Indignation (19 page)

President Lentz had pronounced the words “thoughtless fun” as scornfully as if they were a
synonym for “premeditated murder.” And so conspicuous was his abhorrence of “rebellious insolence” that he might have been enunciating the name of a menace resolved to undermine not just Winesburg, Ohio, but the great republic itself.

H
ERE MEMORY CEASES
. Syrette after syrette of morphine squirted into his arm had plunged Private Messner into a protracted state of deepest unconsciousness, though without suppressing his mental processes. Since just after midnight, everything lay in limbo except his mind. Prior to the moment of cessation, to the moment when he was past recall and able to remember no more, the series of morphine doses had, in fact, infused the tank of his brain like so much mnemonic fuel while successfully dulling the pain of the bayonet wounds that had all but severed one leg from his torso and hacked his intestines and genitals to bits. The hilltop holes in which they’d been living for a week back of some barbed wire on a spiny ridge in central Korea had been overrun in the night by the
Chinese, and bodies in parts lay everywhere. When their BAR jammed he and Brunson, his partner, were finished—he’d not been encircled by so much blood since his days as a boy at the slaughterhouse, watching the ritual killing of animals in accordance with Jewish law. And the steel blade that sliced him up was as sharp and efficient as any knife they used in the shop to cut and prepare meat for their customers. Attempts by two corpsmen to stanch the bleeding and transfuse Private Messner were finally of no use, and brain, kidneys, lungs, heart—every-thing—shut down shortly after dawn on March 31, 1952. Now he was well and truly dead, out from under and far beyond morphine-induced recollection, the victim of his final conflict, the most ferocious and gruesome conflict of them all. They pulled his poncho over his face, salvaged the grenades in his web belt that he’d never had the chance to throw, and hurried back to Brunson, the next to expire.

In the struggle for the steep numbered hill on the spiny ridge in central Korea, both sides sustained casualties so massive as to render the battle a fanatical calamity, much like the war itself. The few whipped and wounded who hadn’t been stabbed to
death or blown apart eventually staggered off before first light, leaving Massacre Mountain—as that particular numbered hill came to be known in the histories of our midcentury war—covered with corpses and as void of human life as it had been for the many thousands of years before there arose a just cause for either side to destroy the other. In Private Messner’s company alone, only twelve of two hundred survived, and not a one saved who wasn’t crying and crazed, including the twenty-four-year-old captain in command, whose face had been crushed from the butt of a rifle swung like a baseball bat. The Communist attack had been launched by more than a thousand troops. The Chinese dead totaled between eight and nine hundred. They’d just kept coming and dying, advancing with bugles blaring “Arise, ye who refuse to be bondslaves!” and retreating through a landscape of bodies and blasted trees, machine-gunning their wounded and all they could locate of ours. The machine guns were Russian made.

In America the following afternoon, two soldiers came to the door of the Messner Newark flat to tell his parents that their only son had been killed in combat. Mr. Messner was never to recover from the
news. In the midst of his sobbing he said to his wife, “I told him to watch out. He would never listen. You begged me not to double-lock the door in order to teach him a lesson. But you couldn’t teach him a lesson. Double-locking the door taught him nothing. And now he’s gone. Our boy is gone. I was right, Marcus, I saw it coming—and now you’re gone forever! I cannot bear it. I will never survive it.” And he didn’t. When the store reopened after the period of mourning, he never joked lightheartedly with a customer again. Either he was silent while he worked, except for his coughing, or he said in a mumble to whomever he was serving, “Our son is dead.” He stopped shaving regularly and no longer combed his hair, and soon, sheepishly, the customers started to drift away to find another kosher butcher in the neighborhood to frequent, and more of them took up shopping for their meat and their poultry at the supermarket. One day Mr. Messner was paying so little attention to what he was doing that his knife slipped on a bone and the tip of it entered his abdomen and there was a gush of blood and stitches were required. In all it took eighteen months for his hor
rendous loss to torture the wretched man to death; he died probably a decade before the emphysema would have grown acute enough to kill him on its own.

The mother was strong and lived on to be almost a hundred, though her life too was ruined. There was not a single day when she did not look at the high school graduation photograph of her handsome boy in its frame on the dining room sideboard and, aloud, ask in a sobbing voice of her late husband, “Why did you hound him out of the house? A moment’s rage, and look what it did! What difference did it make what time he got home? At least he was home when he got here! And now where is he? Where are you, darling? Marcus, please, the door is unlocked—come home!” She went to the door then, the door with the notorious lock, and she opened it, opened it wide, and she stood there, knowing better, awaiting his return.

Yes, if only this and if only that, we’d all be together and alive forever and everything would work out fine. If only his father, if only Flusser, if only Elwyn, if only Caudwell, if only Olivia—! If only Cottler—if only he hadn’t befriended the superior
Cottler! If only Cottler hadn’t befriended him! If only he hadn’t let Cottler hire Ziegler to proxy for him at chapel! If only Ziegler hadn’t got caught! If only he had gone to chapel himself! If he’d gone there the forty times and signed his name the forty times, he’d be alive today and just retiring from practicing law. But he couldn’t! Couldn’t believe like a child in some stupid god! Couldn’t listen to their ass-kissing hymns! Couldn’t sit in their hallowed church! And the prayers, those shut-eyed prayers—putrefied primitive superstition! Our Folly, which art in Heaven! The disgrace of religion, the immaturity and ignorance and shame of it all! Lunatic piety about nothing! And when Caudwell told him he had to, when Caudwell called him back into his office and told him that they would keep him on at Winesburg only if he made a written apology to President Lentz for hiring Marty Ziegler to attend chapel in his stead and if thereafter he himself attended chapel not forty but, as a form of instruction as well as a means of penance, a total of eighty times, attended chapel virtually every single Wednesday for the remainder of his college career, what choice did Marcus have, what else could he do but, like the Messner that he was, like the student of Bertrand Russell’s
that he was, bang down his fist on the dean’s desk and tell him for a second time, “Fuck you”?

Yes, the good old defiant American “Fuck you,” and that was it for the butcher’s son, dead three months short of his twentieth birthday—Marcus Messner, 1932–1952, the only one of his classmates unfortunate enough to be killed in the Korean War, which ended with the signing of an armistice agreement on July 27, 1953, eleven full months before Marcus, had he been able to stomach chapel and keep his mouth shut, would have received his undergraduate degree from Winesburg College—more than likely as class valedictorian—and thus have postponed learning what his uneducated father had been trying so hard to teach him all along: of the terrible, the incomprehensible way one’s most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result.

In 1971 the social upheavals and transformations and protests of the turbulent decade of the 1960s reached even hidebound, apolitical Winesburg, and on the twentieth anniversary of the November blizzard and the White Panty Raid an unforeseen uprising occurred during which the boys occupied the office of the dean of men and the girls the office of the dean of women, all of them demanding “student rights.” The uprising succeeded in shutting down the college for a full week, and afterward, when classes resumed, none of the ringleaders of either sex who had negotiated an end to the uprising by proposing liberalizing new alternatives to the college officials were punished by expulsion or suspension. Instead, overnight—and to the horror of no authorities other than those by then retired
from administering Winesburg’s affairs—the chapel requirement was abolished along with virtually all the strictures and parietal rules regulating student conduct that had been in force there for more than a hundred years and that were implemented so faithfully during the tradition-preserving tenure of President Lentz and Dean Caudwell.