Pacifist, page 3
I hardly knew my father. He seemed to me always a cold and distant man whom I admired and feared as a child, and who took the train away each day—to my relief—and who the train returned each evening to such family business as more often than not had nothing to do with me.
When shortly after my mother’s death I was put to live with an aunt and uncle, my contact with my father became a matter of infrequent visits and of even less frequent correspondence. I missed him very little.
I knew my father to be accomplished, able; but his influence upon me was negative, in the sense that early on I resolved never to be taken away each day by the train that took him, and never to be like him. Which indeed was the way it turned out.
In the town where I lived when I was a child there were, in those days, dirt roads still here and there; and scattered mounds of horse turds would still now and then appear on the pavement before the railroad station at the town’s center like strange mushrooms of some sort springing upon through the cement. People still kept chickens, an occasional cow.
Our town had a blacksmith. I used to stop by his shop on the way home from school. I was young enough that the smith would give me pennies and I would take them. The interior of his shop was dark and cave-like and smelled of fire and cinders and horses. Often the forge was cold, the man idle. He shoed the junkman’s horse and the horses of the rich who lived up in the hills. He was small, with hands bent and twisted like pieces of iron, at which I marveled as I watched, wondering how he could cradle the monstrous horse’s hoof so gently in such a hand, as though he held a cat, talking softly all the while to the horse, the same indifferently, to its head or its ass, as the case might be.
I think he was the only man in town whose work I understood, of whom I could say that I knew what he did. I was no more than ten, I would guess, when he shut himself up in his shop one day and put a bullet through his brain.
I felt that shot deep in my own young flesh-and-bone head.
It put a caution in me.
The smith had gone bankrupt, my father said, there being no work, no need for a smith here anymore.
I was cautioned that among men, between men, to a man himself, life can have a price.
At the western edge of our village there were some few hundred acres of hilly field and woodlot belonging to a family named Burley, which wilderness of woods and fields, I appropriated to my own uses and which I considered, in this sense, to be mine.
I explored there endlessly, sometimes with companions, often alone.
There I could climb to the top of whatever tree to the alarm of no one, and to the sight of everywhere a seeming wilderness still, of an earth everywhere primitive and new, the village lost in the valley below, and of no account.
There in a high place of rocks I searched out a red fox’s den where day after day I came and waited, finally to see three young cubs emerge and stand and seem actually to taste the shadowed evening air. Of this den and these foxes—and I was not yet twelve—I had the great and unusual wisdom to tell no one.
I believe that it was in Burley’s woods that I first came to understand how real a thing I was as a thing in nature—of nature, not set apart from nature—being man. And it was there for a fact that I came to side with such other larger creatures of the earth that kill, but which eat their kill.
I killed my first rabbit on Burley’s hill, alone, caught with a snare and killed with a blow and eaten half raw from a fire of twigs. Small wonder that I was not made a vegetarian then and there. I wasn’t. I eat meat to this day, and can do my own butchering. But perhaps a kind of pacifism was begun with me, even then, in Burley’s woods above those bloody rabbit bones.
I could never think to eat a man.
At the edge of Burley’s woods was the house of Bonnie McGuire. It stood at the end of a dirt road, with a large green lawn, neatly fenced. Bonnie was twelve, fair and blue-eyed, and had breasts. She had been sitting alone on a bench in the school yard one day when I passed by. Looking down, I had seen immediately that she was altogether more beautiful than all others known to me or likely ever to be known to me.
At that time she wasn’t known to me at all.
I learned that her father was the hulking Irish cop who directed traffic daily at the school crossing. He had a voice like a bull, and would point at us with his billy club and bellow, “You!”
I had half a terror of the man. He seemed to me the sort of big mean bastard that would take pleasure in cracking the skull of a kid.
No matter, I started hanging out each day after school in the woods by the fence, waiting to be noticed.
It was Bonnie’s father who noticed me first. It was early evening and I was standing on a stump, looking down into the empty yard. He was in uniform. He got out of his car and saw me and came up to the fence and stood leaning on it, looking at me, swinging his damn club.
I remember what was said, or the sense of it, anyhow.
“What the hell are you doing on that stump?” he asked.
“Waiting to see Bonnie,” I said.
“To see Bonnie?” he said.
“Yes sir,” I said.
“You know Bonnie?” he asked. He seemed to find this hard to believe.
“Not yet,” I said.
He thought about it, and then he said, “You’d best be getting on with you.”
And I might have left, except that then Bonnie leaned out of an open upstairs window and smiled down at me over her father’s head, fixing me, as though rooted, to the spot.
“And did you hear me?” her father said.
I nodded, struck dumb, filled with a wonder and a dread that just possibly now the man might strike me dead, but holding my ground, held there no matter that the window had gone empty; and then held, as though by chains, by the sight of Bonnie moving toward me across the yard, come to say my name, to say she knew me; held there, as I never can forget, by a rush of love—in that fine late autumn evening light and time—beyond all reach of any evil stick of either his or mine.
The field that day was won by me, and peaceably.
