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Chapter 25 The Chaplain

    It was already some time since the chaplain had first begun wondering what everything was all about. Was therea God? How could he be sure? Being an Anabaptist minister in the American Army was difficult enough underthe best of circumstances; without dogma, it was almost intolerable.

  People with loud voices frightened him. Brave, aggressive men of action like Colonel Cathcart left him feelinghelpless and alone. Wherever he went in the Army, he was a stranger. Enlisted men and officers did not conductthemselves with him as they conducted themselves with other enlisted men and officers, and even otherchaplains were not as friendly toward him as they were toward each other. In a world in which success was theonly virtue, he had resigned himself to failure. He was painfully aware that he lacked the ecclesiastical aplomband savoir-faire that enabled so many of his colleagues in other faiths and sects to get ahead. He was just notequipped to excel. He thought of himself as ugly and wanted daily to be home with his wife.

  Actually, the chaplain was almost good-looking, with a pleasant, sensitive face as pale and brittle as sandstone.

  His mind was open on every subject.

  Perhaps he really was Washington Irving, and perhaps he really had been signing Washington Irving’s name tothose letters he knew nothing about. Such lapses of memory were not uncommon in medical annals, he knew.

  There was no way of really knowing anything. He remembered very distinctly—or was under the impression heremembered very distinctly—his feeling that he had met Yossarian somewhere before the first time he had metYossarian lying in bed in the hospital. He remembered experiencing the same disquieting sensation almost twoweeks later when Yossarian appeared at his tent to ask to be taken off combat duty. By that time, of course, thechaplain had met Yossarian somewhere before, in that odd, unorthodox ward in which every patient seemeddelinquent but the unfortunate patient covered from head to toe in white bandages and plaster who was founddead one day with a thermometer in his mouth. But the chaplain’s impression of a prior meeting was of someoccasion far more momentous and occult than that, of a significant encounter with Yossarian in some remote,submerged and perhaps even entirely spiritual epoch in which he had made the identical, foredooming admissionthat there was nothing, absolutely nothing, he could do to help him.

  Doubts of such kind gnawed at the chaplain’s lean, suffering frame insatiably. Was there a single true faith, or alife after death? How many angels could dance on the head of a pin, and with what matters did God occupyhimself in all the infinite aeons before the Creation? Why was it necessary to put a protective seal on the brow ofCain if there were no other people to protect him from? Did Adam and Eve produce daughters? These were thegreat, complex questions of ontology that tormented him. Yet they never seemed nearly as crucial to him as thequestion of kindness and good manners. He was pinched perspinngly in the epistemological dilemma of theskeptic, unable to accept solutions to problems he was unwilling to dismiss as unsolvable. He was never withoutmisery, and never without hope.

  “Have you ever,” he inquired hesitantly of Yossarian that day in his tent as Yossarian sat holding in both handsthe warm bottle of Coca-Cola with which the chaplain had been able to solace him, “been in a situation whichyou felt you had been in before, even though you knew you were experiencing it for the first time?” Yossariannodded perfunctorily, and the chaplain’s breath quickened in anticipation as he made ready to join his will powerwith Yossarian’s in a prodigious effort to rip away at last the voluminous black folds shrouding the eternal mysteries of existence. “Do you have that feeling now?”

  Yossarian shook his head and explained that déjà vu was just a momentary infinitesimal lag in the operation oftwo coactive sensory nerve centers that commonly functioned simultaneously. The chaplain scarcely heard him.

  He was disappointed, but not inclined to believe Yossarian, for he had been given a sign, a secret, enigmaticvision that he still lacked the boldness to divulge. There was no mistaking the awesome implications of thechaplain’s revelation: it was either an insight of divine origin or a hallucination; he was either blessed or losinghis mind. Both prospects filled him with equal fear and depression. It was neither déjà vu, presque vu nor jamaisvu. It was possible that there were other vus of which he had never heard and that one of these other vus wouldexplain succinctly the bafing phenomenon of which he had been both a witness and a part; it was even possiblethat none of what he thought had taken place, really had taken place, that he was dealing with an aberration ofmemory rather than of perception, that he never really had thought he had seen, that his impression now that heonce had thought so was merely the illusion of an illusion, and that he was only now imagining that he had everonce imagined seeing a naked man sitting in a tree at the cemetery.

