Good Hope Road: A Novel (26 page)

July 1932

im rolled down the window as far as it would go, letting what little breeze there was into the cab of the truck. The Major and he had set off early that morning, the trees still dark silhouettes along the side of the road, the cool wash of air over the hills pristine. It had got progressively hotter as the hours went by, the highway steadily more crowded, until, by the time they were on the turn-off that led to Washington DC, their progress had slowed to a crawl.

The road ahead was crowded with veterans and their families. Most carried all that they owned. Despite the heat, many of the men were dressed in what remained of their doughboy uniforms, tatty overcoats with lapels missing and mismatched buttons. Some wore medals on their chests. They carried knapsacks and old suitcases, sometimes little more than a worn-out grocery bag stuffed with all their belongings. Bedrolls and bits and pieces of mess kits were slung upon their backs, with tin cups, obviously of army issue, dangling from belts here and there. A family of six, packed into a car with a cracked windshield and battered fenders, the paint long scraped off the back. Jim spotted clothes piled up on the back seat, a crate of potatoes, a rocking chair and an old radio tied to the roof. From an open window, the American flag fluttered in the breeze.

Jim glanced at his father, still marvelling at the fact that they were undertaking this journey at all, knowing how crowds upset him. To his surprise, the Major was leaning his head eagerly outside, one arm along the window as he drank it all in.

‘Pull up,’ he said to his son as they inched abreast of a merry crowd of about fifteen men. They were singing as they marched, waving rough, home-made placards at the oncoming traffic.

‘
Bonus or Bust!
Cheered in ’17, jeered in ’32!
’

‘Headed to Washington, boys?’ the Major called. ‘Come along, we’ll give you a ride.’

At first, the men refused. ‘We’ve made it this far on pretty much a prayer and shoe leather,’ they said cheerfully, pointing at the old puttees and hobnailed boots they wore, telltale wads of newspaper sticking out from the sides where the leather had given way. ‘We’re going to walk all the way there, show those fat-cat senators what it takes to be a true doughboy,’ they declared.

He’d been a doughboy too, the Major retorted. Damned if he was about to let any man who’d tramped about in the mud of France go walking to Washington, not when he was headed there himself with a pair of wheels under him. ‘I’m Major Stonebridge. Get your damn fool selves in here, and that’s an order,’ he said, in a tone that brooked no interference, and they sent up a cheer that made Jim grin.

‘AEF! AEF! Three cheers for the Bonus Army!!’

They scrambled in among the sacks and crates of provisions stacked in the bed, and when all of that space was used, lined up on the running boards on either side of the truck. ‘Say Major!’ one of the men called. ‘Whereabouts did you serve?’

Major Stonebridge hesitated. ‘A desk job, mostly,’ he said. ‘Translating.’

‘He enlisted with the French Foreign Legion,’ Jim interjected. He looked in the overhead mirror at the men. ‘Went over in 1914, soon as the war began.’

The Major said nothing, continuing to look out the window, but surprised and touched that his son remembered.

‘1914, huh?’ the man said soberly. ‘You spent more time over there than all of us combined, I figure.’

The Major was silent for a moment. ‘It isn’t so much the time one spends fighting, as how well one fights,’ he said then, and they sent up another ear-splitting cheer. ‘I reckon every last one of you boys fought like a hellcat in hot water.’

They rolled onwards towards Washington, and the men started to sing once more, in merry, discordant chorus.

‘My bonus lies over the ocean, My bonus lies over the sea . . .’

They hollered greetings to every other group of veterans they passed, waving their placards and flags, and banging on the sides of the truck.

‘My bonus lies over the ocean, O bring back my bonus to me!’

Jim noticed the twitch of amusement in his father’s face. There was something else as well, something that he hadn’t seen in that worn cast of features for a very long time – a firm-jawed sense of purpose, and of pride.

Their progress was so slow that it was evening by the time they approached the city. The Washington Monument towered above the tree line on the horizon, the shaft of the obelisk pointing straight up, like some immutable beacon of hope.

