“Oh, he’s one smart fella,” Pancho said. “Oh yes.”
“One smart fella, he felt smart,” said Al Mass across from him.
“Two smart fellas, they felt smart—”
“Shut up, Al,” said Sal.
At midnight the Swing Shift ended and what longtime factory workers
always called the Graveyard Shift but now throughout the war indus-
try was called the Victory Shift began, special commendation and
maybe a couple of cents more an hour for those who took it on and
worked through the dark toward dawn: a contingent of Teenie Weenies
including the Indian and the Doctor (of veterinary medicine, he hadn’t
practiced in the years since he took up the bottle). Somehow the still-
ness of the deep midnight, or the ceasing of certain jobs done only in
the daytime, made the shift quieter: maybe it just seemed so. Conversa-
tion seemed possible. At three in the morning they had begun talking
about people in the news who could or couldn’t sing.
“Norman Thomas had a fine voice,” Vilma said. “I stood once in a
crowd that all sang the ‘Internationale’ with him. I could hear him
loud and clear. A fine tenor voice.”
72 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“ ‘Arise you prisoners of starvation,’ ” a union man who’d overheard
sang out, hymnlike. “ ‘Arise you wretched of the earth.’ ”
“How long till lunch break, anyway?” said Lucille the spot welder.
“You know who couldn’t sing,” somebody else said. “Huey Long. I
saw him in the newsreel singing ‘Every Man a King.’ He waved his
finger like this but couldn’t keep the time. He looked like a spastic.”
“I’ll bet the President has a fine voice.”
“I know his favorite hymn is ‘Our God Our Help in Ages Past.’ He
sang it on that ship, the time he met Churchill. They had a Sunday ser-
vice right on the ship. They both sang.”
The Doctor hearing this began to sing:
“Our God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast,
And our eternal home.”
Somebody else took it up, as though unable not to, the way some
people can’t help blessing someone who sneezes, no matter how far off
the sneezer, how unheard the blessing.
“Under the shadow of Thy throne
Thy saints have dwelt secure;
Sufficient is Thine arm alone,
And our defense is sure.”
It was harder to hear it now, amid the noise of the place, but it was
clear the song was being passed on, sometimes a couple of people stop-
ping what they were doing to sing a verse; and some of those who sang
or listened to the old words heard them anew, here on the Victory Shift
gathered around the wingless Pax like ants around their queen:
“A thousand ages in Thy sight
Are like an evening gone;
Short as the watch that ends the night
Before the rising sun.”
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 73
And farther aft, where the pop of rivet guns punctured it:
“Time, like an ever rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly, forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day.”
Coming back around like a little circling breeze to where Vi, Lucille,
and the fuselage team worked. A colored man strapping wire within
the fuselage could be heard taking it up, a light sweet tenor like Norman
Thomas’s, you wouldn’t have thought it from such a large man, it was
so surprising that some around him stopped work to notice, while
others shook their heads and didn’t:
“Like flowery fields the nations stand
Pleased with the morning light;
The flowers, beneath the mower’s hand,
Lie withering ere ’tis night.”
Those who knew the hymn well recognized this as the last awful
verse, and they could begin again on the chorus, comforted or not, in
agreement or not, or simply able to remember a hundred Sundays in a
different world:
“Our God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Be Thou our guard while troubles last,
And our eternal home.”
But now it’s morning, and Vi Harbison sits on the bed with Prosper in his
bedroom in the house on Z Street, trimming his nails with a pair of
little scissors. Pancho Notzing’s on the Day Shift but Prosper on this
day has been moved to Swing Shift, so the house is theirs. The sensa-
tion of having his nails cut is one that Prosper can’t decide if he
enjoys or not: it recalls his mother, who used to do it, grasping each
finger tightly in turn; seeing the dead matter cut away, something
74 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
that should be painful but was only forceful. And the feeling of
pressing the exposed fingertips into his palms. Vi’s doing it because
Prosper scratched her as he put a finger, then two, far up inside her.
She wasn’t going to have that. There was a lot this young man needed
to learn.
“There.”
And since she’s naked there on the bed, because she’d stopped him
from going farther before she performed that operation, Prosper
reaches out and circles the globes of her breasts with his hands, the
newly sensitized fingertips, like a safecracker’s sanded ones, assaying
the yielding curve of flesh.
“Okay?” he asked.
What he loved to see, had loved ever since he was ten and it had
been Mary Wilma’s step-ins and jumper: the pile of a woman’s dis-
carded clothes on the floor, his own too, the astonishment of naked-
ness. They went down together. Time passed.
“Okay so,” she said.
They lay face-to-face. She held his eyes with hers, but not as though
she saw him; she was looking, with a gaze of some other sort, down
into where he went; her face was like that of a blind woman he’d known
back when he worked for The Light in the Woods doing piecework:
how she’d sorted rivets into bins by touch, looking with her fingers,
eyes on nothing.
“That,” she said.
“This?”
“No. Ah. That.”
Now he too was looking within, looking with a clipped finger’s end.
It lay under a soft fold falling just below where the brushy mountain
ran out and the bare cleft began. It too was soft but soft differently,
satin not velvet. Now he’d lost it again. Found it. It seemed to grow or
peep out at his touch.
“Everybody has this?” Except for his own finger’s movements they
were both still.
“Every woman does. Ah.”
He examined it, tiny movements so that he, his little searching self,
didn’t get lost. It did seem to remind him of an arrangement or com-
plexity he’d encountered before but hadn’t actually perceived, not as a
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 75
separate thing or part that needed a name. The Little Man in the Boat,
she’d said. Here was the boat, the covering fold. Here the man. The
slick moisture made it seem to roll beneath his finger like an oiled ball
bearing in its socket. She moved then, earthquakelike, to lie on her
back, and he had to begin the search again, in a new land. “Little
man,” he said. “Why a little man, why not a little woman?”
“Hush.”