Andy wanted to hit him. They were not even in the same argument that Andy had thought they were in. It was not an argument about right and wrong ways of farming. It was an argument about the way things were going to be for the foreseeable future. And he was losing that argument. He was now on the side that was losing it, and he was furious. He felt his fury singling him out. And he was exultant. He stood, to discover that he was shaking.
For the foreseeable future, then, no argument would be effective against the blocks of economic power. Farmers were going to fail, taking the advice of Netherbough and his kind. And Netherbough and his kind were going to thrive, giving bad advice. And that was merely what was going to happen until the logical consequences of that course of success became intolerable. And then something else would happen. And who knew what?
But that an argument was losing did not mean that it should not be made. It had already been made and it would be made again, not because he would make it, but because it existed, it always had, and he belonged to it. He would stand up on it here, in Tommy Netherbough’s office, in Tommy Netherbough’s face. That it was losing did not mean it was beaten.
“We have a difference,” he said. “You don’t think Isaac Troyer represents anything that you and your readers ought even to consider?”
“I don’t think he’s even considerable.”
“Do you know whose side I’m on, between you and Isaac Troyer?”
“I don’t think you have such a choice.”
“Well, I choose Isaac Troyer’s side.”
“Do you know what that choice will cost you?”
He knew. He was shaken, and shaking, but he knew. “It won’t cost anything I can’t pay.”
He knew then where he was going. As he was leaving Tommy’s office, it came to mind, all of a piece, a place familiar as if both dreamed and known: the stone house above the wooded bluff, the spring in its rocky cleft, the ridges, the patches of old woods, the smell of bruised bee balm in the heat of the day, the field sparrow’s song spiraling suddenly up into the light on the ridgetop, the towhee calling “Sweet!” in the tangle.
He asked a secretary to get word to Flora that he had been called out of town and would be back tomorrow. And then he drove to the airport.
He is in the limousine, swinging in the curves of the freeway, heading south out of San Francisco toward the airport. His bag is under his feet, the other passengers are looking straight ahead, nobody has said a word. He is thinking of himself driving out of Chicago toward the airport, twelve years ago, his anger at Tommy Netherbough grown to a kind of elation, lifting his thoughts, and he was thinking of the Harford Place.
When they wanted to be very specific about it, they called it the Riley Harford Place. Riley Harford had died there in 1903, and his neighbor, Griffith Merchant, Ben Feltner’s first cousin, had bought the hundred acres. In 1903 Griffith Merchant was on his last legs himself, but buying land was his habit, and when he got the chance he bought Riley Harford’s. After Griffith’s death in 1906, the Harford Place, along with the rest of the Merchant land, was jointly inherited by Roger, Griffith’s son, and Griffith’s daughter, Violet, who was living in Paducah. From 1906, the Harford Place, along with the rest of the Merchant land, declined until 1945 when Mat Feltner assumed guardianship of Roger, who had by then become non compos mentis by the agency of drink, silliness, idleness, and age. Mat kept it, at least, from declining any further until 1948 when Roger died and it fell into the managerial powers of a Louisville law firm hired by Violet, and then, after Violet’s death, by her daughter, Angela, who lived in Memphis. And now Angela was dead, and her children had moved to sell the land, most of it to be divided for that purpose into its original tracts. Henry Catlett, Andy’s brother, had been hired by the Louisville firm to oversee the sale of it.
Andy had known the place all his life. He had hunted over it many times, and had worked over it almost as many, for, in the 1950s, after the house had been vacated by its last tenants, Wheeler and Elton had rented it, plowed the whole arable surface of it, and sowed it all in alfalfa and bluegrass. They made hay and pastured cattle there for five or six years, until the heirs refused to rebuild the fence. After that, as far as Andy knew, the place had lain idle, growing weeds and bushes.
