The Ink Truck

by William Kennedy

  “Thou hast covered in thy wrath,” the preacher was saying, “and hast struck us: Thou hast killed and hast not spared. Thou hast set a cloud before thee, that our prayer may not pass through …”

  “Liar,” mumbled Bailey. “Filthy pig liar.”

  “Shhhh,” said the girl. “Shhhh.”

  They walked toward the city’s edge. He yielded to the pull of the girl’s hand, holding her shawl to his head with his free hand to stop the bleeding. He heard, before he saw the source of it, a voice that belonged to the alderman. A voice with a wheeze and a wheedle. The girl led him to a clearing where he stood by a small coffin adorned with yellow and white wildflowers. The family, a father and two grown daughters, looked at the coffin with tearless eyes while the alderman spoke with head bowed. The father was smiling. Bailey did not know where he was, but the woman reassured him he was still in the city, in a meadow where the dead without status were being buried; for the cemetery was full. Over the hill, she said, the immigrants were camped: those who had come on canal boats and had nowhere else to go. The canal had its terminus in the city, so the immigrants could go no farther. The plague had closed off the river to steamboat traffic, and the stagecoaches would not carry such rabble. Their improvised shanty town was a last-resort move by the city fathers.

  “I’m no immigrant,” Bailey said. “I was born here.” But even as he said it he felt its irrelevance echoing. And even if he had been born in this city, he knew nothing of it in this condition.

  “This beautiful child,” said the alderman, “had no will to live, but preferred to return to her mother. She was bright, like her father, and beautiful, like her mother. She learned her faith well and understood Heaven is a far better place.”

  “This is a silly man,” Bailey told the girl. “A politician who talks like the preacher.”

  “Her story of seeing her mother in Heaven,” said the alderman, “draws largely upon believing capacity. But he would be a bold man who should say dogmatically that it is not true. There are many things which cannot be explained but much that is not easy to deny. On the other hand, we must confess that her story was never properly authenticated. So there you are.”

  The smiling man spoke up: “I was sorry when my good wife died. I was sorry when my first child died en route over the sea from Ireland. I was sorry when my second child died of the cholera and I was sorry today when this beautiful child died of it too. But I am sorry no longer. Though I still have two children, I know they are happy in this world, and I am not. I long only to be with my good wife and my beautiful children. I ask the good God to take me to Heaven with my family.” He smiled brightly.

  “He’s a cheap quitter,” Bailey said. “His kids are better off without him, a punk like that.”

  Bailey felt nauseous. He wondered if it was from the blow on the head, or from what he was seeing. Or was it the plague?

  “We almost had no coffin for this dear child,” the alderman said. “Coffins are at a premium, as I’m sure none of us has to be told. But I saw to it that the City Council had one made especially for this rare little creature. I could not bear the idea of her lying in a common grave with no protection from the earth. Just the thought of worms crawling in and out of her eye sockets disturbed me greatly.”

  “He’s mad,” Bailey said. “You don’t say that sort of thing at a child’s funeral. Is there anybody who isn’t mad?”

  “We found the wood down behind the wheel works,” the alderman continued. “You may note that it is not a conventional coffin that the child lies in. It has no sharp edges. We used curved wood. It is the only oval coffin I’ve ever seen. A fitting thing for a unique, well-rounded child.”

  “I’m quite sick,” Bailey told the girl. “I must lie down someplace.”

  “You have the look about you,” she said. “I’ve seen it often. It’s a devilish pallor. Your blood is drying out.”

  Bailey looked toward the cemetery. A great oak tree shaded where he stood. Sunlight, the first he’d noticed, came through its leaves and dappled the child’s coffin and his own feet. The girl pointed up the bright, green hill toward where the tombstones formed a jagged ridge.

  “The immigrant camps are beyond that hill,” she said. “They’d take you in there. They have nothing to fear. They’ll either die or they won’t, but they have no escape.”

  “You’ve never gotten it,” Bailey said.

