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Title: Two Whole Glorious Weeks

Author: Will Worthington

Release Date: November 6, 2019 [EBook #60624]

Language: English

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Bertha and I were like a couple of city kids on their first country outing when we arrived at Morton's place. The weather was perfect—the first chill of autumn had arrived in the form of a fine, needle-shower rain of the type that doesn't look very bad through a window, but when you get out in it, it seeks out every tiny opening between the warp and weft of your clothing and runs through your hair and eyebrows, under your collar and over the surfaces of your body until, as though directed by some knowing, invisible entity, it finds its way to your belly-button.

It was beautifully timed: the ancient motor-bus had two blowouts on the way up the last half-mile of corduroy road that led to the place, and of course we were obliged to change the tires ourselves. This was a new experience for both of us, and on the very first day! Everything was as advertised, and we hadn't even arrived at the admission gate yet.

We didn't dare talk. On the way from the heliport we had seen some of the other folks at work in the swamp that surrounded the camp proper. They were digging out stumps with mattocks, crowbars and axes, and some of them stood waist-deep in the dark water. Bertha had said "Looky there!" and had made some remark about the baggy gray coveralls they wore—"Just like convicts," she said. The driver, a huge, swinelike creature with very small, close-set eyes, had yanked the emergency brake and wheeled around at us then.

"You shnooks might just as well get outa the habit o' talkin' right here an' now. One more peep outa ya, 'n ya git clobbered!"

All we could do was look at each other and giggle like a couple of kids in the back pew of Sunday School, after that. Bertha looked ten years younger already.

The gate was exactly as the brochure had pictured it: solid and massive, it was let into a board fence about ten feet high which extended as far as you could see in either direction and lost itself on either side in a tangle of briers, elder bushes and dark trees. There were two strands of barbed wire running along the top. A sign over the gate—stark, black lettering on a light gray background—read:

Silence!—No admission without
authority—No smoking!

*** MORTON'S MISERY FARM ***

30 acres of swamp—Our own rock
quarry—Jute Mill—Steam laundry

Harshest dietary laws in the
Catskills

A small door opened at one side of the gate and a short, stocky, well-muscled woman in a black visored cap and a shapeless black uniform came out and boarded the bus. She had our releases with her, fastened to a clipboard. She thrust this under my nose.

"Read and sign, shnook!" she said in a voice that sounded like rusty boiler plate being torn away from more rusty boiler plate.

The releases were in order. Our hands shook a little when we signed the papers; there was something so terribly final and irreversible about it. There would be no release except in cases of severe medical complaint, external legal involvement or national emergency. We were paid up in advance, of course. There was no turning away.

Another attendant, who also looked like a matron of police, boarded the bus with a large suitcase and two of the baggy gray garments we had seen the others wearing in the swamp. No shoes, socks or underwear.

"Strip and pack your clothes here, shnooks," said the woman with the empty suitcase. We did, though it was pretty awkward ... standing there in the aisle of the bus with those two gorgons staring at us. I started to save out a pack of cigarettes, but was soon disabused of this idea. The older of the two women knocked the pack from my hand, ground it under her heel on the floor and let me have one across the face with what I am almost certain must have been an old sock full of rancid hog kidneys.

"What the hell was that?" I protested.

"Sock fulla hog kidneys, shnook. Soft but heavy, know what I mean? Just let us do the thinkin' around here. Git outa line just once an' you'll see what we can do with a sock fulla hog kidneys."

I didn't press the matter further. All I could think of was how I wanted a smoke just then. When I thought of the fresh, new pack of cigarettes with its unbroken cellophane and its twenty, pure white cylinders of fragrant Turkish and Virginia, I came as close to weeping as I had in forty years.

The ground was slimy and cold under our bare feet when we got down from the bus, but the two viragos behind us gave us no time to pick our way delicately over the uneven ground. We were propelled through the small door at the side of the gate, and at last we found ourselves within the ten-foot barriers of the Misery Camp. We just looked at each other and giggled.

