Free Tears Are for Angels by Paul Connolly Page B

little crazy with it, the hate and the longing and the sorrow and the dark, nameless voice in me ceaselessly asking, Why ? Maybe it was the loneliness and the eternal sand, or the never ending beans and bacon, or the silence at night. Maybe it was all of that.
        But whatever it was, whether it was crazy or not, some giant grip took hold of my brain and steadily squeezed on it until it slopped. I could no longer, literally, think. My body moved and functioned. Some instinct supplied what it had to have, the motions, the food, the rest, or rather the stretching of bones and flesh upon the unyielding bunk.
        But beyond that, cells and lobes refused to go. The careful calculation of the hospital days was impossible now. I could not even remember what those exhaustive, always flawed plans had been, much less conceive new ones. The ability to think, to reason, to apply logic was squeezed out of me, and in its place an image rose: a lace, swart, handsome, always smiling, with not only mockery but defiance in the deep blue of the eyes, with tumbling curly hair, the lips moist and wet, Stewart's face, bodiless, bloodless, fleshless, always before me, always mocking, always haunting even the tortured fever of sleep.
        The image persisted until it was no longer image but reality, like the spring or the four ghostly posts, the skeletons against sand and sky. It persisted until one day I took a stick six feet long and drove it into the earth about twenty yards from my door and placed an empty bean can over the end of it and went back and sat in the door until the face came, leering from what had once been a can of beans, and then I took the rifle and methodically began to put bullets through the can.
        When that one was full of holes, I put up another can, and then another, and thereafter the image appeared always sieved with dark, evil holes, none of them different from the hole in Lucy's head about which the stain of exploding powder was seared.
        But the plan did not come, the plan to which my days were to have been devoted, the plan to which I would someday apply my hand like an implacable god. It devolved into an ethereal face and a can of beans and a rifle, a dream that inevitably faded before the final moment of knowledge.
        The hand still squeezed on me, cells and lobes still stagnated, and I remained a god without lightning.
        Yes, the Negro was right. And one night, when I had been here three months, the loneliness and the hurt and the hate, the face in the can, and the impotence told me he had been right. And I walked out of the little shack and out of the road and down it to a small unpainted farmhouse set back among overbearing trees.
        When I returned, I put the two fruit jars on the floor by the door, got a can of beans off the shelf, emptied them in the unwashed frying pan, and then took the can out and hung it on the stick. I went back to the shack, got the rifle from the corner, sat down in the door, and took a drink from one of the jars.
        Pretty soon, in the moonlight, I could see the face in the can and I lifted the rifle and put a bullet over its right eye, a little in toward the nose. Then I put the rifle down and took another drink and waited for the face to come again.
        
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        I was drunk.
        I had to lean for a moment against the candy counter, my eyes furry and my mouth a little slack, and then I had my feet firmly on the floor under me again and I walked on over to the potbellied stove, glowing red against the raw winter chill.
        There was a vacant chair in the circle around it and I lurched down on it, Feeling the sharp edge of the pistol in my hip pocket.
        "Well, Harry," the man sitting next to me said. My eyes focused slowly on him and I saw that it was George Aitken, who owned a small farm beyond my own. Or what had been my own.
        I looked at him and there couldn't have been any greeting in my