Eric Knickerbocker
February 2, 2003
“The great Pullman was whirling onward with such dignity of motion that a glance from the window seemed simply to prove that the plains of Texas were pouring eastward” (91). Boom! We’re on a train witnessing the liquid landscape of Texas. This fact is all Stephen Crane chooses to tell us. In fact, he doesn’t even use the word “train” until the ninth paragraph when he is writing dialog for the man who is the betrothed to the woman implied in the title of the piece, “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.” We learn in the second paragraph that the couple is on a coach from San Antonio and that “the man’s face was reddened from many days in the wind and the sun” (91). We also learn that the “bride was not pretty, nor was she young” and it would seem that this couple are rather out of place on this coach speeding away from San Antonio (91). Crane is up to something. Don’t think he’s going to leave them on this train. No, I am here to inform you that he has a nasty little trick up his sleeve and his goal is to “deceive to delight”; he is going to try a fast bait and switch, dangling the barbed hook before your startled imagination, and then, when you least expect it, he plans to go for the kill, jerking the carpet out from beneath your feet.
The couple “were evidently very happy” (91). The “man’s face in particular beamed with an elation that made him appear ridiculous to the negro porter” (92). It would seem that this handyman “bullied” them in their seeming naïvité. In fact, everything about this couple seems naïve, simple, unsophisticated. She tells him the time “with a shy and clumsy coquetry” which causes a passerby to grow “excessively sardonic” and “wink at himself” in the mirror (92).
We eventually find out this man has a name. Jack Porter. We discover Jack Porter is “the town marshal of Yellow Sky, a man known, liked, and feared in his corner, a prominent person” (92). Why do we learn this? Because we are told he feels like he has betrayed “his innocent and unsuspecting community” by going off and “inducing” a girl from San Antonio “he believed he loved” to marry him (92). Now that is quite interesting. An “innocent and unsuspecting community” (92). It would almost seem to suggest an “innocent and unsuspecting” couple. Somehow I don’t think this inference is any accident.
Now in Yellow Sky people marry just like anywhere else, or so we are told. But we learn that Jack Porter feels such a sense of duty to his town that he feels “heinous,” guilty of “an extraordinary crime,” because he never overtly garnered their good graces before the fact. In the nineteenth paragraph he thinks to tell them, but “a new cowardice” has taken stole over him (93). The short sentence Crane chooses says it succinctly: “He feared to do it” (93).
He turns these thoughts of guilt over in his mind, thinking how he will slink into town, tail tucked dutifully between his legs. Then our attention is brought to rest on the bride: “What’s worrying you, Jack?” His reply? “I’m not worrying, girl; I’m only thinking of Yellow Sky” (93). Then we learn “she flushed in comprehension” (93). From here they look at each other “with eyes softly aglow,” Potter laughs “the same nervous laugh,” and “the flush on the bride’s face” seems to still be lingering around: it seems “quite permanent” (93).
The porter shows up again to brush Potter’s new clothes, to which Potter hands the man a coin “as he had seen others do” (93). Crane could leave our understanding of this man’s level of sophistication and cultural refinement here, but he doesn’t. Instead he follows it up by adding: “It was a heavy and muscle-bound business, as that of a man shoeing his first shoe” (93). What would ever give me the impression that this Jack Potter of Yellow Sky wasn’t savvy to the ways of porters who brush clothes off with “a brush,” of all possible things?
We find the train “rushing” up to the platform, the same one Potter “swept” with his eye (93). He noted, to his undying relief, that only the station-manager was there to greet him. Potter’s voice is hoarse when he hops down off the platform and sure enough, after “each laughed on a false note” and discovered their feet firm on the ground, we find out “they slunk rapidly away, his hang-dog glance” snaking furtively around with its “sweeping” sideswipes that first “swept” the platform (94).
