by Joan Brady
Atlas never knew about his father’s atheism. He never read the diaries. He never understood what a puritan his father was, either: how fearful Jonathan was of anything that made inroads on his control. The idea of farming no longer had the Malloys’ money to back it up, but Jonathan was not going to let that stop him. There had to be a way. There was no co-operative movement in the United States at the time; we’ve always been backward in such things. But Jonathan had read a little about Robert Owen, and he knew something about the weavers of Lancashire, the people who founded the first English co-operative in the middle of the nineteenth century. It was very successful. Jonathan figured that what worked with a textile mill just might work with a farm.
‘It’s no joke, Sarah,’ he said. ‘I intend to farm.’
She studied his expression, then turned away. ‘So it’s going to be forty acres and a mule after all, is it? After all the talk? How can you set your sights so low?’
Jonathan looked down at his hands. He turned them palm up, palm down; it was a gesture he had come to without knowing why. ‘You don’t know me,’ he said softly. ‘I can go much lower than that. Twenty acres will do to start with. This is virgin land out here. It’ll take a lot of working.’
‘Up at four, porridge with sorghum—’ Her voice was abruptly shrill; little Rayner stopped babbling at once, chin atremble. ‘Out to milk, cows to pasture, hoe, plow, seed, reap. You’re a preacher: for the love of God, Johnny, preach. Cook, wash, dig, cut wood, draw water. Is this what you want for me? for him?’
‘Preacher preach,’ Rayner whimpered, fearful now, looking anxiously from Sarah to Jonathan and back again.
Jonathan sighed. ‘Nobody said it was going to be easy.’
‘Not enough rain,’ she said, ‘too much rain. If the weather isn’t perfect, the crops fail and nothing’s ever perfect.’
‘You exaggerate,’ he said.
When Helen died Jonathan had gone to the lawyer in Ellsworth who’d drawn up that queer contract between Josh and the Malloys. Josh was right. Nothing was left. The First National Bank of Maine owned it all. Jonathan had managed to cajole him onto the train to Washington; they’d traveled together in silence for more than two thousand miles. Then in the middle of Utah, in a featureless desert, the train had stopped for water. Josh had gone for a walk and never come back.
‘Squirrels and rats and birds,’ Sarah cried, ‘cinch bugs, bot flies, termites, mosquitoes.’ Rayner hugged himself to her and wailed. ‘The banker takes a cut. Transporters take a cut. Commodity speculators take a cut. Wholesaler in Chicago, broker in Boston, retailer in New York—’
‘I hadn’t realized you were so knowledgeable,’ Jonathan interrupted.
‘Johnny, please, please, please don’t do this to me.’
‘You’re frightening that baby.’
Rayner clung to her like a koala bear to a tree trunk. She looked at Jonathan’s implacable face, at the anger that never left it, and her shoulders slumped in defeat; tears started down her cheeks.
‘There’s no reason to imagine the northwest is Kansas,’ he began.
‘What difference does it make?’
‘Sarah—’
‘Farming’s farming.’
‘This is childish,’ he said.
‘I could have married any one of half a dozen farmers around Sweetbrier,’ she wept. ‘But I didn’t. I married a preacher—’
‘You married a preacher who’d lost his vocation. And you knew it.’
‘But you said—’ She broke off.
‘I said what?’
‘Before we got married, you—’ She broke off again, frowned, sniffled, wiped her nose on the back of her hand. The baby held his breath.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘There wasn’t enough money then. Remember?’ She cocked her head (the baby cocked his, too). ‘Remember?’
‘So?’
‘So where are you going to get the money now? You’ll need a lot of money. There, there, Rayner. There’s a good boy. Where’s the down-payment coming from?’
‘I’ll get it.’
‘Nobody will loan you money like that.’ The sudden pleasure in her voice was so rich that the baby began to croon.
‘I’ll get it,’ he said again.
‘No you won’t. Oh, goodness, what a relief. I don’t care how poor we are as long as we don’t have to farm. You had me scared.’ She got up impetuously, kissed his nose and stroked his shoulder.
He shook her off.
‘Don’t be like that. Read to me, will you? Read my father’s letter. Over there. On the table. It came in a week ago.’
