Butterfly's Shadow (14 page)

The ground was hard, baked by the sun. Ben’s shovel hit the dry, cindery earth as though striking steel. Further off, kitchens were being set up, children warned off, as makeshift cooking stoves smoked and crackled. Huts and shanties, put together from junk and cardboard and scrap iron debris, began to spread, confronting the President with the biggest Hooverville in the country.

‘
Dearest Nance, I’m taking a break from digging latrines. We’re putting up a regular home from home here. Great view: I tell you, I’d rather be us looking at Capitol Hill, than those guys looking at us.
’

Nancy read aloud the scrappy pages that arrived from Washington. Later, in bed, Joey studied the scrawled notes, read and reread the words. In his head he heard the sounds of men
at work building the camp, the digging, chopping, clearing; the clash of steel spade on hard ground, the voices calling. It sounded like a distant battlefield.

He began to think about his father in a new way.

Ben had helped write out an official statement to the press, but in the end Walter tore it up and walked over to the waiting reporters.

‘Gentlemen. Will you take a look at these guys. Most of them married, been out of work two years or more. Offer them a job at a dollar a day, they’d take it. We think they deserve to be heard.’

The reporters wrote their stories, the men waved their banners, and on 15 June Ben wrote jubilantly to Nancy that the veterans’ Bonus Bill had scraped through its first reading.

‘
Hoover threatened a veto but there’s dancing in the streets.
’

Two days later the Senate defeated the bill.

As the weeks passed, handouts from townsfolk dried up. Food replaced justice in the forefront of men’s minds. The camp stank of more than garbage and latrines: it smelled of hunger. Without knowing what it was, Ben inhaled the metallic, acetate tang of malnutrition. He was acquainted with poverty – at a distance: sailing into foreign ports he had seen natives begging. At home, even before his own security began melting like ice in summer, he had been made aware of the homeless and the jobless. Now he was one of them, and it came to him that there was a quality of poverty here which was different from anything he had known before.

Cutting through blackened potatoes and peeling off rotten outer leaves to make use of a cabbage salvaged from a market trader’s refuse, he felt, first shame, then curiously privileged: they were beating the system.

But as the weather grew hotter, tempers too grew heated, and one night the men picketing the Capitol building extended the demonstration by bedding down in the grounds.

Next morning a government minion handed out official bits of paper: the Speaker had invoked a hitherto forgotten regulation that prohibited people from loitering.

‘Move along, buddy: no squatting. No sleeping.’

But Ben read the small print and pointed out there was no regulation against
walking
in the grounds.

For the next three blazing days and humid July nights, they shuffled up and down Pennsylvania Avenue in silent protest. There was some stumbling and one or two keeled over, but mostly they kept going. To make sure nobody sneaked in a catnap on the grass, the garden sprinkler system was kept running –

‘So we now have regular showers to cool us down . . . God must be on our side.’

In the shanty town a carnival atmosphere began to spread, with children playing on the riverbank and songs round campfires.

On the evening of 27 July Ben began a new letter, the page lit by a lantern hanging from the lintel of the shack. ‘
It’s quiet tonight, Nance. I’m feeling hopeful.
’

He wiped his sweaty hands on a rag, and tried to put his thoughts down on the crumpled page. There was so much he wanted to tell her, about the men whose stories he was hearing: how they had acquired their wounds, the scars of war, and the invisible wounds that still had them crying aloud and shaking on bad nights . . . and about the sense of discovery he had felt crossing thousands of miles of a country he barely knew. This had been more than one journey: he had made a voyage of his own; found time to look inside his own head; to think, for the first time, about Nancy and Joey, about the way life might be different.

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.

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 of 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,