All Fall Down
[1969–1972]
These were the tense years. The city, once so distant, moved closer—on hot, still summer days they could see the gray pall of its fumes rising over the northern hills; its nighttime glow erased Polaris from their lives. Through television the city entered the Hardins’ living room, and in the absence of any pictures of their rural world they came to understand how different they were, what a sheltered life they led, how no one in the great, sprawling mass of their countrymen much cared about the fate of their hinterland village, which for generations they had considered the center of the known universe.
Then the cities exploded. Demonstrations and riots in Watts and Harlem, then Detroit, where they had relatives, then Louisville, growing always closer, or so it seemed to the white men of Strang Knob. Tom Hardin was not the first to keep a loaded pistol in his nightstand drawer. Meanwhile men were going straight from high school to boot camp to Fort Knox to Saigon to Khe Sanh, Cam Ranh Bay, Da Nang; and some from there to the cemetery at Our Lady of the Hills.
While Clark Hardin was still in high school he served as acolyte for the burials of any number of local men. Then he graduated, to attend the local community college for one semester and wait to be drafted. When he was called, he went. A fleet of buses picked him and some other nineteen-year-olds up at the county courthouse to drive them to a Louisville induction center for their mental and physical exams.
Clark was assigned to a group of five boys he’d never met, all of them so green he was the only one ever to have ridden an elevator. Throughout the day Clark guided them through the process—assured them they’d all pass. They were country boys—already they knew how to handle a gun; they were familiar enough with death (all those squirrels and doves and deer) to appreciate the power and pleasure of bloodied hands. When one of their number was rejected (heart murmur), they raged as a group. At Clark’s suggestion all five gathered around the officer who sported the most bars and stars, who looked to be running the show. Why, they’d known their friend since he was a kid, they protested; they’d seen him throw hay and strip tobacco! The officer agreed to forward the case to Washington. Touched by their earnestness, he suggested they consider enlisting as a group. They left his office tinged with no small excitement—Washington! It was as close to glory as they’d known.
The night before he left for boot camp, Clark stopped in Our Lady of the Hills, lit a votive candle, and knelt. He intended to say his usual memorized prayers—a rosary or even the Litany of the Saints. Their singsong monotony of call and response elevated him into a kind of meditative trance, the most peaceful state he knew (long after Vatican II he still delivered his responses in mysterious, extraterrestrial Latin: House of Gold, miserere nobis; Mystical Rose, ora pro nobis).
But this night his heart broke inside him. Out poured feelings he’d not even suspected: fear, anger, resentment (why me?), guilt (I should be proud to serve my country), and swarming throughout all a remnant of his thinking, rational self, figuring the odds, attempting to stanch the torrent with reason: You’ll come back. You’ll survive.
He had come to the church for peace and he found none, and finally he decided he would be better off amid the noise and bustle and farewell drinks of his family. He rose and turned to go, to be overtaken by this single, great fear, born of too many nights of watching the war play itself out on Walter Cronkite. He turned back to the altar, slipped a quarter into the slotted brass box, and lit a votive light before the statue of Saint Anthony.
He’d known since knowing that it was against the rules to wish for some specific benefit—it was demeaning to the whole notion of prayer to see it as some kind of tit-for-tat devotion, so much piety in exchange for a late-model Corvette. Besides, it stood to reason that God and the saints were above such manipulation. There was no more certain way to jinx a wish than to articulate it straightforwardly, to ask for something for yourself. The secret lay in subterfuge—if what you really wanted was a swing set, pray for a neighborhood playground.
But his religion was a mixture of Baltimore Catechism and childhood superstition, and Clark, lighting the votive candle before Saint Anthony, could not keep himself from wishing—just this once, even though he knew he was breaking the rules. So he struck the match and lit the candle and spoke aloud the worst fate his heart could enfold and comprehend. “Don’t let me come back crippled.”
