Alive and Dead in Indiana Read online

  Major Whistler steps out on the porch of his quarters and shouts with command, “What in God’s name is going on here!”

  The sisters confide to those nearby that the boy needs a mother, that he’s getting too big to chase after.

  Harriet is portrayed as a flirt, though distracted with the care of her father. Her motivation for wishing to see our father married again comes from her own desire to be free to find a husband. She will later marry a Captain Phelan who will be killed in Detroit. She’ll live to 1872. Harriet.

  Major Whistler will become the military storekeeper at Bellefontaine, Missouri. He will move with the troops to the new Jefferson Barracks in 1826, and die there in September.

  Eliza will go with her husband, Lieutenant Curtis, from here to Detroit to Green Bay. She will have a child in the cradle and one in school when, one day, while washing clothes in a river near Fort Howard, she will be killed by a bolt of lightning. That’s it for Eliza.

  Daniel Curtis and I are eating pieces of pie in the hospital. He is there caring for Marshall. The record shows that Curtis served as the fort doctor that summer when there was no one else to do it. Had some training, had some schooling. He was liked by the Indians, having witnessed the speeches at Brownstown in 1810. He was a schoolteacher from New Hampshire.

  “Stickney,” he said, “is an opportunist. He is receiving money from the whiskey-traders.”

  The pie is very good. Made with berries from our own canes.

  It is hard for me to keep from thinking about the futures of these people. I feel sorry for Curtis, though it is years before his wife’s death and his bungling at Fort Howard. He will be court-martialed and discharged.

  We sit and eat the warm pie in pieces he’s cut with his knife. We’ve hidden what’s left of it beneath a bunk. The man who plays Curtis winks at me a lot.

  The visitors stick their heads in the door. They see us eating the pie in what seems a normal fashion. They see another log building, bare and chinked. The planking has been ripped out by a two-man saw. The only color is the leather fire bucket in the corner. It’s painted blue.

  Les says that it would drive him crazy.

  “It’s enough for me just to not think about school this fall.”

  We are sitting on the riverbank by North Side, down below the concrete levee. The brewery makes the air smell rotten. Cottonwood seeds are floating in the green water. I tell him it’s kind of like living with premonitions all the time or ESP.

  “It’s neat knowing everything,” I say.

  The clock on the brewery has read twenty after ten since it was sold to a national brewer.

  “See,” I say, “they’re going to let that place go right down the drain. Let it all just fall apart.”

  Les just grunts and heaves a rock to make the pigeons fly. Cadmium is light blue, I think, and rhodium is red but expensive. Iodine is not really black but violet. A dark violet.

  We have been spying on the cheerleaders who are practicing in the parking lot by the school. We watch them from behind the levee as they work on their movements. The way they clap their hands and bounce on their toes. They climb on each other’s knees and backs. They do the type of cheers you like to watch even though you can’t cheer along with them. Splits and flips. They wear red sweatshirts, white skirts.

  “Try and explain that to future generations,” Les says. We keep watching through the afternoon, ducking down to the river when we think they’ve seen us. The littlest one is on the top of the pyramid. We see her skirt fly up. She lands on her feet and bounces. Falling with her from all over the formation are the other girls, landing and clapping. They bounce, no longer in unison. Applaud what they’ve done. Then they do the pyramid cheer again.

  I like to think the painter Whistler didn’t paint a picture of his father because he was like me. He didn’t trust his memory, was only comfortable with a model sitting in front of him. He was my age when his father died, and he’d just started drawing.

  I have a collection of postcards with reproductions of his paintings and his etchings. Les says if I have etchings, I should tell the cheerleaders to come around and take a look.

  They are pictures of docks and streets in France and England—highly detailed—panes in the windows and reflections in the glass. The portraits are all very sad, though I can see that they are beautiful. They are titled after their colors and compared to music.

  Arrangement in Black and White.

  Blue Nocturnes.

  Things like that.

