Страница:
light of distant worlds.
I'm drunk, thought Tomбs. I won't tell anyone of this
tomorrow, no, no.
They stood there on the ancient highway, neither of them
moving.
"Where are you from?" asked the Martian at last.
"Earth."
"What is that?"
"There." Tomбs nodded to the sky.
"When?"
"We landed over a year ago, remember?"
"No."
"And all of you were dead, all but a few. You're rare,
don't you _know_ that?"
"That's not true."
"Yes, dead. I saw the bodies. Black, in the rooms, in
the houses, dead. Thousands of them."
"That's ridiculous. We're _alive!_"
"Mister, you're invaded, only you don't know it. You must
have escaped."
"I haven't escaped; there was nothing to escape. What do
you mean? I'm on my way to a festival now at the canal, near
the Eniall Mountains. I was there last night. Don't you see the
city there?" The Martian pointed.
Tomбs looked and saw the ruins. "Why, that city's been
dead thousands of years."
The Martian laughed. "Dead. I slept there yesterday!"
"And I was in it a week ago and the week before that, and
I just drove through it now, and it's a heap. See the broken
pillars?"
"Broken? Why, I see them perfectly. The moonlight helps.
And the pillars are upright."
"There's dust in the streets," said Tomбs.
"The streets are clean!"
"The canals are empty right there."
"The canals are full of lavender wine!"
"It's dead."
"It's alive!" protested the Martian, laughing more now.
"Oh, you're quite wrong. See all the carnival lights? There
are beautiful boats as slim as women, beautiful women as slim
as boats, women the color of sand, women with fire flowers in
their hands. I can see them, small, running in the streets
there. That's where I'm going now, to the festival; we'll float
on the waters all night long; we'll sing, we'll drink, we'll
make love, Can't you see it?"
"Mister, that city is dead as a dried lizard. Ask any of
our party. Me, I'm on my way to Green City tonight; that's the
new colony we just raised over near Illinois Highway. You're
mixed up. We brought in a million board feet of Oregon lumber
and a couple dozen tons of good steel nails and hammered
together two of the nicest little villages you ever saw.
Tonight we're warming one of them. A couple rockets are coming
in from Earth, bringing our wives and girl friends. There'll
be barn dances and whisky--"
The Martian was now disquieted. "You say it is over that
way?"
"There are the rockets." Tomбs walked him to the edge of
the hill and pointed down. "See?"
"No."
"Damn it, there they _are!_ Those long silver things."
"No."
Now Tomбs laughed. "You're blind!"
"I see very well. You are the one who does not see."
"But you see the new _town_, don't you?"
"I see nothing but an ocean, and water at low tide."
"Mister, that water's been evaporated for forty
centuries."
"Ah, now, now, that _is_ enough."
"It's true, I tell you."
The Martian grew very serious. "Tell me again. You do not
see the city the way I describe it? The pillars very white,
the boats very slender, the festival lights--oh, I see
them _clearly!_ And listen! I can hear them singing. It's no
space away at all."
Tomбs listened and shook his head. "No."
"And I, on the other hand," said the Martian, "cannot see
what you describe. Well."
Again.they were cold. An ice was in their flesh.
"Can it be . . . ?"
"What?"
"You say 'from the sky'?"
"Earth."
"Earth, a name, nothing," said the Martian. "_But_ . . .
as I came up the pass an hour ago. . ." He touched the back of
his neck. "I felt . . ."
"Cold?"
"Yes."
"And now?"
"Cold again. Oddly. There was a thing to the light, to
the hills, the road," said the Martian. "I felt the
strangeness, the road, the light, and for a moment I felt as if
I were the last man alive on this world. . . ."
"So did I!" said Tomбs, and it was like talking to an old
and dear friend, confiding, growing warm with the topic.
The Martian closed his eyes and opened them again. "This
can only mean one thing. It has to do with Time. Yes. You are
a figment of the Past!"
"No, you are from the Past," said the Earth Man, having
had time to think of it now.
"You are so _certain_. How can you prove who is from the
Past, who from the Future? What year is it?"
"Two thousand and one!"
"What does that mean to _me?_"
Tomбs considered and shrugged. "Nothing."
"It is as if I told you that it is the year 4462853 S.E.C.
It is nothing and more than nothing! Where is the clock to show
us how the stars stand?"
"But the ruins prove it! They prove that _I_ am the
Future, _I_ am alive, _you_ are dead!"
"Everything in me denies this. My heart beats, my stomach
hungers, my mouth thirsts. No, no, not dead, not alive, either
of us. More alive than anything else. Caught between is more
like it. Two strangers passing in the night, that is it.
Two strangers passing. Ruins, you say?"
"Yes. You're afraid?"
"Who wants to see the Future, who _ever_ does? A man can
face the Past, but to think--the pillars _crumbled_, you say?
And the sea empty, and the canals dry, and the maidens dead,
and the flowers withered?" The Martian was silent, but then
he looked on ahead. "But there they _are_. I _see_ them. Isn't
that enough for me? They wait for me now, no matter _what_ you
say."
And for Tomбs the rockets, far away, waiting for _him_,
and the town and the women from Earth. "We can never agree,"
he said.
"Let us agree to disagree," said the Martian. "What does
it matter who is Past or Future, if we are both alive, for
what follows will follow, tomorrow or in ten thousand years.
How do you know that those temples are not the temples of your
own civilization one hundred centuries from now, tumbled and
broken? You do not know. Then don't ask. But the night is very
short. There go the festival fires in the sky, and the birds."
Tomгs put out his hand. The Martian did likewise in
imitation.
Their hands did not touch; they melted through each other.
"Will we meet again?"
"Who knows? Perhaps some other night."
"I'd like to go with you to that festival."
"And I wish I might come to your new town, to see this
ship you speak of, to see these men, to hear all that has
happened."
"Good-by," said Tomбs.
"Good night."
The Martian rode his green metal vehicle quietly away into
the hills, The Earth Man turned his truck and drove it silently
in the opposite direction.
"Good lord, what a dream that was," sighed Tomбs, his
hands on the wheel, thinking of the rockets, the women, the
raw whisky, the Virginia reels, the party.
How strange a vision was that, thought the Martian,
rushing on, thinking of the festival, the canals, the boats,
the women with golden eyes, and the songs.
The night was dark. The moons had gone down. Starlight
twinkled on the empty highway where now there was not a sound,
no car, no person, nothing. And it remained that way all the
rest of the cool dark night.
October 2002: THE SHORE
Mars was a distant shore, and the men spread upon it in
waves. Each wave different, and each wave stronger. The first
wave carried with it men accustomed to spaces and coldness and
being alone, the coyote and cattlemen, with no fat on them,
with faces the years had worn the flesh off, with eyes
like nailheads, and hands like the material of old gloves,
ready to touch anything. Mars could do nothing to them, for
they were bred to plains and prairies as open as the Martian
fields. They came and made things a little less empty, so that
others would find courage to follow. They put panes in hollow
windows and lights behind the panes.
They were the first men.
Everyone knew who the first women would be.
The second men should have traveled from other countries
with other accents and other ideas. But the rockets were
American and the men were American and it stayed that way,
while Europe and Asia and South America and Australia and
the islands watched the Roman candles leave them behind. The
rest of the world was buried in war or the thoughts of war.
So the second men were Americans also. And they came from
the cabbage tenements and subways, and they found much rest
and vacation in the company of silent men from the tumbleweed
states who knew how to use silences so they filled you up with
peace after long years crushed in tubes, tins and boxes in New
York.
And among the second men were men who looked, by their
eyes, as if they were on their way to God. . . .
February 2003: INTERIM
They brought in fifteen thousand lumber feet of Oregon
pine to build Tenth City, and seventy-nine thousand feet
of California redwood and they hammered together a clean, neat
little town by the edge of the stone canals. On Sunday nights
you could see red, blue, and green stained-glass light in
the churches and hear the voices singing the numbered hymns.
"We will now sing 79. We will now sing 94." And in certain
houses you heard the hard clatter of a typewriter, the novelist
at work; or the scratch of a pen, the poet at work; or no sound
at all, the former beachcomber at work. It was as if, in many
ways, a great earthquake had shaken loose the roots and cellars
of an Iowa town, and then, in an instant, a whirlwind twister
of Oz-like proportions had carried the entire town off to Mars
to set it down without a bump.
April 2003: THE MUSICIANS
The boys would hike far out into the Martian country.
They carried odorous paper bags into which from time to time
upon the long walk they would insert their noses to inhale the
rich smell of the ham and mayonnaised pickles, and to listen to
the liquid gurgle of the orange soda in the warming bottles.
Swinging their grocery bags full of clean watery green onions
and odorous liverwurst and red catsup and white bread, they
would dare each other on past the limits set by their stem
mothers. They would run, yelling:
"First one there gets to kick!"
They biked in summer, autumn, or winter. Autumn was most
fun, because then they imagined, like on Earth, they were
scuttering through autumn leaves.
They would come like a scatter of jackstones on the marble
flats beside the canals, the candy-cheeked boys with blue-agate
eyes, panting onion-tainted commands to each other. For now
that they had reached the dead, forbidden town it was no longer
a matter of "Last one there's a girl!" or "First one gets to
play Musician!" Now the dead town's doors lay wide and they
thought they could hear the faintest crackle, like autumn
leaves, from inside. They would hush themselves forward, by
each other's elbows, carrying sticks, remembering their parents
had told them, "Not there! No, to none of the old towns! Watch
where you hike. You'll get the beating of your life when you
come home. We'll check your shoes!"
