by James Jones
“I offer no plans by which to coordinate it into future social structures,” Malloy grinned, “but before Millennium comes somebody is going to have to take it into account some way or other—in spite of the economist-idealists like Sinclair and Chaplin. It is one of the reasons I’ve never got married.”
As a deepsea sailor Jack Malloy had had the clap six times—
“The syph never, knock on wood.”
—and it still did not cure him, yet there was still something in him, deep in the unabashed-dreamer’s eyes, that none of it had ever really touched. He had always kept on reading. And of it all, all the places, all the jobs, all the experiences, all the women, he still wanted the USA. That was where he belonged, that was where his faith lay, and that was where he needed to be.
It was in 1937 when Harry Bridges who was no longer a punk, but still was growing, finally reached the level of the trans-oceanic and trans-global sailors and pushed Jack Malloy clear off the sea for good.
“And he isnt through yet,” Malloy said. “Before this war is over three years, he’ll have all Hawaii in his pocket along with the rest.”
Jack Malloy, with eleven years experience as a deepsea man behind him, at the age of 32, came back home. He enlisted as a green hand into the Regular Army. He wanted to be there for the war. He still kept on reading.
“Of them all,” he said, “I think the Wobblies came the closest. Nobody ever really understood them. They had the courage, and whats more important, they had the soft heart to go with it. Their defeat was due to faulty technique of execution, rather than to concept. But also, I dont think the time was right for them yet. I’m a fatalist. If you believe in the logic of evolution you have no choice but to be a fatalist.
“I’ve thought about it a lot. Christ had to have his Isaiah; even Martin Luther had his Erasmus. I think the Wobblies were the prophets and forerunners of a new religion. Christ knows, we need one. And if you had ever studied the evolution of religions as natural facts instead of supernatural mysticisms, like I have, you wouldnt look so startled.
“You think religions are constant things? inflexible and solid and born full-grown? Religions evolve. They grow out of a need, just like any other natural phenomenon, and they follow the same natural laws. They are born, grown, have sons, and illegitimate sons, and die.
“Every true religion follows the same logical path. First come the prophets, growing new faith out of the deathrot of the old. Every Christ has to have his Isaiah and John the Baptist to prepare the way for him. Read up on religions sometime and see. You can see how they all follow the same logical principles:
“Every religion starts at the bottom level, with the whores, publicans, and sinners. Logically, it has to start there, with the dissatisfied. You cant get the satisfied to accept new ideas.
“And every religion brings martyrdom to its innovators. That part is a test of natural selection. If the new faith is strong enough, it conquers persecution and goes on to glory.
“And then—and only then—in every religion, the satisfied ones (who through fear did the persecuting) do an about-face and climb on the bandwagon, through the same fear that made them once persecute it.
“And, also, every religion begins to die then, at that moment When the Emperor Constantine accepted Christianity because it won a battle for him and made it the Roman State religion, he also at the same moment decreed the inevitable decline and death of Christianity.
“The stronger the religion, the longer it takes to triumph, and the longer it takes to die, and the more illegitimate offspring it has. But they all follow the same step-by-step logical process.
“They are prophesied, they come up, they triumph, they are accepted, they degenerate, and they decline. A religion that has done its work and made its point and taught its lesson has no other place to go but down. It must crack up and begins its degeneration to make room for its successor, that will take the old one’s lesson and elaborate it and evolve it—just as Christianity once did for Judaism.
“Look,” he said excitedly, “what was Judaism? Judaism taught that God was fixed as the earth around which the universe revolved, unchangeable, a God of perpetual punishment and vengeance; Judaism taught the Ten Commandments.
“Okay.
“What did Christianity do? Christianity took Judaism and changed it a little. It still taught that God was fixed, unchangeable, but fixed as the sun around which the earth and universe revolved, further away but still unchangeable, a less personal Center. It changed the God of perpetual punishment and vengeance to a God of perpetual love and forgiveness that only punished evil when He absolutely had to. Christianity replaced the Ten Commandments with the Sermon on the Mount.
