by Jack Cady
"Are you ever going to grow up, Jimmy boy?" My cousin passed me, not running, but striding. Over by the barn the other men hesitated, then decided my cousin could handle matters. They returned to work, could not admit the work was hopeless.
Jaws of depression gnawed. No matter how hard men struggled, failure and despair were triumphant. Some years we did not make seed money. The bill for land tax stood dark as that black tree.
The sewing machine sat in a corner of the invaded parlor, and the tinker knelt. He removed a worn sleeve from the treadle. He spoke of a neighbor’s daughter, studying at Ball State Teacher’s College.
My cousin stood in the doorway. I stood behind him, embarrassed to be there, unable to not be there. The three women watched the tinker. My mother laughed. My grandmother said that college would be good for that particular girl. My least cousin yearned after the tinker’s words. To us, college was a grand and remote place. I fidgeted. My grandmother turned, saw us in the doorway.
"Ralph," she said to my cousin, "this is not your place."
I do not know how scorn and sadness can combine in such a low voice. The tinker knelt above his work, but for a moment he fumbled with his wrench. My mother turned. I had never seen such anger from my mother, never saw such anger afterwards. My least cousin blushed and stood silent. The man in the doorway stiffened. He stood rigid as a rifle.
"You’d take away what little joy there is," my grandmother said. "Get about your business." She turned back. My mother looked at me, and I did not understand her quick sadness. Nor, probably, did she.
I sat in the kitchen with Ralph as the tinker finished his work. The man sat with fists closed. His blue eyes turned pale as his face. He fought shame with anger, and while his eyes remained pale his face gradually heated. "We’ll see," he kept muttering. "We’ll see about this."
That night—with the tinker long departed—marked the crossroads of my growing up. A curious silence lived in kitchen and parlor. We were isolated hearts. My mother avoided speaking with my father. My grandmother murmured to my least cousin, had nothing to say to the men. My least cousin worked in complete silence. Darkness lay across the fields by eight o’clock. Exhausted and sullen men made thin excuses to get out of the house, then made no excuse. They piled in the Ford and left on the road to town. For the first time in memory, I went to bed without hearing my father read a passage from the Bible.
No one spoke because no one knew what to say. A stranger came among us. He wielded the power of appreciation, and the power of unheeding affection.
Night passed. Morning arrived with sullen silence. Haying continued, although on that day the men were dragged-out. We made slow progress. When we went to the house for dinner at noon, the women spoke indifferently. An awful resignation dwelt among the women, a permanent tiredness of spirit. I never again remember spontaneity in that house.
The telephone party line buzzed with news. The tinker’s wagon had burned. The tinker was intact. His horses had been unhitched and tied. They were also intact, but the wagon of red and white and blue and green was in ruins . . .
I wish this story could end here. I would be compelled by its darkness, would feel such sorrow, but would not have to feel the rest. I sit in my comfortable workroom and type on this antique machine that was new when the world went spoiled. The tinker was not a man who would seek revenge. Perhaps he taught what old mystics knew, that wisdom arrives on the breath of inexplicable pain.
We got the hay in, and we had three days of storm. Sunday came with church and Sunday school. Cornfields stood bright, dust gone from leaves washed beneath August thunder. The land expressed grain, but lives turned dull as sermons. We left church and drove the graveled road that lay like a glowing path, but our way led back to the farm.
We were met by sparkles of light dancing among the tattered leaves of that spectral walnut. My mother gasped, remained silent. My grandmother chuckled. My least cousin was so confused she seemed about to weep.
"Get to the house," my uncle said to the women. "I don’t want to hear a word." He climbed from the car and stood staring at the walnut. "How in the hell did he do it?"
The tree was alight with polished pans. They hung far out on branches. Pans glowed silver and copper, iron and enamel. No one could climb that tree. Even if a man could, it would be impossible to inch far enough out on the branches.
"He must have nailed boards like steps, then took ‘em back down," my English cousin said. "He must have used a pole and hooked that stuff out there. The man is slick." My English cousin, known for radical notions, was not about to defect from us. At the same time he could appreciate what he saw.
