by Stephen King
ON THE EVENING BEFORE the great contest, John Henry dreamed again of the strange and beautiful bird-man who had been haunting him for so long. It was a wondrous sight to his weary soul, Good Lord knew that to be the truth, yessir, but despite its beauty—or maybe because of it, for he felt somehow unworthy to gaze upon such splendor—it sparked a frightful suspicion in his heart.
Surrounded by the eerie blue radiance that always came with him, the bird-man whispered something.
John Henry gulped a deep breath and coughed.
The bird-man unfurled his magnificent wings, transforming their variegated plumage into a feathery rainbow, and John Henry’s own chest suddenly felt as tight as if it had been wrapped in steel cables.
He saw that the bird-man felt this pressure as well, and an odd thought, unbidden and unexpected, came to him: Was I once this, or is it what I will become?
This seemed to make the bird-man happy. It came closer, and John Henry saw that the layers of each wing held pictures and designs, faces of people he had never seen, small dramas played out in the wingspan, all parts of the same story, the same puzzle, all joined together by a thin silver thread that extended from the bird-man’s body like a puppet’s string, leading into the deeper darkness where John Henry knew a terrible thing, a thing so awful it might damn well frighten God his own self, was coming, maybe even for him.
The bird-man whispered to him again, and this time John Henry heard it speak what might have been its name.
And it frightened him more than any master’s whip.
His fisted hands gripped the sheets of the bed, and he began to sing in his dream, softly, with a hoarse, broken voice, his Hammer Song, imagining himself striking stone and rocky hillside with each verse:
Oh, my hammer, (WHAM!)
Hammer ring, (WHAM!)
While I sing, Lawd, (WHAM!)
Hear me sing! (WHAM!)
“Perdix,” whispered the strange and beautiful bird-man.
John Henry came awake and sat up choking.
Across from the bed, on the other side of the room, the picture-box … what did they call it here? … the television screen displayed snowy static. To John Henry’s frightened eyes, it looked like the mouth of Eternity.
Polly Ann, his wife, sat up and took hold of him. “John Henry, what is it? You have that dream about Martin again?”
Martin. John Henry almost laughed. Considering the way the bird-man dream made him feel, a nightmare about his brother would almost be welcomed. Poor, ignorant Martin, whipped to bloody ribbons by a group of Klansman the night before Master was to grant him his freedom. And it wasn’t enough for them Klan-boys to just whip every “… uppity emancipated nigger” they could lay hands on, no; they had to go and kill the ones that were still too frightened of their new freedom to know they had the right to fight back.
“No, honey, it wasn’t ‘bout Martin.”
Polly Ann rubbed her silken hands over his massive arms. “Wanna tell me ‘bout it?”
“It was a bird-man. And it was showin’ me its story.”
After a long moment of silence, Polly Ann kissed John Henry’s cheek. “That all?”
John Henry shrugged. “I don’t quite remember. I know there was something about his killing or … or maybe bein’ killed by someone in his family and … “Then he realized that if he went on, he’d have to tell her things he promised he’d keep to himself. “… and the rest of it’s kind of blurry.”
“Here, you just lay your head down here on my shoulder and—shhh, there you go—just lay your head down and go back to sleep. Gonna need all your strength for tomorrow.”
“Yes, I am …” Lord, how he hated having to keep anything from his dear Polly Ann. Maybe that’s why he’d been having such awful dreams.
“… ain’t no one can make a hammer sing the way you can, John Henry …”
“… no one …”
“… and you know you’re the only man alive who can take down their machine …”
“… no machine can do better work than a man …”
“… gonna show ‘em all, John Henry …”
“… gonna show ‘em all …”
And as John Henry fell back into a dreamless sleep, he recalled everything that had led him and Polly Ann to this moment, and prayed a good Christian man’s prayer that he’d grow stronger of body, character, and will for the remembering …
“You sure sound happy, John Henry,” said Polly Ann. “And I hope for both our sakes that it’s like they sing in that song, that we’ve found our home. I don’t know about you, John Henry, but I, for one, and powerful tired of all this roaming.”
