No, no, it won’t help us, Alonzo Hickman; you and I, we’re beyond help; I had to come. Have you a woman here, a wife? You’d better call her because there isn’t much time.
Just like that. And I felt the pistol throbbing beneath my hand like a hungry hound that’s sighted game. So she wants me too, it’s not simply the men who want me. She got Mamma and Robert and now she wants me. I’m supposed to be next. Less than seven months to pickle me in my pain and now she wants me. All right, if that’s the deal, then all right. But she goes too. This time she’ll lead the way.
There’s not much time, she said.
All right.
Standing there, leaning—Lord, I can see her after all this time—leaning a little to one side with her fingers just touching the back of the chair as though she knew it was Mamma’s, and so to her a rocking accusation, and me looking across the room at those black-smudged eyes in that chalk-white face, not even a tint of rouge to give it the color even a corpse would have nowadays … Me, looking at her and all dedicated to one last act and trying to hold on to my life and trying to live my life fully in those few seconds I felt I had left to live … Oh, Hickman, you’d been a rover and a rounder, but man, you were young. Young? Wasn’t even born! No, and you couldn’t see the side of a church house: There the lamp on the table was telling you to look at the facts of life staring you dead in the face and you seeing only the white paperish mask above that black lace shawl; standing there with that heavy Colt .45 so light in your hand that it seemed to be part of your own body; then her coming toward me casting the shadow across the floor and the opposite wall and then across me, and that was the first time I noticed that she was moving like a woman pushing a basket of clothes in a wheelbarrow—that slow, heavy-laden walk, yet swift in the mind’s eye tightened with my feelings. Moving the omen or sign I couldn’t read. Yes, coming like a sick woman carrying a Christmas gift under her coat to hide its shape from the children’s eyes; seeing it floating before her as I raised my hand towards her and still could not accept what my eyes screamed to me was there and which my brain refused to deal with because it didn’t want to give up its simple-minded interpretation of the scene as through a glass darkly. Like my eyes had jumped clean out of my head and flown up there beside Papa’s picture on the wall and were just sticking there watching and recording and saving till later what I was trying to see through my fingers or my skin. Yes, my brain refusing to accept the bold-faced evidence because knowing that Bob hadn’t been anywhere around and wasn’t the type. So it doubly wasn’t him, and so making her big-bellied ripeness a fact as meaningless to me as a mole on her shoulder blade beneath the shawl, or an offending tonsil that had been removed and dropped in a jar of alcohol when she was twelve years old.
And then we were joined together. Me without realizing it, sailing past the table with the lamp and the Bible and jamming the pistol barrel there where I knew the pain would wind slow and live and give birth to death long after I was beyond the revenge of screams … Rest, Bliss—Wonder why they don’t give him something to really ease him?…
Brother Bob, the only brother I had left; the good, true and dutiful son to Mamma while I the preacher’s hellion son rambled and gambled out there in the Territory, in Joplin, St. Joe, and K.C. You, Hickman, that was you. Yes indeed. I had prayed for the end of her and all like her, and for revenge, and here, I thought, was the answer. How many have shriveled with that pain? It was for me to round out the order, to bring it to a halt, dead-end—But all the time saying not a word to her, just thinking in snatches and hearing breathing sounds, hers and mine. Standing there gripping her neck in my hand like it was a bass fiddle’s and with the sight of the barrel pressing into the curving of her belly. Still refusing to recognize what it all meant. Just trying to feel it all as I saw it, so that I could say it all, so she could suffer it all and feel it keen in one red burst like an abscessed tooth at midnight on a highballing train. No relief. No red lights. No one to flag it down. So that she’d know what it meant to let loose all that old viciousness out of the pit to strike down some innocent man in his defenselessness; so that I could throw her upon the same old disgusting sacrificial altar on all the ignored blood still screaming there for justice. Ay, so that in my anger the high and mighty young priestess would for once sprawl where her victim fell.… But those must have been the terms that came afterwards, sitting in the chair; not then. Then was more blind feeling and thinking. I was swept backwards into deeper and older depths of living, down where the life had gone out of the air and only animals could breathe. Just why I didn’t slap her backhanded across the room and kick her into a corner like a bouncer or a dance-hall floor-manager would have done any overbearing whore who’d interrupted a dance just to win herself some cheap notoriety at the expense of his good nature, I’ll never know. Such I had learned to watch without flinching back there in those places where the music was more important than any violation of a woman’s womanliness by a man’s male strength. I was sure a big heathen, back there. You sure were, although Lord knows you were taught better. Yes, but it’s a fact that those women knew that the consequences of fooling around like that was either a black eye, a lumped head or a bruised behind. As Rush used to sing it, Women all screaming murder. I never raised my hand…. But that would have been too personal, I was beyond just that, I was as a thousand in my ache for vengeance. So I must have been changing.