Cut! Crane drops Potter and his wife abruptly and slices to scene two, leaving the couple to scurry home on their own. We find ourselves at the bar, the “Weary Gentlemen Saloon” to be exact (94). We join “three Texans who did not care to talk at that time,” two “Mexican sheepherders, who did not talk as a general practice”—at least here, anyway—and a “drummer who talked a great deal and rapidly” (94). The second paragraph informs us that, save these five and their bartender, Yellow Sky “was dozing” (94). It would seem that this “innocent and unsuspecting community” we met earlier has a lazy streak about it, taking a siesta from the “blazing sun,” the same “blazing sun” guilty for “the sands that burned” outside (94).
The drummer, which the gloss informs the uninitiated is another term for a salesman, seems a bit ignorant of the social protocol of Yellow Sky. This oversight is forgivable, I suppose, when we discover that something is amiss: “Scratchy Wilson’s drunk, and has turned loose with both hands” (94). Whoever this sandpaper man is, he evidently has everyone delicately embroidered and in absolute stitches. The Mexicans “fade” out—actually, Crane says they “faded out of the rear entrance of the saloon” (94). The rest, it seems, had “become instantly solemn,” this “information” making “such an obvious cleft in every skull in the room” that our poor drummer is “obliged to see its importance” (94).
Still, it would seem his skull is a bit thicker than most, though upon finding out that Scratchy Wilson packs a mean pair of six-shooters, he seems “to be swayed between the interest of a foreigner and the perception of personal danger” (95). After the bartender’s advice to “lay down on the floor,” our fierce little drummer “kept a strict eye upon the door,” and while “the time had not come for him to hug the floor,” he “sidled near the wall” . . . “as an extra precaution,” of course (95).
After questioning the remaining patrons as to Scratchy’s intentions—he seems to be especially interested to learn whether Scratchy would “kill anybody”—Crane then extracts a rather telling question from this drummer’s lips: “But what do you do in a case like this? What do you do?” (95). What do you do, you ask? If you are Crane and you are writing the short story “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” you drop a bomb. Yes, another unnamed marionette, dancing on strings drawn taut by Stephen Crane’s pen, pipes up, saying something of Scratchy:
“Why he and Jack Potter—” (95).
Jack Potter? Where have we heard that name before? Wasn’t he that marshal from the “innocent and unsuspecting community” of Yellow Sky, the man too cowardly to telegraph ahead to tell of wooing the hand of his bride? Didn’t he stick out all over the place in a train from San Antonio, inviting the derision of the negro porter, and the sardonic wick of the man in the mirror? What does Jack Potter have to do with Scratchy Wilson, the sandpaper man? “‘But,’ in chorus the other men interrupted, ‘Jack Potter’s in San Antonio’” (95). Now Crane has our attention. Grabbing the drummer, he loosens these words from his lips, “Well, who is he? What’s he got to do with it?” (95).
“Oh, he’s town marshal. He goes out and fights Scratchy when he gets on one of these tears” (95). Now why is it that we delight in the redundant information? We all know by now who this Jack Potter is. But maybe we are seeing him in a slightly different light. Maybe we were too focused on the baited hook and didn’t notice that Crane is nearly finished whisking the carpet out from beneath our feet. We learn Scratchy Wilson, when sober is “all right—kind of simple—wouldn’t hurt a fly—nicest guy in town” (95). We also learn he is “a wonder with a gun,” the “last one of the old gang that used to hang out here” (96). Shortly before Crane cuts to scene three, the “man of bottles” was heard to utter, “I wish Jack Potter was back from San Anton’. He shot Wilson up once—in the leg—and he would sail in and pull out the kinks in this thing” (96). Then we hear the distant shot; scene two ends with a bang.
In scene three we meet “a man in a maroon-colored flannel shirt, which had been purchased for purposes of decoration”—nice alliteration, Crane—“and made principally by some Jewish women on the East Side of New York” (96). But he is not motionless. He “rounded the corner and walked into the middle of the main street of Yellow Sky” (96). And what does the scene reveal about the man’s hands? Each holds “a heavy, blue-black revolver” (96). Any guesses as to who this man might be?
