The Wild Palms: [If I Forget Thee Jerusalem] Page 3

  The second convict was short and plump. Almost hairless, he was quite white. He looked like something exposed to light by turning over rotting logs or planks and he too carried (though not in his eyes like the first convict) a sense of burning and impotent outrage. So it did not show on him and hence none knew it was there. But then nobody knew very much about him, including the people who had sent him here. His outrage was directed at no printed word but at the paradoxical fact that he had been forced to come here of his own free choice and will. He had been forced to choose between the Mississippi State penal farm and the Federal Penitentiary at Atlanta, and the fact that he, who resembled a hairless and pallid slug, had chosen the out-of-doors and the sunlight was merely another manifestation of the close-guarded and solitary enigma of his character, as something recognisable roils momentarily into view from beneath stagnant and opaque water, then sinks again. None of his fellow prisoners knew what his crime had been, save that he was in for a hundred and ninety-nine years—this incredible and impossible period of punishment or restraint itself carrying a vicious and fabulous quality which indicated that his reason for being here was such that the very men, the paladins and pillars of justice and equity who had sent him here had during that moment become blind apostles not of mere justice but of all human decency, blind instruments not of equity but of all human outrage and vengeance, acting in a savage personal concert, judge lawyer and jury, which certainly abrogated justice and possibly even law. Possibly only the Federal and State’s attorneys knew what the crime actually was. There had been a woman in it and a stolen automobile transported across a state line, a filling station robbed and the attendant shot to death. There had been a second man in the car at the time and anyone could have looked once at the convict (as the two attorneys did) and known he would not even have had the synthetic courage of alcohol to pull trigger on anyone. But he and the woman and the stolen car had been captured while the second man, doubtless the actual murderer, had escaped, so that, brought to bay at last in the State’s Attorney’s office, harried, dishevelled and snarling, the two grimly implacable and viciously gleeful attorneys in his front and the now raging woman held by two policemen in the anteroom in his rear, he was given his choice. He could be tried in Federal Court under the Mann Act and for the automobile, that is, by electing to pass through the anteroom where the woman raged he could take his chances on the lesser crime in Federal Court, or by accepting a sentence for manslaughter in the State Court he would be permitted to quit the room by a back entrance, without having to pass the woman. He had chosen; he stood at the Bar and heard a judge (who looked down at him as if the District Attorney actually had turned over a rotten plank with his toe and exposed him) sentence him to a hundred and ninety-nine years at the State Farm. Thus (he had ample leisure too; they had tried to teach him to plow and had failed, they had put him in the blacksmith shop and the foreman trusty himself had asked to have him removed: so that now, in a long apron like a woman, he cooked and swept and dusted in the deputy wardens’ barracks) he too mused at times with that sense of impotence and outrage though it did not show on him as on the first convict since he leaned on no halted broom to do it and so none knew it was there.

  It was this second convict who, toward the end of April, began to read aloud to the others from the daily newspapers when, chained ankle to ankle and herded by armed guards, they had come up from the fields and had eaten supper and were gathered in the bunkhouse. It was the Memphis newspaper which the deputy wardens had read at breakfast; the convict read aloud from it to his companions who could have had but little active interest in the outside world, some of whom could not have read it for themselves at all and did not even know where the Ohio and Missouri river basins were, some of whom had never even seen the Mississippi river although for past periods ranging from a few days to ten and twenty and thirty years (and for future periods ranging from a few months to life) they had plowed and planted and eaten and slept beneath the shadow of the levee itself, knowing only that there was water beyond it from hearsay and because now and then they heard the whistles of steamboats from beyond it, and during the last week or so had seen the stacks and pilot houses moving along the sky sixty feet above their heads.

  But they listened, and soon even those who like the taller convict had probably never before seen more water than a horse pond would hold knew what thirty feet on a river gauge at Cairo or Memphis meant and could (and did) talk glibly of sandboils. Perhaps what actually moved them were the accounts of the conscripted levee gangs, mixed blacks and whites working in double shifts against the steadily rising water; stories of men, even though they were negroes, being forced like themselves to do work for which they received no other pay than coarse food and a place in a mudfloored tent to sleep on—stories, pictures, which emerged from the shorter convict’s reading voice: the mudsplashed white men with the inevitable shotguns, the antlike lines of negroes carrying sandbags, slipping and crawling up the steep face of the revetment to hurl their futile ammuntion into the face of a flood and return for more. Or perhaps it was more than this. Perhaps they watched the approach of the disaster with that same amazed and incredulous hope of the slaves—the lions and bears and elephants, the grooms and bathmen and pastrycooks—who watched the mounting flames of Rome from Ahenobarbus’ gardens. But listen they did and presently it was May and the warden’s newspaper began to talk in headlines two inches tall—those black staccato slashes of ink which, it would almost seem, even the illiterate should be able to read: Crest Passes Memphis at Midnight. 4000 Homeless in White River Basin. Governor Calls out National Guard Martial Law Declared in Following Counties. Red Cross Train with Secretary Hoover Leaves Washington Tonight; then, three evenings later (It had been raining all day—not the vivid brief thunderous downpours of April and May, but the slow steady gray rain of November and December before a cold north wind. The men had not gone to the fields at all during the day, and the very second-hand optimism of the almost twenty-four hour old news seemed to contain its own refutation.): Crest Now Below Memphis. 22,000 Refugees Safe at Vicksburg. Army Engineers Say Levees Will Hold.

