The Pledge (40 page)

Then she left, and the visit was over and time began. Time, which had never occupied many minutes of his thoughts, began to preoccupy him. He searched the library for the few theoretical books on time. He listened to men who told him of their absolute suffering when it came to building time. For them, hours became days and days became weeks. He was taken back in his thoughts to the Boy Scout camp of his boyhood, summers that lasted forever, that were concocted out of the pure joy of childhood, a joy never really repeated in the adulthood of any person. The prison barber was an old black man, and sitting in his chair in a little shed off the mess hall, he asked the old gentleman what time was.

“Don't you know, sonny?”

“I'm afraid not.”

“Time's like a loop, old cowboy lasso. Angel's got it, and you got all the sweet summer days when you was little, slow, slow. God's got it, time passes like it should. But ifen the devil get hold of it, he stop time. He stop it cold. That's what happens in the slammer. Time stops, and man we suffer like little Jesus till God frees us.”

“And when is that?”

“Day you walk out of here, sonny — day you walk out of here.”

Heavy snow began, and work in the woods came to a halt. Most of the men spent the day in the barracks, where some of them read books and some read magazines and some read comic books, and some just sat and watched the snow through the windows. It fell slowly, hour after hour, fat, lazy flakes turning over and over and over. The bunkhouses or barracks were warm enough, their steam-heated pipes fed from a central source by an endless supply of branch limbs from the cut trees. But tempers grew short in the close confinement, and every now and then there would be a burst of angry sound from an argument that rarely came to anything more than words. Nobody wanted ventilation because the area near the open window became icy cold; and as a result the barracks would fill with pipe and cigarette smoke and the smell of men's bodies. There was a strange prison game, aptly called Tactics, which was said to have come out of the wartime prison camps. It was played by four players, four chess sets, and four chessboards, the boards split and rearranged, and it went on for weeks. There was a game going in the barracks, and each day a crowd of men would gather around and watch it in silence. Bruce would join them every now and then, brooding over what a strange thing prison was. But whereas the heavy snow brought days of leisure to the woods gang, his own work at the auto shop went on. They dug through the snow to the garage, to fit the big army trucks with chains and to have everything ready for work in the snow. When the snow stopped, leaving the world a white and green pine wonderland, the trucks began to roll and the woods gangs went out again.

In the white world, they had a Christmas dinner with plum pudding — one half the mess hall white, one half black, and at least the voices mingling in the carols they sang.

It was a strange, strange world, this prison camp in the mountains of West Virginia. He lived in a community of convicts, but for the most part they were simple, easygoing men, himself the only middle-class person among them, poor people with commonplace Federal crimes, stolen autos across state borders, stolen checks from the mail, making moonshine and paying no revenue tax and selling it across the border in Ohio, fifty cents' worth of mash distilled into five dollars' worth of a hundred and eighty proof whiskey, doing a quick mugging or purse snatching in the District of Columbia, and himself there for contempt of Congress, the only one of his kind, in prison for a crime he could explain to no one. There was little violence in the prison. People worked hard all day, eight o'clock in the morning until five o'clock at night, and for the first few months, there wasn't a night when Bruce didn't go to bed with his muscles aching. But his muscles hardened and he reached a stage where he knew what a carburetor was and where spark plugs went and what they did and what was a cylinder and a piston, and he could even make a fair stab at a transmission. He could dismantle the treads of a Caterpillar tractor and he could fix and sharpen a chain saw.

All this knowledge and skill was as remarkable to him as achieving the power to transmute base metal into gold would have been to an ancient alchemist. One day, the warden called him up to the Administration Building and told him that James Bennett, the head of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, had sent out notices that all communist prisoners in Federal prisons should have the privilege of writing and the assurance that whatever they wrote could be taken out of the prison.

The John Bunyan syndrome, Bruce thought to himself, and then asked, “Why?”

“I suppose he finds what's going on out there not to his liking. He's an honest man. He also specified you. He wants you to be free to write; and if it's necessary to find you a typewriter, I guess we can dig one up.”

“I can understand that. This prison is one damn remarkable place, and I wonder whether there's anything like it in the world. He wants it written about. I think that's a mistake. If I write about it, those morons in Washington will close you down. Anyway, I'm not a communist, and I don't want to write. I like what I'm doing.”

“You do?” Demming asked him. “Is that the truth?”

“It's the truth. I like it.”

And then Bruce found himself puzzled by what he had told Demming. Did he like it? Could he, he asked himself, spend the rest of his life as a garage mechanic? He admitted to himself that he couldn't, and he tried to fight through to an understanding of that. More and more, he was looking into himself, admitting to himself that he didn't have the vaguest notion of who he was or what he was or what his motivations were. Of course he could supply superficial answers to all of these questions; he was Bruce Nathaniel Bacon, he was six feet tall, had brown eyes and straight brown hair, and weighed one hundred and seventy pounds or so. He was a writer, a newspaperman, and a Christian; and that last gave him pause. He had never thought of himself or announced himself as a Christian before. Why now suddenly? Was it the John Bunyan thing that had called Christian into his thinking? He didn't know. The world was filled with things he did not know, and a few months in prison had put him through a process of unlearning. He wrote to Molly: “I have the feeling that my head was like a squirrel cage, endless movement, endless desperation, endless plans to fight whatever brought me here. Now it's stopped. I look at things, and I see everything in a new way. Not that I'm any smarter, but I seem to see things for the first time. I'll give you an example. I'm lucky to be in this prison. I listen to prisoners who have been to various state prisons. They agree that the most terrible are the Virginia state prisons, only a few miles from here. There, they hang black prisoners by their thumbs — yes, by their thumbs for a whole day. They put prisoners into solitary in a hole five feet deep, four feet high, and four feet wide. They beat men across the feet. I sit sometimes in the evening with the cons with our pipes — I learned to make and smoke a corncob pipe, the poor man's comfort — and I listen to their stories. They appear to have a desperate need to tell their stories, and they want me to write about them; and I have come to believe that whatever men do as criminals, they are far less criminal than the men who control our state prisons. In this year of nineteen fifty, we have by and large, except here in Mill Bog, learned nothing that makes the conduct of our prisons any better than they were in ancient Babylon.