  It was obvious to the chaplain now that he was not particularly well suited to his work, and he often speculatedwhether he might not be happier serving in some other branch of the service, as a private in the infantry or fieldartillery, perhaps, or even as a paratrooper. He had no real friends. Before meeting Yossarian, there was no onein the group with whom he felt at ease, and he was hardly at ease with Yossarian, whose frequent rash andinsubordinate outbursts kept him almost constantly on edge and in an ambiguous state of enjoyable trepidation.

  The chaplain felt safe when he was at the officers’ club with Yossarian and Dunbar, and even with just Natelyand McWatt. When he sat with them he had no need to sit with anyone else; his problem of where to sit wassolved, and he was protected against the undesired company of all those fellow officers who invariablywelcomed him with excessive cordiality when he approached and waited uncomfortably for him to go away. Hemade so many people uneasy. Everyone was always very friendly toward him, and no one was ever very nice;everyone spoke to him, and no one ever said anything. Yossarian and Dunbar were much more relaxed, and thechaplain was hardly uncomfortable with them at all. They even defended him the night Colonel Cathcart tried tothrow him out of the officers’ club again, Yossarian rising truculently to intervene and Nately shouting out,“Yossarian!” to restrain him. Colonel Cathcart turned white as a sheet at the sound of Yossarian’s name, and, toeveryone’s amazement, retreated in horrified disorder until he bumped into General Dreedle, who elbowed himaway with annoyance and ordered him right back to order the chaplain to start coming into the officers’ clubevery night again.

  The chaplain had almost as much trouble keeping track of his status at the officers’ club as he had rememberingat which of the ten mess halls in the group he was scheduled to eat his next meal. He would just as soon haveremained kicked out of the officers’ club, had it not been for the pleasure he was now finding there with his newcompanions. If the chaplain did not go to the officers’ club at night, there was no place else he could go. Hewould pass the time at Yossarian’s and Dunbar’s table with a shy, reticent smile, seldom speaking unlessaddressed, a glass of thick sweet wine almost untasted before him as he toyed unfamiliarly with the tiny corncobpipe that he affected selfconsciously and occasionally stuffed with tobacco and smoked. He enjoyed listening toNately, whose maudlin, bittersweet lamentations mirrored much of his own romantic desolation and never failedto evoke in him resurgent tides of longing for his wife and children. The chaplain would encourage Nately withnods of comprehension or assent, amused by his candor and immaturity. Nately did not glory too immodestly that his girl was a prostitute, and the chaplain’s awareness stemmed mainly from Captain Black, who neverslouched past their table without a broad wink at the chaplain and some tasteless, wounding gibe about her toNately. The chaplain did not approve of Captain Black and found it difficult not to wish him evil.

  No one, not even Nately, seemed really to appreciate that he, Chaplain Robert Oliver Shipman, was not just achaplain but a human being, that he could have a charming, passionate, pretty wife whom he loved almostinsanely and three small blue-eyed children with strange, forgotten faces who would grow up someday to regardhim as a freak and who might never forgive him for all the social embarrassment his vocation would cause them.

  Why couldn’t anybody understand that he was not really a freak but a normal, lonely adult trying to lead anormal, lonely adult life? If they pricked him, didn’t he bleed? And if he was tickled, didn’t he laugh? It seemednever to have occurred to them that he, just as they, had eyes, hands, organs, dimensions, senses and affections,that he was wounded by the same kind of weapons they were, warmed and cooled by the same breezes and fedby the same kind of food, although, he was forced to concede, in a different mess hall for each successive meal.

  The only person who did seem to realize he had feelings was Corporal Whitcomb, who had just managed tobruise them all by going over his head to Colonel Cathcart with his proposal for sending form letters ofcondolence home to the families of men killed or wounded in combat.

