The Winter After This Summer

by Stanley Ellin

  “The mark is my badge.”

  “Yes, and it means you fell down drunk like an animal. Now get on your feet and be a man. And remember that the Book says, We have sealed the servants of God in their foreheads. You misbegotten lump of dirt, you’re a servant of God and can be redeemed, do you hear? So come along with me and we’ll work on that. Come along and you’ll be cleansed, body and soul.”

  That was Samuel Fisher, a short-tempered man but a son of God shining with glory. And he lived near Chatham Square in a building as broken-down as the worst of them there. He had two rooms, a kitchen and a parlor, with four cots in them, and in all the seven years I lived with him there was never a night when any of those cots was empty. He used one, the rest were for me and others like me, and the same day when any of us left he would go out and find someone to take his place. But it was not a mission. And when someone forgot and called it a mission he would get angry.

  “That was a good word once,” he would say. “God sent forth a man on his mission and rejoiced in his work. Now the church sends forth missions, and what do I have to do with churches? They reek with vanity. Pride afflicts them like the boils afflicted Job. Surely the Devil is in them saying, ‘It was not the Cross that made the church, it was the church that made the Cross.’ So this is not a mission, you benighted fool. This is my home, and you’re a guest in it. And while you are, do me the favor of not talking nonsense.”

  He had been a preacher of the Word, but now he was a carpenter like another had been in Bethlehem. He fitted out restaurants for the heathen in Chinatown and did repairs on the buildings roundabout and sometimes helped out in the cabinet shop across the Square. And while he was away daytimes we would shave and clean up—twice a week getting money from him to go to the baths—and would clean up the rooms and get the stew cooking in the pot and sit and look out of the windows or read the newspaper or whatever else was around and especially the Book.

  Then evenings when he came home he would look to see if we had drunk liquor during the day, and if there was a backslider he would be angry with him and try to make him ashamed although most were too far gone for that. And after we ate we would sit around the table while he read from the Book. And we would talk about it and tell what we thought, and he would explain everything so that we understood it. That was when I came to see that everything was in the Book. Before the earth was formed it was written down for us so that we could see what would happen until Armageddon. All of us are written down in the Book, so that when it is opened to a man he can see what was, and is, and will be. In that way he can save himself, for even a man who is marked as a servant of God can be lost and must save himself.

  And after he put away the Book, Samuel Fisher would talk to us about where we had come from and what had happened to us along the way. And ask about our families and the people back home, and what kind of schooling we had, and what we used to do for a living, and how we came to fall. He would ask about it and some would tell the truth and some would lie, but I did neither, being ashamed.

  In that way he sometimes found out about a man’s family, and the man being willing and repentant, Samuel Fisher would write to the family, and now and then they would come and the man would go with them. Or if a man had no family but was willing and repentant Samuel Fisher would get him a job away from New York which is Babylon and give him the money to get there. Or a man might feel so strong again that he might want to go out and try his strength without help. Then he would shake hands and go, but whether or not his strength was enough I don’t know, because no one like that ever came back to tell about it while I was there.

  And many backslid and were lost. They would be there one day and gone the next, and then Samuel Fisher would turn his face against them. He would wait until late in the night, and if the cot stayed empty he would go out and find someone else to fill it, which is how he was sent to me. Afterwards, when he thought about the backslider he would be angry and would read from the Book to show that the Lord cannot lift a man to Heaven alone, but he must help. The Lord has him by the hands but the Devil has him by the heels, and he must free himself from the Devil.

  In all that time there was only one lost soul Samuel Fisher did not turn his face against. That was Berry, a little man who never spoke or read the newspaper but sat all day carving on pieces of wood that Samuel Fisher brought him. He carved heads of people and figures of animals, all fine work to look at. Then one day he was gone, and the next night a cop came from the hospital to say that Berry was there and was asking for Samuel Fisher, who all the cops on the Bowery knew. That was the time when the government was putting wood alcohol into regular alcohol so that people wouldn’t drink it. But Berry, not knowing, had gone with two others under the bridge and drunk it, and when the cops found them, the other two were dead and Berry was blind and dying.

  So Samuel Fisher went to the hospital, I along with him, and I waited all night while he held Berry’s hand and prayed for him, but it was no use. Then when we left the hospital I could see he was crying. And he said to me out of the Book, “A wonderful and horrible thing is committed in the land,” which is what the prophet Jeremiah said. And he said, “He was a good carpenter,” and that was all. After that he never talked about Berry again, but that was the only time he did not turn his face away from a backslider who was lost.

  So, one way or another, they came and went, but I stayed on. And after a while I was like a right hand to Samuel Fisher. I took care of his house and I made sure nobody in it was dirty or drank behind his back. I bought the food because I found out where you could get the most for the least money, and I did the cooking. And after Samuel Fisher took me around to those storekeepers on the Bowery and on Bayard Street who were righteous men, I would go to them when clothes and shoes were needed, and they would give me old clothes and shoes and not ask money for it. Even some Jews gave this way and some of the heathen in Chinatown, because they knew I was sent by Samuel Fisher.

