We Are What We Pretend to Be

by Kurt Vonnegut

  “You’re right,” faltered Hope.

  “Yessir,” said Haley. The lesson sounded like an eminently reasonable one, easily committed to memory.

  “What you have done tonight has hurt, not helped, all of us,” said the General, “and poor, harebrained Kitty most of all. You’ll see. Because you helped her run away with that crude, asinine chimpanzee, she is in for nothing but grief. We’ll get her back, because she’s too young to marry without my say so, but she’ll never be the same again—because you didn’t have the good sense to stop her. Am I right or wrong?”

  “I didn’t know what I was doing,” moaned Haley. Hope remained silent.

  “Do you feel I have stated the situation fairly, and that you have done something quite bad?” asked the General, his eyebrows arched.

  Haley and Hope nodded.

  “Very well, then, some kind of punishment is in order. Hope, Annie and I have decided that you should be sent away to some boarding school. I’ll look into the matter tomorrow, and I’ll pick one where you’ll be watched carefully and kept in line. I think one of your big troubles has been the smart-aleck company you’ve been keeping at the high school.”

  “Daddy!” cried Hope.

  “Haley, I have decided that for your own good you’d better not go to the Conservatory. You will work around the farm instead. I wouldn’t class that as punishment, actually. It’s the greatest kind of character training a man can get.”

  Haley did not believe it. He shut out the sound of the General’s voice and nodded mechanically. It was hours later that a chill passed over him and he knew that the small parcel of dreams he had brought with him into his new home was hopelessly smashed.

  “That is all. Good night,” said the General, without rancor.

  “But, Daddy,” began Hope.

  “I said good night.”

  Annie had sat quietly, nodding in agreement whenever the General had spoken. “Better go now,” she said. She rose and shooed them from the room. “What in Heaven’s name happened to your hand, Haley?”

  “The ladder banged it. It doesn’t hurt much.”

  “You come with me,” said Annie. She took him up to the bathroom and painted his cuts with iodine. Involuntarily, Haley jerked back his hand. “Hurt?” asked Annie.

  “A little,” said Haley, sucking in air between his teeth.

  “Fine,” said Annie, plainly satisfied. “Shows it’s doing some good.”

  V.

  “Quite a ruckus last night, eh?” called Mr. Banghart to Haley above the rattling and creaking of the empty wagon on its way to the fields. Haley sat on the rear corner of the wagon, kicking dispiritedly at the fragile white heads of milkweeds lining the lane. He did not hear Mr. Banghart’s question; his senses were turned inward, examining his conscience.

  Annie had aroused him this morning and reminded him that he and Mr. Banghart were to work today, even though it was Sunday. The radio had predicted rain, she had said, and the hay bales would be too heavy to lift and too wet to store if they were not brought in before the downpour. The General and Hope still slumbered, and Annie had returned to bed after warming coffee left over from the night before and laying out a bowl of cold cereal and an orange for Haley’s breakfast. He had met Mr. Banghart in the barn and done what he could to help harness Caesar and Delores. The coffee had purged him of his sleepiness, giving him in its stead a keen, tense wakefulness.

  He was willing to admit that he had done a bad thing in helping Kitty elope with the somewhat substandard Roy Flemming. He did, then, for his own good, as the General had said, deserve to be punished. But he searched his conscience in vain for a grain of remorse to justify the desolating punishment the General had promised. “When you punish somebody, you take something away from them that they want,” he reasoned. “All I had in the whole wide world was my music, so that’s what I lost—everything.”

  As he reviewed his condition again and again in the light of a spotless conscience, he found himself starting to derive from it the pungent, bittersweet pleasure of righteous indignation. Another thought, however, nagging on the fringes of his consciousness, soon came into view to spoil his pleasure. He lived again his ignominious flight from the secret room in the loft, and his abandoning of Hope, and his spirits tumbled into depths of recrimination.

  He looked up at Mr. Banghart and wondered how he had found out about the turmoil of the night before. “Probably watched it all through the windows,” he thought. “Hope said he did a lot of that.”

