by John Cheever
If the only song I can sing is a sad song,
I ain’t going to sing at all.
If the only song I can sing is a sad song,
I ain’t going to sing at all.
I ain’t going to sing about the dead and the dying,
I ain’t going to sing about the knives and the firing,
I ain’t going to sing about the praying and the crying—
If the only song I can sing is a sad song,
I ain’t going to sing no more.
So they were naked again or nearly so, waiting in line to get new DC issue, choosing their places in front of signs that said EXTRA LARGE, LARGE, MEDIUM and SMALL, having stripped themselves of their prison grays and tossed these into a bin. The new issue was a noncommittal green, scarcely, thought Farragut, a verdant green, scarcely the green of Trinity and the long summer months, but a shade up from the gray of the living dead. It was only Farragut who sang a bar of “Greensleeves” and only the Cuckold who smiled. Considering the solemnity of this change of color, skepticism and sarcasm would have seemed to them all trifling and contemptible, for it was for this light-greenness that the men of Amana had died or had lain, vomiting and naked, for hours in the mud. That was a fact. After the revolution, discipline was less rigorous and their mail was not scrutinized, but their labor was still worth half a package of cigarettes a day and this change of uniform was the biggest thing to have been accomplished by the riot at The Wall. None of them would be so stupid as to say “Our brothers died for this,” and almost none of them were so stupid as not to guess at the incalculable avarice involved in changing the dress of the prison population at a universal cost and for the profit of a handful of men who could spend a longer time snorkeling in the Lesser Antilles or getting blown on yachts or whatever they liked. There was a marked solemnity to this change of dress.
The change of dress was part of an atmosphere of amnesty that had settled over Falconer after the rebellion at The Wall had been crushed. Marshack had hung up his plants again with the wire that Farragut had stolen and no one had found the honed typewriter key. After new uniforms were issued, alterations were in order. Most of the men wanted their new issue cut and resewn along sharp lines. It was four days before there was any green thread for sale, and the supply ran out in an hour, but Bumpo and Tennis, both of whom could sew, got a spool and a week was spent in fittings and alterations. “Knock, knock,” said the Cuckold, and Farragut asked him in although he did not and never had truly wanted to see his mate. He did want to hear a voice other than TV, and to feel in his cell the presence of another man, a companion. The Cuckold was a compromise, but he had no choice. The Cuckold had had his new issue cut so tight that it must be painful. The seat of his pants would bark his asshole like the saddle of a racing bike and the crotch definitely gave him pain, Farragut could see, because he flinched when he sat down. In spite of all this pain, thought Farragut uncharitably, there was nothing appetizing to be seen, but then his thinking about the Cuckold was generally uncharitable. As his mate sat down and prepared to talk again about his wife, Farragut thought that the Cuckold had an inflatable ego. He seemed, preparing to talk, to be in the act of being pumped up with gas. Farragut had the illusion that this increase in size was palpable and that the Cuckold, swelling, would push the copy of Descartes off the table, push the table up against the bars, uproot the toilet and destroy the cot where he lay. His story, Farragut knew, would be unsavory, but what Farragut didn’t know was what importance to give unsavory matters. They existed, they were invincible, but the light they threw was, he thought, unequal to their prominence. The Cuckold claimed to have a rich lode of information, but the facts he possessed only seemed to reinforce Farragut’s ignorance, suspiciousness and his capacity for despair. These were all parts of his disposition and might, he guessed, need cultivation. Haste and impetuous optimism could be contemptible, and with this in mind he did not protest when the Cuckold cleared his throat and said, “If you was to ask my advice about marriage, I would advise you not to put too much attention on fucking. I guess I married her because she was a great fuck—I mean she was my size, she came at the right time, it was great there for years. But then when she started fucking everybody, I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t get any advice from the church and all I could get out of the law was that I should divorce her, but what about the kids? They didn’t want me to go, even when they knew what she was doing. She even talked with me about it. When I complained about her screwing everybody, she gave me this lecture about how it wasn’t an easy life. She said sucking every cock on the street was a very lonely and dangerous way to live. She told me it took courage. She did, really. She gave me this lecture. She said that in the movies and in the books you read it’s a very nice and easy thing, but she’d had to face all sorts of problems. She told me about this time when I was on the road and she went to this bar and restaurant for dinner with some friends. In North Dakota we have these food divorcement laws where you eat in one place and drink in another, and she had moved from the drinking place to the eating place. But at the bar there was this very, very beautiful man. She gave him the horny eye through the doorway and he gave it right back to her. You know what I mean. The horny eye?
