This time Fainy was careful to open the package before he brought it in. Doc Bingham took the books out of his hand without looking at him and Fainy went round behind the stovepipe. He stood there in the soggy steam of his clothes listening to Doc Bingham boom. He was hungry, but nobody seemed to think of offering him a piece of pie.
“Ah, my dear friends, how can I tell you with what gratitude to the Great Giver a lonely minister of the gospel of light, wandering among the tares and troubles of this world, finds ready listeners. I’m sure that these little books will be consoling, interesting and inspirational to all that undertake the slight effort of perusal. I feel this so strongly that I always carry a few extra copies with me to dispose of for a moderate sum. It breaks my heart that I can’t yet give them away free gratis.”
“How much are they?” asked the old woman, a sudden sharpness coming over her features. The scrawny woman let her arms drop to her side and shook her head.
“Do you remember, Fenian,” asked Doc Bingham, leaning genially back in his chair, “what the cost price of these little booklets was?” Fainy was sore. He didn’t answer. “Come here, Fenian,” said Doc Bingham in honied tones, “allow me to remind you of the words of the immortal bard:
Lowliness is your ambition’s ladder
Whereto the climber upward turns his face
But when he once attains the topmost round
He then unto the ladder turns his back
“You must be hungry. You can eat my pie.”
“I reckon we can find the boy a piece of pie,” said the old woman.
“Ain’t they ten cents?” said Fainy, coming forward.
“Oh, if they’re only ten cents I think I’d like one,” said the old woman quickly. The scrawny woman started to say something, but it was too late.
The pie had hardly disappeared into Fainy’s gullet and the bright dime out of the old tobaccobox in the cupboard into Doc Bingham’s vest pocket when there was a sound of clinking harness and the glint of a buggylamp through the rainy dark outside the window. The old woman got to her feet and looked nervously at the door, which immediately opened. A heavyset grayhaired man with a small goatee sprouting out of a round red face came in, shaking the rain off the flaps of his coat. After him came a skinny lad about Fainy’s age.
“How do you do, sir; how do you do, son?” boomed Doc Bingham through the last of his pie and coffee.
“They asked if they could put their horse in the barn until it should stop rainin’. It’s all right, ain’t it, James?” asked the old woman nervously. “I reckon so,” said the older man, sitting down heavily in the free chair. The old woman had hidden the pamphlet in the drawer of the kitchen table. “Travelin’ in books, I gather.” He stared hard at the open package of pamphlets. “Well, we don’t need any of that trash here, but you’re welcome to stay the night in the barn. This is no night to throw a human being out inter.”
So they unhitched the horse and made beds for themselves in the hay over the cowstable. Before they left the house the older man made them give up their matches. “Where there’s matches there’s danger of fire,” he said. Doc Bingham’s face was black as thunder as he wrapped himself in a horseblanket, muttering about “indignity to a wearer of the cloth.” Fainy was excited and happy. He lay on his back listening to the beat of the rain on the roof and its gurgle in the gutters, and the muffled stirring and chomping of the cattle and horse, under them; his nose was full of the smell of the hay and the warm meadowsweetness of the cows. He wasn’t sleepy. He wished he had someone his own age to talk to. Anyway, it was a job and he was on the road.
He had barely got to sleep when a light woke him. The boy he’d seen in the kitchen was standing over him with a lantern. His shadow hovered over them enormous against the rafters.
“Say, I wanner buy a book.”
“What kind of a book?” Fainy yawned and sat up.
“You know . . . one o’ them books about chorus girls an’ white slaves an’ stuff like that.”
“How much do you want to pay, son?” came Doc Bingham’s voice from under the horseblanket. “We have a number of very interesting books stating the facts of life frankly and freely, describing the deplorable licentiousness of life in the big cities, ranging from a dollar to five dollars. The Complete Sexology of Dr. Burnside, is six fifty.”
