by James Purdy
CAPTAIN STADGER WAS looking for more evidence than sleepwalking had given him, and he didn’t have to look long. The evidence he had been seeking, however, was not one half so good as some he came up with completely out of the blue. He had put his soldier on KP just about every day that month, for Haws’s misdemeanors since he got malaria came to be legion: he had not made his bed properly, left peanut shells on his pillow, torn the mosquito bar, had not shined his dress shoes properly, dirty collar, buttons not polished on his O.D. blouse. But the unexpected evidence which the captain had never dreamed would turn up (he was going to have to manufacture it) came just after retreat one hot July day about the time Amos Ratcliffe had returned to Chicago, following Mrs. Masterson’s funeral service.
Captain Stadger, not finding things to his liking in Daniel Haws’s tent, asked the private to empty out the contents of his barracks bag.
Obedient in the same unhesitating way as when he had responded to the imperious command of dismissal after he had sleepwalked that first night, Daniel patiently unfastened the neck of the bag. Out fell clothing, a package of rubbers, letters tied with string, math books, some chewing tobacco, and then, unaccountably perhaps to both of the men, as if it were alive, falling at the feet of Captain Stadger, a photograph of Amos Ratcliffe. The captain stooped, picked it up, interrupting Daniel’s quick flurry to seize the picture, held it in both hands, studied it decisively, pokerfaced.
Daniel Haws went pale and extended his arms defensively as if he heard a row of rifles crack over his head.
“Ever notice how everybody down here talks like a nigger except you and me, Private Haws?” Captain Stadger began carefully tucking the photograph into his crisp pants pocket. “You and me talk more like mountaineers, I suppose. Some might even say moonshiners . . . We talk alike anyhow, that’s for sure . . . Don’t we?” the captain raised his voice ever so slightly.
Daniel Haws nodded, and stood stiff at attention.
“Now supposin’,” the officer said thoughtfully, “after I walk out of this here tent,” and he looked down at his wristwatch giving it the same stare of accusatory suspicion he gave to men, “and after I am gone five, six minutes, say, you begin to walk slowly after me, and catch up with me in the O.D.’s tent, which will be vacant then except for us . . .”
He looked critically at Daniel’s tie, the soldier straightened it with nervous fingers, saluted.
A few minutes later Daniel stood at attention, his hands firmly alongside the crease in his trousers, before the captain seated at his desk in the O.D.’s tent. Daniel aimlessly tried to recall what Amos Ratcliffe had talked like since the officer had mentioned the speech of mountaineers and moonshiners, and he felt in dimming memory that the sounds Amos had spoken must be also like his and of course therefore—as it had been explained to him—like Captain Stadger’s.
“This photograph,” the officer spoke sleepily, and then stopped. Daniel looked at the captain’s hand to see whether he was holding the snapshot in question, but he was not.
“This boy whose photograph you have kept in your possession,” Stadger began again, but at the sudden unexpected sound which came out, uncontrollable, from the private’s chest and throat and which he may have thought was a disturbance coming from outside, Captain Stadger peered through the flap in the tent. Then satisfied that the sound had actually proceeded from the soldier, pleased, he resumed the question. “This photograph you kept so carefully is of course a member of your family, I suppose a younger brother . . .”
“No, sir.”
The captain stared to show careful incredulity, surprise.
“Who then should be so unusually honored by you, Haws?”
Whether Daniel had lost track of time, or his fever had increased at that moment and he had missed words, he didn’t know, but the next thing he saw was the open furious mouth and lifted tongue of the officer, the jugular vein distended improbably, demanding answer, and Haws heard his own voice say:
“Amos Ratcliffe, sir, a boy I knew in Chicago.”
“A casual relationship or distant friendship you’d call it?” The captain became as quickly cool and collected as he had been previously savage and angry.
“You could call it so, sir,” Daniel now stumbled, having lost his way.
“Or would you call it a special relationship and very close deep friendship, do you suppose?” the captain prompted.