  “I reckon that means it will bust tonight,” one convict said.

  “Well, maybe this rain will hold on until the water gets here,” a second said. They all agreed to this because what they meant, the living unspoken thought among them, was that if the weather cleared, even though the levees broke and the flood moved in upon the Farm itself, they would have to return to the fields and work, which they would have had to do. There was nothing paradoxical in this, although they could not have expressed the reason for it which they instinctively perceived: that the land they farmed and the substance they produced from it belonged neither to them who worked it nor to those who forced them at guns’ point to do so, that as far as either—convicts or guards—were concerned, it could have been pebbles they put into the ground and papier-mache cotton- and corn-sprouts which they thinned. So it was that, what between the sudden wild hoping and the idle day and the evening’s headlines, they were sleeping restlessly beneath the sound of the rain on the tin roof when at midnight the sudden glare of the electric bulbs and the guards’ voices waked them and they heard the throbbing of the waiting trucks.

  “Turn out of there!” the deputy shouted. He was fully dressed—rubber boots, slicker, and shotgun. “The levee went out at Mound’s Landing an hour ago. Get up out of it!”

  The Wild Palms

  When the man called Harry met Charlotte Rittenmeyer, he was an intern in a New Orleans hospital. He was the youngest of three children, born to his father’s second wife in his father’s old age; there was a difference of sixteen years between him and the younger of his two half sisters. He was left an orphan at the age of two and his older half sister had raised him. His father had been a doctor before him. He (the father) had begun and completed his medical training at a time when the designation Doctor of Medicine covered everything from pharmacology through diagnostics to surgery and when an educa
tion could be paid for in kind or in labor; the elder Wilbourne had been janitor of his dormitory and had also waited on table in commons and had completed his four year course at a cash outlay of two hundred dollars. Thus when his will was opened, the last paragraph read:

  To my son, Henry Wilbourne, and realising that conditions as well as the intrinsic value of money have changed and therefore he cannot be expected to obtain his degree in Surgery and Medicine for the same outlay of money which obtained in my day, I hereby bequeath and set aside the sum of two thousand dollars, to be used for the furthering and completing of his college course and the acquiring of his degree and license to practise in Surgery and Medicine, believing that the aforesaid sum will be amply sufficient for that purpose.

  The will was dated two days after Harry’s birth in 1910, and his father died two years later of toxemia gotten from sucking a snake bite on the hand of a child in a country cabin and his half sister took him. She had children of her own and was married to a man who died still a clerk in a grocery store in a small Oklahoma town, so by the time Harry was ready to enter medical school that two thousand dollars to be stretched over four years, even in the modest though well-rated school which he chose, was not much more than his father’s two hundred had been. It was less, because there was steam heat in the dormitories now and the college was served by a cafeteria requiring no waiters and the only way a young man could earn money in school now was by carrying a football or stopping the man who did carry it. His sister helped him—an occasional money order for one or two dollars or even a few stamps folded carefully into a letter. This bought his cigarettes and by stopping tobacco for a year he saved enough to pay his fee into his medical fraternity. There was nothing left over for squiring girls (the school was coeducational) but then he had no time for that; beneath the apparent serenity of his monastic life he waged a constant battle as ruthless as any in a Wall Street skyscraper as he balanced his dwindling bank account against the turned pages of his text books.

  But he did it, he came in under the wire with enough of the two thousand dollars left either to return to the Oklahoma town and present his sheepskin to his sister, or to go straight to New Orleans and assume his internship, but not enough to do both. He chose New Orleans. Or rather, there was no choice; he wrote his sister and her husband a letter of gratitude and thanks, inclosing a signed note for the full amount of the postage stamps and the money orders, with interest (he also sent the diploma with its Latin and its spidery embossed salutation and its cramped faculty signatures, of which his sister and brother-in-law could decipher only his name) and mailed it to them and bought his ticket and rode fourteen hours in a day coach. He reached New Orleans with one bag and a dollar and thirty-six cents.

