Season of the Witch

by James Leo Herlihy

  Peter took a good long look at Hank. I think he was trying to decide whether to throw him down the stairs or just gently let him know he was acting like a pain in the ass.

  He said, “Hank, were you actually listening? Because somebody should’ve warned you about people who smoke dope. Y’see, what happens is they get high and they talk this really awful shit. You should never listen to it seriously.”

  Well, I thought, at least he hasn’t thrown him down the stairs.

  Hank took a moment, then nodded his head and said, “Oh. Oh, I see. Thank you. That explains it.”

  Peter’s face broke into a smile. He wasn’t faking it either. He was really amused. Then Hank, not wanting to be caught with too many square bones sticking out of his head, laughed too. Except he laughed quite a bit too loud. The moment was sad and awkward and touching and a little bit tense. I knew if Peter wanted to he could say something sweet that would help us through it. Joshua spoke up instead. His blue eyes were bright with feeling and that wild cornsilk hair framing his face made him look like a sunburst. Sally Sunflower was digging his act with wide-open admiration, and I flashed on what beautiful babies they could make if they got together.

  “Excuse me for butting in here, good people,” he said, “but with all due respect to everyone present, I just wanted to say I’ve been digging what Brother Peter had to tell us.” Joshua’s whole style is cornball-beautiful. “I been listenin’ with every ear I got to m’name, and my nose was workin’, too. And I can tell you for a certainty that I did not pick up the scent of shit. In fact, I’ll go farther. What I picked up sounded to me just like the nitty-gritty itself. I say, Amen and hallelujah!”

  His approval was taken up all around the table. Mother-love Ford burst into applause. Lu stood up and said, “Right on!” The acid-tripping cop said, “I am getting rid of this goddam uniform,” and proceeded to take off all his clothes.

  Hank was having a problem with his eyes: he couldn’t believe what they were showing him.

  Joshua turned to the acid-tripping ex-cop. “A fine idea, brother,” he said, “a fine idea.” And then, to Peter, “Brother, would you have any objections if some more of us here got down to our skin?”

  Peter said, “I’m not wearing a blue uniform, am I?”

  “No, no, brother, you’re sure not.”

  Joshua’s little family began to take off their clothes, then Nyoom and Sally and Cary—and pretty soon I lost track. There were petals falling everywhere.

  Meanwhile I was having this little dialogue in my own head:

  “Why aren’t you stripping, Witch? As a rule you lead the parade. What’s happening?”

  “I can’t take off my clothes in front of my father!”

  “Oh, really? What’s your hangup.”

  “I don’t know what my hangup is, but I am not disrobing.”

  “I can remember when you used to face everything. Now all you do is get uptight and tell me to shut up.”

  “That’s right, and I’m telling you now—shut up!”

  So I changed stations and tuned back into Peter and Hank.

  Peter was saying, “I think we’re all high on this Moratorium thing. I think we feel encouraged. Don’t you?”

  “Encouraged?” Hank said, trying hard not to notice the sudden flowering of naked bodies all over the room. “No, I don’t. I’m sorry. I don’t feel encouraged. My subject is history. If a man knows history, he never feels encouraged.”

  “Wow, man!” said Cary Colorado, hanging his trousers over the back of his chair. “If you really mean that, you ought to give up that history trip. It sounds like a bummer.”

  “Wait a minute, though,” Peter said. “It’s not a bummer for Toynbee. Toynbee says the twenty-first century will be the century of the unity of man—if the United States doesn’t louse it up.”

  “If?” Hank said. “It’s not if any more! She’s doing it. Right now.”

  “Yes, I know,” Peter said, “but Americans aren’t going to let it go on any longer. Today proved that!”

  “Proved? Proved what?”

  “The country’s waking up!”

  “A few thousand New Yorkers.”

  “Not a few thousand New Yorkers. Millions,” Peter said, “all over the country. I’m telling you, I saw it on TV. The tuning-in rate is gaining fantastic velocity everywhere. Listen, do you know how many Americans are deserting from the armed forces this year alone?”

  “A few thousand, that’s nothing.”

  “But it’s not a few thousand. Would you like to take a guess at the actual figure?”

