The Quartermaster's Boy

• Chapter 1 Intake at Depot Seven
• Chapter 2 The Ledger of Broken Things
• Chapter 3 Burlap, Brass, and Grease
• Chapter 4 Requisition Number Nine
• Chapter 5 The Weight of Wool
• Chapter 6 Rust in the Rail Yard
• Chapter 7 A Standard Issue Life
• Chapter 8 Inventory by Candlelight
• Chapter 9 The Tally Clerk's Daughter
• Chapter 10 Spoiled Rations
• Chapter 11 Dust on the Stacks
• Chapter 12 Red Tape and Shovels
• Chapter 13 The Dead Stock Pile
• Chapter 14 Surplus Souls
• Chapter 15 A Stamp on the Wrist
• Chapter 16 Night Shift on Track Four
• Chapter 17 The Quartermaster’s Order
• Chapter 18 Crates Without Names
• Chapter 19 Discrepancy in the Count
• Chapter 20 Broken Seals
• Chapter 21 The Paperwork of Survival
• Chapter 22 Inspection Day
• Chapter 23 Human Freight
• Chapter 24 Condemned and Written Off
• Chapter 25 Burning the Vouchers
• Chapter 26 Beyond the Manifest

The train did not stop so much as it surrendered to the mud. It was an ancient, soot-blinded consolidation engine dragging nine boxcars and three flatbeds of pitted corrugated iron, and when its air brakes hissed their last breath against the siding, the sound was identical to a tired man sitting down in a wet cellar.

Will Finch climbed down out of the second cattle car with his canvas duffel bag slung across his collarbone. His knees, locked stiff after twenty-four hours on a floor of damp pine shavings, refused to bend properly, and he pitched forward onto the cinder track. The dirt here did not smell like farm dirt. It smelled like sulfur, coal tar, and tallow—the unmistakable reek of government storage.

"Get up, son, or get chalked," a voice barked above him.

The man holding the clipboard wore a high-collared olive drab coat that had lost its brass buttons to bone ones somewhere during the late war. His fingers were bare, split red by the November wind, and clamped over a yellow ream of intake manifests. Behind him, three hundred yards of whitewashed planking and corrugated zinc roofs stretched through the gray fog like a row of slaughtered hog carcasses hung up to dry. This was the United States Army Quartermaster Depot Seven, known to the trainmen simply as the Dump.

"Finch," Will said, wiping his palms on his trousers. They came away black with cinders. "William E."

The man didn't look up from his paper. His pencil, a stub of lead held in a brass casing, ticked twice against the pulp. "Finch, William E. Civilian casual. Category Four. You got your voucher from the relief committee?"

Will fished inside his jacket, beneath the lining where his mother had sewn a pouch out of an old flour sack. The paper was folded into sixteenths, soft and fuzzy along the creases like felt. He handed it over. The clerk took it between two yellowed fingers, didn't bother to unfold it entirely, and stamped it with a heavy wooden rocker that smelled of stale purple ink.

"Dock Three," the clerk said, his breath pluming out in short, bored puffs. "Go see Sergeant Krum. Don't look at the officers' quarters, don't pick up nothing off the ties, and if an engine whistles behind you, don't turn around to see what it is—just jump to the ditch. You're six minutes behind the morning shift."

"Where's Dock Three, mister?" Will asked.

The clerk used the pencil to point vaguely into the mist toward a row of high, unpainted wooden ramps where men in grease-stained denim jackets were already rolling fifty-five-gallon drums down skid boards. The drums hit the planks with a hollow, gut-thumping tonk-tonk that seemed to set the pace for everything in the yard: men walked to that rhythm, shovels bit into coal to that rhythm, and two tracks over, an oil-fired yard switcher shuffled boxcars back and forth like a cardsharp working a cold deck.

Will hoicked the duffel higher on his shoulder and started down the gravel walkway. He was seventeen, though the paper in his pocket said nineteen. Down in southern Illinois, the bank had taken the team of mules first, then the thresher, and finally the porch furniture before anyone got around to looking at the deed for the scrub oak acreage out past the creek. His father had sat on the pump handle for three days without speaking, until an uncle in Terre Haute sent word that the War Department was opening up the regional depots to civilian contract boys to clean out the Great War overstock before the whole mess rotted into vinegar. A dollar twenty a day, bunk and salt pork found. To Will, walking through the gray Illinois dusk toward the depot gates two days prior, it had sounded like an empire.

Seen up close, Depot Seven looked less like an empire and more like an enormous kitchen that had been abandoned while the stew was still boiling.

Between the tracks lay mountainous windrows of crated wheelbarrows, spokes sticking up through broken slat-work like ribs. Further on, a hundred thousand duckboards were stacked twelve feet high under tarpaulins that had shredded into long, greasy ribbons, leaving the green wood beneath to sprout a fine beard of orange shelf-fungus. Nothing was moving fast, but everything was moving. Men with wooden two-wheeled hand trucks trotted in pairs, their shoulders hunched against the mist, moving identical olive-drab crates from a boxcar marked Erie to a warehouse door marked Section C-4: Webbing & Harness.

Will reached the lip of Dock Three by climbing an incline made of three-inch white oak planks, polished slick as lard by ten years of hobnailed boots. A man was sitting on an overturned lard tub beside a pot-bellied stove that had been hauled out onto the open dock. The stove pipe ran up five feet and ended in the open air, puffing greasy black smoke into the drizzling sky.

