The Plot Against America

off, Mr. Mawhinney had graduated from the College of Agriculture at the University of Kentucky, while my father, like most other Newark slum children before the World War, hadn't been educated beyond the eighth grade. Mr. Mawhinney owned not just one farm but three-the lesser two rented to tenants-land that had been in his family going back nearly to the days of Daniel Boone, and my father owned nothing more impressive than a six-year-old car. Mr. Mawhinney could saddle a horse, drive a tractor, operate a thresher, ride a fertilizer drill, work a field as easily with a team of mules as with a team of oxen; he could rotate crops and manage hired men, both white and Negro; he could repair tools, sharpen plow points and mowers, put up fences, string barbed wire, raise chickens, dip sheep, dehorn cattle, slaughter pigs, smoke bacon, sugar-cure ham-and he raised watermelons that were the sweetest and juiciest Sandy had ever eaten. By cultivating tobacco, corn, and potatoes, Mr. Mawhinney was able to make a living right out of the earth and then, at Sunday dinner (where the six-foot-three-inch, two-hundred-and- thirty-pound farmer consumed more fried chicken with cream gravy than everyone else at the table combined), eat only food that he himself had raised, and all my father could do was sell insurance. It went without saying that Mr. Mawhinney was a Christian, a long-standing member of the great overpowering majority that fought the Revolution and founded the nation and conquered the wilderness and subjugated the Indian and enslaved the Negro and emancipated the Negro and segregated the Negro, one of the good, clean, hard-working Christian millions who settled the frontier, tilled the farms, built the cities, governed the states, sat in Congress, occupied the White House, amassed the wealth, possessed the land, owned the steel mills and the ball clubs and the railroads and the banks, even owned and oversaw the language, one of those unassailable Nordic and Anglo-Saxon Protestants who ran America and would always run it-generals, dignitaries, magnates, tycoons, the men who laid down the law and called the shots and read the riot act when they chose to-while my father, of course, was only a Jew.

Sandy got the news about Alvin once Aunt Evelyn had gone home. My father was at the kitchen table working on his account books preparatory to going out to make his evening collections and my mother was in the cellar with Sandy sorting through the clothes he'd brought back from Kentucky, deciding what to repair and what to throw out before putting everything else in the washtub. My mother always did immediately whatever had to be done, and she was set on disposing of his dirty clothes before she went to bed. I was down there with them, unable to let my brother out of my sight. He'd always known everything I didn't know, and he'd come back from Kentucky knowing still more.

'I have to tell you about Alvin,' my mother said to him. 'I didn't want to write because…well, I didn't want to shock you, dear.' Here, having gathered herself together to make certain she wouldn't cry, she said in a low voice, 'Alvin was wounded. He's in a hospital in England. He's there recovering from his wounds.'

Astonished, Sandy asked, 'Who wounded him?' as though she were reporting an occurrence in our neighborhood rather than in Nazi-occupied Europe, where people were being maimed, wounded, and killed all the time.

'We don't know any details,' my mother said. 'But it wasn't a superficial wound. I have to tell you something very sad, Sanford.' And despite her attempt to keep everyone's courage up, her voice began to waver when she said, 'Alvin's lost a leg.'

'A leg?' There aren't many words less abstruse than 'leg,' but it took some doing for him to comprehend it.

'Yes. According to a letter we got from one of his nurses, his left leg below the knee.' As if it might somehow soothe him, she added, 'If you'd like to read it, the letter's upstairs.'

'But-how will he walk?'

'They're going to fit him with an artificial leg.'

'But I don't understand who wounded him. How did he get wounded?'

'Well, they were there to fight the Germans,' she said, 'so it must have been one of them.'

Still half staving off what was half sinking in, Sandy asked, 'Which leg?'

As tenderly as she could, she repeated, 'The left.'

'The whole leg? The whole thing?'

'No, no, no,' she rushed to reassure him. 'I told you, dear-below the knee.'

Suddenly Sandy began to cry, and because he was so much bigger across the shoulders and through the chest and around the wrists than he'd been just last spring, because his arms were now brawny like a man's rather than stringy like a child's, I was so startled to see tears running down his deeply tanned face that I started crying too.

'Dear, it's awful,' my mother said. 'But Alvin is not dead. He is still alive, and now at least he's out of the war.'

'What?' Sandy erupted. 'Did you hear what you just said to me?'

'What do you mean?' she asked.

'Didn't you hear yourself? You said, 'He's out of the war.''

'And he is. Absolutely. And because he is, he'll now come home before anything more can possibly happen.'

'But why was he even in the war, Ma?'

'Because-'

'Because of Dad!' Sandy shouted.

'Dear, no, this isn't true,' and her hand flew up to cover her mouth as though it were she who had spoken those unpardonable words. 'That is not so,' she objected. 'Alvin went off to Canada without telling us. He ran away on that Friday night. You remember how terrible it was. Nobody wanted Alvin to go to war- he just went, on his own.'

'But Dad wants the whole country to go to war. Well, doesn't he? Isn't that why he voted for Roosevelt?'

'Lower your voice, please.'

'First you say thank God that Alvin is out of the war-'

'Lower your voice!' and the tension of the day now so overwhelmed her that she lost her temper, and to the boy she had so painfully missed all summer long, she snapped, 'You don't know what you're talking about!'

'But you won't listen,' he shouted. 'If it wasn't for President Lindbergh-'

That name again! I would rather have heard a bomb go off than to have to hear one more time the name that was tormenting us all.

Just then my father appeared in the dim light of the landing at the top of the cellar stairs. It was probably a good thing that from where we were standing by the deep laundry sink, all we could see of him were trousers and shoes.

'He's upset about Alvin,' my mother said, looking up to explain what the shouting was about. 'I made a mistake.' To Sandy she said, 'I should never have told you tonight. It's not easy for a boy to come home from a big experience like that…it's never easy to go from one place to another…and anyway you're so tired…,' and then, helpless, giving herself up to her own exhaustion, she said, 'The two of you, both of you, go upstairs now so I can do the wash.'

And so we turned to mount the stairs and found, fortunately, that my father had already disappeared from the landing and was off in the car to make his evening collections.

In bed, one hour later. The lights are out all over the house. We whisper.

Did you really have a good time?

I had a great time.

What made it so great?

Being on a farm is great. You get to get up early in the morning, and you're outside all day, and there are all these animals. I drew a lot of animals, I'll show you my drawings. And we had ice cream every night. Mrs. Mawhinney makes it herself. There's fresh milk there.