  The guessing traveled around the table. The only one I picked up was Joshua’s. He pushed his great face forward and declared, “There must be a million at least?”

  “Not quite,” Peter said. “It’s 79,000 and some. Nearly 80,000.”

  Everybody said wow except Hank. He challenged it. “Where do you get that figure?”

  “From the Pentagon,” Peter said. “That’s the Pentagon estimate for 1969. It was in the Times, all the wire services carried it, it’s official. And that’s double the figure for 1967 by the way.”

  “If it continues at this rate,” Nyoom informed us, “there won’t be an Army in 1980.”

  “And what about the thousands,” Roy said, “who’ve gone underground? How many of us are there? Nobody even knows.”

  Cary said, “And the refusers. Guys like Will who’ve gone to prison. There are thousands and thousands of them. And what about all the thousands that pretend to be gay?”

  “And all the cases,” Peter said, “that are on the federal dockets right this minute. Something like 28,000 of them.”

  Nyoom’s quiet little Mary spoke up. “Does anyone know how many of our boys have gone to Canada?”

  Peter turned to Hank again. “How many of the lads in your classes are there to keep out of the Army?”

  “About half,” Hank admitted.

  “Okay then. Now you know why we feel like celebrating. Peace is getting almost as popular in America as . . . ” He paused to look for a word. Someone threw in “fucking,” and somebody else said “money.” And then everyone talked at once for a while, and when a lull came, Hank filled it up.

  “Not peace,” Hank said. “Opposition to Vietnam—maybe. Peace? No. Peace is not popular.”

  “Then what was today all about?”

  “It’s a nice day. They walk around in the streets, burn a few candles.”

  “You don’t think the word has gotten around finally that peace is urgent?”

  “People are stupid, my friend.”

  “Not when they’re threatened with extinction.”

  “Oh yes. Especially then. Man is threatened with extinction at this minute, and he chooses Mr. Nixon to lead him over the edge.”

  Cary Colorado said, “That wasn’t fair though. The only opposition he had got assassinated.”

  Hank said, “Another example of the popularity of peace, huh?”

  “Wow, I don’t want to argue with you, man. I love you. Besides, we want to go upstairs and chant for peace.”

  Cary and the three Colorado people got up and began to clear the table. Then our bunch joined in and when it was done, Cary said to Hank, “Would you like to come chant with us, sir?”

  Hank said no. Not no thank you. Just no.

  Sally said, “What are you going to chant?”

  “Oh, any old thing,” Cary said. “What about Nam Myoho Renge Kyo?”

  “Far out! Can we come, too?”

  “Sure! Anybody that wants to.”

  Sally and the cop and Nyoom and Mary followed Cary and the Colorado tribe up the stairs. Which left the house divided neatly into two groups. Upstairs, the naked chanters. Downstairs, the dressed talkers. The latter group included Doris and Peter and Jeanette and Roy and Hank and me. Jeanette brought in what she called the deuxième infusion—the teapot with its second infusion of water.

  While we were still pouring, Hank said, “That kid was right. Robert Kenne
dy might have been elected. But he wasn’t. The good men get murdered. They don’t fit in with the stinking mess, so they have to die.”

  Then he helped himself to what was left of the wine.

  “Is that the way you see it?” Peter said.

  “That’s not the way it is?”

  “Good men do sometimes get murdered, Hank. But can’t you see other things going on, too?”

  “Yes,” Hank said. “I see more than that. I see good men performing wonderful deeds, smoking marijuana and feeding LSD to cops, telling fairytales about the future. Spectacular things, no doubt. But where? In the White House? On Wall Street? No. These wonderful things happen in tenement buildings, in the slums, in dying cities. Forgive me if I don’t expect these, uh, these—great things—to change the course of history.”

  For some reason Hank was being openly hostile. Doris had one hand resting on Peter’s knee. Peter himself was quiet. I think he was trying to listen to Hank in the deepest way he could. Roy glanced at me. Neither of us were breathing. We could hear the chanting upstairs, Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, Nam Myoho Renge Kyo. Jeanette suddenly sprang from the table and on her way out of the room she said, “Man, that chanting is heavy! I got to get in on it.”