Daniel sought mute permission to wipe the sweat that was gathering in a sheet over his brow and eyes, but his appeal was not recognized.
“The fact that you would honor a casual friend by keeping a photo doesn’t seem very convincing or probable.” The captain had begun what was probably intended to be a series of carefully constructed questions when the irrevocable words, along with a sudden rain of perspiration, came from the soldier in sounds like the snapping of a huge sheet of ice broken by some distant explosion:
“I loved Amos Ratcliffe.”
Captain Stadger picked up two sheets of oblong paper on the top of his desk, folded them tightly together, and rose. There was no expression on his face, beyond the heaviness of his eyelids.
Daniel Haws tried to look up into the eyes of his officer. Then he sensed that the captain would allow this intimacy, not removing his own eyes at all from the soldier’s desperate scrutiny, allowing Daniel so to speak to gaze immodestly and at will into that unknown pair of cold blue eyes so that he might apprehend, rather than have to be told, all that was ready and in store for him as a result of his reply to the captain’s interrogation.
“I love Amos Ratcliffe,” the soldier now said in a heavy rush of air that escaped from his lungs, and his voice came out now totally changed and as deep as if it had risen from the bottom of a shaft.
He turned his eyes slightly away from his interrogator, and at the same instant he heard the captain’s “Dismissed, Private Haws.”
Daniel saluted, pivoted, held himself rigid a moment, then marched in perfect cadence out away from the tent.
ONCE YOU HAVE admitted a fearful thing to another ear, there may be at first a kind of relief, and then the fearful thing is made more awful by reason of the stranger who knows your secret. Daniel Haws felt intense relief at having given up his secret, even though to such an obvious enemy as Captain Stadger, a man who, he was certain, would with pleasure eat his heart with garlic. But then the first peace that came from no longer carrying his burden alone was suddenly doubled, quadrupled by the anxious dread of an enemy’s possessing the secret.
Sitting on a stool erect as a granite pillar in his tent, a day or so later, while Daniel Haws stood at attention before him (the captain almost never gave the words “At ease”), Stadger indicated he wanted Private Haws to go over the “entire story” with him in some detail.
“After all, I’m not going to have you burn . . . I’m going to protect you,” Captain Stadger grinned. “You got nothing to fear from me. I like you, Haws, and I think you like me.”
Attempting to look into the officer’s eyes, Daniel’s mind went back to the distant days in the mine when he had looked up into the black shaft and had seen nothing. His pupils likewise now seemed incapable of focussing on the captain.
“What do you say to our agreement?” He heard Stadger’s voice, and to his astonishment he perceived for the first time its similarity to the tones of Amos, when that boy had been most grave with him.
“Sir?” Daniel’s voice came after the officer called back his wandering attention by a sudden movement of his hand on the desk.
“An agreement,” the captain went on, “by which you put yourself entirely into my hands in all and every matter, and surrender your trust to me.”
Daniel stared before him.
“You’re willing to agree to that, I’m sure, in view of the way things now stand?”
The soldier blinked, did not answer.
“A man who would present himself without his clothes on before his officer’s bunk on his first night’s arrival in camp,” the captai
n spoke just loud enough to make himself heard.
Incredulous at what he had heard, Daniel looked into the officer’s eyes, and could only believe that what Stadger spoke had been the truth, but he cried out nonetheless: “That was not the case, surely, sir!”
“You don’t mean to excuse yourself then under the guise of sleepwalking?” Stadger raised his voice ever so slightly and suddenly touched the packet of letters which he had taken from Daniel’s barracks bags.
“Sleepwalking, sir?” Daniel’s mouth broke into a grin of horror, as the old forgotten charge stirred dimly in his mind. “I never recall sleepwalking in my life, sir.”
“Then you never presented yourself stark naked as a nail that night in my tent, Private Haws?” As the captain spoke, a whole wave of terrible and unknown memories swept over the soldier’s flickering consciousness.
