That would do it. That would draw them. That was all that was needed. Billy Graham might as well go back to peddling Fuller brushes. He could see them already, coming up the road like a line of ants: every faith-faddist, every chronic cultist, every spiritual hypochondriac—everybody!—in the land. It was what the world was waiting for—a faith for the times—and here was its Jerusalem. A faith for our times: confession without absolution. Group guilt. Nobody believed in absolution any more but everybody had more of an urge to confess than ever—maybe that was the reason. Everybody was simply busting with things to confess. Ride on an airplane to anywhere and you were barely off the ground before the person seated next to you was confiding everything you hadn’t asked about himself. First class or economy—made no difference. And never make the mistake of trying to cheer one up by making light of his self-indictment. Nothing offends a man more—though your aim was to help ease his conscience—than to have his sins belittled. Of nothing is a man more vain than of a bad conscience—so long as he has got nothing really bad on it. Their sins were the only thing that made them interesting to themselves. Absolve them and they would have nothing left.
Not hope, but release from the fretfulness of hope: that was what people came here seeking. A strange new kind of cult, this that had sprung up around his deified sister. One that worshiped a god who instead of rising preferred the tomb. Who instead of offering her followers hope and life offered them despair and death. It must suit the longing of the times: in this short while they had multiplied like a mold around that mound. The hordes of the hopeless, that was what they could look forward to having descend upon them.
Shug’s face appeared on the screen and just as quickly was gone.
It was as if he had never seen her before. Was that just the surprise and the novelty of seeing her on the television screen? Was it because she was unconscious of being seen? Or was it her expression that made the sight of her so poignant, an expression of sorrow which he had never seen on her face before and which he could still see in his mind? Perhaps it was all these things. In any case, it was as if he were seeing her for the first time.
Had none of the others, not even watchful Wanda, heard his gasp? His panting, the hammering of his heart—how could they sit there watching television and not rush to his aid? Surely he was dying. No, he was not dying, though he might be better off dead. He was not dying. Just that when a man rounds a corner and collides with himself going full tilt in the opposite direction, he does get the wind knocked out of him.
He felt like crying, “Foul!” Only where would he find a referee who would rule that a foul blow was one above the belt, a blow to the heart?
In that instant his doubts about whether Shug was deceiving him were resolved. She was. You learn that you want something when you learn that you cannot have it. She was not his; the breaking of his heart told him so. He put his hand upon it, and he felt the grim reassurance of his razor.
He saw then what was so engrossing to the others that they had not heard even his stricken groan. They were watching as he, on the screen, got up from his place in the crowd and made his way down to the mound. Not “years hence.” Not “hence” at all. Not even now as he watched, but already—yesterday, when this was filmed. Just as he had always feared, always known he would, he had done it without knowing it.
He watched himself mount the steps of the mound, as in a trance, and sink to his knees before the culvert pipe. Useless to hold his hands over his ears. Had he had as many hands as a Hindu statue they would not have been enough to keep him from hearing himself say down that pipe that he loved a nigger. No getting off light; he must confess it all. “Don’t think I mean just—” And for a moment he had not known how to put it, he who had never been at a loss for a word for that before. “Just that I go to bed with her,” he said, his head bowed with shame. It took all his breath to say it, but he said it. “I love her.” Horrified silence came up the pipe from below, and he nodded in assent. “The joke’s on me, Amy,” he said. “A little black slut that I took without so much as a by your leave, who isn’t even faithful to me but deceives me with one of my own fieldhands, and I have to go and fall in love with her.” Before rising to go he said, “I know I don’t deserve any pity. I don’t ask for any. I don’t want any. I’m here to confess, not to complain. But, Sister, isn’t it a rotten piece of luck!”
There was nothing left for him to say. He wondered whether he would ever say anything more. He had said everything. He stood up and turned to face the camera and come down the steps. It was like looking into the mirror and seeing somebody else: the man on the mound was not himself but some stranger from out of the crowd. He had not even been in the audience yesterday when this film was shot. His secret from the world was still his. It was his secret from himself that he had given away.
Following the commercials, a silhouette of the cellar mound against the setting sun, the day’s last penitent on her knees, her head bowed over the pipe. Not just yesterday. Not just staged for pictorial effect by the television cameraman. By turning around in his chair and looking out the window he could have seen the same sight outside now. A part of the rite, one that like all the other parts had become ritualized without ever having been set down, a tradition no less rigid for being recent: that with the setting of the sun the time for confessions was over. The woman on the mound stood up and turned from the pipe and slowly descended the steps to the ground. Between sundown and darkness was the time allotted for what in orthodox church services would have been the reading by the preacher of the prayer and the response of the congregation but which in this gospelless church dumb with despair was a wordless wail.
It began low, like a wind sweeping over a waste. oooooooooooooh. Then like a wind it quickened: ooooooo-OOOOOOH. Like a wind over some desolate waste it rose to a howl, a shriek: aaaaaaa AAAA EEEEEEEH. It fell away in a series of dying gasps: AAAH aaah aah ah a … Only to rise again. And again. And again.
