The Eighth Day (17 page)

“It's a fifty-dollar horse, what with that saddle. Give that corn to Win Dinkler—runs the store at Brennan's Point. Tell him it comes from Mrs. Hodge. Tell him I said to fix you up on one of those Swede barges.”

She looked at him in silence for a moment. Only once before had he seen such eyes—his grandmother's. “Keep your mouth closed. Don't go shooting anybody, unless you have to. Take off your hat.”

He did. She nodded, laughing in a low rumble. “Coming on. You'll not need to wash your head for a week or two.”

Ashley put his hand on her wrist. He asked urgently, “After a while . . . ? could you think of some way to get a word to my wife?”

“Start getting down into that boat.—To torment her worse? Say to yourself: seven years. Leave impatience to boys. Goodbye. Run along.”

He started down the steps. She added: “Trust women. Men won't be much help to you from now on.”

She turned and went back to her house.

Ashley spent the next four days in and around Dinkler's store, which was part grocery, part chandlery, and part saloon. It sold flea and tick powder. Barges came and went. When Dinkler's was full of rivermen he stayed in his shed at the water's edge. The satchel Mrs. Hodge had given him contained socks, underwear, shirts, soap, a half-used tube of salve, a razor, a frayed copy of Robert Burns's poems, and a suit of church-going black, of old-fashioned cut and for a taller man. Thrust into the pocket was an old envelope addressed to Mrs. Tolland Hodge, Giles, Illinois. He did not finish the letter that began “Dear Bet.” He decided that his new name was James Tolland, a Canadian. On the fifth day Win Dinkler put him on a Norwegian barge, forty cents a day and another twenty cents for all the akvavit you could drink. Life on a barge headed downstream is of an almost intolerable boredom. The men played cards. He won back half his passage and half his akvavit. He made friends. In their language the rivermen called him the “young one.” To explain himself he told a number of lies and was allowed to resume his taciturnity. On clear nights he slept under the stars on the odorous boards. At table he repeatedly turned the conversation toward the subject of New Orleans. He learned the names of a number of
réunions
where fairly clean cards were played far into the night. He was warned to avoid a certain café, Aux Marins, which was frequented by smugglers, ammunition runners, and the like—men without “papers.” He heard a great deal about the importance of “papers.” Just when he was beginning to be concerned about the problem of eluding the port inspectors the solution was offered to him. Twenty miles north of the city they could expect a boat to draw up beside the barge. There would be long chaffering. They would be offered clandestine rum, mash,
sapot
, and aphrodisiac drugs. His moment came; as the boat was leaving, Ashley seized his carpetbag, jumped into the boat, shouted goodbye to his friends and was rowed ashore.

In New Orleans Ashley seldom left his room by day. He wore his overalls and went to no pains to keep them neat. He dragged his fingers through his thick hair and even rubbed grime on his face. He was a Canadian seaman looking for a job. He changed his lodgings every four days, never moving far from the neighborhood of Gallatin and Gasquet streets. There was nothing about him to arouse suspicion, but he was everywhere an object of curiosity and he knew it. But for a long time he was unaware that a preposterous thing had befallen his appearance. The curly straw-colored sidewhiskers followed the line of his jaw, descending to a short beard. Other curls played about his wide forehead. The commonplace features of John Ashley of Coaltown had taken on a strange distinction. He had come to resemble one of the Apostles—a John or a James—as they are pictured in art, particularly in bad art, on name-day cards, and votive medals, or as wax or plaster statues. People stopped to stare at him; later, in the southern hemisphere, passersby furtively crossed themselves. Ashley did not know this, or that the police—alert for the bloodthirsty assassin of Illinois who had shot his best friend in the back of the head and had fought his way, single-handed, through a posse of ten armed men—gave no second glance at this pious-looking youth.

