The Tall Men
THEY PASSED THE DARK
bulk of the cotton gin. Then they saw the lamplit house and the other car, the
doctor's coupe, just stopping at the gate, and they could hear the hound
baying. "Here we are!" the old deputy marshal said. "What's that
other car?" the younger man said, the stranger, the state draft
investigator. "Doctor Schofield's," the marshal said. "Lee
McCallum asked me to send him out when I telephoned we were coming."
"You mean you warned them?" the investigator said. "You
telephoned ahead that I was coming out with a warrant for these two evaders? Is
this how you carry out the orders of the United States Government?" The
marshal was a lean, clean old man who chewed tobacco, who had been born and
lived in the county all his life. "I understood all you wanted was to
arrest these two McCallum boys and bring them back to town," he said.
"It was!" the investigator said. "And now you have warned them,
given them a chance to run. Possibly put the Government to the expense of
hunting them down with troops. Have you forgotten that you are under a bond
yourself?" "I ain't forgot it," the marshal said. "And ever
since we left Jefferson I been trying to tell you something for you not to
forget. But I reckon it will take these McCallums to impress that on you... Pull
in behind the other car. We'll try to find out first just how sick whoever it
is that is sick is." The investigator drew up behind the other car and
switched off and blacked out his lights. "These people," he said.
Then he thought, But this doddering, tobacco-chewing old man is one of them,
too, despite the honor and pride of his office, which should have made him
different. So he didn't speak it aloud, removing the keys and getting out of
the car, and then locking the car itself, rolling the windows up first,
thinking, These people who lie about and conceal the ownership of land and
property in order to hold relief jobs which they have no intention of
performing, standing on their constitutional rights against having to work, who
jeopardize the very job itself through petty and transparent subterfuge to
acquire a free mattress which they intend to attempt to sell; who would
relinquish even the job, if by so doing they could receive free food and a
place, any rathole, in town to sleep in; who, as farmers, make false statements
to get seed loans which they will later misuse, and then react in loud
vituperative outrage and astonishment when caught at it. And then, when at long
last a suffering and threatened Government asks one thing of them in return,
one thing simply, which is to put their names down on a selective-service list,
they refuse to do it. The old marshal had gone on. The investigator followed,
through a stout paintless gate in a picket fence, up a broad brick walk between
two rows of old shabby cedars, toward the rambling and likewise paintless
sprawl of the two-story house in the open hall of which the soft lamplight
glowed and the lower story of which, as the investigator now perceived, was of
logs. He saw a hall full of soft lamplight beyond a stout paintless gallery
running across the log front, from beneath which the same dog which they had
heard, a big hound, came booming again, to stand foursquare facing them in the
walk, bellowing, until a man's voice spoke to it from the house. He followed
the marshal up the steps onto the gallery. Then he saw the man standing in the
door, waiting for them to approach: a man of about forty-five, not tall, but
blocky, with a brown, still face and horseman's hands, who looked at him once,
brief and hard, and then no more, speaking to the marshal, "Howdy, Mr.
Gombault. Come in." "Howdy, Rafe," the marshal said. "Who's
sick?" "Buddy," the other said. "Slipped and caught his leg
in the hammer mill this afternoon." "Is it bad?" the marshal
said. "It looks bad to me," the other said. "That's why we sent
for the doctor instead of bringing him in to town. We couldn't get the bleeding
stopped." "I'm sorry to hear that," the marshal said. "This
is Mr. Pearson." Once more the investigator found the other looking at
him, the brown eyes still, courteous enough in the brown face, the hand he
offered hard enough, but the clasp quite limp, quite cold. The marshal was
still speaking. "From Jackson. From the draft board." Then he said,
and the investigator could discern no change whatever in his tone: "He's
got a warrant for the boys." The investigator could discern no change
whatever anywhere. The limp hard hand merely withdrew from his, the still face
now looking at the marshal. "You mean we have declared war?"
"No," the marshal said. "That's not the question, Mr.
McCallum," the investigator said. "All required of them was to
register. Their numbers might not even be drawn this time; under the law of
averages, they probably would not be. But they refused; failed, anyway to register."
