by Jack Cady
At six AM pill time begins. Lights up. The stage opens to the day’s comedy—or tragedy if that be the will of the Lord. At six a.m. everyone coughs a lot, and if one is destined to die choking, the odds are best around six. Pills run the range of the pharmacopoeia. Drugs take on personalities. Most are plebeian, some even duller, but some are simply splendid. Some drugs cause dreams to run a riff, a coda, a trumpet ride like Ziggy Elman playing And The Angels Sing.
Burnside, with a big reputation for going off on his own initiative, and being independent as a hog on ice, waits for no nurse or orderly. He has a system of stainless steel pulleys rigged over his bed. It’s like living next door to a circus. Still, it’s tough to see him swing here and there. The man would have made a fine elf or gremlin or leprechaun, or even a grown-up pixie, and he’s reduced to swinging like an ape. He lowers himself into his seat and heads for the latrine, the tattered battle flag like a broken sun above that rolling chair.
Breakfast comes at seven. You can take it in your room or hit the chow line at the cafeteria. Among geriatrics the chow line carries a message: line up here and tell the world you’re still kicking.
Our troops break bread in the company of younger patients, guys in their 40s to 60s who have their own specters, but who were not seeing ours. These are leftovers from later wars. Nearly all are cripples, and not a few are crazy. I wouldn’t trust a one with rubber bands and paper clips, leave alone a dull knife.
Physical therapy starts at 8:30 and lasts until you drop, which in most cases is 8:45. Burnside doesn’t need it. His jaw works just elegant, and his legs are nearly ready to fall off, anyway. He gets plenty of wholesome push and pull from that chair. "I’d get a Harley," he complains, "but they don’t build ’em."
Doctors pull rounds from ten to lunch. They detail hip replacements, spinal taps, and ’ectomies to rearrange the innards. The docs make time-tested jokes, and are capable of their own b.s. After all, what are wars created for?
"Other hospitals ain’t this nice," Burnside explains to anyone who bitches. "In Japan the nurses are all dykes. In England the docs sound like Mortimer Snerd. In Frogland . . ." he then rolls his eyes and tries to appear lewd ". . . which is why DeGaulle had that tremendous big nose. DeGaulle was damn popular."
Before lunch, and especially during uncertain days, we grab the Jim Beam, ‘have a little sip’ as Louis Armstrong used to say, then chase the whiskey with a bowl of soup. "It ain’t like South Dakota," Burnside explains. "Back on the farm we never drank after four AM." Burnside credits South Dakota as the place that made him famous. After putting in his time, and drawing retirement from Uncle Sugar, he went back home. "The only available job in all of South Dakota was with a porta-pot outfit." He worked and really strived. In just three months he got promoted to head poop.
After lunch and a nap, some patients receive visitors, be they relatives or social workers or church ladies or a chaplain. Some visitors bring photos of great grandchildren, as if anyone here pretended to give a hang for the precious tykes, or photos of great-great grandchildren who will not need this ward until the back half of the next century. Visitors talk valentine talk. I listen and imagine those kiddies as they will become, dressed in spandex uniforms, lasers at the ready, enduring fleabites as they crawl through mud, or lie chilled and sleeping on frozen tundra. I imagine them in trenches along some MLR, huddled behind a super sonic zap gun, and they have their shod feet tucked in sleeping bags to avoid going lame from freezing. Enjoy your childhoods, youngsters, because as long as there are humans there’ll always be the Infantry.
Burnside and I ran our visitors away more than a year ago, old age being a private occupation—and at the time we thought our reasons made sense. I honestly told my visitors to shove off, but Burnside waxed eloquent. He pretended to discover religion. His wheelchair became a pulpit. He preached, favoring Moses and Abraham, and Burnside scared himself half to death. He ran his visitors away all right, but among the TV stiffs he actually made a convert, a gunner’s mate named Hawkins who was, anyway, on his road to glory. "Packed him off to heaven," Burnside mumbled, ". . . no good deed goes unpunished . . . stars in my crown . . ." The power of the Word scared the living bejesus out of Burnside, and that’s the truth of it.
