“Shot,” Pondible ordered the bartender, “and buttermilk for my chum
here.”
The bartender kept on polishing the wood in front of him with a wet,
dirty rag. “Got any jack?”
“Pay you tomorrow, friend.”
The bartender’s uninterrupted industry said clearly, then drink
tomorrow.
“Listen,” argued Pondible; “I’m tapering off. You know me. Ive spent
plenty of money here.”
The bartender shrugged. “I don’t own the place; anything goes over the
bar has to be rung up on the cash register.”
“Youre lucky to have a job that pays wages.”
“Times I’m not so sure. Why don’t you indent?”
Pondible looked shocked. “At my age? What would a company pay for a
wornout old carcass? A hundred dollars at the top. Then a release in a
couple of years with a med holdback so I’d have to report every week
somewhere. No, friend, Ive come through this long a free man—in a
manner of speaking—and I’ll stick it out. Let’s have that shot; you can
see for yourself I’m tapering off. Youll get your jack tomorrow.”
I could see the bartender was weakening; each refusal was less surly
and at last, to my astonishment, he set out a glass and bottle
for Pondible and an earthenware mug of buttermilk for me. To my
astonishment, I say, for credit was rarely extended on any scale, large
or small. The inflation, though sixty years in the past, had left
indelible impressions; people paid cash or did without. Debt was not
only disgraceful, it was dangerous; the notion things could be paid
for while, or even after, they were being used was as unthinkable as
was the idea of circulating paper money instead of silver or gold.
I drank my buttermilk slowly, gratefully aware Pondible had ordered
the most filling and sustaining liquid in the saloon. For all his
unprepossessing appearance and peculiar moral notions, my new
acquaintance seemed to have a rude wisdom as well as a rude kindliness.
He swallowed his whiskey and called for a quart pot of light beer which
he sipped slowly. “That’s the trick of it, Hodge. Avoid the second
shot. If you can.” He sipped again. “Now what?”
“What?” I repeated.
“Now what are you going to do? What’s your aim in life anyway?”
“None—now. I ... wanted to learn. To study.”
He frowned. “Out of books?”
“How else?”
“Books is mostly written and printed in foreign countries.”
“There might be more written here if more people had time to learn.”
Pondible wiped specks of froth from his beard with the back of his
hand. “Might and mightnt. Oh, some of my best friends are book-readers,
don’t get me wrong, boy.”
“I’d thought,” I burst out, “I’d thought to try Columbia College. To
offer—to beg to be allowed to do any kind of work for tuition.”
“Hmm. I doubt it would have worked.”
“Anyway I can’t go now, looking like this.”
“Might be as well. We need fighters, not readers.”
“‘We?’ ”
He did not explain. “Well, you could always take the advice our friend
here gave me and indent. A young healthy lad like you could get
yourself a thousand or twelve hundred dollars—”
“Sure. And be a slave for the rest of my life.”
“Oh, indenting aint slavery. It’s better. And worse. For one thing the
company buys you won’t hold you after you arent worth your keep. Not
that long, on account of bookkeeping; they lose when they break even.
So they cancel your indenture without a cent payment. Course theyll
take a med holdback so as to get a dollar or two for your corpse, but
that’s a long time away for you.”
An inconceivably long time. The medical holdback was the least of my
distaste, though it had played a large part in the discussions at
home. My mother had heard that cadavers for dissection were shipped
to foreign medical schools like so much cargo. She was shocked not so
much at the thought of the scientific use of her dead body as at its
disposal outside the United States.
“Yes,” I said. “A long time away. So I wouldnt be a slave for life;
just thirty or forty years. Till I wasnt any good to anyone, including
myself.”
He seemed to be enjoying himself as he drank his beer. “Youre a gloomy
gus, Hodge. Taint’s bad’s that. Indenting’s pretty strictly regulated.
That’s the idea anyway. I aint saying the big companies don’t get
away with a lot. You can’t be made to work over sixty hours a week.
Ten hours a day. With twelve hundred dollars you could get all the
education you want in your spare time and then turn your learning to
account by making enough to buy yourself free.”