“So then she told me that she told her friends, very loudly, that she wasn’t going to have any dessert, that she was going to drive home to her empty house and read a book. She said all this so he could hear her and would know that there wasn’t going to be any husband or kids around. She knew the bartender and the bartender would give him her address. So she went home and put on a wrapper and then the doorbell rang and there he was. So right in the hallway he began to kiss her and put her hand on his cock and drop his pants, right in the front hallway, and at about this time she discovered that while he was very beautiful, he was also very dirty. She told me that he couldn’t have had a bath in a month. As soon as she got a whiff of him she cooled off and began to figure out how she could get him into a shower. So he went on kissing her and getting out of his clothes and smelling worse and worse and then she suggested that maybe he would like a bath. So then he suddenly got angry and said that he was looking for a cunt, not a mother, that his mother told him when he needed a bath, that he didn’t go around looking for sluts in saloons in order to be told when he needed a bath and when to get his hair cut and when to brush his teeth. So he got dressed and went away and she told me this to illustrate how to be a round heels takes all kinds of courage.
“But I did lousy things too. When I came off the road once I said hello and went upstairs to take a crap and while I was sitting there I noticed that there was this big pile of hunting and fishing magazines beside the toilet. So then I finished and pulled up my pants and came out shouting about this constipated fisherman she was fucking. I yelled and yelled. I said it was just her speed to pick up with a boob who couldn’t cast a fly or take a shit. I said I could imagine him sitting there, his face all red, reading about catching the gamy muskallonge in stormy northern waters. I said that was just what she deserved, that just by looking at her I could tell it was her destiny to get reamed by one of those pimply gas pumpers who do their fishing in magazines and can’t cut a turd. So she cried and cried and about an hour later I remembered that I had subscribed to all these hunting and fishing magazines and when I said that I was sorry she really didn’t care and I felt shitty.” Farragut said nothing—he seldom said anything to the Cuckold—and the Cuckold went back to his cell and turned up his radio.
Ransome came down with the flux one Tuesday morning and by Wednesday afternoon everyone but the Stone had it. Chicken claimed that it came from the pork they had been eating all week. He claimed that a fly had flown out of his meat. He claimed to have captured the fly and offered to show it to anyone who asked, but no one asked. They all put in for sick call, but Walton or Goldfarb announced that the infirmary was overworked and that no doctor’s or nurse’s appointment could be made for ten days. Farragut had the flux and a fever and so did everyone
else. On Thursday morning they were issued, in their cells, a large dose of paregoric, which granted them an hour’s amnesty from Falconer but seemed powerless before the flux. On Friday afternoon there was this announcement over the PA. “A PREVENTIVE VACCINE FOR THE SPREAD OF INFLUENZA THAT HAS REACHED EPIDEMIC PROPORTIONS IN SOME CITIES OF THE NORTHEAST WILL BE ADMINISTERED TO REHABILITATION FACILITY INMATES FROM THE HOURS OF NINE HUNDRED TO EIGHTEEN HUNDRED. WAIT FOR YOUR CELL CALL. THE INOCULATION IS MANDATORY AND NO SUPERSTITIOUS OR RELIGIOUS SCRUPLES WILL BE RESPECTED.”
“They’re trying to use us as guinea pigs,” said Chicken. “We’re being used as guinea pigs. I know all about it. There was a man in here who had laryngitis. They had this new medicine for him, this needle, they gave it to him two, three days and they couldn’t get him out of here up to the infirmary before he was dead. Then they had this guy with clap, a light case of clap, and they gave him inoculations and his balls swole up, they swole up as big as basketballs, they swole and swole so he couldn’t walk and they had to take him out of here on a board with these big globes sticking up in the sheet. And then there was this guy whose bones were leaking, the marrow was leaking out of his bones which made him very weak, and so they give him these shots, these experimental shots, and he turned to stone, he turned to stone, didn’t he, Tiny? Tiny, tell that’s true about the fellow whose bones leaked and who turned to stone.”