Shifting, the captain went on, as his charge hung helpless now on every syllable:
“You say you were the son of coalminers,” Captain Stadger mused. “Don’t suppose you might have had as much formal schooling therefore as you might have wished, though you tried to better yourself in Chicago . . .”
Daniel Haws remained at attention, but his eyes showed that he was hearing now almost nothing.
“The army is looking for good men, you know, Haws, in this unlimited national emergency. Men like you . . . You been in service before, haven’t you now?”
Daniel Haws, frozen speechless, blinked again.
“I said, haven’t you!” the captain raised his voice.
Extending one arm, then dropping it against the creases of his trousers, Daniel spoke: “I didn’t love Amos Ratcliffe the way you may be thinking, Captain Stadger, sir . . .” His tone was of sudden passionate beseeching. His face had gone an awful yellow, the wrinkles on his brow and around his eyes gathered now like nets.
“What are you talking about, Private Haws?” Captain Stadger inquired, a groundswell of some unknown feeling in his voice. “I’m sure I don’t know.”
“What I confessed to you, sir.”
“You haven’t confessed to a thing to me, Private Haws. Whatever you may have told me you told me as a friend. Such as your telling me, say, that you were in the army before, and left by the door of AWOL, and never returned till now, under another name. In one ear, out the other, Haws. Because you were talking to a friend, you see. Not just an army officer. A true friend . . . We’ll get to know each other, you and I. You’re coming clear to me, Haws. Maybe we might even take a few little trips together, by and by. . . . Not as officer and enlisted man but as two friends with a lot in common . . .”
“I didn’t love Amos Ratcliffe with my body, sir! That’s what I wanted to say. I never loved him so, sir!”
“How did you love the cocksucker?” Captain Stadger leaped up from his stool like a wire suddenly galvanized into white hot death.
Daniel Haws did not see the look of kindled rage and madness on the face of the captain. If he had, and had he understood, he would have gone over the hill as soon as the captain dismissed him, and he would have done well to do so. All he could see at that moment was the face of Amos Ratcliffe as he had looked when he last took his leave of him in his rooming house in Chicago.
“I loved him as myself,” Daniel finished.
Captain Stadger then struck the private with all the accumulated force of a man made criminal by all the hard years behind him and the hate and need.
“You’ll love who you’re told to love, you fucking bastard, and you’ll talk about what we decide to talk about!”
The spectacle of the blood pouring from Daniel’s face and mouth calmed the officer. He was affable again. “You may use your handkerchief,” Captain Stadger nodded to him.
Haws wiped his mouth and face. The sight of his own blood and in such quantity calmed him also, for tears were not his forte, and he was grateful he could bleed. Captain Stadger handed him another handkerchief he pulled quickly from his own pocket, after Haws had filled the first one.
“I can see we will understand each other, Private Haws.” The captain advanced now within an inch of his face. “The army is funny this way. If a man cooperates, his life can be relatively easy, relatively smooth. Things run on and come to an end. But if the man resists and can’t take command,” and Daniel felt with the thrill of unbelief iron fingers closing over his broken mouth and lips, as Stadger held him in savage embrace, “if he resists there’s hardly a thing that don’t happen to him until he’s broke down to the bone.”
Removing his fingers from the soldier’s mouth, he waited for Haws’s “Yes, sir.”
“WHILE YOU, DANIEL,” Eustace Chisholm wrote to the APO in Biloxi, Mississippi, “are being devilled by Captain Stadger, or at least you make out you are at death’s crumbling door, your Amos, about whom you beg so frequently for news, is, I am happy to report, flourishing like a whole peninsula of green bay trees.
“I am only,” Ace’s letter continued, “if the truth must be told, half sorry for you because though your persecutor may have uncovered your weak spot, he has been summoned to be your judge by you yourself, Daniel Haws. Like all the martyrs in history, you have presented yourself at his bench before your case was ever called, and without so much as a touch from his white-hot iron on your so-receptive flesh, you have confessed your crime: ‘Yes, captain, I am the lover of Amos. Yes, sir, that photograph is of the boy who stole my heart away.’ If you had told him the full truth, how you left your love, after killing it in the bud, and chickened out of Chicago, maybe even a Captain Stadger would not have the yen to put the poker to your palpitating asshole . . .