I tried to think about it dispassionately, though goodness knows I’d
been over the ground often enough. It was true the amount, a not
improbable one, would see me through college. But Pondible’s notion of
turning my “learning to account” I knew to be a fantasy. Perhaps in
the Confederate States or the German Union knowledge was rewarded with
wealth, or at least a comfortable living, but any study I pursued—I
knew my own “impracticality” well enough by now—was bound to yield few
material benefits in the backward United States, which existed as a
nation at all only on the sufferance and unresolved rivalries of the
great powers. I’d be lucky to struggle through school and eke out some
kind of living as a freeman; I could hardly hope to earn enough to buy
back an indenture on what was left of my time after subtracting sixty
hours a week.
“It wouldnt work,” I said despondently.
Pondible nodded, as though this were the conclusion he had expected me
to come to. “Well then,” he said, “there’s the gangs.”
I looked my horror.
He laughed. “Forget your country rearing. What’s right? What the
strongest country or the strongest man says it is. The government says
gangs are wrong, but the government aint strong enough to stop them.
And maybe they don’t do as much killing as people think. Only when
somebody works against them—just like the government. Sure they have
to be paid off, but it’s just like taxes. If you leave the parsons’
sermons out of it there’s no difference joining the gangs than the
army—if we had one—or the Confederate Legion—”
“They tried to recruit me yesterday. Are they always so....”
“Bold?” For the first time Pondible looked angry and I thought the scar
on his forehead turned whiter. “Yes, damn them. The Legion must be half
United States citizens. When they have to put down a disturbance or run
some little cockroach country they send off the Confederate Legion—made
up of men who ought to be the backbone of an army of our own.”
“But the police—don’t they ever try to stop them?”
“What’d I tell you about right being what the strongest country says
it is? Sure we got laws against recruiting into a foreign army. So we
squawk. And what have we got to back it up with? So the Confederate
Legion goes right on recruiting the men who have to beg for a square
meal in their own country. Well, the government is pretty near as bad
off when it comes to the gangs. Best it can do is pick off some of the
little ones and forget about the big ones. Most of the gangsters never
even get shot at. They all live high, high as anybody in the twenty-six
states, and every so often there’s a dividend—more than a workman makes
in a lifetime.”
I began to be sure my benefactor was a gangster. And yet ... if this
were so why had he wheedled credit from the barkeep? Was it simply an
elaborate blind? It seemed hardly worth it.
“A dividend,” I said, “or a rope.”
“Most gangsters die of old age. Or competition. Aint one been hung I
can think of the last five-six years. But I see youve no stomach for
it. Tell me, Hodge—you Whig or Populist?”
The sudden change of subject bewildered me. “Why ... Populist, I guess.”
“Why?”
“Oh ... I don’t know....” I thought of some of the discussions that
used to go on among the men around the smithy. “The Whigs’ ‘Property,
Protection, Permanent Population’ —what does it mean to me?”
“Tell you, boy, means this: Property for the Confederates who own
factories here and don’t want to pay taxes. Protection for foreign
capital to come in and buy or hire. Permanent Population—cheap native
labor. Build up a prosperous employing class.”
“Yes, I know. I can’t see how it helps. Ive heard Whigs at home say the
money’s bound to seep down from above, but it seems awfully roundabout.
And not very efficient.”
He reached over and clapped me lightly on the shoulder. “That’s my
boy,” he said. “They can’t fool you.”
I wasnt entirely pleased by his commendation. “And protection means
paying more for things than theyre worth.”
“Taint only that, Hodge, it’s a damn lie as well. Whigs never even
tried protection when they was in. Didnt dast. Knew the other countries
wouldnt let them.”
“As for ‘permanent population’ ... well, those who can’t make a living
are going to go on emigrating to prosperous countries. Permanent
population means dwindling population if it means anything.”
“Ah,” he said. “You got a head on your shoulders, Hodge. Youre all
right; books won’t hurt you. But what about emigrating? Yourself, I
mean?”
I shook my head.
He nodded, chewing on a soggy corner of his mustache. “Don’t want to
leave the old ship, huh?”
I don’t suppose I would have put it exactly that way, or even fully
formulated the thought. I was willing to exchange the familiar for the
unknown—up to a certain point. The thought of giving up the country
in which I’d been born was repugnant. Call it loyalty, or a sense of
having ties with the past, or just stubbornness. “Something like that,”
I said.
“Well now, let’s see what weve got.” He stuck up a dirty and slightly
tremulous hand, turning down a finger as he stated each point. “One,
patriot; two, Populist; three, don’t like indenting; four, prosperity’s
got to come from the poor upward, not the rich down.” He hesitated,
holding his thumb. “You heard of the Grand Army?”
