Basic Training (2 page)
Authors: Kurt Vonnegut
Hope dropped from the wagon, ran to the head of the frantic team, and unsnapped the reins from the bridles. “You’ll regret that piece of high-handedness, young lady,” threatened the driver, pink with anger. In another moment, she had freed the team from the tongue and traces, and set them trotting toward the barnyard.
Haley gaped as the man seized Hope by the arm and fetched her a smart slap on her behind. “Didn’t hurt,” she yelled. The man, still grasping her arm, marched her toward the house. “Don’t care, don’t care, don’t care,” she chanted, as they scuffled nearer and nearer to Haley.
“We’ll see who cares,” said the man. He thrust her before him into the sunroom. Haley instinctively ducked behind a chair. “Now go upstairs, Miss I-know-so-much-more-than-anybody. No supper for you tonight, and no movies for a month. Do we understand each other?”
“Simply don’t care at all,” said Hope. She turned, and walked turtle-slow to the foot of the stairs. “I repeat,” she said, “that I don’t care. I might add that this must have looked simply wonderful to cousin Haley, who’s hiding behind the red chair.”
The man wheeled to glare at Haley’s shelter. Haley bobbed up from behind the chair’s high back and bared his teeth in what he hoped would look like a smile. “How do you do, sir,” said Haley.
“You’re Haley Brandon?”
“Yessir.”
“Well, how do you do, young man? I’m your uncle, the great big bad bully the girls call ‘the General.’ Welcome to Ardennes Farm, and what were you doing behind the chair? Did I scare you, eh?” The General chuckled jovially.
Haley smiled sheepishly. “I just didn’t want to intrude—”
“Sorry about that disturbance,” the General interrupted. “It’s the sort of thing that could happen in any family — maybe not quite as often,” he added thoughtfully. “You saw it all from the first?”
“Yessir.”
“Good. Then I don’t have to justify my actions. You saw the outrage that gave me no alternative.” He dismissed the matter with a shrug. “Well, first let me say that we’re glad you’re here. My sister brought you up as her own, and that’s what I intend to do. I know a good bit about you already from your mother’s letters. You’re thinner than I expected — a whole lot thinner — but otherwise she kept me pretty well posted. She was a lot better letter writer than I am. I know you’re quite a piano player, for one thing, and that you were looking forward to going to Chicago to study at the Conservatory this winter, before all this happened. That right?”
“Yessir, it is. I—”
“Good for you. If there’s anything I admire in a man, it’s ambition. Frankly, wanting to be a piano player seems like a funny one to me, but, like I’ve told the girls a million times, ‘I don’t care what you want to be, just as long as it’s honest, and you want to be the best there is.’ I think maybe we can send you to Chicago, all right.”
Haley broke into his first heartfelt smile of the interview.
“I’ve heard you’re pretty smart all the way around, too,” the General continued. He settled into a chair, and lit a cigarette. “Here you are sixteen, and you’ve already finished up high school. Wish you’d give some of your brains to Kitty. Looks like she’ll be in high school until the diamond jubilee of the atom bomb.” He motioned for Haley to sit down. “I hope you haven’t got a swelled head about your school record.”
“I just liked school was all,” said Haley, blushing, “and I went to summer school. I don’t think I’m any smarter than—”
“Don’t say Kitty,” warned the General. “I was just going to tell you a story about a man I grew up with, just in case you were cocky about being smart in school. I see you aren’t, but I’ll tell it to you anyway. I learned a lot from what happened to him.”
“I’d like very much to hear about it,” said Haley.
“Well, Haley, this boyhood chum of mine was a lot like you, from what I’ve heard about you. He was always reading books, books, books — everything he could get his hands on. We used to ask him to come fishing or to play baseball, and things like that, and he always had the same answer: ‘No thanks, I just got a new book that looks very interesting.’ Sometimes he’d forget to stop reading for meals. By the time he was fifteen, he knew more about the royal family of Siam and the slum problem in Vladivostok than I knew about the back of my hand. All his teachers swore he was a genius, and said he’d be at least President of the United States when he was thirty-five.” He paused to give Haley a meaningful look.
Haley attempted to appear as solemn and absorbed as possible. “What finally became of him?” he asked soberly.
The General seemed satisfied that his story was carrying the proper impact. “When World War II broke out, this man was immediately made an officer. Everybody expected him to win the war single-handed. But when the going got tough over there in France, he cracked up completely. It turned out he didn’t know the first thing about leadership, and he couldn’t even take care of himself, so he was sick all the time.” The General lowered his voice. “The morale in his company was so bad, that all his men had thrown away their gas-masks rather than carry them on marches. The first thing you know, the Jerries dropped mustard gas shells all over them. Zip! One whole company wiped out! And I’ll always say it was a library card that killed them. See my point?”
“Yessir, I think so. He was one-sided. Is that it?”
“That’s it in a nutshell,” said the General, beaming. “You expressed it perfectly. That’s why I brought my whole family out here to the farm to live after the war, to keep us all from getting soft, from getting one-sided. Now spruce up for supper. People with dirty fingernails don’t get to eat around here.”
.
At 2 a.m., Central Standard Time, as reckoned by the parlor mantle clock in the home of Brigadier General William Cooley, retired, a light beam left the burning Sun. At 2:08 it glanced from the lip of a Moon crater, and a second later died on Earth, in the staring eyes of Haley Brandon.
Haley lay sleepless between cool sheets, his thin arms folded behind his head, his eyes fixed on the window through which the wistful moonlight streamed. He felt wholly a stranger. None of the old, seemingly sweetly reasonable patterns of the past now applied. He was not actively melancholy — it was too soon for that. Rather, he was like a settler on his first day in a foreign land, bemused by his initial contacts with unfamiliar customs; not yet ready to admit that it would be those customs instead of his own that would enable him to remain and prosper.