“Okay, what would be the next step, the next logical evolvement? Mightnt it be a religion that would teach that God was not fixed at all? A religion that would teach that God was nothing at all if He was not eternally Changeable? That neither the earth nor the sun is the fixed unchangeable center, but that instead there is no center, as Einstein says the universe is a circle in time where both the earth and sun are small minor parts and everything is in constant flux and forever changing. Mightnt the new religion teach that instead of being permanently fixed God is growth and evolution, a God which is never the same twice?”
When he had gone that far with it, he was no longer talking to Prew to take Prew’s mind off of Angelo. He was caught up and expounding the theory that had grown to obsess his whole life. The unabashed-dreamer’s eyes did not recognize Prew as Prew or remember a person named Angelo. And, curiously, it was at those times and only those times when Prew was able to lose himself in listening sufficiently to forget there was a Maggio, as the dreamer’s eyes dominated him and the soft gentle voice spun on and on.
“You see what that implies? If God is Instability rather than Fixity, if God is Growth and Evolution, then there is no need for the concept of forgiveness. The mere concept of forgiveness implies the doing of something wrong, Original Sin. But if evolution is growth by trial and error, how can errors be wrong? since they contribute to growth? Does a mother feel called upon to forgive her child for eating green apples or putting his hand on the stove? Did you ever truly love some body, or some thing? A woman; did you ever love a woman? If you ever really truly loved a thing, you never even considered forgiving it something, did you? Anything it did was all right with you, wasnt it? No matter how much it hurt you. You dont have to forgive something you love. You forgive the ones you dont love.
“If you love someone,” Jack Malloy said, “you never even think of forgiving them. You may fight them like hell over something, and use every pressure to change them. But when the brawl is all over and you havent changed them one bit, you go right on accepting them. You’re never so smug, or so righteous, or so superior, to tell yourself—or tell them—you forgive them.”
And with that Jack Malloy’s philosophy was expounded, his religion preached, his credo stated. All the years of the Wobblies, the fights with the Communists, Haywood and Chaplin, Upton Sinclair, Harry Bridges, the years at sea, the women he had loved to sleep with, and the Army; all rolled into one superhuman distillation of experience in an attempt to account for everything. He came back to it again and again later on. He couldnt stay away from it. It meant too much to him. But always it amounted to this same thing: that over the old God of Vengeance, over the new God of Forgiveness, was the still newer God of Acceptance, the God of Love-That-Surpasseth-Forgiveness, the God who saw heard and spoke no Evil simply because there was none.
And with it came out the secret that Prew had puzzled over, the secret of his power over the men in the Stockade, the secret of the bigheartedness that an archcynic like Blues Berry could worship unreservedly:
Jack Malloy was able to love the human race because he expected ahead-of-time to be let down by his friends and hurt by his enemies and betrayed by his leaders. He saw these things as natural reactions to be anticipated, instead of perfidies to be decried.
If there was one single regret in Jack Malloy’s life, it was that he had been born in the wrong time. He had been born with the prophets, instead of with the Messiah.
“Because it will come,” he said. “It hasnt come yet, but eventually it will have to come. Logic and evolution demand that it will come. And it will come here in America, because it is here in America, the home of the most hated race, where the hope of the world will lie. The greatest religions always come up out of the most hated races. Maybe I wont live to see it. Maybe you wont. But it has to come.”
He did not expect to live to see it. He had had his fling, with the Wobblies, and they had turned out to be only one of the forerunners. He attributed his bad luck to something terrible he had done once ages past, some bad mistake, that he was still working out and paying for. Jack Malloy believed in reincarnation, because to his logical mind it was the only logical explanation. And it was for this same reason that he worshipped the memory of Joseph Hillstrom so.
“He was a saint. He had to be one, to have been given the life he was allowed to have.”