Whoever he is, “he bellowed and fumed and swayed his revolvers here,” there, “and everywhere” (97). The bartender’s dog does not seem to have “appreciated” this “advance of events,” for “he yet lay dozing in front of the master’s door” (97). Seeing our mystery man, “the dog sprang up and walked diagonally away, with a sullen head, and growling” (97). Soon, however, “something spat in the ground before it,” something that made “a loud noise, a whistling,” and “the dog screamed,” its pace strangely accelerated as “the man stood laughing, his weapons at his hips” (97). Oh, the things that Crane tells us without ever saying a word!
“Ultimately the man was attracted by the closed door”—and we all know how alluring those can be—none other than the one attached to the Weary Gentleman Saloon (97). “He went to it and, hammering with a revolver, demanded drink” (97). The door, seeming to be of a solid stock, does not seem particularly interested in what this man has to say. Regardless, it does not yield to his request, or even complain when he pins “a bit of paper from the walk” to its frame with a knife that sprang into the story from nowhere, and doesn’t so much as wince when, after walking away, he pirouettes abruptly on his heel, and revolver spitting lead from its lips, misses by half an inch (97). Now how boring can a door be, anyway? The man is looking for a fight, and there is no offer.
Finally we get our first explicit clue as to who this man is. “The name Jack Potter, his ancient antagonist, entered his mind, and he concluded that it would be a glad thing if he should go to Potter’s house and by bombardment induce him to come out and fight” (97). This thought seizing him by the mind, Crane sends him off to Potter’s house, but not just in any old way. No, Crane shuffles him off “chanting Apache scalp-music,” which I understand is a particularly onerous style none too popular with the older generation (97).
Scene three concludes, spilling into the final scene four. Who is it that we meet here? “Potter and his bride” who are walking “sheepishly and with speed” (97). And what are they doing besides walking? “Sometimes they laughed together shamefacedly and low” (97). But we don’t get much of a glance, because in the third sentence, which is the second paragraph, we find Potter guiding his wife around the corner. Now why do you want me to tell you the end? Something tells me you have a really good idea what’s going to happen. Yes Crane reveals that Potter is no coward, he is no naïve little simpleton. And he has no gun. But Potter’s “heels don’t move and inch backward,” as he informs our mystery man Mr. Scratchy that “I ain’t got no gun on me. Honest, I ain’t” (98).
“Don’t tell me you ain’t got no gun on you . . . . Don’t take me for no kid” (98). These are the lines Crane provides for Scratchy, to show the true nature of Potter, who replies: “I ain’t takin’ you for no kid. I’m takin’ you for a damn fool. It tell you I ain’t got a gun, and I ain’t. If you’re goin’ to shoot me up, you better begin now; you’ll never get a chance like this again” (98). This confounds Scratchy, who sneers, “Been to Sunday-school?” (98).
Yes, Crane has completely whisked the carpet out from beneath our feet now. He has chosen Scratchy to be the first in the “innocent and unsuspecting community” of Yellow Sky to learn of Potter’s new marriage. Upon bearing witness to this fact, a befuddled Scratchy replies “Well, I s’pose it’s all off now,” and, “placing both weapons in their holsters,” his feet make “funnel-shaped tracks in the sand” as they carry him out of the story, the covers of the book folding shut on this scene (99). And this, I suppose, explains that nasty little trick Crane had up his sleeve, his goal of “deceiving to delight” accomplished with whatever degree of success the reader is willing to grant him, his fast bait-and-switch ploy holding up an “innocent and unsuspecting” simpleton only to transform him, with deft slight of pen, into a hero before our unsuspecting eyes.
Table of Contents | Home | About | Newsletter | Forum | Misc. | Contact | Search | Links | Random Page
.:| get up to date: newsletter :. 1&1 .: discussion forum: participate |:.