The Fool's Progress

by Edward Abbey

  Two of us—the old man and little Paul—already in the ground, under the hemlocks at Jefferson Church graveyard. Sister Marcie teaching high school in Santa Cruz, California, and our baby brother Jim a logger in British Columbia. Exiled. Even our mother has left the home place, living in a little apartment in Shawnee close to her friends and the Holyoak family. Only Will, everybody’s ideal older brother, stayed home on the farm.

  How did this happen? How could we ever have allowed such a thing to happen to us?

  It’s hard to understand. But it seemed to begin, for my family, along about 1943. We’d survived George Washington’s War (1775-83), Andrew Jackson’s War (1812), Polk’s War (against Mexico, 1848) and even “Honest Abe” (sounds like a used-car dealer) Lincoln’s War (1861-65), although we lost a great-great-uncle at Antietam and another barely escaped starvation in Libby Prison, and we stuck together through McKinley’s War (1898) and Wilson’s War (1917-18), but when Roosevelt’s War (1941-45) came along—things began to fall apart. The whole country began to come apart. And then we’d lose little Paul in Truman’s War (1949-52). And would almost lose Jim and two cousins in the Johnson-Nixon War (1964-75). But the trouble really commenced, for us Lightcaps, one evening in late May, 1943, right after supper.

  (And we were a peace-loving people.)

  The fireflies were blinking outside the windows. Marcie and Jimmy were running around under the sugar maple tree and across the yard, catching those luminous bugs in Mason jars. Silent heat lightning flickered over the eastern hills.

  “You what?” Paw roared.

  “Signed up,” said Will quietly. Not proud or smug or defiant but with his usual resolute manner. Will didn’t talk much but when he said something you believed him. When he did something he did it. Did it right. Did it so it stayed done.

  “When’d this happen?” Paw roars again.

  “It didn’t happen. I volunteered.”

  “When?”

  “A week ago.”

  “For Christ’s sake why didn’t you tell us?”

  “I’m telling you now.”

  “Not the Army?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Not that goddamn Roosevelt’s Army?”

  “That’s right, Paw.”

  Mother shut her eyes, shuddering. We stared at Will in silence, in twilight, over the supper table. The yellow light from the kerosene lamps played on the shiny oilcloth. I was impressed, envious—once again Will had beaten me into the spotlight. Mother looked shocked, frightened, almost stunned. But the old man was simply enraged.

  “You’re gonna go git your head blowed off for that damned old windbag Winston Churchill?”

  Will said nothing.

  “For that scheming old sneaky son of a bitch Roosevelt?”

  Will remained silent.

  “For that bloody old communist tyrant Joe Stalin?”

  Will did not reply.

  “I’m disgusted,” Paw said. “Absolutely disgusted. That any son of mine would go fight in that rich man’s war. Would risk his neck for”—he put on his fake Groton-Harvard accent—“foah thu bull-luddy”—rolling the r’s—“Buh-ritish…Empah!” He glared at Will from beneath his shaggy, twitching eyebrows. “I’m ashamed. I am sick with shame. My own son….”

  Will sat motionless and silent, staring at his plate, swabbed clean with bread, waiting for Paw to calm down. Of course Will had anticipated this reaction from our old man. He did not seem much disturbed by it. What he dreaded was Mother’s question. And she was a Holyoak—pro-English.

  She spoke. “Will—you know you could get deferred. We need you here. Houser’s boy got a deferment.” She meant farm work—producing food for the War Effort.

  Will permitted himself a small smile. “Henry can handle my place.”

  Little Paul whispered, “Will’s joined the Army? He’s gonna be a serviceman?”

  Paw picked up the word. “Serviceman,” he sneered. “My son Will the serviceman. Gonna go serve Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt.”

  I saw Will’s hands tighten then, his face flush a little. Looking up at the tin-plated ceiling, he muttered, “Soldier. Not serviceman.”

  “You think there’s any difference?” Paw bellowed.

  Mother intervened, trying to head off trouble. “You still have a year of high school, Will. You should finish.”

  Will relaxed a bit. He’d been expecting this objection. “War’ll be over soon. I can finish school then.” If I feel like it, I imagined him thinking. I knew that he despised high school; if it weren’t for shop and industrial arts and football he’d have dropped out a year ago. “We’ll be back in about a year, I expect.”

  “We?” said the old man. “We? Who’s this ‘we’? Who talked you into this foolishness anyhow?”

