“Yes,” Wilbourne said. “Yes. Do you suppose we could go outside a while?” The officer rose with alacrity, the cigarette still unlighted in his hand.
“That’s an idea. We could smoke then.” But then he could not.
“You go on. I’ll stay right here. I’m not going to leave. You know that.”
“Well, I dont know. Maybe I could stand at the door yonder and smoke.”
“Yes. You can watch me from there.” He looked up and down the corridor, at the doors. “Do you know where I could go if I get sick?”
“Sick?”
“Should have to vomit.”
“I’ll call a nurse and ask her.”
“No. Never mind. I wont need it. I dont suppose I’ve got anything more to lose. Worth the trouble. I’ll stay right here until they call me.” So the officer went on down the corridor, on past the door hung in its three fierce slashes of light, and on toward the entrance through which they had come. Wilbourne watched the match snap under his thumb-nail and flare against his face, beneath the hat-brim, face and hat slanted to the match (not a bad face either exactly, just that of a fourteen-year-old boy who had to use a razor, who had begun too young to carry the authorised pistol too long), the entrance door apparently still open because the smoke, the first puff of it, streamed back up the corridor, fading: so that Wilbourne discovered that he really could smell the sea, the black shallow slumbering Sound without surf which the black wind blew over. Up the corridor, beyond an elbow, he could hear the voices of two nurses, two nurses not two patients, two females but not necessarily two women even, then beyond the same elbow one of the little bells tinkled, fretful, peremptory, the two voices murmuring on, then they both laughed, two nurses laughing not two women, the little querulous bell becoming irascible and frenzied, the laughter continuing for half a minute longer above the bell, then the rubber soles on the linoleum, hissing faint and fast; the bell ceased. It was the sea he smelled; there was the taste of the black beach the wind blew over in it, in his lungs, up near the top of his lungs, going through that again but then he had expected to have to, each fast strong breath growing shallower and shallower as if his heart had at last found a receptacle, a dumping-place, for the black sand it dredged and pumped at: and now he got up too, not going anywhere; he just got up without intending to, the officer at the entrance turning at once, snapping the cigarette backward. But Wilbourne made no further move and the officer slowed; he even paused at the light-slashed door and flattened his hat-brim against it, against the crack for a moment. Then he came on. He came on, because Wilbourne saw him; he saw the officer as you see a lamp post which happens to be between you and the street because the rubber-tired door had opened again, outward this time (The Kliegs are off he thought. They are off. They are off now.) and the two doctors emerged, the door clashing soundlessly to behind them and oscillating sharply once but opening again before it could have resumed, re-entered immobility, to produce two nurses though he saw them only with that part of vision which still saw the officer because he was watching the faces of the two doctors coming up the corridor and talking to one another in clipped voices through their mouth-pads, their smocks flicking neatly like the skirts of two women, passing him without a glance and he was sitting down again because the officer at his elbow said, “That’s right. Take it easy” and he found that he was sitting, the two doctors going on, pinch-waisted like two ladies, the skirts of the smocks snicking behind them, and then one of the nurses passed too, in a face-pad also, not looking at him either, her starched skirts rustling on, he (Wilbourne) sitting on the hard bench, listening: so that for a moment his heart evacuated him, beating strong and slow and steady but remote, leaving him globed in silence, in a round vacuum where only the remembered wind murmured, to listen in, for the rubber soles to sibilate in, the nurse stopping at last beside the bench and now he looked up after a space.
“You can go in now,” she said.
“All right,” he said. But he didn’t move at once. It’s the same one who didn’t look at me he thought. She’s not looking at me now. Only she is looking at me now Then he got up; it was all right, the officer rising too, the nurse looking at him now.
“Do you want me to go in with you?”
“All right.” It was all right. Probably a breath would do it yet when he put his hand on the door he found that his whole weight would not do it, that is, he could not seem to get any of his weight into it, the door actually like a fixed iron plate in the wall except at that moment it fled suddenly before him on its rubber tires and he saw the nurse’s hand and arm and the operating table, the shape of Charlotte’s body just indicated and curiously flattened beneath the sheet. The Kliegs were off, the standards shoved away into a corner and only a single dome light burned, and there was another nurse—he had not remembered four of them—drying her hands at a sink. But she dropped the towel into a bin at that moment and passed him, that is, walked into then out of his vision, and was gone. There was a blower, a ventilator, going somewhere near the ceiling too, invisible or at least concealed, camouflaged, then he reached the table, the nurse’s hand came and folded back the sheet and after a moment he looked back past her, blinking his dry painful eyelids, to where the officer stood in the door. “It’s all right now,” he said. “He can smoke now, cant he?”
“No,” the nurse said.
