Four Freedoms
Page 10
the crowd at his own table, who were now curious to see what would
happen next. “You’ll see. The unions, the government, the military, the
corporations, they’ll all knit together”—here he interlaced his own fin-
gers—“into one big grinding machine to grind our faces. We’ll all be
rich as Dives and miserable as worms.” He dabbed his lips with a paper
napkin. “The union, ” he said, as though that were all that needed to be
said about that, and tossed the napkin down.
Larry was out of his seat now, and still Pancho, nose lifted, declined
to notice him.
“You damn fool, you can keep your opinions to yourself, or I might
just jam ’em down your throat!”
Pancho arose and said something to his table about those without
reasons, who used blows instead. Larry threw a chair out of the way to
get at Pancho and now around him people were getting to their feet
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 71
and yelling Hey hey and other cries to quell argument. Pancho in a
graceful rapid move pushed up both his sleeves even as he took an old-
fashioned boxer’s stance, the backs of his fists to Larry. Larry appeared
startled at Pancho’s ready-Eddy defense and jutting chin, and backed
away, kicking the chair instead. “Ah go sit down, y’old dope. Who
needs your advice.”
Pancho maintained his posture for a moment more, then sat again,
dusting his hands.
That seemed to those at the tables a forbearance on Larry’s part, as
he was known to be a brawler not only practiced but ruthless—he’d
told how as a younger man he’d carried a set of brass knuckles, and
he’d won fights by slipping them on in his pocket while he and the
other man Stepped Outside, then he’d clip the other guy with a dis-
abling punch before the mutt knew what was happening, and slip off
the knuckles before he was caught with them: a history he seemed
proud of. He was smart enough, though—he said now, glaring at Pan-
cho’s back—not to start a fight in the damn cafeteria.
“Oh, he’s one smart fella,” Pancho said. “Oh yes.”
“One smart fella, he felt smart,” said Al Mass across from him.
“Two smart fellas, they felt smart—”
“Shut up, Al,” said Sal.
At midnight the Swing Shift ended and what longtime factory workers
always called the Graveyard Shift but now throughout the war indus-
try was called the Victory Shift began, special commendation and
maybe a couple of cents more an hour for those who took it on and
worked through the dark toward dawn: a contingent of Teenie Weenies
including the Indian and the Doctor (of veterinary medicine, he hadn’t
practiced in the years since he took up the bottle). Somehow the still-
ness of the deep midnight, or the ceasing of certain jobs done only in
the daytime, made the shift quieter: maybe it just seemed so. Conversa-
tion seemed possible. At three in the morning they had begun talking
about people in the news who could or couldn’t sing.
“Norman Thomas had a fine voice,” Vilma said. “I stood once in a
crowd that all sang the ‘Internationale’ with him. I could hear him
loud and clear. A fine tenor voice.”
72 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“ ‘Arise you prisoners of starvation,’ ” a union man who’d overheard
sang out, hymnlike. “ ‘Arise you wretched of the earth.’ ”
“How long till lunch break, anyway?” said Lucille the spot welder.
“You know who couldn’t sing,” somebody else said. “Huey Long. I
saw him in the newsreel singing ‘Every Man a King.’ He waved his
finger like this but couldn’t keep the time. He looked like a spastic.”
“I’ll bet the President has a fine voice.”
“I know his favorite hymn is ‘Our God Our Help in Ages Past.’ He
sang it on that ship, the time he met Churchill. They had a Sunday ser-
vice right on the ship. They both sang.”
The Doctor hearing this began to sing:
“Our God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast,
And our eternal home.”
Somebody else took it up, as though unable not to, the way some
people can’t help blessing someone who sneezes, no matter how far off
the sneezer, how unheard the blessing.
“Under the shadow of Thy throne
Thy saints have dwelt secure;
Sufficient is Thine arm alone,
And our defense is sure.”
It was harder to hear it now, amid the noise of the place, but it was
clear the song was being passed on, sometimes a couple of people stop-
ping what they were doing to sing a verse; and some of those who sang
or listened to the old words heard them anew, here on the Victory Shift
gathered around the wingless Pax like ants around their queen:
“A thousand ages in Thy sight
Are like an evening gone;
Short as the watch that ends the night
Before the rising sun.”
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 73
And farther aft, where the pop of rivet guns punctured it:
“Time, like an ever rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly, forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day.”
