The Eighth Day (15 page)

There was no gravel on the floor.

A young man with a beard like cornsilk sat nightly from eleven to two in a café, Aux Marins, on the New Orleans waterfront. No habitual drunkards frequented Aux Marins; no altercations ever arose there. It was a place of long conversations, conducted in an undertone, about shipping and cargoes and crews. If a stranger came in the door, voices were raised slightly and the conversations turned upon politics, weather, women, and gambling. The café was watched by the police, and Jean Lamazou—Jean-le-Borgne—and his habitual customers were on the lookout for informers. They watched the young man with the silky beard. He gave little attention to what went on around him, and made no effort to enter into conversation with others. He spoke little (that little was in the French of France), but his greetings were open and friendly. He read newspapers and he studied pages torn from a
Spanish in Fifty Lessons
(“
See, sain-yore, tain-go do-see pay-sos
”). By the third week Jean-le-Borgne lost his distrust of this stranger; they were soon playing cards together for very small stakes. The young man let it be known that he was James Tolland, a Canadian. He was waiting to be joined by a friend from the north who owned a sugar plantation in Cuba.

John Ashley was a man of faith. He did not know that he was a man of faith. He would have been quick to deny that he was a man of religious faith, but religions are merely the garments of faith—and very ill cut they often are, especially in Coaltown, Illinois.

Like most men of faith John Ashley was—so to speak—invisible. You brushed shoulders with a man of faith in the crowd yesterday; a woman of faith sold you a pair of gloves. Their principal characteristics do not tend to render them conspicuous. Only from time to time one or other of them is propelled by circumstance into becoming visible—blindingly visible. They tend their flocks in Domrémy; they pursue an obscure law practice in New Salem, Illinois. They are not afraid; they are not self-regarding; they are constantly nourished by astonishment and wonder at life itself. They are not interesting. They lack those traits—our bosom companions—that so strongly engage our interest: aggression, the dominating will, envy, destructiveness and self-destructiveness. No pathos hovers about them. Try as hard as you like, you cannot see them as the subjects of tragedy. (It has often been attempted; when the emotion subsides the audience finds that its tears have been shed, unprofitably, for itself.) They have little sense of humor, which draws so heavily on a consciousness of superiority and on an aloofness from the predicaments of others. In general they are inarticulate, especially in matters of faith. The intellectual qualifications for faith—as we shall see when we consider Ashley's faith in connection with his mathematical gift and his talent as a gambler—are developed and fortified by a ranging observation and a retentive memory. Faith founded schools; it is not dependent on them. A high authority has told us that we are more likely to find faith in an old woman on her knees scrubbing the floors of a public building than in a bishop on his throne. We have described these men and women in negative terms—fearless, not self-referent, uninteresting, humorless, so often unlearned. Wherein lies their value?

We did not choose the day of our birth nor may we choose the day of our death, yet choice is the sovereign faculty of the mind. We did not choose our parents, color, sex, health, or endowments. We were shaken into existence, like dice from a box. Barriers and prison walls surround us and those about us—everywhere, inner and outer impediments. These men and women with the aid of observation and memory early encompass a large landscape. They know themselves, but their self is not the only window through which they view their existence. They are certain that one small part of what is given us is free. They explore daily the exercise of freedom. Their eyes are on the future. When the evil hour comes, they hold. They save cities—or, having failed, their example saves other cities after their death. They confront injustice. They assemble and inspirit the despairing.

But what do these men and women have faith
in?

They are slow to give words to the object of their faith. To them it is self-evident and the self-evident is not easily described. But men and women without faith,
they
are articulate. They are constantly and loudly expatiating on it: it is “faith in life,” in the “meaning of life,” in God, in progress, in humanity—all those whipped words, those twisted signposts, that borrowed finery, all that traitor's eloquence.

There is no creation without faith and hope.

There is no faith and hope that does not express itself in creation. These men and women work. The spectacle that most discourages them is not error or ignorance or cruelty, but sloth. This work that they do may often seem to be all but imperceptible. That is characteristic of activity that never for a moment envisages an audience.