  The picture of his mother has a picture hanging on the wall that I can barely make out. I think it is another one of his pictures. I can’t imagine what he looked like. George, I mean. Sideburns, I guess. A high collar? The Czar took a ruler and drew a straight line from St. Petersburg to Moscow.

  “Do this,” he said.

  And Whistler did.

  His father, Major Whistler, and B. F. Stickney are having it out near the gate. Everyone draws in, the garrison as well as the remaining visitors, who feel better about what is happening around them now. This is all made up, they are thinking.

  “How dare you, sir! How dare you!” Stickney is saying.

  The Major produces maps and indicates lands deeded by the treaty of Greenville to the Richardville clan of the Miami in perpetuity.

  “There are white settlers on the land, Mr. Stickney. Here and here.”

  I see my father in the crowd, listening to what’s going on.

  I guess it looks like a dispute at home plate, both benches emptied.

  Soldiers are moving in with muskets. They begin breaking through the crowd. Lieutenant Curtis holds the two men apart. His hat is knocked off his head. “Gentlemen! Gentlemen!”

  I edge over to my father, who asks me what’s going on. I tell him about what Stickney’s been up to, selling land to families up from Kentucky, paying off the tribes, and getting the money back by tripling the whiskey prices on payment day.

  I can smell the copper.

  He has just come from the plant, so it’s strong and mixed in with my own smell and the smell of the wool uniforms that only get washed once a week since that was regulation. My dad begins to ask me another question, but then I can see he starts to understand the way things work. So he waits for me to speak first.

  He probably stopped by to give me a ride home, probably got across the bridge without paying since it’s close to closing.

  My eyes are very tired and I can’t wait to take them out. I mean the contacts. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to wear them as long as they say you’re supposed to.

  The soldiers are pushing us all back with their muskets now. The braid on their shakos is loose. There is an eagle and a white cockade. The hats make the soldiers look taller.

  My father takes a few steps back. His tie is loose but still knotted.

  This is the first time he has seen the fort. I point out the gardens and the pickets and the Pennsylvania key, notched in the corners of the buildings. Cars are going by on Spy Run. Flashes of color. Engines are revved high. People are on their way home from work. We stand there on the edge of the crowd, my dad and I, listening to an argument that was settled a long time ago.

  DEAR JOHN

  I am living in Indianapolis now. Like me, it has no reason for being here. The people of the state simply wanted their capital in the middle of Indiana, paced off the distance, and brought an apprentice of L’Enfant out from Washington, D.C., to make all the same mistakes in this city’s plans. Streets, named after states, radiate from circles where monumental statuary bases are waiting for statues, waiting for someone to become famous enough to become a statue. Everywhere you look in this city you see these flat-topped pyramids, empty niches in building facades, friezes without faces, metopes without bas-relief. The circles here, too, were planned for defense purposes as if someone would wish to take a thing that was never meant to be. The theory was that batteries positioned in the circles could command three hundred and sixty degrees of the neighborhood.
The airplane makes this all silly, of course. But, on the other hand, it is only from the air that you can see the plan, gain any perspective on the order here. Instead, the circles cause traffic jams, rotaries coursing with cars at all hours (late-model plum-colored Chevrolets, it seems, are everywhere), all looking for numbered streets. There are quadrant designations too—NW, SE. It is very much like an army camp, except there are no white rocks. There are boulders on people’s lawns. Blank bronze plaques are bolted on the sides of the boulders. In the summer, you can watch the husbands trim the grass by crawling on all fours around the boulders using those hand clippers. The boulders came all the way from Canada, their sides worn smooth for the plaques by the glaciers that carried them down here.

  I came here looking for you. You’re not dead yet, officially. Still listed as missing in action on the Lung-hai Railroad en route to Hsuchow, China, 25 August 1945. I can’t go back there now and look for you myself. What were you doing in Anhwei Province? Another airfield in the middle of nowhere? I thought when you left Changsha for the last time you were on your way to Shantung Province to organize the North. I can’t remember what you said to me.

