John Passos - The 42nd Parallel

A hand dropped onto his shoulder. Doc Bingham was standing beside him.

“Fenian, my young friend, we are in clover,” he said. “She is alone in the house, and her husband has gone to town for two days with the hired man. There’ll be nobody there but her two little children, sweet bairns. Perhaps I shall play Romeo. You’ve never seen me in love. It’s my noblest role. Ah, some day I’ll tell you about my headstrong youth. Come and meet the sweet charmer.”

When they went in the kitchen door a dimplefaced pudgy woman in a lavender housecap greeted them coyly.

“This is my young assistant, ma’am,” said Doc Bingham, with a noble gesture. “Fenian, this is Mrs. Kovach.”

“You must be hungry. We’re having supper right away.”

The last of the sun lit up a kitchen range that was crowded with saucepans and stewpots. Fragrant steam rose in little jets from round wellpolished lids. As she spoke Mrs. Kovach leaned over so that her big blue behind with starched apronstrings tied in a bow above it stood up straight in the air, opened the oven door and pulled out a great pan of cornmuffins that she dumped into a dish on the dining table already set next the window. Their warm toasted smoke filled the kitchen. Fainy felt his mouth watering. Doc Bingham was rubbing his hands and rolling his eyes. They sat down, and the two blue-eyed smearyfaced children were sat down and started gobbling silently, and Mrs. Kovach heaped their plates with stewed tomatoes, mashed potatoes, beef stew and limabeans with pork. She poured them out coffee and then said with moist eyes, as she sat down herself:

“I love to see men eat.”

Her face took on a crushed pansy look that made Fainy turn away his eyes when he found himself looking at it. After supper she sat listening with a pleased, frightened expression while Doc Bingham talked and talked, now and then stopping to lean back and blow a smoke ring at the lamp.

“While not myself a Lutheran as you might say, ma’am, I myself have always admired, nay, revered, the great figure of Martin Luther as one of the lightbringers of mankind. Were it not for him we would be still groveling under the dread domination of the Pope of Rome.”

“They’ll never get into this country; land sakes, it gives me the creeps to think of it.”

“Not while there’s a drop of red blood in the veins of freeborn Protestants… but the way to fight darkness, ma’am, is with light. Light comes from education, reading of books and studies…”

“Land sakes, it gives me a headache to read most books, an’ I don’t get much time, to tell the truth. My husband, he reads books he gets from the Department of Agriculture. He tried to make me read one once, on raisin’ poultry, but I couldn’t make much sense out of it. His folks they come from the old country… I guess people feels different over there.”

“It must be difficult being married to a foreigner like that.”

“Sometimes I don’t know how I stand it; course he was awful goodlookin’when I married him… I never could resist a goodlookin’ man.”

Doc Bingham leaned further across the table. His eyes rolled as if they were going to drop out.

“I never could resist a goodlooking lady.”

Mrs. Kovach sighed deeply.

Fainy got up and went out. He’d been trying to get in a word about getting paid, but what was the use? Outside it was chilly; the stars were bright above the roofs of the barns and outhouses. From the chickencoop came an occasional sleepy cluck or the rustle of feathers as a hen lost her balance on her perch. He walked up and down the barnyard cursing Doc Bingham and kicking at an occasional clod of manure.

Later he looked into the lamplit kitchen. Doc Bingham had his arm around Mrs. Kovach’s waist and was declaiming verses, making big gestures with his free hand:

… These things to hear

Would Desdemona seriously incline

But still the house affairs would draw her hence

Which ever as she could with haste dispatch

She’d come again and with a greedy ear…

Fainy shook his fist at the window. “Goddam your hide, I want my money,” he said aloud. Then he went for a walk down the road. When he came back he was sleepy and chilly. The kitchen was empty and the lamp was turned down low. He didn’t know where to go to sleep, so he settled down to warm himself in a chair beside the fire. His head began to nod and he fell asleep.

A tremendous thump on the floor above and a woman’s shrieks woke him. His first thought was that Doc Bingham was robbing and murdering the woman. But immediately he heard another voice cursing and shouting in broken English. He had half gotten up from the chair, when Doc Bingham dashed past him. He had on only his flannel unionsuit. In one hand were his shoes, in the other his clothes. His trousers floated after him at the end of his suspenders like the tail of a kite.

“Hey, what are we going to do?” Fainy called after him, but got no answer. Instead he found himself face to face with a tall dark man with a scraggly black beard who was coolly fitting shells into a doublebarrelled shotgun.

“Buckshot. I shoot the sonabitch.”

“Hey, you can’t do that,” began Fainy. He got the butt of the shotgun in the chest and went crashing down into the chair again. The man strode out the door with a long elastic stride, and there followed two shots that went rattling among the farm buildings. Then the woman’s shrieks started up again, punctuating a longdrawnout hysterical tittering and sobbing.

Fainy sat in the chair by the stove as if glued to it.

He noticed a fiftycent piece on the kitchen floor that must have dropped out of Doc Bingham’s pants as he ran. He grabbed it and had just gotten it in his pocket when the tall man with the shotgun came back.

“No more shells,” he said thickly. Then he sat down on the kitchen table among the uncleared supper dishes and began to cry like a child, the tears trickling through the knobbed fingers of his big dark hands. Fainy stole out of the door and went to the barn. “Doc Bingham,” he called gently. The harness lay in a heap between the shafts of the wagon, but there was no trace of Doc Bingham or of the piebald horse. The frightened clucking of the hens disturbed in the hencoop mixed with the woman’s shrieks that still came from upstairs in the farmhouse. “What the hell shall I do?” Fainy was asking himself when he caught sight of a tall figure outlined in the bright kitchen door and pointing the shotgun at him. Just as the shotgun blazed away he ducked into the barn and out through the back door. Buckshot whined over his head. “Gosh, he found shells.” Fainy was off as fast as his legs could carry him across the oatfield. At last, without any breath in his body, he scrambled over a railfence full of briars that tore his face and hands and lay flat in a dry ditch to rest. There was nobody following him.

“IT TAKES NERVE TO LIVE IN THIS WORLD” LAST WORDS OF GEORGE SMITH HANGED WITH HIS BROTHER BY MOB IN KANSAS MARQUIS OF QUEENSBERRY DEAD FLAMES WRECK SPICE PLANT COURT SETS ZOLA FREE

a few years ago the anarchists of New Jersey, wearing the McKinley button and the red badge of anarchy on their coats and supplied with beer by the republicans, plotted the death of one of the crowned heads of Europe and it is likely that the plan to assassinate the president was hatched at the same time or soon afterward

It’s moonlight fair tonight upon the Wabash

From the fields there comes the breath of newmown hay

Through the sycamores the candlelight is gleaming

On the banks of the Wabash far away

OUT FOR BULLY GOOD TIME

Six Thousand Workmen at Smolensk Parade With Placards Saying Death To Czar Assassin.