The man had three stripes sewn onto the sleeve of a sweater that was unraveling at the cuff. He had an ear like a dried pear and eyes that seemed permanently focused on an imaginary line two inches above Will’s forehead.

"You the boy from Cairo?" the sergeant asked without looking down.

"Finch, sir. Yes."

"Don't call me sir. I work for a living. I’m Sergeant Krum. Give me your voucher."

Will handed over the twice-stamped paper. Krum took it, spat a brown stream of tobacco juice against the side of the hot stove where it hissed and vanished instantly, and then read the paper with an agony of slow lip-movements.

"Finch," Krum said. "Weight, one-forty. Height, five-ten. Teeth, fair. Sound in wind and limb. Well, that’s what the township saw fit to lie about. Drop that bag."

Will let the duffel drop. It hit the wet oak planks with a limp thud.

"Open it," Krum said.

Will knelt and untied the hemp cord. Inside were two spare pairs of gray wool socks his sister had knitted from unraveled sweaters, a pocketknife with a bone handle that had a split down the rivet, an extra cotton work shirt, and a tin of lard-grease salve for boils.

Krum reached down with a pine lath he used as a walking stick and poked at the socks. "Keep the socks. Keep the knife if the blade’s under four inches. Give the grease to the gate guard on your way back out tonight or he’ll take it off you for contraband axle dressing. We don't allow outside petroleum products on Depot Seven. Too many fires. Too many thieves."

"It's just hog fat and pine rosin, mostly," Will said. "For my neck."

"I don't give a damn if it's the holy oil of Jerusalem, it don't come past Dock Three," Krum said evenly. He reached into a wooden crate beside the stove and pulled out a bundle tied with rough brown sisal. "Take your uniform."

"I'm civilian casual," Will said, recalling the words on his paper.

"You're on the depot rolls," Krum said, shoving the bundle against Will’s ribs. "Which means you don't wear blue denim. Blue denim is railroad. You wear brown denim so the sentries don't shoot you through the brisket when you cross the tracks after the six o'clock whistle. You get two pair of trousers, two jumpers, one pair of shoes, field, trench, model nineteen-seventeen. Put the shoes on now."

The boots were heavy enough to sink a rowboat. They were broad-toed, unlined, and had five rows of hobnails driven into the double leather soles in a horseshoe pattern. When Will shoved his wool-clad foot into the first one, the leather inside felt like cold cast iron. There was no give to it; it had been tanned in hemlock bark fifteen years before and had sat in a crate in Ohio until the grease in the pores had turned into white wax.

"Lace 'em tight," Krum said, leaning his chin on the pine lath. "The tongue’s got to fold twice over the instep or the gravel gets in through the eyelets and eats your skin down to the tendon. Then you get the blood-rot, and then we have to fill out Form Ninety-Four to strike you off the civilian ledger, which takes two weeks and pisses off the Captain. I hate the Captain when he's pissed off. He starts counting shovels."

Will laced the boots. His fingers were already losing their feeling in the raw damp. When he stood up, he felt six inches taller and five stone heavier, his ankles locked inside the stiff leather like an ox in a stanchion.

"Walk," Krum said.

Will took four steps down the planking. The hobnails bit into the wet oak with a sharp, grating crunch that echoed under the dock roof.

"Adequate," the sergeant grunted. "You ain't lame, anyway. Come on."

He didn't wait to see if Will was following. Krum had a hitch in his left hip that gave him a dipping, side-to-side roll, like a barge in a wash, but he covered the ground with terrifying efficiency. Will had to trot to keep up, his ungreased boots squeaking and crunching against the cinders as they left Dock Three and dove into the alleyways between the long, low warehouses.

Depot Seven, Will began to realize, was not an installation so much as an unmapped city of dead material. It had been built in 1918 to supply three divisions that had never sailed, and it had been receiving the backwash of the whole American Expeditionary Force ever since. Everything the Army had bought in its great, terrified spending spree between the declaration of war and the Armistice had ended up here, or in depots just like it, stacked in crates, barrels, bundles, and bales, waiting for an accounting that never happened.

They passed Warehouse Twelve, where through the open sliding doors Will could see stacks of trench periscopes—thousands of small wooden boxes with gray painted mirrors—reaching to the rafters like cords of firewood. Outside Warehouse Fourteen, a dozen men with hand scrapers were cleaning cosmoline off stacks of spare artillery wheels, their arms black to the elbow with the thick, amber grease that smelled of petroleum and wintergreen.

"Don't look at them," Krum muttered without turning around. "They're the wheel gang. Half of 'em are six-month men from the state farm at Vandalia. They look at you, you look at their boots. Looking a convict in the eye gets you four inches of scrap hoop-iron between the short ribs."

"Are they dangerous?" Will asked, his voice shaking slightly from the cold.

"They're hungry," Krum said. "A hungry man’s dangerous if you got a sandwich. Otherwise, he's just slow. Here's your shed."

They stopped before a small lean-to built against the southern wall of Warehouse Nineteen. It was little more than a tar-paper shack with a stovepipe and a half-glass door that had been painted with green stencil lettering: SUB-DEPOT 7-B: HARDWARE & RECOVERED SUNDRIES.