By the time he flew to Cincinnati, rented a car, and drove to Hargrave, it was long past dark. He ate a sandwich in Hargrave, and then drove up through Port William and turned onto the Katy’s Branch road. At the mouth of the lane going up Harford Run, he hesitated. It had been a long time, he imagined, since anybody had been up that lane with a tractor, let alone an automobile. But the momentum that had carried him out of Tommy Netherbough’s office was still upon him, and he did not let the car come all the way to a stop. He turned, and as he entered the lane immediately saw that he could not see. The lane was choked with tree sprouts, the tall dead stems of last year’s weeds, vines, raspberry briars, and, underneath the rest, a thatching of dead grass. The headlights penetrated the tangle to about the length of his arm, but they showed him at least the hill slope on the right-hand side, cut back to accommodate the little ledge of the road.
“Come on,” he said to the car, accelerating a little to keep it boring in, while the brush rattled and scraped around it. He was just trusting the road to be there, and it kept on being there, approaching him as anxiety, passing beneath him as relief.
“Come on,” he said. It seemed to him that the little car was surprised, not having been brought up to such work. And then he saw abruptly the trunk of a tree fallen across the lane at the height of the windshield, and he jammed the car to a stop.
He pushed in the light switch and killed the engine, and sat still while the violence of his entry subsided around him. He heard silence, and then the peepers shrilling along Harford Run. After a time he got out and began to walk.
He wished for a flashlight, but he had not brought one. He had brought nothing but himself. But there was light from the moon, and he knew the place. He knew it day and night, for he had walked and worked over it in the daytime, and had hunted over it at night with Elton and Burley Coulter and the Rowanberrys. He would be all right except for the briars, which he found only by walking into them; he would have to put up with that. He was hurrying. He wanted to see if the old house was still standing. He wanted to see if its roof still covered it.
He followed the lane up over a rise and then down again, and through the three little tree-ringed meadows that lay along Harford Run, the peepers falling silent as he passed. He could hear the creek tumbling in the riffles. The woods stood dark on the bluff above the creek. The meadows were weedy, but he could see his way, for the night shone and shone upon them. And then there was an opening among the trees on the bluff, and he followed the road up through it to where the road went level again. From there he could see the top of the great spreading white oak that stood by the house. And then he could see the house.
It was a low stone house, thick walled, with an ell — four rooms downstairs, and upstairs two low, dormered ones with sloped ceilings. He walked through the shadow of the tree and up onto the porch. The door, when he pressed it, did not resist at all, the latch broken. He went in and walked, feeling his way through the dark, damp, mouse-smelling air, to the back door and came out again. It was sound, he knew then; after all the years of use and misuse and abandonment, not a board had creaked.
He went and looked at the barn, which had swayed off its footings along one side, but was still roofed and probably salvageable. He walked into the driveway, smelling the must of old hay and manure, old use. He stood in the barn in the dark, looking out into the bright night through fallen-open doors at each end. Many had worked there, some he knew, some he had heard of, some he would never hear of. He had worked there himself — work that he had thought he had left behind him forever, and now saw ahead of him again.
He had begun to dream his life. As never before, he felt it ahead of him, not maybe, not surely, as it was going to be, but as it might
be. He thought of it, longing for it, as he might have thought of a beloved woman, known and dreamed. He dreamed, waking, of a man entering a barn to feed his stock in the dark of a winter morning before breakfast. Outside, it was dark and bitter cold, the stars glittering. Inside, the animals were awaiting him, cattle getting up and stretching, sheep bleating, horses nickering. He could smell the breath and warmth of the animals; he could smell feed, hay, and manure. The man was himself.
He went out. He went past the house and under the tree again. Following only a path now through a fallen gate, he went farther along the slope, crossed a little draw, and slanted down through the still sheen of the moonlight to where a shadowed notch opened in the hillside beneath another white oak as large and spreading as the one by the house. Again feeling his way, he went into the shadow and up into the notch. When the shadow seemed to hover and close around him, he felt with his hands for the cleft in the rock, and found it, and felt the cold water flowing out and the flat stone edging the water. He knelt and drank.