“Who hasnt? Not much difference between them and the regular gangs.”
“Now what makes you say that?”
“Why ... everybody knows it”
“Do, huh? Maybe they know it all wrong. Look here now—and remember
about the Confederate Legion riding over the laws of the United
States—what would you think ought to be done about foreigners from the
strong countries who come here and walk all over us? Or the Whigs who
do their dirty work for them?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Not murder, certainly.”
“Murder,” he repeated. “That’s a word, Hodge. Means what you want it
to mean. Wasnt murder back during the War when Union soldiers was
trying to keep the country from being split up. Taint murder today when
somebody’s hung for rape or counterfeiting. Anyhow the Grand Army don’t
go in for murder.”
I said nothing.
“Oh, accidents happen; wouldnt deny it. Maybe they get a little rougher
than they intend with Whig traitors or Confederate agents, but you
can’t make bacon out of a live hog. Point is the Grand Army’s the only
thing in the country that even tries to restore it to what it once was.
What was fought for in the War.”
I don’t know whether it was the thought of Grandfather Backmaker or the
unassuaged guilt for the miserable figure I had cut only three days
back that made me ask, “And do they want to give the Negroes equality?”
He drew back sharply, shock showing clearly on his face. “Touch of the
tarbrush in you, boy? By—” He bent forward, looking at me searchingly.
“No, I can see you aint. Just some notions youll outgrow. You just
don’t understand. We might have won that war if it hadnt been for the
Abolitionists.”
Would we? I’d heard it said often enough; it would have been
presumptuous to doubt it.
“The darkies are better off among their own,” he said; “they never
should have been here in the first place; black and white can’t mix.
Leave ideas like that alone, Hodge; there’s plenty and enough to be
done. Chase the foreigners out, teach their flunkies a lesson, build
the country up again.”
“Are you trying to get me to join the Grand Army?”
Pondible finished his beer. “Won’t answer that one, boy. Let’s say I
just want to get you somewheres to sleep, three meals a day, and some
of that education youre so fired up about. Come along.”
_4._ _TYSS_
He took me to a bookseller’s and stationery store on Astor Place with
a printshop in the basement and the man to whom he introduced me was
the owner, Roger Tyss. I spent almost six years there, and when I left
neither the store nor its contents nor Tyss himself seemed to have
changed or aged.
I know books were sold and others bought to take their places on the
shelves or to be piled towerwise on the floor. I helped cart in many
rolls of sulphide paper and bottles of printers’ ink, and delivered
many bundles of damp pamphlets, broadsides, letterheads and envelopes.
Inked ribbons for typewriting machines, penpoints, ledgers and
daybooks, rulers, paperclips, legal forms and cubes of indiarubber
came and went. Yet the identical, invincible disorder, the synonymous
dogeared volumes, the indistinguishable stock, the unaltered cases of
type seemed fixed for six years, all covered by the same film of dust
which responded to vigorous sweeping only by rising into the air and
immediately settling back on precisely the same spots.
Roger Tyss grew six years older and I can only charge it to the
heedless eye of youth that I saw no signs of that aging. Like Pondible
and, as I learned, so many members of the Grand Army, he wore a beard.
His was closely trimmed, wiry and grizzled. Above the beard and across
his forehead were many fine lines which always held some of the grime
of the store or printing press. You did not dwell long on either beard
or wrinkles however; what held you were his eyes: large, dark, fierce
and compassionate. You might have dismissed him at first glance as
simply an undersized, stoopshouldered, slovenly printer, had it not
been for those eyes which seemed in perpetual conflict with his other
features.
“Robbed and bludgeoned, ay?” he said with a curious disrespect for
sequence after Pondible had explained me to him. “Dog eats dog, and the
survivors survive. Backmaker, ay? Is that an American name?”
So far as I knew, I said, it was.
“Well, well; let’s not pry too deeply. So you want to learn. Why?”
“Why?” The question was too big for an answer, yet an answer of some
kind was expected. “I guess because there’s nothing else so important.”
“Wrong,” he said triumphantly, “wrong and illusory. Since nothing is
ultimately important there can be no degrees involved. Books are the
waste-product of the human mind.”
“Yet you deal in them,” I ventured.