And there they stood in the dead city, a heap of boys,
their hiking lunches half devoured, daring each other in
shrieky whispers.
"Here goes nothing!" And suddenly one of them took off,
into the nearest stone house, through the door, across the
living room, and into the bedroom where, without half looking,
he would kick about, thrash his feet, and the black leaves
would fly through the air, brittle, thin as tissue cut from
midnight sky. Behind him would race six others, and the first
boy there would be the Musician, playing the white xylophone
bones beneath the outer covering of black flakes. A great skull
would roll to view, like a snowball; they shouted! Ribs, like
spider legs, plangent as a dull harp, and then the black flakes
of mortality blowing all about them in their scuffling dance;
the boys pushed and heaved and fell in the leaves, in the death
that had turned the dead to flakes and dryness, into a game
played by boys whose stomachs gurgled with orange pop.
And then out of one house into another, into seventeen
houses, mindful that each of the towns in its turn was being
burned clean of its horrors by the Firemen, antiseptic warriors
with shovels and bins, shoveling away at the ebony tatters
and peppermint-stick bones, slowly but assuredly separating
the terrible from the normal; so they must play very hard,
these boys, the Firemen would soon be here!
Then, luminous with sweat, they gnashed at their
last sandwiches. With a final kick, a final marimba concert,
a final autumnal lunge through leaf stacks, they went home.
Their mothers examined their shoes for black flakelets
which, when discovered, resulted in scalding baths and fatherly
beatings.
By the year's end the Firemen had raked the autumn leaves
and white xylophones away, and it was no more fun.
June 2003: WAY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE AIR
"Did you hear about it?"
"About what?"
"The niggers, the niggers!"
"What about 'em?"
"Them leaving, pulling out, going away; did you hear?"
"What you mean, pulling out? How can they do that?"
"They can, they will, they are."
"Just a couple?"
"Every single one here in the South!"
"No."
"Yes!"
"I got to see that. I don't believe it. Where they going--
Africa?"
A silence.
"Mars."
"You mean the _planet_ Mars?"
"That's right."
The men stood up in the hot shade of the hardware porch.
Someone quit lighting a pipe. Somebody else spat out into the
hot dust of noon.
"They can't leave, they can't do that."
"They're doing it, anyways."
"Where'd you hear this?"
"It's everywhere, on the radio a minute ago, just come
through."
Like a series of dusty statues, the men came to life.
Samuel Teece, the hardware proprietor, laughed uneasily.
"I _wondered_ what happened to Silly. I sent him on my bike an
hour ago. He ain't come back from Mrs. Bordman's yet. You think
that black fool just pedaled off to Mars?"
The men snorted.
"All I say is, he better bring back my bike. I don't
take stealing from no one, by God."
"Listen!"
The men collided irritably with each other, turning.
Far up the street the levee seemed to have broken. The
black warm waters descended and engulfed the town. Between
the blazing white banks of the town stores, among the tree
silences, a black tide flowed. Like a kind of summer molasses,
it poured turgidly forth upon the cinnamon-dusty road. It
surged slow, slow, and it was men and women and horses and
barking dogs, and it was little boys and girls. And from the
mouths of the people partaking of this tide came the sound of
a river. A summer-day river going somewhere, murmuring
and irrevocable. And in that slow, steady channel of darkness
that cut across the white glare of day were touches of alert
white, the eyes, the ivory eyes staring ahead, glancing aside,
as the river, the long and endless river, took itself from
old channels into a new one. From various and uncountable
tributaries, in creeks and brooks of color and motion, the
parts of this river had joined, become one mother current,
and flowed on. And brimming the swell were things carried by
the river: grandfather clocks chiming, kitchen clocks ticking,
caged hens screaming, babies wailing; and swimming among
the thickened eddies were mules and cats, and sudden excursions
of burst mattress springs floating by, insane hair stuffing
sticking out, and boxes and crates and pictures of dark
grandfathers in oak frames-- the river flowing it on while the
men sat like nervous hounds on the hardware porch, too late to
mend the levee, their hands empty.
Samuel Teece wouldn't believe it. "Why, hell, where'd they
get the transportation? How they goin' to _get_ to Mars?"
"Rockets," said Grandpa Quartermain.
"All the damn-fool things. Where'd they get rockets?"
"Saved their money and built them."
"I never heard about it."
"Seems these niggers kept it secret, worked on the rockets
all themselves, don't know where--in Africa, maybe."
"Could they _do_ that?" demanded Samuel Teece, pacing
about the porch. "Ain't there a law?"
"It ain't as if they're declarin' war," said Grandpa
quietly.
"Where do they get off, God damn it, workin' in secret,
plottin'?" shouted Teece.
"Schedule is for all this town's niggers to gather out by
Loon Lake. Rockets be there at one o'clock, pick 'em up, take
'em to Mars."
"Telephone the governor, call out the militia," cried
Teece. "They should've given notice!"
"Here comes your woman, Teece."
The men turned again.
As they watched, down the hot road in the windless light
first one white woman and then another arrived, all of them
with stunned faces, all of them rustling like ancient papers.
Some of them were crying, some were stern. All came to find
their husbands. They pushed through barroom swing doors,
vanishing. They entered cool, quiet groceries. They went in at
drug shops and garages. And one of them, Mrs. Clara Teece, came
to stand in the dust by the hardware porch, blinking up at her
stiff and angry husband as the black river flowed full behind
her.
"It's Lucinda, Pa; you got to come home!"
"I'm not comin' home for no damn darkie!"
"She's leaving. What'll I do without her?"
"Fetch for yourself, maybe. I won't get down on my knees
to stop her."
"But she's like a family member," Mrs. Teece moaned.
"Don't shout! I won't have you blubberin' in public this
way about no goddamn--"
His wife's small sob stopped him. She dabbed at her eyes.
"I kept telling her, 'Lucinda,' I said, 'you stay on and I
raise your pay, and you get _two_ nights off a week, if you
want,' but she just looked set! I never seen her so set, and
I said, 'Don't you _love_ me, Lucinda?' and she said yes, but
she had to go because that's the way it was, is all. She
cleaned the house and dusted it and put luncheon on the table
and then she went to the parlor door and--and stood there with
two bundles, one by each foot, and shook my hand and said,
'Good-by, Mrs. Teece.' And she went out the door. And there was
her luncheon on the table, and all of us too upset to even eat
it. It's still there now, I know; last time I looked it was
getting cold."
Teece almost struck her. "God damn it, Mrs. Teece, you get
the hell home. Standin' there makin' a sight of yourself!"
"But, Pa . . ."
He strode away into the hot dimness of the store. He came
back out a few seconds later with a silver pistol in his hand.
His wife was gone.
The river flowed black between the buildings, with a
rustle and a creak and a constant whispering shuffle. It was
a very quiet thing, with a great certainty to it; no laughter,
no wildness, just a steady, decided, and ceaseless flow.
Teece sat on the edge of his hardwood chair. "If one of
'em so much as laughs, by Christ, I'll kill 'em."
The men waited.
The river passed quietly in the dreamful noon.
"Looks like you goin' to have to hoe your own turnips,
Sam," Grandpa chuckled.
"I'm not bad at shootin' white folks neither." Teece
didn't look at Grandpa. Grandpa turned his head away and shut
up his mouth.
"Hold on there!" Samuel Teece leaped off the porch. He
reached up and seized the reins of a horse ridden by a tall
Negro man. "You, Belter, come down off there!"
"Yes, sir." Belter slid down.
Teece looked him over. "Now, just what you think you're
doin'?"
"Well, Mr. Teece . . ."
"I reckon you think you're goin', just like that
song--what's the words? 'Way up in the middle of the air';
ain't _that_ it?"
"Yes, sir." The Negro waited.
"You recollect you owe me fifty dollars, Belter?"
"Yes, sir."
"You tryin' to sneak out? By God, I'll horsewhip you!"
"All the excitement, and it slipped my mind, sir."
"It slipped his mind." Teece gave a vicious wink at his
men on the hardware porch. "God damn, mister, you know what
you're goin' to do?"
"No, sir."
"You're stayin' here to work out that fifty bucks, or my
name ain't Samuel W. Teece." He turned again to smile
confidently at the men in the shade.
Belter looked at the river going along the street, that
dark river flowing and flowing between the shops, the dark
river on wheels and horses and in dusty shoes, the dark river
from which he had been snatched on his journey. He began to
shiver. "Let me go, Mr. Teece. I'll send your money from up
there, I promise!"
"Listen, Belter." Teece grasped the man's suspenders like
two harp strings, playing them now and again, contemptuously,
snorting at the sky, pointing one bony finger straight at
God. "Belter, you know anything about what's up there?"
"What they tells me."
"What they tells him! Christ! Hear that? What they tells
him!" He swung the man's weight by his suspenders, idly, ever
so casual, flicking a finger in the black face. "Belter, you
fly up and up like a July Fourth rocket, and bang! There you
are, cinders, spread all over space. Them crackpot scientists,
they don't know nothin', they kill you all off!"
"I don't care."
"Glad to hear that. Because you know what's up on that
planet Mars? There's monsters with big raw eyes like mushrooms!
You seen them pictures on those future magazines you buy at
the drugstore for a dime, ain't you? Well! Them monsters jump
up and suck marrow from your bones!"