“Never mind,” he said. “You’ll be through soon. Then you—”
“Come,” the nurse said. “You only have a minute.” Only this was not a cool wind blowing into the room but a hot one being forced out, so there was no smell in it of black sand it had blown over. But it was a wind, steady, he could feel it and see it, a lock of the dark savagely short hair stirring in it, heavily because the hair was still wet, still damp, between the closed eyes and the neat surgeon’s knot in the tape which supported her lower jaw. Only it was more than this. It was more than just a slackening of joints and muscles, it was a collapsing of the entire body as undammed water collapses, arrested for the moment for him to look at but still seeking that profound and primal level much lower than that of the walking and upright, lower than the prone one of the little death called sleep, lower even than the paper-thin spurning sole; the flat earth itself and even this not low enough, spreading, disappearing, slow at first then increasing and at last with incredible speed: gone, vanished, no trace left above the insatiable dust. The nurse touched his arm. “Come,” she said.
“Wait,” he said; “wait.” But he had to step back; it came fast as before, the same stretcher on its rubber tires, the wiry man hatless now too, his hair parted neatly with water, brushed forward then curved back at the brow like an old time barkeeper’s, the flashlight in his hip pocket, the rim of his coat caught up behind it, the stretcher wheeling rapidly up broadside to the table as the nurse drew the sheet up again. “I wont need to help those two,” he said. “Will I?”
“No,” the nurse said. There was no especial shape beneath the sheet now at all and it came onto the stretcher as if it had no weight either. The stretcher whispered into motion again, wheeling sibilantly, sucking through the door again where the officer now stood with his hat in his hand. Then it was gone. He could hear it for a moment longer. Then he could not. The nurse reached her hand to the wall, a button clicked and the hum of the blower stopped. It cut short off as if it had run full-tilt into a wall, blotted out by a tremendous silence which roared down upon him like a wave, a sea, and there was nothing for him to hold to, picking him up, tossing and spinning him and roaring on, leaving him blinking steadily and painfully at his dry granulated lids. “Come,” the nurse said. “Doctor Richardson says you can have a drink.”
“Sure, Morrison.” The officer put his hat back on. “Just take it easy.”
The jail was somewhat like the hospital save that it was of two storeys, square, and there were no oleanders. But the palm was there. It was just outside his window, bigger, more shabby; when he and the officer passed beneath it to enter, with no wind to cause
it it had set up a sudden frenzied clashing as though they had startled it, and twice more during the night while he stood, shifting his hands from time to time as that portion of the bars which they clasped grew warm and began to sweat on his palms, it clashed again in that brief sudden inexplicable flurry. Then the tide began to fall in the river and he could smell that too—the sour smell of salt flats where oyster shells and the heads of shrimp rotted, and hemp and old piling. Then dawn began (he had been hearing the shrimp boats putting out for some time) and he could see the draw bridge on which the railroad to New Orleans crossed standing suddenly against the paling sky and he heard the train from New Orleans and watched the approaching smoke then the train itself crawling across the bridge, high and toylike and pink like something bizarre to decorate a cake with, in the flat sun that was already hot. Then the train was gone, the pink smoke. The palm beyond the window began to murmur, dry and steady, and he felt the cool morning breeze from the sea, steady and filled with salt, clean and iodinic in the cell above the smell of creosote and tobacco-spit and old vomit; the sour smell of the flats went away and now there would be a glitter on the tidechopped water, the gars roiling sluggishly up and then down again among the floating garbage. Then he heard feet on the stairs and the jailor entered with a tin mug of coffee and a piece of factory-made coffee cake. “You want anything else?” he said. “Any meat?”
“Thanks,” Wilbourne said. “Just the coffee. Or if you could get me some cigarettes. I haven’t had any since yesterday.”
“I’ll leave you this until I go out.” The jailor produced a cloth tobacco-sack and papers from his shirt. “Can you roll them?”
