12

PUBLIC AUCTION

Goods & Furnishings from the Rooms

Top of 1887 Building

December 12, 10:00 A.M.

Standing motionless for some time before this sign attached to a lamp post, Eustace exclaimed, “So then the birds are flown!”

Nonetheless he had hurried to the alley and up the back staircase in some faint hope of finding the landlord if not the tenant, but he arrived only in time for the perfunctory conclusion of the auction itself: the few people in attendance were already leaving with the sticks, boards, and vessels which passed for furniture, a water pitcher, a broken bookcase, or a small mirror under somebody’s arm—articles which a later epoch would hardly deem worthy of the dump-heap.

But in a far corner, Eustace caught sight of paper—old letters, ledgers—and it was paper, as he had once joked to Amos, that he was really queer for. The auctioneer, about to follow the congregation down the staircase, observed the poet’s interest, stepped over to him cautiously, and after convincing himself that the would-be purchaser was as impecunious as he appeared, sold him all the “trash” for twenty-five cents, which Eustace counted out into the fellow’s mittened hand in uneven change, mostly pennies.

Only when Ace had the bundle of papers in his own room did he realize the magnitude of his luck (and his loss). He found himself in possession not only of Cousin Ida’s letters, but Amos’s scrawled notes to himself in his Greek lessons. But the find of finds was a diary of Daniel Haws scribbled in an old record-book of rents due and problems in trigonometry. Among the pile he also found a recent letter, yet unopened, from Cousin Ida to Amos. But with his joy over treasure came the realization that the two men to whom the papers belonged were gone, probably forever. To Eustace it seemed unlikely he would ever set eyes on either of them again.

About a week after the auction, Carla brought Eustace a red-white-and-blue envelope with an army A.P.O. address, and said, “Who are you exchanging information with in the armed forces?”

“Jesus, he’s done it,” Ace cried, after glancing through a sheaf of ruled letter paper extricated from the envelope. “It’s our landlord-hero, Daniel Haws.”

Some people confess in the flesh, others on paper. Daniel, a mumbler or a mute in company, could pour himself out on a blank sheet of paper in a P.X. waiting-room to an invisible correspondent.

His choice of Ace as a correspondent came about soon after he was inducted into the army. Daniel went first through Camp Grant, thence to the baked plains of Scott Field, and finally to Biloxi, Mississippi, where, one grim Sunday morning, seated at a table in the P.X., he heard the voice of a chaplain addressing him.

“Attending chapel today, soldier?”

When Daniel claimed no church, the chaplain went on, “Then, son, do the next best thing and write home.”

“Nobody left to home, sir,” he replied.

“You’ve talked with Captain Stadger, I suppose.” The chaplain studied Daniel’s face carefully.

Daniel paused over the name, and his eyes blinked.

“That’s all right,” the chaplain cleared his throat. “You look like a capable young fellow and probably ought to go into special training school . . . I’ll let the captain know about you. But write to somebody, today.” He pointed to letter paper and envelopes laid out on the stand beside them.

When the chaplain had departed, Daniel looked about the room, saw that four or five other soldiers were busy with letter-writing. A sign often seen in flophouses and other lodgings of desperation was hanging on the wall:

HAVE YOU WRITTEN HOME TO HER TODAY?

Starting suddenly, as if he were just hearing the name Captain Stadger minutes after the chaplain had pronounced it to him, Daniel gave a short low cry and laid his head down against the writing arm of the chair.

Unable to call to mind what disturbed him, he groped now to find his bearings. His body knew something which he could not define, and it had cried out just now with his voice.

What Daniel Haws could not tell himself, because he did not remember, was that on the very first night of his arrival in camp, he had sleepwalked into the tent of Captain Stadger. The officer, still awake at 2:30 A.M. and swatting from time to time at a moth which flew about his only illumination, a flashlight, was occupied in rubbing salve into a ringworm on his arm. He looked up with unbelief and yet with an expression of recognition and fulfilled hope at the sight of the soldier standing stark naked with sightless eyes before him.