Joe Hill, who had written Casey Jones and Hallelujah, I’m A Bum without ever even getting the credit of authorship, who had died back in 1915 before Jack Malloy ever heard of the Wobblies, who had been shot to death by a Utah firing squad for a murder he did not commit after asking that his body be transported to the Montana State Line because he “didnt want to be found dead in Utah,” who had not lived to see the degeneration, destruction and death of his beloved IWW.
Joe Hill, whom Jack Malloy envied more than any other man.
“Thats the way to go out. That shows what can be done. But you have to have what it takes. And then on top of that you have to have the luck. Someday they will rank Joe Hill right up alongside old John the Baptist. He must have done something great, back a long time ago before he was ever Joe Hill, to have earned a chance at a ticket like that one.”
When Prew asked what he meant, he said, “In one of his previous lives.”
Chapter 43
IT WAS DURING the month after Angelo had gone to the hosp and before Stonewall Jackson came back with news of him, that the young Indiana farmboy Prew had seen beaned in Number Three was transferred into Number Two. Of all the men that had been in Number Three with Prew he was the one Prew would have picked as least likely to succeed but he came in with them after his three day jaunt in the Hole as mildly affable as ever.
They had been expecting him since before Angelo had gone in the Hole. Apparently, after that first spell of lapse that resulted from the beaning itself and had lasted only one day, the Indiana farmboy had started having them more and more often and for longer and longer periods. When he was normal, he was the same old mild uncomplaining self; when he was in one of the lapses, he was the same docile dreamy idiot Prew had seen. But every time he came out of a period of lapse he went crazy fighting mad and attacked whatever happened to be closest to him. Twice he had attacked guards on the rockpile. Once in the messhall he had emptied his plate of catsup and beans over the head of the man eating next to him and started sawing on him with the dull edge of his table knife; the only thing that saved the man was the fact that the GI cutlery would hardly cut butter. He got three days in the Hole for that one, served them uncomplainingly affably, and the day after he got out tried to brain the man next to him on the rockpile with a medium-sized boulder. A number of times at night in the barracks some man in Number Three would wake to find a crazy-faced demon wildly choking his neck and grapple with him until three or four others, roused by the scuffle, would come to his aid and sit on the Indiana farmboy until he was all right again. The boys in Number Three loyally covered these up for him and finally set up a system of guard duty in which there was always one man awake at night to keep an eye on him. But finally he went after Fatso himself one day in the messhall. He was beaned with a grub hoe handle again for his trouble, and it was decided he was worthy Number Two Material.
The truth was, he was not. He was as out of place in Number Two as a white chicken amongst a black flock. But he accepted this with the same equanimity that he accepted everything else. He remembered Prew and eagerly made friends with him, and he quickly arrived at a worship of Jack Malloy that surpassed even that of Blues Berry and came very close to the point of embarrassment the way he followed Jack around like a puppy. When they came to playing games in the evenings he tried as hard with that as he tried with everything else, when he was normal, and suffered the knee-punctures and burned hands of Indian-wrassle and the sore ribs of The Game as uncomplainingly as he suffered everything else. Once, he even managed to stay up at The Game through the five smallest men and was cheered roundly. He achieved the distinction of being the first man in the history of Number Two who was ever offered exemption from playing games, but he refused to sit on the sidelines and not play, although he was never known to have won any game from anybody, up to the time they all started taking it easy on him.
They took him under their wing and looked after him and adopted him as a sort of a mascot. His crazy spells when he was coming out of one of his lapses did not bother them and they did not need to set up a guard system because without exception they were all adepts at rough and tumble fighting and had been since childhood. If one of them woke up to find him choking on him he would wrassle loose from him, knock him out, and then put him back to bed where he would wake up in the morning his old mild affable self again. None of them in Number Two, in fact nobody in the Stockade, considered him even remotely dangerous. Even a mind like Jack Malloy could not have seen danger in such an ineffectually murderous Indiana farmboy. That he would ever be the match that would touch off the fuse that would blow apart the tautly balanced status quo of the Stockade as a whole and Number Two in particular, and alter the whole lives of several of them, even unto the Outside, was frankly laughable.