"I see," the other said. He was not looking at the investigator. The
investigator couldn't tell certainly if he was even looking at the marshal,
although he spoke to him, "You want to see Buddy? The doctor's with him
now." "Wait," the investigator said. "I'm sorry about your
brother's accident, but I..." The marshal glanced back at him for a
moment, his shaggy gray brows beetling, with something at once courteous yet a
little impatient about the glance, so that during the instant the investigator
sensed from the old marshal the same quality which had been in the other's
brief look. The investigator was a man of better than average intelligence; he
was already becoming aware of something a little different here from what he
had expected. But he had been in relief work in the state several years,
dealing almost exclusively with country people, so he still believed he knew
them. So he looked at the old marshal, thinking, Yes. The same sort of people,
despite the office, the authority and responsibility which should have changed
him. Thinking again, These people. These people. "I intend to take the
night train back to Jackson," he said. "My reservation is already
made. Serve the warrant and we will " "Come along," the old marshal
said. "We are going to have plenty of time." So he followed: there
was nothing else to do fuming and seething, attempting in the short length of
the hall to regain control of himself in order to control the situation,
because he realized now that if the situation were controlled, it would devolve
upon him to control it; that if their departure with their prisoners were
expedited, it must be himself and not the old marshal who would expedite it. He
had been right. The doddering old officer was not only at bottom one of these
people, he had apparently been corrupted anew to his old, inherent, shiftless
sloth and unreliability merely by entering the house. So he followed in turn,
down the hall and into a bedroom; whereupon he looked about him not only with
amazement but with something very like terror. The room was a big room, with a
bare unpainted floor, and besides the bed, it contained only a chair or two and
one other piece of old-fashioned furniture. Yet to the investigator it seemed
so filled with tremendous men cast in the same mold as the man who had met them
that the very walls themselves must bulge. Yet they were not big, not tall, and
it was not vitality, exuberance, because they made no sound, merely looking
quietly at him where he stood in the door, with faces bearing an almost
identical stamp of kinship: a thin, almost frail old man of about seventy,
slightly taller than the others; a second one, white-haired, too, but otherwise
identical with the man who had met them at the door; a third one about the same
age as the man who had met them, but with something delicate in his face and
something tragic and dark and wild in the same dark eyes; the two absolutely
identical blue-eyed youths; and lastly the blue-eyed man on the bed over which
the doctor, who might have been any city doctor, in his neat city suit, leaned:
all of them turning to look quietly at him and the marshal as they entered. And
he saw, past the doctor, the slit trousers of the man on the bed and the
exposed, bloody, mangled leg, and he turned sick, stopping just inside the door
under that quiet, steady regard while the marshal went up to the man who lay on
the bed, smoking a cob pipe, a big, old-fashioned, wicker-covered demijohn,
such as the investigator's grandfather had kept his whisky in, on the table
beside him. "Well, Buddy," the marshal said, "this is bad."
"Ah, it was my own damn fault," the man on the bed said. "Stuart
kept warning me about that frame I was using." "That's correct,"
the second old one said. Still the others said nothing. They just looked steadily
and quietly at the investigator until the marshal turned slightly and said,
"This is Mr. Pearson. From Jackson. He's got a warrant for the boys."
Then the man on the bed said, "What for?" "That draft business,
Buddy," the marshal said. "We're not at war now," the man on the
bed said. "No," the marshal said. "It's that new law. They
didn't register." "What are you going to do with them?"
"It's a warrant, Buddy. Swore out." "That means jail." "It's
a warrant," the old marshal said. Then the investigator saw that the man
on the bed was watching him, puffing steadily at the pipe. "Pour me some
whisky, Jackson," he said. "No," the doctor said. "He's had
too much already." "Pour me some whisky, Jackson," the man on the
bed said. He puffed steadily at the pipe, looking at the investigator.