His hurry was over then. He walked, taking his time, around the boundary of the hundred acres. After he had done that he went back to the car and put on his overcoat and got in under the steering wheel again and slept. As soon as it became light enough to see, he started the car and backed it out of the lane.
When he walked into the house, his clothes fretted by briars, mud from the Harford Place still on his shoes, Flora was sewing.
“Flora,” he said, suddenly frightened, as if he did not know her, as if he might have mistaken her entirely, “we’re going home.”
She looked at him with her mouth full of pins, and then she took them out. “Well, it’s about time.”
“Well, don’t you think we should? I mean, don’t you want to know what I’m talking about?”
“Sure.”
6. Bridal
He passes through the Gate of Universal Suspicion and is reduced to one two-hundred-millionth of his nation, admitted according to the apparent harmlessness of his personal effects. Or it is an even smaller fraction that he is reduced to, for all the world is here, coming and going, parting and greeting, laden with bags and briefcases, milling around piles of baggage, hurrying through the perfect anonymity of their purposes. And none may be trusted, not one. Where one may be dangerous, and none is known, all must be mistrusted. All must submit to the minimization and the diaspora of total strangeness and universal suspicion. The gates of the metal detectors form the crowd momentarily into lines, and send it out again, particled, into the rush of the corridor. Adrift, he allows himself to be carried into that eddying, many-stranded current.
A man to the love of women born, no specialist, he feels his mind tugged this way and that by lovely women. They seem to be everywhere, beautiful women in summer dresses beautifully worn, flesh suggesting itself, as they move, in sweet pressures against cloth. He lets them disembody him, his mind on the loose and rambling, envisioning unexpectable results, impossible culminations. What pain of loneliness draws him to them! As though ghostly arms reach out of his body toward them, he yearns for some lost, unreachable communion. You. And you. Oh, love! Loving them apart from anything that he knows, or might know, he is disembodied by them: no man going nowhere, or anywhere, his mind as perfectly departed from his life as a lost ghost, dreaming of meetings of eyes, touches, claspings, words. He hears their music, each a siren on her isle, and deep in his own innards cello strings throb and strum in answer. He goes by them bound to his own direction. They flow past each other in their courses, countenances veiled, as though eternally divided, falling. They will not sing to him.
It seems to him that he is one among the living dead, their eyes fixed and lightless, their bodies graves, doomed to hurry forever through the abstraction of the unsensed nowhere of their mutual disregard, dead to one another.
This is happening to my soul. This is happening to the soul of all the world.
All in the crowd are masked, each withdrawn from the others and from all whereabouts. The light of their eyes, the regard of their consciousness and thought, their body heat — all turned inward. And the faces of the women are the most closed of all. For fear. Lost to men by fear of men in the Land of Universal Suspicion. The good level look of their eyes lost.
The more he sees of them in this place, the less he can imagine them. Who are they? What are their names? Where are they going? Who loves them? Whom do they love? They appear and pass, singly, each in the world alone, the solitary end result of the meetings of all the couples that have made her, each the final, single point of her own pedigree.
And where is the dance that would gather them up again in the immortal ring, the many-in-one?
He has heard the tread of his own people dancing in a ring, the fiddle measuring time to them, a voice calling them, through the steps of change and absence, home again, the dancers unaware of their steps, which only the music, older than memory, remembered. Now that dance is broken, dismembered in the Land of Universal Suspicion, where no face is open to another. Where any may be dangerous and none may be trusted, all must live in conflict, the fire of the world’s death prefigured in every heart.
Shall we disappear with our longing, dismembered, in the annihilating flame?
Spare us, O Lord, the logical consequence of our folly.
Here is the eye of the whirlwind of directions. These gathered here today, tonight will be in Tokyo, Delhi, Paris, Lima, where? Dead, perhaps, on an unseen mountainside? Or dead in the world’s death? The long corridor stretches out ahead of him, a noplace to which all places reach, beyond the last horizon of the world.
