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  Immediately after the passing of the first shock, a feeling of pleasure went through him. It swept as a liquid from either end of his body and into the tingling hollow of his groin. He dared not look, but he knew what the Negro must see. The black giant was grinning.

  I hope I didn’t hit you too hard, he murmured.

  No, said Burns.

  Turn over, said the Negro.

  Burns tried vainly to move but the luxurious tiredness made him unable to. The Negro laughed and gripped the small of his waist and flopped him over as easily as he might have turned a pillow. Then he began to belabor his shoulders and buttocks with blows that increased in violence, and as the violence and the pain increased, the little man grew more and more fiercely hot with his first true satisfaction, until all at once a knot came loose in his loins and released a warm flow.

  So by surprise is a man’s desire discovered, and once discovered, the only need is surrender, to take what comes and ask no questions about it: and this was something that Burns was expressly made for.

  Time and again the white-collar clerk went back to the Negro masseur. The knowledge grew quickly between them of what Burns wanted, that he was in search of atonement, and the black masseur was the natural instrument of it. He hated white-skinned bodies because they abused his pride. He loved to have their white skin prone beneath him, to bring his fist or the palm of his hand down hard on its passive surface. He had barely been able to hold this love in restraint, to control the wish that he felt to pound more fiercely and use the full of his power. But now at long last the suitable person had entered his orbit of passion. In the white-collar clerk he had located all that he longed for.

  Those times when the black giant relaxed, when he sat at the rear of the baths and smoked cigarettes or devoured a bar of candy, the image of Burns would loom before his mind, a nude white body with angry red marks on it. The bar of chocolate would stop just short of his lips and the lips would slacken into a dreamy smile. The giant loved Burns, and Burns adored the giant.

  Burns had become absent-minded about his work. Right in the middle of typing a factory order, he would lean back at his desk and the giant would swim in the atmosphere before him. Then he would smile and his work-stiffened fingers would loosen and flop on the desk. Sometimes the boss would stop near him and call his name crossly. Burns! Burns! What are you dreaming about?

  Throughout the winter the violence of the massage increased by fairly reasonable degrees, but when March came it was suddenly stepped up.

  Burns left the baths one day with two broken ribs.

  Every morning he hobbled to work more slowly and painfully but the state of his body could still be explained by saying he had rheumatism.

  One day his boss asked him what he was doing for it. He told his boss that he was taking massage.

  It don’t seem to do you any good, said the boss.

  Oh, yes, said Burns, I am showing lots of improvement!

  That evening came his last visit to the baths.

  His right leg was fractured. The blow which had broken the limb was so terrific that Burns had been unable to stifle an outcry. The manager of the bath establishment heard it and came into the compartment.

  Burns was vomiting over the edge of the table.

  Christ, said the manager, what’s been going on here?

  The black giant shrugged.

  He asked me to hit him harder.

  The manager looked over Burns and discovered his many bruises.

  What do you think this is? A jungle? he asked the masseur.

  Again the black giant shrugged.

  Get the hell out of my place! the manager shouted. Take this perverted little monster with you, and neither of you had better show up here again!

  The black giant tenderly lifted his drowsy partner and bore him away to a room in the town’s Negro section.

  There for a week the passion between them continued.

  This interval was toward the end of the Lenten season. Across from the room where Burns and the Negro were staying there was a church whose open windows spilled out the mounting exhortations of a preacher. Each afternoon the fiery poem of death on the cross was repeated. The preacher was not fully conscious of what he wanted nor were the listeners, groaning and writhing before him. All of them were involved in a massive atonement.

  Now and again some manifestation occurred, a woman stood up to expose a wound in her breast. Another had slashed an artery at her wrist.

  Suffer, suffer, suffer! the preacher shouted. Our Lord was nailed on a cross for the sins of the world! They led him above the town to the place of the skull, they moistened his lips with vinegar on a sponge, they drove five nails through his body, and He was The Rose of the World as He bled on the cross!

  The congregation could not remain in the building but tumbled out on the street in a crazed procession with clothes torn open.

  The sins of the world are all forgiven! they shouted.

  All during this celebration of human atonement, the Negro masseur was completing his purpose with Burns.

  All the windows were open in the death chamber.

  The curtains blew out like thirsty little white tongues to lick at the street which seemed to reek with an overpowering honey. A house had caught fire on the block in back of the church. The walls collapsed and the cinders floated about in the gold atmosphere. The scarlet engines, the ladders and powerful hoses were useless against the purity of the flame.

  The Negro masseur leaned over his still breathing victim.

  Burns was whispering something.

  The black giant nodded.

  You know what you have to do now? the victim asked him. The black giant nodded.

  He picked up the body, which barely held together, and placed it gently on a clean-swept table.

  The giant began to devour the body of Burns.

  It took him twenty-four hours to eat the splintered bones clean.

  When he had finished, the sky was serenely blue, the passionate services at the church were finished, the ashes had settled, the scarlet engines had gone and the reek of honey was blown from the atmosphere.

  Quiet had returned and there was an air of completion.

  Those bare white bones, left over from Burns’ atonement, were placed in a sack and borne to the end of a car line.