1970—midway through Clark’s tour of duty—two dress-uniformed soldiers appeared at the Hardins’ door, one older (a chaplain, but not Catholic—the Catholic chaplain was already with another family in this Catholic neck of the woods with so many twenty-year-old soldiers). The younger soldier broke down and cried as he delivered the news, even as Rose Ella and Tom Hardin stayed dry-eyed. The chaplain was grateful for their composure, though he thought to himself that they’d suffer for it later.
The soldiers are gone. From the window Rose Ella and Tom Hardin watch their black, government-issue Ford back slowly from the drive (it’s a tricky dogleg, it’s easy to ram the Chinese elm, Rose Ella finds herself worrying about such things). And then they are left alone with each other and their grief. They pass a few minutes in stunned silence, neither so much as weeping. Then in their way they separate, Tom Hardin to his woodshop, Rose Ella to her flowers.
Behind the locked door of his woodshop, Tom Hardin remembers the day when he and a team of white men pulled from the icy river a colored boy, surely no more than sixteen, who’d been knocked in the head, then thrown from the railroad bridge by an overzealous train watchman. A night and a day in the river and the boy looked like he’d just fallen in—the river had preserved him in its cold embrace. As they lifted the boy to shore, Leola Ferber, Rose Ella’s laundrywoman and the boy’s mother? grandmother? let forth an unearthly keening cry, the moan of a hundred lost souls. Here in his workshop Tom Hardin understands that in that moment all griefs had been enfolded into Leola’s grief, all losses were her loss. He feels now welling from his gut that same woman cry and he chokes it down and back, he swallows it into rage at himself for all the chances he missed to be a better father to his son.
It was his son’s duty, his father’s duty, he tells himself this. They have been good citizens.
He kneels before his workbench and strikes his forehead against its sharp edge until blood mixes with his tears and the pain drowns the cry stuck in his throat. From under the shelf he pulls a bottle of whiskey. He drinks in long hot swigs until he passes out.
Sometime in the night he awakes covered with his own vomit. He is savagely proud of this humiliation (This is what I think of You and Your fucking life, God damn!). He feels taken, used, a fool—where is the honor that he thought would come with such a death? It isn’t politics that has robbed this from his son and from himself—he knows what he thinks about the politics of it all and Clark’s death has done nothing to change his opinion (to hell with the protesters, they should be rounded up and stuck in the front lines as cannon fodder, a fate too good for them, if a dozen had been standing in front of Clark, who’d been doing his duty in fighting for them, he would still be alive now).
Something else has happened here. He has discovered that he is a father. He is bound to this distant corpse in ways stronger and larger than he can comprehend.
Later, when Clark’s body is returned, Tom Hardin’s grief will center itself on the slow and necessary labor of accepting what cannot be accepted—that this son, with Rose Ella’s tapered legs and his own broad shoulders, will never return. They will not look up one day to see him loping up the drive. Miracles do not happen.
For now, his discovery of his father’s place seeks its greatest pain in the understanding that like most revelations, this one has come too late. All he has now is knowledge of his loss. He can be no better or kinder to Clark than he once was, or wasn’t. If a time might come when the pain of this knowledge might teach him something—he cannot and does not want to imagine that far in the future. Lying on his side on the workshop flo
or, knees drawn to his chest and arms crossed, he is nowhere but the here and now, where he is discovering that with Clark’s death some living and essential part of himself has died.
Tom Hardin had chosen (yes, he’d had opportunities—he could have moved to the city, made more money, lived in a suburb in a tract house), he had chosen to live his life in one place because he wanted to remain loyal to that place, to pass a lifetime making love to it and then to be enfolded peacefully into its open earth at his death. Now his son is dead ten thousand miles from a home that no longer seems like home, that through Clark’s death has lost its sacredness, has been transformed from a holy place into a plot of dirt indistinguishable from any other. It is Tom Hardin’s first intimation of old age—his first understanding that the places and the life he has taken for granted are growing and changing into places where he will not be following. Places and faces more familiar to him than his own hands are leaving him behind; the day is coming when he will look upon his heart’s landscape only to find it so changed that he is no longer part of it, no more than a pilgrim moving across its foreign face to journey’s end.
