Cain’s Book (19 page)

I
ALWAYS FELT IT WAS
strange that the butcher Abel should be preferred to the agriculturist Cain.

Abel waxed fat and rich breeding sheep for the slaughter while Cain tilled. Cain made an offering to the Lord. Abel followed suit with his quaking fat calves. Who’d have gruel rather than
a T-bone?

And soon Abel had vast herds and air-conditioned slaughterhouses and meat storehouses and meat-package plants, and there was a blight on Cain’s crop. And that was called
sin
.

Cain stood and looked at the blight on his crop. And his spade was useless against it in his hand.

And it came to pass that Abel was trespassing there where Cain would carry his spade, which is where land is to be tilled and not where sheep pasture.

And Abel saw his elder brother and he was thin and with a starved look and held the spade to no purpose in his hand. And Abel approached his brother, saying: Why don’t you give up and come
to work for me? I could use a good man in the slaughterhouse.

And Cain slew him.

If I say to you “People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones”, be vigilant.

I fell asleep last night over this document. When I woke up this morning around eight I found I was the last scow in a tow of four moving like a ghost ship in fog. I say
“a tow of four” because last night there were four of us. Actually I cannot even see the scow ahead of me. I know we are moving because the wrinkled brown water slides like a skin past
my catwalk. I threw an empty can overboard. It bobbed in the wake of my stern for a few seconds and then, like something removed by a hand, it was out of sight. I suppose I can see in all
directions for about fifteen feet. Beyond that, things become shadowy and at the same time portentous, like the long swift movement of the log which floated by a few minutes ago.

Everything is damp this morning, cigarettes, the paper on which I write, the wood with which I kindled the fire to make coffee, and the sugar. I smell my own damp smell, wood, tar, jeans that
cling smoothly to my thighs.

A foghorn sounds somewhere. It is difficult to tell from which direction it comes. The water is about me and the sudden billowing yellow shapes of fog, and somewhere in it, like a signal for me
alone, the foghorn sounding. The sun came up a while ago but the mist is still low on the water and no land is visible. The scow also is very low in the water.

I lay for three days at the quarry without being loaded. There is a cement strike and contractors are reluctant to stockpile stone. Approaching the quarry, the works on the green hillside are
like the carcass of some gigantic grey insect glinting grey in the sun. The sun making shadows on the dock; offices, stockrooms, and the housing shaft of the long stone conveyer belts running like
an endless shanty up into the excavation. The days were sunny. The work of loading went on slowly. I waited for the daily tows to arrive – the fight scows began to pile up – hoping to
see Geo, or Jacqueline.

Most of the time I was abstracted from it all. Sometimes I sat outside my cabin and watched the men on the dock, the loaders, the carpenters, the scowmen going to and from the company store. I
felt like a Martian: slightly puzzled, fundamentally uninterested. Sometimes when I was high I watched it all with an overpowering sense of benevolence, the green valley of the river, the water
grey-silver, its shimmering surface sliding away down towards Newburgh where seriously damaged scows are repaired, the little grey motor tug pushing scows about, like a terrier pushing floating
coffins, the white-helmeted loaders all looking bronzed and fat and healthy and unimaginative, working the moving lip of the stone chute, the scows, light and loaded, ranged up in tiers against the
dock, the trucks, the cranes, the pneumatic drills sounding sporadically, and an occasional explosion from the quarry at the other side of the hill; nearer, the bucket of slops hurled suddenly
towards the eddying water by a shapeless-looking woman of fifty who had been screaming all morning that her man was a drunken sonofabitch, another woman, slightly drunk, older or younger, occupied
with a tub near a line of fluttering clothes, both of them unkempt, tough, ignorant, angry – involving myself in a daydream of white buttocks striking savagely against the wooden sideboards
of a bunk. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck... Those unbeautiful women could still be beautiful in their lust... or could they? Currrrrump – attention distracted by a distant explosion from the
hillside quarry. Then both women were gone, and a loader, six foot four, is standing in his white helmet, light-blue shirt and dungarees, his large red hands on his hips, watching me. I nod to him.
His grimace is not particularly friendly.

“You bastards sure get it easy!” he said.

“Yeah, it’s a way of life.”

