In mid-winter of 1944 I was given a lift in the back of an overcrowded GI truck going from Luxembourg City to the front at Halzhoffen, Germany--a distance of four flat tires, three (reported) cases of frozen feet, and at least one case of incipient pneumonia.

The forty-odd men jammed in the truck were nearly all infantry replacements. Many of them had just got out of hospitals in England where they had been treated for wounds received in action somewhat earlier in the war. Ostensibly rehabilitated, they were on their way to join rifle companies of a certain infantry division which, I happened to know, was commanded by a brigadier general who seldom stepped into his command car without wearing a Luger and a photographer, one on each side; a fighting man with a special gift for writing crisp, quotable little go-to-hell notes to the enemy, invariably when outnumbered or surrounded by the latter. I rode for hours and hours without looking anybody in the truck very straight in the eye.

During day-light hours the men made an all-out effort to suppress or divert their eagerness to get another crack at the enemy. Charade groups were formed at either end of the truck. Favourite statesmen were elaborately discussed. Songs were started up--spirited war songs, chiefly, composed by patriotic Broadway songwriters who, through some melancholy, perhaps permanently embittering turn of the wheel of fortune, had been disqualified from taking their places at the front. In short, the truck fairly rocked with persiflage and melody, until night abruptly fell and the black-out curtains were attached. Then all the men seemed to go to sleep or freeze to death, except the original narrator of the following story and myself. He had the cigarettes and I had the ears.

This is all I know about the man who told me the story: His first name was Rudford. He had a very slight Southern accent and a chronic, foxhole cough. The bars and red cross of a captain in the medics were painted, as fashion had it, on his helmet.

And that's all I know about him except for what comes naturally out of his story. So please don't anybody write in for additional information--I don't even know if the man is alive today. This request applies particularly to readers who may sooner or later think that this story is a slam against one section of this country.

It isn't a slam against anybody or anything. It's just a simple little story of mom's apple pie, ice cold beer, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the Lux Theater of the Air--the things we fought for, in short. You can't miss it, really.

Rudford came from a place called Agersburg, Tennessee. He said it was about an hour's drive from Memphis. It sounded to me like a pretty little town. For one thing, it had a street called Miss Packer's Street. Miss Packers had been an Agersberg school teacher who, during the Civil War, had taken a few pot shots at some passing Union troops, from the window of the principal's office. None of the flag-waving, Barbara Fritchie stuff for Miss Packer. She had just taken aim and let go, knocking off five of the boys in blue before anybody could get to her with an ax. She was then nineteen.

Rudford's father originally had been a Bostonian, a salesman for a Boston typewriter company. On a business trip to Agserberg, just before the first World War, he had met--and within two weeks married--a well heeled local girl. He never returned either to the home office or to Boston, apparently X-ing both out of his life without a jot of regret. He was quite a number altogether. Less than an hour after his wife died giving birth to Rudford, he got on a trolley going to the outskirts of Agsberg and bought out a rocky, but reputable, publishing house. Six months later he published a book he had written himself, entitled, "Civics for Americans." It was followed, over a period of few years, by a highly successful series of highly unreadable textbooks known-- only too widely, even today--as the Intelligence Series for Progressive High School Students of America. I certainly know for a fact that his "Science for Americans" paid the public high schools of Philadelphia a visit around 1932. The book was rich with baffling little diagrams of simple little fulcrums.

The boy Rudford's early home life was unique. His father evidently detested people who just read his books. He grilled and quizzed the boy even at the height of marble season. He held him up on the staircase for a definition of a chromosome. He passed him the lima beans on condition that the planets were named--in order of size. He gave the boy his ten-cent weekly allowance in return for the date of some historical personage's birth or death or defeat. To be brief, at the age of eleven Rudford knew just about as much, academically, as the average high-school freshman. And in an extracurricular sense, more. The average high-school freshman doesn't know how to sleep on a cellar floor without using a pillow or blanket.

There were, however, two footnotes in Rudford's boyhood. They weren't in his father's books, but they were close enough to make a little quick sense in an emergency. One of them was a man named Black Charles, and the other was a little girl named Peggy Moore.

Peggy was in Rudford's class at school. For more than a year, though, he had taken little note of her beyond the fact that she was usually the first one eliminated in a spelling bee. He didn't begin to assess Peggy's true value until one day he saw her, across the aisle from him, insert her chewing gum into the hollow of her neck. It struck Rudford as a very attractive thing for anybody to do--even a girl. Doubling up under his desk, pretending to pick up something from the floor, he whispered to Peggy, "Hey! That where you put your gum?"

Turning her lips ajar, the young lady with the gum in her neck nodded. She was flattered. It was the first time Rudford had spoken to her out of the line of duty.

Rudford felt around the floor for a nonexistent ink eraser. "Listen. You wanna meet a friend of mine after school?"

Peggy put a hand over her mouth and pretended to cough. "Who?" she asked.

"Black Charles."

"Who's he?"