Early in Sarah’s pregnancy, Jonathan had begun reading to her in bed before they turned off the gas lamp. He read her poetry sometimes, sometimes the novels of Hawthorne and Dickens, sometimes letters that came in from her mother and father. Sarah said she loved listening to him; she said reading hurt her eyes. He took the letter out of the envelope and scanned it. Then he read it again carefully, a little shaken by the speed of the victory it represented.
He looked up at her and back down at the letter. ‘How can you do this to me?’ he said. He was a fine tactician, my grandfather.
‘What do you mean? What is it?’
‘Why didn’t you tell me you can’t read?’ There was an odd combination of wonder and contempt in his voice.
‘Of course I can read. I skimmed—’
‘Don’t lie to me.’
‘Look at that!’ She snatched the letter out of his hand, jostling Rayner, who let out a shriek. ‘How can I read handwriting like that? My father can’t write properly – that’s all. How dare you—’
‘Sarah, your mother is dead.’
She froze, mouth agape, then shook her head and formed the questions with her lips. ‘It says so? In that letter?’ She took in her breath. ‘I could never get the words the right way around somehow.’ The baby’s cries almost drowned her voice; she searched Jonathan’s eyes. ‘I tried and tried, but the letters kept sliding away into one another. Don’t blame me too much, Johnny. I really did – How long has she—?’ Jonathan spread his hands. ‘Only that she’s dead? Just like that? Nothing more?’
‘Yes. There’s more. There’s money.’
‘Money?’
He nodded.
‘How much?’
‘Six hundred dollars,’ he said.
She held her breath a moment. ‘Enough?’ she whispered then.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Quite enough.’
It was a judgment on them both. By the time Sarah arrived back from Sweetbrier with a strongbox containing thirty double eagles, he’d chosen twenty-two acres of sandy loam that ran right down to the railroad tracks, precisely as the Stoke homestead had, at precisely the same orientation to the sun, and for precisely double the price Alvah had paid. Jonathan took his wife – pretty, strawberry-blond Sarah – who even though she was pretty, could read no better than Alvah Stoke’s wife had been able to: Sarah who had paid for his land with her mother’s money just as Wify had paid for Alvah’s land with her mother’s: he took his Sarah to see his land just as Alvah Stoke had taken Wify to see his land precisely half a century before. Sarah carried Rayner, and they walked three miles through the cedar forests that still surrounded Hannaville.
But there is something primal about ownership of land; Jonathan had felt it first when he was talking to the Malloys. So despite these similarities with the Stokes, all of which he saw and recorded in his diaries, he was in high spirits: the occasionally glimpsed gaiety in him is in full flight in his entries for this period. He dashed ahead, jumping fallen logs as he went, just as years before he’d jumped the railway ties in the Denver yards on his first day in that land of miracles. He slapped a hand on a huge tree, fifteen feet in diameter, and yelled back to her that these were western red cedars, arbor-vitae.
‘The tree of life, Sarah,’ he said. ‘Look at the slope of that trunk’ – he drew a scoop-sided pyramid with his hands in imitation of it – �
��like a wineglass elm upside down. They’ve got wineglass elms in Ellsworth, did I tell you that?’ He broke off a frond of scaly leaves, put it to his nose and ran back to her. ‘Smell it, Sarah. Isn’t it wonderful? Smell, Rayner.’
The little boy stuck the frond in his mouth.
The land was not yet fully logged off. Lumberjacks in pairs balanced on narrow platforms twelve feet up in the trees, sawing and swinging axes: Swedes and Norwegians, mammoth men with mammoth shoulders and mammoth hips. The beasts that dragged the timber away over stripling slips were hogs – not oxen, not horses: hogs – huge, red hogs called Durocs, as mammoth when compared to ordinary hogs as the men were compared to ordinary men. To the east was forest. To the west the land was clear; tall stumps of thousand-year-old trees stood in ragged disarray.
