The Last Supper: And Other Stories

by Howard Fast

  He cocked his head at the boy, who looked back at him with wide, terror-stricken eyes. So would the lightning, proper partner for the hellish thing he had just witnessed, fork down from heaven and consume this iniquity! But instead, the sun shone.

  “And the Larkspur was a proper Christian ship,” the sailorman went on. “Proper, Sammy. You asked me how I knew what had betaken her. I conjectured from out of experience, laddie, and don’t you never go to sea. Mother of God, I could take off my shirt and show you, in the many raised welts on my poor aching back, a history all right. The dirty miserable food, the lashes, the work, the freezing cold, the dry time when she’s blown off course and no water no more, no more, the scurvy with the teeth a-dropping out, the wet that goes into your bones when she storms—and work, Sammy, such work from the poor body of a man. Sometimes you vomit it up, like they must-a done on the Larkspur, and that is mutiny, and the punishment is death. But if you want to make a mutiny, Sammy, out of your terrible misery and despair, you will want a gun, won’t you? And where are the guns, Sammy, but in the captain’s cabin and in his fowling chest? And who can get to it but the cabin lad? So he must be one of you, the poor motherless, lost lad who has no childhood but only the bitter years at sea. So you entice him, Sammy—God forgive you, you entice him—and his tender little heart bleeds for you, and he does your will. And then, when the mutiny is put down, like always the revolting and striking of scum like me, is put down, you got to pay the price. That’s right, Sammy—that’s proper. He who dances must fair enough pay the pipers, and every one of them, Sammy. So that is why you see the little lad hanging from the boom, hanging out there in the hot sunshine,, while his soul races off to hell for the terrible wrong he done.”

  Only then did the Irishman realize that the white face of Samuel Adams was covered with tears. In a fumbling and awkward way, he took the boy’s small hand between his big, course ones and fondled it, and remembered a lad of his own who had died of the pox, and said, “Bide your own way, Sammy, in quiet and peace. Don’t take heed of what is said of adventure and far places, for it is all a rotten curse. Stay at home, Sammy, and make no revolts—for when you strike out against what makes you less than a man, there is always a lash for the back and a rope for the neck. Now heed me, Sam’l.”

  It was wrong to say that all and anything that happens to a child is of great consequence—and as wrong to say that nothing that happens to a child is of great consequence; and this was a child who lived in a world of ships, where the land was only shelf for the ship to nuzzle to, but who did not take ship? There began somewhere at some time in this child, in his mind, in his blood, in his heart, in the whole of him, a series of less than thoughts and more than thoughts, patterns perhaps, for there is no precise way of describing the formation and growth of what is sometimes called personality and sometimes character and sometimes other names as foolish—but is actually a fire the world stokes and then sometimes in return sets the world on fire. You will have to look hard to find the Larkspur, and it doesn’t matter; for once the boy saw a carriage roll over a mouse, just seeming to touch it but killing, even though the mouse was able to kick and squirm and make tiny mouse cries of terror and anguish and pain, and the boy, picking the mouse up in his two hands and holding it close to his face, thought that in all his life he had never heard anything so heart-rending, and as the life went out of the mouse, he pressed it against his cheek, filled with the sense of suffering and hurt that he shared with the world, not in equal guilt but in equal sufferance.

  The child sat at home at table with his mother and his father and his sisters and his brothers, and each and all knew that a ship terrible and horrible had come into Boston Harbor, but to each it was different and to none as it was to him. “Blessed art thou, oh Lord our God, King of the universe,” said his father, in a rough and homely grace, stripped, as he so often put it, of the swinish filth of that iniquity of iniquities, the High Church of England, “who layeth our board and giveth us bread to grace it.” They said, “Amen,” and one of them then said, “Who saw the ship?” knowing they all had seen it.

  “There will be no talk of that,” said Samuel Adams, the father, and the son, Samuel Adams, said, “I saw it.”