  And there came a time when I went to the bank for him every week and gave them the tithe money and had them mark it in the book. He had been tithing every week since he first started to help the fallen, sometimes two dollars and sometimes three, because he wanted to set up his own carpenter shop and teach men the trade there and put them to work.

  “There is the road to salvation,” he said. “A man must work with his hands and be paid for it. Do you hear that, you miserable imitations of humanity? He must stand erect and work with his hands for his pay, because that is why he was created a man. Otherwise he would have been made a hog to wallow in mud, drunk on rotten apples and idleness.”

  And when someone asked where it said that in the Book, he said, “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, that is what is written in the Book.” And he showed him.

  And he said, “In the sweat of thy face. Do you understand that? Not in the dirt of the gutter and the ooze of alcohol out of your forsaken bodies, but in honest sweat. And when I have my shop and tools you’ll find that out for yourselves. For the first sin was in turning away from honest work, and the second was in coming to despise it, and all the rest follow from that.” And when I looked into my heart I knew what he said was true.

  So he tithed to get money for a shop and tools, and because of that and because of trusting me to go to the bank for him, I fell. In the seven years I was with him up to the day it happened I was tempted many times but I never fell. Sometimes at night I would have bad dreams and sweats and would wake up in the dark feeling as if the skin had been peeled off me so that I was like a crab out of its shell with the Devil poking a fork into me, but I would pray until I was eased. And there were days when I needed a drink more than I needed air to breathe. Then my hands would shake and my teeth would rattle together so that I couldn’t talk. But I would take the money Samuel Fisher left me for it and would go to the baths and lie in the steam room until the evil was sweated out of me. That way I fought temptation.

  But then before the seven years were up hard ti
mes came to the country all of a sudden. First it was only in the newspapers and it didn’t matter. Then it moved into the house and you could feel it. Every week there was a little less meat in the stew at supper, and every week the tithe money got less and less until it was down to nickels and dimes. And finally trouble touched the banks, and there was worry about what would happen to the money in them.

  I knew Samuel Fisher was worried because he talked to me about it now and then. And one night in the seventh year of my being there he took me by the arm and we went outside in the hall where we could be alone.

  He said, “When I went by the bank this morning there was a line in front of it a block long. Do you know what that means? People drawing out their money right and left. Yes, first come first served, and what happens if you get there when it’s too late? Do you understand? I hate to hide the cash around here, but I can’t see leaving it in the bank any longer. Yes, the bankers are full of confidence, they’re singing hallelujah, good times are just around the corner, but is it not written, The rich man is wise in his own conceit? Tomorrow I’ll give you a check for the whole amount. Get down there early, draw it all out, and hold on to it tight until I get home. Then we’ll consider the best thing to do with it.”

  “I’ll tend to it,” I said.

  “First thing in the morning,” said Samuel Fisher. “Yes, the misbegotten bankers and usurers have called down wrath on themselves, but the poor will pay for it. Wise in his own conceit, sayeth Solomon, and he was a rich man himself. Who would know better?”

  So the next day I got the money from the bank—almost twelve hundred dollars of it—and I put it in my inside pocket with my hand over it to make sure it was safe. And when I was out on the street temptation took me the way it never had before. It grabbed me by the throat and squeezed the breath out of me. My body shook. My guts churned in me. My mouth dried so that there was no spittle in it. And my hand on the money felt the way it used to when I was on the deck of a ship along Rum Row, looking at the cases and cases and sacks and sacks of quart bottles piled there.

  The baths were one way, but I couldn’t get myself to face that way. I walked the opposite way like a body in a dream, and I went to a place I used to know well. I had one drink there, telling myself it would only be one drink but knowing all the while that I was going to fall the whole way. And when I woke up and got my eyes open and spit the taste of puke out of my mouth, I saw I was in an alley back of Division Street, a long way from where I started.

  And the money was gone. I tore my clothes apart hunting for it. I went along the street on my hands and knees feeling for it. And it was gone.

  I went back to the place but they wouldn’t let me in. I hit the door with my fist and called out until the man opened the door a crack.

  “I want my money back,” I yelled at him. “Twelve hundred dollars of money. I want it back. Oh, Jesus, I want it back. I was robbed and I want it back.”

  “Go on, get out of here,” he said. “You dirty bum, where would you get that kind of money? Go on, beat it before I call the cops.”

  But I stayed there a long time, not knowing what else to do, and now and again I called out to him and cursed him, and hit the door and threw myself against it, all the time knowing it was no use. And stayed until I saw the cops coming, and I had to run away from them. I went across town until I was at the ferry, and paid my way with pennies to the New Jersey side and walked on from there with my sins bleeding in me.

  For I had sinned in my time but I had always been an honest man, and now I was not.

