The Watchman (17 page)

It was the Trumpet Home Tabernacle Band come to inspire the parting penitents and not only with campground melodies for now their leader Mister I. W. Humbolt produced a stack of inspirational leaflets and went the round of the men with them, having come provided (with relentless evan-

gelism) with two extra pamphlets for the guards. Their tuning-up was always enough to draw a crowd in Adena: the tentative male whinny of the slide-trombone (reputed to have been willed to I. W. Humbolt by the late Homer Rhodeheaver), the skittish, noodling soprano of the old-fashioned, yellow-wood clarinet, the cornet, drums, and, of course, the tambourine.

The fifteen ex-convicts whose lives, if they had achieved nothing more for themselves, had conditioned them to an unastonished acceptance of the bizarre and unforeseen, looked a little more miserable and glanced hopefully up the dusk of Lafayette Avenue for the lights of the Greyhound.

It was the guards whose composure was shaken. The crowd gathered, increased, the faces of them illumined now by the street light which arced on suddenly, coldly, noiselessly above their heads Hke a corporation moon. Everyone in Adena who ignored, hated, or misunderstood music liked the Trumpet Home Tabernacle Band. Captain Jarvis of the Salvation Army, to his credit, disliked them with that mild degree of violence of which his temperate, wise spirit was capable; disliked them for the very reason that had brought them out that evening. Captain Jarvis, having spent as many hours among convicts as he slept each night, knew and understood them well enough to guess how dreadful it was for them, at a moment when they wished for nothing more than whatever last shred of inconspicuousness was left to them, wished nothing less than to find themselves surrounded by a loud, small street band. The spectators came from every direction and began to gather like leaves around a river island in the flowing dusk. If not appropriately, at least with a certain locational symbolism, they struck out with "Brighten Up the Corner Where You Are."

Jason seized Jill's hand and pulled her into the shoulders of the crowd: Luther could not see them there. The band played with desperate, zealous imprecision. Star of the aggregation—perhaps, after all, it was he more than anything that was the lodestar attraction of the Trumpet Home Tabernacle Band—was the comettist. Though, even at the band's beginnings, no one in Adena had been surprised at the notion that a man of such myriad, arcane and shadowy virtuosities as Matthew Hood could also play the horn. It was not the instrument of redemption with which his life had traditionally been associated. And yet, to the most tone-deaf and literal-minded man, there is always the suggestion of Judg-

ment in the very name of trumpet. The crowd thickened, necks craned, children lifted onto shoulders, small dogs ran barking, windows flew open: the street was filled clear across to the theater entrance. So that Jason guessed at Luther elbowing his way through the throng to get to Jill. To himself. He pulled her on, ducking and moving among the multitude.

Jase, let's go back in the hotel?

"Brighten up the corner where you are!" he sang, and pulled her on into the seclusion of so many others. He laughed and caught a glimpse of one of the guards, beet-faced and furious, shouting something which could not be heard above the din, his mouth open and working soundless and idiotic like a landed fish. The roar of a powerful motor thundered through now: for a moment the guards and prisoners turned, bright with hope that the bus was coming. It was Colonel Bruce in his 1926 Buick touring car on his way to Qick Doty's Grocery for the rriakings of his evening meal. He parked at the outer edges of the crowd and nudged his big frame through toward the band, the convicts, the outraged guards.

Matt! he bawled at the cornettist, in a moment's rest between spirituals. What are you trying to do? Wake all those dead so you can hang them again?

- Matthew Hood shook spit from his horn and smiled with silent martyrdom.

When the band struck up "Jesus Wants Me for a Sun Beam" Jason looked anxiously among the faces for some sign of Luther, thought he caught a glimpse of one eye of him somewhere among straw hats and hair ribbons and tossed children's knees.

Come on, honey, he said, dragging her off into the crowd again. The bus is in. Let's get on.

Those men! she gasped. Jason, I'm scared.

Why? I feel safer with them than I do in this crowd.

We—we don't have bus tickets! she cried. And I don't have Mama's purse—and not so much as a nickel of mad money in my handkerchief.

I've got a dollar, he laughed, jubilant and all the tingle of the crowd and even the poor little makeshift band somehow quickening his heart and deepening the love, both heavy and light: a golden nugget at the top of his stomach. A dollar's all we need to get to Captina.

Captina! Jason, what in the world for. Captina's just a

little nothing down the river road! Captina! she cried. Jason, whatever would we go there for? What would be there?

We'd be there! he shouted, thrusting his arms under the sleeves of her coat and lifting her off the bricks. That's who'd be there. Jill, it's autumn! Look at the new moon waiting in the trees up there in the orchard ridges!

It's a strange thing to think of, she said oddly, giving him a slow, queer, suspicious stare. Jason, you wouldn't just want to get me down there in the country to—to be fresh, would you?