  Will said nothing. So I blurted out the truth, despite Will’s warning frown. I’d heard about it days ago. Everybody at Shawnee High knew. “They all signed up together,” I said. “The whole varsity team. Him and Chuck Tait and Homer Bishop and Charlie Kromko and the Spivak brothers and Floyd Hendrickson and Bill Gatlin and Dick Holyoak—the whole first string. They all went up to Morgantown together and signed up.”

  Paw’s look of disgust became even deeper. “Bunch of damned fools,” he snarled. “And I know why you done it too, it’s because of that eager-beaver Bible-kissing short-pants Eagle Scout Tait kid too, hain’t that right?” Will did not reply. “Because of him, hain’t that so?”

  Will leveled his brown, dark eyes at the old man. “Don’t yell at me, Paw,” he said softly.

  Father and son stared coldly at each other for a few long silent moments. Paw wasn’t about to tangle with Will and he knew it and we knew it.

  Will looked away. “Guess I’ll go feed the horses.”

  “Wait a minute,” Mother said. A pause. Then she asked the question that she knew Will would never answer from the old man. “Will…why’d you do it?”

  Will hesitated, not meeting her eyes.

  “I can’t believe it,” Paw mumbled. “After all I tried to teach these boys. Just can’t believe it.”

  Brother Will was not stupid. He was thick but he wasn’t stupid. Embarrassed by the necessity to answer, by his inability to please, by his obligation to personal honesty, he looked out the nearest window and mumbled, “Well, they all wanted to go.” And stopped.

  “Yes?” says Mother.

  “They wanted to go. Not just Chuck. Charlie and the others. All of them.” Chuck Tait was the quarterback. But Will was the team captain. Chuck was the star but nobody liked him; Will was slow, stolid, dependable—everybody trusted him. “So, well, I had to go too.”

  As if that explained everything. Or anything.

  “What are you?” Paw thundered. “They go, you have to go? Are you a man or a sheep?”

  Will froze again, staring at Paw.

  “Joe,” Mother says. “Please.” She looked back at Will, a haunted yearning in her tired eyes, sorrow on her thin and weary face. “Go on, Will. Tell me.”

  “Well,” he says, embarrassed, “that’s it. You know, those guys, they’re not very—somebody has to look after them. Make sure they get back alive. In one piece.” He laughed awkwardly. “They’re all town boys except Homer and Bill. Great guys,” he hastened to add, “good football players, but…” He lapsed toward silence. “…you know, not too bright.”

  Quite a speech for Will.

  “Look who’s talking,” Paw said. “William the Brain. D-minus Willy. Christ,” he went on, “what makes you think they’ll even let you stay together? The Army couldn’t care less what happens to you and your buddies, once they throw you into Roosevelt’s meat grinder.”

  “The recruiter promised we’d stay together,” Will says. “He swore it.”

  “They signed up for the paratroops,” I said, horning in again where I knew I was not wanted, eager to see how Paw would respond. Again Will gave me a dirty look.

  Paw did not disappoint me. “Paratroops!” he bellowed. “Suicide, you mean
, you joined the suicide troops. I knew that football was no good for your brains. All that banging heads together.” And yet, watching him, I thought he was secretly pleased. Our old man always did admire the daring, the foolish, the reckless.

  “Paratroops?” said Mother, puzzled.

  “They jump out of airplanes,” I explained, “and float down to the ground in parachutes. If the parachute opens. While the Germans down on the ground are shooting at them.”

  Mother closed her eyes.

  “We got no quarrel with the Germans,” Paw muttered. “Nor with the damn Japs neither.”

  Mother could find nothing more to say. Too confused and shocked to protest, too brave and frightened to weep, she got up quickly, gave Will a sudden hug and kiss, put her shawl around her neck and went out. Off on another of her long walks; we knew she wouldn’t be back for an hour.

  The rest of us sat at the table gaping at the dirty dishes. Little Paul, age twelve, says, “How about another poker game, Paw?” Henry, age sixteen, says, “Soon as you and Marcie clean off the table, shrimp.” Will says nothing. And our Paw, age forty-three—a man of the century—pulls out his old Barlow pocketknife, flips the blade open with one hand and whittles himself a toothpick from a kitchen match. Scowling, outraged, proud.

