Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [44]
Next morning the Bonus Bill was defeated.
Optimism began to drain away. Men lost their briskness; sagged. Walter looked suddenly old.
‘The President wants us out. He’s sending in the army. MacArthur’s giving the orders now.’
‘The army?’ Ben was incredulous. ‘Against vets? That has to be a joke.’ But no one was laughing.
MacArthur’s troops blocked off streets; there were scuffles, some broken bones, and downtown Washington was cleared. A couple of tanks pursued the men to the water’s edge. There was a sense of stand-off. Everyone knew the President had ordered the troops to go no further than the river. They were safe, across the water.
Wives prepared food, men discussed the next step as the sun set.
Close to midnight, unable to sleep, Ben came out of the hut for some air. He saw what looked like a torchlight procession crossing the bridge, moving fast. There was noise, and the grinding of wheel tracks. Then he saw it for what it was: troops, horses, tanks: an army on the move. He began to shout, pulling on his boots, running between huts to rouse those sleeping, stumbling on the rough ground.
MacArthur had crossed the Anacostia river. Like some invading emperor he set loose his force. Men, women and children fled in panic from the cavalry and the glitter of sabres, bludgeoned by clubs, gashed by bayonets, vomiting from the effects of tear gas. In the confusion shots were fired. People ran as they run from an earthquake, without aim or direction, the crowd scattering as troops moved from shack to shack with kerosene-soaked torches. Flames swept through the camp, leaping high into the darkness and the smoke swirled across the river. As Ben looked back over his shoulder he saw a distant vision: the Capitol in flames.
‘Jesus Christ! It’s on fire!’ he yelled, but what he saw was a mirror image, the inferno of Hooverville reflected in the Capitol’s high windows blazing crimson and gold.
Spread out along the riverbank, the men resisted eviction, fighting back; coughing and half blinded, women pressed wet rags over children’s faces to protect them from the gas. Ben, ducking and wheeling, turned back to give a hand to a weeping woman left behind in the panic, and came face to face with an infantryman. Each hit out wildly, whether in attack or defence, who could tell? Ben was unarmed: the infantryman’s rifle struck him hard on the side of the head, spun him around and sent him staggering back towards the bridge. And there a trooper’s club, swishing through the dark, caught him off balance and he fell against the parapet and toppled, quite slowly, over the edge and into the river and sank beneath the scum-encrusted waters.
Open-eyed, through the murky liquid Ben could make out above him the flickering surface, the glancing light of the flames. He was comforted; he was a swimmer, wasn’t he? This was his element. All he had to do was instruct his limbs to send him upwards. Even as the darkness closed in he knew he was always safe in water.
21
The New York Times carried the story.
‘Flames rose high over the desolate Anacostia flats at midnight tonight, and a pitiful stream of refugee veterans of the World War left their home of the past two months, going they knew not where.’ The biggest Hooverville in the land, sheltering 25,000 people, had been razed to the ground. Nancy read on.
There had been deaths. Officially, the Times reported, there were ‘two adult fatalities’. Two men were shot, and two infants died, asphyxiated by tear gas. There was a drowning, but that was described as ‘incidental’.
Nancy already knew Ben was dead when she read the story in the New York Times. She had received the annihilating blow and absorbed it.
One afternoon many years before, home from school, Nancy had been watching her mother refill a tall glass storage jar in the kitchen. As she turned aside, the jar top caught Mary’s sleeve and fell to the floor. Surprisingly, the heavy glass stopper survived the fall – it bounced intact, but on the second impact, of just