No. (Sam walked slowly through the cold street.) For suppose he went over there and Mr. Harris was right: Poonkin was already dead.
“You shouldn’t do that!” Clarice said one day. “You don’t do it at Elsie and Corey’s. I’m sure you didn’t do it in front of your Mama and your Papa at home.” Which was true.
“If he’s going to do it,” Hubert said from the wing chair where he’d begun to read, “I’d just as soon he did it in front of me. You don’t want the boy sneaking off to do it behind my back, now.”
Sam was surprised at Clarice’s upset. He’d thought her unconcerned about the matter till now.
“Hubert, you should speak to him — you said you were going to speak to him. Oh, I’m sorry — it isn’t any of my business! And I shouldn’t have said anything.” Then, with her coat still unbuttoned, she went to the door and out.
As she pulled it after her, it stuck — with a noise like Pra, then, when she opened it an inch and pulled it to again, with a Ja. Outside, she yanked it, and it closed on two beats: Pa-Ti. The tensions of her leaving turned the sound into a kind of thunder that left the room whispering its silence. Sam thought about saying: Hubert, you said you didn’t mind if I —
But Hubert cut the thought off: “You know, I used to work in the tobacco fields — and by and large, it’s a pretty ordinary sort of Negro you find there.”
“That’s right. In Connecticut. What do you mean?” Sam asked; because Hubert was speaking in his serious, older-brother voice. Another sort of thunder.
“Well, you got hardworking Negroes. You got lazy Negroes. Then you got no-accounts — that shouldn’t be news to you…”
Sam nodded.
“But you got another kind you’re going to run into up here — only thing to call ’em is animals. Maybe there’re white people like that too — I guess there must be, someplace. But, now, there were some good men working with me in the Connecticut fields. And there were some lazy ones. Lots of them were no-accounts — but even more of them were just animals.” Hubert pointed his finger. “And that’s why I don’t smoke no cigarettes.”
“I don’t understand…”
“When they pick tobacco,” Hubert said, “they cure it before they make those. But they don’t wash it.”
“I still don’t — ”
“Where does an animal make water or do his business?”
“Right where he’s standing.”
“Well, that’s what I mean,” Hubert said. “And I don’t mean once or twice; I mean all day every day — right in the row where they’re hooking tobacco. They don’t even go to the side. And at least ten times or more I come across some feller doing a lot worse than making water or his business — grinning and telling you he’s gotta do it now ’cause there ain’t much more to life but that and getting drunk and he’s just got to do it! Right on top of what you’re putting in your mouth and sucking into your body! They know white people going to be smoking them things — they think it’s funny.”
“What’s a lot worse?” Sam took the delicate white paper from his lip, feeling its faint adhesion unstick, to look at the tube of fire and flavor in his clubbed fingers.
“If you can’t figure it for yourself,” Hubert said, “it’s not my place to tell you. It’s not my place to preach to you, neither. And I’m not going to talk about it to you anymore.” With a theatrical finality Sam found much more maddening than any preaching (that, at least, with Hubert, meant you could turn it back into an argument), Hubert got up from the wing chair and walked, slowly and with the deliberation of a silent, primal force, into the other room — and did not close the door. Sam watched him pull out the chair, move two heavy law books over, sit down, settle one forearm on the desk, and begin studying.
Within the silence, which was almost a rumble, like a train’s thundering off somewhere, Sam tried to detect the instructions that would release him from his own paralysis. He really didn’t know what Hubert meant by “a lot worse.” But the veiled suggestions went immediately with the things that could happen to you in the vestibules of subway cars. It wasn’t scarifying so much as it defined an area wholly constituted of his ignorance. Sam hated that and felt stupid before it.
It didn’t stop him from smoking. But it stopped him from smoking in the house when he was around Clarice — or Hubert.
c
He sees an image of the bridge springing from a remote past and propelled upward, spiraling, arching the sky, casting its shadow down upon us and vanishing in space.
The intricate interpenetration of the senses, woven into that proto-historic textile — the tapestry of day — sleep and forgetfulness unravel, as effectively as any Penelope, largely before the next day’s panel is begun. (Forget a city in which you’ve once lived, and it might as well have fallen into the sea.) But it would be as naive to think that all forgettings are random as it would be to think thus of all dreams: the first things to go are, systematically, the incidents confirming our own weaknesses which, because we are lucky enough not to have to talk about, there’s no particular reason to recall. The incidents we will, likewise, retain are among those that tell of a certain strength. We may talk about them or not. In between are all the positive and negative lessons of life that life itself will not let us lose. But even among these, on imagination’s intricate loom, one can be reworked into the other with astonishing rapidity, strength into weakness, weakness into strength.
It was astonishing how quickly Sam forgot Poonkin. Guilt he’d felt for not trying to see him on Ward’s Island was replaced by guilt at not wrapping up some of the magazines, trudging to the post office — stripped now of its green and red and silver — , and mailing them to Lewy, who, with his small dark hands, with his chocolate chest, with his crisp-haired enthusiasm, would pass them on to tobacco-colored John: a much smaller guilt, since they’d all already traded so many. Back home, they’d received dozens from Sam; Sam had received dozens from them. Probably they’d seen most of these anyway. (Five among the eighteen Sam had actually read before.) But when the last bedsheet-sized pulp was closed and returned to the pile under the daybed beside the wicker, both guilts extinguished each other. He never thought of Poonkin again.
Or anything Poonkin might have remembered.