A Fable

‘It wasn’t August,’ the old Negro said. ‘It was October. We walked. We would have to stop now and then to find work to earn money to eat on. That taken a while, because this boy never had no size then, and I never knowed nothing but horses and preaching, and any time I stopped to do either one, somebody might have asked me who I was.’

‘You mean you had to bring the money to him first before you could even draw travel expenses from it?’

‘There wasn’t no money,’ the old Negro said. ‘There never was none, except just what we needed, had to have. Never nobody but that New Orleans lawyer ever believed there was. We never had time to bother with winning a heap of money to have to take care of. We had the horse. To save that horse that never wanted nothing and never knowed nothing but just to run out in front of all the other horses in a race, from being sent back to Kentucky to be just another stud-horse for the rest of its life. We had to save it until it could die still not knowing nothing and not wanting nothing but just to run out in front of everything else. At first he thought different, aimed different. But not long. It was during that time when we was walking to Texas. We was hiding in the woods one day by a creek and I talked to him and that evening I baptised him in the creek into my church. And after that he knowed too that betting was a sin. We had to do a little of it, win a little money to live on, buy feed for it and grub for us. But that was all. God knowed that too. That was all right with Him.’

‘Are you an ordained minister?’ the runner said.

‘I bears witness,’ the old Negro said.

‘But you’re not an ordained priest. Then how could you confirm him into your church?’

‘Hush, Pappy,’ the youth said.

‘Wait,’ the runner said. ‘I know. He made you a Mason too.’

‘Suppose he did,’ the old Negro said. ‘You and this boy are alike. You think maybe I never had no right to make him a christian, but you know he never had no business making me a Mason. But which do you think is the lightest to undertake: to tell a man to act like the head Mason thinks he ought to act, that’s just another man trying to know what’s right to do, or to tell him how the head of Heaven knows he ought to act, that’s God and knows what’s right to ease his suffering and save him?’

‘All right,’ the runner said. ‘It was October——’

‘Only this time they knowed where he was. “France?” I says, with this boy already jerking at my sleeve and saying, “Come on, Grampaw. Come on, Grampaw.” “Which way is that?” I says. “Is that in Tennessee too?”

‘ “Come on, Grampaw,” this boy says. “I knows where it is.” ’

‘Yes,’ the runner said to the youth. ‘I’ll get to you in a moment too.’ He said to the old Negro: ‘So you came to France. I wont even ask how you did that with no money. Because that was God. Wasn’t it?’

‘It was the Society,’ the youth said. Only he didn’t say ‘society’: he said ‘societe’.

‘Yes,’ the runner said to the youth. He said in French, his best French: the glib smart febrile argot immolated into the international salons via the nightclubs from the Paris gutter: ‘I wondered who did the talking for him. It was you, was it?’

‘Someone had to,’ the youth said, in still better French, the French of the Sorbonne, the Institute, the old Negro listening, peaceful and serene, until he said:

‘His mamma was a New Orleans girl. She knowed gobble talk. That’s where he learned it.’

‘But not the accent,’ the runner said. ‘Where did you get that?’

‘I dont know,’ the youth said. ‘I just got it.’

‘Could you “just get” Greek or Latin or Spanish the same way?’

‘I aint tried,’ the youth said. ‘I reckon I could, if they aint no harder than this one.’

‘All right,’ the runner said, to the old Negro now. ‘Did you have the Society before you left America?’ and heard that, insequent and without order or emphasis, like dream too: they were in New York, who a year ago had not known that the earth extended further than the distance between Lexington, Kentucky, and Louisville until they walked on it, trod with their actual feet the hard enduring ground bearing the names Louisiana and Missouri and Texas and Arkansas and Ohio and Tennessee and Alabama and Mississippi—words which until then had been as foundationless and homeless as the ones meaning Avalon or Astalot or Ultima Thule. Then immediately there was a woman in it, a ‘lady’, not young, richly in furs—

‘I know,’ the runner said. ‘She was in the car with you that day last spring when you came up to Amiens. The one whose son is in the French air squadron that she is supporting.’

‘Was,’ the youth said. ‘Her boy is dead. He was a volunteer, one of the first airmen killed in the French service. That’s when she began to give money to support the squadron.’

‘Because she was wrong,’ the old Negro said.

‘Wrong?’ the runner said. ‘Oh. Her dead son’s monument is a machine to kill as many Germans as possible because one German killed him? Is that it? And when you told her so, it was just like that morning in the woods when you talked to the horse-thief and then baptised him in the creek and saved him? All right, tell me.’

‘Yes,’ the old Negro said, and told it: the three of them traversing a succession almost like avatars: from what must have been a Park Avenue apartment, to what must have been a Wall Street office, to another office, room: a youngish man with a black patch over one eye and a cork leg and a row of miniature medals on his coat, and an older man with a minute red thing like a toy rosebud in his buttonhole, talking gobble talk to the lady and then to the youth too—

‘A French consulate?’ the runner said. ‘Looking for a British soldier?’

‘It was Verdun,’ the youth said.

‘Verdun?’ the runner said. ‘That was just last year—1916. It took you until 1916——’

‘We was walking and working. Then Pappy begun to hear them——’

‘There was too many of them,’ the old Negro said. ‘Men and boys, marching for months down into one muddy ditch to kill one another. There was too many of them. There wasn’t room to lay quiet and rest. All you can kill is