"I don't care, don't care at all, don't care." Belter
watched the parade slide by, leaving him. Sweat lay on his dark
brow. He seemed about to collapse.
"And it's cold up there; no air, you fall down, jerk like
a fish, gaspin', dyin', stranglin', stranglin' and dyin'. You
_like_ that?"
"Lots of things I don't like, sir. Please, sir, let me go.
I'm late."
"I'll let you go when I'm _ready_ to let you go. We'll
just talk here polite until I say you can leave, and you know
it damn well. You want to travel, do you? Well, Mister Way up
in the Middle of the Air, you get the hell home and work out
that fifty bucks you owe me! Take you two months to do that!"
"But if I work it out, I'll miss the rocket, sir!"
"Ain't that a shame now?" Teece tried to look sad.
"I give you my horse, sir."
"Horse ain't legal tender. You don't move until I get
my money." Teece laughed inside. He felt very warm and good.
A small crowd of dark people had gathered to hear all
this. Now as Belter stood, head down, trembling, an old man
stepped forward.
"Mister?"
Teece flashed him a quick look. "Well?"
"How much this man owe you, mister?"
"None of your damn business!"
The old man looked at Belter. "How much, son?"
"Fifty dollars."
The old man put out his black hands at the people around
him, "There's twenty-five of you. Each give two dollars; quick
now, this no time for argument."
"Here, now!" cried Teece, stiffening up, tall, tall.
The money appeared. The old man fingered it into his hat
and gave the hat to Belter. "Son," he said, "you ain't missin'
no rocket."
Belter smiled into the hat. "No, sir, I guess I ain't!"
Teece shouted: "You give that money back to them!"
Belter bowed respectfully, handing the money over, and
when Teece would not touch it he set it down in the dust at
Teece's feet. "There's your money, sir," he said. "Thank
you kindly." Smiling, he gained the saddle of his horse and
whipped his horse along, thanking the old man, who rode with
him now until they were out of sight and hearing.
"Son of a bitch," whispered Teece, staring blind at the
sun. "Son of a bitch."
"Pick up the money, Samuel," said someone from the porch.
It was happening all along the way. Little white boys,
barefoot, dashed up with the news. "Them that has helps them
that hasn't! And that way they _all_ get free! Seen a rich man
give a poor man two hundred bucks to pay off some'un! Seen
some'un else give some'un else ten bucks, five bucks, sixteen,
lots of that, all over, everybody!"
The white men sat with sour water in their mouths. Their
eyes were almost puffed shut, as if they had been struck in
their faces by wind and sand and heat.
The rage was in Samuel Teece. He climbed up on the porch
and glared at the passing swarms. He waved his gun. And after
a while when he had to do something, he began to shout at
anyone, any Negro who looked up at him. "Bang! There's another
rocket out in space!" he shouted so all could hear. "Bang! By
God!" The dark heads didn't flicker or pretend to hear, but
their white eyes slid swiftly over and back. "Crash! All them
rockets fallin'! Screamin', dyin'! Bang! God Almighty, I'm glad
_I'm_ right here on old terra firma. As they says in that old
joke, the more firma, the less terra! Ha, ha!"
Horses clopped along, shuffling up dust. Wagons bumbled
on ruined springs.
"Bang!" His voice was lonely in the heat, trying to
terrify the dust and the blazing sun sky. "Wham! Niggers all
over space! Jerked outa rockets like so many minnows hit by
a meteor, by God! Space fulla meteors. You know that? Sure!
Thick as buckshot; powie! Shoot down them tin-can rockets like
so many ducks, so many clay pipes! Ole sardine cans full of
black cod! Bangin' like a stringa ladyfingers, bang, bang,
bang! Ten thousand dead here, ten thousand there. Floatin'
in space, around and around earth, ever and ever, cold and way
out, Lord! You hear that, _you_ there!"
Silence. The river was broad and continuous. Having
entered all cotton shacks during the hour, having flooded all
the valuables out, it was now carrying the clocks and
the washboards, the silk bolts and curtain rods on down to
some distant black sea.
High tide passed. It was two o'clock. Low tide came. Soon
the river was dried up, the town silent, the dust settling in
a film on the stores, the seated men, the tall hot trees.
Silence.
The men on the porch listened.
Hearing nothing, they extended their thoughts and
their imaginations out and into the surrounding meadows. In
the early morning the land had been filled with its usual
concoctions of sound. Here and there, with stubborn persistence
to custom, there had been voices singing, the honey laughter
under the mimosa branches, the pickaninnies rushing in clear
water laughter at the creek, movements and bendings in the
fields, jokes and shouts of amusement from the shingle shacks
covered with fresh green vine.
Now it was as if a great wind had washed the land clean
of sounds. There was nothing. Skeleton doors hung open on
leather hinges. Rubber-tire swings hung in the silent
air, uninhibited. The washing rocks at the river were empty,
and the watermelon patches, if any, were left alone to heat
their hidden liquors in the sun. Spiders started building new
webs in abandoned huts; dust started to sift in from unpatched
roofs in golden spicules. Here and there a fire, forgotten in
the last rush, lingered and in a sudden access of strength fed
upon the dry bones of some littered shack. The sound of a
gentle feeding burn went up through the silenced air.
The men sat on the hardware porch, not blinking or
swallowing.
"I can't figure why they left _now_. With things lookin'
up. I mean, every day they got more rights. What they _want_,
anyway? Here's the poll tax gone, and more and more states
passin' anti-lynchin' bills, and all kinds of equal rights.
What _more_ they want? They make almost as good money as a
white man, but there they go."
Far down the empty street a bicycle came.
"I'll be goddamned. Teece, here comes your Silly now."
The bicycle pulled up before the porch, a
seventeen-year-old colored boy on it, all arms and feet and
long legs and round watermelon head. He looked up at Samuel
Teece and smiled.
"So you got a guilty conscience and came back," said
Teece.
"No, sir, I just brought the bicycle."
"What's wrong, couldn't get it on the rocket?"
"That wasn't it, sir."
"Don't tell me what it was! Get off, you're not goin' to
steal my property!" He gave the boy a push. The bicycle fell.
"Get inside and start cleaning the brass."
"Beg pardon?" The boy's eyes widened.
"You heard what I said. There's guns need unpacking there,
and a crate of nails just come from Natchez--"
"Mr. Teece."
"And a box of hammers need fixin'--"
"Mr. Teece, sir?"
"You _still_ standin' there!" Teece glared.
"Mr. Teece, you don't mind I take the day off," he
said apologetically.
"And tomorrow and day after tomorrow and the day after the
day after that," said Teece.
"I'm afraid so, sir."
"You _should_ be afraid, boy. Come here." He marched the
boy across the porch and drew a paper out of a desk. "Remember
this?"
"Sir?"
"It's your workin' paper. You signed it, there's your X
right there, ain't it? Answer me."
"I didn't sign that, Mr. Teece." The boy trembled. "Anyone
can make an X."
"Listen to this, Silly. Contract: 'I will work for Mr.
Samuel Teece two years, starting July 15, 2001, and if
intending to leave will give four weeks' notice and continue
working until my position is filled.' There." Teece slapped
the paper, his eyes glittering. "You cause trouble, we'll take
it to court."
"I can't do that," wailed the boy, tears starting to roll
down his face, "If I don't go today, I don't go."
"I know just how you feel, Silly; yes, sir, I sympathize
with you, boy. But we'll treat you good and give you good food,
boy. Now you just get inside and start working and forget all
about that nonsense, eh, Silly? Sure." Teece grinned and patted
the boy's shoulder.
The boy turned and looked at the old men sitting on the
porch. He could hardly see now for his tears. "Maybe--maybe one
of these gentlemen here . . ." The men looked up in the hot,
uneasy shadows, looking first at the boy and then at Teece.
"You meanin' to say you think a _white man_ should take
your place, boy?" asked Teece coldly.
Grandpa Quartermain took his red hands off his knees.
He looked out at the horizon thoughtfully and said, "Teece,
what about me?"
"What?"
"I'll take Silly's job."
The porch was silent.
Teece balanced himself in the air. "Grandpa," he said
warningly.
"Let the boy go. I'll clean the brass."
"Would you, would you, really?" Silly ran over to Grandpa,
laughing, tears on his cheeks, unbelieving.
"Sure."
"Grandpa," said Teece, "keep your damn trap outa this."
"Give the kid a break, Teece."
Teece walked over and seized the boy's arm. "He's mine.
I'm lockin' him in the back room until tonight."
"Don't, Mr. Teece!"
The boy began to sob now. His crying filled the air of
the porch. His eyes were tight. Far down the street an old tin
Ford was choking along, approaching, a last load of colored
people in it. "Here comes my family, Mr. Teece, oh please,
please, oh God, please!"
"Teece," said one of the other men on the porch, getting
up, "let him go."
Another man rose also. "That goes for me too."
"And me," said another.
"What's the use?" The men all talked now. "Cut it out,
Teece."
"Let him go."
Teece felt for his gun in his pocket. He saw the men's
faces. He took his hand away and left the gun in his pocket
and said, "So that's how it is?"
"That's how it is," someone said.
Teece let the boy go. "All right. Get out." He jerked his
hand back in the store. "But I hope you don't think you're
gonna leave any trash behind to clutter my store."
"No, sir!"
"You clean everything outa your shed in back; burn it."
Silly shook his head. "I'll take it with."
"They won't let you put it on that damn rocket."
"I'll take it with," insisted the boy softly.
