The Jacket (Star-Rover) Part 4

Oh, our guards were brutes! And under their treatment we had to harden to brutes in order to live. Hard work makes calloused hands. Hard guards make hard prisoners. We continued to talk, and, on occasion, to be jacketed for punishment. Night was the best time, and, when subst.i.tute guards chanced to be on, we often talked through a whole shift.

Night and day were one with us who lived in the dark. We could sleep any time, we could knuckle-talk only on occasion. We told one another much of the history of our lives, and for long hours Morrell and I have lain silently, while steadily, with faint, far taps, Oppenheimer slowly spelled out his life-story, from the early years in a San Francisco slum, through his gang-training, through his initiation into all that was vicious, when as a lad of fourteen he served as night messenger in the red light district, through his first detected infraction of the laws, and on and on through thefts and robberies to the treachery of a comrade and to red slayings inside prison walls.

They called Jake Oppenheimer the "Human Tiger." Some cub reporter coined the phrase that will long outlive the man to whom it was applied. And yet I ever found in Jake Oppenheimer all the cardinal traits of right humanness. He was faithful and loyal. I know of the times he has taken punishment in preference to informing on a comrade. He was brave. He was patient. He was capable of self-sacrifice--I could tell a story of this, but shall not take the time. And justice, with him, was a pa.s.sion.

The prison-killings done by him were due entirely to this extreme sense of justice. And he had a splendid mind. A lifetime in prison, ten years of it in solitary, had not dimmed his brain.

Morrell, ever a true comrade, too had a splendid brain. In fact, and I who am about to die have the right to say it without incurring the charge of immodesty, the three best minds in San Quentin from the Warden down were the three that rotted there together in solitary. And here at the end of my days, reviewing all that I have known of life, I am compelled to the conclusion that strong minds are never docile. The stupid men, the fearful men, the men ungifted with pa.s.sionate rightness and fearless championship--these are the men who make model prisoners. I thank all G.o.ds that Jake Oppenheimer, Ed Morrell, and I were not model prisoners.

CHAPTER VI

There is more than the germ of truth in things erroneous in the child's definition of memory as the thing one forgets with. To be able to forget means sanity. Incessantly to remember, means obsession, lunacy. So the problem I faced in solitary, where incessant remembering strove for possession of me, was the problem of forgetting. When I gamed with flies, or played chess with myself, or talked with my knuckles, I partially forgot. What I desired was entirely to forget.

There were the boyhood memories of other times and places--the "trailing clouds of glory" of Wordsworth. If a boy had had these memories, were they irretrievably lost when he had grown to manhood? Could this particular content of his boy brain be utterly eliminated? Or were these memories of other times and places still residual, asleep, immured in solitary in brain cells similarly to the way I was immured in a cell in San Quentin?

Solitary life-prisoners have been known to resurrect and look upon the sun again. Then why could not these other-world memories of the boy resurrect?

But how? In my judgment, by attainment of complete forgetfulness of present and of manhood past.

And again, how? Hypnotism should do it. If by hypnotism the conscious mind were put to sleep, and the subconscious mind awakened, then was the thing accomplished, then would all the dungeon doors of the brain be thrown wide, then would the prisoners emerge into the sunshine.

So I reasoned--with what result you shall learn. But first I must tell how, as a boy, I had had these other-world memories. I had glowed in the clouds of glory I trailed from lives aforetime. Like any boy, I had been haunted by the other beings I had been at other times. This had been during my process of becoming, ere the flux of all that I had ever been had hardened in the mould of the one personality that was to be known by men for a few years as Darrell Standing.

Let me narrate just one incident. It was up in Minnesota on the old farm. I was nearly six years old. A missionary to China, returned to the United States and sent out by the Board of Missions to raise funds from the farmers, spent the night in our house. It was in the kitchen just after supper, as my mother was helping me undress for bed, and the missionary was showing photographs of the Holy Land.

And what I am about to tell you I should long since have forgotten had I not heard my father recite it to wondering listeners so many times during my childhood.

I cried out at sight of one of the photographs and looked at it, first with eagerness, and then with disappointment. It had seemed of a sudden most familiar, in much the same way that my father's barn would have been in a photograph. Then it had seemed altogether strange. But as I continued to look the haunting sense of familiarity came back.

"The Tower of David," the missionary said to my mother.

"No!" I cried with great positiveness.

"You mean that isn't its name?" the missionary asked.

I nodded.

"Then what is its name, my boy?"

"It's name is . . ." I began, then concluded lamely, "I, forget."

"It don't look the same now," I went on after a pause. "They've ben fixin' it up awful."

Here the missionary handed to my mother another photograph he had sought out.

"I was there myself six months ago, Mrs. Standing." He pointed with his finger. "That is the Jaffa Gate where I walked in and right up to the Tower of David in the back of the picture where my finger is now. The authorities are pretty well agreed on such matters. El Kul'ah, as it was known by--"

But here I broke in again, pointing to rubbish piles of ruined masonry on the left edge of the photograph.

"Over there somewhere," I said. "That name you just spoke was what the Jews called it. But we called it something else. We called it . . . I forget."

"Listen to the youngster," my father chuckled. "You'd think he'd ben there."

I nodded my head, for in that moment I knew I had been there, though all seemed strangely different. My father laughed the harder, but the missionary thought I was making game of him. He handed me another photograph. It was just a bleak waste of a landscape, barren of trees and vegetation, a shallow canyon with easy-sloping walls of rubble. In the middle distance was a cl.u.s.ter of wretched, flat-roofed hovels.

"Now, my boy, where is that?" the missionary quizzed.

And the name came to me!

"Samaria," I said instantly.

My father clapped his hands with glee, my mother was perplexed at my antic conduct, while the missionary evinced irritation.

"The boy is right," he said. "It is a village in Samaria. I pa.s.sed through it. That is why I bought it. And it goes to show that the boy has seen similar photographs before."

This my father and mother denied.

"But it's different in the picture," I volunteered, while all the time my memory was busy reconstructing the photograph. The general trend of the landscape and the line of the distant hills were the same. The differences I noted aloud and pointed out with my finger.

"The houses was about right here, and there was more trees, lots of trees, and lots of gra.s.s, and lots of goats. I can see 'em now, an' two boys drivin' 'em. An' right here is a lot of men walkin' behind one man.

An' over there"--I pointed to where I had placed my village--"is a lot of tramps. They ain't got nothin' on exceptin' rags. An' they're sick.

Their faces, an' hands, an' legs is all sores."

"He's heard the story in church or somewhere--you remember, the healing of the lepers in Luke," the missionary said with a smile of satisfaction.

"How many sick tramps are there, my boy?"

I had learned to count to a hundred when I was five years old, so I went over the group carefully and announced:

"Ten of 'em. They're all wavin' their arms an' yellin' at the other men."

"But they don't come near them?" was the query.

I shook my head. "They just stand right there an' keep a-yellin' like they was in trouble."

"Go on," urged the missionary. "What next? What's the man doing in the front of the other crowd you said was walking along?"

"They've all stopped, an' he's sayin' something to the sick men. An' the boys with the goats 's stopped to look. Everybody's lookin'."

"And then?"

"That's all. The sick men are headin' for the houses. They ain't yellin' any more, an' they don't look sick any more. An' I just keep settin' on my horse a-lookin' on."

At this all three of my listeners broke into laughter.

"An' I'm a big man!" I cried out angrily. "An' I got a big sword!"