  The woman at the American Legion headquarters here is very kind and helpful. She tells me that I mustn’t worry, that GIs are marching home all the time. Some have knocks on the head and have lost their memories. Pockets of Japanese resistance are still being turned up on nameless atolls a dozen years after the surrender. There are prisoner exchanges all the time. Priests stumbling out of the jungle. I have pretty much given up hope, though. I go on out of habit. I think you can keep someone alive. I keep. I still write often to your sister Betty on the farm in Macon. I tell her about her brother in China. She tells me about growing up with you in Georgia. The farm, she writes, has now been all planted with trees, just as you wanted it to be. Elm (though there is a new disease here in the States that is killing them), tulip, white pine, and, of course, birches that do not grow well since they are not native to the South. Your father still preaches. Your mother still plays the organ for him. Things would not be that different if you came back now.

  I sit in the study room at the American Legion with the other women—widows mostly, though some are old girl friends like me. We all have our files, the accordion type, filled with letters from comrades, maps, commendations, canceled orders. We wait for records to become declassified, for belongings or effects or last remains to appear from the warehouse searches in Kansas City. The older women wear hats with veils. The cross-hatch of the netting makes their faces look made up out of dots like newspaper photos. They remove just the one white glove, the one from their writing hand. The other glove is specked with the crumbs from their erasures. When a regular gives up her place by the window, someone new comes to take it and stays until, a few weeks or years later, her work too is done.

  In front of the American Legion Headquarters building, a mall begins, and from there it stretches four blocks along Meridian and Pennsylvania to the Post Office. There are plazas and parks. There is a hundred-foot obelisk of black Berwick granite. Around the base is a varicolored electric-lighted water fountain. There is a cenotaph, gold Roman eagles and all. Halfway down the mall is the War Memorial, a replica one-third the size of the mausoleum erected by Artemisia. There is even a light on the plateau of the stepped roof that represents the eternal flame. Scaffolds, like the ones window-washers use, hang high up along the west wall of the building. Workmen are still carving the names of the Korean dead. Watching them, I hear the sound of hammer and chisel long after I see the blow. All of the buildings around the mall are made from limestone in that New Deal style. The U’s are carved as Vs. There is, on the part of the mall that begins in front of the Legion building, a vast vehicle park and ordnance dump the Legion supervises and maintains. Rows of 37mm antitank guns, howitzers (all spiked, the breechblocks gone), files of quad .50 mounts and Bofors guns. There are a few old Shermans and Grants, even a Stuart, destined for a park somewhere or maybe to be cemented in a town square. The Legion distributes the surplus to the local posts, to be set up on stoops and front lawns next to lighted flagpoles. The guns will be trained on the part of Main Street that is most menacing. Every city will have one. They can’t all be hammered into plowshares. I can imagine a crew of drunken legionnaires scrambling from a stag, manning this fieldpiece, pretending they are walking shells toward the grain elevators. In purple fatigue caps sagging with medals, these men will crank the elevation wheel because that is the only thing that is left working, and then they’ll lob a few shells toward home, the wife, the kids.

  After a day of looking for you, I walk along the rows of weapons, and if the wind is right, I hear the whistle coming from the vents of the air-cooled barrels. I smoke a cigarette, watch them carve the names. It is all drab and battleship gray. Everything that is loose has been stolen. There are chalk marks on the shields and fenders. Stars glow on the armor.

  I live in Chinatown here. It is on the near south side in the shadow of the Lilly pill plants. To get there, I walk around the monument circle at Market Street and cross the Crossroads of America at Washington and Meridian. Under the railroad overpass. By John’s Hot Stew. I don’t know why I am writing this as if you will come looking for me.

  Chinatown here is the type of thing you would expect. Chop suey joints above laundries or laundries above chop suey joints. Banners hang above the street. The smells of soy and dry-roasted peanuts. Taiwanese mainly. Many from the fall of the Tachen Islands. Quemoy is being shelled again. There are animated arguments at the walls where the language dailies are posted. Children dribble basketballs along the sidewalk. Wearing scarlet, they weave around their fathers. The public phones are in pagodas. The shelter signs are in Chinese.

