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Description
The True Story of John Henry

John Henry was a black man.  He was six feet straight of useful muscle.  He held a hammer in his hand from the day he popped out his mother to the day he laid himself in the grave.  This was when America was still fresh, when its stories were only halfway told.  Then the world was sleepy waking up from its dreaming, and everything was a little bit lazier than it is now – it’d take what we’d think of as a week for it go get from Monday to Tuesday sometimes.  Back then, some animals were still curious, some people still were too, and it was not unknown for someone’s brother to have met a rather gregarious rabbit once, or a talking fox, or a singing bull – and if your brother hadn’t met one yet it was a solid bet your cousin’s friend had met one and lost his shirt to him in cards.

John Henry dug a hole into the side of a mountain.  There was no reason for the work yet, the good boys up in Washington were busy trying to think one up, but for the time being the boys were told just to keep on digging.  All the workers except for John Henry spent most of their time idle, leaning on their hammers, chewing jerky, telling stories and singing songs.  Sometimes their boss, old Thomas Jefferson, would stumble down from his mansion house running after one of his girls, his bathrobe spilling out everywhere, and he’d notice the boys weren’t working he’d get to work yelling at them.  That’s what they called leadership back then.  The boys’d all stop their stories (it was the only way you could convince one of them to end a story), pick up their hammers and go join John Henry at the mountain.  Well, Thomas Jefferson was every bit as lazy as the rest of them and pretty soon he’d tire of yelling and go back to chasing his girls around and the boys could go back to their important work of leaning all on their hammers and talking.

John Henry was a good worker.  He wouldn’t even eat if people didn’t make a path of productive work from the mountain to the mess camp so he wouldn’t waste a step in idleness.  Even with that he ate rarely, and while he ate he’d walk a treadmill that had been set up to grind grain for the bread, and he’d mill enough flour to feed the whole camp until the next time he grew hungry.  The other workers didn’t much mind John Henry’s hard work, as they had important talking to do.  One bookish fellow reckoned that John Henry worked the mountain enough for them all, and that they talked and ate and stood leaning on their hammers enough for John Henry.  When Mrs. Henry showed up to camp, complaining that Mr. Henry had some other holes he’d ought to be drilling, why the bookish man laughed that they’d ought to make the ledgers straight on that responsibility, too.

Everything went along smoothly.  John Henry worked, the other workers talked, Thomas Jefferson stumbled after his girls with a drink in one hand and the other hand busy either keeping the bathrobe on or flinging it off – for what we’d think of as three decades.  Back then, it amounted only to a couple years.

Trouble came one day when Thomas Jefferson had a visitor.  This annoyed him plenty because it meant that he had to refrain from chasing his girls and he was stumped at what the girls would do if he were otherwise occupied.  But Thomas Jefferson exchanged his nice soft bathrobe for his starched white suit, tied his thin black cravat on daintily, combed his hair and then retired out on the verandah to meet his old friend, Colonel Sanders, who was dressed exactly identically.  They were busy drinking mint juleps and playing cards and boasting for at least a week and a half.

Both Thomas Jefferson and Colonel Sanders were blind drunk when they started making bets.  Thomas Jefferson bet Colonel Sanders that he couldn’t eat a bucket of fried chicken quicker than a dog could, and Thomas Jefferson ended up losing ten dollars, which is too much money in today-dollars to even reckon.  Colonel Sanders bet Thomas Jefferson that he had the best talking horse in the world, but they called that bet a draw because the horse was feeling mighty shy and could barely talk about the weather.  Well they bet on if the next bird that flew by would come from the north or south; they bet on the number of vowels a word randomly chosen out of the bible would have; they bet on how many bets they’d have made at the end of the day.  But soon Colonel Sanders made a bet that’d change the world.

“You reckon your John Henry is the best worker you’d ever hope to see, is that correct?”

“Why I assure you it is correct, Colonel,” Thomas Jefferson said.  “Ain’t nobody else in this whole state who works as much as my John Henry.”

“Well I bet you your Stetson hat that there’s a better worker coming down from the North just tomorrow who could dig that mountain quicker than your John Henry ever could.”

Thomas Jefferson gasped.  His Stetson hat was his favorite object in the world after his girls and his bathrobe, and Colonel Sanders knew Thomas Jefferson would not let such an audacious claim go unmatched.

“What’ll I get when I win?”  Thomas Jefferson drawled.

“Well,” the Colonel had given this some thought too, “I’ll give you my secret recipe.”

“You won’t even give that recipe to your wife!”

“Well I’ll give it to you if you win.  All eleven of my herbs and spices.”

That sealed the deal.  The two men shook hands and went back to betting on the number of fleas they’d find on the next mongrel dog they’d catch walking by.

