George Mills

by Stanley Elkin

  “I’ve no recriminations, none at all.

  “But dying’s like the marathon, I think. There’s no way to go the distance till you’ve gone it. And sooner or later you hit the wall and whimper if you cannot scream. I seem a saint and so far think I am one.

  “Listen, everyone. I make this pledge to you. There will be no trips to Mexico for Laetrile, and I’ll never call out for any other of those fast-food fixes of the hopeful doomed. Neither will I be wired to any of those medical busy-boxes to extend for one damned minute what only a fool would call my life. If Jesus wants me He can have me. To tell you the truth, He can probably use me.

  “Now, Cornell, I want a favor.”

  “Of course, Judith,” Messenger said, “if there’s anything I can do.”

  “I want you to take over my Meals-on-Wheels route.”

  4

  Because he knew Coule’s type. Recognized retrospectively the solid, bulldog centers of gravity of his kind, his big-bodied, full-bellied, hard-handed, heavy-hammed, iron-armed, thick-throated, barrel-chested lineman likenesses and congeners. Not overgrown, like giants, say, such men did not, or so it seemed to Mills, even possess glands, lacking not a pituitary so much as the space for one, mass not a function of secretions, of body-buried wells of the cellular juices splashed and splattered indiscriminately throughout the skeletal sluices of their frames, nothing endocrinic, hormonal, for there could have been no more room for these, or for organs either, than there was for glands, their insides pure prime meat, human steak all the way through, gristled perhaps and marbled possibly and certainly scaffolded with bone, but nothing liquid to account for size, and even their blood only for coloring, flesh tones, flush; their pee and excrement, too, merely variants of their blood’s limited palette, affected by the air perhaps, the light, like exposed film. So nothing leviathan in their genes—he’d seen their parents, their brothers and sisters like the law of averages—their physical displacement a kind of decision, the ukase of their boom town wills, their realtor reality. And many were realtors, or at least landlords. It would have been difficult not to be in the Florida of the thirties, even though this wasn’t Miami or even Tampa or Jacksonville, even though it wasn’t anywhere oceaned, beached, or even, particularly, mild.

  It was Cassadaga, and except for the fact that George knew they had come south, that he and his mother and father had changed their lives and been translated to a state called Florida—he had no memory of how they’d gotten there, probably some of the way by bus, some by hitchhiking—where his father meant to pick oranges, become a migrant worker, it could have been not Milwaukee, since Milwaukee was a city of some size and Cassadaga was barely a town, but some residential neighborhood in Milwaukee. Stucco might never have been invented or Florida so new it had not yet become indigenous there, its properties undiscovered, it no more occurring to the other Easterners and Midwesterners to mix cement and sand and hydrated lime to make their homes than to build them out of thatch. So the houses were wooden as the trees, the ordinary oaks and elms and maples of any Iowa or Wisconsin yard or street. And perhaps that’s why he had no memory of how they’d gotten there (he’d seen no sea, no gulls or beach), because the landscape was the same he’d lived in all his nontropical, Tropic of Cancer life, along the bland, unrainy seasoned peel of earth with its gray and temperate gifts of the to-scale regular.

  He did not even know where the oranges would be, could be. There were no groves near Cassadaga, nothing citrus in the odor of the wind. He’d seen more fruit in Milwaukee. And no palm trees except for the one by the bench in the town’s small square, its tall stem and leaves like an immense shredded umbrella.

  “That’s a tree?” he’d asked.

  “Hell,” his father said, “I don’t know if it’s even wood.”

  He pointed to its sky-high shells, shaggy, brown as bowel, clustered as cannonball or the cabbages in produce bins. “Are the oranges inside those things?”

  “If they are you don’t pick oranges, you climb them.”

  Because this is where they’d been dropped, the young men who’d given them the ride—it was their journey he couldn’t recall, not their arrival—driving on toward Daytona Beach. “Looks nice and homey,” one of them said. “You should be able to get a room here. Tomorrow you can walk the few yards to where the groves begin.”

