A Fable

‘But you’re not an ordained priest. Then how could you confirm him into your church?’

‘Hush, Pappy,’ the youth said.

‘Wait,’ the runner said. ‘I know. He made you a Mason too.’

‘Suppose he did,’ the old Negro said. ‘You and this boy are alike. You think maybe I never had no right to make him a christian, but you know he never had no business making me a Mason. But which do you think is the lightest to undertake: to tell a man to act like the head Mason thinks he ought to act, that’s just another man trying to know what’s right to do, or to tell him how the head of Heaven knows he ought to act, that’s God and knows what’s right to ease his suffering and save him?’

‘All right,’ the runner said. ‘It was October——’

‘Only this time they knowed where he was. “France?” I says, with this boy already jerking at my sleeve and saying, “Come on, Grampaw. Come on, Grampaw.” “Which way is that?” I says. “Is that in Tennessee too?”

‘ “Come on, Grampaw,” this boy says. “I knows where it is.” ’

‘Yes,’ the runner said to the youth. ‘I’ll get to you in a moment too.’ He said to the old Negro: ‘So you came to France. I wont even ask how you did that with no money. Because that was God. Wasn’t it?’

‘It was the Society,’ the youth said. Only he didn’t say ‘society’: he said ‘société’.

‘Yes,’ the runner said to the youth. He said in French, his best French: the glib smart febrile argot immolated into the international salons via the nightclubs from the Paris gutter: ‘I wondered who did the talking for him. It was you, was it?’

‘Someone had to,’ the youth said, in still better French, the French of the Sorbonne, the Institute, the old Negro listening, peaceful and serene, until he said:

‘His mamma was a New Orleans girl. She knowed gobble talk. That’s where he learned it.’

‘But not the accent,’ the runner said. ‘Where did you get that?’

‘I dont know,’ the youth said. ‘I just got it.’

‘Could you “just get” Greek or Latin or Spanish the same way?’

‘I aint tried,’ the youth said. ‘I reckon I could, if they aint no harder than this one.’

‘All right,’ the runner said, to the old Negro now. ‘Did you have the Society before you left America?’ and heard that, insequent and without order or emphasis, like dream too: they were in New York, who a year ago had not known that the earth extended further than the distance between Lexington, Kentucky, and Louisville until they walked on it, trod with their actual feet the hard enduring ground bearing the names Louisiana and Missouri and Texas and Arkansas and Ohio and Tennessee and Alabama and Mississippi—words which until then had been as foundationless and homeless as the ones meaning Avalon or Astalot or Ultima Thule. Then immediately there was a woman in it, a ‘lady’, not young, richly in furs—

‘I know,’ the runner said. ‘She was in the car with you that day last spring when you came up to Amiens. The one whose son is in the French air squadron that she is supporting.’

‘Was,’ the youth said. ‘Her boy is dead. He was a volunteer, one of the first airmen killed in the French service. That’s when she began to give money to support the squadron.’

‘Because she was wrong,’ the old Negro said.

‘Wrong?’ the runner said. ‘Oh. Her dead son’s monument is a machine to kill as many Germans as possible because one German killed him? Is that it? And when you told her so, it was just like that morning in the woods when you talked to the horse-thief and then baptised him in the creek and saved him? All right, tell me.’

‘Yes,’ the old Negro said, and told it: the three of them traversing a succession almost like avatars: from what must have been a Park Avenue apartment, to what must have been a Wall Street office, to another office, room: a youngish man with a black patch over one eye and a cork leg and a row of miniature medals on his coat, and an older man with a minute red thing like a toy rosebud in his buttonhole, talking gobble talk to the lady and then to the youth too—

‘A French consulate?’ the runner said. ‘Looking for a British soldier?’

‘It was Verdun,’ the youth said.

‘Verdun?’ the runner said. ‘That was just last year—1916. It took you until 1916——’

‘We was walking and working. Then Pappy begun to hear them——’

‘There was too many of them,’ the old Negro said. ‘Men and boys, marching for months down into one muddy ditch to kill one another. There was too many of them. There wasn’t room to lay quiet and rest. All you can kill is man’s meat. You cant kill his voice. And if there is enough of the meat, without even room to lay quiet and rest, you can hear it too.’

‘Even if it’s not saying anything but Why?’ the runner said.

‘What can trouble you more than having a human man saying to you, Tell me why. Tell me how. Show me the way?’

‘And you can show him the way?’

‘I can believe,’ the old Negro said.

‘So because you believed, the French government sent you to France.’

‘It was the lady,’ the youth said. ‘She paid for it.’