Ad Francis
A former champion prizefighter, damaged past repair, camped by a railway track. Nick Adams walks into his firelight in "The Battler."
To be believed about what he can take. He shows Nick his ruined face and his missing ear and asks him twice whether he thinks he could take it, and follows it with the claim he keeps returning to: they all bust their hands on him, and they could not hurt him.
The book
At a glance
- "The Battler" only
- Adolph Francis; "Ad" to everyone, "Mister Francis" to Bugs
- Prizefighter — a former champion Nick knows by name
- Bugs, a Black man he met in jail, who cooks, carries the money, and manages his temper
- The woman who was his manager and then his wife sends him money
- One ear gone, nose sunken, and brain damage he describes himself as being crazy
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeAd Francis is a fictional ex-prizefighter, once a champion well enough known that a boy riding freight trains recognises the name at once. Nick Adams finds him alone at a fire beside the tracks in northern Michigan, and "The Battler" is the hour or so they spend together. Adolph Francis is his full name; he asks Nick to call him Ad.
He has been beaten into brain damage and says so within a minute of meeting a stranger. He is friendly, then proud, then without warning dangerous, and the story's real subject is the second man at the fire, his travelling companion Bugs, who has worked out exactly how to manage him.
How the book draws them
- The faceBy firelight Nick sees that the face is misshapen before he can see how. The nose is sunken, the eyes are slits, the lips are queerly shaped, and the whole thing is the colour of putty and looks dead in the light. Then the man takes off his cap: one ear is thickened flat against his head, and where the other should be there is a stump.
- How he introduces himselfIn the space of a page he tells Nick three things in order: "Listen!" the man said. "Call me Ad." Then, "Listen," the little man said. "I'm not quite right." Then, when Nick says he seems all right: "No, I'm not. I'm crazy."
- The heart trickHe explains that he beat men because his heart is slow — forty beats a minute, and it never speeds up — and makes Nick hold his wrist and count while he counts aloud to sixty. Nick makes it forty. Neither of them owns a watch, which Ad concedes spoils the demonstration.
- The knifeWatching Nick cut bread, he leans forward and asks to borrow the knife. Bugs, without raising his voice, tells Nick to hang on to it. Ad sits back and says nothing more for a long time, and everything that follows comes out of that refusal rather than out of anything Nick has done.
- The turnThe abuse arrives out of nowhere and in full: Nick is a snotty bastard who came where nobody asked him, ate a man's food and got snotty about his face. Then he stands up, tells Nick he is going to get his can knocked off, and comes at him flat-footed, left foot forward and the right dragging up to it. Nick backs away and says he doesn't want to hit him.
- How it ended his careerBugs gives Nick the history over coffee. Too many beatings made him simple, for one thing. Then the woman who managed him was presented in the newspapers as his sister, with stories about how much the two of them loved each other, and then they married in New York, which caused a great deal of unpleasantness. "Of course they wasn't brother and sister no more than a rabbit, but there was a lot of people didn't like it either way and they commenced to have disagreements, and one day she just went off and never come back." After that he went crazy. She still sends him money.
- Asleep by the fireLaid out unconscious with his coat folded under his head, his blond hair down over his forehead, the mutilated face looks childish. He wakes with no memory of any of it and says only that he has an awful headache.
He then asks Nick, very politely, to leave, on the grounds that the sight of him might set the whole thing off again, and sends him up the track to Mancelona with a ham sandwich. The last thing Nick hears from the clearing is Ad complaining about his head and Bugs offering him coffee.