The Fool's Progress

  “Will? He’s in France now. Still fighting Winnie’s war.”

  Uncle Jeff smiled. “It’s our war, Joe. I’m proud of Will and I’m proud of all of them. They’re fighting in a good cause, Joe.”

  “What cause is that?”

  “The good cause. They’re fighting for democracy and peace.”

  “Fighting—for peace? That’s a good one, Holyoak. I like that. That’s pretty damn good.”

  “They’re fighting for the Four Freedoms. Against an evil dictatorship.”

  “You mean Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms. I thought you were a goddamn Republican, Jeff.”

  “Yes sir I am. But this is not a Democrat war, not a Republican war, it’s an American war. An All-American war.” Uncle Jeff was getting a bit steamy himself. Other men stood nearby, listening. And some of the boys, like Henry. The women turned their backs and moved away. “But maybe that word American doesn’t mean much to you, Joe.”

  Now it was our father’s turn to smile. The smile revealed that he’d been hurt. He lowered his bottle of Iron City Pilsener and said, “What are those Four Freedoms, Holyoak? Can’t seem to recollect them myself.”

  “Well…freedom of speech. Freedom of religion. Freedom from hunger…”

  “Yeah? What’s the other one, Jeff?”

  Uncle Jeff hesitated, turning red. “Fear,” somebody murmured in the background. “Freedom from fear,” Uncle Jeff said.

  “Pretty good. Just a little coaching and you done good. Real good. Now what’s this evil dictatorship we’re supposed to be fighting? You mean Joe Stalin?”

  “I mean Hitler and Tojo and you know what I mean.”

  “What about Stalin? You know how many million people he murdered, Holyoak?”

  “We’ll take care of him later.”

  “Oh we will, huh? Another war, huh? Right after this one, you reckon?”

  Uncle Jeff was silent for a moment. “In good time. When we have to.”

  Paw said, “Tell me more about this democracy we’re a-fighting for, Holyoak. What’s your notion of democracy anyhow?”

  “Government for the people, by the people and of the people.”

  “We got plenty of government of the people all right. But I hain’t seen no government by the people yet. Name the Bill of Rights, Holyoak.”

  “What?”

  “The Bill of Rights. You believe so much in democracy, name me the first ten amendments to the Constitution of these here U.S. of A.”

  “You know so much, you name them.”

  He should not have said that. Our old man had the Bill of Rights down pat and he began rattling them off like a genuflector reciting his catechism. Uncle Jeff cut him short after Article III. “Okay, Joe, okay okay. We believe you.” He took a deep slug from his bottle of Nehi orange crush. “You should’ve been a schoolboy, Joe.” He recited two lines of his own: “She was the girl in calico, He was her bashful barefoot Joe.” Laughing, he glanced at the men around him.

  The old man squeezed his bottle of beer so tightly I thought he’d break the neck off. Quietly, so that everyone had to strain to hear, he said, “Tell me just one thing, Jeff. Just one thing and then I’m gonna go home. Just tell me this: This is such a noble holy goddamn war, how come the draft?”

  “What?”

  “Conscription, Jeff, conscription. How come the government has to force men to fight in this holy noble bloody English war of yours?”

  Uncle Jeff hesitated for only a second. “My son volunteered. Nobody had to draft Dick. And they didn’t draft your boy either, Joe.”

  Our old man waved this qualification aside. “Two out of ten million. They knowed they’d be drafted anyhow. Answer my question, Holyoak, How come the draft? Why does Roosevelt have to conscript teenage boys, under penalty of prison or worse, to fight in this here noble war?”

  Silence. Uncle Jeff thought about it. “Well,” he finally said, “to be fair. That’s why. So that some boys wouldn’t have to go off and fight while the slackers stayed home. That’s why.”

  It was my father’s turn to laugh—and it was a scornful, bitter laugh. “The government was afraid there’d be too many slackers and not enough fighters, ain’t that right, Holyoak?”

  “Maybe. The draft law was approved by Congress. Congress was elected by the people. Congress spoke for the majority.”

  “You think so? It certainly didn’t speak for the majority of the boys who’d have to go and do the dying, did it? Why the draft, Holyoak? If this is such a good and holy war, why do we need the draft?”

  Again Uncle Jeff hesitated. I felt sorry for him, up against a crazy anarchist like my father.

  “Well…I think I gave you a good answer, Joe.”

