Burning boy, p.72
Burning Boy, page 72
In this book of small, exploding fragments, religion is never so much as even mentioned. Church bells ring, but no one is seen in the churches, no one invokes the name of God, and no minister or priest has any role to play in the community. By introducing a character named John Twelve, however, Crane is all but begging the reader to open the Book of John and reread the twelfth chapter. We know how conflicted he was about the religion of his parents and the Christian soldiers of the Whilom drum corps, but Crane knew his Bible well, so well that his prose often carries the rhythms of the King James version deep inside its music, and now that he has alluded to the Book of John in the figure of John Twelve, I wonder if he wasn’t thinking about another verse from another book when John Twelve says to Trescott that he has “changed from the leading doctor in the town to about the last one,” which seems to echo the well-known verse from chapter 20 of the Book of Matthew: “So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen.” Has Trescott been called, and if so, has he been chosen? And if he has been chosen—chosen for what? There is only one plausible answer that comes to mind: for martyrdom. “No, John Twelve,” he says, “it can’t be done.” And with those words he aligns himself with the martyred Henry Johnson against the white men who control the town and becomes a martyr himself. The black man and the white man will henceforth share the same destiny.
God bless America, and long may it wave.
9
the bride comes to yellow sky.
A tragedy followed by a comedy. A shift in tone as drastic as a jump from King Lear to As You Like It, but for all the differences between them, both works are the product of the same imagination, and each one is generated by a series of intractable human conflicts. I mention Shakespeare not to compare him to Crane but because he is the purest example of a writer with a mind large enough and flexible enough to understand that every human being is a collection of many beings and that if I weep today and curse the day I was born, tomorrow I could spring out of bed asking myself what I want for breakfast—scrambled, over easy, or hard-boiled. The line that separates tragedy from comedy is thin, and in Shakespeare’s plays the only difference between the two is what happens in the final act. In Lear, half the characters are lying dead on the stage. In As You Like It, everyone gets married and lives happily ever after. With Crane’s comedy, the twist is that the story begins with a marriage and plays out in reverse, and even if no one dies at the end, there is plenty of human conflict along the way—enough to keep the reader guessing until the last moment.
Both The Monster and “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” are studies in spiritual dislocation. Each one is set in a rural backwater—a small town in New York State and a microscopic Texas village just north of the Rio Grande—and as each place is transformed from something familiar and solid into something alien and incomprehensible, the central characters are forced to cope with the altered reality that has sprung up around them. In The Monster, chance is the agent of disruption (a fire), whereas in Crane’s Western, time is the destabilizing force that upends the old traditions and ultimately destroys them. The novella ends in devastation. The story comes to a stop with a brief, resonant guffaw.
Jack Potter, the veteran marshal of Yellow Sky, has gone off to San Antonio and found himself a bride, and as the story opens the newlyweds are sitting on a train and barreling toward the marshal’s hometown, which is due west from their starting point, but “a glance from the window seemed … to prove that the plains of Texas were pouring eastward.” A common misperception, often experienced on trains, and by slipping it into the first sentence, Crane is subtly announcing the premise that will drive his little work forward: the East has moved in on the West, and the days of the wild frontier are done. He had been thinking about this ever since his travels through Texas two and a half years earlier, and now he was going to bring it to life by showing what happens when the march of civilization runs into its last, ornery holdout and wins a gunfight without firing a gun.
Potter and his new wife are a pair of middle-aged innocents on a once-in-a-lifetime journey, and they are decked out in new clothes that are as strange to them as the fact that they are now married. The sunburned, windburned Potter looks down “respectfully” at his black suit and sits there “with a hand on each knee, like a man waiting in a barber shop.” His bride, who is neither pretty nor “very young,” is embarrassed by her unaccustomed finery and blushes whenever one of the other passengers looks at her. But they are both happy, “very happy,” and fairly stunned by the “dazzling fittings of the coach”—the plush green velvet, the shining brass and silver, the gleaming polished wood. However awkward or intimidated they might feel, Potter is determined to make the most of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. A bit later, they will go to the dining car, he says, and have the “finest meal in the world.” It costs a dollar, he adds, to emphasize how excellent the food will be, and when his timid bride says, “That’s too much—for us—ain’t it, Jack?,” the marshal “bravely” replies: “Not this trip, anyhow. We’re going to go the whole thing.”