“I’ve got a feeling this is it for us, honey,” he replied. “And I can’t help but think that we’ve had plenty of sign, as well.”
“Signs? Like what?”
John Henry smiled at her. “Look what year it is—1872. Add one and eight and you get nine. Add seven and two and you get nine. My lucky number is nine, Polly Ann. There’s nine letters in my natural-born name, I weighed thirty-three pounds on the nose when I was born—and you multiply three times three and you get nine—this is bound to be our lucky year! Hey—listen!”
What they heard was the sound of hammers ringing on steel in the distance, and the songs of the workers working.
“That’s the finest music I ever heard,” said John Henry, putting his arm around Polly Ann as they continued on down the road. “It reminds me of those times when Martin and I would play with Daddy’s hammers when we were kids.”
When they got to the place where the hammers were ringing, it was a mountain. And the men who were hammering and singing were at work building a tunnel.
It wasn’t much of a railroad, so far as size went. John Henry had worked all of the big ones, too—the Union Pacific, the Santa Fe, the Southern Pacific and Northern Pacific, even the Great Northern, and this here railroad, the Cassiopeia, well, maybe it wasn’t so big right now, but John Henry had a feeling about it. Yessir, something in his gut told him that this railroad was going to become one of the biggest and most important ever to cut a path through the Confederate States of Mexico. God bless the States and President John Brown and all they’d done.
Besides, its name had nine letters, as well.
A man named Captain Tommy was the boss of the men working the tunnel. John Henry watched him for a few minutes to make sure he was a man who knew how to run a railroad team.
Captain Tommy oversaw every aspect of the work. He made sure that the first line of men drove the long rods of steel deep into the rock, then stayed on the tails of the second line, whose job it was to put nitroglycerin and mica powder and dualin into the holes and blow away the rock, huge chunks at a time. And this Captain Tommy, he didn’t flinch at any of it, even went so far as to apply the dualin himself. Man seemed to John Henry a born rail-boss.
“You look big and strong enough,” Captain Tommy said to John Henry when he braced him for a job. “We might be able to make a steel-driving man out of you, sure enough.”
John Henry laughed. “You don’t need to make a steel-driving man out of me, nosir—I am one already! ” He reached into his bag and pulled out his Daddy’s twelve-pound hammer. “You bring me a shaker and stand out of my way, ‘cause I can drive more steel than any nine men.”
Captain Tommy laughed. “You’re either as good as you say you are, or you are one crazy sumbitch. Either way, I think you’re gonna provide us with lots to talk about over our supper tonight. Li’l Bill, you get yourself over here and shake for this big-mouthed black man. The rest of you, stand back, smoke ‘em if you got ‘em, and be ready to laugh until you bust, ‘cause what we got here is a man what talks mighty big, and if his say-so is bigger than his do-so, we’ll laugh him right out of the camp!”
The shaker held the steel, and John Henry kissed his Polly Ann and raised his Daddy’s hammer, readying himself to swing the hammer. He took a deep breath to get a feel of the rhythm in his arms and chest, his legs, his stomach an
d shoulders and arms and, most important of all, in his head. He and Martin used to joke that you couldn’t do nothing with a hammer if you couldn’t get the beat going in your head.
Martin. Poor, dead Martin.
And John Henry, he tapped into the most important part of the rhythm in his head, his anger over his brother’s senseless death, and just like every time he drove steel, he focused his eyes between the shaker’s hands, right there at the center of the steel, and he imagined the white hoods of the Klansman who’d whipped his brother to pieces, then afflicted every form of degradation on his ruined body as he lay dying, and—wham!—there it was, the rhythm, the power, the focus, and the song:
“Ain’t no hammer”—WHAM!
“Rings like mine”—WHAM!
“Rings like gold, Lawd”—WHAM!
“Ain’t it fine?”
Captain Tommy and the steel drivers laughed at his song, slapped their knees and pointed at him—”Ain’t never heard such bragful singing in all our born days!” they cried. But that didn’t deter John Henry, not one little bit.
