A distant screeching. It gets louder and louder until the train light appears in the dark, so loud that instinct tells you to plug your ears—your eardrums hurt, Mozart will never be so beautiful again, your wife’s voice will sound flat after this: you are destroying your fabulous ears and getting a pair of nineteen-dollar ones instead—but putting fingers in your ears might mark you as a greenhorn, so you stand placid and afraid as the antique piles of spray-painted cars slide slowly past and stop, a door opens halfway, your fellows squeeze past, we all shove in, the voice in the speaker overhead says, “Watch for the closing doors,” and the doors shut on us packed in tight, lurching into each other as the train jerks forward.
A tall man with long filthy hair, dressed in ripped jeans and dirty sneakers, on crutches, carrying an empty Crisco can. He says loudly: “PEOPLE. I’M A WOUNDED VIETNAM VETERAN. I FOUGHT FOR YOU, PEOPLE. I DON’T HAVE A HOME OR FOOD OR ANYTHING. IT ISN’T RIGHT, PEOPLE.” You look at your shoes as the train bangs along and we careen from side to side. You sneak a look: he’s unshaven, red eyes, cuts on his forehead and cheek. Will he shoot us? He says, “PLEASE, PEOPLE.” He shakes the coins in his can. Some people reach into their pockets. Sitting, they hoist up an inch and fish change out of their jeans, dig down deep. He limps through the crowd, swinging on the crutches, the train sways, he almost tumbles, holding out the can. “I GOT NOTHING, PEOPLE, AND YOU GOT EVERYTHING. IT ISN’T RIGHT AND YOU KNOW IT. JESUS SAID TO HELP THE POOR AND THE HOMELESS. DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE TO GET SHOT DEFENDING YOUR COUNTRY AND THEN HAVE TO SLEEP ON A FLOOR IN THE BUS STATION? PEOPLE! I NEED YOU!” His voice breaks. “GODDAMN IT, I’VE JUST ABOUT COME TO THE END OF MY ROPE!” Change clinks in the can. People drop in a pinch of change here, a pinch there. You reach into your tweed jacket pocket and touch bills and fish out three singles, and after two seconds’ thought, you stuff them in the passing can and immediately turn red and feel dumb, feel pity and anger at the same time. Pity for the man and anger at him for manipulating us like this. All of us good middle-class folk, black and white, brought up to respond to suffering with compassion, trapped in a hot car banging and screeching through the black cave, afraid (“VIET VET RUNS AMOK ON K TRAIN, LIMOUSINE LIBERAL AMONG THOSE SLAIN”), and, worst of all, embarrassed by your own lack of humor and ingenuity in the face of fear. You dimly recall an old movie about a wounded veteran (played by Jimmy Stewart?) who wanders the city streets, homeless, when one day the plain kindness of a tall stranger in a brown suit (“Son, here’s a dollar and here’s my phone number if you want a job”) restores his faith in the goodness of people. You wish you could be that stranger. The train comes into a lighted station, stops, and you push out the door, up the stairs, and into sunshine.
AUTOGRAPH
YESTERDAY WAS MY wife’s birthday, and, according to our custom, I woke up before dawn and sneaked out of bed. Our custom is that the birthday person sleeps until the family tiptoes in and wakes her up with singing and banging on pans and hauls her smiling to the table and sits her down to a perfect candlelit breakfast next to a stack of gifts. It was 6 A.M. I put on water for tea and sliced some nectarines, which she likes to eat with goat yogurt, and got out a block of her favorite cheese, which gives off an aroma like yesterday’s hiking socks. The kids had baked rolls the night before. I set the glass-top table on the terrace with white plates, wineglasses for the orange juice, candles, and American-flag napkins, and then, because it was too early to wake the household and also because I am a cook who believes that too much is just barely enough, I decided to go out and find fresh bagels and lox and some more fruit. Also because that’s a sweet time for a Midwesterner to walk around town. New York at six o’clock on Saturday morning is as close to being like Minneapolis as New York ever gets.