“Tiny ain’t here,” said Walton. “Tiny don’t come in until Saturday.”
“Well, Tiny will tell you when he comes in. He turned to stone. He was just like cement—stone. Tiny carved his initials on his ass. He turned into rock right before our eyes. And the crazies. If they think you’re crazy they give you this green shot—yellowish-green, it is—and if it don’t work it makes you so crazy you wouldn’t believe it. Like there was this guy claimed he could play the national anthem on his toenails—all day long he did this—and then they gave him this experimental shot. Well, first he tore off part of one of his ears—I forget which side—and then stuck his fingers into his eyes and blinded himself. Tiny, isn’t that true, isn’t that true, Tiny, about the yellowish-green stuff they give the crazies?”
“Tiny ain’t here,” said Walton. “He don’t come in until Saturday and I got no patience with any of you. I got a wife and a baby at home and they need this vaccine but I can’t get none for them. You get medicine that millionaires can’t buy and all you do is complain.”
“Oh, what the hell,” said Chicken. “I’ll take anything they give me it’s free, but I ain’t no guinea pig.”
They got their vaccine on Saturday afternoon—not at the infirmary but in the supply room from the windows marked EXTRA LARGE, LARGE, MEDIUM and SMALL. Fifteen or twenty men from that lot whose religious beliefs forbade them to take medicine were corralled by the used-clothes bin and Farragut asked himself if he possessed any religious beliefs for which he would endure solitary. There was his spiritual and his chemical dependence upon drugs, for which he would likely have killed a man. He realized then and only then that he had been given no methadone during the three days of the revolution and the three days of the plague. He did not understand at all. One of the orderlies giving the shots was the man who had given him methadone. When Farragut rolled up his sleeve and presented his arm for the needle, he asked, “Why haven’t I been getting my methadone? It’s against the law. It says right in my sentence that I’m entitled to methadone.” “You’re a dumb sonofabitch,” said the orderly kindly. “Some of us have been wondering when you’d notice. You’ve been on placebos for nearly a month. You’re clean, my friend, you’re clean.” He gave Farragut the needle and he shook a little at this extraneous and unnatural pain and imagined the vaccine coursing through his blood. “It can’t be true,” said Farragut, “it can’t be true.” “Count the days,” said the orderly, “just count the days. Move along.” Farragut was stunned. He went over to the door, where Chicken was waiting. Farragut’s singular smallness of mind was illustrated by the fact that he resented that the Department of Correction had been successful where the three blue-ribbon drug cures he had taken had failed. The Department of Correction could not be right. He could not congratulate himself on having mastered his addiction, since he had not been aware of it. Then an image of his family, his hated origins, loomed up in his mind. Had that antic cast—that old man in his catboat, that woman pumping gas in her opera cloak, his pious brother—had they conveyed to him some pure, crude and lasting sense of perseverance? “I made a big decision,” said Chicken, hooking his arm in Farragut’s. “I made a very big decision. I’m going to sell my gitfiddle.” Farragut felt only the insignificance of Chicken’s decision in the light of what he had just been told; that, and the fact that Chicken’s hold on his arm seemed desperate. Chicken seemed truly feeble and old. Farragut could not tell him that he was clean. “Why are you selling your gitfiddle, Chicken?” he asked. “Why are you going to do a thing like that?” “Three guesses,” said Chicken. Farragut had to put an arm around him to get him up the slope of the tunnel and into the block.
It was very quiet. Farragut’s fever reminded him of the bliss of drugs, something he seemed to have forsworn. He was torpid. Then a strange thing happened. He saw, at the open door of his cell, a young man with summery hair and immaculate clericals, holding a little tray with a silver chalice and ciborium. “I’ve come to celebrate the Holy Eucharist,” he said. Farragut got out of bed. The stranger came into the cell. He had a very cleanly smell, Farragut noticed as he approached him and asked, “Shall I kneel?” “Yes, please,” said the priest. Farragut knelt on the worn concrete, that surface of some old highway. The thought that these might be intended for his last rites did not disconcert him. There was nothing on his mind at all and he entered, completely, into the verbal pavane he had been taught as a youth. “Holy, Holy, Holy,” he said in a loud and manly voice. “Heaven and earth are full of Thy Glory. Praise be to Thee, O Lord most high.” When he had been blessed with the peace that passes all understanding, he said, “Thank you, Father,” and the priest said, “God bless you, my son.” But when the youth had left his cell and the block, Farragut began to shout, “Now, who in hell was that, Walton? Who in hell was that?”
