Ghosts of Tom Joad

by Peter Van Buren

  “This is where my religious and political views meet up, Earl, kinda like how you and me met up. Most wealthy folks say they’re religious people, but when the churches are rich and the regular people poor, you gotta wonder who is serving who. Most of those wealthy ignore one of the highest ideals from the Sermon—caring. Those words aren’t just some more poetry of hopefulness that passes for Christianity. He said quite clearly, ‘they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, they should be satisfied.’ But it ain’t just about handing over a few crumbs, saying it’s better than no bread at all. Getting into Heaven isn’t about earning merit badges, here’s one for those canned goods you didn’t want anyway at Christmas or another for tossing change into a cup. It’s about how you live a life in total, what you do 99 percent of the time, what you make of the world you live in. It isn’t religion that’s wrong, same as it isn’t business that’s wrong. It’s greed and selfishness that’s wrong, no matter what channel you’re watching.”

  I always thought the Bible was like the dictionary, all the words was inside and you could scramble them around to mean anything you like, but Casey made sense.

  “Look Earl, even though the original Owner was barefooted, what happens upstairs in my church is that as soon as some expensive shoes hit that floor it seems like the place loses its purpose. Me, I preached for the Lord a long time, but some days I think God’s the laziest man on earth. What I want is to be able to look out over my congregation and say to them forget most of what I’ve said but go out and be kind to each other, help each other and walk humbly when you have something others still need. When they hear someone cry in America because they’re hungry, I want that to be louder in their ears than any sermon.”

  “So okay, Preacher, when’s it going to get better? When are we going to be able to live like our grandparents did?”

  “Earl, nostalgia isn’t history. This is a story about change, and it’s important for you to know how that happened. Here we are forty years on still talking about recovery like it was as real as an election year promise. Prosperity is not something that will follow if we simply wait long enough. Like my friend says, cut through all the lies and there it is, right in front of you: America used to be a developing nation, in the best sense of that word. Almost in spite of themselves, the robber barons built prosperity through jobs. We had to get past the horrors of enslaving other human beings, past making children work in factories, past killing men in mines and machines. There were dark times, criminal times, but people had a sense of ‘we’ll get past this.’ Then we crossed a line. Manufacturing in America became expensive. Businesses sought lower costs and higher profits. String that out as far as it goes and it means paying workers as close to zero—or zero if you somehow could like with slavery—and pulling in as much profit—as close to one hundred percent—as you somehow could. The question seemed to have become, ‘How many miles can you drive on a gallon of our blood?’ We watched a reversal of two hundred years. American workers never earned as much again as they did in 1973. It was soon after that someone laid off a steelworker who became Patient Zero of the new economy.”

  “The numbers are too consistent, the lines too straight. This was no accident, no invisible hand. Earl, we changed from a place that made things—radiators, cash registers, gaskets, ball bearings, TVs—into a place that just makes deals. Making things creates jobs, and jobs create prosperity. Making deals just creates wealth for the dealers. It’s math. The money that went up had to come from somewhere. That was Reeve, right out of your father’s pocket. The deal makers don’t care because they don’t live here, hell, they don’t live anywhere. We live here.”

  IT WAS SOMEWHERE in there that my old man finally fell apart like a cardboard box in the rain. He died just like I expected, word coming in the form of a late night phone call from Mom. I put the phone down, sitting up in bed, wishing maybe I smoked so I had something to do with my hands, and remembered a last visit, him in the old folks home or the hospital, I don’t recall which. His skin was wrinkling like how bacon looks frying, but so thin you could see the veins blue under there. The doctors said it was the stroke, maybe caused by the liquor, but to me what killed him was the tension of being him, holding whatever it was inside him, never letting the poison out. When I was young that thing in there was a mystery, maybe something cool I thought, like he was a war hero, maybe even a spy and couldn’t talk about it. Over the years I began to think it wasn’t that he couldn’t talk about it, as much as he just wouldn’t. At the hospital or wherever it was that last time, I remember him trying to take his pills. They came in little paper cups, and I watched him dump them onto his tray. His hands shook, and his fingers were so dry and fragile, he couldn’t get them pills up to his mouth. I was sittin’ right there, but he wouldn’t say a word to me, just tried to wet his fingertips from the corner of his mouth, so the pill would stick to his finger and he could get it onto his tongue. He tried and tried, finally reaching over for the call button to the Puerto Rican attendant who came and silently pushed the pill into his mouth while I sat there. I imagined her when he died, looking at her cheap watch and thinking about whatever paperwork they had to do when another one passed.

