Butterfly's Shadow Page 11

  But he wrote down none of those things.

  He could feel the heat from the lamp above his head; the wind came over the river like the blast from an oven. The pencil moved across the soggy notebook and spelled out how he missed her. He asked her to hug Joey for him. He would be home soon. He addressed and stamped the envelope and gave it to one of the bigger kids to put in the mailbox.

  Next morning the Bonus Bill was defeated.

  Optimism began to drain away. Men lost their briskness; sagged. Walter looked suddenly old.

  ‘The President wants us out. He’s sending in the army. MacArthur’s giving the orders now.’

  ‘The army?’ Ben was incredulous. ‘Against vets? That has to be a joke.’ But no one was laughing.

  MacArthur’s troops blocked off streets; there were scuffles, some broken bones, and downtown Washington was cleared. A couple of tanks pursued the men to the water’s edge. There was a sense of stand-off. Everyone knew the President had ordered the troops to go no further than the river. They were safe, across the water.

  Wives prepared food, men discussed the next step as the sun set.

  Close to midnight, unable to sleep, Ben came out of the hut for some air. He saw what looked like a torchlight procession crossing the bridge, moving fast. There was noise, and the grinding of wheel tracks. Then he saw it for what it was: troops, horses, tanks: an army on the move. He began to shout, pulling on his boots, running between huts to rouse those sleeping, stumbling on the rough ground.

  MacArthur had crossed the Anacostia river. Like some invading emperor he set loose his force. Men, women and children fled in panic from the cavalry and the glitter of sabres, bludgeoned by clubs, gashed by bayonets, vomiting from the effects of tear gas. In the confusion shots were fired. People ran as they run from an earthquake, without aim or direction, the crowd scattering as troops moved from shack to shack with kerosene-soaked torches. Flames swept through the camp, leaping high into the darkness and the smoke swirled across the river. As Ben looked back over his shoulder he saw a distant vision: the Capitol in flames.

  ‘Jesus Christ! It’s on fire!’ he yelled, but what he saw was a mirror image, the inferno of Hooverville reflected in the Capitol’s high windows blazing crimson and gold.

  Spread out along the riverbank, the men resisted eviction, fighting back; coughing and half blinded, women pressed wet rags over children’s faces to protect them from the gas. Ben, ducking and wheeling, turned back to give a hand to a weeping woman left behind in the panic, and came face to face with an infantryman. Each hit out wildly, whether in attack or defence, who could tell? Ben was unarmed: the infantryman’s rifle struck him hard on the side of the head, spun him around and sent him staggering back towards the bridge. And there a trooper’s club, swishing through the dark, caught him off balance and he fell against the parapet and toppled, quite slowly, over the edge and into the river and sank beneath the scum-encrusted waters.

  Open-eyed, through the murky liquid Ben could make out above him the flickering surface, the glancing light of the flames. He was comforted; he was a swimmer, wasn’t he? This was his element. All he had to do was instruct his limbs to send him upwards. Even as the darkness closed in he knew he was always safe in water.

  21

  The New York Times carried the story.

  ‘Flames rose high over the desolate Anacostia flats at midnight tonight, and a pitiful stream of refugee veterans of the World War left their home of the past two months, going they knew not where.’ The biggest Hooverville in the land, sheltering 25,000 people, had been razed to the ground. Nancy read on.

  There had been deaths. Officially, the Times reported, there were ‘two adult fatalities’. Two men were shot, and two infants died, asphyxiated by tear gas. There was a drowning, but that was described as ‘incidental’.

  Nancy already knew Ben was dead when she read the story in the New York Times. She had received the annihilating blow and absorbed it.

  One afternoon many years before, home from school, Nancy had been watching her mother refill a tall glass storage jar in the kitchen. As she turned aside, the jar top caught Mary’s sleeve and fell to the floor. Surprisingly, the heavy glass stopper survived the fall – it bounced intact, but on the second impact, of just a few inches, it shattered into a thousand fragments. Nancy had never forgotten that moment.

  Now here it was again, that second impact. The New York Times, arbiter of what mattered, laid it out in black and white: two official fatalities. An ‘incidental’ drowning. The pathos of that incidental drowning floored her, and her carefully acquired strength cracked like glass. The tears came.

  *

  The funeral was well attended, the congregation unusual in its shabbiness, locals outnumbered by vets who showed up in force, along with wives and children. Between the hymns there was an old army song.

  Ben’s parents, surfacing into grief, tried to connect with Nancy’s family but seemed unable to find the right words. They stood, grimly accepting condolences, kissed Joey briefly on the cheek and turned away, resentful of their loss. A tall blond boy trailing behind them stepped forward, smiling.

  ‘Nancy? You probably don’t remember me. Jack.’

  Moving through the day like a sleepwalker, Nancy acknowledged the greeting mechanically:

  ‘Jack . . .’ She paused. ‘Ben’s cousin. Of course! You were at our wedding. Thank you for coming today.’ She turned. ‘And here’s Joey, you remember him.’

  ‘Hi,’ Jack said, not remembering.

  By her side, Joey remained silent.

  ‘How you’ve grown,’ Nancy remarked, for something to say.

