The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (12 page)

Over everything and all of them the odour hung and covered and pressed like the roof of a gigantic invisible tent from which there could be no escape. It smelled of work clothes, soaked and dried in sweat and seldom washed, and of spilled beer and of the sour rags used to mop it up, and of the damp and decaying wood that lay beneath the floor, and of the reek that issued forth from the constantly swinging doors of the men’s washroom: the exhausted urine and the powerful disinfectant and the shreds of tobacco and soggy cigarette papers which appeared in the trough beneath the crudely lettered signs: This is
not
an ashtray; Please don’t throw cigarette butts in
our toilet, we don’t urinate in your ashtray;
DON’T THROW CIGARETTE BUTTS HERE
.

And as it all assailed his senses he felt that everything was wrong with his life and that all of it was ruined, though he was yet but in his eighteenth year. And he wished that he were home.

He could see the situation at home now. The five younger children would be in bed and his sister Mary, who was sixteen, would be helping his mother prepare the lunch that his father would carry in his pail to the meat-packing plant. His younger brother, Donny, who was thirteen, would be desperately hoping, though he knew his hopes were doomed, that the television might remain on longer. And his father who had been propped in front of the television in his undershirt, and in his sock feet and with the waistband of his trousers undone, and with his greying reddish head flopping occasionally from side to side as he dozed and slept more than he dared admit, would have risen and gone to lock the door for the night. And then he would stop and ask gruffly, “Where’s Jesse?” And then there would be the awful, awkward silence, and, “Well don’t he live here no more?” And they would all squirm and his mother would dry glasses that were already dry, and Mary and Donny would glance furtively at one another, while the heavy-set man, now fully awake and puffing on his pipe, would walk from one window to the next, shielding his eyes against the glass while trying to catch a glimpse of his eldest son approaching beneath the street lights. He would walk ceaselessly back and forth with the long, loping outdoor stride which he had brought to the northern Indiana city from eastern Kentucky and which he could not or would not change and he would mutter: “Where is that fella?” or more strongly, “Where’n hell’s that boy at and it goen on past twelve midnight?” And his wife would watch too, as intently but secretly, so that her husband would not see and become more agitated because of her awareness. And sometimes to make it better
she would lie or tell one of the young children to say, “Jesse is studyen over at Caudell’s tonight with Earl. He said he wouldn’t be in till late.”

Then she alone bore the burden of the watching and the waiting and it was much easier then, for unlike her husband she bore her burdens silently and you did not realize that she worried at all unless you happened to catch her at an unguarded moment and saw the trace of strain about her high cheekbones and the tautness of her jaw or the tight compression of her lips. So she would say or cause others to say, “studyen at Caudell’s,” because if it was not the best answer it was better than any other that she knew. And she realized that her husband, even like herself, looked upon “studyen” and whatever it might entail with a deep respect not far removed from fear. For they were both of them barely literate and found even the signing of the magnificent report cards that their children triumphantly and relentlessly presented to them something of a task. Yet while they were sometimes angry and tried to be contemptuous of “book learnen” and people who were just “book smart” they encouraged both as much as they could, seeing in them a light that had never visited their darkness, but realizing that even as they fanned the flame they were losing a grip on almost all they had of life. And feeling themselves as if washed by a flood down the side of a shale-covered Kentucky mountain, clutching and grasping at twigs and roots with their hopeful fingers bloodied raw.

They had been at the base of a very real Kentucky mountain ten years ago when Everett Caudell had finally convinced them to come North. He had been a friend of the boy’s father in the isolation of that squirrel-hunting, pie-social youth and their girls had become the wives they had taken with them to the anguish of the coal camps where jobs and life were at best uncertain amidst an awful certainty of poverty and pain. Caudell had come North and secured the job in the meat-packing plant and then returned with the battered half-ton truck for his family
and their belongings and then again for the friend of his youth. The friend who had recently been almost killed when the roof of the illegal little mine that burrowed into the hillside had come crashing down. He had escaped only because he saw the rats racing by him toward the light and had dropped his tools and followed, sprinting after them and almost stepping on their scaly tails as the beginning roar of the crashing rock and the shot-gun pops of the snapping timbers sounded in his ears.

Ever since, both he and his wife had been more strongly religious than before because they felt somehow that God had either sent the fleeing rats as a sign or had physically propelled the man upon his way, and perhaps had even planned it so that they might come North to a new life. A life that found them ten years later waiting after midnight for the sound of footsteps at their door.

Always before, he had been home by eleven-thirty. Always. Always. But now he was here with the music and the odour in his ears and in his nose, with the cue-stick in his hand and with the green table beneath the tarnished yellow light flat before him. He could see the quarters of the challengers and hear the voices of the men quietly placing side bets behind him and he knew somehow that no matter what the cost, and almost against his soul, he would not, could not go. For it had taken him a long time to reach this night and it could never be again.

It was two years since he had first stopped outside the open door and gazed in at the life that moved beyond it. It had been a hot night in midsummer with the heat moving in little waves off the sidewalk and he had been returning from his job at the Grocery. He had been first attracted by the music, the sound of Eddy Arnold and Jim Reeves, that his father played constantly and of which both he and his sister were ashamed. They did not know the aching loneliness of which it spoke and when it floated from the windows of their house on warm summer nights it branded their parents indelibly as hillbillies and they
themselves as well, as extensions of those parents. And it was a label that they hated and did not wish to bear.

He had watched, that night, fascinated, from the sidewalk and when people began to jostle him he had stood in the doorway and then with one foot inside the door, mindful of the signs that read: We do not serve minors; If you are under 21, do not enter; but entering nevertheless although with one eye always careful of the door while wearing that expression that he had often noticed on the faces of nervous gentle Negroes on the fringes of all-white crowds.

