The New Inheritors

by Kent Wascom

  When the doctor came to pronounce Joseph Woolsack dead, he was at first confronted by the sight of the dead man’s son, who looked no less feverish and stricken. The doctor sat the man down and touched for his pulse, his temperature, and in that moment glanced from son to father and realized the wild look wasn’t sickness, wasn’t something caught, but rather must have been a familial trait. Something passed down in the blood.

  PART 6

  Prisoners

  1918 – 1919

  One

  Looking out from a great distance onto the prairies of the Middle West, in the dead last days of 1918, you would see the wood and steel veins of railroads stand empty for days at a time. The once-busy tracks are walked by packs of dogs heading south, small bands overseen by a last few half-frozen birds that cling to sagging phone lines. A stillness and a peace that only comes in the absence of human beings, and which absence only comes when human beings are dead or otherwise distracted; the quiet broken now and then only by trains bearing shipments of troops, remnants that would hurtle by and be gone sudden as a storm, the only movement deemed essential at this time of war and, now, pandemic. What the United States facetiously calls its heartland is where the influenza first hits home. In Haskell County, Kansas. The young dying by the hundreds, the old for the most part spared. A storm in the body: first you burn, then you drown. The fourth horseman on the plains in October of 1918. (Within six weeks New York falls under quarantine.) And he is still riding even as the New Year breaks.

  Isaac peering through the slats of the boxcar at still towns and farmland rolling past. Scattered on the straw floor of the bucking car sat twelve other men, prisoners like himself, some sleeping, some playing cards, others looking out. Taking every scrap of earth and movement that they could, knowing just what they were headed for. A pale band of sky, slim as hope, crushed between the dark earth and the lowering clouds, the rainfall only coming harder on the last leg to the United States Military Prison at Fort Leavenworth.

  When they reached the prison depot, herded into the back of the truck that would take them to the disciplinary barrack, the rain had frozen and fell as hail. A steady pelting of the tarp that whapped over the heads of the twelve men, prisoners, more than half of them long-jawed Christian farmboys variously bearded according to their sects, the other half made up of fellow travelers, I.W.W. men, socialists, and Isaac Patterson, of no set creed and something of a ghost among the true believers. His sentence, fifteen years. Through the half-fastened flaps of the truck he watched the road unreel skittering with hail under the floodlights, the air so dark he couldn’t tell whether it was night or day.

  Hooded guards with lanterns led them over a footbridge to the entrance of what none of them could have taken in full, the prison a monstrous wave of stone ready to break over them.

  They were brought through a series of corridors and cages, passing a clock behind its own wire cage to the office of the yard sergeant. There, with some twenty other new arrivals, they were ordered to strip, and their piled clothes were swept off as they stood naked, waiting this way until they were put into lines and marched to another room where they were measured and given ashen uniforms stamped with numbers colored according to their crimes, which a tired-looking non-com read aloud from a little book.

  —Patterson, Isaac. 1296. Violation section 65, United States Code of Military Justice. Fifteen years at labor.

  Isaac looked from the numbers that crossed his chest, his cuffs, his pantslegs, to those of the men around him. The numbers stood in stark relief against the gray sea of men. Scrawls of brightness. For a wild moment he imagined the numbers to be like dates, far into the future or past, and the men who wore them travelers awaiting passages to other times.

  Before evening mess they were taken to the chapel and arrayed in pews before a cleric who delivered a speech from rote until he caught sight of the men with white numbers, and he paused in his speech to assure them that, while this was a place of hope and penitence for ordinary sins, those who had refused to take part in this holiest of holy wars would have neither his pity nor the Lord’s.

  The objectors were pared from the others and were quartered in the basement of the seventh wing. A long, low room the doors of which were left open and the men were able to move about for the time being. Mennonites seeing others of their kind gave yelps of joy, as did Hutterites and other Christians, and the socialists gathered together and shared news. Isaac could find no comfort with Christ nor with the Revolution and dead czars, and so sat off alone. He’d brought no letters, no photograph of his wife, no Bible. It had been a year since he’d last drawn. He was as alien to himself as he was to the others in the wing.

  At nine the room orderly, a thin prisoner with a sawed-off broomstick in his belt, came and took the count. Coughing as he did so. Whispers now about the number sick with ’flu. And Isaac stood before his cell with his wrists crossed, waiting for his number to be called.

  The following morning, after roll and a breakfast of pale gravy and bread, a thousand men ranked in the dim dininghall facing the officer of the day, when the others went off to their work in the factory or fields or the stoneyard, the new arrivals were sent into the far wings of the prison, up countless stairs and through countless cages, to be assessed in body and mind. They came to a tiled hall that opened on a dank shower room and were told to wait. While they stood, an orderly went among them asking questions.

  —Any of you boys Jehovah’s?

  None knew what this was.

  —Any of you have a problem with your blood being taken?

  —For what, one said.