Inside the yard, about twenty other guests shuffled around and around in a circle. Their gray coveralls were dark and heavy with the rain and clung to their bodies in clammy-looking patches. All moved sluggishly through the mud with their arms hanging slack at their sides, their shoulders hunched forward against the wet chill, and their eyes turned downward, as though they were fascinated with the halting progress of their own feet. I had never seen people look so completely dispirited and tired. Only one man raised his head to look at us as we stood there. I noticed that his forehead had bright purple marks on it. These proved to be "No. 94, Property of MMF," in inch-high letters which ran from temple to temple just above his eyebrows. Incredibly enough the man grinned at us.

"You'll be sah-reeeee," he yelped. I saw him go down into the mud under a blow with a kidney-sock from a burly male guard who had been standing in the center of the cheerless little circle.

"Leave the welcoming ceremonies to us, knoedelhead!" barked the guard. The improvident guest rose painfully and resumed his plodding with the rest. I noticed that he made no rejoinder. He cringed.

We were led into a small office at one end of a long, wooden, one-story building. A sign on the door said, simply, "Admissions. Knock and Remove Hat." The lady guard knocked and we entered. We had no hats to remove; indeed, this was emphasized for us by the fact that the rain had by now penetrated our hair and brows and was running down over our faces annoyingly.

As soon as I'd blinked the rain from my eyes, I was able to see the form of the person behind the desk with more clarity than I might have wished. He was large, but terribly emaciated, with the kind of gauntness that should be covered by a sheet—tenderly, reverently and finally. Picture the archetype of every chain-gang captain who has been relieved for inhumanity to prisoners; imagine the naked attribute Meanness, stripped of all accidental, incongruous, mitigating integument; picture all kindness, all mercy, all warmth, all humanity excised or cauterized, or turned back upon itself and let ferment into some kind of noxious mash; visualize the creature from which all the gentle qualities had been expunged, thus, and then try to forget the image.

The eyes were perhaps the worst feature. They burned like tiny phosphorescent creatures, dimly visible deep inside a cave under dark, overhanging cliffs—the brows. The skin of the face was drawn over the bones so tautly that you felt a sharp rap with a hard object would cause the sharp cheekbones to break through. There was a darkness about the skin that should have been, yet somehow did not seem to be the healthy tan of outdoor living. It was a coloring that came from the inside and radiated outwards; perhaps pellagra—a wasting, darkening malnutritional disease which no man had suffered for three hundred years. I wondered where, where on the living earth, they had discovered such a specimen.

"I am in full charge here. You will speak only when spoken to," he said. His voice came as a surprise and, to me at least, as a profound relief. I had expected an inarticulate drawl—something not yet language, not quite human. Instead his voice was clipped, precise, clear as new type on white paper. This gave me hope at a time when hope was at a dangerously low mark on my personal thermometer. My mounting misgivings had come to focus on this grim figure behind the desk, and the most feared quality that I had seen in the face, a hard, sharp, immovable and imponderable stupidity, was strangely mitigated and even contradicted by the flawless, mechanical speech of the man.

"What did you do on the Outside, shnook?" he snapped at me.

"Central Computing and Control. I punched tapes. Only got four hours of work a month," I said, hoping to cover myself with a protective film of humility.

"Hah! Another low-hour man. I don't see how the hell you could afford to come here. Well, anyway—we've got work for climbers like you. Real work, shnook. I know climbers like you hope you'll meet aristocracy in a place like this—ten hour men or even weekly workers, but I can promise you, shnook, that you'll be too damned tired to disport yourself socially, and too damned busy looking at your toes. Don't forget that!"

Remembering, I looked down quickly, but not before one of the matrons behind me had fetched me a solid clout on the side of the head with her sap.

"Mark 'em and put 'em to work," he barked at the guards. Two uniformed men, who must have sneaked in while I was fascinated by the man behind the desk, seized me and started painting my forehead with an acrid fluid that stung like strong disinfectant in an open wound. I squinted my eyes and tried to look blank.

"This is indelible," one of them explained. "We have the chemical to take it off, but it doesn't come off till we say so."

When I had been marked, one of the guards took his ink and brush and advanced upon Bertha. The other addressed himself to me. "There is a choice of activities. There is the jute mill, the rock quarry, the stump-removal detail, the manure pile...."

"How about the steam laundry?" I asked, prompted now by the cold sound of a sudden gust of rain against the wooden side of the building.

Splukk! went the guard's kidney-sock as it landed on the right hinge of my jaw. Soft or not, it nearly dropped me.

"I said there is a choice—not you have a choice, shnook. Besides, the steam laundry is for the ladies. Don't forget who's in charge here."

