“No. Awfully poor. But happy and contented.”
“Where your Poppa leeve?”
“My father is the Man in the Moon.”
That answer changed him completely. I seemed to have given the password. I had joined whatever it was he belonged to. He gave me three oranges as a sign.
I had hoped we would drive past the smoke and fire. But he turned at right angles, into the midst of it, and drove into a big black barn. He waved me good-by in the courtliest manner, as though he were somebody important, and I were somebody important.
Pretty soon I asked a passer-by the nearest way to the suburbs. I had to walk on the edges of my feet they were so tired. The street he pointed out to me was nothing but a continuation of tar-black, coughing, out-of-door ovens, side by side, shoulder to shoulder, on to the crack of doom. I presume, in the language of this vain world, they were coke ovens.
I opened my eyes as little as possible and breathed hardly at all. Then, by way of diversion, I nibbled animal crackers, first a dog, then a giraffe, then a hippopotamus, then an elephant.
Those ovens looked queerer as the street led on. There were subtle essences abroad when the smoke cleared away, and when the great roar ceased there were vague sounds that struck awe into the heart. I may be mistaken, but I think I know the odor of a burning ghost on the late afternoon wind, and the puffing noise he makes.
As the cinders crunched, crunched, underfoot, the conviction deepened: “These ovens are not mere works of man. Dying sinners snared and corrupted by Oil City are carried here when the city has done its work—carried in the wagon of Apollyon, under bunches of green bananas. Body and soul they are disintegrated by the venomous oil; they crumble away in the town of oil, and here in the town of ovens, the fragments are burned with unquenchable fire.”
Now it was seven o’clock. The street led south past the aristocratic suburbs of Franklin, and on to the fields and dandelion-starred roadside.