by James Purdy
As if, then, to prove to Carla that his “gift” was real and not a literary attitude, he would quote from Daniel’s letters before they ever reached Chicago. He also reported conversations being held near Cobden, Illinois, by Cousin Ida; he said that Maureen O’Dell was to marry Reuben Masterson before that item appeared in the society columns, and he foresaw the terrible thing to befall Amos.
But chiefly his second sight was limited to Biloxi, and from his dirt-stained apartment windows he watched both the principal drama and took in the tropical backdrop—saw the pelicans on the Mississippi Sound, smelled azaleas and magnolias, touched the palms and the live oaks with the moss. He remembered without knowing that there had once lived down there Indians who passed the time of day in the shade of those oaks on the shore of the Bay. He looked in on the factory that was solely devoted to the manufacture of paper flowers for the Day of the Dead, and passed by the old Biloxi Cemetery with its strange construction of canopies over the graves.
Often in the middle of the night, pressed against his wife, Eustace would wake with a start, and throw off his quilt, spellbound by the encounter between Captain Stadger and Daniel Haws. With helpless sick terror he saw the moon face of the officer bent over the soldier, while from a mouth which looked too well-shaped to form such words he heard: “Private Haws, burglars use diamond-tipped drills to get at their treasure. Know what I’ll use to get mine from you?”
Carla, so trained in the rationalism and liberalism of the epoch and partisan to its simple-minded definition of human nature, finally could only turn away from her husband. She had been able to stand all his other failings, but his having even an unwilling relationship with the “unknown” began to estrange her at last from him, jeopardize her love itself. She thus took refuge in the explanation he was insane.
Eustace should have been glad therefore that Amos returned to him at such a time. Yet occupied as he was with Daniel, he was less grateful than he might have been otherwise. He turned to Amos now principally because Carla refused to pursue his experiences any further. Had he been less interested in Daniel at that moment, he might also have warned Rat of the fateful thing that was about to overtake him, but he missed it until almost the moment of the event itself.
When the two had resumed “running” together again, an incident took place which amused and delighted both Ace and Amos. Incessant walkers as ever, they were meandering along the Lake Front one afternoon, when a natty policeman stopped them and asked Amos (still in his Masterson wardrobe) if the older poorly dressed gent had propositioned him. Taken aback, Amos had tried to explain that Ace and he were old friends. The cop, however, incredulous, had separated them, and after giving Amos a lecture on the perils of picking up rough trade told him to go home.
Catching up with one another a few minutes after the brush with the police, the two walked on together in moody silence.
Eustace insisted suddenly on stopping in front of a Bethel Mission, near Sixty-third Street, to inspect the wording of a sign:
DEAR GOD, THROW YOUR STRONG ARMS OF PROTECTION AROUND THE TRUE WIDOWS AND AGED PEOPLES OF THE WORLD, AND DO NOT AVERT YOUR EYES FROM OUR ARMY OF YOUNG MEN, MANY HARDLY MORE THAN BOYS.
“I’ve got something bad to tell you,” Eustace mumbled. Amos waited, worry lines about his eyes and over the bridge of his nose.
“I’ve turned into a Goddamned Negro spiritualist,” Eustace said.
After a long walk they had reached the rocks which were piled fifteen or twenty feet high above the water of the lake. They sat down, remembering how less desperate and much happier, after all, they had used to feel when they sat here the year before, and yet how desperate they had been then too. A few gulls hovered near some refuse floating on the oil-stained water.
“I hear and see everything Daniel tells me even before his letters get here with the news,” Eustace began.
Amos nodded.
“I can’t help it, it’s so.” Ace defended himself for the first time in Amos’s memory. “Carla kept count of the coincidences for a time, my knowing an event in Mississippi before Daniel confirmed it in a later letter, but she’s given up keeping count now. Wouldn’t be surprised she ran out on me again . . . I see this Captain Stadger, for example, he’s the one who’s going to do something to Daniel Haws, probably kill him. Then the damned letter comes, with the P.X. smell, the desperate handwriting but intelligent message. Why didn’t Daniel stay in the coal mines? We’d both be a hell of a lifetime better off . . .”
