The Watchman (13 page)

The Colonel was craggy and yet massively solid with an ageless and patrician face, held always high to match the back-thrust of his giant shoulders; dressed invariably in old, frayed, rumpled suits of muted Manx tweeds and nothing new about his get-up except for a flannel shirt of glowing, garish plaid, buttoned tight at the throat, and, perhaps, some fresh variation in the grin of fixed outrage in which his face seemed originally molded, like the dangerous, stamped, furious head of a satyr cast in the pewter lid of a snuffbox. He spent his days at home reading: in the mornings, only newspapers: last night's Mound, both Wheeling papers, the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, the Times and Tribune and—to the endless gabbing and delighted suspicions of the mailman's wife—the Manchester Guardian, the London Times and the New Statesman and Nation.

In the evenings he read all the current novels, histories, criticisms, and political memoirs. The large window of his bedroom was kept open, winter and summer, and from it from time to time hurled volumes plummeted out in flapping

trajectory, like chickens shot from cannons, so that in the yard beneath the window there was always to be seen a mildewing pile of most of the current popular books of the season: hke a disordered, steaming, and rain-soaked rental library. Having read everything ancient from the speeches of Catiline to the millennium-ending memoirs of the Sitwells he read everything current; cursing and slashing the machete of his restless, hopeful intellect through the tangled undergrowth of that dismal and epidemic swamp, panting ever onwards in savage optimism that his gnostic, eclectic eye would, as sometimes it did, fall upon the rare and precious-petaled weed of a fresh and personal imagination: reading all the seasons' slop, trash and pudder in a valiant, iterant, often maddening compulsion not unlike Ort Dobey's night quests through the four-sheet Evening Mound.

Aside from the classics, the library in the Colonel's bedroom was small, queer and crankishly varied, the painfully achieved distillation of a thousand and one nights' dissertain-ments, three close-packed bookshelves of a monster and epicurean eccentricity: Rebecca West and the autobiography of Billie Holliday, the war cartoons of Mauldin and the warrior first-nights of James Agate, Mother Jones and Father Schweitzer, Eugene V. Debs and Cyril Connoly, Simenon, Raymond Chandler, Albert Camus; and two identical copies of the personal, best-selling memoirs of the past two decades' most celebrated general, copies the Colonel had especially purchased to be used as heavy book ends having sent them to be, for that purpose, encrusted in thick bronze by a flabbergasted Middle Western firm which specialized in electroplating baby shoes. For Colonel Bruce was not, as most Adenans euphemized it, a Republican, and since most of them were, it was natural for them to avoid the word Democrat as nicely as possible.

One winter in a mood of particularly sour literary exasperation he set out to write a book of his own: a mystery, a romance, a memoir, a God knows what: compendium of his own enormous, turbulent, mob-vast mind, spirit and years: love story whose maiden was the cosmos and cavalry charge whose objective was the close-ranked trenches of general stupidity. He finished the two thousand pages of it in that single, snowed-in winter. It was of course never published—probably he had never intended it to be for it was, if anything, the savage manuscription of a man talking to himself. And no one ever read it—not more than a fraction

of it, at least—and those fragments only by a terrified, infuriated Doctor O. T. Sncdcker and a milk-skinned, black-haired and extraordinarily pretty young stenographer, nervous and fresh from an Office School in Wheeling who, shortly after her winter in the Colonel's exclusive employment, had a brief emotional breakdown and later took orders in a Western Pennsylvania convent.

In the middle and darkest hours of bleak, crackling winter nights the Colonel would spring from his quilts and search cursing in the pack rat's nest of his desktop for notepaper, his mind ratding full of wild, fresh phrases which would not, could not wait till morning for transcription. When in that stumbling, crashing dark he found scratch-paper he would make his furious notes but in the morning somehow he could not ever find the sheets or, if he found them, could not fit them into sensible sequence and so one night, after stamping about the carpet in the circle of his desk's single gooseneck lamp, the muslin of his short, shabby nightshirt flapping round his legs, he flung himself angrily back in the bed, glared for a moment in outraged improvisation and suddenly began writing notes on the bared skin of his knee.