Coming back around like a little circling breeze to where Vi, Lucille,
and the fuselage team worked. A colored man strapping wire within
the fuselage could be heard taking it up, a light sweet tenor like Norman
Thomas’s, you wouldn’t have thought it from such a large man, it was
so surprising that some around him stopped work to notice, while
others shook their heads and didn’t:
“Like flowery fields the nations stand
Pleased with the morning light;
The flowers, beneath the mower’s hand,
Lie withering ere ’tis night.”
Those who knew the hymn well recognized this as the last awful
verse, and they could begin again on the chorus, comforted or not, in
agreement or not, or simply able to remember a hundred Sundays in a
different world:
“Our God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Be Thou our guard while troubles last,
And our eternal home.”
But now it’s morning, and Vi Harbison sits on the bed with Prosper in his
bedroom in the house on Z Street, trimming his nails with a pair of
little scissors. Pancho Notzing’s on the Day Shift but Prosper on this
day has been moved to Swing Shift, so the house is theirs. The sensa-
tion of having his nails cut is one that Prosper can’t decide if he
enjoys or not: it recalls his mother, who used to do it, grasping each
finger tightly in turn; seeing the dead matter cut away, something
74 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
that should be painful but was only forceful. And the feeling of
pressing the exposed fingertips into his palms. Vi’s doing it because
Prosper scratched her as he put a finger, then two, far up inside her.
She wasn’t going to have that. There was a lot this young man needed
to learn.
“There.”
And since she’s naked there on the bed, because she’d stop
ped him
from going farther before she performed that operation, Prosper
reaches out and circles the globes of her breasts with his hands, the
newly sensitized fingertips, like a safecracker’s sanded ones, assaying
the yielding curve of flesh.
“Okay?” he asked.
What he loved to see, had loved ever since he was ten and it had
been Mary Wilma’s step-ins and jumper: the pile of a woman’s dis-
carded clothes on the floor, his own too, the astonishment of naked-
ness. They went down together. Time passed.
“Okay so,” she said.
They lay face-to-face. She held his eyes with hers, but not as though
she saw him; she was looking, with a gaze of some other sort, down
into where he went; her face was like that of a blind woman he’d known
back when he worked for The Light in the Woods doing piecework:
how she’d sorted rivets into bins by touch, looking with her fingers,
eyes on nothing.
“That,” she said.
“This?”
“No. Ah. That.”
Now he too was looking within, looking with a clipped finger’s end.
It lay under a soft fold falling just below where the brushy mountain
ran out and the bare cleft began. It too was soft but soft differently,
satin not velvet. Now he’d lost it again. Found it. It seemed to grow or
peep out at his touch.
“Everybody has this?” Except for his own finger’s movements they
were both still.
“Every woman does. Ah.”
He examined it, tiny movements so that he, his little searching self,
didn’t get lost. It did seem to remind him of an arrangement or com-
plexity he’d encountered before but hadn’t actually perceived, not as a
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 75
separate thing or part that needed a name. The Little Man in the Boat,
she’d said. Here was the boat, the covering fold. Here the man. The
slick moisture made it seem to roll beneath his finger like an oiled ball
bearing in its socket. She moved then, earthquakelike, to lie on her
back, and he had to begin the search again, in a new land. “Little
man,” he said. “Why a little man, why not a little woman?”
“Hush.”
“Why not though.”
“Because ah. Because it’s ah, a little man. That’s the name. Ah. My
little man.”
Another seismic heave and she turned another quarter turn over so
that her back was to him. He pressed close against her and she took his
arm and drew it around her and directed his hand again downward,
her own now atop it, lightly, reminding him (when he thought about it
later) of his aunt May’s hand resting on the planchette of the Ouija
board and waiting for its subtle movements. She lifted her outside or
upper leg a little. “There,” she said. But soon she grew restless, or dis-
satisfied, or encouraged—Prosper tried to gauge her feelings—and
rolled again, now onto her stomach, and her legs opened as though
grateful to be able to, and they lifted Vi up a bit. This was a challenge
for Prosper, he’d learned, since his own legs weren’t up to the power
requirements, but Vi had a way of hooking her lower legs over his to
keep him steady and in place, and she could help too in getting him or
it in past the gatekeepers and on into the interior, which she now did,
with a seemingly pitiful small cry.
“Now you be careful,” she gasped into the pillow. “Prosper. You be
careful. You know?”
“I know.”
This being the second time that morning he thought he could do
all right, in fact it felt a bit wooden and abused after having gone on
in, but she again drew his hand around and onto her to go find that
Little Man he’d met, which now he could easily do, not nearly so
little this way, why hadn’t he identified it before; and with every-
thing then set and going, the round and round along with the in and
out, like rubbing your stomach while patting your head, the train
left the station, picking up speed wonderfully, amazingly: even as he
began making sounds of his own he was able to marvel at it.