  They had no luggage to speak of, only the single suitcase between them which contained not all their clothes but all the clothes which they still had, which they had not sold along with their furniture and dishes and odds and ends in order to get a nest egg together, a stake, to make the trip. Anyway, they had all the clothes which they believed they would need in the hot new climate to which they believed they had come——socks, the three changes of boys’ and men’s and women’s underwear, the two sets of overalls and denim workshirts, the two cotton dresses. They had not even brought handkerchiefs because they thought they had come to a place where no one caught cold. They had not brought anything dressy for Sundays. They were not religious and so wouldn’t need anything for church. For Sundays and holidays there were the three brand new bathing suits in the brand new valise. The only other things in the grip were a change of sheets and pillowslips and a large box of laundry powder. They were ready to make their new life, traveling light as any three people could who had excised not only fall and winter from their lives but the very idea of temperature.

  And so if Cassadaga looked homey—and it did—they looked, save for the single clue of the single suitcase, already at home.

  “Look here,” his father said. He was standing by an immense glass-enclosed hoarding at the entrance to the square. “It’s the church directory. Just look at them all. Did you ever see so many? Maybe it ain’t even Florida. Maybe we hitchhiked all the way to Rome.”

  “I don’t see any churches,” his mother told his father. “Seems in a town as tiny and churchy as this one you’d be able to spot at least one spire. Wouldn’t you think so, George?”

  “Maybe there’s an ordinance against them. Maybe they only run the crosses up on Sundays, like flags on the Fourth of July.”

  “Oh, George,” his mother said.

  “Well,” his father said, “we didn’t come all this way to sightsee. And tomorrow we got to look for work. I think our best bet is to find somewhere we can get a place to sleep. You tired, George?”

  “Yes, sir,” George said.

  They walked through the little town. Mills remembered it yet. It was a paradigm of neighborhood, not a town but a constituency, not a place but a vicinity, homogeneous as graveyard or forest or a field of wheat. There were no stores or gas stations, no public buildings, neither school nor library nor jailhouse——whatever of municipality or commonwealth, canton, arrondissement, deme or nome, whatever of government itself centripetalized in the bench in the small square. There were no churches.

  “I think it must be one of those suburbs,” his father said.

  “What of?” said his mother.

  “I don’t know,” his father said. “Maybe the highway.”

  They passed several blocks of neat frame houses, not identical but all lawned, porched and porch-swing’d. Many had gardens, some narrow driveways that led to tiny garages that looked like scaled-down versions of the houses themselves.

  They walked up a side street, turned south at the corner, went down that street and entered another side street. They turned at another corner. It was the same everywhere they walked. (He was carrying the suitcase now. It was that light.)

  They came out of the town and were in open country.

  “I think those houses must be the main crop around here.”

  “Oh, George,” his mother said.

  “Look there,” his father said. He pointed to the open country. “They must already have harvested that part.”

  “Oh, George,” his mother said. “You tired, honey?” she asked Mills.

  “A little I guess,” he said.

  “Here. Give me that.” She took the s
uitcase from him. “We better turn back, George. The kid’s falling off his feet.”

  “Suits me,” his father said, “but I didn’t see signs for lodging, no folks either, if it comes to that.”

  “We’ll just knock and ask if they have a room. Some of these houses must be where the ministers live.”

  (George had seen the owners’ shingles nailed to their front doors like addresses or planted in their yards like For Sale signs, the saw-toothed, varnished boards suggestive of resorts, fishing lodges, summer camps, things Indian, rustic, though the names on them were almost defiantly white.)

  “That’s what I was thinking,” his father said. “Give me the case. We’ll just go back into town and ask if we can be put up for the night in some spare room of the parsonage. I don’t expect they’d charge travelers and strangers too much if they at least looked like Christians.”