It happened without warning or expectation, out on the rockpile one afternoon. Since he had come into Number Two, the Indiana farmboy had gradually grown more and more bitter about life in an affable sort of a way. It was not like him, and nobody ever knew afterwards if it was because he was trying to emulate his new heroes, or if it was because his spells had cost him his time-off-for-good-behavior and, with his final removal to Number Two, lengthened his one-month sentence into a two-month one.
That afternoon he was in one of his dreamy lapses. Prew was working between Blues Berry and Stonewall Jackson when he came out of it They had been watching for the signs, and no sooner had the Indiana farmboy dropped his hammer and looked up wildly than the three of them fell on him and held him down until he was all right again. Then they all four went on back to work without thinking anything much about it since they were all used to the procedure by now.
But a little while later the Indiana farmboy stepped over to them with an unusually affably resolute look and asked if one of them would break his arm for him.
“What the hell for, Francis?” Prew wanted to know.
“Because I want to go to the hospital,” the Indiana farmboy explained.
“What do you want to go to the hospital for?”
“Because I’m sick and tired of this goddam hole,” the Indiana farmboy said affably. “I’ve pulled my whole month’s sentence and I’ve still got twenty-six days to do. Twenty-six more days.”
“How would you like to have six months to do, like me?” Jackson said.
“I wouldnt like it,” the Indiana farmboy said.
“Breaking your arm wont help you to get out any quicker,” Prew said reasonably.
“It’ll get me two or three weeks in the hospital though.”
“Anyway, how the hell could we break your arm? Take it over our knee like a stick and break it?” Prew said, “An arm’s hard to break, Francis.”
“I’ve already thought of that,” the Indiana farmboy said triumphantly. “I can lay my arm down between two rocks and one of you can hit it with a sledgehammer. That would break it quick and easy and give me at least two weeks vacation
in the hospital.”
“I don’t want to do it, Francis,” Prew said, suddenly feeling a little bit queasy.
“Will you do it for me, Stonewall?” the Indiana farmboy said.
“What the hell do you want to go to the hospital for?” Jackson evaded. “It aint no better than here. I’ve been there, and I’m telling you true. It aint a dam bit bettern here.”
“Well, at least there wont be no Fatso there, and you wont have to work in this goddam sun breaking rocks with a hammer.”
“No,” Jackson said, “but you’ll sit around on your dead ass looking out through them goddam chainmesh grids till you’ll wish to hell you was breaking rocks with a hammer.”
“At least the food will be better.”
“Its better,” Jackson admitted. “But you’ll get just as sick of it anyway.”
“Then you wont do it for me? Even as a favor?” the Indiana farmboy said reproachfully.
“Oh, I guess I’d do it for you,” Jackson said reluctantly squeamishly, “but I’d a hell of a lot rather not, Francis.”
“I’ll do it,” Blues Berry grinned. “Any old time you want it done, Francis. If you really want to do it, that is.”
“I want to do it,” the Indiana farmboy said affably firmly.
“Well, wheres some rocks?” Berry said.
“Theres a couple over here where I’m working that’ll do just fine.”
“Okay,” Berry said. “Lets go.” Then he paused and turned back to the others. “You guys dont care if I do it for him, do you? I mean, what the hell? If he’s that sick of it. I can see how I might want somebody to do it for me sometime maybe.”
“No,” Prew said reluctantly. “I dont care. Its none of my affair. I just dont want to do it, thats all.”
“Thats the way I feel,” Jackson said queasily.
“Okay, I’ll be right back,” Berry said. “Keep an eye out for them guards.”
The guard down in the pit was clear out of sight, but the two guards up on the cliff were both in position to see them.