“I dont know,” Wilbourne said. “Yes. Thanks. This will be fine.” But he didn’t make much of a job of it. The coffee was weak, oversweet and hot, too hot to drink or even hold in the hand, possessing seemingly a dynamic inherent inexhaustible quality of renewable heat impervious even to its own fierce radiation. So he set the cup on his stool and sat on the cot’s edge above it; without realising it he had assumed the immemorial attitude of all misery, crouching, hovering not in grief but in complete guttish concentration above a scrap, a bone which would require protection not from anything which walked upright but from creatures which moved on the same parallel plane with the protector and the protected, pariah too, which would snap and snarl with the protector for it in the dust. He poured from the cloth sack into the creased paper as he knew, without being able to remember at all when and where he had seen the process, it should be done, watching in mild alarm as the tobacco sprayed off the paper in the light wind which blew in the window, turning his body to shelter the paper, realising that his hand was beginning to tremble though not concerned about it yet, laying the sack carefully and blindly aside, watching the tobacco as if he were holding the grains in the paper by the weight of his eyes, putting the other hand to the paper and finding they were both trembling now, the paper parting suddenly between his hands with an almost audible report. His hands were shaking badly now; he filled the second paper with a terrific concentration of will, not of desire for tobacco but just to make the cigarette; he deliberately raised his elbows from his knees and held the filled paper before his calm unshaven faintly haggard face until the trembling stopped. But as soon as he relaxed them to roll the tobacco into the paper they began to tremble again but this time he did not even pause, turning the tobacco carefully into the paper, the tobacco raining faintly and steadily from either end of the paper but the paper turning on. He had to hold it in both hands to lick it and then as soon as his tongue touched the paper his head seemed to catch from the contact the same faint uncontrollable jerking and he sat for an instant, looking at what he had accomplished—the splayed raddled tube already half empty of tobacco and almost too damp to take fire. It took both hands to hold the match to it too, it not smoke but a single thin lance of heat, of actual fire, which shot into his throat. Nevertheless, the cigarette in his right hand and his left hand gripping his right wrist, he took two more draws before the coal ran too far up the dry side of the paper to draw again and dropped it, about to set his foot on it before he remembered, noticed, that he was still barefoot, and so letting it burn while he sat looking at the coffee mug with a kind of despair, who had shown none before this and perhaps had not even begun to feel it yet, then taking up the mug, holding it as he had held the cigarette, wrist in hand, and brought it to his mouth, concentrated not on the coffee but on the drinking of it so that he perhaps forgot to remember that the coffee was too hot to drink, making contact between the cup-rim and his steadily and faintly jerking head, gulping at the still wellnigh scalding liquid, driven back each time by the heat, blinking, gulping again, blinking, a spoonful of the coffee sloshing out of the cup and onto the floor, splashing over his feet and ankles like a handful of dropped needles or maybe ice particles, realising that he had begun to blink again too and setting the mug carefully—it took both hands to make contact with the stool too—on the stool again and sitting over it again, hunched a little and blinking steadily at that granulation behind his lids, hearing the two pair of feet on the stairs this time though he did not even look toward the door until he heard it open then clash again then looking around and up, at the double-breasted coat (it was of gray palm beach now), the face above it freshly shaved but which had not slept either, thinking (Wilbourne) He had so much more to do. I just had to wait. He had to get out at a minute’s notice and find someone to stay with the children. Rittenmeyer carried the suitcase—that one which had come out from under the cot in the intern’s quarters a year ago and had travelled to Chicago and Wisconsin and Chicago and Utah and San Antonio and New Orleans again and now to jail—and he came and set it beside the cot. But even then the hand at the end of the smooth gray sleeve was not done, the hand going now inside the coat.
“There are your clothes,” he said. “I have made your bond. They will let you out this morning.” The hand emerged and dropped onto the cot a sheaf of banknotes folded neatly twice. “It’s the same three hundred dollars. You carried it long enough to have gained adverse possession. It should get you a long way. Far enough, anyhow. I’d say Mexico, but then you can probably stay hidden anywhere if you’re careful. But there wont be anymore. Understand that. This is all.”
“Jump it?” Wilbourne said. “Jump the bail?”
“Yes!” Rittenmeyer said violently. “Get to hell away from here. I’ll buy you a railroad ticket and send it to you—”
“I’m sorry,” Wilbourne said.
“—New Orleans; you could even ship out on a boat—”
“I’m sorry,” Wilbourne said. Rittenmeyer ceased. He was not looking at Wilbourne; he was not looking at anything. After a moment he said quietly:
“Think of her.”
“I wish I could stop. I wish I could. No I dont. Maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s the reason.…” Maybe that was; that was the first time when he almost touched it. But not yet: and that was all right too; it would return; he would find it, hold it, when the time was ready.
“Then think about me,” Rittenmeyer said.
“I wish I could stop that too. I feel—”
“Not me!” the other said, with that sudden violence again; “dont you feel sorry for me. See? See?” And there was something else but he didn’t say it, couldn’t or wouldn’t. He began to shake too, in the neat dark sober beautiful suit, murmuring, “Jesus. Jesus. Jesus.”
“Maybe I’m sorry because you cant do anything. And I know why you cant. Anybody else would know why you cant. But that doesn’t help any. And I could do it and that would help some, not much maybe but some. Only I cant either. And I know why I cant too. I think I do. Only I just haven’t.…” He ceased too. He said quietly: “I’m sorry.” The other ceased to tremble; he spoke as quietly as Wilbourne:
“So you wont go.”
