Hocus Pocus

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

ELIAS TARKINGTON WAS a tall and skinny man with chin whiskers and a stovepipe hat. He was shot through the right chest at Gettysburg, but not fatally. The man who shot him was 1 of the few Confederate soldiers to reach the Union lines during Pickett’s Charge. That Johnny Reb died in ecstasy among his enemies, believing that he had shot Abraham Lincoln. A crumbling newspaper account I have found here in what used to be the college library, which is now the prison library, gives his last words as follows: “Go home, Bluebellies. Old Satan’s daid.” During my 3 years in Vietnam, I certainly heard plenty of last words by dying American footsoldiers. Not 1 of them, however, had illusions that he had somehow accomplished something worthwhile in the process of making the Supreme Sacrifice. One boy of only 18 said to me while he was dying and I was holding him in my arms, “Dirty joke, dirty joke.”