by James Purdy
“Write that sentence down you just said,” the captain cried.
Haws seized the remaining pencil and, in a passionate flourish of letters, obeyed.
Happily, deliriously he handed the paper to the captain who read it eagerly and put it in his stiff jacket.
“Just so you don’t ever make me write him,” Haws muttered.
“I’ll tell you something, Haws.” The captain came very close to him now, leaning over the picnic table, one hand resting on his bent knee. “I’ll tell you the truth, too, because you just give me the idea. (You give me more ideas anyhow than any enlisted man I ever saw.) I’m goin’ to take you over, as you say, and do what you just give me permission to do.”
The captain returned to Amos’s letter again, as if the impossible, the incredible had here been expressed in concrete form for him. It was as if he had not that first time believed he was hearing aright when, without prompting or torture, Daniel had confessed to his love for Amos.
“One thing before we part, Private Haws, and please lift up your chin and look me straight in the eyes.”
Daniel obeyed, and the captain drew still closer.
“What would you call this letter I just read to you, from Amos Ratcliffe?”
Haws swallowed, somehow found the answer: “The letter of a friend.”
“You mean you’d call it a perfectly commonplace communication between two men?”
Haws hesitated, somehow got out, “It’s what I first said, sir, the letter from one friend to . . . another.”
“You wouldn’t say then you are receiving letters from a degenerate and a blackmailer, and that is why you refuse to answer him?”
Under Haws’s silence, the captain, his anger roused, raised his voice ever so slightly: “What kind of a person would you say then wrote you that letter?”
Daniel started to rise, the captain pushed him down, and the soldier’s eyes tried to find something to rest on. In the dying light, the last flash of day reflected itself on the distant iron stakes that had been pounded into the earth that afternoon.
Captain Stadger had to repeat his question.
“A troubled person,” Daniel replied at last. As he uttered these words, a strange soft peaceful look came over Daniel Haws’s face. The remarkable look, so sudden and so unexpected, made the captain pause for a moment.
“Then why couldn’t you write as one troubled person to another?” Here the captain’s hate and loathing struggled under limited control. “What you told me that day—that you reciprocate his feelings for you . . .”
“I’m not man enough to accept his love,” Haws said, but it seemed clear somehow he had not spoken in this case really for the captain.
Then suddenly taking up another packet of letters, this time from Eustace Chisholm, the captain read page after page of damaging testimony against Amos Ratcliffe. Daniel hardly heard it. There was nothing, however, left out in Eustace’s letters. They were the letters of a literary man who tries hard to say everything damaging he can about another human being. In the end, one felt he was listening to the speech of the prosecution before the judge and jury.
“Anything to say to all of that?” Captain Stadger asked quietly, folding the papers back into the envelope.
“You don’t have no right to read my mail, and you know it,” Daniel said, and without permission he rose vehemently. He struck the captain full in the face.
Not so much inflamed perhaps as relieved and grateful, the officer sprang at the younger man’s throat and his fingers tore at the flesh, bringing blood.
“I’ll break you,” the captain said. “I’ll put you where you won’t see the light of day for the rest of your natural life unless you listen to me . . .”
Recovered from his “daring,” Daniel cocked his head like a deaf man who feels the earth explode from under him.
“Do you know what I’ve got on you?” the captain cried. Then gaining some control over himself to steady his own maniacal passion, he added: “You gave me permission to do as I saw fit with you if you didn’t write the letter I ordered you to Amos Ratcliffe.”
Daniel nodded.
“I want you to tell me here and now then that he was a cheap little cocksucker and you never loved him.”
Daniel stared implacably at Stadger, while the captain waited. When he saw Daniel’s refusal was as stubborn as his earlier one to write the letter, the captain’s fists flew in an unrestrained volley over the private’s face, desperately unprotected.
“Now let me see you take off that goddamn fatigue suit and any other rags you have under it, and I’m going over you in earnest.”
Smiling, almost happily obedient, Daniel began unbuttoning his fatigues, as if at last he was to meet the punishment he would be able to take.
HARDLY RECOGNIZING HIMSELF the next morning after reveille as he looked in the cracked latrine mirror, Daniel Haws at first could scarcely connect his disfigured appearance with the happening in the green clearing outside the area of the pitched tents. It now appeared improbable—for one thing, the outrage had been committed near enough to the camp easily to be observed, even though the light had failed at that particular hour. Daniel’s body was a crazy quilt of cuts, slashes and bruises, and everything from his waist down pained sickeningly where Stadger had poured out what seemed to be unappeasable ferocity of longing for this individual soldier’s flesh.
The enlisted men who shared their tent with Haws had decided, when they had seen him return after Stadger’s assault on him, that the soldier had again been beaten up by outsiders on one of his regular visits to the out-of-bounds Negro sections of town. They left him strictly alone, in grudging silence, perhaps admiration, and considered him probably too tough even for the regular army.
Just before his dismissal from his punishment, Haws remembered now dimly, the captain had given him this speech. Shattered by his own physical exertions over the soldiers, the officer had spoken with as much coolness as possible. “I’ve worked myself to my limits against you tonight, Haws, but you’re still granite against me. You give only resistance, while yielding. Against your granite then I’ve got to find a substitute. I’ve got to make your hardness yield to some other hardness which I’ll have to bring from the outside. Now we’ve gone this far, neither of us can stop until you give me complete submission . . .”
