Eustace Chisholm and the Works

by James Purdy

  Daniel then returned to Ace’s letter, and read:

  I will have myself to blame, I suppose for the rest of my life, along with my other misdeeds, for having sent Amos to pay off that old black nigger fortune-teller so she would remove the Mantle of Second Sight from me. I never dreamed he would go there, and succeed, and of course never dreamed he would be shot as he came out by a policeman mistaking him for a housebreaker.

  Aren’t you getting my letters, Daniel?

  Please believe me, I never meant he should go over to the district or pay her off. I was only joking.

  Why aren’t you answering my letters? Maybe they are keeping them from you. Should I go on writing?

  Just to think, our Amos has already been in the ground now for over a week, and we’ll never set eyes on that fellow again . . .

  “Do you want to report to sick call?” Daniel heard the corporal’s voice over him. He had slipped down from where he was seated to the floor, hardly without realizing it. He had not fainted, for his eyes were open.

  Moving slightly, Daniel shook his head, took the corporal’s extended hand, and stood up stiffly as if at attention before an officer.

  “Fever maybe,” the corporal said.

  Daniel shook his head, persuaded the corporal he could leave him, and when the non-com had left he stumbled over to the P.X., where he inquired of the soldier-clerk if they sold thermometers.

  “Only to officers,” the clerk informed him.

  “This is for Captain Stadger,” Daniel told the bare-faced lie.

  The clerk nodded, eyes oblique, and handed Haws a thermometer without wrapping it up.

  Going into the latrine, Haws hesitated a moment, whether he should determine his temperature here or go into the woods where there was less likely to be anybody to watch, then inserted the glass tube carefully in his mouth, and stepped over to a stall to urinate.

  Pissing slowly, he heard the voice, “Watch it, soldier.”

  He stopped wetting for a minute.

  “Get your cock away from that wall, it’s covered with lime, and if another of you bastards goes on sick call for lye on your prick, you’ll be court-martialed.”

  Daniel Haws nodded to the non-com shouting at him, began to urinate slowly again clear of the wall, finished, dried his hands on his khaki handkerchief, then took the thermometer slowly out of his mouth and shook it carefully. He blinked, shook it again, gazed slowly. It read 104°F. The thermometer must be busted, he figured.

  Outside he found his way to a shady clump of bushes, lay back, smoothed out Eustace’s letter, read and read again the message.

  “Rat,” he called, as he lay back holding the thin pages.

  He saw the army boots out of the corner of his eyes. He closed his eyes tight, then heard the captain’s voice.

  Rising to salute him, Daniel felt, as in a revelation, that he was seeing the officer for the first time. What now attracted his eye was not the captain’s hands, but his smooth fair face, the blond straight hair as yellow as cornsilk; whereas before he had seen him as without age, Daniel saw him now almost as youthful as Amos, and at that moment of looking at him, Stadger showed no trace of cruelty on a face smooth as a linen sheet.

  “If you’ve been fixing to go on sick call, you can forget it.” The captain’s voice was so disparate from the impression his face had just given. “I can cure you of anything amiss with you. Besides the colonel has assigned you to me indefinitely . . . No more K.P. for you, Haws.” He laughed.

  Daniel pushed the thermometer toward him.

  The captain grasped it without reading it, placed it in his jacket. He yawned lazily at Daniel.

  “Dismissed.” The captain’s voice seemed to come from a great distance.

  By some tremendous exertion, Daniel was able to bring his hand to his forehead in some vague similitude of a salute, heard his own heels click, then smiling faintly felt himself sprawling at the officer’s effulgent shoes.

  WAKENING, HE FOUND himself in some heavily wooded section of the camp, rife with the whirl of insects. Looking about, he saw Stadger lying beside him in his immaculate starched trousers and jacket, but with a touch of grass stain on one leg. Shading his eyes, trying to get his bearings, Daniel realized with certainty that the officer would have had to carry him here. In the pocket of the captain’s jacket he recognized the letters from Eustace and Ida Henstridge.

