Quartet for the End of Time (34 page)

At first he thought he had only somehow slept on his hands funny, cutting off the circulation to them temporarily—but no matter how hard he shook them out or wriggled his fingers the numbness remained. He was slower than usual that morning, but Hadley didn't say anything. Finally, around midday when they were all gathered to swallow their few mouthfuls of bread alongside of the shaded pathway that ran through the two largest fields, Douglas said, Damn if my hands ain't numb, like I slept on them funny, and Hadley and one or two of the other men, including the bandit and a midget—whom everyone called El Niño, because even though he was small he was still a force to be reckoned with—laughed.

That's nicotine, son, Hadley said. First it gets into your hands and then it gets into your brain, 'til you can't hardly think straight anymore.

One by one the men showed Douglas their hands and he saw that all of them were cracked and swollen, and he wondered how he had never noticed it before, and then he looked at his own hands and he saw that they were red and swollen, too, and he saw very briefly in a flash the way they were the same hands as everyone else's hands.

You got to be careful, nobody ever tell you? the midget said. You got to keep your fingers clean, else they're liable to fall off.

Douglas must have looked pale as death, sitting there with his bread half chewed, his throat too dry suddenly to swallow—just looking back and forth from his hands to theirs. The men laughed again and then someone changed the subject and they forgot about Douglas, and he was
left to try to swallow his food, and though finally he did, he could feel it all afternoon. A tight knot in the middle of his throat, like Chet's big Adam's apple must have felt in his.

But then, when they were walking back together through the row at the end of the day, Hadley ahead of him, Hadley turned and said, You don't worry about what they say, son, y'hear? The feeling will come back in yer hands, sure enough. Next week; I promise. Soon's we get paid.

But they didn't get paid next week, and the feeling did not return to Douglas's hands. The morning they were supposed to be paid the field manager said that it would be the week after next, if then. Could be, he said, not 'til the end of the season. And it did no use to grumble, he said, because everyone was in the same boat—himself and the farmer as well.

A week more passed—then two. And though still no one was paid and Douglas's hands became with each passing day increasingly numb, the days began, at last, to take on recognizable form, and just as they did Douglas began to see that they would end. The season wouldn't, he could see now, last forever—and soon enough the men began to speak of the next. Some would head farther south, they said, where the planting went on longer. Some would head west. A man could pick fruits and vegetables there. Though the pay was not so good, at least a man's hands did not go numb, or his brain twisted.

Being able to distinguish between days and see that the season would end meant that Douglas, too, trained his mind around that time toward the future: he began to expect his father again. When there had existed for him just one long moment that he could not measure, he had hardly thought of his father, nor expected anything at all—but now, and against all logic, every moment became one in which his father might arrive. Nearly a hundred times every day he would look up and expect to see his father swinging down the shaded road, Chet alongside him—shielding his eyes with his hand. The way Douglas imagined it, his father was always looking. Sometimes the image of it was so clear in his mind that for a moment when he himself looked up to scan the skyline he would
actually
see
his father there, looking back, and for a very brief moment their eyes would meet. But—at that precise moment of contact—his father would disappear, and Douglas would realize that it had once again been only his imagination that had summoned his father briefly into being; that he had not yet arrived, and would not. But despite the fact that he told himself this each time, his father not yet having arrived did not close, but rather opened the possibility that he
would.
And so until the final moment when they were paid out and everyone moved on, he still looked for his father, and still expected, every time he did—even if he looked up a hundred times in a day—that his father would be there, looking back. It got so bad he had to force himself to wait; to count to five hundred, say, before he looked again, or run through the lyrics of “Roses of Picardy,” which his father used to sing, six times in his mind. Sometimes he could do it, and sometimes not. He would always be disappointed when he disobeyed his own rules, as he often did, and looked up too soon, and punished himself by picking an even higher number to count to, or an even longer song.