"You come from the Government?" he said. "Yes," the
investigator said. "They should have registered. That's all required of
them yet. They did not..." His voice ceased, while the seven pairs of eyes
contemplated him, and the man on the bed puffed steadily. "We would have
still been here," the man on the bed said. "We wasn't going to
run." He turned his head. The two youths were standing side by side at the
foot of the bed. "Anse, Lucius," he said. To the investigator it sounded
as if they answered as one, "Yes, father." "This gentleman has
come all the way from Jackson to say the Government is ready for you. I reckon
the quickest place to enlist will be Memphis. Go upstairs and pack." The
investigator started, moved forward. "Wait!" he cried. But Jackson,
the eldest, had forestalled him. He said, "Wait," also, and now they
were not looking at the investigator. They were looking at the doctor.
"What about his leg?" Jackson said. "Look at it," the
doctor said. "He almost amputated it himself. It won't wait. And he can't
be moved now. I'll need my nurse to help me, and some ether, provided he hasn't
had too much whisky to stand the anesthetic too. One of you can drive to town
in my car. I'll telephone " "Ether?" the man on the bed said.
"What for? You just said yourself it's pretty near off now. I could whet
up one of Jackson's butcher knives and finish it myself, with another drink or
two. Go on. Finish it." "You couldn't stand any more shock," the
doctor said. "This is whisky talking now." "Shucks," the
other said. "One day in France we was running through a wheat field and I
saw the machine gun, coming across the wheat, and I tried to jump it like you
would jump a fence rail somebody was swinging at your middle, only I never made
it. And I was on the ground then, and along toward dark that begun to hurt,
only about that time something went whang on the back of my helmet, like when
you hit a anvil, so I never knowed nothing else until I woke up. There was a
heap of us racked up along a bank outside a field dressing station, only it
took a long time for the doctor to get around to all of us, and by that time it
was hurting bad. This here ain't hurt none to speak of since I got a-holt of
this johnny-jug. You go on and finish it. If it's help you need, Stuart and
Rafe will help you... Pour me a drink, Jackson." This time the doctor
raised the demijohn and examined the level of the liquor. "There's a good
quart gone," he said. "If you've drunk a quart of whisky since four
o'clock, I doubt if you could stand the anesthetic. Do you think you could
stand it if I finished it now?" "Yes, finish it. I've ruined it; I
want to get shut of it." The doctor looked about at the others, at the
still, identical faces watching him. "If I had him in town, in the
hospital, with a nurse to watch him, I'd probably wait until he got over this
first shock and got the whisky out of his system. But he can't be moved now,
and I can't stop the bleeding like this, and even if I had ether or a local
anesthetic..." "Shucks," the man on the bed said. "God
never made no better local nor general comfort or anesthetic neither than
what's in this johnny-jug. And this ain't Jackson's leg nor Stuart's nor Rafe's
nor Lee's. It's mine. I done started it; I reckon I can finish cutting it off
any way I want to." But the doctor was still looking at Jackson.
"Well, Mr. McCallum?" he said. "You're the oldest." But it
was Stuart who answered. "Yes," he said. "Finish it. What do you
want? Hot water, I reckon." "Yes," the doctor said. "Some
clean sheets. Have you got a big table you can move in here?" "The
kitchen table," the man who had met them at the door said. "Me and
the boys..." "Wait," the man on the bed said. "The boys
won't have time to help you." He looked at them again. "Anse,
Lucius," he said. Again it seemed to the investigator that they answered
as one, "Yes, father." "This gentleman yonder is beginning to
look impatient. You better start. Come to think of it, you won't need to pack.
You will have uniforms in a day or two. Take the truck. There won't be nobody
to drive you to Memphis and bring the truck back, so you can leave it at the
Gayoso Feed Company until we can send for it. I'd like for you to enlist into
the old Sixth Infantry, where I used to be. But I reckon that's too much to
hope, and you'll just have to chance where they send you. But it likely won't
matter, once you are in. The Government done right by me in my day, and it will
do right by you. You just enlist wherever they want to send you, need you, and
obey your sergeants and officers until you find out how to be soldiers. Obey
them, but remember your name and don't take nothing from no man. You can go
now." "Wait!" the investigator cried again; again he started,
moved forward into the center of the room. "I protest this! I'm sorry
about Mr. McCallum's accident. I'm sorry about the whole business. But it's out
of my hands and out of his hands now. This charge, failure to register
according to law, has been made and the warrant issued. It cannot be evaded
this way. The course of the action must be completed before any other step can
be taken. They should have thought of this when these boys failed to register.
