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By Root 14018 0

everybody, even Prew and Malloy. Jackson had gotten to talk to him just once, after he had been before The Board and his discharge was already certain. He had been very suspicious, but when Jackson proved to him conclusively that he really was from Number Two, he opened up with a grin and asked Jackson to pass on to the boys that he was okay—and that he was on his way out. He was very badly scarred, Jackson said, he looked like a punch-drunk fighter. But he did not, Jackson said, act like one. They had kept him in the prison ward two weeks after he went before The Board. Then they sent him back to the States. The Board recommended a yellow Dishonorable Discharge, Jackson said, on the grounds that soldier was a mental incompetent inherently unable to adjust, this disability being neither service-connected nor service-aggravated, and therefore was mentally unfit for service.

During the weeks Angelo had been in the Hole, and the month of silence before Jackson came back from the hosp to give them word, Jack Malloy had stood at Prewitt’s back like a big brick wall. When it was bad he was always there to talk to, or listen to. Mostly, he talked to Prew. Malloy would spin him yarns for hours, about his own life and past. In those weeks, without realizing it, Prew learned more about him than any of the rest of them had ever learned.

There was a singular quality about Jack Malloy. When he looked at you with his unembarrassed-dreamer’s eyes and talked to you with that soft powerful voice, you began to labor under the delusion that you were the most important person on this, or on any other, planet; and you believed you could do many things you never would have thought you could.

He had been almost everywhere and done almost everything in his 36 years. Among other things, he still walked with a little bit of a seaman’s roll. It set off his physique to perfection and gave him a kingly swagger that in the Stockade was no less than awesome. And there is nothing as romantic to professional soldiers as a civilian sailor. Also, there is a great respect for the printed word in the Army. Jack Malloy had read a tremendous lot. He seemed to have thumbnail biographies on his fingertips of everyone from old John D Rockefeller clear on down to the obscure Philippine Department General, Douglas MacArthur. And he could not talk without quoting books they had never heard of. But he did not even need these accomplishments to cinch his reputation. Jack Malloy was the kind of man who did not have to earn his reputation; it was tendered to him free-gratis by the imagination of every man in the Stockade.

Born the son of a county sheriff in Montana in 1905, he had been 13 in 1917 when his father started jailing the IWWs in earnest. That was what started him off: The Wobblies had taught him to read. He started his reading in his father’s jail with their books they always carried with them. In his gratitude he offered to help them escape from his dad’s jail. When the Wobblies turned down his offer, he learned the first lesson in what was to become his passion for passive resistance.

“They utilized it,” he would tell Prew, “but they didnt use enough of it. They didnt understand the principle. That was their greatest fault, and damn near their only one. But it was enough to make them fail. They believed in militant force. It was written into their covenant. They never fought or killed one-tenth as much as they were accused of, and not one-twentieth as much as their enemies fought and killed them; but the point is they believed in it abstractly, and thats what defeated them: a mistake in abstract logic.

“But they were all great guys just the same. With their courage and intelligence, nothing on earth could have stopped them if they had understood the principle of passive resistance.

“You dont remember the Wobblies. You were too young. Or else not even born yet. There has never been anything like them, before or since. They called themselves materialist-economists, but what they really were was a religion. They were workstiffs and bindlebums like you