Warday

The Children’s Train

Thirtieth Street Station in Philadelphia was an astonishing sight as we walked in, weary from the long bus ride that had brought us here from White Plains. We were planning to catch the Southern Crescent to Meridian, and from there take the bus to Dallas.

There must have been a thousand children in the station. We had just been to Independence Park and put our hands on the Liberty Bell, which you can do now, and stood before Independence Hall, seeking to renew our hope. There were hundreds of people there, including a doubled family, where a man had taken on his neighbor’s children when the parents died. Such mixing is much more common in this part of the country than in Texas, where we tend to focus down on the unit rather than look to our neighbors.

The spirit of the frontier, perhaps, still influences our habits.

There is at Independence Hall a daily schedule of recitations of the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Gettysburg Address. This is a program developed by the Philadelphia school system, and the speakers are children.

We listened with the rest of the crowd to the hasty voice of a girl reciting the Bill of Rights. Her eyes darted as she spoke. She was as frail as a bird, and her tone was high and thin, but something in her delivery came from deep within her, and set the breathless, mumbled words to ringing.

I had been thinking long thoughts of children as we walked through Philadelphia’s quiet streets.

Now, here in the station, I was surrounded by children who had not gotten the chance to double up. Quiet children, sitting in rows on the floor. Here and there, one slept in another’s lap. Older kids attended babies. The cries of babies echoed in the huge waiting room. A supervisor moved among the rows.

There was none of the hubbub of childhood among these kids.

Their situation was serious, and they knew it.

They were all dressed identically, in white T-shirts and jeans, girls and boys alike. On the back of their shirts were stenciled their names, years of birth, blood types, TB susceptibilities, and Pennsylvania ID numbers. I began noting down a sampling of their names, but stopped when I saw the way Jim was leaning against the wall. We’d both dreaded getting sick on our journey. We were exhausted from too many nights in trains and too much third-rate food. Stepping between the rows of kids, I went to him.

“I’m sorry. I’m nauseated. I’ve got to lie down.”

“No—let’s go outside. You’ll be better.”

I did not say it, but I knew what had happened to him. The over-powering odor of unwashed people was stifling in that station. Out on the street he began to feel better.

“Jim—”

He stared off into the darkness. We both understood the stakes here. This scene was being repeated commonly all over the country. How many orphans are there? What are the support programs like? What are we doing to protect the future?

We did not speak, not until long afterward, when we were on the train. The children were jammed into eight passenger cars behind us. We were in the through-car. Ahead of us were three “state cars” for people planning to leave the train in resident-only states, such as Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia.

“I want to find out about the kids,” Jim said.

“You mean why they’re on the train?”

“Why they’re on the train.”

Their presence worried him too. It must be an enormous undertaking to move so many children. Why was it being done?

We started moving back toward their cars. When we opened the door we saw dim lights and hard seats, and smelled their odor again. These were not the normal Amtrak cars, but old commuters with ceiling fans and dim bulbs, obviously put on at the last moment. They rattled and swayed. The night wind bellowed in the windows. The trainmen were giving out blankets and sheets, which the children made into beds on the seats and the floor. There was a gravity among them that was deeply unsettling, as if this bedmaking were the most important thing in the world, and these blankets were valuable beyond price.

Other passengers were coming back too, bringing food and water bags and whatever else they could spare. Soon the cooks appeared, bearing what later proved to be every scrap of Amtrak food in the train. But there were so many of them, and I know that the great majority must have gone hungry that night.

Jim found one of the adult supervisors at the rear of the car.

She could have been thirty years old, or fifty, it was hard to tell. A little boy slept with his head in her lap, a girl of twelve with her head on her shoulder. She held a baby in her arms. Another baby lay in the girl’s arms. “We’re writing a book,” Jim said. “Can we talk to you?”

She smiled. “I guess so, if you don’t wake anybody up. I got some mighty tired kids on this train.”