He rushed back through the hardware store. There were
sounds of sweeping and cleaning out, and a moment later
he appeared, his hands full of tops and marbles and old dusty
kites and junk collected through the years. Just then the old
tin Ford drove up and Silly climbed in and the door slammed.
Teece stood on the porch with a bitter smile. "What you goin'
to do _up there?_"
"Startin' new," said Silly. "Gonna have my _own_
hardware."
"God damn it, you been learnin' my trade so you could run
off and use it!"
"No, sir, I never thought one day _this'd_ happen, sir,
but it did. I can't help it if I learned, Mr. Teece."
"I suppose you got names for your rockets?"
They looked at their one clock on the dashboard of the
car.
"Yes, sir."
"Like Elijah and the Chariot, The Big Wheel and The Little
Wheel, Faith, Hope, and Charity, eh?"
"We got names for the ships, Mr. Teece."
"God the Son and the Holy Ghost, I wouldn't wonder? Say,
boy, you got one named the First Baptist Church?"
"We got to leave now, Mr. Teece."
Teece laughed. "You got one named Swing Low, and another
named Sweet Chariot?"
The car started up. "Good-by, Mr. Teece."
"You got one named Roll Dem Bones?"
"Good-by, mister!"
"And another called Over Jordan! Ha! Well, tote that
rocket, boy, lift that rocket, boy, go on, get blown up, see if
I care!"
The car churned off into the dust. The boy rose and cupped
his hands to his mouth and shouted one last time at Teece:
"Mr. Teece, Mr. Teece, what _you_ goin' to do nights from now
on? What you goin' to _do_ nights, Mr. Teece?"
Silence. The car faded down the road. It was gone. "What
in hell did he mean?" mused Teece. "What am I goin' to do
nights?"
He watched the dust settle, and it suddenly came to him.
He remembered nights when men drove to his house, their
knees sticking up sharp and their shotguns sticking up sharper,
like a carful of cranes under the night trees of summer, their
eyes mean. Honking the horn and him slamming his door, a gun in
his hand, laughing to himself, his heart racing like
a ten-year-old's, driving off down the summer-night road, a
ring of hemp rope coiled on the car floor, fresh shell boxes
making every man's coat look bunchy. How many nights over the
years, how many nights of the wind rushing in the car, flopping
their hair over their mean eyes, roaring, as they picked a
tree, a good strong tree, and rapped on a shanty door!
"So _that's_ what the son of a bitch meant?" Teece leaped
out into the sunlight. "Come back, you bastard! What am I goin'
to do nights? Why, that lousy, insolent son of a . . ."
It was a good question. He sickened and was empty. Yes.
What _will_ we do nights? he thought. Now _they're_ gone, what?
He was absolutely empty and numb.
He pulled the pistol from his pocket, checked its load.
"What you goin' to do, Sam?" someone asked.
"Kill that son of a bitch."
Grandpa said, "Don't get yourself heated."
But Samuel Teece was gone around behind the store. A
moment later he drove out the drive in his open-top car.
"Anyone comin' with me?"
"I'd like a drive," said Grandpa, and got up.
"Anyone else?"
Nobody replied.
Grandpa got in and slammed the door. Samuel Teece gutted
the car out in a great whorl of dust. They didn't speak as
they rushed down the road under the bright sky. The heat from
the dry meadows was shimmering.
They stopped at a crossroad. "Which way'd they go,
Grandpa?"
Grandpa squinted. "Straight on ahead, I figure."
They went on. Under the summer trees their car made a
lonely sound. The road was empty, and as they drove along they
began to notice something. Teece slowed the car and bent out,
his yellow eyes fierce.
"God damn it, Grandpa, you see what them bastards did?"
"What?" asked Grandpa, and looked.
Where they had been carefully set down and left, in neat
bundles every few feet along the empty country road, were old
roller skates, a bandanna full of knicknacks, some old shoes,
a cartwheel, stacks of pants and coats and ancient hats, bits
of oriental crystal that had once tinkled in the wind, tin cans
of pink geraniums, dishes of waxed fruit, cartons of
Confederate money, washtubs, scrubboards, wash lines, soap,
somebody's tricycle, someone else's hedge shears, a toy wagon,
a jack-in-the-box, a stained-glass window from the Negro
Baptist Church, a whole set of brake rims, inner tubes,
mattresses, couches, rocking chairs, jars of cold cream,
hand mirrors. None of it flung down, no, but deposited gently
and with feeling, with decorum, upon the dusty edges of the
road, as if a whole city had walked here with hands full, at
which time a great bronze trumpet had sounded, the articles had
been relinquished to the quiet dust, and one and all,
the inhabitants of the earth had fled straight up into the
blue heavens.
"Wouldn't burn them, they said," cried Teece angrily.
"No, wouldn't burn them like I said, but had to take them along
and leave them where they could see them for the last time, on
the road, all together and whole. Them niggers think they're
smart."
He veered the car wildly, mile after mile, down the
road, tumbling, smashing, breaking, scattering bundles of
paper, jewel boxes, mirrors, chairs. "There, by damn, and
_there!_"
The front tire gave a whistling cry. The car spilled
crazily off the road into a ditch, flinging Teece against the
glass.
"Son of a bitch!" He dusted himself off and stood out of
the car, almost crying with rage.
He looked at the silent, empty road. "We'll never catch
them now, never, never." As far as he could see there was
nothing but bundles and stacks and more bundles neatly placed
like little abandoned shrines in the late day, in the
warm-blowing wind.
Teece and Grandpa came walking tiredly back to the
hardware store an hour later. The men were still sitting
there, listening, and watching the sky. Just as Teece sat down
and eased his tight shoes off someone cried, "Look!"
"I'll be _damned_ if I will," said Teece.
But the others looked. And they saw the golden bobbins
rising in the sky, far away. Leaving flame behind, they
vanished.
In the cotton fields the wind blew idly among the snow
dusters. In still farther meadows the watermelons
lay, unfingerprinted, striped like tortoise cats lying in the
sun.
The men on the porch sat down, looked at each other,
looked at the yellow rope piled neat on the store shelves,
glanced at the gun shells glinting shiny brass in their
cartons, saw the silver pistols and long black metal shotguns
hung high and quiet in the shadows. Somebody put a straw in
his mouth, Someone else drew a figure in the dust.
Finally Samuel Teece held his empty shoe up in triumph,
turned it over, stared at it, and said, "Did you notice? Right
up to the very last, by God, he said 'Mister'!"
2004-05: THE NAMING OF NAMES
They came to the strange blue lands and put their names
upon the lands. Here was Hinkston Creek and Lustig Corners and
Black River and Driscoll Forest and Peregrine Mountain and
Wilder Town, all the names of people and the things that the
people did. Here was the place where Martians killed the first
Earth Men, and it was Red Town and had to do with blood. And
here where the second expedition was destroyed, and it was
named Second Try, and each of the other places where the rocket
men had set down their fiery caldrons to burn the land, the
names were left like cinders, and of course there was a Spender
Hill and a Nathaniel York Town. . . .
The old Martian names were names of water and air and
hills. They were the names of snows that emptied south in stone
canals to fill the empty seas. And the names of sealed and
buried sorcerers and towers and obeisks. And the rockets struck
at the names like hammers, breaking away the marble into
shale, shattering the crockery milestones that named the old
towns, in the rubble of which great pylons were plunged with
new names: IRON TOWN, STEEL TOWN, ALUMINUM CITY, ELECTRIC
VILLAGE, CORN TOWN, GRAIN VILLA, DETROIT II, all the mechanical
names and the metal names from Earth.
And after the towns were built and named, the graveyards
were built and named, too: Green Hill, Moss Town, Boot Hill,
Bide a Wee; and the first dead went into their graves.
But after everything was pinned down and neat and in its
place, when everything was safe and certain, when the towns
were well enough fixed and the loneliness was at a minimum,
then the sophisticates came in from Earth. They came on parties
and vacations, on little shopping trips for trinkets and
photographs and the "atmosphere"; they came to study and
apply sociological laws; they came with stars and badges and
rules and regulations, bringing some of the red tape that had
rawled across Earth like an alien weed, and letting it grow on
Mars wherever it could take root. They began to plan people's
lives and libraries; they began to instruct and push about the
very people who had come to Mars to get away from being
instructed and ruled and pushed about.
And it was inevitable that some of these people pushed
back. . . .
April 2005: USHER II
"'During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in
the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low
in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback. through
a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found
myself, as the shades of evening drew on, within view of
the melancholy House of Usher. . . .'"
Mr. William Stendahl paused in his quotation. There, upon
a low black hill, stood the House, its cornerstone bearing
the inscription 2005 A.D.
Mr. Bigelow, the architect, said, "It's completed. Here's
the key, Mr. Stendahl."
The two men stood together silently in the quiet autumn
afternoon. Blueprints rustled on the raven grass at their feet.
"The House of Usher," said Mr. Stendahl with pleasure.
"Planned, built, bought, paid for. Wouldn't Mr. Poe
be _delighted?_"
Mr. Bigelow squinted. "Is it everything you wanted, sir?"
"Yes!"
"Is the color right? Is it _desolate_ and _terrible?_"
"_Very_ desolate, _very_ terrible!"
"The walls are--_bleak?_"
"Amazingly so!"
"The tarn, is it 'black and lurid' enough?"
"Most incredibly black and lurid."
"And the sedge--we've dyed it, you know--is it the proper
gray and ebon?"
"Hideous!"
