“It’s true what your captain says. We’re Northerners. Hard times forced us south. There’s no work up there no more. We come for the sunshine. To catch fish from the water. My boy ain’t had no nourishment in two days. His ma is pregnant. If you got some candy, the sugar in gum…If you could let them drink off the last sweetness in those soda bottles you picked up from the ground. If you could—”
“Wait a minute, hey,” the guard said who had told them about the shells.
“If you saved something from your lunch—”
“Hold on there. What—”
“My boy ain’t had nothing in his mouth these two days, my wife’s been hungry three. Flowers we eat, the crusts from peanut butter and jelly sandwiches from other folks’ picnics in the public parks.”
“Now just a golden goddamn min—”
“I guess I don’t need this fruit,” the convict Frizzer said, and produced an orange from where it had been stored in his blouse.
“Me neither,” said another con and handed over a second orange, placing it beside Frizzer’s in his father’s upturned hat.
“I ain’t hungry,” said a third man, handing his orange to the boy.
“What the hell!” the guard shouted.
“Thank you,” his father said. “God bless you. God bless you, men. God bless you,” his father said, still like the hobo, dispensing love’s holy wampum, and hurried his wife and son from the square. They disappeared up a street.
“But we all had sandwiches and milk two hours ago,” George said.
“Son of a bitch,” his father said. “Son of a bitch!” He was furious, his size restored, not magnified, compact as a middleweight, coiled, latent with force and uppercut, like the clever laborer he was who took weight’s measure, gravity’s marksman.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” his mother said.
“Working conditions!” his father roared. “The competition!” He turned and, as hard as he could, threw the two oranges he still carried back in the direction of the square. “The way they organize the labor around here! Evidently they got to arrest and chain you before they let you work in their parks or pick their oranges. Apparently you first got to kill a man, then arm-rob and rape him before they let you into their union! We might as well stay and get a good night’s rest before we start back home in the morning.”
It was getting on toward dusk. There were cars parked in the street now, two and sometimes three cars in each of the driveways, giving the town or neighborhood or whatever it was a vaguely prosperous look.
“Look at them,” his father said, pointing to the houses, which had now turned on their porch lights, “they’re blind pigs. Or cat-houses. This must be where they apprentice their farmhands. What’s that piano music?”
“Organ,” his wife said.
When he was calmer he jabbed the doorbell of the first carless, unlighted house they came to.
“Reverend?” his father said to the large, powerfully built man who opened the door for them, the hearty, glandless and even organless type George would remember all his life (though he didn’t know this yet and saw only a big old man who looked even bigger in the dark, loose flowing robe he wore like a dress, only not like a dress any woman would wear, and suddenly recalled the prisoners’ strange garb, thinking, So it isn’t the land or trees or animals or even the houses that’s weird down here, it’s the clothes; thinking, There ain’t nothing in Mama’s suitcase like anything they wear in Florida, Mama packed all wrong). “Reverend,” his father said again. “Joe sent me, Reverend. My wife figures you have a spare room, but I figure it’s more like a back room, so you can bring me and her a couple of beers and the boy a Coca-Cola.”
“Why don’t you set your case down?” the big man said. George had never heard a voice like it. Vocal cords could not have produced such clear, resonant sound, only hard, unflexed, lenient muscle. “Your boy’s tired. He’s falling asleep on his feet.”
“We’re all tired, Reverend,” his father said. “Or maybe I should call you Foreman.”
“Foreman?”
“Well, it’s just that I’ve seen your work detail or day shift or whatever you call those chained, shotgun-trained fellows down by the square. I figured the bosses would have to have somewhere to sleep nights, too. Where they could rest their bodies and put down their rifles and jackboots. It would be pretty uncomfortable, fitting all them gun-toting foremen and overseers on just that one bitty bench. Ain’t this the hotel?”
The man seemed bewildered. He turned to George. “Where have you come from?”
“Milwaukee,” George said.
“Was it your brother or sister you lost?”
George looked to his father for help.
“Hey, you, watch it,” his father said angrily.
“Which was it, Mother,” the big man asked, “your son or your daughter?”
“I miscarried some years ago,” his mother said. “A little girl.” Her eyes were red.
“Had you named her yet? They’re easier to locate if they had a name.”
“She was born dead,” his mother said.
“Of course,” the man said, “but often a name’s been picked out. Even if there were only one or two you were merely favoring. Were you going to call the child after a relative? Were you thinking of giving her your name?”
“Come on, Nancy,” George Mills said. “We’ve made a mistake.”
“Nancy,” the man said sweetly. “She’d have been Nancy.”
“Let’s go.” He picked up the suitcase and turned to leave.
“I preferred Janet,” his mother said softly.
“Yes,” he said. “Janet’s a fine name.”
“Let’s go,” Mills said, “let’s just go.” But his wife was weeping now, his son had begun to sob. “Ah, for Christ’s sake,” his father said, setting the suitcase down again.
He was not crying for the stillborn sister whom he had seen only briefly in a blur of swaddling and whose name he had just heard for the first time, and not for his mother whose grief seemed to trigger his own, nor even for his suddenly confused, uncomfortable father. He wept as children in fairy tales did. It wasn’t even grief. It was fear. How could he ever have supposed that there was no difference between where they were and where they’d come from? They were lost, all of them. They were missing persons.
He had little moral imagination. His sense of evil was circumscribed by his ideas about the wicked, what they could do to you, the harm in villains. Only the monstrous and disfigured. Not murderers and holdup men but murderers and holdup men hobbled and joined at the ankles — some chain reaction of the irrational. Even their uniforms — the guards’ as well as the convicts’—suggesting action in multiples, armies of bad men, familied, for all he knew actually related, blooded. (This would have been in the days of the Dillingers and Babyface Nelsons and Capones and others, gangs, clans, tribes, confederated in wickedness and villainy like the red savages he read about in books.) The town, the community itself, presented just such a face to him, its east-west axes like its north-south ones, the configuration of each block like that of its neighbor. All the churches — he knew they were churches now — advertised on the glass-encased hoarding and reverends — he knew there were reverends, men and maybe even women, too, like the dark-robed fellow who spoke of his dead sister, the two-year-buried little girl — in all the rectories, vicarages, and parsonages like the one they stood in.