“I couldn’t go higher’n a dollar . . . Say, you won’t tell the ole man on me?” the young man said, turning from one to another. “Seth Hardwick, he lives down the road, he went into Saginaw onct an’ got a book from a man at the hotel. Gosh, it was a pippin.” He tittered uneasily.
“Fenian, go down and get him The Queen of the White Slaves for a dollar,” said Doc Bingham, and settled back to sleep.
Fainy and the farmer’s boy went down the rickety ladder.
“Say, is she pretty spicy? . . . Gosh, if pop finds it he’ll give me a whalin’. . . Gosh, I bet you’ve read all them books.”
“Me?” said Fainy haughtily. “I don’t need to read books. I kin see life if I wanter. Here it is . . . it’s about fallen women.”
“Ain’t that pretty short for a dollar? I thought you could get a big book for a dollar.”
“This one’s pretty spicy.”
“Well, I guess I’ll take it before dad ketches me snoopin’ around . . . Goodnight.” Fainy went back to his bed in the hay and fell fast asleep. He was dreaming that he was going up a rickety stair in a barn with his sister Milly who kept getting all the time bigger and whiter and fatter, and had on a big hat with ostrich plumes all round it and her dress began to split from the neck and lower and lower and Doc Bingham’s voice was saying, She’s Maria Monk, the queen of the white slaves, and just as he was going to grab her, sunlight opened his eyes. Doc Bingham stood in front of him, his feet wide apart, combing his hair with a pocketcomb and reciting:
“Let us depart, the universal sun
Confines not to one land his blessed beams
Nor is man rooted like a tree . . .
“Come, Fenian,” he boomed, when he saw that Fainy was awake, “let us shake the dust of this inhospitable farm, latcheting our shoes with a curse like philosophers of old . . . Hitch up the horse; we’ll get breakfast down the road.”
This went on for several weeks, until one evening they found themselves driving up to a neat yellow house in a grove of feathery dark tamaracks. Fainy waited in the wagon while Doc Bingham interviewed the people in the house. After a while Doc Bingham appeared in the door, a broad smile creasing his cheeks. “We’re going to be very handsomely treated, Fenian, as befits a wearer of the cloth and all that . . . You be careful how you talk, will you? Take the horse to the barn and unhitch.”
“Say, Mr. Bingham, how about my money? It’s three weeks now.” Fainy jumped down and went to the horse’s head.
An expression of gloom passed over Doc Bingham’s face. “Oh, lucre, lucre . . .
“Examine well
His milkwhite hand, the palm is hardly clean
But here and there an ugly smutch appears,
Foh, ’twas a bribe that left it. . . .
“I had great plans for a cooperative enterprise that you are spoiling by your youthful haste and greed . . . but if you must I’ll hand over to you this very night everything due you and more. All right, unhitch the horse and bring me that little package with Maria Monk, and The Popish Plot.”
It was a warm day. There were robins singing round the barn. Everything smelt of sweetgrass and flowers. The barn was red and the yard was full of white leghorns. After he had unhitched the spring wagon and put the horse in a stall, Fainy sat on a rail of the fence looking out over the silvergreen field of oats out back, and smoked a cigarette. He wished there was a girl there he could put his arm round or a fellow to talk to.
A hand dropped onto his shoulder. Doc Bingham was standing beside him.
“Fenian, my young friend, we are in clover,” he said. “She is alone in the house, and her husband has gone to town for two days
with the hired man. There’ll be nobody there but her two little children, sweet bairns. Perhaps I shall play Romeo. You’ve never seen me in love. It’s my noblest role. Ah, some day I’ll tell you about my headstrong youth. Come and meet the sweet charmer.”
When they went in the kitchen door a dimplefaced pudgy woman in a lavender housecap greeted them coyly.
“This is my young assistant, ma’am,” said Doc Bingham, with a noble gesture. “Fenian, this is Mrs. Kovach.”
“You must be hungry. We’re having supper right away.”
