Philosophy Made Simple

by Robert Hellenga

  “Barney,” he said. “Is that what I think it is?”

  Barney nodded. “Norma Jean. Belongs to a Russian fellow. He brought it over from Mexico and taught it how to paint pictures.”

  Rudy said, “That’s amazing, Barney That’s really astonishing.”

  Barney shrugged. “You can buy yourself a painting for twenty or thirty bucks. Depends on what size.” He pointed to a stand by the side of the road, like a little vegetable stand. He looked at his watch. “Maybe on the way back. He sells postcards too, with a picture of Norma Jean painting. He used to take her over to the river market in Hidalgo on Saturdays and sell paintings there, but I don’t know if he’s still doing that.”

  Plato says that philosophy begins in wonder. Aristotle too. Had they ever seen an elephant painting?

  The property was a small part of one of the old Spanish land grants, or porciones, a strip of land about three thousand feet wide that had once extended twelve miles inland from the river. The original porciones, which had been measured out on horseback by throwing a waxed rope, were narrow so that as many rancheros as possible could have access to the river. Creaky’d bought it from the Oblate Fathers, who’d raised cattle on it for a hundred and fifty years, and had laid out the grove himself.

  Rudy had done business with Creaky for years and had talked to his wife, Maxine, dozens of times, before and after the accident that left Creaky a paraplegic, confined to the wheelchair that was still sitting in his study in the back of the house. An auto accident, ten years ago. A window in Creaky’s study opened onto the upper grove. Maxine had described the avocado trees as “mature,” and Rudy had been afraid he’d find that they were past their prime. But they were in good shape, topped off at twenty-five to thirty feet, nicely hedged. He sat at the dead man’s desk with a cup of coffee, going over the records — irrigation, fertilization, crop production — that were kept in big cardboard boxes with orange backs. He’d seen boxes like that in lawyers’ offices. These were labeled according to the avocado calendar in Texas: MARCH 1947-FEBRUARY 1948, MARCH 1948-FEBRUARY 1949, and so on. They were stored on gray metal shelves, the kind you expect to see holding old paint cans in the basement or the garage.

  He could hear Maxine and Barney talking in the kitchen. Maxine, a gray-haired woman in her fifties, ten years younger than Creaky, kept coming in to fill up Rudy’s cup. Barney had said she was considering several offers, but Rudy didn’t believe him. She looked anxious, eager to sell. She was going to move to San Francisco to start a new life.

  Rudy had done his homework. He’d studied the Texas Avocado Growers Handbook and gotten advice (much of it contradictory) from growers and shippers and brokers with whom he’d done business over the years. He’d brought a checklist with him and he went down the list item by item: parts per million of dissolved solids in the water supply, irrigation records, fertilization history, amount of allowable tip burn caused by the nitrogen in the fertilizer, production leaf analysis, chlorides and sodium in the irrigation water, the age and quality and type of irrigation system, the dollar returns per acre, market accessibility, labor, how much water necessary to leach the salts out of the soil. He’d gotten a soil profile and a history of low-register thermometer readings in the winter from the Soil Conservation Service of the USDA. Has-ses and Fuertes won’t grow in the Rio Grande Valley, but the Lula does well because its salt tolerant. But neither the records of the grove, nor the Texas A&M Extension agent, nor the real estate agent, nor Creaky’s widow could tell him what he really needed to know: would he be happy here? Would he find something final and self-sufficient? Aristotle’s “supreme good,” the end at which all actions aim?

  He looked out the window. A tractor was pulling a wagon up a gentle slope; four men on ladders were snipping avocados with their avocado shears; the wagon disappeared into the trees. He put the boxes back in order on the shelves, right next to a big Latin dictionary, just like Helen’s. Over the desk was an abstract painting that would have appealed to Helen. He’d never much cared for abstract art, but he liked this painting. The colors were too bright not to like it, the brushstrokes too strong, as if the painter had been mashing the brush into the paper. It wasn’t signed, but he knew without asking that it was a Norma Jean.

