Cast the First Stone

by Chester Himes

  “And when they got through running the needle through his brain he went out and played seven innings of ball,” I said sarcastically.

  “No, he had a little headache and went to bed,” the nurse replied.

  “Now, if you’ll give me a drink of whisky I’ll go to bed and you won’t even have to bother about all the rest,” I said.

  The nurse grinned. “You could have it, you know.” I knew.

  I was going on my second week when I received a letter from my mother saying the governor had promised to commute my sentence to make me eligible for parole in September. I got so excited I started to leave the hospital right then and go over to the dormitory in my pajamas. The guard asked me where did I think I was going and I said, “Home. I’m going home in September.”

  He said, “You better get the hell—September?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “I hit the jackpot this time.”

  “Congratulations, Monroe,” he said.

  I saw Tim, the hospital runner, coming from upstairs and I called him over. “Say, take this letter to the dormitory and show it to Dido, will you?” I said.

  He hesitated. “I can’t, Jimmy.”

  “Aw, go ahead,” the guard said. “Tell ‘em I sent you if anybody wants to know.” After Tim left he turned to me, “That Dido’s your buddy, ain’t he?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  In ten minutes Tim brought back the reply, “Congratulations, Jimmy, aces to you and all of them. I’m so glad for you.”

  Five days later when I got back to the dormitory they all had it. A few of them congratulated me, but most didn’t. It was fine with Tom but he wasn’t too happy about losing a star player. At least the season would be over by then. But what he wanted to know, first off, was when I would be able to play again. In a couple of weeks, I told him.

  And then I saw Dido. “I’m so happy for you, Jimmy,” he said. “I knew you’d make it; I’ve always known you’d make it.”

  I grinned and then said, solemnly, “You’re the one who helped me do it, kid. If it hadn’t been for you I’d have blown it sure as hell. You don’t know what you give me.”

  “I’m so flattered and glad you think I am able to give you something,” he said.

  “You give me everything,” I said.

  “Hand in hand.”

  “Hand in hand,” I repeated after him solemnly.

  “And to the top.”

  “And to the top.”

  It was a solemn moment, and then we were laughing, embarrassedly, at ourselves.

  We were very close. Signifier told me how Dido had reacted when I broke my arm. “Man, he tried to kill himself. Every time he’d hit a ball he’d slide halfway to first through all those cinders. He ran into the wall once like he didn’t even see it, and another time he stumbled over those rocks out there in center field and fell flat on his face. Tom had to stop him from playing. He was like a man trying to commit suicide.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s certainly gone about you. It wouldn’t have done for you to have broken your neck,” he said.

  I had to laugh. After that I wanted to bunk beside Dido. I propositioned old man Foley, who slept beneath him, to swap bunks with me. I had to pay him a couple of dollars. Then I asked Tom to get me transferred down to his bunk.

  “I’ll have to have somebody help me dress, as long as I wear these splints,” I told him. “Dido will help me but I bunk too far away, so it’s pretty inconvenient. The guy who sleeps underneath him said he’d swap bunks with me and that’ll make it easier for him to help with my clothes. Then after I take off the splints I’ll have to have someone rub my arm with cocoa butter so the muscles will get strong again.”

  “Can the bull,” Tom said. “I’ll get you transferred.

  He had us transferred that afternoon. Dido and I were so excited at being so close to each other at last that all that night we couldn’t sleep. He leaned over the side of his bunk and we talked all night long in whispers and giggled like two kids, then looked about to see who was watching. A new moon came out and walked across our window and we made believe it was a magic carpet and rode it everywhere. It was very thrilling but the next day we had to catch up on our sleep and everybody wondered why.

  Dido helped me with my clothes the next morning, telling me to move this way and that and bossing me around in general and getting a big kick out of it. He helped me put on my shoes and while he was lacing them, he looked up teasingly, and said, “How does it feel to have someone kneeling at your feet?” He was very pleased with himself.