  There was silence for a moment. Then Peter said, “Please go on, Hank. I’d like the benefit of your insight.”

  Hank looked suspicious. He thought Peter was putting him on. Then Doris said, “So would I, Hank. We sometimes tend to get a little insular. Tell us what you see. Please.”

  Hank’s expression, the way his face looked at that moment, made his entire trip clear to me. My father was a damaged person. His life had taught him to land the first blow, to strike before he was struck. He’d never been into peace. He’d lived in a world of attack and retaliation. I’ll bet I’m right about all this. In fact, I just know I am.

  Anyway, for at least a brief moment, I think he trusted us. He folded his hands on the table in front of him and stared at them for a minute. Then he began to talk.

  “I see plenty. I see fear. I see a country paralyzed with fear. Everybody afraid the end is coming, and grabbing what they can. Strikes. Shit, I’m an old-line Socialist. I like strikes. But I’m telling you, the wrong ones is striking. It should be the poor. Only it’s not. It’s the middle class, the fat union workers. The poor don’t strike. We shut them up with welfare money, just enough to keep them alive—but so weak they can’t revolt. It’s a crazy country. The world never saw anything like it before.”

  While he spoke, his hands were locked in a death grip, fighting to hold each other still. But his thumbs kept trying to escape. And the harder they tried, the tighter his hands kept gripping one another. As for me, I kept wanting to put my hands on his, but I couldn’t talk myself into it. My mind is always getting in the way of my earth mother impulses. All I could do was listen and watch the struggle.

  “It’s not nice to tell you these things,” he said. “I am a foreigner, a refugee. I want to be grateful. America let me in here, and if it didn’t, I probably be dead like all the other Jews in Poland. I come to Detroit, a young man, and they give me a job. I go to night school, I learn the new language, I get an education. It’s all a dream, too good to be true. For these things I want to be grateful. Right? But I am not, my friends. I hate this country. Why? Because it seduced me. It gave me my life back, it gave me job, education. But why is it so generous? Why does it give me all these things? I’ll tell you why. So it can start crapping on my soul.” He looked around the table. “You don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  Peter said, “Not exactly. But keep talking. Maybe we will.”

  “Okay,” Hank said. “I try again. A smart man with a big drive can get drawn into the system here. He can become a little king, have his own back yard and a fence around it. He can buy Coca-Cola, a television. His wife can go to the drugstore and come back smelling good. He can buy a car and drive fast on big highways. Superhighways. Everything super. He is a little king because he’s got a little intelligence, a little ambition. But you know something about kings, even little ones? They can’t see good. They can’t see millions of other people still desperate, still hungry. The fat grows up around their eyes. They don’t see the millions of poor who don’t fit in the system. And the poor? What about them? They not even angry, my friends. They think it’s their own fault to be broke and out of work. They’re not angry. They feel guilty. They live in the greatest country of all, where every man can be king, but they look in the mirror and they see a piece of shit. They don’t know what the hell they doing wrong. If they get drafted in the Army, that’s good luck. Maybe in the war they find a way to fit the system. Otherwise, stay home, get drunk, die.

  “This is why I hate America.”

  Nobody spoke for a while. The tea wasn’t hot but we all sipped what was in our cups.

  Peter said, “What about you, though, Hank? I mean you personally. You said America seduced you and then started crapping on your soul.”

  Hank took a long time to think about the question, and then he said, “America made me a little king, no better than all the others. I get seventeen thousand a year. I talk history. Nobody listens. Except a few. And the few, what do they do? They hate my guts. They pass petitions, they try to get me fired. I don’t care. I’ve lived enough. The world is all over. It’s true, you know. America was the last hope. And it went crazy. So now everything is finished.”

  Roy said, “Tell me something, will you, Professor Gliss. If you’re a Socialist and all, how come you say America was the last hope? What about Russia and China?”

  “They didn’t have a chance, boy. From the start, they are forced into militarism, totalitarianism. Germany and America did it to Russia. And now America and Russia both together doing it to China. It’s crazy. China got two choices. Give up totalitarianism, get destroyed right away. Keep it, get destroyed a little later. Doesn’t matter, of course. Too late now.”

