by Robert Kloss
Remember how men and women wandered streets against the near constant drone of names, their ears plugged with cotton—
Remember how the sky opened with this endless crackling deluge and many stayed home from work rather than miss the death or the not death of some son or nephew or cousin or uncle or next door neighbor or former paperboy, and now the milk bottles piled and curdled on hundreds of porches and stoops until the unpaid ventured from the forest to gulp them by the moonlight, their cream-smeared lips.
And now classes were interrupted by the naming of a cousin or a father or even the teacher’s own son, and remember your teacher became mere gray flesh as the sound of her son’s name and his age and his address lingered, and the chalk snapped against the board, and the stick fell to the floor, and from within this gray flesh was born such a terrible sound.
Remember how names droned and crackled until those who wandered Main Street wandered with ears stuffed with blood and pus-soaked cotton, and they no longer stopped to talk or greet each other or shake hands, instead passing with eyes to the cobbled walks while low moans issued from their throats. And the streets stood vacant save those tottering women with ears fat like cabbages, their handbags filled with cuts of aged-meat and canned peaches.
And when the speakers ceased their torrent of names and the air hummed with silence, there were those who believed the war was concluded. But when the speakers spoke again they spoke in the voice of conscription, and remember now the names of those “randomly” selected to serve were called into the open air, and all the wives of the land looked sidelong at their husbands and their husbands had gone pale.
The mother of many a boy such as you said, “Your father claims his back troubles will keep him from the war. Other days he insists his game leg is the ailment,” and remember how that mother gazed as if with great longing before finishing, “Have you ever seen that man so much as limp?”
And those lines of men with their pipes, their cigarettes, coiling from the bars and taverns, and many children returned from school to houses emptied, save a note which read “GONE INTO HIDING LOVE MA AND PA.” Or they returned to their mother’s weeping while their father hummed the melody to “Yankee Doodle” before he turned to his child and said, “I’ll probably be leaving for the war any day now” or those fathers who now wore stumps for hands, or who smelled of whisky and no longer worked but sprawled on the sofa resting a glass on their bellies, or those fathers who pontificated from their front stoops about “doing something about all those unpaids” who they were expected to die for, those unpaid who had shot their hand off or their foot off or their knee cap off not to die for, those gibbering workers everyone suspected would take their jobs, victorious or no, and all would soon become as unpaid workers themselves beneath the brute rule of these unpaids now, suddenly, paid.
And remember the mandatory military age was raised from forty to fifty and soon men hobbling on crutches and canes, or cowering under sinks or behind bookshelves were called to service, and these men staggered to military offices or they were found and marched to offices by militiamen, and while most said their rifles did not work this mattered not, for their bayonets did and these were the sort of men who preferred the thrust of a good bayonet.
And only the names of dandies or the sons of fur barons escaped conscription for these fellows paid vagrants to enlist in their place. And when these sons and nephews with golden locks, with black velvet jackets and purple silk top hats, heard their names uttered, they plucked gold coins from their purses and to the nearest urchin they said, “You there boy—”
And now secretaries wore eyes black-blotted by husbands who suspected them of consorting with the unpaids.
And men such as your father said, “You see now how this fellow of yours, this Abraham, intends to replace us. You see now the whole plot revealed,” and those lines of workers with their lunch pails entered the factory, their laughter amongst each other. And this language they spoke with each other seemed a monstrous tongue, and now many men said, “I can’t believe my son is off fighting so some savage can take his job.”
“I am hollow without you”
And militias stampeded the streets and they fired buckshot into crowds and the crowds returned fire and brandished planks of wood, and dandies fled to country estates while the rest of the town burst shop windows with bricks, lit torches, battered down city house doors while the militia waited within, their eyes fat and their bayonets affixed.
And you attended to the porch, your father’s rifle on the ready, while your mother lay on her sofa with her lists, and along the night, explosions and sirens, and you did not sleep nor stir from your post while the horizon hazed with red smoke, while workers were rooted out of forests and church basements and thrashed to death with clubs and bullwhips, and the wide soulless eyes, the unpaid bodies pitched forward, covered in flies.
Remember the sun blotted into blackness as neighboring towns burned.
And the bodies of unpaid workers swung from gas lamps and speaker poles and tree limbs; the beaten and mutilated bodies, their necks elongated like the necks of swans, their eyes jellied and popping; the shadows of swinging bodies cast by fires onto cobbled streets and against brick exteriors while overhead, gulls swirled and shrieked.
And the bodies of rioters lay bloodied and smoldering, banked against gutted out shops, blanketed beneath the ashes of incinerated awnings. And the bodies of rioters and militiamen became the nests of rats, and when your mother pointed to the smoke along the horizon she said, “That’s flies you see there,” and when she saw your rifle she snorted and she said, “You don’t think you’ll use that on someone?” and you said, “If it’s in my heart, I will. It’s in his heart, isn’t it?”