He had stopped then almost every evening for a week on his way home, standing outside or just inside the door, captured by the music and the odour but most of all by the heavy men moving around the pool table. And then one night he had looked up at the man who was then holding the cue-stick and his eyes had looked into the eyes of Everett Caudell and their glances had met and held, somewhere there in the emptiness of the space above the table like the probing, seeking beams of two lonely mountain freight trains which round a bend at midnight and find themselves even in that instant forever committed to each other. And he had sensed even then the way that it would be; that Everett Caudell would never tell his father “I seen Jesse the other night,” nor would he tell Earl Caudell who was in the same grade and played football in the same backfield, “I saw your father playing pool in a bar the other night.” Because some things transcend all differences in age, and chronology in the end is but an empty word.

And so he had begun. At night on the way home from the Grocery he would stop for ten or twenty minutes to watch, standing just within the door and against the wall. Always mindful of the sign which reminded him that he was a “minor” and as such should “not enter”; but realizing with the passage of time that no one really cared, no more than they cared for the other sign which read,
NO GAMBLING
. And he moved farther away from the door
and deeper and deeper into the room, becoming slowly aware that the strange, violent, profane men seemed to like him and winked at him when they sank the good shots and complained to him when they missed. And he discovered still later that the door was open even at four when he went to work as well as at seven when he returned. Often in the time when there was no football practice he would almost run from school to get there for a few precious moments, hoping with a desperate hope that the table would be empty and waiting so that he might deposit the quarter which was always sweaty because he held it so tightly while almost running. And then he would watch and listen to the balls as they rolled to their release and practice by himself the shots he had seen the night before; practice intently and relentlessly until four o’clock when the heavy men began to appear from the completion of their shifts. He had done all of this somehow without even daring to think that he would ever play in a real game himself, and now, seeing and feeling his body leaning over the table, he felt a strange sensation and kinship with those boys in the F. Scott Fitzgerald stories who practice and practice but never play until a certain moment comes along in their lives and changes them forever.

There had been four men playing when he had entered and taken his stand beside the wall and beneath the signs that forbade his presence. Two sets of middle-aged men who circled the table, first swiftly with their eyes and then slowly with their bodies, speaking to the balls with pleading profanity and wiping away the tiny beads of perspiration that formed upon their brows. They played for only the token dollar, which too was forbidden by a sign, and when the losers had paid, one of them said that he must go home and had gone almost instantly. And then his partner had turned and said to the figure that he had so often seen there beside the wall, “Me and you,” and offered him the cue-stick. So he had taken it, almost instinctively and if feeling like the boys of Fitzgerald, feeling also, and perhaps
more, like the many youths of Conrad who never thought they would do what is now already done. And the commitment had been made and the night had so begun.

At first he was so preoccupied with the thought that he would lose and have to pay a dollar he was not sure he had, that he played very badly and they won only because of the shots his partner made, but in the second and third games he became stronger, playing cautiously and deliberately and while he was not spectacular at least he did not lose and he was surprised at how much he had learned from the solitary practice sessions and from the hours of standing and watching beneath the signs. And when the men they had played went out into the darkness he and his partner played against each other and after what seemed like a very long time he won and pocketed the dollar and stayed and stayed, seeing from the corner of his eye the challenging quarters being laid on the brown-black wood by the broken-nailed fingers of the faceless unknown men, until he had recognized one set of fingers and looked into the face of Everett Caudell but said nothing, as nothing had been said on that first meeting here in a time that seemed so long ago. So they played quietly, both of them, very carefully and very slowly until only the eight-ball remained and the older man took his shot and scratched and then laid his dollar upon the table and went out into the night and was replaced by a set of nameless hands and another nameless face.

He had thought while playing against Caudell many different things. First he had been embarrassed and afraid that the man would attempt to make conversation and then he had thought, that if he were to lose, it would be very fitting that his loss should be to the only man of all those present that he really knew. And then he had, right until the end, been very much afraid that Everett Caudell would purposely lose the game, the way a fond father loses at checkers to his seven-year-old child, and he had hoped and almost prayed that they would both not have to go through such an emasculating loss of dignity on this his
night of realization. And when he finally was certain that Caudell was playing his very best he felt deeply grateful for the unspoken acknowledgement and when the defeated man departed he was overcome by a mingled feeling of loneliness and sorrow, regret and anger and fierce exultant pride that made him almost ashamed. The way one feels when standing at the graveside of a loved one that has died.

And the night flashed on and he played as if still in the dream, unaddled by the beer that began to affect his opponents with the hours passing and unaddled by the music or the activities that became more frenzied as the night wore on. Once he had raised his head, to the twanging bass chords of a Duane Eddy composition, and looked along the bar’s surface where one of the perspiring middle-aged dancers spread her heavy net-stockinged limbs and lowered herself gradually and gradually until she was almost sitting on the bald head of the man who had leaned forward across the bar, holding him there with a hot, heavy inner thigh against each of his ears and grinding herself backwards and forwards across the baldness of his pate. And he had felt almost sick then and had quickly averted his eyes and taken his shot too quickly and missed.

At one-thirty a man tapped him on the shoulder and told him someone wanted to speak to him and he had turned to see his younger brother, Donny, beckoning him from the street through the door that was still open. He excused himself and went out quickly, pulling the solid door behind him so powerfully that it slammed, as if by doing so he protected his brother from the woman on the bar and perhaps himself from the men within.

Donny’s brown eyes were wide in their sockets and he began to speak in fast little uneven sentences: “Gee, you better come home. They’re walking around looking out the windows. It’s awful, especially Dad. He’s smoking like mad. He’s got that funny look on his face. They don’t know where you’re at.”