Inside, sitting at a tall schoolmaster’s desk that had been propped up on four wooden blocks to bring it to standing height, was a man who looked like he had been constructed entirely out of gray paper. He had a gray pencil behind his ear, gray skin that hung in loose bags beneath his eyes, and a gray alpaca coat that was missing both lapels.

"Mister Finch," Krum said, shoving Will through the door by the shoulder. "The replacement for that boy who fell through the skylight on Tuesday."

The man at the desk did not stop writing. His steel-nibbed pen scratched across the blue-lined paper with the sound of a beetle crawling inside a dry wainscot.

"Name," he whispered.

"Finch," Will said. "William."

"Can you read?"

"Yes, sir."

"Can you count to one hundred without taking off your shoes?"

"I can count to a thousand," Will said, a little heat rising in his neck. "I did the books for my father’s threshing ring."

The man dipped the pen into an inkwell made from an empty three-inch brass shell casing. "Your father's threshing ring didn't have forty-two thousand different items in four grades of preservation, Finch. Here, if you count ninety-nine and write down a hundred, the auditor from Fort Sheridan comes down on the passenger coach and stays at the hotel for three days on depot per diem. The depot commander doesn't like that. He has to buy the auditor dinner at the railway hotel. The auditor gets beef; we get a memorandum. Do you know what a memorandum is, Finch?"

"A letter, I reckon."

"It is a curse," the gray man said softly, blotting his ledger with a square of dirty gray felt. "It is an official curse that stays in the drawer forever. I am Mister Satterfield. I am the storekeeper of Sub-Depot Seven-B. Sergeant Krum is the field transport. The men out there on the skids are the hands. You are neither. You are the boy."

"The boy," Will repeated.

"The Quartermaster's boy," Satterfield said. He stood up from his tall stool. He was small, barely reaching Will’s collar, but he possessed the dry, terrifying authority of a schoolmaster who had never in his life been contradicted by anyone with less than three rows of medals. "The boy fetches the tally books. The boy checks the crate stencils against the shipping bills. The boy goes up into the high bins where the floorboards are rotten because the boy only weighs nine stone and won't go through the joists unless he’s stupid enough to carry two cases of harness grease at once. You aren't stupid, are you, Finch?"

"No, sir."

"We shall ascertain that by noon," Satterfield said. He reached under the desk and pulled out a small wooden shingle with a brass clip screwed into the top. Clipped to it was a single sheet of paper covered in tiny, cramped figures written in purple copying pencil. "Building Four. Bin seventy-two through bin eighty-eight. Pickaxes, entrenching, Model Nineteen-Ten. Without handles. The handles were condemned in twenty-eight due to wood-borer, but the heads are still good if they haven't rusted through the cosmoline. Go count them."

"How do I count them?" Will asked. "Just... count 'em?"

Satterfield sighed, a sound like autumn leaves blowing across a porch. He looked at Sergeant Krum, who was still leaning against the door frame, whittling a match down to a toothpick with his thumbnail.

"He asks how to count them," Satterfield said. "The Cairo academy of science has sent us a philosopher."

"He’s big enough to lift 'em, anyway," Krum said. "Give him the chalk."

Satterfield reached into a drawer that smelled powerfully of camphor and handed Will a stick of thick, blue lumber-marking chalk. "You find Bin Seventy-Two. You take down each crate. You verify the wire seal is unbroken. If the wire seal is unbroken, the box contains twenty-five heads. You mark the box with a blue cross on the left end—not the right end, the left end—and you write the count on this voucher. If the seal is broken, you open the crate, take out the heads, wipe the cosmoline off the stamp with a kerosene rag, verify they are marked 'U.S.' and 'Ames,' and count them one by one. If they are marked 'W-B,' they are British contract and belong in Shed Nine. Do not bring British heads into Building Four. The system does not admit British heads in Building Four."

"What if there's twenty-six in a box?" Will asked.

Satterfield paused, his pen poised an inch above the inkwell. He looked at Will with an expression of real, clinical sorrow.

"There are never twenty-six," Satterfield said. "The Army does not make mistakes in excess, Finch. It only makes mistakes in deficit. Go."

Building Four was three hundred yards down the main line of the depot, a cavernous barn of red-painted pine with a roof of corrugated zinc that rattled like a snare drum under the rising wind. Inside, the air was ten degrees colder than it had been on the platform, trapped in the permanent shade of four million board-feet of government lumber. The smells were different here: dry cedar shavings, tallow, decaying canvas, and the strange, peppery dust that rises from thousand-bale stacks of surplus wool blankets that have been treated with arsenical powder to keep the moths away.

A single row of four-pane skylights ran down the center of the ridgepole, thirty feet up, but half of them had been blacked over with roof tar to patch leaks, casting the interior into a long lane of gloomy gray interrupted by sudden, cold shafts of wet daylight.

Will found Bin Seventy-Two by the simple expedient of walking until the numbers stenciled on the pine uprights grew larger. The bins were not boxes; they were three-tiered timber racks that ran from the floor nearly to the rafters, deep enough to hold three tiers of four-foot crates.

Bin Seventy-Two was full. The crates were made of rough-sawn white oak, bound with flat iron bands that had rusted into a dark, crumbly crust. Each one was stenciled in faded black lampblack: 25 EA. HEADS, INTRENCHING PICK, M-1910. CONTRACT 4412-PHILA. DEPOT.