Amos bowed his head, squinted his eyes, and looked toward South Chicago, from which one could see clearly even at this daylight hour the steel works belching out foundations of sparks from the Bessemer converters.
“Captain Stadger is bushwhacking Daniel Haws,” Eustace said.
Amos winced, bowed his head.
“I forgot you still feel strong so about him,” Ace mumbled, throwing a stone hard into the lake. “What I’m telling you then, Amos, is that the old nigger woman, when she renounced her second sight for the sake of her Church, by Christ, put her powers on me. Handed me her Mantle. I’m bedeviled and bewitched, and I’m getting everything that happens to Daniel Haws as soon as it happens to him. Captain Stadger is going to tear his guts out, and I’m the messenger of the event sent by the Lord . . .”
Amos sat immobile, growing paler. Eustace punched him sharply.
“We’re being observed again,” Ace pointed out. “Damned police squad car has been tailing us over here . . . Cops can’t understand why anybody is ever out of his workshop, house or penitentiary . . . Besides, I’m in rags compared to your ill-gotten finery . . .”
“I can’t quit remembering how nice we used to think it was here in the summer, on these rocks,” Amos said.
“Yes, sweetheart,” Ace replied, “but that was when we both had someone to love us.”
“Ace, do you have the syph?” Amos asked swiftly, looking back briefly at the squad car which just then decided, after all, to leave.
“There go the yellow bastards,” Ace said. “They run out of niggers to pick on, and only your good clothes kept them off us. They still think I picked you up, Rat. How do you like that?”
Eustace lay back on the rocks now and squinting looked at the saffron-tinged cumulus clouds skirting by. “I had the syphilis, yes, sweet Amos, but that isn’t why I’ve got second sight, so don’t try to explain it like some shitty intellectual.”
“Did they cure you?” Amos kept at it.
“Oh, I suppose they must have,” Ace said. “See how spry I am?” He grasped his penis firmly in his hand and showed its outlines beneath his thin trousers.
“You’re not pulling the wool over my eyes then, Ace, about you seeing all them things in Mississippi . . .”
“Wish I was.” Ace sprang up from his lolling position on the rocks. “Wish oh wish I was! It’s the strict bone-bred truth, Rat. When that old nigger put off her Mantle, it fell right on my shapely shoulders. And here’s where you come in, Amos darling . . . I got to get rid of the Mantle and you’re the one to help me.”
Stopping before he went on with a description of his “plan,” Eustace stared an unaccustomed length of time at the boy, then added:
“Amos Ratcliffe, do you know something? You are beautiful. You have posed a long time as a scholar and, Christ, you are bright, but let me tell you something, you can make it better as a whore. Masterson wasn’t up to your level, that’s why that went wrong. Though we all laugh about his coming wedding with old Maureen, that’s more his speed then you. But you can find yourself somebody who will really pay for you. I mean your face only comes a couple of times in a century, why you’re a fucking Antinous. Get all the money you can while you still look like a sunflower of the gods, and give me just enough to get this black woman’s gift off me. That’s all I ask . . . But regardless of me, and my little problem, you’ve got a gift but it’s a gift that don’t last. I never said this to you before, or to anybody, but you do look like God Almighty. Sell your ass, Amos, wh
ile you can.”
Ace got up and brushed his clothes.
“See that funny bird over there with that awful pair of eyes. That’s a bustard.” They both laughed. “That’s right,” Ace said, “a bustard.”
“Stand up and let me look at you again,” Eustace said after a moment. “Good. Now let me tell you how you can help me. We’ll go back to my den as my noble wife is out working . . .”
BACK IN ACE’S apartment, Amos looked at his friend and all of a sudden could see the truth of what the poet was talking about. He saw the change that had taken place in Ace since Daniel had run off and he himself had gone to live those few weeks with Reuben. Old Eus was really going down hill.