"Jim," my father said, "go get the goddamn rifle."
In a sense it was I who defected. Over the next two years I grew closer to my mother and grandmother. My least cousin turned seventeen. She married. The men became silent and critical, but we still worked. Trapped in questions, I became silent. We avoided our confusions.
At the end of two years we lost the farm to taxes. The world started talking about war, but even that most hideous of wars leaves no memory this enduring:
The tinker used piano wire. Bullets only glanced, causing the pans to dance. We shot at the handles, broke a few pans loose. Work called and we worked. The crops came in.
We fired, and fired, and fired; pings, rattles, the sound of bullets. Autumn departed into winter, and shotguns cleared the walnuts. We spoke of cutting the tree, but did not. We fired as new leaves budded in the spring. Guns tore away small branches, and until we lost the farm they tore at my understanding.
My uncle was tight-lipped when we left the farm. My father wept, but my mother did not. I remember the tractor standing silent in the fields, and a few straggling pans hanging in the walnut. I remember our farm truck loaded with household furnishings, and wish that this were all. It is not, however; for what I remember always, can never forget, are two years of wasted ammunition and the sounds of firing, the silhouettes of raised weapons, the rattle of bullets as men sought redemption; through all the seasons shooting guns into that tree.
Kilroy Was Here
He dreamed his feet were so cold that he ran to the battalion aid station, and there were his mother and sister fixing him some hot food over a wood fire, and poking up the fire so he could warm his feet. But before he could eat the food or warm his feet he woke up—and his feet were still cold.
—Ernie Pyle, “Brave Men”
The V.A. hospital sits solemn and grand above this too busy northwest city where traffic rumbles and rain mostly pours. Darkness lies between this place and the city, a darkness we’ve but noticed lately. I totter at a red-hot half-a-mile an hour along lighted halls and Burnside generally outruns me. Burnside drives a wheelchair and his motto is, ‘Leave no nurse’s butt unpatted’ because, as he says, "Waste is a sin and I’m practicin’ to be a preacher."
And this V.A. hospital, itself, is no bad place for a Burnside type of ministry. The hospital stands like a temple, and through its halls and secret passages and operating rooms eternally pour shapes of human hope and pain; shapes of mystery, dread, high times and low. People stride or tippy-toe or cakewalk these halls depending on who’s got what share of joy or trouble, and where that trouble lives. Talking about the geriatric ward, Burnside says to me, "It ain’t altogether a noble occupation, Ross, but it’s three hots and a flop. It is, by God, a livin’."
"It’s a dying," I tell him. "It’s the jump-off place where the world takes its last shot, and Sarge, the world is gonna win." When you talk to Burnside you have to mix good sense with a touch of facts or he won’t understand. Burnside has flung b.s. for seventy-six of his seventy-eight years, having been somewhat slow as a baby.
He rolls that wheelchair like a Hell’s Angel of the geriatric ward; a wheelchair with racing stripes, a foxtail, an ooga-ooga horn, and the remnants of a Japanese battle flag fluttering from a stick of the kind you see on bicycles. Burnside has arms and shoulders like a dwarfed goliath, and legs so th
in his small feet look like powderpuffs attached to toothpicks. "It’s a real adventure being in this kind of shape," he tells me. "You learn to crap in a lotta new ways." Burnside has about three red hairs remaining along each temple, his dome is bald, his moustache gray, and hair sprouting from his ears approaches maroon.
The kind thing would be to let him pass away in silence, and the smart thing would be to pass away myself; but days stretch long when the brain is good and the body is shot—and for too long, maybe, we’ve been silent. My hands no longer hold a pen, but thanks to the mysterious East I have a tape recorder that works. My hips almost don’t work. I’ve got hips like cracked glass.
My tape recorder purrs like a Japanese cat as I tell about what happens, or has happened, and as I concentrate on Burnside. Burnside was okay until, some years ago, he bounced a Honda Goldwing off a phone pole and into a lady’s petunia patch. She stood wailing over bruised petunias. He claims to have hammed it up over a busted motorcycle and a busted pelvis, taking advantage of the situation in an attempt to lure her into the sack.
