‘Yes,’ the old Negro said. ‘Then he did vanish, because the next time they seed him they wouldn’t have knowed him except for the cap, the coat and them Irish britches gone now and wearing over-halls and a hickory shirt. Except that they would have had to gone out there to seen that, because he was a farmer now, a wage-hand, likely not getting much more than his board and lodging and washing because the place he was working on hadn’t hardly supported the two folks that was already trying to live on it—’ the runner seeing that now almost as well as the Federal ex-deputy could have seen it:—a childless couple of arthritic middleage: two heirs of misfortune drawn as though by some mutual last resort into the confederation of matrimony as inversely two heirs of great wealth or of royalty might have been,—a one-room-and-leanto cabin, a hovel almost, clinging paintless to a sheer pitch of mountainside in a straggling patch of corn standing in niggard monument to the incredible, the not just back- but heart-breaking labor which each meagre stalk represented: moloch-effigy of self-sustenance which did not reward man’s sweat but merely consumed his flesh;—the man who ten months ago had walked in the company of giants and heroes and who even yesterday, even without the horse and solitary and alone, had still walked in its magnificent gigantic shadow, now in faded overalls milking a gaunt hill cow and splitting firewood and (the three of them, distinguishable at any distance from one another only because one wore the checked cap and another a skirt) hoeing the lean and tilted corn, coming down the mountain to squat, not talking yet not actually mute either, among them on the gallery of the store on Saturday afternoon; and on the next morning, Sunday, again in his back pew in the church, always in that clean fresh rotation of faded blue which was not the regalia of his metamorphosis and the badge of all plodding enduring husbandry, but which hid and concealed even the horse-warped curvature of his legs, obliterating, effacing at last the last breath or recollection of the old swaggering aura bachelor, footfree and cavalier, so that (it was July now) there remained (not the heart) only the foul raked heavily-checked cap talking (not the heart talking of passion and bereavement) among the empty Tennessee hills of the teeming metropolitan outland:
‘Then he was gone. It was August; the mail rider had brought the Chattanooga and Knoxville papers back over the Gap that week and the next Sunday the preacher made the prayer for all the folks across the water swamped again in battle and murder and sudden death, and the next Saturday night they told me how he taken his last degree in Masonry and how that time they tried to talk to him because the Chattanooga and Knoxville papers was coming over the Gap every day now and they was reading them too: about that battle——’
‘Mons,’ the runner said.
‘Mons,’ the old Negro said.—‘saying to him, “Them was your folks too, wasn’t they?” and getting the sort of answer there wasn’t no reply to except just to hit him. And when the next Sunday came, he was gone. Though at least this time they knowed where, so that when we finally got there that day——’
‘What?’ the runner said. ‘It took you from June until August to travel from Missouri to Tennessee?’
‘It wasn’t August,’ the old Negro said. ‘It was October. We walked. We would have to stop now and then to find work to earn money to eat on. That taken a while, because this boy never had no size then, and I never knowed nothing but horses and preaching, and any time I stopped to do either one, somebody might have asked me who I was.’
‘You mean you had to bring the money to him first before you could even draw travel expenses from it?’
‘There wasn’t no money,’ the old Negro said. ‘There never was none, except just what we needed, had to have. Never nobody but that New Orleans lawyer ever believed there was. We never had time to bother with winning a heap of money to have to take care of. We had the horse. To save that horse that never wanted nothing and never knowed nothing but just to run out in front of all the other horses in a race, from being sent back to Kentucky to be just another stud-horse for the rest of its life. We had to save it until it could die still not knowing nothing and not wanting nothing but just to run out in front of everything else. At first he thought different, aimed different. But not long. It was during that time when we was walking to Texas. We was hiding in the woods one day by a creek and I talked to him and that evening I baptised him in the creek into my church. And after that he knowed too that betting was a sin. We had to do a little of it, win a little money to live on, buy feed for it and grub for us. But that was all. God knowed that too. That was all right with Him.’
‘Are you an ordained minister?’ the runner said.
