Slapstick Or Lonesome No More! Part 13

She did not laugh.

"The reason I am not laughing," she said, "is that you, coming along so unexpectedly, have spoiled a surprise for your birthday."

"How is that?" I said.

She spoke of one of her slaves. "Donna was going to make a present of this to you. Now you won't be surprised."

"Um," I said.

"She thought it was an extra-fancy kind of candlestick."

She confided to me that Melody and Isadore had paid her a call earlier in the week, had told her again how much they hoped to be her slaves someday.

"I tried to tell 'em that slavery wasn't for everybody," she said.

"Answer me this," she went on, "What happens to all my slaves when I die?"

"'Take no thought for the morrow,'" I told her, "'for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.'

"Amen," I said.

44.

OLD V VERA AND I reminisced there on the townhouse steps about the Battle of Lake Maxinkuckee, in northern Indiana. I had seen it from a helicopter on my way to Urbana. Vera had been in the actual thick of it with her alcoholic husband, Lee Razorclam-13 Zappa. They were cooks in one of the King of Michigan's field kitchens on the ground below. I reminisced there on the townhouse steps about the Battle of Lake Maxinkuckee, in northern Indiana. I had seen it from a helicopter on my way to Urbana. Vera had been in the actual thick of it with her alcoholic husband, Lee Razorclam-13 Zappa. They were cooks in one of the King of Michigan's field kitchens on the ground below.

"You all looked like ants to me down there," I said, "or like germs under a microscope." We didn't dare come down close, for fear of being shot.

"That's what we felt like, too," she said.

"If I had known you then, I would have tried to rescue you," I said.

"That would have been like trying to rescue a germ from a million other germs, Wilbur," she said.

Not only did Vera have to put up with sh.e.l.ls and bullets whistling over the kitchen tent. She had to defend herself against her husband, too, who was drunk. He beat her up in the midst of battle.

He blacked both her eyes and broke her jaw. He threw her out through the tent flaps. She landed on her back in the mud. Then he came out to explain to her how she could avoid similar beatings in the future.

He came out just in time to be skewered by the lance of an enemy cavalryman.

"And what's the moral of that story, do you think?" I asked her.

She lay a callused palm on my knee. "Wilbur-don't ever get married," she replied.

We talked some about Indianapolis, which I had seen on the same trip, and where she and her husband had been a waitress and a bartender for a Thirteen Club-before they joined the army of the King of Michigan.

I asked her what the club was like inside.

"Oh, you know-" she said, "they had stuffed black cats and jack-o-lanterns, and aces of spades stuck to the tables with daggers and all. I used wear net stockings and spike heels and a mask and all. All the waitresses and the bartenders and the bouncer wore vampire fangs."

"Um," I said.

"We used to call our hamburgers 'Batburgers,'" she said.

"Uh huh," I said.

"We used to call tomato juice with a shot of gin a 'Dracula's Delight,'" she said.

"Right," I said.

"It was just like a Thirteen Club anywhere," she said, "but it never went over. Indianapolis just wasn't a big Thirteen town, even though there were plenty of Thirteens there. It was a Daffodil town. You weren't anything if you weren't a Daffodil."

45.

I TELL YOU TELL YOU-I have been regaled as a multimillionaire, as a pediatrician, as a Senator, and as a President. But nothing can match for sincerity the welcome Indianapolis, Indiana, gave me as a Daffodil!

The people there were poor, and had suffered an awful lot of death, and all the public services had broken down, and they were worried about battles raging not far away. But they put on parades and feasts for me, and for Carlos Daffodil-11 Villavicencio, too, of course, which would have blinded ancient Rome.

Captain Bernard Eagle-1 O'Hare said to me, "My gosh, Mr. President-if I'd known about this, I would have asked you to make me a Daffodil."

So I said, "I hereby dub thee a Daffodil."

But the most satisfying and educational thing I saw out there was a weekly family meeting of Daffodils.

Yes, and I got to vote at that meeting, and so did my pilot, and so did Carlos, and so did every man, woman, and every child over the age of nine.

With a little luck, I might even have become Chairperson of the meeting, although I had been in town for less than a day. The Chairperson was chosen by lot from all a.s.sembled. And the winner of the drawing that night was an eleven-year-old black girl named Dorothy Daffodil-7 Garland.

She was fully prepared to run the meeting, and so, I suppose, was every person there.

She marched up to the lectern, which was nearly as tall as she was.

That little cousin of mine stood on a chair, without any apologies or self-mockery. She banged the meeting to order with a yellow gavel, and she told her silenced and respectful relatives, "The President of the United States is present, as most of you know. With your permission, I will ask him to say a few words to us at the conclusion of our regular business.

"Will somebody put that in the form of a motion?" she said.

"I move that Cousin Wilbur be asked to address the meeting at the conclusion of regular business," said an old man sitting next to me.

This was seconded and put to a voice vote.

The motion carried, but with a scattering of seemingly heartfelt, by-no-means jos.h.i.+ng, "Nays" and "Noes."

Hi ho.

The most pressing business had to do with selecting four replacements for fallen Daffodils in the army of the King of Michigan, who was at war simultaneously with Great Lakes pirates and the Duke of Oklahoma.

There was one strapping young man, I remember, a blacksmith, in fact, who told the meeting, "Send me. There's nothing I'd rather do than kill me some 'Sooners,' long as they ain't Daffodils." And so on.