It should not have been a surprise to Daniel then that on Friday evening a few days later, going out the main entrance of the army post, having recovered sufficiently from his night of beating and planning to hitchhike to New Orleans, Daniel was presenting his two-day pass to an M.P., when a corporal came up and asked for the private’s name and serial number.
“Haws is the man who’s to be on special detail for the weekend,” the corporal said as he checked a list.
“Sorry, soldier.” The corporal studied Daniel now with grave attention. “You’ve been requested for special duty on the post, and can’t go on leave.”
Returning to his tent, Daniel put down his overnight bag, loosened his tie a bit, then suddenly tied it again with firm strictness. He looked about the camp, already more than half-deserted.
He walked slowly back to the place of the recent “encounter,” saw the picnic table on which the letters had been placed, and where he had written out his abdication to the authority of the captain, and a choking sensation gripped his throat.
At the same time Daniel understood that he was now hunting him, and this realization froze him with horror.
As he walked toward the waters of the Sound, he wondered whether he should not just go out swimming and never come back.
Stumbling about in the underbrush, he came to another little clearing which he would have sworn had not been there before. It was close enough to the water so that some of the Sound’s shimmering surface emerged through the leafage, and here a long mess table had been recently placed, freshly painted. At the end of the table, his hands resting on the new green coating, immobile as a waxworks dummy, sat Captain Stadger, a bi
lly club near his left starched-sleeved hand.
“What does this place remind you of?” the captain inquired, his voice only loud enough to carry to the soldier, still some yards away.
Daniel walked on up to the seated captain.
“I remember picnics, I guess, sir, at county fairgrounds,” the soldier replied. He saluted then at a warning glance from his officer.
“I’m glad you got such a good memory, Haws,” the captain said gently after a pause. Although some flies had lit and sat motionless on the face of the officer as he spoke, he made no effort to chase them away, and Daniel found himself gazing at Stadger’s hands. For such powerful instruments superbly fitted to torture, they now looked only beautifully shaped, symmetrical, almost white and harmless. Except for a deep scratch on the right one, the result of their struggle together, they were unmarked, but even this was the result, chiefly accidental, of Haws’s frantic determination to give the captain every ceded right to torture him to the limit short of making him write Amos of his love. Actually the scratch had been self-inflicted when the captain had mistaken Haws’s movements of compliance for those of aggression.
“The army needs men with good memories,” he heard the captain speak again. The officer rose now, smiling faintly.
“Picnics in the county fairgrounds,” he repeated Daniel’s remark.
Turning now to face the soldier, the officer spoke suddenly with fierce inflection: “You and me will have picnics galore together.”
Daniel bent his head forward in a nod. There was a kind of yellow tone under his tanned skin today, and his thick straight hair seemed suddenly covered with Amos’s macassar oil, but it was sweat pouring out of his scalp.
“The colonel gave you to me on special detail for the whole weekend,” Stadger mumbled, as if careless whether his words were audible to Haws. “So let’s just mosey about in the brush here, wait for the light to fail a bit, and see where we might pick us a picnic site for now or future outings.”
Suddenly wheeling about abruptly, as if some alarm had rung, the captain said, “You go ahead, first now, Haws.”
A flood of childhood memories swarmed over Daniel as he and the officer now walked into the thickest part of the foliage. He remembered in detail one deserted county fairground in particular after the picnicking season was at an end and the concessions and the grounds themselves had been closed.
In the hot still August afternoon, he could hear an ovenbird with its little cry of “Teacher! teacher!” and in the distance the note of a waterthrush.
“A beautiful place when twilight casts its spell on the tropical waters,” Captain Stadger quoted a tourist guidebook on the Gulf, in a voice of terrible expressionless calm.
When they had got into another section of vegetation, where the stillness was even more deadly, Stadger told Daniel to halt.
“Did you notice whether or not I was wearing sidearms?” The captain spoke to the soldier’s back.
Daniel did not reply, and he dared not turn around.
“Don’t tell me you’re as pisspoor an observer as you are a soldier. Turn around and look.”
Daniel obeyed, and the captain touched his revolver in its holster.
“I only hope I won’t have to use this on you tonight,” the captain said. “Come over here, Haws . . . Now take hold of this revolver and then pull it out from the holster.”
Daniel did so.
“Now put the revolver back in its holster.”
Again Daniel obeyed.
“You done that pretty well,” the captain complimented him. “Your mouth trembled, but your fucking hands were still.
“Now face ahead again,” the captain commanded. “Walk ten paces and stop.”
Daniel did so.
A small black non-poisonous snake darted across his path while he executed the paces, and a kind of rejoicing relief came over him to see a living creature at this moment.
“By the by, do you know what is done to a soldier who has syphilis and don’t report it, Private Haws?” The captain’s voice came from a seeming great distance, further, Daniel felt, than the ten paces.
“They court-martial him, sir.”
“Do you have syphilis, Private Haws?”
