Soldiers Pay (31 page)

The other guffawed again, flattered. “Ain't she, though? Make her myself, and she's good. You'll git used to it, though. Take another.” He drank it like water, with unction.

“Dam'f I do. I got to get to town.”

“Take a little sup. I'll put you on the road all right.”

If two drinks make me feel this good I'll scream if I take another, he thought. But his friend insisted and he drank again. “Let's go,” he said, returning the jug.

The man carrying “her” circled the lake. Gilligan blundered behind him, among cypress knees, in occasional mud. After a time he regained some control over his body and they came to a break in the willows and a road slashed into the red sandy soil.

“Here you be, friend. Jest keep tight to the toad. 'Tain't over a mile.”

“All right. Much obliged to you. You've sure got a son-of-a-gun of a drink there.”

“She's all right, ain't she?” the other agreed.

“Well, good night,” Gilligan extended his hand and the other grasped it formally and limply and pumped it once from a rigid elbow.

“Take keer of yourself.”

“I'll try to,” Gilligan promised. The other's gangling malaria-ridden figure faded again among the willows. The road gashed across the land, stretched silent and empty before him, and below the east was a rumorous promise of moonlight. He trod in dust between dark trees like spilled ink upon the pale clear page of the sky, and soon the moon was more than a promise. He saw the rim of it sharpening the tips of trees, saw soon the whole disc, bland as a saucer. Whippoorwills were like lost coins among the trees and one blundered awkwardly from the dust almost under his feet. The whisky died away in the loneliness, soon his temporarily mislaid despair took its place again.

After a while passing beneath crossed skeletoned arms on a pole be crossed the railroad and followed a lane between negro cabins, smelling the intimate odour of negroes. The cabins were dark but from them came soft meaningless laughter and slow unemphatic voices cheerful yet somehow filled with all the old despairs of time and breath.

Under the moon, quavering with the passion of spring and flesh among whitewashed walls papered inwardly with old newspapers, something pagan using the white man's conventions as it used his clothing, hushed and powerful not knowing its own power:

“Sweet chariot . . . comin' fer to ca'y me home. . . .”

Three young men passed him, shuffling in the dust, aping their own mute shadows in the dusty road, sharp with the passed sweat of labour: “You may be fas', but you can't las'; cause yo' mommer go' slow you down.”

He trod on with the moon in his face, seeing the cupolaed clock squatting like a benignant god on the courthouse against the sky, staring across the town with four faces. He passed yet more cabins where sweet mellow voices called from door to door. A dog bayed the moon, clear and sorrowful, and a voice cursed it in soft syllables.

“ . . . sweet chariot, comin' fer to ca'y me home . . . yes, Jesus, comin' fer to ca'y me hoooooome. . . .”

The church loomed a black shadow with a silver roof and he crossed the lawn, passing beneath slumbrous ivied walls. In the garden the mockingbird that lived in the magnolia rippled the silence, and along the moony wall of the rectory, from ledge to ledge, something crawled shapelessly. What in hell, thought Gilligan, seeing it pause at Emmy's window.

He leaped flower beds swiftly and noiselessly. Here was a convenient gutter and Jones did not hear him until he had almost reached the window to which the other clung. They regarded each other precariously, the one clinging to the window, the other to the glitter.

“What are you trying to do?” Gilligan asked.

“Climb up here a little further and I'll show you,” Jones told him snarling his yellow teeth.

“Come away from there, fellow.”

“Damn my soul, if here ain't the squire of dames again. We all hoped you had gone off with that black woman.”

“Are you coming down, or am I coming up there and throw you down?”

“I don't know: am I? Or are you?”

For reply Gilligan heaved himself up, grasping the window ledge. Jones, clinging, tried to kick him in the face but Gilligan caught his foot, releasing his grasp on the gutter. For a moment they swung like a great pendulum against the side of the house, then Jones's hold on the window was torn loose and they plunged together into a bed of tulips. Jones was first on his feet and kicking Gilligan in the side he fled. Gilligan sprang after him and overtook him smartly.

This time it was hyacinths. Jones fought like a woman, kicking, clawing, biting, but Gilligan hauled him to his feet and knocked him down. Jones rose again and was felled once more. This time he crawled and grasping Gilligan's knees pulled him down. Jones kicked himself free and rising fled anew. Gilligan sat up contemplating pursuit, but gave it up as he watched Jones's unwieldy body leaping away through the moonlight.