  As a kid, I never understood funerals. The person was dead and no amount of pound cake, covered casseroles and flowers was gonna fix that. I got over-dressed up against my will and dragged out to my grandpa’s and then my grandma’s funerals to sit and watch people cry while I struggled to unbutton my shirt collar. Funerals were big affairs in Reeve, because growing up, living and dying in the same town left a lot of loose ends to tie up. I came to understand that these funerals were for the living, to figure out what to do with the memories, decide which connections were gonna stay intact and which were gonna, well, die. My grandparents passed when I was still a kid, old enough to be sad, but mostly just ’cause I knew I wasn’t gonna see them again, like death just made things permanently inconvenient. With my old man, the memories were funny colors I didn’t fully understand yet, mostly too fresh to have been washed and folded away neatly the way time does.

  We had the wake for him at the VFW hall. It would have been wrong to make much out of the church part, but he was a drinker and so it seemed appropriate to gather at a bar. It was a pale Wednesday morning outside, but inside it was dark and damp and whatever day you wanted it to be, and eternally felt like 3 a.m. I recognized a lot of the people, odd though, them seeing me mostly for the first time as an adult. I got tired of decrepit men and pinched old women coming up to me and saying, “It’s Ray’s boy, Earl,” like me and him were always tied together that way. My mom wasn’t talking much, and I found shelter at the end of the bar. The door to the kitchen kept swinging open, the sticky green fluorescent flash half interrupting me and half keeping me awake as I looked to set down the burden I carried around from my old man.

  “You know Ray?” said the guy who was riding the bar stool hard right to me. Stubbed out a butt, lit another one. Teeth stained yellow from a lifetime of unfiltered Camels. Thin lips, just a line.

  “Smoke?” he said to me.

  “Nah, thanks.”

  “I hear you. I’ve been trying to quit for thirty years. Sure you don’t want one?”

  “Thanks, no mister. So how’d you know Ray?”

  “Me and Ray served together in Korea. I hadn’t talked to him but maybe twice since, then two days ago Sissy found my name in some of Ray’s old stuff and called me. I drove down here to say goodbye.”

  “Not from Reeve then?”

  “Nah, home is near Pittsburgh.”

  “Steel?”

  “Yep. Thirty years on the big bucket, pouring out two hundred tons of steel a day. Lookit my right arm—muscle’s twice as thick as on the left ’cause of that lever I pulled every day. I got that job right after Korea in fact. My old man sent me to see the foreman while I was still wearing my uniform.”

  “How’s it up there now? I heard the president say he’s creating more jobs, so I was considering moving
up.”

  “Moving on isn’t a bad idea. I wished I had done it at your age. Hell, I wished I’d done it last month.”

  “So there’s work where you’re from?”

  “Same there as it was four years ago and four years before that. Every four years the president comes back into western Pennsylvania like a dog looking for a place to pee. He reminds us that his wife’s cousin is from some town near to ours, gets photographed at the diner if it’s still in business, and then makes those promises to us while winking at the big business donors who feed him bribes they call campaign contributions. I’m tempted to cut out the middle man and just write in ‘Goldman Sachs’ on my ballot next election.

  Another cigarette.

  “Smoke?”

  “Nah.”

