by Dave Godfrey
I know him, Rhett Smith. In the modern way I know details, facts, histories. Who he stayed with when he went down south for freedom. What kind of beer he drank with the people he stayed with, the Haydts. What Mr. Haydt did for a living. But I couldn’t have predicted that he was going to peak out at this stage. Anger and a desire for action were building up inside of him, that was obvious. And some desire for fame or attention. Then he just threw in the whole sponge. Took a dive or got smart. Realized that he was being led astray by forces inimicable to the American way of life. The way you describe him now doesn’t matter, the way you describe him is forever relative. I know details about his beard. I know what precise moment of awareness triggered all the actions of the past three years. The thing, the moment, and all that. Somewhere inside the rented farmhouse it sits in a file.
Now, the corn is soggy with the damp that comes when a real cold delays. A rustle. Down the field, a long shot, the old cock is running through the stubble. Smith listens to it, as though it were a distant crow, something distant and bleak. Into the scrub weed along the fence, the wild marijuana? Or a right turn and across the furrows and back up distant stubble?
“Funny all that wild pot up here, so far from Mexico,” I say. “We had a good crop this year, but you have to get it at the right time.”
“I was never one for that,” he replies. There is something Baptisty about him, small-town Methodist, and I wonder why I am wasting this unusual hunting time with him.
It was newspaper reports of a girl being raped in New York which set him going. A lot of people saw it from an office building, stood up, and went to the windows to watch. But nobody did a thing. Apathy, that got to him. Religious disgust welled up in him. Apathy is one of his key words. Lack of compassion. That’s what he didn’t want to suffer from when he came of age. The apathy that the newspapers and magazines chronicled for him during the ’60s. Oil millionaires and rat-infested slums. He was going to do something and he went down to Mississippi.
Where the police beat him up but didn’t shoot him. He thought that if he had been Jewish they might have, but he was a boy of German extraction from Iowa. He came back with a lot of stories to tell and decided to go on a hunger strike. He sat in bars and apartments with the young radicals and poets who listened to his stories. He told them how young Haydt’s car had been shot up by the police as they drove home late one evening. “Car’s getting a bad case of rust there boys,” one policeman said. “Better be careful it doesn’t spread.” Laughing a little. “That been like that long?” the other policeman said about the shattered windshield. “Ought not to drive around like that. Might have to ticket you. You boys better take better care of that car; bet it ain’t even paid for yet.”
He told all his new stories and enjoyed the response and trimmed his beard a little more neatly and then in the winter went out with three other friends and sat in front of the Federal Post Office with only a tent and sleeping bags and they promised not to eat until they had raised five thousand dollars for people who had been deprived of shelter and amenities during the troubles in the south.
And raised quite a good proportion of the five thousand dollars, although two of his friends quit and Rhett caught the third one eating candy bars one night and would have asked even that one to acknowledge defeat except that he didn’t want to have to go through it all alone.
Then when spring came he painted his car with flowers and became more interested in the war and eventually burnt his draft card. He was the second person in the whole country to do that. Events swirled about him. A washing machine millionaire, third-generation, offered him financial support.
Now, he explains to me very seriously where the wild marijuana came from.
“During the war, the second war, they tried to grow hemp in the state because there was a shortage of rope and they felt that anything would grow here. But it didn’t do too well for that purpose. It spread all over the place, but nobody cared. The war was over by then and nobody was interested in drugs. Now they’re beginning to worry.”
We come down to the corner and the bird hasn’t gone up. I kick along through the weeds, but nothing happens.
Repetition. The thin thread of reality. Suddenly the cock goes high, still the colours of the sun and the fall in this dull season lingering beyond reason. The bird goes high enough so that Rhett comes out of his lethargy and gets his gun up and bangs off a shot and I am glad enough at that sudden action to forego my careful watching for the moment when the bird must level off, when it gets beyond even its unlearned height.