  “No, it’s no damn good a-tall. The majority of Americans never wanted to get into this rotten war. And when Roosevelt maneuvered us into it, even after Pearl Harbor, the majority still never wanted to go overseas to fight. That’s why the government needs the draft, Holyoak. Because there was no other way they could get our boys into it. They have to force them to fight.”

  Uncle Jeff was still trying to be reasonable. “Joe, we have to have some confidence in our government. Otherwise—”

  “You think the government knows what’s best for us? You think the government knows better than the people?”

  We could see the thought “Yes, sometimes it does” forming in Uncle Jeff’s puzzled, thoughtful, kindly eyes. But he was surrounded by Appalachians. Mountaineers. Country men. “I didn’t say that, Joe.”

  “Do you think American men are cowards, Holyoak?”

  “Never. Never.” His face turning red again.

  “You think they have to be forced into a war they believe in? You think we wouldn’t all be fighting, Holyoak, every damn man here, if we seen it had to be done?” The old man’s voice remained low, deep, intense, deadly—his fighting voice. “Free men don’t have to be pushed into war, Holyoak.” Silence. And while Uncle Jeff groped for the right answer, our father turned away, turned his back on all the Holyoaks and Gatlins and their kin—his by marriage—and walked away by himself, alone, alone again, across the baseball diamond where the kids were picking up teams for a game of mushball. There was little Jim and Cousin Sonny alternating hands on a bat to see who’d get first pick. I saw Jim forking the top end of the handle with his fingers; he’d better pick me, Henry thought. And Paw crossed the outfield pasture, where three of Prothrow’s cows followed him for a piece, and he lifted his long legs over the fence and disappeared into the woods. He always did like it best in the woods. He felt he belonged there. He’d probably walk the whole way home, three miles, cross-country.

  There was a silence as the men watched him go. The women, in their separate group, resumed their talk of pie socials, the next blood-donation drive, the latest marriage. Only Henry’s mother remained silent, her head lowered. Among the men, only Uncle Harold could not keep his mouth shut. “Somebody ought to report that crank to the FBI.”

  The Gatlins looked at Harold. Grandfather Holyoak said, “Don’t talk like a fool, Harry.”

  “Well, dang, all I meant was he shouldn’t talk like that. Not in front of these boys. He—” And then he became aware of Henry and Paul, watching him. He flushed a little, stopped.

  Henry’s heart was beating so loud, so hard, as he tried to speak, that he thought he’d drop dead. But he got it out. “Our paw…” he stammered, “our paw…he’s the bravest man in all Shawnee County.” He touched Paul on the shoulder. “Come on. Let’s get in that game.” Henry stalked off, Paul trotting beside him.

  III

  Henry reported for induction, as ordered. What choice did he have? The draft was like a well-organized cattle drive, with this difference: most cattle have brains enough to attempt to resist, to escape. But not humans. It’s not that we lacked the courage or intelligence to resist; we lacked the means to resist. And the will. We were solitary, frightened, unorganized teenagers caught in the moving parts of a gigantic subhuman social machine. We
were barely given time to kiss our mothers goodbye. No bands played and the cheerleaders were busy elsewhere.

  Slow train to the Deep South. Soot and smoke from the coal-burning engine poured into the open windows of the filthy carriages. But the dirt was better than suffocation from the heat. The boys read their comic books, played cards, smoked cigarettes, gathered in clumps here and there with guitars, harmonicas, banjos, Jew’s harps, and made music of the only kind they knew: hillbilly, country, bluegrass. They talked about their girlfriends, their mothers, their dreams of the future—after the war. Nobody talked about the war. Roosevelt was dead, somebody named Truman was the president, and none of them cared. The war was a great blank abyss on the edge of their lives, a black hole of nothingness.

  The locomotive whistled far ahead, a wail of despair that drifted back, with sulfur and ashes, over the sleeping heads of a thousand teenagers dressed in khaki. The train rumbled through the valleys of western Tennessee, rocked and rattled, rollicked and rolled toward the southern dawn. Fireflies shimmered in galaxies above dark humid fields of hay, tobacco, cotton. Frogs clanked in the swamps, dogs barked from isolated farms, dim lights glowed in little one-store villages and from the woods came the chant of the whippoorwill, American bird of the night.

  IV

  They were greeted at Fort McClellan by the training cadre, stern hard aggrieved men with sullen faces, who barked yelled howled screamed sputtered and roared at them in voices bitter with contempt. Mostly Southerners, the cadre spoke what Henry and his friends called “chigger English” or “boll-weevil American.”