‘The house goes there, Sarah,’ Jonathan said. The strawberries there – and there – Anjou pears, I think.’ Sarah laughed at his enthusiasm despite herself. ‘Nobody out here grows soft fruit yet. There’s no competition, do you see? It’s a completely new idea. We’ll corner the market. How can we miss? The black caps go there—’
The lumberjacks left in the middle of summer; by the time they went, Jonathan had dynamited enough stumps to make room for the house. He smoothed the ground and laid cement for his own wooden house precisely as Bessie had taught him to lay it for the Stokes’ wooden house when he was twelve years old. When the shell was largely finished, he took Sarah out to see what he had done. They left Rayner with Eliza for the afternoon and walked through the woods together. They sat beneath the big cedar tree; she spread out a blanket, unpacked a few tidbits to eat, and there she brought two years of celibacy to an end. She tickled his nose with a frond of sweet-smelling cedar, much as he’d tickled Rayner’s when the three of them had first gone out to look at this stretch of land together; she laughed when he pulled away, loosened her strawberry blond hair, then the delicate, cloth-covered buttons of her blouse.
He’d built a cupola for mating swallows on the roof of the house, a pretty dome atop a circle of fluted pillars; he’d whittled it in the evenings when it got too dark to work outside and put it in place only a week or so before. It stood there smiling down on them that summery day. ‘Have you ever seen swallows mating?’ my uncle Atlas asked me. ‘They fly up high into the air, body to body, wings aflutter; they swoop and bank together. It’s the most beautiful of all love-making: the coital kiss of swallows.’
By the time the house was ready to move into, Sarah was pregnant for the second time.
9
My father Rayner, with his romantic emotional spillage, is the one who keeps me. Fortunately for me, he’s dead – fortunately for him, too: otherwise, neither one of us could afford the likes of me: cripples are expensive. That suicide attempt of his was high drama: police, sirens, write-ups in the papers, even an entry in California’s medical history: ‘62.3 ounces pumped from this patient’s stomach’, and yet he survived. A few months later he had the stroke that should have killed him as surely as the nembutal before it, but he was a strong man; he lingered on for a couple of years, a basket case, unable to speak or understand. In the end he died a natural death from another stroke. He’d taken out one of those policies that pay vast sums if you die young – and of natural causes. My mother got it all when he died at fifty-four, just weeks under the deadline. When she died, a year later, the lion’s share of the $2 million came to me, to the youngest sister: the one who needed it. This was twenty-five years ago; the capital has doubled since.
Whatever would Jonathan have thought if he’d known his little Rayner would leave $2 million to his children? to anybody for that matter? Rayner of all people! There was Jonathan, working all day for the railroads for money to buy seed, working half the night, too, to plow and plant his own land by the light of the twenty-foot-high piles of cedar splinters that he’d dredged out of the soil chunk by chunk, collected together, and set fire to; they burned for months on end. By the time his daughter Gwendolyn was born, he’d planted his first two acres. Cinch bugs destroyed his first crop, just as Sarah had prophesied, and so destroyed his plan to buy her a piano, a pelmet (whatever that was) and curtains. The next harvest succeeded, but because the first had failed so disastrously, all the profit went back into the farm. Again, no pelmet; again, no piano. Not even a Christmas cactus. When their second son was born in 1905, Jonathan was working a hundred miles away for another farmer and couldn’t afford to come back for the confinement. He didn’t get home until spring, dirty, thin and unshaven. Gwendolyn ran out to meet him; she was a round, sturdy child, with fat, pink cheeks and a bossy manner. He asked her what the baby’s name was.
Gwendolyn pulled back. ‘Shame on you, papa. Baby is Naham.’
Inside, he patted Rayner on the head, kissed Sarah and said he’d like to take a look at ‘little Naham’. Sarah flounced away from him and ran upstairs. Jonathan stood there a moment, staring after her.
‘You’re silly,’ said Rayner, my father-to-be, who was to lecture on the economics of war at the University of California at Berkeley, and to leave his children $2 million.
‘Well, what is his name?’ Jonathan asked.
Rayner lifted the one eyebrow that was to become the terror and the delight of his students. ‘Won’t tell you.’
‘Why not?’
Rayner eyed him up and down. ‘’Cause you’re silly.’
