From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [383]
And with it came out the secret that Prew had puzzled over, the secret of his power over the men in the Stockade, the secret of the bigheartedness that an archcynic like Blues Berry could worship unreservedly:
Jack Malloy was able to love the human race because he expected ahead-of-time to be let down by his friends and hurt by his enemies and betrayed by his leaders. He saw these things as natural reactions to be anticipated, instead of perfidies to be decried.
If there was one single regret in Jack Malloy’s life, it was that he had been born in the wrong time. He had been born with the prophets, instead of with the Messiah.
“Because it will come,” he said. “It hasnt come yet, but eventually it will have to come. Logic and evolution demand that it will come. And it will come here in America, because it is here in America, the home of the most hated race, where the hope of the world will lie. The greatest religions always come up out of the most hated races. Maybe I wont live to see it. Maybe you wont. But it has to come.”
He did not expect to live to see it. He had had his fling, with the Wobblies, and they had turned out to be only one of the forerunners. He attributed his bad luck to something terrible he had done once ages past, some bad mistake, that he was still working out and paying for. Jack Malloy believed in reincarnation, because to his logical mind it was the only logical explanation. And it was for this same reason that he worshipped the memory of Joseph Hillstrom so.
“He was a saint. He had to be one, to have been given the life he was allowed to have.”
Joe Hill, who had written Casey Jones and Hallelujah, I’m A Bum without ever even getting the credit of authorship, who had died back in 1915 before Jack Malloy ever heard of the Wobblies, who had been shot to death by a Utah firing squad for a murder he did not commit after asking that his body be transported to the Montana State Line because he “didnt want to be found dead in Utah,” who had not lived to see the degeneration, destruction and death of his beloved IWW.
Joe Hill, whom Jack Malloy envied more than any other man.
“Thats the way to go out. That shows what can be done. But you have to have what it takes. And then on top of that you have to have the luck. Someday they will rank Joe Hill right up alongside old John the Baptist. He must have done something great, back a long time ago before he was ever Joe Hill, to have earned a chance at a ticket like that one.”
When Prew asked what he meant, he said, “In one of his previous lives.”
Chapter 43
IT WAS DURING the month after Angelo had gone to the hosp and before Stonewall Jackson came back with news of him, that the young Indiana farmboy Prew had seen beaned in Number Three was transferred into Number Two. Of all the men that had been in Number Three with Prew he was the one Prew would have picked as least likely to succeed but he came in with them after his three day jaunt in the Hole as mildly affable as ever.
They had been expecting him since before Angelo had gone in the Hole. Apparently, after that first spell of lapse that resulted from the beaning itself and had lasted only one day, the Indiana farmboy had started having them more and more often and for longer and longer periods. When he was normal, he was the same old mild uncomplaining self; when he was in one of the lapses, he was the same docile dreamy idiot Prew had seen. But every time he came out of a period of lapse he went