by Lee Langley
18
Around three hundred men were gathered at the Portland railroad mustering yard by the time Ben arrived. It was a fine May morning, the heat of the sun tempered by a refreshing breeze. Some wore working clothes, others had put on their old army uniforms – the veterans’ Bonus Army, they were calling themselves, not altogether seriously. Quite a few had pinned medals to crumpled jackets.
‘Okay: anyone here got cash?’ Derisive laughter. Who was planning to buy a ticket?
They reckoned they had $30 between them, but to their surprise, Union Pacific loaded them into empty boxcars and sent them east. The flint-faced rail guards with truncheons and dogs were absent today.
‘They want us out, across the state line,’ Walt said cheerfully. ‘They don’t want trouble.’
‘We’re undesirables,’ Ben said.
‘Yeah, and that’s fine by me. Once we hit Washington we can sit tight till the Bonus Bill gets through.’ He called out to the crowd: ‘So no panhandling, no illegal drinking. And,’ a tired grin, ‘no radicalism – they’ll have us figured for communists.’
Rocking to the rhythm of the track, packed close, squatting shoulder to shoulder with strangers, breathing in their sweat, bad breath and noxious farts, Ben flexed his stiff limbs and cautiously changed position. As he folded his legs beneath him he relived a moment from a banished past: sitting cross-legged on a smooth tatami mat, Cho-Cho’s cool hands, the small sweetness of her body.
A world that seemed unimaginably clean and comforting. Through a slit in the side of the boxcar he glimpsed a brilliant, sunlit landscape speeding past, quite close but unreachable. His mouth was dry, his eyes stung. Did cattle feel this way? Was awareness unique to humans? These thoughts had not occurred to him before and seemed unhelpful now. In that other life Cho-Cho had bathed him, first washing off their mingled stickiness then leading him to the bath to steep in the steaming water, holding out fresh clothes.
‘Nice?’ Her invariable question.
Oh, how nice, he now acknowledged ruefully. He saw himself for a moment close-up as if through some telescope of time, swaggering into town, the bright young sailor, buying himself a good time, careless about who or what might be damaged in that fragile world. He saw something ugly – he shook his head as though brushing off flies, to shake away painful thoughts. Instead he brought up a picture of Nancy, whose body too had been sweet and smooth before the bad times, who wrinkled her nose beguilingly when she smiled.
With Nancy there was no ‘come here’, turn this way or that, lift higher, push harder. Cho-Cho’s creamy white flesh had invited violation. Nancy’s thighs were suntanned, firm from tennis and swimming; he held back from instructing her how to please him, or experimenting in ways to please her.
From his pocket he pulled a snapshot of Joey. As the intermittent light stabbed into the dark boxcar, he studied the tentative smile, the tilt of the head, the enquiring look. He should have paid more heed to the boy, done more stuff; he barely knew his own son. He’d make sure they spent more time together, when this trip was over.
Closing the door of the apartment had been unexpectedly painful. It was a dump, but it was their dump. Or had been. Electric light, a stove. A bed. He was now as homeless as the men around him. Nancy’s parents were kind but they too had been hit by events; they’d moved to a smaller house in a neighbourhood with overflowing trash cans and, Mary remarked with a sad shrug, no magnolia tree to shade the yard.
He had to find a job. Words filtered, whispering in his head . . . If he’d stayed in the navy. . . He cut them off. He disliked those ‘What if ?’ kind of thoughts. There must be some outfit, somewhere, that needed a man with his skills. Then again: skills. Nancy was the smart one. He would have to read a few books, prepare himself, keep one step ahead, look decent, knock on doors. When he got back from Washington.
Around him the men were singing along sporadically, snatches of half-remembered songs that gradually coalesced into one they all knew, one that brought alive a happier land, the Big Rock Candy mountain, ‘where the cops don’t snarl and the dogs don’t bite’. . . Someone had brought along a banjo, and above the rattling of the iron wheels Ben could hear the strumming and plunking of the strings, and the voices, some hoarse, some sweet, singing of a place where the brooks were hot as steam, ‘full of big stewed oysters lying in a bed of cream’, where you picked a sandwich from an old ham tree, ‘and all the smokes and booze were free’. . .