“Ring like silver”—WHAM!
“Peal on peal”—WHAM!
“Into the rock, Lawd”—WHAM!
“I drives the steel.”
The laughter of the steel-drivers and Captain Tommy grew softer, then died altogether as they watched his hammer swing round his shoulder in a rainbow arc faster and more precise than any man’s they’d ever seen. Li’l Bill, the shaker, had to work mighty hard to loosen the steel after each mighty ring of John Henry’s hammer. Everyone’s eyes grew big and round as dinner plates.
“If’n I dies, Lawd”—WHAM!
“I command”—WHAM!
“Bury me with my hammer”—WHAM!
“Hammer in my hand!”— WHAM-WHAM-WHAM!
Captain Tommy rose and ordered John Henry to stop so he could examine the work.
Captain Tommy’s eyes grew even bigger, and he let fly with a long, low, loud, impressed whistle. “Well, John Henry, looks like your do-so is as good as your say-so and then some. You aren’t just bragful and uppity like I thought, and I hope you’ll accept my apology for the way I behaved earlier. Yessir, you drove the steel as good as you promised, better than any nine men could into this here mountain.”
“Of course he did,” said Polly Ann, smiling her pearly-whites and taking hold of her man’s hand. “He’s a natural-born steel-driving man, and what my man says, he means.”
Captain Tommy took off his hat to John Henry—something he’d never done for another steel-driver—and offered his hand. “You work for me, if you care to.”
John Henry shook the man’s hand. “Praise the Lord, we got ourselves a home now.”
“That you do,” said Captain Tommy. “The boss himself is going to want to meet you someday, mark my words.”
“Can I ask a favor?”
“You name it, John Henry.”
“Can I have me a little advance? Enough to go into town and buy me a couple of twenty-pound hammers? This hammer here, it belonged to my daddy, and I don’t want to be bustin’ it on no mountain-work.”
Captain Tommy handed John Henry a small roll of bills. “You got it. And this company, it don’t charge its workers for their housing, either. Mr. Daedalus—he’s the boss—is a damned decent fellow about the way he treats his workers.”
John Henry turned around and picked up his Polly Ann in one arm and lifted her off the ground. “I told you there was signs!” he said, and then kissed her. “Praise the Lord, honey, we have come home!”
He kissed her again.
The steel-drivers cheered him.
So John Henry came to work for Captain Tommy’s team, and Polly Ann set about taking care of their cozy little house.
It was hard work in the tunnel. The smoke from the blackstrap lamps and the dust from the red shale were so thick that a tall man like John Henry couldn’t see his own two feet without stooping almost double. The thick air was hot, and the men stripped to their waists before working.
But John Henry was the best steel-driving man in the world; he could sink a hole down or he could sink it sideways, in soft rock or in hard—it made no difference. With his two twenty-pound hammers in each hand, it sounded as if the mountain was caving in, the ring of the steel was so loud.
Everything was going fine until a man calling himself Mr. Minos came along trying to peddle his steam drill to Captain Tommy.
“No, sir, don’t need it; I got me the best steel-driving team in the world.”
“We’ll see about that,” said the man.
The next day, when the men came to work, they found that a full one-fifth of the tunnel had been filled back in overnight, and at the mouth of the tunnel stood a man with a bull’s head, his massive arms looking even bigger than John Henry’s. One of the shakers tried to make the Bull-man step aside, but it just grabbed him up in one hand and snapped his neck like a twig.
Captain Tommy pulled out his carbine and shot the thing many times, but it didn’t so much as make a scratch.
Around noon, with no work done and the Bull-man still standing guard at the mouth of the tunnel, Mr. Minos came back with his steam drill and asked Captain Tommy, “Change your mind about my machine yet?”
“You get that goddamn filthy beast away from my mountain!”
“Your mountain?” said the man, laughing. “Hell, that mountain don’t belong to nobody—no man, at least.”
“I respectfully invite you to take your monster and your machine and you go straight to hell, sir!” yelled Captain Tommy.