Every night at eleven he pushed open the door of Aux Marins, murmured “
Bon soir
” cheerfully, and sat down with his newspapers. He often laid out a pack of cards and studied the card games he had been taught on the raft. Jean-le-Borgne suffered from insomnia. Night after night he postponed the hour when he must climb the circular iron staircase to wait for sleep beside his dropsical wife. He watched his Canadian customer at his games and proposed that they play together. It became custom. The stakes were small. Luck favored them in alternation. Ashley learned
la manille, les trois valets
, and
piquet.
There was at first little conversation, but the silences became congenial. Finally Ashley's patience was rewarded. He learned of a certain ship that would be leaving—in a week or two, or maybe a month or two—for Panama from a certain abandoned and decaying dock on an island in the Delta. Its cargo would be, ostensibly, rice.

Ashley needed money. He had the black suit altered to fit him. He put on a high stock collar. He presented himself at La Réunion du Tapis Vert and at La Dame de Pique, paid his door fee, and joined the tables. These clubs were frequented by small merchants, in slavery to cards, and by the younger sons of plantation owners who had no wish to play under their fathers' eyes at the more fashionable clubs. For the first two hours Ashley neither won nor lost; toward four in the morning he would occasionally have a sudden run of luck. When he resorted to cheating it was with limited ambition and great circumspection.

Ashley was a man of faith and did not know it; he was also a gifted mathematician—perhaps with a touch of genius—and did not know it. He was a born card player, though he had not played in twenty years. In the fraternity house at his engineering school in Hoboken, New Jersey, there had seldom been fewer than six games in progress, night and day. Ashley had no competitive sense and no need of money, but he took great interest in the play of numbers. He drew up charts analyzing the elements of probability in the various games. He had a memory for numbers and symbols. He had applied himself there to not winning overmuch and—since he was president of the fraternity—to preventing any other player from doing so. On the barge, at play with Jean-le-Borgne, and here at the clubs he learned new games; alone in his room he studied their structure.

Men of faith and men of genius have this in common: they know (observe and remember) many things they are not conscious of knowing. They are attentive to relationships, recurrences, patterns, and “laws.” There is no impurity in this operation of their minds—neither self-advancement nor pride nor self-justification. The nets they fling are wider and deeper than they are fully aware of. Clarity is a noble quality of mind, but those who primarily demand clarity of themselves miss many a truth which—with patience—might become clear at some future time. Minds that are impatient for clarity—or even reasonableness—become gradually narrower and dryer. A few years after these events a relatively obscure scientist, working in a bureau of weights and measures in Switzerland, was searching—as were many others—for a formula that would express the nature of energy. He tells us that it appeared to him in a dream. He awoke and reconsidered; he laughed, for it was of a laughable self-evidence. An ancient philosopher ascribes knowledge to recollection: the delighted surprise at learning what one already knows. Ashley had no idea why he was so accomplished a gambler. He relied upon a whole series of fetishes, irrational promptings and superstitions, and was ashamed of them.

Faith is an ever-widening pool of clarity, fed from springs beyond the margin of consciousness. We all know more than we know we know.

His sailing was delayed. He waited.

Several nights a week, in grimy overalls, he explored the city. He renewed a lapsed curiosity about the lives of others. His interest was centered on the relationships in the family. With the coming on of night he set out on long walks. He became an impenitent eavesdropper. He followed married couples; he particularly lingered where he could overhear the conversation between a father and his older son or daughter. Everywhere he attempted to appraise the quality of a relationship. He turned about the homes of the prosperous as though he were planning to rob them. Most attentively he immersed himself in the lives of those in his own quarter. He came to feel like some husband, father, or uncle who returns unrecognized after years of absence—an Enoch Arden, a Ulysses beggar at his own hearth. He was driven by a need to persuade himself of the happiness of others. He shrank from the sights and sounds of brutality and disease, but, by some unhappy chance, he came upon them everywhere. In the mines at Coaltown he had learned to distinguish the cough of tuberculosis; he now heard it on all sides and saw the red spittle on the pavements. He had thrust upon him the marks of other diseases, also—the one-eyed, the ravaged noses. Everywhere prostitutes patrolled their exclusive territory, as bees are said to do. He did not venture into the half-mile square of Storeyville—famous in song, parterre of youth and beauty, selected and fostered from among thousands. Here about him were women who could never enter Storeyville or who had outlived their service there. At dusk the world fed; there were sounds of laughter and contentment. This was followed by an hour of strolling, of sitting on galleries and front steps, of low-voiced courtships, of measured discussions in the cafés—lofty intelligences discussing politics. By ten-thirty, however, the mood changed. An ominous current invaded the city. By midnight sudden cries filled the air, blows, pursuits, overturned furniture, sobbing and whimpering. In Coaltown the report that men—particularly the miners—beat their wives was matter for laughter. Here Ashley saw them. In a narrow alley he came upon a man striking a woman, blow after blow; she sank gradually to her knees, taunting him as no father, as a clown of a father. Another man was beating a woman's head monotonously against the wall of a staircase. He saw children cowering under blows. A girl of six rushed from a doorway and leapt into his arms like a squirrel on a treetop. A man followed her, his head lowered, a table leg in his hand. All three fell into the gutter. Ashley hurried away. A hunted man is in no position to defend the persecuted. He longed to be at sea, to be on a mountain peak, on the Andes.