  —For the doctors to test.

  —What for?

  —Syphilis, shithead.

  Near the door of the examination room, a tall Mennonite boy stood with his hand raised sheepishly. The orderly looked him over—his lank blondeness, his baleful eyes.

  —What’s the problem, son? It against your religion or whatever?

  —No, sir, the Mennonite said in his labored English. I don’t like … a … needle.

  A ripple of laughter in the line. Elbows prodding.

  —Well, son, the orderly said. You’re out of luck. The orderly turned to the rest of the line. Anybody who says no is out of luck, because if you do they’ll just strap you down and jab a spike in your spine. Works the same way, I hear.

  The showers spat cold water and the men shivered, clutched themselves, cursing. The Mennonite had to be prodded back under the showerhead and when the cold hit him he bayed so that it echoed in the tiled walls of the room, and to Isaac he looked like a bearded, long-faced dog. A voice, then another, said for him to shut the fuck up, and he did.

  The men were led naked into another tiled hall, followed a stream of greasy yellow light into the bleakness of the examination room. There Isaac, like the others, had his blood drawn, his tongue depressed, his asscheeks spread and a finger swept within. Some men tried to joke, but Isaac was past that too. They were given their clothes back, dressed, and the sick were taken to the side and the others separated by the color of their numbers, with the white numbers being sent to the psychiatrist’s office, a wire-frame room that lay before a series of gates barring off the madmen’s wing.

  Isaac shuffled in line, drifting from himself and the body that, to his disgust, remembered well such movements and ordered days from the Baptist Boys’ Home in Florida. Knew how to stand at attention, stand in line, how to look when spoken to. How to look away. He drifted somewhere above himself and tried not to think of what he had believed to be his life but was now only a gap in time between confinements. A dream. A reprieve he evidently did not deserve.

  The caged bulbs cast a sour-milk light on the men in white numbers. The bearded Christians mumbling the verses they would quote in response to the psychiatrist’s questions. A murmured current of thousand shalts not so different than the maniac noises that came now and then from deep in the wing. As though they were lined up to meet judgement at the gates of heaven and not
a prison madhouse, and Isaac thought for a moment of asking one of the Mennonites or Dunkers how this place matched their idea of heaven.

  When his turn came Isaac sat crosslegged before the psychiatrist’s desk. The doctor, a man his age who by chance had gone to Tulane, smoked cigarettes and asked questions that had been put to Isaac before.

  —Do you use liquor? Tobacco?

  —Sure.

  The doctor lit another cigarette from a table-lighter made of black stone shaped like an egg, Isaac catching his reflection in the gleam and wishing he hadn’t.

  —Do you use profane language?

  —Do we really need to do this?

  —It says here you’re an artist. What did you paint?

  —Pictures.

  The doctor looked at him wearily.

  —Abstracts, Isaac said.

  —Modern.

  —Yes.

  —Do you belong to the Socialist Party?

  —I’m a registered Democrat.

  —Do you belong to a church?

  —No.

  —Do you believe in God?

  —No.

  —Are you afraid of what will happen to you when you die?

  —Not as much as I used to be.

  —Are you being sarcastic?

  —I wish I was, Isaac said.

  The doctor had the egg again in his hand, hefting its weight.

  —Have you lived a pure sexual life?

  —The first time they asked me I gave honest answers, Isaac said. Now I’m just wondering what you mean by that. A pure life.

  —Have you committed any unnatural sexual acts? Do you struggle with unnatural urges?

  —When I was a boy I was told I’d be tortured for all eternity if I touched myself.

  —Do you still masturbate?

  —For Christ’s sake.

  —Do you get angry often?

  —More and more.

  —Which side do you want to win the war?

  —Ours.

  —Which is?

  —The United States.

  —Good, the doctor said. But you’re here, aren’t you. Do you believe you can do more good by not fighting for your country?

  —I think nobody’s got the right to make someone kill for something they don’t believe in and make heroes out of men who do. I think ten million dead men’s plenty.

  —But you care for your country. America is your home.

  —I’m from Mississippi.

  The doctor grinned.

  —What if your home was being robbed, he said. Would you strike the man who tried to rob it, if you could?

  —It’s not the same—Isaac stopped himself. —Look, you’ve got my answers right there in the file. You know what I’ve said.

  The doctor set down his egg.

  —What if a nigger attacked your mother, the doctor said. Would you strike him to stop him?

  —Attacked.

  —Raped, then, the doctor said. What if a nigger was raping your mother? Would you hit him?

  —My mother died while I was in the stockade at Fort Kerry, Oklahoma, three … four months ago.

  —Sorry to hear that, the doctor said. What about your wife? What if she was being raped—

  —By a nigger.

  —If you like.

  Isaac leaned forward in his seat. The black egg lay on the table, within reach. Begging.

  —You want to know what I think, he said.