Will reached for the top crate on the bottom row. His new boots felt clumsy, the iron hobnails sliding on the damp pine planks of the flooring like lard on glass. He caught the iron band with his fingers, braced his hip against the timber upright, and heaved.

The crate didn't budge.

He set his feet wider, let his breath out in a grunt, and pulled with his shoulders. The wood groaned, a seal of dried rot and old grease gave way with a sound like tearing linen, and the crate slid six inches out of the rack. It weighed at least seventy pounds. The oak had soaked up the river damp of twelve winters, and the iron inside had settled into a solid, heavy lump.

Will checked the end. There was no wire seal. There had never been one; the iron straps had simply been nailed down with heavy, broad-headed clout nails through the timber.

"Satterfield," Will muttered under his breath, "you old bastard."

He took out his pocketknife, but the bone handle seemed too small and frail against the rusted hoop-iron. He looked around for an iron bar, but the aisle was completely empty except for three dead sparrows near the wall and a pile of broken excelsior that had been swept into a corner and forgotten until the rats had nested in it.

He used the heel of his new boot. He kicked upward against the lower edge of the crate lid, once, twice, three times, until the nails shrieked and backed out a half-inch. Then he jammed the point of his pocketknife into the gap, using his thumb against the back of the blade to pry. The iron band yielded with a dull plink, the head of the top nail flying off to strike the corrugated wall twenty feet away.

Inside, packed in sawdust that had turned gray and greasy with age, were the picks.

They were laid across one another like salt herrings in a keg, five to a layer, five layers deep. Each one had been dipped in a mixture of beef fat and kerosene before being dropped into the wood. The grease had hardened into an amber jelly that smelled of an old butcher shop on a hot August afternoon.

Will reached in and took the first one by the point. It was cold—not cold like iron in the winter, but cold like something that had lived at the bottom of a well. He wiped his thumb across the broad eye where the ash handle was supposed to seat.

Under the grease, the letters were clear, stamped deep into the rough steel: U.S. — AMES — 1917.

He laid it on the floor. It clanged once against the oak planks, a flat, hard note that died instantly in the huge, wool-stifled quiet of the warehouse.

"One," Will said aloud.

His voice sounded ridiculously small. Down the aisle, fifty yards away, something rustled in the canvas stacks—a rat or a cat, or one of the six-month men from Vandalia looking for a corner to sleep off his morning chicory.

"One," he said again, quieter this time.

He pulled the second pick out. It had stuck to the third, the cold tallow gluing the metal together until he had to strike them against the edge of the rack to separate them. The grease got on his brown denim jumpers, leaving dark, oval stains across the knees that instantly picked up the gray dust from the floor. His fingers were stiffening; the kerosene in the grease bit into the small cracks around his fingernails with a dull, throbbing burn.

By the time he had emptied the crate, twenty-four pick heads were arranged in four neat rows of six on the floorboards.

He stared into the bottom of the box. There was nothing left but two inches of yellow sawdust and a dead bumblebee, perfectly preserved in a drop of tallow like an insect in amber.

Twenty-four.

He reached into the sawdust, raking his fingers through it until his nails scraped the bottom planks. Nothing. He checked the paper on his board: 25 EA.

Satterfield’s dry, papery voice came back to him down the cold tunnel of the warehouse: The Army does not make mistakes in excess, Finch. It only makes mistakes in deficit.

Will stood there for a long moment, the blue chalk heavy in his fist. He could put the twenty-four back, nail the lid down with the heel of his boot, and mark the blue cross on the left end. Nobody would ever know. The crate had sat there since the year he was two years old; it would likely sit there until the zinc roof rusted through and the river drowned the whole valley. Nobody was going to dig a trench with these picks. The war had been over for thirteen years. The Kaiser was chopping wood in Holland; the boys who had dug the trenches with picks just like these were selling apples on the street corners in Cairo or sitting on their fathers' pump handles waiting for the corn to drop in price.

He looked at the blue chalk. Then he looked at the wooden shingle.

He marked the sheet: Bin 72. Box 1. Twenty-four (24).

As he bent to heave the second crate from the rack, a bell began to toll from the central water tower out by the tracks. It was not a church bell; it was an old locomotive bell mounted on a cedar post, and it sounded nine times, each stroke hard, flat, and unmusical.

Nine o'clock. He had been here two hours. He had ninety-six boxes to go in Bin Seventy-Two alone, and beyond Seventy-Two lay Seventy-Three through Eighty-Eight, three tiers high, forty feet deep, stretching off into the smelling dark where the skylights gave out entirely.

Will wiped his hands on his trousers, leaving two wide, grease-black stripes from thigh to knee, and took hold of the second box.

Outside, on the main switching lead, a locomotive whistled—two short blasts and a long, low wail that rattled the iron roofing above him. A rake of cars was being shoved into the yard from the north, thirty more carloads of iron, or cloth, or harness, or tallow, come to join the great, unmoving heap. Will didn't turn around to look. He set his hobnailed boots against the planks, took a breath of the cold, oil-thickened air, and pulled.

The noon whistle did not so much dismiss the yard as grant a temporary armistice between the men and the metal. When the siren on the powerhouse died down, a heavy, dead silence dropped over the aisles of Building Four. It lasted only until a chorus of coughing started up among the stacks, followed by the dry rattle of lard tins being uncapped.

