Eustace Chisholm and the Works

by James Purdy

  “You can come past for me anytime now, Captain Stadger,” he muttered.

  23

  The penmanship on that envelope and on the creased half-torn pieces of ruled letter paper inside looked no more like Daniel’s handwriting than if he had let a tame spider run over the page. It did not look like a communication formed by one human being for another. Eustace had paused a long time over it, after removing the letter from the mailbox.

  Amos’s terrible death, his own sickening feeling of responsibility for it, his involved correspondence with Cousin Ida, and his own growing despair made him now incapable of feeling further loss and tragedy, but he knew, even though Luwana Edwards claimed she had lifted from off him the Mantle of Second Sight, what the handwriting meant. He knew what was to come and he had no wish to confirm what he foresaw by reading it.

  Not opening the letter that morning immediately, he gave one of his long essay-talks on letters, out of desperation, to Carla. “Letters,” he began, “our wonderful postal service and its destiny-bearing carriers of the mails. Those scraps of paper disfigured with the juices of plants and insects which tell us of fate, love, and destruction, change the circulation of the blood and configuration of the brain as we read, while the postman is unaware, as he goes his rounds, that he carries the skeins of destiny in his leather pouch.”

  Carla took the letter from his hands.

  “Is this the handwriting of that Negro psychic?” she asked. “You told me she had washed her hands of you after Amos died.” Then she spied the Mississippi postmark.

  She surprised Eustace by opening the envelope without permission. After all, her action seemed to say, she was in charge of everything now.

  “Read me what he says, since you were indecent enough to open it,” Ace told her.

  Carla first read the message to herself. Then at his command she began, in her metallic business woman voice pronouncing the words aloud, but Eustace interrupted her suddenly.

  “Can’t you just tell me the gist of it, maybe, Carla, dear?”

  A bit taken aback, she looked at the letter’s single short paragraph again and said, “He simply says you’re the only person in the world left to him now. He’s ill with malaria.”

  Eustace asked then to see the letter. He stared at it, blinking.

  “That’s no more his hand than it’s Jesus Christ’s,” he said.

  CREEPING BACK BAREFOOT to where he had left the captain briefly, Daniel stood for a moment by a crape myrtle bush watching the sleeping terror that was the man who had come out of his worst expectations and dreams. Daniel pulled off his trousers and lay down next to the officer under one of the latter’s extended arms, which even in sleep was tight with bundles of sinews. He lay sleepless through the rest of the night, while the intense heat made stinging salt drops of sweat fall from his own forehead and from the officer’s arms and face into his eyes. He made no motion to wipe the sweat away. Every so often a moth or other night insect would light on his face to touch him with hairy appendages, and he allowed it to remain without motioning it away as the captain had that time, when the flies crawled over his face, pretended insensibility.

  In the morning Daniel woke up alone. His fever had gone down some, and he hastened over to the medical officer’s tent where he met Lieutenant Carrens. He was about to say, “I want to go on sick call,” when the lieutenant anticipated him with, “Captain Stadger tells me he’s going to drive you himself up to the hospital in Hattiesburg and let them check on your fever.”

  For a second or two he may have believed the lieutenant’s statement. Then incredulous, and casting aside any thin hope he might have had, he turned away, knowing he would not try anything more to save himself. He went back into the deepest part of the underbrush without having tasted a thing in the mess hall.

  As his fever rose now, he remembered going back a few times to the back of the mess hall and begging a cup of their heavy chicory coffee from the mess sergeant. Then the first thing he knew, it was again dark, with spots of heat lightning in the distance over the Sound.

  Daniel waited now with the most extreme impatience for the reappearance of Captain Stadger, and suddenly the terrible thought presented itself that perhaps the captain would not appear. He knew then that he counted greatly on the officer’s coming, that he counted above all else on receiving whatever it was he was to receive finally from his hands, that he counted on the “release” by which Stadger would sever him from all and everything he had had connection with before. He waited now for the captain with the impatience with which he had waited, in his hidden soul, for Amos. He was ready and he was at full surrender.

  As the evening wore away and there was no Captain Stadger, his fever mounted and he began to allow to escape from his throat certain cries almost like those of the longing a wild animal will emit for an absent mate. The flashes of summer lightning continued and were followed by shattering peals of thunder.

  Then suddenly at last he saw the white figure coming toward him, and he gasped with relief.

  Captain Stadger, however, had altered indefinably, one of his hands trembled slightly, and he sat down at a distance from Haws.

  It was Daniel who went over to him.

  “I’m ready to begin, sir,” the soldier said.

  “God damn this lightning!” The captain turned his face away from Daniel toward the Gulf, where the storm was originating.

  A shrinking hesitancy and disappointment came over Daniel Haws’s face, a real grief that the captain should show even token fear of anything, lightning or storm. It was this look of incipient but unmistakable reproach on Daniel’s face that broke the spell and revived the real captain. Stadger stood up and went over to where the soldier faced him.

  “Wipe that look off your face, Haws.”

  “We’ll see if you fail me before I do you!” Daniel shot back at him.

  When the captain still hesitated, Daniel muttered, “You yellow cocksucker.”

