by James Purdy
“One last word about this captain before I close. I never felt the goose-pimples so hard as when I see him. Something is going to go wrong, and I’ve got to get all my strength together, I can see, just to keep standing in the same position. I got to get out of this man’s army with a clean bill of health. I can’t leave it under any cloud . . .”
Amos had gone back to his room on Dorchester Avenue which he was sharing with somebody—Eustace was not sure just who it was at the moment (Reuben looked in on him occasionally to see he was not starving to death)—and Ace sat on in the glowering Chicago twilight, a feeling of strange malaise stirring vaguely inside him somewhere, as if suddenly he saw the whole U.S.A. nothing but Daniels and Amoses whispering and muttering to him in the falling darkness.
For one thing, Eustace had taken a good look at Amos’s palm this afternoon, not having studied it for many weeks, and he had caught a glimpse of a line in it that was new, and that had brought out the hard goose-pimples on his body also.
In his disturbance, Ace reached back to take up the tied packet of old letters from Daniel, and began reading one from weeks ago:
“Remember when Amos, or maybe it was you, dragged me to a nigger fortune-teller named Luwana Edwards? She wouldn’t see me; she had already told your and Amos’s fortune, but every time I went over to South Parkway and stood at her big old glass door, she either wouldn’t come out at all, or would say, ‘Huh-huh, no siree!’ ‘Why not, Luwana?’ I would answer her back. ‘Am sick in bed,’ she said. ‘Stepped in some glass on the bathroom floor and got me a case of blood-poison. Can’t tell nobody’s fortune.’ I knew that was made up, but I kept at her because I wanted to know about myself, and finally she let me have her reason: she seen a streak of bad luck for me, Ace, such as she had never in all her years of prophesying and forecasting witnessed before.”
Without lighting the floor-lamp, waiting in the dark for Carla, Eustace thought about Luwana Edwards. In fact right after she had refused to tell Daniel Haws’s fortune, she changed her name and gave up her profession. He had cast a bad shadow on her, his own luck was so bad.
“I saw worse than the Kingdom of Death on that young man’s brow and hand,” he could hear the voice of the Negro psychic coming to him. “I shook when I seen the signs, Mister Chisholm. My hands trembled, my knees turned to water, I done went into the house after closing the front door on him and kneeled before the picture of the Savior, and I cried till my heart would break. Does the world have to be so very violent and sad, precious Master? I prayed. Does the sorrow have to come in such wide-mouthed vessels for us to drink, Lord?”
She had knelt in prayer a long time, then, suddenly free, she had the word: she was released forever from prophecy and foretelling, she would give up the profane art of fortune-telling and devote her psychic abilities to her own Grace Evangelical Missionary Church.
But it was Daniel Haws’s brow and hand which had effected her conversion and change.
19
Nobody had been sure why the Ku Klux Klan had burned a cross in front of Mr. Bates’s cornfield behind the First Baptist Church that night in April, but later, months later, an official of the Klan had telephoned Cousin Ida and told her to quit her worrying, they had not had the burning on account of anything she might have done but because of one of the Jamaican blacks who was getting too familiar with a white parlormaid in old man Graber’s house, a stone’s throw from Ida’s. But it was the cross burning in the Spring air that had caused all the trouble between her and Amos and had made him leave town and had deprived her of the comfort and support of a son who was now, she was certain, lost forever to her.
Ida’s letters to Eustace arrived now more frequently (she had written to him ever since Amos had first mentioned Ace, in his first weeks in Chicago) especially now since Amos himself had quit keeping in touch with her.
But the letters to and from Eustace were not enough for her, and she felt, though she was only thirty-eight, that she was going down “the shady side” of life’s road, without news of a son who was the paramount, yes, the only thing in her life. Of late she had had nothing but one terrible dream about him after another, and her pillow was wet in the morning from both weeping and the sweat of terror and anxiety.
