Invisible man: читать книгу онлайн полностью и бесплатно

"Nineteen years, six months and two days. And what I did wasn't much; that is, it wasn't much when I did it. But after all that time it changed into something else and it seemed to be as bad as they said it was. All that time made it bad. I paid for it with everything I had but my life. I lost my wife and my boys and my piece of land. So what started out as an argument between a couple of men turned out to be a crime worth nineteen years of my life."

"What on earth did you do, Brother Tarp?"

"I said no to a man who wanted to take something from me; that's what it cost me for saying no and even now the debt ain't fully paid and will never be paid in their terms."

A pain throbbed in my throat and I felt a kind of numb despair. Nineteen years! And here he was talking quietly to me and this no doubt the first time he'd tried to tell anyone about it. But why me, I thought, why pick me?

"I said no," he said. "I said hell, no! And I kept saying no until I broke the chain and left."

"But how?"

"They let me get close to the dogs once in a while, that's how. I made friends with them dogs and I waited. Down there you really learn how to wait. I waited nineteen years and then one morning when the river was flooding I left. They thought I was one of them who got drowned when the levee broke, but I done broke the chain and gone. I was standing in the mud holding a long-handled shovel and I asked myself, Tarp, can you make it? And inside me I said yes; all that water and mud and rain said yes, and I took off."

Suddenly he gave a laugh so gay it startled me.

"I'm tellin' it better'n I ever thought I could," he said, fishing in his pocket and removing something that looked like an oilskin tobacco pouch, from which he removed an object wrapped in a handkerchief.

"I've been looking for freedom ever since, son. And sometimes I've done all right. Up to these here hard times I did very well, considering that I'm a man whose health is not too good. But even when times were best for me I remembered. Because I didn't want to forget those nineteen years I just kind of held on to this as a keepsake and a reminder."

He was unwrapping the object now and I watched his old man's hands.

"I'd like to pass it on to you, son. There," he said, handing it to me. "Funny thing to give somebody, but I think it's got a heap of signifying wrapped up in it and it might help you remember what we're really fighting against. I don't think of it in terms of but two words, yes and no; but it signifies a heap more ..."

I saw him place his hand on the desk. "Brother," he said, calling me "Brother" for the first time, "I want you to take it. I guess it's a kind of luck piece. Anyway, it's the one I filed to get away."

I took it in my hand, a thick, dark, oily piece of filed steel that had been twisted open and forced partly back into place, on which I saw marks that might have been made by the blade of a hatchet. It was such a link as I had seen on Bledsoe's desk, only while that one had been smooth, Tarp's bore the marks of haste and violence, looking as though it had been attacked and conquered before it stubbornly yielded.

I looked at him and shook my head as he watched me inscrutably. Finding no words to ask him more about it, I slipped the link over my knuckles and struck it sharply against the desk.

Brother Tarp chuckled. "Now there's a way I never thought of using it," he said. "It's pretty good. It's pretty good."

"But why do you give it to me, Brother Tarp?"

"Because I have to, I guess. Now don't go trying to get me to say what I can't. You're the talker, not me," he said, getting up and limping toward the door. "It was lucky to me and I think it might be lucky to you. You just keep it with you and look at it once in a while. Course, if you get tired of it, why, give it back."

"Oh, no," I called after him, "I want it and I think I understand. Thanks for giving it to me."

I looked at the dark band of metal against my fist and dropped it upon the anonymous letter. I neither wanted it nor knew what to do with it; although there was no question of keeping it if for no other reason than that I felt that Brother Tarp's gesture in offering it was of some deeply felt significance which I was compelled to respect. Something, perhaps, like a man passing on to his son his own father's watch, which the son accepted not because he wanted the old-fashioned time-piece for itself, but because of the overtones of unstated seriousness and solemnity of the paternal gesture which at once joined him with his ancestors, marked a high point of his present, and promised a concreteness to his nebulous and chaotic future. And now I remembered that if I had returned home instead of coming north my father would have given me my grandfather's old-fashioned Hamilton, with its long, burr-headed winding stem. Well, so my brother would get it and I'd never wanted it anyway. What were they doing now, I brooded, suddenly sick for home.

I could feel the air from the window hot against my neck now as through the smell of morning coffee I heard a throaty voice singing with a mixture of laughter and solemnity:

A whole series of memories started to well up, but I threw them off. There was no time for memory, for all its images were of times passed.

There had been only a few minutes from the time that I'd called in Brother Tarp about the letter and his leaving, but it seemed as though I'd plunged down a well of years. I looked calmly now at the writing which, for a moment, had shaken my total structure of certainty, and was glad that Brother Tarp had been there to be called rather than Clifton or some of the others before whom I would have been ashamed of my panic. Instead he'd left me soberly confident. Perhaps from the shock of seeming to see my grandfather looking through Tarp's eyes, perhaps through the calmness of his voice alone, or perhaps through his story and his link of chain, he had restored my perspective.

He's right, I thought; whoever sent the message is trying to confuse me; some enemy is trying to halt our progress by destroying my faith through touching upon my old southern distrust, our fear of white betrayal. It was as though he had learned of my experience with Bledsoe's letters and was trying to use that knowledge to destroy not only me but the whole Brotherhood. Yet that was impossible; no one knew that story who knew me now. It was simply an obscene coincidence. If only I could get my hands upon his stupid throat. Here in the Brotherhood was the one place in the country where we were free and given the greatest encouragement to use our abilities, and he was trying to destroy it! No, it wasn't me he was worrying about becoming too big, it was the Brotherhood. And becoming big was exactly what the Brotherhood wanted. Hadn't I just received orders to submit ideas for organizing more people? And "a white man's world" was just what the Brotherhood was against. We were dedicated to building a world of Brotherhood.

But who had sent it -- Ras the Exhorter? No, it wasn't like him. He was more direct and absolutely against any collaboration between blacks and whites. It was someone else, someone more insidious than Ras. But who, I wondered, forcing it below my consciousness as I turned to the tasks at hand.

The morning began with people asking my advice on how to secure relief; members coming in for instructions for small committee meetings being held in corners of the large hall; and I had just dismissed a woman seeking to free her husband, who had been jailed for beating her, when Brother Wrestrum entered the room. I returned his greeting and watched him ease into a chair, his eyes sweeping over my desk-with uneasiness. He seemed to possess some kind of authority in the Brotherhood, but his exact function was unclear. He was, I felt, something of a meddler.

And hardly had he settled himself when he stared at my desk, saying, "What you got there, Brother?" and pointed toward a pile of my papers.

I leaned slowly back in my chair, looking him in the eye. "That's my work," I said coldly, determined to stop any interference from the start.

"But I mean that," he said, pointing, his eyes beginning to blaze, "that there."

"It's work," I said, "all my work."