  The captain smashed his jaw with murderous thrust, knocking the soldier back against the oak tree.

  Even though there was the crash again of thunder and more of the lightning which the captain evidently feared so much, the sight of the soldier’s flowing blood snapped whatever hesitation may have held back the officer’s hand. Quickly, like a man working fast to save a sinking vessel, Stadger stripped the enlisted man of the last of his clothing, tied him with the special wire to the tree. Daniel sighed vociferously. He had waited for death so long, he was almost already at peace, and the look of satisfaction on the soldier’s face removed any last fear or compunction the captain may have had of elements, man, God.

  “Tell me what I’m going to do to you?” Captain Stadger asked when he had securely tied him. The exhaustion of the last moments had cost the captain something, it was clear, and he spoke now with his head falling for the moment on Daniel’s bare shoulder.

  “Kill me,” the soldier pressed his face against the captain’s neck.

  The captain struck him viciously again and again, and the queer sound as of bone breaking was faintly audible through the uproar of the tropical storm.

  “Don’t you command me, you fucker,” the captain’s voice rose.

  Then he repeated his question to the soldier: “What am I going to do to you?”

  “Have power,” Daniel mumbled.

  He struck the soldier again and again.

  “Answer my Goddamned question right, Haws.”

  “You’re going to exercise your rightful authority over me,” Daniel whispered.

  The captain was only partly satisfied.

  “What more, Haws?”

  “You’re going to inflict punishment according to your orders,” the soldier replied. Then in a wild delirium Daniel Haws talked, lectured, ranted, quoted the Articles of War, rehearsed court-martial, confessed, condemned himself.

  “How did you show Amos Ratcliffe your love?” Captain Stadger’s voice came like the thunder behind them, while with pitiless savagery he held ope
n the mutilated man’s eyelids.

  “I never gave him love,” the soldier said. “I failed him as I failed myself.”

  Pulling out of his pocket a photograph of the dead boy, Captain Stadger thrust it in front of the soldier.

  “Prefer me to him now, and you’re free, Haws.”

  When Daniel did not reply, he rained one blow after another upon his prisoner until the bark of the tree ran red.

  Leaving the soldier for a few moments then, he returned with the weapon he had shown him a short while before.

  A pink sheet of lightning illuminated the weapon’s sharp edges and the captain without a word more began his work, pushing like flame with the instrument into Daniel’s groin upward and over, and then when its work was nearing completion he put his face to Daniel’s and pressing said something, in bloody accolade, that not even Daniel heard.

  ABOUT 2 A.M. on Sunday, Corporal Paulding, from the colored section of the encampment, said he heard a service revolver go off. As he later testified during the full investigation of the tragedy, after the shots, he saw to his never-fading horror a naked man emerge from the woods “carrying his bowels in his hands like provisions.” The man fell in a pool of gore at his feet. He was not dead. They had been lucky to have an ambulance which, inexplicably, had already been brought to the entrance of the camp and in it, still conscious and crying, the soldier, Private Haws, had kept screaming all the way to hospital. “Kill me, kill me, for I’ve stood all tests, and you owe me my death.”

  They did not find Captain Stadger’s body until the next afternoon—he had hidden himself so carefully in the place he had selected for shooting himself through the head with his service revolver.

  epilogue

  24

  The series of terrible summer events had cleared Eustace’s head and made his memory almost as crystal clear as before his marriage. Having bought his freedom—he liked to think by means of Amos’s having earned the money in the park—the Mantle which had fallen onto him from Luwana Edwards was now snatched up and away from him. He realized that this not only was the conclusion of his youth but also the end of what he had thought he was. After these awful events, ending in the deaths of Amos and Daniel, he never wrote a line again.

  Eustace, abdicating both as seer and poet, now found himself no longer the center of a group of disciples or even a “figure.” While the “economic burnout” (in which horror he had somehow been an important person) modulated into a world war, he was merely Carla’s husband.

  It was, in any case, Carla’s turn. She had been in the wings, and then to her own unbelief her cue came, and she walked out to the center of the stage. The bright lights showed her graying hair and all those lines, the ravages of bread-winning, poverty and disappointment. Having lost her role as the romantic love of any man, there she was, the star, after everyone else had left. She was frightened, but looking down at her hands, she saw she was steady.

  Eustace’s final abdication came as follows.

  As he waited in the last days of summer for further word from Mississippi—he was as anxious to know the end of the Daniel-Amos story as a depraved inveterate novel-reader—to his own queer exhilaration and sick terror, his own draft number improbably came up. He smoked some of the marijuana Amos had left him some weeks before his death (it seemed incredible to him that he had not seen Amos alive now for at least six weeks). At the army induction center he was greeted by a pale professional doctor with the usual horror professional often show when they meet someone alive in a different category of human existence than their own. Ace was about to tell the doctor he was a criminal degenerate, who had caused a boy’s death, when the medic informed him there was every indication he had syphilis, and should be under a physician’s care. He gave Eustace, to his grudging gratitude, a beauty of a pain-killer, which made him feel almost ready to go on living.