His own father hadn’t launched Tom Hardin into the world with any understanding of this—there’d been no need for it. The world was a known quantity, the ways a man might grow into his hands were fixed in number and entailed three considerations: learning how to do a given thing (carpentry, whiskey making, hunting, running a store); knowing somebody who would teach you to do it well; passing it on to someone in your turn. The learning and the knowing demanded hard work but both were easy enough come by—you just had to keep your eyes open and look around. As for the passing on—this was why a man had several sons, so that there would be at least one at hand to take up his proper place when that time arrived.
Where had Tom Hardin got the notion that this way was not good enough for his own sons? He couldn’t say. All he knew was that from his earliest thought of having sons (not the daughters—sure, they’d been educated, but that was Rose Ella’s doing), he understood that his boys were to learn books, they would go to be a soldier or get a scholarship or whatever and then use that as a way to get to college, to find their ways into safe jobs where they would wear coats and ties and make enough money to live in the kind of luxury that Tom Hardin himself had once turned down. That none of his sons would follow him into his work, that they would move far away, that he would have nothing in common with their new world, that one would die in some unheard-of foreign place—who could have told him this? How might he have learned this, except by living through it? For better and worse, Tom Hardin had known the world he was entering when he entered it. Now when he speaks to his sons it’s as if he’s talking across a river, that has grown wider and deeper with each passing year. Only Clark had shown any signs of wanting to stay nearby, to learn what his father had to teach—wood, and hunting, and the multiplicity of small things a man of Tom Hardin’s generation needed to know to get by. And now the river separating him from Clark is never to be bridged.
He will be better to his remaining sons, Tom Hardin swears this as he hauls himself to his feet. He will try to enter their lives, rather than demand that they enter his.
How is it possible to comprehend fully the dimensions of love except through grief? Rose Ella seizes upon this terrible dilemma in the days following the chaplain’s visit—this thought and nothing else keeps her from breaking apart. While Clark was alive she took him for granted. Now that he is dead she sees the scope and grandeur of her love. She spends her time trying to convince herself that this is only human, that this is the purpose of grief and death, that these exist to teach the heart its dimensions. Clark’s memory and presence are now defined by the length, height, depth, and mass of her grief, which is exactly as tall, wide, deep, and heavy as she.
If she could see his body she would be able to cry—in the first days following the chaplain’s visit she tells herself this: See him dead and she would be able to believe in his death. But in the absence of his corpse his death is nothing but loss, emptiness, nothingness, whose reality is as abstract as zero.
And then his body arrives. A week, two weeks since his death in a hot, tropical country—they cannot open the coffin. “He died in a war, ma’am,” says the soldier when she asks; then, as if to make amends for his bluntness, “He was a hero.”
Her heart has no room for Tom Hardin—that will come later. In the first months following the news, the arrival of Clark’s body, the funeral, there is only the contradiction between the infinitude of her suffering and the neat black dimensions of her loss.
She cannot go out. The sight of people together—a girl and her boyfriend, a man and his wife, most especially a woman and her child—causes her physical pain. If they are affectionate or chatting her envy forms an acid hole in her stomach. If they are fighting she wants to fly at them, to remonstrate—don’t they know the insignificance of their petty argument, the value of their time together, what they’re frittering away?
She passes afternoons—the hardest times—digging in her flower beds, working to accept the burden of her grief. While Clark was alive she’d never acknowledged what she now admits—always she’d thought of him as the safe son, the son who never got into trouble, who seemed best adjusted to the world. He wasn’t rambunctious (like Joe Ray) or bedeviled by some deep bone of solitude (like Raphael). With so many children it was a relief to have one who seemed to flourish on his own, about whom she didn’t have to worry. She’d wondered sometimes if he didn’t need a little more personality—she’d thought a stint in the military might be good for him, might toughen him up and help him settle who he was and where he was going. His death she sees now as her punishment for taking him for granted, a sentence that she has no choice but to serve out. Her penance is to keep his memory alive as long as she lives, and to pray for his soul.