News of the bet spread as fast as anything could spread back then, and by the next morning the work camp was humming softly in something close to excitement at the idea this marvelous worker from the North.  Some people went up to the mountain to tell John Henry about it, but if John Henry heard anything he was too busy saving his breath for the swinging of his hammer so didn’t waste a word in reply.

The sun took three days to go from morning to noon, but when noon finally came a big wagon rolled up to camp.  Thomas Jefferson, Colonel Sanders, and Ben Franklin jumped out.  Ben Franklin was an off-balanced man whose small body was fitted on top with a pale balding head about three sizes too big.  He reeked of perfume and was carrying a dainty scented handkerchief all the time.  The boys were surprised to see Thomas Jefferson out of his bathrobe and in a suit, but he was acting like it was the most natural thing in the world so they didn’t dare mention the change.  Thomas Jefferson and Colonel Sanders stumbled over to the camp and Ben Franklin waddled and they didn’t have to tell anybody to stay quiet and listen before they spoke because the only sound in the whole state at that point was the swinging of John Henry’s hammer.

“Everybody,” Thomas Jefferson proclaimed, “you get a couple days off work because we’re going to have us a little contest.”

There was a slow and lazy cheer.

“Ben Franklin here has invented a steam drill that he says can work harder than any man at half the pay and only visits his wife on weekends.”

The men stood there, stating at the covered wagon.

“And I cannot for the life of me believe that anything on this earth can work harder than our John Henry can, so we’re going to pit man against machine and see who comes out on top.”

The cheer was limply refrained.

“The first machine to break down loses.”

A big hulking thing covered with a sheet was hauled out from the wagon, and Ben Franklin stood beside it and gave a speech.  Nobody could understand a word he said, though, because Ben Franklin’s voice was so soft and had a funny accent to it.  Still, when Ben Franklin gave the word and his boys removed the sheet hiding the steam drill from sight, all the workers around gave a cheer four-and-a-half times louder than any cheer Thomas Jefferson would ever get in his whole distinguished life.

The steam drill was a monstrous contraption of levers, pulleys, pumps, wires, tubing, batteries, fans, and rust attached to a drill the size of John Henry himself.  It looked like it was as likely to drill a hole into a mountain as it was to fall into scrap in a second, but Colonel Sanders vouched for its sturdiness by a giving it a good kick to its side.  Ben Franklin’s boys then pulled the machine to the mountain right next to where John Henry was working and John Henry was called out to face his competitor.

“I’m working, boss,” He said to Thomas Jefferson, refusing to come out.

“But I have other work for you, John Henry.”

“Let me just finish up here, boss.”

“Haven’t you heard?  There’s gonna be a contest.”

John Henry wouldn’t listen to reason and kept on swinging his hammer against the mountain.  Well, Thomas Jefferson felt as silly as Colonel Sander’s must’ve when his talking horse would only mention the weather and blushed so darkly he had to put a coat of foundation on so he’d still look white.  Eventually the entire camp had to be employed in ripping John Henry out his hole and placing him on a fresh patch of mountain so the contest would start fair.  At that moment, Ben Franklin flipped a switch on the steam drill and it began to steam, shudder, and whir.  It stopped suddenly and a loud cheer went through the audience because they thought that it was bound to explode and they’d get to see some fireworks like on the 4th of July.  Unfortunately, the machine sputtered back to life and was soon eating into that mountain just as fast as anything else could.

You never saw a man as surprised as John Henry when that machine kicked in to work.  It was like he’d been speaking Chinese all his life thinking it gibberish and finally stumbled into a Chinatown.  Some people even claim John Henry smiled.  The two worked at that mountain without stopping for days, and the news of the contest spread all across the nation.  Before either John Henry or the steam drill could break into a sweat the camp became the first ever bona fide media circus.  There were tents, clowns, rides –Ben Franklin even made a daily newspaper with each day’s headline marking the progress of the two drillers in pounds of rock removed and feet drilled.  Well, the only two creatures in all of America who didn’t have fun at that carnival was the steam drill and John Henry.  Even Christians and Indians came to the show.

Some of the most famous people of the time came to watch John Henry fight the steam drill.  On the third day Moses came down with about thirty Israelites.  He was a big man with a bigger grey beard and lugged around those ten commandments everywhere he would go just in case any of his flock would forget or something.  Moses started preaching before he even set up camp calling both the steam drill and John Henry instruments of the devil because they worked too hard and did not honor the lord’s Sabbath.  He was such a good preacher that most of the Christians who heard him decided to boycott the carnival completely and the whole enterprise nearly sunk then and there.  Ben Franklin was too good a businessman for that and offered a discount at all his hot-dog stands and that got everyone rushing back even though Moses yelled at them that it was wrong to eat pork.