John Ashley was of this breed. No historic demands were laid upon him and we do not know how he would have met them. He was late-maturing and little given to reflection. He was almost invisible. For a time many tried to catch a glimpse of him through his children. He was a link in a chain, a stitch in a tapestry, a planter of trees, a breaker of stones on an old road to a not yet clearly marked destination.

Ashley had no idea who his rescuers were. Perhaps a miracle is like that—simple, natural, and unearthly. Their actions had been swift, precise, and silent. They had smashed the overhanging lamps. His guards had lunged about in the dark, shouting; they had fired a shot or two and then ceased. His handcuffs fell from his wrists. He had been led out of the car—more carried than led—into a grove. One of these friends had placed his hand upon the saddle of a horse. Another had given him a suit of worn blue overalls, a purse containing fifteen dollars, a small compass, a map, and a box of matches—all in silence and darkness. An old and shapeless hat had been placed on his head. Finally one of them lit a match and again he saw their faces. These railway porters did not look like Negroes, but like the grotesquely blackened performers in a minstrel show. The tallest of them pointed in a certain direction, then slowly his extended finger moved fifteen degrees to the right.

Ashley said, “Thank you.”

They disappeared. He heard no sound of horses' hoofs.

Simple, natural, and unearthly.

Left alone, he lit a match and consulted his compass. The friend had first pointed to the southwest then to the west. Ashley knew that he was beside the railroad yard near the station at Fort Barry. Sixty miles to the west was the Mississippi River. He changed his clothes, rolling his prison garb into a bundle which he attached to the pommel. He found a bag of apples and a bag of oats hanging from the saddle.

He was filled with wonder. He laughed softly. “Gee whillikers! Gee whillikers!”

He had been prepared to die, but to John Ashley death is never now—there remains always a month, day, hour, even a minute to live. He had never known fear. Even when the sentence was read in court, even when he sat in the train on what the newspapers would certainly be calling his “last journey,” he had felt no fear. To a John Ashley worst never comes to worst.

When the match was lit in the grove he had looked at the horse and the horse had looked at him. He now mounted her and waited. She moved forward slowly. Did she see a path through the thick undergrowth? Was she returning to her stall? After ten minutes he again lit a match and consulted his compass. They had been moving to the southwest. He split an apple and shared it with her. They rode on. At the end of an hour they came to a broad country road and turned right. Twice he heard riders coming from the east behind him. He had time to leave the road and conceal himself among the trees. He heard the reverberations of a wooden bridge beneath them; they went down the bank and drank from the stream. They resumed the journey at a brisker pace. Ashley felt younger hourly. He was filled with an indefensible, an impermissible, happiness. He was out of that jail where he had suffered more in body than in mind. From time to time he dismounted and walked beside the horse. He felt the need to talk. The horse seemed to like being talked to; in the diffused starlight he could see her ears rising and falling.

“Bessie? . . . ? Molly? . . . ? Belinda? . . . ? Someone gave you to me. It's not often one receives presents like that—a present as big as a whole life. Will I ever know why six men risked their lives to save mine? Will I die without knowing that?

“No! Your name is Evangeline, bringer of good tidings. . . . ? It's been strange, hasn't it? No one knew when you were foaled that you would have a part in a mysterious adventure—in an act, like this, of generosity and courage. No one knew when you were broken—it must be a black and frightening thing to be broken, Evangeline!—that one day you would carry a man on your back and give him a chance to live. . . . ? You are a sign. We've both been marked for something.”

After these conversations he felt even more buoyant. Not forgetting to listen for oncoming riders, he even sang fragments of his favorite songs, “'Nita, Juanita,” and “No gottee tickee, No gettee shirtee, At the Chinee laundryman's,” and the song of his fraternity at engineering school, “We'll be true until we die to the brothers in Kappa Psi.”

The west began to brighten. Dawns are poor things in Coaltown. He was overwhelmed with the wonder of it. “Yes, that's what they mean when they say a ‘new day'!” He came to a crossroad and read the signs; to the south, “Kenniston, 20 m.,” to the northeast, “Fort Barry, 14 m.,” to the west, “Tatum, 1 m.” He passed through Tatum, blank and pallid in the early light. Two miles beyond it he turned left into a deep wood, following a brook. He found seven yards of rope attached to his saddle and tethered Evangeline. He poured some oats into the crown of his hat (blew on it, sniffed it, took some into his mouth) and set it before her. In the bag of apples he found some baked potatoes. He glanced briefly from time to time at Evangeline.