  “No, I guess I have very wet blood.”

  “Go with me.”

  “No, I couldn’t go in there. There’s things even I can’t do. I’d take you home with me, but I have no home anymore. You must lie down and get fresh, ripe fruit. Don’t wash. Husband your strength.”

  “You may notice,” said the alderman, “that there are real, square-headed nails in this coffin, and not the improvised wooden pegs that have been used lately. The lid is secure, you can all be sure of that. Your City Council, under my prompting, appropriated funds to send to the wire and nail works beyond the town limits for a special-priority order. No snakes, no rabbits, no rats, no gophers will eat holes in this child’s pink and lovely flesh.”

  Bailey looked at the young woman beside him and felt a profound sadness. He handed her back her blood-covered shawl and she threw it around her shoulders as if it were not soiled. He touched her lips with his hands, touched her soft black hair, ran his hand over her neck and shoulders and drew her close. He kissed her lips this time, unafraid, for she could contaminate no one. She was the beautiful, innocent harlot of his dreams: tough, selfless, accepting: O Lord, I am not worthy. Ah, but she was worthy. And even as she kissed him, even as she prepared to leave him, even when she was gone, she would be with him. The lovely purity of the ravaged virgin, the bleeding hymen, the unconquerable face. She would be his bride.

  He walked away from her, up the hill toward the ridge, his nausea growing. Hundreds of huts of rough lumber and logs had been thrown up at irregular angles along the slope and laid across with wood scraps, pieces of tin and tree bark. Some were only lean-tos. And a few people were lying under trees or in the shade of large bushes with no overhead protection at all. As he passed them, Bailey saw that a few had their mouths permanently gapped, their fingers permanently clawed, their pockets slit open.

  All eyes watched him walk through the tombstones and into the shanty village. Black flags were posted in front of some shanties. Since no one he had ever known would voluntarily admit they were sick to the death, Bailey assumed that even at this level a kind of order prevailed, a majority rule that segregated the quick from the walking dead. It seemed certain that this was a wistful segregation. The future of this impromptu village was total doom.

  Bailey saw a drunken man in rags, bottle in hand, sitting with his back against a tree. He smiled at Bailey and waved the bottle. Bailey approached, only to see the man looking beyond him to another man in rags, equally drunk and also with a bottle in his fist. The drunks converged and offered Bailey a drink. He refused, emulating nausea, which the men took to be a spasm, and sadness came over their eyes. But Bailey smiled, and they tipped up their bottles and grinned at him.

  “What do you do here?” he asked them.

  “We get the cholera,” said one.

  “Where do you get the whiskey?”

  “Some makes it, some buys it, some steals it, some gets it as work rations. And all as can drinks it.”

  “Do you live under the tree?”

  “Except when it rains. Then we go in with the dyin’ bastards.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Months, I guess it is. I lost the track of how many they be.”

  “Neither of you has the cholera. Does whiskey keep it off?”

  “Whiskey keeps everything off,” one answered, and the other agreed.

  “Do people ever leave here?”

  “Leave?” One man laughed. “There’s no boats.”

  “Who brought you here?” the other man asked Bailey.

  “I came on my own,” he said
, and the two drunks looked in wonderment at each other.

  “Hey all,” one of them called out in a loud voice, “here’s one come without a shove.”

  Heads peered out of huts, and sick men under the lean-tos sat up to gawk at Bailey, who stood in bewilderment, looking from face to face. Women gathered around, holding children. People walked up and touched him. Men made a circle, and all stared silently at the wonder of Bailey. In the profound silence Bailey understood their awe. It would be momentary. In the moment beyond, they would resent him, not as an enemy but as some odd statuary to be befouled at will. Then, too, there would be a few who would clean off the statue, keep it shined for future awe-seekers.

  “Why did you come here?” a woman asked him.

  “I have a need to open my pores,” he said.

  “Three cheers for open pores,” a drunk called out.

