The Conditions of Justice

A STORY

by R. V. CASSILL

ON the jungle hill fronting the farthest and now seldom used end of the fleet anchorage at a South Pacific island the pattern of streets and coral walks was emptying at suppertime. The hot December bursts of rain had stopped an hour or so before. In the breadfruit trees and among the long, pink limbs of the banyans the evening light had a buttery look, as though the light itself were part of the oppressive medium which the garrison breathed and in which they sweated.

Captain Mercer, who commanded the hospital troop detachment, had just finished his shower. Returning to his tent — the screened hut roofed with a pyramidal tent — he powdered all the upper part of his body and rubbed his face with an alcohol lotion. Then, still clothed only in the towel wrapped around his loins and his shower clogs, he returned to the steps outside to read his letters. Even the screen walls of the tent seemed to add to the heavy mugginess of the air, and he wanted for a little while to stay free of sweat.

He opened the letter from his wife first, and his first approach to it was to count the pages — three tonight — observing with pleasure that the handwriting was small and compact as it sometimes was not when Margaret had little to say.

Her letters were always cheerful, but he believed by now that he had become so sensitive to her expression that he could always tell exactly her stale of mind regardless of the particular thing which she had written to him. So the beginning of her letter was satisfying. The description of the drive she had taken with the children to show them the leaves turning red in the foothills up behind Edwardsville was so full of detail that he guessed happily that she must not only have written it conscientiously, but, while driving, have purposely made mental notes of sights which she would want to share with him.

The second page of her letter was an answer, perhaps the answer which she had been thinking of for a long time— too troubled for a while even to try to put it in words — to some things which he had lately told her. “From all you say,” she wrote, “your Colonel Logan must be turning into a terrible grouch or a martinet or something. I shouldn’t think the Army would want men like that in top positions. And what you say about his always snooping around in this primitive jungle where naturally there’d be weeds, to see if your men have all the weeds cut, and his wanting the white picket fence around his office when your latrines needed working on. I should think this general coming to inspect would be much more concerned about the sanitary facilities than about any white fence. But as you say, That’s the Army.

“But Ralph, it doesn’t matter so much about these little foibles of his as the way they affect you. I can guess that all these months and years that you’ve been on this island have worn you down. Maybe because you can’t get away from it they’ve narrowed your perspective in a way that isn’t characteristic of you. Tell me I’m completely wrong if I am. I know things do change.

“But I remember some of the things you used to say about the Army and it seemed to me that I’d be wifely (or maybe terrible? Don’t pay any attention if I’m wrong) to remind you of them. To help you keep your detachment from things and your good judgment.

“For one thing, before you went overseas you used to always lecture me every time you told me about something ridiculous the Army had done, to remember this was just the fluff and not the real thing. That we were fighting a big war that had to be won and were mostly doing a good job of it and that I ought to keep telling the boys that in this war we were doing just what Americans had always done to make them proud of it. You used to like Colonel Logan pretty well too. I know he thought you were one of his best officers or he wouldn’t have promoted you so fast. So . . .”

Captain Mercer began to chuckle — at first mirthlessly, then with more and more pleasure. It pleased him to laugh at himself for these absurdities which he must once have uttered just as Margaret reported them, and he was glad that Margaret had an explanation of his situation which would satisfy her. To write back and confirm her theories and thank her for reminding him of his long-range views seemed to him an easy way to relieve the pressure of worry about what she might be thinking of him these days.

He was still smiling when Major Swift came past on his way to the shower. He paused a minute in front of Mercer, clutching his towel over the little pod of his belly. “Somebody write you a good dirty joke, Ralph?” he asked.

Mercer shook his head. “Just my wife kidding me about how bald I’m getting. She just got those pictures we took in October, you know.”

“We can’t claim to them that we’re getting any younger.”

“What was it Washington said about he couldn’t sign something without his spectacles because he’d grown old and gray in the service?” Mercer asked. “I’m getting old and bald.”

Major Swift’s eyes narrowed a little. “I’ve been wondering about that, Ralph. How you’ve been feeling.” He sat down on the steps, carefully folding the towel over his knees. “You know, being the Executive Officer around here means I’m supposed to be the nosy old woman that pries into everybody’s affairs. I lift up the damn pie crusts in the kitchen” — he laughed here and paused — “to see what they’ve really put in the pie. Tell you what I’m getting at. The Old Man came back to the office hopping mad the other day. Said you’d given him an argument. Something about the number of men you couldn’t put on detail to get the place fixed up before General Carr gets here. Four stars, you know. Don’t forget that means something, Ralph.”

“My point is” — and Mercer could feel the tightness and anger coming back — “if I pull these men out of their regular jobs on the wards and stuff where they’re working ten hours a day — some of them — and think they’re doing something important, and put them on some weed-pulling detail they can’t see any point to, it discourages the hell out of them. Makes bums out of them.”

“Now wait. Don’t ever underestimate your men. That’s the worst mistake an officer can make. If you explain it to them, they’ll coöperate. I’ve always found that true.”

“Explain? I’ll be damned if I see the point.”