Other people around here are lucky, maybe. They fester in a vegetable state. They’ve disconnected from the world, have dreamed their ways into the past, and become ghosts who sit before the dayroom TV; listening to chatter, patter, gossip, and lisping cartoons. The TV spooks are more ghostly than the real ghosts who plague this hospital. This place is a ghost factory.
It was the real ghosts who started things. We lifers were peaceful enough telling lies about our different wars, and about our lives in and out of the military. We were happy checking obituaries each day, and chortling over the passing of generals and presidents. "The main difference between dead and alive," says Burnside, "is that ‘dead’ means off the payroll."
Then the ghosts got into it. They generally hang around the cemetery out back with its brightly glowing slabs, or else jungle up in broom closets or under beds. They wisp their ways through these halls, rolling along silent as the soft paws of dust kittens. The orderlies don’t see them. The nurses don’t see them. We can hardly see them.
"It’s a perfect setup," Burnside says. "Plenty of company, cafeteria, television, bed, and a cemetery right at hand." Then he tells a Burnside type of story. Once, in the days after he retired from the Infantry, he worked as a groundskeeper in a corpse farm called, Rest Eternal. "They had amazin’ discounts for employees," he tells anyone who will listen. "I was losin’ money every day I stayed alive."
But stories about Burnside’s past didn’t amount to a pastel damn once the present took over. The ghosts in this geriatric ward began manifesting. We didn’t know what was happening at first. We did know our ranks were thinning . . . around here the ranks are always thinning. In a little over a month two beds opened up as sgts. Smith and Sanders passed to the great beyond. Their empty chairs in the dayroom quickly filled with a couple of retired Marines still dumb enough to believe they were assigned to temporary duty. Plus, another bed was knocking on empty. The door to corporal Harvey’s room stayed closed. Nurses came and went, came and went. Doctors avoided the place. All signs read ‘Farewell, Dan Harvey.’
Darkness started to roll along the hallways, and darkness clustered in the geriatric ward. The dayroom clouded, became blue like a 1940s bar filled with jazz and tobacco smoke. A clarinet wailed as the TV ceased its quack and faded without a flicker. Darkness fell in individual rooms and squelched the common sounds of people puking, or gasping and sucking for breath, or whimpering as pain pills wore off.
Not a mother’s son or daughter in that dayroom missed a thing, although nurses kept scampering back and forth, back and forth, unseeing.
Ghosts appeared tricked out in their best things, and so solid you could see them. The men wore ’40s uniforms, and the women looked like Greta Garbo, except more fun; American, English, other kinds mostly Oriental. Some of the gals wore uniforms, most wore dresses. The clarinet wailed like the love-ridden and lonesome voice of a transport leaving dock, the voice behind final waves, final goodbyes. The clarinet talked about Lili Marlene, and in the background a trombone sobbed. The ghosts seemed trying to tell us something. A sailor ghost flagged semaphore; colored flags whipping around the alphabet, but the only man on the ward who knew how to read it was a blind quartermaster, so that was a loss.
The halls became bluer, smokier, like lukewarm passions in the dusk of an old man’s mind. Chill air moved through the halls, and the door to corporal Harvey’s room opened. A nurse stepped through the doorway, her shoulders slumped, her hair astray, and she carried that beaten look the nurses get when they have lost.
"Janet," Burnside said in an abstract and irrelevant way that for the moment held no b.s. "Susan. Yukiko-san. The girls we left behind." He watched another dejected nurse leave corporal Harvey’s room. "That poor sumbitch is so dead," he muttered, "that he really ought to go on sick call."
We sat blinking. No one here ever thought of ghosts as more than shadows or memories, fragments of aged imaginations. The past adds up as men age, and remembered voices come from everywhere. Now it seemed there was more to it. I thought of reasons for being in a haunted place. I thought of history, of how things begin . . .
We credit tuberculosis with the building of this hospital. In the early parts of the century the ‘tee bees’ took lives in breathless manners as lungs turned to shreds of dangling tissue, as lesions and excrescence sought out final gasps behind lips stained with choked-up blood. Tuberculosis is not the most vivid of diseases. That score goes to cholera; but unlike cholera, t.b. spelled equal opportunity. It killed schoolteachers and bankers and captains of industry.