‘So are you,’ Jonathan said angrily. ‘I’ll call him Atlas. God knows, he’ll need some endurance to survive around here.’ Thus it was that my uncle Nathaniel, the doctor, came to be known as Atlas, who – as Heine puts it – bears on his back the weight of this world of sorrows.
My father-to-be retreated up the stairs after his mother and cried ‘You’re silly’ once more from the safety of her skirts.
‘Why does he dislike me so much?’ Jonathan asked Sarah one night a year or so later when Rayner was six or seven years old. For all my grandfather’s passionate love of his children (and of this the diaries leave no doubt whatever), he had no idea – absolutely none – of what a normal child, a child not brought up as a slave, might need or want. The children worked hard on the farm, many long hours every day, though not anywhere near as long and hard as he had worked. He built swings for them by the house; sometimes he watched them play, heart in throat, and wrote that he could not be working them too hard or too long if they had energy left over to play. ‘He just didn’t understand,’ Atlas said, ‘that it’s necessary for children to play.’
‘They tease Rayner at school,’ Sarah said to Jonathan.
He’d built the school for Hannaville with his own hands, for no pay, for no return at all except that his kids, goddamnit, were not going to be denied as he had been. ‘What are you saying?’ he said.
‘He has patches on his clothes.’ Sarah was pregnant yet again. She dropped her hands into her lap, a helpless, angry, despairing gesture, not like her really, and shut her eyes. ‘I’m so tired—’
‘You’re doing too much. You should get some rest.’
‘—and I’m afraid this time. It hurts so.’
‘What hurts? Where does it hurt? Show me.’
‘I don’t know. Everywhere.’
‘It must hurt some places more than others.’
‘Why must it?’
‘If something hurts,’ Jonathan said, ‘let’s get Burgess—’
‘Why do you always have to have a neat answer?’
‘There’s no point in talking to him if we can’t tell him what’s the matter.’
‘I don’t want another baby!’ she cried out. ‘Why can’t you leave me alone?’ But even as she spoke she snatched at his hands and kissed them. ‘Oh, Johnny, I couldn’t dig more than two rows today. I’ll never get the turnips in – Why don’t you talk to me anymore?’ she wept. ‘You shout at the children. You hit Rayner—’
‘He spat at me,’ Jonathan said indignantly. And indeed he had, that very afternoon.
When I was a child, the fights I went to
sleep with night after night had the same rising and falling rhythms this one has. My father Rayner took his opening role from his father Jonathan; he began cool, controlled, in command; his professorial manner gave him great elegance. In his final fight with my mother – the one that ended with the bottle of nembutal – a new neighbor, unused to the shouting, frightened by it, knocked at the door. My father answered. He wore a red paisley robe that hung to the ground like a cardinal’s cassock: ‘Surely you can see, my friend,’ he said to the neighbor, ‘that the woman’s hysterical.’
Sarah pushed Jonathan away as vehemently as she’d pulled him to her. ‘What use is a sensitive boy to you?’ she said. ‘All you want is field hands.’ She slapped her belly. ‘Why don’t you get yourself a calf instead?’
‘You don’t mean what you’re saying.’
‘Wouldn’t a calf serve you as well? Wouldn’t it? Say something! Why don’t you answer?’
‘Because you’re not making sense.’
‘We were going to corner the market in soft fruit.’
‘And so we will—’
‘Corner the market! Five years of solid labor and we can’t even afford a team to pull the plow. We don’t get a calf because babies are cheaper.’
My mother’s and father’s fights were foreplay; they built up to a verbal climax before the grappling began that was to end in its own furious bedroom excitements. This anticipatory violence was of the dish-throwing sort. One time my father threw a glass of iced tea across the room (I remember the smash it made, glass and ice all over the floor); another time – mad as hell, and strong as only farm boys are strong – he tore a telephone book in two. Jonathan was different. He showed his anger for the threat it held, much the way an army on parade shows off tanks and artillery, but he kept his control.
‘I think it’s time to stop this,’ he said, dismissing her and the squabble. ‘You are saying things you will regret. Next year will be better.’
‘Next year! What about this year? Bare walls, bare windows. Ugly, ugly, ugly. Remember the pelmet, Johnny? Remember? And the piano? I want a piano. I want—’