‘I bears witness,’ the old Negro said.
‘But you’re not an ordained priest. Then how could you confirm him into your church?’
‘Hush, Pappy,’ the youth said.
‘Wait,’ the runner said. ‘I know. He made you a Mason too.’
‘Suppose he did,’ the old Negro said. ‘You and this boy are alike. You think maybe I never had no right to make him a christian, but you know he never had no business making me a Mason. But which do you think is the lightest to undertake: to tell a man to act like the head Mason thinks he ought to act, that’s just another man trying to know what’s right to do, or to tell him how the head of Heaven knows he ought to act, that’s God and knows what’s right to ease his suffering and save him?’
‘All right,’ the runner said. ‘It was October——’
‘Only this time they knowed where he was. “France?” I says, with this boy already jerking at my sleeve and saying, “Come on, Grampaw. Come on, Grampaw.” “Which way is that?” I says. “Is that in Tennessee too?”
‘ “Come on, Grampaw,” this boy says. “I knows where it is.” ’
‘Yes,’ the runner said to the youth. ‘I’ll get to you in a moment too.’ He said to the old Negro: ‘So you came to France. I wont even ask how you did that with no money. Because that was God. Wasn’t it?’
‘It was the Society,’ the youth said. Only he didn’t say ‘society’: he said ‘société’.
‘Yes,’ the runner said to the youth. He said in French, his best French: the glib smart febrile argot immolated into the international salons via the nightclubs from the Paris gutter: ‘I wondered who did the talking for him. It was you, was it?’
‘Someone had to,’ the youth said, in still better French, the French of the Sorbonne, the Institute, the old Negro listening, peaceful and serene, until he said:
‘His mamma was a New Orleans girl. She knowed gobble talk. That’s where he learned it.’
‘But not the accent,’ the runner said. ‘Where did you get that?’
‘I dont know,’ the youth said. ‘I just got it.’
‘Could you “just get” Greek or Latin or Spanish the same way?’
‘I aint tried,’ the youth said. ‘I reckon I could, if they aint no harder than this one.’
‘All right,’ the runner said, to the old Negro now. ‘Did you have the Society before you left America?’ and heard that, insequent and without order or emphasis, like dream too: they were in New York, who a year ago had not known that the earth extended further than the distance between Lexington, Kentucky, and Louisville until they walked on it, trod with their actual feet the hard enduring ground bearing the names Louisiana and Missouri and Texas and Arkansas and Ohio and Tennessee and Alabama and Mississippi—words which until then had been as foundationless and homeless as the ones meaning Avalon or Astalot or Ultima Thule. Then immediately there was a woman in it, a ‘lady’, not young, richly in furs—
‘I know,’ the runner said. ‘She was in the car with you that day last spring when you came up to Amiens. The one whose son is in the French air squadron that she is supporting.’
‘Was,’ the youth said. ‘Her boy is dead. He was a volunteer, one of the first airmen killed in the French service. That’s when she began to give money to support the squadron.’
‘Because she was wrong,’ the old Negro said.
‘Wrong?’ the r
unner said. ‘Oh. Her dead son’s monument is a machine to kill as many Germans as possible because one German killed him? Is that it? And when you told her so, it was just like that morning in the woods when you talked to the horse-thief and then baptised him in the creek and saved him? All right, tell me.’
‘Yes,’ the old Negro said, and told it: the three of them traversing a succession almost like avatars: from what must have been a Park Avenue apartment, to what must have been a Wall Street office, to another office, room: a youngish man with a black patch over one eye and a cork leg and a row of miniature medals on his coat, and an older man with a minute red thing like a toy rosebud in his buttonhole, talking gobble talk to the lady and then to the youth too—
‘A French consulate?’ the runner said. ‘Looking for a British soldier?’
‘It was Verdun,’ the youth said.
