He drew back sharply, shock showing clearly on his face. “Touch of the tarbrush in you, boy? By—” He bent forward, looking at me searchingly. “No, I can see you aint. Just some notions youll outgrow. You just don’t understand. We might have won that war if it hadnt been for the Abolitionists.”
Would we? I’d heard it said often enough; it would have been presumptuous to doubt it.
“The darkies are better off among their own,” he said; “they never should have been here in the first place; black and white can’t mix. Leave ideas like that alone, Hodge; there’s plenty and enough to be done. Chase the foreigners out, teach their flunkies a lesson, build the country up again.”
“Are you trying to get me to join the Grand Army?”
Pondible finished his beer. “Won’t answer that one, boy. Let’s say I just want to get you somewheres to sleep, three meals a day, and some of that education youre so fired up about. Come along.”
4. TYSS
He took me to a bookseller’s and stationery store on Astor Place with a printshop in the basement and the man to whom he introduced me was the owner, Roger Tyss. I spent almost six years there, and when I left neither the store nor its contents nor Tyss himself seemed to have changed or aged.
I know books were sold and others bought to take their places on the shelves or to be piled towerwise on the floor. I helped cart in many rolls of sulphide paper and bottles of printers’ ink, and delivered many bundles of damp pamphlets, broadsides, letterheads and envelopes. Inked ribbons for typewriting machines, penpoints, ledgers and daybooks, rulers, paperclips, legal forms and cubes of indiarubber came and went. Yet the identical, invincible disorder, the synonymous dogeared volumes, the indistinguishable stock, the unaltered cases of type seemed fixed for six years, all covered by the same film of dust which responded to vigorous sweeping only by rising into the air and immediately settling back on precisely the same spots.
Roger Tyss grew six years older and I can only charge it to the heedless eye of youth that I saw no signs of that aging. Like Pondible and, as I learned, so many members of the Grand Army, he wore a beard. His was closely trimmed, wiry and grizzled. Above the beard and across his forehead were many fine lines which always held some of the grime of the store or printing press. You did not dwell long on either beard or wrinkles however; what held you were his eyes: large, dark, fierce and compassionate. You might have dismissed him at first glance as simply an undersized, stoopshouldered, slovenly printer, had it not been for those eyes which seemed in perpetual conflict with his other features.
“Robbed and bludgeoned, ay?” he said with a curious disrespect for sequence after Pondible had explained me to him. “Dog eats dog, and the survivors survive. Backmaker, ay? Is that an American name?”