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Authors: Kurt Vonnegut
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breath. That was for sure.
11
S O EVERYTHING was going to be okay.
And Father’s life and Mother’s life and my life would have been okay, I firmly believe, if it weren’t for what Father did next.
He felt that, given who he was, he had no option other than to behave nobly. “The boy did it,” he said, “but it is I who am to blame.”
“Now, just a minute, Otto—” Morissey cautioned him.
But Father was off and running, into the house, shouting to Mother and Mary Hoobler and anybody else who could hear him, “I am to blame! I am to blame!”
And more police came, not meaning to arrest me or Father, or to even question us, but simply to report to Morissey. They certainly weren’t going to do anything mean, unless Morissey told them to.
So they heard Father’s confession, too: “I am to blame!”
• • •
What, incidentally, was a pregnant mother of two doing, operating a vacuum cleaner on Mother’s Day? She was practically asking for a bullet between the eyes, wasn’t she?
• • •
Felix missed all the fun, of course, since he was on a troop bus bound for Georgia. He had been put in charge of his particular bus, because of his commanding vocal cords—but that was pretty small stuff compared to what Father and I were doing.
And Felix has made surprisingly few comments over the years on that fateful Mother’s Day. Just now, though, here in Haiti, he said to me, “You know why the old man confessed?”
“No,” I said.
“It was the first truly consequential adventure Ufe had ever offered him. He was going to make the most of it. At last something was happening to him! He would keep it going as long as he could!”
• • •
Father really did make quite a show of it. Not only did he make an unnecessary confession, but then he took a hammer and a prybar and a chisel, and the machete I had used on the chickens, and he went clumping upstairs to the gun-room door. He himself had a key, but he didn’t use it. He hacked and smashed the lock away.
Everybody was too awed to stop him.
And never, may I say, would the moment come when he would give the tiniest crumb of guilt to me. The guilt was all his, and would remain entirely, exclusively his for the rest of his life. So I was just another bleak and innocent onlooker, along with Mother and Mary Hoobler and Chief Morissey, and maybe eight small-city cops.
He broke all his guns, just whaled away at them in their racks with the hammer. He at least bent or dented all of them. A few old-timers shattered. What would those guns be worth today, if Felix and I had inherited them? I will guess a hundred thousand dollars or more.
Father ascended the ladder into the cupola, where I had been so recently. He there accomplished what Marco Marítimo later said should have been impossible for one man with such small and inappropriate tools. He cut away the base of the cupola, and he capsized it. It twisted free from its last few feeble moorings, and it went bounding down the slate roof, and it went crashing, weather vane and all, onto Chief Morrisey’s police car in the driveway below.
There was silence after that.
I and the rest of Father’s audience were at the foot of the gun-room ladder, looking up. What a hair-raising melodrama Father had given to Midland City, Ohio. And it was over now. There the leading character was above us, crimson faced and panting, but somehow most satisfied, too, exposed to wind and sky.
12
I THINK F ATHER was surprised when he and I were taken away to jail after that. He never said anything to confirm this, but I think, and Felix agrees, that he was sufficiently adrift to imagine that wrecking the guns and decapitating the house would somehow settle everything. He intended to pay for his crime, the trusting of a child with firearms and live ammunition, before the bill could even be presented. What class!
That was surely one of the messages his pose at the top of the
11
S O EVERYTHING was going to be okay.
And Father’s life and Mother’s life and my life would have been okay, I firmly believe, if it weren’t for what Father did next.
He felt that, given who he was, he had no option other than to behave nobly. “The boy did it,” he said, “but it is I who am to blame.”
“Now, just a minute, Otto—” Morissey cautioned him.
But Father was off and running, into the house, shouting to Mother and Mary Hoobler and anybody else who could hear him, “I am to blame! I am to blame!”
And more police came, not meaning to arrest me or Father, or to even question us, but simply to report to Morissey. They certainly weren’t going to do anything mean, unless Morissey told them to.
So they heard Father’s confession, too: “I am to blame!”
• • •
What, incidentally, was a pregnant mother of two doing, operating a vacuum cleaner on Mother’s Day? She was practically asking for a bullet between the eyes, wasn’t she?
• • •
Felix missed all the fun, of course, since he was on a troop bus bound for Georgia. He had been put in charge of his particular bus, because of his commanding vocal cords—but that was pretty small stuff compared to what Father and I were doing.
And Felix has made surprisingly few comments over the years on that fateful Mother’s Day. Just now, though, here in Haiti, he said to me, “You know why the old man confessed?”
“No,” I said.
“It was the first truly consequential adventure Ufe had ever offered him. He was going to make the most of it. At last something was happening to him! He would keep it going as long as he could!”
• • •
Father really did make quite a show of it. Not only did he make an unnecessary confession, but then he took a hammer and a prybar and a chisel, and the machete I had used on the chickens, and he went clumping upstairs to the gun-room door. He himself had a key, but he didn’t use it. He hacked and smashed the lock away.
Everybody was too awed to stop him.
And never, may I say, would the moment come when he would give the tiniest crumb of guilt to me. The guilt was all his, and would remain entirely, exclusively his for the rest of his life. So I was just another bleak and innocent onlooker, along with Mother and Mary Hoobler and Chief Morissey, and maybe eight small-city cops.
He broke all his guns, just whaled away at them in their racks with the hammer. He at least bent or dented all of them. A few old-timers shattered. What would those guns be worth today, if Felix and I had inherited them? I will guess a hundred thousand dollars or more.
Father ascended the ladder into the cupola, where I had been so recently. He there accomplished what Marco Marítimo later said should have been impossible for one man with such small and inappropriate tools. He cut away the base of the cupola, and he capsized it. It twisted free from its last few feeble moorings, and it went bounding down the slate roof, and it went crashing, weather vane and all, onto Chief Morrisey’s police car in the driveway below.
There was silence after that.
I and the rest of Father’s audience were at the foot of the gun-room ladder, looking up. What a hair-raising melodrama Father had given to Midland City, Ohio. And it was over now. There the leading character was above us, crimson faced and panting, but somehow most satisfied, too, exposed to wind and sky.
12
I THINK F ATHER was surprised when he and I were taken away to jail after that. He never said anything to confirm this, but I think, and Felix agrees, that he was sufficiently adrift to imagine that wrecking the guns and decapitating the house would somehow settle everything. He intended to pay for his crime, the trusting of a child with firearms and live ammunition, before the bill could even be presented. What class!
That was surely one of the messages his pose at the top of the
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