hand, In your hand, Lordy, in your hand, Every day is Sunday's dollar, in your hand.
That was Rosie. Rosie was their dream, their love, their inspiration.
Rosie got them through the long afternoon hours, otherwise unmarked by time or incident.
A man killed a snake.
A guard hit a loafer with a stick, or maybe he wasn't a loafer, maybe he was just sick.
The boss cursed out a lazy nigger.
The men just worked, that was all, without rest, without speeding up or slowing down, just abiding by the harsh rules imposed and finding instinctive ways beyond it, with the help of Rosie.
When she walks, she reels and rocks behind, When she walks, she reels and rocks behind, Ain't that enough to worry a convict's mind, Ain't that enough to worry a convict's mind.
And they loved her for worrying their minds, for when they worried about Rosie, they didn't think about the boss with his stick and gun, they didn't think about the blue ticks hungering for their flesh, they didn't worry about the strutting clown prince Fish, who sucked up to the guards and wore his petty gift of stature like a crown, and they didn't think about the heat, the mud, the sun, the mosquitoes, they didn't think about a tomorrow and a tomorrow and a tomorrow of that same hard thing without end.
Earl slipped twice in the mud, and once hit his knee on a rock hard enough to bruise. He felt his hands pulping up in pain, swelling, and glanced at his palms, which were seared raw with his own blood.
'You, white boy, you keep on a-shoveling, you don't need to be looking at them purty hands, ' they ain't so purty now,' the section boss called.
'You keep working, white boy,' a voice crooned to him, 'or they beat you silly and then they beat us just fo' the fun of it.'
Earl took the advice to heart, and gave himself to the shovel, and never again that whole afternoon did he take a break or look away; he just gave himself to the rhythm of the labor, and like the men around him, tried to close it out.
Only one oddness struck him; he looked up late in the afternoon for the glinting of light on a lens far off. Sometimes early in the war the Japs gave away their positions that way, and the brief flash would be answered with a long belt of.30-caliber machine gun fire or a mortar barrage. So he knew: someone was watching from far away, with binoculars, steadily and professionally.
Section Boss worked them hard that day, as he would all days, and after dark they shuffled back to the Ape House. There were no showers or mercies or softnesses waiting for them there, either. They stripped and ran naked through hoses held by white guards, that was the shower, and then pulled the same foul clothes on. The food was cold grits, coffee, a biscuit, some beans ladled out in the cook house on tin plates, gobbled quickly under the watch of men with guns. They ate with their hands, squatting in the yard, then went back to soak the tin plates in a cauldron of boiling water.
Then they went back to the Ape House, and the card players took up the game and the talkers started up reveries about '-towns they'd visited, and the crazies and the sick ones retreated to their corner of hell to gibber irrationally, and Earl pulled his bunk against the corner and slept lightly.
The next morning at 4:00 it started all over again, the same thing, exactly, and on and on it went, the hot mornings, the jabbering torture of the monkey Fish, the baleful stares of Moon, the visits in song of Rosie and the escape she brought. On and on. Over and over. There was nothing else, except now and then he'd catch the flash of light off lenses. Whoever was watching from afar was making a consistent, scientific job of it. Meanwhile, he lost track of the time. A week, a month, a year? It felt the same.
And then one day as they were climbing from the pit, a weariness on their bones so powerful they could hardly speak of it, somebody brought himself close to Earl. It was a man who'd never acknowledged him, one of the card players, but he whispered something fierce, and then slid away, and nobody had seen him do it.
He whispered, 'They gon' cut you tonight, white boy. Moon and his fellas. Cut you to death.' sam stared at the photo. The man was extraordinarily handsome, and if one had the inclination to imbue beauty with more substantive virtues, he was possibly noble.
The late David Stone, M. D.' Ph. D.' Maj.' United States Army Medical Corps stared back at Sam from his formal studio setting, tinted vaguely sepia after the fashion of 1943, when the shot had been taken. He wore his uniform proudly, with the entwined staff and serpent of the medical corps glinting on his lapels next to a block of ribbons that testified to a career that mattered. He wore a pencil-thin moustache, and had pearly teeth, his hair pomaded back neatly. He looked like a philosopher prince of some sort.
