by John Hersey
Here we came to the clay pits. We stood on the rim. The old half-track pit bulldozer was chattering and coughing, and the young men in the work gang, naked down to the belts of their jeans, shouted to each other over the engine’s unsteady sputtering. They were cutting pile for a new compound wall as well as clay for the potters. The dozer was hauling an old-fashioned mud scoop, at whose handles four young men strained as the metal lip cut into the iridescent ooze.
Sitting like an easy horseman at the controls of the dozer was Gabe, the foreman of the village labor gang. Agatha and I had more than once whispered about his beautiful shirtless back at work, where manifold energies seemed to ripple like aspen leaves in languid air. Now Agatha struck me lightly on my backsides, and I knew what she meant: Look! Gabriel! There he is!
Our bucket having been packed with damp clay, we took it between us and started back with a fluent trotting straight-spined haste, for we carried half as much as either of us weighed.
As the path swung around a tall candelabra of giant cactus, not far from the main gate in the hedge, I was startled to see a convoy of three big autos turn off the highway and onto the bumpy spur up to the village. My first thought: They are some yellows. I had never seen a yellow man, but terror of the faraway victors had been bred into me and underlay every moment of my life.
Agatha and I dropped the bucket and started to run for the gate.
While I fleetly ran, soon leaving clumsy Agatha behind, I scanned the procession throwing up funnels of dust as it approached.
The first car was a blue Overland with a heap of baggage strapped into a rack on its roof; then followed, dusty but glinting in the sunlight with trimmings of brass around its headlights which curved up like cornets out of its fenders, a snazzy Pierce Arrow with wickerwork pants and a cabriolet top; and finally a long Packard touring car, in the back of which, behind an auxiliary windscreen, sat five men playing “Stormy Weather” with zany abandon on a tenor sax, two trumpets, a trombone, and a kazoo, while a man in the right front seat, who was evidently a drummer, thumped a beat on the outside metal of the car door.
Some sort of traveling show, I thought, as I scooted into the opening between the chevaux-de-frise. The guards were nervous. I was both elated and terrified. Our village never had casual visitors. California licenses!
I ran very fast all the way to the pottery shed, and I collapsed on my knees at my mother’s lap, a piercing stitch under my ribs. I panted out what I had seen. My mother’s alarm quadrupled mine. She sharply told me to run and tell the mayor, Agatha’s father, and at once I was on my feet again, running again.
I knew that my father, who was our schoolmaster—we were then in our summer vacation—was at the mayor’s house “conferring”; otherwise known as having a beer. I ran straight into the mayor’s office. Agatha’s father and mine and two other men were in the cool room, playing cards. It was amazing how the mere sight of my father’s broad face calmed me; my chest stopped its painful heaving.
I told the mayor what I had seen.
The mayor quietly directed my father to have the women prepare guest rooms in our compound and told all his companions to spruce up for the visitors; for courtesy was the basic law of our lives, even in danger, which was always presumed to exist.
I went home with my father, clinging lovingly by one hand to his belt at the back of his trousers.
The potters broke off their work; Kathy Blaw, fierce woman though she seemed to be, showed not a sign of emotion over the ruin, through incompletion, of her morning’s efforts. By the time my father was finely dressed, in black coat and string tie, we could hear the visitor’s musicians patiently playing outside the hedge. “Button Up Your Overcoat.” “Mood Indigo.” Most of the village went out to watch as the mayor strode to the gate to receive the visitor.
The band came first through the gap, six foxy-looking gents in sharp dark clothes, and then followed a large fat man in a crumpled white suit, with a white necktie and a Panama hat with a white band; his manner was benign and genteel, and he grinned with a corpulent man’s irrepressible good humor.
Our mayor, my father, and other important men approached him, flourishing their pistols over their heads, whooping greetings and jumping around to make a show of politeness that was at the same time a show of strength, while the visitor laughed, bobbed his head, and gracefully waved his huge arms as if they were weightless wings; then removing his hat from a totally bald and perspiring capitol of a skull, he bent with some effort in a low sweeping bow, his Panama whooshing up a salute of our village dust.
