Ward Moore: Bring the Jubilee

“Where yuh from, boy? What rural—see, sober now— precincts miss you?”

“Wappinger Falls, near Poughkeepsie. My name's Hodge Backmaker.”

“Well now, that's friendly of you, Hodge. I'm George Pondible. Periodic. Just tapering off.”

I hadn't an idea what Pondible was talking about. Trying to understand made my head worse.

“Took everything, I suppose? Haven't a nickel left to help a hangover?”

“My head,” I mumbled, quite superfluously.

He staggered to his feet. I slowly sat up, tenderly touching the lump over my ear with my fingertips.

“Best thing—souse it in the river. Take more to fix mine.”

“But… can I go through the streets like this?”

“Right,” he said. “Quite right.”

He stooped down and put one hand beneath the drunk, who murmured unintelligibly. With the other he removed the jacket, a maneuver betraying practice, for it elicited no protest from the victim. He then performed the still more delicate operation of depriving him of his shirt and shoes, tossing them all to me. They were a loathsome collection of rags not fit to clean a manure spreader. The jacket was torn and greasy, the pockets hanging like the ears of a dog; the shirt was a filthy tatter, the shoes shapeless fragments of leather with great gapes in the soles.

“It's stealing,” I protested.

“Right. Put them on and let's get out of here.”

The short walk to the river was through streets lacking the glamour of those of the day before. The tenements were smoke streaked, with steps between the parting bricks where mortar had fallen out; great hunks of wall were kept in place only by the support of equally crazy ones abutting. The wretched things I wore were better suited than Pondible's to this neighborhood, though his would have marked him tramp and vagrant in Wappinger Falls.

The Hudson, too, was soiled, with an oily scum and debris, so that I hesitated to dip even the purloined shirt, much less my aching head. But urged on by Pondible I climbed down the slimy stones between two docks and pushing the flotsam aside, ducked myself in the unappetizing water.

“Fixes your head,” said Pondible with more assurance than accuracy. “Now for mine.”

The sun was hot, and the shirt dried on my back as we walked away from the river, the jacket over my arm. Now that my mind was clearing my despair grew rapidly; for a moment I wished I had waded farther into the Hudson and drowned.

Admitting any plans I'd had were nebulous and impractical, they had yet been plans of a kind, something in which I could put, or force, my hopes. My appearance had been presentable, I had the means to keep myself fed and sheltered for a few weeks at least. Now everything was changed, any future was gone, literally knocked out of existence, and I had nothing to look forward to, nothing on which to exert my energies and dreams. To go back to Wappinger Falls was out of the question, not simply to dodge the bitterness of admitting defeat so quickly, but because I knew how relieved my mother and father must have been to be freed of my uselessness. Yet I had nothing to expect in the city except starvation or a life of petty crime.

Pondible guided me into a saloon, a dark, secretive place, gaslit even this early, with a steam piano tinkling the popular, mournful tune, Mormon Girl :

There's a girl in the state of Deseret

I love and I'm trying to for-get.

Forget her for my tired feet's sake Don't wanna walk to the Great Salt Lake.

They ever build that railroad toooo the ocean

I'd return my Mormon girl's devotion.

But the tracks stop short in Ioway…

I couldn't remember the next line. Something about Injuns say.

“Shot,” Pondible ordered the bartender, “and buttermilk for my chum here.”

The bartender kept on polishing the wood in front of him with a wet, dirty rag. “Got any jack?”

“Pay you tomorrow, friend.”

The bartender's uninterrupted industry said clearly, then drink tomorrow.

“Listen,” argued Pondible; “I'm tapering off. You know me. I've spent plenty of money here.”

The bartender shrugged. “I don't own the place; anything goes over the bar has to be rung up on the cash register.”

“You're lucky to have a job that pays wages.”

“Times I'm not so sure. Why don't you indent?”

Pondible looked shocked. “At my age? What would a company pay for a worn-out old carcass? A hundred dollars at the top. Then a release in a couple of years with a med holdback so I'd have to report every week somewhere. No, friend, I've come through this long a free man—in a manner of speaking—and I'll stick it out. Let's have that shot; you can see for yourself I'm tapering off. You'll get your jack tomorrow.”

I could see the bartender was weakening; each refusal was less surly, and at last, to my astonishment, he set out a glass and bottle for Pondible and an earthenware mug of buttermilk for me. To my astonishment, I say, for credit was rarely extended on any scale, large or small. The inflation, though sixty years in the past, had left indelible impressions; people paid cash or did without. Debt was not only disgraceful, it was dangerous; the notion things could be paid for while, or even after, they were being used was as unthinkable as was the idea of circulating paper money instead of silver or gold.

I drank my buttermilk slowly, gratefully aware Pondible had ordered the most filling and sustaining liquid in the saloon. For all his unprepossessing appearance and peculiar moral notions, my new acquaintance seemed to have a rude wisdom as well as a rude kindliness.

He swallowed his whiskey and called for a quart pot of light beer which he sipped slowly. “That's the trick of it, Hodge. Avoid the second shot. If you can.” He sipped again. “Now what?”

“What?” I repeated.

“Now what are you going to do? What's your aim in life anyway?”

“None—now. I… wanted to learn. To study.”

He frowned. “Out of books?”

“How else?”

“Books is mostly written and printed in foreign countries.”

“There might be more written here if more people had time to learn.”

Pondible wiped specks of froth from his beard with the back of his hand. “Might and mightn't. Oh, some of my best friends are book readers, don't get me wrong, boy.”

“I'd thought,” I burst out, “I'd thought to try Columbia College. To offer—to beg to be allowed to do any kind of work for tuition.”

“Hmm. I doubt it would have worked.”

“Anyway I can't go now, looking like this.”

“Might be as well. We need fighters, not readers.”

“'We'?”

He did not explain. “Well, you could always take the advice our friend here gave me and indent. A young healthy lad like you could get yourself a thousand or twelve hundred dollars—” “Sure. And be a slave for the rest of my life.”

“Oh, indenting ain't slavery. It's better. And worse. For one thing the company that buys you won't hold you after you aren't worth your keep. Not that long, on account of bookkeeping; they lose when they break even. So they cancel your indenture without a cent of payment. Course they'll take a med holdback so as to get a dollar or two for your corpse, but that's a long time away for you.”

An inconceivably long time. The medical holdback was the least of my distaste, though it had played a large part in the discussions at home. My mother had heard that cadavers for dissection were shipped to foreign medical schools like so much cargo. She was shocked not so much at the thought of the scientific use of her dead body as at its disposal outside the United States.

“Yes,” I said. “A long time away. So I wouldn't be a slave for life; just thirty or forty years. Till I wasn't any good to anyone, including myself.”