Later that afternoon a man who looked a lot like Moses only with a crooked hat and no robe and a slightly smaller beard came up and started preaching himself.  It was Walt Whitman and he talked about how beautiful John Henry was with his tight muscles moving and sweaty skin and that big strong hammer.  The machine was pretty beautiful, too, in Walt Whitman’s eyes.  A small crowd gathered around Whitman and pretty soon started a wild party with a bunch of laughter and sexual references to sea-spray until a bunch of Moses’ Israelites broke up the party with shouts of “Sodom!’ “indecency!” and “family values!”.  Moses himself came up to Walt Whitman and the two got into such a horrible shouting match that Thomas Jefferson made a bet that it’d wake Rip Van Winkle, but he lost.

It was late into the night when Moses and Walt Whitman each uncorked their jugs of wine and almost a minute afterwards the two went arm in arm, ruddy-cheeked, singing hymnals about the beauty of the sun and god and creation.  Seeing their leaders break their feud so suddenly, the Israelites and the revelers got together and partied themselves.  It was great fun.  The revelers taught the Israelites some party tricks and the Israelites taught the revelers some really good jokes.  By the end of the night you couldn’t tell who were the holy and who were damned, and a good deal of them just upped and left for as far out West as they could find, and after forty years of wandering the desert settled down in a town they called Hollywood.

The next day Robert Johnson came into camp.  He had just got a brand new guitar from the devil and sat himself down a little bit aways from the carnival and plucked for a while and sang a song or two.  The music was so beautiful and mournful that everybody who could hear dropped what they were doing to listen.  The bees stopped their buzzing and making honey; Thomas Jefferson stopped looking for girls to chase; bears and wolves and rabbits all came in from the wilderness to hear better; the women stopped their arguments; the men put down their coffees; the newspaper men stopped and looked and listened; the boys on John Henry’s team ended their stories; the politicians in Washington stopped their lying; even John Henry started to tear up and rested his hammer on his shoulder, the first time he had rested in his entire life.  The steam drill would have stopped, too, if it had ears – but it didn’t, and it would have cried about not being able to hear the music, if it had eyes to cry from.

It was the first rest John Henry had ever had and it felt beautiful.  His muscles suddenly felt tired and heavy, his stomach empty, and his heart ached for his wife when he realized he did not remember her face.  John Henry turned a little behind him and looked out through the tunnel he’d dug to the faintest glimmer of daylight.  Through the rock he could hear the constant chugging of the steam drill and realized he was losing valuable time.  He went back to swinging his hammer but was distracted, and couldn’t get a rhythm going while Robert Johnson was doing all  that singing.  The two competitors had been neck and neck at this point but John Henry knew he was losing ground fast, so he called in one of Ben Franklin’s boys to call a time out or install ears on the steam drill so’d it be distracted too.

The steam drill was turned off.  Without the noise of its breaking rock Robert Johnson’s song spread even further, and the greatest crowd had assembled around him that had ever yet assembled.  John Henry stormed right into the middle of that crowd and stared at Robert Johnson with tears in his eyes.  Everybody was so hypnotized by Robert Johnson that they didn’t realize that it was probably the first time John Henry had even heard music, and it was the first time he’d ever stopped work except for sleep.

“What are you doing?”  John Henry asked in a big booming voice.

Robert Johnson kept on singing.

“You’re distracting me,” John Henry said.  He caught the face of his wife in the crowd.  She was accompanied by the bookish man and looked like she was having the best day of her entire life.

Robert Johnson didn’t skip a beat of his song.

In the pure rage and anger and sorrow John Henry ripped the brand-new guitar out of Robert Johnson’s hands and broke it across his massive knee, tossing the splintered halves to the crowd.  The guitar was made by the devil, and the moment its shattered body hit god’s god earth it fell into dust.  Everyone was speechless as John Henry walked back to his hole and gave the order for the steam drill to be turned back on.

“Well,” Robert Johnson said, “if the boy likes working that damn much I’m gonna make sure he’s at it for his whole damned life.”

Robert Johnson didn’t even stop for a drink as he walked into the wilderness on his way back to hell where he could buy a new guitar.

That night John Bunyan stopped by to say hello to the camp, but once hearing about the contest decided to leave lest he be roped into the whole thing.  John Bunyan knew that he could flatten that whole mountain in a matter of hours, but didn’t want to cause any trouble.

John Henry was deep inside the mountain.  Sweat fell from his skin and streamed out the cave.  For the first time in his life he could feel the weakness of his body and knew his time on earth was limited, that his muscles were bound to slacken and his body bound to turn to dust.  He turned around once to catch the daylight but was so far in he couldn’t see it anymore.  Every so often one of Ben Franklin’s boys would come in with a long stream of measuring tape to mark John Henry’s progress, tell him how far the steam drill was at, and give him a glass of lemonade.  Besides that there was nothing.  He was winning.