Mr. Bigelow consulted his architectural plans. From these
I'm drunk, thought Tomбs. I won't tell anyone of this
tomorrow, no, no.
They stood there on the ancient highway, neither of them
moving.
"Where are you from?" asked the Martian at last.
"Earth."
"What is that?"
"There." Tomбs nodded to the sky.
"When?"
"We landed over a year ago, remember?"
"No."
"And all of you were dead, all but a few. You're rare,
don't you _know_ that?"
"That's not true."
"Yes, dead. I saw the bodies. Black, in the rooms, in
the houses, dead. Thousands of them."
"That's ridiculous. We're _alive!_"
"Mister, you're invaded, only you don't know it. You must
have escaped."
"I haven't escaped; there was nothing to escape. What do
you mean? I'm on my way to a festival now at the canal, near
the Eniall Mountains. I was there last night. Don't you see the
city there?" The Martian pointed.
Tomбs looked and saw the ruins. "Why, that city's been
dead thousands of years."
The Martian laughed. "Dead. I slept there yesterday!"
"And I was in it a week ago and the week before that, and
I just drove through it now, and it's a heap. See the broken
pillars?"
"Broken? Why, I see them perfectly. The moonlight helps.
And the pillars are upright."
"There's dust in the streets," said Tomбs.
"The streets are clean!"
"The canals are empty right there."
"The canals are full of lavender wine!"
"It's dead."
"It's alive!" protested the Martian, laughing more now.
"Oh, you're quite wrong. See all the carnival lights? There
are beautiful boats as slim as women, beautiful women as slim
as boats, women the color of sand, women with fire flowers in
their hands. I can see them, small, running in the streets
there. That's where I'm going now, to the festival; we'll float
on the waters all night long; we'll sing, we'll drink, we'll
make love, Can't you see it?"
"Mister, that city is dead as a dried lizard. Ask any of
our party. Me, I'm on my way to Green City tonight; that's the
new colony we just raised over near Illinois Highway. You're
mixed up. We brought in a million board feet of Oregon lumber
and a couple dozen tons of good steel nails and hammered
together two of the nicest little villages you ever saw.
Tonight we're warming one of them. A couple rockets are coming
in from Earth, bringing our wives and girl friends. There'll
be barn dances and whisky--"
The Martian was now disquieted. "You say it is over that
way?"
"There are the rockets." Tomбs walked him to the edge of
the hill and pointed down. "See?"
"No."
"Damn it, there they _are!_ Those long silver things."
"No."
Now Tomбs laughed. "You're blind!"
"I see very well. You are the one who does not see."
"But you see the new _town_, don't you?"
"I see nothing but an ocean, and water at low tide."
"Mister, that water's been evaporated for forty
centuries."
"Ah, now, now, that _is_ enough."
"It's true, I tell you."
The Martian grew very serious. "Tell me again. You do not
see the city the way I describe it? The pillars very white,
the boats very slender, the festival lights--oh, I see
them _clearly!_ And listen! I can hear them singing. It's no
space away at all."
Tomбs listened and shook his head. "No."
"And I, on the other hand," said the Martian, "cannot see
what you describe. Well."
Again.they were cold. An ice was in their flesh.
"Can it be . . . ?"
"What?"
"You say 'from the sky'?"
"Earth."
"Earth, a name, nothing," said the Martian. "_But_ . . .
as I came up the pass an hour ago. . ." He touched the back of
his neck. "I felt . . ."
"Cold?"
"Yes."
"And now?"
"Cold again. Oddly. There was a thing to the light, to
the hills, the road," said the Martian. "I felt the
strangeness, the road, the light, and for a moment I felt as if
I were the last man alive on this world. . . ."
"So did I!" said Tomбs, and it was like talking to an old
and dear friend, confiding, growing warm with the topic.
The Martian closed his eyes and opened them again. "This
can only mean one thing. It has to do with Time. Yes. You are
a figment of the Past!"
"No, you are from the Past," said the Earth Man, having
had time to think of it now.
"You are so _certain_. How can you prove who is from the
Past, who from the Future? What year is it?"
"Two thousand and one!"
"What does that mean to _me?_"
Tomбs considered and shrugged. "Nothing."
"It is as if I told you that it is the year 4462853 S.E.C.
It is nothing and more than nothing! Where is the clock to show
us how the stars stand?"
"But the ruins prove it! They prove that _I_ am the
Future, _I_ am alive, _you_ are dead!"
"Everything in me denies this. My heart beats, my stomach
hungers, my mouth thirsts. No, no, not dead, not alive, either
of us. More alive than anything else. Caught between is more
like it. Two strangers passing in the night, that is it.
Two strangers passing. Ruins, you say?"
"Yes. You're afraid?"
"Who wants to see the Future, who _ever_ does? A man can
face the Past, but to think--the pillars _crumbled_, you say?
And the sea empty, and the canals dry, and the maidens dead,
and the flowers withered?" The Martian was silent, but then
he looked on ahead. "But there they _are_. I _see_ them. Isn't
that enough for me? They wait for me now, no matter _what_ you
say."
And for Tomбs the rockets, far away, waiting for _him_,
and the town and the women from Earth. "We can never agree,"
he said.
"Let us agree to disagree," said the Martian. "What does
it matter who is Past or Future, if we are both alive, for
what follows will follow, tomorrow or in ten thousand years.
How do you know that those temples are not the temples of your
own civilization one hundred centuries from now, tumbled and
broken? You do not know. Then don't ask. But the night is very
short. There go the festival fires in the sky, and the birds."
Tomгs put out his hand. The Martian did likewise in
imitation.
Their hands did not touch; they melted through each other.
"Will we meet again?"
"Who knows? Perhaps some other night."
"I'd like to go with you to that festival."
"And I wish I might come to your new town, to see this
ship you speak of, to see these men, to hear all that has
happened."
"Good-by," said Tomбs.
"Good night."
The Martian rode his green metal vehicle quietly away into
the hills, The Earth Man turned his truck and drove it silently
in the opposite direction.
"Good lord, what a dream that was," sighed Tomбs, his
hands on the wheel, thinking of the rockets, the women, the
raw whisky, the Virginia reels, the party.
How strange a vision was that, thought the Martian,
rushing on, thinking of the festival, the canals, the boats,
the women with golden eyes, and the songs.
The night was dark. The moons had gone down. Starlight
twinkled on the empty highway where now there was not a sound,
no car, no person, nothing. And it remained that way all the
rest of the cool dark night.
October 2002: THE SHORE
Mars was a distant shore, and the men spread upon it in
waves. Each wave different, and each wave stronger. The first
wave carried with it men accustomed to spaces and coldness and
being alone, the coyote and cattlemen, with no fat on them,
with faces the years had worn the flesh off, with eyes
like nailheads, and hands like the material of old gloves,
ready to touch anything. Mars could do nothing to them, for
they were bred to plains and prairies as open as the Martian
fields. They came and made things a little less empty, so that
others would find courage to follow. They put panes in hollow
windows and lights behind the panes.
They were the first men.
Everyone knew who the first women would be.
The second men should have traveled from other countries
with other accents and other ideas. But the rockets were
American and the men were American and it stayed that way,
while Europe and Asia and South America and Australia and
the islands watched the Roman candles leave them behind. The
rest of the world was buried in war or the thoughts of war.
So the second men were Americans also. And they came from
the cabbage tenements and subways, and they found much rest
and vacation in the company of silent men from the tumbleweed
states who knew how to use silences so they filled you up with
peace after long years crushed in tubes, tins and boxes in New
York.
And among the second men were men who looked, by their
eyes, as if they were on their way to God. . . .
February 2003: INTERIM
They brought in fifteen thousand lumber feet of Oregon
pine to build Tenth City, and seventy-nine thousand feet
of California redwood and they hammered together a clean, neat
little town by the edge of the stone canals. On Sunday nights
you could see red, blue, and green stained-glass light in
the churches and hear the voices singing the numbered hymns.
"We will now sing 79. We will now sing 94." And in certain
houses you heard the hard clatter of a typewriter, the novelist
at work; or the scratch of a pen, the poet at work; or no sound
at all, the former beachcomber at work. It was as if, in many
ways, a great earthquake had shaken loose the roots and cellars
of an Iowa town, and then, in an instant, a whirlwind twister
of Oz-like proportions had carried the entire town off to Mars
to set it down without a bump.
April 2003: THE MUSICIANS
The boys would hike far out into the Martian country.
They carried odorous paper bags into which from time to time
upon the long walk they would insert their noses to inhale the
rich smell of the ham and mayonnaised pickles, and to listen to
the liquid gurgle of the orange soda in the warming bottles.
Swinging their grocery bags full of clean watery green onions
and odorous liverwurst and red catsup and white bread, they
would dare each other on past the limits set by their stem
mothers. They would run, yelling:
"First one there gets to kick!"
They biked in summer, autumn, or winter. Autumn was most
fun, because then they imagined, like on Earth, they were
scuttering through autumn leaves.
They would come like a scatter of jackstones on the marble
flats beside the canals, the candy-cheeked boys with blue-agate
eyes, panting onion-tainted commands to each other. For now
that they had reached the dead, forbidden town it was no longer
a matter of "Last one there's a girl!" or "First one gets to
play Musician!" Now the dead town's doors lay wide and they
thought they could hear the faintest crackle, like autumn
leaves, from inside. They would hush themselves forward, by
each other's elbows, carrying sticks, remembering their parents
had told them, "Not there! No, to none of the old towns! Watch
where you hike. You'll get the beating of your life when you
come home. We'll check your shoes!"