Rising, pointing his flashlight away from the soldier’s face and over his body, the captain studied and waited. Then sensing what he had on his hands, he quickly looked at the serial number on the sleepwalker’s dog-tag and in a hollow voice of command, in strict military etiquette, dismissed his caller with the implication that it had been the captain who had summoned him from his tent and would summon him again. Obedient, Daniel saluted and, with still unseeing eyes, pivoted and with steady bearing marched back to his cot.

Shaken by something half-remembered and by the name of his captain, and unwelcome as the very sound Eustace Chisholm was to him, nonetheless Daniel’s fingers, pressed white against the lead pencil, began to move over the letter paper as he wrote a message to Chicago:

“Why, Ace, you will ask,” Daniel Haws wrote, “am I sending this letter to you. Well, that is a question I might better put to myself. I have lost all shame. Spreading the cheeks of my ass for every little graduate 2nd lieutenant from West Point to look up, milking my cock in short-arm inspection, cleaning garbage cans, having my arms and thighs shot full of cow-pox and typhoid, I am a public mop-handle, they have all of me, and are planning to sever anything they cannot freely manipulate. Since I have lost all shame here in Mississippi and since you never had any, and I know you blab everything the minute you hear it, for though you are people say brilliant, you are the lowest species of human being ever crawled over earth, and you will admit this, for if there is one thing in you that distinguishes you from slime it is you are honest, this makes you, I imagine, a man. I admire the trait and you are the one I can write to as a consequence. You are a chancre and you admit it. I do not know what I am, the only thing I know is I signed back to hell, can you figure it out, nobody here can—I was in this hell once and came back of my own free will to reenlist at the advanced age of 25, but as I said I have no shame and will admit to you on paper, which you can show then to all your cackling ball-less friends that what I have I have bad, the fever of Amos, I mean. I ran away thinking I would get it out of my blood but my blood now is burning like naphtha. I have broken the rules here and gone out of bounds nightly to the nigger whorehouse and every black whore I have been with only brought out the fire of Amos and burned me to the root of my insides with it. I am in love with him and can only admit it to a hyena like you. If there was God for me, I would be on my knees all day, all night, I would have entered a religious order, but there is no-nothing for me but Amos, and now the army—I need it, and the army I can see sees I need it. I am under, I understand, a Captain Stadger, who is death in circles, and I hear from beforehand he will exercise all the authority he has over me, well, let him, let him put me on the wheel if he has to and twist until I recognize the authority of the army so good there will be nothing but it over me, over and above Amos and even all the pain—Give me news of him. I earn only twenty bucks a month but am willing to give it all to you for word from that curly-haired master of me. I will even beg, borrow and steal to give you more, if you will only write me about him. Ace, I’m on my knees in front of you, DANIEL HAWS, Headquarters Squad, Biloxi, Miss.”

STUNNED PERHAPS AS much by his unexpected luck as at the prospect of receiving more letters, Ace wrote back:

“I am as surprised to get a letter from you as to hear a tombstone speak. I don’t want your army money. I want more letters. I never knew there was so much inside of you. God, Daniel, it’s glorious. If you can still be in love from an army tent, I can do the impossible and be a poet in Chicago. And you’re in love with somebody that is both impossible himself and hoplessly in love with you . . .

“You ask for news of him. Since you ask for it, I’ll have to give it to you but it’s bound to be all bad. Your Amos has sold his ass to a millionaire, but you know he did try to find work, he tried, but everything was stacked against him and so, to repeat, he has sold his ass to the rich. That’s all the news I have from that quarter, but I’ll go out and hunt for more if necessary in order to have your letters. I’ll even blackmail to keep you in information. Amos is well taken care of, probably for the first time in his life, so you don’t need to worry. Whether he will go on loving you or not, who knows. I hope he doesn’t. You two could have been happy together until Armageddon, which is probably not far off, but you are a proud man and can evidently only declare yourself over the distance of our South. Maybe they will lynch you down there for your pride. Goodbye and for God’s sake keep sending the letters. ACE.”