  There the masseur walked out on a lonely pier and dropped his burden under the lake’s quiet surface.

  As the giant turned homeward, he mused on his satisfaction.

  Yes, it is perfect, he thought, it is now completed!

  Then in the sack, in which he had carried the bones, he dropped his belongings, a neat blue suit to conceal his dangerous body, some buttons of pearl and a picture of Anthony Burns as a child of seven.

  He moved to another city, obtained employment once more as an expert masseur. And there in a white-curtained place, serenely conscious of fate bringing toward him another, to suffer atonement as it had been suffered by Burns, he stood impassively waiting inside a milky white door for the next to arrive.

  And meantime, slowly, with barely a thought of so doing, the earth’s whole population twisted and writhed beneath the manipulation of night’s black fingers and the white ones of day with skeletons splintered and flesh reduced to pulp, as out of this unlikely problem, the answer, perfection, was slowly evolved through torture.

  April 1946 (Published 1948)

  Something about Him

  There was something about him, something they didn’t like, they didn’t know what. Mrs. Archie Henderson made a further analysis than most when she said that he was “too oily.” He acted like a new preacher on his first Sunday, you know, trying to please everybody but so dreadfully afraid that he wouldn’t that his politeness was almost gruesomely excessive, ducking jerkily up and down at the front door and wringing hands so fiercely that the married ladies’ rings cut into their fingers and they whispered afterward among themselves, “What a strong personality!” But Haskell wasn’t a preacher, he
was just an ordinary dime-a-dozen grocery clerk. There were Haskells in Grenada and also a family of Haskells down near Biloxi. However, none of these were related to him, not even remotely it seemed. He had no family connections whatsoever. This might have been forgiven the way things are nowadays, but…

  Well, for instance, one Monday morning Mrs. Archie Henderson came into the store with her ten-year-old daughter Lucinda. Fat runs in the Henderson family, and Lucinda was right in the family tradition. She was very, very plump and buck-toothed and had committed the indiscretion, that Monday morning, of hanging a necklace of purple clover about her scarcely visible neck.

  Mrs. Henderson was extremely self-conscious about the child’s appearance—or lack of it—and people who knew her tactfully mentioned nothing about Lucinda except her reported skill at domestic science. But Haskell didn’t know this and so he decided to compliment Lucinda on her chain of purple clover. He touched it delicately with his finger tips and exclaimed: “How pretty! How awfully pretty that is!”

  Mrs. Henderson glared at him suspiciously.

  “Yes. Pretty. Give me two bars of Waltke’s Extra Family soap.”

  When he had fetched her the soap she jerked Lucinda’s arm roughly and marched straight out of the store.

  Mr. Olliphant Owens, the boss, came over to Haskell’s counter.

  “What did she get sore about?”

  “Why, nothing, not a thing!” said Haskell. “Of course not!”

  Mr. Owens gave him the same look that customers gave him, puzzled, uneasy, a little bit hostile.

  There is something about him, thought Mr. Owens, something that I don’t like. But he couldn’t decide what it was…

  On Saturday afternoons Haskell was off and he went to the public library. He sat down in a secluded corner and polished his glasses meticulously for several minutes and then opened a volume of modern verse. He would alter his position frequently without ever removing his eyes from the book. It was like he was steering around hazardous turns in an auto race—you know, his body bent stiffly forward, his neck extended so that the cords stood out, and little crystal beads of sweat coming forth on his forehead and even his fingers clenched on the sides of the book. Yes, it was ludicrous-looking. Not because Haskell himself was homely. He wasn’t. His features were quite regular and his figure was nicer than most of the nonathletic type. Except for these eccentric manners of his he might have been called good-looking.

  “What is it about him?” asked Miss Rose, who was the Assistant Librarian. “Nobody seems to like him, but I think he’s nice.”

  Her superior. Miss Jamison, glanced at Haskell sharply.

  “I don’t like the way he rubs his glasses and blows on ‘em and then puts cotton under the bridge so it won’t chafe his nose.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t hold that against him,” said Miss Rose. “I think it’s refreshing to see a man who is careful about little things, and heaven knows those red marks on your nose that you get from wearing glasses do look pretty awful!”

  Miss Jamison’s animosity became more defined as Miss Rose warmed in his defense.

  “If glasses are properly adjusted,” she snapped, “they don’t make ridges. I take mine to the optician’s whenever I go to Memphis and have them refitted—free of charge!”

  “He reads good books,” said Miss Rose.

  “I think his taste in poetry is extremely queer.”

  “Well, it’s unusual,” said Miss Rose, “for anybody to read modern verse, least of all a clerk in a grocery store.”

  “A clerk in a grocery store is unusual as a subject for conversation,” said Miss Jamison. “I personally am not interested!”

  However, Miss Rose was. She concluded that she liked Haskell and, only through saying it once or twice to herself, the idea became firmly fixed in her mind, so that now when he entered the library Saturday mornings she gave him her pleasantest slightly worn smile and made some little remark about the weather which, however unimportant, was always given an accent of sprightly concern.