Never, Jill! Never ever would I ever! he said gravely.

She looked at him closely, chewed her lip, looked at him a moment more, blinking twice slowly.

I can see you really mean it, she said, squeezing his hand. So I won't ask you to swear. Oh, Jason, it is a beautiful night! No fog! Hurry, she cried, pulling him now, pushing her way into the very center of the weary, hangdog cluster of gray, identical men forming to file, with long, unfolded tickets in their sweating, pallid fingers, on their way to the open bus. Luther was lost in the milling background, the bass drum boomed like a madman pounding from the inside of a padlocked cellar door, while the apocalyptic chant of Matthew Hood's horn awoke the ghosts of the night's murdered serenities. The bus driver with his ticket-punch, uncased as the guards had been by his strange gray cargo: Hurry, please. Running half an hour late as it is. Tickets, please.

Jason pressed closed behind Jill, her hair fragrant as food against his nostrils and mouth, his thrilled, shaky fingers fumbling for money in his jacket. The Trumpet Home Tabernacle Band in remorseless pursuit: "When the Roll Is Called up Yonder I'll be There." Tickets, please. Hurry. Somewhere as if in savage, tiny assault upon the taunting timbrel of the tambourine-sound like the thumping jingling of a bagful of coins, a small dog barking agnostically. Hurry. Hurry. Something bumps shouldering against his legs. He glances down: it is old Toomis Burke, thirty years legless from the mines, down there on his cushioned dolly, knuckling his way through the shoes and ankles and creased trousers, his massive, muscular trunk rattling along the bricks like a toy on his little iron wheels; a pint bottle, half empty in his fist and himself having a huge good time on his different level down there in that quite different and most private forest of other folks' sound legs, at the curb edge

now where, unseen he fancies, and without self-consciousness, he opens his trousers and piddles in the gutter. The queue shortens. Almost there. But someone tugging now at Jason's sleeve and he whirls, his mind gone mindless with words to be shouted in the Sheriff's covetous face. But it is only Cristi.

Jason, listen to me just a minute.

Cristi, let go of my arm, he shouts into the clamor of the hangman's horn and the drum-imprisoned imbecile, still hammering to be let out of his drum. Cristi's face seemed aged and corrupted with the ferocity of long weeping, and her fingers were fixed tight as the hand of a drowning woman in his sleeve.

Jason, my God, don't go tonight. Not tonight, please! she screamed among that loud, harsh music about a quiet, gentle Man.

Tickets, please. Come on, folks, I'm late now! Inside, please, shouted the busman.

Jason, I never asked you for anything before now—never anything, Jason! Cristi yelling at him. Please, Oh God, please!

He hauls his clutched arm free, thrusts Jill's shoulders forward, Cristi's face drowned in the crowd, and like all such last images of swift exposure, a face of stark, memorable emotion; though not perhaps to Jason so dramatic and wonderful as the smiling, knowing, feverish look Jill threw back after her sister, now swallowed in the ocean of hats, hair and baby legs: a withering grimace of odd triumph. Now with a hiss and a rumble the bus was off. They stood: Jason with his hands on her shoulders from behind. Most of the convicts stood, as well: some fortunate ones in the pressed, breathless, shoving sway of passengers massed tight as fisted hands, able to turn and direct their miserable eyes into the dark luggage racks; less lucky were those unable to move and forced to stand with their nose tips fairly brushing the poking, probing, unabashedly curious faces of huckstering farm wives and big-vested salesman of strip-mine equipment.

Say, are you fellows really just fresh out of the pen?

Yes'm.

Guess it must feel pretty good being out, mister?

A shadow of a pause before the answer to that most moot of all questions, then: Yes'm. Pretty good.

Reckon you fellers in the pen's the only ones they couldn't never pin the Blake murder on.

No comment to that: a most torturing and interesting thought to one of the men: an old Marion County bank robber with a face as flat, smooth, impervious as an ax blade. He remembers the lifer named Jacoby Banjo, a favorite of the Warden's, permitted passes whenever he wanted them, movies down town once a month, sometimes a woman in a river road beer joint motel: the bank robber winces at the memory of those squandered nights and the most fascinating alibi a man might ever want for any crime conceivable: I'm a lifer. I been in jail fifteen years. And I got one hundred and ninety-nine to go. Don't look funny at me. I was here. Go ask the warden. The bus hisses, lunges, pauses, hisses, lurches rumbling on, its tires ripping silk down the blacktop river road. A very small girl without so much warning as a premonitory consternation in her large, sad eyes is suddenly sick all over the front of the new coat Grandma got her for last Easter, now sitting bolt-upright, weeping in the aftermath, her arms elevated to either side of her now, like those of a ropewalker, in shamed, fastidious humiliation at the lunch in her lap.

