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  Praise for John Casey and

  TESTIMONY AND DEMEANOR

  “Arresting and distinctive.… Completely convincing.… The four stories in this collection are extremely impressive.”

  —The Miami Herald

  “Each of the stories contains small gems.… The first, ‘A More Complete Cross-Section,’ is a masterpiece, beautifully written in every line.”

  —Joyce Carol Oates, The New Republic

  “A major novelist at the top of his form, Casey captures not only the texture of individual lives, but the shape and momentum of all lives that begin with the best intentions, then stray off course.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “[Casey] is an astute observer of the ruses as well as the private confrontations that govern our behavior.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “Testimony and Demeanor is serious writing that deserves serious reading.”

  —Washington Star

  “[Casey’s] descriptions of nature and feelings are tautly lyric.… He is reclaiming and extending a rich tradition of American literature.”

  —Newsweek

  “Casey … is an accomplished craftsman and a delight to read. No mode seems beyond him … all is understated and imbued with a powerful grace.”

  —Lynne Sharon Schwartz, author of The Writing on the Wall

  “Even better reading the second time.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  John Casey

  TESTIMONY AND DEMEANOR

  John Casey was born in 1939 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and educated at Harvard College, Harvard Law School, and the University of Iowa. His novel Spartina won the National Book Award in 1989. He lives with his wife in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he is Professor of English Literature at the University of Virginia.

  BOOKS BY JOHN CASEY

  The Half-life of Happiness

  Spartina

  Supper at the Black Pearl

  Testimony and Demeanor

  An American Romance

  TRANSLATIONS

  Enchantments by Linda Ferri

  You’re an Animal, Viskovitz! by Alessandro Boffa

  FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, DECEMBER 2005

  Copyright © 1968, 1969, 1971, 1979 by John Casey

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1979.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks and Vintage Contemporaries is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The following stories appeared originally in The New Yorker: “A More Complete Cross-Section,” “Mandarins in a Farther Field,” and “Testimony and Demeanor.”

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Casey, John, 1939–

  Testimony and demeanor / by John Casey.

  I. Title.

  p. cm.

  PS3553.A79334 T47 1979

  823′.9′14 78-20599

  Vintage ISBN-10: 0-375-71930-X

  Vintage ISBN-13: 978-0-375-71930-1

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-5273-0

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  A More Complete Cross-Section

  Mandarins in a Farther Field

  Connaissance des Arts

  Testimony and Demeanor

  A MORE COMPLETE CROSS-SECTION

  WHEN I FIRST HEARD THAT I WAS TO go on active duty in the Army—specifically at Fort Knox, Kentucky—I welcomed the news. I regarded the ensuing six months’ military service as an opportunity to see a more complete cross-section of my fellow man.

  I was cheated at first. There were only surfaces. The people circled me like the moon the earth, always presenting the same face, keeping the dark side hidden.

  Moreover, the shock of being suddenly piled together in Fort Knox distorted even the surface appearances; I saw them as though through a prismatic kaleidoscope, their true colors and shapes scattered. No one was in his natural setting. I don’t know why I had expected at least some of the people to be at home, but I could see that they were not—just by the way they fingered their stiff fatigue uniforms and ran their hands fitfully over their shaved heads. One man fainted when they clipped off his hair. That was interesting, but he disappeared from the reception center. There was only the prevailing fabric of the Army that held steady. That, however, was somewhat more richly textured than I had imagined. When I arrived at Fort Knox, the commanding general’s name was Wonder. General Wonder. There were a number of coincidences of name, all of them equally hauntingly unperceived. The master sergeant who lectured us on military courtesy, company formations, and the meaning of bugle calls was named Roland. The supply sergeant who came to supervise us while we dyed our brown government-issue boots with black government-issue dye was named Glissen. If we had been asked to paint white roses red, I could not have been more delighted.

  The first week of basic training we continued to be rushed about. There was always a great flurry, but our roles were so undemanding and passive that it was soothing. I did note that we had an apparently authentic sergeant. He was small and thin, with a rather unpleasant, fair—almost hairless—face. “My name is McQueen,” he said, underlining his name tag with the chewed end of his cigar. “My first name is Sergeant.” He walked down the front row, looking up into our faces, and stopped in front of the boy next to me. “Ellridge,” he said, reading the name tag in front of his nose.

  “Yes, sir,” Ellridge said.

  “Don’t call me ‘sir.’ I earn my money.”

  “All right.” Ellridge was a Southerner with a soft agreeable voice.

  McQueen spun on his heel and whistled. I turned to look at Ellridge while the sergeant’s back was turned. His thin neck drooped forward as he watched McQueen with puzzlement. McQueen, facing him again, reached out. I rolled my eyes to watch. His fingers grasped the middle button of Ellridge’s fatigue shirt. The button was unbuttoned. In the sergeant’s belt buckle I could see the reflection of Ellridge’s left hand as it moved. I turned and saw him cover the top of his own left thigh with it.