  He had been in the hospital almost two years now. He lived in the intern’s quarters with the others who, like him, had no private means; he smoked once a week now: a package of cigarettes over the week-end and he was paying the note which he had executed to his half sister, the one- and two-dollar money orders in reverse now, returning to source; the one bag would still hold all he owned, including his hospital whites—the twenty-six years, the two thousand dollars, the railroad ticket to New Orleans, the one dollar and thirty-six cents, the one bag in a corner of a barracks-like room furnished with steel army cots; on the morning of his twenty-seventh birthday he waked and looked down his body toward his foreshortened feet and it seemed to him that he saw the twenty-seven irrevocable years diminished and foreshortened beyond them in turn, as if his life were to lie passively on his back as though he floated effortless and without volition upon an unreturning stream. He seemed to see them: the empty years in which his youth had vanished—the years for wild oats and for daring, for the passionate tragic ephemeral loves of adolescence, the girl- and boy-white, the wild importunate fumbling flesh, which had not been for him; lying so he thought, not exactly with pride and certainly not with the resignation which he believed, but rather with that peace with which a middleaged eunuch might look back upon the dead time before his alteration, at the fading and (at last) edgeless shapes which now inhabited only the memory and not the flesh: I have repudiated money and hence love. Not abjured it, repudiated. I do not need it; by next year or two years or five years I will know to be true what I now believe to be true: I will not even need to want it.

  That evening he was a little late in going off duty; when he passed the dining room he heard already the clash of cutlery and the voices, and the interns’ quarters were empty save for a man named Flint who in evening trousers and shirt was tying a black tie before the mirror and who turned as Wilbourne entered and pointed to a telegram on Wilbourne’s pillow. It had been opened. “It was lying on my cot,” Flint said. “I was in a hurry to dress so I didn’t take time to look at the name good. I just picked it up and opened it. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s all right,” Wilbourne said. “Too many people have already seen a telegram for it to be very private.” He removed the folded yellow sheet from the envelope. It was decorated with symbols—garlands and scrolls; it was from his sister: one of those stereotyped birthday greetings which the telegraph company sends to any distance within the boundaries of the United States for twenty-five cents. He found that Flint was still watching him.

  “So this is your birthday,” Flint said. “Celebrating?”

  “No,” Wilbourne said. “I guess not.”

  “What? Listen. I’m going to a party down in French Town. Why not come along?”

  “No,” Wilbourne said. “Thanks, though.” He did not yet begin to think Why not? “I’m not invited.”

  “That dont matter. It’s not that kind of a party. It’s at a studio. Painting guy. Just a mob sitting around on the floor in each others’ laps, drinking. Come on. You dont want to stick here on your birthday.” Now he did begin to think Why not? Why really not? and now he could almost see the guardian of the old trained peace and resignation rise to arms, the grim Moses, not alarmed, impervious to alarm, just gauntly and fanatically interdicting: No. You will not go. Let well enough alone. You have peace now; you want no more.

  “Besides, I haven’t any dress clothes.”

  “You wont need them. Your host will probably be wearing a bathrobe. You’ve got a dark suit, haven’t you?”

  “But I dont—”

  “All right,” Flint said. “De Montigny has a tux. He’s about your size. I’ll get it.” He went to the closet which they used in common.

  “But I dont—” Wilbourne said.

  “All right,” Flint said. He laid the second dinner suit on the cot and slipped his braces and began to remove his own trousers. “I’ll wear de Montigny’s and you can wear mine. We’re all three about standard.”

  An hour later, in a borrowed costume such as he had never worn before, he and Flint halted in one of the narrow, dim, balcony-hung one-way streets between Jackson Square and Royal Street in the Vieux Carre—a wall of soft muted brick above which the crest of a cabbage palm exploded raggedly and from beyond which came a heavy smell of jasmine which seemed to lie visible upon the rich stagnant air already impregnated with the smell of sugar and bananas and hemp from the docks, like inert wisps of fog or even paint. A wooden gate hung slightly awry, beside it a wire bell pull which under Flint’s hand produced a remote mellow jangling. They could hear a piano, it was something of Gershwin’s. “There,” Flint said. “You dont need to worry about this party. You can already hear the home-made gin. Gershwin might have painted his pictures for him too. Only I bet Gershwin could paint what Crowe calls his pictures better than Crowe plays what Gershwin calls his music.”

  Flint jerked the bell again, again nothing came of it. “It’s not locked, anyway,” Wilbourne said. It was not, they entered: a court paved with the same soft, quietly rotting brick. There was a stagnant pool with a terra-cotta figure, a mass of lantana, the single palm, the thick rich leaves and the heavy white stars of the jasmine bush where light fell upon it through open french doors, the court balcony-overhu
ng too on three sides, the walls of that same annealing brick lifting a rampart broken and nowhere level against the glare of the city on the low eternally overcast sky, and over all, brittle, dissonant and ephemeral, the spurious sophistication of the piano like symbols scrawled by adolescent boys upon an ancient decayed rodent-scavengered tomb.