Our compound was crowded all day. We girls had to keep our distance with the women, who stayed mostly out of sight—except for a few principal wives, who fed the men and shooed flies away from them.
Agatha and I crept out a couple of times and peeked into the house where the men sat, fanning themselves with folded newspapers, sucking at tall glasses with straws, and quietly talking.
After the worst of the afternoon heat the visitors left. The band boarded the Packard and played “Baby Face.” The cars drove off in a whirl of dust.
Until evening there was a stir of talk; the visitor had set himself forth as a real estate speculator, looking for irrigable lands to buy and sell. The band and all was for auctions, he’d said. He was jovial, the reports went, a bottomless drinker, inquisitive beyond good manners, quick in his own answers, mendacious without a doubt.
Shortly after dark there was a fuss at our bolted compound gate. A messenger had come from the mayor to tell my father that two of the village men could not be found anywhere. Kid Schlepp and Johnno Pye, grove men. Were they with him? Father searched the pottery factory, the schoolhouse, and the eight homes of our enclosure with great zeal, but the men were not in our compound. They had vanished from the village.
Away Like Goats
I slept fitfully, starting up again and again from frightful dreams, in one of which, the worst of all, there was lightning. Early in the morning I burst from yet another, in which I had been pursued by all the potters, who screamed at me, and Kathy Blaw, with furious eyes, having howled louder and run faster than the rest, had hurled at my head the curved iron tool with which she scraped the drying clay of half-finished pots.
I awoke at that, but with a flesh-crawling feeling that the nightmare had not ended, because a ghastly faraway screeching persisted in my ears. I jumped out of bed. I saw that my mother, father, and sister—we all slept in one room—were not yet stirring. I was afraid that some evil presence had entered my head; I remembered my careless glance at San Pedro’s porcelain smile the day before. I ran out into the compound. It was barely light. The shrilling was far beyond the wall. I had to see what it was, for fear that my mind was going, and clutching my locket of the Guevavi martyr which hung on a string around my neck, I hurried trembling in my nightgown to the compound gate, which was shut and bolted. I peeped through one of its judases, and wondered, with a new onset of tremors, whether I was still drugged in a bad dream.
At a distance I could see the gate of Mayor Jencks’s compound, its stout boards splintered like matchwood, and back and forth through the gap ran strangers who seemed in the dim light to be dressed in ordinary dark suits, and they were dragging out limp shapes in white—could they be the forms of some of our villagers in pajamas and nightgowns? The shrieks I had heard were coming from within that compound.
I ran back and threw myself against my mother’s body. She was awake and trembling; my father was getting out of bed. Mother clutched my sister and me in her arms. Father picked up his pistol and rushed out in his pajamas.
Cringing in our room, we heard my father and other men of our compound shouting and running, and later—time seemed strung out like an endless creeper of the thorn apple which Indians brewed to induce visions—many shots, cries, clashes, groans, and screams, of both men and women, and later still we heard the gate of our compound rammed and shattered, and fou
r of the strangers bulled into our house and roughly hauled my mother and my sister and me outside. They drove us with other women of our compound in a pack toward the mayor’s compound.
Not far along, near smiling San Pedro, I saw a headless body lying and, a few feet away, the head, its face shockingly at peace, of one of my classmates in school, Wesley Bane, who had been a shy, gentle youth, learning to be a weaver.
God, I saw then that some of these strangers in ordinary business suits were armed with swords—curving broad blades of the sort the yellows used.
We saw the corpses of a dozen men as we went—an ironsmith, old Shaughnessy the gravedigger, and several young grove men and stable hands.
The women and girls of the village, all in nightgowns, some of which were sheer and immodest, were assembled in the mayor’s compound. There was not a sound, even of the terror we so amply shared. Not one of our men was to be seen. We waited. The sun climbed to heat our shoulders.