“Are you the only supervisor?”

“Lord, no! I’d be dead! There are ten of us with this group, one for every hundred kids.”

“How did you get your job?”

“Well, I have my Master’s in early-childhood education from Bank Street, and I have a degree in child psychology. But I didn’t get the job on qualifications. I was with the State Department of Social Work before the war. Afterward we found ourselves with tremendous numbers of orphans. It was natural that anybody in the Welfare Department who knew anything at all about kids, or just liked them, would end up doing what I’m doing.”

“Why are they on the train?”

She smiled again. “These children are being transferred to an institution in Alabama. We’ve been informed by the Department of Agriculture that there’s going to be another grain emergency by April, so we’re evacuating them to a better-fed area. We do not want to go through another famine the way we went through the last one. My unit buried an awful lot of children. That will not happen again, not if there is any way on God’s earth to prevent it.”

We returned to our own car. An hour passed. For a while I stared at my own reflection in the window. Haggard, thin, cadaverous even. I hadn’t shaved since I was at Quinn’s, in California. I was greasy and grungy and totally exhausted.

Jim read the Philadelphia Inquirer and then slept I felt frightened, as if the delicate balance of the future were swaying and trembling with the movement of the train.

When I was twenty-two I went this way in a Volkswagen, on my way home from New York to San Antonio for a family reunion.

Years later I went in my Mercedes, through the Smokies and across the back of the South, through the piney woods of Arkansas and the hot plains of northeast Texas.

I went also in a bus, broke, hungry, too. And work one year when it was too long between checks from publishers.

My life has been punctuated by journeys between Texas and New York.

I can remember coming this way with my father, and seeing barefoot children with fishing poles in the Cumberland Valley and longing from my luxurious Pullman drawing room to be one of them.

To be a child.

I am tired of trains, tired of travel. Now that it’s almost finished, I wonder what will become of this new book. These days it is not easy to gain publication, and the distribution of books is a difficult process.

I am very used to the rattle of trains, the smell of trains, the mood of travelers. In these past six weeks we have seen a fair sample of the country. And we have learned some things. America is changing, profoundly and probably irrevocably. In a few years there will be a kind of country here with as few references to us as we have to, say, the Kennedy years. Maybe fewer.

There is death in this, certainly, and the collapse of old ways.

But there is also this other thing, which I heard again and again, in the voices along the road. I know it, and yet I cannot seem to put it down in words, except that it is America in us, the promise and the children. It is the common dream of gold—the golden valley, the golden door, the gold in the hills, the gold at the end of the rainbow.

The night deepens and the old diesel’s horn sounds and sounds.

This is another of those bumpy, slow routes around one of the dead areas, in this case Washington.

I close my eyes. Music comes into my mind, soft and slow, the music of the swaying car and the dark. I remember, so well, when I was a child.

JIM My Final Image

When Whitley and I arrived in New York, I realized that, emotionally, I had reached the end of the journey. For me, New York exemplified the whole experience—both the folly of the war and the drama of our effort to recover.

Morgan Moore didn’t talk much about his present project, but I must say that the dismantling of the World Trade Center is a work of tremendous energy and vision. Everything is being done on a gigantic scale. Massive devices pull wiring out onto huge wheels, drawing it like the meat from a crab claw. Dozens of scaffolds hang down from the towers, with men on them loosening sheathing while others work with cranes, taking the plates to the ground.

Inside the buildings, window crews dismantle the good glass, floor crews take up usable wood and linoleum, decoration crews remove furniture. Behind all this, Morgan Moore sits in his command trailer, manipulating a sophisticated new Toshiba computer and talking to his people over an elaborate communications system.

I went as far as the thirtieth story in the elevator that they have rigged along the side of the South Tower. From there I saw the whole of New York Harbor, from the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge between Staten Island and the black ruins of Brooklyn to the Statue of Liberty. I could see the arm and torch lying at the base of the great statue. Even if New York remains uninhabited, that statue ought to be restored—even moved, maybe to Philadelphia.

