Departure Read online

  “I’ll be damned,” the colonel said.

  The subaltern smiled gently as the train guards interposed themselves and firmly pushed the little people back.

  “Woollies,” the colonel said. “And where do you suppose they come from?” He was more moved than the subaltern, who merely remarked, “You would think they’d put some clothes onto them.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “You know—decent, and all that.”

  The train guards were neither cruel nor hard; they were simply firm. They pushed the little people away, and the little folk had not much heart in it and gave it up rather easily.

  I got out of the compartment and went back to the mail. “In this country,” the tech sergeant said, “anything can happen. Jesus God, anything can happen. It could rain balls.”

  “What do the Limeys say?” the staff sergeant asked.

  “They say they shouldn’t be undressed.”

  “So they hocked their clothes. I’m going over to look.” We locked up the mail, and the three of us went over together.

  “What about the train?” asked the tech sergeant. “How long does she sit here?”

  We guessed one and two and three hours, but in any case this was not something you could pass by without seeing. Alongside the station there was a broad field of sun-baked clay and a little parched grass. It was out in the center of this field that the little people had made their encampment and built small stick fires and raised a few hide lean-tos. There they were, a hundred or a hundred and fifty of them, a whole people, a tribe, a village, a folk, as some would say, with their old and their young, their graybeards, their infants and their children.

  They were small people; none of the men were more than five feet in height; the women were like large dolls and the children were like small, fragile dolls. The men and women were tired and hopeless looking, but the tiny children were like other children, even laughing just a little. In color they were a deep yellow-brown, and their eyes made you think of Chinese, but they were not Chinese and they were not anything else that had ever been itemized, catalogued or studied. They wore no clothes, except for a shred of G-string on the men and sometimes a bit of leather on the women, yet they had no consciousness or knowledge of nakedness; you could see that. Also, the Stone Age was ahead of them. Their spears were sticks of wood with fire-hardened tips. Their bows were toy bows, and their arrows had neither tips nor feathers. Their shields were pieces of dry, untanned hide, and their cooking pots were molded crudely from clay. They had no footgear whatsoever, but walked barefoot, and there was just a trace of hair on the faces of the men.

  I had never seen such people before. Neither had the staff sergeant; neither had the tech sergeant. They were out of the dawn of man; with each other they were gentle and loving and caressing; they fondled each other, they put their arms around each other, they comforted each other. And they were very hungry; their pots were empty, and they were terribly, terribly hungry. Their bones stood out and their flesh had dried away. Even in that hungry land, they were more hungry than just the hungry, and soon they would die because of the hunger.

  We walked among them and their large, soft brown eyes followed us. We stopped by a woman with bare, flat, dry breasts, and the tech sergeant pointed to the baby she held in her arms and said, “Jesus God, that kid has been dead a long time. That kid has been dead so long it stinks.”

  “Who are they?” I wanted to know. “What are they? And where are they from?”

  “You stink after four hours in this heat,” the staff sergeant said.

  “Now I’ve seen everything.”

  “Sure you’ve seen everything. Wherever you are, you see everything. You got a broad Arkansas perspective. The first time you seen a necktie, you seen everything.”

  The tech sergeant went back to the train and got some rations and some candy we had there. We opened the cans and took the paper off the chocolate, but at first the people wouldn’t eat. We had to persuade them to eat, and then they gave it to the children, and the men and women wept and chattered in their strange tongue while the children ate. We spoke to some bearers, some station people, and some of the people who were standing around, but no one knew who they were, or what they were, or where they were from.

  Then the train whistle blew, which meant that sometime in the neighborhood of five minutes or an hour the train would start. We walked back, and when we got to our compartment, there in front of it were the two British officers talking to a civilian; and the colonel said to me, “Rum lot, aren’t they?”

  “Who?”

  “The woollies.”

  “Why do you call them woollies?”

  “Got to call them something, don’t you know,” the pink-cheeked subaltern smiled. “No one really knows who they are or what they are. Can’t talk their language and they can’t talk ours. Damned shame. They’re from up in the hills somewhere and they must have had a hard time of it with famine and all that, and I suppose a rumor reached them about a train being something which takes you from one place where there’s no food to another place where there is food, so here they are.” He added as an an afterthought, “They’ve been trying to board every train for six days now.”

  The civilian’s name was Johnson, and he was the local commissioner or something. The colonel introduced him to me, but not to the two sergeants.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  “What can one do?” Johnson said. “They can’t ride the train without tickets, and if they could, where would they ride to? Food is tight. They’re not properly the concern of my district in any case.”

  Then he walked off with the colonel, toward their compartment in the car behind ours. The subaltern lingered. Embarrassed and apologetic, he said something to the effect of their not lasting very long. “Bloody shame and all that, but they are on their last legs. It solves a problem for the poor beggars.”

  “What do you mean?” the tech sergeant asked.

  “He means, you horse’s ass, that they’ll starve to death in a few days,” the staff sergeant said quietly; and then, just as quietly, but deliberately, he said to the subaltern, “You, my friend, are a dirty second-rate son of a bitch—an upstanding pile of crap, if you follow me.”

