John Passos - The 42nd Parallel

In Salem, Ike found that he had a dose and Mac couldn’t sleep nights worrying for fear he might have it too. They tried to go to a doctor in Salem. He was a big roundfaced man with a hearty laugh. When they said they didn’t have any money he guessed it was all right and that they could do some chores to pay for the consultation, but when he heard it was a venereal disease he threw them out with a hot lecture on the wages of sin.

They trudged along the road, hungry and footsore; Ike had fever and it hurt him to walk. Neither of them said anything. Finally they got to a small fruitshipping station where there were watertanks, on the main line of the Southern Pacific. There Ike said he couldn’t walk any further, that they’d have to wait for a freight. “Jesus Christ, jail ’ud be better than this.”

“When you’re outa luck in this man’s country, you certainly are outa luck,” said Mac and for some reason they both laughed.

Among the bushes back of the station they found an old tramp boiling coffee in a tin can. He gave them some coffee and bread and baconrind and they told him their troubles. He said he was headed south for the winter and that the thing to cure it up was tea made out of cherry pits and stems. “But where the hell am I going to get cherry pits and stems?” Anyway he said not to worry, it was no worse than a bad cold. He was a cheerful old man with a face so grimed with dirt it looked like a brown leather mask. He was going to take a chance on a freight that stopped there to water a little after sundown. Mac dozed off to sleep while Ike and the old man talked. When he woke up Ike was yelling at him and they were all running for the freight that had already started. In the dark Mac missed his footing and fell flat on the ties. He wrenched his knee and ground cinders into his nose and by the time he had got to his feet all he could see were the two lights on the end of the train fading into the November haze.

That was the last he saw of Ike Hall.

He got himself back on the road and limped along until he came to a ranch house. A dog barked at him and worried his ankles but he was too down and out to care. Finally a stout woman came to the door and gave him some cold biscuits and applesauce and told him he could sleep in the barn if he gave her all his matches. He limped to the barn and snuggled into a pile of dry sweetgrass and went to sleep.

In the morning the rancher, a tall ruddy man named Thomas, with a resonant voice, went over to the barn and offered him work for a few days at the price of his board and lodging. They were kind to him, and had a pretty daughter named Mona that he kinder fell in love with. She was a plump rosy-cheeked girl, strong as a boy and afraid of nothing. She punched him and wrestled with him; and, particularly after he’d gotten fattened up a little and rested, he could hardly sleep nights for thinking of her. He lay in his bed of sweetgrass telling over the touch of her bare arm that rubbed along his when she handed him back the nozzle of the sprayer for the fruittrees, or was helping him pile up the pruned twigs to burn, and the roundness of her breasts and her breath sweet as a cow’s on his neck when they romped and played tricks on each other evenings after supper. But the Thomases had other ideas for their daughter and told Mac that they didn’t need him any more. They sent him off kindly with a lot of good advice, some old clothes and a cold lunch done up in a newspaper, but no money. Mona ran after him as he walked off down the dustyrutted wagonroad and kissed him right in front of her parents. “I’m stuck on you,” she said. “You make a lot of money and come back and marry me.” “By gum, I’ll do that,” said Mac, and he walked off with tears in his eyes and feeling very good. He was particularly glad he hadn’t got the clap off that girl in Seattle.

Paris Shocked At Last

HARRIMAN SHOWN AS RAIL COLOSSUS

noted swindler run to earth

TEDDY WIELDS BIG STICK

straphangers demand relief.

We were sailing along

On moonlight bay

You can hear the voices ringing

They seem to say

You have stolen my heart, now don’t go away

Just as we sang

love’s

old

sweet

songs

On moonlight bay

MOB LYNCHES AFTER PRAYER

when the metal poured out of the furnace I saw the men running to a place of safety. To the right of the furnace I saw a party of ten men all of them running wildly and their clothes a mass of flames. Apparently some of them had been injured when the explosion occurred and several of them tripped and fell. The hot metal ran over the poor men in a moment.

PRAISE MONOPOLY AS BOON TO ALL

industrial foes work for peace at Mrs. Potter Palmer’s

love’s

old

sweet

song

We were sailing along

on moonlight bay

skating on the pond next the silver company’s mills where there was a funny fuzzy smell from the dump whale-oil soap somebody said it was that they used in cleaning the silver knives and spoons and forks putting shine on them for sale there was shine on the ice early black ice that rang like a sawblade just scratched white by the first skaters I couldn’t learn to skate and kept falling down look out for the muckers everybody said bohunk and polak kids put stones in their snowballs write dirty words up on walls do dirty things up alleys their folks work in the mills

we clean young American Rover Boys handy with tools Deerslayers played hockey Boy Scouts and cut figure eights on the ice Achilles Ajax Agamemnon I couldn’t learn to skate and kept falling down

Luther Burbank was born in a brick farmhouse in Lancaster Mass,

he walked round the woods one winter

crunching through the shinycrusted snow

stumbled into a little dell where a warm spring was

and found the grass green and weeds sprouting

and skunk cabbage pushing up a potent thumb,

He went home and sat by the stove and read Darwin

Struggle for Existence Origin of Species Natural

Selection that wasn’t what they taught in church,

so Luther Burbank ceased to believe moved to Lunenburg,

found a seedball in a potato plant

sowed the seed and cashed in on Mr. Darwin’s Natural Selection

on Spencer and Huxley

with the Burbank Potato.

Young man go west;

Luther Burbank went to Santa Rosa

full of his dream of green grass in winter ever

blooming flowers ever

bearing berries; Luther Burbank

could cash in on Natural Selection Luther Burbank

carried his apocalyptic dream of green grass in winter

and seedless berries and stoneless plums and thornless roses brambles cactus—

winters were bleak in that bleak

brick farmhouse in bleak Massachusetts—

out to sunny Santa Rosa;

and he was a sunny old man

where roses bloomed all year

everblooming everbearing

hybrids.

America was hybrid

America should cash in on Natural Selection.

He was an infidel he believed in Darwin and Natural

Selection and the influence of the mighty dead

and a good firm shipper’s fruit

suitable for canning.

He was one of the grand old men until the churches

and the congregations

got wind that he was an infidel and believed

in Darwin.

Luther Burbank had never a thought of evil,

selecting improved hybrids for America

those sunny years in Santa Rosa.

But he brushed down a wasp’s nest that time;

he wouldn’t give up Darwin and Natural Selection