(George had seen the owners’ shingles nailed to their front doors like addresses or planted in their yards like For Sale signs, the saw-toothed, varnished boards suggestive of resorts, fishing lodges, summer camps, things Indian, rustic, though the names on them were almost defiantly white.)
“That’s what I was thinking,” his father said. “Give me the case. We’ll just go back into town and ask if we can be put up for the night in some spare room of the parsonage. I don’t expect they’d charge travelers and strangers too much if they at least looked like Christians.”
“I don’t remember how to say grace,” his mother said.
“You can remember how to say amen,” his father said. “Just fold your hands and try to look like you don’t deserve what they feed you.”
His father was not a bitter man. Like all the George Millses before him, he had known subsistence but rarely hardship, treading subsistence like deep water but never really frightened, comfortable enough in his own dubious element as steeplejacks or foretopmen in theirs. So the Depression was no real setback for him. Indeed, it had presented possibilities to him, an opening of options. He had all the skills of the unskilled, chopping, digging, fetching, a hewer and drawer of a man, not strong so much as knowledgeable about weight, knowing weight’s hidden handholds the way a diamond cutter might know the directions and cleavage points of a gem merely by glancing at it. So it would not have been correct to say that the Depression had changed their lives or even that they had come south to seek their fortune. It would never have occurred to Mills that fortune could actually be sought. Fortune, if it had been his birthright ever to have more than he could use, would have sought him, it, She, Fortune, in his father’s view, being a sort of custom tailor of the goddesses, like talent perhaps, who did all the really hard work. “I promise you we’ll never starve,” his father had told him once, “we’ll never even go hungry. We won’t freeze for want of shelter or die for lack of medicine. We’re only low. We ain’t down.” So if they came to Florida to find employment it was because his father understood that there were chores in Florida too, that the menial was pretty much evenly distributed throughout the world, that Florida had its weight as well as Milwaukee — he’d shoveled coal there, been a janitor, collected garbage — its tasks and chores, odd jobs, stints, and shifts. “Our kind,” he assured his son, “could find nigger work in Paradise. What, you think it isn’t dirty here just because the sun is shining?”
So it was only a change of scene he’d wanted. And hadn’t gotten yet. “Maybe we aren’t close enough yet, maybe we’re still too high up the slope of the world. Maybe we have to be where all you have to do is just nudge a stone with your shoe and it rolls all the way downhill to the equator. But whatever, I don’t see no parrots in this neighborhood. I ain’t spotted any alligators.” (Because they’d been in Florida better than a day now, crossing from Dothan, Alabama, into Marianna, Florida, passing Tallahassee and Gainesville and Ocala and De Land, all of which could have been Northern towns except for the souvenirs in the gas stations and grocery stores — the toy ’gators and candies in the shape of oranges and grapefruits, the rubber tomahawks and Seminole jewelry, drinking glasses with scenes of St. Petersburg, Miami, Florida’s keys, fishing tackle with deep-sea, heavy-duty line — where they bought his father’s cigarettes and his mother the makings, the dry cereals and packaged breads and luncheon meats and quarts of milk, for their meals. There were suntan lotions on the drugstore shelves, cheap sunglasses on pasteboard cards. This is where his mother had bought their three new swimsuits. “It stands to reason,” she’d said before they’d ever left Wisconsin, “bathing trunks have to be cheaper down there.” And picked out the swimsuits in the first town they came to after they crossed the state line. “Sure,” his father had said, still good-humored, “maybe we should never have got George that cloth alligator when we were still up North. I think we made a mistake there. That stands to reason too. A cloth souvenir toy doll lizard should cost a lot less money in some grocery store near the swamps where there ain’t no call for pretend alligators because there’s the real thing snapping at your toes no further off than the distance of your own height.”) But still good mooded, the absence of physical evidence that they were there still within the acceptable limits of credulity. It was only late summer. They would have to wait months yet before they would get the benefit of the hot winter weather, before they would have any reason to wonder where the snow was, where the ice. His father’s mild complaint about the whereabouts of the strange birds and animals only the teasing echo of his own kid questions and alerted suspicions. He was obviously enjoying himself, the twelve-hundred-mile journey they had already come itself a vacation. He was having a good time, his temper was sweet, he was feeling fine, even the queer, beachless, ungoverned and, for all they knew, spare-roomless town a pleasant curiosity. His father, all of them, were happy.
Then they saw the chain gang.
It was policing the small square where the bench and palm tree were.
Two guards with rifles slouched along on either side of the line of convicts as they moved across the square picking up cigarette butts, Coca-Cola bottles, the feeble litter of the lightly trafficked park. A third guard sat on the bench watching the prisoners as one might casually watch a ball game played by children, his arms embracing the back of the bench, his rifle balanced against his crotch.
The convicts were actually chained at the legs, the chains drawn so close the men were almost shoulder to shoulder like men on parade. They took small steps like Chinese house servants or young girls in heels. With their backs to them, the thick white and black horizontals of their uniforms seemed a single broad fabric like a wide flag flapping. They looked like staves on sheet music.
George and his mother followed his father to the guard on the bench.
“How do you do?” his father said.
“Are there real bullets in that?” George Mills asked.
“They’re shells, son. Bullets is in handguns.”
“My boy never saw a chain gang,” his father said. “We’re from up North.”
“Up North they lock folks up,” the guard said. “Here they get to go outdoors.”
“What did these men do?” his father said.
“All different things,” the guard said. “Murders and armed robberies. Rapes. Different things.”
“Murders,” his son said. “Gee, they’re not even very big.”
“Size got nothing to do with it, son. Big men can get what they want without killing people.”
“See what can happen, George?” Mills said. “See what they do to you if you grow up wild? Officer, would you mind if we had a word with these men?” His father winked at the guard.
The guard looked at George and returned his father’s wink. His mother said nothing.
“These shells is real, son,” he said, and tapped the chamber of his rifle. “They call ’em shells ’cause they’re so big. They’re bigger than bullets. You get hit with a shell you never get better. You go along with your dad. You listen to what these cons tell you.” The man stood up and blew two shrill blasts on a whistle that hung from his neck. The convicts stopped where they were and came to a sort of attention. “Gary and Henry,” he called out to the other two guards, “these folks is from up North and got a little boy with them who don’t always mind.” He accompanied Mills and his son to the rank of convicts.
“Tell the kid how old you was when you come to us, Frizzer,” the man said.
Before Frizzer could answer, George’s father did an astonishing thing. He took his hat from his head and held it in his hands in exactly the attitude of supplication George had seen hobos employ when they came to his mother’s door in Milwaukee. Status seemed instantly altered, perspective did, his father exchanging actual inches and pounds with the prisoner. There was something religious, even pious about the gesture. It startled George, it startled them all, the prisoners literally moved, forced back, their chains scraping in a sharp, brief, metallic skirl.