And there they stood in the dead city, a heap of boys,
their hiking lunches half devoured, daring each other in
shrieky whispers.
"Here goes nothing!" And suddenly one of them took off,
into the nearest stone house, through the door, across the
living room, and into the bedroom where, without half looking,
he would kick about, thrash his feet, and the black leaves
would fly through the air, brittle, thin as tissue cut from
midnight sky. Behind him would race six others, and the first
boy there would be the Musician, playing the white xylophone
bones beneath the outer covering of black flakes. A great skull
would roll to view, like a snowball; they shouted! Ribs, like
spider legs, plangent as a dull harp, and then the black flakes
of mortality blowing all about them in their scuffling dance;
the boys pushed and heaved and fell in the leaves, in the death
that had turned the dead to flakes and dryness, into a game
played by boys whose stomachs gurgled with orange pop.
And then out of one house into another, into seventeen
houses, mindful that each of the towns in its turn was being
burned clean of its horrors by the Firemen, antiseptic warriors
with shovels and bins, shoveling away at the ebony tatters
and peppermint-stick bones, slowly but assuredly separating
the terrible from the normal; so they must play very hard,
these boys, the Firemen would soon be here!
Then, luminous with sweat, they gnashed at their
last sandwiches. With a final kick, a final marimba concert,
a final autumnal lunge through leaf stacks, they went home.
Their mothers examined their shoes for black flakelets
which, when discovered, resulted in scalding baths and fatherly
beatings.
By the year's end the Firemen had raked the autumn leaves
and white xylophones away, and it was no more fun.
June 2003: WAY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE AIR
"Did you hear about it?"
"About what?"
"The niggers, the niggers!"
"What about 'em?"
"Them leaving, pulling out, going away; did you hear?"
"What you mean, pulling out? How can they do that?"
"They can, they will, they are."
"Just a couple?"
"Every single one here in the South!"
"No."
"Yes!"
"I got to see that. I don't believe it. Where they going--
Africa?"
A silence.
"Mars."
"You mean the _planet_ Mars?"
"That's right."
The men stood up in the hot shade of the hardware porch.
Someone quit lighting a pipe. Somebody else spat out into the
hot dust of noon.
"They can't leave, they can't do that."
"They're doing it, anyways."
"Where'd you hear this?"
"It's everywhere, on the radio a minute ago, just come
through."
Like a series of dusty statues, the men came to life.
Samuel Teece, the hardware proprietor, laughed uneasily.
"I _wondered_ what happened to Silly. I sent him on my bike an
hour ago. He ain't come back from Mrs. Bordman's yet. You think
that black fool just pedaled off to Mars?"
The men snorted.
"All I say is, he better bring back my bike. I don't
take stealing from no one, by God."
"Listen!"
The men collided irritably with each other, turning.
Far up the street the levee seemed to have broken. The
black warm waters descended and engulfed the town. Between
the blazing white banks of the town stores, among the tree
silences, a black tide flowed. Like a kind of summer molasses,
it poured turgidly forth upon the cinnamon-dusty road. It
surged slow, slow, and it was men and women and horses and
barking dogs, and it was little boys and girls. And from the
mouths of the people partaking of this tide came the sound of
a river. A summer-day river going somewhere, murmuring
and irrevocable. And in that slow, steady channel of darkness
that cut across the white glare of day were touches of alert
white, the eyes, the ivory eyes staring ahead, glancing aside,
as the river, the long and endless river, took itself from
old channels into a new one. From various and uncountable
tributaries, in creeks and brooks of color and motion, the
parts of this river had joined, become one mother current,
and flowed on. And brimming the swell were things carried by
the river: grandfather clocks chiming, kitchen clocks ticking,
caged hens screaming, babies wailing; and swimming among
the thickened eddies were mules and cats, and sudden excursions
of burst mattress springs floating by, insane hair stuffing
sticking out, and boxes and crates and pictures of dark
grandfathers in oak frames-- the river flowing it on while the
men sat like nervous hounds on the hardware porch, too late to
mend the levee, their hands empty.
Samuel Teece wouldn't believe it. "Why, hell, where'd they
get the transportation? How they goin' to _get_ to Mars?"
"Rockets," said Grandpa Quartermain.
"All the damn-fool things. Where'd they get rockets?"
"Saved their money and built them."
"I never heard about it."
"Seems these niggers kept it secret, worked on the rockets
all themselves, don't know where--in Africa, maybe."
"Could they _do_ that?" demanded Samuel Teece, pacing
about the porch. "Ain't there a law?"
"It ain't as if they're declarin' war," said Grandpa
quietly.
"Where do they get off, God damn it, workin' in secret,
plottin'?" shouted Teece.
"Schedule is for all this town's niggers to gather out by
Loon Lake. Rockets be there at one o'clock, pick 'em up, take
'em to Mars."
"Telephone the governor, call out the militia," cried
Teece. "They should've given notice!"
"Here comes your woman, Teece."
The men turned again.
As they watched, down the hot road in the windless light
first one white woman and then another arrived, all of them
with stunned faces, all of them rustling like ancient papers.
Some of them were crying, some were stern. All came to find
their husbands. They pushed through barroom swing doors,
vanishing. They entered cool, quiet groceries. They went in at
drug shops and garages. And one of them, Mrs. Clara Teece, came
to stand in the dust by the hardware porch, blinking up at her
stiff and angry husband as the black river flowed full behind
her.
"It's Lucinda, Pa; you got to come home!"
"I'm not comin' home for no damn darkie!"
"She's leaving. What'll I do without her?"
"Fetch for yourself, maybe. I won't get down on my knees
to stop her."
"But she's like a family member," Mrs. Teece moaned.
"Don't shout! I won't have you blubberin' in public this
way about no goddamn--"
His wife's small sob stopped him. She dabbed at her eyes.
"I kept telling her, 'Lucinda,' I said, 'you stay on and I
raise your pay, and you get _two_ nights off a week, if you
want,' but she just looked set! I never seen her so set, and
I said, 'Don't you _love_ me, Lucinda?' and she said yes, but
she had to go because that's the way it was, is all. She
cleaned the house and dusted it and put luncheon on the table
and then she went to the parlor door and--and stood there with
two bundles, one by each foot, and shook my hand and said,
'Good-by, Mrs. Teece.' And she went out the door. And there was
her luncheon on the table, and all of us too upset to even eat
it. It's still there now, I know; last time I looked it was
getting cold."
Teece almost struck her. "God damn it, Mrs. Teece, you get
the hell home. Standin' there makin' a sight of yourself!"
"But, Pa . . ."
He strode away into the hot dimness of the store. He came
back out a few seconds later with a silver pistol in his hand.
His wife was gone.
The river flowed black between the buildings, with a
rustle and a creak and a constant whispering shuffle. It was
a very quiet thing, with a great certainty to it; no laughter,
no wildness, just a steady, decided, and ceaseless flow.
Teece sat on the edge of his hardwood chair. "If one of
'em so much as laughs, by Christ, I'll kill 'em."
The men waited.
The river passed quietly in the dreamful noon.
"Looks like you goin' to have to hoe your own turnips,
Sam," Grandpa chuckled.
"I'm not bad at shootin' white folks neither." Teece
didn't look at Grandpa. Grandpa turned his head away and shut
up his mouth.
"Hold on there!" Samuel Teece leaped off the porch. He
reached up and seized the reins of a horse ridden by a tall
Negro man. "You, Belter, come down off there!"
"Yes, sir." Belter slid down.
Teece looked him over. "Now, just what you think you're
doin'?"
"Well, Mr. Teece . . ."
"I reckon you think you're goin', just like that
song--what's the words? 'Way up in the middle of the air';
ain't _that_ it?"
"Yes, sir." The Negro waited.
"You recollect you owe me fifty dollars, Belter?"
"Yes, sir."
"You tryin' to sneak out? By God, I'll horsewhip you!"
"All the excitement, and it slipped my mind, sir."
"It slipped his mind." Teece gave a vicious wink at his
men on the hardware porch. "God damn, mister, you know what
you're goin' to do?"
"No, sir."
"You're stayin' here to work out that fifty bucks, or my
name ain't Samuel W. Teece." He turned again to smile
confidently at the men in the shade.
Belter looked at the river going along the street, that
dark river flowing and flowing between the shops, the dark
river on wheels and horses and in dusty shoes, the dark river
from which he had been snatched on his journey. He began to
shiver. "Let me go, Mr. Teece. I'll send your money from up
there, I promise!"
"Listen, Belter." Teece grasped the man's suspenders like
two harp strings, playing them now and again, contemptuously,
snorting at the sky, pointing one bony finger straight at
God. "Belter, you know anything about what's up there?"
"What they tells me."
"What they tells him! Christ! Hear that? What they tells
him!" He swung the man's weight by his suspenders, idly, ever
so casual, flicking a finger in the black face. "Belter, you
fly up and up like a July Fourth rocket, and bang! There you
are, cinders, spread all over space. Them crackpot scientists,
they don't know nothin', they kill you all off!"
"I don't care."
"Glad to hear that. Because you know what's up on that
planet Mars? There's monsters with big raw eyes like mushrooms!
You seen them pictures on those future magazines you buy at
the drugstore for a dime, ain't you? Well! Them monsters jump
up and suck marrow from your bones!"
"I don't care, don't care at all, don't care." Belter
watched the parade slide by, leaving him. Sweat lay on his dark
brow. He seemed about to collapse.
