Quartet for the End of Time (8 page)

William Hushka, age thirty-five—a Lithuanian immigrant and veteran from Chicago, who had sold his butcher shop to join the U.S. Army in 1917—and Eric Carlson—thirty-eight years old, from Oakland, California, who had survived the most brutal of the trench war fighting in France—were dead.

Within minutes, ambulances had arrived and the bodies of the dead men, along with the injured police officers, were carried away.

M
EAN WHILE
, G
ENERAL
M
AC
A
RTHUR HAD
called up Dwight D. Eisenhower and, despite Eisenhower's protestations that suppressing a potential riot was “beneath the dignity” of any Army chief of staff—or even, by implication, a low-ranking aide—had begun briefing him on the full-scale combat operation he was about to put into effect. An hour later, Glassford arrived at the Ellipse on his motorcycle to find MacArthur in full dress uniform. When he asked what the plan was regarding military presence on the Hill, MacArthur replied without hesitation. We are here to break the back of the BEF, he said. We'll move down Pennsylvania Avenue first, sweep through the billets there, then clean out the other two camps. The operation will be continuous. It will all be done tonight.

Glassford requested a ten-minute delay, which he was granted. He raced to the Penn Ave. camp to spread the word among the veterans still billeted there. Then he ordered the message carried to the other camps, urging the immediate evacuation of at least the women and children. He then cleared Pennsylvania Avenue, where a sort of ceremonial order had fallen over the crowd who had gathered there, waiting for the troops.

I
T WAS A LONG WAIT
. The troops were still being sailed upriver from Fort Washington. More were arriving from Fort Myer—having left, for the first time in its history, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier alone and unguarded. Finally, the first of them came into sight—accompanied by a half dozen flatbed trucks and tanks, which, as Judge Kelly had warned, had been transferred to Fort Myer in early June, should the occasion for their use arise.

At four-thirty p.m., armed with tear-gas grenades, and the instructions from MacArthur to use “such force as necessary” to accomplish the task, the troops, with sabers drawn, their feet clicking like wrought iron on the hard pavement, approached Camp Glassford. Many of the veterans and bystanders along the route cheered, thinking the procession merely a demonstration of strength—but the mood soon changed when, after arriving at the Ford building, the first troops stopped abruptly and fixed their bayonets at a crowd of veterans, just then lining up for mess call.

The last time I saw bayonets I was going through Marne, came the shout of one veteran.

A whistle rose through the crowd. A few men laughed.

You got three minutes! yelled an officer. Three minutes, I warn you! And then what? a veteran called.

Then it's the Marne all over again, another replied.

A stone soared through the crowd. At first it looked like a bird. Then the riot began. The infantrymen donned gas masks and approached the billets, tossing tear gas grenades behind them as they went. The recently evacuated buildings were set on fire, and before long the entire city seemed engulfed in gas and flame. An officer moving between his ranks said, Be careful, men, don't burn any flags. But everything was burned. The scraps of wood and other materials that had been used as shelters for those billeted outside the government houses—everything.

The veterans retreated. There was nothing else to do. A few stood their ground and were grazed in warning by the sabers of approaching soldiers. One man, blood streaming from his ear and holding aloft a tattered flag, screamed, Hit me! Hit me, you yellow bastards! I took it then and I can take it now!

And somewhere—amid it all—Arthur and Douglas were moving, Alden with them. Somewhere, Chet. Somewhere, John and Aida. This more than anything was difficult for Sutton, later, to imagine. The child pressed tightly against Aida's breast to protect it from the choking gas. The child, breathing in terrified gasps, forcing her head against her mother's hand—unable to tell the difference any longer between the protection, which the hand delivered, and the smothering air.