If Mr. Gombault refuses to serve this warrant, I will serve it myself and take
these men back to Jefferson with me to answer this charge as made. And I must
warn Mr. Gombault that he will be cited for contempt!" The old marshal
turned, his shaggy eyebrows beetling again, speaking down to the investigator
as if he were a child, "Ain't you found out yet that me or you neither
ain't going nowhere for a while?" "What?" the investigator
cried. He looked about at the grave faces once more contemplating him with that
remote and speculative regard. "Am I being threatened?" he cried.
"Ain't anybody paying any attention to you at all," the marshal said.
"Now you just be quiet for a while, and you will be all right, and after a
while we can go back to town." So he stopped again and stood while the
grave, contemplative faces freed him once more of that impersonal and unbearable
regard, and saw the two youths approach the bed and bend down in turn and kiss
their father on the mouth, and then turn as one and leave the room, passing him
without even looking at him. And sitting in the lamplit hall beside the old
marshal, the bedroom door closed now, he heard the truck start up and back and
turn and go down the road, the sound of it dying away, ceasing, leaving the
still, hot night, the Mississippi Indian summer, which had already outlasted
half of November filled with the loud last shrilling of the summer's cicadas,
as though they, too, were aware of the imminent season of cold weather and of
death. "I remember old Anse," the marshal said pleasantly, chattily,
in that tone in which an adult addresses a strange child. "He's been dead
fifteen-sixteen years now. He was about sixteen when the old war broke out, and
he walked all the way to Virginia to get into it. He could have enlisted and
fought right here at home, but his ma was a Carter, so wouldn't nothing do him
but to go all the way back to Virginia to do his fighting, even though he
hadn't never seen Virginia before himself; walked all the way back to a land he
hadn't never even seen before and enlisted in Stonewall Jackson's army and
stayed in it all through the Valley, and right up to Chancellorsville, where
them Carolina boys shot Jackson by mistake, and right on up to that morning in
'Sixty-five when Sheridan's cavalry blocked the road from Appomattox to the
Valley, where they might have got away again. And he walked back to Mississippi
with just about what he had carried away with him when he left, and he got
married and built the first story of this house this here log story we're in
right now and started getting them boys Jackson and Stuart and Raphael and Lee
and Buddy. Buddy come along late, late enough to be in the other war, in France
in it. You heard him in there. He brought back two medals, an American medal
and a French one, and no man knows till yet how he got them, just what he done.
I don't believe he even told Jackson and Stuart and them. He hadn't hardly got
back home, with them numbers on his uniform and the wound stripes and them two
medals, before he had found him a girl, found her right off, and a year later
them twin boys was born, the livin', spittin' image of old Anse McCallum. If
old Anse had just been about seventy-five years younger, the three of them
might have been thriblets. I remember them two little critters exactly alike,
and wild as spikehorn bucks, running around here day and night both with a pack
of coon dogs until they got big enough to help Buddy and Stuart and Lee with
the farm and the gin, and Rafe with the horses and mules, when he would breed
and raise and train them and take them to Memphis to sell, right on up to
three, four years back, when they went to the agricultural college for a year
to learn more about whiteface cattle. "That was after Buddy and them had
quit raising cotton. I remember that too. It was when the Government first
begun to interfere with how a man farmed his own land, raised his cotton.
Stabilizing the price, using up the surplus, they called it, giving a man
advice and help, whether he wanted it or not. You may have noticed them boys in
yonder tonight; curious folks almost, you might call them. That first year, when
county agents was trying to explain the new system to farmers, the agent come
out here and tried to explain it to Buddy and Lee and Stuart, explaining how
they would cut down the crop, but that the Government would pay farmers the
difference, and so they would actually be better off than trying to farm by
themselves. "'Why, we're much obliged,' Buddy says. 'But we don't need no
help. We'll just make the cotton like we always done; if we can't make a crop
of it, that will just be our lookout and our loss, and we'll try again.'