  “I don’t remember how to say grace,” his mother said.

  “You can remember how to say amen,” his father said. “Just fold your hands and try to look like you don’t deserve what they feed you.”

  His father was not a bitter man. Like all the George Millses before him, he had known subsistence but rarely hardship, treading subsistence like deep water but never really frightened, comfortable enough in his own dubious element as steeplejacks or foretopmen in theirs. So the Depression was no real setback for him. Indeed, it had presented possibilities to him, an opening of options. He had all the skills of the unskilled, chopping, digging, fetching, a hewer and drawer of a man, not strong so much as knowledgeable about weight, knowing weight’s hidden handholds the way a diamond cutter might know the directions and cleavage points of a gem merely by glancing at it. So it would not have been correct to say that the Depression had changed their lives or even that they had come south to seek their fortune. It would never have occurred to Mills that fortune could actually be sought. Fortune, if it had been his birthright ever to have more than he could use, would have sought him, it, She, Fortune, in his father’s view, being a sort of custom tailor of the goddesses, like talent perhaps, who did all the really hard work. “I promise you we’ll never starve,” his father had told him once, “we’ll never even go hungry. We won’t freeze for want of shelter or die for lack of medicine. We’re only low. We ain’t down.” So if they came to Florida to find employment it was because his father understood that there were chores in Florida too, that the menial was pretty much evenly distributed throughout the world, that Florida had its weight as well as Milwaukee—he’d shoveled coal there, been a janitor, collected garbage—its tasks and chores, odd jobs, stints, and shifts. “Our kind,” he assured his son, “could find nigger work in Paradise. What, you think it isn’t dirty here just because the sun is shining?”

  So it was only a change of scene he’d wanted. And hadn’t gotten yet. “Maybe we aren’t close enough yet, maybe we’re still too high up the slope of the world. Maybe we have to be where all you have to do is just nudge a stone with your shoe and it rolls all the way downhill to the equator. But whatever, I don’t see no parrots in this neighborhood. I ain’t spotted any alligators.” (Because they’d been in Florida better than a day now, crossing from Dothan, Alabama, into Marianna, Florida, passing Tallahassee and Gainesville and Ocala and De Land, all of which could have been Northern towns except for the souvenirs in the gas stations and grocery stores—the toy ’gators and candies in the shape of oranges and grapefruits, the rubber tomahawks and Seminole jewelry, drinking glasses with scenes of St. Petersburg, Miami, Florida’s keys, fishing tackle with deep-sea, heavy-duty line—where they bought his father’s cigarettes and his mother the makings, the dry cereals and packaged breads and luncheon meats and quarts of milk, for their meals. There were suntan lotions on the drugstore shelves, cheap sunglasses on pasteboard cards. This is where his mother had bought their three new swimsuits. “It stands to reason,” she’d said before they’d ever left Wisconsin, “bathing trunks have to be cheaper down there.” And picked out the swimsuits in the first town they came to after they crossed the state line. “Sure,” his father had said, still good-humored, “maybe we should never have got George that cloth alligator when we were still up North. I think we made a mistake there. That stands to reason too. A cloth souvenir toy doll lizard should cost a lot less money in some grocery store near the swamps where there ain’t no call for pretend alligators because there’s the real thing snapping at your toes no further off than the distance of your own height.”) But still good mooded, the absence of physical evidence that they were there still within the acceptable limits of credulity. It was only late summer. They would have to wait months yet before they would get the benefit of the hot winter weather, before they would have any reason to wonder where the snow was, where the ice. His father’s mild complaint about the whereabouts of the strange birds and animals only the teasing echo of his own kid questions and alerted suspicions. He was obviously enjoying himself, the twelve-hundred-mile journey they had already come itself a vacation. He was having a good time, his temper was sweet, he was feeling fine, even the queer, beachless, ungoverned and, for all they knew, spare-roomless town a pleasant curiosity. His father, all of them, were happy.

