Read Ebook: Two Whole Glorious Weeks by Mohler Will Freas Kelly Illustrator

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Ebook has 31 lines and 5465 words, and 1 pages

I do not remember that anyone spoke to me directly or, at least, coherently enough so that words lodged in my memory, but someone must have explained the general pattern of activity. The object, it seemed, was to move all this soggy fertilizer from its present imposing site to another small but growing pile located about three hundred yards distant. This we were to accomplish by filling paper cement bags with the manure and carrying it, a bag at a time, to the more distant pile. Needless to say, the bags frequently dissolved or burst at the lower seams. This meant scraping up the stuff with the hands and refilling another paper bag. Needless to say, also, pitchforks and shovels were forbidden at the Farm, as was any potentially dangerous object which could be lifted, swung or hurled. It would have been altogether redundant to explain this rule.

I have absolutely no way of knowing how long we labored at this Augean enterprise; my watch had been taken from me, of course, and of the strange dislocation of my normal time-sense I have already spoken. I do remember that floodlights had been turned on long before a raucous alarm sounded, indicating that it was time for supper.

Impressions of this character have a way of entrenching themselves, perhaps at the cost of more meaningful ones. Conversation at the Farm was monosyllabic and infrequent, so it may merely be that I recall most lucidly those incidents with which some sort of communication was associated. A small man sitting opposite me in the mess hall gloomily indicated the dumpling at which I was picking dubiously.

"They'll bind ya," he said with the finality of special and personal knowledge. "Ya don't wanta let yaself get bound here. They've got a--"

I don't now recall whether I said something or whether I merely held up my hand. I do know that I had no wish to dwell on the subject.

If I had hoped for respite after "supper," it was at that time that I learned not to hope. Back to "The Big Rock Candy Mountain" we went, and under the bleak, iridescent glare of the lights we resumed our labor of no reward. One by one I felt my synapses parting, and one by one, slowly and certainly, the fragile membranes separating the minute from the hour, the Now from the Then, and the epoch out of unmeasured time softened and sloughed away. I was, at last, Number 109 at work on a monstrous manure pile, and I labored with the muscles and nerves of an undifferentiated man. I experienced change.

I knew now that my identity, my ego, was an infinitesimal thing which rode along embedded in a mountain of more or less integrated organisms, more or less purposeful tissues, fluids and loosely articulated bones, as a tiny child rides in the cab of a locomotive. And the rain came down and the manure bags broke and we scrabbled with our hands to refill new ones.

The raucous alarm sounded again, and a voice which might have been that of a hospital nurse or of an outraged parrot announced that it was time for "Beddy-by." And in a continuous, unbroken motion we slogged into another long building, discarded our coveralls, waded through a shallow tank of cloudy disinfectant solution and were finally hosed down by the guards. I remember observing to myself giddily that I now knew how cars must feel in an auto laundry. There were clean towels waiting for us at the far end of the long building, but I must have just blotted the excess water off myself in a perfunctory way, because I still felt wet when I donned the clean coverall that someone handed me.

"Beddy-by" was one of a row of thirty-odd slightly padded planks like ironing boards, which were arranged at intervals of less than three feet in another long, low-ceilinged barracks. I knew that I would find no real release in "Beddy-by"--only another dimension of that abiding stupor which now served me for consciousness. I may have groaned, croaked, whimpered, or expressed myself in some other inarticulate way as I measured the length of the board with my carcass; I only remember that the others did so. There was an unshaded light bulb hanging directly over my face. To this day, I cannot be sure that this bleak beacon was ever turned off. I think not. I can only say with certainty that it was burning just as brightly when the raucous signal sounded again, and the unoiled voice from the loudspeaker announced that it was time for the morning Cheer-Up Entertainment.

I am happy to report that I do not remember them more specifically than this, but I was probably more impressed by the delivery than the message delivered. I could not imagine where they had discovered these women. During their performance, some sense of duration was restored to me; while I could be certain of nothing pertaining to the passage of time, it is not possible that the Cheer-Up period lasted less than two hours. Then they let us go to the latrine.

After a breakfast of boiled cabbage and dry pumpernickel crusts--more savory than you might imagine--we were assigned to our work for the day. I had expected to return to the manure pile, but got instead the rock quarry. I remember observing then, with no surprise at all, that the sun was out and the day promised to be a hot one.

The work at the rock quarry was organized according to the same futilitarian pattern that governed the manure-pile operation. Rock had to be hacked, pried and blasted from one end of the quarry, then reduced to coarse gravel with sledge-hammers and carted to the other end of the excavation in wheelbarrows. Most of the men commenced working at some task in the quarry with the automatic unconcern of trained beasts who have paused for rest and water, perhaps, but have never fully stopped. A guard indicated a wheelbarrow to me and uttered a sharp sound ... something like HUP! I picked up the smooth handles of the barrow, and time turned its back upon us again.

It was that night--or perhaps the following night--that Bertha and I had our first fifteen-minute visit with each other. She was changed: her face glowed with feverish vitality, her hair was stringy and moist, and her eyes were serenely glassy. She had not been more provocative in twenty-five years. An old dormant excitement stirred within me--microscopically but unmistakably.