“It was some do-gooder,” said Walton. “I have to study.”
“But how did he get in? I didn’t ask for a priest. He didn’t do his thing for anybody else. Why did he pick on me?”
“This place is going to hell,” said Walton. “No wonder they got riots. They let anybody in. Salesmen. Encyclopedias. Frying pans. Vacuum cleaners.”
“I’ll write the governor,” said Farragut. “If we can’t get out, why can everybody get in here? They take your picture, they give you the Holy Eucharist, they ask your mother’s maiden name.”
He woke late that night. The toilet woke him. He didn’t check the time. Naked, he went to his window. Bright lights burned on the drive. A station wagon with its motor running was parked in frorit of the main entrance. A ski rack was lashed to the roof. Then he saw two men and a woman come down the stairs. All three wore tennis sneakers. They carried an old-fashioned wooden coffin with a cross painted on its top. It was built to fit some rudimentary concept of a Byzantine male, with broad, sloping shoulders and a slender base. Whatever it contained weighed almost nothing. Lightly they lifted it onto the ski rack, secured it there and drove away. Farragut returned to bed and slept.
On Sunday afternoon when he came on duty Tiny brought Farragut half a dozen tomatoes and asked him to take Chicken into his cell. The old man needed care. Tiny explained that the infirmary was full of beds, they had put beds in the waiting room, the administration office and the corridors, but there was still no room. Farragut ate his tomatoes and agreed. Farragut made his bed in the upper bunk and Tiny got sheets and a blanket and made a bed for Chicken. When Tiny brought Chicken down the corridor he seemed half asleep and he was very smelly. “I’ll wash him before I put him in clean sheets,” said Farragut. “It’s up to you,” said Tiny. “I’m go
ing to wash you,” he said to Chicken. “You don’t have to do this,” said Chicken, “but I couldn’t walk to the shower.” “I know, I know.” He drew a basin of water, got a cloth and removed the invalid shift Chicken was wearing.
The famous tattooing, on which he had squandered the fortune he had made as a brilliant second-story worker, began very neatly at his neck, like a well-cut sweater. All the colors had fled and even the blue of the primary design had gone to gray. What a gaudy sight he must have been! His chest and his upper abdomen were occupied by the portrait of a horse named Lucky Bess. On his left arm there was a sword, a shield, a serpent and the legend “Death Before Dishonor.” Below this was “Mother,” wreathed in flowers. On his right arm was a lewd dancer, who could probably buck when he flexed his biceps. She stood above the heads of a crowd that covered his forearm. Most of his back was a broad mountainous landscape with a rising sun, and below this, forming an arch above his buttocks, Farragut read, in faded and clumsy Gothic lettering: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” Serpents sprang from his groin and wound down both his legs, with his toes for fangs. All the rest of him was dense foliage. “Why did you sell your gitfiddle, Chicken?” he asked. “For two cartons of menthos,” said Chicken. “But why—why?” “Curiosity killed the cat,” said Chicken. “Why did you kill your brother, Zeke?”
The accident or what they called the murder had taken place, Farragut thought, because of the fact that whenever he remembered or dreamed about his family he always saw them from the back. They were always stamping indignantly out of concert halls, theaters, sports arenas and restaurants, and he, as the youngest, was always in the rear. “If Koussevitzky thinks I’ll listen to that …” “That umpire is crooked.” “This play is degenerate.” “I don’t like the way that waiter looked at me.” “That clerk was impudent.” And so on. They saw almost nothing to its completion, and that’s the way he remembered them, heading, for some reason in wet raincoats, for the exit. It had occurred to him that they may have suffered terribly from claustrophobia and disguised this weakness as moral indignation.
