Clarkton (23 page)

The newspaper reporter who wrote the story in which Clark Lowell's name was first mentioned was a little more alive, a little more curious and human than most of his colleagues. While they wrote in their notebooks, he knelt in the snow next to what had been Clark Lowell, and turned the body over. Strangely, his first quick impression of the face, all blue and purple with frost, was that this man had been beautiful. Except for the awful hole the Luger made, the boy slept, a shadow of doubt on the waxen face, a shadow of uncertainty, a hint of incredulity, but also the peaceful conviction that brings repose.

26.
F
reddy Butler lived on Cherry Street and
Third Avenue, which was two blocks east of Oak and about three blocks from the union headquarters. Butler had Wilson drop him on Second Avenue, on the other side of Concord Way. There were no words between them, and Butler, the five hundred dollars in his pocket, a rankling bitterness in his heart, thought to himself, “To hell with the bastards! To hell with them, the lice!” He felt cheated, lonely, and woeful, and the picture of rooting up his family at that hour of the night, listening to their complaints, having to substitute his will for rational argument, packing their few things, and going through the bitter cold to stand and wait for the milk train, was not an inviting one. Now, as so often before, the idea came to him of leaving them stranded and hitting out on his own, and, as before, he toyed with it and rejected it. Once there would have been an element of excitement to drifting, the road, the whoring from town to town, the right to pick up a job or drop one whenever he damn pleased. But youth was an essential to that and he was well into middle age; the spark and spring had gone out of him, and his family was the only security he knew. He sensed well enough that without them, he would funnel down to the bottom, a loafer and a drag and a feeble, dirty bum. So he put his hands in his pockets, and walked through the sleeping town, through the cold, silent, moonlit night, harking to the far-off and lonely call of a train, the somber barking of some farmer's dog, and meanwhile rehearsing what he would say to his wife.

He was just rounding the corner of Third Avenue, when a soft voice out of nowhere or anywhere said, “Hello, Freddy. It's mighty late for a family man to be coming home…,” a voice without malice or threat, just soft and gentle.

He stopped short, fear a heartless knife inside of him, himself oppressed with the hopelessness of a man already dead, Killed though conscious, full of that last and dreadful petulance. All the time, as he thought to himself, it was for peanuts, not the way some sold their souls, the devil a smiling gentleman, weighted down with gold, not the way the big trade-union leaders sold out, for comfortable and lasting endowments, not the way the intellectuals sold themselves, for a gold-plated seat of honor in a plush-lined sewer, but like a working stiff—for peanuts, the pure and simple of it, peanuts. He might have run, leaped away, cried out, but it was coming all these years and it was no use to run.

“Who is it?” he asked.

It was Joey Raye, a monstrous large black man, who stepped out of the doorway of a store where he had been standing to shield himself from the cut of the wind, and who showed his white teeth under his puffed, bruised lips, and said, “Hello, Freddy.” With his hands in the pockets of a blue pea-jacket, with a woolen cap perched on the back of his head, with the soft drawl of his rich voice, he restored familiarity to fear. “Been walking?”

“I played a game of pool,” Butler smiled, and explained, “Nerves. I went out for a cigar, and I played a game of pool.”

“Where?” Raye inquired.

“Benny's.”

“I took a walk around to Benny's. I thought I might find you there.”

“I must have stepped out,” Butler said, meeting the Negro's eyes squarely. “You ought to be getting some rest. You took a bad licking.”

“They thumped me, all right,” Joey Raye said genially. “They just whupped the devil out of me. My God and Jesus, them white men sure can do a whupping.” He raised his brows at the way Butler shivered. “Cold?” Butler nodded, and Raye said, “Step in here in the doorway and out of that wind. That wind's just like a razor's edge, just sharp and nasty as a razor, just like a razor I seen them city men carry. That's an awful mean and bad thing, a razor. I don't like a razor. I'd rather have a man come all over me with a sap than a razor.”

“That's right,” Butler nodded, stepping into the doorway, watching the Negro, trying to decide whether he was simple or not; he seemed simple; he had always seemed simple.