Moore has twelve workmen, all paid in gold on the basis of the market value of their salvage. Some of these men, skilled wire-pullers for example, can make the extraordinary salary of ten gold dollars a week.

But I could not love Morgan Moore’s salvage operation. I could only think of the city before the war, with the sun on its towers and the throngs in its streets. It was a great work of art, New York, made up of millions of sophisticated, convoluted lives.

I find that I cannot really say much about it. It was Whitley’s home, and fortunately writing about it has been his responsibility.

Instead, I am going to turn to other events that occurred toward the end of our journey.

We were unable to arrange a flyover of Washington. The Army refused without giving a reason. I think maybe the military is ashamed of losing the capital city.

Our money was nearly gone, which didn’t matter much, since we couldn’t leave the train once we crossed the Mason–Dixon line and entered the South, an area of the country almost as economically healthy as California. As long as one stays in the through-car there’s no problem, so we watched Virginia and Tennessee pass by the window. We had neither the funds nor the emotional energy to do a repetition of California and become fugitives.

Watching the towns go by, the flash of a main street or a town square, big, leafy trees, kids waving from the backs of horses, I felt something I have never felt before, that under the circumstances was rather curious. I did not feel alienated at all, even though I could not walk freely down those streets, nor even set foot on this soil. I guess I understood. They can’t afford too many immigrants. There have to be controls. I hope that what I felt never leaves me. It was a closeness to my fellow human beings, as if the very concept of the stranger were false. As if the borders, the restrictions, all were also false.

We belong to one another; in a sense we are married one to all.

Before the catastrophe we had failed to notice this. But we all have as much of a stake in everybody else as we have in ourselves.

The thought of this great marriage brings me down to a much smaller one. Perhaps if Quinn Yarbro doesn’t find Vivian, I will create some kind of a monument for her. A monument for one person still makes sense, I think, if she was your person.

In my mind I am trying to assemble the elements of my journey into some whole image: the people, their voices and faces and stories; the landscapes; the documents; my perceptions and what I feel about all of it.

The vision that remains of the journey is complex. It is a great mass of haunting images, of suffering and work, of people who keep on even when they ought to be unable.

I was affected by smiles. Before the war there were never such smiles. They can shatter you, the smiles of the Americans.

I listen to the rattle of the train. Beside me, Whitley rests from working on his own notebook. His head lolls onto the seat.

I realize that a radio is playing.

A radio?

Well, there are a lot more of them around these days than there were even a couple of months ago.

The music is soft, repetitive, peaceful. Typical popular music. I know the album: Brian Eno’s Persistence of Vision.

I close my eyes. For a while, I’ll sleep also. May my dreams be peaceful.

Georgia Patrol

The kids ran into trouble at the patrol station three miles across the Georgia border.

People in through-cars aren’t supposed to get out in restricted-immigration states, but a restless murmur went among us when we saw them being herded off the train and into holding pens.

The Georgia Patrol wears green. They look like park rangers, not at all terrifying like the California Immigration Police. But they herded a thousand children into a fenced enclosure suitable for perhaps three hundred. They crowded them there in the blazing sun, the ten supervisors among them. A tall black man stood just inside the gate, clutching a sheaf of papers. We could see his mouth moving as he obviously tried to reason with the patrol officers.

“This is outrageous,” a woman said.

A man went to the door of the car. “What’s going on?”

He was ignored.

Jim got up. He took out his Herald News identification and strode out onto the platform. Most of the other passengers followed him, myself included.

“I’m a reporter,” Jim said, flashing his papers. “Can I see the commanding officer, please?” The patrolman to whom he spoke shook his head, but in disgust, not refusal.

“Just what we need,” he said. “Do you travel with ’em or what?”

“I think the press has a right to know what’s going on here. These kids are bound for Alabama. Why are you taking them off the train?”

