Making Sacrifices: Reading “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” in Quarantine
Peter Trachtenberg
The morning I started writing this essay New York City, where I was born and spent most of my life, had lost 10,842 people to COVID-19. When I checked the numbers just now, on November 15, 2020, the toll was above 24,118, a little less than one-tenth the United States total of 245,000. This is one of the difficulties of writing about a catastrophe in progress; you are the catastrophe's asymptote, haplessly flailing after its moving edge. In some hospitals the dead had overflowed the morgues and were being crowded into empty rooms. Outside others they were stored in refrigerated trucks. Unclaimed bodies were being buried on Hart Island, which since the late nineteenth century has been a resting place for New York's indigent dead. Traditionally, the burial parties were made up of staff and inmates from the correctional facility on nearby Riker's Island, but because of the horrific infection rate inside the prison the city replaced them with contract workers in hazmat suits. In the general vacuum of the quarantine, it was hard to identify one thing you didn't see, one absence among many absences, but among the things you didn’t see in New York back in April was funeral corteges. The city's funeral homes were admitting only ten mourners per service, enough to fit in two SUV’s.
Funerals are more visible in "Pale Horse, Pale Rider," Katherine Ann Porter's short novel (she preferred this term to the "slack, boneless" novella) set during the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918. She had a strong will, and she called things what she made of them. Regardless of what one calls Porter’s work, it often reads like it had been written with the current moment in mind, not a prophesy so much as a diagram of what happens when a society in thrall to various kinds of falsehood is confronted by the incontrovertible fact of a plague. Miranda, the young newspaperwoman protagonist, sees at least three funerals pass in one afternoon and barely remarks on them. But then no one really talks about the flu, either, or calls it by its name. Miranda's boyfriend refers to it as "this funny new disease" that "simply knocks you into a cocked hat." (Porter, 281) Judging from internal evidence in the text, this is in mid or late October; that month the flu killed 195,000 Americans, more than would die in all of World War I. Not wanting to dampen enthusiasm for the war effort, the Woodrow Wilson administration discouraged public discussion of the pandemic, and the press obliged him. Headlines touted breakthroughs on the Hindenburg Line while stories about the flu's quickening saturation of the country were quarantined in the middle of the book.
In "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" what people talk about is the war. It occupies the novel's central position like a bloodstained altar set up in the city center for the offerings of the populace. Miranda wakes up thinking of it: "A single word struck in her mind, a gong of warning, reminding her for the day long what she forgot happily in sleep, and only in sleep. The war, said the gong, and she shook her head." (Porter, 281) Even if she were to forget about it, other people would remind her, starting with the pair of thuggish functionaries who plant themselves on her desk at work and badger her to buy a fifty-dollar Liberty Bond she can't afford: "Do you know there's a war, or don't you?" Her colleague on the sports desk keeps bringing up his bad lungs to explain why he wasn't accepted into the service. At night she goes to the theater with Adam, the young soldier with whom she's having a whirlwind romance before he leaves for the front, only to have the show ruined by another bond salesman who comes onstage before the third act to whip the audience into a patriotic delirium:
"In Flanders Field the poppies grow, Between the crosses row on row"—"He's getting into the home stretch," whispered Adam—atrocities, innocent babes hoisted on Boche bayonets—your child and my child—if our children are spared these things, then let us say with all reverence that these dead have not died in vain—the war, the war, the WAR to end WAR, war for Democracy, for humanity, a safe world forever and ever—and to prove our faith in Democracy to each other, and to the world, let everybody get together and buy Liberty Bonds and do without sugar and wool socks . . . .