Mr. Minos laughed even louder at that one. “I never visit the same place twice, buster. Now, you go to your boss and tell him that if you don’t buy my machine and use it to make your tunnel, that there’s gonna be worse than that—” He pointed at the Bull-man. “—coming here to stop your working.”
Captain Tommy stared hard at the man, then spit a wad of chewing tobacco at his feet. “I’ll be sure to pass along your message.”
“You do that,” said Mr. Minos, then handed Captain Tommy a letter. “Give that to your boss, while you’re at it.”
“What’s in here?”
“It’s personal business. Just make sure you give it to him. You don’t, and I’ll have my step-son over there kill an even dozen of your men in their beds tonight.”
John Henry—who’d been standing over to the side listening to the exchange—stepped forward and said, “You got enough faith in your hell-fire machine to accept a challenge?”
Mr. Minos looked John Henry up and down, then sneered. “What you got in mind, boy?”
Every man there saw John Henry stiffen at the word “boy,” and knew just what was going through his mind: He was thinking back to his slave days, and, more to the point, he was thinking about what the Klan had done to his brother, Martin, how they’d finished with him then hung him by his ankles from a tree and split him down the center like some hog and tied a sign saying THE ONLY GOOD BOY IS A DEAD ONE! around one-half of his head. John Henry had been the one to cut his brother’s body down, and to weep over it, and to bury it.
You did not call John Henry or any man he called friend “boy” and expect to walk away in one piece.
The steel-drivers held their breath, waiting for John Henry to snap Mr. Minos in half just like the bull-man had done the shaker, but John Henry held his temper. When he spoke again, his voice was tight and quiet: “What I got in mind is that I go up against that machine of yours, and the two of us, we keep going until one of us beats the other through the mountain or one of us gives out.”
Captain Tommy said, “John Henry, there’s no need for you—”
“Yessir, there is! I don’t mean no disrespect, Cap’n, but this man, he comes here with his fine suit and his murdering bastard monster of a step-son and his hell-fire machine, and he looks down his nose at us like we were something you scrape off the bottom of your shoe, and then he makes sport of Li’l Bill’s being killed—well, you all are my friends, you
all are the men I work with and respect, and ain’t no uppity man with his damned machine gonna take away no part of the home me and Polly Ann have come to love so much.” He stepped right up to Mr. Minos and glared down; and John Henry’s glare was a fiercesome thing to behold. “You just name the day.”
“Dawn, day after tomorrow.”
“I’ll be here.”
“I bet you will,” said John Henry. “I’ll just bet you will.”
Then he did something no one expected.
John Henry walked right up to the bull-headed man and pulled back a fist and socked the monster so hard in the jaw that he cracked some bone in the thing’s face. The beast staggered back a bit but did not drop down—which surprised everyone because John Henry’s punch had enough fury in it to kill any ten men—then it righted itself, wiped the blood away from its snout, and snorted foul-smelling sulfur into John Henry’s face.
“That was for Li’l Bill,” said John Henry. “And it ain’t half of what I’d’ve liked to’ve done to your sorry ass.”
The Bull-man only stared at him, hate burning in its eyes.
John Henry spit tobacco juice onto the Bull-man’s boots, then picked up his hammers and walked away.
No other man there would have had the nerve to turn his back on that thing, but, as any of them could tell you, John Henry weren’t just any man.
It was getting near bed-time when someone came knocking on the door to John Henry’s home. Polly Ann answered.
“Evenin’, Mrs. Henry,” said Captain Tommy. “Is John busy?”
“No, sir. Come right on in.”
Captain Tommy did, removing his hat as he stepped through the door. “My, my, you have certainly done a fine job of turning this place into a right lovely home, Mrs. Henry.”
“Thank you, Captain. Would you like something to drink?”
“No, ma’am, afraid I’m here on—” John Henry stepped into the room.
“John Henry,” said Captain Tommy, “Mr. Daedalus has requested that you come up to his house to speak with him. He has sent his private car for you. It’s right outside.”