Will did not have a lard tin. His breakfast had been two biscuits of cold soda dough eaten in the cattle car somewhere north of Centralia, and by noon his stomach felt like an empty canteen rattling against his ribs. He sat down on the edge of Bin Seventy-Four with his heels dangling six inches above the greasy floor. His hands were stiff and yellow-brown from the pick tallow, smelling fiercely of kerosene, mutton fat, and the peculiar vinegar-scent of ancient iron rust. Across his wooden tally shingle lay the morning’s harvest: seven crates checked, three opened, and an aggregate deficit of five entrenching heads, two rusted bands, and one oak lid that had turned entirely into red punk under the attentions of carpenter ants.

He took his blue lumber crayon and tried to make his figures look like Satterfield’s, but his knuckles were too thick and swollen from the cold. The numbers looked like crooked nails driven into white pine.

"You write like a ditcher," a voice remarked from the shadowy gap between Bins Seventy-Six and Seventy-Seven.

A small man stepped out from behind a tiered pallet of canvas feed-troughs. He was no taller than Will’s shoulder, wearing an officer’s trench coat that had been sheared off at the knees with a pair of shears, leaving the raw threads dangling down his denim trousers like a frayed hem. A greasy knitted watch cap was pulled down so far that his ears poked out from underneath it like dried apricots. In one hand he held a flat tin of sardines and in the other an entrenching tool handle, sharpened at the spade end into a blunt chisel.

"Name's Toby," the small man said, using the wood point to hoist an oily, gray fish out of the tin and straight into his mouth without touching his lips. He chewed three times, his adam's apple bobbing violently, and swallowed with a wet gulp. "You're the new casualty."

"Civilian casual," Will corrected, leaning his head back against an oak upright. "Will Finch."

"Same difference to the Captain," Toby said. He sat down on an overturned tub that had once held harness dressing and set the sardine tin between his boots. "Casualty means you got hit by something; casual means they ain't decided what's gonna hit you yet. Satterfield give you the pick line?"

"Bins Seventy-Two through Eighty-Eight," Will said. "I'm five short already."

Toby paused, his wooden spatula halfway into the tin. He looked up at Will with one watery eye squinted against the cold draft from the rafters. "Short? You wrote 'em down short?"

"There were twenty-four in the first box and twenty-three in the fourth. The wire was off."

"God Almighty," Toby muttered, shaking his head until his cap wobbled. "The boy's an honest man. They went and sent us an honest boy from the country. They ain't got the sense God gave a mule down at the intake office."

"Satterfield said don't make mistakes in excess," Will said defensively. "He said the Army only makes mistakes in deficit."

"He meant on paper, you damn fool," Toby said, though his tone was more weary than sharp. He used his thumb to flick an oil bead off his knuckle. "You don't put a deficit on a white slip. A deficit on a white slip means an Inquiry. An Inquiry means Lieutenant Peebles has to leave the stove in the administration hut, put on his overshoes, and come down here with an ink pencil to find out whose cousin stole forty pounds of tool steel back in November of nineteen-and-nineteen. Peebles don't like overshoes. His ankles are weak from sitting down."

Toby wiped the chisel clean against his thigh and reached into the pocket of his shorn coat. He pulled out a fat, cloth-bound notebook with corners reinforced with zinc sheet. The canvas cover was stained with coffee, axle grease, and several large rings where kerosene cans had been set upon it.

"This here is the Ledger of Broken Things," Toby said, tapping the zinc-bound corner against his shin. "Satterfield keeps the blue book for the Captain. The Captain keeps the red book for Fort Sheridan. But this here is the only book on Depot Seven that don't lie, because it was wrote by men who had to carry the crates."

"What's in it?" Will asked, leaning down to peer at the fraying edges of the pages.

"Everything that ain't where it’s supposed to be, which is pretty near everything that ever come through the gate on a flatcar," Toby said. He flipped the leaves with a thumb that looked like a ginger root. "You got your short crates, your split crates, your dropped crates, and the crates that went into the drainage canal behind Shed Eleven when the switch-engine jumped the frog in the wet spring of twenty-seven. You short five Ames picks?"

"Five," Will said.

Toby turned three pages, his tongue working into the hollow where his left bicuspid used to be. "Building Four, Section D, Tier Two. Box Forty-One. Stenciled pick heads, Ames, nineteen-sixteen. That box don't have picks in it. That box has got thirty-two pounds of scrap iron pipe and five cobblestones from the paving over by the roundhouse. Put your five against that box. Mark 'em 'serviceable, wet-pack,' and leave the count at twenty-five."

Will frowned. His father had kept the threshing books in a marbled copybook with an elastic band, and every bushel of oats that went into the bin was balanced against the measure that went into the horses' nosebags at sundown. If three bushels were gone, you looked for the hole in the floorboards or you had words with the hired hand from down by the bottoms.

"That ain't counting," Will said. "That’s just juggling."

"That’s military administration, son," Toby said cheerfully. He tossed the empty sardine can into a dark corner where it landed with a tiny clatter among thousands of iron washers. "The War Department don't want forty thousand picks. The War Department wants forty thousand picks accounted for. A pick in the ground rots; a pick on the paper lasts until the paper gets wet, and Satterfield keeps the paper dry. You put five short on that slip, and Satterfield’s got to report an inventory variation to the Major. The Major’s got to dock the depot maintenance fund two dollars and forty cents. You know where that two-forty comes out of?"