In The Monster, Reifsnyder the barber makes a passing reference to Pullman car porters, the all-black contingent of railway employees that was formed in the late 1860s when George Pullman began hiring ex-slaves to serve the white passengers who rode in his newly invented sleeping cars. In the thirty years since then, the porters had established a reputation for elegance, efficiency, and impeccable decorum—the American version of the British valet for long-distance train travelers. No matter how rudely or condescendingly they were treated, the porters could never let down their guard, which made them the most doubled of all the split-in-two black men trapped in Du Bois’s no-man’s-land of “double consciousness.” Writing just three years after the bloody Pullman Strike of 1894, and perhaps wanting to provide a comic antidote to the poisonous black-white relations depicted in The Monster, Crane plants one of these gentlemanly porters on the train to Yellow Sky, and it is through him that we come to understand the full depth of the couple’s naïveté and unworldliness.
To the minds of the pair, their surroundings reflected the glory of their marriage that morning in San Antonio. This was the environment of their new estate, and the man’s face in particular beamed with an elation that made him appear ridiculous to the negro porter. This individual at times surveyed them from afar with an amused and superior grin. On other occasions he bullied them with skill that did not make it exactly plain to them that they were being bullied. He subtly used all the manners of the most unconquerable kind of snobbery. He oppressed them, but of this oppression they had small knowledge, and they speedily forgot that infrequently a number of travelers covered them with stares of derisive enjoyment. Historically there was supposed to be something infinitely humorous in their situation.
Historically. Another one of Crane’s odd word choices, but nevertheless apt and fully congruent with his deeper purpose. History in this case refers not only to the situation on the train but to the history of Yellow Sky, and in that town Potter is a “man known, liked, and feared in his corner, a prominent person,” and as the train approaches its destination, the marshal is feeling more and more unsettled by what he has done—slinking off to San Antonio to get married “without consulting Yellow Sky”—and by shirking his duty toward his friends, or at least what he perceives to be his duty, he is committing “an extraordinary crime.” He knows that people in Yellow Sky marry one another “as it pleased them in accordance with a general custom,” but Potter is different from the others because he is the lawman of the town. He holds himself to a higher standard, and therefore “his deed weighed upon him like a leaden slab.”
A strange form of self-punishment, it would seem, but perhaps a bit less strange when one considers that Potter’s guilt is the same guilt Crane was feeling when he began work on the story. He had just moved to England and set up house with Cora, where they were living as man and wife, but he had kept the marriage hidden from his family in America and would go on hiding it for close to a year and a half, too embarrassed by the nature of that marriage to tell them the truth. In Potter’s case, there is no ocean to protect him from discovery, and the news is bound to get out quickly once he returns, but still, hoping to defer the moment of reckoning as long as he can, he plans to use “all the devices of speed and plains-craft in making the journey from the station to his house.” The train pulls into Yellow Sky. “With all his airy superiority gone,” the porter brushes off the marshal’s new clothes, and Crane adds one more detail to underscore the lawman’s discomfort with the posh world of big-city refinement: “Potter fumbled out a coin and gave it to the porter as he had seen others do. It was a heavy and muscle-bound business, as that of a man shoeing his first horse.” Bags in hand, Potter and his bride scurry away from the station, not even pausing to talk to the station agent, who is running toward them and waving his arms as he sprints along the platform. Potter assumes that the man wants to congratulate him on his marriage, but in fact the agent knows nothing about it. He is trying to warn the marshal that Scratchy Wilson is back in town, all boozed up and itching for a fight. The reader doesn’t know that yet, however—and neither does Potter, who is walking home with his bride on his arm, praying that no one will see them.
