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putting water on to boil was as far as he got before flopping down at the kitchen table to catch up with the other two.
    Jellet was going on about losing a loving and loyal companion in the prime of life—how disgusting, how maudlin. But as he talked I realized he truly was grieving. He just didn’t know how to do it except with other people’s words. His buddies kept assuring him they would stand by him, ready to help any way they could. Of course they didn’t have specific suggestions. I sat in a corner listening to them.
    I’d put Morrie to bed and left the light on in the hall. This was strictly forbidden. I think Jellet noticed, but he decided not to say anything. Black Douglas laid out a hand of clock solitaire. He was waiting for me to turn in before suggestingpoker, and in the meantime probing Jellet as to how he had come to marry an Indian girl, pretty though she was.
    A change came over Jellet’s face. His usual sour expression vanished. I’d seen him happy only a few times in my life, and then when he was roaring drunk. This was a different kind of happiness, simple, faraway. He didn’t smile, but his mouth softened with remembering.
    They’d met in the Italian campaign of World War II. He had been assigned as a replacement driver for the New Zealand general, Tuker. Tuker’s penchant for poking his nose into every corner of the front lines at Monte Cassino sent half a dozen drivers to the hospital. When he ran out of New Zealanders, he borrowed Jellet from the neighboring Canadian corps. Tuker disagreed with the Fifth Army plan to destroy the Monte Cassino fortress monastery by air power. He was convinced he could take it by ground action. He asked General Mark Clark’s headquarters in Naples to supply him with blueprints of the buildings and topographic maps of the environs. Intelligence claimed no such information was available. Tuker blew his top, rousted out Jellet, and set off for Naples, where he intended to research the monastery himself at the public library.
    “He stops a war to go to the library?” Hubert asked.
    “Did he have his library card with him?” Black Douglas, a few sheets to windward, snickered at his witticism.
    Jellet, ignoring this, tried to picture for them the steep rut at the side of the road, and how it was the jeep turned over, breaking his arm. Tuker himself had to drive back to the casualty clearing station, where Mum, a surgical nurse, set Jellet’s armand gave him a shot of penicillin against infection. Then a shot of morphine. He thought she was the most beautiful girl he’d ever set eyes on, and the kindest, and the gentlest—the only person in his life who had treated him with any consideration.
    Here Jellet launched into a bitter tirade against his parents, his family, his father’s administration of justice. Whenever an infraction occurred, his father took out his appointment book, set a date, a time, and an estimate of the requisite number of canings. “Saturday, before breakfast, 6:40 A.M. , here in the study, eleven strokes—” The boy had plenty of time to think it over. When World War II broke out, he traded home for the Italian front. You got shot at, but you didn’t have to make an appointment.
    At war’s end Jellet came back to Canada to learn that his parents had died. Most of the estate went to other relatives, but he inherited a small piece of property in a little town near Lesser Slave Lake, which his father had foreclosed on. Formerly an elegant pub, it had rapidly deteriorated into a hangout for bums, Indians, and riffraff in general. The family urged him to sell it and go to work in their law firm.
    “In other words,” Jellet said, folding his hands, “take orders from them. No way. I told them all what they could do, moved here, cleaned up the bar, and hung out a sign, OPEN FOR BUSINESS.”
    It struck him that he’d heard the name of this town in Italy. The beautiful nurse at the Cassino front who’d sat with him, eased his pain,