some of us aren’t here.” He looked at his notebook, and then shut it, which I had never seen him do. “Eat your dinner. Thank you.”

He sat down. Nobody said anything for a moment. Then Szabo said, loudly, “Somebody pass the cathedral,” and everybody laughed, and the captain too.

---

The parcel had come the day before, by the same dispatch rider, with a label in the uphill hand: C Bty, No. 3 gun, attn. Sgt Ridley. Not to be opened before Thursday.

Ridley had put it in the ammunition truck and said nothing about it, and on the Thursday he brought it into the schoolroom under his arm and put it on the desk in front of Brandauer.

“Open it.”

“Me, Sergeant?”

“It’s food. You’re the one who cares.”

Brandauer opened it. Inside, in a nest of newspaper with Arabic writing on it, there were boxes, small wooden boxes, a dozen of them, packed tight, and in each box, in rows, there were dates. Dark brown, sticky, shining, in rows, like something precious.

There was a card on top.

For the section. They are not a vegetable. Brandauer will want to know. L.

Brandauer held up a date between his finger and thumb, very carefully, and looked at it in the light from the window.

“What is it?”

“A date,” said Peter. “It’s a fruit. It grows on a palm tree. In the desert.”

“In the desert,” said Brandauer.

“In the desert.”

Brandauer ate it. He chewed slowly, the way he did everything. Then he took the stone out of his mouth and looked at it.

“Well,” he said. “It is very sweet.” He looked at the card again. “He remembered my name.”

“He remembers everybody’s name,” said Hollis. “It’s unnatural.”

The boxes went round the schoolroom, all the way round, to every man in the battery, and there were enough, just, and the captain had one, and said “Good Lord,” and had another. Ridley did not have one until the boxes came back to him, and then he took one, and ate it standing by the window, looking out at the frozen square.

---

I had the vinegar in my pocket.

I had got it the day before from the farmer’s kitchen, a small bottle, a stoppered one that had held something else once, and the farmer’s elder daughter had filled it for me from the big jar in the larder and asked what it was for, through Brandauer, and Brandauer had told her he didn’t know, and I hadn’t told him.

I had a spoon too. My own spoon from my mess kit. I had cleaned it.

When the dinner was done and the dates had gone round and the men were standing about in the schoolroom with cigarettes, or sitting on the little desks, or looking at the maps, I took out the bottle and the spoon and sat at the end of a bench by the window, and took the stopper out, and filled the spoon.

Peter was sitting on the next desk. He watched me do it.

I drank it. Vinegar, by itself, on a spoon, is a terrible thing. It goes up the back of your nose and down your throat at once, and your eyes water, and it is supposed to.

Peter waited until I had stopped coughing.

“Wheeler,” he said. “What was that?”

“Vinegar.”

“I could see it was vinegar.”

I put the spoon down on the desk. The schoolroom was noisy round us. Nobody else was looking.

“It’s a thing we do,” I said. “At home. At Thanksgiving. Everybody has a spoonful. Before dinner usually. My father does it, and my mother, and Clara makes a face.”

“Why?”

“For Lem Snow.”

“Who’s Lem Snow?”

“A boy. In Eli’s war. He was in the artillery with Eli, at Valley Forge. Seventeen. A fisherman’s son from Marshfield.” I turned the spoon over on the desk. “They had Thanksgiving at the Gulph, before they went into Valley Forge, in December. The army did. All they had was rice and vinegar. A spoonful of vinegar each. And in the spring Lem got the putrid fever and died, in the hospital, and Eli tried to go and see him and they wouldn’t let him in.”

Peter did not say anything.

“So Eli had a spoonful of vinegar every Thanksgiving after,” I said. “For the rest of his life. He never said why. And his children did it, because he did. And after a while they found out why.” I put the stopper back in the bottle. “That’s all. Nobody knows anything else about Lem. Just his name and Marshfield and that he was seventeen. And the vinegar.”

“Valley Forge,” said Peter, quietly.

“Yes.”

“December 1777.”

“The eighteenth. At the Gulph. That’s the date in the family.”

Peter looked at the bottle.

“And last year,” he said.

“I was at sea.”

“I remember. You were sick for eleven days.”

“That was the year before. Coming over. Last year I was in the North Sea, coming back from Germany. In a gale. I forgot it.”

Peter nodded slowly. He looked at the spoon, and then at me.

“May I?” he said.

I looked at him.

“I’d like to,” said Peter. “If it’s allowed. For Lem.”

I took the stopper out again and filled the spoon and gave it to him, and he drank it, and coughed, and his eyes ran behind his glasses, and he took them off and wiped them and put them back on.

“God,” he said. “Every year?”

“Every year.”

“Your family’s mad.”

“Yes,” I said.

He gave me back the spoon.

---

I filled it again.

I sat at the end of the bench by the window with the spoon full of vinegar in my hand, holding it level so that it would not spill, and outside the window the frozen square was white and the church tower stood up into a white sky, and in the schoolroom behind me somebody was laughing and somebody else was arguing about baseball, and I held the spoon.

Peter watched me. He did not say anything.

The spoon was very steady. I had good hands. I always had.

After a while I tipped the vinegar back into the bottle, carefully, the way you pour back cream, so that none of it went down the side, and put the stopper in, and put the bottle in my pocket, and wiped the spoon on my sleeve.

Peter looked at the window.

“It’s going to snow,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “It looks like it.”

---

It snowed that night. We stood in the door of the schoolroom and watched it come down into the square, slow, big flakes, the first of the winter, settling on the frozen mud and the duckboards and the gun and on the roof of the cookhouse, and Dunne, who was from Rhode Island and had seen snow every winter of his life, put his hand out and caught some and looked at it as if he had never seen it before.

Ridley came and stood in the doorway beside me. He had a date in his hand, the last one, I think, out of the last box. He did not eat it. He held it.

“You did your thing,” he said. “With the spoon.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

He did not ask what it was. He stood there and looked at the snow.

“Two,” he said. “I saw two.”

“One for Peter.”

“And the third?”

I did not answer. Ridley did not look at me. He stood in the doorway with the date in his hand and watched the snow come down on the gun, and after a while he put the date in his shirt pocket and buttoned it, and went out across the square to check the gun, once, the way he always did, leaving tracks in the new snow.