  “With the black, heathen Irishman McKinney,” said his brother, with malice; and in the child there were the unspoken words, “Damn you, curse you.” His eyes probed at his brother who was soon to die, in a time when few enough grew to manhood; the memory of sickness goes, but the memory of hatred festers and lingers; and while the two children stared at each other, the father said stolidly, “This is a house where God is not unwelcome and we do not talk of godless things. No ship came into Boston harbor today. A ship of inequity is no ship.”

  Large jawed, big-boned and righteous was the father, Samuel Adams; he was a fierce and God-fearing man and he had done well in the world—justice of the peace, deacon, selectman, representative of the people on one hand and the Almighty God on the other, a merchant of means, a man who conducted his business with a word bonded by the sword of the angel Gabriel, a man of substance and property, he could be understood better by what he hated than by what he loved. What he loved was unspoken and often unrealized in the conscious parts of his mind, but what he hated he catalogued day in and day out; English he hated, the sound of the London language, the men who used it, and the, high Church they worshipped in; he hated Rome a little less, and he hated the Irish who deserted ship and profaned the Boston streets and worshipped images, even as the Children of Israel did when they heeded not Moses who led them, and of all folk in all the past, he loved Moses best. He hated the whores who multiplied in the streets day by day, and he hated the red Indians, the black-eyed somber men who wandered in from the wilderness like a conscience in motion; he hated the West Indian rum that cursed his land, and he hated all men who wore the uniform of His Majesty’s regiments, even as he hated His Majesty and all the crowned “scum,” as he put it, of all time back. These and much more he hated, but what he loved he had never formulated; he was not a sensitive man, and when his children spoke, he often as not hardly listened. So the name of the Irishman McKinney echoed in his mind for a time before he reacted to it, slowly then, fixing his pale eyes on the child who bore his own name.

  “Samuel,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “You were with the Irishman McKinney?”

  “Yes,” said the child.

  “Can we not eat in peace?” the mother asked, a thin and ailing and tired woman.

  “There will be peace,” the father said. “Peace, Mary, comes with the truth. And what is the truth, Samuel?”

  “I went with him to look at the ship,” the child said.

  “Through the public street?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you knew that you walked with a handman of the devil?”

  “Yes,” Samuel whispered.

  “But it was not the child’s doing,” Mary Adams pleaded, “and if the child didn’t know, it was not the child’s sin.”

  There was a frozen, timeless silence at the table, and even the brother who had betrayed him was awed and crushed by what he had done. Calvin and Wesley stood one on either side of Samuel Adams, the father—who stared so somberly and thoughtfully at Samuel Adams, the child, and to the mother there came a phrase from the book that was so knit with their lives, and he hardened his heart against him.

  “And he hardened his heart,” she said to herself over and over.

  The father then said, “And this is a just household, Samuel—heed ye, we walk in justice and in righteousness. Perhaps he enticed you?”

  The child could not speak; but he moved his head from side to side, just a fraction, just a trifle.

  “Cozened you? Wheedled you?”

  “No,” the child whispered.

  “Threatened you?”

  No answer.

  “Dragged you?”

  “No,” the child managed to say again.

  “Then you walked with him of
your own free will, through the public streets.”

  “Yes,” the child admitted, with no sorrow, no regrets, no resentment, but only a projection of himself into the image of the lad who swung and swayed from the yard-arm. And also no sorrow and no fear when the father rose and motioned. In the midst of the meal, the two departed, so that justice might be done according to the lights of the elder, but for the younger justice was a thing forming in a riot of troubled impressions and doubts and wonders.