The Big Rock Candy Mountain, where coffee grew on white oak trees and the rivers flowed with brandy. A place where a homeless man could sleep easy in a soft bed.
Moving from one railroad station to another, begging rides on boxcars and trucks, hitting the road, walking across country, splitting up and rejoining forces, the Portland march slowly progressed. Ben moved among the men, making himself useful, sweet-talking hostile railroad guards with dogs straining to be unleashed.
This was something new for him; his style was to walk away. Mostly, as he admitted to Nancy once, he didn’t give a shit. But he was finding out that time can change a man. He must have been around twelve when a teacher at school told the class: ‘with age comes wisdom’. He had thought that was crap: with age comes grey hair and weak limbs, a bent back, poor eyesight, was what he had wanted to say, but kids didn’t talk back to teachers. In those days kids had been disciplined and protected, treated like pets. Now they lived in the real world.
Wives and a few youngsters had come along for the ride, parents perhaps not fully aware of the journey they would be making. Sometimes, when Ben went ahead into town to organise drinking water, or basic food and sleeping quarters, he made sure a few little ones trailed after him. A tall man with worker’s muscles and sun-bleached hair, all smiles and sincere blue eyes, heading up a bunch of kids, this was a reassuring sight for the locals. He could tell they were thinking with some relief that at least this one didn’t look like a communist. He felt things were proceeding peacefully.
Ten days and two thousand miles later, in east St Louis, he was proved wrong: the train pulled in and men poured in a shabby stream from the trucks. Beyond the rail stop, exemplars of law-abiding citizenry lined the roadside. Some carried home-made placards: ‘No Commies wanted!’ ‘No Bolshie troublemakers!’
Walt muttered, ‘Shit’, and trotted around the men like a sheepdog, keeping them in order, telling them to look as unlike troublemakers as possible. Ben kept smiling. He called, reassuringly, ‘Okay folks, we’re just passing through—’ but got no further. Stepping forward, shoulder to shoulder, a line of cops presented an unambiguous welcome party.
‘Back the way you came, guys.’ Batons tapping hardened palms.
The uniforms seemed to have won the day as men turned back to the boxcars, but a minute later they were uncoupling the freight cars, filling buckets and grabbing bars of soap: the vets were soaping the tracks. The Governor, watching from an upper window, sent in the National Guard.
Clatter of boots on tarmac, shouts, cries, whistles blowing; trained professional law-enforcers met half-starved rabble, the undernourished bodies easy to knock aside. Ben, swifter, more agile, kept out of the soldiers’ way. Around him, batons came down hard; blood flowed.
It was local people who settled the matter; ordinary, law-abiding citizens noisy enough to be heard; women who yelled at the Guard to lay off the vets, and elderly men in suits banging on the Governor’s door, so that quite soon he changed his mind, called off the boots and batons and sent in state-owned trucks to pick up the marchers, move them on, ‘Outta here. Outta town.’ Out of Illinois at least. Let someone else have the problem. The loaded trucks bumped their way to the state line.
As they blazed the wavering trail of the journey Ben gradually became aware that he was with them, but not quite one of them, as Charlie would have been. Divided by a war; not a vet, after all. The men were reverting to a regimental organism, buddies, moving en masse, in accord, seeming to know each other’s thoughts. And when they reached Mississippi, the
cops wore grins; some of them had served in the army. Vets themselves.
‘You guys know how to drive?’
Ben raised his hand. ‘That’s what I do. I drive a truck.’ Other voices joined his: men who could drive, when they had work and wheels.
Not far from the railroad station the road curved to a compound fenced off with chicken wire, the gate padlocked. Behind the wire, a metallic elephants’ graveyard, a scene of desolation: huge steel bodies lined up in rows, grand automobiles. Official loot: beautiful cars confiscated from jailed bootleggers.
‘Okay, guys; they’re all yours as far as the state line.’