“Perhaps he’s inherited it,” I say. “It’s a whole new breed to make things hard on us killers.”
A glimmer of a smile.
I have been up to the small town which bred Rhett. His father runs a shoe repair shop which also stocks boots and tennis sneakers and slippers. In the front window is a sign which states that one can pay his American Legion dues here. I have been up to the town school from which Rhett graduated and talked to the teacher he says helped spark him towards this life of action.
“Most of the people here are kinda anti-Rhett,” she said, with just the smallest of nervous smiles as though I might be weird enough not to understand what was implied, what all Americans would understand was implied. “If not, you just don’t say anything. When Rhett wanted to speak on civil rights here in the school last fall, before any of this worse trouble came, there were some who felt he should be let to talk, but those who didn’t had a point and what could you answer? We’re a public-supported school; we have to walk a middle path. Otherwise you get yourself too involved. My husband didn’t want me to come at all to talk to you. I told him what you wanted to know about, about Rhett, and, well, we own a rent house over in Cedar Rapids and we’re renting it to Negroes now, but that’s our first real contact. I do quite a bit with the Negro in American History of the twentieth century and I was glad to see that this year the English people were reading Raisin in the Sun in that magazine they work out of, Cavalcade. One of the younger teachers asked me about it, there’s a conservative minister or two in town who could stir up trouble if it were handled wrong, but — of course English’s different than history — but I told her to handle it just as people. The play was about people in a slum, she said, so I said to her just have them judge it as a family living in a slum and what they would do if they were in similar conditions.”
Such is inspiration.
The bird has flown east and landed again in the stubble. We walk slowly up back towards the farmhouse. A light snow is falling. When we reach the fence around the old orchard which surrounds the house, Rhett relaxes and unloads his gun, but I am still alert, the phrases of the woman teacher in his small town still running through my mind. Repetition. I kick through the weeds, walking towards the far fence, and the old cock goes up thirty yards ahead of me. I down him very quickly, before he can do his spiral act.
I offer the tail feather to the blond girl who has been waiting unhappily in the Chevy, but she refuses it. I know that she suspects me as one of those people who led Rhett astray, and we are awkward, so I let them leave and turn to clean the old bird. His left eye has been shot out.
Don Silverbuck phones while I am still plucking wing feathers. He is very excited. He has been following all of Rhett’s activities, planning to write another In Cold Blood as soon as Rhett is jailed. That is why our house is full of files.
“I’ll be home in about two hours,” he hollers into the phone. “You should have seen that trial yesterday, you wouldn’t have believed it. Clarence Darrow all over again. What a phrase. Rhett was late and he said: ‘I’m sorry, judge, we took a wrong turn on the way to the courtroom.’ How’s that for a title? Sell a million. I’ve been checking a few things. I don’t know how they got to him; he just crumpled. But there’s going to be a big protest meeting and all the poets are going to read.”
“He told me he got off.”
“Suspended sentence. It’s a different thing. Christ, what I’m learning about law. They should have let him off completely, that’s our point. Or he should have gone to jail. I don’t know, something’s happened to him. Drugs maybe, I wouldn’t put it past them. The FBI were out in force. He’s going straight. Did you get anything out of him? We’re having real signs printed for the protest.”
“No, Don. We just hunted. I’m going to get ready to leave. As soon as they start bombing Hanoi I’m going to leave.”
“What? We’ve got to finish this. It’ll make us both rich. We’d never do that anyhow. Bomb Hanoi, you must be out of your mind. Even the generals aren’t suggesting that. Christ, we’ve got to finish this. All the hard work’s done; we’ve got all the details in the bag.”
“I shot the old bird today,” I say. “Somebody shot his left eye out a long time ago, that was all. That was why he kept going high. That was all.”