The men fell momentarily silent as they caught sight of it. Someone whistled, low and long. ‘Would you look at that? Washington DC. We’re here, buddies.’

‘That thing’s huge!’

‘Ah, it ain’t so big. You should see mine when I got the missus with me.’ They fell about laughing, revelling in the camaraderie they’d missed for years, converted again to the mere boys they’d been when they’d shipped out to France all those decades ago, nervous, excited and wisecracking all the way.

Unsure where exactly to head next, they polled some of the groups that they passed. Most said they were headed to the Anacostia Flats, where a large veteran camp had been set up. There was little need to ask for directions – Jim simply followed the long, slow line of trucks and cars with ‘B.E.F’ and ‘BONUS ARMY!’ emblazoned on their sides. Balding men with signs strapped to their backs: ‘Imagine if the Kaiser had won!’ Riders on motorcycles with the Stars and Stripes fluttering from the handlebars: ‘We done right in France, now do right by us, America!’ A baby, sound asleep in a pushcart.

Jim wondered again what Madeleine would have made of it all. An eager sense of anticipation hung over the crowd. This was no motley gathering of down-on-their-luck folks, tramping aimlessly about the country as so many others were. The men of the Bonus Army may have been thin and shabbily dressed, but they held themselves tall, filled with a touching faith in the justness of their cause. So affecting was their demeanour that local pedestrians stopped to watch, the younger among them breaking into spontaneous whoops of applause.

Through the city they went, towards the river and the 11th Street Bridge, the motley procession of vehicles and people crossing over reflected in the river’s water as it lapped gently against the draw spans.

Jim was reminded of an illustration in one of his grandfather’s books, of an ancient pioneer caravan pressing forward, the images shimmering in the water like a mirage.

He pulled up outside the entrance to the camp. The men jumped eagerly from the back and began to gather their meagre belongings. Jim stretched and got down, looking curiously about him.

It was a crescent-shaped piece of land, no more than ten acres across, and identified by the city as a park development. The ‘park’ was very much a project in progress: demarcated at one end by the white lines of a baseball diamond and a desultory attempt at a tennis court, it was bounded at the other end by the river, thick with sludge and debris from an open sewer, and a city dump scattered over a small hill.

In the few weeks that the veterans had taken over the land, it had been transformed, virtually overnight, from a barren mudflat into a thriving shanty town. Hoovervilles, they were called, these shanty towns of the poor and transient, named after President Hoover whom they blamed for their suffering. Hundreds had sprouted all across America during the grind of the Depression, and the Anacostia Flats, with its view of the Capitol Building, now boasted the largest Hooverville of them all, startling both for the speed of its manifestation as well as the eccentricity of its architecture.

Jim took in the shabby tents, the shelters built from tar paper and scrap lumber that stretched in precise, military rows. Here was a lean-to with the rusted bonnet of a car for a roof, there, a structure conjured out of fence posting and a wooden advertisement for shoes. Men had scoured the junk pile on the hill, requisitioning every bit of scrap that could conceivably be put to use. Rusted bed-springs, egg crates, newspapers, strips of wallpaper, cardboard boxes, tin cans that they hammered flat and nailed together, whorls of barbed wire, pieces of corrugated iron, ripped car seats with the stuffing spilling out – every discarded, forgotten piece of rubbish had been repurposed and brought back to life here in Anacostia.

‘Bonus Inn’, a sign on a shack made from wooden shutters, half its slats long missing, proclaimed; pebbles had been painted white and arranged in starfish patterns around the front. A rudimentary shelter, no larger than a chicken coop, was propped up at the back with a child’s chalkboard. ‘Stay Till They Pay!’ someone had scrawled defiantly across it. One man had simply claimed a barrel set on its side and lined it with grass for his home; another, a casket set on trestles. A third had appropriated a piano box – ‘Castle of Music’, he’d painted along the side.

Despite its ramshackle construction, a distinct orderliness permeated the camp, with many of the shelters proudly sporting the American flag. Dozens, maybe hundreds of flags, the collective mascot of this grizzled, rag-tag army, planted firmly in the mud and fastened to rickety roofs; the red, white and blue of the Stars and Stripes visible everywhere he looked.