“I’m alive and I shall die too; this doesnt mean I approve of either
life or death. Well, if you are going to learn you are going to learn;
there’s nothing I can do about it As well here as another place.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Gratitude, Hodgins”—he never then nor later condescended to the
familiar “Hodge” nor did I ever address or even think of him except as
Mr Tyss—“Gratitude, Hodgins, is an emotion disagreeable both to the
giver and to the receiver. We do what we must; gratitude, pity, love,
hate, all that cant, is superfluous.”
I considered this statement reflectively.
“Look you,” he went on, “I’ll feed you and lodge you, teach you to set
type and give you the run of the books. I’ll pay you no money; you can
steal from me if you must You can learn as much here in four months as
in a college in four years—if you persist in thinking it’s learning you
want—or you can learn nothing. I’ll expect you to do the work I think
needs doing; any time you don’t like it youre free to go.”
And so our agreement, if so simple and unilateral a statement can be
called an agreement, was made within ten minutes after he met me for
the first time. For six years the store was home and school, and Roger
Tyss was employer, teacher and father to me. He was never my friend.
Rather he was my adversary. I respected him and the longer I knew him
the deeper became my respect, but it was an ambivalent feeling and
attached only to those qualities which he himself would have scorned.
I detested his ideas, his philosophy and many of his actions, and this
detestation grew until I was no longer able to live near him. But I am
getting ahead of my story.
Tyss knew books, not merely as a bookman knows them—binding, size,
edition, value—but as a scholar. He seemed to have read enormously and
on every conceivable subject, many of them quite useless in practical
application. (I remember a long discourse on heraldry, filled with
terms like “paley-bendy” or, “fusils conjoined in fess, gules” and
“sable demi-lions.” He regarded such erudition, indeed any erudition,
contemptuously. When I asked why he had bothered to pick it up, his
retort was, “Why have you bothered to pick up calluses, Hodgins?”)
As a printer he followed the same pattern; he was not concerned solely
with setting up a neat page; he sometimes spent hours laying out some
trivia, which could have interested only its author, until he struck a
proof which satisfied him. He wrote much on his own account: poetry,
essays, manifestoes, composing directly from the font, running off a
single proof which he read—always expressionlessly—and immediately
destroyed before pieing the type.
I slept on a mattress kept under one of the counters during the day;
Tyss had a couch hardly more luxurious, downstairs by the flatbed
press. Each morning before it was time to open he sent me across
town on the horse-cars to the Washington Market to buy six pounds of
beef—twelve on Saturdays, for the market, unlike the bookstore, was
closed Sundays. It was always the same cut, heart of ox or cow, dressed
by the butcher in thin strips. After I had been with him long enough to
tire of the fare, but not long enough to realize the obstinacy of his
nature, I begged him to let me substitute pork or mutton, or at least
some other part of the beef, like brains or tripe which were even
cheaper. He always answered, “The heart, Hodgins. Purchase the heart;
it is the vital food.”
While I was on my errand he would buy three loaves of yesterday’s
bread, still tolerably fresh; when I returned he took a long
two-pronged fork, our only utensil, for the establishment was innocent
of either cutlery or dishes, and spearing a strip of heart held it
over the gas flame of a light standard until it was sooted and toasted
rather than broiled. We tore the loaves with our fingers and with a
hunk of bread in one hand and a strip of heart in the other we each ate
a pound of meat and half a loaf of bread for breakfast, dinner, and
supper.
“Man is uniquely a savage eater of carrion,” he informed me, chewing
vigorously. “What lion or tiger would relish another’s ancient,
putrefying kill? What vulture or hyena displays human ferocity? Too, we
are cannibals at heart. We eat our gods; we have always eaten our gods.”
“Isnt that figurative, or poetic, Mr Tyss? I mean, doesnt it refer to
the grain of wheat which is ‘killed’ by the harvester and buried by the
sower?”
“You think the gods were modelled on John Barleycorn and not John
Barleycorn on them—to conceal their fate? I fear you have a higher
opinion of mankind than is warranted, Hodgins.”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean by gods.”
“Embodiments or personifications of human aspirations. The good, the
true, the beautiful—with winged feet or bull’s body.”
“How about ... oh, Chronos? Or Satan?”
