Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [79]
“All the returning veterans in the movies are our age or older,” he said. That was true. In the movies you seldom saw the babies who had done most of the heavy fighting on the ground in the war.
“Yes—” I said, “and most of the actors in the movies never even went to war. They came home to the wife and kids and swimming pool after every grueling day in front of the cameras, after firing off blank cartridges while men all around them were spitting catsup.”
“That’s what the young people will think our war was fifty years from now,” said Kitchen, “old men and blanks and catsup.” So they would. So they do.
“Because of the movies,” he predicted, “nobody will believe that it was babies who fought the war.”
“Three years out of our lives,” he said about the war.
“You keep forgetting I was a regular,” I said. “It was eight years out of mine. And there went my youth, and God, I still want it.” Poor Dorothy thought she was marrying a mature, fatherly retired military gentleman. What she got instead was an impossibly self-centered and undisciplined jerk of nineteen or so!
“I can’t help it,” I said. “My soul knows my meat is doing bad things, and is embarrassed. But my meat just keeps right on doing bad, dumb things.”
“Your what and your what?” he said.
“My soul and my meat,” I said.
“They’re separate?” he said.
“I sure hope they are,” I said. I laughed. “I would hate to be responsible for what my meat does.”
I told him, only half joking, about how I imagined the soul of each person, myself included, as being a sort of flexible neon tube inside. All the tube could do was receive news about what was happening with the meat, over which it had no control.
“So when people I like do something terrible,” I said, “I just flense them and forgive them.”
“Flense?” he said. “What’s flense?”
“It’s what whalers used to do to whale carcasses when they got them on board,” I said. “They would strip off the skin and blubber and meat right down to the skeleton. I do that in my head to people—get rid of all the meat so I can see nothing but their souls. Then I forgive them.”
“Where would you ever come across a word like flense?” he said.
And I said: “In an edition of Moby Dick illustrated by Dan Gregory.”
He talked about his father, who is still alive, by the way, and who has just celebrated his hundredth birthday! Think of that.
He adored his father. He also said that he would never want to compete with him, to try to beat him at anything. “I would hate that,” he said.
“Hate what?” I said.
“To beat him,” he said.
He said that the poet Conrad Aiken had lectured at Yale when Kitchen was in law school there, and had said that sons of gifted men went into fields occupied by their fathers, but where their fathers were weak. Aiken’s own father had been a great physician and politician and ladies’ man, but had also fancied himself a poet. “His poetry was no damn good, so Aiken became a poet,” said Kitchen. “I could never do such a thing to my old man.”
What he would do to his father six years later, in the front yard of Kitchen’s shack about six miles from here, was take a shot at him with a pistol. Kitchen was drunk then, as he often was, and his father had come for the umpteenth time to beg him to get treatment for his alcoholism. It can never be proved, but that shot had to have been intended as a gesture.
When Kitchen saw that he had actually gunned down his father, with a bullet in the shoulder, it turned out, nothing would do but that Kitchen put the pistol barrel in his own mouth and kill himself.
It was an accident.
It was on that fateful truck trip, too, that I got my first look at Edith Taft Fairbanks, who would be my second wife. I had negotiated the rental of the barn from her husband, who was an affable idler, who seemed a useless, harmless waster of life