There Won't Be War

Being dead offers certain advantages. True, my pickled flesh is locked away inside this cold marble box, but my senses float free, as if they were orbiting satellites beaming back snippets of the world. I see the city, dense with black citizens and white marble. I smell the Virginia air, the ripe grass, the river’s scum. I hear my keeper’s boots as he pivots south, the echo of his heels coming together: two clicks, always two clicks, like a telegrapher transmitting an eternal I.

My keeper pretends not to notice the crowd—the fifth graders, Rotarians, garden clubbers, random tourists. Occasionally he catches a cub scout’s bright yellow bandanna or a punker’s pink mohawk. “Known but to God,” it says on my tomb. Not true, for I’m known to myself as well. I understand Wilbur Simpson Hines perfectly.

Thock, thock, thock goes my keeper’s Springfield as he transfers it from his left shoulder to his right. He pauses, twenty-one seconds again, then marches south twenty-one paces down the narrow black path, protecting me from the Bethesda Golden Age Society and the Glen Echo Lions Club.

I joined the army to learn how to kill my father. An irony: the only time the old man ever showed a glimmer of satisfaction with me was when I announced I was dropping out of college and enlisting. He thought I wanted to make the world safe for democracy, when in fact I wanted to make it safe from him. I intended to sign up under a false name. Become competent with a rifle. Then one night, while my father slept, I would sneak away from basic training, press the muzzle to his head-Harry Hines the failed and violent Pennsylvania farmer, Harry Hines the wife abuser and son beater, laying into me with his divining rods till my back was freckled with slivers of hazelwood—and blast him to Satan’s backyard while he dreamed whatever dreams go through such a man’s mind. You see how irrational I was in those days? The tomb has smoothed me out. There’s no treatment like this box, no therapy like death.

Click, click, my keeper faces east. He pauses for twenty-one seconds, watching the morning mist hovering above the river.

“I want to be a Doughboy,” I told them at the Boalsburg Recruiting Station. They parceled me. Name: Bill Johnson. Address: Bellefonte YMCA. Complexion: fair. Eye color: blue. Hair: red.

“Get on the scales,” they said.

They measured me, and for a few dicey minutes I feared that, being short and scrawny—my father always detested the fact that I wasn’t a gorilla like him—I’d flunk out, but the sergeant just winked at me and said, “Stand on your toes, Bill.”

I did, stretching to the minimum height.

“You probably skipped breakfast this morning, right?” said the sergeant. Another wink. “Breakfast is good for a few pounds.”

“Yes, sir.”

My keeper turns: click, click, left face. Thock, thock, thock, he transfers his rifle from his right shoulder to his left. He pauses for twenty-one seconds then marches north down the black path. Click, click, he spins toward the Potomac and waits.

It’s hard to say exactly why my plans changed. At Camp Sinclair they put me in a crisp khaki uniform and gave me a mess kit, a canteen, and a Remington rifle, and suddenly there I was, Private Bill Johnson of the American Expeditionary Forces, D Company, 18th U.S. Infantry, 1st Division. And, of course, everybody was saying what a great time we were going to have driving the Hemies into the Baltic and seeing gay Paree. The Yanks were coming, and I wanted to be one of them—Bill Johnson nee Wilbur Hines wasn’t about to risk an A.W.O.L. conviction and a tour in the brig while his friends were off visiting la belle France and its French belles. After my discharge, there’d be plenty of time to show Harry Hines what his son had learned in the army.

They’re changing the guard. For the next half-hour, an African-American PFC will protect me. We used to call them Coloreds, of course. Niggers, to tell you the truth. Today this particular African-American has a fancy job patrolling my tomb, but when they laid me here in 1921 his people weren’t even allowed in the regular divisions. The 365th, that was the Nigger regiment, and when they finally reached France, you know what Pershing had them do? Dig trenches, unload ships, and bury white Doughboys.