“Cigarette?”

Butler took a cigarette, but his hands were shaking and twice the light went out. Raye lit a match and held it in cupped hands, where it burned like a candle. “That's a shipboard trick,” the Negro grinned. “First time I shipped out, it took me six weeks to learn to strike a match and hold it. Mighty handy trick to know. I guess you didn't know I ever shipped, did you, Freddy?”

Butler shook his head.

“I been around,” Joey Raye went on. “My land, I been around, steel and auto and maritime and even a spell in packing in Omaha. That's sure one place, that Omaha. It's something, the places a man gets to in these United States, just trying to hold down a job and keep his belly full. But that was in the bad old times—”

“I got to be getting home,” Butler said. “If we get that line out at the crack of dawn—”

“You don't worry about that line,” Joey Raye smiled. “How long you been in the party, Butler?”

“Just a few months. You know when I joined.”

“Now sure enough, that's funny. That's mighty funny, because it seems to me I known someone like you a long time back, maybe in California or in Illinois or someplace. Well, maybe it's somebody else, I been in the party so long and met so many. I been in the party a long time, Butler. Fifteen-years, come this spring. That's a mighty long time.”

“It's a long time,” Butler agreed.

“You know how I come to join—that's a funny thing too. My pappy, he cropped in Mississippi. He takes out a load of cotton, and I ride into the gin with him—last load of all. He goes in to the boss man and settles and comes out and says to me, My word, Joey, I got just seventy-five cents, just holding that money out like that in the palm of his hand, a whole season's work. We was supposed to bring this and that for Ma and this and that for the two little girl sisters I got, but we wasn't going to bring back nothing, just that seventy-five cents my pappy holds out in his hand, and then just standing there he starts to cry, and I figured my heart's like to break. So I say to him, Don't you cry, Pappy. You go home. What you going to do? he asks me. I tell him, Don't you cry and don't you worry, you go home. Then I go in the gin, and I give that white boss a whupping like he never had in all his born days. Two other white men there, they don't like that, so I got to whup them too. Then they go for a pistol gun, and I got to take that away from them. Then I come outside, and Pappy's still there, crying for real now, and he says to me, My God, oh my little Jesus God be gentle, what you done now? I whupped them white men, I tell him, and then he drives me into town, whupping them mules every inch of the way. They put me under my aunt's house, and there I stay two days and two nights while the whole damn county's being fine-combed for me. Then I hit a freight going up, and I never been back to Mississippi.”

Butler's confidence was returning. He flicked the cigarette to the sidewalk and said, “Look, Joey, I got to get home.”

“Sure—sure. I just set out to tell you how come I join the party, that's all. I knock around two, three years, just all over, doing nigger work, cleaning toilets, sweeping bars, shining shoes, washing dishes—and then there ain't even that. Ain't no work at all, not a blessed lick. All this time, I got a hate in my heart for white men that's festering like a cancer, just spreading out from my heart and all over me and turning me into an animal instead of a human man. Then I'm in Pittsburgh, and it's a bad town back then in 'thirty-one. I meet up with a white feller who's trying to organize the unemployed. He buys me lunch. I never eat with a white man before, but I'm awful hungry. We go into a restaurant, and they try to throw us out, but he put up one awful fight, that white man. We end up in the can, but the next day they throw us out, the can's so damn full. The white man tells me there going to be a demonstration, and I go along with him, always waiting for him to make a break, but he don't make a break. He treats me the way no white man ever treat me before. We go in that demonstration, with big banners calling for solidarity, maybe forty-fifty thousand folk, and the cops come in, and I don't know how to use my head yet, so I get an awful whupping and back in the can. The same white man come around with lawyers, and then after the cops whup me some more, they let me go. I'm still watching for him to make a break, and I still don't trust him, but little by little, he changes that. He teaches me. Ain't never had a day's schooling in my life, but he teaches me, and by and by I get a new slant on why things, they are what they are, and instead of living in a world of hate and murder, I got a brother in every man who works. I begin, to see how hatred for the black man is a tool, and what a poor fool a human man is to let himself be used with that tool. Then I join the party. That's fifteen years ago, and the party's my mother and my sister and my brother and my whole goddam life, because no man's an angel or a saint and there are good men and bad men, but in the party, like Christ says, all men are brothers, and I seen the white and black shake hands and die for each other too.” He took a long breath and then continued:

