I am happy to report that I do not remember them more specifically than this, but I was probably more impressed by the delivery than the message delivered. I could not imagine where they had discovered these women. During their performance, some sense of duration was restored to me; while I could be certain of nothing pertaining to the passage of time, it is not possible that the Cheer-Up period lasted less than two hours. Then they let us go to the latrine.
After a breakfast of boiled cabbage and dry pumpernickel crusts—more savory than you might imagine—we were assigned to our work for the day. I had expected to return to the manure pile, but got instead the rock quarry. I remember observing then, with no surprise at all, that the sun was out and the day promised to be a hot one.
The work at the rock quarry was organized according to the same futilitarian pattern that governed the manure-pile operation. Rock had to be hacked, pried and blasted from one end of the quarry, then reduced to coarse gravel with sledge-hammers and carted to the other end of the excavation in wheelbarrows. Most of the men commenced working at some task in the quarry with the automatic unconcern of trained beasts who have paused for rest and water, perhaps, but have never fully stopped. A guard indicated a wheelbarrow to me and uttered a sharp sound ... something like HUP! I picked up the smooth handles of the barrow, and time turned its back upon us again.
It was that night—or perhaps the following night—that Bertha and I had our first fifteen-minute visit with each other. She was changed: her face glowed with feverish vitality, her hair was stringy and moist, and her eyes were serenely glassy. She had not been more provocative in twenty-five years. An old dormant excitement stirred within me—microscopically but unmistakably.
She told me that she had been put to work in the jute mill, but had passed out and had been transferred to the steam laundry. Her job in the laundry was to sort out the socks and underwear that were too bad to go in with the rest of the wash. We speculated on where the socks and underwear could have come from, as such fripperies were denied to us at the Farm. We also wondered about the manure, considering that no animals were in evidence here. Both, we concluded, must have been shipped in specially from the Outside. We found it in us to giggle, when the end of the visit was announced, over our own choice of conversational material for that precious quarter hour. Thereafter, when we could catch glimpses of each other during the day, we would exchange furtive signals, then go about our work exhilarated by the fiction that we shared some priceless Cabalistic knowledge.
The grim Captain made an appearance in the rock quarry one morning just as we were beginning work. He stood on top of a pile of stones, swinging his kidney-sap from his wrist and letting his eyes sweep over us as though selecting one for slaughter.
When the silence had soaked in thoroughly, he announced in his cold, incisive tone that "there will be no rest periods, no chow, no 'Beddy-by,' until this entire rock face is reduced to ballast rock." He indicated a towering slab of stone. We raised our heads only long enough to reassure ourselves of the utter hopelessness of the task before us. Not daring to look at each other closely, fearing to see our own despair reflected in the faces of others, we picked up our hammers and crowbars and crawled to the top of the monolithic mass. The film must have cleared from my eyes then, momentarily.
"Why—this thing is nothing but a huge writing slate," I said to a small, bald inmate beside me. He made a feeble noise in reply. The Captain left, and the only other guard now relaxed in the shade of a boulder nearly fifty yards away. He was smoking a forbidden cigar. Suddenly and unaccountably, I felt a little taller than the others, and everything looked unnaturally clear. The slab was less than six inches wide at the top!
"If we work this thing right, this job will practically do itself. We'll be through here before sundown," I heard myself snap out. The others, accustomed now to obeying any imperative voice, fell to with crowbars and peaveys as I directed them. "Use them as levers," I said. "Don't just flail and hack—pry!" No one questioned me. When all of the tools were in position I gave the count:
"One—two—HEAVE!"