He caught the itch. He mixed some sulphur and hog fat and greased his body every morning. He clawed himself raw and it seemed that the itching would never be soothed. One night he broke loose. He had been sitting alone for many hours. He had mixed gin and whiskey and was very drunk. It was almost morning. He leaned out of the window and looked at the dark silent street. He thought of all the people around him.
Sleeping. The don’t-knows. Suddenly he bawled out in a loud voice: ‘This is the truth! You bastards don’t know anything. You don’t know. You don’t know!’
The street awoke angrily. Lamps were lighted and sleepy curses were called to him. The men who lived in the house rattled furiously on his door. The girls from a cat-house across the street stuck their heads out of the windows.
‘You dumb dumb dumb dumb bastards. You dumb dumb dumb dumb--’
‘Shuddup! Shuddup! The fellows in the hall were pushing against the door: .You drunk bull! You’ll be a sight dumber when we get thu with you.’
‘How many out there?’ Jake roared. He banged an empty bottle on the windowsill. ‘Come on, everybody. Come one, come all. I’ll settle you three at a time.’
‘That’s right, Honey,’ a whore called.
The door was giving way. Jake jumped from the window and ran through a side alley. ‘Hee-haw! Hee-haw!’ he yelled drunkenly. He was barefooted and shirtless. An hour later he stumbled into Singer’s room. He sprawled on the floor and laughed himself to sleep.
On an April morning he found the body of a man who had been murdered. A young Negro. Jake found him in a ditch about thirty yards from the showgrounds. The Negro’s throat had been slashed so that the head was rolled back at a crazy angle. The sun shone hot on his open, glassy eyes and flies hovered over the dried blood that covered his chest. The dead man held a red-and-yellow cane with a tassel like the ones sold at the hamburger booth at the show. Jake stared gloomily down at the body for some time. Then he called the police. No clues were found. Two days later the family of the dead man claimed his body at the morgue.
At the Sunny Dixie there were frequent fights and quarrels.
Sometimes two friends would come to the show arm in arm, laughing and drinking--and before they left they would be struggling together in a panting rage. Jake was always alert.
Beneath the gaudy gaiety of the show, the bright lights, and the lazy laughter, he felt something sullen and dangerous.
Through these dazed, disjointed weeks Simms nagged his footsteps constantly. The old man liked to come with a soapbox and a Bible and take a stand in the middle of the crowd to preach. He talked of the second coming of Christ. He said that the Day of Judgment would be October 2, 1951. He would point out certain drunks and scream at them in his raw, worn voice. Excitement made his mouth fill with water so that his words had a wet, gurgling sound. Once he had slipped in and set up his stand no arguments could make him budge. He made Jake a present of a Gideon Bible, and told him to pray on his knees for one hour each night and to hurl away every glass of beer or cigarette that was offered him.
They quarreled over walls and fences. Jake had begun to carry chalk in his pockets, also. He wrote brief sentences.
He tried to word them so that a passerby would stop and ponder over the meaning. So that a man would wonder. So that a man would think. Also, he wrote short pamphlets and distributed them in the streets.
If it had not been for Singer, Jake knew that he would have left the town. Only on Sunday, when he was with his friend, did he feel at peace. Sometimes they would go for a walk together or play chess--but more often they spent the day quietly in Singer’s room. If he wished to talk Singer was always attentive. If he sat morosely through the day the mute understood his feelings and was not surprised. It seemed to him that only Singer could help him now.
Then one Sunday when he climbed the stairs he saw that Singer’s door was open. The room was empty. He sat alone for more than two hours. At last he heard Singer’s footsteps on the stairs.
‘I was wondering about you. Where you been?’ Singer smiled. He brushed off his hat with a handkerchief and put it away. Then deliberately he took his silver pencil from his pocket and leaned over the mantelpiece to write a note.
‘What you mean?’ Jake asked when he read what the mute had written. ‘Whose legs are cut off?’
Singer took back the note and wrote a few additional sentences.
‘Huh!’ Jake said. That don’t surprise me.’
He brooded over the piece of paper and then crumpled it in his hand. The listlessness of the past month was gone and he was tense and uneasy. ‘Huh!’ he said again.
Singer put on a pot of coffee and got out his chessboard. Jake tore the note to pieces and rolled the fragments between his sweating palms. ‘But something can be done about this,’ he said after a while. ‘You know it? ‘ Singer nodded uncertainly. ‘I want to see the boy and hear the whole story. When can you take me around there? ‘ Singer deliberated. Then he wrote on a pad of paper, ‘Tonight.’ Jake held his hand to his mouth and began to walk restlessly around the room. ‘We can do something.’
JAKE and Singer waited on the front porch. When they pushed the doorbell there was no sound of a ring in the darkened house. Jake knocked impatiently and pressed his nose against the screen door. Beside him Singer stood wooden and smiling, with two spots of color on his cheeks, for they had drunk a bottle of gin together. The evening was quiet and dark. Jake watched a yellow light shaft softly through the hall. And Portia opened the door for them.
‘I certainly trust you not been waiting long. So many folks been coming that us thought it wise to untach the bell. You gentlemens just let me take you hats--Father been mighty sick.’
Jake tiptoed heavily behind Singer down the bare, narrow hall.
At the threshold of the kitchen he stopped short The room was crowded and hot. A fire burned in the small wood stove and the windows were closed tight. Smoke mingled with a certain Negro smell. The glow from the stove was the only light in the room. The dark voices he had heard back in the hall were silent.
‘These here are two white gentlemens come to inquire about Father,’ Portia said. ‘I think maybe he be able to see you but I better go on in first and prepare him.’
Jake fingered his thick lower lip. On the end of his nose there was a latticed impression from the front screen door. ‘That’s not it,’ he said. ‘I come to talk with your brother.’
The Negroes in the room were standing. Singer motioned to them to be seated again. Two grizzled old men sat down on a bench by the stove. A loose-limbed mulatto lounged against the window. On a camp cot in a corner was a boy without legs whose trousers were folded and pinned beneath his stumpy thighs. ‘Good evening,’ Jake said awkwardly. ‘Your name Copeland? ‘ The boy put his hands over the stumps of his legs and shrank back close to the wall. ‘My name Willie.’
‘Honey, don’t you worry none,’ said Portia. ‘This here is Mr. Singer that you heard Father speak about. And this other white gentleman is Mr. Blount and he a very close friend of Mr. Singer. They just kindly come to inquire about us in our trouble.’ She turned to Jake and motioned to the three other people in the room. This other boy leaning on the window is my brother too. Named Buddy. And these here over by the stove is two dear friends of my Father. Named Mr. Marshall Nicolls and Mr. John Roberts. I think it a good idea to understand who all is in a room with you. ‘Thanks,’ Jake said. He turned to Willie again. ‘I just want you to tell me about it so I can get it straight in my mind.’
‘This the way it is,’ Willie said. ‘I feel like my feets is still hurting. I got this here terrible misery down in my toes. Yet the hurt in my feets is down where my feets should be if they were on my l-l-legs. And not where my feets is now. It a hard thing to understand. My feets hurt me so bad all the time and I don’t know where they is. They never given them back to me. They s-somewhere more than a hundred m-miles from here.’