: Two Whole Glorious Weeks by Mohler Will Freas Kelly Illustrator - Science fiction; Short stories; Vacations Fiction; Catskill Mountains Region (N.Y.) Fiction; Camps Fiction

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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.

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