"He's a fella. Plays the piano on Willard Street. He's a friend of mine."

"I'm not allowed on Willard Street."

"Oh!"

"When are you going?"

"Right after she lets us out. She's not gonna keep us in today. She's too bored...Okay?"

"Okay."

That afternoon the two children went down to Willard Street, and Peggy met Black Charles and Black Charles met Peggy.

Black Charles's cafe was a hole-in-the-wall hamburger joint, a major eyesore on a street that was regularly torn down, on paper, whenever Civic Council convened. It was, perhaps, the paragon of all restaurants classified by parents--usually through he side window of the family car--as unsanitary-looking. It was a swell place to go, in short. Moreover, it is very doubtful if any of Black Charles's young patrons had ever got sick from any of the delicious, greasy hamburgers he served. Anyway, almost nobody went to Black Charles's to eat. You ate after you got there, naturally, but that wasn't why you went.

You went there because Black Charles played the piano, like somebody from Memphis--maybe even better. He played hot or straight, and he was always at the piano when you came in, and he was always there when you had to go home. But not only that. (After all, it stood to reason that Black Charles, being a wonderful piano player, would be wonderfully indefatigable.) He was something else--something few white players are. He was kind and interested when young people came up to the piano to ask him to play something or just to talk to him. He looked at you. He listened.

Until Rudford started bringing Peggy with him he was probably the youngest habitue of Black Charles's cafe. For over two years he had been going there alone two or three afternoons a week; never at night, for the very good reason that he wasn't allowed out at night. He missed out on the noise and smoke and jump indigenous to Black Charles's place after dark, but he got something, afternoons, equally or more desirable. He had the privilege of hearing Charles play all the best numbers without interruption. All he had to do to get in on this deal was to wake the artist up. That was the catch. Black Charles slept in the afternoon, and he slept like a dead man.

Going down to Willard Street to hear Black Charles play was even better with Peggy along, Rudford found out. She was not only somebody good to sit on the floor with; she was some body good to listen with. Rudford liked the way she drew up her racy, usually bruised legs and locked her fingers around her ankles. He liked the way she set her mouth hard against her knees, leaving teeth marks, while Charles was playing. And the way walked home afterwards: not talking, just now and then kicking at a stone or a tin can, or reflectively cutting a cigar butt in two with her heel. She was just right, though of course, Rudford didn't tell her so. She had an alarming tendency to get lovey-dovey with or without provocation.

You had to hand it to her, though. She even learned how to wake Black Charles up.

One three-thirtyish afternoon, just after the two children had let themselves in, Peggy said, "Can I wake him up this time? Huh, Rudford?"

"Sure. Go ahead. If you can." Black Charles slept, fully dressed except for his shoes, on a bumpy, ratty-looking settee, a few stacked tables away from his beloved piano.

Peggy circled the problem academically.

"Well, go ahead and do it," Ruthford said.

"I'm fixin' to; I am fixin' to. Go away."

Rudford watched her a trifle smugly. "Naa. You can't just shove him around and get anywhere. You've seen me," he said. "You gotta really haul off. Get him right under the kidneys. You've seen me."

"Here?" said Peggy. She had her finger on the little island of nerves set off by the dorsal fork of Charles's lavender suspenders.

"Go ahead."

Peggy wound up and delivered.

Black Charles stirred slightly, but slept on without even seriously changing his position.

"You missed. You gotta hit him harder than that anyway."

The aspirant tried to make a more formidable weapon of her right hand. She sandwiched her thumb between her first and second fingers, held it away from her and looked at it admiringly.

"You'll break your thumb that way. Get your thumb out of--"

"Oh, be quiet," said Peggy, and let go with a haymaker.

It worked. Black Charles let out an awful yell and went all of two feet in the stale cafe air. As he came down, Peggy put in a request: "Charles, will you play 'Lady, Lady' for me, please?"

Charles scratched his head, swung his immense, stockinged feet to the cigarette-butt specked floor, and squinted. "That you, Marga-reet?"

"Yes. We just got here. The whole class was kept in," she explained. Would you please play, 'Lady, Lady,' Charles?"

"Summer vacation starts Monday," Rudford enthusiastically put in. "We can come around every afternoon."

"My, my! Ain't that fine!" Charles said--and meant it. He got to his feet, a gentle giant of a man, towing a hook-and-ladder gin hang-over. He began to move in the general direction of his piano.

"We'll come earlier too," Peggy promised.

"Ain't that fine!" Charles responded.

"This way, Charles," Rudford said. You're going right into the ladies' room."

"He's still sort of asleep. Hit him just once, Rudford..."

I guess it was a good summer--the days full of Charles's piano--but I can't say for sure. Rudford told me a story; he didn't give me his autobiography.

He told me next about a day in November. It was still a Coolidge year, but which one I don't know exactly. I don't think those Coolidge years come apart anyways.