The audience rose and sang, "There's a Long, Long Trail A-winding," their opened mouths black and faces pallid in the reflected footlights; some of the faces grimaced and wept and had shining streaks like snail's tracks on them. Adam and Miranda joined in at the tops of their voices, grinning shamefacedly at each other once or twice. (Porter, 293-4)
All of Pale Horse seems to take place in a delirium, if not the delirium of patriotism, then the delirium of war, for which patriotism is just one pretext. And if not of war, then of death, of which war is just one means of production, though more efficient than others. (Adam, who is slated to serve on a sapping, or entrenching, crew, makes the gloomy boast that the average life expectancy of one from the time it starts its work is nine minutes [Porter, 285].) Miranda doesn't move from place to place so much as she abruptly finds herself in different settings—her newspaper office or a greasy spoon (called "The Greasy Spoon") or a night club and at last in her rented room, where she woke at the novel's beginning from a dream in which she was trying to outride a "lank, greenish stranger" whom she recognized as Death. A literal explanation would be that she's experiencing symptoms of the flu, which build imperceptibly during the preceding scenes until the sickness finally crashes down on her in a flood of images that have the hot, phosphorescent life of Rousseau's junglescapes and the oozing, metamorphic dread of a Cronenberg movie.
At the climax of her sickness, while Adam cares for her, she has a vision of him being repeatedly killed and brought back to life, as if he had been chosen to stand in for all the 116,708 American boys who died in that war to end all wars: to stand in for them sequentially:
Almost with no warning at all, she floated into the darkness, holding his hand in sleep that was not sleep but clear evening light in a small green wood, an angry dangerous wood full of inhuman concealed voices singing sharply like the whine of arrows and she saw Adam transfixed by a flight of these singing arrows that struck him in the heart and passed shrilly cutting their path through the leaves. Adam fell straight back before her eyes, and rose again unwounded and alive; another flight of arrows loosed from the invisible bow struck him again and he fell, and yet he was there before her untouched in a perpetual death and resurrection. She threw herself before him, angrily and selfishly she interposed herself between him and the track of the arrow, crying, No, no, like a child cheated in a game. It's my turn now, why must you always be the one to die? And the arrows struck her cleanly through the heart and through his body and he lay dead, and she still lived, and the wood whistled and sang and shouted, every branch and leaf and blade of grass had its own terrible accusing voice. (Porter, 304-5)
Throughout "Pale Horse" there is no doubt in Miranda's mind, and hence little in the reader's, that Adam will die. While she is still lucid, she has the thought that he is "pure . . . all the way through, flawless, complete as the sacrificial lamb must be." (Porter, 295) The expectation is that he'll die in the war. That's the source of the novel's suspense. Its shock is that he dies of influenza that he contracts while caring for her. (Neither Adam nor Miranda practices social distancing, and along with meds and orange juice he brings her cigarettes.) This places "Pale Horse" in the same class as the story of the Lydian king Croesus, who, having had a dream in which his son was killed by a spear, forbade him to lead his armies into battle, only for the boy to die in a hunting accident, impaled by a friend's spear. It's a story about the futility of defying fate and the impossibility of escaping it. I don't know whether Porter believed in fate. She published "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" in 1938, twenty years after her own near-death from influenza while working for a newspaper in Denver. If you believe in fate, it was hers to survive the disaster that in a year and a half killed 675,000 Americans and between fifty and one hundred million persons around the world.
On seeing that appalling figure, someone alive today might be happy to note that to date COVID-19 has killed nowhere near that number. “If we didn’t do the moves that we made, you would have had a million, a million and a half, two million people dead. You would have had ten to twenty to twenty-five times more people dead than all of the people that we’ve been watching." This was President Donald Trump in a press conference on April 20, 2020 hailing the good news that the earlier forecasts had been scaled back to sixty thousand American deaths by early August. But the new projections were proven wrong, and the death toll reached sixty thousand before April was over.