Another patrolman came over. His underarms were wet. He was haggard, his face covered with sweat. “I’m Captain Howell,” he said. “These children are not bound for Alabama. They’re going back to Pennsylvania.”

“The hell they are, Bob Howell,” a man’s voice boomed out. We all turned to see a stocky gentleman in a cream-colored suit coming down off the Georgia car.

“Lord, if it isn’t T.K. What the hell are you doin’ all the way up here in Toccoa?”

“I just come from a meetin’ of the Southeast Funeral Directors in Greensboro. Look here, Bob, I want to know what’s goin’ on. You can’t just herd them kids into that hot corral. You’ll have some dead babies on your hands, man.”

“They can’t go any farther. We got a bulletin from Alabama about them. They haven’t got room for them down there.”

“We’ve got papers,” the leader called from the enclosure. “We’ve got all the authorizations we need.”

“What he has is a permit from Pennsylvania. The Northeastern states send these kids down here without so much as a by-your-leave. They figure we won’t turn away a bunch of helpless orphans. You know how many of these kids have come down this one rail line in the past six months? Eighteen thousand and change. We can’t handle ’em, T.K. We’ve got to send ’em back.”

The children, I noticed, were scarcely aware of the drama on the platform. They were going about making their new place as endurable as they could, tying blankets to the fencing to create sun shades. The babies and the little ones were kept in the shaded areas, watched over by the supervisors and the older kids.

The woman we had talked to on the train came to the edge of the enclosure. “We’re going to need water and milk,” she called.

“We can’t stay in this sun without water and milk.”

A woman on the platform began to cry. She wept bitterly, her fists clenched, her body bent as if the least weight would break her in the middle.

“Do you have supplies for them, Captain Howell?” Jim asked.

“There’s plenty of water. And we can give them a few gallons of milk for the babies.”

“They sure must be hungry, Bob,” his friend T.K. said.

“We don’t have a budget to provide food for detainees.”

“I hate to hear you talk like that, Bob. It makes you sound like a nasty little peacock, and I don’t think you’re really that way at all.”

“Look here, T.K., I’ve got a job to do—a job you wouldn’t do when you were asked.”

“I’m in a critical profession, Bob, as you well know. I’ll tell you something, if you can’t find a way to provide for these kids, you shouldn’t be in this job yourself. Now you find them more than water and milk. They need food. They’ve gotten little enough on the train.”

“I can’t go all out for every bunch of orphans—”

“The hell you can’t! And don’t you dare say ‘orphan’ like it was a dirty word. Kids like these are the future and honor of this country. There’s no shame in being an orphan, Bob. Look at ’em. They oughta get medals, the way they behave. Now you take care of ’em or I swear I’ll see you outa that pretty uniform inside of a week!”

The people on the platform broke out into applause. The captain promised to provide the children with food, and to let them wait for the northbound Crescent under the trees beyond the platform.

As our train pulled out, I found myself full of a mixture of anger and a curious sort of hope. I saw something in those kids that is strong. And I saw strength also in the way the passengers jumped in on their side.

The train picked up speed past Toccoa, and we moved on toward Atlanta through the warm October morning.

“T.K.” turned out to be a funeral director from Savannah. His opinion was that one of the other Southern states would probably agree to take the children. “There’s a lot more to it than you might think. And old Bob Howell’s a good man. That uniform’s gone to his head a little bit, but he’ll do his duty.”

We never found out what happened to the children.

On the road, one gets used to lost people. You see roadies all the time, walking the bus routes, following the railroad tracks, or just hiking across the countryside.

But you also encounter another type on the road, those whom it seems nothing can stop, who keep on no matter what happens to them, those who will not give up.

It isn’t that they aren’t afraid. They all have their nightmares.

But when they wake up, they find a way to go on.

No doubt the children do the same.