“I can give you another example. You know how we always talk outside about anti-Semitism and how we despise it, and how so many of our friends are Jewish. Well, here in Mill Bog there's a prisoner whose name is Cline. He's a large, fat, whining petty thief, and no more Jewish than I am. But somehow it's gotten around the prison that Cline is a Jewish name and that Abe Cline is Jewish. Actually he comes out of a small fundamentalist total-immersion Baptist church in Macon, Georgia. He is intensely disliked, and whenever he tries to join any group, the men turn on him and say, ‘Get the hell out of here, you lousy Jew bastard.' Most of the Kentucky men here have never seen a Jew, but they decided out of their distaste for Cline that he's Jewish, as have all the other men. Cline comes whining and pleading to me and begs me, ‘Professor, I ain't Jewish. You can tell them I ain't no lousy Jew. You can make them believe that, can't you?'

“I don't have enough charity for that, and I shun Cline as much as the others do, but the experience has taught me more about anti-Semitism than anything I ever encountered. Again, it's looking at something for the first time.”

Time passed, and it became January and then it became February, and then March with its wild winds and cumulus clouds flung across the blue sky, and the snow melting and the whole wilderness around them vibrating to the awakening of sleeping life. Most prisoners marked their days on the wall behind their beds, a practice Bruce followed, and one day he counted the marks and they added up to one hundred and fifty.

It was the day Molly came for the third time, and this time his father came with her. It was not a good visit for Bruce. He had adapted to Mill Bog, and when they came here to him they found a stranger. His lean figure made him look taller. He carried his body differently. His hands appeared to be larger, his fingernails broken, the grease dirt ingrained. He realized how bad it was for both of them, but there was nothing he could do about that. Loneliness had come to Molly like a straitjacket drawn ever tighter and tighter. She had moved away from the Communist Party, in part because she felt that any presence there might be harmful to Bruce, in part because she felt that their insistence on defending every move of the Soviet Union was a path of self-destruction. Her left-wing friends had dropped away, indifferent to Bruce's fate. She was convinced by now that Bruce's search for the truth about what had taken place in India was at the bottom of all that had happened to him. Seeing Bruce shattered all her inner strength, and it had something of the same effect on him; and as for his father, the man had suddenly become so old, so helpless, and inarticulate as well. Bruce's eyes filled with tears as he embraced them, each in turn.

“I think I'll wait a while before I come back. Do you understand that, my love?” Molly asked him.

He understood all too well.

He built time, and time passed. The snow melted and the forest returned to life and the trees put out their leaves as proof that winter was not death but only an interval before reawakening. The deer, hungry after the winter cover of snow, came nosing around the prison camp, intrigued by the smells of food and men and somehow knowing that this was a place without guns, and once a black bear came and ripped their garbage containers apart and would not depart until he had eaten his fill, for all the shouting and gesturing by the kitchen crew.

And in good time, it was July and summer and the men in the garage stripped to the waist as they worked in the heat, and Sunday was a time to stretch out on the grass in the shade and watch the clouds in the sky or to sit on the steps of one of the buildings and talk and smoke a corncob pipe. Sometimes, Bruce sat with the Kentucky men, listening to their endless discussions of the best method to build a still and the best proportions of grain and sugar to make whiskey and the best way to get it over the border into Ohio; other times, he would write to Molly or his folks or sit quietly somewhere and let the day be gentle; and once a month, he would be on garbage detail.

The garbage detail was rotated. There were men who hated it, because after gathering the garbage that had accumulated in the prison, the garbage truck would drive to the saw mill, a mile and a half from the prison, and pick up garbage at the mill. The smell of mill garbage was hideous beyond belief, and there were men who couldn't stand it. Bruce didn't mind the smell, and the excitement of getting out of the prison, first to the mill and then three miles more to the dump, more than made up for enduring the smell.

On this Sunday afternoon in July, Bruce was out during the afternoon with the garbage truck. When they came back to the prison, he was interrupted on his way to a shower by Mac Olsen, who said, “I got four more reds up in the hospital for quarantine. Drop by. Maybe you know someone.”

“Not likely,” Bruce said.

But after he had washed, curiosity took him to the hospital. The four newcomers were sitting on the steps outside, watching him as he approached, and then, suddenly, one of them leaped to his feet and cried out, “I'll be damned! Bruce Bacon!”

It was Hal Legerman, a little stouter, a little older, but very much the same man he had said goodby to in India five years ago.

GOING HOME

   

B
RUCE WROTE
to Molly: “Forgive me for letting last week go by without a letter to you. I have some explanations, but no excuses for causing you worry and anxiety, and I eased my conscience by deciding you would call my mother and ask whether she heard from me. I do hope you did so. You know, writing to my mother is a most painful task. I do love her and I know that she lives for me, and I have been away so much, my four years at college and after that the years of the war; and now here I am gone for another year. Well, I set out to write a long and proper letter, struggled with it for two evenings, and then felt so despairing at even the very thought of letter writing that I put you off to the next letter day.