To my surprise, he was scolded by several speakers for his military ardor. He was told that war wasn't supposed to be fun, and in fact wasn't fun-that tragedy was being discussed, and that he had better put on a tragic face, or he would be ejected from the meeting.

"Sooners" were people from Oklahoma, and, by extension, anybody in the service of the Duke of Oklahoma, which included "Show Me's" from Missouri and "Jayhawkers" from Kansas and "Hawkeyes" from Iowa, and on and on.

The blacksmith was told that "Sooners" were human beings, too, no better or worse than "Hoosiers," who were people from Indiana.

And the old man who had moved that I be allowed to speak later on got up and said this: "Young man, you're no better than the Albanian influenza or The Green Death, if you can kill for joy."

I was impressed. I realized that nations could never acknowledge their own wars as tragedies, but that families not only could but had to.

Bully for them!

The chief reason the blacksmith was not allowed to go to war, though, was that he had so far fathered three illegitimate children by different women, "and had two more in the oven," as someone said.

He wasn't going to be allowed to run away from caring for all those babies.

46.

EVEN THE CHILDREN and the drunks and the lunatics at that meeting seemed shrewdly familiar with parliamentary procedures. The little girl behind the lectern kept things moving so briskly and purposefully that she might have been some sort of G.o.ddess up there, equipped with an armload of thunderbolts. and the drunks and the lunatics at that meeting seemed shrewdly familiar with parliamentary procedures. The little girl behind the lectern kept things moving so briskly and purposefully that she might have been some sort of G.o.ddess up there, equipped with an armload of thunderbolts.

I was so filled with respect for these procedures, which had always seemed like such solemn tomfoolery to me before.

And I am still so respectful, that I have just looked up their inventor in my Encyclopedia here in the Empire State Building.

His name was Henry Martyn Robert. He was a graduate of West Point. He was an engineer. He became a general by and by. But, just before the Civil War, when he was a lieutenant stationed in New Bedford, Ma.s.sachusetts, he had to run a church meeting, and he lost control of it.

There were no rules.

So this soldier sat down and wrote some rules, which were the identical rules I saw followed in Indianapolis. They were published as Robert's Rules of Order Robert's Rules of Order, which I now believe to be one of the four greatest inventions by Americans.

The other three, in my opinion, were The Bill of Rights, the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous, and the artificial extended families envisioned by Eliza and me.

The three recruits which the Indianapolis Daffodils finally voted to send off to the King of Michigan, incidentally, were all people who could be most easily spared, and who, in the opinion of the voters, had had the most carefree lives so far.

Hi ho.

The next order of business had to do with feeding and sheltering Daffodil refugees, who were trickling into town from all the fighting in the northern part of the state.

The meeting again discouraged an enthusiast. A young woman, quite beautiful but disorderly, and clearly crazed by altruism, said that she could take at least twenty refugees into her home.

Somebody else got up and said to her that she was such an incompetent housekeeper that her own children had gone to live with other relatives.

Another person pointed out to her that she was so absent-minded that her dog would have starved to death, if it weren't for neighbors, and that she had accidentally set fire to her house three times.

This sounds as though the people at the meeting were being cruel. But they all called her "Cousin Grace" or "Sister Grace," as the case might be. She was my cousin too, of course. She was a Daffodil-13.

What was more: She was a menace only to herself, so n.o.body was particularly mad at her. Her children had wandered off to better-run houses almost as soon as they were able to walk, I was told. That was surely one of the most attractive features of Eliza's and my invention, I think: Children had so many homes and parents to choose from.

Cousin Grace, for her part, heard all the bad reports on herself as though they were surprising to her, but no doubt true. She did not flee in tears. She stayed for the rest of the meeting, obeying Robert's Rules of Order, and looking sympathetic and alert.

At one point, under "New Business," Cousin Grace made a motion that any Daffodil who served with the Great Lakes Pirates or in the army of the Duke of Oklahoma should be expelled from the family.

n.o.body would second this.

And the little girl running the meeting told her, "Cousin Grace, you know as well as anybody here, 'Once a Daffodil, always a Daffodil.'"

47.

IT WAS AT LAST my turn to speak. my turn to speak.

"Brothers and Sisters and Cousins-" I said, "your nation has wasted away. As you can see, your President has also become a shadow of his former shadow. You have n.o.body but your doddering Cousin Wilbur here."

"You were a d.a.m.n good President, Brother Billy," somebody called from the back of the room.

"I would have liked to give my country peace as well as brotherhood and sisterhood," I went on. "There is no peace, I'm sorry to say. We find it. We lose it. We find it again. We lose it again. Thank G.o.d, at least, that the machines have decided not to fight any more. It's just people now.

"And thank G.o.d that there's no such thing as a battle between strangers any more. I don't care who fights who-everybody will have relatives on the other side."

Most of the people at the meeting were not only Daffodils Daffodils, but also searchers for the kidnapped Jesus. It was a disconcerting sort of audience to address, I found. No matter what I said, they kept jerking their heads this way and that, hoping to catch sight of Jesus.

But I seemed to be getting across, for they applauded or cheered at appropriate moments-so I pressed on.

"Because we're just families, and not a nation any more," I said, "it's much easier for us to give and receive mercy in war."

"I have just come from observing a battle far to the north of here, in the region of Lake Maxinkuckee. It was horses and spears and rifles and knives and pistols, and a cannon or two. I saw several people killed. I also saw many people embracing, and there seemed to be a great deal of deserting and surrendering going on.

"This much news I can bring you from the Battle of Lake Maxinkuckee:" I said- "It is no ma.s.sacre."