"Who is in charge here, then?" I asked, strangely emboldened by the clout on the side of the jaw.

Splukk! "That's somethin' you don't need to know, shnook. You ain't gonna sue nobody. You signed a release—remember?"

I had nothing to say. My toes, I noted, looked much the same. Then, behind my back, I heard a sharp squeal from Bertha. "Stop that! Oh stop! Stop! The brochure said nothing about—"

"Take it easy lady," said the other guard in an oily-nasty voice. "I won't touch you none. Just wanted to see if you was amenable."

I would like more than anything else in the world to be able to say honestly that I felt a surge of anger then. I didn't. I can remember with terrible clarity that I felt nothing.

"So he wants a nice inside job in the steam laundry?" said the man behind the desk—"the captain," we were instructed to call him. Another gust of wet wind joined his comments. "Put him on 'The Big Rock Candy Mountain.'" He fixed me then with those deep-set, glow-worm eyes, coldly appraising. The two Sisters of Gorgonia, meanwhile, seized Bertha's arms and dragged her from the room. I did not try to follow. I knew the rules: there were to be three husband-and-wife visiting hours per week. Fifteen minutes each.

The Captain was still scrutinizing me from under the dark cliff of his brow. A thin smile now took shape on his lipless mouth. One of the guards was beating a slow, measured, somewhat squudgy tattoo on the edge of the desk with his kidney-sock.

"You wouldn't be entertaining angry thoughts, would you shnook?" asked the Captain, after what seemed like half an hour of sickly pause.

My toes hadn't changed in the slightest respect.

It must have been then, or soon after that, that my sense of time went gently haywire. I was conducted to "The Big Rock Candy Mountain," which turned out to be a Brobdingnagian manure heap. Its forbidding bulk overshadowed all other features of the landscape except some of the larger trees.

A guard stood in the shadow of a large umbrella, at a respectable and tolerable distance from the nitrogenous colossus, but not so distant that his voice did not command the entire scene. "Hut-ho! hut-ho! Hut-ho HAW!" he roared, and the wretched, gray-clad figures, whose number I joined without ceremony or introduction, moved steadily at their endless work in apparent unawareness of his cadenced chant.

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.

My weariness from the unaccustomed toil had carried me past the point of hunger, but I do remember my first meal at the Farm. We had dumplings. You usually think fondly of dumplings as being in or with something. We had just dumplings—cold and not quite cooked through.

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.

These orgies, it turned out, were held in the building housing the admission office. There was a speech choir made up of elderly women, all of whom wore the black uniform of the Farm matrons. The realization that a speech choir still existed may have startled me into a somewhat higher state of awareness; I had assumed that the speech choir had gone out with hair-receivers and humoristic medicine. The things they recited were in a childishly simple verse form: One and two and three and four; One and two and THREE. These verses had to do with the virtues of endless toil, the importance of thrift, and the hideous dangers lurking in cigarette smoking and needless borrowing.

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.

It was that night—or perhaps the following night—that Bertha and I had our first fifteen-minute visit with each other. She was changed: her face glowed with feverish vitality, her hair was stringy and moist, and her eyes were serenely glassy. She had not been more provocative in twenty-five years. An old dormant excitement stirred within me—microscopically but unmistakably.

She told me that she had been put to work in the jute mill, but had passed out and had been transferred to the steam laundry. Her job in the laundry was to sort out the socks and underwear that were too bad to go in with the rest of the wash. We speculated on where the socks and underwear could have come from, as such fripperies were denied to us at the Farm. We also wondered about the manure, considering that no animals were in evidence here. Both, we concluded, must have been shipped in specially from the Outside. We found it in us to giggle, when the end of the visit was announced, over our own choice of conversational material for that precious quarter hour. Thereafter, when we could catch glimpses of each other during the day, we would exchange furtive signals, then go about our work exhilarated by the fiction that we shared some priceless Cabalistic knowledge.

The grim Captain made an appearance in the rock quarry one morning just as we were beginning work. He stood on top of a pile of stones, swinging his kidney-sap from his wrist and letting his eyes sweep over us as though selecting one for slaughter.