  They boy’s pink flushed to red; he stiffened, he stared at the two enlisted men, muttered something. “Oh, I say,” or something of that sort, stared at them a moment or two longer, then turned on his heel and walked away. The train began to move, and we ran for our compartment. The tech sergeant seated himself sadly on a mail sack and started to whistle “Don’t Fence Me In.” The staff sergeant went to the toilet bowl where he kept a cake of ice and a few cans of tomato juice, and proceeded to open one of the cans.

  “What in hell did you do that for?” I asked him finally.

  “No more tea? No more nice people to talk to?”

  “You hate, but you never hate with your brains. That was just a nice dumb kid.”

  “You want some tomato juice?”

  “Sure. I’ll pretend it’s a Martini.”

  “What are you so pissed-off about?” the tech sergeant asked me.

  “Nothing—nothing, but what a righteous, clean-limbed race of people we are. Oh, my God, how righteous!”

  “To hell with him,” said the staff sergeant. “He’s got no more nice people to talk to.”

  Who Is He?

  MY GOODNESS, YOU would think that Jesus Christ was worse than Al Capone; a name that should not be spoken. I came home and said, “Mamma, who’s Jesus Christ?”

  She was washing clothes and she kept on washing clothes.

  I said, “Mamma, who was he?”

  She wrung out a sheet like a big fat sausage. The whole kitchen was full of the good creamy smell of hot, clean clothes. Suds ran from her arms as she wiped her hands on her apron. Her broad face turned to me with an unspoken question; did I want bread and butter and jam or cake and milk?

  “I ain’t hungry,” I said. “Who is Jesus Chris
t?”

  “If you ain’t hungry, go and play.”

  I turned to the window and indicated the pack. They had driven me tight and close, and here I was and there they were. They hung over the fence, and their words were in their motions because all the windows were closed. There were eight of them, and beyond them, down the hill, stretched the ragged fringe of Linday, the curl of the river, the smoking stacks of the factories beyond.

  “I got to wait,” I said calmly.

  “What did you do to them?” she demanded fiercely. “What do they want from you? I’ll take my ironing board and break it over their heads! I’ll break every bone in their bodies!”

  I waited for her rage to pass. “You couldn’t catch them,” I said.

  “Then stay in the house!” She turned back to her washing.

  “I killed Christ,” I said, pressing my face against the window and showing them that my facial gestures could be as competent as theirs.

  “What!”

  “That’s what I told them.”

  This time she dried her hands more slowly. She looked at me keenly and curiously and wanted to know “Why did you tell them that?”

  “They say I killed him. My God, they don’t stop saying I killed him. They threw me into the river because I killed him. When they took off my pants and burned them up, it was because I killed Christ. And I don’t even know who he is. So today I said, ‘God damn you, I killed him and I’m damn glad.’”

  “Don’t use such words,” she whispered.

  “What words?”

  “Damn.”

  “All right, but that’s what I told them.”

  “You shouldn’t have told them that,” she said sadly. “When they hit you, come into the house. But don’t tell them such things.” Then she turned back to her washing.

  I knew that it was no use by now, but I kept insisting. “Who was Jesus Christ?” I pestered her. “Who was Jesus Christ?”

  “Go read a book.”

  “Who was Jesus Christ?”

  “Leave me alone. Go play.”

  So that was that. And when I asked my father that night, do you think I got any more satisfaction? Like fun I did.

  My father peddled down the valley to Aberlee with a Ford truck. The Ford was a ninteen twenty-seven Model T, and he would say that he pushed it as much as it pushed him. All the way down the river it was corn and cucumber country. He sold to the farmers, and he said it was as hard to sell to farmers as it was to find a good man. When he came home at night, the tiredness stood out all over him. He wasn’t a good man to ask questions.

  I asked him while he was eating, and he stopped eating and looked at me as if he had never seen me before.

  “Who?” he demanded.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  At first he looked mad, so mad that I could feel the rage crackling all over him like electricity; and I was terrified and sorry that I had asked him the question, and would have liked to take it all and cram it back down my throat. But then the anger drained away, and I saw the love come back into his eyes, the same love that was always there when he regarded me, his one child, his son and first-born.

  “Ah, ah, ah,” he smiled. “And I was going to bite off your nose for a foolish question.”

  Then he turned back to his meal.

  “All day long,” Mamma said, “he bothered me with that.”

  “Enough. For the last time, enough!” Then he pointed a finger at me and said, “That name is something not to mention in this house—never again. For us, such a man does not live.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t ask me why,” he said.

  I saw how things went, and closed my mouth. That’s the best way when you see how things are going.

  The next day, I asked Mike Finnegan, the garbage man, all the time cocking an eye over my shoulder for my mother. Mike Finnegan had on his left arm a naked lady, tatooed in pink and yellow, but with a snake covering the part I wanted to see most. Whenever I asked him, he wiggled his muscle and made the lady dance.

  I said to him, “Mike, who was Jesus Christ?”

  “Holy Christ,” he whispered, putting down the can of garbage. “Can it be that in this Christian country a boy of your age don’t know the Lord’s name?”