Where now is the great good land? Where now the house under the white oak? Oh, cut off, cut off!
A woman is walking ahead of him whose face he will never see. She is wearing a simple dress that leaves it to her to have the style. And she has it. How he would like to go up and walk beside her! How he would like to walk with his arm around her! He can imagine such a permission coming to him from her as would darken and stagger him as if blindfolded and turned round three times.
He will never see her again. He will never see her face. The dance that would bring her back again is broken. The hand that he would open to her is gone.
When he returned, bringing Flora and their children to live at the Harford Place, he returned to a country in visible decline. After his absence, he saw his native place as by a new birth of sight, and rejoiced in it as never before. But now he saw it also as a place of history — a place, in part, the result of history — and he began to see the costs that history had exacted: hillsides senselessly cropped, gullies in old thicket-covered fields that would not be healed in ten times the time of their ruin, woodlands destructively logged, farms in decline, the towns in decline, the people going to the cities to work or to live. It was a country, he saw, that he and his people had known how to use and abuse, but not how to preserve. In the coal counties, east and west, they were strip-mining without respect for the past or mercy to the future, and the reign of a compunctionless national economy was established everywhere. Andy began to foresee a time when everything in the country would be marketable and everything marketable would be sold, when not one freestanding tree or household or man or woman would remain. Such thoughts, when they came to him, shortened his breath and ached in the pit of his stomach. Something needed to be done, and he did not know what. He turned to his own place then — the Harford Place, as diminished by its history as any other — and began to ask what might be the best use of it. How might a family live there without reducing it?
He has come to the second gate now, that between earth and sky, where his plane is waiting. He goes into the waiting lounge and chooses a seat against the end wall where he can see everything. He is sure that he will see nothing that will be of any use to him, but he is an economizer of opportunities.
Directly across from him is a man in a Palm Beach suit, with rings on the ring fingers of both hands, hidden from the lap up behind a newspaper proclaiming: TR
ANSVESTITE’s LIFE ENDS IN SHOOTING. Next there is a young couple — a young man in an army private’s uniform, a young woman in T-shirt and jeans — who sit holding hands and do not speak. Beside them is a woman of perhaps sixty, in half-glasses, knitting a sweater, the yarn traveling upward in jerks from her large handbag. And beside her is a professional football player with his leg in a cast, chewing gum rapidly and reading a copy of Keyhole magazine. His showpiece lady is clinging to his arm, unattended. His injured leg propped on two pieces of leather luggage, the football player is wearing a warm-up suit with his team’s famous name in block letters on the jacket. People recognize him and stare at him as they pass.
At the other end of the row, divided by an empty seat from the man with the newspaper, a woman in a tailored suit is sitting with a legal pad on her lap. She is talking to a tiny machine that she holds in her hand. She speaks, snaps off the machine to think, snaps it on again and speaks. She speaks almost inaudibly, but otherwise seems oblivious of the crowd around her. It is a wonder that she is of the same species and sex as the football player’s lady, and yet both seem to have themselves in mind as types — symbols, perhaps, of historical epochs or phases of the moon. The businesswoman is austerely tailored and coiffured; her eyeglasses are severe. She lives, her looks imply, entirely by forethought, her beating heart nobody else’s business. Her taste and bearing are splendid. She is impeccable.
And Andy would like to give her a little peck on her ear. His mind is calling out to her: “Hello, my Tinkerbelle, my winsome, weensy crocodile. Come out! Come out! I know you’re in there somewhere.”
He says to his mind, “Shut up, you dumb bastard!”
And yet he cannot take his mind or eyes from her, for she is very beautiful. And who is she? Where did she come from? Where is she going? He knows that he is looking at her across an abyss, that if all the world should burn, they would burn divided in its flames. She is wearing the veil of American success, lost in the public haze that has covered the land from sea to sea. He is lost there himself, divided and burning. How would they break the veil? How call out?
Remembering Page 9
