The Wheatfield

There is always a man on duty at the Cambridge City Dump. A small, aging man in glasses and a thin black sweater looks away over the mile of bromo, beer, and molasses bottles; ripped mattresses, spilling their insides; worn-out bras; punctured car tires, cans, cartons, containers, crates rusted, flattened, discarded, dumped.

"The City's always been good to me," he says. "I was on one of the regular trucks up until a few years ago. Now I can't manage that, so I'm out here. I like it. Steady pay, car to drive, couple of weeks vacation, fifteen days sick leave every year. I was in the Veteran's Hospital once for a month. I got paid every day." He turns to answer a question.

"First World War. The Great War. We got shipped to Liverpool in 1918, train to Southhampton, boat to Le Havre, and in we went. Not much time to think. I was at the Marne, St. Quentin, Belleau Woods, the Wheatfields."

"Belleau Woods?" He points out at the dump. "Belleau Woods was a little forest about the size of this place. We hacked at each other for three weeks in that little forest. All the trees got shot up and burnt. It looked like a field of burnt telephone poles. About eight thousand Marines got killed.

"Then, I got gassed at the Wheatfields. Phosgene. The damn Wheatfields. We didn't have any air cover or artillery support. That's when a lot got it. Crawling out in the open." He turns his head and squints. "Gas?" he says. "Well, they used the phosgene, what I got; and chlorine; and the mustard gas shells mixed in with the regular barrage. You could tell when one hit, because it only made a kind of pouff! and then you'd see a mushroom spreading along the ground, like that smoke over there. Only there wasn't anywhere to run at the Wheatfields. I was lucky it wasn't mustard. The mustard ate you in pieces."

He sat on a Coke carton and coughed. "So I got sent to a hospital over there. Nearly got the flu. Most of us did. They had me in a bed by a window. I could see them building pine boxes outside. Rows of boxes waiting for us." He smiles. "I used to wonder whether the carpenter was building mine while I watched him."

"Of course that trench fighting is way out of date now. But it was a stinking business: trench-foot, wet, trenchmouth, lice, mud, flu. I remember we used to open our tins of food and they'd be all blown up with gas and poison." He looks out over the dump silently, gazing.

"This dump is an old clay pit," he says. "Used to be a brick company over on the other side. Moved up to New Hampshire. You know it's going to take twenty-five years to fill this up. That's what they tell me. Twenty-five years of dumping. I won't be around to see it."