Outside the rain began again, Dove heard the wind blowing between the wash of it, trying to say ‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’
But no one heeded the brainless rain and nobody heard what the wind tried to tell. For the wind and the rain came every day and whispered like two unpaid lawyers together all night, fixing to say what, in the coming day, what everyone wished to hear said.
‘It’s awful when it’s like this,’ Dove thought, ‘and it’s like this now.’
Out of the corner of his eye he felt he was being watched, yet did not turn his head. Something moved in the corner – that cat! Hallie’s brindle again! She made a dash for it right across the floor and as she turned a corner invited him, by one whisk of her tail, to follow. He followed into a room where a virgin burned vaguely high above and, closer at hand, a woodstove cast a heartshaped flame the flowing hue of blood. A woman’s black lace slip and a man’s blue jeans were entangled on the floor and he could not tell where the cat had gone. A layer of dust had fallen, long ago, across the floor and the walls. The entangled slip and the jeans that had, but a moment before, been clothing, was a heap of dust. Panes, pictures, doorways, curtains; all were dust.
He touched a speck to his tongue and it was not dust, but salt. As the light of the virgin too high on the wall began burning too bright and he wakened with the night bulb shining right in his eyes.
And the taste of salt on his tongue.
‘What’s the word on Country?’ he asked.
‘Turned his face to the wall half an hour ago,’ the turnkey replied.
And heard Gonzales grieving—
‘I feel like I been everywhere God got land,’ Dove thought, ‘yet all I found was people with hard ways to go. All I found was troubles ’n degradation. All I found was that those with the hardest ways of all to go were quicker to help others than those with the easiest ways. All I found was two kinds of people. Them that would rather live on the loser’s side of the street with the other losers than to win off by theirselves; and them who want to be one of the winners even though the only way left for them to win was over them who have already been whipped.
‘All I found was men and women, and all the women were fallen. Sports of the world, poor bummies, poor tarts, all they were good for was to draw flies I was told. You could always treat one too good, it was said, but you never could treat one too bad. Yet I wouldn’t trade off the worst of the lot for the best of the other kind. I think they were the real salt of the earth.’
And his heart remembered the harlots’ streets till it came to a rutted and unpaved road at the end of a little lost town. A town where time, going backward, had left great paving stones severed by wind and sand. And felt the wind still coming across the mesquite to where a single gas lamp at the end of town made a lonely fire. By midnight its faltering, flickering glow would lighten a legend across a dark pane:
‘Terasina,’ the boy asked in a small awed wonder of the woman who once had pitied his ignorance there, ‘Are you there? Are you there in your bed at the end of the world while I’m here in my bed at mine?’
On the morning that seven meal-tins came up instead of eight, an immediate clamor rose. A prisoner didn’t get breakfast the morning of his release. All were willing to go hungry for freedom’s sake. ‘Who’s makin’ it, Mr Foster?’ they had to know, ‘Who’s makin’ the big door?’
Dove, on his haunches and his blanket over his shoulders, answered instead for Mister Foster.
‘All you crim’nals can quit worryin’. It’s Linkhorn makin’ it today.’ He had kept exact count of the days.
The Rag, the Timberwolf, Sec Fiend, Natural Bug, Wayback and Out-Front, Chicken Spanker and the Honorable William Makepeace Murphy crowded about to wish him the worst.
‘You’ll be back tomorrow!’ Wayback promised.
‘Hell, he’ll be back tonight,’ Out-Front was sure.
‘Meanwhile, make this last you,’ Murphy said, and presented Dove with a sack of Bull Durham, neatly tied as a gift ought to be.
Dove hesitated. Gathered crumb by crumb from seven sacks, it was nearly three-quarters full. ‘And the papers,’ Murphy added proudly, holding out the pitiful gift.
Dove accepted. ‘I’ll see you guys,’ he told them, then shook hands on that understood lie, knowing he would never see a man of them all again.
In the mixed-up April of ’32 the numbers of jobless rose to eight millions, two hundred thousand steelworkers took a fifteen percent wage cut and it took a cardinal to perceive that the country’s economic collapse was actually a wonderful piece of luck, for every day it brought thousands closer to the poverty of Christ, who had been nowhere near before. For thousands it was the chance of a lifetime to bring Jesus’ simplicity, the cardinal said, right into the home. All over the country men and women and even small children began taking advantage of this spiritual opportunity. All manner of little goodies like that were lying about in the mixed-up April of ’32.
The D.A.R. demanded that unemployed aliens be deported; a mob lynched a man at Atwood, Kansas; a detachment of the Nicaraguan National Guard killed its American commander; a crisis in unemployment relief was imminent; somebody shot the President of France; cotton was up slightly following wheat and Huey Long said the time had arrived to redistribute the wealth. Russ Columbo was still singing Please.
Cuban sugar was held to imperil our own; Mayor Walker announced that New York Had Kept The Faith. The search for the missing Lindbergh infant was extended to England; Al Capone was on his way to Atlanta. Mayor Walker decried local pay reductions and Huey Long said he would vote Farmer-Labor before he’d vote with the ‘Baruch-Morgan-Rockefeller Democrats.’ Cotton was down again following wheat but the Congress decided not to redistribute the wealth after all.
In the curious April of ’32 Mussolini wrote a play and Calvin Coolidge had to make public apology and pay a St Louis insurance man twenty-five hundred dollars for calling insurance abstractors ‘twisters’ in a radio speech. Max Schmeling was taking his forthcoming fight with Sharkey seriously; California refused to pardon Tom Mooney and people were still singing I Surrender Dear. Senator Borah demanded that arms be reduced and atoms of hydrogen were transmuted to atoms of helium. The president of the University of Wisconsin announced that statesmanship had come to a full stop; Herbert Hoover was having his portrait painted; the Congress was asked to unseat Senator Bankhead and the crisis in unemployment relief was more imminent than ever.
In curious, long-ago ’32 so many people were saying that Prohibition was a failure that the New York Chamber of Commerce said it officially. Cotton was up again following wheat and domestic wine-growers demanded that domestic wines be made legal. A fragment of a human jawbone found near Lake Victoria was believed to be that of the earliest man. The Congress refused to unseat anybody. Kansas was the last state still voting dry and even Kansas was close to going wet. Sharkey was taking his forthcoming fight with Schmeling seriously and an ash-dust obscured the sun over Buenos Aires for forty hours.