… Old clock used to work by weights passing one another, up and down. Maybe the shock of their death had to change me if I was to live even a second after I heard the news. Maybe the shock was so great that I knew even in my tongue-tied condition of wickedness that there was a moment when all heaven and hell had come together to purge men with the pill of eternal judgment, emptying us just like those old Greek folks were emptied after they committed some of their God-cursing crimes. And, in fact, the same kind of crime it was and just as holy-horrible even though we ignore it and let it happen year after year after year and no punishment or hope for justice. Thy must regulate thyself or take the pill. Ha, yes! But one day soon now it’ll come back to us from strange places, seeking us out with sword and fire in a strange sunburned hand, saying, Here, you folks without recollection or feeling for the humiliation and the wasted blood, take some of old Dr. Time’s Compound Cathartic.… Thou shalt not bear false witness—No, but that don’t even begin to describe it, not what she did … they do. Maybe something like that went on under the old skin of my brain back there. Ah, Bliss, would knowing the story have helped you?… With her breathing between my hands and me recognizing that here was more than we actually saw when we sat up there on the bandstand playing while they danced, or when we passed on the street and thought: That there now is a woman who flows with the moon and who squats in the morning like other women but who by law and custom can spread herself or smile only for those she knows as her own kind. She there is a woman who wills herself to believe that she’s different from my women and better than my women simply by being born and not because of anything she can do that’s more womanly or wifely or motherly, but who can prove she is what she’s supposed to be when the chips are down only by letting hell yell rape from the pit between her thighs and then pointing her lying finger at me. Talking about having the power of life and death! Maybe the shock of Bob’s death—poor Mamma was old and sick and wore out with trouble, so I had faced up to her leaving us before long, I had only hoped to see her once more before—But Bob, Lord, their doing that to him was such a shock that even in my lost condition I understood that even if she, there in the palm of my hand and curved hard against the pistol barrel, even if she were the finest of the fine, a lady fair and gentle-wayed was now become a pus pot slopping over with man’s old calcified evil and corruption. What kind of love and respect is that—raised up like a golden cow just to plunge then in the raising lower than those poor whores performing daisy-chain circuses in dope-fiend cathouses and West Coast opium dens. Lower! Those poor lost souls couldn’t touch the downright obscenity of one of the
se. Not even the ones who perverted themselves with dogs and goats before flyspecked spotlights for money and then moved from table to table lifting their tips from dirty, liquor-ringed tabletops with the shaved, raw, puffed, dry, slack-mouthed lips of their corrupted and outraged businesses. Those shameless whores with their guts fish-mouthing for filthy old limp and wrinkled dollar bills that they had to straddle the corners of the tables and grind down to in order to retrieve—No, Hickman, not even these—And back there you had seen life raw. You had seen the bottom of the bucket and the hole in the bottom of the bucket and the cruel jagged edges of the hole. Yes, and seen the bitter lees lying on the bottom, the very dregs and under the gritty bottom level of the dregs those poor lost souls. But none so lost and bound for perdition on Perdido Street could touch those who had been armed with the power to kill with that lying cry….
Lord, Hickman, I wonder what you’d done if she had been a man? You know what you would’ve done; that’s why women could do so much good if they would, they’re meant to make us men put on brakes, meant to break our headlong pace. Ay! but anyone seeing us that night would have been justified in calling for the straitjackets! This here is insanity, I told myself. This here is the instant before you foam at the mouth and bite off your tongue; the split second when you see the man pull the trigger just five feet away and when you realize still without pain that you have been hit because you can’t hear the gun go off and then he’s turning cartwheels with the gun still pointing straight at you.… In Tulsa, that was, and lucky I threw my trombone and the bullet went through my shoulder.… Oh yes, indeed. That was me back there—wild and reckless. Who used to hit the poolroom’s swinging doors yelling,
Fee fi fo fum
Who wants to shoot the devil one?
My name is Peter Wheatstraw,
I’m the devil’s son-in-law,
Lord, God Stingerroy!
Both of us must have risen up about three feet off the floor and been standing there in the air by now, because no floor in Alabama could support such goings-on. No, and no one could live through it without some modification of his deepest soul. So I was already changing, I suppose. Hearing her saying like someone in a trance:
If you’ve got to do it, go ahead; only hurry. But it won’t help either of us, Alonzo Hickman, it wouldn’t help a bit and I’m not worth what it’ll cost you….
And me repeating, He didn’t do it; Robert didn’t do it and you know dam’ well he didn’t do it….
That’s right, I lied. You don’t have to say it again because I acknowledge it.
Just breathing, nervous between my hands like a scared convert standing chest-deep in the baptismal water. Then that word lied started banging around in my head. Like when you put a coin in one of those jukes, yes, and it takes a while before the machinery goes into action, then all of a sudden—wham! the red and blue lights go on and the sound comes blaring out:
Woman, is all you can say is that you lied? What’s that word got to do with it? If you’re going to use these last minutes to talk, then say something.