  “What’ll you do when the bullets start whizzing, if you pass out like this in training camp, Haws?” the captain’s voice inquired.

  Lunging suddenly, Daniel tried to grasp the stolen letters resting in the captain’s pocket, but Stadger caught the soldier’s hand in mid-air and flung it back.

  Removing his revolver from his belt, he held it indifferently now in his left hand, while with his other hand he pushed Haws back against the grass, and leaned over him for what seemed an eternity, lost in concentration like one reading a difficult map. Daniel kept his eyes tightly closed, waiting whatever the captain might now elect to bestow on him.

  “Open your eyes and look at me, Mr. Walk-in-Your-Sleep.”

  Daniel looked at him then. The sight of the captain’s own face reflected in the soldier’s pupils may have given him some pause, for he seemed to release Daniel for a moment, but then tightening his pressure on him, he cried out with vehemence:

  “I’m the only one left to you in this entire fucked-up world and you know it.”

  Rising over the soldier, he dropped his smartly creased crisp trousers, pulled away starched dazzingly white shorts, and fell in furious stiffness and bulging agitation against Daniel’s face, still holding the revolver in hand.

  ONCE IT WAS understood that Private Haws of Headquarters Squad was Captain Stadger’s steady choice for “special detail,” all the rules under which the enlisted man had lived in his squadron were suspended, and in effect no longer applied to him. He was now considered so “special” that, to tell the truth, he had been separated in effect, from the service. He was in Captain Stadger’s own army.

  Daniel’s sergeant, a bony little fellow from Missouri, stared at him now with penetrating lack of understanding. “You was a good soldier, Haws. Hate to see you end up like this in one man’s special detail.”

  His preferential treatment and his being “singled out” meant, Private Haws learned from those to whom it had leaked down from above, that he would not be shipped out with the rest of them at the end of their basic training. In all probability, he would stay on at this army post for the “duration,” until the end of the war and perhaps of time itself.

  “You done so good in everything,” the sergeant went on, considering Daniel’s case. “You got a perfect record here, oh with a few exceptions, maybe.” Here the sergeant looked at Daniel’s cut-up face, which he ascribed to “harmless” brawls and fights in town. “Maybe, however,” the sergeant ruefully continued, “the higher-ups will change things around after a bit and give you back to us.” He looked off in the distance now, toward the Gulf, spat, wiped his mouth, stooped over and picked up some sand in his hands and rubbed the sand into his palm and fingers. “I seem to have caught myself a case of the itch down here, Haws,” Sergeant Munsey said. “How do you feel about our God-damned South?”

  “There wasn’t too much up North for me.” Daniel was laconic.

  “You don’t talk too much like a Northerner neither, sure enough, Haws.” The sergeant studied his “lost” enlisted man. “But you don’t talk like anybody I ever knew, come to think of it.

  “Look,” he drew the private now over to the back of his own tent, spoke to him almost tenderly. “This don’t go beyond you and me now, keep in mind, but that captain you’re under ain’t no God-damned good. You got to get yourself out from under him, or he’ll break your ass . . .”

  The sergeant paused at the look this received from the enlisted man. Then he continued: “Stadger is more army than the army, the arrogant bastard. And he don’t act like a captain or a general, he acts like God Almighty.” He studi
ed Daniel now closely. “You look bad, boy . . . Why don’t you report for sick call?”

  Daniel waved his hand dispiritedly, and the sergeant’s eye rested briefly on the sheet of perspiration convering the private’s brow.

  “Remember our little talk here has been strictly on the Q.T., Haws. But if you need me, I’ll help you, Haws, if I can help.”

  As if unable even now to break away, the sergeant continued: “Stadger’s got no right borrowing you from this outfit, from the whole God-damned army.” He exploded angrily. Then, letting more sand trickle down between his fingers, he mumbled, “What can we do about it, though.” He sighed. “Colonel swears by that cocksucker captain. You be on the Q.T. now about our little talk. After all, I’m married with a wife and kids’ future to worry about,” Sergeant Mursey seemed to shake off any plan of action, or correction of abuses. “Won’t do any of us any kind of good to make the captain our enemy.”