  “Such brilliant sunlight this morning!”

  “Yes, isn’t it, though!”

  Or else she would say: “It’s terribly cloudy! I should have brought my umbrella!”

  And Haskell agreed: “Yes, it is cloudy! I guess I should have brought mine!”

  One Sunday morning she saw him go into the First Presbyterian Church. She made plans all that week, and the following Sunday she went there herself, wearing a brown tweed jacket with a little corsage of rosebuds and lilies of the valley fastened on the lapel. She glanced about her discreetly as the service commenced. But he wasn’t there. She felt quite terribly let down. Miserable, in fact. She fastened her eyes on the stained glass picture of the Shepherd Jesus and composed her face with marvelous fortitude as she began to feel once more, gnawing voraciously under the tweed and crisp linen, under the charming corsage of pink and white flowers, that fox-toothed loneliness which always plagued her when she was not occupied with books and rubber stamps and ink pads and yellow library cards…

  The following Saturday something miraculous happened.

  Haskell sneezed violently as he stepped in the library door.

  “You have a bad cold,” said Miss Rose.

  “Yes, my room is so drafty,” said Haskell. “I have had one continual cold all winter.”

  “Oh, goodness, you ought to move!”

  “I’ve thought of moving,” he said, “but I can’t find a place near the store.”

  “Oh! Now I wonder!”

  “Yes?”

  “Mrs. Stovall’s got a vacant room on her third floor, and it’s just exactly one block from where you stay now!”

  “Is that right? How fortunate! I wonder if you could give me this lady’s address?”

  “Of course!” She laughed breathlessly. “It’s where I stay!”

  “Oh! Indeed!”

  His voice assumed an almost girlish falsetto.

  “Now that makes it very, very nice indeed!”

  She wrote the address on a slip of paper—her fingers trembled so it was scarcely legible.

  “You’d better see Mrs. Stovall right away,” she advised.

  “Oh, I shall, I shall!—111 make inquiries at once!”

  He went away from the desk—then had to return for his book. In her confusion she dropped it, and Haskell said: “Pardon! I beg your pardon!”

  She whispered: “Not at all.”

  Her voice died away very oddly. She cleared her throat.

  She learned from Mrs. Stovall that evening that Haskell had paid five dollars down on the room and would move in the first of the month.

  Soon afterward and without acknowledging to herself any special reason, she went to the Delta Gift Shoppe and purchased an exquisite French negligee of shell-pink crepe de chine with a froth of ivory lace at the throat and sleeves.

  That night when she was alone in her room she slipped it on and stood in front of the long oval mirror. It created a new Miss Rose, not one who was employed at the Blue Hill Public Library, but one who danced all night in open pavilions, laughed recklessly in Mediterranean moonlight and won huge sums, they said, at roulette in the gambling casino…

  It was the first of March when Haskell moved in.

  They were very constrained, at first, when they met in the hall or on the stairs. They both laughed nervously and edged unnecessarily close to the wall to prevent their clothes from touching.

  Miss Rose went on with her dreams and her speculations.

  One morning she stood just on the inside of her door till she heard him descending the stairs from the third floor. Then she caught the creamy lace about her throat and stepped out of her bedroom. She stood there in his full gaze for three ecstatic moments before she scurried into the bathroom with a slight hysterical giggle and locked the door—while Haskell proceeded unsteadily down the rest of the stairs.

  Already in early March the Mississippi spring was well advanced. The trees were in leaf, there was a great deal of
wind and rain which caused talk of high water and possible floods on the river.

  The mornings had an exceptional quality when it had rained all night and stopped at daybreak, the clouds having thinned like smoke until they were gone altogether, except for some milky white threads which still clung like bits of shattered web to the pointed church steeples or tallest treetops. It was as though in the course of the night some radiant white cloth, like a bridal veil, had been drawn swiftly over the sky and fragments of it had caught on these sharp projections and been torn loose and held there…

  “It must have been on a morning like this,” said Haskell, “that Robert Browning wrote that poem of his—”

  ” ‘God’s in his heaven,’ you mean? ‘All’s right with the world’?”

  “Yes!” said Haskell. There was a pause and then he asked:

  “Do you agree about that?”

  Miss Rose’s heart leaped.

  “I do sometimes,” she murmured. “I certainly do this morning!”

  “Occasionally,” said Haskell. “I have my doubts. The lark and the snail and the dew are not always convincing. Not always completely convincing. You know what I mean?”

  He looked down at her very slyly and something new came out of his eyes. It was almost palpable. It seemed to touch her cheek with little, tentative fingers. A palpable though very timid caress.

  “Yes, I know what you mean,” she breathed.

  He caught her elbow as she stepped over the curb. His touch, his slight upward pressure, seemed to release her from all effect of gravity so that she felt as though she were floating with feathery lightness over the street. The laughter bubbled out of her lips irrepressibly like water gone down the wrong way. At the opposite curb his pressure was resumed. She caught her breath. She was lifted up and blown forward, a thin tissue kite that was suddenly caught in a rising wind.

  “My goodness, what weather!” she cried.

  “Isn’t it marvelous, though?”