‘Verdun?’ the runner said. ‘That was just last year—1916. It took you until 1916——’
‘We was walking and working. Then Pappy begun to hear them——’
‘There was too many of them,’ the old Negro said. ‘Men and boys, marching for months down into one muddy ditch to kill one another. There was too many of them. There wasn’t room to lay quiet and rest. All you can kill is man’s meat. You cant kill his voice. And if there is enough of the meat, without even room to lay quiet and rest, you can hear it too.’
‘Even if it’s not saying anything but Why?’ the runner said.
‘What can trouble you more than having a human man saying to you, Tell me why. Tell me how. Show me the way?’
‘And you can show him the way?’
‘I can believe,’ the old Negro said.
‘So because you believed, the French government sent you to France.’
‘It was the lady,’ the youth said. ‘She paid for it.’
‘She believed too,’ the old Negro said. ‘All of them did. The money didn’t count no more now because they all knowed by now that just money had done already failed.’
‘All right,’ the runner said. ‘Anyway, you came to France—’ hearing it: a ship; there was a committee of at least one or two at Brest, even if they were just military, staff officers to expedite, not a special train maybe but at least one with precedence over everything not military; the house, palace, sonorous and empty, was already waiting for them in Paris. Even if the banner to go above the ducal gates was not ready yet, thought of yet into the words. But that was not long and the house, the palace, was not empty long either: first the women in black, the old ones and the young ones carrying babies, then the maimed men in trench-stained horizon blue, coming in to sit for a while on the hard temporary benches, not always even to see him since he was still occupied in trying to trace down his companion, his Mistairy, telling that too: from the Paris war office to the Department of State, to Downing Street to Whitehall and then out to Poperinghe, until the man’s whereabouts were ascertained at last: who (that Newmarket horse and its legend were known and remembered in Whitehall too) could have gone out as groom to the commander-in-chief himself’s horse if he had chosen, but enlisted instead into the Londoners until, having barely learned how to wrap his spiral putties, he found himself in a posting which would have left him marooned for the duration as groom-farrier-hostler in a troop of Guards cavalry had he not taught the sergeant in charge of the draft to shoot dice in the American fashion and so won his escape from him, and for two years now had been a private in a combat battalion of Northumberland Borderers.
‘Only when you finally found him, he barely spoke to you,’ the runner said.
‘He aint ready yet,’ the old Negro said. ‘We can wait. There’s plenty of time yet.’
‘We?’ the runner said. ‘You and God too?’
‘Yes. Even if it will be over next year.’
‘The war? This war? Did God tell you that?’
‘It’s all right. Laugh at Him. He can stand that too.’
‘What else can I do but laugh?’ the runner said. ‘Hadn’t He rather have that than the tears?’
‘He’s got room for both of them. They’re all the same to Him; He can grieve for both of them.’
‘Yes,’ the runner said. ‘Too much of it. Too many of them. Too often. There was another one last year, called the Somme; they give ribbons now not for being brave because all men are brave if you just frighten them enough. You must have heard of that one; you must have heard them too.’
‘I heard them too,’ the old Negro said.
‘Les Amis à la France de Tout le Monde,’ the runner said. ‘Just to believe, to hope. That little. So little. Just to sit together in the anguished room and believe and hope. And that’s enough? like the doctor when you’re ill: you know he cant cure you just by laying his hands on you and you dont expect him to: all you need is someone to say “Believe and hope. Be of good cheer”. But suppose it’s already too late for a doctor now; all that will serve now is a surgeon, someone already used to blood, up there where the blood already is.’
‘Then He would have thought of that too.’
‘Then why hasn’t He sent you up there, instead of here to live on hot food in clean bugless clothes in a palace?’
‘Maybe because He knows I aint brave enough,’ the old Negro said.
‘Would you go if He sent you?’
‘I would try,’ the old Negro said. ‘If I could do the work, it wouldn’t matter to Him or me neither whether I was brave.’