I was wondering whether he was going to get over his resentment. I was wearing nothing but a pair of shorts and I was relaxing in the sun with a cigarette and a can of beer. My feet were dirty.
I hadn’t shaved for three days. He looked disgusted. Perhaps he didn’t like to think of men like me existing in the same world as the wafer-white and odourless flesh of his teenage
daughter.

“You bums’s not supposed to drink on board, you know that?”

“Fuck you,” I said.

“What did you say?”

“Ug mug tug dug,” I said.

“You trying to be funny?”

I drank some beer. “You want to start a war, is that it?”

“Maybe I do,” he said. He hesitated, spat, turned away. “You bastards sure get it easy,” he said as he went.

The loader originally dislikes the scowman because the scowman doesn’t work. That makes the job unpleasant from time to time, finding oneself having suddenly to deal with the animosity of
a man who makes a virtue of his work. It is difficult to explain to the underprivileged that play is more serious than work.

So I was glad when they finally loaded me and I joined the tow going downriver again. The sun still shone and I spent most of my time lying on the roof of my shack under a sky which streamed
sunlight down on to the twelve scows of the tow. The bank on either side rose steeply up from the water’s edge, brown masses of bald rock grown in and over by trees. It is a historic part of
America, this stretch of the Hudson, from Manhattan to Albany. The trees were very green. The scowmen were sitting at the sterns of their scows, on the roofs of their shacks mostly, watching, on
chairs, like admirals on the aftercastles of galleons. Some had their women with them, on deckchairs, under gaudy beach umbrellas. And everything was very relaxed and peaceful until we passed under
the George Washington Bridge.

At Pier 72 I had no opportunity to go ashore. A tug was already standing by to pull me out. That was last night. And this morning when I awoke there was the fog.

They loaded me with 1½” stone. Good and bad. Not so much dust so they don’t use so much water and it comes aboard drier than smaller stuff. The stone comes down the hillside
to the river’s edge from the stockpiles near the quarry on a narrow canvas conveyer belt about two feet wide. The grey tube-like housing shaft high enough for men to walk in contains the
mechanism of the conveyer belt. From a distance it has the distinctness of a grey arrow pointing sharply from the hilltop to the water, and, as I said before, with the other constructions might be
the carcass of a grey lizard or insect. It is an el-train
²⁷
for crushed stone. A man in a pillbox high over the water’s edge at the end of the
housing shaft controls the flow of stone, gravel or dust, which moves down a metal chute onto the scow. The smaller the stuff the more water they use to control dust. When it is dust that is being
loaded it comes aboard the scow like a flood. This can be a pain in the ass. The water leaks through the wooden planks of the deck into the massive boomed bilges for hours after loading and it has
to be pumped out. A deck scow carries its whole load on deck. What would be the hold in a ship is simply a heavily beamed compartment to insure buoyancy. After loading this is a dark, dripping,
slimy place, murkier than under the darkest pier. I sometimes stash my spike down there in an airtight box, below water level. The trouble with 1½” is that it doesn’t usually go
as quickly as smaller stuff at the unloading yards of the various sand and stone corporations, so that it is likely that one will be hung up for days without overtime, waiting to be unloaded.

I was thinking about this coming downriver and I am thinking of it now, somewhere in Long Island Sound, isolated from all things by fog.

–
What the hell am I doing here?

Why am I not in India, or Japan, or the moon?

Everything changes; everything remains the same.

–
What the hell am I doing here?

I arrived in London the night before I sailed for America.

I decided not to look anyone up. It would have meant explanations... just passing through on my way from nowhere to nowhere.

I left the railway station and mingled with the other people on the street. It was the rush hour. Shops were closing. People swarmed in the dusk towards the underground. Men, small bent men,
were selling newspapers. As usual I felt myself overcome by the cheerful sense of orderliness Londoners seem to exude. At times it had amused, at times infuriated me, and once or twice during the
war, I remember, the sense of solidarity it implied gladdened me. This time, however, leaving France for no good reason, on my way to America for no good reason, with an acute feeling of being an
exile wherever I went, I found it oppressive. I was heavy with the sense of my own detachment.

