Butterfly's Shadow (12 page)

One Saturday afternoon, helping her clear away the meal, he looked around the room that served as kitchen and living room.

Above the sink, washing hung suspended from the ceiling, whites that remained grey however hard Nancy scrubbed, shirts that she wrung out and twisted, but that dripped, creating a clammy dankness in the air.

Joey said, mildly, ‘It’s horrible here.’

‘Yes,’ Nancy agreed. ‘It is.’

She looked at the remains of a corned beef casserole on the table. She made sure he had enough to eat, but he looked thinner.

‘Tell you what: why don’t I make us a blackberry pie? We’ll go blackberry picking, like we used to.’

She made an extravagant decision: they took a bus to their old neighbourhood, then walked, though Nancy made sure they avoided the tree-lined street and the house where they had lived in happier days. Further out, on the edge of town they came to the patch of open land where fat, juicy blackberries had flourished, but found it was transformed: no longer a haven of wild fruit and flowers, it was a place of flimsy shacks and cinders, with torn scraps of paper blowing across the wrecked landscape. The brambles were gone, the trees too, chopped down to be put to use as makeshift walls. Pet dogs had formed themselves into packs, loping the perimeter, seeking out trash cans in the hunt for food.

The boy looked up at Nancy, bewildered. ‘What happened?’

‘These are people that lost their homes, Joey. This is where they live now.’

They walked on; she led him to the river where, not long before, the family had spent a Sunday afternoon watching kingfishers and dragonflies, with boys seated on the banks fishing alongside fathers. Now the bank was lined with shanties occupied by homeless squatters. Broken-down trucks without their wheels lay alongside the river like ruined barges.

‘There are lots of these places,’ Nancy said. ‘They call them Hooverville, after the President. It’s a sort of joke, but it’s not funny.’

The two of them looked around silently at the flimsy structures created from rotting planks, cardboard, bits of scrap. There were chimneys made out of tin cans joined together, poking from roofs of tar-paper held down by branches. Nancy saw with a pang that some even had improvised doors that flapped, creaking as the wind hit them.

Women, bodies slack, the hollow of their eyes dark as soot, watched them. She forced herself not to turn quickly aside, to look at these figures, grey as cinders, branded with an invisible scar of shame, and see them as ordinary folk who had once possessed proper homes, where the men had left for work after breakfast, the women had sometimes bought flowers to put in a vase on the window ledge. But they were no longer ordinary; they had slipped through the grid and were drowning in hopelessness. And she became aware that there were no men in sight; an eerie absence at a time when there was really no place else for them to go.

A girl about the same age as Joey squatted to defecate in the scrubland behind a shack. She glanced across at them, her face blank. Nancy took Joey’s arm and turned in the opposite direction, talking rapidly to distract his attention.

‘Well! No blackberries today. We’ll think of something else. One of the mothers at the nursery was telling me she’s trying out all kinds of interesting new ideas for food. She made soup out of stinging nettles.’

Joey wrinkled his nose thoughtfully, trying to grasp a fugitive memory.

‘Nettles are good. I ate nettles.’

She was surprised. ‘When was that?’

‘I don’t remember.’ He began to feel anxious.

Nettles. What next? Nancy wondered. Prices rising, farmers producing less. Perhaps kingfishers and dragonflies would be on the menu; cicadas trapped and broiled. Anything edible.

She recalled a phrase from Ambrose Bierce that she had gleefully committed to memory in college. Bierce said ‘edible’ meant good to eat and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm. It seemed less amusing today.

The toddlers enjoyed singing, and Nancy sang along with them – she loved the high sweet voices wavering through old
nursery songs, chubby hands clapping – but there were days when the singing itself became difficult: taking a deep breath she found herself gasping, on the point of sudden tears, lungs swelling, her voice wobbling on the note. It was as though the stream of sound unblocked a cache of sadness she was holding within her. She longed to get it out, wash it away. Instead she gulped, swallowed, beat time and nodded encouragingly at the children.

Unhappiness grew on her, thickening like a second skin, but she did her best to conceal it, and since she was out of practice with smiling these days, concealment was relatively easy. But one day at the nursery, cradling a curly-haired tot who had grazed his knee, she broke down, holding the toddler to her breast and weeping inconsolably into his soft hair, to the alarm of her colleagues.