  “Mah nay-em,” says one, “is Coprol Hay-in-ton.” (My name is Corporal Hinton.) “Ow-ah fust layah-sun t’day we-ell be eeh-in mi-lah-tay-ree cut-ass-see.” (Our first lesson today will be in military courtesy.) “Now-ah…”

  “Corporal?”

  “Y’all wee-el address non-coh-missioned uffishahs bah tattle and last nay-em only.”

  “Corporal Hinton, sir?”

  “Only uffisahs ah addressed as suh.”

  “Sorry, Corporal Hinton. My question is—”

  “The dee-skushion comes latah. Nowah: whut is the fust an’ mos’ im-potent doodee of the soljah?” The corporal stared at the silent platoon. One boy raised a hand. “Yay-uss, Pravvit?”

  “To kill Japs, Corporal Hinton.”

  “Wrong.” The corporal studied his reluctant draftees, his eyes a smoldering brown under black effeminate eyelashes. No one offered a second answer to his question. The corporal singled out a dark lanky boy with wandering eyes, straying attention. “You theah. Lat-cap. Whut is the fust an’ mos’ im-potent doodee of the soljah?”

  Henry thought about it. “To salute?”

  A pause. “No,” said Corporal Hinton. “Wrong. We’ll dee-skuss the salute latah. No. The fust an’ mos’ im-potent doodee of the soljah is—obee-jence. Obee-jence, Lat-cap. The soljah mus’ lunn t’ obey strickly, an’ execute prumply, the lawful o-dahs of his suhpee-yuhs.” Another pause for reflection. “Pravvit Lat-cap!”

  “Yes, Corporal Hinton.”

  “Whut is the mos’ im-potent doodee of the soljah?”

  “Obey orders, Corporal Hinton. To obey orders strictly, promptly, obediently, without even thinking about them.”

  A pause. The corporal considered. “Raht ansuh, Pravvit Lat-cap, but wrong attitude. You spoze to obey o-dahs strickly, prumply, without not even thankin’ about thankin’ about them. Gimme twentah-fahv.”

  “Twenty-five, Corporal Hinton?”

  “Pushups, Pravvit Lat-cap.”

  V

  Loved those parades. Henry always loved a parade. He enjoyed the battalion review, marching past the stand, rifle on his shoulder, pack on his back, the steady tromp tromp tromp of booted feet around him, and the order “Eyes…right!” (“When I order ‘Eyes right!’” the drill sergeant said, “I wanta hear them eyeballs click.”)

  He loved the long march back to camp at night, the freedom of the rout step, the soldiers’ chorus:

  Oh we’re evil sonsabitches

  and we’re raiders of the night,

  we’re ugly horny bastards

  who would rather fuck than fight.

  There was an official infantry song, something about “Kings of the Highway,” but none of the boys would learn it, like it, sing it. We knew bullshit when we saw it. Smelled it. Stepped in it. Dog soldiers, foot soldiers were not kings of anything, they were the peons of war. Instead, tramping home to barracks, we sang our own song:

  So, heidy-deidy christ almighty

  who the hell are we?

  Wham! bam! thank you, ma’am!

  We’re the infantry.

  But best of all Henry loved the combat training, the art of the bayonet, the science of the rifle, the fine techniques of killing men. He knew such training would come in handy when the war was over.

  Loved that bayonet drill. Fix—bayonets! On guard! Lunge! Thrust! Butt stroke! Slash! Lunge and thrust again!

  “Put your guts into it, Lightcap,” growled Sergeant Bell. “That ain’t no stuffed dummy, that’s a live living Jap there. He hates you. He wants to kill you. So yell when you stick it in him. Holler. Stick it in and twist it. Make the dirty little yellow slant-eyed bastard scream—real vigorous-like.”

  Henry nodded, grinned, sweated, stabbed, thrust and slashed, grunting like a butcher.

  “You ain’t yelling loud, Lightcap. When you club his teeth with the butt stroke, yell. You got to hate, Lightcap.”

  The cadre hated everyone. They hated Japs, Germans, Jews, Dagos, Frogs, Limeys, Commies, Wops, Indians, Meskins and of course Niggers and of course and especially Yankees. In the eyes of Alabama anyone from north of Kentucky was a Yankee. Weren’t too keen on women neither. But loved dogs, okra, guns and Coca-Cola. Things balance out.

