The Lacuna
Page 29
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It was shameful to read those newspapers, to feel any eagerness for knowing each awful detail of the massacre. How the artillery marched right over the camp on the riverbank, destroying the hobo jungle of fruit crates, chicken coops, tarpaper shacks, and dirt-colored tents. God Bless Our Home. Families must have been kneeling in there, praying for any miracle a tightfisted God might have left for them.
The Bonus Army families had crops planted in their camp. Every Saturday this summer Bull’s Eye had pointed those out—how we cheered for the measly corn rows sprouting by the Potomac. They made the encampment look like Mexico. A real village, where people might live and eat. Hungry kids were waiting for those almost-ready ears—after months of porridge, sweet corn roasted in the coals. To think of MacArthur’s horses trampling it on purpose: somehow that small part of the story made tears come.
Bull’s Eye never came to bed after lights-out. He turned up hiding in the infirmary, sitting hunched on the side of a bed, smoking. With more newspapers.
“Look at this.” He threw it.
The penalty for prowling around after lights-out is severe, but the infirmary was deserted. The late extra: After sunset yesterday the flames in the Anacostia encampment rose fifty feet in the air and spread to the surrounding woods. Six companies of firemen were required to defend adjacent property. The president observed from the White House windows an unusual glow in the eastern sky, and conceded MacArthur was right to proceed with the routing. In his opinion the Bonus Army consists of Communists and persons with criminal records.
The editorial writer applauded MacArthur for sparing the public treasury: The nation is being bled dry by persons like these who offend the common decency.
“Why would the paper say they’re criminals?”
“They were treated like criminals,” Bull’s Eye replied. “So people want to think it. The paper says whatever they want.”
It was no use reading more, but hard to stop. The late extra had photos. A society page. While soldiers poured gasoline on the shacks, the upper crust were cruising the river on their yachts, watching MacArthur spare the public treasury. A Mrs. Harcourt required medical attention after she saw a small boy receive a bayonet through his lower body. Senator Hiram Bingham of Connecticut was badly jostled on the street in front of the warehouse while attempting to leave his office. His injuries were not mortal, but earned as many newspaper inches as all the others together, including a woman in the Anacostia camp who lost her sight to flaming gasoline thrown in her face, and the vets from the Argonne shot dead in their own country. A dozen kids got shattered limbs or broken skulls. Two infants died of inhaling gas.
“Was one of them Nick’s baby, do you think?”
Bull’s Eye kept his head turned away. “For Christ’s sake,” he said. “A gas bomb costs more than a hundred loaves of bread.”
ARCHIVIST’S NOTE
The next journal after this one will not appear to the reader, for it was destroyed in 1947. This note presents an intrusion, and I beg pardon for it. The notebook was burned in a metal tar bucket outdoors on a September evening, at the start of a rain. Mr. Shepherd watched through an upstairs window. The one doing the burning was myself.
It was a slim book of lined paper and cotton-duck binding with “Potomac Academy” stamped on it, a type of thing issued to the boys there, probably in great number. But this one in particular he had used for a diary, in 1933. It isn’t my place to give an opinion about the burning. I’m a typist. But he made it plain he didn’t want that little book to reach the public view. Nor any of these personal writings, truth be told. He was averse to making himself known. Even when greatly misunderstood. He liked to say, “Dios habla por el que calla,” meaning God speaks for the silent man. If he believed that, after all that happened, I am not sure how.
So, any regrets over the missing “Potomac Academy” 1933 would not be his. Evidently the notebook had something in it to disturb him, and he decided to destroy it. Later he would make the same judgment about all the rest of his diaries. But that particular one he plucked out first from among all the notebooks and pages he kept in portmanteau bindings on a shelf in his study. I won’t try to say why a man would write pages he meant no one to see, let alone keep them nice in bindings. The sole place he let his words be seen was in the books published with his name on their spines. Harrison Shepherd. You might think of him as your friend, when closing one of these books. Many did. But he never let any photograph of himself go on the dust jacket, to encourage that kind of feeling. Even though he was a good-looking man, well groomed with dark hair and Roman features, about six feet and five inches in height. He did not have physical deformities, as has been said. The height alone was unusual.
But maybe you’ll not have heard of him at all, nor have any idea why you should have. Until reading all this here.
The notebook that burned, then. People who make a study of old documents have a name for this very kind of thing, a missing piece. A lacuna, it’s called. The hole in the story, and this one truly missing still, I know it is gone and won’t turn up later in any trunk, as that first little leather-bound one finally did. The burned book from the Potomac Academy probably described his friendships and so forth until his leaving the school in 1934, midway through the graduation year. I didn’t read it, before putting it to the flame. I am not concealing any scandal. Mr. Shepherd spoke of having made a disaster of his schooling, but said little else of it. He went back to Mexico then to live with his mother, who had abandoned her liaison with the American and found work as a seamstress in a Coyoacán dress shop. Mr. Shepherd and his mother accumulated some disagreements. He took a position again with the painter Diego Rivera, as a plaster-mixer to start. By late in the year 1935 he was paid as a member of their household staff.
Some writings did survive from his time at the Potomac Academy, sheafs of typewritten pages describing battle scenes and dialogues he later used in his novel Vassals of Majesty (1945). But as to the journal, his express wish was to see it removed from this earth. In time, with full voice and sound mind, he expressed that same wish for the other journals too: all these now collected in a volume.