I headed toward a bagel bakery on Broadway around 81st, thinking I would come across an all-night fruit market along the way, and I was swinging down Amsterdam Avenue when a man called to me from behind. He said, “Mister? Sir?” I’ve lived in New York long enough to be able to ignore panhandlers when I want to: the New Testament doesn’t say a person has to be at the beck and call of the needy every waking moment, you know. But, feeling Midwesternly, I turned, and he came up to make his pitch. “I’m not bad,” he was saying. “I’m not going to rob you, or anything.” A young black man in an old tweed coat, torn sneakers, jeans; his hair was long, and tangled in long snarls. He smiled at me sweetly. He smelled slightly rancid, and he spoke fast, with a Southern accent and a slight lisp. He said, “I’m sorry. I don’t like to do this. But I didn’t have anyplace to sleep last night. I spent the night in the Park. Today is my twenty-ninth birthday. It really is. I’m from North Carolina, and I’ve been trying to get into a shelter—you know where the cathedral is? I tried up there, but they were full. There’s another one on Ward’s Island I’m trying to get to. My grandpa is in Bellevue. He’s dying with cancer, and I want to be with him—that’s why I’m here. My name is Kevin. I have this aunt who lives in Hoboken. If I had five or six dollars, I could go over there and look her up and stay with her until I can get back on my feet. I’m sorry to take your time like this, but I just need some help. Now, I’ve got these books.” He brought out a handful of paperbacks from under his coat. “If you’d like to buy one, I’d sure appreciate it.”
Incredibly, one of the books was by me. I saw it right away, of course. One was a romance in a pinkish cover, and one was a Danielle Steel, and one was my book. The cover was torn off, but not the inside cover, which had my picture on it, with me in clear-rim glasses, squinting, in jeans and a green sweater, sitting on the white steps of a house on West 22nd Street, where we used to live. He was telling me how he’d come by these books honestly. I reached into my pocket and pulled out all the money I had—about twenty-eight dollars. I had to do this. I gave it to him. “That’s my book,” I said. He handed it to me. “No, you keep it,” I said. “I just meant that it’s my book. I wrote it.” He looked at the photograph: it was me.
He seemed astonished to be holding a book with a picture of a man who had just given him a small wad of money. Then he touched my arm and said, “I want you to sign it for me.” He dug in his pockets and got out a ballpoint. He said, “Make it out to Kevin and Anthony—he’s my best friend. Oh, he’s not going to believe this! This is incredible!” But the pen didn’t work. “Oh, no, this is terrible!” he cried. He looked up and down the street. He moaned, “I got to find a pen.” He approached a woman walking toward us—“Lady, could I borrow your pen?”—and she glanced away from him and walked on.
I had never seen panhandling from that perspective, and it struck me as genteel the way the beggar shut up when there was no eye contact. He didn’t press his case even slightly. Kevin tried to borrow a pen from two more passersby, with no luck. I believe that if you were out walking at 6 A.M. in Minneapolis and a panhandler asked to borrow a pen you’d be interested—but never mind. We finally went into a deli a block away and got a pen from the clerk. I signed the book “With every good wish for a long & happy life,” thinking that perhaps I should give him my phone number. Twenty-eight dollars doesn’t go far in New York. But I didn’t.
Back home, I made tea and woke up the kids, and we paraded into the bedroom, where she was still asleep, and rattled our pans and sang “Happy Birthday.” It was cool and still on the terrace. We lit the candles. The city out beyond our little potted trees looked serene, though hazy. She opened her gifts: a poster, a scarf, a book of pictures, and a green balloon that inflated so big you couldn’t get your arms around it. It looked like a giant grape. We also had individual balloons, with whistles in their necks, which when the balloons exhaled made loud cawing sounds. The day bounced along; we drove to Bear Mountain for a long hike, came home, slept, and took a major dinner that night at a restaurant. I thought several times, in a sentimental way, about Kevin out there in the city, as if somehow I could have made things right for him. He is, after all, my only homeless reader as far as I am aware. I’ve thought of him o
ften since. Whatever his reason for getting my autograph, my signing the book means just one thing to me, and that is that I know his name: Kevin. Two years in this city, and finally I have met a homeless person.
