Good Hope Road: A Novel (48 page)

He grimaced. ‘Just kids being kids, but those snowballs stung, made some of the men real mad.’ He drew on his cigarette again. ‘It was when the blasting started that I had to leave. The sound of it . . .’ He looked at the Major. ‘Couldn’t take it,’ he said simply. ‘Too much like France.’

He’d dropped out of the camp in Vermont last year, wandered some, and when his dollars ran out, footed it back to Washington. Figuring that he’d had about all that he could take of the cold, he’d signed up for a veteran rehabilitation camp way down South, near Charleston.

The rehab camps had been set up the previous fall. Loath to enlist additional veterans into the previously initiated CCC projects, not when there were so many younger, able-bodied men across the country eager to enrol, the Roosevelt Government had instead formulated a plan targeted specifically at veterans. The men who signed up at these rehab camps would be assigned public work projects. All meals and board would be taken care of, with pay ranging from between thirty and forty-five dollars a month.

There was a fundamental difference between the CCC and the rehab camps though. The latter were filled not only with down-on-their-luck doughboys, but a sizable number of veterans who’d previously been claiming disability benefits. In the wake of the budget cuts implemented by the Roosevelt administration, veteran benefits had been affected across the board. Those with physical disabilities and service-related illnesses had their benefits reduced. Those with ‘neuroses’ that could not irrefutably be connected to their time served in France lost their benefits entirely.

‘A lot of head cases,’ Connor said now. ‘Wasn’t anywhere else for them to go, after their benefits were taken away. Good men, some better than others, but real messed up from the Front. There was this engineer, not two whiskers on his face, although we must have been about the same age. Babyface here was real polite, real pleasant, but a couple of drinks in him and he’d just about turn inside out. He’d go looking for trouble, pick fights with just about anyone – the bigger the better – get himself beat to a pulp on purpose.’

He chuckled as he poured himself another shot of whisky. ‘Not that the rest of us were much better. All sorts of trouble they have down there in the South, and we found it all. Come payday, this guy who owned a bar in Camden would send down a bus for us; in between, there were sellers of moonshine. And the women! This one time, a buddy was up to his eyeballs in booze, so pickled that he goes wandering off into some stranger’s house. He goes right on upstairs and when the homeowner returns, who does he find but this weary-ass doughboy, all tucked up and snoring in his bed!

‘That one, the police laughed off. But when a bunch of us got into a fight with some of the locals last month, that didn’t go down as well.’ His face twisted. ‘You know what happened in Washington around then, Major.’

‘The veto.’

It had been a crushing disappointment. When the Bonus Bill had passed with such ease through Congress in January, veterans across the country had come to believe that their bonuses might at long last, be in sight. For months, it was all Connor and so many more like him had talked about, the BONUS, the
Bonus!
, spinning dreams around all that they’d do when they finally had it in their hands.

On 22 May 1935, however, President Roosevelt stood before Congress. In an unprecedented move, he explained in a fifty-five-paragraph speech just why he was compelled to veto the Bill. It was one thing, the President maintained, for the Government to provide inancial support to those veterans left physically disabled by the war. It was quite another entirely to be expected to accord special compensation via the Bonus Bill to the able-bodied. Those veterans, he said, ought to be treated exactly the same as other American citizens, on a par with all those who did not wear a uniform during the war.

Yet again, victory had been snatched from the veterans. In this cruel, see-saw ride, the Bonus Bill was now dead until 1936, when the next session of Congress would convene.

Connor had fallen into a black mood after the broadcast. The veto had been bad enough, but what made it worse were the President’s words.

‘The veteran who is disabled owes his condition to the war. The healthy veteran who is unemployed owes his troubles to the Depression.’

The statement had picked at a deep-rooted sense of shame. What of the years
before
the Depression, then? Everyone around him was making money hand over fist, while nothing had seemed to stick with him. The drifting, the falling in and out of jobs, the troubles at home – he’d been one of the lucky ones, practically unscathed in France, and yet, he’d racked up failure after failure all the years of his return.

Men like him had returned from the Front entirely capable, the President had stated with such firm conviction. The parts inside of him that felt shot through to pieces, those then, Connor thought, must be entirely of his own making. A fault of character, an abject failing of strength.

‘I rounded up a bunch of us for some hard drinking that evening,’ he recounted now to the Major and Jim. ‘We piled into a couple of beat-up old cars and headed into town. Every last penny we had, we put it on the counter and told the bartender to keep ’em coming. The mood we were in, didn’t take much to get into an all-out brawl with some locals. The police came, blowing their whistles and laying about with batons. Next thing you know, they put us doughboys behind bars. We were still so cut up over what we’d heard on the radio, we broke that jail.’

Connor waved his cigarette about with boozy pride. ‘That’s right, we
broke
the damn jail. The entire top floor – smashed the panes and broke the screens, pissed all over the walls. The captain in charge of the camp was a real decent sort. He sprung us out of there, but told us there wasn’t much more that he could do for us, not after the trouble we’d stirred up. He paid us for the rest of the month and said we’d have to move on to someplace else.’