  CAPTAIN STADGER HAD seen from the start out of the depths of his own being that Daniel Haws expected the trial and torture that was now to come. If the soldier had not at first precisely welcomed it, the captain knew that now at last his charge understood it was completely necessary and that it had always been fated to come.

  Because the captain now had the letters containing the announcement of the death of Amos—the only real obstacle ever between them—the officer was certain that Daniel was more prepared than ever for complete surrender and submission.

  Daniel knew hiding or concealment was no longer possible. As to running away from the camp into the world, a fugitive again, Daniel did not even consider such a move. He had run off before, and he had returned, as if indeed to and for Stadger. The latter had everything now which pertained to or was of Daniel Haws, he had everything “on” him and from him, and carried his whole life with him as no other person living or dead could or ever had; everything about the soldier was engraved in memory, on file, in Captain Stadger himself, his sole knower, judge, confessor, enemy, friend, and authorized executioner. Daniel knew at last he had come to that limit of life where no action on one’s own part is possible or thinkable.

  He heard a twig crack then, and the small bushes beside him move.

  “Been gettin’ impatient, I bet, Private Haws,” he heard the familiar voice.

  Daniel rose, made a slight motion with his hand against his forehead in way of salute.

  His eye fell to the captain’s belt from which hung a new addition, a sheathed knife, on which Stadger’s hand rested somewhat emphatically. He smiled to note Daniel’s attention to its presence.

  If surprise was a state of mind of which the soldier was any longer capable, he was now surprised, for the captain ceremoniously removed his starched shirt, his hand-stitched undershirt (an almost feminine blue) and then, removing his knife from its sheath, began slashing his own chest with calm deliberation.

  “Have some mercy then on yourself!” Daniel heard his own voice.

  Tearing apart Daniel’s own khaki covering, Stadger slashed his chest less savagely than he had his own, and pressing his own bleeding wound against Daniel, cried into the soldier’s face:

  “This is so there’s not the slightest doubt in your mind I’ll chicken out of any of this, or give you the damndest tiniest chance to chicken on me, until we’re at the end of the road of all this . . .”

  He pressed the soldier now with his rib cage until Daniel collapsed in the captain’s embrace.

  IN HIS EXTREME physical suffering, Daniel finally turned to his own torturer for sympathy. It was this action of the soldier that Captain Stadger himself now evidently required, in his own despair, for without Daniel’s turning to him, he might not have been able to find the strength to inflict the last and most consummate of the punishments he had ready for the man elected for them.

  Early that evening with his shock of black hair drenched from torment, Daniel leaned against the captain’s chest, felt his breath as hot as from steel-mill furnaces, and heard Stadger in dulcet tones promise him keener pains that would subdue the ones he had suffered up until then.

  “For you wouldn’t want to stop now when your body has gone this far with me,” he soothed his captive. “We must go through to the end now, Haws, to the absolute finish line.”

  Captain Stadger musing, dreamy, spoke of sharp iron, scythes, hooks and when he had tormented Daniel until both fell, without a stitch of clothing, into each other’s arms like renowned athletes who have won some coveted wreath, the captain deposited Daniel carefully on a path covered with moss, and said he would show him now the weapon he had been saving for the final test and proof.

  Stadger went to a clump of bushes, looked up briefly toward the low-hanging sky with its pulsating array of southern constellations, then bending dug in some leaves, carefully touched something.

  Daniel lay unconscious, but the captain easily awakened him by a new show of exigency.

  “I’ve hunted for this particular piece here for a long endless time,” he pulled open Daniel’s eyes with his fingers, and looked longingly in his pupils.

  The captain was holding the weapon in front of Daniel now. When the soldier saw it, he recognized it as one of those immemorial instruments of destruction mentioned by his preacher reading from Scripture when as a boy he and his mother had attended the Disciples of Christ Church long ago.

