Colson Whitehead - John Henry Days

Herbert knocks on the door and Guy answers that he’ll be downstairs soon. He truly is a clever boy; Guy wishes there were more opportunities for him in this town. He searches the floor for the insect, but it has disappeared, abandoning the lemon sour. Too much to digest. Herbert and Guy are to return to Talcott this afternoon. Mr. Arnett, a retired conductor on the C&O, told Guy yesterday that his great-uncle was a foreman on the Big Bend job and saw the race with — what else—“his own eyes.” He gave Herbert directions; the man is a bit of hermit, from his relative’s description. “All these people talk about the day of the race around these parts, but they never seen it with their own eyes. If anybody seen it,” Mr. Arnett insisted, “it’s my uncle.” Guy is exhausted, his morale depleted, but what other course is there for him? This is my profession, he reminds himself. He puts on his coat, grabs his satchel and his hand starts for the doorknob. But he has forgotten something. He opens his billfold and removes the paper. Each morning when he leaves his house, to prepare himself for his daily battle with university intrigue, he reads what he has written there. Since he arrived in Hinton, he consults it whenever he is about to begin another foray into the field. He reads, we make our own machines and devise our own contests in which to engage them.

He shuts the door behind him, thinking, perhaps this will be the one.

Even when he doesn’t want to Bobby hears the song. Since the day he was born. Always and especially today.

He’s about to leave the house with his shirttail hanging out when his mother stops him and reminds. He can’t go out the house looking like that, not today.

When he’s not at his father’s garage handing his father his tools and putting them back on the peg when his father is done using them, sometimes Bobby goes out back to the little pond and watches the frogs leap.

Sometimes he goes to the library and looks at the snake book. He knows right where it is on the shelf. He can get a ride home usually because everybody knows him, it’s not too bad.

But today he’s not doing either of those things. The frogs don’t come out when it’s hot like this until the shade gets over the water and it’s the big fair today so the library is closed, like when Miss Fletcher is sick and the sign says closed. Today he’s going out to the tree.

And sometimes he goes into the tunnel and listens to the hammers, but he’s not doing that right now. Maybe later, even though he’s wearing his new sneakers and the tunnel is full of puddles and he’ll ruin them. There was a bit of a fuss because when he came home last night, he was so tired he just lay on his bed and fell asleep like that in his good clothes. Then when his mother came to dress him this morning she said don’t do that again.

But there were nice people last night at the big dinner and after he sang the song he got an extra piece of cake. That man liked the song so much he jumped up and fell over so Bobby kept singing because the man liked it so much. If you understand sometimes you can act funny like that. John Henry makes you do funny stuff like that sometimes. It was for the John Henry Days that everybody was waiting for and today is the day.

He finds the trail easily, it’s where it always is. You can’t see it if you don’t know where it is, it starts right there between those two trees. Two feet in, the pine trees huddle like two big men. Bobby squeezes between them and he’s in the forest. The trail winds and avoids trees. You can move branches but not trees.

He’s bigger than he was when he first started coming here. Stabbing sticks once at eye level now hit his chest; sticks that once got stuck in his hair now try to get into his belly button. Born big, his father says, and he just got bigger. When he hit thirteen he stopped growing because he was already as big as a man. That’s how his father explains it to him when Bobby sometimes borrows a T-shirt that is too small for him. He likes it when he goes to work with his father and they sit together in the truck both wearing his father’s shirts.

There are slim pine cones and big fat pine cones. There’s no grass, in other places but not here. Every Sunday Bobby has to clean the driveway and he has to sweep away the pine needles. But he doesn’t have to do that in the woods and more and more of the brown pine needles come down and make it so he can’t even see the ground. It’s all brown pine needles and pine cones that slowly lose their nut color and get gray as they go back to nature. He doesn’t have to pick those up either.

When he notices that his shoelaces are untied, flopping off his sneakers, he stops to tie them and that takes five minutes. Usually if he looks at the floor of the forest and concentrates, he can make ants and bugs come out. First one black one maybe and then maybe two black ones then there’s a whole lot of bugs around him. Today he’s kneeling for so long working on his shoelaces that they come out without him even thinking about them and concentrating. There a red one with a black butt, like its mother was a black one and its father a red one and they race-mixed. They’re going to be in trouble if they find out.

Then there is the other thing that happens when he is still. He hears the music better. His mother said she used to sing the song to him when he was in her belly and he remembers it. That’s why. But he thinks it is because it is around all of them, coming through your fingertips if you lean your hand on a tree or touch dirt. You can feel it then especially. His father shakes his head when Bobby tries to tell him this thought.

He was happy that they were happy to hear him sing John Henry last night. They always like it when he sings it, it’s the only song he knows. He first heard a recording of it when he was little, on the radio; he started singing it right along with the voice on the radio and his mother said, listen to that!

She said he had true musical ability. He had heard it before, all along, every day, but for the first time he heard the words. But when they tried to make him sing other songs he just sang the John Henry words to the music. It would be the Star Spangled Banner or Swing Low Sweet Chariot and he’d sing the John Henry words. They didn’t get mad or anything but they stopped trying to make him sing other songs. He only likes to sing John Henry. His mother said to his father, you never know about the things that occur to the boy.

This morning his father said they should pay him if they want him to sing. Bobby works with his father in his father’s garage handing him tools and getting stuff for him and gets his pay in allowance. He stopped going to school when he was thirteen. He was bigger than the other kids and his mother said God has other plans for him. Since then he goes with his father to work and everybody knows him. He’s not allowed to touch the cash register after that time when he did and his father had to drive all the way out to Mr. Beecher’s house to get the change back. His mother said to his father that night, what do you expect, things occur to the boy sometimes. Today is the festival so his father will go only if he gets a beep that someone needs a tow for their car.

He’s almost where there’s a small clearing and it’s white bark trees that are naked until high up and then they have little branches with little leaves. He passes the old tree that fell over years before and now is all green with moss. One time he stepped on it just to see what would happen and the old wood started pouring out like sand. Now there is moss in the hole he made because that was a long time ago. He told his father about it at dinner and his father said it was going back to nature. Everything goes back to nature, he said. The light from the clearing starts coming into the trail and the dark green leaves get light green. When he gets into the little clearing he walks over to the tree that has the mark he made in the bark. When the other people come they won’t even notice the mark because it looks like a scratch. He knows other people come there because sometimes he trips on a rock and there are letters on it. The other people put initials on the rocks, but he doesn’t. He was being sneaky when he made the mark. He was being sneaky when he borrowed the hammer.