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repair.
    â€œPete, I swear it, you are the individual and not the symbol, yet I can’t deny the suggestion. Transportation-men are the most modern. They’re always heading westward, for that is the way the roads, the rails and even many of the greatest rivers ultimately run. They see life as it is to-day and see it up close and at first hand, not through a gauze curtain. They see it in bright sunlight. On the other hand, they— maybe I should be saying you, all of you— remind me of the ancients, the Greeks, how they take things at their ease and are robust.”
    Pete sees that stevedores, deckhands, carters, brakemen and teamsters do have something in common, but the talk about Greeks eludes him, its meaning undisturbed.
    â€œWhat was his name?” Pete has the fingers of his left hand on Walt’s upper thigh and is mimicking a piano player’s motions on the keyboard.
    â€œIt’s now long in the past.”
    In fact, though, Fred Vaughan up in New York has written letters to Walt until just a little while ago, usually moaning that he so seldom receives a reply. Still, his letters have been full of good humor. In Sixty, when a Boston publishing concern took on Walt and his plans for a bigger edition of
Leaves
, relieving him of the chore of selling his own book, he tells Fred of his plan to go up there for a couple of months to see the work through the press. In response comes a letter back offering suggestions. “If you want to form the acquaintance of any Boston Stage men, get one of the stages running to Charlestown Bridge, or Chelsea Ferry, & inquire for Charley Hollis or Ed Morgan, mention my name, and introduce yourself as my friend.” The Boston publisher went bankrupt the following year and the plates of the greatly expanded
Leaves
were acquired by a notorious book-pirate. Recently Fred has been writing again, not knowing that Pete has appeared on the horizon and indeed now consumes the foreground,like a big tall figure taking up all the space in a narrow doorway. Walt neglects to respond even more adamantly than in the past.
    Fred is from Canada. Eventually, after many long years in America, he will return home. He will marry there, only to grow restless and footloose in his native jurisdiction and die in a place called Vancouver, a town too new to have history but only opinions.
    Pete becomes still more mischievous. “Was his robertson as good a thing as my own?” he asks, looking down at himself. Pete’s dick is not long but nonetheless enormously thick even in repose, nearly the circumference of a silver half-dollar.
    â€œI’ll not answer that,” Walt replies. “But I have had the sad duty to give bed baths and such to many a young man in the hospitals. I may very likely have seen more phalluses than the majority of doctors, and while some are sweet and others sassy, none is more outstanding than your own.”
    Pete purses his lips in satisfaction, receiving the compliment for what it is: generous but not exaggerated.

    Having already told Walt to keep away from the wards until his own health is more certain, the doctors suggest he go north where there are no noxious swamps and where, by seeing that the other Whitmans are all right, he might relieve at least one major source of the anxiety that has caused him to become so run-down. The nurse who has now in effect become a patient has hesitated, undecided as to what he should do. The fighting is intense, the reports in the papers still horrifying. If George should be wounded again, would he not be sent to the capital once more? Walt should be there for him. And yet the family is coming apart. Jeff is all right, always has been. But Andrew is in the grave now, Eddie the slow one still lives withMother, and Jesse is not right in the head either, just as before, except that now he is prey to violent outbursts against Mother and Jeff’s daughter (who is called Hattie because her full name,