INTERVIEW T. K. Allerton, Funeral Director

What happened in Savannah, the way the war hit us, was that the radio and the TV went off. I remember I was in the showroom with some clients, and all of a sudden, no Muzak. I thought, hell, the bastard’s on the fritz, and went on with my consultation.

After I’d sold the funeral I went back into the office and found Frances Tolliver trying to get the Apple to boot the database management program. She said the computer had made this funny popping noise and that was it. So I told her to call Computerland and we then discovered that the phones were out. I turned on the radio in my office and couldn’t get a sound out of it.

That was the first sign of the war in Savannah. We never got a scratch, and we’ve never suffered any fallout. We were damn confused for about a week. But we knew, we all just knew, that all hell had broken loose. A lot of people couldn’t start their cars. My broker’s line to New York was dead, and it stayed dead. There was no TV. Even the civil defense sirens weren’t working. And out at the airport—you couldn’t get anything beyond an ultralight into the air.

Of course, cars can be hot-wired, and soon people were on the road again. People went up to Charleston and down the coast toward Florida, hunting for news.

Meanwhile, things began to happen to my business. At first I just kept going, no real problems. No computer, but that was only an inconvenience for us. The phone was a pain in the neck, but we got used to that, too.

But coffins are shipped by rail, and no trains were coming in.

Plus there was the bank rush. I participated in it when the Southern & National stopped taking checks. I tried to get at my money.

The banks just handed out all the cash in Savannah and closed their doors. They were electronic basket cases from the EMP. I had about eighty thousand in the S&N, and I ended up with two thousand. Better than some did. Some people didn’t get a dime.

And there was no more FDIC insurance, although we didn’t know that at the time.

First off, I got a lot of heart attack and accident situations, where people who were on the edge died. I think about half the people with pacemakers, which was about eight hundred in Savannah, died on the spot when the EMP blew out their units. The rest of them either kept up without the pacemaker or they somehow were shielded, like sitting in a car, that plus the body itself shielded the pacemaker enough, apparently. Accidents, there were a lot of those. There were fires. People couldn’t get the fire department on the phone. In those days right after the war, we were still living as if nothing much had happened. There was no panic. There was no idea how much things were going to change.

People were strong and confident in those days. They’re good now, and we’ve learned something about just how tough we can be if we’ve got to be, here in America, but in those days we were basically happy people. There was none of this talk like there is now that the human race is sort of fundamentally defective. And of course movements like the Extinctionists and the Destructuralists didn’t exist.

You were proud of your government in those days. America was the land of the free, from sea to shining sea. Not like it is now, a jumbled-up whatnot. Do we even have a President? I don’t think the Europeans and the Japs even want us to become self-governing again. Don’t quote me on that. Or you probably can’t say it anyway—look at you, smiling at me! You can’t say that, can you?

A couple of days after the war, I had all of a sudden sixty deceased in the fridge. Sixty! We stacked them in there like logs. Later I found out how lucky Savannah was we didn’t lose our electric power. God knows what they did with the cadavers where they had no refrigeration.

All of mine were either accidents or, like I said, pacemaker. I never worked so hard in my life as I did that couple of weeks after the war. I was in real trouble. No coffins, low on formaldehyde. I had to go to the county and get body bags. Can you imagine that?

Here I was, selling the most beautiful funerals in Savannah, and all of a sudden I’m doin’ body bags.

Had to. They would’ve stunk. I was just draining away the blood and putting in a weak solution of formaldehyde. I’d display ’em in a real fine casket, and then take ’em to the cemetery in it.

When everybody went home, we’d bag ’em and bury ’em. Had to be that way.

I got a carpenter to start making me boxes. He’d use pine, and sand ’em down. Shellac ’em if he could. So for a while I was turning out a fairly good funeral again. The boxes were just boxes, but the smell of uncured pine is a good smell. I’ve got it in my brain, that smell.

