The Watchman (32 page)

No, I tell you! cried the horse trader. He just died, that's aU. Snedeker says he can tell no more than that. Not a mark on him.

No one spoke of grief, none of them there mentioned that a man of massive will might will to die.

By God, Luther Alt was a good Sheriff! roared a man, his voice shaking with emotion.

A good man! chorused others. A man folks could respect.

By God, now, said another. I'll miss hearing those old boots of his ringing down the bricks on foggy nights like this. Me and my missus slept easy hearin' that sound. Nobody blames him for his Godless daughters!

That's a fact! shouted Pruney Wrinkle, wanting to be remembered for having said something on that night to be so infinitely remembered. There's bad apples in the best of orchards! Ain't that so now, boys?

Yes. Yes, they roared softly in bumbling accordance. That's so. Yes. That's a God known fact!

Now the figure of a man in shirt sleeves, flushed and breathless from an evening of ingenious exertion, clambered on top of a parked car beneath the movie-house marquee and smiled, bowing with anxious petition like a flexing puppet. Tzchak's hand thrust out, the fingers opened, the white cards rose, broke and drifted down upon the heads of the people like a spurious and scissored snow.

I want all you good Mound County folks to know, the deputy announced, that I'm here to offer myself as your servant. That and no more. With the dead body of my dearest and closest friend of more than twenty years hardly cool yet on the stone table up at Peace's Parlors it would not be fitting for me to say more than that. Luther Alt was a brave man—a good Sheriff. I'd not presume to tell you I can ever fill those boots that stand limp and empty now beside the undertaker's table. All I can say is this—if you want me I'm here—if you ask me I'll step forward—if you let me I'll serve, as I've always tried to serve. Your safety—the lives of poor young lads Uke Cole Blake—the hallowed innocence of your littlest children. You there, little darling. Lady, lift her up here to me!

Instantly then, the figure of a small girl in a green flannel coat thrust up above the heads of the mob as if propelled from a circus cannon. She wailed and blubbered, reaching her hands back beseechingly to the gnarled, young hands of the mother who had held her to the deputy. Tzchak cuddled her and the crowd murmured and laughed warmly after he fumbled in his jacket and fetched out a small, gray catnip mouse to play with.

Why, sure now you can keep it! cried Tzchak, just loud enough for all of them to hear, yet carefully not loud enough to frighten the child into tears again. The fat, four-year-old fingers took the strange, gray toy with its tiny eyes like hatpin beads, examined it, snuffling, still shaking now and then from the subsidence of her sobs. Sure now you can keep it, Tzchak said. You don't reckon I'd haul you all the way up here and scare you half to death and then give you a toy I was going to take back again. That's yours, little kitten, that's yours!

Reckon you'd have right smart of a tussle getting that play-toy back even if you wanted it, Sheriff! roared a man who promptly set off a flurry of heart-warmed laughter.

Did someone yonder call me Sheriff? said Tzchak with a slow and humble shake of his hand. No, friends, Luther Alt's still Sheriff of Mound County—even in death. Not until the court of Mound County at you people's bidding elect a new man will you have the right to any other man by the name of Sheriff.

That'll not be long, Tzchak! shouted Deke Virgin from the open window of his second-story flat.

Tzchak for Sheriff! cried the mother of the little girl, tak-

ing the child back from the deputy's gentle hands and brandishing her body aloft above the heads: a banner of wailing innocence. Tzchak for Sheriff! came a great chorus from the waiting, readied mouths. The deputy with a diffident wave of the hand, a boyish, appreciative shake of curly, black hair, ducks smiling now and jumps from the car top back down into the democratic midst of his cheering constituency. Like a moving river in the congealed ocean of massed heads, jostling, laughing dozens now bear him up Seventh Street toward the Court House.

But ain't one of us ever gonna forget Luther Alt I shouts Jibbons from the hotel steps.

That's right, Trader! cries a woman.

I reckon it wouldn't be amiss if we was all to spend a minute's silence, cried the horse trader in a moved and broken voice. Let us bow our heads in the Sheriff's memory. And think about the Lord!

Put perhaps it was simply that the crowd was in no mood for silence then—not even for a minute: perhaps, on the other hand, the words of Mister Jibbons had been misunderstood. For suddenly the old army cap of the band leader gave a nod, his baton slashed the air, the cornet of Matthew Hood led them off with the bass-drum boom and the cymbal clash of "Onward, Christian Soldiers." By the small desk at the hotel door stood a pale boy: Jason shakes his head; Jason's mouth shapes No. He moves down the steps, fighting his way through the heaving shoulders of the singers. They must be told; they must know about a warm and dimlit bedroom in a long-lost Texas night. Jason shouts but no sound is heard above the hymn. Jason's mouth shapes No and shouts it close into their faces. But they think only that, like them, he is singing.

