Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [10]
They had persuaded themselves by now that this attack would surely come. Their alarm and bravado were the first strong hints young Alexander received, as he would tell young Walter F. Starbuck decades afterward, again stammering, that there were “certain instabilities inherent in the pageant.”
He himself, of course, was carrying a loaded revolver in his overcoat pocket—and so were his father and brother, who now came into the corridor to approve of the arrangements one last time. It was ten o’clock in the morning. It was time to open the windows, they said. The plaza was full.
• • •
It was time to go up to the top of the tower, they told Alexander, for the best view of all.
So the windows were opened and the sharpshooters laid their rifles in their cradles of different kinds.
Who were the four sharpshooters, really—and was there really such a trade? There was less work for sharpshooters than there was for hangmen at the time. Not one of the four had ever been hired in this capacity before, nor was he likely, unless war came, to be paid for such work ever again. One was a part-time Pinkerton agent, and the other three were his friends. The four of them hunted together regularly, and had for years praised one another for what unbelievably good shots they were. So when the Pinkerton Agency let it be known that it could use four sharpshooters, they materialized almost instantly, like the company of citizen soldiers.
The man with the tripod had invented the device for the occasion. Nor had the man with the sandbag ever couched his rifle on a sandbag before. So it was, too, with the chairs and tables and the tidy displays of ammunition and all that: They had agreed among themselves as to how truly professional sharpshooters should comport themselves.
Years later Alexander McCone, when asked by Starbuck what he thought the principal cause of the Cuyahoga Massacre had been, would reply: “American am-am-am-amateurism in the muh-muh-matters of luh-life and duh-duh-duh-death.”
• • •
When the windows were opened, the oceanic murmurs of the crowd came in with the cold air. The crowd wished to be silent, and imagined itself to be silent—but this person had to whisper a little something, and that one had to reply, and so on. Hence, sounds like a sea.
It was mainly this seeming surf that Alexander heard as he stood with his father and brother in the belfry. The defenders of the factory were quiet. Except for the rattles and bumps of the opening of the windows on the second floor, they had made no reply.
Alexander’s father said this as they waited: “It is no dainty thing to shape iron and steel to human needs, my boys. No man in his right mind would do such work, if it were not for fear of cold and hunger. The question is, my boys—how much does the world need iron and steel products? In case anybody wants some, Dan McCone knows how they’re made.”
Now there was a tiny quickening of life inside the fence. The chief of police of Cleveland, carrying a piece of paper on which the Riot Act was written, climbed the steps to the top of the scaffold. This was to be the climax of the pageant, young Alexander supposed, a moment of terrible beauty.
But then he sneezed up there in the belfry. Not only were his lungs emptied of air, but his romantic vision was destroyed. What was about to happen below, he realized, was not majestic. It would be insane. There was no such thing as magic, and yet his father and his brother and the governor, and probably even President Grover Cleveland, expected this police chief to become a wizard, a Merlin—to make a crowd vanish with a magic spell.
“It will not work,” he thought. “It cannot work.”
It did not work.
The chief cast his spell. His shouted words bounced off the buildings, warred with their own echoes, and sounded like Babylonian by the time they reached Alexander’s ears.
Absolutely nothing happened.
The chief climbed down from the scaffold. His manner indicated