  “Meanwhile the coast reporters will write another story about the ‘heartland’ and then get out as fast as they can, acting as if something might stick to them if they stood still too long. We got so few families in town anymore we can’t hardly come up with a football team. I had to drive thirty miles last week to find a dentist, nobody closer still in business. The new mayor has this idea of encouraging art galleries and boutiques to take up in vacant buildings to revive the economy. So that’s us now, building a country on boutiques.”

  He cupped his smoke in his hand, hiding the orange dot at the end just like those soldiers in the war movies on TV did, like there was gonna be a Nazi sniper there in the VFW hall or something.

  “Helps me remember,” he said. “Remembering’s the only thing I got.”

  Some kid slipped up to the bar.

  “Were you were a soldier, sir? Thank you for your service. You’re a hero, sir.”

  The drunk barely looked up. Made it seem like his head was too heavy to lift.

  “Was in Korea. I wasn’t no hero. Don’t thank me for what I did, ’cause you don’t have any idea. No fucking idea.”

  “Sorry sir, see, I’m going to enlist, and I wanted to thank you for protecting us.”

  “Get away now son, there’s dangerous objects around here.”

  The kid popped away, more confused and threatened than chastised.

  Back to me and the drunk.

  “So, I guess Ray and you had a pretty good time over there in Korea. To hear him tell it, it was all booze and broads.”

  “Is that what he said? My memory is a little soggy right now, more like a scar to me even when it’s working right, but I seem to recall it a little different.” It was a smile, but shaped like a sickle the farmers around Reeve used to use. “Name’s Miles by the way.”

  “Hey Miles, I’m Earl. Lemme buy the next round. I’m drinking beer. You?”

  “Whiskey. Beer’s a good foundation, but it don’t have the octane no more, just leaves me drowsy.”

  I should’ve known. He had empty shot glasses lined up on the bar like they were on sale on a shelf at Bullseye.

  “So c’mon Miles, how was Korea, really?”

  “There wasn’t a whole lot of broads anywhere near us and damn little booze. Mostly local-made hooch that kids would wander up and trade us for C-rat cans of Spam and some goop called ‘Fruit, Peach, Canned, Syrup-Type.’ The Korean kids would wear tin cans salvaged from us around their necks, clanging and clinking to warn us they were comin’. I learned how to say ‘hello’ in their language, so I’d yell that at them. But it wasn’t no fun. Ray and me spent most of our war on some fucked-up hill freezing our asses off.”

  “Is that so Miles?” I said. “So old Ray was a liar then in addition to everything else. To hear him talk about Korea and the service, you’d think it was New Year’s Eve with a cherry on top every night.”

  “Isn’t my place to talk ill of the dead, but Korea was no cherry. Look at me—throw a white ball against a dirty wall and it comes back dirty every time. I never had no great dream, and in return I never expected to feel like this. I came back a drunk and have been happy to be one every damn day since. Thinking on what made me start drinking is worse than all this any time, my young friend. Hand me them cigarettes, willya? You want one? Cheers.”

  He threw back a shot, then another one right on top of it. In the light of the kitchen door swinging open, I could now see he was a real old-school rummy, a catalog of tells. Light bulb nose, red spiderwebbed veins in his eyes, broken blood vessels on his face, tobacco-stained voice, lots of old blue bruises from falling down, skin yellowed from the jaundice, like Grandma would say about Grandpa. It took years of whiskey for that. You get there different ways, but in the end pain is all the same. The trip’s all you have until you arrive, right? You had to have a reason to keep working at it that long, ’cause the fun of drinking must’ve passed away a long while ago.

  “So c’mon, what was it really like, Miles?”

  “Korea? Ray? You keep asking me—you really wanna know? I’ll tell you: we threw snowballs at each other, so okay, there, now you know, smart guy. You think we hadda choice out there? Fuck no, just like here, now, we did what we was told and then shit we couldn’t control happened to us. What more you want from me boy, to confess to my sins? You think you’re some sorta preacher? You think I don’t have a reason, hell, a right, to stay quiet and just drink myself to death?”

