Now the breeze took the water from the garden hose as the boy lifted it, the breeze took it, for one brief moment, into a roostertail in the air. Then the boy brought it down. What had moved him to lift the hose? “Exuberance, certainly,” and, “What a miracle,” Frank thought. “What a blessing the water was.”
The flag, however, was heavier. The breeze moved it hardly at all. Of what material was it? Almost certainly a canvas. Not new. Weathered, how many years old? He could not remember when they’d first put it up. Had they hung it every year? Stars and Bars. The reds faded to a sort of purple. “Well, the sun will do that,” he thought. And he thought back to the other flags.
“Rags, really. Battle ensigns. If,” he thought, “that is indeed the correct style.”
Battle flags, carried in the Confederate Memorial Day celebration.
“Old men, now. Old men. How could they not be? So proud. As the town was proud. And why should they not be?” It was good to have tradition. Who was he to say it was wrong?
Yes, slavery was wrong. But the War had been fought over more than slavery. If, in fact, it had been fought over slavery at all—was it only the Jews who had that earnest discussion? The rest of the world seemed to’ve accepted this received notion of History. Why should they not? They’d fashioned it, and moved on.
But the Jews, as the Jews said, the Jews would worry it to death, and love the sad irony of the Southern side.
There were the Jews, celebrating exodus from Egypt, and free to use the full play of their intellect to probe the causes, the cures, of the Institution.
“There was economic servitude,” as Morris said, “as severe as bodily indenture. And the position of Southern merchants, in thrall to the North, unable to …”
Every year—it was a family joke—he would start his speech, and every year he was laughed to a stop, and he would stop, appreciating the affection in which he was held. But he would shrug, to say, “However, there is some merit in my case, which you may see someday,” and someone would say, “Government intervention is damned meddling, unless we need them, when we call it Humanity,” or some such, and they would play their ritual out every year. For it assured them that they were home.
And was that not the point of ritual? For what was going to be settled at the Seder table? At any family conclave? The point of worth was the liberty to discuss, and, beyond that, below that, the solidarity—the joy of being the same as everyone there, which joy was only underlined by their playing at differences.
The argument was their ritual. Others had their observances, he thought, which defined them, which assured them, for the savagery they feared was not in the world, as they thought, but in their minds. And who could grapple with that?
In the kitchen, behind him, were the sounds of supper being cleared away. The last sounds.
Who could grapple with it? he thought. A factory. Why? Workers. Why? The Wage System. Why? Slavery, freedom.
Across the way, the Confederate Flag hung in the heat. “It drapes down but is not defeated,” he thought. “It hangs stiffly.”
And he thought it hung too stiffly—that the material, fashioned for wear, did not allow the flag to loft: as he phrased it to himself, to “wave like a banner.”
On his walk to work tomorrow he would see thousands of them. On the homes, in lapel pins, on cars, the thousand banners in the parade, certainly. And he wondered about the business of the flags. “For any business,” he thought, “protected by sanctimony should prosper.” He nodded.
“Flags … funerals …” He searched for a third example.
Behind him he heard Ruthie putting the last dishes away, and the clink of the latch of the pantry. Now she was done. Now he would hear her padding to the stairs out back, where she would sit and catch her breath.
Now his wife was upstairs. Sitting in bed. Reading. Now he should go to bed. Now he should lay his cigar down in the smoking stand to let it go out, and get up and go to bed.
There was work to do tomorrow. The problems of the world would keep. And what were they, finally, but a diversion? We could not know them, he thought. We spoke of them, if we knew it, simply as entertainment, he thought, and sighed, and smiled with affection at his gentle folly.