  The town was already old, a century old in this new land, and the men of the Massachusetts Bay Company who had put it there were all of them dead and gone and many of them forgotten too. The town had the aspect of something old and established, perhaps more so than would ever again be the case in the future. Only an occasional citizen whose imagination was a little more vivid and active than most would pause to think of how the great and endless wilderness swept away westward from this town, a green sea, unknown, untouched, unexplored, unchanged, crossed only by the narrow, moccasin-beaten trails of the red men and filled with all manner of wild beasts. If you looked at the town with that in mind, you would have realized that it was just a scratch on the shore; but that was not the point of view of the child, born and raised in the town. For him it had always been here, since he could not accept emotionally what he knew intellectually—that a group of men had come from a share-holding company in an old country called Britain, and that they had planted the few shacks with which the, town began. His sense of time was not yet developed to a point where he could wholly accept such a thing; he saw the town as it was in the moment of its being.

  He, had crept out of the house, and the town lay there in the spring moonlight, in the gentle, sweet New England evening, all black and all over with a ripe velvety sheen. The great silver-blue moon sailed in the heavens and its trail coursed across the bay. The town was old and homely and lovely in that moonlight, with all the hard edges softened away and ancient too, and for the first time in his life, the child was able, to make a conscious appraisal of the relationship between himself and his city. His heart filled with wonder and love and awe, and he was able to put into words a feeling that this was his place and he was able to realize himself as a plant that had sprung out of this cobbled earth. The sense of identity flowed through him like heady wine, and he felt like he walked on air as he moved down toward the waterfront. He felt that he would like to touch every piece of wood in every house in this town, and the sleeping folk in the houses communicated to him. He felt a song in his heart that was nameless and wordless but which he knew very well indeed and would never forget, and now, in this moment, the future was assured and resilient and ready to be, kneaded, like a wet lump of clay. He remembered the Irishman McKinney, and he felt a great pride in his ability to know people and like them and understand them—and no fear for the sin he had sinned. Sin would not trouble him again.

  So he thought as he came onto the dock and curled up against a tangle of rope and looked out over the bay to where that awful ship floated. Still, the bodies hung, and the boy looked without fear at the obscene thing that had been done to the living.

  But horror, already muted, was less horrible in this caressing moonlight, and the child who had paid with his life for acting in the mutiny was familiar by now. From the child on the dock, there went out a current of love and sympathy to the child on the yardarm, and sitting there, Samuel Adams wept softly and without fear or pain for what the other had suffered.

  Sunday Morning

  THE LITTLE DOCTOR, WHO WAS SIXTY YEARS OLD AND suffered cruelly from insomnia, spent all of Saturday night pacing up and down his cell. Even Finnigan, the guard, who came by every two hours, flashing his light and making the count, seemed to feel a twinge of sympathy, and he said,

  “Don’t you ever get to sleep a night through, doc?”

  “Not in jail.”

  Finnigan whispered, but his hoarse whisper boomed like a base drum, and the little doctor wondered how anyone could sleep through it. Also, Finnigan was not original; he said the same thing every night; he said that jail was no place for someone like the little doctor, and the little doctor always agreed with him. At first, the little doctor would try to recall the exact words of Thoreau’s fine statement that “in a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place of a just man is also in prison,” but as the little doctor remembered it, it did not seem that it would convince Finnigan of anything in particular, and after a time, Thoreau or no, he felt fully in accord with what Finnigan said. Once, some weeks ago, he had attempted to explain to Finnigan why he was in prison, but Finnigan’s reaction to the explanation left much to be, desired. The whole concept of a political prisoner made Finnigan uneasy and nervous, disturbing his long and carefully erected rational of working in a jail.

  Tonight, Finnigan said cheerfully, “Well, anyway, tomorrow’s Sunday, and you’ll be able to sleep, providing you get yourself tired enough. That’s a blessing, ain’t it?”

  The little doctor agreed that it was a blessing, and sure enough, when the first tint of dawn grayed the high windows facing the cellblock, the little doctor’s eyes began to feel heavy and languid. His whole body ached with weariness now.

  This was the moment his insomniac nature cherished, and coming as it did on a Sunday morning, the one day of peace and rest, it was doubly cherished. He stretched out luxuriously on his prison cot, closed his eyes, and almost immediately drifted into that precious realm of slumber which he prized so highly and visited so infrequently. It seemed he had been asleep only a moment before, the sound of a nightstick rapping on the bars of his cell door awakened him.