  “Isn’t there a chance though?” Roy said. “Couldn’t people’s heads change and make everything right? Couldn’t the United States just quit scaring everybody shitless?”

  “How? This country’s too crazy already! Got a million soldiers in Asia, rockets pointed at everybody’s head. Why? The president says we got Chinese trying to get into the back yard. Where? You see any Chinese? Not me. I see Chinese in Chinatown. But the president’s got everybody crazy with fear. If he decided to tell the truth, if he got on television tonight and said, Excuse me, people, we were mistaken. We have discovered the Chinese are not interested in conquering America and so we bringing our soldiers back home—you know what happens then? A hundred million fat American kings and queens start shitting their pants and impeach the sonofabitch. Because it’s too late now. They’re too crazy already. They been scared so long the truth sounds like a big Communist plot. Just like people in a nut house, they think everybody’s after them with guns. The only ones not scared is the president and a few of his buddies, a handful of generals and billionaires. They’re not scared because they think power and money will save them forever. There’s blood in the streets already, but that’s okay. These men live in palaces. They think they can shoot the failures or lock them up in prison. They doing it, too. You watch and see, boy. They getting away with it. Sure. More and more men going to get shot and thrown in prison. You think Bobby Seale and Abbie Hoffman, this bunch of clowns in Chicago, you think they’re going to get off? That’s not what they going to get. They going to get locked up. And the Black Panthers, you think they the only ones going get murdered? That’s nothing, not even the beginning. America will be the worst police state yet in history. And it won’t be saved by this schoolboy revolution. The schoolboys think they can win a revolution with dope. Typical reasoning for the sons of fat kings. And the blacks, they buy a handful of guns in the hardware shop and they show them on the television! But that’s not how you win. That’s how you lose. In fact, they already lost. It takes peasants to win a revolution. America
hasn’t got peasants. It’s got kings and failures.”

  “How do you see us?” Doris said. “The people in this house, what are we? Are we kings or failures or what?”

  “I don’t want to be personal,” Hank said. “I am your guest. You are friendly people.”

  No one said anything. I’m almost sure Hank expected to be pressed for an answer. But no one repeated the question. Hank’s hands were still joined and resting on the table, but mentally I think he was rolling up his sleeves for a fight. He turned to Peter and said, “I’ve talked so much. Don’t you want to go upstairs now and chant?”

  Peter considered the idea. “No, Hank. Not right now.”

  “But it’s for peace! Don’t you want the guns to stop?”

  Peter smiled. “It’s very tempting. But at the moment, I think I’ll just sit here and listen to you tell me what a shit-head I am. Isn’t that what you’d like to do?”

  Hank laughed. It was a sneaky laugh. “What do you mean, my friend?”

  “You think I’m a fool, don’t you?”

  “Oh, please,” Hank said, “if I offended you, my English is clumsy. We’re just two humble men exchanging our views.”

  “That’s not true, Hank, is it? We’re not humble men. We both think we’re right. In fact, each of us is thoroughly convinced that if the world doesn’t listen to us, it’s going right down the drain. That’s not humility. That’s arrogance.”

  “All right. We’re arrogant. So what?”

  “So don’t say we’re humble. We’re not. That’s all. And if we’re going to keep talking, we’d better not ridicule each other.”

  For a minute Hank almost let his hands get away from each other, but they didn’t quite make it. “Okay, okay,” he said. “But I listen to you talk at dinner, and I hear one thing only. This fine man, this Peter, with his beautiful ideas, he is Mr. Nixon’s best ally. He works for the generals and the billionaires and the corporations. He takes the young people and he keeps them soft in the head with all his hashish and his dreams. They should be out organizing and plotting the takeover of the government, but he puts them to sleep instead with his talk of love. Very fine talk. The whole world holding hands. Beautiful. There should be such a world. And perhaps it comes. Who knows. It could happen—ten thousand years from now! In the meantime, some other things going to happen first. America will be obliterated. There is no other fate for such a cancer of rubbish and greed. Europe and Russia will go, too. And for hundreds of years this land will be cemetery land, with Asiatics and Africans and South Americans picking over the bones. Our bones.”