John Henry hit a vein of silver that would make him richer than George Washington but didn’t think twice about it, kept on going.

John Henry hit a vein of gold that would bring tears to the eyes any king of England but only paused to wipe the sweat from his brow.

John Henry hammer’s broke through.  His breath caught in his throat.  Light erupted from the cracks.  Had he reached the end?  He caught the hope of a new morning.

He stepped into a grotto, lit from an unknown source.  In it were thirteen beautiful girls singing songs to one another, and seven trees ripe with apricots, figs, and peaches.  Something was cooking that smelled better than Abigail Adam’s apple pie and Ben Franklin’s hot dogs put together.  John Henry could not believe his eyes, and then set down his hammer and leaned on it, marveling at what he had found.  Was this why he had felt the urge to dig through the mountain?  Could this be the purpose of his life?

The girls came up to him one by one.  They fed him greens and lean meat with lots of cracklings.  They brought him cups of wine and coffee and baked him cakes.  They put platters of fruit out before him.  After he was through they sat around him in a circle.  They were the most beautiful girls in all creation.  They asked him to tell a story.

“I don’t know any stories,” John Henry stammered.

They asked him to dance with them, then.

“All my body knows how to do is swing this hammer” John Henry’s words were heavy in his throat.

The girls were disappointed, they moved away from him slightly.  The youngest looked sorry for him, approached, and asked in the sweetest voice anyone had ever asked a question: “Will you sing a song?”

John Henry was about to reply that he didn’t know any songs.  Then he remembered Robert Johnson singing the blues all those days ago.  He tried to remember the words.  He sang.  He was making it up.  And just like a starving man sat down at a dinner John Henry glutted himself on that song.  He put feeling he’d ever felt into those words. every pump of blood through his huge heart.  He pushed his heart into it harder than he had ever pushed.  He pushed harder than he’d ever had, even for work.  The song was so sad, so lonely, that by the end of it all the beautiful girls had tears sliding down their faces.

Ben Franklin’s boys found John Henry passed out against the side of the tunnel.  No grotto at all.  His heart had given out and his breath was rattling in his throat.  His eyes were dreamy.  One of the boys, being a born journalist, told John Henry that the steam drill had broken down a day ago and he, John Henry, had won.  John Henry didn’t crack a smile.  Taking out a pad and a pen, the boy asked John Henry for some last words.  John Henry croaked, tried to speak, but could not manage another thing except hum that lonesome tune he’d remembered Robert Johnson singing.

When the news came to the camp the whole nation wept.  Ben Franklin clapped his hands and urged calm.  The same ghostly force that fed the steam drill could bring John Henry back to life, he promised.  Soon Ben Franklin’s boys were dragging the remains of the steam-drill into John Henry’s tunnel.

Ben Franklin waddled in.  He got sweaty and found it hard to breathe when he came to the end of the tunnel, and moped his brow with one of those French handkerchiefs.  He clipped two wires from the steam drill.  He touched them together and it made a flash like lightning.  He bent down and rested those two wires on John Henry’s big, black chest.  The lightning flashed again and life surged through those tired muscles.

John Henry shot up, his eyes blinking, fresh as the day he was born.  The breath came through him like hunger.  He clasped his hands at his flesh and wept and laughed and drew everyone around him a big warm embrace.

Thomas Jefferson was overcome by delight.  He promised John Henry his freedom, and told him he could live the rest of the days up with him in the mansion, making bets and drinking mint juleps and running after the girls.  Everyone waited for his answer.  His work was done.
John Henry shook his head as he rose.  “I  just have one more thing to do,” he said, not letting his hammer fall from his hands.

And he slumped out of the cave, took his hammer, and dug six feet straight into the ground.  There he closed his eyes, died, and no amount of lightning would wake him again.

After the carnival was taken down the whole world felt guilty.  Why had John Henry been the only one to work at the task?  The boys he’d worked with berated themselves for being so lazy.  Thomas Jefferson came out in full suit and barked orders at them for a full eight hours.  Even the sun and the moon got back on track and rotated perfectly evenly, each day twenty-four exact hours from that day onwards.  No one felt they could be lazy again.

A year later Robert Johnson came into camp with a new guitar and more sadness on his face than ever before.  He couldn’t talk any more, as the new guitar’s price had been his speaking voice.  He sat down and the workers took a break from digging their tunnel.  He sang a song about how John Henry had kept on working even when he reached heaven, trying to dig a tunnel big enough for god to walk through.  It was true, Robert Johnson had heard from the devil himself.