  “Nobody told me.”

  “I’m not blaming you,” Mike said. “It’s others I’m blaming.”

  “What others?”

  “Them that keep you in your heathen ignorance.”

  “Yes,” I nodded.

  “And when you mention the name of our Lord,” Mike said, “do this.” He crossed himself.

  “Like this?”

  Mike grinned and took away the garbage. I went into the kitchen and said, “Mamma, look,” and I crossed myself.

  The stinging slap of her hand sent me reeling back against the wall. I began to cry, and then she knelt down next to me and begged my forgiveness.

  “I didn’t do nothing,” I said.

  She smoothed my tears away and spoke to me softly and entreatingly. “Look, my little one,” she said. “My precious one, listen to me. You got to know how we are and what we are. I can’t make you understand because you’re just a little boy. But try to see this. A great big ocean of water and in the middle of it one little island of sand. All day and all night for all the years, the ocean tries to wash away the little island of sand. But each grain of sand clings to the next grain. They hold on to each other like when I hold on to you, so tight. And no matter what the ocean tells them, they hold on, and because of that, they’re able to look up and see the sun. No matter what black days come, they can still see the shining promise of almighty God. Do you understand, my little one?”

  “No,” I said.

  She smiled and shrugged and said, “Go and play.”

  “No,” I said, and she looked at me and seemed to understand why. She shrugged her shoulders and kissed me.

  “Let them say it,” she said softly. “They themselves killed him, a long time ago, maybe two thousand years ago. They hated us before that, but when they killed him, they had more reasons to hate us.”

  “Why?” I demanded.

  “Who knows why?” She made faces at me, trying to make me laugh. “Have some bread and butter and milk and play in the house.”

  “All right,” I said.

  And I didn’t ask that question of anybody else for a long time. But years later, there was a learned man traveling west from Chicago, and he stopped off at our town and stayed at our house because it was the only house of our faith in the town. After dinner, he sat at the table and talked with my parents and I put my chin on my hands and watched him. They talked about this and that and everything.

  Finally, the learned man turned to me and said, “It is good for a boy to listen, but even better for a boy to ask certain questions that may be in his mind.”

  I questioned my father with my eyes, and when he nodded, blurted out, “Who was Jesus Christ?”

  Well, what did they expect? Hadn’t I waited long enough with that question gnawing my insides like a rat?

  In the deep, ominous silence that followed, I saw the stranger smiling. He answered calmly, the way he had answered twenty other questions during the evening.

  “Jesus was a part of the truth.”

  “What truth?”

  “I must apologize,” my father began.

  “No, no, I am glad he asked that. Who is to say what man the child is father of? Perhaps he too will be part of the same truth.”

  My father knit his brows. He was an uneducated peddler. I could see that he was determined to listen to the stranger without revealing his own unlearnedness.

  “They killed him,” I said.

  “Because he told them the truth and they feared him. In the same way that they fear every wise man and every good man.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they are afraid of the truth. Because as soon as the truth wins, there will be no more hate. Do you understand?”

  I was
afraid to say no. I felt small and unworthy.

  Almost humbly, my father said, “Go up to bed. It’s late.”

  “Good night,” I told them. I was full of fear as I groped my way through the dark up to my room.

  The Suckling Pig

  HE CALLED MARCUS and said, “I just heard about it. Jack Brady passed away this morning.”

  “No!”

  “Got up, took a shower, began to dress, and then keeled right over.”

  “No! Heart?”

  “That’s right. I makes you stop to think. We’re none of us as young as we used to be.”

  “That’s the God’s honest truth. But a guy like Brady, you’d think he had twenty good years ahead of him.”

  “Never had a sick day in his life. It makes you stop to think.”

  “That’s the truth. How’s his wife taking it?”

  “She’s making a big thing. But I got my own ideas on that subject.”

  “I got mine,” Marcus said. “I guess I’ll see you at the wake.”

  “I guess so.”

  After he called one or two more of the boys, he told his girl to get Rialto Liquor to send a case up to Brady’s, half Scotch and half bourbon, and to have a big wreath made up out of red and yellow roses.

  “I wouldn’t think red and yellow roses for a wreath,” the girl said.

  “What in hell’s the difference? Jack Brady liked red and yellow roses.”

  The rest of the afternoon dragged slowly, interrupted only by phone calls to tell him what he already knew, that Jack Brady had passed away. Thoughts of death, more and more frequent lately, clouded his mind, and he half regretted that he was not a Catholic, like Brady, so he could let others do the worrying for him. At five, he cancelled the tickets for that evening, and went over to Toots’s for a drink.

  A half a dozen of the boys were there at the bar, and he killed four Scotches with them, and then felt better. They were all men in their middle fifties, about the same age Jack Brady had been, and they thought of themselves as well as Brady.

  “Anyway, it’s a nice, clean exit,” someone said.

  “Clean or not, it ain’t nice.”

  “I had dinner with Jack at the Hickory House last night. He didn’t have a thing on his mind, except he thought he’d go down to Florida a little early.”