GETTYSBURG
I DROVE DOWN TO GETTYSBURG the weekend of the Fourth, the anniversary of the battle, along with my wife, who grew up on different books than I and doesn’t care two cents about the Civil War. She is crazy about fiction, especially Gabriel Garcia Márquez whose latest she happened to have in her bag, and after we walked around the battlefield monuments for a half-hour that Saturday afternoon and ate a hot dog and watched a Union battery demonstrate artillery firing, she found a place in the shade back behind the crowds near the Gettysburg Volunteer Fire Department’s refreshment tent and sat and read. All around us on Cemetery Ridge were men and scenes out of books I passionately loved as a boy. Row after row of cream-colored pup tents straight out of Brady photographs. Bearded sunburned men bundled up in wool uniforms, baggy pants, the caved-in caps and worn-out shoes, leather ammo bags and tin drinking cups on their belts, carrying single-shot carbines six feet long with narrow steel bayonets, and among them some teen-agers, one with long blond ringlets who looked exhausted. They had camped on the ridge for a week, part of the National Park Service’s 125th anniversary commemoration, all volunteers. I watched two hundred Union troops fire a volley and charge across a meadow toward Plum Run, re-enacting the charge of the First Minnesota Regiment on July 2,1863, realizing a moment vivid in my imagination since I was twelve or so. I stood by the road along the crest of the ridge as a regiment of Confederates swung along in ragged formation singing “Bonny Blue Flag” in tender and weary voices, brave fellows in motley gray-and-butternut outfits with scraps of uniform laced together, like a band of old deer-poachers. I saw it all clear in my mind, not seeing the other tourists in their red shorts and yellow haltertops, men in dazzling green pants shooting pictures, just the blue and gray. If General George Meade had walked up to say hello, I’d’ve just reached out and shaken his hand. Fifty yards away, under the trees where the Pennsylvania reserves must’ve sat on July 3 waiting Pickett’s charge, my wife in white jumpsuit reclined on the grass, so absorbed in the passions of a man on the Colombian coast that she didn’t answer when I came over and said hello to her. Eyes on the page, she just reached out and took me by the ankle.
Sunday morning I borrowed a bicycle and rode around the battlefield, a pleasant ten-mile circuit along shady roads. Hot dry weather, as it was in July 1863, and along the Emmitsburg Pike south of town, fields of wheat and oats stood in the mile-wide valley between the long low ridges where the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia faced each other on the third day of the battle, July 3. The first day’s fighting was wild and sudden and scattered west and north of Gettysburg; the second was intense and murderous and located at the Union flanks on Culp’s Hill and around Little Round Top, The Wheatfield, The Peach Orchard, and Devil’s Den, where men in close quarters battered each other to death by the thousands; but it is the third day, when the lines had been drawn, that is clearest in the imagination. At three o’clock that afternoon, about thirteen thousand Southern men came out of the trees on Seminary Ridge and marched through the fields straight into a Northern artillery barrage and up the slope against Northerners drawn up in a superb defensive position along Cemetery Ridge. The slaughter lasted a half-hour, and two-thirds of the men who left Seminary Ridge did not return.
This half-hour is so vivid to anyone who has read accounts of it that, as you bike up through the red brick Lutheran campus and along Seminary Ridge, cruising in low gear through McMillan Woods, where Pettigrew’s Brigade of North Carolinians waited, you can hear them rustle in the weeds in the ditch where they lie listening. Of the brigade, some two thousand arrived on July 1 and about six hundred marched away in the middle of the night, July 4, their cause lost. “To the eternal glory of the North Carolina soldiers who on this battlefield displayed heroism unsurpassed, sacrificing all in support of their cause. Their valorous deeds will be enshrined in the hearts of men long after these transient memorials have crumbled into dust,” reads the inscription on a nearby monument. In a tree overhead, a mockingbird went through its entire routine of six or seven songs. I rode on, to the figure of Robert E. Lee on his horse looking east watching his men die in the sun. The sculpture has been given a protective coating against acid rain that makes it look like dark-brown plastic, the color of a toy man on a horse. I dismounted and walked the bike out beyond the tree line and up to the first stand of wheat.