"And it's cold up there; no air, you fall down, jerk like
a fish, gaspin', dyin', stranglin', stranglin' and dyin'. You
_like_ that?"
"Lots of things I don't like, sir. Please, sir, let me go.
I'm late."
"I'll let you go when I'm _ready_ to let you go. We'll
just talk here polite until I say you can leave, and you know
it damn well. You want to travel, do you? Well, Mister Way up
in the Middle of the Air, you get the hell home and work out
that fifty bucks you owe me! Take you two months to do that!"
"But if I work it out, I'll miss the rocket, sir!"
"Ain't that a shame now?" Teece tried to look sad.
"I give you my horse, sir."
"Horse ain't legal tender. You don't move until I get
my money." Teece laughed inside. He felt very warm and good.
A small crowd of dark people had gathered to hear all
this. Now as Belter stood, head down, trembling, an old man
stepped forward.
"Mister?"
Teece flashed him a quick look. "Well?"
"How much this man owe you, mister?"
"None of your damn business!"
The old man looked at Belter. "How much, son?"
"Fifty dollars."
The old man put out his black hands at the people around
him, "There's twenty-five of you. Each give two dollars; quick
now, this no time for argument."
"Here, now!" cried Teece, stiffening up, tall, tall.
The money appeared. The old man fingered it into his hat
and gave the hat to Belter. "Son," he said, "you ain't missin'
no rocket."
Belter smiled into the hat. "No, sir, I guess I ain't!"
Teece shouted: "You give that money back to them!"
Belter bowed respectfully, handing the money over, and
when Teece would not touch it he set it down in the dust at
Teece's feet. "There's your money, sir," he said. "Thank
you kindly." Smiling, he gained the saddle of his horse and
whipped his horse along, thanking the old man, who rode with
him now until they were out of sight and hearing.
"Son of a bitch," whispered Teece, staring blind at the
sun. "Son of a bitch."
"Pick up the money, Samuel," said someone from the porch.
It was happening all along the way. Little white boys,
barefoot, dashed up with the news. "Them that has helps them
that hasn't! And that way they _all_ get free! Seen a rich man
give a poor man two hundred bucks to pay off some'un! Seen
some'un else give some'un else ten bucks, five bucks, sixteen,
lots of that, all over, everybody!"
The white men sat with sour water in their mouths. Their
eyes were almost puffed shut, as if they had been struck in
their faces by wind and sand and heat.
The rage was in Samuel Teece. He climbed up on the porch
and glared at the passing swarms. He waved his gun. And after
a while when he had to do something, he began to shout at
anyone, any Negro who looked up at him. "Bang! There's another
rocket out in space!" he shouted so all could hear. "Bang! By
God!" The dark heads didn't flicker or pretend to hear, but
their white eyes slid swiftly over and back. "Crash! All them
rockets fallin'! Screamin', dyin'! Bang! God Almighty, I'm glad
_I'm_ right here on old terra firma. As they says in that old
joke, the more firma, the less terra! Ha, ha!"
Horses clopped along, shuffling up dust. Wagons bumbled
on ruined springs.
"Bang!" His voice was lonely in the heat, trying to
terrify the dust and the blazing sun sky. "Wham! Niggers all
over space! Jerked outa rockets like so many minnows hit by
a meteor, by God! Space fulla meteors. You know that? Sure!
Thick as buckshot; powie! Shoot down them tin-can rockets like
so many ducks, so many clay pipes! Ole sardine cans full of
black cod! Bangin' like a stringa ladyfingers, bang, bang,
bang! Ten thousand dead here, ten thousand there. Floatin'
in space, around and around earth, ever and ever, cold and way
out, Lord! You hear that, _you_ there!"
Silence. The river was broad and continuous. Having
entered all cotton shacks during the hour, having flooded all
the valuables out, it was now carrying the clocks and
the washboards, the silk bolts and curtain rods on down to
some distant black sea.
High tide passed. It was two o'clock. Low tide came. Soon
the river was dried up, the town silent, the dust settling in
a film on the stores, the seated men, the tall hot trees.
Silence.
The men on the porch listened.
Hearing nothing, they extended their thoughts and
their imaginations out and into the surrounding meadows. In
the early morning the land had been filled with its usual
concoctions of sound. Here and there, with stubborn persistence
to custom, there had been voices singing, the honey laughter
under the mimosa branches, the pickaninnies rushing in clear
water laughter at the creek, movements and bendings in the
fields, jokes and shouts of amusement from the shingle shacks
covered with fresh green vine.
Now it was as if a great wind had washed the land clean
of sounds. There was nothing. Skeleton doors hung open on
leather hinges. Rubber-tire swings hung in the silent
air, uninhibited. The washing rocks at the river were empty,
and the watermelon patches, if any, were left alone to heat
their hidden liquors in the sun. Spiders started building new
webs in abandoned huts; dust started to sift in from unpatched
roofs in golden spicules. Here and there a fire, forgotten in
the last rush, lingered and in a sudden access of strength fed
upon the dry bones of some littered shack. The sound of a
gentle feeding burn went up through the silenced air.
The men sat on the hardware porch, not blinking or
swallowing.
"I can't figure why they left _now_. With things lookin'
up. I mean, every day they got more rights. What they _want_,
anyway? Here's the poll tax gone, and more and more states
passin' anti-lynchin' bills, and all kinds of equal rights.
What _more_ they want? They make almost as good money as a
white man, but there they go."
Far down the empty street a bicycle came.
"I'll be goddamned. Teece, here comes your Silly now."
The bicycle pulled up before the porch, a
seventeen-year-old colored boy on it, all arms and feet and
long legs and round watermelon head. He looked up at Samuel
Teece and smiled.
"So you got a guilty conscience and came back," said
Teece.
"No, sir, I just brought the bicycle."
"What's wrong, couldn't get it on the rocket?"
"That wasn't it, sir."
"Don't tell me what it was! Get off, you're not goin' to
steal my property!" He gave the boy a push. The bicycle fell.
"Get inside and start cleaning the brass."
"Beg pardon?" The boy's eyes widened.
"You heard what I said. There's guns need unpacking there,
and a crate of nails just come from Natchez--"
"Mr. Teece."
"And a box of hammers need fixin'--"
"Mr. Teece, sir?"
"You _still_ standin' there!" Teece glared.
"Mr. Teece, you don't mind I take the day off," he
said apologetically.
"And tomorrow and day after tomorrow and the day after the
day after that," said Teece.
"I'm afraid so, sir."
"You _should_ be afraid, boy. Come here." He marched the
boy across the porch and drew a paper out of a desk. "Remember
this?"
"Sir?"
"It's your workin' paper. You signed it, there's your X
right there, ain't it? Answer me."
"I didn't sign that, Mr. Teece." The boy trembled. "Anyone
can make an X."
"Listen to this, Silly. Contract: 'I will work for Mr.
Samuel Teece two years, starting July 15, 2001, and if
intending to leave will give four weeks' notice and continue
working until my position is filled.' There." Teece slapped
the paper, his eyes glittering. "You cause trouble, we'll take
it to court."
"I can't do that," wailed the boy, tears starting to roll
down his face, "If I don't go today, I don't go."
"I know just how you feel, Silly; yes, sir, I sympathize
with you, boy. But we'll treat you good and give you good food,
boy. Now you just get inside and start working and forget all
about that nonsense, eh, Silly? Sure." Teece grinned and patted
the boy's shoulder.
The boy turned and looked at the old men sitting on the
porch. He could hardly see now for his tears. "Maybe--maybe one
of these gentlemen here . . ." The men looked up in the hot,
uneasy shadows, looking first at the boy and then at Teece.
"You meanin' to say you think a _white man_ should take
your place, boy?" asked Teece coldly.
Grandpa Quartermain took his red hands off his knees.
He looked out at the horizon thoughtfully and said, "Teece,
what about me?"
"What?"
"I'll take Silly's job."
The porch was silent.
Teece balanced himself in the air. "Grandpa," he said
warningly.
"Let the boy go. I'll clean the brass."
"Would you, would you, really?" Silly ran over to Grandpa,
laughing, tears on his cheeks, unbelieving.
"Sure."
"Grandpa," said Teece, "keep your damn trap outa this."
"Give the kid a break, Teece."
Teece walked over and seized the boy's arm. "He's mine.
I'm lockin' him in the back room until tonight."
"Don't, Mr. Teece!"
The boy began to sob now. His crying filled the air of
the porch. His eyes were tight. Far down the street an old tin
Ford was choking along, approaching, a last load of colored
people in it. "Here comes my family, Mr. Teece, oh please,
please, oh God, please!"
"Teece," said one of the other men on the porch, getting
up, "let him go."
Another man rose also. "That goes for me too."
"And me," said another.
"What's the use?" The men all talked now. "Cut it out,
Teece."
"Let him go."
Teece felt for his gun in his pocket. He saw the men's
faces. He took his hand away and left the gun in his pocket
and said, "So that's how it is?"
"That's how it is," someone said.
Teece let the boy go. "All right. Get out." He jerked his
hand back in the store. "But I hope you don't think you're
gonna leave any trash behind to clutter my store."
"No, sir!"
"You clean everything outa your shed in back; burn it."
Silly shook his head. "I'll take it with."
"They won't let you put it on that damn rocket."
"I'll take it with," insisted the boy softly.