“Look, you’ve got to stay. Write a poem, you could do it, and come to the protest. It’s all going to be recorded and we’ll get some of it on the AP wire. That old woman, you remember, the one we talked to who leaned on the lockers in the hall as though she was going to make them and said please don’t repeat any of this, she was there today and she didn’t say a damn thing. Just Rhett was a good student, and Rhett went a little astray, but Rhett was going to be okay now.”
“I don’t know, Don. All you guys are like flies or ants somehow. One of these days somebody’s going to lift the swatter and that’ll be it. I’ll see you at supper.”
May. This mountain boy, Frank Randall Smith, walks up a wide and dirty street in my city. He’s never heard of Pratt. He doesn’t know who donated this street to the city and where the farmhouses used to be, before the high rises, before the grand houses. But he is intent on talking to me, talking about how he got to enjoy his brother’s enjoyment of killing, especially one story where the squad had taken three prisoners and nobody wanted to kill them so they dressed the three of them up in uniforms of their own dead buddies, American uniforms, and then let them go a little until the Cong shot the hell out of them. That pleased him to a frightening extent and he is desperate to tell me about it, desperate, while I take him in and buy him a hamburger and some chips and a coke and tell him where he can get a bed for a few nights while he settles into his new life.
Up in the Rainforest
The young English engineer, Morley Horstler, was excited to have found someone, even this uncommunicative German hunter, Ure Talle, whose marriage with a Ghanaian girl had worked out satisfactorily. Of course he still had the problem ahead of convincing Christiana to marry him, but Ure seemed to think that there would be no problems after that.
“People leave alone one here,” Ure had said.
They were in the plains country beyond Accra, driving slowly because it was not yet dark, and John was enjoying the flagrant death of the sun beyond the plains in the distant ocean. He felt very useful and adventurous. For three months he had been surveying at a dam site up in the forests; before that he had been up by third-class railway, lorry, and camel-back to the desert in Mauritania.
“We have too accustomed become to daytime hunting,” Ure said. “To this plan there are numerous advantages.”
They drove through the low hills and villages of the coastal plain, past the palm-wine sellers, past trays of red peppers, stacked pineapples, mounds of laterite-dusted yams, the women and girls selling peeled oranges at the lorry stops. The lamps began to be lit for the night.
“Your dam is some effect going to have here,” Ure said.
“Their dam,” Morley corrected him quickly, angry inside at the habitual expatriate’s distinction between the pronouns they and us, not quite certain what it was that really caused these sudden irritations in him. He had been looking forward to this trip.
At Kwangonsi they signed at the police station for their guns and waited for Kwesi Bampong who hunted with them when he was not on duty. They turned off the paved road near a group of mango trees and got set up, loading the guns and adjusting their head lamps. It had rained in the afternoon so that it turned dark enough early for their kind of hunting.
Ure moved off first into the darkness. He was always eager for antelope and seldom came back without one, but tonight he had already complained of the amount of water that filled small depressions and noted that it would keep the main water places sparse of game.
Kwesi went next. Morley felt envious of them both. He could never feel secure in the darkness. It was too simple to feel why the Africans believed in the presence of ancestral spirits. The gutteralities of thousands of frogs were as constant and overlapping as though a new race were looking for its past; the bush babies cried like demented old men; owls were wandering souls. After a short time, his face was a swarm of insects and he switched off the light to conserve the batteries. Kwesi and Ure would pick up anything.
At first, from a distance, they thought the snake was an animal; it was looped down from a tree so that its eyes were at the natural level. Kwesi was the first to notice the swaying motion.
“Good, good,” said Ure. “For the bridegroom, power. Virility, you say, hey! Wait, wait. We go close and then you shoot. Put on your torch too. One move at one time now.”
Morley wanted to back out, to give someone else the shot, but Ure insisted vehemently that he shoot. Ure calculated the wind velocity and the distance for him; he stood beside him as he shot; he cast a steady beam of light at the python from the miner’s lamp on his forehead.
“A very nice shot, I think,” Ure said when Morley had fired. “We with our empty hands will not go back tonight. I will have this one skinned for you. And the meat, do not throw away the meat. The meat is very good for eating; is not that so, Kwesi?”