Some—as though her message were not clear enough!—strained, like listening into the wind, for words in it; but none could ever agree on what these were. Some said she was begging God’s forgiveness for herself and all of them; others said she was calling down His wrath upon them all. One old man maintained that it was Gaelic she was speaking; he had heard it spoken when he was a boy long ago in Ireland. Told that the woman knew no Gaelic, he said she did now; she had been given the gift of tongues and could speak them all. On the contrary, said others, the faculty of speech had been taken from her. As punishment for her crime she had been shown a vision of the world’s coming doom and condemned to warn the world in words which no one could interpret. Others said she was not saying anything, it was enough that she was simply lamenting. Even here there was disagreement. Lamenting her mother’s death, said some. The death of God, said others.
Now came the first response from the crowd. Somewhere someone—generally a woman—released upon the air a long-drawn, broken groan. It was the signal all were waiting for, and throughout the crowd, as though a baton had been brought down, other voices joined in the lugubrious chorus.
And now came the separation of the sheep and the lambs. Now began an exodus from the grounds and from the parking lot that on some evenings tied up traffic along the road as the fainter-hearted fled with their faith intact, or in tatters, from this prairie Golgotha where the buried god did not rise radiant from the sepulcher promising redemption and life everlasting but remained stubbornly entombed. Those fled, the ones made of sterner stuff stayed on. Old Testament types, these: believers in damnation but not in salvation, of too little faith, or too much pride, to accept redemption through any god made of mere flesh and blood the same as themselves.
They were lost, and had abandoned hope. They were not calling to that empty sky above to hear their cry and forgive them for their sins. They were not even appealing to that distant dome to come crashing down and flatten them to earth for their unforgivable offenses. They were simply calling on night to fall and hide
them one more time from themselves and from the sight of others like themselves. He could feel rise in his own throat a kindred cry.… aaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa AAAAAAAAAAAAAA aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa oooooooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooo aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa AAAAAAAAAAAAAA aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa ooooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooo.…
On and on it went, and when one could carry the lead no longer, another, others, in the crowd took it up. And when all fell silent, the voice from underground went on, urging them to it again. Words? What could words add to that woeful wail? If the world could have concentrated the sickness of its soul and the depth of its despair into one cry it would have chosen that voice and it would have uttered that inconsolable lament. Uttered in that close space and with the pipe its outlet, even what had been a loud cry, even a shriek, came out muffled, low, sometimes so low that it could just be heard or not heard at all; yet even at those times you knew it was going on—the voice of the earth itself and of all the suffering souls interred in it since time began, those yet to come for all time to come. That even when you did not hear it it went on, like the sigh of the sea inside a sea-shell, always there whenever the shell is picked up and held to the ear, though generations might elapse between times.
The scene on the screen slowly retreated and the sound retreated too as the camera backed off for the fadeout. He got up and switched off the set. The switch-off light contracted with a concentrated gleam to the center of the screen, winked out, yet the sound seemed still to come from the set as, outside, the wail went on.
He went to the window, a man crushed by a confession made to himself alone. He had admitted the inadmissible. He had condemned himself, he had exiled himself. Of all degradations, what more shameful than a forbidden love?
The cows came up the path to the barn, bending slow incurious glances upon the wailing throng seated around the cellar mound. Now was the hour when bullbats and barn swallows, martens and chimneysweeps and presently bats appeared low overhead to bank and dip and to add their squeaks and hurt little cries to the human chorus below.
Another day was done. In Amy’s cell the pale circle of light in the center of the floor would have failed, leaving her in darkness. Up from the pipe came no further sound. She had cried herself out and the crowd now followed her lead, like a distant, dying echo. The last wail subsided into a sob, the sob into a sigh, the sigh into silence. Another day with evil sufficient unto it was done; all too soon another would be here.
FOUR
O’Toole winds. Kicks. Delivers. High and outside and the count on Lopez is three balls, no strikes.
Again O’Toole looks down to Hubbard for the sign. Nods. Cranks. The pitch. It’s over for a called strike with Victor taking all the way, and the count goes to three and one.
O’Toole goes to the rosin bag. Taking his time. Now he steps back onto the rubber. Gets the sign. It’s a slow curve breaking just inside for ball four and Lopez is on with the fourth pass issued by the visiting young left-hander here today. That brings up Deron Reynolds, Mets third baseman. Reynolds batting .265 for the season, one for two here today.
Lopez leads off first. The pitcher checks the runner. He serves. Reynolds swings. It’s past Hollachek, a sizzling line drive going deep into left center field, that brings the crowd surging to their feet. Turley off and running with the crack. And Turley has it! A spectacular one-handed running catch by Leo Turley, his second of the inning, and the side is retired. One run: Clemson’s homer into the left field stands; one hit, no errors, and at the end of six it’s the Mets 2, Cleveland Indians o, here in the fifth game of the World’s Series being played in Shea Stadium before a crowd of …
The youth with the portable radio slouched around the corner into Mulberry Street. Maybe that was where his runaway brother was today, thought Lester Renshaw, feeling a sneeze coming on and lifting his nose with his forefinger, sneezing anyway: among the fifty-one thousand three hundred and some odd out at the ball park.