And of the bodies gone black in the merciless sun your father wrote to you, “The microbes are constant and everywhere” and he wrote, “Hold a rag to your face” and he wrote, “If you do not hold this fast I will command your mother to wrap it unto your face.” Your father insisted disease carried on the wind. He wrote that you must boil water upon the stove and toss this steaming into the tin tub, and there he bade you strip, and there he bade you scrub until the waters reddened. How you sobbed and wailed as your flesh scalded. And of his own constant days amidst such rot, your father said he did not need to bath or cover up because “my life entire I have been exposed to such contagion. By now I am immune.”
And from the speakers the voice of Abraham said unto the people, “In times of rebellion and to suppress said rebellion, we must arm those you have so long considered unarmable and we must pay those we have so long considered unpayable, and I, as President of these here parts, do solemnly declare those who have never been paid must now be paid” and how many of these runaway unpaid came clattering into army camps trussed in the rotten outfits of their previous employ, speaking languages unknown, gesturing for firearms, and many of these unpaid were handed pitchforks and wheelbarrows and were told to clean the fields of corpses. They were paid in promissory notes and many took their notes to the stores and feed mills and were given pouches of boll weevil infested tobacco and torn burlap sacks.
Your father called this proclamation a “terrible folly” and he said, “We trusted those runaways who came into our camps to clear roads of debris and to erect forts, but they worked only when our rifles commanded them, and they fled at the first sign of trouble. The spirit of the unpaid,” your father often said, “is not a sturdy one.”
And little sent rebel employers scurrying faster than the thunder of their former employees marching, and nothing terrified the captured rebels more than the bayonets and impish laughter of their former unpaid, who cackled and hooted and called them “Boss.” And when the unpaid soldiers lost battles, they were shoveled into pits like dead chickens, and when they waved white flags they were shot through the necks or the skulls or the chests or beaten with clubs or rifle butts and made to moan and told to “Beg!” and if they begged they were shot in the back of the skulls and if
they did not their hands were chopped off and then their ears and these were worn in necklaces by rebel bands. And those who were not murdered were returned to their former employers and were whipped and beaten and again made to work without pay if they could yet walk or breathe.
These acts were not reported in the papers. And these unpaid were not wept for along the land.
And now all the night lit by the light of the cities your father burned to husks, your father along the hillsides, the cigars he smoked, the ashes mounded at his feet, smudging his horse. And the tide of refugees as they drifted from burning cities. The bayonets awaiting them. “Bring them Hell,” your father shouted. “Make them know what they brought on themselves.” And those women wrestled into ditches, their corsets gutted by bayonets, screaming in the light of their burning city, and those buildings burned and devastated into half-walls and heaps of brick and ashes, and the burned carcasses of horses in the streets and the cats that picked cleaned the ash-bones, and now babies and mothers, covered in dust, slept against the husks of buildings while soldiers marched the scorched and dusty road, while your father smoked his cigars and nodded ashes to the burned-out city streets.
And soldiers slept in rebel yards, bloodied and bandaged, and stray dogs licked at their wounds, and hogs rooted at their flesh, ate their toes, their hands. Soldiers slept on the laps of soldiers, in the arms of soldiers, and soldiers dying and bleeding and draining onto other soldiers said, “Tell Mother I died a hero.”
Here the awful universe of battle, the sloping forest of flashing steel, men gulping blood, men falling armless, legless, headless into the mud, into the fields, into the trampled dust.
Soldiers wandered back-roads and through swamps half-naked through clouds of dust, covered in filth and vermin, those soldiers who wandered hollow-eyed and collapsed along roads to be trampled over by those who followed.
And in the smoke of combat men fired upon their own commanders, even generals taking volleys from their own men, and generals were carried from the field coolly smoking cigars, coughing blood.
Men lay moaning and bleeding in the dust, and from their knapsacks they removed lockets and photographs, the images of sweethearts and wives. And if they could not remember the voices of these women in those last moments, or the sensation of touch, or the whisper of breath, if they could not remember the warmth pressed to their sides, their hearts, they could at least say unto these icons, “I have ever hastened to return to you,” and rarely could they say names, rarely could they remember them for the numbness unfolding, the immeasurable whiteness.
And there were two ways for surgeons—the way of those who would not be paid, these conducting themselves with blood and pus-stained hatchets and bone-saws, their leather aprons and the ether they sometimes used. And they hoisted bodies screaming unto tables and there they hacked appendages apart at the most obvious place. And if no appendage revealed itself as infected they prayed unto the Lord to guide his hand, to choose a leg or arm to sever. Appendages piled bloody and fly-gathered at the tent entrance, and the bodies piled in nearby fields, and soldiers lit these with gasoline-soaked rags and bundles of dead grass.
And there were those who would be made wealthy. In those times embalming surgeons advertised in newspapers and ladies magazines, and embalming surgeons agreed to follow the sons of wealthy families at a “discreet distance” waiting for the death of those they agreed to “handle.” And no embalming surgeon would reveal his “secret formula” although there were those who claimed “no arsenic” or “of chemicals all natural” as if one could drink the stuff from barrels. And there were those who advertised in the papers: “Bodies embalmed by us never turn black but retain the color and countenance of those asleep.” Embalming surgeons amassed fortunes from widows and parents who wished for the remains of sons to be returned “as they were when alive.”