  It was Schwartz, the daytime guard, and through a curtain of fatigue, the little doctor heard him say,

  “Sleeping, doc?”

  The little doctor gathered his drugged senses, hiked up on one elbow, and nodded.

  “Figured you were sleeping. I figured you were catching yourself a little, catnap, forty winks, eh doc?”

  “Yes, forty winks,” the little doctor mumbled.

  “It’s a shame I got to disturb you. It really is a shame.”

  The little doctor had an acutely scientific turn of mind. He had never, in all his life, really wanted to kill anyone, although there were numerous people whose death he would have accepted with certain satisfaction. But now he wanted to kill Schwartz and would have done so cheerfully. For a while, hovering in the delicious land between sleep and wakefulness, he wished Schwartz dead, and then, because Schwartz remained very much alive and because the little doctor realized that one did not unnecessarily make enemies of prison guards, he asked Schwartz what he wanted.

  “The Christian Scientists are in trouble,” Schwartz said.

  “What? What Christian Scientists?”

  “Upstairs where they’re, holding services,” Schwartz continued patiently, “the Christian Scientists are in trouble. They ain’t got a congregation. The Catholics and the Baptists did all right, but the Christian Scientists are in trouble,.”

  “I’m not a Christian Scientist,” the little doctor said briefly, and prepared to drift back to sleep.

  “I know. I know that. But someone’s got to go up there and be the congregation. How would it look if they got no congregation at all?”

  “It would look bad,” the little doctor admitted. “But I want to sleep.”

  “Now I got to ask you to go up there, doc,” Schwartz said steadily. “You don’t want to not do a favor if I ask you to do a favor for us, do you, doc?”

  “All right—all right. Let me shave and I’ll go,” the little doctor said wearily. But a moment later he had drifted back to sleep, and Schwartz had to wake him up all over again, and this time Schwartz stood there while the little doctor shaved himself and then started up to the chapel.

  The chapel had pews for two hundred worshippers, but when the little doctor arrived, only one other member of the congregation was present. Since there were two volunteers on the platform, who had given this Sunday morning to
lead services for those who were lost and unredeemed, it made an even balance, two and two. Feeling the necessity for this balance, the little doctor seated himself where he felt he, supplied the most filling effect.

  The one other member of the congregation was a young dope peddler whom Schwartz had also recruited. His mental process was rather sluggish, and he had not quickly enough claimed to be either a Catholic or Baptist, as the others had. Now he sat with his head in his hands, thinking gloomy thoughts of the other prisoners who were now taking the sunshine and playing checkers and chewing the fat in their two hour recreation period; and the more he thought of this, the more resentful he became. His resentment grew and grew and burst all bounds of discipline, and suddenly he stood up and stalked out of the chapel, leaving the little doctor completely alone as the congregation. The two volunteer pastors, both of them balding, middle-aged businessmen who were serving this thankless task when, as must have occurred to them, they could be out playing golf, were, to say the least, disconcerted at the loss of half their congregation. Their first impulse, it seemed to the little doctor, was to rush after the disappearing half and by some means persuade him to stay, but they must have soon realized that such tactics would not save the situation. Therefore, they allowed fifty percent of the congregation to vanish, and simply stood on the platform, first staring at the dope peddler, then at each other, then at their remaining congregation. Feeling a deep sympathy for their situation, the little doctor smiled hopefully.

  “Perhaps we’ll wait just a little for the others to gather,” one of the volunteer pastors said tentatively.

  “A few minutes more,” the other added.

  The little doctor nodded, went on nodding, and then began to drift deliciously into sleep. His favorite prison dream took shape; he was back in his consulting room, with at least a dozen more patients outside in his waiting room, and he was making a miraculous diagnosis of a mysterious disease with ease and aplomb, when the coughing of one of the pastors awakened him.