It proved to be one of those creative accidents of inspired ingenuity: now he had his notes always at hand and even, one might say, at knee, at thigh, and eventually at stomach, chest and shoulders, finding upon his flesh that unique continuity of surface which no conceivable paper could provide: his scribbled ideas and even, toward the end, whole phrases and sections of chapters from the book itself scrawled all over himself from the soles of his feet to the collar-line of his neck: no book, perhaps in all history both hterarily and literally had been so much a part of any author; so that, seen naked, the old man, with all his flesh, youthful and well muscled as Blake's Jehovah, intricate with crabbed and circumambient scribbling, looked like some sort of inscribed Egyptian god: a walking, human notebook; though, of course, he was cautious never to write on any part of him that would show beyond the wrist or neckline of his flamboyant shirts of schoolboy plaid, for it was his notion that Link Doty's Grocery where he went once weekly to buy his victuals was teeming with cynics and plagirists. During the day's work it was not uncommon for him to tear open his collar and begin checking and incorporating into the manuscript, notes from his chest and stomach.

One afternoon he had gone to the office of Doctor O. T. Snedeker, presumably for a heart and lung examination, and taken off his shirt and let the top of his long underwear fall round his waist and not at all out of absent-mindedness either but in a mood of flaunting arrogance over some jaunty and outrageous comments about the medical profession in general and of O. T. Snedeker in particular: savage paragraphs which took up the most of his abdominal area and disappeared suddenly and maddeningly under his trouser tops, all of it written upside-down, of course, so that it was necessary for O.T., who had long since dropped his stethoscope and commenced reading in almost apoplectic disbelief, to crook his neck and invert his outraged head to read it.

You can't say that about me, you old bolshevik radical, cried the doctor, fumbling to undo the top of the Colonel's trousers so that he might j&nish the horrifying passage.

Snedeker! boomed Colonel William Tansy Jackson Bruce. I came here to be examined—^not expurgated!

And so Jibbons, this night, as he might have summarily dismissed from his mind the two-year-old who placed eighth that day at Wheeling's Downs, forgot the nature of the fixed, thought-rigged, unbeatable wheel which rested, oiled and ready on its jeweled hub, across the hotel lobby from him.

What brings you up town tonight, Colonel Bruce, sir? he blurted, pleasantly, recklessly, fatally.

Mister Jibbons, I came to see and feel and sense the beginnings of that happy-hunt which will end inevitably in the hound running the sick, rabid fox to ground and tearing the little creature to bits. Hasn't it started yet?

Jibbons scowled, since it was his policy when confused to look angry and so cleverly divert attention from his consternation.

Hasn't what started yet, Colonel?

The town, sir? Isn't Adena flexing its muscles for the kill? A boy's been murdered. Mister Jibbons. The Sheriff is hot on the spoor. God help him if he doesn't find his town a fresh trail.

We'll get him, said the horse trader perfunctorily. Don't you ever worry about that. Colonel Bruce.

"The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction," Mister Jibbons, smiled the Colonel. That's William Blake. You remember him—that painter who used to see

God grinning at him out of Link Doty's prune barrel. They sent him to the Weston asylum. Whew, a dangerous one was Blake!

I knew him, said Matthew Hood, suddenly rising from his glaring, fog-enchanted reveries. Lucky they taken him off when they did, too. He had a hanging look about him, that one. Another week on the loose and—bango!—he'd have off and shot his wife and then—bingo!—he'd have been mine. Bill was it? Bill Blake, yes. A hanging look, Colonel. You know what I mean, I'm sure. A hanging look if you can imagine what that is, sir.

"Everything possible to be believed," said the Colonel, chuckling softly. "Is an image of truth."

Did he say that, too? cried the old hangman, rising in his chair. By God now, you see what I mean? By God, that BUI Blake!

The big door to the street opened suddenly and the Reverend Doctor G. Robert Godd came in, with a wisp of fog in his black shoes' wake, which hung in the air for a moment by the crack of the shut door, like a rag of angelic muslin snatched from his heels. In the three generations since the doom-bogged and sepulchral manner of eighteenth century divines a transition has occurred more challenging and resourceful than those faced by any other of theatrics: the problem of blending harmoniously the humility of the Lord-appointed with the jolliness of the Rotarian: Doctor Godd had not fallen short in this subtle, flashy duality.