76 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“So how do you know these things,” Prosper said later. The bed was
mussed and suffering, not really meant for two if one of them was Vi.
“Who taught you?”
If you lay still in that dry air, as the heat rose you could feel the
sweat pass off you even as it was produced. They lay still. They had
stopped touching.
“You just know,” Vi said. “It’s part of me. I know about it.”
“But those names,” Prosper said. She knew names for what she had
and what he had, what they did, what came of it, some of them useful,
some funny.
“Oh. I learned. From somebody.”
“Man or woman?”
“Man.”
“Tell me,” Prosper said.
“Why should I?”
“Why shouldn’t you? All these things are educational.” He put his
hand on the rise of her thigh. He thought how soon you can get used to
being naked alongside someone naked, so that the two of you can con-
verse just as though you were dressed, and how that ought to be odd
but somehow isn’t, which is odd in itself. “Isn’t that so?”
“You might be asking out of jealousy. People can be jealous of
people’s old lovers. Former lovers. They pretend to ask just out of curi-
osity but it’s a nagging thing, they’re jealous even if they don’t know it.
They think they just want to learn something about someone, but it
poisons them to hear it.”
“Really?”
“Really. It’s like bad earth.” She rolled away from him and looked
upward at the ceiling, which seemed to be hammocking ever so
slightly downward. “Poisoned through the ear. And they asked for it
too.”
“No. I just wanted to know. About you. What you did, what you
thought, before. I’d like to know.”
She turned her head toward him, and he could see that she was con-
sidering him. Her eyebrows rose, asking something, more of herself
than of him: but she smiled.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 77
“Tell me,” he said, smiling too.
“Tell you. Tell you what.”
“Start at the beginning.”
“No,” she said. “I won’t.”
“So start in the middle. Like True Story.”
“Like what?”
“The stories in True Story always start in the middle. ‘Little did I
know when I saw the dawn come that day that by nightfall I’d be locked
up in jail.’ You know.”
“You read True Story? It’s for women.”
“I used to.”
“Little did I know I’d find myself in bed with a ninny.” She reached
down to pluck the crumpled and somewhat soggy pack of Luckies from
the pocket of her shirt, where like a man she kept them. “Okay,” she
said. “Here goes.”
7
Little did she know: that when the great worldwide storm rolled
over at last, after hovering so long undecided, it would leave the
land remade by its passing, the way spring storms and th
e sun
following them can change the brown prairie to green almost
overnight or overday: that it would move her farther than she had ever
thought to move, though not as far as she had once dreamed of moving.
She’d gone out to the Pacific Northwest first, looking for work, coming
down after a long trip into a port city along swarming roads filled with
others also ready to go to work if they could find someplace to stay.
There were ten shipyards slung out into the bay and a ship was being
launched every month, soon it would be every twenty days, and it was
easy to find out how to get to the employment offices, as easy as fol-
lowing the crowd funneling into a ballpark, and after you signed up at
one—whichever you came to first, you couldn’t know which was the
better place to work but the work was all the same and you had lots of
company no matter which one you picked—they told you about places
to look for a room or at least a bed, and where not to look if you were
a young single girl in a summer dress and a thin sweater carrying an
old suitcase tied up with a length of twine. Not even if you were a girl
just a little short of six feet, wide-shouldered and big-handed with a
touch-me-not coolness in your long narrow eyes.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 79
It was less than a week since she’d left the ranch and her father’s
house. Six weeks since her youngest brother had left for the army
induction center, following his older brothers. Ten since the bulldozer
had covered with dirt the corpses of the last sick cattle shot by the gov-
ernment agents and her father had shut the door on those agents as
though he’d never open it again for anyone.
Bad earth they’d called it, stretches of prairie that were somehow
naturally poisonous, whose poisons could be drawn up into plants
that stock would eat. Maybe for a long time eating the plants hadn’t
hurt them, maybe not for years, but then there’d be a change in the
groundwater, or some new plant would start growing there and take
hold—a kind of vetch, they said, was one—and it could suck up so
much of the poison it could kill. Kill a sheep in an hour, a heifer in a
day; leave cattle with the blind staggers or their hooves softening
and sloughing off, too weak to feed, had to be shot, so poisoned they
couldn’t be sold for slaughter even if they lived. Government gave
you a penny on the pound. She herself had to sell the horses; they