  Henry loved Kitchen Police. He enjoyed being a kitchen policeman, peeling spuds, scrubbing boilers, plucking chickens, mopping cool floors in the shade of the mess hall when the rest of the company was out in the hot stinking sun, in July, digging straddle trenches in the red clay of Alabama.

  Henry even loved the cooks, especially the first cook, everybody’s favorite, Sergeant Twee Twipes. Everybody loved Sergeant Twipes, a touchy hot-tempered hair-triggered little man about five foot five inches high, a rigorous perfectionist with a fondness for detail, whether the task at hand was the cleaning of what he called the “coffee urinals” (semantic confusion in the sergeant’s mind) or in the meticulous preparation of his pièce de résistance, a dish known variously as La Merde sur le Bardeau (literally, “Zee Sheet on zee Shin-gale,” as explained by Private Herbert Waxler, the company intellectual) or simply as SOS in the relaxed terminology of the rank and file. Creamed beef on toast might not be everyone’s favorite but Henry could eat it. Grim as army food might be, Henry liked to say, at least it beat Mom’s home cooking. Any day! But best of all in the old mess hall he loved Sergeant Twee Twipes, even when the sergeant lost his temper, as he did every ten minutes, and began screaming again, pointing at the chevrons on his sleeve: “Look!” he screamed at Henry; “twee twipes! Twee, Lightcap!” (Not one. Not two. Twee.) Sergeant Twipes suffered from a speech impairment that became conspicuous when his spirit was inflamed; he’d worked hard for his three stripes. “I worked hard for these twee twipes, Lightcap,” he’d explain, many times, dancing up and down on his tippytoes and plucking at his badge of rank, “and you’d better weethpect them! Or I’ll have your ath in a thling!”

  Respect them? Henry loved them.

  Henry loved Field Police. He enjoyed policing the company area, he with his buddies picking up cigarette butts under the sharp eyes of his friend and mentor Corporal Hinton. “Aw-raht, may-in,” Corporal Hinton would chant, “less poh-lees the ar-ya na-ow. Don’ wanna see nothin’ but a-ess-holes an’ ail-bows”

  Henry loved mail call and the weekly letter from Mother:

  Your father spends more and more time working in the woods. I wish he wouldn’t work alone but he does—he insists
on it. I worry about him, he comes home late so often. He’s been spending 10-12 hours a day out there with his ax and saw and cant-hooks and the old horse Fred. Someday he’s going to have an accident and who will help him? He seems to be happy, tho’ he worries a lot about you and Will. But he says the war will end soon. Says the Japanese are making peace “overtures” through the Russians and the Swedish legation in Washington. Or so he reads in that IWW newspaper of his. But says Truman does not want the Japanese to surrender too soon. We had a short note from Will last week. He’s stationed in Austria now at a place called Kitzbuhl. Says he has seen some terrible things in Germany but didn’t say exactly what. Very glad, he says, that the war is over in Europe. All the boys in his squad came through alive. He asks about the farm and I don’t know what to tell him. The coal company has begun stripping those 60 acres on the east side of the hill that your father leased many years ago. How can I tell Will about that? I dread it. His heart will break. Paul and Marcie and Jim and I are raising a big garden this summer—our “Victory Garden.” Did you know that little Paul has become very good at the piano? You never paid much attention to your little brother but he’s a fine, sensitive, talented boy. He admires you, Henry. Thinks you are the “smartest” Lightcap. I tell him that intelligence is valuable only when combined with a generous heart and a kindly nature. You and I know that “brains” aren’t everything, don’t we, Henry? Marcie and Jimmy are doing fine. All is well here. We miss you very much. I pray for you every night. Love and a hug from your Mother.

  Henry’s mate on latrine duty, a boy named Johnny Pearce from Latrobe, Pennsylvania, looked morose as he scanned his latest letter. He was staring at a small sheet of pink stationery with a floral fringe. What’s wrong, Johnny? says Henry.

  This letter.

  Yeah? What’s wrong?

  She says she don’t love me no more, Henry.

  Who does?

  My girlfriend. Louise.

  You sure? What’s it say? Read it.

  It’s kind of personal.

  Don’t read it.

  I don’t mind. Maybe you can tell me what she really means, exactly. I’ll read it. Pearce cleared his throat. She says, Dear John…He paused, gulped, stopped.