The second part of the four-part story begins with a small chronological displacement—similar to the one in The Monster when the fire alarms ring out before the fire has been seen, but this time the jump is backward rather than forward, and there we are in the Weary Gentleman saloon, precisely twenty-one minutes before the California Express makes its stop at Yellow Sky. It is a purely functional scene, inserted to provide the necessary background about badman Scratchy Wilson and his ongoing, yearslong battle with lawman Jack Potter, but Crane is so fully in command of his subject here, and taking such pleasure in the multiple ironies oozing from his sentences, that it hardly makes a difference. From the dog lying in front of the saloon door—“His head was on his paws, and he glanced drowsily here and there with the constant vigilance of a dog that is kicked on occasion”—to the man at the bar saying, “There’ll be some shootin’—some good shootin’,” Crane is both parodying the dime-novel Westerns of his boyhood and embracing their conventions in order to advance his ideas about the mutating realities of contemporary America. He also uses the classic device of putting a newcomer in the midst of the Weary Gentleman regulars so they will have to explain to him (and us) why the barkeeper decides to bolt the doors of the saloon. “It means, my friend,” someone answers in response to the stranger’s question, “that for the next two hours this town won’t be a health resort.” It is all so transparent, and so playfully executed, that one would have to be half dead not to find it funny. Scratchy Wilson, we are told, is the last one left from the gang of outlaws “that used to hang out along the river here,” and even though he “wouldn’t hurt a fly” when sober, “he’s a terror when he’s drunk.” They all know that Jack Potter is out of town and fervently wish he were here today: “He shot Wilson up once—in the leg—and he would sail in here and pull out the kinks in this thing.” Without Potter, those kinks mean trouble, for “this here Scratchy Wilson is a wonder with a gun—a perfect wonder.” A few moments after that, they hear a shot fired in the distance, “followed by three wild howls.”
The gunman is approaching the saloon, and as Crane cuts outside to begin the third chapter, he presents us with a singular display of sartorial weirdness: “A man in a maroon-colored shirt … made, principally, by some Jewish women on the east side of New York.… And his boots had red tops with gilded imprints, of the kind beloved in winter by little sledding boys on the hillsides of New England.”
The rugged outlaw turns out to be a dandy, a clownish fop, a Beau Brummell of the plains. From one sentence to the next, the dime-novel talk in the saloon has given way to satire, and beyond the blindsiding wit of the passage, it is wholly on point. The East has infiltrated the West so thoroughly by now that even the most notorious Texas bandit struts around town in a shirt made by small Jewish hands in a New York sweatshop, and his tough-guy feet are shod in a pair of quaint, ornamented cold-weather boots—shipped straight from the snowy mountaintops of Vermont. Not such a fearsome character, after all, but something of a fool, a man who has become so ridiculous that he deserves to be laughed at or, even worse, pitied.
Wilson, however, has no idea that he is ridiculous. In his own eyes, he is still the baddest cuss this side of tomorrow, and as he wanders drunkenly through the empty streets of Yellow Sky with “a long, heavy, blue-black revolver” in each hand, his loud, full-throated yells fly over the roofs and are answered by no one. The entire population is cowering indoors, and “it was as if the surrounding stillness formed the arch of a tomb over him.” With that one word, tomb, Crane is signaling the end of Scratchy and the bygone world that made him. The old West is dead, the twentieth century is just over the horizon, but Scratchy still hasn’t received the news. He doesn’t understand that he is little more than a ghost now, and yet—here’s the rub—with a long, blue-black revolver firmly clenched in each hand, even a ghost can be dangerous.