—

B
UT THEN AT LAST THEY HAD BEEN PAID
,
AND THERE WAS NO WORK OR
anything else one morning but the heavy stink of liquor lingering in the air. Douglas woke up before anyone else had risen; he sat up suddenly, bolt upright. He only later realized it was on account of the alcohol he'd drunk the night before, because every time he indulged afterward the same thing happened. He would be wide awake suddenly, like he had never been more sober or more awake or alive in his life, and when it happened he couldn't do anything else but get out of bed and jangle his feet around, try to shake out whatever demons had lodged themselves overnight in his legs or his soul.

And so on that particular morning he woke up very early, while everyone else was still sleeping, and walked outside. It was very quiet; not even the birds spoke. There was a heavy blanket of gray mist that had crept up over the hill and covered the tobacco fields—the last plant
spudded just hours before—and it occurred to him for the first time that the world was beautiful. It was a terrible, sick feeling, he felt then, as he realized it. He felt it shoot all the way through his body—from the tip of his head, which was bare and open to the chill of the morning air, to the ends of his fingers, which tingled with a by-now-familiar sensation, which was almost no sensation at all. A sensation, or lack thereof, which (though Hadley had promised him it would) had not gone away now that he'd been paid, and in fact never would. He would still feel it even many years later—all during and even long after the war. Not as sharply or as vividly as he did then, but still—an echo of it. A memory of numbness that, through the confusions of time, he later connected not with the pain of the work, but with the beauty of that landscape, which had just then revealed itself to him.

He stood out there that morning with that chill in his heart as equally as in his head and his hands, and he prayed that he might sense in that terrible beauty some sign, something that might indicate to him the path that he should follow. He looked up into the sky, which was just beginning to lighten, into that thick blanket of mist just beginning to disperse itself into the coming day, and he prayed. He prayed out loud—to God or whatever force was out there that might instruct him best.

He did not know why he formulated his question in words that he actually spoke out loud, and perhaps that was his most grievous mistake, for the words came out sounding dull, nearly meaningless in the open air. And no answer came. Perhaps if he had not spoken, but had found some language equivalent to whatever was just at that moment beginning to stir in his heart, then he might have been answered in kind. The risk was, of course, that the reply would come back as mysterious and as incomprehensible to him as the feeling that currently resided within him; that there would have been nothing to understand. No simple word, no sign. So he spoke his request in simple words, but still there was no recognizable reply, and the longer he stood there in the empty field, the emptier and more alone both he and it became; so much so that, finally, when he turned his attention inward—the world having offered him no guidance at all—he seemed to himself as scoured and hollow as a reed or a shell.

Finally, when the sun had burned away what was left of the mist and the first sounds of the men breaking camp interrupted what had until then been perfect stillness (disrupted only by the occasional call of a bird and, once, the rattle of an old truck on the road, its motor popping in tired, slow retreat), Douglas turned back to the camp. And later that morning, because he had arrived at nothing else, he found himself—along with the bandit, Hadley, and the midget El Niño— headed farther south.

A
S USUAL
,
THE BANDIT
entertained them as they went. Among many other stories of his onetime adventures, there were the stories of how he had once been a rich man: manager of one of the richest silver mines in southern Arizona. Whatever it was that had happened to change the course of his fate Douglas never knew—the bandit always skipped over that part of the story. He'd just sort of pause, sometimes marking the gap with a soft popping sound that he made with his mouth. Depending on how the story got told, sometimes it would seem to indicate one thing, and sometimes another, but always there came the point in the story when the bandit—
pop
—was obliged to depart from his home state, for which he was named, and his past glory, to which likewise (as the bandit would often lament appreciatively himself) he was never now likely to return.

T
HEY WERE CONTENT
,
FOR
the most part, to get blown just as the wind blew, to move from job to job, and not to think much past the next meal, or the next place to lay their heads. And if there wasn't a next meal, or a place to lay their heads, well, that didn't trouble them much, either. Douglas still hoped (and in some small way, despite his fears, fully expected) that his path might cross, at some point or the other, with his father's. And so, even as they drifted farther and farther south following the rumor of work—always ahead of them, just out of reach—he continued to measure his progress and direction according to the relative distance he imagined between them.

