I obeyed, mostly because the ceiling pressed so low that kneeling under it, even with my injuries, came easy. I propped my crutch against the piano crate.
“Take my father as your own. Revile him for his paternal failings, or grieve in silence for your heretofore unwept loss. Or do both together. Sometimes we must rage in order to reflect, inveigh in order to vindicate.”
As I knelt there, Henry blundered softly out. In a way, taking Henry’s daddy for my own and treating him to a prayer of curses may have helped some. In another way, it didn’t seem to help at all. After a while, my brain’d turned into a shifting globe of axle grease. I leaned my head against the crate and tried to let go of the whole sad jam-up inside me.
Nothing came.
Out of politeness, or maybe pity, I stayed with Henry for two more days. Sleeping in a bunker a couple of dozen feet from his horsehide-jacketed daddy gave me an even creepier feeling than rooming with Henry had. It worried me I had a train ticket home, but Henry had only this creek-bank hole in the ground, fancy as it was, and no real prospects for a better life.
“What’re you gonna do?” I asked him on Wednesday night.
“I continue to owe Buck Hoey’s widow and children a debt.”
“You can’t creep around Highbridge trying to do them daily good turns. You’ll get caught.”
“I wish to redeem the crime-nay, the condign retribution-that befell Hoey and prompted his family’s current suffering.”
“But you never meant to kill him.”
“Perhaps I did. I meant to do… great harm.”
“Well, you’re a big son of a gun, and trying to fix broken glider chains, or drop off bags of groceries, or cut wood for em-Henry, it just aint gonna do.”
“My recidivism condemns me utterly.”
That remark-the way he sat, his head in his hands-worried me. I could see him quitting, flinging himself off a cliff, even if the act maimed rather than croaked him. What a cross. He was suicidal, but couldn’t die.
I rummaged in my bag and found the letter he’d written me. I quoted from it: “ ‘In this much longer incarnation, by many accepted and by many others acclaimed, I have killed but once, Daniel, and then for love.’ ” Henry didn’t even look up. “Not for revenge, you said. For love. Evolution you call it here.”
“Sophistries. Carrion comfort.”
“So what’re you gonna do?”
“What I must.” Henry lifted his head. “Continue. Begin anew and continue.”
“Turn yourself in. Then maybe you’ll see justice done.”
“Justice? I came to consciousness, Daniel, in its cynical and selfish abrogation.”
“You’ve seen it done. We won the pennant, didn’t we? You and I got called up.”
Henry stared at me like I’d just proposed to end the war by sending the Japs my mama’s favorite oatmeal-cooky recipe. Then he smiled-I think-and shook his head.
“Daniel, the electric chair would merely recharge me. Your species cursed and harassed me during my first career on this earth. It owes me one, I think.”
Henry ate hawthorne nuts from a stoneware cereal bowl. I cracked some early wild pecans we’d gathered. Outside, the call of a shivering Alabama screech owl echoed over the empty channel of the Tholocco. Henry pulled off his left shoe and turned it upside down next to his cereal bowl.
I raised my eyebrows.
“To ward off ills otherwise sure to follow,” Henry said. “I am entitled to my superstition.”
On Friday morning, I stood on the blacktop on my crutches, my duffel at my feet and Henry hidden in a nearby pine copse. It wouldn’t’ve done for him to ogre around in broad daylight. I was waiting for a chance to thumb a ride into Troy. In Troy, I planned to connect with my train out of Highbridge and to ride it to Memphis, where another carrier would pick me up and haul me across Arkansas to Oklahoma.
I had a pasteboard sign-TROY OR BUST-around my neck, and a stoic look on my farm-boy face. The ban on pleasure driving and the absence of cars made me begin to think I’d do better to set off crutching it, but finally a truck-loaded down, as my luck required, with dozens of stacked crates of live chickens-came grinding towards me from the southeast. The middle-aged driver pulled over and waved me towards his passenger side. He saw my crutches and got down to help me.
“You a wounded sojer, kiddo?”
His hair-the color of fresh-made doughnuts-rose in a greasy pompadour from his forehead, and his ratty pin-striped shirt lacked its top two buttons. He’d rolled its sleeves up to his elbows, where the twisted-over cuffs gave it a funny space-suitish look. I didn’t want to lie so I lied not to lie, if you can follow my logic. I tapped my throat with one finger and lifted one of my crutches.
“Awright then. Climb on up.”
We stuttered off, the reek of doomed chickens hanging over that truck like a moving canopy. The driver told me his name, who he worked for, how many kids he had, how much he admired and respected young fellas like myself who’d sacrificed life and limb to fight the Nips and the Huns. By the time we hit Troy, he’d invented an Army unit for me, a romantic battle or two, five or six heroic wounds, and a faithful sweet-heart back home in… well, wherever I was from.
He drove me straight to the train station. He helped me down, carried my bag inside, and, at the ticket counter, shook my hand with a solemn, prime-the-pump rhythm. When he let go, I found a dollar in my palm.
“Nothin can repay yall for yore wounds, kiddo, but that’s, well, that’s a… a token. Okay?”
I nodded.
The trains from Troy to Memphis and from Memphis to Oklahoma teemed with young guys in uniform. I was dressed in civvies, and everybody aboard naturally assumed-correctly-I’d hurt myself in a frivolous schoolboy game, not in the training camps of Georgia or on the battlefields of Europe. So the dogfaces ignored me, and I felt lucky, privileged even, to be ignored.
Mama Laurel, Miss Tulipa, and Colonel Elshtain met me at the station in Tahlequah. On first catching sight of me, Mama commenced to cry her eyes out. She grabbed me and pulled me to her, my crutches be damned. She clung to me like a burr, then shoved me out to arm’s length and gave me a sappy smile.
“At least you won’t have to go off to war,” she said. “At least you won’t have to die.”
“Mama, I done already done both.”
Colonel Elshtain sniffed, but Mama and Miss Tulipa hugged me, flooding me with the stinks of woman sweat, prairie grime, and drugstore gardenia water.
I liked it.
61
The CVL shut down at the end of the 1943 season. Mister JayMac hadn’t wanted it to, but only three of the league’s eight teams had turned a profit that summer-the Hellbenders, the Gendarmes, and the Orphans. The other five clubs had taken a bath. Mister JayMac might still’ve willed the loop to go on, but the loss of Hank Clerval and myself, along with Darius’s vamoosement and Miss Giselle’s self-pyrotechnics, had yanked the heart right out of him. When the owners met in Highbridge after the Yankee-Card World Series, they voted five to three to suspend the CVL until the war ended and able-bodied prospects again came into the talent pool. Mister JayMac’s vote counted twice-maybe three times-as much as any other owner’s, but you can’t force five smart men to bleed themselves bankrupt and so he had to bow to majority rule.