What thoughts would have flickered through the mind of the tall Indian as he pressed himself, along with his young wife and child, to the outer limits of the crowd? Only to find that everyone else was pressing in the same direction. Only to find that there was, therefore, no outside or inside any longer to press toward, and that likewise it was impossible to discern between the shouts of the veterans and the shouts of the soldiers; between his own thoughts and the noise of the street—or even, indeed, between the future and the past. So that the stories of his ancestors
(which had been passed down from generation to generation, and which now, as ever—so profoundly had they been etched there as to become nearly a physical trait—trembled in his brain) mixed indistinguishably with his own deeply personal and most ardent desires. How they had once been driven by cattle prod, from the fertile Mississippi River Delta over seven hundred miles, through fire and flood and driving hail, into the dusty center of the beleaguered continent where nothing grew, and how they would, at last, be relieved of that history, became one, a single element, which the Indian moved through then; his arms stretched out as far as he could extend them, as though moving—or attempting to move—through the impassable space of a uninterpretable dream.

Finally, though, there would have been—there would have had to have been—some sudden, dramatic shift in pressure. By whatever outside force: some change, some slight shift, and then—no more resistance. The crowd, unexpectedly released from whatever it was that had kept them knotted, both pressed upon and pressing against one another, suddenly free to move in any direction they chose.

Without pausing to consider any other option, the Indian, his wife and child—absorbed by the singular determination of the crowd— would have turned, then, as one, and headed back toward the camp. There was something irresistible about it. That final blaze on the horizon: so big it lit up the whole sky.

II.

Douglas

ON THE MARCH. JUNCTION CITY
,
TOPEKA, KANSAS CITY, EARLY MAY, 1932—WITH A BRIEF DETOUR TO BELLEAU WOOD, FRANCE, 1918, AND SILVER PEAK, NEVADA, 1930— SIBERIA, 1918–1920
.

L
ater, what Douglas remembered best was not really his father at all, but the shape of his father, from behind: head bent and leaning into the wind—the entire empty state of Kansas opening off around him, from every side. Douglas's own lungs, as he ran, would be filled nearly to bursting, his brain hot with thinking how much, how badly, he wanted to catch him this time. But each time, equally, he would not. Each time, when his father halted, he would find himself still several paces behind. He would pull up short and stand there while his father caught his breath. Sometimes his father would even have to drop to the ground; sort of arch his back up—his head thrown at an angle so that his two missing teeth showed, and the thick tendons in his neck stood out like hard wire. It was a wonder Douglas never could catch him, the way his father choked and sputtered like that at the end. His own breath came
back so easily. It was like, after it was over, he hadn't even tried—while his father's heavy breathing and slow recovery attested clearly to the fact that he'd expended nearly everything he had. That was, of course, the difference: the exact distance by which Douglas always lagged, and each time, because of it, he swore that next time he'd try harder. He'd throw himself into the race like there wasn't going to be anything he would need his heart or his lungs or his legs for ever again after—but next time would always turn out the same. His father spluttering and half dead with exhaustion and him just standing there—as though he had hardly even moved, but just followed with his eyes.

When his father had caught his breath again, it was always the same.
Well, I ain't beat yet
, he would say. More to himself than to Douglas. Then he'd pick himself up and the two of them would walk together back to the wagon, which seemed, suddenly, from that distance, small and insignificant, like it could never hold anything—even if they filled it up and emptied it again a thousand times.

Then his father would start to laugh.

Ha, ha! he'd shout. If the Duke could see us now!

It was in those moments, when his father laughed like that and invoked the Duke by name, that Douglas got his first, brief inkling that the Duke did not preside over time itself—deciding at any moment what was and was not to be done with it. Everyone was always talking about it like that. It was always “the Duke's time and money,” and how much of it went into, or came out of, any given thing. Never once as a boy, that he could later recall, did he hear of time falling under anyone else's jurisdiction.