"So they wouldn't sign no papers nor no cards nor nothing. They just went
on and made the cotton like old Anse had taught them to; it was like they just
couldn't believe that the Government aimed to help a man whether he wanted help
or not, aimed to interfere with how much of anything he could make by hard work
on his own land, making the crop and ginning it right here in their own gin,
like they had always done, and hauling it to town to sell, hauling it all the
way into Jefferson before they found out they couldn't sell it because, in the
first place, they had made too much of it and, in the second place, they never
had no card to sell what they would have been allowed. So they hauled it back.
The gin wouldn't hold all of it, so they put some of it under Rafe's mule shed
and they put the rest of it right here in the hall where we are setting now,
where they would have to walk around it all winter and keep themselves reminded
to be sho and fill out that card next time. "Only next year they didn't
fill out no papers neither. It was like they still couldn't believe it, still
believed in the freedom and liberty to make or break according to a man's
fitness and will to work, guaranteed by the Government that old Anse had tried
to tear in two once and failed, and admitted in good faith he had failed and
taken the consequences, and that had give Buddy a medal and taken care of him
when he was far away from home in a strange land and hurt. "So they made
that second crop. And they couldn't sell it to nobody neither because they
never had no cards. This time they built a special shed to put it under, and I
remember how in that second winter Buddy come to town one day to see Lawyer
Gavin Stevens. Not for legal advice how to sue the Government or somebody into
buying the cotton, even if they never had no card for it, but just to find out
why. 'I was for going ahead and signing up for it,' Buddy says. 'If that's
going to be the new rule. But we talked it over, and Jackson ain't no farmer,
but he knowed father longer than the rest of us, and he said father would have
said no, and I reckon now he would have been right.' "So they didn't raise
any more cotton; they had a plenty of it to last a while: twenty-two bales, I
think it was. That was when they went into whiteface cattle, putting old Anse's
cotton land into pasture, because that's what he would have wanted them to do
if the only way they could raise cotton was by the Government telling them how
much they could raise and how much they could sell it for, and where, and when,
and then pay them for not doing the work they didn't do. Only even when they
didn't raise cotton, every year the county agent's young fellow would come out
to measure the pasture crops they planted so he could pay them for that, even if
they never had no not-cotton to be paid for. Except that he never measured no
crop on this place. 'You're welcome to look at what we are doing,' Buddy says.
'But don't draw it down on your map.' "'But you can get money for this,'
the young fellow says. 'The Government wants to pay you for planting all this.'
"'We are aiming to get money for it,' Buddy says. 'When we can't, we will
try something else. But not from the Government. Give that to them that want to
take it. We can make out.' "And that's about all. Them twenty-two bales of
orphan cotton are down yonder in the gin right now, because there's room for it
in the gin now because they ain't using the gin no more. And them boys grew up
and went off a year to the agricultural college to learn right about whiteface
cattle, and then come back to the rest of them: these here curious folks living
off here to themselves, with the rest of the world all full of pretty neon
lights burning night and day both, and easy, quick money scattering itself
around everywhere for any man to grab a little, and every man with a shiny new
automobile already wore out and throwed away and the new one delivered before
the first one was even paid for, and everywhere a fine loud grabble and snatch
of AAA and WPA and a dozen other three-letter reasons for a man not to work.
Then this here draft comes along, and these curious folks ain't got around to
signing that neither, and you come all the way up from Jackson with your paper
all signed and regular, and we come out here, and after a while we can go back
to town. A man gets around, don't he?" "Yes," the investigator
said. "Do you suppose we can go back to town now?" "No,"
the marshal told him in that same kindly tone, "not just yet. But we can
leave after a while. Of course you will miss your train. But there will be
another one tomorrow." He rose, though the investigator had heard nothing.
The investigator watched him go down the hall and open the bedroom door and
enter and close it behind him. The investigator sat quietly, listening to the
night sounds and looking at the closed door until it opened presently and the
marshal came back, carrying something in a bloody sheet, carrying it gingerly.
