From Here to Eternity Read Online Free Page A

she was dying his mother made him promise her one thing. "Promise me one thing, Robert," she wheezed at him. "From your father you got pride and endurance and I knowed that you would need it. But one of you would have kilt the other if it hatnt of been for me. And now, I wont be standin atween you no more." "I'll promise anything you want, ma, whatever you say for me to promise, whatever it is you say," the boy, watching her die in front of him, looking at her above his haze of disbelief for signs of immortality, said woodenly. "A deathbed promise is the most sacred one there is," she hawked at him from the lungs that were almost, but not quite, filled up yet, "and I want you to make me this promise on my deathbed: Promise me you wont never hurt nobody unless its absolute a must, unless you jist have to do it." "I promise you," he vowed to her, still waiting for the angels to appear. "Are you afraid?" he said. "Give me your hand on it, boy. It is a deathbed promise, and you'll never break it." "Yes maam," he said, giving her his hand, drawing it back quickly, afraid to touch the death he saw in her, unable to find anything beautiful or edifying or spiritually uplifting in this return to God. He watched a while longer for signs of immortality. No angels came, however, there was no earthquake, no cataclysm, and it was not until he had thought over often this first death that he had had a part in that he discovered the single uplifting thing about it, that being the fact that in this last great period of fear her thought had been upon his future, rather than her own. He wondered often after that about his own death, how it would come, how it would feel, what it would be like to know that this breath, now, was the last one. It was hard to accept that he, who was the hub of this known universe, would cease to exist, but it was an inevitability and he did not shun it. He only hoped that he would meet it with the same magnificent indifference with which she who had been his mother met it. Because it was there, he felt, that the immortality he had not seen was hidden. She was a woman of an older time set down in a later world and walled off from knowing it by mountains. If she had known the effect of the promise she exacted from her son, upon his life, she would not have asked it of him. Such promises belong in an older, simpler, less complex and more na'ive, forgotten time. Three days after he was seventeen he got accepted for enlistment. Having been used to certain elemental comforts back in Harlan, he had already been turned down a number of times all over the country because he was too young. Then he would go back on the bum awhile and try some other city. He was on the East Coast at the time he was accepted and they sent him to Fort Myer. That was in 1936. There were lots of other men enlisting then. It was at Myer he learned to box, as distinguished from fight. He was really very fast, even for a bantamweight, and with that punch, all out of proportion to his size, he found he might have a future in The Profession. It got him a PFC in the first year of his hitch, a thing that, in 1936, when getting any rating at all in your first hitch was considered a sin that made for laxity of character by every soldier who had begun his second three-year term, bespoke his talent. It was also at Myer where he first handled the bugle. It made a change in him right away and he dropped out of the boxing squad to get himself apprenticed to the Bugle Corps. When he truly found a thing he never wasted time, and since he was still a long ways from being a Class I fighter then the coach did not think it worth his while to hold him. The whole squad watched him go without any sense of loss, figuring that he did not have the staying power, that the going was too rough, that he would never be a champion like Lew Jenkins from Fort Bliss, as they would be, and marked him off the list. He was too busy then to care much what they thought. With the call