She had frequently called Lily over to have a talk with her about it, and once a few weeks back when she had started to tell Lily the story of that April evening and the Klan, Lily had said firmly, “Ida, I don’t think you’d best finish what you’ve started to say. Not for my sake, precious, but for your own. Don’t tell me. Certain secrets a woman must keep buried in her own heart. This is one of them. We have to carry some things with us to the grave, and hope the Lord will turn away from judging us for them, and judge us only on the ones we can talk about in daylight.”
When therefore Cousin Ida had sent Lily a new urgent summons to come down to the end of the road for a “serious talk,” Lily was afraid that Ida was going to broach again the unwelcome subject of what had happened between mother and son.
Lily entered the house with a tight mouth, as if to say, “If you so much as open your mouth again about that matter, I’ll never darken this door again. I’ve been your best friend, but there’s a limit to what friendship can endure.”
Lily sat down stiffly and refused Ida’s offer of a piece of fresh-made cinnamon cake.
“Something awful has happened or is about to happen to Amos.” Cousin Ida went to her worry without preamble, placed the Woolworth sheet of stationery she had just received from Eustace Chisholm, and which contained the exact sentence she had uttered, in front of the music teacher. “Lily, for God’s sake, read what Mr. Chisholm has wrote.”
Lily refused to touch the stationery for several long seconds. Finally she took it.
“What on earth is wrong with you today, Lily? You act like I had the bubonic plague! If I can’t turn to you in trouble,” and her emphasis of the word trouble brought back to both women Cousin Ida’s role a number of years ago when she had gotten Dr. Sherman Stokes to perform an illegal operation for Lily when pregnancy would have ruined her career as a music teacher in a small town. Dr. Stokes, a respected M.D., had only done it because he was so fond of Ida.
“All right,” Lily said, remembering the old favor. “Let me read this gentleman’s letter.”
She read then.
“I think it’s wonderful you don’t have to use glasses, Lily, when you use your eyes so much in your teaching,” Ida rambled on while her friend perused the letter, and waiting, she took a bite out of her own cinnamon coffee cake.
Cousin Ida saw with impatience that Lily had now gone back to reread what Eustace had written. Impatient, she smoothed down her pretty home-made gingham apron with the forget-me-not pattern, and looked pridefully about at her immaculate kitchen.
Suddenly Ida noted with astonished surprise a look of relief, if not outright pleasure, spreading over Lily’s face as she read.
“What in God’s name is making you look so glad with a letter like that!” Ida could no longer contain herself.
She suddenly snatched the letter paper out of Lily’s hands.
“Ida, how unlike you, dearest!”
“Don’t Mr. Chisholm’s and my concern mean anything to you?” Ida thundered, and rising, forgetful, the empty cake plate fell from her lap and broke into pieces on the floor.
Lily stooped down with her and helped her pick up the fragments, uttering regrets.
“Ida, my angel, may I explain what you mistook for gladness in my expression? I thought the letter was going to contain something much worse than it did! After all, it’s only premonitions so far, on this Mr. Chisholm’s and your part . . . Not fact!”
Ida burst into tears in Lily’s arms.
“I love you, Ida, and you’ll never know how much. You’re the dearest girl in the world. Your only trouble is you love too much. You’re too full of love for your own good.”
The two women sat then talking and reasoning things out. Then Lily tasted the cinna
mon coffee cake.
“I wish you’d move in here with me,” Ida said dispiritedly.
“Oh, the piano playing would drive you crazy, precious,” Lily replied. “I can hardly stand it myself any more.”
“And you think Amos will get through Chicago all right then and come back to us?” Ida spoke as if to herself.
Lily hesitated. There was the remembrance of the pack of cards, when at Ida’s insistence, over a year ago, she had told mother and son’s fortune.
She thought back to her own recollections of the boy. There was something about Rat, something she had never been able to explain, from the day when she had unsuccessfully given him a few piano lessons, then told him to stick to his Greek . . .
“We’ll hear from Amos, in the world,” Lily said ambiguously. “I’m sure of that.” But Ida was not listening to her.