  In his own weak horror, he now held on to Captain Stadger’s arm as one might to an anaesthetician who must accompany one to the shadows of death.

  “I’ve been hunting all my life for the right man, the right body and will, who could accept this perfect weapon,” Captain Stadger went on looking into the soldier’s eyes. “Now I have them all.”

  They both lay then next to one another on the moss, near a row of the night-blooming moonflower, without a stitch to cover them, calm and collected.

  “You didn’t ask when it was to be,” Captain Stadger complained softly, “so, Haws, I will tell you. It’s tomorrow night, which is a Saturday. No moon, cloudy. Everybody’ll be out on pass, nearly, just as if you and me was in this outpost together all by ourselves with nobody for miles, for our trial and experiment.”

  Daniel nodded, and let his hand rest on the captain’s extended arm.

  Perhaps his fever went down, or some last kind of instinctive animal prompting to save his body and life rose in Daniel. He now got up, determined to return to camp and seek help. Stumbling in the dim light of dawn, he fell across the outstretched form of the captain, and bending down was astonished to note again that without his garrison hat and uniform, wearing only his identification tag and an additional gold identification bracelet, stripped of any authority for the moment, Stadger looked scarcely older than himself. Sunk in heavy slumber, he had a harmless, almost cherubic appearance.

  Grabbing his clothes and moving off a few yards from the sleeping officer, Daniel moistened his khaki handkerchief, wiped off the traces of blood around his nose and lips, and went as fast as he could to the sergeant’s tent.

  To his dismay he caught sight of Sergeant Munsey, already with his grip in hand, walking in the direction of the camp’s exit.

  Catching up with him, breathless, Daniel could say nothing for a moment.

  “Still giving you a rough time, Haws?” Munsey studied his outlandish appearance and manner.

  “I’d like to ask you that favor you promised me a while back,” Haws got out.

  The sergeant expressed impatience. His wife and kids were waiting for him at a hotel in New Orleans, Haws heard the words vaguely, and then something else about the camp bus waiting.

  “I hear your pass is cancelled as per usual, Haws,” the sergeant’s voice reached him now again after a pause.

  “Can’t you call the colonel on the phone before you go, sergeant?” Daniel blurted out.

  The sergeant indicated the earliness of the hour by pointing to his wristwatch. Still studying Daniel’s face, the non-com hesitated a moment. Looking down at his shoe, he lowered his small grip, bent over me
thodically to remove some white tooth paste which had fallen on the toe, then picked his grip up again.

  “We can talk to the colonel next week about it,” the sergeant was grave. “I mean it now, Haws. We’ll see him together.” He looked away quickly from Daniel’s eyes.

  “For Christ’s sakes, Haws,” he added, “nobody’s going to kill you, after all.” The sergeant laughed.

  He put his hand on Haws’s shoulder, then gave him a light friendly punch in the stomach and said goodbye.

  Returning from the mess hall with his dirty mess kit, Daniel put the aluminum plate and utensils into the dirty soapy water of the first container, moved to the second pail filled with clearer hot water, and then on to the third pail full of furiously boiling clear water. Whether it was the sudden contact with the fire under the containers of water or a sudden upsurge of his fever, his face was suddenly swimming with perspiration so that at first the sight of the floating newspaper photo was unbelievable as a mirage. It seemed to be Amos’s face moving in the churning liquid. He stood transfixed until another soldier yelled at him impatiently to move on. Placing his hand in the boiling water, Daniel slowly drew out the paper, to the astonished outcry of some soldiers near him, and unconscious of their horror walked to a clump of bushes and half-fell down near a sand pile.

  As the newspaper began to dry slightly in the Gulf breeze, he studied the face and saw that he had had no hallucination.

  Above the countenance of his lost Amos, who looked out at him as from some non-existent eternity, was the heavy black headline:

  LAST RITES FOR SLAIN YOUTH

  Some skin from his fingers damaged by the boiling water had come off onto the newspaper held tight by him in both hands. His head fell back against the pile of sand which he had used so frequently to scrub his mess kit.