  The crowd cheered, and a man thrust a bottle into Bailey’s hand. He drank. When he tipped the bottle down, the crowd was dispersing. He was alone again.

  “I need a place to sleep,” he called out to no one in particular.

  The man who gave him the bottle turned and pointed toward a ramshackle shelter of red tin and charred boards at the end of a path. Bailey nodded his thanks at the man and headed for the shelter. Once inside on the soft earth, he finished the whiskey. It seared his throat and set him coughing. But his nausea waned as he fell on his back, and with his head throbbing from the blow at church, he fell into a profound sleep in which no dreams were possible.

  Bailey sensed that he had been awake for a long period of time without realizing it. He made a cursory inspection of his body, found that his shoes were off and that his toenails had grown to extraordinary lengths. His hair had grown over his ears. He had a small beard. His fingernails were as long as his toenails, and had curved. His big toenail had grown long and curved at its sides. His fingernails had curved not at their sides, but under his fingers like claws, like the nails of a dog who walks only on carpet. He attempted to draw conclusions from the difference between the manner in which his big toenail had grown and the manner in which his middle fingernail had grown. He assumed that the claw theory was relevant for the hands of man, but not for his feet: that prehensility was a forgotten trait in the lower extremities, but not in the upper. After reaching this conclusion, he felt at ease and did not think of anything for some time.

  At length he felt his hair, long over his ears, and he spent an uncertain period calculating its growth rate between haircuts, and how long it had been since the last haircut. But since he could not calculate how long he had been in the city (it seemed only a day, but he sensed it was longer), there was no meaningful way of estimating time previous. All periods he could recall seemed imprecise, as if one measured time in abstractions such as: some, too much, excruciatingly long, just enough, inadequate and a bit more, please. He concentrated on the age of his clothing, but all he could say was that it was not new, not terribly old. He thought of looking outside the place where he was, but he had not yet looked around inside, and so he did look and saw walls, and the absence of sunlight and sky. He conceived then of turning around, and when he did he saw a doorway with light shining through its cracks. He tried to determine whether the light was straight or slanted or curving and judged it to be straight and felt that at last he had reached a conclusion, but one of dubious value. He looked away from the light to see whether anything else might yield a conclusion, and he found his shoes. He studied them for an indefinite period of time before deciding that they belonged on his feet. He felt greatly satisfied with this conclusion, for one could think about it, whereas the straightness of light did not lead to any new avenues of perception. He saw that his toenails had grown straight out like points. Surely they would not have grown so pointy inside the shoes. They might not have grown at all without the sunlight. And he concluded: Perhaps sunlight nourishes growth. He wondered whether he should go where there was more sunlight.

  More sunlight. He considered that notion.

  Yes, there were places with more sunlight: yet another conclusion. He felt very pleased. It was indeed a certainty that there were such places.

  He turned around and pushed at the door. It did not readily open, and so he gave it a violent kick. Dried flakes of time fluttered out of his hands onto the ground.

  FAMINE CAN BE FUN BOARDWALKER TELLS FRIENDS

  AND NECESSITY TURNS OUT TO BE A MOTHER

  Now all the truth is out,

  Be secret and take defeat

  From any brazen throat,

  For how can you compete,

  Being honour bred, with one

  Who, were it proved he lies,

  Were neither shamed in his own

  Nor in his neighbour’s eyes?

  Bred to a harder thing

  Than Triumph, turn away

  And like a laughing string

  Whereupon mad fingers play

  Amid a place of stone,

  Be secret and exult,

  Because of all things known

  That is most difficult.

  —WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

  “To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing”

  “Bailey.”

  When he looked up from the small fragments of the old newspaper that had fallen to the floor he saw Irma at the edge of the aisle. He smiled warmly, stared dumbly.

  “I’m here,” she said.

  “There you are,” he said. He did not move.

  “Well, come and sit.”

  He responded to that by pushing the bound volume back into its niche on the shelf and walking with Irma to the table near the elevator.

  “I don’t like it here,” she said. “Every word you say goes right up the elevator shaft.”