“Now Ralph,” Major Swift tapped him on the knee. “You see, this is just what I’m talking about. You’re getting all wound up in yourself and want to argue. You can’t argue with the Old Man. You don’t really want to. I know that. It’s his job to see the whole hospital here and see what should be done here, what should be done there. You just see one little part of it.”

Let it go, let it go, Mercer thought. And as suddenly as a cool breeze cutting in under the heat could have done it, the notion that he would quit thinking about it and play their way seemed to ease all the muscles in his back and soothe his face. He laughed and stretched. It was so damn easy to play their way. “I need to get canned up on about a case of beer,” he said.

Major Swift smiled, “You know, that’s just what I was going to suggest to you. Why don’t you drop over to my tent after supper? I got a pretty nice bottle of brandy from a friend of mine in the 13th. Those boys are never short.” He lingered a minute to say, “I don’t even think it would be a bad idea for you to knock off a day or two. Let your First Sergeant run things. That boy has got a sound head.”

2

MERCER’S second letter was from Miss Margoulies, whose desk faced his in the accounting department of the store at home. She had written of a couple of boys from the store who had just finished pilot training. “Though I’m proud of all our boys,” she said, “I can’t help being especially proud that so many of those that I know from the store are officers.”

With rights and privileges thereto pertaining, Mercer thought as he dressed. He took clean khakis from the chest in which a perpetually burning light bulb kept them dry. Anyway for the evening he was going to cut as far loose from the muck of this time and place as he could — dress up a little, maybe walk along the beach, and if he felt like it accept Swift’s invitation to split the brandy, He really didn’t mind Swift as long as the man didn’t talk too much about the years he’d spent running a CCC camp dispensary.

And then the company clerk was there, knocking at his door. “Can you come over to the office, sir?” the man said. “I think you’d better come. There’s been some trouble in the PX.”

“Well,” Mercer said, “look, isn’t it something the First Sergeant can handle? It’s just about suppertime. I can come over after supper.”

“No. He said I better get you,” the clerk said.

“He ought to settle little things that come up at mealtime by himself or keep them over. We can always take care of things tomorrow.”

“He told me to get you if you can come, sir.”

On the way to the office the clerk told Mercer what he had heard of the fracas, the argument that led to it. “. . .so it wasn’t really Corporal Miller’s fault, the way I look at it. But I don’t say he should have done it the way he did. This colored boy had pushed his way right up through the line and banged his money on the counter, they said . . .”

A sense of bafflement, of undeserved personal trouble, was rising in Mercer’s mind. He tried to imagine some way he could sweep into the office and give a few deft orders to settle the matter. But what those orders might be he could not think. He felt sweat already making his fresh shirt sticky around his shoulders. “Damn,” he muttered. “I can’t imagine Miller, of all people, doing that. You know Miller. Why would he blow up? The way he’s run that PX so nobody ever had to worry —”

“He never really hit him with it,” the clerk said. “Only he was coming around the counter with it when Red and Smiley grabbed him or he might of killed him.”

“My God! With an axe.”

As Mercer climbed the steps to his office he looked back and saw the other officers straggling into the mess hall, where they could get a beer before supper. He felt very tired.

3

HE TALKED to Corporal Miller first, after he had cleared everyone else out of the office. The man Smiley had gone out saying earnestly, “It wasn’t Miller’s fault, sir. If he’d just been coming after the nigger with his fist, I’d ‘ve helped him.”

Miller’s short, blond pompadour was hanging damply on either side of his forehead. His face looked very white except for a spray of freckles. He began to answer in a low voice. “ . . . and then I said to him that niggers don’t talk that way where I come from. And I don’t know, then I just seen red and I went to get the axe. I don’t know what I would’ve done if they hadn’t grabbed me.”

“You can be damn glad you’re not responsible for what you would have done,” Mercer said. “But here, I thought you were one man I could count on. This isn’t going to be easy to figure out.”

“No, sir. I wish it hadn’t happened.”

“You ought to know—hell, you do know you can’t do things that way. We’ve got a lot of colored patients here that have to be treated just like anybody else.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’ve got to think about your part in it.”

“It wasn’t anything but I saw red for a minute. I wish you’d take me off my job. I’ll take a bust.”

“Oh hell,” Mercer said. “It isn’t that simple. Somebody’s got to run this place. I can’t bust everybody and put them out cutting weeds. Let’s see what this guy says.”

Jackson, the patient, came in wearing his blue pajama suit, the jacket hanging open. He saluted smartly when he approached Mercer’s desk and Mercer said, “You don’t need to do that. Suppose you just tell me about what happened.”

“Sir, I came into the PX a while ago to get a box of cigars. I asked the corporal for the cigars. He didn’t like the way I asked him and he said that niggers don’t talk like that to white men. Then he come after me with a fire axe.”

“All right,” Mercer said. “We’ve got that much agreed on.” He was trying to size Jackson up; for some reason the man’s low, even voice disconcerted him, seemed to suggest that Jackson already understood what would take place now but wanted to see it worked out in detail.

