Nelson Algren: A Walk on the Wild Side

Through old Virginia’s tobacco-scented summers the Linkhorns had done little cropping and less sharing. So long as there lay a continent of game to be had for the taking, they cropped no man’s shares for long.

Fierce craving boys, they craved neither slaves nor land. If a man could out-fiddle the man who owned a thousand acres, he was the better man though he owned no more than a cabin and a jug. Burns was their poet.

Slaveless yeomen – yet they had seen how the great landowner, the moment he got a few black hands in, put up his feet on his fine white porch and let the world go hang. So the Linkhorns braced their own narrow backs against their own clapboard shacks, pulled up the jug and let it hang too. Burns was still their poet.

Forever trying to keep from working with their hands, the plantations had pushed them deep into the Southern Ozarks. Where they had hidden out so long, saying A Plague On Both Your Houses, that hiding out had become a way of life with them. ‘It’s Mr Linkhorn’s war. We don’t reckon him kin of our’n,’ they reckoned.

Later they came to town often enough to see that the cotton mills were the plantations all over again: the prescriptive rights of master over men had been transferred whole from plantation to mill. Between one oak-winter and one whippoorwill spring, the Linkhorns pushed on to the Cookson Hills.

Three score years after Appomattox a Linkhorn showed up in the orange-scented noon of the Rio Grande Valley still saying ‘Be Damned To The Lot Of You – Who got the pitcher?’ Had there been an International Convention of White Trash that week, Fitz would have been chairman.

Cotton grew, fruit grew, oil gushed a year and dried. Before it dried Fitz put in a year as a gaffer, made good money and found his girl. A girl who had thought herself rough enough.

Cotton failed, fruit failed – oil had spoiled the soil. It became a country of a single crop, and the crop was dust. Fifteen years of it did the girl in, feeling she’d had enough of oil.

Years begun with oranges and love, till dust blew love down the Gulf with the oranges. Leaving Fitz penniless as ever and more loveless than before. As the nineteen thirties lowered he trotted about town with a hired hose, pumping out cesspools.

And sensed no mockery in being greeted, hip-boots streaming, with a ‘Hiya, Preacher!’

Some of the folk of that little town offered the widower no greeting at all. He was too unpredictable. He would take one man’s jibes without offense and get his back up at another’s ‘Howdy, friend.’ In a town where nearly everyone danced, swore and gambled, the only fun Fitz had left was getting his back up.

He was against modern dancing, modern dress, swearing, gambling, cigarettes and sin. He preached that the long drought of 1930 was God’s way of putting an end to such things. But as the drought went on and on and never a drop of rain he reversed himself and said it must be the pope’s doing.

He was also said to be against fornication. But then it was said he was against corn whiskey too.

Saturday nights he pulled an ancient black frock coat over his patches; a coat with a pocket under the slit of the tail to hold the little brown bottle he called his ‘Kill-Devil.’ Getting stiff on the courthouse steps while denouncing the Roman Catholic clergy was a feat which regularly attracted scoffers and true believers alike, the believers as barefoot as the scoffers. For drunk as a dog or broke as a beggar, Fitz could spout religion like a hog in a bucket of slops.

Sometimes a girl would stand a moment among the men, pretending interest in The Word. But hunger has a scent more dry than love’s and she would move along wishing she were in Dallas.

For many in Arroyo the Lord’s Day was Saturday; but every night of the week was the Lord’s to Fitz.

‘“And when they wanted wine”’ – he put down a mocker who wanted to know what caused the bulge on his hip – ‘“the mother of Jesus saith unto him, ‘Give them wine.’” Satan didn’t claim Jesus’ mother ’count of wine, ah reckon he won’t claim me ’count of a half-pint of busthead.’

‘What cause folk to git dispatched to Hellfire then?’ a believer demanded to know right now.

‘You don’t git “ dispatched ” to Hellfire,’ Fitz assured him – ‘You’re born right in it. Gawd got a fence clean a- round Hell. So a sinner caint git out! Sinner caint dig underneath! Too deep! Sinner caint crawl between! Caint climb over! It’s ee-o-lectrified!’

‘How’d you git out?’ the mocker asked softly. He was astride the barrel of the town howitzer, his face and figure shadowed like a cannoneer’s who has lost both battle and cause.

‘Ah clumb ,’ Fitz explained, and clumb right into his theme – ‘Ah clumb the lowest strand ’cause that’s the strand of LOVE. Ah clumb the second strand ’cause that’s the MERCY strand. Ah clumb the third because ah been LONGSUFFERIN’!’—

‘—thought you said that fence wasee-o-lectrified,’ the cannoneer reminded him, but Fitz was climbing too hard to hear – ‘Ah clumb clean ovah the topmost one of HIS MOST PRECIOUS BLOOD! Brothers! Sisters! Step on the strand of LOVE! Step on the strand of MERCY! Step on the LONGSUFFERING strand and get ready – to cross the strand of THE BLOOD!’

‘You know, I was thinking along those lines myself,’ the cannoneer commented, and spat. Yet Fitz paid him no heed.

‘I know some of you boys come a mighty far way in hope I’d save you for the Heavenly Home,’ he acknowledged. ‘That was my pure intent. But now that I see your actual faces I’ve had a change of mind. Boys, I’m woeful sorry, but the Lord just don’t want a bunch of dirt-eating buggers walking the Streets of Gold. The Lord don’t mind sinners – but he just can’t stand rats. And I’ll be god damned if I’ll take the responsibility!’ – and openly took a defiant swig of his half-pint.

Both skeptics and hopers cheered at that – the old man was warming up. ‘You tell ’em, Preacher! Drink ’er down! Don’t you play whore to no man!’

Fitz smacked his lips, rewound his dirty bandanna about his bottle and replaced it in the hidden pocket.

‘ Now tell us about Temptation, Father,’ the man on the cannon asked, trying to get Fitz pointed at the Pope.

‘I’ll tell you this much about Temptation, Byron Linkhorn,’ the old man answered directly – ‘there are so-called Christians right in this gathering tonight who voted for the Pope in ’28. Do you think the Lord caint remember two year?’

Fitz could forgive a man for using marijuana, but not for voting for Al Smith. Others who had voted for the Pope in ’28 stood silent, letting Byron take the full brunt of their guilt. It was Byron who had ruined everyone’s chance for the New Jerusalem, that silence implied. Now no one could go.

‘Tell the rest of us how to be saved, Preacher,’ one hypocrite pleaded.

‘Or the time you fell in the cesspool,’ Byron stayed in there.

Fitz was hell on the Pope, but Byron was hell on Fitz.

‘The Lord does work in mysterious ways, that’s certain sure,’ the old man found his text – ‘for example, the pitiful critter atop the county property happen to be my son.’

‘Here come the part I come for,’ somebody dug his naked toes in the earth with anticipated pleasure – ‘Here’s where thet busthead starts really taken holt.’

‘—a critter not long for this world,’ Fitz gave hope to all creation – ‘the Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away – and the sooner he taketh away that particular civet, the air hereabouts will be considerable fitter for humans. His lungs is gone, his mind is weak, his heart is dry as an autumn leaf. The brickle thread of his life is ready to snap. I envy him his trials is about to cease!’