He licked his fingers of the meat juices, obviously pleased. “Satan. An
excellent example. Epitome of man’s futile longing to upset and defy
the divine plan—I use the word ‘divine’ derisively, Hodgins—; who does
not admire and reverence Lucifer in his heart? Well, having made a god
out of the devil we eat him daily in a two-fold sense: by swallowing
the myth of his enmity (a truer friend there never was), and by
digesting his great precepts of pride and curiosity and strength. And
you see for yourself how he finds interesting thoughts for idle minds
to speculate on. Let’s get to work.”
He expected me to work, but he was far from a hard or inconsiderate
master. In 1938-44, when the country was being ground deeper into
colonialism, there were few employers so lenient. I read much,
generally when I pleased, and despite his jeers at learning in the
abstract he encouraged me, even going to the length, if a particular
book was not to be found in his considerable stock, of letting me get
it from one of his competitors, to be written up against his account.
Nor was he scrupulous about the time I took on his errands. I continued
to ramble and sight-see the city much as though I had nothing else to
do. And if, from time to time, I discovered there were girls in New
York who didnt look too unkindly on a tall youth even though he still
carried some of the rustic air of Wappinger Falls, he never questioned
why the walk of half a mile took me a couple of hours.
True, he kept to his original promise never to pay me wages, but he
often handed me coins for pocketmoney, evidently satisfied I wasnt
stealing, and he replaced my makeshift wardrobe with worn but decent
clothing.
He had not exaggerated the possibilities of the books surrounding
me. His brief warning, “—you can learn nothing,” was lost on me. I
suppose a different temperament might have become surfeited with
paper and print; I can only say I wasnt. I nibbled, tasted, gobbled
books. After the store was shut I hooked a student lamp to the nearest
gasjet by means of a long tube, and lying on my pallet with a dozen
volumes handy, I read till I was no longer able to keep my eyes open
or understand the words. Often I woke in the morning to find the light
still burning and my fingers holding the pages open.
I think one of the first books to influence me strongly was the
monumental _Causes of American Decline and Decay_ by the always popular
expatriate historian, Henry Adams. I was particularly impressed by
the famous passage in which he reproves the “stay-at-home” Bostonian
essayists, William and Henry James, for their quixotic sacrifice
and espousal of a long-lost cause. History, said Sir Henry, who
had renounced his United States citizenship and been knighted by
William V, history is never directed or diverted by well-intentioned
individuals; it is the product of forces with geographical, not moral
roots.
Possibly the learned expatriate was right, but my instinctive
sympathies lay with the Jameses, in spite of the fact that I had not
found their books enjoyable. This was due at least partly to the fact
that the small editions were badly printed and marred, at least so
foreign critics claimed, by an excessive use of Yankee colloquialisms,
consciously employed to demonstrate patriotism and disdain of imported
elegance. For some reason, obscure to me then, I did not mention
Adams to Tyss, though I usually turned to him with each of my fresh
discoveries. When he came upon me with an open book he would glance at
the running title over my shoulder and begin talking, either of the
particular work or of its topic. What he had to say gave me an insight
I might otherwise have missed, and turned me to other writers, other
aspects. He respected no authority simply because it was acclaimed or
established; he prodded me to examine every statement, every hypothesis
no matter how commonly accepted.
Early in my employment I was attracted to a large framed parchment
he kept hanging, slightly askew and highly attractive to dust, over
his typecase. It was simply but beautifully printed in 16 point
Baskerville; I knew without being told that he had set it himself:
_The Body of
Benjamin Franklin
Printer
Like the Cover of an Old Book
Stripped of Its Lettering and Gilding
Lies Here
Food for Worms.
But the Work Shall Not Be Lost
For it will, As he Believed,
Come Forth Again
In a new and Better Edition
Revised & Corrected
By
The Author._
When he caught me admiring it Tyss laughed. “Felicitous, isnt it,
Hodgins? But a lie, a perverse and probably hypocritical lie. There is
no Author; the book of life is simply a mess of pied type, a tale told
by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. There is no
plan, no synopsis to be filled in with pious hopes or sanctimonious
actions. There is nothing but a vast emptiness in the universe.”
“The other day you told me we admired the devil for rebelling against a
plan.”
He grinned. “So you expect consistency instead of truth from me,
Hodgins. There is no plan, authored by a Mind; it is this no-plan
against which Lucifer fought. But there is a plan too, a mindless plan,
which accounts for all our acts.”