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.