Embalmers followed marching soldiers in wagons with the words “Embalming, Deodorizer, Disinfectant” whitewashed on either side, and embalming surgeons wandered battlefields in their silk top hats and camel-hair jackets, sifting the still smoking and writhing aftermath, and soon those men stood like butchers in leather aprons and with sleeves rolled, connecting hoses to figures as-if-asleep on tables, and how the red fluid was drawn from the bodies while the yellow fluid was injected.
And the skin of thousands of dead soldiers took on a yellow glow and neither did they age nor putrefy nor gray. And your father gazed upon the aspect of these men and said it was a “genuine miracle” and he wrote to your mother, “If only such capabilities existed when Walter—how different our lives may have been.”
And Abraham journeyed those lands when all was silent along the fields of combat, sifted through the rubble and kicked at the skulls smoldering in dust. And Abraham spoke unto the gathered generals and politicians and the press and unto those former soldiers who sat in chairs, their pus and blood-smeared bandages, and to the wives of those attending, and how this man Abraham said, “We come here not to dedicate, nor consecrate, nor hallow this ground. The men who have lived and died and struggled here have consecrated it far beyond our low powers to add or detract. It is for us to commit to the great task before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to the conflict for which they gave the last full measures of their lives—that we resolve these dead have not died in vain—”
And there were those who scoffed and snickered and said, “See here the gibbering ape.”
Houses throughout your town were abandoned, the windows punched out by neighborhood children. Families officially “went west” to stake a claim toward a future, and no one remembered these families planning to move although they remembered the covered wagons of the military in their yards or militiamen drinking the bottled milk from their front stoops.
And your school chums found notes in their desks accusing them of rebel sympathies, and even your teacher’s voice seemed tinged with twang, and it was so that she disappeared the very next week, and soon a man who knew nothing of your class or your studies stood at the front of the room and said, “Let us now open our books” and the children each opened a different text.
And the neighbor across the way disappeared, his milk bottles gathered on his stoop until runaway workers carried them to the forest, and when you asked your mother where this man went she said she dreamed that he had piled into a covered wagon with a mattress and burlap sacks filled with clothing and feed and his chickens and rabbits thrashing in cages and hutches, while everyone else called this neighbor a “rebel sympathizer” and said it was only a matter of time. And soon the house was boarded over by militiamen and indeed there were many such houses now and it seemed half the houses one passed were houses boarded over or houses in the process of being boarded over by militias crowded into wagons with hammers and boards and other implements. And your friends investigated these abandoned houses while you watched from your porch, rifle across your lap. And your friends whispered of the rebel flags they found bannered throughout your neighbor’s house, the portraits of gray woolen generals in his personal office, their bedroom, above the child’s bed.
And now children accused classmates of accents, of smelling like rebel foods, and children met in the mornings before school and bloodied noses, their pale faces spattered with red, eyes smote with tears.
And detention centers or “camps” constructed of concrete and barbed wire were initially denied, then proudly confirmed with headlines: “Our Country Kept Safe.” These centers constructed and filled with turncoats, traitors, and spies, for the impulse to “turn rebel” was pervasive in the low times of war. Your grandmother claimed insomnia for thoughts of rebels lurking in honest men’s clothing. She would sniff the air, cautiously, and imply she could smell them even now, or at least she could scent the stink of their cooking.
Children dreamed the rebel flag suspended over the blackboard or rebel families tunneling from the prison yards, dirt-smeared and soon camped in the streets. Rebel families soot-black and b
urning lawns with lit torches, touching them to houses and fences, all the neighborhoods smoldering and blazing to stubble. And arithmetic and Latin classes were regularly interrupted by the wearied screams of half asleep children.
And the Gazette reported that the interned had started baseball leagues, and the Goober Peas held a narrow margin over the Boll Weevils in the pennant race, and they were said to have knitting circles and book clubs, and they were said to sing carols and pray in churches, and the goods of the prisoners made their way into general stores, and these goods were labeled “Made by the Interned,” and there they remained, no matter the price.
And from those camps came the frequent reports of rifle fire. And many greeted this rapture by muttering “good riddance.”
It was said that the rebels kept their prisoners crowded into patches of dirt and most slept in holes with woolen blankets tossed over, and when they drank they drank from maggoty swamp water that doubled as their toilet, and they died retching, and when they ate they ate only a ration of salt, and some applied this to the rats they caught, or to the bunk mate who died, or to the clump of dirt they searched for worms, or to the festering maggots of the drinking water—
And it was said that when your father liberated one of these camps he found the soldiers of his country as skeletons, all caved-in sockets, all ribs and hip bones. And the sound of whistling came when they tried to speak. And when they tried to move nothing happened. These men your father found in heaps of black-bloated dead, and when they pulled free men yet living, your father said, “Are you actually men? Are you not corpses?”
And when they spoke finally, worms and maggots wriggled from their gummy mouths.
And your father fell then to weeping, and for days he could not cease, and when he emerged from his tent your father spoke only in chattering, in wild eyes, in clicking and humming.