It was about six weeks after the war that we got a visit from the National Guard in Atlanta. They called a meeting of all the VFW and the American Legion and the Sons of the Confederacy and the Rotary Club and the Lions and all those clubs, down at the Hilton. General Trowbridge was the speaker. He announced that an organization called the Georgia Patrol had been formed by the Governor, and this group was supposed to keep refugees out of the state. I thought that was awfully harsh. I don’t have anything against people who need help. But then he started talking about radiation poisoning and looters, and things like people with rabies, and fleas carrying unknown diseases, and all of that. Then he tells about the problem with medical supplies, how the plants have been damaged or are irradiated. Most of them were in the Northeast, and those that weren’t are hardly shipping to Georgia, even if they are operating, and I see that we really are in a hell of a mess.

So then he says there is going to be a voluntary sign-up, that they need five thousand able-bodied men from Savannah for the Georgia Patrol. They are going to be covering the border complete.

The patrol would consist of a hundred thousand people, and they were just to keep the foreigners outside of the state altogether, except if they were known to have business here.

I realized as he talked that he and the Governor and all of ’em in Atlanta were nuts, to think a state in virtual economic chaos could field an army that size and supply it with food and weapons and all—it was damn foolishness,

They must have thought we’d lost the war, and they didn’t want to say it, but they were preparing a last-ditch defense of Georgia in case the Russians showed up.

But hell, if it was a last-ditch defense, I was damn well going to do my part. So on that assumption I joined up. As soon as I put down my job, funeral director, I got an earful about how I could carry a card as an auxiliary, but I couldn’t go on patrol because mine was an essential service, and under the Emergency Services Act passed that week by the legislature, I had to stay in my present business and I had to follow new regulations being worked out now.

I left that meeting mad and all confused. What regulations?

And what about the Georgia Association of Funeral Directors?

Were they involved, had they been consulted?

I buried fifty people that week, and found myself selling cremations real hard because fuel for the digging tools was getting scarce.

In those days the mail was still working, but it was slow, slow, slow. Not like it is now. You mail a letter in the morning collection here in Savannah, and it will be anywhere in Georgia in the afternoon. One thing that goes real good is the mail. Mail’s as good as the phone is bad. I mean, I still can’t get used to phone-call rationing. Hell, I was going to call my coffin company up in Illinois to special-order a real good casket, and here I find myself on a waiting list, the operator says ten days! That was Monday. How the mighty have fallen! I remember the days when you hardly even thought about the phone.

Well, no damn more.

So, getting back, let’s see, they started in dropping like flies.

Then we got gas-pressure trouble. The furnace won’t take ’em in my crematorium. I call the other guys and they all got the same problem. What the hell, we’re in trouble. We get together, and everybody’s in the same boat as me, doing maybe four times his usual business, no coffins, no preservatives, not even any damn cosmetics! And trouble with the digging tools and nobody to fix the damn things because you used to take ’em up to Atlanta for that and now it’s a long drive and they might not be able to help you, and on and on like that. We’re paying people fifty cents an hour to predig graves. We figure we can get some stoop labor if we just make some posters and put ’em up.

We each put up a poster, a meeting down on Cotton Exchange, fifty laborer jobs at half a dollar an hour. Can you imagine? The minimum wage was two-fifty, then. But there was no federal government now, was there? And we did not have that much money. It was a wild time, then. People would buy and sell stuff for peanuts.

I remember, during the famine, I would have to go out and barter funerals for food. Now isn’t that a hell of a note? But I was watching my own kids die. And Jennine did die, that’s my wife.

That was the flu as much as the hunger. And Ed’s not right, we don’t know why. He’s gone what they call catatonic, and the GP is saying it’s against the law for him to have hospital care. I guess it won’t be long before we put that boy to sleep. The hospital’ll do it for free since he’s on the triage due to mental incompetence. Or I could take him to a private practitioner. That death clinic over on Eleventh, the one called Sunshine House, is real nice. They have a live country-and-western group that does your favorite song, and you just go to sleep. “She’ll Be Comin’ ’Round the Mountain” would be for Ed. He used to love that song back before the war.