Description
The True Story of John Henry

John Henry was a black man.  He was six feet straight of useful muscle.  He held a hammer in his hand from the day he popped out his mother to the day he laid himself in the grave.  This was when America was still fresh, when its stories were only halfway told.  Then the world was sleepy waking up from its dreaming, and everything was a little bit lazier than it is now – it’d take what we’d think of as a week for it go get from Monday to Tuesday sometimes.  Back then, some animals were still curious, some people still were too, and it was not unknown for someone’s brother to have met a rather gregarious rabbit once, or a talking fox, or a singing bull – and if your brother hadn’t met one yet it was a solid bet your cousin’s friend had met one and lost his shirt to him in cards.

John Henry dug a hole into the side of a mountain.  There was no reason for the work yet, the good boys up in Washington were busy trying to think one up, but for the time being the boys were told just to keep on digging.  All the workers except for John Henry spent most of their time idle, leaning on their hammers, chewing jerky, telling stories and singing songs.  Sometimes their boss, old Thomas Jefferson, would stumble down from his mansion house running after one of his girls, his bathrobe spilling out everywhere, and he’d notice the boys weren’t working he’d get to work yelling at them.  That’s what they called leadership back then.  The boys’d all stop their stories (it was the only way you could convince one of them to end a story), pick up their hammers and go join John Henry at the mountain.  Well, Thomas Jefferson was every bit as lazy as the rest of them and pretty soon he’d tire of yelling and go back to chasing his girls around and the boys could go back to their important work of leaning all on their hammers and talking.

John Henry was a good worker.  He wouldn’t even eat if people didn’t make a path of productive work from the mountain to the mess camp so he wouldn’t waste a step in idleness.  Even with that he ate rarely, and while he ate he’d walk a treadmill that had been set up to grind grain for the bread, and he’d mill enough flour to feed the whole camp until the next time he grew hungry.  The other workers didn’t much mind John Henry’s hard work, as they had important talking to do.  One bookish fellow reckoned that John Henry worked the mountain enough for them all, and that they talked and ate and stood leaning on their hammers enough for John Henry.  When Mrs. Henry showed up to camp, complaining that Mr. Henry had some other holes he’d ought to be drilling, why the bookish man laughed that they’d ought to make the ledgers straight on that responsibility, too.

Everything went along smoothly.  John Henry worked, the other workers talked, Thomas Jefferson stumbled after his girls with a drink in one hand and the other hand busy either keeping the bathrobe on or flinging it off – for what we’d think of as three decades.  Back then, it amounted only to a couple years.

Trouble came one day when Thomas Jefferson had a visitor.  This annoyed him plenty because it meant that he had to refrain from chasing his girls and he was stumped at what the girls would do if he were otherwise occupied.  But Thomas Jefferson exchanged his nice soft bathrobe for his starched white suit, tied his thin black cravat on daintily, combed his hair and then retired out on the verandah to meet his old friend, Colonel Sanders, who was dressed exactly identically.  They were busy drinking mint juleps and playing cards and boasting for at least a week and a half.

Both Thomas Jefferson and Colonel Sanders were blind drunk when they started making bets.  Thomas Jefferson bet Colonel Sanders that he couldn’t eat a bucket of fried chicken quicker than a dog could, and Thomas Jefferson ended up losing ten dollars, which is too much money in today-dollars to even reckon.  Colonel Sanders bet Thomas Jefferson that he had the best talking horse in the world, but they called that bet a draw because the horse was feeling mighty shy and could barely talk about the weather.  Well they bet on if the next bird that flew by would come from the north or south; they bet on the number of vowels a word randomly chosen out of the bible would have; they bet on how many bets they’d have made at the end of the day.  But soon Colonel Sanders made a bet that’d change the world.

“You reckon your John Henry is the best worker you’d ever hope to see, is that correct?”

“Why I assure you it is correct, Colonel,” Thomas Jefferson said.  “Ain’t nobody else in this whole state who works as much as my John Henry.”

“Well I bet you your Stetson hat that there’s a better worker coming down from the North just tomorrow who could dig that mountain quicker than your John Henry ever could.”

Thomas Jefferson gasped.  His Stetson hat was his favorite object in the world after his girls and his bathrobe, and Colonel Sanders knew Thomas Jefferson would not let such an audacious claim go unmatched.

“What’ll I get when I win?”  Thomas Jefferson drawled.

“Well,” the Colonel had given this some thought too, “I’ll give you my secret recipe.”

“You won’t even give that recipe to your wife!”

“Well I’ll give it to you if you win.  All eleven of my herbs and spices.”

That sealed the deal.  The two men shook hands and went back to betting on the number of fleas they’d find on the next mongrel dog they’d catch walking by.

