by Larry Kramer
It’s on almost every man’s hands. Somewhere on his body he carries it. It’s impossible to wash it off. It’s under nails, in body cracks, at hair roots, inside ears. People are constantly infected and infecting each other. No one has ever seen so many people sick with something. No one knows what to do. Certainly no one in authority knows what to do, since there is no one in authority. Most of the doctors are dead from the war or so depressed that they’re useless.
There is so little to eat and drink that blood and shit are ingested accidentally or otherwise. At the notorious concentration camps at Percyville and Andersonville, huge bloodlettings are effected regularly from the dead for drink, and shit is consumed daily as a primary food. It is mixed with mud and wild berries and fried in animal fat, an old Indian recipe. There is no other food.
No one knows what to do. This is an incredible statement, and an incomparable indictment. How are we ever going to become anything at all if in the face of such grotesque treatment of each other daily, and in the wake of such grotesque treatment of each other on the killing fields, no one knows what to do? The new president, what is his name? Well, that’s what it’s like. If ever a country needed a great leader, this is that country, and now is that time. And it doesn’t have one. And it isn’t going to get one for a long, long time.
That NITS was established is irrelevant. Such buildings as were built to house it are empty. Not only are all those dead doctors not replaced, no one wants to be a doctor anyway.
Why is it that The American People never have a great leader when we need one, or if and when we have one we don’t let him lead for very long?
WANDERERS
From 1865 on, an entire country’s set of values is turned upside down and sideways and every which way but straight.
For too many people, the accumulations of a lifetime are now gone. Robbery becomes a way of life. Even murder becomes, in certain places, an accepted means of … what?
America will never again be the same.
A lot of men don’t come home, not because they are dead, but because they don’t want to. Many just go wandering in the wilderness. Many are genuinely lost. Many take new names to start again. Many don’t care who won. Or why. Or who they are. Or what the fight was about. Who shot me? A boy from where? Many don’t understand. Anything. Anymore. Many feel free now. Maybe for the first time. They can start over. But too many are just plain depressed. And scared. Frightened. They are not ready for freedom.
One thing should be certain, but of course it isn’t. Trust of brother for brother has been destroyed in America forever. Few would understand this, or use this word destroyed, or forever. People don’t think in terms of forever except in church. If they go to one. Forever, for now, will be just another naïve dream for another time, another place.
Yes, so many men have loved each other, at first out of fear of being confronted by the horrors of having to kill their own, having to actually murder someone just like themselves, that for many now it is as if they only want to hold and feel each other, somehow.
Wandering men of many ages form small groups of their own to live together in who knows what kind of harmony, seeking some kind of peace. “All I know is I do not want to see anyone who did not fight in this war, be it father or mother or sisters or any men other than my brothers-in-arms” pretty much sums up the kind of letter many a son or husband sends home, if he writes at all. Many folks back home think their boys are dead when they aren’t; these sons and fathers and husbands just don’t want to see anyone who could possibly have done anything at all to have caused this hideous war of brotherly hate. Many of them are beginning to cotton on to just what they had been obliged to do.
No one pays much attention to this loss of trust. No one pays much attention to the ones who are frightened and depressed. For too long too many people have believed that all we have to do is start over, move on, look to tomorrow.
The only thing not in short supply is inner emptiness.
How do you stay alive after a war like this one?
How do you rebuild a self on emptiness?
How do you stay curious and interested and positive and full of beans?
How do you get anything done?
Few are happy. The country is filled with blood. This point, already made, can’t be made enough. You can’t imagine it, but that’s what the country is. Filled with blood. Few aren’t bleeding. It can’t be said enough. Blood is everywhere.
Blood is everywhere.
There are bands of homeless orphaned youngsters roaming the wilderness, going nowhere in particular, just moving. They are unable to stand still. They don’t stay anyplace for long. It is not the first time we have seen this. Now there are more of them. And they are more wounded, in every conceivable way.
Some of them perform strange acts like flagellating themselves in public to atone for man’s sins, for brother killing brother. There are more of these than you would think. Something about the act, the public display, the pain, draws many to join these bands of wandering flagellators. Only by our sacrifices can the anger of Christ be appeased, one sign says, carried by a child whose name, which he can’t remember yet, is Clarence Meekly. We carry our scourges as Christ carried his Cross, another sign says, carried by a young man, Horatio Dridge, who remembers his name, but not where he comes from. Some wear only loincloths, even in the freezing cold. They sleep all in a heap at night. They prostrate themselves on the ground in the form of a great cross by day. They go from town to town. At first they shock people so much that they are fed and prayed with. But after a while they become too scary, or too annoying, or too numerous, and they are sent scurrying away.
Many of these wandering young ones continually sob and cry.
Many of the older ones do as well.
Some know they are lost. Some do not.
Yes, the wandering wounded are everywhere. Many wander to Washington, as if by being in what is now firmly recognized as the capital of America they will receive a Sign that will tell them what to do or where to go or how to lead a life.
These tragic human beings are very sad. There are a great many of them. They are the orphans of this war.