The cops swung open the gates, the vets piled into Packards, Buicks, Chryslers, Caddies and set off out of town. Cheering, yelling slogans, drunk on temporary power, at least some of the Bonus Army was running on silk, until the gas ran out. Ben found himself – unimaginable luxury – at the wheel of a Pierce Arrow. He could feel the engine responding to the pressure of his foot; this was class, top racehorse quality, this was Kentucky Derby, Triple Crown stuff, the leather seats soft as a woman’s thighs, the suspension smooth. Bootleggers lived in style, smuggling Scotch from London, selling it on, running illegal breweries, rum ships, all to keep their clients happy. By now the owner of this beauty was probably free, sprung on a technicality and driving some other thoroughbred.
Ben shifted the gearstick, released the clutch and leaned into the movement, the ease, the creamy surge forward. He flung back his head and laughed aloud, running his hands over the wheel. The automobile was the future, right? He always knew that. The sleek lines of the car, the deep gleam of the paintwork were visible even through the dust swirling like a storm . . . Crammed in around him, the men cheered, slapped Ben on the back, drew him into their song. The barrier had melted. Washington, here we come. He wished Nance and Joey could see him as he gunned the engine and the car flew.
19
Resting like a convalescent in the shade of her mother’s tiny porch, Nancy follows the story in the newspaper; reports of men fighting with rail guards, forcing themselves on to freight trains. Others plodding the tracks on foot. Elsewhere, trucks, jalopies slowly covering ground. She senses a murmuring, a surge, a tracking of the land; the homeless on the move. Not all are bound for Washington: some are just on the road. Men walking, women too, children stumbling alongside, crawling like ants, moving east, moving north, from Reno, New Orleans, Kansas City. These moments, these migrations, recur in history. The land seethes: once it would have been men pushing carts, wagons drawn by oxen, mule trains. Go West; the magical words. Go West. But this is the West, and if they keep going there’s nothing but water. Next landfall: Japan.
Even here, she can see slow-moving, solitary men passing by on their way to nowhere. At the little general store on the corner one or two stop to buy a can of sardines and salteen crackers, squatting by the roadside to eat them, shaking the last shreds of sardine into wide-open mouths, heads tilted back. After dark, the walkers are intermittently caught in the headlamps of a passing car, heads drooping, backlit by the flaring lights like figures in a shadow show, their silhouettes racing ahead of them, then as the car passes on, men and shadows fade back into darkness and obscurity.
She imagines them, these sad souls, leaving towns and cities; listless tributaries flowing from state to state, reaching this town, this street, just another stage on a journey. Some of them, at least, have a goal: the White House. Men who fought for their country, now desperate. And among them, Ben, carrying a dead brother on his back, trying to prove something to himself.
What’s to become of us all? she wonders.
Once, she might have found comfort in prayer, but though they still attend the local church as a family, Nancy is unable to open herself to the consolation of penitence; she has too long held within herself knowledge of a transgression that sets her apart from the good people around her. They could count on God’s mercy, but she continues to live with an old and festering guilt; she finds it impossible to ask for forgiveness of her sins.
She prays aloud, when ordered to do so, but when the prayers move into silent communion her thoughts circle, refusing to rise, heavy as unleavened bread. Her life is divided into Before and After, like a terrain bisected by dark water. On the far side all seemed sunlit, flowers grew, there were family picnics, laughter; a landscape of innocence. On the After bank, an ominous cloud casts shadow on the dry ground; there is a sense of withering away. Between the two lies an ocean, a sea crossed and re-crossed, a moment when innocence was lost for ever and she was expelled from the Garden.
This week, breathing in the familiar church blend of wax polish and flowers, with her parents on one side and Joey tucked close next to her, for once she was lulled into a sense of peace; the service itself seemed infused with a glow of lost innocence; the preacher evidently perplexed as he spoke of men from Oregon camping out in Washington, making demands. As a law-abiding citizen he recognised they should have obeyed orders, stayed home, trusted in their representatives to speak for them. But as a man who had seen their problems at first hand, their children hungry, he could only pray their voices would be heard.
‘Remember: God will comfort, guide and forgive every person, no matter who they are or what they’ve done.’ Amen.
Amen to that, Nancy silently echoed. But could she depend on it?
May 30th Memorial Day. ‘Dear Nance, well, we finally got here . . .’
Before he left, she had given Ben a notebook with shiny black covers, a batch of stamped envelopes and two sharp pencils.