Without offering Amos so much as a glass of water in way of refreshment, Eustace went right to the core of his trouble.
“I have not been a nigger-haunter since my earliest youth, way back when you were at your mother’s breast.” Amos heard Ace’s voice from his seated position on the floor, and could not suppress a yawn. “Again, Amos, old child, I felt the need of rinsing out my brain of those letters I was getting from your renegade lover, those confessions, those tales from Magnolia, Mississippi, and before I knew it—this was not very long ago—I had walked as if in my sleep to South Parkway. There I was alone with 233,903 Negroes, having emerged unscathed from the 371 acres of the largest inland black park in the city, with the Poro College Negro School of Beauty sign staring me in the face.
“I went right up the stone steps to Luwana’s front parlor and rang. No answer, of course. I looked in through the window at the furniture draped as per usual with the white sheets, with incense burning before a statue of a saint (she combines all religions under one roof). I knew Luwana Edwards alias Stella Martin alias Ruby Watkins alias Emma Green was in that house alive . . . I rang and rang, and finally, as if she had been behind it all that time, she opened the door. Scared, I guess.
“She let me come in. ‘You’ve felt the change in yourself, then,’ she came right to the point, without turning around to face me.
“ ‘I’m getting these terrible letters from Mississippi,’ I said, ‘and I happen to know you are from Biloxi yourself originally, Miss Watkins.’
“ ‘I’m sorry you ain’t appreciative of a gift like that which I done give you not without a lot of thought and which many a man would give his all to have.’
“ ‘Name one,’ I said.
“ ‘Well,’ she said, looking down at her house-slippers, ‘Mister Chisholm, it was destiny. I thought a writer, just the same, would get a lot out of my gift.’
“That stumped me,” Eustace said, rising, walking the floor now in earnest in front of Amos. He was picking his teeth with an old goose-quill toothpick, probably because he had run out of snuff.
“ ‘I done give you the gift of my Mantle, second sight,’ she said, as if I needed to have it explained again. ‘But, Mr. Chisholm, I don’t know no way of you givin’ it back to me, if that’s why you keep comin’ here to see me. Ain’t no way I ever heard of.’
“ ‘I’m not leaving your house until you think of a way,’ I told her, and I must have looked really portentous, because she began studying hard and even cried a little, the silent kind of bawling I don’t mind, I guess it was sincere, and then she came up with her little proposal.
“ ‘For a hundred dollars, Mister Chisholm, I think I can work out something for you.’
“ ‘Sounds like maybe blackmail, don’t it?’ I said, but there was no real conviction in my voice, I was too desperate to turn anything down and she knew it.
“ ‘Blackmail, rabbits,’ she scoffed. ‘You know me better than that, Mister Chisholm. We has to pray the Mantle away from you and that take a congregation in session prayin’ for twenty-four hours solid. Most of them is workin’ people, can’t just sit and pray without no recompense, and you know it . . . One hundred dollars is a bottom minimum, Mister Chisholm.’
“I got up, then,” Eustace finished, “and thought of everybody I could think of to give me the hundred. I even called your old lover Masterson. He’s all busy with wedding plans, and by the time he hung up I was beginning to feel like lending him money, he talked so poor . . .
“Amos,” Eustace took the boy’s hands and kissed each palm, “go out and get old Eus a hundred crisp new bills and get me off this hot seat. In the name of the love you bear Daniel Haws, please?”
Amos got up and looked at Ace, and the look said he would do it.
That was the last time Eustace ever set eyes on Amos Ratcliffe alive.
22
From a work detail in the midst of the thickest part of foliage, Daniel Haws wiped the sweat from his eyelids to be sure that he was actually seeing in a clearing twenty yards away Captain Stadger, immobile, unaffected by the atrocious heat, standing with his unmoving hands emerging from starched cuffs, holding a letter, reading attentively.
Putting down his shovel, without asking permission from the detail sergeant, Daniel, dressed only in fatigue trousers, found himself in the presence of Stadger, hardly aware he had left without authorization.