  The Texas A&M Extension agent was talking to the grove manager, Medardo, when Rudy came outside. He was pointing and gesturing. Barney and Rudy stepped down off the veranda and walked toward them, side by side. Barney was puffing. The agent, who’d been collecting soil samples with a tube, was speaking in Spanish. Rudy listened. They were talking about pH levels, which in the Rio Grande Valley were higher than they ought to be for avocados. As far as Rudy was concerned, the samples weren’t necessary; he’d already felt the loose, loamy soil beneath his feet.

  Maxine was in the kitchen making another pot of coffee. Rudy looked at his watch: 10:02. In fifteen minutes it would be sunset in Jerusalem. He gave a little laugh that came out like a hiccup. He wanted to make a joke about the Second Coming. He wanted to tell somebody, anybody, about the letter from his nephew, and about the radio program. But something stopped him, a counter-impulse. He turned and started to walk up the little hill where he’d seen the tractor disappear. “I got to take a leak,” he said to Barney He wanted to wait it out alone. Not that he thought anything was going to happen. Not that at all. But he wanted to think for a minute, by himself.

  There were two groves, really, a lower grove and a smaller upper grove. The upper grove, about nine acres, was on the same “little hill” that had given the nearby mission its name, La Lomita. Creaky had his own five-horsepower pump to lift water from the lateral canal up to the sprinkling system. Rudy walked up the slope through the trees, which were loaded with fruit, even though Medardo’s crew had been picking since late September. He was feeling sick and tired and hungover and uncertain, but when he came out of the dark grove into the sunlight, he thought once again of Plato’s cave. The sun was so bright he could hardly see. The mesquite trees on the far side of the slope were covered with pale yellow spikes, and the ground was covered with yellowish pods. Through their airy foliage Rudy caught a glimpse of something shiny, a river, stretching from one horizon to the other, like a ribbon wrapped loosely around the earth. A ribbon that hadn’t been pulled tight, or that had worked itself free. He hadn’t counted on this. The Rio Grande. This was the Rio Grande Valley after all. The Rio Grande was the source of the water in the irrigation canals. It was the reason he wasn’t standing in the middle of a desert. But he hadn’t counted on it adjoining the property. It wasn’t like anything he’d ever seen. It was mud colored, but shining too, a smooth surface reflecting the bright sunlight. He seemed to see it not simply with his eyes, but with a more profound kind of vision that illuminated everything he looked upon. A slender, long-legged bird took to the air, crying kip-kip-kip-kip as it flapped its black-and-white wings to gain a purchase on the chilly air, and he was reminded once again of Socrates’ comparison of the soul to a bird, for it seemed to him that the beauty he now beheld was a reminder of true beauty, and once again he had the sensation of sprouting wings. He was so overwhelmed that he forgot for a moment that he had to take a leak. He looked at his watch again: 10:12. If you were going to wait for the end of the world, where would you want to be? The radio hostess, Helen, had advised people to stay in their living rooms, but Rudy thought he’d found a better vantage place. He unzipped his pants and watered the ground, tracing a big R, for Rudy. 10:15. Two minutes. He watched the second hand on his watch, sweeping time before it, sweeping the seconds away, describing by its movement a mysterious dividing line between past and present. It was a long two minutes, like waiting for an egg to boil. What would it be like, Rudy wondered. The Second Coming, or a nuclear holocaust — which would be worse? He had forty seconds left to think about it. His mind suddenly started racing, traversing his whole life, his childhood: his dad jumping up on a truck to bid on a load of strawberries and then collapsing — dead of a heart attack before he hit the
pavement; his high school graduation in the old school; the day the public library burned down, the morning of his wedding day, the births of his daughters, their first days of school, the day he and Helen signed the papers for the house, the night Helen died. And that only took up two seconds. He had thirty-eight seconds to go, an eternity. He started counting them — thirty-seven, thirty-six, thirty-five, thirty-four — but he was too impatient. He felt in his pocket for the keys to the rental car. They were there okay. His wallet was okay too, but it was too fat; there was too much junk in it. He took it out of his pocket and checked the hundred-dollar bill he’d folded up and stuck in the section behind his credit cards. Seven seconds to go. One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three, one thousand four, one thousand five, one thousand six, one thousand seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. He waited another minute, just to make sure, before heading back down the hill.