But when she kneels before Our Lady of the Hills her heart is blank, a newly erased blackboard on which she is afraid to write because she knows what will come: rage, disbelief, bitterness. No prayers come to her, not even the memorized mantras (Hail Mary, Our Father, Glory Be) that she knows deep as love itself. Finally she asks forgiveness for her doubt, rises and crosses herself, promises to return tomorrow.
And she does return, for the better part of a year she kneels daily and waits for Clark’s memory, his living face, some ghost to seize her heart and break it if need be, but she looks down into her heart and she sees no spark, no light, only a blank and even gray stillness.
Each evening Raphael and Tom Hardin watched Walter Cronkite alone—with Clark in Vietnam, Rose Ella couldn’t bear the shots of bomb-strewn villages, mangled and decapitated bodies, crowded hospitals, and always the possibility (certainty?) that Clark was in there somewhere; and then the news of Clark’s death.
The night after Clark’s funeral Raphael and Tom Hardin found their separate ways to the television—Tom Hardin to prove to himself that nothing had changed, that the world was still the same; Raphael in the certainty that now, surely, Tom Hardin would understand all that was different, the revolution that was upon them.
Across the next months they watched in silence—almost in silence. Villagers fleeing burning huts—Raphael shook his head and muttered, “Our tax dollars at work.” Protesters rioting in the streets, tac squads wielding bullet-proof shields, tear gas, batons—Tom Hardin growled, “Too good for them.”
Each night the air grew more charged, until no one else could bear to enter the room, and still Tom Hardin and Raphael made their father-and-son ways to sit before the television and watch.
Until barely a year after Clark’s death, when Raphael was called for the draft, driven to the county seat by a tight-lipped Rose Ella, put on the bus, and taken to the Louisville induction center.
In little more than a year this much had changed: The stories Raphael heard on the bus involved how to stump the doctor, how to fool the system. Everyone in his group knew how to use an elevator. They’d all watched the war on televis
ion; everyone thought of himself as potential cannon fodder. Drinking six-packs of Cokes to raise the blood sugar, downing white crosses (plentifully available now, from returned GIs who had picked up the habit in the service and were selling them to make an easy buck) to screw up the blood pressure. There was discussion of how to fail the mental abilities test, but Raphael knew he’d not get far cheating on that—he a scholarship recipient.
But before the medical and mental exams Raphael came to this small moment of truth. Do you have or have you had any of the following? the induction form asked. Heart disease, diabetes, rheumatic fever? Raphael checked No—No—No, until he came to this casually planted time bomb: Homosexual tendencies? Raphael read the question with an electric shock, checked a hasty negative, moved down the page.
He filed as a C.O.—conscientious objector. The draft board secretary, a buxom childless woman, studied him with a worried glance. Did he realize—of course not, he was only a teenager—the implications of what he was doing? Forget about a career in politics! she said, and that’s only the beginning.
But branded for life as a C.O. wasn’t the worst fate one could suffer, Raphael thought; the Army itself acknowledged as much. It was better than confessing to wanting men.
And so Raphael went before the Jessup County draft board. He lied to Tom Hardin and Rose Ella—told them he had a date, asked Rose Ella to cut his hair, and borrowed the car from Tom Hardin. He drove to the county seat, to be grilled by seven old men (two farmers, one preacher, two shopkeepers, a teacher, a salesman). He knew five of them. They all knew his father.
“I want you to tell me why a son of Tom Hardin’s would waste our time with such bullshit.” That was the first question. “You know why they call it C.O.?” the salesman asked, and answered his own joke. “Short for C-O-W-A-R-D.” The preacher, chairman of the board, spoke up. “We’ll have none of that.”
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