I didn’t make this plain at the beginning. I do so now. If you’re of the mind to honor a dead man’s wishes, always and regardless, be now fairly warned. If you feel it is best or kindest, then put these pages down and read no more.
The Bonus Army families had crops planted in their camp. Every Saturday this summer Bull’s Eye had pointed those out—how we cheered for the measly corn rows sprouting by the Potomac. They made the encampment look like Mexico. A real village, where people might live and eat. Hungry kids were waiting for those almost-ready ears—after months of porridge, sweet corn roasted in the coals. To think of MacArthur’s horses trampling it on purpose: somehow that small part of the story made tears come.
Bull’s Eye never came to bed after lights-out. He turned up hiding in the infirmary, sitting hunched on the side of a bed, smoking. With more newspapers.
“Look at this.” He threw it.
The penalty for prowling around after lights-out is severe, but the infirmary was deserted. The late extra: After sunset yesterday the flames in the Anacostia encampment rose fifty feet in the air and spread to the surrounding woods. Six companies of firemen were required to defend adjacent property. The president observed from the White House windows an unusual glow in the eastern sky, and conceded MacArthur was right to proceed with the routing. In his opinion the Bonus Army consists of Communists and persons with criminal records.
The editorial writer applauded MacArthur for sparing the public treasury: The nation is being bled dry by persons like these who offend the common decency.
“Why would the paper say they’re criminals?”
“They were treated like criminals,” Bull’s Eye replied. “So people want to think it. The paper says whatever they want.”
It was no use reading more, but hard to stop. The late extra had photos. A society page. While soldiers poured gasoline on the shacks, the upper crust were cruising the river on their yachts, watching MacArthur spare the public treasury. A Mrs. Harcourt required medical attention after she saw a small boy receive a bayonet through his lower body. Senator Hiram Bingham of Connecticut was badly jostled on the street in front of the warehouse while attempting to leave his office. His injuries were not mortal, but earned as many newspaper inches as all the others together, including a woman in the Anacostia camp who lost her sight to flaming gasoline thrown in her face, and the vets from the Argonne shot dead in their own country. A dozen kids got shattered limbs or broken skulls. Two infants died of inhaling gas.
“Was one of them Nick’s baby, do you think?”
Bull’s Eye kept his head turned away. “For Christ’s sake,” he said. “A gas bomb costs more than a hundred loaves of bread.”
ARCHIVIST’S NOTE
The next journal after this one will not appear to the reader, for it was destroyed in 1947. This note presents an intrusion, and I beg pardon for it. The notebook was burned in a metal tar bucket outdoors on a September evening, at the start of a rain. Mr. Shepherd watched through an upstairs window. The one doing the burning was myself.
It was a slim book of lined paper and cotton-duck binding with “Potomac Academy” stamped on it, a type of thing issued to the boys there, probably in great number. But this one in particular he had used for a diary, in 1933. It isn’t my place to give an opinion about the burning. I’m a typist. But he made it plain he didn’t want that little book to reach the public view. Nor any of these personal writings, truth be told. He was averse to making himself known. Even when greatly misunderstood. He liked to say, “Dios habla por el que calla,” meaning God speaks for the silent man. If he believed that, after all that happened, I am not sure how.
So, any regrets over the missing “Potomac Academy” 1933 would not be his. Evidently the notebook had something in it to disturb him, and he decided to destroy it. Later he would make the same judgment about all the rest of his diaries. But that particular one he plucked out first from among all the notebooks and pages he kept in portmanteau bindings on a shelf in his study. I won’t try to say why a man would write pages he meant no one to see, let alone keep them nice in bindings. The sole place he let his words be seen was in the books published with his name on their spines. Harrison Shepherd. You might think of him as your friend, when closing one of these books. Many did. But he never let any photograph of himself go on the dust jacket, to encourage that kind of feeling. Even though he was a good-looking man, well groomed with dark hair and Roman features, about six feet and five inches in height. He did not have physical deformities, as has been said. The height alone was unusual.
But maybe you’ll not have heard of him at all, nor have any idea why you should have. Until reading all this here.
The notebook that burned, then. People who make a study of old documents have a name for this very kind of thing, a missing piece. A lacuna, it’s called. The hole in the story, and this one truly missing still, I know it is gone and won’t turn up later in any trunk, as that first little leather-bound one finally did. The burned book from the Potomac Academy probably described his friendships and so forth until his leaving the school in 1934, midway through the graduation year. I didn’t read it, before putting it to the flame. I am not concealing any scandal. Mr. Shepherd spoke of having made a disaster of his schooling, but said little else of it. He went back to Mexico then to live with his mother, who had abandoned her liaison with the American and found work as a seamstress in a Coyoacán dress shop. Mr. Shepherd and his mother accumulated some disagreements. He took a position again with the painter Diego Rivera, as a plaster-mixer to start. By late in the year 1935 he was paid as a member of their household staff.
Some writings did survive from his time at the Potomac Academy, sheafs of typewritten pages describing battle scenes and dialogues he later used in his novel Vassals of Majesty (1945). But as to the journal, his express wish was to see it removed from this earth. In time, with full voice and sound mind, he expressed that same wish for the other journals too: all these now collected in a volume.
I didn’t make this plain at the beginning. I do so now. If you’re of the mind to honor a dead man’s wishes, always and regardless, be now fairly warned. If you feel it is best or kindest, then put these pages down and read no more.