Will looked at the old man's thin, grease-caked wrists. "The coal?"

"The civilian mess," Toby said. "We get three fewer bags of navy beans next month, and the lard gets cut with more cottonseed oil until the biscuits taste like a wagon axle. Don't you never write down a deficit on an Ames pick, boy. An Ames pick is holy water. If the crate says twenty-five, you write twenty-five, and if there’s only three and a dead mouse inside, you write down twenty-five and you come find Toby. I got seventeen tons of scrap iron in the swamp behind the wheel-shop. I can make twenty-five out of anything except harness leather."

Before Will could answer, the cold air in the aisle stirred, carrying with it the smell of dry wool and stale cigar smoke.

A second man was coming down the boards, his boots making no sound at all because he wore thick felt overshoes buckled with four brass clasps. He was tall, thin-shouldered, and carried an iron-tipped yardstick under his arm like an officer's swagger stick. His mustache was trimmed into two gray bristles that did not quite cover a lip that had been split by an old frostbite.

Toby didn't look up, but his fingers slipped his little zinc-cornered ledger back into his coat lining with the grease-slick speed of an adder going under a flat rock.

"Finch," the newcomer said. His voice was thin and dry, like two shingles sliding over each other.

"Yes, sir," Will said, getting down off the bin. The hobnails of his field shoes hit the planking with an iron strike that sounded terribly loud compared to the visitor's silent felt.

"I am Mr. Gidley," the man said. He didn't look at Will's face; he looked at the blue chalk marks on the crate ends, then down at the shingle Will held against his thigh. "Assistant Storekeeper for Salvage and Reclaim. You have completed seven containers."

"Seven, sir."

Gidley reached out two long, white fingers and took the shingle from Will's grip. He didn't use a pencil to check the sums; his pale eyes simply dropped down the page like water finding a crack. When they hit the first '24', the gray bristles of his mustache twitched once.

"A deficit," Gidley whispered. He looked at Toby, who had found a small piece of pine lath and was industriously cleaning his thumbnail with it. "Toby, did you instruct this civilian casual?"

"I told him the wind was out of the east, Mr. Gidley," Toby said without looking up. "I told him the coal in the stove was half slate this morning. I didn't say nothing about pick heads. Pick heads are hardware. I’m Reclaim."

"Quite so," Gidley said. He looked back at Will. "Finch, the United States Government does not purchase twenty-four of anything. A squad is eight men. A platoon is four squads. Three platoons to a company. Everything is divisible by four, or six, or eight. Twenty-four is divisible by eight, but twenty-five is the packaging unit because the twenty-fifth is the reserve piece for the sergeant. A sergeant must have a pick, Finch. Would you deprive the non-commissioned officer of his trenching instrument?"

"No, sir," Will said. "There just wasn't but twenty-four in the oak box."

"The box is stenciled twenty-five," Gidley said, his yardstick coming down with a dry thwack against the lid. "The contract voucher from the Schuylkill Arsenal, dated August twelfth, nineteen-seventeen, specifies twenty-five. The bill of lading from the Pennsylvania Railroad specifies twenty-five. The receiving tally made by Sergeant Major Claggett—who died of the influenza in the winter of nineteen-eighteen, God rest his soul—specifies twenty-five. Are you suggesting, Finch, that the Schuylkill Arsenal, the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the late Sergeant Major Claggett were all mistaken, while an illiterate casual from the third township of Jackson County is correct?"

"I can count to twenty-five, mister," Will said, the heat getting into his cheeks again despite the chill. "My father had eighty head of sheep and three hundred acres of clover. I know when one's missing."

"A sheep," Gidley murmured, "is an organism. It dies, it bleats, it wanders into the brambles. A Model Nineteen-Ten pick head does not wander. It is an article of war. If the voucher says twenty-five, and there are twenty-four in the crate, then one pick head has ceased to exist within the physical sphere while continuing to exist within the accounting sphere. Do you know what happens when an article exists in the books but not in the shed, Finch?"

"No, sir."

"Nothing," Gidley said. "Nothing happens at all for twelve years. And then an auditor from the Sixth Corps Area arrives with an ebony ruler and an empty belly, and we are all required to spend three nights in this icehouse with lanterns, looking for two pounds of forged iron that was likely dropped off a baggage wagon in the Argonne before you had stopped wetting your bed."

Gidley took a small red rubber eraser from his waistcoat pocket, licked the tip with a gray tongue, and carefully rubbed out Will’s '24'. He did the same to the second line, and the third. The greasy blue chalk did not come off cleanly; it smeared into a dull, smudgy thumbprint on the paper, but over the smudge Gidley pressed the point of his own hard pencil, writing three identical, razor-sharp twenty-fives.

"You will proceed through Bin Eighty-Eight," Gidley said, handing the board back. "If you encounter a crate that has been split by frost or bored by worms, you will not open it. You will apply the blue cross to the left end. You will write twenty-five on the card. If you should happen to find twenty-six—which God forbid—you will throw the extra one down the privy hole behind the boiler house. Do not bring an extra pick to this office, Finch. We have no line on the form for surplus. Surplus is an insult to the Quartermaster General."

"Yes, sir," Will said.