I spent a fall and winter more at Bonnie’s house than at my own. Her father never called me anything but “You.” I remember his coming home for lunch one day and finding me there at the table. “You,” he said, “holy Jesus, have we took you to raise?”
Bonnie’s beauty never faded for me. We simply grew to different ways.
I am uncertain as to how this bears on my later becoming a pacifist, but I suspect that it does.
7
Several months after my meeting with the local draft board, I was again called in, this time to be told to report to the conscientious objector’s camp to which I had been assigned.
(On this occasion I was met with only sweetness and light, in the person of a young and pretty woman who issued me a bus ticket and travel instructions and, I believe, a food allowance of some sort, along with repeated expressions of gratitude on behalf of the board and other of my fellow citizens for the service I was about to render to my country; giving me the same thoughtful little speech, I suppose, that she bestowed on the young drafted soldiers being sent off to kill or be killed, hers being the last official act in that long impersonal official process leading to such sendings off, and done in this instance with a true concern, a kindness, a sweetness of such genuineness that it was to me—in regard to either the sending off of a soldier or of myself—something quite beyond irony, a development totally unexpected, and at which, indeed, I might have wept once more, only this time in pity for us all, and not least of all for the lovely young lady.)
I was sent to a conscientious objector’s camp administered under the auspices of the Society of Friends in Big Flats, New York, near Elmira. The camp, of not more than a hundred men or so, I would guess, was made up of a large number of non-affiliated and not particularly religious objectors, like myself, some Quakers, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Church of God blacks, and a scattered assortment of artists, musicians, poets, intellectuals without portfolio, and a handful of Henry Georgeists, these last being by and large a cheerful bunch of economic theorists adamant in their loyalty to the lost cause of the single tax and the reasonable notion that land is the source of all wealth. It was one of their members who first made me welcome at the camp.
“Your name?” he asked, extending his hand.
“Don Wetzel.”
Pumping my hand warmly, “Well, fuck you, Don Wetzel.”
Not the sort of thing one would expect among Friends. He greeted all newcomers that way, I learned later; couldn’t stand the goddamn friendliness of the Friends. A Jehovah’s Witness, being greeted in this fashion, took a swing at him.
I liked it at the camp. We were in the woods a great deal, cutting fallen wood into cord wood. It was an old C.C.C. camp, barracks style. The former camp director was still there, in charge of the work detail. His most earnest and constant advice to us all was not to read on the can; a sure way to get piles.
In the several months I was there I heard discussed all shades of pacifist philosophy and doctrine, from the profoundly simple acceptance, without exception, of the Christian commandment, Thou shalt not kill, to intellectually arrived-at rejections of war on socio-economic-moral-religious grounds put together in a way that would make Bill Buckley’s head swim.
I liked the Quakers, the genuineness of their concerns beyond themselves, their true gentleness, and beneath it, their strength. I took from them their custom of addressing all men by their given names; no titles, no Mister or Sir; with a yes or a no to suffice as answer. This, I might add, did not tend to make matters any simpler for me in court or in prison. Nor did it set well, at the start, with Lepke. It made him mad as hell.
So as it turned out, I didn’t go to prison at the decision of my draft board, but at my own decision, as a matter of choice. The reasons I gave for this choice—reasons set down point by point, numbered, neatly typed and forwarded to the Attorney General of the United States on the day I left camp—still seem to me valid, and reasons central to the act.
In sum, I had become persuaded that the absolutist pacifist position, a refusal to cooperate at all with the draft, the selective service law, was the proper position for me to take.
Could the institution of modern war survive without conscript armies? I believed not then, although now I am not so certain, today’s push-button total war capacities, the ability to measure national military might in terms of thermonuclear megaton overkill, being then but the stuff of certain science fiction novels, which, unfortunately, I hadn’t read.
There were unquestionably other factors entering into this decision. The troubled conscience that is part of the everyday spiritual luggage of most wartime pacifists may have been eased for me somewhat by this act. (The troubled conscience of the wartime pacifist is, I believe, altogether a tribal matter. He stands in violation of a tribal decision on an issue in which the question of tribal survival would appear to be at stake. It doesn’t matter that he thinks this decision is madness, the issue not truly drawn. The tribe has called for sacrifice and courage; he stands aside. He may know he is right in this, but on some profoundly elemental level, in the residual, tribal conscience in his guts, he is troubled. It puzzles him, but it’s there.)
Leaving for New York, I shared a train seat with A. J. Muste, a pacifist spokesman who had been visiting the camp and with whom I wished to discuss my thoughts and plans; (I wanted his praise;) but he was busy writing a speech, or something, throughout the entire trip. A small incident, but I have remembered it; as though then it was that the first door closed, and so goddamned quietly.
8
I have said that I liked it at the conscientious objector’s camp, which might seem strange, the camp being, in fact, itself a quasi-prison camp. But prior to my induction I had spent the fall and winter months living alone at our place at the lake, and by the time I arrived at Big Flats I had had more than enough of solitude. Even a bunch of possibly odd-ball men looked good to me.