The soldier paused, looked into the giant oaks, saw some of the blue sparkle of the Mississippi Sound.
“You wouldn’t want to be court-martialed would you, Haws, for refusing to give needed information?”
“No,” Haws muttered.
“No, or no sir?”
Daniel refused to answer.
“The army is interested in a lot of things about you,” the captain ignored his disobedience. “I could tell the army more about you, but it knows enough for the time being.”
A long period of silence passed then in which Daniel again had the sensation, as in his previous encounter with Stadger, of having gone deaf. He did not seem to hear even the birds now or the oaks moving in the breeze, and no movement, not even of breath, from the captain.
Then he heard the command.
“Drop your pants and shorts and don’t fall forward until I knock you forward.”
Daniel obeyed.
“I didn’t want you to think this hospital report which just come in to me today that says there is a possibility of you having a dose together with malaria scares me from exercising my authority over you, especially in view of the fact I have permission from you to do all I do, in writing.” Stadger spoke almost in one breath.
When Haws did not reply, he pistol-whipped him smartly.
As if in response to this new punishment, Daniel now methodically removed all his clothing, including his shoes and socks, still facing forward.
As if maddened anew at the sight of his rich brown flesh, the captain now whipped him with the pistol across the shoulder blades and spine and buttocks.
After the first savage embraces with his own flesh and the satisfied hardly human outcry of relief from the captain, there was a pause. Then a strange sound came, as if from a whirring of metallic wings. At first Daniel thought he was being attacked with the billy club which in the captain’s powerful hands was being used for this new excruciating torment, but looking back against his orders, before he felt the correcting pistol whip his face, he saw an iron instrument of unbelievable medieval shape and monstrous design, held in the captain’s other hand and thrusting itself now into Daniel’s body, the first of the “real” instruments, he supposed, to be used in breaking him down to “submission.”
For minutes of unendurable hell the soldier, impaled as it were by the iron piece and prevented from falling forward, tasted the most exquisite torment he could have ever imagined his body capable of in his wildest imaginings.
THE THICK FELT body of a moth on his lips awakened Daniel, and opening an eye—half of his face was pressed tight to the ground—he saw the “fair-browed Moon” about which Amos had once written in a poem addressed to him. Another line of the poem came to him, where Amos had called the moon the eternal sleepwalker.
Sitting up, in hideous pain, he noticed the presence of many other heavy-bodied moths. It was not really dark any more, and the water of the Sound, seen through the trees, had already caught a pink light.
He rose to go back to his tent and grimly remembered that the pain he felt now was hardly, after all, greater than on those bitter mornings when as a boy he had to descend into the coal mine, shuttling down into the dark as to destruction.
A kind of grim satisfaction came over him that he had been so frightfully, so hideously injured by Stadger for no purpose or meaning. It confirmed somehow everything he felt about man and life.
He stopped at the edge of the clearing and saw the row of tents. Leaning over, he wiped some blood off his army boot and cleaned his hand on the grass.
He suddenly felt exultant. He wanted Captain Stadger to finish the job now he had begun. He didn’t want to live. He had never wanted to live. The thought had always come bobbing up into his mind like an imaginary cork that reach
es the surface once in a blue moon; now the cork floated visible, palpable, almost entirely out of water, in plain view. He had never wanted to be alive.
He then heard his mouth pronounce the one word, “Amos.”
That had been the only time he had ever been alive.
He knew he was going to be all right where the captain was concerned. He would be able to stand anything now from his hands, he would not fail to give the officer the total satisfaction he required and expected of him, for Daniel had what both Amos and the captain must have been powerless not to linger over, a perfection—compact of blood, bone, flesh—that was the target attracting destruction.
He got back to his tent in time to stand reveille.
After the roll-call, his sergeant came over to him, looked at him quizzically, and said, “Your Captain Stadger wants to see you in the headquarters room.”
At that time, in a stealthy manner that betokened perhaps some faint understanding of the soldier’s predicament, the sergeant handed him two letters, just arrived, addressed to him. One, Daniel saw, without surprise or even interest now, was from Ace; the other was a black-bordered letter from Ida Henstridge.
Walking toward the headquarters squad room, he veered, went over to the mess hall, saw with satisfaction they had side bacon and fried potatoes and grits, took generous helpings and sat down with the strong black chicory coffee, munched, shook his head, opened Ace’s letter.
He had hardly read the salutation when a corporal came over to him and told him Captain Stadger wanted to see him. “Tell him I’m reading my morning mail,” Daniel answered.
A string of obscene expostulations came from the corporal, who knew better than to take such a message to the captain and remained at Daniel’s side.
The letter from Ace, to which Daniel now turned his attention, at first seemed to make no sense, so startling was its news, and as he finished it he realized he had not really comprehended its contents. Trying to reread it he seemed to see only blank spaces. Badly confused now, he turned to Amos’s mother’s letter as if to find explanation there. Written from a funeral parlor, Ida Henstridge’s letter spoke of Amos’s sad “passing,” the expenses of his “service,” which she had had to pay for out of her savings, and went on to a description of the funeral ceremony conducted by Reverend McIlhenny.