"Here," he said. "Hold it a minute." "It's
bloody," the investigator said. "That's all right," the marshal
said. "We can wash when we get through." So the investigator took the
bundle and stood holding it while he watched the old marshal go back down the
hall and on through it and vanish and return presently with a lighted lantern
and a shovel. "Come along," he said. "We're pretty near through
now." The investigator followed him out of the house and across the yard,
carrying gingerly the bloody, shattered, heavy bundle in which it still seemed
to him he could feel some warmth of life, the marshal striding on ahead, the
lantern swinging against his leg, the shadow of his striding scissoring and
enormous along the earth, his voice still coming back over his shoulder, chatty
and cheerful, "Yes, sir. A man gets around and he sees a heap; a heap of
folks in a heap of situations. The trouble is, we done got into the habit of
confusing the situations with the folks. Take yourself, now," he said in
that same kindly tone, chatty and easy; "you mean all right. You just went
and got yourself all fogged up with rules and regulations. That's our trouble.
We done invented ourselves so many alphabets and rules and recipes that we
can't see anything else; if what we see can't be fitted to an alphabet or a
rule, we are lost. We have come to be like critters doctor folks might have
created in laboratories, that have learned how to slip off their bones and guts
and still live, still be kept alive indefinite and forever maybe even without
even knowing the bones and the guts are gone. We have slipped our backbone; we
have about decided a man don't need a backbone any more; to have one is
old-fashioned. But the groove where the backbone used to be is still there, and
the backbone has been kept alive, too, and someday we're going to slip back
onto it. I don't know just when nor just how much of a wrench it will take to
teach us, but someday." They had left the yard now. They were mounting a
slope; ahead of them the investigator could see another clump of cedars, a
small clump, somehow shaggily formal against the starred sky. The marshal
entered it and stopped and set the lantern down and, following with the bundle,
the investigator saw a small rectangle of earth enclosed by a low brick coping.
Then he saw the two graves, or the headstones: two plain granite slabs set
upright in the earth. "Old Anse and Mrs. Anse," the marshal said.
"Buddy's wife wanted to be buried with her folks. I reckon she would have
been right lonesome up here with just McCallums. Now, let's see." He stood
for a moment, his chin in his hand; to the investigator he looked exactly like
an old lady trying to decide where to set out a shrub. "They was to run
from left to right, beginning with Jackson. But after the boys was born,
Jackson and Stuart was to come up here by their pa and ma, so Buddy could move
up some and make room. So he will be about here." He moved the lantern
nearer and took up the shovel. Then he saw the investigator still holding the
bundle. "Set it down," he said. "I got to dig first."
"I'll hold it," the investigator said. "Nonsense, put it
down." the marshal said. "Buddy won't mind." So the investigator
put the bundle down on the brick coping and the marshal began to dig,
skillfully and rapidly, still talking in that cheerful, interminable voice,
"Yes, sir. We done forgot about folks. Life has done got cheap, and life
ain't cheap. Life's a pretty durn valuable thing. I don't mean just getting
along from one WPA relief check to the next one, but honor and pride and
discipline that make a man worth preserving, make him of any value. That's what
we got to learn again. Maybe it takes trouble, bad trouble, to teach it back to
us; maybe it was the walking to Virginia because that's where his ma come from,
and losing a war and then walking back, that taught it to old Anse. Anyway, he
seems to learned it, and to learned it good enough to bequeath it to his boys.
Did you notice how all Buddy had to do was to tell them boys of his it was time
to go, because the Government had sent them word? And how they told him
good-by? Growned men kissing one another without hiding and without shame.
Maybe that's what I am trying to say... There." he said. "That's big
enough." He moved quickly, easily; before the investigator could stir, he
had lifted the bundle into the narrow trench and was covering it, covering it
as rapidly as he had dug, smoothing the earth over it with the shovel. Then he
stood up and raised the lantern a tall, lean old man, breathing easily and
lightly. "I reckon we can go back to town now," he said.