Wanting to protest bitterly: Why are you doing this to me? I did not touch this person. I did not—ever!—touch a single person. My directives were not personal. It was the office—the Presidency.
When I was wakened from the anesthetic, I could hear voices speaking to me and of me—as you would speak to a dead person, to urge him not to despair. The President was a younger man than certain of his advisers. He respected his elders. He respected powerful men, who were very wealthy men. He did their bidding—he would have been very imprudent if he had not. (He would not have been President if he had not.) I didn’t want to kill this person, this person is not my fault. He began to cry. He began to sob. He was helpless in the throes of such sorrow. He did not know what he should do but he’d found solace in the knowledge that, once it was done, it would become “history.” It was not what he decided, or what his advisers had advised, or what our consultants had suggested, it was “history” and you could argue—it had been “meant” to occur from the beginning of Time.
THE MEMORIAL FIELD AT HAZARD is our final resting place. In the Memorial Field, our solid bodies yield to liquid, and when the liquid dries, to dust.
The photographs are taken one by one. For we must die one by one as we are born one by one for we are singular and not plural. And the truth is to know, the one is not the many, and the many is not one. But the one can be as great as the many.
The former President grinning amid the dead. He grips a shovel in one hand and in the other, the partly decayed hand and arm of a young child.
It is the first of the children. It will not be the last.
He must crouch down into the grave. He must embrace the broken body as his own.
SO MANY GRAVES! When you are told casualty numbers, enemy death count you do not think in terms of bodies. At least, I did not. My staff did not. We were presented with figures, and often we joked of these figures—good-naturedly not cruelly, for we are not cruel persons no matter how our enemies misrepresent us—but we were not joking of actual bodies. Because we had no perception of actual bodies.
And so it is unjust now, I think, that I am being punished in this way. I would register an appeal but it would be to the very same court that has so sentenced me, thus an unjust court. My staff and my aides they have been executed, and for these innocent men there can be no appeal.
Never will I come to the end of the unshoveling of the graves at the Memorial Field at Hazard. Barely have I begun my hellish task, and my arms are aching, and my guts are sick, and my eyes are weak and burning in my head. I have been stripped of my absurd hospital gown. Even the paper slippers have been taken from me. The young soldiers prod me with their bayonets, as one might prick a stymied bull, that has not yet comprehended that his death is upon him, no matter how he bellows defiance and no matter how bravely he fights.
I am gripping the shovel with weakening fingers. Soon, it will fall to the ground and I believe that it will be then, the young soldiers will pierce me with their bayonets, in deathly silence. Not one will utter a word of remorse, affection, or simple sympathy. Not one will utter No! Stop! He is innocent, he was a fool.
Forgive me, there is no more speech remaining. It is just me—I—your President—standing naked before you, shovel in hand.
I thank you. And I thank you.
And you, and you. I thank you.
I thank you for your faith in me, as your President. I thank you for your votes. And I thank you now for your applause, and your blessing.
About the Author
JOYCE CAROL OATES is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.
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Also by Joyce Carol Oates
By the North Gate (1963)
Upon the Sweeping Flood and Other Stories (1966)
The Wheel of Love and Other Stories (1970)
Marriages and Infidelities (1972)
The Goddess and Other Women (1974)
The Hungry Ghosts (1974)
The Poisoned Kiss (1975)
The Seduction (1975)
Crossing the Border (1976)
Night-Side (1977)
A Sentimental Education (1980)
Last Days (1984)
Raven’s Wing (1986)
The Assignation (1988)
Oates in Exile (1990)
Heat and Other Stories (1991)
Where Is Here? (1992)
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: Selected Early Stories (1993)
Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque (1994)
Demon and Other Tales (1996)
Will You Always Love Me? (1996)
The Collector of Hearts: New Tales of the Grotesque (1998)
Faithless: Tales of Transgression (2001)
High Lonesome: New & Selected Stories, 1966–2006 (2006)
Wild Nights! (2008)
Dear Husband (2009)
Sourland (2010)
The Corn Maiden (2011)
Black Dahlia & White Rose (2012)
Lovely, Dark, Deep (2014)
Credits
Cover design by Allison Saltzman
Cover art: Edward Hopper, Eleven A.M., 1926, oil on canvas, 28 1/8 × 36 1/8 in. (71.3 × 91.6 cm). Gift of the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Foundation, 1966; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution; photography by Cathy Carver.
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
BEAUTIFUL DAYS. Copyright © 2018 by The Ontario Review, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Digital Edition FEBRUARY 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-279580-9
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-279578-6
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