“ How did all this start, Jackson ? They tell me you pushed your way to the head of the line and began banging on the counter.”

“There isn’t no line in the PX, sir,” Jackson said. “Everybody was moving up to the counter when I come in.”

“We won’t argue about what is a line and what isn’t. What would you say about that, Miller?”

“I guess he’s right. He did come shoving up there, I thought. But I don’t want to say this is his fault.”

“No,” Mercer said. He could see no way in which he could settle this situation, but it seemed to him that he was forced to struggle against it as he would struggle in quicksand. “I wish this had never happened,” he said, and then believing that he saw a look of challenge from Jackson, went on, “but since it did I think we ought to look at it this way—no one really got hurt. I want the thing explained so we’ll all understand it and that’s the best we can do. It seems to me, Jackson, that you shouldn’t have shoved up there like that. Then Corporal Miller was completely wrong in losing his head the way he did. But you understand, Jackson, he knows he was wrong.”

Jackson stood before the captain’s desk — in the thick orange color from the lamp — without any expression on his face, but insistently, as though his presence, his standing stone-still where he could not be ignored, offered an unavoidable barrier. Mercer, becoming nervously eager to get through, get away from the office, said, “Here’s what I’m going to do about it. I’ll just tell you that I think you were partly to blame, Jackson. Corporal Miller, I’m going to put you on a week’s restriction to your quarters.”

He had turned to speak to Miller, but when he looked back at Jackson, the man was standing there without a quiver of gesture or expression, waiting as unanswered as he had been before.

Mercer’s eyes narrowed. “I guess you know I don’t have any authority to settle it that way.”

“No, sir,” Jackson said.

“Well, what do you want?”

Jackson said nothing. He stood there waiting.

“Do you want to prefer charges? I have to tell you that anyone under military jurisdiction has the right to prefer charges.”

Jackson shook his head. An insect hit the screen of the office — a faint, drumlike tone in the silence.

“Speak up, Jackson.”

Another long pause before Jackson said, “I’d like to speak to the Commanding Officer.”

“Oh,” Mercer said. He tapped on his desk with a pencil. “As an officer I can’t say anything about that. But I can tell you frankly that you wouldn’t do any good talking to him.”

“I’d like to present my case to him.”

A sense of angry helplessness swept over Mercer. He lifted his hands to rub his forehead, the gesture prolonged and exaggerated as if by it he tried to rub away not only the sweat but the whole oppressive mess of war and circumstance which had brought him here, five thousand miles from home, and put him on an island nearly as far from the fighting — an island inhabited by the mad. He wanted to shout at Jackson, “You stupid bastard, don’t you think I have sat at the Colonel’s table day after day listening to him tell what he would like to do to you niggers? That you ought to be herded in ahead of the white troops when they invaded an island?”

He did not say this. He said with all the recklessness he was capable of, not knowing whether Jackson would believe it, hoping he could make it stick, “The C.O. would only tell you things like this are up to me to decide. The only thing else you can do is write up charges for a court-martial.” Watching Jackson he thought, Even if he hasn’t heard of our Old Man, he’s heard of court-martials. He knew Jackson would not ask for any part of that.

Again, this situation suspended ominously over the three of them in this room, Jackson stood in the center implacably waiting.

“You’re not satisfied, are you?” Mercer asked.

“No, sir.”

“Can’t you just accept the explanation that Corporal Miller lost his head for a minute? There was nothing more to it than that.”

Now Jackson’s waiting seemed to say, Except the Army and the way things are, that’s all the more there is to it. And he expects me to do something about that, Mercer thought despairingly. Why should it be up to me?

“In my outfit they tell us a noncommissioned officer doesn’t lose his head,” Jackson said stiffly.

Mercer watched him a minute. “You think that I’m not giving you a good deal because you’re colored? Is that it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s not the truth.”

Jackson said nothing.

“Do you think that’s so?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“I don’t know what deal I can give you,” Mercer said. “Maybe your own outfit will do better by you. I’ll call one of your officers to come up here tomorrow and we’ll go over it again.”

“Yes, sir,” Jackson murmured.

When Mercer had rung through to the port battalion and been connected with the mess hall of Company D, he asked for the company commander and presently the voice came over, crisp and military, “Lieutenant Arthur.”

“Mercer at the station hospital. I’m calling about a man in your outfit. Jackson, a private. George Jackson.”

The answer came with an almost startling suddenness, “Jackson? He’s a troublemaking nigger. If he’s giving you any trouble, let us in on it and we’ll be up to take care of him.”

“No,” Mercer said. “It’s just something about his equipment. He came in here worried about whether his gear had been picked up at your supply when he came into the hospital.”

“Ah. I’ll check it. Why the hell should he come bothering you about that? He knows better,” the martial voice said, and Mercer hung up.

He looked at Jackson and said needlessly, “I told him not to come up. O.K. I’ve done all I’m going to. You men better step it up if you want to get supper. There’s still time.” With an attempt at joviality he said, “Hell, might even be time for me to make it.”

As he lifted the watch on his arm, peering at it under the light, holding it steady, staring at it so long his eyes lost it, he was not so sure.