Ashley had ridden horses as a boy, spending his summer vacations on his grandmother's farm. She—the old independent eccentric gray-eyed Marie-Louise Scolastique Dubois Ashley—was the person he most loved until his twenty-first year and the person who had most rigorously loved him. She was, besides many other things, an unlicensed veterinary doctor. The farmers brought their animals to her from far and wide. She infuriated many a farmer with her denunciation of his husbandry. She moved among horses like one knowing their language. Cattle, dogs and cats, birds, deer, even skunks exchanged intelligence with her. By day and often far into the night under a kerosene lamp John helped her with injections, boluses, cataplasms; together they had delivered colts and calves; they had put many an animal to sleep. He remembered some of her injunctions: “Never look a horse or a dog or a child in the eye for longer than a few seconds; it shames them. Don't stroke a horse's neck, slap it; and after you've slapped it, slap your own thigh. Don't do anything sudden with your feet. Feet and teeth are what they use to attack their enemies and to defend themselves. Joe Dekker's always closing his stall door with a kick of his foot; his horses hate him. If you're going to have to use a whip, let the horse see you at a distance striking yourself with it. When you give him oats, sniff it first; blow it all over the place; eat some, and then give it to him as though you hated to part with it.” Ashley had owned a horse and buggy in Coaltown, having paid a bottom price for Bella, an unamiable beast. He had driven Bella for ten years in a friendship to which only a ballad could do justice. He now stole some glances at Evangeline. She was no longer young, but she had been well cared for and was soundly shod.

He fell off to sleep, though he was tormented by fleas. He had written Beata daily from the jail, without mentioning the fleas. He had told her how he missed his bed and the sheets smelling of lavender. He awoke in the early afternoon. It was intensely hot, even in the deep forest. “Come on, Evangeline. Let's follow the stream and find a pool. It's time for a bath.”

And there was a pool. He tethered Evangeline for the last time. He lay in the water and closed his eyes. “Beata knows now. Roger will have heard. Yes, Porky will have heard first. ‘Mama, Papa got away.'” He tried to imagine his own future and to plan for it, but he was deficient in that aspect of the imagination which has to do with taking shrewd care of oneself. He had little if any faculty for making plans; he had no experience of worry. People who are habitually anxious forge plans day and night. Serener natures are incomprehensible to them; they appear to drift and procrastinate. But John Ashley was laying plans without being aware of it. He spent eight days sleeping in the woods. Each evening he awoke with a project formed in his mind. Plans were the gifts of sleep. Waking on that first evening near Tatum, it was clear to him that he was a Canadian on his way to work in the mines of Chile. He was not a mining engineer, but he was an engineer with experience in mining. He knew very little about Chile, but the little he knew suited his situation. Chile was far. It was part of the folklore in engineering schools that no bright graduate went to Chile, if he could help it. The conditions of life and work there were massively difficult. You worked the nitrate mines in intolerable heat on a desert where no rain ever fell. The best copper mines in the Andes, with one famous exception, were located above eleven thousand feet. You couldn't take a wife there. There was no entertainment. You couldn't even drink above ten thousand feet—not what a man calls drinking. His goal was Chile. Not only was Ashley going to Chile, he would become a Chilean.

The next morning he learned that he was to descend the Mississippi River on a lumber barge. Five years before he had borrowed a surrey and taken his family to see the river. The trip had been taken in the spirit of an outing, in preference to a train trip to Chicago, as being cheaper. The Ashleys had sat long on the bluffs above the stream, completely satisfied by the spectacle. They had taken a great interest in the various barges, short and squat or long and narrow, that floated down the river or laboriously chugged their way up it. A passerby informed them that the long thin ones were lumber barges from the north on their way to New Orleans. “Swedish fellas on 'em. Can't speak twenty words of American.” Ashley had not been in swimming since his student days, but he thought he could swim to midstream.