John Passos - The 42nd Parallel

“Let’s see one,” said a little man with protruding ears who sat in the corner. He opened the book and started reading greedily. Fainy stood in the center of the car, feeling pins and needles all over. He caught a white glint in the corner of an eyeball as the little man looked down the line of cigars through the crinkly smoke. A touch of pink came into the protruding ears.

“Hot stuff,” said the little man, “but two dollars is too much.”

Fainy found himself stuttering: “They’re nnnot mmmine, sir; I don’t know…”

“Oh, well, what the hell…” The little man dropped two dollar bills in Fainy’s hand and went back to his reading. Fainy had six dollars in his pocket and two books left when he started back to the daycoach. Half way down the car he met the conductor. His heart almost stopped beating. The conductor looked at him sharply but said nothing.

Doc Bingham was sitting in his seat with his head in his hand and his eyes closed as if he were dozing. Fainy slipped into the seat beside him.

“How many did they take?” asked Doc Bingham, talking out of the corner of his mouth without opening his eyes.

“I got six bucks… Golly, the conductor scared me, the way he looked at me.”

“You leave the conductor to me, and remember that it’s never a crime in the face of humanity and enlightenment to distribute the works of the great humanists among the merchants and moneychangers of this godforsaken country… You better slip me the dough.”

Fainy wanted to ask about the dollar he’d been promised, but Doc Bingham was off on Othello again:

If after every tempest there come such calms as this

Then may the laboring bark climb hills of seas

Olympus high.

They slept late at the Commercial House in Saginaw, and ate a large breakfast, during which Doc Bingham discoursed on the theory and practice of book salesmanship. “I am very much afraid that through the hinterland to which we are about to penetrate,” he said as he cut up three fried eggs and stuffed his mouth with bakingpowder biscuit, “that we will find the yokels still hankering after Maria Monk.”

Fainy didn’t know who Maria Monk was, but he didn’t like to ask. He went with Doc Bingham round to Hummer’s livery stable to hire a horse and wagon. There followed a long wrangle between the firm of Truthseeker Inc., and the management of Hummer’s Livery Stable as to the rent of a springwagon and an elderly piebald horse with cruppers you could hang a hat on, so that it was late afternoon before they drove out of Saginaw with their packages of books piled behind them, bound for the road.

It was a chilly spring day. Sagging clouds moved in a gray blur over a bluish silvery sky. The piebald kept slackening to a walk; Fainy clacked the reins continually on his caving rump and clucked with his tongue until his mouth was dry. At the first whack the piebald would go into a lope that would immediately degenerate into an irregular jogtrot and then into a walk. Fainy cursed and clucked, but he couldn’t get the horse to stay in the lope or the jogtrot. Meanwhile Doc Bingham sat beside him with his broad hat on the back of his head, smoking a cigar and discoursing: “Let me say right now, Fenian, that the attitude of a man of enlightened ideas, is, A plague on both your houses … I myself am a pantheist… but even a pantheist… must eat, hence Maria Monk.” A few drops of rain, icy and stinging as hail, had begun to drive in their faces. “I’ll get pneumonia at this rate, and it’ll be your fault, too; I thought you said you could drive a horse… Here, drive into that farmhouse on the left. Maybe they’ll let us put the horse and wagon in their barn.”

As they drove up the lane towards the gray house and the big gray barn that stood under a clump of pines a little off from the road, the piebald slowed to a walk and began reaching for the bright green clumps of grass at the edge of the ditch. Fainy beat at him with the ends of the reins, and even stuck his foot over the dashboard and kicked him, but he wouldn’t budge.

“Goddam it, give me the reins.”

Doc Bingham gave the horse’s head a terrible yank, but all that happened was that he turned his head and looked at them, a green foam of partly chewed grass between his long yellow teeth. To Fainy it looked as if he were laughing. The rain had come on hard. They put their coat collars up. Fainy soon had a little icy trickle down the back of his neck.

“Get out and walk; goddam it to hell, lead it if you can’t drive it,” sputtered Doc Bingham. Fainy jumped out and led the horse up to the back door of the farmhouse; the rain ran down his sleeve from the hand he held the horse by.

“Good afternoon, ma’am.” Doc Bingham was on his feet bowing to a little old woman who had come out of the door. He stood beside her on the stoop out of the rain. “Do you mind if I put my horse and wagon in your barn for a few moments? I have valuable perishable materials in the wagon and no waterproof covering…” The old woman nodded a stringy white head. “Well, that’s very kind of you, I must say… All right, Fenian, put the horse in the barn and come here and bring in that little package under the seat… I was just saying to my young friend here that I was sure that some good samaritan lived in this house who would take in two weary wayfarers.” “Come inside, mister… maybe you’d like to set beside the stove and dry yourself. Come inside, mister-er?” “Doc Bingham’s the name… the Reverend Doctor Bingham,” Fainy heard him say as he went in the house.

He was soaked and shivering when he went into the house himself, carrying a package of books under his arm. Doc Bingham was sitting large as life in a rocking chair in front of the kitchen stove. Beside him on the wellscrubbed deal table was a piece of pie and a cup of coffee. The kitchen had a warm cosy smell of apples and bacon grease and lamps. The old woman was leaning over the kitchen table listening intently to what Doc Bingham was saying. Another woman, a big scrawny woman with her scant sandy hair done up in a screw on top of her head, stood in the background with her red-knuckled hands on her hips. A black and white cat, back arched and tail in the air, was rubbing against Doc Bingham’s legs.

“Ah, Fenian, just in time,” he began in a voice that purred like the cat, “I was just telling… relating to your kind hostesses the contents of our very interesting and educational library, the prime of the world’s devotional and inspirational literature. They have been so kind to us during our little misfortune with the weather that I thought it would be only fair to let them see a few of our titles.”

The big woman was twisting her apron. “I like a mite o’ readin’ fine,” she said, shyly, “but I don’t git much chanct for it, not till wintertime.”

Benignly smiling, Doc Bingham untied the string and pulled the package open on his knees. A booklet dropped to the floor. Fainy saw that it was The Queen of the White Slaves. A shade of sourness went over Doc Bingham’s face. He put his foot on the dropped book. “These are Gospel Talks, my boy,” he said. “I wanted Doctor Spikenard’s Short Sermons for All Occasions .” He handed the halfopen package to Fainy, who snatched it to him. Then he stooped and picked the book up from under his foot with a slow sweeping gesture of the hand and slipped it in his pocket. “I suppose I’ll have to go find them myself,” he went on in his purringest voice. When the kitchen door closed behind them he snarled in Fainy’s ear, “Under the seat, you little rat… If you play a trick like that again I’ll break every goddam bone in your body.” And he brought his knee up so hard into the seat of Fainy’s pants that his teeth clacked together and he shot out into the rain towards the barn. “Honest, I didn’t do it on purpose,” Fainy whined. But Doc Bingham was already back in the house and his voice was burbling comfortably out into the rainy dusk with the first streak of lamplight.