The next day they were back in the city and he tried, as he had before going shooting, to arrange a meeting with Christiana. He began to question her excuses and somewhat angrily she agreed that she would be at the Bamboo Grog Shop that evening.
“My father is not getting any happier about it;” she said, “no happier at all.”
That evening, although the Bamboo Grog Shop was festive and the musicians happy and he told himself that he was at home there where the musicians were his good friends, he felt ill at ease and found the highlifes repetitive and knew that he would drink too much and that things were headed for a smash.
Christiana was beautiful and he felt she moved like a river out on the crowded dance floor. She sat down when the Kpanlogo was played, but she danced to all the other dances and it was easy to see that she had been to Holy Child and then abroad for her schooling and that for beauty she was easily head and shoulders above everybody else there. Yet she would never dance more than one number with him, and even when they sat out a dance she would not speak seriously with him and when he tried she laughed about incidents she had seen on her last trip to London or made jokes about the weakness of sterling. Her father was a country policeman, but her uncle was in the Ministry of Agriculture and she was his favourite.
There had been an attack on the Redeemer’s life during the week, and no one wanted to talk about hunting. A guard had been killed in mysterious circumstances and Kry Kanaram, who owned half of the nightclub, was convinced that this marked the birth of the counter-revolution. Ure became very happy drinking and listening to the music, but Kry called him a bugger of a German draughtsman three or four times and Ure went home early. He stayed with his wife in the big house which Kry’s trader father owned on Embassy Row.
When the Black Stars stopped playing, and the guitar band, The Avengers, had begun, the trumpet player came over to Morley’s table. He was a Canadian but he knew all of the band’s songs and he played with them except when they were on tour.
“Quite a girl you’ve got there,” he said. “She’s been here nearly every night for the last month and doesn’t look an inch the worse for wear.”
/> Then the drummer came over to have a drink with them. He was a supporter of the Redeemer and insisted that everybody drink toasts to the failure of the attempt.
“No whitey’s bullet will ever kill that man,” he said. “Never, never.”
The drummer had played for many years in America and took Down Beat and kept up on things. He was very happy because he had been playing well and many dancers had come up during his solos and placed ten shilling notes on his damp forehead. He had a towel around his shoulders like a tennis champion.
The Avengers played for a long time before the Black Stars returned.
“That old music is all through,” Kry said when they started again. “These electric guitars are the real show now.” He was quite quietly drunk and his thoughts weren’t connected. “Where did that Ure go? I called him a bugger to his face. He beats his wife you know. You Europeans are all the same. I found out about that pretty gal, by the way. You make violence your god and then you cry shame! shame! Bloody Savages! when somebody tries to assassinate the Redeemer. Kennedy’s death was totally natural. Look at the eighteenth century in England. Savagery. I let that Ure know he could stay for a week once. Big house, you know. Eight bedrooms. But he’s been camped in for a month now. Almost two months. He’ll have his wife’s family there first thing you know. You won’t have any luck with that gal. Her uncle’s arranged an import licence for Christmas biscuits. They offered us a share, but we declined. Last year there were none and this year you’ll have to go into high gear to get over them in the streets. The Redeemer must have taken a fat share. You’re too violent, that’s all. She’ll never have anything to do with a European. Want some real whiskey to drink? I brought it back from Togo last week. In the bottom of fishing pirogues. Seventy bob each.”
Morley left while Kry was going to a back room for the bottle of real whiskey. He felt in genuine despair about his situation; it was a case of collapsing or of causing some rash unpleasantness, and neither of those were what he had hoped for this evening. He thought in the morning he would take the python skin and go back up into the rainforest and get to work. Then when the skin was dried and could be rolled up he would have it delivered to Christiana. He would have a record of himself made, a record of himself singing a Housman poem, for he had a good tenor voice, and he would send that to her also.