The last of the sun lit up a kitchen range that was crowded with saucepans and stewpots. Fragrant steam rose in little jets from round wellpolished lids. As she spoke Mrs. Kovach leaned over so that her big blue behind with starched apronstrings tied in a bow above it stood up straight in the air, opened the oven door and pulled out a great pan of cornmuffins that she dumped into a dish on the dining table already set next the window. Their warm toasted smoke filled the kitchen. Fainy felt his mouth watering. Doc Bingham was rubbing his hands and rolling his eyes. They sat down, and the two blue-eyed smearyfaced children were sat down and started gobbling silently, and Mrs. Kovach heaped their plates with stewed tomatoes, mashed potatoes, beef stew and limabeans with pork. She poured them out coffee and then said with moist eyes, as she sat down herself:
“I love to see men eat.”
Her face took on a crushed pansy look that made Fainy turn away his eyes when he found himself looking at it. After supper she sat listening with a pleased, frightened expression while Doc Bingham talked and talked, now and then stopping to lean back and blow a smoke ring at the lamp.
“While not myself a Lutheran as you might say, ma’am, I myself have always admired, nay, revered, the great figure of Martin Luther as one of the lightbringers of mankind. Were it not for him we would be still groveling under the dread domination of the Pope of Rome.”
“They’ll never get into this country; land sakes, it gives me the creeps to think of it.”
“Not while there’s a drop of red blood in the veins of freeborn Protestants . . . but the way to fight darkness, ma’am, is with light. Light comes from education, reading of books and studies . . .”
“Land sakes, it gives me a headache to read most books, an’ I don’t get much time, to tell the truth. My husband, he reads books he gets from the Department of Agriculture. He tried to make me read one once, on raisin’ poultry, but I couldn’t make much sense out of it. His folks they come from the old country . . . I guess people feels different over there.”
“It must be difficult being married to a foreigner like that.”
“Sometimes I don’t know how I stand it; course he was awful goodlookin’when I married him . . . I never could resist a goodlookin’ man.”
Doc Bingham leaned further across the table. His eyes rolled as if they were going to drop out.
“I never could resist a goodlooking lady.”
Mrs. Kovach sighed deeply.
Fainy got up and went out. He’d been trying to get in a word about getting paid, but what was the use? Outside it was chilly; the stars were bright above the roofs of the barns and outhouses. From the chickencoop came an occasional sleepy cluck or the rustle of feathers as a hen lost her balance on her perch. He walked up and down the barnyard cursing Doc Bingham and kicking at an occasional clod of manure.
Later he looked into the lamplit kitchen. Doc Bingham had his arm around Mrs. Kovach’s waist and was declaiming verses, making big gestures with his free hand:
. . . These things to hear
Would Desdemona seriously incline
But still the house affairs would draw her hence
Which ever as she could with haste dispatch
She’d come again and with a greedy ear . . .
Fainy shook his fist at the window. “Goddam your hide, I want my money,” he said aloud. Then he went for a walk down the road. When he came back he was sleepy and chilly. The kitchen was empty and the lamp was turned down low. He didn’t know where to go to sleep, so he settled down to warm himself in a chair beside the fire. His head began to nod and he fell asleep.
A tremendous thump on the floor above and a woman’s shrieks woke him. His first thought was that Doc Bingham was robbing and murdering the woman. But immediately he heard another voice cursing and shouting in broken English. He had half gotten up from the chair, when Doc Bingham dashed past him. He had on only his flannel unionsuit. In one hand were his shoes, in the other his clothes. His trousers floated after him at the end of his suspenders like the tail of a kite.
“Hey, what are we going to do?” Fainy called after him, but got no answer. Instead he found himself face to face with a tall dark man with a scraggly black beard who was coolly fitting shells into a doublebarrelled shotgun.
“Buckshot. I shoot the sonabitch.”