20
“
The army is not going to be a Mother to you, but your dark bridegroom.” Eustace had written this as a beginning sentence in a letter to Daniel Haws. For a long time Daniel was unable to reply to this particular letter. Like many things Eustace wrote or said, the sentence had an obscure but smarting meaning which struck home long after it was made. The words, “dark bridegroom,” stuck in Daniel’s mind as though it were the pain from a hot cinder cutting into his eyeball.
You are in the arms of the dark bridegroom, the army.
CAPTAIN STADGER FOLLOWED Daniel Haws about almost in the manner of a special detective assigned to him, manacled to his prisoner. Once Daniel looked down at his wrist as if to check whether there was a fetter resting there. The captain singled him out with his eye for observation in drill, in such duties as the cleaning of the officers’ barracks, and elsewhere about the camp. He seemed always and invariably to appear after chow to watch the soldier go through the cleaning of his mess kit. After eating, Daniel had hardly risen from the grass with his empty kit, striking a soiled fork against the tin plate, than the captain appeared as from behind nowhere to watch him. Daniel began the ceremony of cleaning, putting the mess kit and its utensils in the dirty suds contained by the first huge garbage pail set on a bank of flames, then into the second garbage pail with its hot clearer water, and finally in the third and last pail which contained violently bubbling scalding clear water. Going up to the soldier, the captain took the kit and utensils out of his hand, inspecting, pressing the texture of the metal with his massive thumb and fingers as if to test whether it would bend. “See that sandpile,” he ordered Haws. “Get your ass over there and scour this hardware till it shines like Jesus.”
Blinking unaccountably, Daniel did not move. The captain grasped him by the shoulder, and although he seemingly exerted no force, Haws felt as if some central fiber and principal connection of bone had come loose from its anchoring within his body.
Sitting near the sand, scrubbing the kit again and again, only to have Captain Stadger refuse to admit it was clean enough, Daniel scoured on, but the place on his body where the captain had seized him ached out of all proportion to the second in which the officer had exerted his force on him. A fearful vision of Amos suddenly flashed across Daniel’s line of vision, as if the face of the boy was reflected into the gleaming burning oval of his mess kit. Again Eustace Chisholm’s phrase for the army echoed in his brain and formed itself on his mouth. Suddenly nauseated, he vomited near Captain Stadger’s brilliantly shined shoes, saw them withdrawn quickly, then heard the officer’s voice somewhere over him:
“Wipe your mouth clean of that puke, Private Haws, and then get on with your scouring . . .”
ON HIS ARMY bunk at night under the Spanish moss hanging from the live oak trees, Daniel Haws wiped his mouth again and again from some imagined stain, and thought back to when he had worked in the Herrin, Illinois, coalmines. He did not remember childhood, he remembered only being little and called young, in the confusion of his family’s economic distress, and going down the shaft, and bringing home his pay to his mother.
Daniel Haws once heard his mother say to a neighbor woman, “Daniel is the kind of a lad nobody ever thought to give a nickname to.” That was the only time he had heard her describe him, outside of the day when he handed her his first pay-check and she had said, “Son,” nothing more.
By the time his younger brother was old enough to go into the pits, Daniel had run off. He lied about his age, claiming to be older, and enlisted in the U. S. Army. His mother received letters from army bases all over the country, first the little towns in Illinois, then south in the Carolinas, Louisiana, and at last Nicaragua. But the army pay proved too pitiful to help her and her brood, and when he was just two months short of seventeen, he went over the hill. For a while, nothing was heard of him. Having never given the army his correct name or home town, the fugitive felt in time he could return to Herrin, Illinois, and went back to work in the coal mines. Then followed the ferocious strike of the miners and the bloodshed. The brother who had taken his place was killed, his mother died, and in a house chilled by death and hunger, he gathered together his younger brothers and sisters and told them they must break up, he could no longer keep the family as a unit, they would have to scatter and go and live with relatives. It took another year, however, to place them. This was the depths of the economic burnout (as Eustace Chisholm called it) and nobody—friend, relative, church, or Salvation Army—could find enough to feed another mouth without a lot of searching and complaining.
“Finally, I lit out,” Daniel wrote Eustace Chisholm from the P.X., explaining his life in one of those long letters composed on army stationery to the tune of Amapola and the clink of crushed ice in Coca-Cola glasses. “I lit out for Chicago, in a box car on the Illinois Central . . .”