News of the bet spread as fast as anything could spread back then, and by the next morning the work camp was humming softly in something close to excitement at the idea this marvelous worker from the North.  Some people went up to the mountain to tell John Henry about it, but if John Henry heard anything he was too busy saving his breath for the swinging of his hammer so didn’t waste a word in reply.

The sun took three days to go from morning to noon, but when noon finally came a big wagon rolled up to camp.  Thomas Jefferson, Colonel Sanders, and Ben Franklin jumped out.  Ben Franklin was an off-balanced man whose small body was fitted on top with a pale balding head about three sizes too big.  He reeked of perfume and was carrying a dainty scented handkerchief all the time.  The boys were surprised to see Thomas Jefferson out of his bathrobe and in a suit, but he was acting like it was the most natural thing in the world so they didn’t dare mention the change.  Thomas Jefferson and Colonel Sanders stumbled over to the camp and Ben Franklin waddled and they didn’t have to tell anybody to stay quiet and listen before they spoke because the only sound in the whole state at that point was the swinging of John Henry’s hammer.

“Everybody,” Thomas Jefferson proclaimed, “you get a couple days off work because we’re going to have us a little contest.”

There was a slow and lazy cheer.

“Ben Franklin here has invented a steam drill that he says can work harder than any man at half the pay and only visits his wife on weekends.”

The men stood there, stating at the covered wagon.

“And I cannot for the life of me believe that anything on this earth can work harder than our John Henry can, so we’re going to pit man against machine and see who comes out on top.”

The cheer was limply refrained.

“The first machine to break down loses.”

A big hulking thing covered with a sheet was hauled out from the wagon, and Ben Franklin stood beside it and gave a speech.  Nobody could understand a word he said, though, because Ben Franklin’s voice was so soft and had a funny accent to it.  Still, when Ben Franklin gave the word and his boys removed the sheet hiding the steam drill from sight, all the workers around gave a cheer four-and-a-half times louder than any cheer Thomas Jefferson would ever get in his whole distinguished life.

The steam drill was a monstrous contraption of levers, pulleys, pumps, wires, tubing, batteries, fans, and rust attached to a drill the size of John Henry himself.  It looked like it was as likely to drill a hole into a mountain as it was to fall into scrap in a second, but Colonel Sanders vouched for its sturdiness by a giving it a good kick to its side.  Ben Franklin’s boys then pulled the machine to the mountain right next to where John Henry was working and John Henry was called out to face his competitor.

“I’m working, boss,” He said to Thomas Jefferson, refusing to come out.

“But I have other work for you, John Henry.”

“Let me just finish up here, boss.”

“Haven’t you heard?  There’s gonna be a contest.”

John Henry wouldn’t listen to reason and kept on swinging his hammer against the mountain.  Well, Thomas Jefferson felt as silly as Colonel Sander’s must’ve when his talking horse would only mention the weather and blushed so darkly he had to put a coat of foundation on so he’d still look white.  Eventually the entire camp had to be employed in ripping John Henry out his hole and placing him on a fresh patch of mountain so the contest would start fair.  At that moment, Ben Franklin flipped a switch on the steam drill and it began to steam, shudder, and whir.  It stopped suddenly and a loud cheer went through the audience because they thought that it was bound to explode and they’d get to see some fireworks like on the 4th of July.  Unfortunately, the machine sputtered back to life and was soon eating into that mountain just as fast as anything else could.

You never saw a man as surprised as John Henry when that machine kicked in to work.  It was like he’d been speaking Chinese all his life thinking it gibberish and finally stumbled into a Chinatown.  Some people even claim John Henry smiled.  The two worked at that mountain without stopping for days, and the news of the contest spread all across the nation.  Before either John Henry or the steam drill could break into a sweat the camp became the first ever bona fide media circus.  There were tents, clowns, rides –Ben Franklin even made a daily newspaper with each day’s headline marking the progress of the two drillers in pounds of rock removed and feet drilled.  Well, the only two creatures in all of America who didn’t have fun at that carnival was the steam drill and John Henry.  Even Christians and Indians came to the show.

Some of the most famous people of the time came to watch John Henry fight the steam drill.  On the third day Moses came down with about thirty Israelites.  He was a big man with a bigger grey beard and lugged around those ten commandments everywhere he would go just in case any of his flock would forget or something.  Moses started preaching before he even set up camp calling both the steam drill and John Henry instruments of the devil because they worked too hard and did not honor the lord’s Sabbath.  He was such a good preacher that most of the Christians who heard him decided to boycott the carnival completely and the whole enterprise nearly sunk then and there.  Ben Franklin was too good a businessman for that and offered a discount at all his hot-dog stands and that got everyone rushing back even though Moses yelled at them that it was wrong to eat pork.