  The adobe house was shaded by two large sugar hackberries with broad, spreading crowns. The extension agent, standing on the veranda on the south side of the house — which faced a large open area between an old gambrel horse barn and the garage — was jotting down something with a pencil on a pad of paper. The metal balustrades on the veranda, and those on the second-floor balcony, were painted dark green, like the trim on the narrow double-hung windows. Barney was lighting a cigar. Maxine Wilson was emptying her coffee cup over the balustrade. Rudy kicked a rock and they all looked at him, waiting for a sign. He shrugged. He didn’t want them to know that he’d decided to make an offer on the property.

  The River

  Rudy closed on the grove on the sixteenth of March. After the closing, which took place in a lawyer’s office in downtown Mission, he sat in the cab of the full-sized Ford pickup he’d bought from Maxine. (He’d given his old car to Molly) He rolled the windows down and asked himself, Now what? And What have I done? Was it simply a bad case of buyer’s remorse? It was three o’clock in the afternoon. He sat in the cab of the truck till four, watching people walk up and down Conway Avenue, the main north-south street: Mission Dry Goods, a furniture store, a movie theater, a bank, a tiny public library, a few homespun restaurants, a Rexall Drug Store, Spike’s Motors. That was it. He shook his head, but he couldn’t shake off the suspicion that he’d made a huge mistake. He didn’t belong here; he was a Midwesterner; he should have stayed in Chicago. Seasick was the way he felt, as if he were on a ship pitching and rolling in the middle of the ocean. He was tempted to call the Robinsons, the new owners, to see if he could buy his old house back; tempted to call Becker and see if he could get his old job back. There were plenty of guys on the market like Plato’s Thrasymachus, might-makes-right guys who didn’t care how they jerked you around. But there were plenty of good guys too, honest men whose word was their bond. It had been a good life.

  He was tempted to call the girls too, and say he was sorry. At the last minute they’d changed their minds about the sale. The house on Chambers Street was the place they’d always called home. Texas was too far away What would they do about Thanksgiving? Christmas? Molly’s wedding? Molly couldn’t imagine getting married in Texas, and Meg had tried to buy the house herself, but she and Dan had just bought a house in Milwaukee and she couldn’t talk Dan into relocating his medical practice. The two of them, Meg and Molly, had sat at the dining room table crying while they took down the chandelier — strings of Baccarat crystal ornaments hanging on the compass frame of an old Nantucket whaler — which had been excluded from the sale of the house. They’d barely been speaking to him, and they hadn’t been especially pleasant to the people who’d come to look at the house. The dogs had growled too, as if they’d wanted to scare off prospective buyers, though they seemed to approve of the Robinsons, who had dogs of their own. Then the moving van didn’t arrive on schedule. Rudy’d called the downtown office every half hour. It never did show up, and finally he had his stuff shipped in one of Becker’s produce trucks.

  And now, sitting in the cab of his pickup on Conway Avenue, he couldn’t understand how he’d ignored or misread all these signs.

  He bought a couple of blankets and a pillow at Mission Dry Goods. He’d checked out of the motel in the morning and was planning to sleep in the cab of the pickup till his furniture arrived.

  He bought a loaf of bread and some sliced salami and a six-pack of Pearl beer at a small grocery store, Lopez Bros. All the av- ocados in the bins, he noticed, were Fuertes and Hasses from California. On the way home he stopped at the little trailer park, where a small crowd of winter Texans had gathered to watch the elephant paint. She stood at a heavy easel and painted with an assortment of brushes. Some of the larger brushes had special bent handles so she could hold them at the right angle. The smaller brushes she held right up inside her trunk. She wore a heavy metal anklet on her left hind leg. Rudy couldn’t see that she was chained to anything, though there was a three-tiered electric fence surrounding the paddock behind her barn.

  The winter Texans were getting ready to begin their annual migration back north and were there to buy paintings to take with them as presents. The paintings were on display in the stand by the road. Those on canvas were thirty dollars; the ones on heavy paper that could be rolled up and inserted into mailing tubes were twenty. There were also mailing boxes for the framed paintings, most of which were about two and a half feet by three feet. The titles were written on three-by-five cards and clipped to the upper right-hand corners of the paintings.