'He was a very good man,' said the widow Stone, sitting across from him in her apartment, which overlooked a rolling splurge of meadow, pond and tree called Druid Hill Park in Baltimore, eight stories below.
She was a lovely woman, too. There was something aquiline in her facial features, and her eyes were darkness embodied, but lively, merry, so intelligent. They were eyes made for laughter, but not raucous yuks; rather, for the laughter of wit, of erudition, of the bon mot.
He could see them as a married couple, how they fit together, how well they set each other off, what a center to a set they'd be, with his dashing nobility, her brilliance and beauty. It seemed so Eastern some how, something Sam had glimpsed in his time in New Jersey and New Haven, a brilliant world, but one sealed off; you couldn't get into it without fabulous talent or fabulous success or fabulous family. Lacking all three, and moreover aware that he lacked something more?a capacity to dazzle seemed to be it?he knew he'd never move in such a society. He wanted to prosecute rapists and bank robbers in a little county in western Arkansas. No Eastern woman could understand such a thing, and he was hopeless when it came to articulating it. Only a Connie Longacre, stuck there in her tragic marriage, could understand, after much hard study.
'Harvard, as I understand it?' he asked.
'Oh, yes, second generation. David's father was a doctor before him on New York's Park Avenue. Society, that sort of thing, and with it all the expectations that David lived up to without even breaking a sweat.
He had a moral investment in life, if I may say. So David did his undergraduate school at New Haven, then Harvard for medical school, just like his father. Then, after a few years of residency and a fellowship, he came here, to Baltimore, and got his advanced degree in public health at Johns Hopkins.'
'You'll have to forgive me, ma'am, I'm just a humble country lawyer.
It would seem he could have gone anywhere in the world with those credentials and had a very nice life. An opulent life. Even while doing good practicing medicine. Yet he went into public health, which, if I'm not mistaken, is not the most remunerative of fields. And if I'm not mistaken, he spent the early thirties in Africa and Asia.'
'That is correct, Mr. Vincent. David wasn't interested in money. As I say, he was a moral man. He was in some way obsessed with goodness, with progress, with doing well for the world. The money was nothing.
He'd grown up with it, he had a private income, a small one, so possibly he took it for granted, and simply earning money for the sake of earning money held no magic for him. I had some money, too, from my family. We wanted interesting and useful lives, not big houses. This apartment was fine for us. We never wanted a spread in the valley.'
It was a four- or five-bedroom apartment in what had to be the city's best building, a castle overlooking a deer park. What Sam experienced was some sort of tabernacle to a life of the intellect, of stimulation of imagination and eye and mind: it was a book-lined warren, with eclectic furniture and a medical library as large as some small college's, Sam guessed. But there was also literature and poetry on the shelves, and modern art on the walls, and crazed sculptures here and there, and a great many African and Asian artifacts and pieces, as well as a riot of textures and colors from various forms of textile art. The view of the park, Sam had noted, was magnificent.
'You must have been so happy,' Sam said.
'Yes. But it was hard. David was a man of work, of duty. He wanted to bring mercy into the world. He wanted to cure the great tropical diseases, yellow fever, malaria, rickets, all the terrible ulcerations and cataracts of the eye, the lack of nutrition and sanitation. He wanted to make all those faraway dark places light and clean and full of healthy babies and smiling mothers. I can't say I was as idealistic as he was, and it cost us. It cost us a child, a family. After we lost the first one, I couldn't have any more. Not that you asked, and not that I give up such information to any person that comes along. But you have to know how hard it can be to live with a saint.'
'I'm very sorry for your hardships, ma'am. I truly am.'
'Now, you wanted to talk about the war? That was your original line of questioning?'
'Yes, ma'am. I represent a client who is suing the State of Mississippi over the death of a Negro at a prison