“Yes, you who was so wise, so prudent, so clever, such a miser, so careful for your reputation and future, now look at you. Well, when Troy falls, it falls to charred ruins, with nothing left for anybody to poke around in.
“But I started out in this letter to tell you how Amos is flourishing. He not only never looked better—his flesh gives the appearance of having been bathed in fresh strawberry juice, his teeth sparkle, eyes shine, but the thing that has perhaps astonished everybody, stranger, friend, foe, is his ability to wear a wardrobe. Believe you me, the heir of Sampford Court, during the period of his being smitten on your little dagger-mate, bought him a sizable one: shirts of sea-island cotton, custom-made of course, ties from India, shoes hand-made in rugged Scotland. Even his arm pits give off some perfume that costs easily eighty dollars for ten drops; he has now stepped out of the Arabian Nights entertainment, but he is entertaining nobody but himself. He can’t begin to count his lovers, now he is free of old Reuben. Yet I must tell you he is not spoiled or conceited. In fact I can see something is weighing him down, but whatever it is now he would be in the same situation in any case where you left him: the only thing he ever wanted and still wants is you, and so he has even less than when his toes and ass were out and he smelled like a goat . . .”
CAREFULLY TEARING UP Ace’s letter, Daniel allowed the paper to fall into the blue-green waters of the Mississippi Sound.
“You shouldn’t throw away an interesting document like that,” he heard the deep, slightly quavering voice behind him.
He did not need to turn around to know who it was.
“Yes, sir.”
Daniel rose from the grass.
“I want you to save me all your letters from this time on.” Captain Stadger stepped forward to face him. “That way we can be sure they won’t fall into the hands of an outside party who might not understand . . .”
21
Carla Chisholm’s Golgotha was made complete, if not entirely unendurable, the August following her return to Chicago by a change in Eustace that made all her other troubles seem minor and her money worries minuscule. Her job still brought home enough to keep her and Ace in grub, with a roof over their heads, an occasional movie, and more frequently (since Ace walked so much) shoe repairs, though there always came that period of a week or so just before pay day when, despite her scraping and tithing, there wasn’t a red
cent in the house (Eustace was more extravagant than ever, stealing away to a good many boxing matches, and handing out nickels and dimes to bums), and they had to go to bed without supper. A diet of tea and crackers gives one, the first day or so, the vague feeling of having eaten. Later, one wakes up in the middle of the night with a sour stomach and hunger pangs. Carla, sleepless from burdens, would go out into the kitchen at 2:00 A.M. to think things over, leaving her husband also sleepless in bed, perhaps more uncomfortable than she was, for he was more active physically and his poorly shod feet had covered miles along the Lake Front, over museum floors, and down alleys, clutching always his poem to hell, matted together now with sheets of P.X. letter paper, which smelled of army, in the fine delicate handwriting of Private Daniel Haws.
What minimized all the other accidents of Carla Chisholm’s chagrins and sorrows was, to put it simply, her growing certainty that her husband was going insane. He had always been a more or less professional madman according to the dictates of his calling—she understood that, of course. She based her definition of actual insanity on the following series of events.
It began after he told her that the Negro psychic, Luwana Edwards, had passed on her “Mantle” of second sight to him when Luwana had given up telling fortunes for a living and entered standard religious work. Carla had smiled then at what he said, perhaps giggled.
Then only a few days after he had told her about the “Mantle,” he began seeing events before they transpired, in earnest. As in a home movie, the things transpiring in Biloxi, Mississippi (which Luwana had already seen months before and as a result had refused to tell Daniel Haws’s fortune), all unreeled before Ace’s half-startled half-bored eyes. For example, he “got” the name, Captain Stadger; he saw his round face, framed with an aureole of blond hair; he even described his hands, strong to the point of being nearly misshapen. All this before one word of Stadger came in the P.X. letters.