Jennine’d sing it to him at bedtime, and he’d laugh his little head off. Then I’d give him to Weedon’s. I couldn’t do the funeral myself. I remember that boy used to bring me my lunch for a quarter when he was on holidays. Oh Lord. He was a line kid. Full of imagination and fun. Getting good at Little League.

I’ve gotten real close to the Good Lord. I pray all the time. My whole heart and mind is a prayer. I’m burying more than people now, I’m burying a way of life. Praise the Lord. I am burying a world that was so fair.

WHITLEY Dallas, October 10, 1993, 2:15 A.M

I am home again, sitting at the kitchen table with my notebook and a fresh pencil. It is two o’clock in the morning. I arrived home at nine, but so far I haven’t been able to sleep. Jim came back with me but he didn’t stay long. He has nothing like this, and must find it hard to be with another man’s family. The worst losses are those without end, where there is only the question. His own wife is such a loss.

I have seen my wife and son to bed, and now I am alone.

Being on the road so long has made me sharply aware of ordinary household things: the refrigerator’s humming, the kitchen clock’s ticking. Through the window above the sink I can see the moon hanging low in the sky. The night is rich and warm and fills me with expectancy. There is a faint smell of flowers on the air.

I have in my mind’s eye a picture of Anne on the front porch when I came home. At nine the shadows were already dense. I could see the white of her head against the red brick wall of the house. She did not cry out, but came quickly across the lawn, through the tall grass. Then she was standing before me, and I opened my arms and took her in them. She uttered a long sound, soft, and then laid her head against my chest. When she raised her eyes to look at me, I kissed her.

I gave her the little vase from our apartment. She held it a long time, examining it in silence. When we went into the house she put it in a drawer, and I understand that.

That was hours ago. I look at the drawer beneath the kitchen counter, wondering if before Warday any object could ever have been charged with such a combination of remembrance and threat that it could neither be displayed nor discarded.

A mockingbird sings, leaves rustle. I respect how tine a moment the world can yet make. We have been in shattered years, but there is peace in our consciousness now. I saw it in the eyes of the ones we interviewed, heard it in their voices, felt it in the gentle shuffle of traveling America. We are not like we were before. Now our habit is more often to accept and heal rather than to reject and punish. Would things have been different if our postwar consciousness had, by some miracle, arisen before the war?

My son came up to us when we were still standing together in the front yard, and put a surprisingly big hand on my cheek.

“Dad,” he said, “we’re in good shape.”

“Good, Andrew,” I said, and I was glad to feel his name on my tongue. “Andrew. Anne.”

They fed me an enormous supper of fried chicken, green beans, biscuits, and, for dessert, egg custard. Afterward I took out my notebooks and read to them for a time of our experiences on the road. Anne and Andrew told me the chronicle of their life here at home.

The bus service into town is improved.

Andrew has started his sophomore year in high school.

The price of bread went up twice last week, so Anne is back to making her own.

I have eight orders for gardens, and I think I’d like to get back to that.

It was nearly midnight when we went to bed. I do not think I have ever felt anything as good as lying down beside my wife in the dark and feeling the softness and warmth of her.

I expected to fall into deep black sleep after our intimacy, but I did not. The voices of the road came back to me, all the words at once, softly, persistently possessing me.

I got up, stood looking long at the shadow of my wife in our bed, filled with an emotion so rich that it hurt. I went past my son’s room, listened to his heavy sleep, and then came down here to try to write this last little bit.

I suppose the world is passing through a thundering moment of history. I do not feel it that way, though. Words like history have lost their weight. They seem as indefinite as memories, and as unimportant. Anything real means more to me than history. My own house, my kitchen, my chair. Sitting here, I feel something I can only describe as a kind of austere ecstasy, as if I had found my way in a black desert.