“We’ll see to it that you earn your way as best you can — with good, old-fashioned work. Sounds harsh, maybe, but you’ll thank us for it in later years. We’ll put some meat on you, too,” the General had said at supper. The sweat and sinew-worship that seemed to pervade life at Ardennes Farm was a great curiosity to Haley.
Robust
was the password. As a Manhattan cliffdweller, he had won the loyalty of his small circle of friends — most of them adults and fellow musicians — with the cleverness of his fingers on a piano keyboard, with his promise as a concert pianist. Now, he reflected, the emphasis had been changed to the cleanliness of his fingers, and to whether or not he could move a piano.
Haley thought about the peculiar man into whose hands he had been delivered for guidance. The General, he knew from having heard his mother talk about him, was a competent manager, a brave soldier, and well off financially, though not given to exhibiting the last-named quality. He had taken over management of the old Cooley farmstead, run by tenants for nearly a generation, after his retirement from the Army. Haley remembered a few discussions between his mother and father as to the truth of his mother’s contention that the General, “down deep,” had a heart of gold. His mother had never been able to produce much evidence for the affirmative. His father, on the other hand, had always had dozens of incidents to recall, which seemed to back up his opinion that the General was a “pompous, selfish old teddy bear with sawdust for brains.” As he lay abed for his first night in his new home, Haley thought he liked the General. The man was gruff, certainly, but he always gave sound reasons for the things he did.
Haley flexed his fingers and recalled the dream-like quality his music had given his life in the past; and a pleasurable shudder passed over him as he reminded himself that that part of his life would begin anew in thirty days — for the General had promised that he might go to Chicago to resume his studies then. That was all that really mattered, Haley decided. Knowing that that much of the future was assured, he decided that he could adjust to any of the new order’s rigors, and get along with just about anyone.
It was certainly to the General’s credit as a man of compassion that he should understand the importance of music to his new charge, Haley thought, for the man was as tone-deaf as a sparrow, and so were two of his three daughters. Judging from the whistling and humming they did, only Hope was able to carry a tune. Haley had heard that this was a hereditary trait. His mother, or, as Annie had reminded him, his foster mother, had been similarly afflicted. In this thought Haley found some consolation for his not being a blood relative of the Cooleys. There were apparently no instruments on the farm, and the evening’s choice of radio programs had indicated that the General and his family found homicide far more entertaining than music. As Haley had undressed for bed, he had been surprised to hear an excellent, if untrained, tenor voice singing hymns in the barn, and had wondered who it might have been. It could not have been a Cooley, at any rate. He decided to ask about it in the morning.
Tomorrow his new life would begin in earnest, in the vast, unfamiliar flatness of the Plain — a world of strange sounds and sights and attitudes. He was, the General had said, to help with the haying.
He turned over, pulled the sheet over his head, and closed his eyes. Haley dreamed of saying goodnight to his mother and father, of wishing them, handsome and young in evening clothes, a pleasant time at their party. He dreamed of the friends who had come to get him the next morning, to tell him that he must stay with them for a little while, that there had been an automobile accident, that he mustn’t cry, that he must be a man…. He had cried.
Haley was awakened the next morning by a banging on his door, a shout by his ear, and the shock of a cold washcloth on his face. He sat upright, and saw the General standing at the foot of the cot, squat, fat, and laughing. A towel was knotted about the man’s abdomen; with another he was rubbing his bare chest to a glowing pink. “You’re not in the music business, boy; you’re a farmer now. Take a cold shower, and be down for breakfast in ten minutes, or you don’t eat,” he trumpeted.
“Yessir,” said Haley. Ten minutes later he was seated, puffing and shivering, at the long kitchen table, ducking his head now and then to avoid the flying elbows of Annie, who was energetically making flapjacks on the range behind him. The hot water faucet in the shower stall had been a cruel fraud, he reflected resentfully. The glare from the naked bulb that hung over the table hurt his eyes. He looked away from it to the blackness outside the windows, and realized with sleepy awe that he would be seeing a sunrise for the first time in his life. “Good morning,” he said, after waiting fruitlessly for someone — Annie, Hope, or the General — to acknowledge his presence.
The General and Hope sat across the table from him. Both gave him cursory nods. Hope’s expression was sullen, and the General’s boisterous spirits of a few minutes ago seemed to have fled. Haley supposed that they were still nourishing the unpleasantness of the previous afternoon. Uncomfortable in that sort of silence, Haley tried to break it again. “It’s a nice morning,” he said.
The General looked up. “Brush your teeth this morning, boy?”
“Yessir.”
“Good,” said the General firmly. “Dirtiest place in the world, next to the fingernails, the human mouth is.”
“Speak for yourself,” muttered Hope. Haley was grateful that only he seemed to have heard her. The General gave no sign, devoting his full attention to the flapjacks Annie had placed before him. As had been the case at supper the night before, the General was the first to be served. Haley gathered that it was customary not to talk during breakfast.
As he gulped the last of his strong, black coffee, the back door opened, and a muscular, black-haired man, apparently in his thirties, entered. His clothes were threadbare denim, but his manners were wonderfully courtly, Haley thought, and his grooming faultless. His face was shaved and scrubbed to the luster of wax apples, and his heavily pomaded hair resembled a patent-leather helmet as he crossed the room to a chair next to the range. He made a brief bow to each person at the table, and sat down.
“Annie’ll get you some coffee, Mr. Banghart,” said the General. “By the way, you haven’t met my nephew, have you? Mr. Banghart, this is Haley Brandon. You two will be working together as C-squad on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturday mornings.”