But Daniel had at least been free then—free to lie in alleys, sleep on doorsteps or elevated trains, free to panhandle, sink, die, but free.
Now with Captain Stadger he was already in death’s kingdom. He knew that he would never get out of the captain’s hands unless he allowed him to take some part of his body as the price of severance, as a wild animal will dismember its own leg from the trap to go loose. He knew from the first time he saw Captain Stadger watching him, as though he had seen him years ago in some ancient dream, that he would have to surrender part of his flesh to escape or go down forever in the realm the captain ruled.
Then he caught malaria. They sent him to a hospital in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He was released before the medics agreed he was cured, on orders of Captain Stadger who insisted the soldier be sent back “pronto” to his headquarters.
Daniel was writing his letter to Eustace Chisholm with the fever still in his blood. Droplets of sweat, forming on his brow, splattered rhythmically to the paper, while a terrible dryness and parching of the mouth and throat made only a few more words possible of complete formation.
“Amos Ratcliffe has told you the story of his life, now here I am telling you the story of mine,” he wrote. “I only heard Amos’s full story through you, Ace, but I don’t think Amos ever heard mine.”
“HE DIDN’T NEED a story from you,” Eustace muttered as he read Daniel’s letter. “He needed—.” He got up and went over to the alley window and watched the Negroes unload the kosher meat.
“Do the rabbis know which niggers unload their blessed meat?” he mumbled. “I wonder if they do.”
He sat down again.
Eustace Chisholm felt unnaturally depressed. It was Daniel’s letters, he decided. No, it was the face of the President and his wife smiling and telling everyone to be cheerful and give up fear. No, it was the feeling of the something we all carry in the marrow of our bones. No cheerfulness, no joy from wine or drugs can fully eradicate the ache of terror that resides in the marrow of the bones.
Looking at the photo of the President pinned to his wallpaper, Eustace mumbled on to himself aloud: “One thing Government will never be able to do, stop us from dying. Everything else they can make us perform, even killing one another. All our Presidents are killers, but t
hey can’t stop us from dying when the day for us to die comes. It’s a good thing Dame Nature thought up death after the mistake of inventing life, otherwise we’d all go on being forever under some immortal captain or other in timeless slavery.”
The man who had nothing better to do than watch black men deliver rabbi-inspected meat in an alley was “hooked” as much as Daniel Haws had been “hooked” in Chicago on Amos Ratcliffe. Eustace Chisholm was hooked on Daniel Haws’s story as told in letters, and was a goner. The poet had been fascinated by little Rat, but he was taken over by D. Haws.
“I’ve got a sickness may not have a name,” Daniel Haws had written. “I’m sick to the very bottom of me. I hurt everywhere. Inside, I’m all hurt, and have ever been. I’ve got a sickness which may have a name, and if it does, why name it to me? I won’t remember it anyhow. Could you say, Ace, I’m boy-sick? If you want to call it that, I’d have half-admitted it in Chicago, but my sickness is so big now I couldn’t feel any name would be right to contain it. Boy-sick, me that’s mounted all them whores. I’m a whore’s delight. Yet I’m boy-sick, Eus, if you want to say so. I’m lying here still under the same Spanish moss, it’s not my country. My sickness, though, didn’t come from being down here, it didn’t come from the long hours in the mines or me being husband-son to my Ma. I must have come into this world with this hanging over my head, Eus: I was meant to love Amos Ratcliffe, without ever being a boy-lover, and that was written down in my hand. That’s why that nigger woman wouldn’t tell me my fortune. She said, ‘I stepped in some glass and am in awful pain. Can’t tell your fortune, sir . . . Not next week neither. I’m goin’ away, besides.’ ‘Can’t you ever tell it?’ I inquired. ‘Come back in a year maybe,’ she replied. ‘Doubt I’ll still be around here by then.’ ‘That’s right, I can see travel around you, will tell you that much,’ she closed her eyes. ‘Lots of travel. It will do you good.’ ”