  It is not really like Changsha, though there is a jinriksha. Most people here wear black sneakers. They miss China. I can pretend I am still there—bow to the men in sleeveless shirts and gray pants in my building, share silk thread with their wives, who sew all day. I can imagine when I leave in the morning, I am on my way to the Yale-in-China Hospital again. Taste tea in a coffee cup. And I wait for you. At night in bed, I hear a train slam into the station. It is the Japanese shelling.

  There is a man here who says he remembers you when you preached in Chekiang Province. He is still a Christian and insists I go to church with him, an A.M.E. in the next ward. He says he was told you joined the AVG, that all China has heard of you. He tells me your Chinese is perfect. He would not be surprised if you were still alive and preaching to many converts. Mao himself would not be able to tell you were American. I think the man says what he thinks I want to hear; he brings me fried bananas and takes me uptown on the bus to the cathedral to play Bingo.

  There is one bathroom on my floor in my building. I like to sit there, steaming in the tub. I can smell the starch from the street. Do you remember the P-40 shot down over Lingchuan when we lived there? It crashed, pilotless, down the road. I remember when the Chinese peasants, hundreds of them it seemed to me, carried the cracked-up plane up the road to our house. The smaller parts, they held them above their heads. It looked as if it was coming apart as it moved. It was like the dragons at New Year’s. “Here is your plane,” they shouted, dropping it near the porch. We were the only Americans they knew of. You thanked them in your perfect Chinese. Sly General Wang took the aluminum from the fuselage and had his smith make the bathtub. Remember the bathtub? All we had before was the Yangtze Kiang. The way I washed your back like an Asian wife. Why did you leave with Drummond without saying anything? You wrote to Betty trying to explain. She has shown me the letters. And you wrote to your parents. In Lingchuan, in Changsha, when we made love, you whispered to me in Chinese. In Chinese. I didn’t know Chinese. I don’t know it. The geese flying backwards. The Eastern menagerie. And I would have gone with you to the West, to Turkestan if you had wanted. Converted the Jews. It is a place for a woman. “Look, I have a mission.” Now, I have a mission, John. I had one then and they are the same. You,
John. Did you, in doing your duty (and was it duty to God or to country that allowed you to leave me?), confuse your two missions? A missionary is always the best warrior. I remember the Jesuits saying mass along the road in camouflage, the host made of spinach flour. I remember the almond eyes of that Flying Tiger. I kept them above our bed after you left. I would stare back at them as they bore down on me and try to imagine its smile.

  I asked for you at HQ. I waited for your letters every day at the Yale Hospital. I rode my bike back home past the quilted soldiers who eyed me along the road as they unwrapped their puttees at night, just as they had wrapped them as I went to work in the morning. Your letters never came. I always left forwarding addresses. Mailed a packet of letters to your family. I tried to write the letter that would free me. I could live with the secrets of the war you shared with me. I could have lived with you and your God and your other women. I watched you for hours as you studied the code books. A mission makes us the thing we pursue. We are what we study. I am becoming you, John. Losing me. Losing us. Losing the very reason I went looking in the first place. The way you lost yourself in a China you believed could be converted into Georgia. Why did you leave me? Was it that you could no longer understand English? Had you only the taste for the cheapest red rice?

  You don’t know about television. Imagine one of your radios but this one sends pictures along with the words. After my bath, if the night is warm, I go down to the appliance store and watch the televisions in the window. No one in Chinatown can afford one yet. So, people come out and they watch with me. The men wear straw hats and bob up and down to see over shoulders. The women sit on the curb or lean against the few cars and listen to the man who translates the words which come from the small speaker tucked up under the awning with the sparrows’ nests. There are twenty sets on tiers all tuned to the same picture. You can watch people making sure that all the pictures are doing the same thing at the same time. You can see their heads jerk from screen to screen. I go there to watch them watch. During the day, the screens are turned off, and no one stops on the sidewalk. The televisions are watching us. “Take one home,” the appliance man tells me as I pass his door. “It will keep you company.” He says I will never be lonely. “Come back tonight. They will all be turned on tonight.”