And that had been with me for as long as I could remember, gaining in intensity at each new impertinence of the external world with which I signed no contract when I was ejected bloodily from my
mother’s warm womb. I developed early a horror of all groups, particularly those which without further ado claimed the right to subsume all my acts under certain normative designations in
terms of which they would reward or punish me. I could feel no loyalty to anything so abstract as a state or so symbolic as a sovereign. And I could feel nothing but outrage at a system in which,
by virtue of my father’s name and fortune, I found myself from the beginning so shockingly underprivileged. What shocked me most as I grew up was not the fact that things were as they were,
and with a tendency to petrify, but that others had the impertinence to assume that I would forbear to react violently against them.

At that moment I found myself standing in the middle of moving traffic, hesitating, unable to go forwards or back, clutching bag and raincoat, until the signal changed. Finally I reached the far
side and moved quickly into the crowd on the other pavement. From time to time in just that way my absent-mindedness startled me. Although I was walking quickly I had no idea where I was going. I
had thought about it on the boat journey from Calais to Dover, wondering what had moved me to take a ship from Southampton which I could have boarded as easily at Le Havre. For some reason or other
I had wanted to spend the last night in London. I had no desire to see anyone in particular. I had been careful to keep the fact of my arrival to myself. I remember feeling a sense of nostalgia for
this national metropolis in which I had seldom spent more than a few days. When I first visited it at the age of seventeen I remember thinking I would one day live there, but after years abroad on
the continent I wasn’t so sure. Somehow or other I found it difficult to take the English seriously. I had often been appalled by the absurd contrast between what they said and their manner
of saying it, between a frequent lack of talent and imagination and the degree of respect they hoped to exact by virtue simply of acquiring a particular accent.

When I say that I loved London I mean it was a place I recognized as one in which it would be possible for a man like me to live, where people in spite of their many absurdities tended to
respect an individual’s privacy, to a limited degree, to be sure, but more so than in say, Moscow, New York, Peking. (I was feeling already that when I returned from America it would be via
London-Paris.) I am not saying that Londoners are not inquisitive. They may be more so than either Russians or Americans for all I know, but they are a conservative people, like most people who are
not desperate, and the hard core of constitutional law governing the status of the individual in society is not likely to die overnight. In London policemen do not carry guns in their everyday
business.

It had begun to rain. The streets and the grey buildings around Victoria depressed me. I had many memories of Victoria Station. During the war I had arrived and departed from Victoria many times
and the streets and buildings round about were quite familiar. I remembered seeing Gill’s Stations of the Cross
²⁸
in Westminster Cathedral,
refusing a prostitute who offered to masturbate me in one of the air-raid shelters opposite the station, going with a prostitute to one of the streets nearby and thinking she might be older than my
mother, the railway bar, the tearooms cloudy with steam from huge tea urns and coffee pots, and dusty at the same time, and the dry sandwiches under glass, the long tiled lavatories with their
shifting men, and the rush of commuters with bowler hats and umbrellas in the early morning.

It was after six o’clock; fifteen hours in London before the boat train; time to get drunk and sober up, to eat two meals, to go to bed with someone. Plenty of time, and at the same time
short, like a bee’s visit to a flower, and no commitments.

I took a taxi and told the driver to take me to Piccadilly Circus which was central enough and where I knew I could find a room easily in one of the big hotels which corresponded to the
anonymity of my visit... no questions, all the necessities, all visitors passing through. Across broad carpets to the lift, silently upwards to the
n
th floor, along a corridor, realizing
they had given me a room in the rear which would open onto an airshaft and wishing now I had asked specifically for one which opened onto the street, the key in the lock, the door thrown open and
the light switch on, the room looking blankly as it always was and would be, impervious to the stream of human beings who had come and gone, the neatly made bed, the bed light now being switched
off and on by the porter to indicate where it was, vague hotel noises from the airshaft, the smiling face... “All right, sir?” – tipped, gone, the door closed silently behind him.
I squashed my cigarette in the ashtray on the glass-topped table beside the bed, protect it against cigarette burns; lay on the bed and looked up at the white ceiling at the centre of which was a
small, vaguely noticeable grille. It occurred to me that it might be used to house a camera or a microphone or to inject a poison pellet to fill the room with gas.