Cakes and Ale

As the Divine Doc M and I prepare to drive to Boston to experience Sir Paul McCartney in concert, I’m listening to all my favorite Beatle’s songs. One of their best is “Eleanor Rigby,” inspired by a no longer obscure name on a grave in Liverpool.

I can never hear the song without thinking of an obscure grave in West Oneonta, N.Y., where my paternal grandparents and other relatives are buried. Perhaps no one remembers the Butts or the Sitts families, and their real stories are long forgotten. But, like Eleanor Rigby, I think they should also be imortalized in song:

Miss Fanny Whiteman
Fell for a charmer and married one Howard L. Butts.
Then changed her name
To Miss Fanny Butts.
But she never liked all the winks about her large arse
She called for no more.

All the sad arsed people
Where do they get their names?
All the sad arsed people.
Where do they get their names?

Miss Lizzy Butts
Fell for a bounder and ran off with Earl D. Sitts
Became Betty Butts Sitts,
Honeymooned in the Ritz  
Invited her sister, the shy and demure Hazel Butts
To live in her house.

All the sad arsed people
Where do they get their names?
All the sad arsed people.
Where do they get their names?

Old Howard Butts,
Fanny Whiteman Butts and also Miz Betty Butts Sitts
Snuggle Together
In an untended grave
With Earl D. Sitts and the unmarried Miss Hazel Butts,
Sitting Forever.

All the sad arsed people
Where do they get their names?
All the sad arsed people.
Where do they get their names?

My Dad is on jungle patrol near Buna late at night. 

He hears the anxious farting of a Japanese patrol 

And a silhouetted figure looms with menace in his sight. 

“I.D. yourself, goddammit,” thinks my father, sick in soul, 

The answer sounds like leather on the muzzle of a gun. 

Dad feels the vomit in his throat and closes both his eyes. 

He doesn’t see the flash of his exploding Tommy Gun. 

The silhouette collapses with a gasp of sharp surprise. 

It’s too dark to see so Dad crumples to the ground 

And hugs the Tommy to his face and feels the muzzle’s heat. 

The jungle now is quiet and the only human sound 

Is the ghastly, gurgled groaning of that silhouetted heap. 

Dad pulls the Tommy closer and tries to close his ears. 

The moaning ebbed and flowed throughout the endless night. 

Dad thinks of Oneonta and the sweetly passing years 

Of youth, and closes his eyes against the coming of the light. 

When comes the grayness of the dawn he opens both his eyes 

And sees the Japanese boy, chalky white, and still. 

His blood has seeped throughout the night and now he lies, 

A cold and vacant shell. He is Dad’s first wartime kill. 

The teen-ager was gut shot and died in agonizing 

Misery. His face is youthful and unlined, even pretty, 

But all Dad sees is an enemy uncompromising 

In his love for Hirohito. Dad killed him without pity, 

Though now as he beholds this carcass drained of blood, 

It’s hard to ignore the common humanity

He shares with this dead stranger, pacified in the mud.

The war is a metastasis of insanity.