Say you burned up all the cotton and polluted the waterworks. Say that you dried up all the cows; that you spread the hoof-and-mouth disease throughout the state and gave all the doctors the bleeding piles. Even that you brought everybody down with the galloping consumption and the sugar diabetes—But don’t come here telling me that you lied. Everybody, including the littlest children, know that you lied—what’s all this death got to do with the truth?
What? What?
Tell me that you’re responsible for the Johnstown flood.
What?
… That you can stir up cyclones just by waving your naked heels in the air. Tell me that you breathe fire and brimstone from your belly every time the moon comes full—but don’t come talking about you lied! Don’t you realize what you did?
Yes—shaking her head. Yes, can’t you see that I’m here? I’m not a loose woman.… I’m from a good family.… I’m a Christian!
You’re a what?
Yes, a Christian. I lied. Yes. I bore false witness and caused death. Yes, and I’m a murderess. Can’t you see that I understand? How could I help but know? I’m here. Can’t you see, I’m here….
And Lord knows, she was….
You couldn’t deal with that about her being a Christian, could you A.Z. Ho, ho! No, she could just as well said she was the head chief Rabbi of Warsaw, or the Queen of Sheba … or Madame Siseretta Jones. So I ignored that one.
I said: Why Bob? You’ve been knowing me from when we were children, but you didn’t know him from Adam’s off ox….
But it wasn’t him. I didn’t wish to hurt him. Nor anyone. Can’t you understand that, Alonzo Hickman? You have to try. He just didn’t exist for me. He was just a name; just a name which by saying I could protect someone more precious to me than myself or mother or father, or anything he and I might have together. But I wanted only to protect my own. Not to destroy anybody. It was fate. Please, is there a woman here? There’s very little time….
A woman? Won’t I be enough for you this time? Do you have to have another woman as well as another man? Don’t you know that what you did has killed the only woman of this house, my mother?
Yes, I heard. You don’t have to remind me. I’m here. I’ve put myself in your hands but it’s still beyond the two of us. Still I tell you, if you don’t hurry and shoot you’d better hurry and get a woman because you’re going to have too much on your hands for any man….
And even in the hard cold center of my anger I was confounded. I simply couldn’t link all that death back to life. No, I couldn’t fit the links into a chain. Said:
Another woman for what? To lay out our bodies? You want a woman for that? Don’t worry about it, because I’m putting a hot bullet through that oil lamp sitting right there on the table; we won’t need her. Besides, we’ll both be in hell watching the confusion long before she could even get here.
Oh, I was already feasting on revenge and sacrifice, telling myself: Those eyes for Bob’s eyes; that skin for Bob’s flayed skin; those teeth for Bob’s knocked-out teeth; those fingers for his dismembered hands. And remembering what they had done with their knives I asked myself, But what can I take that can replace his wasted seed and all that’s now a barbaric souvenir floating in a fruit jar of alcohol and being shown off in their barbershops and lodge halls and in the judge’s chambers down at the courthouse? And then beginning to really see, my own eyes betraying my aim and my understanding growing and making me say,
Bob’s; you know dam’ well it can’t be Bob’s.
I tell you I didn’t know him, she said. Can’t you get a woman?
I said, Whose is it then?
All I can tell you is that it wasn’t your brother. It’s cost too much my trying not to tell to tell it now. But not his … He had nothing to do with it….
Just like that. So Hickman, maybe that’s when you started to change. It was like seeing all of a sudden the air falling apart so that you could recognize the separate gases and molecules that made up its substance and which you’d have to see gather quick and mix together again if you meant to continue breathing. She had been protecting her secret and her man. That’s all it was for her. All of that destruction just to deny that little growing bit of truth. Gone and set fire to the whole house just to hide where she’d spilled a little grease on the rug. Talk about all those lives ground up to build the Pyramids, she’d have destroyed the nation just to protect her pride and reputation in that little old town. Slop the juice and cause a flood. Fire is more like it. So naturally she couldn’t go to a doctor for help and in confidence. Not after screaming Robert’s name, because then everybody would have yelled Bliss’s question even before he could draw his first living breath. Just as surely as Mary had a baby, King Herod had him a daughter; thousands of ’em.
Where could she go? So not to her doctor, or to her pastor; both those ministering roles were scratched from the book and denied. Neither to her mother, nor to
her father; nor to her sister or to any friends or kinfolks. Neither could she go to any maidservant, to no black cook or washerwoman, nor to any of our preachers, teachers, or doctors. The blind man could stand on the corner and cry, and folks would drop money in his cup so they could ignore his pain, but she bred and spread muteness and blindness and deafness. That poor girl had cut herself loose from both sides. She must have thought about each and every grown person in the whole town, like someone turning over each and every pebble on a mile-square stretch of seashore, hoping to find just one that would give her relief from that terrible loneliness. Misery doesn’t just love company, it reaches out for its own through all the man-erected walls and then claims its own.