He wants to fight someone. He is desperate to fight someone, but for all his threats and shouting, no one answers his challenge. Drifting toward the Weary Gentleman saloon, he sees the dog lying in front and points his revolver at it, “humorously.” The dog jumps up and starts to walk away, but when Scratchy lets out another one of his full-throated yells, the dog breaks into a gallop. Scratchy fires a shot and misses. The dog “screams” and charges off in another direction. Another shot, another miss. Scratchy laughs. Hard to tell if he was aiming to kill or just having fun. He knocks on the door of the saloon demanding a drink, and when the door remains shut, this “wonder with a gun” picks up a piece of paper, nails it to the building with a knife, walks across the street to shoot at it from a respectable distance, and misses by half an inch. Quite good, but not as good as advertised. He swears and walks off. One sentence later, he shoots out the windows of his best friend’s house. Crane remarks: “The man was playing with the town. It was a toy for him.” Still looking for a fight, growing more and more frustrated that he hasn’t found anyone to fight, he begins thinking about Jack Potter and wonders if his “ancient antagonist” would be willing to have a go at it, but when he walks over to Potter’s adobe house, no one is there. The chapter ends with Scratchy standing out front and cursing the house, which stares back at him “as might a great stone god.”
The train has arrived by now, and Potter and his bride are walking toward the house. “Next corner, dear,” the marshal says, and once they turn the corner, they find themselves “face to face with a man in a maroon-colored shirt.” A gun comes out of its holster, and suddenly it is pointing “at the bridegroom’s chest.” The showdown plays out as follows:
The two men faced each other at a distance of three paces. He of the revolver smiled with a new and quiet ferocity. “Tried to sneak up on me,” he said. “Tried to sneak up on me!” His eyes grew more baleful. As Potter made a slight movement, the man thrust his revolver venomously forward. “No, don’t you do it, Jack Potter. Don’t you move a finger toward a gun just yet. Don’t you move an eyelash. The time has come for me to settle with you, and I’m goin’ to do it my own way and loaf along with no interferin’. So if you don’t want a gun bent on you, just mind what I tell you.”
Potter looked at his enemy. “I ain’t got a gun on me, Scratchy,” he said. “Honest, I ain’t.” He was stiffening and steadying, but yet somewhere at the back of his mind a vision of the Pullman floated, the sea-green figured velvet, the shining brass, silver, and glass, the wood that gleamed as darkly brilliant as the surface of a pool of oil—all the glory of the marriage, the environment of the new estate. “You know I fight when it comes to fighting, Scratchy Wilson, but I ain’t got a gun on me. You’ll have to do all the shootin’ yourself.”
His enemy’s face went livid. He stepped forward and lashed his weapon to and fro before Potter’s chest. “Don’t you tell me you ain’t got no gun on you, you whelp. Don’t tell me no lie like that. There ain’t a man in Texas ever seen you without no gun. Don’t take me for no kid.” His eyes blazed with light, and his throat worked like a pump.
“I ain’t takin’ you for no kid,” answered Potter. His heels had not moved an inch backward. “I’m taking you for a——fool. I tell you I ain’t got no gun, and I ain’t. If you’re goin’ to shoot me up, you better begin now. You’ll never get a chance like this again.”
So much enforced reasoning had told on Wilson’s rage. He was calmer. “If you ain’t got a gun, why ain’t you got a gun?” He sneered. “Been to Sunday-school?”
“I ain’t got a gun because I’ve just come from San Anton’ with my wife. I’m married,” said Potter. “And if I’d thought there was going to be any galoots like you prowling around when I brought my wife home, I’d had a gun, and don’t you forget it.”
“Married!” said Scratchy, not at all comprehending.
“Yes, married. I’m married,” said Potter distinctly.
“Married?” said Scratchy. Seemingly for the first time he saw the drooping drowning woman at the other man’s side. “No!” he said. He was like a creature allowed a glimpse of another world. He moved a pace backward, and his arm with the revolver dropped to his side. “Is this—is this the lady?” he asked.
“Yes, this is the lady,” answered Potter.
There was another period of silence.
“Well,” said Wilson at last, slowly. “I s’pose it’s all off now.”
“It’s all off if you say so, Scratchy. You know I didn’t make trouble.” Potter lifted his valise.
“Well, I ’low it’s off, Jack,” said Wilson. He was looking at the ground. “Married!” He was not a student of chivalry; it was merely that in the presence of this foreign condition he was a simple child of the earlier plains. He picked up his starboard revolver, and placing both weapons in their holsters, he went away. His feet made funnel-shaped tracks in the heavy sand.
