“All right,” Goodyhay said. “Anybody that thinks all he’s got to do is sit on his stern and have salvation come down on him like a cloudburst or something, don’t belong in here. You got to get up on your feet and hunt it down until you can get a-hold of it and then hold it, even fighting off if you have to. And if you can’t find it, then by God make it. Make a salvation. He will pass and then earn the right to grab it and hold on and fight off too if you have to but anyway hold it, hell and high water be damned—” when a voice, a man, interrupted:
“Tell it again, Joe. Go on. Tell it again.”
“What?” Goodyhay said.
“Tell it again,” the man said. “Go on.”
“I tried to,” Goodyhay said. “You all heard me. I can’t tell it.”
“Yes you can,” the man said; now there were women’s voices too:
“Yes, Joe. Tell it,” and he, Mink, still watching the hands not clenched but just closed on the plank, the coldly seething anchorite’s eyes — the eyes of a fifth-century hermit looking at nothing from the entrance of his Mesopotamian cave — the body rigid in an immobility like a tremendous strain beneath a weight.
“All right,” Goodyhay said. “I was laying there. I was all right, everything snafu so I was all right. You know how it is in water when you don’t have any weight at all, just laying there with the light coming way down from up on top like them lattice blinds when they shake and shiver slow in a breeze without making any sound at all. Just laying there watching my hands floating along without me even having to hold them up, with the shadow of them lattice blinds winking and shaking across them, and my feet and legs too, no weight at all, nowhere to have to go or march, not even needing to breathe, not even needing to be asleep or nothing: just all right.
When there He was standing over me, looking like any other shavetail just out of a foxhole, maybe a little older, except he didn’t have a hat, bucket: just standing there bareheaded with the shadow of the lattice running up and down him, smoking a cigarette. ‘Fall in, soldier,’ He said.
“ ’I can’t,’ I says. Because I knew that as long as I laid still, I would be all right. But that once I let myself start thinking about moving, or tried to, I would find out I couldn’t. But what the hell, why should I? I was all right. I had had it. I had it made. I was sacked up. Let them do whatever they ….ing wanted to with their ….ing war up on top.
“ ’That’s once,’ He said. ‘You ain’t got but three times. You, the Top Soldier, saying can’t. At Château-Thierry and St-Mihiel the company would have called you the Top Soldier. Do they still do that in the Corps on Guadalcanal?’
“ ’Yes,’ I says.
“ ’All right, Top Soldier,’ He said. ‘Fall in.’ So I got up. ‘At ease,’ He said. ‘You see?’ He said.
“ ’I thought I couldn’t,’ I says. ‘I don’t believe I could.’
“ ’Sure,’ He said. ‘What else do we want with you. We’re already full up with folks that know they can but don’t, since because they already know they can, they don’t have to do it. What we want are folks that believe they can’t, and then do it. The other kind don’t need us and we don’t need them. I’ll say more: we don’t even want them in the outfit. They won’t be accepted; we won’t even have them under our feet. If it ain’t worth that much, it ain’t worth anything. Right?’
“ ’Yes sir,’ I says.
“ ’You can say Sir up there too if you want,’ He said. ‘It’s a free country. Nobody gives a damn. You all right now?’
“ ’Yes sir,’ I says.
“ ’TenSHUN!’ He said. And I made them pop, mud or no mud. ‘About-FACE!’ He said. And He never saw one smarter than that one neither. ‘Forward MARCH!’ He said. And I had already stepped off when He said, ‘Halt!’ and I stopped. ‘You’re going to leave him laying there,’ He said. And there he was, I had forgot about him, laying there as peaceful and out of it too as you please — the damned little bastard that had gone chicken at the exact wrong time, like they always do, turned the wheel a-loose and tried to duck and caused the whole damn mess; luck for all of us he never had a …ing bar on his shoulder so he could have …ed up the whole detail and done for all of us.
“ ’I can’t carry him too,’ I says.
“ ’That’s two times,’ He said. ‘You’ve got one more. Why not go on and use it now and get shut of it for good?’ ”
“ ’I can’t carry him too,’ I says.
“ ’Fine,’ He said. ‘That’s three and finished. You won’t ever have to say can’t again. Because you’re a special case; they gave you three times. But there’s a general order coming down today that after this nobody has but one. Pick him up.’ So I did. ‘Dismiss,’ He said. And that’s all. I told you I can’t tell it. I was just there. I can’t tell it.” He, Mink, watching them all, himself alien, not only unreconciled but irreconcilable: not contemptuous, because he was just waiting, not impatient because even if he were in Memphis right this minute, at ten or eleven or whatever o’clock it was on Sunday morning, he would still have almost twenty-four hours to get through somehow before he could move on to the next step.
He just watched them: the two oldish couples, man and wife of course, farmers obviously, without doubt tenant farmers come up from the mortgaged bank- or syndicate-owned cotton plantation from which the son had been drafted three or four or five years ago to make that far from home that sacrifice, old, alien too, too old for this, unreconciled by the meagre and arid tears which were less of tears than blisters; none of the white people actually watching as the solitary Negro woman got up from her back bench and walked down the aisle to where the young woman’s soiled yellow hat was crushed into the crook of her elbow like a child in a child’s misery and desolation, the white people on the bench making way for the Negro woman to sit down beside the young white woman and put her arm around her; Goodyhay still standing, his arms propped on the closed fists on the plank, the cold seething eyes not even closed, speaking exactly as he had spoken three nights ago while the three of them knelt on the kitchen floor: “Save us, Christ.
The poor sons of bitches.” Then Goodyhay was looking at him. “You, there,” Goodyhay said. “Stand up.” Mink did so. “He’s trying to get home. He hasn’t put in but one full day, but he needs ten dollars to get home on. He hasn’t been home in thirty-eight years. He needs nine bucks more. How about it?”
“I’ll take it,” the man in the officer’s cap said. “I won thirty-four in a crap game last night. He can have ten of that.”
“I said nine,” Goodyhay said. “He’s got one dollar coming. Give him the ten and I’ll give you one. He says he’s got to go to Memphis first. Anybody going in tonight?”
“I am,” another said.
“All right,” Goodyhay said. “Anybody want to sing?”
That was how he saw Memphis again under the best, the matchless condition for one who hadn’t seen it in . . . He could figure that. He was twenty years old when he got married. Three times before that he had wrenched wrung enough money from the otherwise unpaid labour he did on the tenant farm of the kinsman who had raised him from orphanhood, to visit the Memphis brothels. The last visit was in the same year of his marriage. He was twenty-six years old when he went to Parchman. Twenty dollars from twenty-six dollars was six dollars. He was in Parchman thirty-eight years.
Six dollars and thirty-eight dollars was forty-four dollars to see Memphis again not only after forty-four years but under the matchless condition: at night, the dark earth on either hand and ahead already random and spangled with the neon he had never seen before, and in the distance the low portentous glare of the city itself, he sitting on the edge of the seat as a child sits, almost as small as a child, peering ahead as the car rushed, merging into one mutual spangled race bearing toward, as though by the acceleration of gravity or suction, the distant city; suddenly off to the right a train fled dragging a long string of lighted windows as rapid and ephemeral as dream; he became aware of a convergence like the spokes of a gigantic dark wheel lying on its hub, along which sped dense and undeviable as ants, automobiles and what they told him were called buses as if all the earth