‘To believe and to hope,’ the runner said. ‘Oh yes, I walked through that room downstairs; I saw them; I was walking along the street and happened by simple chance to see that placard over the gate. I was going somewhere else, yet here I am too. But not to believe and hope. Because man can bear anything, provided he has something left, a little something left: his integrity as a creature tough and enduring enough not only not to hope but not even to believe in it and not even to miss its lack; to be tough and to endure until the flash, crash, whatever it will be, when he will no longer be anything and none of it will matter anymore, even the fact that he was tough and, until then, did endure.’
‘That’s right,’ the old Negro said, peaceful and serene, ‘maybe it is tomorrow you got to go back. So go on now and have your Paris while you got a little time.’
‘Aha,’ the runner said. ‘Ave Bacchus and Venus, morituri te salutant, eh? Wouldn’t you have to call that sin?’
‘Evil is a part of man, evil and sin and cowardice, the same as repentance and being brave. You got to believe in all of them, or believe in none of them. Believe that man is capable of all of them, or he aint capable of none. You can go out this way if you want to, without having to meet nobody.’
‘Thanks,’ the runner said. ‘Maybe what I need is to have to meet somebody. To believe. Not in anything: just to believe. To enter that room down there, not to escape from anything but to escape into something, to flee mankind for a little while. Not even to look at that banner because some of them probably cant even read it, but just to sit in the same room for a while with that affirmation, that promise, that hope. If I only could. You only could. Anybody only could. Do you know what the loneliest experience of all is? But of course you do: you just said so. It’s breathing.’
‘Send for me,’ the old Negro said.
‘Oh yes—if I only could.’
‘I know,’ the old Negro said. ‘You aint ready yet neither. But when you are, send for me.’
‘Are what?’ the runner said.
‘When you needs me.’
‘What can I need you for, when it will be over next year? All I’ve got to do is just stay alive.’
‘Send for me,’ the old Negro said.
‘Goodbye,’ the runner said.
Descending, retracing his steps, they were still there in the vast cathedral-like room, not only the original ones but the steady trickle of new arrivals, entering, not even to look at the lettered banner but just to sit for awhile inside the same walls with that innocent and invincible affirmation. And he
had been right: it was August now and there were American uniforms in France, not as combat units yet but singly, still learning: they had a captain and two subalterns posted to the battalion, to blood themselves on the old Somme names, preparatory to, qualifying themselves to, lead their own kind into the ancient familiar abbatoir; he thought: Oh yes, three more years and we will have exhausted Europe. Then we—hun and allies together—will transfer the whole business intact to the fresh trans-Atlantic pastures, the virgin American stage, like a travelling minstrel troupe.
Then it was winter; later, remembering it, it would seem to him that it might actually have been the anniversary of the Son of Man, a gray day and cold, the gray cobbles of that village Place de Ville gleaming and wimpled like the pebbles beneath the surface of a brook when he saw the small augmenting crowd and joined it too, from curiosity then, seeing across the damp khaki shoulders the small clump of battle-stained horizon blue whose obvious or at least apparent leader bore a French corporal’s insigne, the faces alien and strange and bearing an identical lostness, like—some of them at least—those of men who have reached a certain point or place or situation by simple temerity and who no longer have any confidence even in the temerity, and three or four of which were actually foreign faces reminding him of the ones the French Foreign Legion was generally believed to have recruited out of European jails. And if they had been talking once, they stopped as soon as he came up and was recognised, the faces, the heads above the damp khaki shoulders turning to recognise him and assume at once that expression tentative, reserved and alert with which he had become familiar ever since the word seeped down (probably through a corporal-clerk) from the orderly room that he had been an officer once.
So he came away. He learned in the orderly room that they were correctly within military protocol: they had passes, to visit the homes of one or two or three of them in villages inside the British zone. Then from the battalion padre he even began to divine why. Not learn why: divine it. ‘It’s a staff problem,’ the padre said. ‘It’s been going on for a year or two. Even the Americans are probably familiar with them by now. They just appear, with their passes all regularly issued and visa-ed, in troop rest-billets. They are known, and of course watched. The trouble is, they have done no——’ and stopped, the runner watching him.
A Fable Page 22