When the silence had soaked in thoroughly, he announced in his cold, incisive tone that "there will be no rest periods, no chow, no 'Beddy-by,' until this entire rock face is reduced to ballast rock." He indicated a towering slab of stone. We raised our heads only long enough to reassure ourselves of the utter hopelessness of the task before us. Not daring to look at each other closely, fearing to see our own despair reflected in the faces of others, we picked up our hammers and crowbars and crawled to the top of the monolithic mass. The film must have cleared from my eyes then, momentarily.

"Why—this thing is nothing but a huge writing slate," I said to a small, bald inmate beside me. He made a feeble noise in reply. The Captain left, and the only other guard now relaxed in the shade of a boulder nearly fifty yards away. He was smoking a forbidden cigar. Suddenly and unaccountably, I felt a little taller than the others, and everything looked unnaturally clear. The slab was less than six inches wide at the top!

"If we work this thing right, this job will practically do itself. We'll be through here before sundown," I heard myself snap out. The others, accustomed now to obeying any imperative voice, fell to with crowbars and peaveys as I directed them. "Use them as levers," I said. "Don't just flail and hack—pry!" No one questioned me. When all of the tools were in position I gave the count:

"One—two—HEAVE!"

The huge slab finally leaned out, wavered for a queasy moment, then fell with a splintering crash onto the boulders below. After the dust settled, we could see that much of the work of breaking up the mass was already accomplished. We descended and set to work with an enthusiasm that was new.

Long before sundown, of course, we were marched back to the latrine and then to the mess hall. Later I had expected that some further work would be thrust upon us, but it didn't happen. The grim Captain stopped me as I entered the mess hall. I froze. There was a queer smile on his face, and I had grown to fear novelty.

"You had a moment," he said, simply and declaratively. "You didn't miss it, did you?"

"No," I replied, not fully understanding. "No, I didn't miss it."

"You are more fortunate than most," he went on, still standing between me and the mess hall. "Some people come here year after year, or they go to other places like this, or permit themselves to be confined in the hulls of old submarines, and some even apprentice themselves to medical missionaries in Equatorial Africa; they expose themselves to every conceivable combination of external conditions, but nothing really happens to them. They feel nothing except a fleeting sensation of contrast—soon lost in a torrent of other sensations. No 'moment'; only a brief cessation of the continuing pleasure process. You have been one of the fortunate few, Mr. Devoe."

Then the film dissolved—finally and completely—from the surface of my brain, and my sense of time returned to me in a flood of ordered recollections. Hours and days began to arrange themselves into meaningful sequence. Was it possible that two whole glorious weeks could have passed so swiftly?

"You and Mrs. Devoe may leave tonight or in the morning, just as you prefer," said the Captain.

Bertha and I have had little to say to one another as we wait in the office for the car that will take us to the heliport. For the moment—this moment—it suffices that we stand here in our own clothes, that we have tasted coffee again, brought to us on a tray by a matron whose manner towards us bordered on the obsequious, and that the aroma of a cigarette is just as gratifying as ever.

We will go back to our ten-room apartment on the ninety-first floor of the New Empire State Hotel; back to our swimming pool, our three-dimensional color television, our anti-gravity sleeping chambers, our impeccably efficient, relentlessly cheerful robot servants, and our library of thrills, entertainment, solace, diversion and escape—all impressed on magnetic tape and awaiting our pleasure.

I will go back to my five kinds of cigars and my sixteen kinds of brandy; Bertha will return to her endless fantasy of pastries and desserts—an endless, joyous parade of goodies, never farther away than the nearest dumb-waiter door. And we will both become softer, heavier, a little less responsive.

When, as sometimes happens, the sweet lethargy threatens to choke off our breath, we will step into our flying platform and set its automatic controls for Miami, Palm Beach, or the Cote d'Azur. There are conducted tours to the Himalayas now, or to the "lost" cities of the South American jungles, or to the bottom of any one of the seven seas. We will bide our time, much as others do.

But we will survive these things: I still have my four hours per month at Central Computing and Control; Bertha has her endless and endlessly varying work on committees (the last one was dedicated to the abolition of gambling at Las Vegas in favor of such wholesome games as Scrabble and checkers).

We cannot soften and slough away altogether, for when all else fails, when the last stronghold of the spirit is in peril, there is always the vision of year's end and another glorious vacation.

End of Project Gutenberg's Two Whole Glorious Weeks, by Will Worthington

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