Our government, being enlightened, warehoused victims instead of shooting. It built hospitals in remote places. This hospital towers on a long hill overlooking a city that was once a place of neighborhoods if not a city of light. The hospital is thus downwind from prevailing weather patterns. The hospital is huge, serving as a landmark for airplanes, and even a landmark for ships cruising Puget Sound. Its outside displays yellow brick, and its inside glows mental ward green.
By 1940 the docs found ways to beat tuberculosis. Some hospitals closed for lack of customers. Then, as Burnside points out, the happiest circumstance occurred. World War II arrived and spelled a blessing for the medics. "Gave them something to do," Burnside says. "Kept ’em off the streets and out of jail. I never heard of a single doc who got vagged."
A great mixing of ghosts began as the hospital resurrected, first under the military, then under the V.A. Spirits whirled, like in a Waring blender. On this west coast most casualties came from the South Pacific, although a lot of freeze and burn cases came from that snafu in the Aleutians. Men died in colorful ways, or were launched to new adventures from the O.R.s; adventures in learning to walk without legs, work without hands, see without eyes—adventures in sipping beer through a straw when too sad and drunk to pick a glass up with a G.I. prosthesis. Brain cages cooked like French fries as electricity zapped, shock therapy being a hobby with the best medical minds of the day. A grateful nation, loving its loyal sons, did its damndest to sweep the warped remnants of men under the shaggy shagrug of history.
Fortunately for the hospital, as Burnside points out, the country discovered a conscience. "War saves people from themselves," Burnside says, "and we found how to save the slanteyes. We can shoot in any Asian language."
The hospital did not finish sweeping up WWII before Korea vets began to hurt, and Korea did not get swept up even after Vietnam. Around here, docs still sweep, and nurses slump with fatigue and failure when another soul goes west.
What with soldiers and sailors and jarhead marines, it is no surprise this hospital seems loaded with ghosts. I say ‘loaded’ and not ‘haunted’ because until corporal Harvey checked out, the ghosts saw us the same way we saw them, which is to say, insubstantial. Ghosts didn’t give a hang for us, nor did they give a fat rat’s behind. And, we didn’t think they were any too loveable.
I sat, still blinking, and thinking of history a
nd ghosts and blue light and 1940s bars; of transports and tears. Our ghosts had just held a real shindig, then disappeared. The ghost waving semaphore was last to leave.
"Sarge," I said to Burnside, "what in the world was all of that about?" I eased into a chair in the dayroom, sitting among TV stiffs, and looked around. Twenty old soldiers parked there, including a couple of Wacs . . . during WWII one of those kids helped run an ops center in jolly old Liverpool, the other did time in a supply room in Norfolk. There are not many women in V.A. geriatric wards. We only have these two.
Now the Wacs nudged the guys beside them, and the gals made dry-throat giggles of the kind that say, ‘catch me if you can.’ Tallulah Bankhead had nothing on these kids, and who would’ve ever suspected?
"Ross, old buddy, that’s amazin’." Burnside watched the women, watched the surprised but suddenly interested men. "If that’s the best they can do, okay. I’ve got my sights a few clicks higher."
"No b.s.," I told him. "What was all of that about?" I looked around the dayroom. No clarinet, no blue light, nobody waving semaphore or goodbye. The door to corporal Harvey’s room remained closed. Come lights-out orderlies would steal in with a gurney, play body snatcher, and by dawn’s early light corporal Harvey would become a fading memory. This hospital never snatches corpses in broad daylight. It depresses the troops.
"I can’t figure it. If the corporal’s on the far side, why is the far side waving goodbye? Makes me right uneasy." Burnside popped a wheelie. The wheelchair rared like a pony with ambition, then hit the floor as Burnside spun in a circle. He would catch fire-breathing hell if any nurse saw that wheelie. Staff does not like wheelies. Wheelies mark the deck, cause scuffmarks the buffers almost can’t erase, and wheelies are traces of rebellion by patients.