Gidley turned on his silent felt heels and moved down the lane between the crates, his yardstick swinging in time with his knees, vanishing into the brown gloom of the duckboard stacks without making more sound than a barn owl.

Toby waited until the faint creak of the distant fire door signaled Gidley’s exit into the main alleyway. Then he spat into the sawdust.

"There goes five feet ten inches of pure War Department stationery," Toby said. "He was a clerk at the water depot in Newport News during the big push. Never saw a German, never saw an ocean, but he can spot an irregular seven on a manifest from forty paces in the dark."

"Why didn't he want the short count?" Will asked, staring down at the three neat '25s' that had replaced his honest work. "If the stuff ain't here, it ain't here. Somebody stole 'em."

"Nobody stole 'em," Toby snorted. "They never put 'em in. The Ames company was turning out seventy thousand of them things a week in seventeen. The girls in the packing shed in Massachusetts was fourteen years old and getting eighteen dollars a week to throw 'em in boxes by the shovel-load. You think some little girl with ribbon in her hair was counting pick heads while the band was playing 'Over There' down at the common? She had a beau in the infantry; she was thinking about him, not about the twenty-fifth pick head. The box was full when the sawdust reached the top, and they nailed the bands down with an air hammer."

Toby stood up, tucked his sharpened handle under his arm, and hitched his trousers by the suspender buckles.

"Come on," the little man said.

"Satterfield said I had to stay until the four o'clock whistle," Will said.

"Satterfield’s down at the oil house seeing about three drums of neat's-foot that turned out to be ditch water," Toby said. "He won't be back till the yard switcher pulls out for the junction. You want to see where them picks go when they ain't twenty-five?"

Will hesitated. His fingers were so cold they felt like wooden pegs, and his field boots were beginning to rub a raw circle into the meat of his right heel where the leather had shrunk inward during its long sleep in Ohio. He looked back at Bin Seventy-Four. The tiers of dark oak boxes looked like the burial vaults in the stone cemetery outside Carbondale, piled three deep to keep the water out.

"All right," Will said.

They left Building Four by a small side door that had no handle, only a leather strap looped through a hole in the pine casing. Outside, the wind had come around from the north, driving the river mist into a thin, spiteful sleet that didn't stick to the ground but made the black cinders slick underfoot.

Depot Seven looked even larger from the back alleys. Between the long rows of sheds lay the narrow-gauge tracks where the hand-cars ran, their steel rails half-buried in dead weeds and iron scrap. In a wide hollow between two coal dumps lay a field of wheeled vehicles: hundreds of Model 1917 escort wagons, their canvas tops long since rotted into gray cobwebs, their white-oak spokes gray as drift logs. They sat in four straight ranks of fifty, their tongues resting on the greasy gravel like the chins of dead cattle, waiting for the horses that had been sold off at auction in Louisville twelve years ago.

"Look at 'em," Toby said, not stopping. "Ten thousand wagons built in South Bend. Iron axles, oak bolsters, linchpins from the steel mills in Gary. The government paid seventy-eight dollars apiece for 'em. Now the farmers come in with three-dollar vouchers from the relief committee to buy the iron off the tires for stone-sleds, only the Captain won't sell 'em because the voucher’s the wrong color. The blue voucher buys lumber; the yellow voucher buys iron. If the farmer’s got a white voucher, he can look at 'em through the wire till his teeth fall out, but he can't touch a nut."

They crossed Track Six, where four convicts from Vandalia were sitting on a handcar under the shelter of a corrugated zinc shed, their striped trousers soaked to the knees, sharing a single hand-rolled cigarette that they passed between them with two fingers curled tight against the wet. They didn't look at Will, and Will, remembering Krum’s advice, looked straight at their boots. The convicts had no hobnails; their soles were smooth leather, tied to their feet with strips of baling wire to keep the uppers from parting from the welt.

Behind the boiler house lay what the depot called the Reclaim Yard, though Toby called it the Bone Orchard.

It was an acre of land enclosed by eight-foot cedar posts and woven wire, topped with three strands of rusted barbed wire that sagged between the stays. Inside, the ground did not look like earth. It was a dark, greasy muck composed of cinders, coal ash, rotten canvas, and pulverized slag, piled into mounds eight and ten feet high.

At the center of the yard was an open shed with a chimney made of three oil drums welded together with lead solder. Inside the shed, two men were working before an iron trough filled with boiling soda-ash water.

"Hey, Toby," one of them said. He was an older man with no teeth and a leather apron that had been oiled so many times it was stiff as stovepipe iron. "Who's the calf?"

"Finch," Toby said. "He’s counting picks for Gidley."

Both men by the trough laughed—a short, wet hack that ended in spitting against the hot iron of the tank. The soda water smelled terrible, like an outhouse that had been scrubbed with lye on a hot morning.

"Show him the box," Toby said.

The man in the apron reached behind the trough with a pair of long blacksmith’s tongs and dragged out a wooden packing case. It was identical to the ones in Building Four: rough white oak, rusted hoop iron, the same Philadelphia contract stencil.

"Open it," Toby told Will.

Will knelt in the cinders. His jumper was already wet through at the shoulders, the stiff brown denim clinging to his flannel shirt like cold canvas. He took the lid by the split corner and lifted it.

