798
PARTISAN REVIEW
rag of the waitress fighting sleep under the hegemony of the huge
visible clock, sober up enough to redeem the sense of becoming drunk.
We shared the air, the toilets, the thin trickle of water from
the
wall-spigots, those delights of children whose asses we patted as they
went by us with their precarious papercups, back and forth to the
bored mother smelling of their excrement. There was not enough
of anything, only of time too much, but I at least was not bored.
(An
old man, clean and nervous, sat opposite me for a while between two
jerkwater stations, tearing a Crackerjack box to pieces, mathematical–
ly, doggedly in his scrubbed fingers; when he caught me watching
him, he shrugged and said, "What the hell else is there to do," but
he thought I was kidding him when I amwered, "Have a drink.")
There was always a card game to sit in on, and after nightfall
somewhere a group singing.
Some of us would sing for a while our own songs, the ballads
of our recent exile and parochial contempt:
So it's bless, bless, bless, bless them all
As over the fantail we fall.
. . .
but it would not work,. the ironies badly sung seemed only obvious,
and it was as if no one had ever really gone over the fantail to the
unimaginable gullets of sharks. Only the Sewanee River mattered,
that long, long trail and the little brown church in the wildwood.
Oh come, come, come, come!
Come, come, come, come!
Come to the church in the wildwood.
...
How mean our common culture is: these few songs, some verses
learned before the eighth .grade, the faces on picture-cards and the
tops of Dixie Cups, the slogans on cereal boxes-no more, except
the debased comradeship of shared trite viciousness. All else we are
or know divides us, and sensing it whenever the music lapsed, we
would turn from each other in terror after the last chorus, as the
meaningless racket of the wheels recurred, filling the interstices be–
tween our alien heads.
At night the card games adjourned to the men's toilets; the
soiled mothers, the grandparents with their thumb-marked snapshots,
the workers moving to new cities faded from us like the obtrusive