“I just tell you all this, Freddy, so you know how come I don't kill you. There ain't no use in that,” he went on, gently, almost sadly. “Ain't no use in rubbing out one little speck of dirt. Just give me satisfaction, that's all, and I can do without that kind of satisfaction.” He spread his great, long-fingered hands. “I break you like I break a chicken with a mold on its skin—so what? There ain't no good comes from that. You go home, Freddy Butler. Get your wife and little ones, God help them, and go away on the milk train. Don't never come back.”

Sunday, December 9, 1945

W
hile the night still lingered
, Max Goldstein, who had slept but fitfully, woke with that clear and worried finality that betokens an end to sleep, moved his enormous bulk, and tried to see the hands of his watch in the graying darkness. He had, finally, to strike a match which he shielded with a cupped palm, and he saw that the hands stood at a minute or two after six o'clock, a time that struck him as a lonely and unholy and woeful hour. In the same brief light of the match, he caught a glimpse of his wife's face, traced over with hair that was still blonde, a child's face at this moment, and her sleep was so peaceful and relaxed that he rejected immediately any thought of waking her. For that reason, he struggled with his elephantine bulk, easing it out of the bed as quietly and as gently as he could, sitting for a long moment with the stomach pain that comes from late retiring and early rising, nursing it, and then climbing to his feet and shuffling into the bathroom.

He faced himself in the mirror with the same, rather mawkish curiosity that had been a part of pre-shaving for as long as he could remember, indulging that brief moment of contemplation where a man sees himself from without. The big, fleshy, rather gross, beard-shadowed face broke into a smile, partly cynical, partly forlorn, and then lather washed it into the shape of a clown, the bulbous nose prodding from the little mountains of soap, bits of which were caught on the shaggy eyebrows, and the pale-blue eyes wrinkling in wordless interrogation. As he began to shave, it occurred to Max Goldstein that many of the world's evils were not so much a result of a lack of perspective as a lack of humor, and he wondered whether even that somber man, Elliott Abbott, would not see the ridiculous side to such a situation as this, the portly and archaic barrister Goldstein rising before the dawn to march up Concord Way to the plant with a crowd of pickets. In the seven years since he had joined the Communist Party, this was actually the first step of physical militance in which he had indulged, nor was he too certain now as to precisely why he had come to this decision. During his slow toilet, he ruminated on why a man does the things he does, whether they be large or small; and he turned over in his mind his own relationship to an organization that had earned for itself more abuse than any other since man's beginning—except possibly Christianity itself.

Heroism was in the long past. Twenty-eight years ago, he had been a great war hero; he hardly remembered anything except the band which met him at the station when he came home, and the hard, youthful core had long since disappeared into a hundred pounds of fat. Reason persisted; in those old, old days, he had learned under a group of men who were essentially reasonable, ancients even then, who had come out of the tough fiber of the Republic. The principle that
Ye shall know the right and do it, and render justice unto all
, was something he clung to as a child clings to his mother, and it had led him step by step to a group of people of whom he was sometimes highly critical, sometimes indulgent, and sometimes bitterly admiring. In himself, he recognized none of the stuff of which martyrs are made, and he hated violence with a deep, philosophical, and ancient hatred. But equally, he despised the never-ending headlines which informed him that he was a Russian agent, a subversive element, a bearded rat, and a malignant cancer in the society that had given him sustenance. He knew what he was; he was a fat lawyer, on toward the end of his middle age, a lazy man who collected from too few of his clients, an omnivorous reader of Spinoza, Voltaire, and A. Conan Doyle, the son of an immigrant Jew who had become more Yankee than most products of ten New England generations, a gossip, a small-town, rather rusty sage. and a psychopathic checker player. Those things he was, and they were none of them, as he realized, things to call for unprejudiced admiration.