“Maybe if you could tell me why,” Wilbourne said. But the other didn’t answer. He took an immaculate handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped his face c
arefully with it and Wilbourne noticed too that the morning breeze from the sea had dropped, gone on, as if the bright still cumulus-stippled bowl of sky and earth were an empty globe, a vacuum, and what wind there was was not enough to fill it but merely ran back and forth inside it with no schedule, obeying no laws, unpredictable and coming from and going nowhere, like a drove of bridleless horses in an empty plain. Rittenmeyer went to the door and rattled it, not looking back. The jailor appeared and unlocked the door. He was not going to look back. “You’ve forgotten the money,” Wilbourne said. The other turned and came back and took up the neat fold of notes. After a moment he looked at Wilbourne.
“So you wont do it,” he said. “You wont.”
“I’m sorry,” Wilbourne said. Only if he had just told me why Wilbourne thought. Maybe I would have Only he knew he would not have. Yet he continued to think it from time to time while the last days of that June accomplished and became July—the dawns while he listened to the heavy beat of the shrimper engines standing down the river toward the Sound, the brief cool hour of morning while the sun was still at his back, the long glare of brazen afternoons while the salt-impinged sun slanted full and fierce into his window, printing his face and upper body with the bars to which he held—and he had even learned to sleep again, finding sometimes that he had slept between two shiftings of his hands upon the sweating bars. Then he stopped thinking it. He didn’t know when; he did not even remember that Rittenmeyer’s visit had gone completely out of his mind.
One day—it was toward sunset, how he had failed to see it before he did not know, it had been there twenty years—he saw, beyond the flat one-storey border of the river, across the river and toward the sea, the concrete hull of one of the emergency ships built in 1918 and never finished, the hull, the hulk; it had never moved, the ways rotted out from under it years ago, leaving it sitting on a mudflat beside the bright glitter of the river’s mouth with a thin line of drying garments across the after well deck. The sun was setting behind it now and he could not distinguish much but the next morning he discovered the projecting slant of stove pipe with smoke coming out of it and he could distinguish the color of the garments flapping in the morning sea-wind and watched later a tiny figure which he knew to be a woman taking the garments from the line, believing he could distinguish the gesture with which she put the clothes pins one by one into her mouth, and he thought If we had known it we could probably have lived there for the four days and saved ten dollars, thinking Four days. It could not possibly have been just four days. It could not; and watching, one evening saw the dory come alongside and the man mount the ladder with a long skein of net cascading downward from his climbing shoulder, fragile and fairy-like, and watched the man mend the net under a morning’s sun, sitting on the poop, the net across his knees, the sun on the mazy blond webbing tawnily silver. And a moon began and waxed nightly while he stood there, and he stood there in the dying light while night by night it waned; and one afternoon he saw the flags, set one above another, rigid and streaming from the slender mast above the Government station at the river mouth, against a flat steel-colored scudding sky and all that night a buoy outside the river moaned and bellowed and the palm beyond the window threshed and clashed and just before dawn, in a driving squall, the tail of the hurricane struck. Not the hurricane; it was galloping off somewhere in the Gulf, just the tail of it, a flick of the mane in passing, driving up the shore ten feet of roiled and yellow tide which did not fall for twenty hours and driving fiercely through the wild frenzied palm which still sounded dry and across the roof of the cell, so that all that second night he could hear the boom of seas against the breakwater in the crashing darkness and the buoy too, gurgling now between bellows; he could even seem to hear the roar of water streaming from it as it surged up again with each choaking cry, the rain driving on, into the next dawn but with less fury now, on across the flat land before the east wind. It would be even quieter inland, it would become only a bright silver summer murmur among the heavy decorous trees, upon the clipped sward; it would be clipped; he could imagine it, it would be a good deal like the park where he had waited, maybe even with children and nurses at times, the best, the very best; there would even be a headstone soon, at just exactly the right time, when restored earth and decorum stipulated, telling nothing; it would be clipped and green and quiet, the body, the shape of it under the drawn sheet, flat and small and moving in the hands of two men as if without weight though it did, nevertheless bearing and quiet beneath the iron weight of earth. Only that cant be all of it he thought. It cant be. The waste. Not of meat, there is always plenty of meat. They found that out twenty years ago preserving nations and justifying mottoes—granted the nations the meat preserved are worth the preserving with the meat it took gone. But memory. Surely memory exists independent of the flesh. But this was wrong too. Because it wouldn’t know it was memory he thought. It wouldn’t know what it was it remembered. So there’s got to be the old meat, the old frail eradicable meat for memory to titillate.
The Wild Palms: [If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem] Page 25