The “U.S.” and the “USSR” I grew up with are gone, and that is strange. It is, I suppose, also history. If we could have our old America back, I suspect that most of us would gladly take the old Soviet Union too. We could live so well together, in the calm of present maturity.

In retrospect the war seems odd and exotic, as if it was fought not by us, but by innocents disguised as ourselves, who, in their fury, forgot how fragile we were. It is eerie to remember the bitter hatred I felt against the Russians when they shot down that Korean airliner in ’83, or after the Kabul firebombing in ’85. Those brutal acts seemed the work of pride, but time and experience have revealed that they were the fearful doings of the trapped. I wish we could reach back through time and heal our relationship. And how would we have done it? The Soviets were punished without surcease for the whole seventy years of their existence. It would have been a remarkable adventure to give up our punitive habits and try to view them as one does a friend who has fallen from the grace of accepted ways.

But what that past world might or might not have done matters little now. It has disappeared so utterly that even granting it consideration seems an indulgence.

I think much more of healing my own body. I touch my hands to my face, running my fingers over the wrinkles that complicate my cheeks. These are the hands and this is the face of a Warday casualty. I wonder what is going wrong in the deeps of my body, in among the pulsing organs and the blood. Are there cells that should not be there, obdurate and growing in the softness of me?

I want to die right here in this house, attended by my wife and son. Even if I must feel pain, I will not choose euthanasia. I want my pain. Perhaps that is a silly and outmoded notion, but I do not recall giving myself life, and feel uneasy about taking it from myself.

I look down at the table, listen to my pencil scratching along the pad. Lord, heal me. Heal my world. Heal the past. If we could accept one another so completely that we were free of all judgment, of all anger, of all denial, would heaven not shine through us then?

Would it shine even through the engineers of Warday, the soldiers and the fliers, the generals and the bureaucrats who worked the machine? The greater justice is not to punish evil, but to give the evildoer the courage to experience his own conscience.

If we are all participants in the glory of mankind—the songs of children, the joy in the bedrooms of the world, the great cathedrals and paintings—then are we not also each responsible in some way for the failures? Or at least, if we accept them into our hearts as our own, can we not heal ourselves?

I wonder. I hope I can come to terms with the feelings that this journey has evoked in me. We bear weighted memories; we all hold the dead in our hearts. Our humanity demands that we do this.

Their memory is the conscience we so urgently require if we are not, in the future, to drift back to the old recourse to war. The Europeans, especially, need to remember this. Otherwise another century will see them again battling for senseless dominion.

To decide that a given war can be endured and survived is to let oneself come that much nearer to fighting it. War’s greatest tragedy is not the destruction; it is the lives that are prevented from unfolding. And size counts: the greater the war, the more profound the wrong.

The mere existence of nuclear weapons was the most revealing symptom of what was out of balance about the past. Two societies, in varying degrees acceptable or unacceptable to one another, were so interested in their differences that they came to hate their common ground. That obsession was as a cancer in the mind and heart of the old world, which spread cruelty and blindness through the whole enormous body, and finally killed it.

When I awake in sweat and dread, sensing that things are starting to grow in my body that shouldn’t be there, imagining my flesh tricked into destroying itself, I get my heart to stop its thrashing by remembering that at least the war is over. I must still live with my personal consequences, but I am coming to terms with that.

Now I am going upstairs. I’ll finish these last few lines in bed.

As I slip into our room, I see that Anne is sleeping heavily, her right arm stretched across my side of the bed. I lay it on her breast and get into bed beside her. There is a sense of completion now. At last I am going to sleep.

I lie down, drawing the sheet up around my chin. I sit with my pad on my knees. Music comes to me, an unknown melody, and an image of my son rises in my mind. I want to allow myself to have hope for him and his generation.

If only we have gained wisdom from the fire. If only we can accept how alike we all are, one and another.