Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [100]
Harmony between White people thought not to like each other very much was what the rainbow represented then. The Rainbow Division did in fact fight about as well as any other one during the War to End Wars, the prelude to the Finale Rack.
AFTERWARD, THE EXPERIMENT complete, the 42nd Division became merely one more National Guard outfit, arbitrarily handed over with its battle ribbons to New York State.
But the symbol of the rainbow lives on in its shoulder patch.
Before I was arrested for insurrection, I myself was a wearer of that rainbow, along with the star of a Brigadier!
39
DURING MY FIRST 2 weeks as Military Commander of the Scipio District, all the way to the head of the lake and all the way down to the National Forest, the best thing I did, I think, was to make some of the soldiers firemen. A few had been firemen in civilian life, so I got them to familiarize themselves with the town’s firefighting apparatus, which hadn’t been hurt during the siege. One real stroke of luck: the fire trucks all had full tanks of gasoline. You would have thought, in a society where everybody from top to bottom was stealing everything that wasn’t nailed down, that somebody would have siphoned off that priceless gasoline.
Every so often, in the midst of chaos, you come across an amazing, inexplicable instance of civic responsibility. Maybe the last shred of faith people have is in their firemen.
1 ALSO SUPERVISED the exhumation of the bodies next to the stable. They had been buried for only a few days, but then the Government, personified by a Coroner and the Medical Examiner from the State Police who knew so much about crucifixions, ordered us to dig them up again. The Government had to fingerprint and photograph them, and describe their dental work, if any, and their obvious wounds, if any, and so on. We didn’t have to dig up the Shultzes again, who had already been dug up once, to make room for the Pavilion.
And we hadn’t found the young woman’s skull yet. The digging hadn’t gone deep enough yet to find out what had become of the head of the missing Lilac Queen.
THE GOVERNMENT, JUST those 2 guys from out of town, said we had to bury the bodies much deeper when they were through with them. That was the law.
“We wouldn’t want to break the law,” I said.
The Coroner was black. I wouldn’t have known he was Black if he hadn’t told me.
I asked him if he couldn’t arrange for the County or the State or somebody to take possession of the bodies until the next-of-kin, if any, could decide what was to be done with them. I hoped they would be taken to Rochester, where they could be embalmed or refrigerated or cremated, or at least buried in decent containers of some kind. They had been buried here in nothing but their clothing.
He said he would look into it, but that I shouldn’t get my hopes up. He said the County was broke and the State was broke and the Country was broke and that he was broke. He had lost what little he had in Microsecond Arbitrage.
AFTER THE GOVERNMENT left, I faced the problem of what the best way would be to dig much deeper graves. I was reluctant to ask National Guardsmen to do it with shovels. They had been resentful when I had them dig up the bodies and were growing more sullen in any case as it became more and more apparent, even that early in the game, that they might never be allowed to return to civilian life. The glamour of their Combat Infantryman’s Badges was wearing thin.
I couldn’t use convict labor from across the lake. That, too, was the law. And then I remembered that the college had a backhoe which ran on diesel fuel, which wasn’t a hot item on the black market. So if somebody could find the backhoe, there might still be some fuel in its tank.
A soldier found it, and the tank was full!
Miracle!
Again I ask the question: “How much longer can I go on being an Atheist?”