No! shouts Jason. He must make them hear, make them believe. And so he tears among their shoulders, seizing their arms, shaking them, his mouth opening and closing in dumb, unheard dissent before their faces which smile into his, acknowledging his enthusiasm, nodding their heads to the tune and singing all the louder.

The hangman's horn rings golden through their chant; the bass drum thumps like fate's fist banging at the door of mounded mists; the cymbal's plangent splash of brass rings like the ready sword of Christian War.

Almost insanely now, yet never so sane, Jason's lost, diminutive shape hurtles and shoulders through the choiring

crowd. He shakes his livid face; he rounds his mouth to No. They must be told. And what must they be told? Some slander against their freshest, heroed novelty; protege of all their strongest, happiest instincts, and on the very night when hero is what they need the most to fill some dangerous, steaming gap? What must they be told? Words babbled from the lips of a mad girl who lies now, providently and by a providence of their own, smashed, extinct, no longer babbling? What must they hear? Soiled and guessed-at hearsay from the corrupt mouth of her harlot sister?

Yet Jason moves on, his voice ragged and failing from his soundless, screaming imprecations; he stumbles, falls, not feeling the knee bruise from the street bricks, struggles up again, swims shouting on among them. One man leans forward, sensing something in the boy's man eyes, perhaps cupping one hand behind a hairy ear to catch the faint-cried word.

What's say?

Jason's mouth works in idiot, inaudible fury before the old man's eyes.

What's that, boy?

On-ward, Christian Sol-diers—Marching as to Wa-a-ar! With the cross of Jee-e-e-huh-sus—goi-ing on be-fore I

Can't hear ye, boy? What say?

Again his dumb-show mouthing to the old man's straining face.

Juanita? Juanita who, boy? Ain't no one round here by that name that I know of. Juanita? says the old one. No. Fraid not. Nope.

In the hotel lobby, Jason slams the door behind him. Beyond the shut door the sound of singing, the clash and thump and bugling band persist.

He breaks down now in sobs of frustration at a throat soundless and useless for speech; he weaves toward the side door, leaving the old night clerk staring at him, astonished. Beyond the crowd now, in the mists and immediate stillness of the tree-shadowed bricks Jason wanders down Lafayette Avenue toward the river road, into the night.

Cristi? he thinks. Will you forgive me this last, worst failure of them all? Cristi, I tried. My God, I couldn't make them hear. They were shouting about Jesus so loud I couldn't make them hear about TzchakI Cristi?

Behind him, as if slowly smothering away among the mists, the voices and the band grow faint. Jason walks a

while, exhausted, his sobs subsiding, his legs grown again more steady, his pace footsure. Something glimmers on the wet bricks in the fog before him. He turns and sees the twin lights of a trailer truck approach, like a slow, fire-eyed behemoth making its massive way across the floor of that gray ocean. Jason stands, waving a weary hand.

Ain't supposed to pick up hitchers, boy, says a voice from the high cab, the pipe above him spouting black smoke of its diesel like giant ink from an angered squid. Well, which way you going?

West, croaks Jason.

Which way?

West! cries Jason.

Get in, said the voice. I'll drop you off outside Parkers-burgh in the morning.

But for a moment in the cab the old zeal, the fury, the panic seizes him for an instant: they must be told, he must go back, he must make known his No. And for that instant as the truck lights sweep round across the veiled poplars of the ancient yard of Colonel Bruce, Jason's face thrusts out of the cab window, his mouth rounded and gawping its broken, senseless soundlessness. The truck moves on, its tires singing on the black-top of the highway's westward bound. Yet who else tonight gawps in Adena with dumb and shout-torn throat to cry, unheeded and wilderness-lost, craving for ears unhearing in the din of rainy hymns and windy praise.

Now in this late and hallowed hour of imminent earliness what other soundless mouths croak broken: "Man, wake up. Man, light up the wet wick of your eyes while still there's time to see." Who else wanders the peopled nothing of quenched and drifting mists this autumn river night?— slaughtered, mad girl-child whose blood, in menstrual premonition, already seedling, wombs the murder of a child not bom? What steals creeping by there, Watchman-who-walks-no-more?—or face of the prosecutor, fresh as pearled day-rise with new and skeptic sense; legal face with one black, crazed crack run up in storm-struck zigzag through the virgin bellmetal of that tough and untolled conscience: lawyer Christmas Janders tongue-tied with doubts before the railing of these yawning, juried mists? What else, Silence-that-walks, what else to be seen in the Mound of mists tonight?—the Colonel's window slammed chattering to its casement, latched, sealed against sound of Adena and world this once in ten year's time; old Colonel, beyond windows, beyond