But just before they returned—before the wagon once again established itself in correct proportion to the field and their approach— Douglas's father would pause again, suspending the moment just that one beat longer, before he bent again to his task, and Douglas followed. Before their minds, in unison, began revolving slowly, once more, around the same narrow groove that countless rotations had already worn: wondering to themselves, for example, what was cooking up at the house, though it never turned out to be more than one of two or three
things, about how much longer it was until quitting time, and how many more rocks they would pick until then, Douglas's father would stretch his hand out, in the direction they'd come, and say, By God, would you look at that, boy? And then he'd turn to Douglas, and Douglas would turn in the direction his father pointed, and strain his eyes as far as he could see. Because, even though he was never mistaken by his father's tone to imagine there really was some particular thing to see out there, he always looked anyway, as if there might be one time, and was always, therefore, equally surprised when he saw, again, only an empty Kansas sky. Hardly ever even a cloud, as he later recalled it—and the field below, so flat and big and empty that at a certain point it was impossible to tell where the field ended and the sky began. There was nothing, nothing, not even a bird that would stay still long enough for him to fix with his gaze. And it would not be until many years later that he would finally realize that what had stirred in his father, in those moments—what had impelled him to pause, to turn back, to strain against that emptiness for something he could, if briefly, share with his son—was not any
thing
at all. That there existed in the very act of looking, or rather in its brief— and almost wholly imaginary—arrest, some resistance to the slow constriction of the heart brought about generally by the passage of time, which had, almost certainly (though this, too, Douglas had no knowledge of then), already narrowed the passageways leading toward and away from it to such a degree that it was for that reason and that reason alone that he both ran harder, and gasped longer, after running a certain distance across the Duke's—unmeasurable—field.

It makes him sad to think of it now, so many years later. Of the way that his father, and his mother, too, no doubt—with her surprised eyes and her mouth always set in a thin line, making it seem as though she were forever attempting to cure herself of the hiccups by holding her breath—must have also felt that slow constriction over the years from some equivalent point in their own childhoods, when they, too, must have felt the same way he did, while chasing after his father, whom he never once could catch. He can't help but wonder, when he thinks of it, if there might be another, different sort of world, or a way of living in it,
where the heart would not constrict. Where the skyline would always seem as it did in childhood: irrelevant, nearly abstract. But then he always gets stuck wondering about it, because it is only in retrospect, after all, that he is able to recognize—in the way he wanted to, so badly, then—the sort of beauty in the landscape his father had pointed to when he stretched his hand toward it, and, with that gesture, conjured it into being at all.

S
O THEN IT WAS
quitting time. They'd walk, the two of them, to wash themselves in the cold water, which, after a few strong thrusts, the handle screaming, gushed from the pump's long snout. It felt good, the way that water poured over Douglas's head and down the back of his neck, wetting his shirt. His father would take his handkerchief and find a clean corner of it to scrub behind Douglas's ears, and before he tucked the rag away, he'd show Douglas the dirt that he'd gathered. Then they'd turn together toward the house, and as they approached, a black shape would appear from beneath the eaves to take the form of a crow—a big bird with a damaged wing his father had tamed, and whom he called Faustina, though never in front of Douglas's mother. (After an Italian girl with a wooden leg, he'd said, whom he had known, briefly, during the war.)

Each evening when they returned from the field she would appear from beneath the eaves, at first dark and indistinct, to become a bird and sit on Douglas's father's shoulder and poke her beak into the thinning hair on top of his head, and his father would sing a few lines of “Roses of Picardy.” It was the only song Douglas ever knew him to sing, but he sang it well—his voice vibrating deep in his chest on the lower notes. Then, when they reached the porch, he would lift the bird from his shoulder and place her down lightly on the porch rail before ducking into the kitchen ahead of Douglas, where his mother would have already laid out the meal. She kept it waiting each evening, either on the stove or in the oven, 'til the loud squeal of the pump across the yard warned of their arrival. It was at that point that (though Douglas himself never witnessed the moment) she would bring it out and then disappear into the kitchen
again, so that it would always be there, waiting for them, when they arrived—the steam still rising—as though no one had had a hand in its making.