  “Embarrassing,” I said.

  That afternoon he began working on a song. He sent over to the band room and got some score sheets and then, from after supper until bedtime, he sat around plunking out the notes and writing down the score. It was a monotonous dirge and after two days of it my nerves were frazzled.

  “What the hell is it, anyway?” I asked. “It sounds like the ‘Song of The Volga Boatman.’”

  “Did you ever hear the woolen mill in operation?” he asked.

  And I said suddenly, “Damn right, that’s what it is.”

  I could hear again the slow clanking melody of the mills in the deathly silence that day, a long time ago. It was up in the idle house and Sergeant Cody had just shot a convict to death, and in the silence which followed the echoing of the gunshots the mill below had continued to clank its slow and eternal song—so deliberately, so mockingly. And I could imagine those convicts as I had imagined them then, working at the looms, feeding the stinking, dusty wool, stopping neither for the years nor for death, and I said, “If you get all that in your song you’ve really got something.”

  “It’s going to be a love song,” he said.

  I was unreasonably disappointed. It left me feeling queer because it was the first time he had disappointed me.

  “I don’t know, I guess there’s a whole lot of people who have been disappointed,” I said.

  “You wanted it to be a dirge, didn’t you?” he said.

  “No, I like the love idea,” I lied.

  “I know you don’t but I can’t help it.”

  “I do, honestly. I think it’s a wonderful melody for a love song.”

  “You’re a very obvious liar, but you’re sweet,” he said. And then something about him underwent a change and he said, “I’m up to my throat in death, as it is.”

  I looked at him. “You sound despondent. What’s the matter?”

  “I’m scared,” he confessed.

  I laughed. “What the hell for?”

  “Oh, its just a silly thought, and I’m not very gallant to think it.”

  “What is it?” I was perplexed.

  “I don’t want you to go away. I don’t want you to go home. I tried very hard to want you to but I don’t.” His voice was choked.

  “I know,” I said. “I’ve known it all along.”

  “I know I’m very ungallant and low and despicable and all,” he said. “But I just can’t help it. I don’t want it to ever come to an end.”

  “It won’t come to an end,” I said. “We’ll always be pals.”

  He shook his head. “Not outside, Jimmy. The world won’t accept me.”

  “If they accept me they’ve got to accept you,” I argued. “You’re half of me.”

  “Let’s don’t talk about it, please,” he begged.

  “But I mean it,” I said. “Why shouldn’t we talk about it?”

  “Sure,” he said, forcing a smile. “I know you mean it, darling. And we’ll always be friends, won’t we?”

  “Always,” I said.

  27

  NOTHING WAS REAL. In all the world there was nothing so unreal. It was all fantasy and frenzy and delirium. It was dread and apprehension, new and weird and shameful; with its peaks very high and its depths in slop; but above all, indescribably fascinating. I had never known anyone like Dido, and knowing him was unreality, pure and sheer. The days passed through this grotesque unreali
ty, wired together and meteoric, headed for September. But each day was filled to overflowing and could not hold it all. Always there was some left over that spilled into the day that followed, and the day that followed could not hold it all.

  There was not enough time to hold it all. There never had been.

  There was no time to think. Everything was a feeling, an action, an emotion. Mostly emotion, ninety per cent emotion and the rest action and feeling, with perhaps a fraction of one per cent rationalization. It was like a fantastic dream. No one can rationalize in a dream. But even in the dream there was the tiny, insistent warning of awakening. September was coming. Time was running out.

  We planned against it, thought against it. Like two little kids planning the grown-up future, we talked of how we were always going to be together.

  “The very first thing I’m going to do is get some dough and get you a pardon.”

  “You don’t have to, Jimmy. If you’ll just go and see my mother and write to me sometimes and always remember me, I’ll get out. It won’t be so long. I’ll be a model convict and they’ll give me a parole the first time I go up.”

