Kurt Vonnegut - Hocus Pocus

The donor, Miss Hanson, was the last to arrive. She and her wheelchair were set down on the top step outside. Then all 3 sets of doors between Pam’s bagladies and the North Pole were thrown open wide. So all the bagladies were blown off their pedestals. They wound up on the floor, piled up against the hollow baseboards which concealed hot heating pipes.

TV cameras caught everything but the smell of hot polyurethane. What a relief from mundane worries! Who says the news has to be nothing but grim day after day?

pamela was sulking next to the stable. The stable wasn’t in the shadow of Musket Mountain yet. It would be another 7 hours before the Sun went down.

This was years before the prison break, but there were already 2 bodies and I human head buried out that way. Everybody knew about the 2 bodies, which had been interred with honors and topped with a tombstone. The head would come as a complete surprise when more graves were dug with a backhoe at the end of the prison break.

Whose head was it?

The 2 bodies everybody knew about belonged to Tarkington’s first teacher of Botany and German and the flute, the brewmaster Hermann Shultz and his wife Sophia. They died within 1 day of each other during a diphtheria epidemic in 1893. They were in fairly fresh graves the day I was fired, although their joint grave marker was 98 years old. Their bodies and tombstone were moved there to make room for the Pahiavi Pavilion.

The mortician from down in town who took charge of moving the bodies back in 1987 reported that they were remarkably well preserved. He invited me to look, but I told him I was willing to take his word for it.

Can you imagine that? After all the corpses I saw in Vietnam, and in many cases created, I was squeamish about looking at 2 more which had absolutely nothing to do with me. I am at a loss for an explanation. Maybe I was thinking like an innocent little boy again.

I have leafed through the Atheist’s Bible, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, for some sort of comment on unexpected squeamishness. The best I can do is something Lady Macbeth said to her henpecked husband:

“Fie! a soldier, and afeard?”

Speaking of Atheism, I remember one time when Jack Patton and I went to a sermon in Vietnam delivered by the highest-ranking Chaplain in the Army. He was a General.

The sermon was based on what he claimed was a well-known fact, that there were no Atheists in foxholes.

I asked Jack what he thought of the sermon afterward, and he said, “There’s a Chaplain who never visited the front.”

The mortician, who is himself now in a covered trench by the stable, was Norman Updike, a descendant of the valley’s early Dutch settlers. He went on to tell me with bow-wow cheerfulness back in 1987 that people were generally mistaken about how quickly things rot, turn into good old dirt or fertilizer or dust or whatever. He said scientists had discovered well-preserved meat and vegetables deep in city dumps, thrown away presumably years and years ago. Like Hermann and Sophia Shultz, these theoretically biodegradable works of Nature had failed to rot for want of moisture, which was life itself to worms and fungi and bacteria.

“Even without modern embalming techniques,” he said, “ashes to ashes and dust takes much, much longer than most people realize.”

“I’m encouraged,” I said.

I did not see Pamela Ford Hall by the stable until it was too late for me to head off in the opposite direction.

I was distracted from watching out for her and Zuzu by a parent who had fled the bagpipe music on the Quadrangle. He commented that I seemed very depressed about something.

I still hadn’t told anybody I had been fired, and I certainly didn’t want to share the news with a stranger. So I said I couldn’t help being unhappy about the ice caps and the deserts and the busted economy and the race riots and so on.

He told me to cheer up, that 1,000,000,000 Chinese were about to throw off the yoke of Communism. After they did that, he said, they would all want automobiles and tires and gasoline and so forth.

I pointed out that virtually all American industries having to do with automobiles either were owned or had been run out of business by the Japanese.

“And what is to prevent you from doing what I’ve done?” he said. “It’s a free country.” He said that his entire portfolio consisted of stocks in Japanese corporations.

Can you imagine what 1,000,000,000 Chinese in automobiles would do to each other and what’s left of the atmosphere?

I was so intent on getting away from that typical Ruling Class chowderhead that I did not see Pamela until I was right next to her. She was sitting on the ground drinking blackberry brandy, with her back to the Shultzes’ tombstone. She was gazing up at Musket Mountain. She had a serious alcohol problem. I didn’t blame myself for that. The worst problem in the life of any alcoholic is alcohol.

The inscription on the grave marker was facing me.

The diphtheria epidemic that killed so many people in this valley took place when almost all of Tarkington’s students were away on vacation.

That was certainly lucky for the students. If school had been in session during the epidemic, many, many of them might have wound up with the Shultzes, first where the Pavilion now stands, and then next to the

HERMANN SHULTZ

1830—1893

SOPHIA

HIMMLER SHULTZ

1841—1893

FREETHINKERS

stable, in the shadow of Musket Mountain when the Sun goes down.

And then the student body got lucky again 2 years ago. They were all away on a recess between semesters when habitual criminals overran this insignificant little country town.

Miracles.

I have looked up who the Freethinkers were. They were members of a short-lived sect, mostly of German descent, who believed, as did my Grandfather Wills, that nothing but sleep awaited good and evil persons alike in the Afterlife, that science had proved all organized religions to be baloney, that God was unknowable, and that the greatest use a person could make of his or her lifetime was to improve the quality of life for all in his or her community.

Hermann and Sophia Shultz weren’t the only victims of the diphtheria epidemic. Far from it! But they were the only ones who asked to be buried on the campus, which they said on their deathbeds was holy ground to them.

Pamela wasn’t surprised to see me. She was insulated against surprises by alcohol. The first thing she said to me was, “No.” I hadn’t said anything yet. She thought I had come to make love to her. I could understand why she might think that.

I myself had started thinking that.

And then she said, “This has certainly been the best year of my life, and I want to thank you for being such a big part of it.” This was irony. She was being corrosively insincere.

“When are you leaving?” I said.

“Never,” she said. “My transmission is shot.” She was talking about her 12-year-old Buick 4-door sedan, which she had gotten as part of her divorce settlement from her ex-husband. He used to mock her efforts to become a serious artist, even slapping or kicking her from time to time. So he must have laughed even harder than everybody else when her 1-woman show was blown off its pedestals in Buffalo.

She said a new transmission was going to cost $850 down in town, and that the mechanic wanted to be paid in Yen, and that he hinted that the repairs would cost a lot less if she would go to bed with him. “I don’t suppose you ever found out where your mother-in-law hid the money,” she said.

“No,” I said.