  “Horses seem pretty frisky this morning,” said Mr. Banghart, tugging gently on the reins to slow the pace of Caesar and Delores. Haley stood up and walked to Mr. Banghart’s side. He saw that the corners of the horses’ mouths were raw, and that every pull on the edged bits made them swing their heads wildly from side to side.

  Mr. Banghart took out his hunting knife and began shaving fat splinters from a wagon stake. The cuts were effortless, Haley noted, with a youngster’s admiration for a keen edge. “There’s a great day coming,” his companion crooned. “There are a lot of people around who are going to be wishing they had been a lot nicer to old Bing.” He winked and returned the knife to its case. “A man can stand so much and no more, and they’re all going to have to learn that the hard way.”

  Haley asked to have a look at the knife. Mr. Banghart was hesitant. At last he handed it over, admonishing him to be careful. “It’d take your arm off quicker than you could say ‘Jack Robinson,’” he said proudly. “You’re the only one I’d ever let look at it except Hope,” he added. He shook his head mournfully. “A fellow’s in pretty sad shape when he can only trust two people, isn’t he, now?”

  Haley nodded and found himself wondering who it was that he could trust. Everyone seemed intent on worrying him into a pattern of their own making, rather than trying to understand what it might be like to be Haley Brandon. He wondered most about Hope. With discomfiting insight, he recognized that any attention she might have shown him was probably a subtle defiance of her father. “Like protecting Caesar and Delores from him,” he thought ruefully.

  When they set about flinging bales onto the wagon, the circle of Haley’s thoughts grew smaller, with limits set at the hard work on hand. He was pleased to see that he was accomplishing nearly as much as Mr. Banghart. It was more a matter of rhythm than strength—swinging the bales several times, then giving them a hearty boost with a knee on their upward arcs. True, when the load was three bales high, pitches more hefty than Haley’s were called for, but he was able to make himself useful by sitting atop the load and pulling the bales into place as Mr. Banghart tossed them.

  “It’s a load!” he cried, when the fifth tier was complete.

  Mr. Banghart shook his head. “We’ll stack her seven high and save time,” he said.

  “That’ll be above the stakes,” Haley warned.

  “I’ve done it a million times,” said Mr. Banghart. “Nothing to it. Just drive easy, that’s all.”

  Haley looked dubiously at the horses, who were keeping their harness taut and clinking with their restlessness. In a few minutes he was seated uneasily on a swaying load seven bales high, with Mr. Banghart beside him singing and preparing to start the team for the barn. He peered over the edge of the bales at the ground and had the chilly impression of being perched on a steep cliff overlooking a gorge miles below.

  At Mr. Banghart’s soft clucking, Caesar and Delores started off evenly and good-naturedly. The bales rocked as the wheels struck rocks and pits in the lane, but not one had dropped off when the wagon rolled at last onto the hard-packed earth of the barnyard near the house. Mr. Banghart had looked at the sun and guessed that the time was between 8 and 9 o’clock. Haley noted that the General was no longer abed, for his beloved automobile, as immaculate and glistening as a thousand-dollar casket, was out of the garage and parked in the driveway near the kitchen door. No one was outside.

  Suddenly the bales beneath Haley gave a great heave, and he felt himself hurtling downwa
rd, with Mr. Banghart shouting in midair beside him. The whack of his chest against the earth stunned away his breath and senses. When he regained them, it was in time to roll out of the way of Caesar and Delores, who had made a full circle in the barnyard and now bore down upon him with fury. The emptied wagon clattered behind them, its steel-bound wheels screeching on dry bearings and striking sparks from rocks as it came. The team turned into the driveway at a full run. The wagon shot a spray of gravel rattling against the back of the house, and its right wheels skidded into a shallow ditch to set it careening at a crazy angle.

  Haley tried to shout at the horses, but he managed only a whisper, which was immediately overwhelmed by a splintering, ripping, staggering crash, followed by silence, unruffled save for a muted, rhythmic roar in the now-motionless horses’ throats. On one side of the General’s new automobile stood Caesar, his harness askew and dragging, blood streaming from his wounded mouth. On the other side Delores lay gasping, festooned in a tangle of snapped lines and straps.