  II

  We were plowing up the last of the potatoes that day, that Sunday afternoon in December, when old Clarence Nesbit came banging down our road in his loose-bolted loose-shackled fourth-hand Model A sedan. The one that once got four instant flat tires when the front bumper fell off at forty miles an hour. Clarence braked suddenly when he saw us in the field, jumped out of the car without shutting off the engine and hollered over the rail fence.

  “Joe! you hear the news?”

  Our old man stopped the horse, lines draped around his neck, and turned his dark bony face toward Clarence. Will and Henry, watching, recognized the sarcastic smirk on Paw’s face, knowing without a word what Paw thought of Clarence—an elder of the Church—and waited for the smart remark. The stub of a hand-rolled cigarette was stuck to Paw’s lower lip. A wisp of smoke rose past his squinted eyes. “How’s that, Clarence?” he says. “Your pigs get the janders again?”

  Old Clarence was too excited to notice Paw’s sneer or catch his words. “It’s war, Joe,” he shouts, “war! The Japs bombed Pearl Harbor. Bombed the heck out of it.”

  “Surprise,” says Paw.

  Old Clarence was so upset his pale blue eyes were bulging, so excited that a string of drool hung from the corner of his prim, tiny mouth. “I heard it on the radio, Joe, not fifteen minutes ago, them Japs they bombed Pearl Harbor.”

  Paw sucked on his stub of a cigarette, drew it from his lips and flicked it away. “Well, Clarence…”

  “What do you think we oughta do, Joe?”

  Paw smiled. Behind Clarence’s back he saw the old Ford, untended, motor vibrating, starting to inch forward down the grade. “Well, Clarence,” he said, “if I was you—I’d climb in that tin lizzie of yours before it rolls away without you.”

  “Oh my, oh my goodness gracious,” yelped Clarence, running to his car. He gave us a wave and drove away.

  The old man stood behind the plow, watching the departing dust, then fetched out papers and tobacco tin from a shirt pocket and rolled another cigarette. “That Roosevelt,” he muttered, half-smiling in admiration, “I knew he’d get us into that rotten war somehow.”

  Meanwhile, up on high where things matter, all over America, the officers were getting busy. And they were happy. They were very happy. All of our leaders getting ready to push. Getting ready to lead, as they always do, from behind.

  III

  So Will disappeared in early June 1943, with his friends. Shot hell out of the Stump Creek baseball team that summer. We had to let Sonny Adams play catcher, with sister Marcie in right field, Leroy Ginter in center (Red was already in the South Pacific), and Baby Jim at second base. Henry drove Will’s Hudson Terraplane over the hills—in reverse, the power gear, after the camshaft burned out—from Stump Creek to Boone City to Kellysburg to Gatlinville to Marion Center. Without a license, taking the back roads. Siphoning gasoline, when needed, from farm tractors here and there. We won four and lost eleven that summer. Henry’s batting average rose to .440—but he was scorekeeper.

  Now and then Mother received a note from Will, down in Fort McClellan, Alabama:

  Dear Mother we did the 20 mile march last night with full field pack. They put salt tablets in our canteens. It is very hot here. The chiggers bite a lot send some nail polish and calamine lotion. I qualified as Expert Rifleman. I scored 295 out of 300 possible. Maybe that will make Paw happy. All the sergeants are Johnny Rebs. They can’t talk English very good. Everybody talks boll-weevil English down here. But they sure can holler loud. Charlie Kromko is going to OCS but he promised to get back with us when we go to CENSORED Chuck got into the Army Air Corpse. Tell Henry to try to get in the Air Corpse or the Navy or the Merchant Marine. He wont like the US Army. One boy from Maine CENSORED himself on a pine tree last night. We all felt sorry for him. The officers are a bunch of CENSORED I love you. Give Marcie a kiss for me. Tell Paul and Baby Jim to wipe their nose. Tell Henry to check the oil in my car when he drives it or I will ring his neck.

  Will.

  Late in the summer came communiqués from Fort Benning, Georgia:

  Dear Mother we all qualified for Jump School except Homer & Ernie. Homer was two inches too tall and has flat feet. They said Ernie was too fat and too short. He’s in a heavy weapons platoon. He likes mortars and bazookas and .50 cal machine guns. It is nice in a parachute. It’s easy to do. You hook your chute to a cable in the airplane and when the Sergeant says Jump you Jump. If you don’t jump he pushes you. Easy. The hard part is when you hit the ground. The officers say we are going to ship out in CENSORED for CENSORED but we get a two week furlough first. So I’ll see you in September I guess. Tell Paw not to cut down the red oaks by the spring above the cornfield. How are old Ned and Bess and Ellie and Bones? I even miss the chickens some. Tell Henry to keep his hands off my 30.06 or I will kill him. Tell him he can use my .22 if he cleans it every time he shoots it. Otherwise I will have to kill him. How is the corn doing?

