Cool Hand Luke - Donn Pearce [52]
The girl lay curled up in a heap on the floor, burying her face in her arms, refusing to look at the bewhiskered, muddy enemy soldier who stood in the doorway playing his fiendish instrument.
Then Luke stopped. High on the wall was a huge crucifix, the figure of Christ carved in the crude, macabre style of the Middle Ages, the wood dark and stained and splintered by the years, the face gaunt and tormented.
Luke stood there and looked at it. He looked down at the girl. He waited for a long time, hanging his head and thinking and quietly slung his banjo over his shoulder and left the room.
13
SO WE WORKED OUR WAY THROUGH THE spring, building our Time on The Hard Road. But music had come into our lives and we began our days with a new feeling, not at all afraid of the heat and the labor, the ant and the mosquito bites, the cramps and callouses. For Luke’s music had taught us to understand the melody of the leg chains, the rhythm of the Floorwalker’s feet, the wind of the passing traffic. And for once all was harmony. We knew that our yells to count off, to pour it out, to move on up or dig a hole were just part of a prolonged and complicated hymn.
Then the season began for using bush axes to clear away the underbrush from the Shit Ditches. A bush axe has a four-foot handle. At the end is an eighteen-inch blade, double-edged and with a hooked bill at the end. And with the bush axe Luke had found his natural instrument, wading through the chest-deep stagnant water and mud of the briars and vines, the palmettos, the weeds and the swamp willows, every stroke seeming to communicate a vibrant tremor of wild joy that went tingling up his arms and shoulders into his brain.
And that was a hot summer. We were always bear-caught, the axes moving by themselves as we stumbled blindly through the heat, somehow making it to the end of each day and then loading up into the truck, riding back to Camp with our heads drooping and our shoulders slumped, our legs kicking out from under the benches in convulsive spasms, our shoes and pants and bodies covered with muck.
But this was the kind of work that Luke liked best. The supple, long, hooked blade of his bush axe flashed as he brought it down and around, forehand and backhand. The rest of us did what we had to do, working up to our belts in the putrid water, the mosquitoes and horse flies, swarming over us in great clouds as we swung our tools, slapped at the insects, floundered in the mire, sweated, swore, scratched and itched in our agony.
But Luke ignored the blisters and the scratches, the callouses and the heat as he lopped off the branches and fronds, jerking each fallen piece out of the way and wading farther into the tangled thicket, pirouetting, struggling, decapitating and trampling down those shadowed demons that rose up writhing all around him.
Invariably he took a stretch much longer than anyone else’s. Then he managed to finish first, eagerly climbing up the bank and swaggering down the road to the head of the line with long, rapid steps, his shoes and pants sloshing and dripping as he went.
Spinning the handle of his bush axe with a fast twist, the burnished metal of the blade sparkled in the sunlight. Exulting in his strength, he defied that sun and the sun-god alike, his voice booming out over the countryside,
Movin‘ up here, BOSS!
But all the while Boss Godfrey was watching Luke. Some of us began to feel the Heat that was emanating from the smooth, anonymous mirrors of his sunglasses. But he gave no sign, until that day he stood on the edge of the pavement way ahead of the squad, one hand jingling the change in his pocket, the other leaning on his cane. Slowly we hacked and slashed our way towards him, that Shit Ditch running along the edge of a cypress swamp.
Drawling, barely raising his voice, he called out,
Rabbit? Yo! Rabbit! Bring my rifle over here to me.
Waiting for a car to pass, Rabbit then crossed the road to the cage truck, opened the door and dragged out the