He gave a bitter laugh. ‘So here I am again, moving on, back on the road again. You know the best part of it, though? They had us all working on a new golf course while we were there. A golf course, when I bet you anything that there weren’t one set of golf clubs in all of that rundown little tank town.
A fucking golf course
! Busting our backs and knees for one dollar a day.’ Connor barked with laughter again. ‘We doughboys should be treated no different, the President said, than those who did not wear a uniform. When we shipped out to France, we went ready to fight for this country. Went ready to die. You tell me, Major, just how are we the same then, as the ones that stayed behind?’

The Major rose from the table, and reaching for his walking stick, limped from the room. When he returned, Jim recognised the book in his hands.

‘You seen this?’ the Major asked quietly. Connor shook his head.

He thumbed through the passages of Major General Butler’s book, until he found the one he wanted. He began to read aloud. ‘I have visited eighteen government hospitals for veterans. In them are a total of about fifty thousand destroyed men – men who were the pick of the nation eighteen years ago. The very able chief surgeon at the government hospital at Milwaukee, where there are three thousand eight hundred of the living dead, told me that mortality among veterans is three times as great as among those who stayed at home.’

The Major paused, his voice raw. He coughed, cleared his throat. ‘Boys with a normal viewpoint . . . ’ he rasped, breaking off into another bout of coughing.

Jim stood up, and looking over his father’s shoulders, took up the narrative. ‘Boys with a normal viewpoint were taken out of the fields and offices and factories and classrooms and put into the ranks. There they were remoulded; they were made over; they were made to regard murder as the order of the day. They were put shoulder to shoulder and, through mass psychology, they were entirely changed. We used them for a couple of years and trained them to think nothing at all of killing or of being killed.’

Jim paused, disturbed. Connor sat in rapt concentration, staring at the table; even his father, despite having read the book from cover to cover, was listening intently to the words.

‘Then, suddenly, we discharged them and told them to make another “about face”! This time they had to do their own readjustment, sans mass psychology, sans officers’ aid and advice and sans nationwide propaganda. We didn’t need them any more. So we scattered them about without any “three-minute” or “Liberty Loan” speeches or parades. Many, too many, of these fine young boys are eventually destroyed, mentally, because they could not make that final “about face” alone.’

‘You’ve got a place here, you know,’ the Major said gruffly the next day, as Connor prepared to leave. He’d head down to New York, look up a couple of buddies there, he said. Maybe Angelo in New Jersey, and then onwards to Washington. There was a rehab camp in Florida, he’d heard about; maybe it was time he checked out that part of the country.

‘It means a lot to me, Major, but no.’ He grinned. ‘Don’t think I can take another one of your winters.’

The Major nodded without comment, understanding, however, the real reason behind Connor’s reticence.

‘Maybe you could come for apple picking season then, in the fall,’ Jim suggested, helping Connor with his knapsack.

‘Nah. I’ll be in Florida then, sitting by the water, a knockout by my side.’

‘There are storms in Florida,’ Madeleine pointed out, and he laughed.

‘Hemingway lives down there,’ the Major remembered. ‘Ernest Hemingway,’ he said, as Connor looked at him blankly. ‘Famous writer. He served as an ambulance driver in France.’

‘Well I’ll surely say hello if I run into him. Maybe he can write a story about me and my buddies, huh, Major?’

The Major smiled. ‘Should you change your mind,’ he said again, ‘you always have a place here.’ He hesitated, wanting to address what he knew was Connor’s true concern, but trying to find the right words.

Giving up, he looked the younger man in the eye,‘We’re
all
fuck-ups, Connor,’ he said then.

Connor looked away, fiddling with his hat. ‘I guess I just don’t want to fuck up around folks I know,’ he said, barely audibly. Although he was not yet forty, Connor suddenly looked like a very old man. ‘Been fucking up a long time, and I’ll not do it no more around those I know.’

On 28 July, the third anniversary of the Anacostia evacuation, Connor was in Washington yet again. He was part of a contingent of two hundred veterans who marched across the Potomac River to Arlington National Cemetery. The two veterans who had been killed during the riots that day in 1932 lay buried here; the veterans laid wreaths at their graves.

Almost immediately after, Connor enlisted with the camp in Florida. He soon found himself headed down the coast, all the way to Matecumbe Island in the Florida Keys.

Matecumbe Island • 2 September 1935

t had already begun to rain when Connor awoke. He groaned and rolled on to his back, his eyes adjusting to the leaden light as water dripped down the window panes. The barracks were rank with booze and sweat. He sat up gingerly, wincing as he reached for the bottle that lay beside him. There was hardly anything left, but he tilted it to his mouth all the same, draining the last few drops. He swayed upright to his feet. Men lay slumbering around him, in various stages of repose and undress. One of the women from the previous evening was still there, he noticed, snoring gently on somebody’s bunk. Connor let his eyes move over her, dwelling on the naked flop of her breasts, the undulation of waist and thigh. He passed a hand over the semi-hardness of his crotch, and sensing the urgent pressure of his bladder, lurched unsteadily towards the door.

The wind was brisk enough that he had to lean against the door to keep it propped open as he unzipped his pants. He urinated into the wind, letting the rain wash against his face. It felt good.

‘Shut the damn door,’ someone yelled from inside the barracks. ‘Your piss – it’ll all wash inside.’

Connor let rip a loud fart in response, continuing to watch the streaming palms, the wind whipping caps of frothy white from the waves. The storm that they’d been talking about at the bar, it was here.