Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [11]
But Colonel Redfield was enraged. He had the gate opened a crack, to let him out so he could join his half-frozen troops. He took his place between two farm boys at the center of the long line. He ordered his men to level their bayonets at those in front of them. Next, he ordered them to take one step forward. This they did.
• • •
Looking down on the plaza, young Alexander could see the people at the front of the crowd backing into those behind them as they shrank from the naked steel. People at the back of the crowd, meanwhile, had no idea what was going on, and were not about to depart, to relieve the pressure some.
The soldiers advanced yet another pace and the people retreating put pressure not only on those behind them, but on those beside them, too. Those at either end found themselves squashed against the buildings. The soldiers facing them had no heart for skewering someone so hopelessly immobilized, so they averted their bayonets, opening a space between the blade tips and the unyielding walls.
When the soldiers took yet another step forward, according to Alexander when old, people began “… to squh-squh-squirt around the ends of the luh-luh-line like wuh-wuh-water.” The squirts became torrents, crumpling the flanks of the line and delivering hundreds of people to the space between the factory fence and the undefended rears of the soldiers.
Colonel Redfield, his eyes blazing straight ahead, had no idea what was happening on either side. He ordered yet another advance.
Now the crowd behind the soldiers began to behave quite badly. A youth jumped onto a soldier’s pack like a monkey. The soldier sat down hard and struggled most comically, trying to rise again. Soldier after soldier was brought down in this way. If one got back to his feet, he was pulled down again. And the soldiers began to crawl toward each other for mutual protection. They refused to shoot. They formed a defensive heap, instead, a paralyzed porcupine.
Colonel Redfield was not among them. He was nowhere to be seen.
• • •
No one was ever found who would admit to ordering the sharpshooters and the guards to open fire from the windows of the factory, but the firing began.
Fourteen people were killed outright by bullets—one of them a soldier. Twenty-three were seriously wounded.
Alexander would say when an old man that the shooting sounded no more serious than “puh-puh-popcorn,” and that he thought a freakish wind had blown across the plaza below, since the people seemed to be blowing away like “luh-luh-leaves.”
When it was all over, there was general satisfaction that honor had been served and that justice had been done. Law and order had been restored.
Old Daniel McCone would say to his sons as he looked out over the battlefield, vacant now except for bodies, “Like it or not, boys, that’s the sort of business you’re in.”
Colonel Redfield would be found in a side street, naked and out of his head, but otherwise unharmed.
Young Alexander did not try to speak afterward until he had to speak, which was at Christmas dinner that afternoon. He was asked to say grace. He discovered then that he had become a bubbling booby, that his stammer was so bad now that he could not speak at all.
He would never go to the factory again. He would become Cleveland’s leading art collector and the chief donor to the Cleveland Museum of Fine Arts, demonstrating that the McCone family was interested in more than money and power for money’s and power’s sakes.
• • •
His stammer was so bad for the rest of his life that he seldom ventured outside his mansion on Euclid Avenue. He had married a Rockefeller one month before his stammer became so bad. Otherwise, as he would later say, he would probably never have married at all.
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