and visited Stonewall Jackson’s grave; at dusk stood expectorating in the Kanawha River and walked the hillbilly night of Charleston, West Virginia; at midnight Ashland, Kentucky, and a lonely girl under the marquee of a closed-up show. The dark and mysterious Ohio, and Cincinnati at dawn. Then Indiana fields again, and St. Louis as ever in its great valley clouds of afternoon. The muddy cobbles and the Montana logs, the broken steamboats, the ancient signs, the grass and the ropes by the river. The endless poem. By night Missouri, Kansas fields, Kansas night-cows in the secret wides, crackerbox towns with a sea for the end of every street; dawn in Abilene. East Kansas grasses become West Kansas rangelands that climb up to the hill of the Western night.
Henry Glass was riding the bus with me. He had got on at Terre Haute, Indiana, and now he said to me, “I’ve told you why I hate this suit I’m wearing, it’s lousy—but ain’t all.” He showed me papers. He had just been released from Terre Haute federal pen; the rap was for stealing and selling cars in Cincinnati. A young, curly-haired kid of twenty. “Soon’s I get to Denver I’m selling this suit in a pawnshop and getting me jeans. Do you know what they did to me in that prison? Solitary confinement with a Bible; I used it to sit on the stone floor; when they seed I was doing that they took the Bible away and brought back a leetle pocket-size one so big. Couldn’t sit on it so I read the whole Bible and Testament. Hey-hey—” he poked me, munching his candy, he was always eating candy because his stomach had been ruined in the pen and couldn’t stand anything else—“you know they’s some real hot things in that Bi-ble.” He told me what it was to “signify.” “Anybody that’s leaving jail soon and starts talking about his release date is ‘signifying’ to the other fellas that have to stay. We-take him by the neck and say, ’Don’t signify with me!‘ Bad thing, to signify—y’hear me?”
“I won’t signify, Henry.”
“Anybody signify with me, my nose opens up, I get mad enough to kill. You know why I been in jail all my life? Because I lost my temper when I was thirteen years old. I was in a movie with a boy and he made a crack about my mother—you know that dirty word—and I took out my jackknife and cut up his throat and woulda killed him if they hadn’t drug me off. Judge said, ‘Did you know what you were doing when you attacked your friend?’ ‘Yessir, Your Honor, I did, I wanted to kill the sonofabitch and still do.’ So I didn’t get no parole and went straight to reform school. I got piles too from sitting in solitary. Don’t ever go to a federal pen, they’re worstest. Sheet, I could talk all night it’s ben so long since I talked to somebody. You don’t know how good I feel coming out. You just sitting in that bus when I got on—riding through Terre Haute—what was you thinking?”
“I was just sitting there riding.”
“Me, I was singing. I sat down next to you ‘cause I was afraid to set down next to any gals for fear I go crazy and reach under their dress. I gotta wait awhile.”
“Another hitch in prison and you’ll be put away for life. You better take it easy from now.”
“That’s what I intend to do, only trouble is m‘nose opens up and I can’t tell what I’m doing.”
He was on his way to live with his brother and sister-in-law; they had a job for him in Colorado. His ticket was bought by the feds, his destination the parole. Here was a young kid like Dean had been; his blood boiled too much for him to bear; his nose opened up; but no native strange saintliness to save him from the iron fate.
“Be a buddy and watch m‘nose don’t open up in Denver, will you, Sal? Mebbe I can get to my brother’s safe.”
When we arrived in Denver I took him by the arm to Larimer Street to pawn the penitentiary suit. The old Jew immediately sensed what it was before it was half unwrapped. “I don’t want that damn thing here; I get them every day from the Canyon City boys.”
All of Larimer Street was overrun with ex-cons trying to sell their prison-spun suits. Henry ended up with the thing under his