  Another old timer came up, spilling beer on me as he tried to regain his balance, then bumping into me as he had to choose between that and spilling even more beer. I wrinkled my nose at the smell of too much cologne. Lotta these yahoos around here don’t know about dressing up. Tie never tied right, you can spot them a mile away.

  “Oh Earl, that you? Goddamn, honey look, it’s Ray’s boy, all grown up. I ain’t seen you for years. Sorry about your old man. You wanna ’nother drink son?”

  “You’re Ray’s son?” said Miles. “He had a son? He never told me.”

  “Yeah, that’s me, um, what was it, Miles? And he never told me about you neither, so go kiss my ass.”

  “Well, if Ray didn’t find the reason to tell you any stories about Korea, then it isn’t my job. I ain’t your father, thank God for that. You seen it all every day anyway, him drinking, it was written on his fucking face same as me. Now c’mon, we’re enjoying a friendly drink here in Ray’s name. Let’s just have a toast to the old son of a bitch and leave it there. He’s dead now, got his new job to do, so let’s cover him up and let him get to it. To the dead, may they stay buried! You wanna smoke? Here, pass me the pack.”

  ONE NIGHT AFTER dinner at the shelter we all got to talking.

  “Preacher, we heard in Reeve that it was the immigrants, Koreans I guess, who took all the jobs at lower wages. Ain’t that what’s always been said?”

  “Yeah, preacher, what about America for Americans?”

  “Everyone of us are the sons of immigrants,” Casey said, “so don’t be foolish about Koreans.”

  “But we was here first, preacher.”

  “Unless your name is Chief Full-of-Shit, shut the hell up and listen to the preacher now.”

  “It used to be the Irish who took all the jobs, then it was, who? Maybe the Italians next? I forget,” said Casey. “I can’t keep hate in chronological order any more. I think the Mexicans were blamed after that. See many Koreans in your factory in Reeve before it closed? No, of course not. Immigrants will lower the low-end wages certainly. Plenty of them too, so they are easy to hire and fire, disposable labor, spare parts. But you’ve seen the Koreans in Reeve and none of their small business places took any jobs from you, and may even have created a few. We don’t need fewer workers, we need more decent jobs.”

  “But I’ve seen on TV they said the economy added thousands of jobs this month, so that’s good, right?”

  “Yeah maybe, but those are likely mostly minimum wage jobs. Like eating all your daily calories as candy—”

  “—Or booze if you’re Earl.”

  “Shut up. Preacher, you know I’ll take any job. I just want to work. I still know how to sweat.”

  “Easy, Earl, I believe you. But even if you’ll accept a lo
wer wage, how far is a couple of dollars an hour throwing construction crap into a Dumpster going to get you? What if they did pay you minimum wage. How far is seven bucks an hour going to go? We’re back to thinking a few crumbs is better than no bread at all. You going to do five hours of labor for the phone bill? Another ten for the groceries each week? Another twenty or thirty for a car payment? How many hours you going to work? How many can you work? Nobody can make a living doing those jobs, even if you have two or three of them. You can’t raise a family on minimum wage. And you can’t build a nation on the working poor. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, folks say, as a way of blaming the working poor for being swept up in a change they don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell against.”

  “But the jobs will come back someday … right?”

  “No,” Casey said, in that way he had of being patient and frustrated at the same time, “the system is reaching for its natural conclusion. The lines of lower costs and higher profits are converging. My friend says, ‘A rising tide lifts all yachts.’ Our society is dividing into a very narrow band of the super wealthy, and us—everyone else—what they call the working poor. This has been a mass migration, an Apartheid of dollars, money leaving the majority of us into the hands of just a few. Saying today it is one versus 99 is probably wrong in the absolute percentages but dead solid perfect as an indicator. Reeve isn’t the exception. You just got hit in the back of the head earlier than most.”