The crate was full of pick heads, but they were not like the ones in Bin Seventy-Two. These had no cosmoline. They were bright, raw iron, with deep, pitted scars along the edges where an emery wheel had ground away the heavy scale of rust. On the flat of each eye, where the letters U.S. had been stamped at the factory, there was a smooth, shallow hollow where someone had used a cold chisel to shear the government mark right out of the metal.

"Condemned," the man in the apron said. "Rejected for excessive oxidation under Paragraph Forty of the nineteen-twenty-six manual. We grind the 'U.S.' off so they can't be sold back to the militia, then we boil 'em in the soda to keep the rust down."

"And then where do they go?" Will asked.

The man pointed with his tongs toward the far corner of the wire enclosure. A mound of pick heads, handles missing, eyes empty, lay twenty feet high in the sleet like a heap of dark mussels on a gravel bar. There were thousands of them—perhaps ten thousand—slowly turning the color of dried liver under the November drizzle.

"They stay there," Toby said. "Until the scrap contractor from St. Louis comes down with three gondolas and five dollars a ton. But he ain't coming this year because the mills in Gary ain't blowing their stacks. So we grind 'em, we boil 'em, we stack 'em, and then Gidley comes out with his little book and writes 'em down as Material, Ferrous, Reclaimed, Grade Three. And then we go back to Building Four and carry out twenty more."

"Why didn't they just use 'em?" Will asked. He picked up one of the ground heads. It was light, the balance ruined where the chisel had gouged out the steel around the eye. "My uncle had an Ames pick down in Union County. He dug three wells with it and grubbed twenty acres of sassafras out of the bottom pasture. It lasted him thirty years."

"Your uncle didn't have to keep an account with the Sixth Corps Area," Toby said. He sat down on the corner of the wood box and took a twist of dry Kentucky burley from his coat. He bit off a corner with his sound molars and tucked the plug into his cheek. "Your uncle only had to dig a hole. If the pick broke, he took it to the smith and had it drawn out. Here, if a pick breaks, you got to find the pieces. You got to have the head, you got to have the wedge, you got to have the four inches of ash handle that was in the eye. If you don't have the four inches of ash, the smith can't touch it. He ain't authorized to draw out scrap without a requisition signed by a captain."

Toby pointed his stick at the great mound in the corner.

"There's twelve thousand heads over there," he said. "Every one of 'em was bought to kill Germans. The Germans didn't wait around to be killed with pickaxes, so now they’re here, and they'll be here till the wire falls down and the grass covers the iron. Finch, you know what the Army is?"

"A lot of men in brown coats," Will said.

"It’s an iron stove," Toby said, "that don't do nothing but eat wood to keep itself warm. We’re the wood. Satterfield’s the smoke. The Captain’s the ash-pit down below where everything drops when it’s burnt out. You go back to Building Four and you find twenty-four picks in a box, you write down twenty-five. You don't try to save the government no money. The government’s got more money than the state of Ohio, but it ain't got but one set of books, and if you make a blot on 'em, Gidley will take your dollar-twenty and buy himself two pairs of wool socks to wear inside them overshoes."

The bell on the water tower began to ring again—one long, heavy stroke, followed by the wet rattle of the yard switcher’s whistle. One o'clock.

Will stood up, wiping his wet palms on his brown denim thighs. The cinders in the yard had worked through the tongue of his right shoe, and he could feel the sharp little grains grinding against his stocking with every step, just as Sergeant Krum had said they would.

"Come on, philosopher," Toby said, tossing his sharpened pine stick into the woodpile by the boiler. "We got seventy more boxes in Seventy-Two before the light gives out. And if you drop one on your foot, don't scream. The Captain don't like noise during the inventory. It interferes with his lunch."

They walked back through the narrow lane between the escort wagons. As they reached the small side door of Building Four, Will stopped and looked back toward Dock Three.

Through the gray curtain of sleet, the long lines of freight cars looked like an endless brown wall, shutting out the river, the town, and the scrub-oak hills where his father was likely still sitting by the dead stove, waiting for the weather to break. A gang of men in wet denim was shoving a flatcar loaded with crated corrugated iron down the spur, their heads down, their shoulders braced against the timber sills, their boots slipping on the greasy ties in unison.

Nobody was whistling. The only sound was the heavy, rhythmic clank of the wheels crossing the rail joints—tonk-tonk, tonk-tonk—the same dull pulse that had beat through the floor of the boxcar all the way from Cairo.

Will pulled the leather strap, opened the door, and went back into the smell of cedar shavings and old sheep dip.

Bin Seventy-Two was waiting for him, tall and dark and three tiers deep. He picked up his wooden shingle from the timber upright where he had left it, took the blue crayon between his stiffened fingers, and heaved the next crate down from the rack. It hit the planks with a thud that shook the dust from the rafters twenty feet above.

The iron band was unbroken. The stencil said twenty-five.

Will didn't use the heel of his boot to pry the wood. He didn't look for his pocketknife. He set the blue chalk against the rough grain of the left end, made a wide, sweeping cross that smelled of cold wax, and turned the board over.

"Box Eight," he muttered to the empty aisle.

His pencil was firm this time, the lead biting deep into the soft wood pulp of the government form.

"Twenty-five," he wrote.

And down in the dark between the racks, fifty yards away where the dead stock lay under twenty years of lime-dust, Toby's watch cap bobbed once in the shadows, silent as a spider in an empty bin.