John Henry Days (21 page)

The screen returned to whiteness and the tail of the reel slapped around and around until Andrew Schneider turned off the machine. After the cartoon finished, J. was sure Mrs. Goodwin had led a discussion about the lessons of John Henry’s story and its ambiguous ending, but he doesn’t remember it now. Mrs. Goodwin, why did he die at the end? Mrs. Goodwin, if he beat the steam engine, why did he have to die? Did he win or lose?

T
he assistant paymaster delivered word of the contest with the week’s wages. He walked the camp. He talked to the men. He looked down at his ledger and looked into the eyes of each man and gave him his pay. The assistant paymaster counted out coins slowly as if the men did not understand the meaning of wages. As if the men did not know how to count money and did not know what they had earned for their labor. It was payday and all the men knew he was coming. They had learned not to rush up to him and crowd him like begging dogs. He paid each man as he got to his name on the list, which did not follow any order but his own. The list was not determined by name or salary or seniority on the site. It was determined by the mind of the assistant paymaster and over time the men had learned their places in the order. John Henry was toward the back of the list and he waited in his shanty for the assistant paymaster with a dull and rigid patience. As the strongest driver he was paid the most. Most of the men did not resent his salary because they knew they could not beat him and that was a natural fact. Some did resent him. The assistant paymaster gave John Henry his wages for the week and told him that Captain Johnson wanted a contest tomorrow.

The company could not stop talk about the deaths. The men had been told not to talk about life on the mountain and had seen with their own eyes men banished from the site for complaining about the conditions, the injuries and the hours and the deaths. But neither Captain Johnson nor his bosses could keep the men from talking about the mountain at night. Camp life could not be tamed by daylight threat. Night was a release from the mountain in the shadow of the mountain, beneath the outline of the thing against dark blue night. They drank and wagered and told stories, and when they drank their tongues loosed and they dwelled on the violence. Jokes curdled quickly at night and lately the men dwelled on the cave-in at the western cut. It was like a trick, the mountain. The shale resisted hammers, steel and blasting but it gave to rain and wind. Water from Heaven melted the rock of the mountain and the rainwater was red on the ground. After rain, their boots
were caked with red grit from the puddles. The first day after last week’s rain, the roof at the mouth of the western cut gave way, crashing through the timber arching, and killed five graders who stood there to get out of the sun. It was a trick. In the shade of the cut the mountain came down on them like a hammer and killed them. A cry went up. The other men mucked out the rock and pulled out the bodies. They knew the men were dead but hurried anyway. When the doctor arrived he looked at the twisted bodies and talked to Captain Johnson. They talked and Captain Johnson gestured to one of the bosses. The men buried the dead men in the fill of the western cut and no warning from the company was going to stop the talk in the camp.

John Henry held his pay and stepped out into the sun. The cheer of payday animated the men in the camp. The men who drank their wages swiftly and had gone a day or two without whiskey drank. Debts were repaid. Some men with families calculated how much money to send home. John Henry fingered coins in his hand and considered the cunning of Captain Johnson. A contest raised the spirits of the men, even if they all knew who would win. One day John Henry would be beaten. Men bet on the challenger and men bet on John Henry. The excitement, John Henry knew, would put the cave-in out of the minds of the men. Until the next accident. The contest would cure the discontent throughout the camp.

L’il Bob scampered over and wondered to his partner, who will challenge you? John Henry didn’t know. When the word came a few hours later that it was O’Shea he was not surprised. He lifted his eyebrows slightly and no more. He knew the Irishman did not like getting paid less than a nigger. Captain Johnson kept O’Shea in the western cut for that very reason. He didn’t want to know what would happen if the Irishman had to work next to John Henry every day. The black man’s hammer on steel might sound like coins to him, the sound of coins falling out of his pocket. He might decide to use his hammer for something else besides eating into the mountain. Take a swing. O’Shea had arms like stovepipes. Yet it was probably Captain Johnson’s idea that the two men compete in the steel driving contest. The winner got fifty dollars; probably O’Shea would get a bonus if he beat the black. The white men would bet on O’Shea and the black men would bet on John Henry. The contest between the races would distract them from the mountain’s vengeance all the more. If the black man won it would make the men feel good about themselves and they would forget about the mountain for a time. If the white man won it would remind them of their place in this world and the hate
would drive the work. The work progressed in either event. Captain Johnson had a timetable.