He rang the doorbell again, and as he waited for the buzzer to sound, looked across the street. Out of a doorway at the far end of the block Ballard emerged, doubled over in a fit of coughing, but staggering on, unheeding, grim, intent, his face set in a scowl that carried a city block, into the next doorway beyond. Ballard was already finishing the block on his side of the street; he, Lester, was just starting in on his.
The buzzer razzed as Lester was Stifling another sneeze. He grabbed the door handle, just in time, and stepped inside. The air of the hallway tasted of yesterday’s fried onions, of last Tuesday’s boiled cabbage, of (though this Lester was unable to identify) of Friday evening’s tallow candles. He found himself at the foot of a long flight of stairs. He was climbing stairways in his sleep these nights. Heaving a sigh he grasped the gummy handrail and hauled himself up. The air thickened as he ascended into the gloom.
He could hear behind the door the shuffling of felt slippers along the floor, accompanied by a querulous mutter. The door opened of itself, until, looking down, he saw her. She reached hardly above his waist, a stooped and frail, tiny creature, snuff-colored, crinkled as an autumn leaf.
“Excuse me, Ma’am,” said Lester, removing his hat. “Sorry to disturb you. I’m looking—ah-choo! Beg your pardon. I—ah-choo!”
She held up a twisted brown finger, one of a bunch like dried roots, then turning back, disappeared into the darkened room and he heard a shuffling of papers and the noise of something knocked off a table to the floor, then she returned with a sheet of gray cardboard in her hand, the kind that comes back from the laundry inside a shirt. At first Lester could see nothing. Then he made out these words, in pencil, gray on gray:
COME BACK NEXT WEEK WILL HAVE SOME MONEY THEN
The old woman looked at him from underneath the board, her head cocked, her black eyes glistening with rheum. “Ho keh?” she said.
He had been taken now for a process server, the truant officer, the parole officer, a bill collector, the meter reader. For an adoption agency investigator, for a respondent to an ad seeking a home for a kitten, for “a friend of Maury’s,” for the alienator of a wife’s affections by her husband. He had been shown inside and told the patient was in the next room, and he had twice been asked whether he couldn’t read and shown the plaque that said, “Service entrance in rear.”
Lester shook his head. “No, no, lady,” he said wearily. “I’m not the rent collector. I’m here looking for a man. He’s my brother. Can you tell me if Kyle Renshaw lives in the building? That’s Renshaw. R-E-N—”
She pointed again to the message on the cardboard. “Ho keh?” she said.
So that when Lester tried again he shouted, thinking she was hard of hearing. And when she shook her head he took the card from her and the pen from his pocket and wrote, or rather printed:
KYLE RENSHAW DOES HE LIVE HERE??
“Ho keh,” she said, and shut the door in his face.
He knocked again. The door opened. In Spanish that sizzled like something frying in a pan, the old woman told him off, slammed the door, and he could hear her slippers shuffling away across the floor.
When Lester came out again on the stoop, Ballard, wracked by coughs, was ringing the bell of a doorway down in the next block. Ballard’s way of ringing a doorbell was to lean on it until the door was opened. That brought many people to the door in a bad temper. One look at Ballard, however, was enough to cow them. A scowl had always been more or less Ballard’s natural expression, but now his face was enough to frighten children and when he spoke he snarled. If one of his coughing fits should seize him just as the door was opened, he might, in the case of a woman, grab her arm, or in the case of a man grab his lapels and hold on until the fit was over and he could speak.
With Ballard everything had gone wrong right from the first morning when, at the automat, he had put his coins in the slot and pulled the lever and watched his coffee go down the drain because he had neglected to set his cup under the spout, and the customers waiting in line behind him, and Lester too, had snicke
red. Ballard’s fears of being taken for a rube were well founded and he soon developed on his thin skin a raw spot like a gall. If he had worn a sarong—or a ten-gallon Stetson and a pair of high-heeled boots—they could hardly have spotted him sooner: the various leeches and panders who patrol the streets of mid-Manhattan on the lookout for greenhorns. In a single day he had had his picture snapped so many times by those men who jump out at you, if you are a tourist, near the library on 42nd Street, draw a bead on you with an ancient bleary-eyed Leica, and force a claim check on you, that soon he was walking four blocks around to avoid the spot. Those fellows in porter’s caps who haunt the corners of Times Square recruiting for Manhattan sightseeing tours would let a whole stream of native pedestrians flow past, then pounce infallibly upon Ballard. Panhandlers recognized him. Even called him “Tex.” He was offered in raspy whispers wrist watches guaranteed hot, fountain pens, lottery tickets, rubber goods, filthy photos, women. Even urchins identified him at a glance, and every little boy in Greater New York seemed to have lost his subway fare home. One thing only made him madder than all this: that was to be taken for a New Yorker. This error was usually committed by another out-of-towner, who stopped Ballard on the street to ask directions. He never asked directions himself, not of anybody, citizens or policemen. A Texan, and therefore accustomed to taking the car whenever he had to go around the block, he trudged the streets of New York, lost, for hours, sooner than reveal that he was from out of town by asking anybody how to get to wherever he wanted to go.
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