  “But I mean it. I’ll get a recommendation from your sentencing judge and prosecutor, and then I’ll square the prosecuting witness so he won’t protest. How much did you get, anyway?”

  “It wasn’t but twelve dollars, but—”

  “Hell, a hundred will square him easily. After that it’ll be a cinch if you’ll just keep your head and don’t go haywire and get into some trouble here.”

  His face would light up like a Christmas tree and he would say, “And then we’ll be together again and nothing will ever be able to separate us.”

  For a moment we would believe it. Enthusiasm would race through both of us and we would feel that we had it beat at long last.

  “You keep on writing your songs. I’ll go out to California and stay with your mother. I’ll work out an angle and get some dough and in about six months we’ll both come back and get you out. It might take a little more time though.”

  “But you’ll write every day, or at least once a week, won’t you?”

  “Of course I will.”

  “You won’t forget me?”

  “How could I? I’ll be thinking of you every moment.”

  “And I’ll be the bestest convict ever was. I won’t go haywire and I’ll keep my head and I’ll read your letters and think of you and you’ll be proud of me yet.”

  And then something would fall on the moment like a heavy weight and blight the mood. Maybe a colored convict over in the cell block singing—“Night is fallin’ an’ Ah’m recallin’…” The solid facts would surge back upon us and overwhelm us. I was going out in September and he had five more years to do. And after that we couldn’t even pretend any more.

  He’d jump up, dopey-faced and reckless, and cry in a ravaged voice, “Oh, goddammit, it’s no use! It’s no goddamn use!” Then his voice would go dull and lifeless and he’d say, “I was doing time in a Florida chain gang and a freight came by. And screamed. And the hack grabbed his rifle and stood up in his saddle. I was thinking about my mother out in Los Angeles. About how she loved me. And for the moment I was there. And then I came back. And the sun was hotter than hell. And I had chains on my ankles. And I said to myself, if I ever do time again I’ll be doing it in death row waiting for the chair. And here I am, doing another stretch in another prison, and some black bastard has just dropped his uncultured voice through a little tinsel dream. And I’m saying it all over again. The next time I do time I’ll be doing it in death row waiting for the chair.” His face would be ugly and dead white.

  Then he would go out to the poker game and go into debt and I wouldn’t have the heart to stop him. At such times I would wonder if he ever recalled what he had said that first night we knew each other—“That’s a hell of a lot of loneliness. Is anything worth it?” That seemed like a long time ago. Everything had changed since then, it seemed.

  But whatever we did, it was always there, hanging over our heads like a Damoclean sword, staining every moment with a blind, futile desperation, a dull, hurting hopelessness—as if it might be the last. We tried to cram everything into each day but it failed to hold it all; some of it always overflowed into the next. It was always there, even in the middle of a laugh.

  Maybe he hoped that I would do all those impossible things I had promised so earnestly. But it was hope without faith. And I couldn’t really make myself believe he’d do anything but go completely haywire after I left. I knew he needed me to hold him up. I was like his heartbeat; without me he was dead. And it was so completely heartbreaking that most of the time I couldn’t feel as hurt as he, because I was going home. But the desperation was as much of me as of him. Beneath it everything was magnified all out of proportion and often into a grotesqueness where each minor incident assumed a significance all out of proportion to its importance, so that we were continually upset and almost every moment were doing or saying something that hurt unreasonably; creating a persistent need for explanations and assuagements and avowals of affection.

  It was that way when the dormitory ball team played its first game since I had broken my arm. Dido had been wonderful about taking care of me. The splints had finally been removed from my arm but I’d been instructed to keep it bandaged. Tom kept me supplied with rolls of cotton and bandages and adhesive tape, and each day Dido changed the dressing. He was very nice and pleasant and my slightest wish was his command. It was pleasant to have a broken arm and receive so much attention. But when game time came he didn’t want to play.

  “It’s just a silly game without you, Jimmy,” he said.