Led by the same small jazz band we had seen the day before, which was now playing a hepped-up “Halls of Montezuma,” an important man, apparently the commander of this raid, dressed in a double-breasted blue pinstripe suit, came into the compound, and it was no surprise that by his side, whispering in his ear, obsequious yet always grinning, was our bulky white-clad visitor of the day before; and at his ear and beck stood our two village men who had disappeared the previous evening, Kid Schlepp and Johnno Pye, grove men, now complaisant to their kidnappers and sure of themselves. They must have led the breachers to the weakest stretch of the hedge; here they were giving information whenever it was demanded.
The commander sorted us into categories, the sturdy women in one crowd, the girls apart, and the weak, the sick, and the old in a group that was removed from us—to be beheaded, as we later learned to our horror. I was separated from my mother; I held tight to the fat body of Agatha.
In the noon sun we were driven away from our village like goats. The last I saw inside the hedge was the commander supervising the burning of our churches. A number of our village men marched behind us in chains. I searched in vain for my father.
We walked the dusty highway, having eaten nothing, until the sun was low. The procession was fairly long—the commander’s party, in creeping autos, with the band swinging away in the open Packard; our able-bodied women, our flock of frightened girls; then the main force of the dark-suited raiders, many carrying cut-off heads and laden with looted belongings; and finally, under guard, our village men, whose progress in chains was slow, so we were all forced to halt often, letting them close ranks.
Near evening we arrived at an assembly station, a campground of a row of corrugated-iron roofs on poles. We girls were huddled under one roof, and were left, as dusk fell, to sleep on empty bellies on the bare earth while the raiders encamped in a hostile ring of fires around us.
Agatha and I clung to each other and wept. I had never in my life felt such dejection. I was torn from my village, which I had left no more than a half dozen times all told, to take the bus trip to Flagstaff and back; I was separated from my mother, and I was afraid I would never see my father again.
Agatha, exhausted from the day’s march in her capsule of fat, fell quickly asleep, but grief and confusion made my head whirl. Sitting cross-legged, with one knee touching the hollow of Agatha’s back for reassurance, I opened the locket of the Guevavi martyr and tipped out onto my palm the tiny fold of drab cloth, the rusty bent nail, and the shriveled curl of lizard tail. These, my only remaining possessions, had taken on a numinous importance in my mind; my only hopes, it seemed, as I put the luck items back in the locket, were housed in that little metal lozenge, and I lay down with it cupped in my hand and awoke in the morning gripping it.
As the sun climbed we were taken, all of us, chained men, able-bodied women, and sturdy children, into the shade of a grove of cottonwoods, and we were fed, and quite well, from camp kitchens, and the jazz band played for us. We were commanded to remain cheerful!
Agatha found her father. I hurried about looking for mine.
I came across my mother, in hopeless tears, her face and shoulders sunburned and her unshod feet bruised from the march of the day before (we young ones, having been perpetually tanned and barefoot, were not affected); she did not know what had happened to Father—she’d heard a rumor that a party of men had been kept at the village to raze it to the dusty ground with bulldozer, truck, and barrow, to remove every trace of it from sight and, in the end, from memory.
Running here and there to try to confirm this rumor, I saw Gabriel, who stood straight and somber in his fetters; and skinny Plimpton, hollow-chested and sallow-skinned, drowsing just as he had used to in his booth at home; and Mrs. Kathy Blaw, who took me by the shoulders and, eyes burning, told me that my boy friend had been killed, Arty Coteen, who used to take me to the movies and hold my hand. My breast was already so full of sorrow that I could not distinguish any new pain for Arthur.
The band blasted out an admonitory fanfare. A soldier shouting into an amplifier ordered us tinnily to stand still where we were.
Into the grove came the man in the pinstripe suit—Mort Blain, we had realized, a notorious front man for the Palm Springs Syndicate, whose pictures we had often seen in the papers over the years—and with him our portly, grinning, whited visitor, evidently Blain’s aide, and our two villagers, Schlepp and Pye, their captive guides, who by now were strutting with self-importance.