She told me that she had been put to work in the jute mill, but had passed out and had been transferred to the steam laundry. Her job in the laundry was to sort out the socks and underwear that were too bad to go in with the rest of the wash. We speculated on where the socks and underwear could have come from, as such fripperies were denied to us at the Farm. We also wondered about the manure, considering that no animals were in evidence here. Both, we concluded, must have been shipped in specially from the Outside. We found it in us to giggle, when the end of the visit was announced, over our own choice of conversational material for that precious quarter hour. Thereafter, when we could catch glimpses of each other during the day, we would exchange furtive signals, then go about our work exhilarated by the fiction that we shared some priceless Cabalistic knowledge.

The grim Captain made an appearance in the rock quarry one morning just as we were beginning work. He stood on top of a pile of stones, swinging his kidney-sap from his wrist and letting his eyes sweep over us as though selecting one for slaughter.

When the silence had soaked in thoroughly, he announced in his cold, incisive tone that "there will be no rest periods, no chow, no 'Beddy-by,' until this entire rock face is reduced to ballast rock." He indicated a towering slab of stone. We raised our heads only long enough to reassure ourselves of the utter hopelessness of the task before us. Not daring to look at each other closely, fearing to see our own despair reflected in the faces of others, we picked up our hammers and crowbars and crawled to the top of the monolithic mass. The film must have cleared from my eyes then, momentarily.

"Why--this thing is nothing but a huge writing slate," I said to a small, bald inmate beside me. He made a feeble noise in reply. The Captain left, and the only other guard now relaxed in the shade of a boulder nearly fifty yards away. He was smoking a forbidden cigar. Suddenly and unaccountably, I felt a little taller than the others, and everything looked unnaturally clear. The slab was less than six inches wide at the top!

"If we work this thing right, this job will practically do itself. We'll be through here before sundown," I heard myself snap out. The others, accustomed now to obeying any imperative voice, fell to with crowbars and peaveys as I directed them. "Use them as levers," I said. "Don't just flail and hack--pry!" No one questioned me. When all of the tools were in position I gave the count:

The huge slab finally leaned out, wavered for a queasy moment, then fell with a splintering crash onto the boulders below. After the dust settled, we could see that much of the work of breaking up the mass was already accomplished. We descended and set to work with an enthusiasm that was new.

Long before sundown, of course, we were marched back to the latrine and then to the mess hall. Later I had expected that some further work would be thrust upon us, but it didn't happen. The grim Captain stopped me as I entered the mess hall. I froze. There was a queer smile on his face, and I had grown to fear novelty.

"You had a moment," he said, simply and declaratively. "You didn't miss it, did you?"

"No," I replied, not fully understanding. "No, I didn't miss it."

"You are more fortunate than most," he went on, still standing between me and the mess hall. "Some people come here year after year, or they go to other places like this, or permit themselves to be confined in the hulls of old submarines, and some even apprentice themselves to medical missionaries in Equatorial Africa; they expose themselves to every conceivable combination of external conditions, but nothing really happens to them. They feel nothing except a fleeting sensation of contrast--soon lost in a torrent of other sensations. No 'moment'; only a brief cessation of the continuing pleasure process. You have been one of the fortunate few, Mr. Devoe."

Then the film dissolved--finally and completely--from the surface of my brain, and my sense of time returned to me in a flood of ordered recollections. Hours and days began to arrange themselves into meaningful sequence. Was it possible that two whole glorious weeks could have passed so swiftly?

"You and Mrs. Devoe may leave tonight or in the morning, just as you prefer," said the Captain.

Bertha and I have had little to say to one another as we wait in the office for the car that will take us to the heliport. For the moment--this moment--it suffices that we stand here in our own clothes, that we have tasted coffee again, brought to us on a tray by a matron whose manner towards us bordered on the obsequious, and that the aroma of a cigarette is just as gratifying as ever.

We will go back to our ten-room apartment on the ninety-first floor of the New Empire State Hotel; back to our swimming pool, our three-dimensional color television, our anti-gravity sleeping chambers, our impeccably efficient, relentlessly cheerful robot servants, and our library of thrills, entertainment, solace, diversion and escape--all impressed on magnetic tape and awaiting our pleasure.

I will go back to my five kinds of cigars and my sixteen kinds of brandy; Bertha will return to her endless fantasy of pastries and desserts--an endless, joyous parade of goodies, never farther away than the nearest dumb-waiter door. And we will both become softer, heavier, a little less responsive.

When, as sometimes happens, the sweet lethargy threatens to choke off our breath, we will step into our flying platform and set its automatic controls for Miami, Palm Beach, or the Cote d'Azur. There are conducted tours to the Himalayas now, or to the "lost" cities of the South American jungles, or to the bottom of any one of the seven seas. We will bide our time, much as others do.

But we will survive these things: I still have my four hours per month at Central Computing and Control; Bertha has her endless and endlessly varying work on committees .

We cannot soften and slough away altogether, for when all else fails, when the last stronghold of the spirit is in peril, there is always the vision of year's end and another glorious vacation.

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