How long was you in for, Mister?

Five years, eleven months, twenty-nine days, twelve hours, twenty-eight minutes, and fifteen seconds.

Well, I never! You sure got a good mind for numbers.

That's God's own truth, ma'am. Serial numbers. That's what I done my time for.

Jill's eyes burn into Jason's own adoring ones; she squeezes both his hands, bites her lip on a secret, then, teasing, blurts it out: I knew all along why you wanted to get away from the hotel, she cries softly to him.

What? Why? No, you don't, he said. You mean your sister?

No, she says, her face burning pink with the zest of the thought of it. Daddy, she said. You saw Daddy across the street—waiting to come over and make a big fuss.

He started to deny and then flushed and looked away.

ril bet anything, she said, that Daddy's following us.

You make it sound like you wish he was, he said.

No, she laughed. That would be crazy now, wouldn't it?

She sighed and smiled another smile, looking away into the shoulders of the gray men, her eyes misty and wistful.

Still a girl can't help being proud, she murmured. With a daddy looking after her like that—a daddy who loves her that much.

Must get ter'ble confining] shouted the old woman's mouth, snufT-streaked at its corners, her face upthrust inches from the convict's eyes. What's a feller do to pass the time?

Lady, if you don't mind I just as soon not bother remembering.

I saw'n in the Sun-Telegraph where you fellers play checkers with old bottle caps. Is that what they play checkers with up there?

I never played no checkers, lady.

Well, now is that true about all the lights going down dim when they turn on the electric chair?

He shoots his eyes up to hers for a moment, and for a moment hers recoil, and then his gaze slides back again to the plastic cameo at the neck of her rickracked collar.

Well, is that true about the lights when they burn 'em? she cries, seizing courage again, relishing this brush with unknown, arctic, outlaw regions of freedom in all the monotony of her own cozy, dangerless life. Is it? she persists.

Lady, why don't you just go kill somebody and find that out?

"Well, I ne-ever\

She hugs her large net shopping bag and struggles to turn around with her outraged back to him: assaulted, disappointed, and thrilled to her tingling toes.

But why would he make a fuss? Jason asks Jill. Why doesn't he want me to take you out?

Oh, Daddy's strange, she sings. To those that don't know him like I do. He just can't stand the idea of anyone taking me away from him, I guess. Not even for an hour or two.

Was he always that way about you? he asked, sorrowfully, and queerly puzzled.

Always, she said. As bad about me being off somewhere with somebody as if it had been Mama off somewhere with somebody. It's the way I favor her, I guess. You should just see Mama's picture, Jason. Why, I'm her hving image, Papa says!

He turned his head and tried to search through the massed humanity to the big rear window to see if, by chance, a car with a whirling orange light might be following. He could see nothing but the convicts and several black straw hats with plastic Woolworth fruit: hats like lacquered wreaths nailed to the doorways of the dead, beneath whose brims were the faceless faces of those women who seem eternally to be on buses: colorless, ageless, destinationless, and vaguely.

absently troubled women who peer anxiously from time to time into the lightless highway dark as if searching for familiar landmarks and fooling no one about that for it is manifest that these are women hurled by life into the orbit of a family-less, memory-less, deracinated migration. They call incessantly to the driver to know what time the bus will get to Amarillo, Biloxi, Boston—then glance again into the window's futureless pit of blackness, searching again for that illusory and fictional landmark, the clue to home's proximity, while all the bus folk but they themselves know that their haven, home and destination is, and perhaps has been forever since their widowdom, the next rest-station, and tuna salad and a teabag in tepid water as their welcome-feast. While in their bulging string-net shopping bags they bear eternally home-sewn bean-bag toys and tinned oat-meal cookies, fruitcakes and melting bags of peppermints and hard fruit-candies for imaginary (or perhaps vanished, dead, grown up) small nieces, nephews and perhaps children of their own, now children no longer, except in the immutable agelessness of yellowing baby photo-albums: five-year-olds with whining, candid ungraciousness who will not want those homemade presents, and who will want even less the unctuous pats, ministrations and chin-chuckings of those old, child-starved hands. They seem for a moment, these women, to brighten a little in the naked, garish, waking blaze of bus stop luncheonettes and when their tuna salad and tea treat is over they move about, pricing souvenir wall-plaques with burnt-wood slogans and those ubiquitous glazed black china panthers whose jungles seem always to be such shelves; and yet, of course, they never buy, but move on then with cautious, brittle vivacity, like mistresses of mortgaged doUhouses, they cross the room to fluff up the flounce of a plastic curtain at a window and then stand back to inspect it critically, head tilted, mouth pursed, and straighten a paper rose in the vase on the greasy formica tabletop as if Christmas company were due at any moment.