  ‘Runs in the family, I guess.’

  He wanted to say more, tell her that because of Ben he had always known what he wanted to do with his life: join the navy, and as soon as he was old enough, that’s what he would be doing. And, he’d like to add, if Ben had stuck with the navy, he wouldn’t be lying in a coffin now; he’d be alive, safe at sea, wearing his white uniform. But even at fourteen he knew enough to know you didn’t say that to a widow, so he just offered condolences and backed off.

  Daniels from the bank was absent, away on a business trip as he explained, when he wrote to commiserate. There were other absences; the better-off, uneasy with the politics of protest. But the marchers were different: they spoke of the dead man with the warmth of comrades.

  ‘We’d see him scribbling away there in his little notepad. Ben was quite a one for poetry.’

  Ben? Nancy wondered if she was hearing right. Poetry?

  Joey recalled that his father had once recited something that could have been poetry, something about a jumping frog . . . he said all a frog wanted was education, and he could do most anything.

  Always a quiet child, Joey had been virtually silent since the news came in. So now his father, too, was dead.

  He was three when Nancy carried him on to the big ship and showed him the water glowing with green light in the darkness. Later they told him his mother was dead. He wasn’t sure what that meant at the time, but he was ten now and he knew about people dying. A man died and was put into a box and buried and everyone said what a good man he was.

  His father is a good man. Was a good man. Joey found it hard to imagine him not being there. There was a peculiar, heavy feeling somewhere in his body that he couldn’t quite locate, the way it was when he tried to find a place that was itching. His nose ached and his throat hurt.

  He moved closer to Nancy. The pew felt hard under him, but that just made the empty space on his other side, where his father should have been, even bigger. It felt lopsided and cold, like having the blanket slide off you in bed. When Ben came home from work he smelled of the truck, oily and strong, and sometimes of the farm stuff he had been shifting, but when he laughed his breath reminded Joey of the green beans and mint that Nancy sometimes put on the supper table, and when he remembered to look in on Joey to say goodnight, poking his head round the curtain of the closet bedroom, something o
f that minty smell lingered.

  When the service was over, they moved on into the church hall and the shabby strangers stood about awkwardly. Nancy went round the room and shook hands with each in turn, and thanked them all for coming.

  One or two of them told her about the night Ben died, and now she saw it through their eyes, heard it in their bitter words. Then she asked about this other side of Ben she was hearing about.

  ‘He liked poetry?’

  ‘Sort of. There was one guy, Gary, been an actor, before; sometimes he declaimed stuff while he was picketing. Great voice. Ben liked to listen. One day he and Ben and me, we were going past a house in town and Gary was sounding off as usual, and this woman came out and invited us into her kitchen.

  ‘She said she loved to hear poetic language; she handed out coffee, while Gary sat at the table – it had this real pretty cover, shiny, with fruit and flowers – and he spread his hands out on the table and quoted Shakespeare. She loved that, and gave him a cookie, and then he moved on to Walt Whitman, and his voice got stronger and by the time he got on to “I sing the body electric” he was pretty loud and the woman stood up and said she had to go out now and opened the door, so we left. Gary couldn’t understand why Ben and I were cracking up on the sidewalk.’

  Joey could picture them outside the woman’s house. His father hadn’t laughed much since they lost the house with the electric kitchen, but he could recall the way, early on, Ben would fling his head back, laughing, teeth big in his mouth. Joey would find himself joining in, without knowing why: laughing till tears came to his eyes. His eyes prickled now as he blinked back tears, but not of laughter. He swallowed a couple of times and tugged at Nancy’s sleeve. He whispered,

  ‘What’s funny about Walt Whitman?’

  ‘Nothing. I’ll read you some.’

  Like pieces of a mosaic dropping into place, these glimpses and snatches gave Nancy an idea of those weeks in Washington, built up a picture of Ben that caught him at another angle, gave a different view of him.

  She heard how the Bonus Army was beaten; the terrible final day. And Joel, who had shared Ben’s hut on the Anacostia Flats, recalled the government’s hostility and contempt.

  ‘They called us drifters, dope fiends, Bolsheviks. Any Jewish name they figured for a communist. We had coloured vets, guys who served in the 93rd. But black and white sharing, that really bugged those Washington guys, so the word “degenerate” came up. The rest of us, we probably looked pretty crazy by then, we were the dope fiends I guess.’ He shook his head, smiling without humour.

  ‘These are dark days for us all,’ Nancy said.

  Later, alone, she thought about Ben, who had week by week grown closer to her as the distance between them widened. She reread his letters; those crumpled, grubby pages now seemed lit with hope and the possibility of a new beginning. She had closed herself off for so long – an aid to survival – but now, like a thaw after an ice age, she was melting; feeling and pain returned and she wept for the pity of it, the futility, the sad encampment viciously destroyed; the tired, defiant men.

  Earlier, Nancy, like others, had blamed the President for losing control: he had given the orders. At the funeral, close beside her, Joey had listened carefully and held on to certain words: some instructions disregarded, others carried out. He knew who to blame: MacArthur had murdered his father.

