Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [40]
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