The President went from predicting the coronavirus’s miraculous disappearance—by April, as it happens—to boasting of how quickly he responded to it to promoting the healing powers of a malaria drug and injections of disinfectant. Always the true aim was to make the coronavirus go away—not cure it but banish it from public discussion and public consciousness. Given the Borglike mind-meld between the President and his supporters, this means that the official discourse of the pandemic was essentially a non-discourse, an anti-discourse. The virus might be snowflake hysteria or Democrat propaganda or a Chinese bioweapon (in some versions of the last theory, Dr. Anthony Fauci had a proprietary stake in the Wuhan laboratory where the virus is supposed to have been confected), but it was nothing to worry about. Hence the signs seen at some anti-lockdown demonstrations: “FEAR IS THE REAL VIRUS” and “THIS ‘CURE’ IS DEADLIER THAN COVID!” Hence a Fox television personality’s pronouncement that there is no real scientific basis for social distancing.
What the official discourse wants us to worry about is the economy. The economy, the economy, the ECONOMY to end ECONOMIES. Of course, it’s easier to worry about going broke than it is to worry about dying of COVID-19: I worry more about going broke than I do about dying of COVID-19. First, because to picture yourself dying of COVID is to picture a death beyond death, one in which you are simultaneously alone, dazedly watching the people you love say their goodbyes to you on the iPad the nurse holds up at your bedside like a mother holding up a flashing toy above her baby’s crib, and one of the thousands of persons who succumb to the disease on any given day, which is to say, a statistic. And, second because the fear of going broke is something most Americans already know; we knew it long before the novel coronavirus first leapt from a bat into a human being . We felt it when Wall Street got drunk. We felt it whenever a company right-sized. We felt it any time we discovered an ache or a spot or a lump that might necessitate a doctor’s visit, which in turn might set off the cascade of tests and procedures that send half a million Americans into bankruptcy every year. Brokeness awaits us at every minute. Among the many anomalies of the lockdown protests is that the protestors are demanding to be let back to work but not to be given sick leave or decent medical coverage or to be paid commensurately with the risk of contracting a lethal illness from their customers or co-workers. That alone strongly suggests that the protests aren’t grassroots, they’re astroturf. And the protestors’ signs, with their oddly uniform “home-made” lettering, are as much part of the official discourse as the President’s Tweets and the White House’s daily Resolute Reads, which have the subhead “Real News President Trump Doesn’t Want You to Miss.”
The crushing denouement of "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" works by way of a substitution: instead of dying in the war, Adam dies of a virus. The same thing characterizes every sacrifice. Usually what is substituted is the object of sacrifice rather than the method by which it is offered up. In place of your son, you give God a ram, which God has providentially supplied at the last minute, though only after commanding you to give him your son in the first place. The men—and now the men and women—who are killed in war are also spoken of as sacrifices. If our children are spared these things, then let us say with all reverence that these dead have not died in vain. The sacrifice isn’t practical, it’s mystical. Miranda’s fever-dream of Adam’s recurring slaying and resurrection is a mystical apprehension of what is about to happen to him, and if “Pale Horse” were set in Biblical Israel or classical Greece, an augurer might be brought in tell her so. But this is the U.S. at the dawn of the Jazz Age, when instead of visions people had various kinds of delirium that nobody—outside of Freud and his circle in Vienna—was bothering to interpret. Part of the novel’s power arises from the disjunction between the characters’ nervy, jangling repartee (in a movie it would be delivered by Jean Arthur and Gary Cooper), the bloodthirsty clichés of government shills, and the heatwave shimmer of Miranda’s sickbed apocalypse, apocalypse not in the sense of end of the world but in the original Greek meaning, the lifting of a veil or curtain, an uncovering.