It seems dumb to be so caught up in a battle that ended more than a century ago and that you don’t even begin to understand. You hear them whisper as they edge forward, gray-butternut figures crouching in the woods, and hear skittish horses nicker and whinny at the whump of distant cannon, but it’s dumb if you can’t imagine why they would fight this battle, which I can’t. The wheatfield was fresh and untrampled. The silence was like the terrible stillness that, according to most accounts, fell over the field just before Pickett’s Charge began—a wall of silence like a dam about to burst open, then the flood of Confederates marching double-time across the mile and up toward the stone wall in the distance, cheering, yelling, the flags, and then the storm of fire. Now it is so quiet on the losers’ side of the battlefield that you can’t imagine what made them mad. The phrase “states’ rights” means no more to me than the phrase “warm boot. ”
I walked the bike up the road toward Little Round Top, the crucial hill where a brigade of Maine men held off Longstreet’s South Carolinians and Georgians and saved the Union flank. It was a formidable position to attack, impossible even, and as I walked up, the boulders looming above, I could barely imagine the sort of rage that might impel a man to lead such a charge. I tried to imagine. I made a speech to myself, “You SOBs, hide in the rocks, we’re coming to haul you out. Bastards. Shoot you, stab you, cut your throat, pound your head open with a rock, or whatever it takes. This was a good country until you decided you could do what you damn please, when you please, and to whom, chop off people’s rights and go to make every poor sinner be exactly like you—you do that, you kill what’s beautiful in this country. A century from now, if you win, which you likely will, nobody in this country will feel like they are part of anything. Thanks to you, asshole. Everybody’ll be loose as gravel and nobody’ll be free. Nobody’ll even care which state they’re from and it won’t matter, everywhere will be one paved paradise. Well, I don’t care to live in your country and I don’t want you to either. Let’s die.” I swore a little more for flavor as I reached the top of the rise, the woods and sunny meadow where thousands perished in an afternoon, and climbed on the bike and rode north, toward the crowds and the monuments.
POSTCARDS
A POSTCARD TAKES ABOUT FIFTY WORDS gracefully, which is how to write one. A few sweet strokes in a flowing hand—pink roses, black-face sheep in a wet meadow, the sea, the Swedish coast—your friend in Washington gets the idea. She doesn’t need your itinerary to know that you remember her.
Fifty words is a strict form but if you write tiny and sneak over into the address side to squeeze in a hundred, the grace is gone and the result is not a poem but notes for a letter you don’t have time to write, which will make her feel cheated.
So many persons traveling to a strange land are inclined to see its life so clearly, its essential national character, they could write a book about it as other foreign correspondents have done (“highly humorous ... definitely a must”), but fifty words is a better length for what you really know.
Fifty words and a picture. Say you are in Scotland, the picture is of your hotel, a stone pile looking across the woods of Druimindarroch to Loch Nan Uamh near the village of Arisaig. You’ve never seen this country. For the past year you’ve worked like a prisoner in the mines. Write.
Scotland is the most beautiful country in the world and I am drinking coffee in the library of what once was the manor of people who inherited e
verything and eventually lost it. Thus it became a hotel. I’m with English people whose correctness is overpowering. What wild good luck to be here. And to be an American! I’m so happy, bubba.
In the Highlands, many one-lane roads which widen at curves and hills—a driving thrill, especially when following a native who drives like hell—you stick close to him, like the second car of the roller-coaster, but lose your nerve. Sixty mph down a one-lane winding road. I prefer a career.
The arrogance of Americans who, without so much as a “mi scusi” or “bitte” or “s’il vous plait,” words that a child could learn easily, walk up to a stranger and say, “Say, where’s the museum?” as if English and rudeness rule the world, never ceases to amaze. You hear the accent and sink under the table.
Woke up at six, dark. Switzerland. Alps. Raining. Lights of villages high in the sky. Too dark to see much so snoozed awhile. Woke up in sunny Italy. Field after field of corn, like Iowa in August. Mamas, papas, grammas, grampas, little babies. Skinny trees above the whitewashed houses.
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