  Love from Your Will.

  Paw scowled over those letters, snorted, swore, but must have been secretly pleased. We heard him boasting about Will every chance he got, telling Charlie Carci and Hoyt McElhoes and the others at the Labor Day shooting match what a terror his boy would be when he got to Europe. Or “Yerp,” as everyone called that remote and chancre-ridden continent. “Now you fellas know I ain’t got no quarrel with the Germans. They’re just a bunch of damn fools like us, only better organized, and if they had any goddamned sense they’d shoot that son of a bitch Hitler theirselves, save us the trouble. But I sure do feel sorry for them when the Army turns my boy Will loose over there. I wouldn’t be surprised, when the word gets around, if them Germans don’t surrender about the time they hear Will is getting off the boat.” This was said, of course, with a wink and a grin—but we knew that the old man half believed his own words. And the more he talked the more he believed them.

  Our Paw set great store by a man’s ability with a rifle. “The rifle,” he’d say, “is the weapon of democracy. It was free men like us that invented the Pennsylvania long rifle. Only cowards like that windbag Churchill or bloody dictators like that Traitor-to-the-Revolution Joe Stalin need tanks and airplanes.” Paw himself was an expert small-bore rifleman. Three years in a row—1931 to 1934—he’d been a member of the West Virginia state rifle team, which simply meant he was among the twelve best shots in the state. He had a sashful of medals in his treasure chest, that old steel-bound trunk where he kept his pearl-handled .44 Colt revolver, and the Stetson hat with the rattlesnake hatband, and the triangular-bladed trench knife that Uncle Paul brought back from France in 1919 and the photographs of him and his IWW buddies swarming over a sawmill in Eugene, Oregon. Paw once shook hands and talked with Big Bill
Haywood; he heard Eugene Debs give his last speech before the Government locked him up for opposing Wilson’s War.

  “But”—Paw would continue, ruining the effect, spoiling his case with his patient neighbors—“Will and those boys should be going to Wall Street, New York, and that Washington, D.C., not to Europe. That’s where our real enemies are.”

  Uncle Jeffrey, our mother’s older brother, another damned Holyoak, overheard some of this talk. “Sprachen sie Deutsch?” he said to our father. All of the Holyoaks hated Joe Lightcap and with good reason: because a Holyoak girl named Lorraine had long ago and once upon a time, somehow, mysteriously, outrageously, allowed herself to be seduced into marriage with a hillbilly, a low-class deer-poaching redneck….

  “I’ll sprachen-sie any damn thing I feel like,” Paw says. “This is still a free country, Jeff, and I’m freeborn, white and mean as a gut-shot bear, and if you don’t like it you bow-tied bank clerk you can go back to merry old England where you belong and kiss the Queen Mother’s royal asshole.”

  Yes, our uncle Jeff worked in the First National Bank in Shawnee. He was rumored to make over two hundred dollars a month. And he did wear a bow tie.

  Uncle Jeffrey flushed with anger but made no move. Like all the Holyoaks he was familiar with Paw’s hot temper and a mite afraid of him. “Well,” he said sullenly, suppressing his rage, “at least there aren’t any Germans in our family.”

  Paw took that up at once. “The Ostranders was Dutch.” Referring to his mother’s ancestry—Grandmaw Cornflower’s mother. “Dutch,” he repeated.

  “Really, Joe? I thought they were Pennsylvania Dutch.” By which Uncle Jeffrey meant what was the fact—that they were Germans.

  Paw never blinked. “As a matter of fact they were Huns. Huns, Jeff.” He grinned his dangerous grin. “You have any other notions about my family, Jeff? Speak your mind, such as it is. You have anything to say about a Shawnee medicine man, for instance?”

  “Guess I’ll be going,” says Uncle Jeff, retreating to his polished, immaculate, like-new Plymouth sedan. Only a bank clerk would drive a car like that. But he was actually a nice man. Unlike most of the Holyoaks, he enjoyed rabbit hunting and a good target shoot now and then. He was always good to me and Will and the kids. Felt sorry for us.