“Hey, you can’t do that,” began Fainy. He got the butt of the shotgun in the chest and went crashing down into the chair again. The man strode out the door with a long elastic stride, and there followed two shots that went rattling among the farm buildings. Then the woman’s shrieks started up again, punctuating a longdrawnout hysterical tittering and sobbing.
Fainy sat in the chair by the stove as if glued to it.
He noticed a fiftycent piece on the kitchen floor that must have dropped out of Doc Bingham’s pants as he ran. He grabbed it and had just gotten it in his pocket when the tall man with the shotgun came back.
“No more shells,” he said thickly. Then he sat down on the kitchen table among the uncleared supper dishes and began to cry like a child, the tears trickling through the knobbed fingers of his big dark hands. Fainy stole out of the door and went to the barn. “Doc Bingham,” he called gently. The harness lay in a heap between the shafts of the wagon, but there was no trace of Doc Bingham or of the piebald horse. The frightened clucking of the hens disturbed in the hencoop mixed with the woman’s shrieks that still came from upstairs in the farmhouse. “What the hell shall I do?” Fainy was asking himself when he caught sight of a tall figure outlined in the bright kitchen door and pointing the shotgun at him. Just as the shotgun blazed away he ducked into the barn and out through the back door. Buckshot whined over his head. “Gosh, he found shells.” Fainy was off as fast as his legs could carry him across the oatfield. At last, without any breath in his body, he scrambled over a railfence full of briars that tore his face and hands and lay flat in a dry ditch to rest. There was nobody following him.
Newsreel III
“IT TAKES NERVE TO LIVE IN THIS WORLD” LAST WORDS OF GEORGE SMITH HANGED WITH HIS BROTHER BY MOB IN KANSAS MARQUIS OF QUEENSBERRY DEAD FLAMES WRECK SPICE PLANT COURT SETS ZOLA FREE
a few years ago the anarchists of New Jersey, wearing the McKinley button and the red badge of anarchy on their coats and supplied with beer by the republicans, plotted the death of one of the crowned heads of Europe and it is likely that the plan to assassinate the president was hatched at the same time or soon afterward
It’s moonlight fair tonight upon the Wabash
From the fields there comes the breath of newmown hay
Through the sycamores the candlelight is gleaming
On the banks of the Wabash far away
OUT FOR BULLY GOOD TIME
Six Thousand Workmen at Smolensk Parade With Placards Saying Death To Czar Assassin.
riots and streetblockades mark opening of teamster’s strike
WORLD’S GREATEST SEA BATTLE NEAR
Madrid police clash with 5000 workmen carrying black flag
spectators become dizzy while dancer eats orange breaking record that made man insane
The Camera Eye (5)
and we played the battle of Port Arthur in the bathtub and the water leaked down through the drawingroom ceiling and it was altogether too bad but in Kew Gardens old Mr. Garnet who was still hale and hearty although so very old came to tea and we saw him first through the window with his red face and John Bull whiskers and aunty said it was
a sailor’s rolling gait and he was carrying a box under his arm and Vickie and Pompom barked and here was Mr. Garnet come to tea and he took a gramophone out of a black box and put a cylinder on the gramophone and they pushed back the tea-things off the corner of the table Be careful not to drop it now they scratch rather heasy Why a hordinary sewin’ needle would do maam but I ave special needles
and we got to talking about Hadmiral Togo and the Banyan and how the Roosians drank so much vodka and killed all those poor fisherlads in the North Sea and he wound it up very carefully so as not to break the spring and the needle went rasp rasp Yes I was a bluejacket miself miboy from the time I was a little shayver not much bigger’n you rose to be bosun’s mite on the first British hironclad the Warrior and I can dance a ornpipe yet maam and he had a mariner’s compass in red and blue on the back of his hand and his nails looked black and thick as he fumbled with the needle and the needle went rasp rasp and far away a band played and out of a grindy noise in the little black horn came God Save the King and the little dogs howled