Brushing away their anxiety she offered explanations. Her time of the month. A few sleepless nights . . . They sent her home: ‘You have a good rest now.’

In bed, curled into herself, clutching a pillow, she lay unmoving and sobbed into the empty room. Joey had been a mature three-year-old when she took him on; she had missed the early, milk-sweet moments, the small body expanding from the birth canal to fill a mother’s arms; the messy, repetitive demands, the mouth seeking her breast.

Next day she was her usual brisk self, but writing her weekly letter to her mother that night she found tears falling on to the page, smudging the ink.

Driving home, Ben worked on a scenario, trying out different words, rehearsing his speech to Nancy, shaping and reshaping it. Should he build slowly to the point, giving her time to take it in, or lay it out up front? They didn’t talk much these days. Toss a coin; there was no ‘right’ way to deal with this one. He became aware that his bones ached.

He had reached the edge of town when he found his view of the road blocked by a thick cloud of dust which resolved itself into a slow-moving cluster of men: husbands, brothers and fathers of the Hooverville women, a grey, shabby column.

He leaned from the window of the truck.

‘Anyone need a ride?’

A few men gave him a wave; two on the edge of the crowd climbed aboard, and a couple of women with young children.

‘Where to, gentlemen?’

‘We’re heading for Portland.’

‘You can drop us at the turn-off.’

Ben glanced at the men squeezed into the cab of his truck. One of them looked familiar.

‘It’s . . . Walt, right? You guys setting up something?’

He rested his buttocks on the kitchen table and sipped from a glass of water.

‘So I said, what’s going on?’

She continued to get supper ready as he talked, moving from table to gas stove to sink. She did this more and more
these days, half listening, half attending to something else. Ben addressed the back of her head.

‘You know what he said?’

‘Nnh.’ She knew he would tell her. As she began to carve slices off a small end piece of ham she paused and looked over her shoulder: ‘By the way, I had a letter from my mother today.’

He nodded and drained the glass. ‘So anyway, Walt said . . .’

The truck rattled and bounced over the rutted road surface and Walter said in his slow way that the plan was for the men to assemble in Portland and head for Washington the following day.

Ben peeled off a strip of gum and added it to the tasteless lump held between his teeth. He chewed for a moment, drawing the cool, peppermint flavour into his mouth.

‘Washington county, that’s a fair way.’

The two men looked at each other, managing a grin. ‘Washington, DC, Ben, the Capitol. The White House.’

‘Come on, guys. What, you’re crossing the
whole of the United States
?’

Ben overtook the straggling column, inching his way, slow-paced to keep the dust down, throwing quick looks at the men in the cab. ‘Washington DC,’ he repeated, in a tone of disbelief. ‘Washington, DC? That’s what – three thousand miles.’

Now Nancy did stop, in mid-slice, and give him her full attention.

‘
Washington
? We’re talking about the
vets
, right?’

Joey, curled up on the bed in his closet-room, called out, ‘Why are old soldiers going to Washington?’

‘Not so old,’ Nancy said. ‘They were in the war. In Europe.’

She was aware that had Ben been a couple of years older he too might be heading for Washington. So would his big brother, only Charlie hadn’t come back from France. His was one of the white crosses marking the graves of those fallen in battle.

She moved round the table, concentrating on placing knives and forks and plates. Ben sensed she had withdrawn from the conversation. His glance shifted to Joey. The boy at least was listening.

‘Those guys . . .’ Ben shook his head. ‘They’ve got this crazy idea. They’ve tried petitions, speechifying . . .’

He’d read the stories about rioting; newspapers could take a lofty tone, but he thought about Charlie lying in some French field and he understood the frustration that erupted into the breaking of windows and bones.

And today, as the procession wound its way towards town, Ben had seen that these men held within them a slow, determined anger that was building up, and taking them on a long journey.

‘Crazy,’ he said again, ‘Some of them are in really bad shape, half crippled.’ He sounded tired. ‘Washington, DC? They’ll never make it.’