  The chaplain’s wife was the one thing in the world he could be certain of, and it would have been sufficient, ifonly he had been left to live his life out with just her and the children. The chaplain’s wife was a reserved,diminutive, agreeable woman in her early thirties, very dark and very attractive, with a narrow waist, calmintelligent eyes, and small, bright, pointy teeth in a childlike face that was vivacious and petite; he kept forgettingwhat his children looked like, and each time he returned to their snapshots it was like seeing their faces for thefirst time. The chaplain loved his wife and children with such tameless intensity that he often wanted to sink tothe ground helplessly and weep like a castaway cripple. He was tormented inexorably by morbid fantasiesinvolving them, by dire, hideous omens of illness and accident. His meditations were polluted with threats ofdread diseases like Ewing’s tumor and leukemia; he saw his infant son die two or three times every weekbecause he had never taught his wife how to stop arterial bleeding; watched, in tearful, paralyzed silence, hiswhole family electrocuted, one after the other, at a baseboard socket because he had never told her that a humanbody would conduct electricity; all four went up in flames almost every night when the water heater explodedand set the two-story wooden house afire; in ghastly, heartless, revolting detail he saw his poor dear wife’s trimand fragile body crushed to a viscous pulp against the brick wall of a market building by a half-wined drunkenautomobile driver and watched his hysterical five-year-old daughter being led away from the grisly scene by akindly middle-aged gentleman with snow-white hair who raped and murdered her repeatedly as soon as he haddriven her off to a deserted sandpit, while his two younger children starved to death slowly in the house after hiswife’s mother, who had been baby-sitting, dropped dead from a heart attack when news of his wife’s accidentwas given to her over the telephone. The chaplain’s wife was a sweet, soothing, considerate woman, and heyearned to touch the warm flesh of her slender arm again and stroke her smooth black hair, to hear her intimate,comforting voice. She was a much stronger person than he was. He wrote brief, untroubled letters to her once aweek, sometimes twice. He wanted to write urgent love letters to her all day long and crowd the endless pageswith desperate, uninhibited confessions of his humble worship and need and with careful instructions foradministering artificial respiration. He wanted to pour out to her in torrents of self-pity all his unbearableloneliness and despair and warn her never to leave the boric acid or the aspirin in reach of the children or to crossa street against the traffic light. He did not wish to worry her. The chaplain’s wife was intuitive, gentle, compassionate and responsive. Almost inevitably, his reveries of reunion with her ended in explicit acts of lovemaking.

  The chaplain felt most deceitful presiding at funerals, and it would not have astonished him to learn that theapparition in the tree that day was a manifestation of the Almighty’s censure for the blasphemy and prideinherent in his function. To simulate gravity, feign grief and pretend supernatural intelligence of the hereafter inso fearsome and arcane a circumstance as death seemed the most criminal of offenses. He recalled—or wasalmost convinced he recalled—the scene at the cemetery perfectly. He could still see Major Major and MajorDanby standing somber as broken stone pillars on either side of him, see almost the exact number of enlistedmen and almost the exact places in which they had stood, see the four unmoving men with spades, the repulsivecoffin and the large, loose, triumphant mound of reddish-brown earth, and the massive, still, depthless, mufflingsky, so weirdly blank and blue that day it was almost poisonous. He would remember them forever, for theywere all part and parcel of the most extraordinary event that had ever befallen him, an event perhaps marvelous,perhaps pathological—the vision of the naked man in the tree. How could he explain it? It was not already seenor never seen, and certainly not almost seen; neither déjà vu, jamais vu nor presque vu was elastic enough tocover it. Was it a ghost, then? The dead man’s soul? An angel from heaven or a minion from hell? Or was thewhole fantastic episode merely the figment of a diseased imagination, his own, of a deteriorating mind, a rottingbrain? The possibility that there really had been a naked man in the tree—two men, actually, since the first hadbeen joined shortly by a second man clad in a brown mustache and sinister dark garments from head to toe whobent forward ritualistically along the limb of the tree to offer the first man something to drink from a browngoblet—never crossed the chaplain’s mind.