  “You’re pretty sloppy, Ellridge. Do you really want that button?”

  Ellridge smiled nervously.

  McQueen ripped it off. “You’d better sew it on, then,” he said.

  “I could have just buttoned it,” Ellridge said.

  McQueen stared at him. Then his eyes lighted on Ellridge’s left hand. “What’s your hand doing there, Ellridge? You going to play with yourself?”

  There was general laughter. Ellridge looked at me with dismay, and I looked curiously at McQueen.

  He stared back at me. “What’re you staring at, troop? You want to get in on it too?”

  There was more laughter.

  “You better get your eyes front!” he said, grunting the last word so that it had a rather attractive nasal resonance.

  But he also disappeared. The first sergeant told me that he had been flown to Walter Reed Hospital on compassionate leave to be with his Korean stepdaughter while she had an eye operation.

  First Sergeant Plisetsky was a large man. His chest was at least fifty inches around, as were his wais
t and hips. He invited me to his office at Company HQ. He told me McQueen was gone and that there was no one in charge of my barracks. He invited me to sit down.

  “I see you smoke cigars,” he said, pointing to the large flat tin in my breast pocket. I offered him one. He took the tin and said with benevolence, “Have one yourself.” We puffed in silence. “You didn’t get these at the PX,” he said, handing me back the package.

  “No,” I answered.

  “Very fine,” he said, “very fine. I like cigars. Kipling liked cigars. I like Kipling too.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “So you used to wrestle up at college,” he said, tapping my 201 file with his finger. “Fine sport. That why you dropped R.O.T.C.?”

  “In a way.”

  “I understand,” he said. “It’s all right.”

  He reached in a drawer of his desk and pulled out a navy-blue brassard with three chevrons on it and handed it to me. “This is just field stripes,” he said. “No pay.” He paused and then added with satisfaction, “But that won’t bother you.”

  I pinned the brassard on with the safety pins hanging from the worn felt.

  He sighed. “I used to be first sergeant for a training company of clerk-typists. They used to play bridge. You don’t play bridge, do you? I thought we could get up a foursome. I often spend the night here,” he said, pointing to the cot behind him. “I’m a bachelor.”

  “No,” I said.

  “The best bridge player I ever met was a Harvard man too. Big fellow, dark hair. But that was some years back. You wouldn’t know him.”

  We smoked awhile.

  “You won’t have to stand guard, or do any KP,” he said. “But try to stop the fighting. They’re lonely, they’re nervous, they’re”—he stopped to knock a cigar ash into the saucer of his coffee cup—“pent up. We used to run. Even my clerk-typists used to run. If they run, they just go to bed. But we can’t run anymore while it’s warm. A boy died of heat stroke running up a hill. More likely it was a weak heart. Not in our regiment, but still we can’t run. So try to control the horseplay in the barracks. I’ll stop by before the evening meal and tell them you’re the platoon guide. As far as they’re concerned, you’re just like a sergeant.” He started to sigh again but yawned. “It’s not so bad. Not so bad as they all say. I do my job. You do your job. We all do a job. You’ll all be gone soon.”

  I went slightly and pleasantly mad during the next three weeks. The sun shone through the dust in such a mysterious way that I could not believe what we were all doing. I had looked forward to the time in the Army as one of disembodied observation, but I found I still couldn’t see the people as I had hoped. It was arranged that we rarely talked, but I also couldn’t see them because the sun only seemed to shine on things. I saw the black high gloss on the rows of boot tips melt into dullness under the sun. I saw sweat spreading across the softened fibers of fatigue shirts, squeezed out from under the suspenders of the pack harness. I saw hands groping with pieces of rifle. Interminably. And I was dazzled by looking at my shiny thumbnail through the bores of all their rifles. When I looked down the spirals, I had no idea how far away the other end was. I could feel my left hand around the barrel, and I could see my right thumbnail flicking the sunlight at my eye—but sometimes so close it was only the distance through a keyhole, sometimes so far that my stomach lunged up to my chest. Pleasurably, I think. It was a beautiful sight—the glistening foreshortened rifling—and I was often hypnotized.

  The roads we walked on were sometimes soft. The asphalt gave off colorless heat waves reminiscent of the beams in the rifle barrel, but the road itself was velvet, velvet gray as it climbed the hill ahead of us toward the sun.

  I was a half ghost when the sun went down. I could not tell the men from shadows then. There was nothing to do. It seemed a profanation of the place to read. I could hear voices calling to each other. “Him? He don’t care. Just as long as your shit don’t smell.” There were also many small radios that tissue-papered a song—“Come-a come-a come-a come-a to me”—while steam poured out of the shower room, through the latrine (bearing with it the smell of mentholated shaving cream), and out the double screen doors in the flank of the barracks.

  Every night my bunkmate—Demry McGlaughlin was his name—asked me softly, “Is anything wrong, man?”

  “No,” I said. It startled me every time.