Quite a night out there, fellows, he said. By golly, you can feel a hint of old father frost out there in that fog.

Oh, good evening. Reverend Godd, said the horse trader politely, uneasy always in the presence of unfixed handicaps.

"Nothing irritates a vulture like biting into a glass-eye," said the Colonel, looking into the window again.

Was that Bill, too? said the hangman suddenly. By God now, that's a mad one if ever I heard it. Was that him said that. Colonel?

No, strangler, said the Colonel. That was Kin Hubbard of Brown County, Indiana. Did you almost hang him, too?

The name, said Matthew Hood carefully. The name escapes me for the moment. Hubbard? Hubbard. Squint-eyed— big Adam's apple?

Judge Bruce, said Reverend Godd, rubbing his moist hands genially one against the other, and then suddenly folding

them at the fly of the smartly tailored sharkskin suit he wore for the Other Six Days. Judge Bruce, it's you I came to see. I was passing in my car and saw you and I thought it a good chance to drop in and pay my respects.

Your respects, Preacher, might begin by not calling me Judge, said the Colonel, unmoving his eyes from the window. Judge I never was, never wanted to be, never was asked to be, and never would have been trusted to be inasmuch as I would have sent most juries to prison for life and tried to get most defendants a job and at least one new friend.

Well, now you've as much as said it to me, said Reverend Godd. What kind of man I know you to be—a pal and a buddy to the forsaken and doomed.

"Even the best of us has a little of the worst of us in him," smiled the Colonel gently. "And even the best has more of the worst than he knows."

Now there's a quote, said the Reverend, feeling in his breast pocket for a paper and pencil. That's one I want to use.

You did, said the Colonel drily. To the man you led into the green room the night of this state's first electrocution.

So I did. Colonel Bruce. So I did. Poor wretch. Sometimes I think we lost something when the state made that change from the rope and gallows to the inhuman crucifix of electrodes and cruel, naked lightning.

Amen, croaked Matthew Hood bitterly, his eyes suddenly brimming a little.

Hanging a man—dreadful as it is. Doctor Godd went on. How can I phrase it?—Somehow a man went to the gallows and there was a chance that in the very feeling of his terrible isolation from the rest of humanity and his sudden presence at the edge of God's throne brought a chance of repentance. It was—tradition! Since Judas, eh? But with this electric thing—sometimes I think it does nothing for a man's soul—nothing to make him feel so set apart from all the rest of us. In the presence of the noose, gentlemen, I used to see in the eyes of the doomed man a change of heart. But now with this electric chair I miss that look of atonement. Sometimes I think it's this age we've come into. Everything gone electric—electronic. Sometimes when I watch a man's face when they strap him in that chair his eyes almost mock me—almost laugh. Well, maybe it's this queer nuclear age that's to blame. The noose—well it was

somehow less universal. Its passing undoes, I think, the whole spiritual value of execution.

"The Ohio Valley's future now stands proudly on the threshold of a brightly lit new era and that brightness comes from electric energy of that colossus which will give to our region the just name 'Ruhr of America,'" said Colonel Bruce stentoriously. That's another quote for you. Preacher, and that one's from Cliff Rector's speech at the Kiwanis the week he was promoted as President of the Ohio Valley Power and Light Development Association. Reverend, I don't think you should go around knocking big business that way. Especially electrical business. They'll brand you a Democrat if you don't watch out.

Colonel Bruce, politics and the ministry are bad bedfellows, warmly laughed the Reverend, with a wave of his hand and a shake of his head. My reason for stopping by when I saw you tonight was to mildly point out what a stranger you've become in our congregation these past few years. Good heavens, Colonel, it's been so long I'm surprised you even recognized me.

Godd, said the Colonel. The Most Reverend Doctor G. Robert Godd, Doctor of Divinity, Infinity, Trinity and Equanimity. Yes, I recognized you. I'm ninety-seven—my vision is twenty-twenty and my mind is fifty-fifty: half decided that the human race is worth saving and half entirely opposed to such a disgraceful notion. Doctor Godd, you are quite recognizable to me. I believe I knew your father Godd. Or is it Godd, the father? By the way, is that really a family name? Never mind—I knew a prosecuting attorney once whose name was True so I suppose there are as many contradictions among the patronymics of one profession as there are in any other.