A MOTHER
Did I weep when we looked back at Georgetown as I tried to stop my boy’s own weeping? It was a terrible place we left. How could he cry for it? He would not stop. You know how it is when a child weeps for a dead pet, well, that is how he was, only he is some seventeen years and he stays and stays weeping and weeping so much that I have no breath left of my own. I am gasping for him, trying to grab breath for him. I wanted to keep running so as to flee that swamp where his friend lay dead from something called ogloop, at least that is what I think I heard it called. His friend is in the long swamp that runs outside the back doors of the houses all side by side and sinking in muck. His friend, his friend who was all the world to him, his friend who was the only thing in the world to him, certainly more to him than me, the wife to his father, also dead in that swamp from the funny-name disease. He wants to run back! I tell him we cannot stop running away, because the plague that killed his dear friend and also his father in that swamp in this terrible heat, runs after us fast and will catch us dead if we stop for even a moment. The doctors are saying so. They are saying, run, run, run for your lives, for the plague from the swamps is upon us!
“Please, Mammytoo, please let me go back!” and I yank and pull him from all the poisoned dead not only in that swamp and around our house in that place called Georgetown, but everywhere we run forth to, he tries to stop and run back from. He begs me over and over as I yank him forward with all my might. We run without breath and now without shoes and always without food. We run past many dead boys, dead boys from the battle with holes everywhere, in their heads and their legs and their stomachs falling out. So many dead someone’s sons. They lie often in each other’s arms last-comforting each other.
“Mammytoo, Mammytoo, please I want my Davey!” the boy wails on and yet he runs with me now.
He must know that life is not for standing still. He cries and cries and he will not eat the berries I grab for him as we run, not even suck them for their sweet juice to feed his running. Oh my child my child, I choke just as you for what is out there for us, where do we go to find what?
Where are we going?!
A LAKE
The lake is wide and shallow and hard to see for all the brambles and brush fallen upon it, all the dead tree trunks and heavy brown-leafed branches. But it can be seen, through all this, that there is water there. Liquid. As no sun shines in this heavily wooded area, the water’s color is dark, a not unusual characteristic of the many creeks in this part of northern Maryland, and of all the dirty bodies of water that harried and desperate soldiers are called upon to visit. For the parched and filthy this lake is like an oasis in a desert, a mirage come true. Just to be in sight of it perks up spirits and quickens steps. In we go. In we go.
Not all of them come back up. It depends on how much energy is left in their war-weary bones. If they are exhausted, as most of them are, they drown in the heavy water, which appears on the closer experience of submerging in it to be thick oozing muck. In reality this lake is filled with blood, thick blood, blood clotted with bits of persons, flesh blown to bits by cannons and balobustumes, new forged rifles of Russian design made in France by Averva and imported by a War Department that has heard good things about them. This lake is proof of how effective an Averva balobustume is. The rifle was first introduced at Antietam, just down the creek. There were one hundred balobustumes only and more casualties were suffered at Antietam than anywhere else. The North could have had them first but the general in charge of ordnance, Otis B. Jarman, refused to pay extra for them and so his soldiers used the infinitely inferior single-shot muzzle-loaders although the lever-action repeating rifles were available to and used by the Confederates to mow them down. This lake is full of dead bodies. This lake is nothing but blood.
Here comes another harried band of the wounded. One-two-three in we go. Four-five-six they all jump in.
In the blood. In the blood.
They bathe, they drink, they drown.
EVERYWHERE
Dead bodies are a dime a dozen. It’s impossible for children to play in wooded areas without stumbling over a dead body or two, and difficult to ascertain if the corpse is a murdered man or one dead from battle, or from some illness or disease, or starvation, or suicide, not that people can tell the difference. There is no one around to differentiate or to care about which is which. Not much has been written about how commonplace unburied corpses are. Or about the lack of law enforcement. Or the singular absence of pure curiosity about who’s doing what and whether it’s legal. The American People continue to grow along the path of Who Cares? Whatever it is, it’s somebody else’s problem. No, no one is in charge of burying dead bodies. How can they be allowed to rot in plain sight for so long? There may be drums beating for the coming of the railroads, and for greed, there are always drums beating for greed, and a fresh new day, but it’s all frosting on a cake sitting on plates of maggots crawling over mountains of decaying flesh. Talk about cesspools of disease!
Something called the Morgens Report appears, which presents the frightening “fact” that at least four out of five soldiers killed at least one other person.
TWO OF OUR LEADING CHARACTERS MEET EACH OTHER
Another one who can’t remember his name. Or where he comes from. Or what he did before. His body tries to tell him its history. He looks at his scars and scabs and spots and rips and bumps and stitches and holes. Where did he get these? Were they here before? Before what?
He’s very lonely. The war was the first friends he ever had. The war was men who spoke to him nicely. He doesn’t want to take off his uniform. He runs into other boys in uniforms. He reads a magazine in a library. In West Virginia. It’s about a war. He doesn’t recognize much of anything. Maybe the names of towns. He knows he was in some of those towns.