Near where the captain stood reading, another detail of men were pounding iron posts into the ground with sledgehammers. On a kind of short green picnic table, occasionally used down here for officers’ mess, Daniel’s straining eyes caught sight of a sheaf of envelopes, which he identified in panic as having been addressed to him. The letter now fluttering in the Gulf breeze in the captain’s hand, almost certainly, he knew, contained a message written solely for him.
“Information is coming through nicely, Haws,” the captain spoke, ignoring Daniel’s standing there unasked and without permission.
A drone of insects in the clump of bushes sounded heavily, echoed by the feeble cry of birds from more distant green thickets.
The captain suddenly looked up from his reading, his eyes fixed on Daniel’s uncovered chest.
“Developed yourself quite a bit in the coal mines, didn’t you?” The captain kept his eyes on his body. “Or is it just the Cherokee Indian in your blood after all?
“Whatever the hell it is, best go back and tell your sergeant I’ve specially requested you.” The captain looked off now toward nowhere in particular.
Daniel did as he was ordered and the work sergeant felt piqued that Captain Stadger had taken a man from his detail without proper procedure, and looked angrily toward the officer, swearing under his breath.
When he returned, Daniel found the captain’s eyes fixed on the other more distant detail of men pounding iron bars into the earth with sledgehammers. Suddenly whistles sounded from different parts of the camp, giving notice of the end of the work period, and details of men all around fell out and returned in procession to their own squads.
“Have ourselves a nice quiet private stretch of land to read our letters in, Haws . . . Sit down, why don’t you?” the captain invited him.
There was now such an unearthly stillness about them that Daniel almost felt there was no army camp at all and that there had never been any soldiers working nearby on detail minutes before.
“Here’s a pad and a sharp pencil for you,” the captain laid these on the picnic table by Daniel. The soldier stirred uneasily.
“By the way,” the officer began, “this little letter I have been reading so carefully here in the great outdoors is signed Amos Ratcliffe.”
The captain then looked up, and his eyes fixed on Haws.
“Best put something over them prize muscles of yours, though, before you come down with some new fever or other, and we have to ship you back suddenly to the hospital,” the captain said.
Daniel jerked his fatigue jacket over his shoulders.
“Give me your undivided attention now, Haws.”
“Please don’t read me the letter, sir,” Daniel’s voice came, choking.
Taking no notice of the outburst, the captain read slowly, deliberately, almost syllable by syllable while Daniel stared incredulous, wild-eyed at the innocent-looking thin letter pa
per as deadly to him now as escaping poison gas.
He hardly heard the first part of the letter with its childish description of their “old times” together in the rooming-house, Amos’s disappointments with the Mastersons, his worries and indecisions, his “heartbreak.” Only the last sentences, read to him with agonizing halting tempo, as if beaten upon his eardrums by the soldiers bearing the sledgehammers, were audible to him:
No matter what happens in the future days, or weeks, Daniel—and I am going now to try to find some kind of job, probably back home—remember out of all my life it was only you I looked up to and cared for. All I can say, and I got to say it, is you were the only one I ever have loved. Don’t forget that, even if you forget me.
Yours ever, Amos.
Daniel’s head had slipped over so that it rested now on the picnic table, lifeless and unmoving as if it had been severed.
Captain Stadger’s fingers lifted his head up, and pushed it back methodically, and the officer’s voice, when he spoke, had a chilling almost gentle calm:
“I want for you to answer this letter, right here and now, Haws, so I can put it in the mail. Hear? That’s what the paper and sharpened pencil are for.”
“Don’t make me do that, sir.” The soldier shot a glance of imploring helplessness that would have softened perhaps any other man, and Haws’s hand grasping a lead pencil broke it in two pieces. The captain pushed another pencil toward him but the soldier, suddenly seizing the captain’s hand, cried with a voice unrecognizable as his own:
“Do anything you want to with me, or make me confess to anything you want, use me any way you now wish, sir, but don’t make me write him anything . . .”