  “God save us,” moaned Mr. Banghart sitting up. “God save us,” he repeated. “Look at the General’s car, would you.”

  Haley steered a wobbling course for the rear of the team, where he freed a line that still bound Caesar to the wagon. With a dreamy sort of horror, he saw that the wagon tongue had plunged through the trunk door, burst the cushions of the back and front seats, and buried its iron head at last in the instrument panel, splintering the windshield above it.

  He looked up dumbly from the unholy wreck to see Hope running down the walk toward him. She examined the damage with profound respect. “Wow,” she said at last, under her breath. “It would have been kinder of you two to saw the General’s legs off.”

  “It wasn’t our fault,” Haley protested.

  Hope looked at the car again and shook her head. “You poor kid. You’ve really managed to pack a lot into a few days, haven’t you?” she said, her eyes full of sympathy. “Boy, with this to top off Kitty’s elopement—”

  “What’ll I do?” asked Haley helplessly.

  Mr. Banghart had arisen from the ground and walked over to the car to study it in silence. He turned away from it after a few moments and headed across the barnyard.

  “Where are you going?” called Hope.

  Mr. Banghart stopped. “I don’t know,” he said with a shrug. “Dallas, Scranton, Los Angeles—somewhere.”

  An upstairs window rattled open, and Annie appeared, clutching her flamboyant bathrobe together at her waist and neck. “Land of mercy!” she cried, her voice full of anguish. “What have you done to the General’s car, Haley?” Mr. Banghart resumed his flight with new vigor.

  “I hear the General!” said Hope.

  Haley looked up at Annie and then at Mr. Banghart, who was scaling a fence. “Perhaps we’ll meet again,” he heard himself saying. He broke into a run. As he loped after Mr. Banghart he told himself that he was no good to anyone; but by the time he had put the fence and barnyard between himself and the house, new strength flowed into his long legs—the quick, mad joy of liberation.

  He overtook Mr. Banghart in a small grove of elms a few hundred feet from the highway. They trotted together to the road’s shoulder and waved their thumbs at an approaching car. The General’s voice, shouting their names, reached them as clearly as though he were riding them piggyback. Haley laughed aloud; the sound was no more awesome than the chatter of two red squirrels in the elms to his back.

  The automobile, a new maroon sedan, came to a stop beside them. Mr. Banghart climbed in front, and Haley sat by himself on the broad rear seat. The driver was a husky blond man of, Haley guessed, about forty. His chin was covered with stubble, and his eyes were red. “Been driving all night,” he said. “Need somebody to keep me awake. Where are you headed?”

  “Where are you headed?” asked Mr. Banghart.

  “Chicago.”

  “Yep, that’s where we’re going, too.”

  Haley watched through the back window as the car pulled away, and the silos and red roofs of Ardennes Farm slowly lost their identities in the buff horizon of grainland. The sway and hum of the automobile soon lulled him to sleep.

  VI.

  In his dreams Haley felt again the quake of the toppling bales and the sensation of falling. The image ended with a solid thump, and he awakened to find himself on the automobile floor, whence a sudden stop had rolled him.

  “All right back there?” called the driver. “Sorry, the light turned red just as we got to it.”

  “Yep, I’m O.K.,” yawned Haley, lifting himself back to the seat. “Where are we, and what time is it?” He looked out of the window and was surprised to see crowds and blinking neon and the window-checked walls of a city rising on either side. The fragrance of a nearby bakery filled his soul, and his stomach growled hungrily.

  “It’s late afternoon, and you’re in Chicago,” said the driver. “What part of town do you want to go to?”

  “Right along here will be just fine,” said Mr. Banghart in an offhand tone. “The boy and I might just as well start looking for jobs along here as anywhere.”

  The driver looked with curiosity from Haley to Mr. Banghart. “It’s Sunday, you know. What kind of jobs are you looking for?”