The sun sank lower into the horizon, shards of metal and glass gleaming from among the shanties in this last light of day.

The Major got down awkwardly from the truck, his damaged leg cramping after the long ride. ‘There’s no need for any of that,’ he said gruffly when their passengers thanked him, leaning on his cane as he shook their hands.

Jim dropped off a load of provisions at the registration tent, where despite the late hour, a long line of men snaked outside the entrance.

‘There this many every day?’ Jim asked the stocky veteran behind the desk.

‘More,’ the man replied happily, removing his glasses and rubbing his eyes. He tightened the knot of string that held the glasses together at one end and pointed at the stack of papers beside him. ‘We got each one in here, y’know,’ he said proudly. ‘Name, rank, company served in during the war. Everyone’s got to sign up before they’re allowed to stay. This here’s an honest-to-God doughboy camp, no bums or troublemakers allowed.’

He nodded appreciatively towards the crates that Jim set down. ‘The men will thank you kindly for that. Easy it ain’t, feeding so many.’

‘There’s more in our truck.’

‘Then we gotta help you unload.’ He rose to his feet. ‘Mike Connor,’ he said, holding out his hand.

Placing his glasses back on his nose and hollering for volunteers, Connor walked with Jim back to the truck, talking all the way.

Lights were starting to come on in the city across the river, while an inky darkness spread about the Anacostia Flats, spurred on by the lack of electricity and broken now and again by the fitful light of a lantern.

Connor shook the Major’s hand. ‘Real square of you and your townfolk, Major. The cigarettes ’specially – never have enough around here.’

‘How many men in all?’ the Major asked.

‘Twenty thousand or thereabouts. Our camp here’s the largest, but there’s more, about nineteen, twenty, I reckon. The city’s got some of us housed in a group of buildings downtown that are going to be demolished soon. Not much more than brick shells and some with fallen-down roofs, but still, it’s a place for a man to rest his head.

‘We got men from all over the country here,’ Connor continued, ‘from just about every corner of every state. There’s fruit pickers from Florida, miners from Pennsylvania, factory workers from Ohio . . . men who’ve been trying to make it just about anywhere in the country. About seven hundred wives and kids too.’ His eyes twinkled. ‘Just today, we took in the O’Brien six, all red-headed and scrappy as hell. It’s been a struggle, getting enough food to go around, but we been managing so far. Slum, mostly.

‘Slumgullion,’ he explained to Jim as he lifted a crate from the bed of the truck. ‘Doughboy speciality – a bit of meat, whatever vegetables you’ve got, boil the lot together. There’s coffee in the morning, a bit of bread, and potatoes. It ain’t much, but we make do.’

A rooster came squawking over, flapping its wings. It looked them over with beady eyes and started to peck at the burlap sacks. Connor laughed, the headlights of the truck revealing a set of alarmingly rotted teeth. ‘Get on with you,’ he said amiably, shooing the bird away. ‘This here’s Rooster Curtis,’ he informed them. ‘Belongs to one of the families in the camp, and there ain’t nothing that Curtis won’t eat, ain’t that right, Curtis? He’s been having the time of his life here alright. Roaming in and out of the shacks, helping himself to a bit of wire here, a bottle cap there. Become sort of a pet for the whole camp, he has.

‘Ain’t it time for you to get some sleep?’ he demanded, as the rooster sidled towards the sacks again. It cocked its head and looked expectantly at Connor as he fished in his pocket and tossed it a bit of bread. The rooster pounced on it triumphantly and strutted away.

‘Folks been helping as best they can,’ he continued chattily as he unloaded another crate. ‘Chief Glassford – he’s the Chief of Police in DC – comes around often as he can. Given out of his own pocket more than a couple of times. Money to buy meat, potatoes, coffee . . . That tells you something, doesn’t it? Folks care. They ain’t forgotten what we done for them in France. Some folks at least, they still remember. You staying in DC long, Major?’ he asked.