since because they already know they can, they dont have to do it. What we want are folks that believe they cant, and then do it. The other kind dont need us and we dont need them. I’ll say more: we dont even want them in the outfit. They wont be accepted; we wont even have them under our feet. If it aint worth that much, it aint worth anything. Right?’
“ ‘Yes sir,’ I says.
“ ‘You can say Sir up there too if you want,’ He said. ‘It’s a free country. Nobody gives a damn. You all right now?’ ”
‘Yes sir,’ I says.
“ ‘TenSHUN!’ He said. And I made them pop, mud or no mud. ‘About-FACE!’ He said. And He never saw one smarter than that one neither. ‘Forward MARCH!’ He said. And I had already stepped off when He said, ‘Halt!’ and I stopped. ‘You’re going to leave him laying there,’ He said. And there he was, I had forgot about him, laying there as peaceful and out of it too as you please—the damned little bastard that had gone chicken at the exact wrong time, like they always do, turned the wheel a-loose and tried to duck and caused the whole damn mess; lucky for all of us he never had a.…ing bar on his shoulder so he could have.…ed up the whole detail and done for all of us.
“ ‘I cant carry him too,’ I says.
“ ‘That’s two times,’ He said. ‘You’ve got one more. Why not go on and use it now and get shut of it for good?’
“ ‘I cant carry him too,’ I says.
“ ‘Fine,’ He said. ‘That’s three and finished. You wont ever have to say cant again. Because you’re a special case; they gave you three times. But there’s a general order coming down today that after this nobody has but one. Pick him up.’ So I did. ‘Dismiss,’ He said. And that’s all. I told you I cant tell it. I was just there. I cant tell it.” He, Mink, watching them all, himself alien, not only unreconciled but irreconcilable: not contemptuous, because he was just waiting, not impatient because even if he were in Memphis right this minute, at ten or eleven or whatever oclock it was on Sunday morning, he would still have almost twenty-four hours to get through somehow before he could move on to the next step. He just watched them: the two oldish couples, man and wife of course, farmers obviously, without doubt tenant farmers come up from the mortgaged bank-or syndicate-owned cotton plantation from which the son had been drafted three or four or five years ago to make that far from home that sacrifice, old, alien too, too old for this, unreconciled by the meager and arid tears which were less of tears than blisters; none of the white people actually watching as the solitary Negro woman got up from her back bench and walked down the aisle to where the young woman’s soiled yellow hat was crushed into the crook of her elbow like a child in a child’s misery and desolation, the white people on the bench making way for the Negro woman to sit down beside the young white woman and put her arm around her; Goodyhay still standing, his arms propped on the closed fists on the plank, the cold seething eyes not even closed, speaking exactly as he had spoken three nights ago while the three of them knelt on the kitchen floor: “Save us, Christ. The poor sons of bitches.” Then Goodyhay was looking at him. “You, there,” Goodyhay said. “Stand up.” Mink did so. “He’s trying to get home. He hasn’t put in but one full day, but he needs ten dollars to get home on. He hasn’t been home in thirty-eight years. He needs nine bucks more. How about it?”
“I’ll take it,” the man in the officer’s cap said. “I won thirty-four in a crap game last night. He can have ten of that.”
“I said nine,” Goodyhay said. “He’s got one dollar coming. Give him the ten and I’ll give you one. He says he’s got to go to Memphis first. Anybody going in tonight?”
“I am,” another said.
“All right,” Goodyhay said. “Anybody want to sing?”
That was how he saw Memphis again under the best, the matchless condition for one who hadn’t seen it in … He could figure that. He was twenty years old when he got married. Three times before that he had wrenched, wrung enough money from the otherwise unpaid labor he did on the tenant farm of the kinsman who had raised him from orphanhood, to visit the Memphis brothels. The last visit was in the same year of his marriage. He was twenty-six years when he went to Parchman. Twenty dollars from twenty-six dollars was six dollars. He was in Parchman thirty-eight years. Six dollars and thirty-eight dollars was forty-four dollars to see Memphis again not only after forty-four years but under the matchless condition: at night, the dark earth on either hand and ahead already random and spangled with the neon he had never seen before, and in the distance the low portentous glare of the city itself, he sitting on the edge of the seat as a child sits, almost as small as a child, peering ahead as the car rushed, merging into one mutual spangled race bearing toward, as though by the acceleration of gravity or suction, the distant city; suddenly off to the right a train fled dragging a long string of lighted windows as rapid and ephemeral as dream; he became aware of a convergence like the spokes of a gigantic dark wheel lying on its hub, along which sped dense and undeviable as ants, automobiles and what they tidthim were called buses as if all the earth was hurrying, plunging, being sucked, decked with diamond and ruby lights, into the low glare on the sky as into some monstrous, frightening, unimaginable joy or pleasure.
Now the converging roads themselves were decked with globular lights as big and high in the trees as roosting turkeys. “Tell me when we get close,” he said.
“Close to what?” the driver said.
“Close to Memphis.”
“We’re already in Memphis,” the driver said. “We crossed the city limits a mile back.” So now he realised that if he had still been walking, alone, with none to ask or tell him, his troubles would have really begun only after he reached Memphis. Because the Memphis he remembered from forty-four years back no longer existed; he thought
But all that was changed now. They had told him four days ago that most of the trains were gone, quit running, even if he had had that much extra money to spend just riding. They had told him how they were buses now but in all the four days he had yet to see anything that looked like a depot where he could buy a ticket and get on one. And as for the edge of Memphis that back there forty-four years ago a man could have walked in from in an hour, he, according to the driver, had already crossed it over a mile back yet still all he could see of it was just that glare on the sky. Even though he was actually in Memphis, he was apparently still as far from the goal he remembered and sought, as from Varner’s store to Jefferson; except for the car giving him a ride and the driver of it who knew in general where he needed to go, he might have had to spend even the ten dollars for food wandering around inside Memphis before he ever reached the place where he could buy the pistol.