  “Hell, I won’t always be there with you,” I said. I could have bitten off my tongue, watching the hurt grow in his eyes. I had forgotten I couldn’t say things like that any more.

  “I’ll play,” he said dully. “But I won’t be any good without you.”

  And he wasn’t. The team lost. When the pressure got on the game he was horrible to watch. He went to pieces right before my eyes. That was something I never wanted to see again.

  Afterward I said, unreasonably angry, “It seems to me as if you’d have enough pride to keep from making a spectacle of yourself like that. It was disgusting. I’d be ashamed to let anyone see me break into pieces like that.”

  “I haven’t got any pride,” he said. “And you should be the one to know it. If I did—” And that was all. There weren’t any more words; just a dull, hurting silence.

  All that night I could hear his low muffled sobs. I wanted so badly to comfort him, to get up and say, Don’t cry, kid, I’m with you. I don’t give a damn what you do, I’ll always be with you. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t, that was all.

  When early morning came he leaned over the side of his bunk and said, “I didn’t mean what I said, Jimmy. The next time I’ll be very good and you’ll be proud of me.” I was so relieved I could have cried.

  But some perverse impulse prompted me to say, “It isn’t that, that isn’t it, it’s just that—it’s how in the world can I ever feel sure about you when I’m not here if you’re going to be like that?”

  “I’ll be different, I swear,” he said. The next time they played I stayed in the dormitory so I wouldn’t have to see it if he went to pieces. It was worse. They lost again and this time everyone was bitter about it.

  “He was so damned sickening I had to take him out,” Candy said.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “You know who,” he said. I knew who, all right. He didn’t lie. I had only hoped that I was wrong.

  “Boy, that kid’s solid nuts,” Signifier said. “He’d fall down every time he’d start for a ball and one time he just lost his head and picked up the ball and threw it over the wall. It looked like he did it on purpose. When Tom got after him he said he didn’t give a damn and wanted to fight Tom. You know that was wrong.”

  “And the bases were loaded,” Candy added.

  Mose came up a
nd said, “Dammit, you got tuh do somp’n. Ah ain’ gonna pitch no mo’, long as dat fellow’s on the team.” His duck-bill lips were stuck out a country mile.

  And I had to take it without a word.

  Brothers joined the group. “Man, they killed us,” he said. “Fourteen to two. We ain’t never been beat that bad.” He started to say more but he looked at me and didn’t.

  I saw Tom coming down the aisle, shaking his head. I knew what was coming. I tried to head it off.

  “Well have to get someone else for center field,” I said, turning to Brothers. “What about Japcat?”

  “That Dido!” Tom said, shaking his head. “What’s the matter with him?”

  “He’s all right,” I said. “He’s a little excitable at times, but he’s all right.”

  Tom kept on shaking his head as if he wanted to say something else, then Rifle Ed said, “When you going to be ready to play again, Jimmy?”

  “I’m going to play the next time the team plays,” I said.

  Tom’s eyebrows lifted.

  “That’s next Thursday,” Brothers said.

  “That’s when I’m going to play,” I said.

  Tom didn’t know whether to look relieved or not.

  “You better come on back,” Polack Paul said. “Ain’t nobody on the team any good without you there.”

  Dido had stopped by the hospital. I went down to our bunks and waited for him. We had a board we’d placed across the bottom-bunk frames for a seat. After awhile he came in and looked at me without speaking and sat down.

  His trousers were torn at the knees and both of his knees and his left elbow had been freshly bandaged. I noticed that he wasn’t wearing his knee braces but I was determined not to argue about it.

  “Skinned yourself up a little, eh, kid?” I said.

  I was standing over him, leaning with my good arm against the upper-bunk frame. He looked up at me and I noticed that his face was sweaty and his eyes were feverish.

  “Go ahead and say it and get it over with,” he said, and abruptly I went blind. It wasn’t until I could see again that I knew I had hit him in the face. His lips were split and bleeding slightly.