Jones doubled the church at a good speed and let himself out at the gate. He saw no pursuit so his pace slackened to a walk. Beneath quiet elms his breath became easier. Branches motionlessly leafed were still against stars, and mopping his face and neck with his handkerchief he walked along a deserted street. At a corner he stopped to dip his handkerchief in a trough for watering horses, bathing his face and hands. The water reduced the pain of the blows he had received and as he paced fatly on from shadow to moonlight and then to shadow again, dogged by his own skulking and shapeless shadow, the calm still night washed his recent tribulation completely from his mind.

From shadowed porches beyond oaks and maples, elms and magnolias, from beyond screening vines starred with motionless pallid blossoms came snatches of hushed talk and sweet broken laughter. . . . Male and female created He them, young. Jones was young, too. “Yet ah, that Spring should vanish with the Rose! That Youth's sweet-scented Manuscript should close! The Nightingale that in the Branches sang, Ah, whence, and whither flown again, who knows! . . .” Wish I had a girl tonight, he sighed.

The moon was serene: “Ah, Moon of my Delight, that knows't no wane. The Moon of Heav'n is rising once again: How oft hereafter rising shall she look Through this same Garden after me—in vain!” But how spring itself is imminent with autumn, with death: “As autumn and the moon of death draw nigh The sad long days of summer herein lie And she too warm in sorrow 'neath the trees Turns to night and weeps, and longs to die.” And in the magic of spring and youth and moonlight Jones raised his clear sentimental tenor.

“Sweetheart, sweetheart, sweetheart.”

His slow shadow blotted out the pen strokes of iron pickets but when he had passed, the pen strokes were still there upon the dark soft grass. Clumps of petunia and cannas broke the smooth stretch of lawn and above the bronze foliage of magnolias the serene columns of a white house rose more
beautiful in simplicity than death.

Jones leaned his elbows on a gate, staring at his lumpy shadow at his feet, smelling cape jasmine, hearing a mockingbird somewhere, somewhere. . . . Jones sighed. It was a sigh of pure ennui.

VII

On the rector's desk was a letter addressed to Mr. Julian Lowe,—— St., San Francisco, Cal., telling him of her marriage and of her husband's death. It had been returned by the post office department stamped, “Removed. Present address unknown.”

VIII

Gilligan, sitting in the hyacinth bed, watched Jones's flight. “He ain't so bad for a fat one,” he admitted, rising. “Emmy'll sure have to sleep single tonight.” The mockingbird in the magnolia, as though it had waited for hostilities to cease, sang again.

“What in hell have you got to sing about?” Gilligan shook his fist at the tree. The bird ignored him and he brushed dark earth from his clothes. Anyway, he soliloquised, I feel better. Wish I could have held the bastard, though. He passed from the garden with a last look at the ruined hyacinth bed. The rector, looming, met him at the corner of the house, beneath the hushed slumbrous passion of the silver tree.

“That you, Joe? I thought I heard noises in the garden.”

“You did. I was trying to beat hell out of that fat one, but I couldn't hold the so—I couldn't hold him. He lit out.”

“Fighting? My dear boy!”

“It wasn't no fight; he was too busy getting away. It takes two folks to fight, padre.”

“Fighting doesn't settle anything, Joe. I'm sorry you resorted to it. Was anyone hurt?”

“No, worse luck,” Gilligan replied ruefully, thinking of his soiled clothes, and his abortive vengeance.

“I am glad of that. But boys will fight, eh, Joe? Donald fought in his day.”

“You damn right he did, reverend. I bet he was a son-of-a-gun in his day.”

The rector's heavy lined face took a flared match, between his cupped hands he sucked at his pipe. He walked slowly in the moonlight across the lawn, toward the gate. Gilligan followed. “I feel restless tonight,” he explained. “Shall we walk a while?”

They paced slowly beneath arched and moon-bitten trees, scuffing their feet in shadows of leaves. Under the moon lights in houses were yellow futilities.

“Well, Joe, things are back to normal again. People come and go, but Emmy and I seem to be like the biblical rocks. What are your plans?”

