Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [43]
Nancy read aloud the scrappy pages that arrived from Washington. Later, in bed, Joey studied the scrawled notes, read and reread the words. In his head he heard the sounds of men at work building the camp, the digging, chopping, clearing; the clash of steel spade on hard ground, the voices calling. It sounded like a distant battlefield.
He began to think about his father in a new way.
20
Ben had helped write out an official statement to the press, but in the end Walter tore it up and walked over to the waiting reporters.
‘Gentlemen. Will you take a look at these guys. Most of them married, been out of work two years or more. Offer them a job at a dollar a day, they’d take it. We think they deserve to be heard.’
The reporters wrote their stories, the men waved their banners, and on 15 June Ben wrote jubilantly to Nancy that the veterans’ Bonus Bill had scraped through its first reading.
‘Hoover threatened a veto but there’s dancing in the streets.’
Two days later the Senate defeated the bill.
As the weeks passed, handouts from townsfolk dried up. Food replaced justice in the forefront of men’s minds. The camp stank of more than garbage and latrines: it smelled of hunger. Without knowing what it was, Ben inhaled the metallic, acetate tang of malnutrition. He was acquainted with poverty – at a distance: sailing into foreign ports he had seen natives begging. At home, even before his own security began melting like ice in summer, he had been made aware of the homeless and the jobless. Now he was one of them, and it came to him that there was a quality of poverty here which was different from anything he had known before.
Cutting through blackened potatoes and peeling off rotten outer leaves to make use of a cabbage salvaged from a market trader’s refuse, he felt, first shame, then curiously privileged: they were beating the system.
But as the weather grew hotter, tempers too grew heated, and one night the men picketing the Capitol building extended the demonstration by bedding down in the grounds.
Next morning a government minion handed out official bits of paper: the Speaker had invoked a hitherto forgotten regulation that prohibited people from loitering.
‘Move along, buddy: no squatting. No sleeping.’
But Ben read the small print and pointed out there was no regulation against walking in the grounds.
For the next three blazing days and humid July nights, they shuffled up and down Pennsylvania Avenue in silent protest. There was some stumbling and one or two keeled over, but mostly they kept going. To make sure nobody sneaked in a catnap on the grass, the garden sprinkler system was kept running –
‘So we now have regular showers to cool us down . . . God must be on our side.’
In the shanty town a carnival atmosphere began to spread, with children playing on the riverbank and songs round campfires.
On the evening of 27 July Ben began a new letter, the page lit by a lantern hanging from the lintel of the shack. ‘It’s quiet tonight, Nance. I’m feeling hopeful.’
He wiped his sweaty hands on a rag, and tried to put his thoughts down on the crumpled page. There was so much he wanted to tell her, about the men whose stories he was hearing: how they had acquired their wounds, the scars of war, and the invisible wounds that still had them crying aloud and shaking on bad nights . . . and about the sense of discovery he had felt crossing thousands of miles of a country he barely knew. This had been more than one journey: he had made a voyage of his own; found time to look inside his own head; to think, for the first time, about Nancy and Joey, about the way life might be different.
But he wrote down none of those things.
He could feel the heat from the lamp above his head; the wind came over the river like the blast from an oven. The pencil moved across the soggy notebook and spelled out how he missed her. He asked her to hug Joey for him. He would be home soon. He addressed and stamped the