He’d not known he was strange before the colonel came and offered ten dollars and a uniform to anyone who joined the Western Kansas Territory Freedom Brigade. He was thirteen years old then. His skin is pale. He is short and skinny. His mouth is small. His voice is high-pitched. When the war started he learned that he was strange. Too strange for the others, who would not talk to him. He got used to silence. Even when the guns wouldn’t stop he couldn’t hear them. He was lost already.
He knows he can’t remember anything. He was able to before. He could list all the places where he fought. He caressed the heads of dead men many times as he sat beside them, holding their hands, leaning over them too late to hear their last words, these first men who ever talked to him. They looked frightened even after they died.
One day in Ohio he sits on a rock and looks at a creek and talks out loud to himself. “Clarence, you must get a hold of yourself.” Why is he calling himself Clarence? Is his name Clarence? Why is he crying? In Missouri he talks out loud to himself again. “Clarence Meekly, you must get a hold of yourself.”
He’s in Indiana. He’s in Kansas. He’s in Missouri. He’s in Georgia. “You are entering…” “You have crossed…” Hand-painted signs stuck on stakes trying to tell you where you are. America’s very quiet. No one wants to say anything out loud to anyone. When books start to be written about this war no one ever talks about this silence. Perhaps everyone still alive is finally ashamed. That often causes silence. Somewhere in Virginia or Delaware his money starts running low, the severance dollars he was handed along with a piece of paper that says someone named John Doe is discharged. He was told he’d get more dollars if he sends a letter to Washington. He just keeps walking. It’s so quiet. Ohio. A sign says Ohio again. He walks around and through and out of Ohio. Whatever he’s been looking for, it doesn’t seem to be in Ohio. When he thinks he must be in another state he sees a sign that says Ohio. He sleeps under trees. He eats berries and eats leaves. His uniform is tattered almost into dissolution. He is filthy dirty. He runs into other soldiers walking alone, just walking, in one uniform or another, it doesn’t seem to make any difference any longer which one anyone is wearing. It’s like the whole army was the same army, just wearing different clothes. He reads another magazine in a library somewhere else. He doesn’t recognize the battles it writes about either. It tells about a war he didn’t fight in, except for the names of those towns. Yes, he was in some of those towns.
He is crying again. It seems he has been alone his whole life. He can’t remember where he came from. And he never will.
He wants a friend to talk to who won’t die in his arms.
He’s fifteen years old when he meets Horatio.
Young Horatio and young Clarence meet in Washington. They are in their mid-teens now, and each has gone through puberty and is filled with unexplained hungers. They meet at a march for homeless children that has spontaneously erupted. Word has passed, almost nationwide, that all the homeless little boys and girls, though there are mostly boys, will march in Washington on July 4, 1867, “in order to break the hearts of The American People, to let them see how many of us are without food or clothing or work. Come! Come out of the forest! We must break their hearts!”
How many arrive to march? There is no written record of this event, only the memories of hundreds who talk about it over the succeeding years as their lives’ paths cross: “Oh, were you there, too!” In memory the hundreds become thousands, become hundreds of thousands. And perhaps indeed there were. That is both the sad and the wonderful thing about so much of history: we will never know for certain, and therefore we can suppose, we can wonder, we can dream, we can hope, and in doing so, one day, perhaps … what? We can believe?
Horatio sees Clarence first and falls in step beside him. They talk, each of them as if for the first time in years, with animation and growing excitement.
And then, as often happens in parades, in crowds, in love, they lose each other at a turn in a road when mounted policemen on horses break up the crowd.
Each turns to look for the other with growing desperation. Each is overwhelmed with a new fear, a new trembling, but with the same familiar grotesque devastation, which had disappeared for a few brief moments. Each sits down by the side of the road, hoping the other will reappear. He does not. Suddenly life, which for a few hours had seemed worth living, morbidly returns to seeming not worth much at all.
KLANS AND KNIGHTS AND ORDERS
Strange small groups wanting to get rid of assorted folks that they find bothersome are quietly proliferating. Oh, there always have been such since the beginning of time, but now, particularly in certain parts of the country, mainly in the South and the Midwest, one begets another, and there are more of them, and they are larger. Negroes of course are the objects of most, Jews are the obsession of a number of others, but these groups now join others in displeasure of homosexuals. Unnamed as such homosexuals still may be, though they did not go unnoticed during the war, when so many men fell in love with each other. Some people must now know what one looks like. And spies are everywhere, writing down the names of those hated by someone in order to sell their names.
The Ku Klux Klan is only one of a number of secret organizations founded solely and purely on hate. (By the 1930s it will have some two million members.) These guys hate all Negroes and Jews across the board. The KKK is already scary and powerful. The Knights of the Golden Cross and the Knights of the White Camellia are two others that now appear, pledging themselves to the elimination of the Negro population. The Order of the Brothers of Jesus devotes itself to the hatred of anything Roman Catholic, while the Affectionate Order of Abraham’s Bosom expends its considerable energies solely on hatred of Jews.