  Then they saw the chain gang.

  It was policing the small square where the bench and palm tree were.

  Two guards with rifles slouched along on either side of the line of convicts as they moved across the square picking up cigarette butts, Coca-Cola bottles, the feeble litter of the lightly trafficked park. A third guard sat on the bench watching the prisoners as one might casually watch a ball game played by children, his arms embracing the back of the bench, his rifle balanced against his crotch.

  The convicts were actually chained at the legs, the chains drawn so close the men were almost shoulder to shoulder like men on parade. They took small steps like Chinese house servants or young girls in heels. With their backs to them, the thick white and black horizontals of their uniforms seemed a single broad fabric like a wide flag flapping. They looked like staves on sheet music.

  George and his mother followed his father to the guard on the bench.

  “How do you do?” his father said.

  “Are there real bullets in that?” George Mills asked.

  “They’re shells, son. Bullets is in handguns.”

  “My boy never saw a chain gang,” his father said. “We’re from up North.”

  “Up North they lock folks up,” the guard said. “Here they get to go outdoors.”

  “What did these men do?” his father said.

  “All different things,” the guard said. “Murders and armed robberies. Rapes. Different things.”

  “Murders,” his son said. “Gee, they’re not even very big.”

  “Size got nothing to do with it, son. Big men can get what they want without killing people.”

  “See what can happen, George?” Mills said. “See what they do to you if you grow up wild? Officer, would you mind if we had a word with these men?” His father winked at the guard.

  The guard looked at George and returned his father’s wink. His mother said nothing.

  “These shells is real, son,” he said, and tapped the chamber of his rifle. “They call ’em shells ’cause they’re so big. They’re bigger than bullets. You get hit with a shell you never get better. You go along with your dad. You listen to what these cons tell you.” The man stood up and blew two shrill blasts on a whistle that hung from his neck. The convicts stopped where they were and came to a sort of attention. “Gary and Henry,” he called out to the other two guards, “these folks is from up North and got a little boy with them who don’t always mind.” He accompanied Mills and his son to the rank of convicts.

  “Tell the kid how old you was when you come to us, Frizzer,” the man said.

  Before Frizzer could answer, George’s father did an astonishing thing. He took his hat from his head and held it in his hands in exactly the attitude of supplication George had seen hobos employ when they ca
me to his mother’s door in Milwaukee. Status seemed instantly altered, perspective did, his father exchanging actual inches and pounds with the prisoner. There was something religious, even pious about the gesture. It startled George, it startled them all, the prisoners literally moved, forced back, their chains scraping in a sharp, brief, metallic skirl.

  “It’s true what your captain says. We’re Northerners. Hard times forced us south. There’s no work up there no more. We come for the sunshine. To catch fish from the water. My boy ain’t had no nourishment in two days. His ma is pregnant. If you got some candy, the sugar in gum…If you could let them drink off the last sweetness in those soda bottles you picked up from the ground. If you could——”

  “Wait a minute, hey,” the guard said who had told them about the shells.

  “If you saved something from your lunch——”

  “Hold on there. What——”

  “My boy ain’t had nothing in his mouth these two days, my wife’s been hungry three. Flowers we eat, the crusts from peanut butter and jelly sandwiches from other folks’ picnics in the public parks.”

  “Now just a golden goddamn min——”

  “I guess I don’t need this fruit,” the convict Frizzer said, and produced an orange from where it had been stored in his blouse.

  “Me neither,” said another con and handed over a second orange, placing it beside Frizzer’s in his father’s upturned hat.

  “I ain’t hungry,” said a third man, handing his orange to the boy.

  “What the hell!” the guard shouted.

  “Thank you,” his father said. “God bless you. God bless you, men. God bless you,” his father said, still like the hobo, dispensing love’s holy wampum, and hurried his wife and son from the square. They disappeared up a street.