things at least constituted in themselves, by their very structure, the possibility of ending. He would die or survive, he would grow old and leave, whatever.
Not with this: this was just it forever, the torment of the crushing physical labor without help under the watch of the men with sunglasses and guns and no pity at all.
'Now you know what a nigger feel, white boy,' somebody muttered at him.
'You gots to be crazy to do this shit you got a choice. Us, we am' got no choice.' 'You shut up,' someone else said. 'Moon catch you talkin' to the white boy, he skin you.'
And now and then Earl's prickly sensitivities for such things picked up the heaviness of eyes upon him. He looked up, then, risking the syncopation of the shovel rhythm, and thought once he caught a glimpse of the great Moon staring at him from among the ax-wielders, but then he lost him, as he had to get back on the rhythm.
A thousand years passed, or possibly a million. But at a point in time when Earl thought he'd die from it, he heard some new phenomenon of sound?jingling, shuffling, bells and animals linked together?and looked up to the levee where his supervisors watched, and there discovered a man arriving in a wagon pulled by two homely, wretched old mules.
The man was scrawny, with one of those ageless black faces that had seen so much woe and survived so much it could have watched life on earth for anywhere between forty and seventy years.
'Fish here, boys,' the man sang from his wagon, 'old goddamn Fish come to you.'
No signal was needed. The arrival of Fish meant some sort of lunch break, and the men turned from their labor and sloughed through the sludge to the levee and began the hard, slick climb upward, each helping the men around him, though no one helped Earl, and he didn't get up till nearly everyone else did, which put him last in the line that formed at the end of the wagon.
As they filed by, each man took a swig of water from a tin cup chained to a water can, then dropped it and reached as Fish handed each what appeared to be a piece of biscuit dipped in gravy or grease of some kind, which they took over to the edge of the levee and consumed in repose, if only for a few minutes. That was lunch, but it struck Earl as something of a feast.
But when he got there, Fish looked at him coldly.
'This here the line for colored,' he said.
The guards, who'd dismounted and were eating better fare, laughed. Some of the convicts laughed.
'You go find the white line, boy,' said Fish.
'Come on, old man,' said Earl. 'I am hungry.'
Earl grabbed the cup and brought it to the spigot, but Fish tilted the water can, and it fell to the ground with a thump, its fluid spilling out in the dust.
'Ain't fo' no white man,' said Fish. 'You gots to go to a special white place.'
'Where would that be?'
'I don't know. The white peoples didn't tell me!'
Everybody laughed.
Earl looked at the empty water can in its puddle of sodden dust. It seemed the saddest thing he'd ever seen. His throat felt cracked and dry, his lips wooden. He moved on to the bin with the biscuits but when he reached for one, old Fish handed him a special one. It was smeared with some kind of animal shit.
'This here be fo' you, suh. This here be special. Go on, you eat that, boy, you tell me how you be likin' it.'
'Just give me a biscuit.'
'Oh, you be de boss now. Suh,' he yelled back at the section boss, 'is this here a new boss?'
'No, it ain't, Fish. It's just another nigger. You don't owe him nothing, not the time of day or nothing.'
With a clatter, Fish kicked the tin of biscuits to the ground, where they bounced down the slope of the levee and settled in the thick, brackish ooze at its foot.
'There yo' dinner, boy. Seconds, even, ' you be special, you hear? Ain't no one else got seconds.'
Earl felt like snapping the little man's neck. He could have done it, too, in less than a second, for he still had some strength left. But what was the point?
Earl pulled away, hungry and thirsty, but he would not beg, out of a mule-headedness that was not heroic in the least but only crazy. He went stoically to where the convict crew lay along the levee, all gobbling their biscuits, some lounging extravagantly, yammering among themselves.
There was no place for him, nor did he expect one, but simply crouched at the edge, eyes fixed on nothing.
Whack!
A jolt of pain struck him in the small of the back, and he jackknifed up, his feet slid out from under him, and he tumbled down in a cloud of dust into the mud at the bottom of the levee.
'Whoo-eee, y'all see that white boy jump! Didn't know them boys could jump like that!'
It was old Fish, scrawny and demonic, his face knitted up in a glee that only half hid his anger. It was the toe of his sharp boot, delivered with a great deal of springy force, that had just nailed Earl.
Earl almost cursed and called him the ugliest word for a black man that he knew and headed up the hill to beat on him for a while, but then caught himself. That's what you'd do in the world if a man kicked you in the back. He wasn't in the world; he was in Thebes. He looked and saw a bunch of convicts staring at him.
'You go git him, white boy! Yassuh, go git him, see what it gits you.'
Suddenly the section boss was next to Fish, on his horse, his tommy gun pointing at Earl.
'What's going on, Fish?' 'This here man said you be a old bastard, boss,' lied Fish with a grin that showed only a few teeth behind his cracked old lips. 'So I done fixed his ass good.'
He stared at Earl with malevolent yellowed eyes.
'That true, convict?' asked the section boss.
Earl shook his head.
Suddenly, the boss man fired his tommy gun. It was a ten-round burst, and it kicked into the mud next to Earl, a neat stitch of lead that popped ten geysers in a single second. The roar of the gun raced through the air, rebounded off the far trees where the river lay, and came back in rolling echo. All the Negro boys lounging on the levee flinched and cowered at the noise. The shots were meant to make Earl shiver and collapse in terror. But Earl had been shot at before, and so he simply winced at the noise, wiped the mud spatters off his face, and said, 'You want me to show you how to run that gun, let me know.
Otherwise, you might hurt somebody.'
The boss's eyes flared with rage; clearly he had a petty vanity about his Thompson skills, and it was evidently part of his legend among the men, and a source of his power. He expected respect, admiration and fear from the men he commanded.
He reined his horse around, drew it steady, and, one-handed, fired another deafening burst, this time spattering up geysers on Earl's other side.
But Earl stood still.
Then he said, 'I don't believe Bigboy wants me dead yet, so if you put one into me, he will whip on your ass for a month of Tuesdays. So as far as I am concerned, you are just wasting ammunition to no good point.'
'You must want a taste of the stick, boy!'
'You want to come down here and give it to me, you come ahead.'
'Your evil tongue will win you no favors here, boy. I swear on that.'
He reined his horse over a bit, and turned to the men.
'Since y'all find this so amusing, I'm going to cancel the water break at three, goddammit, and you c'n work straight through till dark. You got any problems, you tell it to the white boy. Now, go on, back to work!'
'Men down,' came the cry, and the men groaned as they rose and headed back down into the mud.
Earl headed back to the stump, and around him the black convicts sloshed and pushed along as well. At one point, someone bumped into him, and he went down briefly, but he rose, thinking it was going to be a fight or something. Instead, something was pressed into his hand by an unseen body, and he looked down and saw that it was a half-eaten biscuit. He stuffed it into his mouth, ground it with his teeth, and felt the pleasure of solid food.
Then it was back on the stump and back on the shovel.
Be my woman, gal, I be your man, By my woman, gal, I be your man, Every day is Sunday's dollar in your
