Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [46]
‘He liked poetry?’
‘Sort of. There was one guy, Gary, been an actor, before; sometimes he declaimed stuff while he was picketing. Great voice. Ben liked to listen. One day he and Ben and me, we were going past a house in town and Gary was sounding off as usual, and this woman came out and invited us into her kitchen.
‘She said she loved to hear poetic language; she handed out coffee, while Gary sat at the table – it had this real pretty cover, shiny, with fruit and flowers – and he spread his hands out on the table and quoted Shakespeare. She loved that, and gave him a cookie, and then he moved on to Walt Whitman, and his voice got stronger and by the time he got on to “I sing the body electric” he was pretty loud and the woman stood up and said she had to go out now and opened the door, so we left. Gary couldn’t understand why Ben and I were cracking up on the sidewalk.’
Joey could picture them outside the woman’s house. His father hadn’t laughed much since they lost the house with the electric kitchen, but he could recall the way, early on, Ben would fling his head back, laughing, teeth big in his mouth. Joey would find himself joining in, without knowing why: laughing till tears came to his eyes. His eyes prickled now as he blinked back tears, but not of laughter. He swallowed a couple of times and tugged at Nancy’s sleeve. He whispered,
‘What’s funny about Walt Whitman?’
‘Nothing. I’ll read you some.’
Like pieces of a mosaic dropping into place, these glimpses and snatches gave Nancy an idea of those weeks in Washington, built up a picture of Ben that caught him at another angle, gave a different view of him.
She heard how the Bonus Army was beaten; the terrible final day. And Joel, who had shared Ben’s hut on the Anacostia Flats, recalled the government’s hostility and contempt.
‘They called us drifters, dope fiends, Bolsheviks. Any Jewish name they figured for a communist. We had coloured vets, guys who served in the 93rd. But black and white sharing, that really bugged those Washington guys, so the word “degenerate” came up. The rest of us, we probably looked pretty crazy by then, we were the dope fiends I guess.’ He shook his head, smiling without humour.
‘These are dark days for us all,’ Nancy said.
Later, alone, she thought about Ben, who had week by week grown closer to her as the distance between them widened. She reread his letters; those crumpled, grubby pages now seemed lit with hope and the possibility of a new beginning. She had closed herself off for so long – an aid to survival – but now, like a thaw after an ice age, she was melting; feeling and pain returned and she wept for the pity of it, the futility, the sad encampment viciously destroyed; the tired, defiant men.
Earlier, Nancy, like others, had blamed the President for losing control: he had given the orders. At the funeral, close beside her, Joey had listened carefully and held on to certain words: some instructions disregarded, others carried out. He knew who to blame: MacArthur had murdered his father.
It was difficult, this emptiness where Ben Pinkerton had been; Joey kept stumbling into it. He would be setting the table for dinner and notice that Nancy had come up behind him and was quietly removing a plate, knife, fork . . . she could not bring herself to remind him they needed one less of everything now.
There were still days when, returning from school, where some faraway unknown country had come up in class, he would automatically think of Ben: his father had travelled, he knew places. And then would come the kick in the head, remembering how things were now, and he would hurriedly get a drink of milk from the fridge, or splash his face with cold water and scrub it dry before greeting his mother, home from work. All this came as a shock: he and his father had never been close; now to his surprise he felt bereft. He and Nancy could have cried together, they could have rocked and grieved. But two quiet people, they found feelings