Everywhere he could, he left his name and his next destination—if it
was known—written in large letters across a scrap of paper, or whatever he could find, to be passed on to his father should anyone meet him. Because of this, by the time he returned to Washington again the next spring, there was a map of his travels that pointed straight down the center of the United States, hit the Gulf, and traveled back up again, so that if anyone had cared to they could have followed his trail and seen the pattern it made, though he himself had no knowledge of it until many years later, when he looked at a map for the first time and saw the great distance he had covered. Once he had even passed through Missouri at a point that was, he later realized, only a day or two's travel, at most, from his mother's door. Without knowing it, he had nearly broken the promise his father had made for them both by returning—however unwittingly—home.

T
HOUGH THEY HAD FOLLOWED
the season and the rumor of work faithfully all that time, many weeks went by when they found nothing at all, and after a particularly long spell like that, the bandit—in proportion to his growing hunger—grew increasingly suspicious as to the reason they were continuously turned away. One night he told Douglas that the two of them had better make off on their own, as he doubted whether the midget and old Hadley were improving their lot any. He shook his head sadly as he said it. A man has got to make his own way in the world, he said. And he must harden his heart a little in order to do it.

This Douglas knew to be true. Every day they passed some poor soul on the road whom they were forced to walk right by. There was never enough, you see, to share on the road, and even if there was, by some miracle—if at camp one night, say, they were lucky enough to have at a stretch an extra helping of food in the pot—it was clear there was no point to sharing what was left with one man if they could not share it with every other man, too.

If, at times, this was lamented—either by themselves or the strangers they passed on the road—the bandit would supply the company with a simple lesson in economics, which ran along these lines: If the surplus, he would say (what was left over at the end of any meal, if they
should be so lucky as to have any to spare) was measurable, and the deficit (that observed lack: the beggar next to them, for example, who clamored to be fed) was not, then it was evident the surplus was best banked—shored up. That it might grow upon and against its own worth, rather than be dispersed until all value was lost. There are (the bandit would always conclude) at least two things to be learned from this and kept in mind. One is that value is always reduced through division rather than multiplied. (Take—he would say—for example, when a loaf of bread is divided into two parts, so that one man gets one half and the other, the other. At the outset, though it may seem there is an outcome greater than if the loaf had stayed whole, it must be remembered that the loaf, once divided,
exists only in parts.
This fundamental principle has not, and cannot, be changed—no matter what immediate demand or desire has been momentarily satisfied.) The second law (the bandit said) is that value—though it cannot, perhaps, be measured— always exists, nevertheless, in the possibility of both its accrual and dispersion. (It is possible, therefore—the bandit explained—that two halves of one loaf of bread
could
equal, on certain, rare occasions, more than one loaf of bread as a whole,
if
the potential for earning, making, or stealing
another
loaf of bread once the bread is divided—two men now fed, instead of just one—is greater proportionately than it would be feeding one man alone.)

And so all of these lessons were spinning around in Douglas's head the night the bandit suggested they part company from the midget and Hadley and make their own way, and later he would not have been able to say what decision he and the bandit would have come to had they been required to. He would not have been able to say rightly whether he would have accepted, in the end, the crude calculations of the bandit, though he suspected at their root a gross inaccuracy: something he could neither figure nor describe, but of which he felt deadly certain all the same. Because, in the end, they were not faced with making the decision at all: it was El Niño who left
them—
in order to rejoin a traveling circus, which had made him an offer (he said) he simply couldn't refuse. This, despite the fact that he had sworn on many occasions—in front of
them all—that he would sooner be churned into the dirt of a tobacco field, or tumble off a ladder and be buried a free man in the wide open, than be trampled under the foot of an elephant; that is, die—in the circus—as the property of another man.