I have not forgotten those months at the lake. The summer people were gone. The cabins along the shore were boarded shut, the boats put away—bottoms up—on the docks and porches; the lake empty. I had intended my stay there to be a time of preparation for prison, or whatever might come. It was, in fact, an exercise in simple loneliness, a Nietzscheian mountain top, so to speak, from which I descended more shaken than strengthened.
The cabin in which I lived was little more than a cook shack attached to a large wooden platform on which a tent had stood through the summer months, but which then stood empty, bare except for a large wood-burning stove incongruously left standing, exposed to the elements. I remember the silence, the sound of leaves being blown about, like dancers, across the bare platform boards.
And then—it was in early winter, with as yet no snow having fallen—one evening, friends arrived, unannounced and unexpected, several carloads of couples, laughing, drinking, with cases of beer and bottles of wine and a phonograph, and with even a girl especially to be with me. A roaring fire was built in the wood stove, and we danced, shaking the platform, with a sound as though we danced on a drum, the bare trees emerging from the darkness, encircling us like astonished spectators, unmoving, streaked with our flying shadows.
I remember the faces of the girls by firelight, the warmth of the girl up against me, the cold at my back—dancing, somehow keeping it proper; drinking, somehow not getting drunk—with the flames shooting up from the open stove top, finally, toward a sky growing pale. Then, as suddenly as they had come, they were gone.
I stood by the dying fire and watched morning come in the treetops, and in no way then could the last of the wine make me drunk. I stood there until the stove was cold and the wine was gone and it was all the way day, and in such a pain of loneliness that it seemed I must be half insane.
And perhaps I was.
So, to be for awhile with the others at Big Flats was no trial for me. When eventually I arrived at the decision to act in violation of the selective service law and to quit the camp—an act of open and deliberate civil disobedience which I knew must end in my imprisonment—I left Big Flats with a certain genuine regret.
9
Having left the C.O. camp, and arriving in New York City, I found that hospitals were desperate for help, and I took an interim job at what I believe was Doctor’s Hospital, as a dish washer in the staff kitchen.
Occasionally I would be called upon to wait table for the doctors. Mostly young interns, they talked more about fucking while they ate than any other professional group I’ve had the opportunity to observe. Their table talk, to me, was an unnerving mixture of medical gore and raunchy sex; to this day I have a vague, troubling notion at the back of my mind that all doctors are darkly, secretly cannibalistic.
The hospital, a huge affair, towered over its surroundings, with the staff kitchen and dining rooms being located well up in the building. During the frequent lulls in work I would sit up on the warm dishwashing machine and look down, far below, at the tugs and other boat traffic on the river—the East river, I think—and wonder what in the hell it was I was really doing, and what prison would be like. I wondered much about how it would be not to see a woman for possibly two to five years, this being the sentence range I faced.
There was a waitress there, in her late twenties; a small, pretty, quiet face and passive eyes, and a body not quite fat; a soft lush-lovely thing of a figure in repose, but one subject to some kind of a nerve affliction—the most brutal sort of recurring body tic or spasm I have ever seen—that would at frequent, irregular intervals send a jerking spasm from shoulder to thigh along one side with a force sharp enough to lift the one affected breast as though thrust upward by a blow, swiftly to drop, where slowly it shook and trembled to rest in odd dis-synchronization with the brief fierce shaking of the body flesh below.
Once her eye caught mine as I witnessed the spasm strike. She accepted my helpless pity with unflinching dignity. Being a waitress must have been an agony for her. Particularly out there with all those fucking doctors.
Her name was Joan. We became friends. She would come sit beside me on the dishwashing machine and we would smoke and watch the boats together, her spasms ever so faintly communicated to me through the stainless steel surface on which we sat, a gentle brief vibration. When she smoked, she drew deeply on the cigarette and then sucked the smoke sharply down into her lungs and held it there, long, before slowly releasing it. There was passion in this.
I lusted for her. I lived in a furnished room only a few blocks from the hospital, a little dark closet of a room at the top of the stairs. I wanted so much to take Joan there and make love to her, long and gentle love, to transcend those senseless unbidden spasms that wracked her so, to smother and mute them with a flood of passion, with a final spasm willed and wished for—and least of all to be pitied—at the end.
I considered it often, even knowing that most likely I was quite incapable of it, as least as imagined. Too long had I been young and celibate, celibate—as I trained for prison—even to myself. I would be much too quick, too urgent. A confusion of spasms at best, most probably, and then—done—and the bed shaken on by only this cruel mockery of the passion promised.
Even so, I’m not so sure it would have been a mistake. She might not have cared that in my burning it was so quickly done. I don’t know. We never even talked roundabout it, a visit to my room, or whatever. We talked a lot about the crazy doctors and a little about each other, and that was pretty much it. The most I ever did—and it took timing—was occasionally to light her cigarette.
Once, shortly before the F.B.I. came and picked me up, I was sitting alone on the dishwashing machine watching the falling snow swirling down on the roof tops below, and in a sudden lull in the kitchen noises I heard Joan say to another waitress, sadly, somberly, in reply to some question and in reference to me, “Oh, he’s thinking about the war.” I wasn’t. I was sitting there, altogether too much at the ready, thinking about her. It was as close as I ever came to chucking the whole damn thing.