Visitors leave by mid afternoon, and then arrives The Hour of Charm. Until ghosts got into it, this was the hour of apparitions sliding just on the edge of perception. We could almost see days of our youth, hear the clatter of new model T Fords, or the very first singing commercial from the domed cathedral of a radio aglow with vacuum tubes. We listened as fathers and uncles bulled widely about World War I, while grandfathers flipped b.s. about Gettysburg and Shiloh, or Cuba, or the last of the Indian wars. The Hour of Charm brought a rustle of cornfields beneath midwest sun, the whisper of great rivers: the Mississippi, the Ohio, the Columbia; the heartbeat of a nation’s land, salt soil, mountain, prairie, thin fields of cotton, hardwood forests.
Everything changed as ghosts put together their own lash up. Burnside’s Nipponese soldier was first, but not alone. By the third day our ghosts had their drill down pat. The far side stepped forward as a Burnside story progressed:
Burnside parked in the dayroom and told how his uncle Henry saved a church after its congregation came up busted. The preacher buried uncle Henry in a likely field, then called the field a church cemetery and free of tax. As prices rose he sold the field, moved uncle Henry to another field . . . ". . . and Unc tax-exempted more land through the years than Alexander the Great. The preacher finally quit when the coffin wore out. Unc was holding up just fine . . ."
At that point doors and windows opened. They moved methodically, not slow, but no snap to it either. Some doors and windows were real, and real weather blew like a natural broom through the geriatric ward. From the freeway came rain-ridden breeze carrying car fumes. Puget Sound contributed a little whiff of salt, and northwest mist became a sheen of moisture touching us like a thin coat of protecting fur.
Nurses closed windows, hissed at orderlies who closed doors, and staff had Burnside singled out for blame before the last breeze choked. Burnside, caught mid story, sat blinking, silent, his tale-spinning out of balance as surrealism took over; because another door opened in the center of the dayroom, and this was a door of tribulation through which only we geriatrics could pass. Staff saw nothing.
The door opened on a scene, like rushes for a movie in which no one would want to star. An enormous room lay before us, and ranks of coffins shone dull and black before the backdrop of night. Silence as profound as eternity lay within that night. Silence resonated with power, silence that could be broken only by some mighty force, because the power of that silence swallowed all ordinary sound.
This was death, or at least part of it. Silence and darkness surrounded frail boxes containing remains even more frail. No spirits lay enclosed there, only corpses embraced by that greatest of all silences, embraced by final darkness.
Nurse Johnson sat as the single mourner, and her low sobs were the only sounds powerful enough to break that silence. Her face was barely composed, her lips trembly as they moved in prayers or confusion, her eyes red from weeping. She seemed such a small figure huddled before eternal night. We sensed her confusion, her loneliness, failure, sorrow; and we knew that each of us in that dayroom rested in one of those coffins. We knew the future by recognizing we were the past.
Nurse Johnson is a very good kid in a very bad world. We fight pain with pain, but she does not understand that, and sometimes it doesn’t work all that well, anyway. The coffins sent a message, or seemed to, and the message needed figuring because it said: Take care of this young one, and maybe you are not lost. There is one more job to do. Figure it out, you sergeants and corporals and warrants. You once stirred the depths of history the way bakers stir cake mix. Get it figured, Jerks.
The enormous room, standing before eternal dark, now became shaded as if night pulled the curtain on dreams as well as life. Light drained into dusk, and moveme
nt began among the coffins. They did not open so much as they peeled away, like the droop of decaying flowers. The coffins vanished and we, the congregated souls of the V.A. geriatric ward, lay coffinless. Old bodies stretched frail as tissue across bones fragile as the frame of a child’s kite. We, a museum of the dead, lay in diminishing light. Then, sinking into darkness, our bodies disappeared and only a touch of light remained, like a wisp of smoke above dead faces; old faces; closed eyes behind which lay departed hope. The curtain of dark came down. Our faces vanished. The only sound to register through eternal night was the sound of nurse Johnson sobbing.
