Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [63]
“Fie! a soldier, and afeard?”
SPEAKING OF ATHEISM, I remember one time when Jack Patton and I went to a sermon in Vietnam delivered by the highest-ranking Chaplain in the Army. He was a General.
The sermon was based on what he claimed was a well-known fact, that there were no Atheists in foxholes.
I asked Jack what he thought of the sermon afterward, and he said, “There’s a Chaplain who never visited the front.”
THE MORTICIAN, WHO is himself now in a covered trench by the stable, was Norman Updike, a descendant of the valley’s early Dutch settlers. He went on to tell me with bow-wow cheerfulness back in 1987 that people were generally mistaken about how quickly things rot, turn into good old dirt or fertilizer or dust or whatever. He said scientists had discovered well-preserved meat and vegetables deep in city dumps, thrown away presumably years and years ago. Like Hermann and Sophia Shultz, these theoretically biodegradable works of Nature had failed to rot for want of moisture, which was life itself to worms and fungi and bacteria.
“Even without modern embalming techniques,” he said, “ashes to ashes and dust takes much, much longer than most people realize.”
“I’m encouraged,” I said.
I DID NOT see Pamela Ford Hall by the stable until it was too late for me to head off in the opposite direction. I was distracted from watching out for her and Zuzu by a parent who had fled the bagpipe music on the Quadrangle. He commented that I seemed very depressed about something.
I still hadn’t told anybody I had been fired, and I certainly didn’t want to share the news with a stranger. So I said I couldn’t help being unhappy about the ice caps and the deserts and the busted economy and the race riots and so on.
He told me to cheer up, that 1,000,000,000 Chinese were about to throw off the yoke of Communism. After they did that, he said, they would all want automobiles and tires and gasoline and so forth.
I pointed out that virtually all American industries having to do with automobiles either were owned or had been run out of business by the Japanese.
“And what is to prevent you from doing what I’ve done?” he said. “It’s a free country.” He said that his entire portfolio consisted of stocks in Japanese corporations.
Can you imagine what 1,000,000,000 Chinese in automobiles would do to each other and what’s left of the atmosphere?
I WAS SO intent on getting away from that typical Ruling Class chowderhead that I did not see Pamela until I was right next to her. She was sitting on the ground drinking blackberry brandy, with her back to the Shultzes’ tombstone. She was gazing up at Musket Mountain. She had a serious alcohol problem. I didn’t blame myself for that. The worst problem in the life of any alcoholic is alcohol.
The inscription on the grave marker was facing me.
The diphtheria epidemic that killed so many people in this valley took place when almost all of Tarkington’s students were away on vacation.
That was certainly lucky for the students. If school had been in session during the epidemic, many, many of them might have wound up with the Shultzes, first where the Pavilion now stands, and then next to the stable, in the shadow of Musket Mountain when the Sun goes down.
And then the student body got lucky again 2 years ago. They were all away on a recess between semesters when habitual criminals overran this insignificant little country town.
MIRACLES.
I HAVE LOOKED up who the Freethinkers were. They were members of a short-lived sect, mostly of German descent, who believed, as did my Grandfather Wills, that nothing but sleep awaited good and evil persons alike in the Afterlife, that science had proved all organized religions to be baloney, that God was unknowable, and that the greatest use a person could make of his or her lifetime was to improve the quality of life for all in his or her community.
HERMANN AND SOPHIA