Brace was not a minister’s son, except as all sons of southern Illinois in those days were spiritually sired by ministers. Brace was a son of dusty town squares, gravel roads, fields of corn and pumpkins, soybeans, tomatoes, sugar cane, hay, oats, rye, wheat, and the thin gleaning of daft certainty held by men who own clean barns, bulging red silos, sleek herds, chores, and pitchfork morality. Practically, Brace was the son of the high school bandmaster, a man who breathed the better quality of air, and who produced music that was mechanically sound. The father had a voice like the horns of Joshua. After a night in the bars, Brace claimed that if his old man had not done so much yelling it would have been easier to handle the big, fat, loud mouth of Dane.
“My pop wanted to be a doctor,” Glass said, “but he’s a yid. Works in a drugstore. Make a lot of money with a drugstore.”
“At least he don’t yell. Right?”
“He hates drugstores.”
“Mine’s a lawyer,” a seaman said.
“A crook. I like you better, now,” Glass told him.
“If you chase enough ambulances, you’ll catch a few.”
“Mine’s a taxi-driving pimp.”
“Mine’s a dope.”
“We didn’t have one in our family,” Howard admitted. “We were too poor.”
“They’re all crooks,” Brace said knowledgeably into his beer. “I used to didn’t know that.”
Your seaman cynic, carrying in his heart that awful tradition that is not a myth, but true, is born of offenses rendered in the invisible world. One must go out, but the tradition does not require you to haul spurious cargo. The tradition is a jealous god. Your seaman cynic, that voluntary Jonah, may be forever offended by all other things, and that suits the tradition, just fine.
Brace’s hero was three years his senior, experienced (as was Brace) at trumpeting in the band. Brace’s hero did other and greater things: firing plinking rifles, grappling with dates, breeding cattle, driving at high speeds and shooting basketballs. He was blond and beautiful and, when Brace was not overcome with awe of his hero, Brace loved him. Brace, a son of copper-throated music and copper-fitted morals, looked up to a creature who lived comfortably with copper while having a wonderful time. Following the local ethic of seeking a profitable education, Brace arrived at the cow college where his hero was a star basketball player engaged in shaving points.
“A gorgeous con,” Glass told Lamp. “Nobody got hurt. The team won and the gamblers won. You got to admire the set.”
“Is that what they teach you in those fancy synagogues?”
“They teach delicatessen management,” Glass said thoughtfully. “It just occurs, cook… this ship ain’t kosher.”
Texture fooled Brace. After years of being quietly followed as a hero, the man finally took an interest in Brace. There were motives, of course, but Brace did not even dream of such things. It seemed to him that he was magically launched into the deep meaning and pleasures of adulthood. Lovely young women talked to him. Young men, sensing him an important satellite to the charging and dribbling star, wished to be his friend. Without understanding the seediness of the situation, and without knowing how or why, Brace found himself in the role of an intermediary. Men visited his room and said they were alumni. The men left envelopes for the basketball player. Brace, stricken with uncritical worship, did not at first even try to understand.
“It’s the drop man gets the trouble,” Glass confided to Lamp. “Don’t never get conned into taking the drop.”
Lamp groaned and prophesied.
Understanding came slow. Through most of the season Brace cooperated, while running his small but increasing fund of knowledge through his conscience. He balked at the harm his mind was trying to discover; for heroes, after all, are not easy to come by, and young love suffers not from its lack of truth but from its lack of discrimination. He walked nighttime streets, stood in shadows before his hero’s fraternity house, and, it may be, wept. When he finally understood the message of his conscience, he took that message back to the wise, older men who had given the conscience to him in the first place.
Brace talked to his father. His father spoke in broad and certain tones like the voice of a trombone. His father said that Brace was doing the right thing. His father said that Brace made him proud. His father told Brace to take his information to the minister.
The minister blinked with emotion, as if struck in a mortal place by a beatitude. He shot his cuffs, adjusted his tie, fondled a hymn book, gave a brief prayer of thanks. The minister said that Brace was doing the right thing. God was glad. The minister said he would speak to the basketball coach.
The basketball coach towered above Brace. He laid manly hands the size of hoops on Brace’s shoulders. The coach thanked Brace for doing the right thing in the name of clean sportsmanship.
Brace’s hero disdained him. When Brace phoned the lovely young women, with the lovely, tight-fitting angora sweaters, their roommates said that they were not in. His new men friends greeted him coldly, or not at all. Alumni stopped visiting. Through the rest of the season Brace attended the games, watched wins by narrow margins flash triumphantly on the glowing scoreboard. In the spring, his hero graduated and was hired at a high salary by a professional team.
Brace’s father, this time in a voice like a tuba, decided that in the following year Brace would attend a smaller college nearer to his home.
It would take nearly another year, a year of loneliness that accumulated through silences and avoidance and summary conversations, before Brace understood that every man he knew detested him. His womenfolk could not help. They knew nothing of the affair. Brace’s instincts told him that it was best left that way.
He felt that the world had stumbled. Even the fields, the cropland, the certainty of green and growing things seemed frail and dying. The fields looked like gigantic boxes or crates, heavy with vegetables that were already packed and were for sale.
It is “as rough as a cob” to admit that you no longer have a home. Regret combines with fear when you know you must leave. With some men there is only one way to get the job done. Brace got drunk, truly drunk, really drunk. He puked, passed out, slept, woke, showered, drank coffee and enlisted.
Chapter 5
A set of dungarees ask a good number of washings to make them comfortable. Splotches of red lead, paint, tar, bloodstains from cracked knuckles, frays, patched tears from mistakes with tools, scuffs from loading stores, oil spots on bell bottoms, and a seat worn smooth while the man is pulling an oar in the small boat—introduce a set of dungarees to these influences, add rust that works into the weave to grate and loosen cotton fibers, and the most ironclad outfit works into a liveable, seagoing rig.
By August Brace’s dungarees were beginning to fade while Adrian became brighter. Coiled heaving lines dangled monkey fists from straightened and painted rails. The davits stood like large, inverted hooks with a new small boat, lapstraked and white, snagged between them as rigidly fixed as the sacred cod. Hot updrafts blasted through the fiddley grates as the engines went on the line, rumbling, rough, then smoothing from their godlike belches into a civilized mutter of controlled power, as the engineman, and electrician Wysczknowski, adjusted and puttered and persuaded in low tones. The regulated flow of fuel and lube oil and cooling water spoke in the gush of the overboard discharge, and the black gang appeared abovedecks in the shocking sunlight like old monks from cells after prayer and fasting.