  The chaplain was sincerely a very helpful person who was never able to help anyone, not even Yossarian whenhe finally decided to seize the bull by the horns and visit Major Major secretly to learn if, as Yossarian had said,the men in Colonel Cathcart’s group really were being forced to fly more combat missions than anyone else. Itwas a daring, impulsive move on which the chaplain decided after quarreling with Corporal Whitcomb again andwashing down with tepid canteen water his joyless lunch of Milky Way and Baby Ruth. He went to Major Majoron foot so that Corporal Whitcomb would not see him leaving, stealing into the forest noiselessly until the twotents in his clearing were left behind, then dropping down inside the abandoned railroad ditch, where the footingwas surer. He hurried along the fossilized wooden ties with accumulating mutinous anger. He had beenbrowbeaten and humiliated successively that morning by Colonel Cathcart, Colonel Korn and CorporalWhitcomb. He just had to make himself felt in some respect! His slight chest was soon puffing for breath. Hemoved as swiftly as he could without breaking into a run, fearing his resolution might dissolve if he slowed.

  Soon he saw a uniformed figure coming toward him between the rusted rails. He clambered immediately up theside of the ditch, ducked inside a dense copse of low trees for concealment and sped along in his originaldirection a narrow, overgrown mossy path he found winding deep inside the shaded forest. It was tougher goingthere, but he plunged ahead with the same reckless and consuming determination, slipping and stumbling oftenand stinging his unprotected hands on the stubborn branches blocking his way until the bushes and tall ferns onboth sides spread open and he lurched past an olive-drab military trailer on cinder blocks clearly visible throughthe thinning underbrush. He continued past a tent with a luminous pearl-gray cat sunning itself outside and pastanother trailer on cinder blocks and then burst into the clearing of Yossarian’s squadron. A salty dew had formedon his lips. He did not pause, but strode directly across the clearing into the orderly room, where he waswelcomed by a gaunt, stoop-shouldered staff sergeant with prominent cheekbones and long, very light blond hair, who informed him graciously that he could go right in, since Major Major was out.

  The chaplain thanked him with a curt nod and proceeded alone down the aisle between the desks and typewritersto the canvas partition in the rear. He bobbed through the triangular opening and found himself inside an emptyoffice. The flap fell closed behind him. He was breathing hard and sweating profusely. The office remainedempty. He thought he heard furtive whispering. Ten minutes passed. He looked about in stern displeasure, hisjaws clamped together indomitably, and then turned suddenly to water as he remembered the staff sergeant’sexact words: he could go right in, since Major Major was out. The enlisted men were playing a practical joke!

  The chaplain shrank back from the wall in terror, bitter tears springing to his eyes. A pleading whimper escapedhis trembling lips. Major Major was elsewhere, and the enlisted men in the other room had made him the butt ofan inhuman prank. He could almost see them waiting on the other side of the canvas wall, bunched upexpectantly like a pack of greedy, gloating omnivorous beasts of prey, ready with their barbaric mirth and jeersto pounce on him brutally the moment he reappeared. He cursed himself for his gullibility and wished in panicfor something like a mask or a pair of dark glasses and a false mustache to disguise him, or for a forceful, deepvoice like Colonel Cathcart’s and broad, muscular shoulders and biceps to enable him to step outside fearlesslyand vanquish his malevolent persecutors with an overbearing authority and self-confidence that would makethem all quail and slink away cravenly in repentance. He lacked the courage to face them. The only other wayout was the window. The coast was clear, and the chaplain jumped out of Major Major’s office through thewindow, darted swiftly around the corner of the tent, and leaped down inside the railroad ditch to hide.

  He scooted away with his body doubled over and his face contorted intentionally into a nonchalant, sociablesmile in case anyone chanced to see him. He abandoned the ditch for the forest the moment he saw someonecoming toward him from the opposite direction and ran through the cluttered forest frenziedly like someonepursued, his cheeks burning with disgrace. He heard loud, wild peals of derisive laughter crashing all about himand caught blurred glimpses of wicked, beery faces smirking far back inside the bushes and high overhead in thefoliage of the trees. Spasms of scorching pains stabbed through his lungs and slowed him to a crippled walk. Helunged and staggered onward until he could go no farther and collapsed all at once against a gnarled apple tree,banging his head hard against the trunk as he toppled forward and holding on with both arms to keep fromfalling. His breathing was a rasping, moaning din in his ears. Minutes passed like hours before he finallyrecognized himself as the source of the turbulent roar that was overwhelming him. The pains in his chest abated.