  At four o’clock, Norma Jean finished a painting and her Russian owner led her back to the barn. The winter Texans looked through the paintings in the covered stand and made their selections while they waited for him to return. Rudy picked out a painting too — a swirl of bright colors — deep purples and greens and yellows that seemed to push up against the surface of the canvas. It was one of the thirty-dollar paintings: Plum Blossom and Snow Competing for Spring.

  Rudy’s new house had been built in the second decade of the century by a New England engineer who’d come to Texas to su- pervise the installation of the centrifugal pumps in the big pump house in Hidalgo and who’d stayed on to speculate in land and sugarcane. The double-hung sash windows in the living room still had glass panes that the engineer had brought with him from New England, but the original red roof tiles had been replaced with shingles, and Creaky and Maxine had converted a storeroom at the east end of the house into a big kitchen. Creaky’s study, which had also served as his bedroom after the accident, opened onto the living room. All the doors on the first floor were extra wide to accommodate his wheelchair. The large downstairs bathroom was equipped with a whirlpool tub and an invalids toilet on a pedestal, like a throne.

  Rudy propped up Plum Blossom and Snow Competing for Spring on the counter next to the refrigerator and contemplated it as he ate a salami sandwich and drank a bottle of beer. What he knew about art he’d learned from Helen, because he’d seen all her slide lectures a dozen times and she’d quizzed him about what he’d seen, just the way she quizzed her students: Egyptian vs. Greek, Medieval vs. Renaissance, Mannerism vs. Baroque, Neoclassi-cism vs. Romanticism, Realism vs. Impressionism, Cubism vs. Surrealism. But he didn’t always know what he liked. He’d depended on Helen for cues. She had a way of pointing out things that he hadn’t noticed, like the way the Virgin Mary is holding her thumb in the book she’s reading so she can get right back to it when the angel Gabriel is through telling her she’s pregnant and that God is the father.

  And he wondered about Plum Blossom and Snow Competing for Spring. Was it an accident? A blot? A Rorschach? Or was it a window on ultimate reality? On the Platonic forms? Probably an accident. Platonic Reality seemed to be receding into the distance, like a will-o’-the-wisp, no more meaningful, as Aristotle put it, than singing la la la. In any case, there were too many things in this world that required Rudy’s immediate attention.

  Rudy concealed his doubts and fears from Medardo, his grove manager, who pulled into the drive in the morning in a sky blue Buick Riviera and parked in f
ront of the garage next to Rudy’s pickup. The trees had been stripped in mid-March, before Rudy’d arrived, and Medardo had dressed the grove with nitrogen fertilizer. The new bud scales had separated and the trees were already starting to bloom. The avocados from the old harvest had belonged to Maxine, but Rudy wanted to go over all the records with Medardo, who also managed the little trailer park by the Russians barn. Medardo was a good-looking man in his fifties whose springy mustache had been carefully trimmed to reveal his upper lip. He wore white linen trousers. Ringlets of curly black hair spilled over the collar of his pale yellow shirt.

  Rudy knew from Barney, the real estate agent, that Medardo had been Maxine’s lover for a time, after Creaky’s accident, and had almost married her. In which case Medardo would now be the patron and Rudy would be back in Chicago where he belonged. He wanted Medardo to know, however, that he was not a dumb city slicker, that he’d grown up on a farm and had thirty years’ experience as a commission merchant under his belt, and that he would be keeping a sharp eye on everything — irrigation records, tree maintenance, weeding, fertilizer applications, yields, shipping records, labor costs. And viernes culturales, which Maxine had warned him about. “Cultural Fridays.” What the hell were cultural Fridays? Maxine hadn’t been very clear.

  Rudy greeted him in Spanish, creating the impression that he spoke that language fluently, when in fact his high-school Span ish was limited to the indicative mood. They conversed in Spanish nonetheless, and Rudy learned what he wanted to know: that Medardo and a five-man crew had picked close to a million pounds of avocados last season.

  He also wanted Medardo to know that he intended to open up a new market in Texas instead of relying so heavily on Becker in Chicago.