Because America is largely a Judaeo-Christian (read Christian) nation, Americans are comfortable with the idea of sacrifice, that is to say, comforted by it. It goes along with our dislike of waste. No life is wasted whose ending can be made to yield meaning, the making of meaning being as ruthless in its own way as the making of sausages. In their anxiety to revive the economy from its viral swoon but knowing that doing so too quickly might mean the deaths of as many as three thousand people a day, the President and his supporters began to speak of those deaths as a sacrifice. Not too great a sacrifice, since most of the dead are likely to be old and sick and “if somebody who is 81 dies of COVID-19, that is not the same thing as somebody who is 30 dying of COVID-19.” This observation was made by the conservative polemicist Ben Shapiro, who added, “If this were killing children, everyone would be in lockdown forever.” The lieutenant-governor of Texas softened the cruelty of the substitution by framing it as a personal option: “No one reached out to me and said, ‘As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?’ But if they had? ‘If that is the exchange, I’m all in.’”
For the time being, these sacrifices are mostly hypothetical, unless one counts the staggering death toll in nursing homes, where old people with weakened immune systems are crowded together and ministered to by poorly paid caregivers. How many of those seniors were all in for what happened to them? Currently, the only group that can be said to be sacrificing itself is a nebulous category that includes not just doctors and nurses but ambulance drivers and hospital orderlies, patient transport technicians and cleaning personnel, bus drivers and subway conductors, the people who stock the shelves at Price Chopper and Krogers and fetch merchandise in Amazon warehouses. It includes the workers at meat-packing plants that remained open by executive order even after hundreds of their employees had gotten sick and died. Oh, and the health aides who take care of those old people. The group is disproportionately made up people of color, those people having historically performed hard and dangerous jobs in this country for low pay and suffered the predictable health consequences of that kind of work and that kind of pay, their suffering so taken for granted by their more privileged countrymen that it could be said to be a part of their job descriptions, as mesothelioma and black lung disease used to be part of miners’. Thus, a justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court brushed off the COVID deaths in Brown County, home to the JBS Packerland meat-packing plant, because they weren’t happening to “regular folks.”
That they are categorized as essential workers says something about the sorts of labor that are essential to the functioning of a vast and complex consumer society. Maybe it reflects the bad conscience of their employers, who gave them a fancy name instead of decent hazard pay. But it may also reflect the unconscious idea that the proper sacrifice ought to be pure, flawless, and complete. For similar reason, it’s become customary to speak of medical workers as heroes, a term that in some way normalizes the deaths of so many of them during the pandemic. I’ve taught medical and nursing students and have never heard one voice the expectation that they may die in the course of their work. However, back in spring I read a profile of a worker at a pork-processing plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in which he was quoted as saying, “I don’t like the term essential worker. Essential worker just means you’re on the death track.” (Huber)
The system of sacrifice goes back to the founding of the nation, which depended to a large degree on the labor of Anglo-Irish indentured servants and African slaves. In the beginning the two labor pools were similar except that the indentured served for a limited period—usually four to seven years—and the enslaved were slaves for life, their children after them the same. We can look to this bifurcation as the origin story of the racism of the white working class. Origin stories are always metaphors. And so I am speaking metaphorically when I say that from the late 1940s to the mid-1980s the great-great-grandchildren of indentured servants enjoyed such gains in their livelihood and social mobility that they forgot their forebearers had been marked by the teeth of debt-bondage, and most white Americans believed that the nation extended prosperity to all its citizens—to some a little more, to some a little less—and didn’t see the sacrifice that continued in the shadows. That was what I believed as a child. But at intervals since then the social contract has been revised so that more and more of those who used to be privileged were cast off to be sacrificed. By degrees the bloody operation became more public. Now, in this moment of mass sickness and impoverishment, the contract is being redrawn once more. It may be torn up entirely. The proportion of us who are being designated for sacrifice has yet to be reckoned, but it’s too large to be ignored. And although some of the lockdown protestors carry signs that say “Sacrifice the weak!” who can say who the weak are any more?
