Carver who was given up by Orpheus who was I given up by Three Finger.
'You must be prepared for Moon, Sergeant Bigboy,' the warden counseled.
Yes, Moon was different than the rest, and Moon demanded special consideration, so Bigboy had gone to the world's greatest authority on the male Negro miscreant, classification, behavior, psychology and complexity: the warden, who knew everything about them.
'Moon is a monster, and he is a hero,' the warden lectured. 'Moon is all the nobility of the Negro race, its courage, its endurance, its cleverness, its strength, its physicality. Yet he is also all its flaws, its seething, never vanquished anger, its innocence about the complex, its inability to concentrate on one goal, its refusal to put today's small pleasures aside for next year's bigger payoff, its ready will to violence of no point, its omnivorous sexual hunger above all else, its insane refusal to consider consequences. Moon is all these things and more.' 'Yes, sir,' said Bigboy, awed as always at the man's wisdom.
'You've seen the records,' said the warden. 'Moon has been a pimp, a gambler, a boxer, a confidence man. He has beaten men to death for money, and he ran a string of high yellers in Jackson. He has had money.
He has drunken wine and bubbly champagne. He has won immense amounts betting on the ponies. He has had fine clothes, an automobile, an army of gofers and factotums. He has raped, pillaged, burned, pirated, done evil by violence, cut men to death with knives. And all before he was twenty-two, at which point he shot and killed a Negro gangster named Jelly Belly Long, but the bullet traveled through Jelly Belly and struck a white child named Rufus, who had been down in the dark part of town with his holy-rolling mother, preaching the word to the fallen Negroes of Jackson's bitterest streets. Nobody cared about Jelly Belly; but the death of Rufus just barely avoided getting Moon lynched or tarred and feathered, and only because the judge was a noted radical did he allow for Moon's lack of intent toward the boy Rufus, and so put Moon away for life plus two hundred and made him, shortly, by the natural order of things, the new king of Parchman Farms. There he killed three guards, five convicts, escaped twice, once for six months, and that at last had him removed to Thebes and the Ape House.'
'Yes, I had heard the stories, sir.'
'So if you take Moon, you must take him hard and well. You must tell him at the start who his master is, and strip him of hope, which is the root of courage.'
'Yes, sir. But if I get him before the whip, I will break him.'
'I know you will, son.'
So, at last, Moon.
Taking him down was hard. The guards went in during the dead of night with twice the usual detail. They beat him in his bunk while others with shotguns held his boys off. Bleeding, chained and dazed, he was dragged to the black vehicle and taken to the Whipping House.
Twice he awakened and mutinied, breaking a man's jaw, caving in three ribs of another before he was subdued by another blizzard of blows. But his rebelliousness only put off the inevitable, and the inevitable had at last arrived. He was alone with Bigboy.
Moon was chained to the post, and it was early in the morning with a gray dawn beginning to edge its way into the day. Candles had burned low.
'I expect you'll fight me pretty hard, Moon,' said Bigboy, who had stripped to his skin so that his muscles, every bit as sculpted and magnificent as Moon's, gleamed.
'You can't bust me, boss,' said Moon. 'Ain't got no bust in me. Yo' arm goin' tire afore I sing yo' song.'
'Now Moon, if I remember, it's been a time since you tasted the lash.'
'Ain't never tasted no whippin', boss.'
'Of course not. Then, why now? And to what point? This would be so easy.
You tell me who whispered to you the magic words ' horse; coming.' Then you sit back, have a nice Pepsi- Cola, and I'll find that boy. I will have a talk with him. Then I will know what I am charged to D know and it will be all fine here at the Farm.'
'Ain't tellin' you nuffin', boss man. You think you can beat it out of Moon, you go ahead. Moon done been beat before.'
'But Moon, not by a whip man. I am a whip man. I can do things with a whip that will amaze you.' Bigboy thought of the massive muscle-ripple expanse of Moon's ' back as his new canvas. He would need all his strength. He would be pressed to the maximum, forced to find new creativities of torture.
'Let's try this for a start,' said Bigboy. 'Tell me what you think.'
He unfurled the whip, gave it a crack like a gunshot as its tip broke the sound barrier, then unleashed five fast snaps like darts at five nerve points on Moon's broad back.
Moon jacked hard at each bite, for at the nerves the man is most vulnerable, and pain rocketed to his brain.
'How was that, Moon? Help me here? Was it much?'
'My of' daddy done hit me harder than that, boss.'
'Tell me, Moon, did he hit harder than this?' the Whipping House filled the air with screams that night, and the night after and the night after. It was an epic battle, if a bit one sided The whip man punished, the convict endured. On and on it went, the agonized screams floating like an unholy vapor, seeming to hang in all the air and casting upon it all a pall. Evil things were being done; everybody knew it.
At the Store, the black women of Thebes were especially surly. They could smell the blood floating in the heavy jungle air. They stood in their line with their tickets to get their pound of bacon, their five pounds of flour, their pound of coffee, and no one said a word.
Usually, this was the best part of the week, for it was release from the muddy, grueling sameness of Thebes, the despair, the fear of men in the night with dogs. But no more. The women languished, silent, untouchable.
Admitted, they did their business and left, for the long walk back through the piney woods. They never looked back; they traveled alone, and swiftly.
But perhaps the ordeal was hardest of all on Fish. Not that you would have noticed. Fish went about his ways, merrier, it seemed, than ever.
He stopped in the kitchen house for the day's supply of lunches for the field hands, filled up his water can, and then rode about the fields with his wagon and his two mules, jingling wherever he went, bringing palaver, a note of cheer, a desperate hunger to entertain.
Nobody was in a mood to be entertained. Too many had gone in the night, screamed their nights away, and never returned. The guards were testy too, for they too had known something was up, that the pale horse was said to be coming, that their empire, so stable, so beautifully constructed, so munificent, was possibly in jeopardy. This led to an outbreak of twitchy-finger-itis, a disease that primarily afflicts men with guns in charge of men without them, where every shadow is seen to be a threat, every comment a promise of violence to come. Three men were shot, one fatally, over behaviors that in other circumstances would have been dismissed with a laugh, or at most with a smack or two upside the head.
The warden, who had the only working telephone in the prison, worked it hard every day. He called his network of snitches up and down the river, the politicians he owned in Jackson and Pascagoula, the sheriffs throughout the piney woods. He was reassured that the word was the same.
'Bigboy,' he said at their nightly meeting, just before his bedtime and Bigboy's session with the recalcitrant Moon, 'there is nothing going on.
Not a damn thing. If anybody seeks to move against us, they must come up the river or through the piney woods. I have instructed all to be wary of groups of armed men assembling here or there. They are on the lookout. All is clear. No one can come move against us without coming to us, pale horse or not. Only God could deposit men on our doorsteps without us hearing about it three days in advance.' 'Paratroopers,' said Bigboy, more given to tactical considerations.
'They could' chute in.' But the warden surprised him; he'd thought of this one too.
'I think not, Sergeant. That would involve a goodly expenditure, training, almost certainly some sort of government intervention at some level. Our people in the government who support this endeavor would find out about it, and it could not be done in secret. Who would support financially such an enterprise? No, we have no fears from the sky, at least not from a force large enough to do us any harm. No one coming in here without our knowing about it three days ahead.' 'Yes, sir,' said Bigboy, much assured. Then he went off to his assignation with Moon, and the warden went sleepily to bed. fish was having a nightmare. In the nightmare he was underwater, amid the field of dead Negroes chained to the concrete blocks of their own doom. He clawed for the surface, but he was held