Later that afternoon a man who looked a lot like Moses only with a crooked hat and no robe and a slightly smaller beard came up and started preaching himself.  It was Walt Whitman and he talked about how beautiful John Henry was with his tight muscles moving and sweaty skin and that big strong hammer.  The machine was pretty beautiful, too, in Walt Whitman’s eyes.  A small crowd gathered around Whitman and pretty soon started a wild party with a bunch of laughter and sexual references to sea-spray until a bunch of Moses’ Israelites broke up the party with shouts of “Sodom!’ “indecency!” and “family values!”.  Moses himself came up to Walt Whitman and the two got into such a horrible shouting match that Thomas Jefferson made a bet that it’d wake Rip Van Winkle, but he lost.

It was late into the night when Moses and Walt Whitman each uncorked their jugs of wine and almost a minute afterwards the two went arm in arm, ruddy-cheeked, singing hymnals about the beauty of the sun and god and creation.  Seeing their leaders break their feud so suddenly, the Israelites and the revelers got together and partied themselves.  It was great fun.  The revelers taught the Israelites some party tricks and the Israelites taught the revelers some really good jokes.  By the end of the night you couldn’t tell who were the holy and who were damned, and a good deal of them just upped and left for as far out West as they could find, and after forty years of wandering the desert settled down in a town they called Hollywood.

The next day Robert Johnson came into camp.  He had just got a brand new guitar from the devil and sat himself down a little bit aways from the carnival and plucked for a while and sang a song or two.  The music was so beautiful and mournful that everybody who could hear dropped what they were doing to listen.  The bees stopped their buzzing and making honey; Thomas Jefferson stopped looking for girls to chase; bears and wolves and rabbits all came in from the wilderness to hear better; the women stopped their arguments; the men put down their coffees; the newspaper men stopped and looked and listened; the boys on John Henry’s team ended their stories; the politicians in Washington stopped their lying; even John Henry started to tear up and rested his hammer on his shoulder, the first time he had rested in his entire life.  The steam drill would have stopped, too, if it had ears – but it didn’t, and it would have cried about not being able to hear the music, if it had eyes to cry from.

It was the first rest John Henry had ever had and it felt beautiful.  His muscles suddenly felt tired and heavy, his stomach empty, and his heart ached for his wife when he realized he did not remember her face.  John Henry turned a little behind him and looked out through the tunnel he’d dug to the faintest glimmer of daylight.  Through the rock he could hear the constant chugging of the steam drill and realized he was losing valuable time.  He went back to swinging his hammer but was distracted, and couldn’t get a rhythm going while Robert Johnson was doing all  that singing.  The two competitors had been neck and neck at this point but John Henry knew he was losing ground fast, so he called in one of Ben Franklin’s boys to call a time out or install ears on the steam drill so’d it be distracted too.

The steam drill was turned off.  Without the noise of its breaking rock Robert Johnson’s song spread even further, and the greatest crowd had assembled around him that had ever yet assembled.  John Henry stormed right into the middle of that crowd and stared at Robert Johnson with tears in his eyes.  Everybody was so hypnotized by Robert Johnson that they didn’t realize that it was probably the first time John Henry had even heard music, and it was the first time he’d ever stopped work except for sleep.

“What are you doing?”  John Henry asked in a big booming voice.

Robert Johnson kept on singing.

“You’re distracting me,” John Henry said.  He caught the face of his wife in the crowd.  She was accompanied by the bookish man and looked like she was having the best day of her entire life.

Robert Johnson didn’t skip a beat of his song.

In the pure rage and anger and sorrow John Henry ripped the brand-new guitar out of Robert Johnson’s hands and broke it across his massive knee, tossing the splintered halves to the crowd.  The guitar was made by the devil, and the moment its shattered body hit god’s god earth it fell into dust.  Everyone was speechless as John Henry walked back to his hole and gave the order for the steam drill to be turned back on.

“Well,” Robert Johnson said, “if the boy likes working that damn much I’m gonna make sure he’s at it for his whole damned life.”

Robert Johnson didn’t even stop for a drink as he walked into the wilderness on his way back to hell where he could buy a new guitar.

That night John Bunyan stopped by to say hello to the camp, but once hearing about the contest decided to leave lest he be roped into the whole thing.  John Bunyan knew that he could flatten that whole mountain in a matter of hours, but didn’t want to cause any trouble.

John Henry was deep inside the mountain.  Sweat fell from his skin and streamed out the cave.  For the first time in his life he could feel the weakness of his body and knew his time on earth was limited, that his muscles were bound to slacken and his body bound to turn to dust.  He turned around once to catch the daylight but was so far in he couldn’t see it anymore.  Every so often one of Ben Franklin’s boys would come in with a long stream of measuring tape to mark John Henry’s progress, tell him how far the steam drill was at, and give him a glass of lemonade.  Besides that there was nothing.  He was winning.