II
"Come out of it. Please do." She gently shook my shoulder, because she is used to dealing with frail things. Nurse Johnson stood beside me as, it seemed, half the staff of this enormous place flurried around the dayroom. Shocked patients muttered to themselves, or turned toward each other with looks of belief, not disbelief; and belief had us running scared. Even senility cases looked in touch, and no damn quarrels started over what was illusion and what was real. People looked at each other, and silent messages passed. Nobody had seen anything. Pass it on. Make it clear even to those dumb Marines. Semper Fi, jarheads. Zip your lip and your fly. Shut down the detail.
"It’s okay," I whispered to her. "At least I think it is." When she takes my wrist for a pulse, or Burnside’s wrist, her touch is firm but gentle. When she’s troubled her touch is that of a woman who loves. I do not say ‘lover,’ but one who gently—whether motherly or sisterly or even as a lover—touches with perfect knowledge of how affection is shown. At such times Burnside stops his mouth with stutters. He turns a shade once known as panty pink, which is the most blood he can summon for a blush.
When she takes my wrist I remember my first young love. Years shrug away like scabs from the skinned knees of youth. I feel weak as a ten-year-old who coasts his Western Flyer into a tree.
"We had hallucinations," I whispered. "It happens among cripples and sad sacks. I blame it on the New Deal. I even blame it on Eleanor. There was a time back in Indiana when we let the cats out . . ." Then I began to mumble. Nurse Johnson is used to geriatrics wandering in their minds, but she’s also accustomed to me and Burnside.
"Don’t do this," she told me. "Dementia is bad enough when it’s real."
I would never say ‘bullshit’ in front of a lady. "After Harvey passed you kidded Burnside," I whispered. "Did it help?"
She whispered back. "Are we really talking? Are you serious?" Her whisper is like dandelion down riding warm breezes. Where was this woman when I was her age and lonely? Not born yet. Ships pass, and I would rather die than put up with being young again. Since that’s what’s going to happen my attitude is wholesome. At the same time, ships pass in history and not just on ponds.
"I’m serious," I said. "You conned Burnside. Did it help you? Not, did it help Burnside, or me. Did it help you?"
"It made me sad. It was fun for a minute, and then it made me sad."
That was not the answer I expected, and sure as gospel didn’t want.
"All suffering is wrong," she said. "Dog suffering is wrong. Even bug suffering is wrong." She struggled with some sort of nursish ethics, and decided in my case to make an exception. "Corporal Harvey . . ." She honestly choked, a genuine chokeup.
"It hurt him." I tried to make my voice kind. "It’s supposed to hurt. Part of the rules."
Around us staff moved with the caution of a combat patrol. They whispered to patients, and glanced at doors and windows. V.A. hospitals are not supposed to be weird. They are supposed to be palaces of dependability, dull as prunes.
"You beat the Bible," I told her. "The Bible gives us three score and ten. You helped Harvey make it for ten years beyond that." I stopped. She did not want to hear that. Her thoughts lay elsewhere.
"His spirit died," she said almost timidly. "Something awful is chasing you guys."
I sat frozen. Someone turned up volume on the television. Soap is soap, but terror has some shape to it. Around me staff settled patients back into manageable routine, and patients looked at each other with unspoken promises to talk as soon as we got rid of staff.
Something awful chased us. It was not only what Johnson said, but the way she said it. Something awful.
Memories flashed. We once had our m.g.s dug in on hill seven-twenty in Korea, losing more men from freeze than from enemy fire. Ice. Snow. Blood on snow. Chinese corpses lay strewn across roads and fields and ditches like seed, frozen, mouths open, ice on their teeth. Here and there smoke plumes rose where our troops burned farmer’s houses in order to stay alive. Oil on the m.g.s froze, making their action sluggish. Hill seven-twenty spelled hell on earth. Nurse Johnson talked about something worse.
Nurse Johnson is a kid, but a kid with experience. She hasn’t seen as many men die as I have, because that would amount to several, but she may have seen a couple dozen. If Harvey died differently she would know. I shuddered before a chill. I sat feeble and helpless. My teeth clicked.
Hill seven-twenty was a comfort because you knew that for the rest of your life you would never be more miserable. This was different. We now spoke of something after death, and my chill came because of Johnson’s words, and because ghosts waved goodbye. Burnside said those goodbyes made him uneasy. I wish to God I could settle for ‘uneasy.’
