One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey [62]
I see a Chronic float into sight a little below me. It’s old Colonel Matterson, reading from the wrinkled scripture of that long yellow hand. I look close at him because I figure it’s the last time I’ll ever see him. His face is enormous, almost more than I can bear. Every hair and wrinkle of him is big, as though I was looking at him with one of those microscopes. I see him so clear I see his whole life. The face is sixty years of southwest Army camps, rutted by iron-rimmed caisson wheels, worn to the bone by thousands of feet on two-day marches.
He holds out that long hand and brings it up in front of his eyes and squints into it, brings up his other hand and underlines the words with a finger wooden and varnished the color of a gunstock by nicotine. His voice is deep and slow and patient, and I see the words come out dark and heavy over his brittle lips when he reads.
“No…The flag is…Ah-mer-ica. America is…the plum. The peach. The wah-ter-mel-on. America is…the gumdrop. The pump-kin seed. America is…tell-ah-vision.”
It’s true. It’s all wrote down on that yellow hand. I can read it along with him myself.
“Now…The cross is…Mex-i-co.” He looks up to see if I’m paying attention, and when he sees I am he smiles at me and goes on. “Mexico is…the wal-nut. The hazel-nut. The ay-corn. Mexico is…the rain-bow. The rain-bow is…wooden. Mexico is…woo-den.”
I can see what he’s driving at. He’s been saying this sort of thing for the whole six years he’s been here, but I never paid him any mind, figured he was no more than a talking statue, a thing made out of bone and arthritis, rambling on and on with these goofy definitions of his that didn’t make a lick of sense. Now, at last, I see what he’s saying. I’m trying to hold him for one last look to remember him, and that’s what makes me look hard enough to understand. He pauses and peers up at me again to make sure I’m getting it, and I want to yell out to him Yes, I see: Mexico is like a walnut; it’s brown and hard and you feel it with your eye and it feels like the walnut! You’re making sense, old man, a sense of your own. You’re not crazy the way they think. Yes…I see…
But the fog’s clogged my throat to where I can’t make a sound. As he sifts away I see him bend back over that hand.
“Now…The green sheep is…Can-a-da. Canada is…the fir tree. The wheat field. The cal-en-dar…”
I strain to see him drifting away. I strain so hard my eyes ache and I have to close them, and when I open them again the colonel is gone. I’m floating by myself again, more lost than ever.
This is the time, I tell myself. I’m going for good.
There’s old Pete, face like a searchlight. He’s fifty yards off to my left, but I can see him plain as though there wasn’t any fog at all. Or maybe he’s up right close and real small, I can’t be sure. He tells me once about how tired he is, and just his saying it makes me see his whole life on the railroad, see him working to figure out how to read a watch, breaking a sweat while he tries to get the right button in the right hole of his railroad overalls, doing his absolute damnedest to keep up with a job that comes so easy to the others they can sit back in a chair padded with cardboard and read mystery stories and girlie books. Not that he ever really figured to keep up—he knew from the start he couldn’t do that—but he had to try to keep up, just to keep them in sight. So for forty years he was able to live, if not right in the world of men, at least on the edge of it.
I can see all that, and be hurt by it, the way I was hurt by seeing things in the Army, in the war. The way I was hurt by seeing what happened to Papa and the tribe. I thought I’d got over seeing those things and fretting over them. There’s no sense in it. There’s nothing to be done.
“I’m tired,” is what he says.
“I know you’re tired, Pete, but I can’t do you no good fretting about it. You know I can’t.”
Pete floats on the way of the old colonel.
Here comes Billy Bibbit,