The Human Stain

"This is not a wall to climb, honey," a woman says quietly to a small boy she's gathered back from where he was peering over the low end. "What's the name? What's Steve's last name?" an elderly man is asking his wife as he is combing through one of the panels, counting carefully down with a finger, row by row, from the top.

"Right there," they hear a woman say to a tiny tot who can barely walk; with one finger she is touching a name on the Wall. "Right there, sweetie. That's Uncle Johnny." And she crosses herself. "You sure that's line twenty-eight?" a woman says to her husband. "I'm sure." "Well, he's got to be there. Panel four, line twenty-eight. I found him in Washington." "Well, I don't see him. Let me count again." "That's my cousin," a woman is saying. "He opened a bottle of Coke over there, and it exploded. Booby-trapped. Nineteen years old. Behind the lines. He's at peace, please God." There is a veteran in an American Legion cap kneeling before one of the panels, helping out two black ladies dressed in their best church clothes. "What's his name?" he asks the younger of the two. "Bates. James." "Here he is," the vet says. "There he is, Ma," the younger woman says.

Because the Wall is half the size of the Washington Wall, a lot of people are having to kneel down to search for the names and, for the older ones, that makes locating them especially hard. There are flowers wrapped in cellophane lying up against the Wall. There is a handwritten poem on a piece of paper that somebody has taped to the bottom of the Wall. Louie stoops to read the words: "Star light, star bright / First star I see tonight..." There are people with red eyes from crying. There are vets with a black Vietnam Vet cap like Louie's, some of them with campaign ribbons pinned to the cap.

There's a chubby boy of about ten, his back turned stubbornly to the Wall, saying to a woman, "I don't wanna read it." There's a heavily tattooed guy in a First Infantry Division T-shirt—"Big Red One," the T-shirt says—who is clutching himself and wandering around in a daze, having terrible thoughts. Louie stops, takes hold of him, and gives him a hug. They all hug him. They even get Les to hug him. "Two of my high school friends are on there, killed within forty-eight hours of each other," a fellow nearby is saying. "And both of them waked from the same funeral home. That was a sad day at Kingston High." "He was the first one to go to Nam," somebody else is saying, "and the only one of us to not come back. And you know what he'd want there under his name, at the Wall there?

Just what he wanted in Nam. I'll tell you exactly: a bottle of Jack Daniel's, a pair of good boots, and pussy hairs baked into a brownie."

There is a group of four guys standing around talking, and when Louie hears them going at it, reminiscing, he stops to listen, and the others wait there with him. The four strangers are all gray-haired men—all of them now with stray gray hair or gray curls or, in one case, a gray ponytail poking out from back of the Vietnam Vet cap.

"You were mechanized when you were there, huh?"

"Yeah. We did a lot of humpin', but sooner or later you knew you'd get back to that fifty."

"We did a lot of walkin'. We walked all over the freakin' Central Highlands. All over them damn mountains."

"Another thing with the mech unit, we were never in the rear.

I think out of the whole time I was there, almost eleven months, I went to base camp when I got there and I went on R&R—that was it."

"When the tracks were movin', they knew you were comin', and they knew when you were going to get there, so that B-40 rocket was sittin' there waitin'. He had a lot of time to polish it up and put your name on it."

Suddenly Louie butts in, speaks up. "We're here," he says straight out to the four strangers. "We're here, right? We're all here. Let me do names. Let me do names and addresses." And he takes his notepad out of his back pocket and, while leaning on his cane, writes down all their information so he can mail them the newsletter he and Tessie publish and send out, on their own, a couple of times a year.

Then they are passing the empty chairs. They hadn't seen them on the way in, so intent were they on getting Les to the Wall without his falling down or breaking away. At the end of the parking lot, there are forty-one brownish-gray old metal bridge chairs, probably out of some church basement and set up in slightly arced rows, as at a graduation or an award ceremony—three rows of ten, one row of eleven. Great care has been taken to arrange them just so.

Taped to the backrest of each chair is somebody's name—above the empty seat, a name, a man's name, printed on a white card. A whole section of chairs off by itself, and, so as to be sure that nobody sits down there, it is roped off on each of the four sides with a sagging loop of intertwined black and purple bunting.