He waited.

He descended.

He ventured into other cafés. He spent an evening at Joly's, at Bresson's, and many an evening at Quédebac's. The underworld has its hierarchies. Ashley was a pariah and must accept his caste. One stratum above him was Bresson's—the resort of thieves, burglars, pickpockets, small-time confidence men, the touts at races and cockfights. These were active eager-eyed men, full of plans, heavy drinkers, loud talkers, boisterous liars. Whenever the police—in or out of uniform—strolled among the tables at Bresson's, the habitués neither lowered their voices nor glanced up. Their remarks took on a sarcastic edge; they pretended they were unaware of the intruders. These were convivial men and they admitted only convivial men to their number. Ashley was not a convivial and dared not expose himself to their sharp curiosity. Below him was the rock bottom of social life—Joly's—the pimps' café, which no other man ever knowingly enters. Pimps foregather only with one another.

In his ignorance Ashley spent an evening at Joly's. Toward the end of it Joly approached him and asked him in a low voice, “Are you from St. Louis?”

“No.”

“I thought you was Herb Benson from St. Louis? You're in the
tambour?
”

Ashley didn't know why he should be in any “drum,” but he compliantly said that he was.

“Where did you work?”

“Up in Illinois.”

“Chicago?”

“Near it.”

“Great in Chicago, eh? Great?”

“Yes.”

“Well, well! Baba's Louis had to go up the river. You know Baba? She's the one just went out—the fat one. She told me to tell you it's all right, if you'd take care of her. She'd bring you thirty dollars a week—more, if you'd jump with it.”

“Why would she bring me thirty dollars?”

Joly's breath stuck in his windpipe. His eyes started out of his head. “Get up and get out of here! Get out of here quick! Get! Get!”

Ashley stared at him, put down a coin, and went out the door. Joly flung the money after him down the street.

Ashley's stratum was that of those who had failed in both the orderly and disorderly life. Their café was Quédebac's—men returned from long prison sentences, unlucky housebreakers, unlucky gamblers, ex-pimps, ex-touts, spiritless men, many with tremulous hands and tremulous cheeks. They fed in the sheds at the back doors of convents. Some, intermittently, washed dishes in restaurants; some, intermittently, earned their living at the dismalest of all professions—were orderlies in hospitals. Ashley heard from them of their work and thought of applying for it. He was ready to master his repulsion; he was afraid of nothing except himself. Fastidiousness is a timidity. He did not know if hospitals demanded to see the “papers” of orderlies. In the meantime he was searching for Spanish speakers; he found one and paid for his lessons in drink. Women came and went, the last rejects of their profession.

“M'ssieu James, will you buy me a
verte?
” (Absinthe.)

“I can't afford it tonight, Toinette. You can have a beer.”

“Thank you, M'ssieu James.”

The word “reprobate” is used loosely; this was the world of reprobates. All speech was obscene, but not from any intention to startle or even to convey emphasis. Reprobates are incapable of anger; they have lost the right to it. They have been judged and they agree with their judges. They tell few lies. They have nothing to hide and little to gain. They are generous to one another, but not from any largeness of heart. Abjection devaluates money.