"I’m not a preacher," I told her. "What do you mean, ‘spirit?’"
"I’m not a preacher either, but when corporal Harvey died nothing happened. Nothing."
"I don’t read you."
"Absolutely nothing."
"You were tired."
"Absolutely nothing."
When men die they sort of expire, assuming they are not blown to bits. Something happens. The person leaves. Nothing romantic about it, nothing impressive. They just go until they stop, and then stop. Sometimes the body ticks on for a second or seconds. The point is, no matter how minuscule, something always happens. There is a stepping off, a final sigh or choke or spasm. Always. When you turn out a light bulb you are aware that light departs. It goes quick, but there is a ‘going away.’ Same with men who die.
And with Harvey nothing happened. Something nailed him before he could give a final shrug. I mourned Harvey for exactly two seconds, and would mourn more later—if there was going to be a ‘later.’
Nurse Johnson trembled. "I should keep quiet when I don’t know what I’m talking about."
In general that’s true, because it stands her in the ranks of the rest of the world, but in this case it wasn’t true. "You did me a favor," I told her. "Maybe you did all of us a favor. Will you help me to my room?"
Helplessness is the lousiest of lousy feelings. Around here we pretend independence, but could not defend ourselves against a bouncing puppy; and at our age a bouncing puppy can kill. One stumble, one fall. The clock was running. If something popped Harvey, it waited to pop us. We had little time for defense, were physically capable of squat. This would take brains, and half the brains in this asylum are covered with dust.
Ghosts accompanied us as nurse Johnson led me to my room, wispy ghosts who made no points. These were people I never knew or even shot at. They were vaguely oriental, maybe Malay, and small but pretty. They went nervously about their business, but even in these polished halls I could smell, like an echo, the sharp scent of cordite. If they were Malay the cordite likely came from Japanese artillery. These Malays sort of chirped in that soft, island language that seems all vowels, and nurse Johnson led me through packs of them. You can get used to anything.
I wondered what Burnside saw, and waited in the room knowing he would come a-rolling any minute. Nurse Johnson parked me, patted my shoulder with a gentle hand, and went about her business.
Ghosts passed before me, around me, and it really didn’t matter. They are around us, always, and we pay no attention. These are spirits of the past, and the past is friendly. The reason to understand history is not to avoid the mistakes of history—because some fool will make those
mistakes for you. Some maniac will start a war, and some other maniac will drop an atom bomb, and you’ll be the poor bastard who gets to drop the bomb or be hit by it.
No, you understand history so you can understand yourself.
When Burnside wheeled into the room he looked like a man who needed the chaplain. His chair moved slowly, the tattered battle flag not lifted by any breeze, and Burnside was a man who had the crap knocked out of him. He swung into bed like he aimed to stay for the duration. Not a good sign.
He turned on his side. Then he fidgeted, didn’t like the idea, turned on his back and stared at the ceiling. He didn’t like that either, so he sat up and did some truly magnificent cussing. He swore quietly, like a man talking to a jammed carbine while fearing the enemy is in the neighborhood and close. He didn’t repeat a word. It was stupendous cussing. Inspired.
". . . like a garage sale at a mortuary," he said finally. "Ross, we’re boogered on this one. We got a Chinaman’s chance in Tokyo, that’s what we got."
I didn’t contradict, but if ghosts wanted to nail us, why bother to get elaborate? Our ghosts seemed trying to help.
"They’re trying to tell us something," I said to Burnside. I did not say anything about Harvey. No reason to send Burnside into deeper funk. "Plus," I told him, "other ghosts seem trying to help. Your Japanese kid was never on staff around here before."
From beyond the doorway the hall filled with murmurs, and from the dayroom a voice raised in a thin cry. One of the senility boys sang ". . . you don’t know what lonesome is ’til you get to herdin’ cows . . ." followed by, "here’s to the captain, here’s to the crew, and here’s to the girls . . ." and somebody hushed him.
"I copped my first feel, at least the first feel I remember, when I was six." Burnside seemed about to become senile himself. Either that, or this was more b.s. I waited for a Burnside story—waited for the end of the world—for the dead to rise—for the second coming—for a face-to-face with whatever dark evil waited to axe our spirits.