  “Okay,” Bailey said, but he didn’t move.

  Irma grabbed his hand and pulled him back toward the large work table at the rear of the stacks. It was covered with dusty cartons of records, indexed and covered with newspaper to keep the dust off. But there is nothing to keep the dust off the newspaper, Bailey thought, looking at the cartons. The dust falls like the dew.

  “My undertaker friend,” Irma said, hanging up her coat and sitting down in a chair beside one of the book carts, “is spreading the word that I’m the Guild’s concubine.”

  Bailey looked at Irma, thinking: Love is Irma’s vocation. He felt the need to respond to her remarks, though he preferred to look at her as a specimen of value.

  “Why would he say that?”

  “He knew about you coming home with me.”

  I. Going home with Irma.

  “I’m not the whole Guild.”

  “Francie must have given him some hot ideas about me.”

  Hot Irma. True or false?

  “True or false?”

  “I’m no little Miss Muffet, you know. I never was. I didn’t sit on my tuffet all my life.”

  Irma’s hot career.

  “You never did tell me all your secrets.”

  “You never asked. You always behave as if you met me the day before yesterday.”

  Sweet hot Irma. Bailey smiled in his daze, enjoying. He was not dead. He was not going to die. He felt like a discoverer knowing this. Who would care? Of course you’re not going to die, they’d say. Ah. He listened to Irma, hearing her recounting her old trouble. It reached him as if through brilliant sunlight. The sounds of Irma were too bright. They hurt his eyes. She was recounting a tissue of crazy events. Irma the lovely victim: married young, divorced, fell in love and got pregnant, aborted that to spite her lover, who wanted to be sure he left a child somewhere in the world, then cheated on Irma and so she dumped his dream. Then she had a son, a love child, out of guilt, who was born and swiftly died. Irma went back with her husband; then again to her cheating lover. Then Bailey came along, and when that broke off she dallied with assorted Guildsmen to pass the hours; then the love child’s father again; then the undertaker, then back to Bailey. She nodded glumly at her chronology.

  “S
ometimes,” she said, “I think I’m just a nostalgic screw unit.”

  Bailey was smiling when he realized that the brilliance was becoming comfortable. He was acclimatizing. Not dead, Bailey. You won’t die of sunlight either. He could look forever at Irma. Though she was thirty-four, people would take her for twenty-seven. Sweetface. Twenty-seven unless they took note of the telltale furrows above her nose, which bespoke not only age but an anxious soliloquy, years long. But not dead, Irma. Not dead of your trouble. Bailey could listen to it and not be saddened, for the victimization of Irma was the strengthening of Irma. Toughness in trouble. If he were to paint Irma, Bailey would make her a naked love goddess, wearing only butterfly wings and brass knuckles.

  “Francie walked out,” she said. “This morning. She said she didn’t want people getting the idea she was everybody’s too. What a sister.”

  Sister, trouble, undertaker, trouble.

  “Some fiancé you had, too.”

  “I was pretty dumb to take up with a dud like that guy, wasn’t I?”

  “Something you needed, I suppose.”

  “Damn, Bailey. Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn.”

  Her voice went up on the last syllable. Then she stood and paced by the table. Making policy decisions, Bailey thought. She sat down and smoked, and he sensed she was poking her breasts at him across the table. They seemed to send out messages: Stroke us. But this was not a conventional call to arms. Irma was changing, complexifying and in crisis. Beware of women in crisis, Bailey. They’re like flypaper. Even if you tear yourself away you leave a wing in their stickiness. Irma was lovable, all right. The loveliest of all lovely, perpetual innocents. Are you ready for that, Bailey?

  But as she looked at him with all of her things, he reached out and stroked her left one, softly, as you might pet a goose that would hiss and bite if the pet were imperfect. Irma took his hand and kissed it and put it back on the left. Her hair fell in that soft, black diagonal across her forehead. Her eyes glistened, but it wasn’t tears in the making.