This is a long detour from “Pale Horse, Pale Rider.” Miranda’s apokalupsis is the novel’s dramatic climax, and while the pages that follow are hectically eventful, they essentially describe a reentry path into the world of the living. The world is recognizably the world of the hospital to which Miranda is brought—astonishingly, to a contemporary reader, on the request of her editor. There are doctors who jolly her and a nurse who has the kindness—and the time!-- to read her a note from Adam, and orderlies whom she briefly, terrifyingly sees as executioners wheeling a frail, soiled, abject old man to what both of them are sure will be his death. This and other hallucinations are plainly distorted aspects of a real place and real people engaged in recognizable work. So in the 1939 movie of The Wizard of Oz, the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion, even the cackling, hatched-faced Witch, are broad renderings of Dorothy’s neighbors in Kansas. Hallucinations distort our sense impressions of the world, but a vision like the one Miranda has earlier changes our sense of the world forever.
Structurally, the entire novel enacts a detour away from the real world and then a return to it. In the end, detours always take us where we were going in the first place. But the real world of the novel is itself cut off from reality, so intent on sending its young men off to be killed on the battlefield that it can’t acknowledge the plague that’s killing them at home, that it can’t even call that plague by name. So Miranda’s detour is actually a movement toward reality, the thing Philip K. Dick defined as “that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Once she’s in the hospital her encounters with the real grow longer and more frequent, until suddenly she has what seems to be one final pandemoniac hallucination:
Bells screamed all off key, wrangling together as they collided in mid air, horns and whistles mingled shrilly with cries of human distress; sulphur colored light exploded through the black window pane and flashed away in darkness. . . . there was a bustle of voices and footsteps in the corridor, and a sharpness in the air; the far clamor went on, a furious exasperated shrieking like a mob in revolt. (Porter 312)
A moment later a nurse tells her that it’s the Armistice and people are celebrating. The war is over.
But it means nothing to her, nor does knowing that the worst of her sickness is over. Even the news of Adam’s death comes as an anticlimax, as it might to someone who is still more than a little dead herself.
What I’ve described in “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” can also be found in other pandemic fiction, whether in Camus’s The Plague, now a staple of quarantine reading groups, or in James McCourt’s tender and subversive Time Remaining, the greatest novel written about AIDS. The powerful deny and distract as long as they can, then turn and blame the victims or else praise them as heroes, as if any of them had volunteered to die. And as if their willingness to be substituted would make up for the callousness or incompetence of their leaders.
The Armistice was declared on November 11, 1918, and indeed that day, which we know today as Veteran’s Day, used to be called Armistice Day. In his novel Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut recalls it as a sacred holiday, marked, in those countries that had fought in the First World War, by a minute of silence at the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour. He wrote:
It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.
Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not. (Vonnegut, 6)
I think what he meant was that in secular societies such as our own, the living are always usurping the rights and prerogatives of the dead, even the prerogative of being remembered. And so a hundred years from now, our great-grandchildren may not remember the thousands and tens of thousands who died in this pandemic. They may not remember that there was a pandemic. They will need someone like Porter to remind them.
Katherine Ann Porter, The Collected Stories. New York: Harcourt, 1979
Makenzie Huber, “America’s Food Chain: ‘Essential Worker Just Means You’re on the Death Track.” USA Today, May 12, 2020. https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/2020/05/04/meat-packing-essential-worker-hogs-south-dakota-smithfield-food-chain-covid-19-coronavirus-inside/3064329001/
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. , Breakfast of Champions. New York: Delta, 1973
Peter Trachtenberg is the author of Another Insane Devotion, 7 Tattoos: A Memoir in the Flesh; and The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning, which won the Phi Beta Kappa Society’s 2009 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award. He is now at work on The Last Artists in New York, a group biography of the residents of a subsidized housing estate for artists that will be out from Black Sparrow Press in 2023.
His essays, journalism, and short fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, A Public Space, StoryQuarterly, VQR, and The New York Times Travel Magazine. His honors include the Whiting Award, the Nelson Algren Award for Short Fiction, a Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and residencies at Yaddo and the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Centre.
He teaches in the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh and the Bennington Writing Seminars.