  Soon he felt strong enough to stand. He cocked his ears craftily. The forest was quiet. There was no demoniclaughter, no one was chasing him. He was too tired and sad and dirty to feel relieved. He straightened hisdisheveled clothing with fingers that were numb and shaking and walked the rest of the way to the clearing withrigid self-control. The chaplain brooded often about the danger of heart attack.

  Corporal Whitcomb’s jeep was still parked in the clearing. The chaplain tiptoed stealthily around the back ofCorporal Whitcomb’s tent rather than pass the entrance and risk being seen and insulted by him. Heaving agrateful sigh, he slipped quickly inside his own tent and found Corporal Whitcomb ensconced on his cot, hisknees propped up. Corporal Whitcomb’s mud-caked shoes were on the chaplain’s blanket, and he was eating oneof the chaplain’s candy bars as he thumbed with sneering expression through one of the chaplain’s Bibles.

  “Where’ve you been?” he demanded rudely and disinterestedly, without looking up.

  The chaplain colored and turned away evasively. “I went for a walk through the woods.”

  “All right,” Corporal Whitcomb snapped. “Don’t take me into your confidence. But just wait and see whathappens to my morale.” He bit into the chaplain’s candy bar hungrily and continued with a full mouth. “You hada visitor while you were gone. Major Major.”

  The chaplain spun around with surprise and cried: “Major Major? Major Major was here?”

  “That’s who we’re talking about, isn’t it?”

  “Where did he go?”

  “He jumped down into that railroad ditch and took off like a frightened rabbit.” Corporal Whitcomb snickered.

  “What a jerk!”

  “Did he say what he wanted?”

  “He said he needed your help in a matter of great importance.”

  The chaplain was astounded. “Major Major said that?”

  “He didn’t say that,” Corporal Whitcomb corrected with withering precision. “He wrote it down in a sealedpersonal letter he left on your desk.”

  The chaplain glanced at the bridge table that served as his desk and saw only the abominable orange-red pear-shaped plum tomato he had obtained that same morning from Colonel Cathcart, still lying on its side where hehad forgotten it like an indestructible and incamadine symbol of his own ineptitude. “Where is the letter?”

  “I threw it away as soon as I tore it open and read it.” Corporal Whitcomb slammed the Bible shut and jumpedup. “What’s the matter? Won’t you take my word for it?” He walked out. He walked right back in and almostcollided with the chaplain, who was rushing out behind him on his way back to Major Major. “You don’t knowhow to delegate responsibility,” Corporal Whitcomb informed him sullenly. “That’s another one of the thingsthat’s wrong with you.”

  The chaplain nodded penitently and hurried past, unable to make himself take the time to apologize. He couldfeel the skillful hand of fate motivating him imperatively. Twice that day already, he realized now, Major Majorhad come racing toward him inside the ditch; and twice that day the chaplain had stupidly postponed the destinedmeeting by bolting into the forest. He seethed with self-recrimination as he hastened back as rapidly as he couldstride along the splintered, irregularly spaced railroad ties. Bits of grit and gravel inside his shoes and socks weregrinding the tops of his toes raw. His pale, laboring face was screwed up unconsciously into a grimace of acutediscomfort. The early August afternoon was growing hotter and more humid. It was almost a mile from his tentto Yossarian’s squadron. The chaplain’s summer-tan shirt was soaking with perspiration by the time he arrivedthere and rushed breathlessly back inside the orderly room tent, where he was halted peremptorily by the same treacherous, soft-spoken staff sergeant with round eyeglasses and gaunt cheeks, who requested him to remainoutside because Major Major was inside and told him he would not be allowed inside until Major Major wentout. The chaplain looked at him in an uncomprehending daze. Why did the sergeant hate him? he wondered. Hislips were white and trembling. He was aching with thirst. What was the matter with people? Wasn’t theretragedy enough? The sergeant put his hand out and held the chaplain steady.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” he said regretfully in a low, courteous, melancholy voice. “But those are Major Major’s orders.

  He never wants to see anyone.”

  “He wants to see me,” the chaplain pleaded. “He came ............

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