That night L’il Bob said that Irishman was foolish, and John Henry shrugged. The Irish workers were a step up from the blacks, but not that much. Low competed against lower. L’il Bob on payday was a happy man. He thought up lines he could sing for tomorrow’s contest and told them to his partner. He sang, Shake the drill and turn it ’round, I’ll beat that white man down. John Henry cocked his head. L’il Bob said, Shake the drill and turn it ’round, I’ll beat that Irishman down. How’s that? It’s better, John Henry said. O’Shea and his tribe wouldn’t like it, but the bosses wouldn’t get angry and take it out on them for days. L’il Bob told jokes he thought up as he held the drill bit for John Henry. John Henry would look at the man in the darkness of the tunnel and see a slit of a smile on his lips. It was a joke he would hear later. L’il Bob on payday told his jokes over card games. He made his coworkers lose track of their cards and he took their money at the end of the hand: full house. The blacksmith named Ford asked L’il Bob if his boy were going to beat the Irishman tomorrow or should he put his money on the underdog. Ford looked at John Henry while he said this to see his reaction. The steeldriver said nothing and L’il Bob said, have you lost your sense? Must be crazy—sure playing cards like you’re crazy or maybe you just like giving your money away. Ford grunted and anted.

John Henry turned to bed early that night. He had never been beaten by another man’s hammer but pride is a sin. He took his rest. The payday carousing tried to keep him awake but he willed himself to sleep and dreamed of the contest as a fistfight between the white man and the black man over the fill of the western cut. The dead watched the contest from beneath the rock. He saw through their eyes staring up at himself as he crushed the face of the white man. He did not need his hammer for that.

S
unglasses: where are they? Sunglasses prevent arrest for reckless eye-balling.

Here they are.

So armed, thus fortified, J. traverses the hazy border between parking lot gravel and the half-tamed dirt of country road shoulder, a disputed area this, every rain betrays the ceasefire in a violent push, every car wheel in and out of the Talcott Motor Lodge shifts the balance of power, foreign aid. The frontier a gritty smudge two steps wide, two steps and he is out on the road, before noon, with a mountain to his left and a river on the right. He feels not so bad this morning, not hungover and half-mast, things seem in order, synapses fire apace, the information gets through, and the freebie sunglasses dull the rapier sunlight jabbing through the leaves. Safe in sunglasses, and his throat doesn’t hurt at all.

He looks through the haggard trees to the opposite bank of the river, where railroad tracks skirt the base of still another green mountain like an iron hem. Rounds a turn in the road and in this deviation feels the motel, his room, his stuff, drift off behind him. Just him in the woods, traveling down one of the three disobedient channels that vex the mountains: the road, the river and the tracks. The road he walks on has the worst of it, he thinks. Stuck between two troublesome neighbors and too broke to move. The road tiptoes in asphalt slippers around a mountain that is always throwing trash into its paved yard from high peaks, dirt and leaves and TV dinner containers, while the river on the other side keeps trying to sneak the boundary over, eating shore here and there, taking liberties with the survey line every spring under the guise of sprucing up the yard. Don’t mind me, chum, just pruning these hedges. He follows the easy bump of a distant ridge with his UV-protected eyes and feels sweat roll. The day is hot and cloudless. This isn’t J.’s neighborhood at all. Disputes all around him, but none of them his affair, and he likes it that way.

Just passing through, thanks. He lives in unlikely times, ambles through
the valley of an unlikely Saturday morning. On the underside of his planet, or deep beneath it. Talcott, West Virginia: the world you walk on every day not knowing it’s down there. He feels good, the dirt crushed under his sneakers is a sure and accountable sound, certainly not sidewalk or hotel tile or ballroom carpet, able syncopation against the fluid strumming of the river beside him. Occasionally a bird sitting in, a horn player stepping inside this day’s establishment to see what’s shaking. He takes a deep breath and walks west. One of his comrades—Dave Brown or Frenchie—knocked on his door early that morning, shouting something about the taxi that would ferry them to breakfast. J. yelled him away and slept—five minutes or an hour, it didn’t matter and he didn’t know; he clutched the sheets to his neck as if they were flimsy lapels in a sudden and seeking rain, he got up when he was good and ready. On his own itinerary. He dressed in freebie clothes, he took his time and opened the door of his room when he felt ready. Forsaking a free meal, even, such is the magic of this morning.