Stirring beans, dicing ham, her back to the other two, Nancy listened as Ben talked on.

‘See, Joey, they have no work, no homes. This is a chance of grabbing the President’s attention. They need their army bonus payments now; they can’t hang around another twelve years or whatever, they’re pretty much starving.’

Nancy put down the knife and rinsed her hands. She pivoted slowly from the sink, wiping her hands on her apron, smoothing her palms repeatedly over her thighs.

‘Ben?’

‘I mean they haven’t thought it out.’

‘You’re going to Washington, aren’t you.’ Not a question.

He stopped. ‘What?’

‘You’re planning on going to Washington.’

‘Who said anything about – did
I
say anything – I said they’re crazy, you’re not listening—’

‘I hear you, Ben, even when I don’t seem to be listening. Why would you want to join this march? First off, you’re not a vet. Second, you have problems of your own. You have responsibilities. Third.’ She stopped. ‘You want to say something?’

He was slow, digging for the words he needed like a farmer sifting through clogged earth. She cut in:

‘You need to be here for us, for Joey and me.’

Washington was about his brother, even if Ben refused to admit it.

‘You’re worrying about the vets? You should be thinking about us.’

‘I think about you all the time. It’s what you do when you love someone.’

Nancy noted, distantly, that in his own way he had just told her he loved her; something she hadn’t heard for a long time. But they had drifted so far apart that the signal was too weak to reach its destination; she remained untouched.

‘The letter from my mother . . .’ She appeared to be changing the subject. ‘She thought maybe Joey and I might stay with them for a while. Not a bad idea, seeing that the nursery can’t afford to keep me on.’

She knew what she was really saying and she knew that he knew.

He nodded, slowly, as though thinking over a complex problem. But what he was hearing was the solution; problem solved, the words had miraculously found their way to him, the situation that could no longer be concealed.

‘Honey, that’s great. I’d like to drive you but the thing is, I won’t have the truck.’

‘It broke down?’

‘I had to hand it in. Repo time.’

She gave him a fierce look, aware of the child listening. ‘We’ll talk later. Let’s eat. Joey, wash your hands.’ She gave him a bright smile. ‘Busy day tomorrow. We need to pack. We’re
visiting with Granny and Gramps. And your father’s going to Washington.’

Later, seated on the edge of the bed, whispering, she questioned him, tired, angry.

‘What happened?’

‘No one needs a truck and driver any more, Nance. The farmers are burning their own corn to keep themselves warm, nobody’s buying anything.’

‘Why in hell didn’t you
tell
me? I could have asked Dad—’

‘I can’t drag your parents into this; they have problems enough already. I’ll find a way. Digging ditches, even.’

‘There are no ditches to dig, Ben. If there were, the vets would be digging.’

Without her parents, they would be moving into Hooverville.

In what other country, what other life, had it been that she occupied an electric kitchen? In a house with two whole floors and a staircase that led from one to the other, all air and space and high ceilings? She recalled the soft shag rugs scattered around the house that gave off a comforting smell, like the fleece of a lamb. Through the half-open door she could see into the next room: the stained walls, the chipped, low-grade furniture. The lamplight showed up cracks in the cheap floor covering.

She had hated this apartment, and now it felt precious: a warm place with a proper roof, a chair to read in, a lamp that shone on to the page. She thought of the shacks along the riverbank, the bitter women with their bird’s nest hair, the children without shoes, faces marked with grime and hopelessness. She thought of Joey. Ben said,

‘I’ll find us something better than this. When I get back from Washington. It won’t be long.’

He gave her the smile that had once turned her heart.
He really meant it. She blinked rapidly, forcing back tears. They were about to pack up their remaining worldly goods; they were losing what they had learned to call home and she was swept with something between sorrow and terror. He reached out and took her hand but it lay limp in his, like a wounded bird.

Around three hundred men were gathered at the Portland railroad mustering yard by the time Ben arrived. It was a fine May morning, the heat of the sun tempered by a refreshing breeze. Some wore working clothes, others had put on their old army uniforms – the veterans’ Bonus Army, they were calling themselves, not altogether seriously. Quite a few had pinned medals to crumpled jackets.