Lonely Crusade Read Free Page A

force submission into her living flesh. But he could feel no desire, and she could show no response. He conjured up lust-provoking visions of other women he had seen and desired, women of the street, women of his imagination. It had no effect. He hated her because he could feel no desire. She hated him.
    Yet he had her anyway, because she was his wife. And as his wife, the vessel of his impotency, into whom he must release his slow, numbing sense of panic.
    Even in this, he failed. For it was as self-abuse, repulsive and never ending; and even ending was all the same as when it had begun, passionless, unrelieving, and as unemotional as spitting on the street. Nor did the fear abate.
    Now it was through. He had awakened her and made her listen. And then had raped her without desire. Maybe some day he could tell her why he had done it, and she might forgive him, he thought. But now, bone tired with the first thin rottenness of remorse beginning to leak into his mind, the only thing he wished to do was go to sleep. She must be unutterably weary, also, he thought.
    But he came back to it inescapably, dreading it as he did so, as a man will come back to a place where he has committed a brutality to view in horror his own degradation.
    “Smitty said I’d get a raise if we’re successful at Cornstock,” he said. “Then you can quit your job and stay home. You won’t have to be tired all the time.”
    “Oh, Lee, let’s don’t start quarreling.” The thin thread of exasperation in her voice was near the breaking point.
    “I’m not quarreling. I’m just commenting on my job.”
    “You used to hate the union when I was active in it,” she reminded him.
    “I just didn’t want you running around with all those lousy Communists.”
    “Is that what you intend to do?”
    “Look, why is it you always try to belittle everything I do?”
    “I am just reminding you of your attitude when I was interested in unionism.”
    “At least Fin not going to get so involved that I bring it home to bed.”
    “Then what are you doing now?”
    “I simply remarked that you should be able to stay home and be a wife after I get my raise.”
    He could not tell her how much it hurt him for her to have a better job than he had ever had. Nor what it had done to him inside for her to have supported him since he’d been out of work. Now if she could not understand herself, to hell with her, he thought.
    “Oh, Lee, please let’s go to sleep!” she cried.
    “Go to sleep then!” he shouted. “I’m not stopping you!”
    She turned her back and drew the covers. Soon she was asleep.
    He lay and listened to the rain. He was not only a coward, but a beast, he berated himself—lower than a dog. The bravest thing he had ever done was to rape his wife. What tortured him now was the cold, sober realization of the extents his fear could drive him—as if always he lived on the border line of his own restraint.
    Maybe it came from knowing too much, he tried to rationalize. From having read too many newspapers, magazines, and books, and having studied his American history too well. Had he never known the long history of brutalities toward Negroes, he might not now be so afraid, he told himself. But as it was, every time he read of a white mob lynching a Negro in Mississippi, he felt as if they had lynched Lee Gordon too.
    But all this fear now just because of one, small, insignificant job was senseless, he told himself. Just a case of stage fright, first-night jitters that anyone, white or black, might experience on the eve of a new, strange job.
    He would think of something to refute this fear, then relax, and go to sleep, he decided. Tomorrow he would have forgotten it. But he could think of nothing that would make him unafraid.

Chapter 2
    L EE GORDON came suddenly awake, blasted from his sleep. The darkness had not lifted, and for a moment he wondered what it was that had awakened him. It seemed as if he had just dozed off. As he turned sleepily to