  Able to get through the day now with his pain-killer and the marijuana supply, he spent the next two weeks quietly, during which he had begun to feel, in the wind from the east and the flying carpet of dead maple leaves on Fifty-fifth Street, winter’s touch and breath, when there arrived three communications in the mail.

  The first was from the draft board, confirming the fact he was 4-F owing to venereal disease and traces of only partially cured tuberculosis.

  The sight of the other two letters, also official, from the army, one originating in New Orleans, made the hair on the back of his neck bristle. Not able to read these communications right away, he went into the bathroom, washed his face carefully, then shaved with the German straight razor Amos had bequeathed him, sat down, his ablutions completed, in an expensive dressing-gown, also out of Rat’s effects from his “kept” period with Reuben Masterson.

  It was about noon, he remembered, and looking out at the light coming from Washington Park and the rose garden, he felt he had skipped ten years somewhere. He felt he was an elderly man of forty.

  After reading both of the government letters from the army, he later tried to pretend to Carla that he could not remember where he had hidden them behind the torn wallpaper of his bedroom.

  “Because you are the only person listed as related in any way to Private Daniel Haws, serial number 3603358,” the first one began, “we wish to inform you of his condition. Private Haws was seriously injured while in basic training, at Camp Biloxi, and was transferred to this army headquarters hospital here in New Orleans. It is not certain he will be able to recover. The extent of his physical injuries are very serious, including abdominal lesions. . . . He has, even more seriously, shown extreme mental disturbance. As an enlisted man, he will receive every care and attention. If you know of any kin or relatives of the soldier, etc.”

  Opening the second official letter, Eustace read the single sentence which informed him that Private Daniel Haws had died of injuries sustained in basic training.

  SOMEHOW, WITH AN ordinarily poor memory, Eustace Chisholm could recite the exact contents of those prosaically worded army communications, while he would stumble if he recited Shakespeare or Virgil’s lines, his favorite of all, as translated by Dryden:

  I know thee, Love! in deserts thou wert bred,

  And at the dugs of savage Tigers fed;

  Alien of birth, usurper of the plains!

  While Eustace tried to figure out whether he had been intended to be a writer and poet and had thrown away his gift, or whether his wanting the Mantle returned to its original owner showed that he had never been meant to write from the beginning—whatever the case, in the dead of night, toward the beginning of November, he had got up from sharing his bed with Carla, and had gone into the little alcove where he kept the big pile of old newspapers on which his poem was written.

  “You’ll catch your death!” Carla had cried to him.

  Then she heard his screams.

  What had happened was that, striking a match to find his way, he had set the whole stack and binding of his works into angry bursts of flame, which sprang at the same time onto his expensive bathrobe.

  Flinging a cotton blanket over him, Carla had managed to put out the fire on his own person, and in her concern to see whether he had seriously burned himself—they had gone out into the kitchen to inspect his injuries—they did not think of the burning poems themselves, until Carla rushed out to them and found the papers ashes. Oddly enough, a large spread of a long newspaper account, with copious pictures of the wedding of Reuben Masterson and Maureen O’Dell, remained partially intact.

  Afterwards Eustace was sitting in a big “new” chair in the kitchen which she had purchased from the Salvage, from which he could more comfortably look down into the alley.

  “Can you bear to hear your poem is burned to nothing?” she inquired.

  “I want to tell you something, Carla,” he yawned.

  She went over to him and put some pomade on his burned arm. “I’m listening, sweet,” she said at a sigh of impatience from him.

  There was no sound at all in the room just then un
til the wind caught the Woolworth glass chimes, and now they tinkled comfortingly.

  “It’s come over me too clear to back down, Carla, and I want you to know. You see how calm I am about the poem burning. I’m not a writer, that’s my news, never was, and never will be,” he told her.

  “Furthermore you don’t think I’m a poet and I know I’m not,” he finished.

  “I don’t care what you accomplish, if anything.” Carla pressed her head over his, looking back in the direction of the extinguished conflagration. “All I ever cared about was you.”

  Staring at her dumbly, he stirred, pulled her head down toward his mouth, covered her neck with silent kisses and then slowly, like all the sleepwalkers in the world, took her down the long hall to their bed, held her to him, accepted her first coldness as she had for so long accepted his, and then warmed her with a kind of ravening love.

  Praise for Eustace Chisholm and the Works

  “Eustace Chisholm and the Works is a remarkable achievement. Purdy is a master of the horrible, the wildly funny, and the very sad.”

  —Angus Wilson

  “Mr. Purdy’s novel is so good that almost any novel you read immediately after it will seem at least a little bit posturing.”

  —Jonathan Franzen, from the foreword

  “Amos and Daniel, debased prophets and star-crossed lovers; Reuben Masterson, a happily debauched millionaire, swinging, swinging from Amos to Maureen O’Dell, the ugly but earnest nymphomaniac painter; Eustace, himself . . . a bisexual seer for the visionless prophets . . . No literary map of America is more heavily starred than that of the South Side of Chicago. . . . And no more exotic types have ever thrived here than Eustace Chisholm and his circle.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “James Purdy should be placed alongside William Faulkner in the Gothic corner of American literature.”

  —Gore Vidal, New York Times Book Review