He thinks it’s funny that he is walking west, into town for supplies. I’ll take a bag of flour and two yards of cloth for the missus, thanks, Clem, pay for the goods with company scrip. The railroad had a monopoly grip on all the citizens of Talcott and Hinton, it owned the town store and overcharged more than a Brooklyn bodega. Isn’t that the way it worked back then, he’d seen something along those lines on a PBS documentary. Before unions and pamphlet-waving reds. Abortive insurrection beat down by imported Pinker-ton talent who arrived on the seven o’clock locomotive in menacing slo-mo at dusk, red light swimming in the folds of their long leather coats, suspicious bulges where holsters usually hang. The troublemakers find their shacks burned down and everyone learns from the lesson, keeps quiet, and the grocer stacks toy currency. Syrup for the colicky babe. Nerve tonic for the addled lady of the house. To assuage the monthlies. The grocer gives the goods away for free, fake money with the C&O logo makes everything look like a freebie. J. decides he will pay for his own breakfast when he gets into town.

An orange butterfly stumbles from the trees on the riverbank, startling J. and activating his metropolitan crazy pigeon reflex: one hand rises to shield his head from birdshit, the other straightens to karate chop. But it is just a butterfly, a silver ball upset by invisible bumpers and flippers, and it ricochets away. This is the country, it is safe. He feels good, trying to remind himself, good, and it is best to suppress his natural inclinations and go with the flow. Immortal even. Seems to J. that if you have a near-death experience, you are invincible for a time. Unless you’re in the trenches, the chances of almost dying
twice in the space of a few days are remote. Astronomical. Cars will bounce off him, drive-by gunfire perforate his body’s outline in the wall behind him. He made it through the night, he is golden. Bring on the burning barn with the family of kittens inside; J. is ready.

He finally drifted off at 4 A.M., between gulps, and slept dreamlessly. He rose from bed without his customary stiffness (that odd ratcheting-up of himself that always reminded him of a rollercoaster car clicking up to its first big fall of the day) and disorientation about where he was, what hotel and mission. His mood almost derailed when he ventured down to the front office to find out about a lift into town and the woman at the front desk looked at him as if she’d seen a ghost. (A spook.) She pulled her bathrobe to her chicken neck and asked him if he was staying in room 27. He answered in the affirmative, answered her tentative question as to how he had slept with an over-enthusiastic simile that called up the familiar image of blissful nurslings in their cribs. She seemed relieved, then concerned anew at this response, and at the collapse of her thin eyebrows J. quickly rerouted the conversation to the matter of transport. Turned out the New River Gorge Taxi wasn’t scheduled for another pickup until later that morning; J. had missed the breakfast run. He asked her how far it was to town.

There’s a car behind him, the first car since he started walking, and he fights the vision his paranoia prepares for him: the truck jags right just as it reaches him, sends his body flying into the river and his body washes up weeks later on some littoral strip downriver, wherever this river ends up once it splashes past these mountains. No one around to witness this anonymous violence and no one to identify his body, the fish have eaten his identification (pollution has given them a taste for crisp plastic and magnetic strips). But then he remembers his invincibility, and this morning’s distaste for his customary scenarios. Exhale your city self into this cool country air, this place can absorb all of you and more. It isn’t a truck, he sees as it rounds the turn, but a Chevy Nova of a perky green shade, with hubcaps of spinning rust. The driver, a middle-aged brunette who sucks a cigarette and squints through smoke as they pass; in the passenger seat a little girl with a round moon face stares at J., turning in her seat to watch him recede as they speed on to town. And perhaps her oddly sharp gaze disturbs him for a moment, but then they are gone, he is alone again in the paralyzed landscape. See, nothing to worry about here.