‘Write. Even if you only manage a few lines. Save them up. Mail them when you can.’
He promised to keep in touch.
‘There must be 20,000 of us here, vets, wives, kids, you can hardly move in the streets. The plan is to hand in the petition, get their voices heard . . .’
Once they had been hailed as heroes. Now they saw from the newspapers that the President had given them new labels: ‘Hoover’s calling us bums, pacifists, radicals. He’s locked the White House gates. Some of the guys have moved into downtown blocks about to be demolished, the rest of us are setting up camp on the Anacostia Flats across the river . . .’
The ground was hard, baked by the sun. Ben’s shovel hit the dry, cindery earth as though striking steel. Further off, kitchens were being set up, children warned off, as makeshift cooking stoves smoked and crackled. Huts and shanties, put together from junk and cardboard and scrap iron debris, began to spread, confronting the President with the biggest Hooverville in the country.
‘Dearest Nance, I’m taking a break from digging latrines. We’re putting up a regular home from home here. Great view: I tell you, I’d rather be us looking at Capitol Hill, than those guys looking at us.’
Nancy read aloud the scrappy pages that arrived from Washington. Later, in bed, Joey studied the scrawled notes, read and reread the words. In his head he heard the sounds of men at work building the camp, the digging, chopping, clearing; the clash of steel spade on hard ground, the voices calling. It sounded like a distant battlefield.
He began to think about his father in a new way.
20
Ben had helped write out an official statement to the press, but in the end Walter tore it up and walked over to the waiting reporters.
‘Gentlemen. Will you take a look at these guys. Most of them married, been out of work two years or more. Offer them a job at a dollar a day, they’d take it. We think they deserve to be heard.’
The reporters wrote their stories, the men waved their banners, and on 15 June Ben wrote jubilantly to Nancy that the veterans’ Bonus Bill had scraped through its first reading.
‘Hoover threatened a veto but there’s dancing in the streets.’
Two days later the Senate defeated the bill.
As the weeks passed, handouts from townsfolk dried up. Food replaced justice in the forefront of men’s minds. The camp stank of more than garbage and latrines: it smelled of hunger. Without knowing what it
was, Ben inhaled the metallic, acetate tang of malnutrition. He was acquainted with poverty – at a distance: sailing into foreign ports he had seen natives begging. At home, even before his own security began melting like ice in summer, he had been made aware of the homeless and the jobless. Now he was one of them, and it came to him that there was a quality of poverty here which was different from anything he had known before.
Cutting through blackened potatoes and peeling off rotten outer leaves to make use of a cabbage salvaged from a market trader’s refuse, he felt, first shame, then curiously privileged: they were beating the system.
But as the weather grew hotter, tempers too grew heated, and one night the men picketing the Capitol building extended the demonstration by bedding down in the grounds.
Next morning a government minion handed out official bits of paper: the Speaker had invoked a hitherto forgotten regulation that prohibited people from loitering.
‘Move along, buddy: no squatting. No sleeping.’
But Ben read the small print and pointed out there was no regulation against walking in the grounds.
For the next three blazing days and humid July nights, they shuffled up and down Pennsylvania Avenue in silent protest. There was some stumbling and one or two keeled over, but mostly they kept going. To make sure nobody sneaked in a catnap on the grass, the garden sprinkler system was kept running –
‘So we now have regular showers to cool us down . . . God must be on our side.’
In the shanty town a carnival atmosphere began to spread, with children playing on the riverbank and songs round campfires.
On the evening of 27 July Ben began a new letter, the page lit by a lantern hanging from the lintel of the shack. ‘It’s quiet tonight, Nance. I’m feeling hopeful.’
He wiped his sweaty hands on a rag, and tried to put his thoughts down on the crumpled page. There was so much he wanted to tell her, about the men whose stories he was hearing: how they had acquired their wounds, the scars of war, and the invisible wounds that still had them crying aloud and shaking on bad nights . . . and about the sense of discovery he had felt crossing thousands of miles of a country he barely knew. This had been more than one journey: he had made a voyage of his own; found time to look inside his own head; to think, for the first time, about Nancy and Joey, about the way life might be different.