  What was wrong was—perhaps was—that I knew I made up so much of each day and yet I felt the shadow of all their minds pass over it. I did not know whether they were drawn into my imagination or whether I was drawn into seeing what they saw. Whichever it was, it was a great strain. To be sure, when they slept I was released. As soon as they closed their eyes, I felt the bloat of my authority subside. I was alone, and I saw only what concerned me. I alone saw the moon shine on the white foot powder on the floor, as soft as flour on a pantry table. I saw the moonlight—on the pronged silver knob of the drinking fountain, gleaming hard at a great distance from my open eye. In the morning I felt good. I used to sing as I bloused my fatigue pants. Once someone said behind my back, “What’s he singing about—all the crap he’s gonna give us?”

  I said out loud without turning, “I don’t think you’ve thought very carefully about what you said. The chair gives you leave to reconsider.”

  Usually I ignored who said what. There were so few freedoms for them that I thought they should at least have the freedom of speech. The only way they could be sure of it was by my perfect impartiality, and perfect impartiality is ignorance.

  Demry chuckled. He was the only one in the barracks appreciably bigger than I.

  I favored him. Otherwise I was fair. I favored him not because he was the biggest, nor because he was a Negro, but because he was the first to emerge. I saw him speaking to me and heard him, both at once.

  In general, my reaction to the swell of voices within the barracks was like the sort of puzzlement one has watching a flock of birds, hearing them call to each other but being unable to associate a particular call with a particular bird. As a consequence I could never address anyone by name unless he was wearing a clean name tag and happened to be standing within reading distance and facing me. However, on several occasions I called the roll at assembly entirely from memory. But I knew Demry. Demry was like a large crow flapping along from tree to tree in plain sight, cawing down at me, sometimes companionably, sometimes derisively, but always clearly. That may have been because he seemed to be humoring me. He laughed quite a lot.

  What I said fell heavily on the others. I sometimes would say whatever I was thinking and it dismayed them, especially since the first sergeant often appeared to tell them that he stood behind whatever I told them. Thus, a number of lyric and scientific observations became curiously embedded in my impersonation of a sergeant, the whole batch of which was repeatedly stamped with approval by the first sergeant. I could also say “InspickSHUNNN … HARums!” Click. Click. Clickety-click. “You min will do that again and you min will do it ERRIGHT!” as well as some other things along that line.

  But those were only the ornaments and accidents of my efforts; the substance was plain and just. Their hours in the barracks were arranged on concentric cardboard wheels that I set each morning after breakfast. In the field the first sergeant’s voice reached us all on every main question. I believed no one had reason to complain.

  Yet there was fighting. The first time it was two very small people. Demry held one and I the other. We put them under the shower. The second time it was somewhat larger people, but after a blow had been struck on each side someone saw a plump nurse from the dental clinic walking slowly past the barracks. The crowd rushed to line the roads. The two men fighting became puzzled, and then alarmed. They left off fighting. One man—not one of the two—went on sick call with a swollen knee. He had been pushed down the wooden steps on the way out.

  Sometimes things happened quickly. But mostly time was quicker. The usual day would be half gone before anything of s
ubstance came along. We moved very slowly from point to point—both while walking and while learning our rudiments. There was a special stillness about the faces and postures of all the people in the company—gathered outside the mess hall, inside a classroom, on the roadside—that gave me the feeling that they had been told they were being used as models for a laborious and richly detailed mural painting. Even when we were marching it seemed so—especially in the woods when a bird or a squirrel would appear and disappear at a natural speed. There was so much time passing that I could watch the sun’s shadow move from one side of a nose to the other. But sometimes things happened quickly. One late afternoon we left the company formation, trooped through the barracks, and were seated outside cleaning rifles before the dust had settled on the assembly area, a hundred yards away, visible from the wooden steps of our side porch. A few people stayed inside, but most of the platoon, stripped to their white T-shirts, were gathered on the ground in groups of three or four, their dog tags clanking gently as they slowly moved their forearms about, pulling apart their rifles with the peaceful rhythm of sheep tugging at clumps of grass. I went inside to drink at the water fountain. Demry was sitting on his bunk. I heard Ellridge ask him for the bore cleaner. Demry ignored him. He asked again. Demry said, “You’ll get it. You’ll get it. Just get off my back, boy.”

  Ellridge giggled loudly. I was surprised.

  “Something funny?” Demry said. “You think that’s funny? You go on and tell me what’s funny, boy.”

  Ellridge said, “Oh, you know.” His eyelids drooped almost languidly. But when he looked up again his eyes were wide, his mouth parted, and his cheeks sucked in with fear. I began to see the point about “boy.” It was astonishing how quickly they had come to the point, without a word of elaboration, without having anything else in common. Even so, I would have thought Demry was being overly subtle, but I could see Ellridge’s response of coyness and panic. And there is something about ineptness—ineptness at daring as well as ineptness at flight—that arouses loathing and aggression.