  —Obviously, the doctor replied. The real religious cases say they wouldn’t lift a hand. The socialists ask if the rapist is a union man. No private property, you know. But you … you’re something different. So, yes, I’d like to know.

  Isaac held tight to the arms of the chair.

  —I think you people deserve your goddamn war and every one that comes after it.

  Two

  His hands were cuffed and he was dragged to the subbasement of the seventh wing and thrown in a cell whose opening was narrower than his shoulders so that he had to go in sideways. The guard who’d brought him shut the barred door and told Isaac to turn and face front, and he did, seeing now the other men in the cages than ran on either side of him.

  The guard said for him to stretch up high.

  Isaac on the balls of his feet, straining to reach the crossbar in the cell door with his cuffed hands as the guard fumbled with his keyring and undid the cuff from Isaac’s left wrist and looped the chain around the upright bar.

  —Keep that left hand there, the guard said, letting his keys drop and hooking the cuff closed again on Isaac’s free wrist.

  He listened then with his head down while the guard spoke warnings and rules, and when the man left he was still hanging from the bars of his cage. He would remain this way, providing he didn’t shout or talk back or trouble the room orderly, who sat at the end of the hall beneath the only light, an oil lamp, for nine hours a day for the next two weeks. If he didn’t, they would bolt a wooden door over his cage that would seal him up in darkness.

  The others in that ward were six communists who’d refused any work in the prison and two Mennonites, one of whom was the boy who’d bayed in the shower. Later the men would speak and Isaac would know who was down there with him, but for now he stood shackled and the world before him was the patch of stone floor barely visible. His shoulders had begun to burn. He recalled paintings of saints in similar poses. Their upturned eyes, their idiot ecstasy.

  He tried, as he had so many times before, to raise himself above this. To find something to keep him whole.

  As he’d tried at Camp Kirby Smith, in north Louisiana, where he was sent shortly after his arrest; a patchwork cantonment filled with recruits dressed in overalls for in the war-rush there had been no time to make sufficient uniforms, and these boys, country children oversized and full of ire, singled him for a coward; then days of wariness and small combats; Isaac refusing to drill, to muster, to do anything at all; his mail given special attention by the camp censor, so that one day in March Isaac, trembling, held a letter written by his mother telling him she had been diagnosed with a cancer of the breast (his terse letters home to his wife and family were spared for they had nothing in them, not even hope); in the end, when he was set upon in broad daylight by a troop of boys all full of bloodlust, silent as they held him down and emptied a can of yellow paint over his head, the thick, canary paint pouring out the mouth of the can somehow reminded him of his life (the officers who looked on had yet to encounter any objectors and were much relieved when this one was finally taken off their hands).

  As he tried at Fort Kerry in Oklahoma where he was barracked with seven other objectors in what was called a secondary development unit; days heading out with them to haul trash for burning or to the fields with farmtools, nervously awaiting the black-barred letters and the arrival in June of the review board, a sort of traveling inquisition that determined the fate of objectors. You might be granted a furlough or some dispensation, sent to work on a farm in the Midwest, or you might be shipped to Alcatraz or Leavenworth.

  As he tried when the letters from home were withheld at the behest of the camp commandant, a killer of Filipinos who was sick of coddling these cowards, so that weeks passed without a word from home and Isaac’s pleas for news arrived long after the answers reached him.

  As he’d tried when the board of review came and judged the depth of his convictions and granted him a farm furlough and approved his petition to go home to Mississippi for a week.

  As he’d tried when the administering of the furloughs was left to the major and Isaac became a dog, all salutes and sirs, asking whenever he could about the state of his petition, which remained on the major’s desk as the months wore on.

  As he tried when the letter from his father came in late July, telling Isaac of his mother’s death. (The letter had been written in June and told how she’d read his last, about the furlough, how happy it had made her, though in truth Mr. Patterson had read it to her as she lay insensate in bed, swollen from the cancer, so filled wi
th morphine she could hardly nod; but he did this for the sake of his youngest son’s heart, and for that of his own, which could only bear so much and would cease to beat not long thereafter).

  As he tried when, that same month, a bundle of letters came from Kemper, who’d been there when his mother died. She wrote, delicately as she could, that his brother wanted no more letters from him and had sent Kemper from the house. He set the letter down and from that day forward he did not try: he gave no salutes; he hauled no trash; he went to no farmer’s field. Isaac sat on his cot and refused to move, told the sergeant sent to collect him to get fucked. A moment then of violence and abandonment. When he awoke he was lying on his side in the baking sun on the dirt floor of the stockade. Walls of wire all around him, his aching head lay against the red Port soil, watching boots go by.

  He tried once more and failed. His eyes had unfocused so that he could not see the bars anymore. He stared at the floor. The glow of the orderly’s lamp ebbing at the edge of the dark. He watched the light swim across the stone, in danger of being consumed by the dark. The only thing left that they could take away was light.