John Henry hit a vein of silver that would make him richer than George Washington but didn’t think twice about it, kept on going.

John Henry hit a vein of gold that would bring tears to the eyes any king of England but only paused to wipe the sweat from his brow.

John Henry hammer’s broke through.  His breath caught in his throat.  Light erupted from the cracks.  Had he reached the end?  He caught the hope of a new morning.

He stepped into a grotto, lit from an unknown source.  In it were thirteen beautiful girls singing songs to one another, and seven trees ripe with apricots, figs, and peaches.  Something was cooking that smelled better than Abigail Adam’s apple pie and Ben Franklin’s hot dogs put together.  John Henry could not believe his eyes, and then set down his hammer and leaned on it, marveling at what he had found.  Was this why he had felt the urge to dig through the mountain?  Could this be the purpose of his life?

The girls came up to him one by one.  They fed him greens and lean meat with lots of cracklings.  They brought him cups of wine and coffee and baked him cakes.  They put platters of fruit out before him.  After he was through they sat around him in a circle.  They were the most beautiful girls in all creation.  They asked him to tell a story.

“I don’t know any stories,” John Henry stammered.

They asked him to dance with them, then.

“All my body knows how to do is swing this hammer” John Henry’s words were heavy in his throat.

The girls were disappointed, they moved away from him slightly.  The youngest looked sorry for him, approached, and asked in the sweetest voice anyone had ever asked a question: “Will you sing a song?”

John Henry was about to reply that he didn’t know any songs.  Then he remembered Robert Johnson singing the blues all those days ago.  He tried to remember the words.  He sang.  He was making it up.  And just like a starving man sat down at a dinner John Henry glutted himself on that song.  He put feeling he’d ever felt into those words. every pump of blood through his huge heart.  He pushed his heart into it harder than he had ever pushed.  He pushed harder than he’d ever had, even for work.  The song was so sad, so lonely, that by the end of it all the beautiful girls had tears sliding down their faces.

Ben Franklin’s boys found John Henry passed out against the side of the tunnel.  No grotto at all.  His heart had given out and his breath was rattling in his throat.  His eyes were dreamy.  One of the boys, being a born journalist, told John Henry that the steam drill had broken down a day ago and he, John Henry, had won.  John Henry didn’t crack a smile.  Taking out a pad and a pen, the boy asked John Henry for some last words.  John Henry croaked, tried to speak, but could not manage another thing except hum that lonesome tune he’d remembered Robert Johnson singing.

When the news came to the camp the whole nation wept.  Ben Franklin clapped his hands and urged calm.  The same ghostly force that fed the steam drill could bring John Henry back to life, he promised.  Soon Ben Franklin’s boys were dragging the remains of the steam-drill into John Henry’s tunnel.

Ben Franklin waddled in.  He got sweaty and found it hard to breathe when he came to the end of the tunnel, and moped his brow with one of those French handkerchiefs.  He clipped two wires from the steam drill.  He touched them together and it made a flash like lightning.  He bent down and rested those two wires on John Henry’s big, black chest.  The lightning flashed again and life surged through those tired muscles.

John Henry shot up, his eyes blinking, fresh as the day he was born.  The breath came through him like hunger.  He clasped his hands at his flesh and wept and laughed and drew everyone around him a big warm embrace.

Thomas Jefferson was overcome by delight.  He promised John Henry his freedom, and told him he could live the rest of the days up with him in the mansion, making bets and drinking mint juleps and running after the girls.  Everyone waited for his answer.  His work was done.
John Henry shook his head as he rose.  “I  just have one more thing to do,” he said, not letting his hammer fall from his hands.

And he slumped out of the cave, took his hammer, and dug six feet straight into the ground.  There he closed his eyes, died, and no amount of lightning would wake him again.

After the carnival was taken down the whole world felt guilty.  Why had John Henry been the only one to work at the task?  The boys he’d worked with berated themselves for being so lazy.  Thomas Jefferson came out in full suit and barked orders at them for a full eight hours.  Even the sun and the moon got back on track and rotated perfectly evenly, each day twenty-four exact hours from that day onwards.  No one felt they could be lazy again.

A year later Robert Johnson came into camp with a new guitar and more sadness on his face than ever before.  He couldn’t talk any more, as the new guitar’s price had been his speaking voice.  He sat down and the workers took a break from digging their tunnel.  He sang a song about how John Henry had kept on working even when he reached heaven, trying to dig a tunnel big enough for god to walk through.  It was true, Robert Johnson had heard from the devil himself.