  ELEVEN

  In the years after that I moved between the Great Lakes and the Gulf, north in the summer, south in the winter. I traveled by back roads and hiding in freight cars along with a lot of others, because those were the bad years when work was hard to find. A day here and a week there, and that was all. And I came to see in those years how few of the righteous there were. For every railroad bull who would turn his flashlight on you and tell you to hide better or go away peaceable there were ten who would drag you out and take you to the judge so that you would do thirty days on the road gang. And for anyone who would open the back door and give you something to eat there were ten who would set the dog on you. But after a while things got better so there wasn’t so much need to trust to the righteous. And when the war came there was work enough for everybody, so I could live again in the sweat of my face.

  The job I got was a steady one with the Bargeways Company out of Pittsburgh. There were twenty or more barges to a tow, all lashed together and pushed by a big towboat between Pittsburgh and New Orleans, and I tended the barges upriver and down, three weeks each way and a four-day layover at Pittsburgh and New Orleans so that the new tow could be made up. Sulphur and salt, steel and oil were what we carried, and we went along the Mississippi to Cairo and then east along the Ohio to Pittsburgh and back again.

  On the tow I did my work right and read the Book and minded my own business, being steady and sober and having little to do with any man, so I had a good name with the company. But when I had the four days to myself in town I would waste most of my money getting drunk, because then for a little while I could forget I was accursed and that when I died I would be thrown into the Pit. And wasted the rest of my money in places where women showed themselves naked, because my manhood had been taken from me and that way I hoped to find it again. But I didn’t. And even drunk I could feel the time passing and the Day coming. I saw the hair on my head and body turn gray, but no sign came to me telling me how I might save myself.

  Then one day the sign came. On that day we tied up at New Orleans and next to us was an old barge, and on its stern I read words that made my blood run cold, so that I didn’t know what to do. Voorhees Number 7, Brooklyn, New York, they said, and to everyone else on earth they might be just words, but to me they cried aloud, and the number written among them was my number. It was a sign sent to me, and when I looked at it I smelled blood and tasted it and felt my hands wet with it, but when I held them up they were clean. Yet I knew they were not.

  So I went on the barge. And I said to the hand there, “I know the Voorhees’ yard. You’re a long way from there, aren’t you?”

  “No,” he said. “The barge is, but I’m not.”

  “Well,” I said, “what’s she doing here?”

  “What do you think she’s doing here?” he said. “She works along the Gulf between here and Mobile. But not for long. Next spring the company’s bringing her back to New York for keeps. They had five more like her down here since the war, and she’s the last of the lot. They got all the rest of them back up there now, and in six months it’s bye-bye baby for this one, too.”

  “You going with her?”

  “Me? What would I want to do that for? I hear tell winters are cold enough up there to freeze your ass off. Man, I don’t need the job that bad.”

  “Maybe not,” I said. “Did they get a man yet to fill it?”

  “Not with so much time to go. Why? You looking for the job?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “It’s a one-way ticket,” he said. “Once you’re up there they won’t pay your way back here again. If that don’t worry you none, come around in six months and see the agent. Last week in March that is. Slip him twenty bucks, and you’ll be in like Flynn. There ain’t many others looking for a one-way ticket like this.”

  He would have talked more but I wanted to be alone so I left him and went ashore. And when I stopped in front of the bar across the way I was given strength not to enter it, such strength as I had not been given since I was last in Samuel Fisher’s house twenty-eight years before. And I turned away rejoicing and walked away from it. And kept walking until I was out of the city and on a road that went by shacks and farms with only niggers there. And then the road became a track going through swampland, but I kept on my way looking neither to the right nor to the left, but rejoicing and trying to understand what the sign meant. I walked that way for two days and two
nights, never eating or drinking anything in that time, and then my strength failed me and I fell down on the road. And while I lay there I heard a noise like thunder and saw a glory of lights like fireworks around me, and Ithuriel came to me for the first time.

  And he said, “Do you believe?”

  And I said, “I believe.”

  And he said, “Then go with the sign,” and he left me.

  So I knew what I must do. For six more months I stayed on the job with Bargeways, and I did not waste any of my money or spend it, but put it into a money belt that I wore against my skin, and at the end of six months it was still there, along with the gift money the company gave me when I told them I was quitting. That way I knew I had enough and more to pay back Samuel Fisher for the money I had stolen. Then he would forgive me and lead me on the road to salvation, because he was the only one who could.

  That is what I thought when I hauled the lines aboard the Voorhees barge and we moved out toward Gulf waters. But Satan wars with the Lord. He wrestles with him and he throws him down. Whatever means there are to use against the Lord he uses. There are no means beyond him, even to putting me in the hands of a tugboat captain who was blind to shoal water.

  That was how I was turned aside from my course and delivered to Mooney’s Key and the woman there. She came before me, and I saw that her breasts were round and heavy, and her arms and legs smooth and shapely, and beneath her clothes the white flesh of her buttocks showed, and her face was the face of Jezebel, and then my manhood came back to me. The flesh rose and stood erect and I was helpless before it.

  So all the money went to buy her in marriage. Yet when the time came to know her as a wife, I would not. I fought with the flesh which is the Satan in me, and I would not give in to it.