Friday the 13th

Friday the 13th serves as a chronological peg in Arch Anker’s sprawling recollection, turning a shopkeeper’s answer into the date by which he measures later events. The day is less a self-contained episode than a fragile point of orientation in a narrative where personal memory wanders through anecdotes, prejudice, and violence.

The Date as a Memory Cue

Arch asks Doc Parker what day it is while seeking paregoric for his wife. The answer, Friday the 13th, prompts Arch to remark that he has already had his misfortune. The date thus enters the story through routine business—a request for medicine and the requirement to sign a purchase book—rather than through any declared portent.

Arch’s account then uses the answer to situate what follows. He estimates that roughly twenty minutes to half an hour later, after taking Spanish Fly, he was walking near Grennel Bog. The date gives his digressive narrative a provisional clock: he remembers not only the calendar day but the short interval between the exchange at the shop and the events he describes afterward.

The Recollection’s Unsettling Turn

The memory moves from the drugstore toward Nigger Town, passing a vacant lot where Roy Bane tells Arch about a man who visits nightly. A woman then says that the man is looking at her, and Roy answers that he and the others will burn him. Arch’s account ties this threat to the same Friday the 13th he had just identified, bringing the comic-sounding exchange about bad luck into proximity with the story’s racial violence.

The date’s significance comes from this contrast, not from evidence of supernatural misfortune. A familiar calendar label organizes the recollection, while the episodes attached to it expose the danger and cruelty of the world Arch recounts. Because the day is recalled through his rambling account, it gives the narrative a point of reference without making the surrounding events a neat or reliable chronology.