He rushed back through the hardware store. There were
sounds of sweeping and cleaning out, and a moment later
he appeared, his hands full of tops and marbles and old dusty
kites and junk collected through the years. Just then the old
tin Ford drove up and Silly climbed in and the door slammed.
Teece stood on the porch with a bitter smile. "What you goin'
to do _up there?_"
"Startin' new," said Silly. "Gonna have my _own_
hardware."
"God damn it, you been learnin' my trade so you could run
off and use it!"
"No, sir, I never thought one day _this'd_ happen, sir,
but it did. I can't help it if I learned, Mr. Teece."
"I suppose you got names for your rockets?"
They looked at their one clock on the dashboard of the
car.
"Yes, sir."
"Like Elijah and the Chariot, The Big Wheel and The Little
Wheel, Faith, Hope, and Charity, eh?"
"We got names for the ships, Mr. Teece."
"God the Son and the Holy Ghost, I wouldn't wonder? Say,
boy, you got one named the First Baptist Church?"
"We got to leave now, Mr. Teece."
Teece laughed. "You got one named Swing Low, and another
named Sweet Chariot?"
The car started up. "Good-by, Mr. Teece."
"You got one named Roll Dem Bones?"
"Good-by, mister!"
"And another called Over Jordan! Ha! Well, tote that
rocket, boy, lift that rocket, boy, go on, get blown up, see if
I care!"
The car churned off into the dust. The boy rose and cupped
his hands to his mouth and shouted one last time at Teece:
"Mr. Teece, Mr. Teece, what _you_ goin' to do nights from now
on? What you goin' to _do_ nights, Mr. Teece?"
Silence. The car faded down the road. It was gone. "What
in hell did he mean?" mused Teece. "What am I goin' to do
nights?"
He watched the dust settle, and it suddenly came to him.
He remembered nights when men drove to his house, their
knees sticking up sharp and their shotguns sticking up sharper,
like a carful of cranes under the night trees of summer, their
eyes mean. Honking the horn and him slamming his door, a gun in
his hand, laughing to himself, his heart racing like
a ten-year-old's, driving off down the summer-night road, a
ring of hemp rope coiled on the car floor, fresh shell boxes
making every man's coat look bunchy. How many nights over the
years, how many nights of the wind rushing in the car, flopping
their hair over their mean eyes, roaring, as they picked a
tree, a good strong tree, and rapped on a shanty door!
"So _that's_ what the son of a bitch meant?" Teece leaped
out into the sunlight. "Come back, you bastard! What am I goin'
to do nights? Why, that lousy, insolent son of a . . ."
It was a good question. He sickened and was empty. Yes.
What _will_ we do nights? he thought. Now _they're_ gone, what?
He was absolutely empty and numb.
He pulled the pistol from his pocket, checked its load.
"What you goin' to do, Sam?" someone asked.
"Kill that son of a bitch."
Grandpa said, "Don't get yourself heated."
But Samuel Teece was gone around behind the store. A
moment later he drove out the drive in his open-top car.
"Anyone comin' with me?"
"I'd like a drive," said Grandpa, and got up.
"Anyone else?"
Nobody replied.
Grandpa got in and slammed the door. Samuel Teece gutted
the car out in a great whorl of dust. They didn't speak as
they rushed down the road under the bright sky. The heat from
the dry meadows was shimmering.
They stopped at a crossroad. "Which way'd they go,
Grandpa?"
Grandpa squinted. "Straight on ahead, I figure."
They went on. Under the summer trees their car made a
lonely sound. The road was empty, and as they drove along they
began to notice something. Teece slowed the car and bent out,
his yellow eyes fierce.
"God damn it, Grandpa, you see what them bastards did?"
"What?" asked Grandpa, and looked.
Where they had been carefully set down and left, in neat
bundles every few feet along the empty country road, were old
roller skates, a bandanna full of knicknacks, some old shoes,
a cartwheel, stacks of pants and coats and ancient hats, bits
of oriental crystal that had once tinkled in the wind, tin cans
of pink geraniums, dishes of waxed fruit, cartons of
Confederate money, washtubs, scrubboards, wash lines, soap,
somebody's tricycle, someone else's hedge shears, a toy wagon,
a jack-in-the-box, a stained-glass window from the Negro
Baptist Church, a whole set of brake rims, inner tubes,
mattresses, couches, rocking chairs, jars of cold cream,
hand mirrors. None of it flung down, no, but deposited gently
and with feeling, with decorum, upon the dusty edges of the
road, as if a whole city had walked here with hands full, at
which time a great bronze trumpet had sounded, the articles had
been relinquished to the quiet dust, and one and all,
the inhabitants of the earth had fled straight up into the
blue heavens.
"Wouldn't burn them, they said," cried Teece angrily.
"No, wouldn't burn them like I said, but had to take them along
and leave them where they could see them for the last time, on
the road, all together and whole. Them niggers think they're
smart."
He veered the car wildly, mile after mile, down the
road, tumbling, smashing, breaking, scattering bundles of
paper, jewel boxes, mirrors, chairs. "There, by damn, and
_there!_"
The front tire gave a whistling cry. The car spilled
crazily off the road into a ditch, flinging Teece against the
glass.
"Son of a bitch!" He dusted himself off and stood out of
the car, almost crying with rage.
He looked at the silent, empty road. "We'll never catch
them now, never, never." As far as he could see there was
nothing but bundles and stacks and more bundles neatly placed
like little abandoned shrines in the late day, in the
warm-blowing wind.
Teece and Grandpa came walking tiredly back to the
hardware store an hour later. The men were still sitting
there, listening, and watching the sky. Just as Teece sat down
and eased his tight shoes off someone cried, "Look!"
"I'll be _damned_ if I will," said Teece.
But the others looked. And they saw the golden bobbins
rising in the sky, far away. Leaving flame behind, they
vanished.
In the cotton fields the wind blew idly among the snow
dusters. In still farther meadows the watermelons
lay, unfingerprinted, striped like tortoise cats lying in the
sun.
The men on the porch sat down, looked at each other,
looked at the yellow rope piled neat on the store shelves,
glanced at the gun shells glinting shiny brass in their
cartons, saw the silver pistols and long black metal shotguns
hung high and quiet in the shadows. Somebody put a straw in
his mouth, Someone else drew a figure in the dust.
Finally Samuel Teece held his empty shoe up in triumph,
turned it over, stared at it, and said, "Did you notice? Right
up to the very last, by God, he said 'Mister'!"
2004-05: THE NAMING OF NAMES
They came to the strange blue lands and put their names
upon the lands. Here was Hinkston Creek and Lustig Corners and
Black River and Driscoll Forest and Peregrine Mountain and
Wilder Town, all the names of people and the things that the
people did. Here was the place where Martians killed the first
Earth Men, and it was Red Town and had to do with blood. And
here where the second expedition was destroyed, and it was
named Second Try, and each of the other places where the rocket
men had set down their fiery caldrons to burn the land, the
names were left like cinders, and of course there was a Spender
Hill and a Nathaniel York Town. . . .
The old Martian names were names of water and air and
hills. They were the names of snows that emptied south in stone
canals to fill the empty seas. And the names of sealed and
buried sorcerers and towers and obeisks. And the rockets struck
at the names like hammers, breaking away the marble into
shale, shattering the crockery milestones that named the old
towns, in the rubble of which great pylons were plunged with
new names: IRON TOWN, STEEL TOWN, ALUMINUM CITY, ELECTRIC
VILLAGE, CORN TOWN, GRAIN VILLA, DETROIT II, all the mechanical
names and the metal names from Earth.
And after the towns were built and named, the graveyards
were built and named, too: Green Hill, Moss Town, Boot Hill,
Bide a Wee; and the first dead went into their graves.
But after everything was pinned down and neat and in its
place, when everything was safe and certain, when the towns
were well enough fixed and the loneliness was at a minimum,
then the sophisticates came in from Earth. They came on parties
and vacations, on little shopping trips for trinkets and
photographs and the "atmosphere"; they came to study and
apply sociological laws; they came with stars and badges and
rules and regulations, bringing some of the red tape that had
rawled across Earth like an alien weed, and letting it grow on
Mars wherever it could take root. They began to plan people's
lives and libraries; they began to instruct and push about the
very people who had come to Mars to get away from being
instructed and ruled and pushed about.
And it was inevitable that some of these people pushed
back. . . .
April 2005: USHER II
"'During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in
the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low
in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback. through
a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found
myself, as the shades of evening drew on, within view of
the melancholy House of Usher. . . .'"
Mr. William Stendahl paused in his quotation. There, upon
a low black hill, stood the House, its cornerstone bearing
the inscription 2005 A.D.
Mr. Bigelow, the architect, said, "It's completed. Here's
the key, Mr. Stendahl."
The two men stood together silently in the quiet autumn
afternoon. Blueprints rustled on the raven grass at their feet.
"The House of Usher," said Mr. Stendahl with pleasure.
"Planned, built, bought, paid for. Wouldn't Mr. Poe
be _delighted?_"
Mr. Bigelow squinted. "Is it everything you wanted, sir?"
"Yes!"
"Is the color right? Is it _desolate_ and _terrible?_"
"_Very_ desolate, _very_ terrible!"
"The walls are--_bleak?_"
"Amazingly so!"
"The tarn, is it 'black and lurid' enough?"
"Most incredibly black and lurid."
"And the sedge--we've dyed it, you know--is it the proper
gray and ebon?"
"Hideous!"
Mr. Bigelow consulted his architectural plans. From these