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The Watchman 221

surprise, beyond disenchantment, beyond all but this last shock thunderclap of cruel and blasphemous idiocy, beyond all further ragging hurt, though not beyond an everlasting astonishment at human cruelty remembered in every aching holy-relic bone of sainted cynicism and all the anguish of his mankind-loved-too-well: old, mad Colonel Bruce, bunched deep and fisted in a brass bed's tick, mounds of pouched, feather bolsters like purses of misered snowfall from murdered peace doves, pillowed and stuffed close around his ears: Colonel beyond his window, beyond those honking, bugling, braying confirmations of his life's sorriest, sourest prophecies, beyond his hermetic sill, though not beyond the cauterizing and incendiary thermite of his outrage. What else walks yonder, white-piled-thought?—whose are those smoking wispish boots which pace their soundless round along the unconscienced bricks, what shoulders sculpted from huge mists and what pearled eyes of fumed insubstance watch, what wind-ruined and rain-banished mouth lifts to wake and warn Adena's castrate sleep; lips shaped to shout, rounded to anguished love, christened to ugly need: A light! For what is Hate but Love that has lost its way in the dark! My God, a little light while there's still time for love to find its way. Sir, Christ of the fishes. Lord of loaves still warm! Christ with wrist and heel bone bums of frock-blessed and chapel dispensated War and the four smoldering electrode-scorched stigmata of baptized, priest-praised jails! Sir, Jesus Christ! Joke-named, Christ-word, Kilroy scratched with a dirty pin upon the painted walls of earth's babbling, creed-bound, toileted churches! Gentle Jesus of all names of human love! Sir, the wind rises and the rains sweep in! Lord, please, a light!—a little light! Lord, sir, in Love's name, please! A simple flame to light this poor lamp's blasted, blacked and blown-out wick!

And now they have all gone home to bed again; Adena sleeps. And sleeps a spent, a deep, a dreamless sleep. For that night's savage dream, at least, is done, spun out, and all the tale, at last, is told and tied up at its loose yarn-ends. The pavements of the street before the Mound Hotel lay glistering with the wet of vanished mists, deserted. Towards three o'clock, upon the sudden rising of a river wind, the fog rolled off. Now the curl of whittled country moon rides like a sickled silver in its violet vastness.

Somewhere west beyond the river Jason rides the high-

ways to his quest, golden fleece of manhood, and his Cristi glistening somewhere in the heaped haystack of the long continent, beyond green prairie and the bulTalo-back mountains. Perhaps he will find her. But perhaps, foremost, he will find, at last, himself. If he is lucky; that is, if he is very lucky. Yet perhaps, if at all, these findings will be months or years in coming. A measuring, thinking time, a lone time for each of them: a time of mending, a spell to heal, nights of self-summing. By chance these two may meet again amid some season of the earth's great renewals: perhaps in the big heart of the green comebacks of a spring, or maybe in the ridge and hillside reapings of another summer's end. And maybe better so. Yes, surely, better so.

The corner at Lafayette and Seventh is nearly deserted. Even the doors beneath all the scratched, tawdry beads of beer-halls necklaced out below it are empty. And yet, persistent, indomitable, immortal: the close-clumped members of the Trumpet Home Tabernacle Band; bugling, thumping, crashing on as if they had not even noticed the wandering one-by-one away of everyone, the falling-off of tenors and altos each-by-each, the shambling away of weary, home-bound shapes. It is quite possibly "Rock of Ages" now that they are playing: a rock, if it is that, of stunning and heterogeneous mosaic. It is hard to guess. For even in this hour of staled and unrefreshed exhaustion the little band goes jubilantly on in the achievement of their brilliant effects of that —if not Free—at last furiously Separate Enterprise: the very voicing of the spirit of eccentric, personal and nonconforming joint-effort which is the peculiar and most hallowed native paradox which America—excluding Darkies, Jews, Indians and the other parvenu elements—celebrates on such religious nights and patriotic holidays and holds forth to be its most hallowed symbol of virginal originality. And so now the Trumpet Home Tabernacle Band plays on, heedless of the desolate street corner across whose polished bricks blow bright, dry leaves in scuttling flurry among small white cards which hands have dropped, forgot, and trampled there. The band goes bleating on with no one left to hear, nor any left to sing along; no solitary, mortal ear to heed salvation from their hymns. Ort Dobey sleeps behind his hotel registry. Jibbons the horse trader has gone up. All gone. And yet, with savage zeal the musicians persevere against that shadowed, earless solitude; the flashing brass of their instruments catch lights of moon and star and streetlight gold. Surely they re-