  “Oh, preferably some sort of entertainment work,” said Mr. Banghart airily. “I sing.”

  The driver laughed incredulously. “Are those the only clothes you’ve got?”

  Haley looked down at his faded denim trousers and clay-caked work shoes. Mr. Banghart’s shirt, he remembered, was rent up the back, revealing a bright pink strip of sunburn.

  “What, these?” said Mr. Banghart. “Heavens, no. These old things are just for traveling. Our good clothes are at a relative’s house here in Chicago.”

  “What part of Chicago?”

  “Oh, just about here,” said Mr. Banghart, opening the car door and stepping onto the sidewalk. Haley followed, forgetting to thank the bemused driver, and pursued his companion, who disappeared into the tight currents of the city’s Sunday strollers.

  He caught up with him at an intersection in the bizarre shadows of the elevated overhead. Mr. Banghart was talking earnestly with a policeman, who pointed down the street and shouted above the rumble of trains. “The employment office opens at 8 in the morning,” the policeman said. “Got any money for food and a bed tonight?” Mr. Banghart shrugged and grinned sheepishly. “Then hurry up and get over to the Mission before all the beds are gone,” said the policeman severely. He tapped Mr. Banghart’s shoulder lightly with his nightstick. “And keep out of trouble.”

  Haley kept his distance until the policeman had finished his piece, then walked beside Mr. Banghart, who took no notice of him, but strode along muttering to himself. Haley read his lips. “Keep out of trouble, keep out of trouble,” he was saying.

  Haley nudged his arm to get his attention. His companion’s reaction was instant and violent. Haley felt himself seized by his gathered shirtfront and twisted to face Mr. Banghart. “Just let the others make sure they keep out of trouble, that’s all,” said Mr. Banghart fiercely. He relaxed his grip under the fascinated glances of passers-by eddying about them. “Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean anything by it. I know you’re a friend.”

  Haley’s impulse was to get away from Mr. Banghart, whose eyes grew more lunatic by the second, but the ranks of unfamiliar faces seemed the more ominous, so he continued to trudge, fearfully, by his side. Following the policeman’s directions, the two of them turned a corner and found themselves on a quiet side street, three blocks long. The city’s noises sounded like a distant surf behind them. Warehouse walls banked the street’s left side, their brick faces daubed with posters—tattered reminders of a war-bond drive, a musical comedy, a political campaign, and the Greatest Show on Earth. Haley looked from these to the buildings facing them, his eyes running from the twin green globes marking a police station, the worst of Victorian architecture patinated with soot, to a dozen narrow-fronted hotels, taverns, pawnshop
s, and, at the far end, the blinking cross of the Mission. As though in bas relief, the still, gray figures of silent men stood in doorways or napped on stone steps and the lower treads of fire escapes.

  “Hey, buddy, give a pal a smoke, will you?” said a toothless man, stepping from the shadows of an alley.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t smoke,” said Haley weakly.

  “Trash,” said Mr. Banghart. “Ignore them.”

  “Hey, pal, lemme talk to you a minute. . . . Buddy, got a cigarette? . . . Spare a dime?” whined a hundred voices as Haley and Mr. Banghart picked their way to the Mission. Annie would be preparing dinner now, Haley thought wistfully.

  When they entered the Mission, which Haley saw was an old storeroom filled with benches, a pale young man was standing behind a pulpit, swinging his arms vigorously in time to the hymn he was leading. They took seats by themselves on the rearmost bench. From the room behind the pulpit came a clinking of heavy bowls and the dense smell of boiling kraut. Two dozen unkempt men mumbled the words in their hymnals under the haranguing of the leader. Haley yearned to get at the piano that stood in one corner and wondered if he might not get permission to play it when the singing was at an end.

  Mr. Banghart seemed soothed by the devotional atmosphere. He picked up two hymnals from a shelf along the wall, handed one to Haley, and burst into song with startling volume and brilliance. The young man directing the singing stared with surprise and gratitude, and his unwashed congregation turned their heads to squint in wonder.