  It was difficult, this emptiness where Ben Pinkerton had been; Joey kept stumbling into it. He would be setting the table for dinner and notice that Nancy had come up behind him and was quietly removing a plate, knife, fork . . . she could not bring herself to remind him they needed one less of everything now.

  There were still days when, returning from school, where some faraway unknown country had come up in class, he would automatically think of Ben: his father had travelled, he knew places. And then would come the kick in the head, remembering how things were now, and he would hurriedly get a drink of milk from the fridge, or splash his face with cold water and scrub it dry before greeting his mother, home from work. All this came as a shock: he and his father had never been close; now to his surprise he felt bereft. He and Nancy could have cried together, they could have rocked and grieved. But two quiet people, they found feelings difficult to express.

  ‘How’s my boy?’ she would ask, and hug him tightly, noting a grubby smear on his cheeks.

  ‘I cut my finger at school.’

  ‘I’ll get you a Band-Aid.’

  They got on with things.

  Nancy had never been particularly moved by Whitman, but in her mind she saw Ben and Joel and the ex-actor in the Washington woman’s kitchen, and she had a sudden need to look again at some of the poems. She asked Joey to borrow the Collected Works from the library.

  Elbows on her mother’s kitchen table, this one too covered with brightly coloured oilcloth, she opened the book:

  ‘I sing the body electric . . .’

  She read on through the poem, thinking how that woman in her kitchen might have reacted to some of the more outspoken phrases. She turned the page and came to a line that stopped her, trapped the breath in her lungs till she gasped for air. Slowly she read on:

  ‘The swimmer naked in the swimming bath, seen as he swims through the transparent green-shine or lies with his face up and rolls silently to and fro and from the heave of the water . . .’

  Did Ben roll silently to and fro in the green-shine, with his face up, in his last moments? Ben the beautiful swimmer, the incidental drowning.

  *

  In church the following Sunday the thought for the week seemed to offer a practical note of comfort, a message that reached out to an exhausted, apprehensive people. The preacher’s voice drifted across her consciousness as he spoke of the heroism of long-dead people, of eighteenth-century Quakers who had set a benchmark for courage:

  ‘Every age has heroes and heroines willing to face formidable challenges, make sacrifices for the common good and speak truth to power. They deserve our gratitude and support.’

  At the end of the service the congregation came out into a grey, cold day but Nancy, burning with anger, was unaware of the chill. Speak truth to power . . . The President had betrayed them with his power. Across the country people starved, slept rough, were disallowed their dignity as human beings. Schools closed. The sick were dying untended. The land was full of vagrants, travelling to nowhere. Surely it was time for change?

  She had taken a job as office cleaner, and sweeping up at the local Democrat headquarters she came upon leaflets asking for volunteers. She looked at the posters, studied the literature. Next day, after work, she was knocking on doors, handing out leaflets.

  Not long afterwards, one of the churchgoing ladies approached Nancy, her face contorted into a grimace of commiseration. Voice modulated into appropriate concern she enquired, ‘Nancy my dear. What are your plans?’

  ‘I’m campaigning for FDR,’ she said.

  ‘Let’s hope your hero can deliver the goods,’ her father remarked, sounding less than hopeful. ‘Remember the old fairy tale warning: be careful what you wish for.’

  When the voters got the president they wished for, Nancy danced round the kitchen table.

  ‘We should be drinking champagne! A toast to Franklin Delano Roosevelt!’

  ‘Well now, we were never a wine-in-the-icebox family,’ Louis said. ‘Would you settle for cola?’

  She read the Inaugural Address aloud to Joey from the newspaper:

  ‘So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.’

  There was more: there was comfort, inspiration, when the President told his penniless people that happiness did not lie in the mere possession of money but in the joy of achievement and moral stimulation of work. ‘These dark days will be worth all they cost if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourse
lves and our fellow men.’

  On the radio, later, crackling through the ether, he repeated the words that had given her hope: ‘I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.’

  22

  Filled with post-election euphoria, as she kissed Joey goodnight, Nancy said, like someone ending a bedtime story with the promise of happy ever after: ‘Things will get better, you’ll see. Roosevelt will help the homeless.’

  As she turned to the door of the attic where his bed was squeezed between storage boxes and empty suitcases, she added, to herself, ‘and help us, too, please God.’

  ‘Amen,’ came Joey’s voice, from beneath the bed cover. Nancy looked startled. Had she spoken aloud? The boy must have sharp ears.

  Joey, in the not-quite-darkness of the attic heard her go down the stairs, move around the room below, each sound conjuring up an action: the soft thud of a closing door, the click of a switch, the muffled sound of the radio, a reassuring, unemphatic voice: Nancy was listening to the President.

  Once, there would have been a blur of conversation, husband and wife exchanging comments. Once there would have been a father with peppermint breath looking in to say goodnight and ruffle his head. Crying was not something Joey did, but he felt a familiar, lurching emptiness as though a part of him had been wrenched away, leaving a hollow place too raw to touch.

  The resonance of the calm, measured tones from the radio filtered through the floorboards, up the metal legs of the bed and through the pillow into his head. Not the words, but a deep, soft buzzing sound that lulled him towards sleep.