It was afternoon. A half hour after the pupils of the Agersburg Elementary School had pushed and shoved and punched their way out of the exit doors, Rudford and Peggy were sitting high in the rafters of the new house that was being built on Miss Packer's Street. There wasn't a carpenter in sight. The highest, narrowest, weakest beam in the house was theirs to straddle without annoying interference.

Sitting on a beauty, a story above the ground, they talked about the things that counted: the smell of gasoline, Robert Hermanson's ears, Alice Caldwell's teeth, rocks that were all right to throw at somebody, Milton Sills, how to make cigarette smoke come out your nose, men and ladies who had bad breath, the best size knife to kill somebody with.

They exchanged ambitions. Peggy decided that when she grew up she would be a war nurse. Also a movie actress. Also a piano player. Also a crook--one that swiped a lot of diamonds and stuff but gave some of it to poor people; very poor people. Rudford said he only wanted to be a piano player. In his spare time, maybe, he'd be an auto racer--he already had a pretty good pair of goggles.

A spitting contest followed, at a heated moment of which the losing side dropped a valuable, mirrorless powder compact out of her cardigan pocket. She started to climb down to retrieve it, but lost her balance and fell about a quarter story. She landed with a horrible thud on the new, white pine floor.

"You okay?" her companion inquired, not budging from the rafters.

"My head, Rudford, I am dyin'!"

"Naa, you're not."

"I am, too. Feel."

"I am not comin' all the way down just to feel."

"Please," the lady entreated.

Muttering cynical little observations about people who don't watch where they're even going, Ruthford climbed down.

He pushed back a hank or two of the patient's lovely black-Irish hair.

"Where's it hurt?" he demanded.

"All over..."

"Well, I don't see anything. There isn't any abrasion at all."

"Isn't any what?"

"Abrasion. Blood or anything. There isn't even any swelling." The examiner drew back suspiciously. "I don't even think you fell on your head."

"Well, I did. Keep looking...There. Right where your hand---"

"I don't see a thing. I am going back up."

"Wait!" said Peggy. "Kiss it first. Here. Right here."

"I'm not gonna kiss your old head. Wuddaya think I am?"

"Please! Just right here." Peggy pointed to her cheek.

Bored and enormously philanthropic, Rudford got it over with.

A rather sneaky announcement followed: "Now we're engaged."

"Like fun we are!...I'm leaving. I'm going down to old Charles's."

"You can't. He said not to come today. He said he was gonna have a guest today."

"He won't care. Anyway, I'm not gonna stay here with you. You can't spit. You can't even sit still. And when I feel sorry for you or something, you try to get lovey-dovey."

"I don't get lovey-dovey much."

"So long," Rudford said.

"I'll go with you!"

They left the sweet-smelling empty house and moped along the four-o'clock autumn streets toward Black Charles's. On Spruce Street they stopped for fifteen minutes to watch two irate firemen trying to get a young cat out of a tree. A woman wearing a Japanese kimono directed the operations, in an unpleasant, importunate voice. The two children listened to her, watched the firemen, and silently pulled for the cat. She didn't let them down...Suddenly she leaped from a high branch, landing on the hat of one of the firemen, and springboarded instantly into an adjacent tree. Rudford and Peggy moved on, reflective and permanently changed. The afternoon now contained forever, however suspensory, one red and gold tree, one fireman's hat and one cat that really knew how to jump.

"We'll ring the bell when we get there. We won't just walk right in," Rudford said.

"Okay."

When Rudford had rung the bell, Black Charles himself, not only awake but shaven, answered the door. Peggy immediately reported to him, "You said for us not to come today, but Rudford wanted to."

"Y'all come on in," Black Charles invited cordially. He wasn't sore at them.

Rudford and Peggy followed him self-consciously, looking for the guest.

"I got my sister's chile here," Black Charles said. "Her and her mammy just come up here from 'gator country."

"She play the piano?" Rudford asked.

"She a singer, boy. She a singer."

"Why are the shades down?" Peggy asked. Why don't you have the shades up, Charles?"

"I was cookin' in the kitchen. You chillen can he'p me pull 'em up," Black Charles said, and went out to the kitchen.

The two children each took a side of the room and began to let daylight in. They both felt more relaxed. The Guest discomfort was over. If there were somebody strange, some non-member, hovering about Black Charles's place, it was only his sister's child--practically nobody.

But Rudford, over on the piano side of the cafe, suddenly took in his breath. Somebody was sitting at the piano, watching him. He let go the blind string in his hand, and the blind snapped to the top; it slattered noisily for a moment, then came to a stop.

"'And the Lord said, Let there be light,'" said a grown-up girl as black as Charles, sitting in Charles's place at the piano. "Yeah, man," she added moderately. She was wearing a yellow dress and a yellow ribbon in her hair. The sunshine that Rudford had let in fell across her left hand; with it she was tapping out something slow and personal on the wood of Charles's piano. In her other hand, between long, elegant fingers, she had a burning stub of a cigarette. She wasn't a pretty girl.

"I was just pulling up the shades," Rudford said finally.