We were counted. The fat man in the white suit held a clipboard, on which he recorded the tally. I was thrilled to be counted as a grown woman. When the enumeration was done the fat man and Mort Blain rode off somewhere in the Pierce Arrow, and we were dismissed. The raiders marched away, all but a guard.
We were kept at the assembly station for four days. Each morning and afternoon we were taken to the cottonwood grove for food and music. On the third evening a new large procession arrived, of captives from two villages far from ours, strangers to us; we made acquaintances with them easily, partly because of our common lot and partly because they, as we, were all in pajamas and nightgowns, so there was a shared intimacy, though a dusty one, to begin with.
The new captives were mustered the following morning in the cottonwoods, and again the fat man recorded the count on his clipboard.
As soon as this tally was completed, some of the dark-suited men began forming everyone into a procession, which circled our assembly area as its elements took their places in line, and to Agatha and me—we were only fifteen—this falling-in seemed, at first, an entertainment.
But then as the raiders formed up their line came the end in sudden nausea of our pleasure. Many of the dark-suited men were still carrying severed heads, to claim bounty for them from the Syndicate.
Agatha exclaimed: “Look! Arthur Coteen!”
She was pointing at a head that one of the first of the raiders had by the hair. I looked at it only long enough to see that Agatha had not been mistaken. Then I turned full away, my knees weak at a possibility that surged into my mind: what if I should see my father’s head being carried along?
From that moment, and all through the march, I looked mostly at the ground.
We walked for seven days to horrible cheery music from the Packard. At night we slept under trees like ground squirrels. Agatha weakened; she leaned on me. She was hysterically fearful of all poisonous creatures—Gila monsters, tarantulas, scorpions—and during the nights her whispered fears seeped into me. Some days we passed many village hedges, and we trudged across wastes of mesquite and climbed through granite-ribbed passes. Our column crossed the Colorado on a bridge at Ehrenberg.
Mrs. Kathy Blaw walked much of the time with Agatha and me, and this fierce woman turned out to be sulkily protective of us; she was a barren woman and perhaps had an angry need for daughters. My mother cried day and night, apparently because her nightgown was sheer; I was ashamed of her and kept away from her.
We came to Palm Springs. On the way into the beautiful green town our procession had to move to the side of the road, once, to let the white Cadillac roadster of Gay Moya pass—the great movie star who had had the highest box office in the nation the year before. How often she had made me weep! In her car she looked amazingly plain to me, and rather cross at being delayed by our dusty file.
The Syndicate
Very early the following morning we were driven in a herd into and through the outer gardens of a vast estate on the edge of town. At the gate where we entered, and at each of the gates of the successive fences and walls through which we passed, pairs of human heads lay on the ground to remind all who entered of the limitless mountain-lion power of the Syndicate. We were urged into a corner of an enormous patio, along three sides of which ran Spanish arcades; under the central one of these a long curtain was drawn closed. Nothing happened for several hours. The sun climbed until it stood on our heads.
Suddenly doors at the far side of the great patio opened, pipe-organ music blared from speakers hidden in the palmettos, and at the command of our guards all of us fell to our knees and lowered our foreheads. Gabriel was near me; turning my head a little, I saw this proud young man, who had endured the indignities of recent days with such a grave, serene bearing, tremble now in his red-striped pajamas.
We heard the Syndicate’s legal staff, which was like a flock of clerics, droning some kind of formal jargon with which “meetings” apparently always began. At length, under the direction of the guards, we raised our heads but remained kneeling. The curtains under the arcade drew back.
There they were, in a dazzling ambiance that I recognized at once, from Kathy Blaw’s tales, as a striving imitation of yellow magnificence. This was the nightmare of our lives—that as shadows behind every event the yellows moved in ghostly ways, always the yellows….