Gilligan lit a cigarette with ostentatiousness, hiding his embarrassment. “Well, padre, to tell the truth, I ain't got any. If it's all the same to you I think I'll stay on with you a while longer.”

“And welcome, dear boy,” the rector answered heartily. Then he stopped and faced the other, keenly. “God bless you, Joe, Was it on my account you decided to stay?”

Gilligan averted his face guiltily. “Well, padre——”

“Not at all. I won't have it. You have already done all you can. This is no place for a young man, Joe.”

The rector's bald forehead and his blobby nose were intersecting planes in the moonlight. His eyes were cavernous. Gilligan knew suddenly all the old sorrows of the race, black or yellow or white, and he found himself telling the rector all about her.

“Tut, tut,” the divine said, “this is bad, Joe.” He lowered himself hugely to the edge of the sidewalk and Gilligan sat beside him. “Circumstance moves in marvellous ways, Joe.”

“I thought you'd a said God, reverend.”

“God is circumstance, Joe. God is in this life. We know nothing about the next. That will take care of itself in good time. The Kingdom of God is in man's own heart,' the Book says.”

“Ain't that a kind of funny doctrine for a parson to get off?”

“Remember, I am an old man, Joe. Too old for bickering or bitterness. We make our own heaven or hell in this world. Who knows; perhaps when we die we may not be required to go anywhere nor do anything at all. That would be heaven.”

“Or other people make our heaven and hell for us.”

The divine put his heavy arm across Gilligan's shoulder. “You are suffering from disappointment. But this will pass away. The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten. How does it go? ‘Men have died and worms have eaten them, but not for love.' No, no,” as Gilligan would have interrupted, “I know that is an unbearable belief, but all truth is unbearable. Do we not both suffer at this moment from the facts of division and death?”

Gilligan knew shame. Bothering him now, me with a fancied disappointment! The rector spoke again. “I think it would be a good idea for you to stay, after all, until you make your future plans. So let's consider it closed, eh? Suppose we walk farther—unless you are tired?”

Gilligan rose in effusive negation. After a while the quiet tree-tunnelled street became a winding road, and leaving the town behind them they descended and then mounted a hill. Cresting the hill beneath the moon, seeing the world breaking away from them into dark, moon-silvered ridges above valleys where mist hung slumbrous, they passed a small house, sleeping among climbing roses. Beyond it an orchard slept the night away in symmetrical rows, squatting and pregnant. “Willard has good fruit,” the divine murmured.

The road dropped on again descending between reddish gashes, and across a level moon-lit space, broken by a clump of saplings, came a pure quivering chord of music wordless and far away.

“They are holding services. Negroes,” the rector explained. They walked on in the dust, passing neat tidy houses, dark with slumber. An occasional group of negroes passed them, bearing lighted lanterns that jetted vain little flames futilely into the moonlight. “No one knows why they do that,” the divine replied to Gilligan's question. “Perhaps it is to light their churches with.”

The singing drew nearer and nearer; at last, crouching among a clump of trees beside the road, they saw the shabby church with its canting travesty of a spire. Within it was a soft glow of kerosene serving only to make the darkness and the heat thicker, making thicker the imminence of sex after harsh labour along the mooned land; and from it welled the crooning submerged passion of the dark race. It was nothing, it was everything; then it swelled to an ecstasy, taking the white man's words as readily as it took his remote God and made a personal Father of Him.

Feed Thy Sheep, O Jesus, All the longing of mankind for a Oneness with Something, somewhere. Feed Thy Sheep, O Jesus. . . . The rector and Gilligan stood side by side in the dusty road. The road went on under the moon, vaguely dissolving without perspective. Worn-out red-gutted fields were now alternate splashes of soft black and silver; trees had each a silver nimbus, save those moon ward from them, which were sharp as bronze.

Feed Thy Sheep, O Jesus. The voices rose full and soft. There was no organ: no organ was needed as above the harmonic passion of bass and baritone soared a clear soprano of women's voices like a flight of gold and heavenly birds. They stood together in the dust, the rector in his shapeless black, and Gilligan in his new hard serge, listening, seeing the shabby church become beautiful with mellow longing, passionate and sad. Then the singing died, fading away along the mooned land inevitable with tomorrow and sweat, with sex and death and damnation; and they turned townward under the moon, feeling dust in their shoes.