About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory

by Barry Lopez

  We pulled up in Goshen for gas, but also to show off, to parade ourselves and the vehicle. We were full of pretending we were driving in from California, though we were both in school in South Bend. And, sure, there were other 427 ’Vettes around, pal, but not ones like this one. My brother had made it even more intimidating (only to a certain class of people, of course—we were oblivious) by stripping it of ornament. The chrome body trim and manufacturer’s symbols had been removed. The black fiberglass body showed no panel seams. The magnesium wheels were dull gray, the tires black sidewalls with black-on-black lettering. The seats and interior were black. The faces of some of the dashboard instruments showed the only bits of bright color. The floor mats were red.

  At the gas station we responded with laconic detachment to the curiosity of the attendant, using an arcane jargon indispensable to this kind of conversation.

  “Jesus, some car.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Three-ninety?”

  “Four-twenty-seven.”

  “What’s the compression?”

  “Twelve.”

  “Jesus. You got deuces in there or a four-barrel?”

  “Holly four. The exhaust is tuned. The lakers are for real.”

  “You got Iskindarian cams?”

  “Yeah.”

  We bantered like lawyers before a trial. The only way the attendant could win was to know more about the car and the engine than I did. The tank was full before I ran out of esoteric information about the transmission and rear end. I left a discrete chirp of burning rubber in second gear as I pulled away into traffic.

  He hadn’t mentioned the heat. If we’d been driving a Plymouth sedan, that would have been his opener. When I told him we were from California, he glanced into the car and told me it was illegal to drive barefoot in Indiana.

  We cruised slowly around town in Shipshewana, looking for somebody to introduce ourselves to. It was apparent right away that the car carried no weight at all here. These people preferred buttons on their pants to zippers and they had little truck with electricity. We felt one kind of authority—horsepower—slip away and a second emerge: we were on a professional quest. We acted more intent now, even solemn, though merely sitting in such a car, a high-strung horse all a-jitter in a small corral, made it difficult to regard ourselves in a serious light.

  We parked—the only car—near a large barn where we speculated the auction probably took place and got out. There was no one around. Barefoot in Levi’s and T-shirts, our long hair tied back but wind-ravaged at the edges, we tried to appear in need of assistance. No one came, We walked up to the barn and peered in. No one. The bare ground in front of the building had been hoof-beaten to dust the consistency of flour and was pilled with desiccated crumbles of horse manure. In the stillness only one sound came to us, the rising drone of cicadas from elms growing beside a building that could be a store.

  No one in there either. Was it Sunday? No.

  We got back in the car and pulled out on the highway. We’d go out to one of the farmhouses we could see. In the rearview mirror I spotted a man in dark trousers and suspenders watching us from the shade of the elms. I thought to turn around, but by then Don and I shared a sense that we were so out of place we might as well have been pulling into some town in Mongolia.

  I passed a horse-drawn buggy. I began to distinguish men working in outlying fields and stepping through barn doors. And to notice horses standing head down in the heat. We pulled into a yard. A man in a dark hat wearing dark trousers and with his white shirt buttoned to the throat came over to my side of the car. I didn’t want to shut the engine off, to indicate we assumed we could stay. We’d be moving right along. He and Don tried to converse over the ba-bam-bam-buh-bam-buh-buh-bam of the exhaust. I was so chagrined by our outlandish appearance I didn’t pay attention to the conversation. It was cordial and succinct. The man showed no sign of finding us strange or presumptuous. Yes, there was a stock auction coming up in a week. People from all around in Lagrange and Elkhart Counties and from Michigan would be bidding, mostly on draft and carriage horses. And pigs. I realized as they spoke that the air was pungent with the odors of fresh-cut grass and pig manure. And that the air was a bit cooler here and not so hazy as it was in South Bend.

  He told us to see a Mr. Huster and gave us directions. We thanked him sincerely, with all the politeness we could muster without seeming to be false. I let in the oversize eleven-inch clutch slowly and pulled away as quietly as possible. While the man was talking with Don, I’d been looking sidelong at his hands, suspended at the level of my face. Large, calm, deliberate hands.

  Don asked if I’d brought any shoes. If Mr. Huster was at home he wanted to get out of the car, get away from the car, to inquire about the auction. Yes, I had. We stopped on a swath of golden field stubble at the side of the road and I fished them out from behind the seat.

  Don began to laugh. He made an exaggerated sound like an idling engine’s and crossed his eyes and leered in self-mockery at the foolishness we must have represented to the other man, ignorant as North Side Chicago VISTA volunteers on the Navajo Reservation.

  Mr. Huster was home. Don raised a finger to signal me from his front porch, where someone had answered Don’s knock, to indicate success. He disappeared behind a closing screen door. My interest in his film had ebbed, and it was too hot to sit in the car waiting. I walked over to a fence in a windbreak of poplars and stood in the cooler air. There were Belgian draft horses in the paddock. White fetlocks, blazed faces. Flaxen manes and docked tails. And Percherons, a darker chestnut than the Belgians and smaller headed. Both breeds, stout as bridge timbers, were huge, even-tempered animals.

  There were six Belgians, four Percherons. I studied them to see if I could tell which might be matched pairs. Ants moved along the whitewashed fence rail. The light-blue sky was empty of birds. Only the rising, strident chorus of cicadas and the movement of grazing horses, the streaming of the ants, broke up the stillness, the insistence of the heat.

  When Don came back to the car, he had the perplexed look of someone at odds with many things.

  “How’d you do?”

  “Fine. This guy sort of runs the auction. It’s all right with him to film. I think. Not really sure.”

  We stood facing each other on opposite sides of the car.

  “Look at these horses,” I said.

  “Yeah, what are they, Clydesdales?”

  “The light ones are Belgians. The others are Percherons. Same deal.”

  “This guy Huster sells horses. Maybe these here are for sale.”

  “How much? He say how much?”

  A woman was approaching us from the house with a tray. It bore a large stoneware pitcher and two glasses with ice. She was petite. She wore no makeup. Maybe she was twenty. The hemline of her gray jumper broke at her shins. Underneath it, she wore a plain, high-collared blouse with long sleeves. She held the tray out with a demure smile and spoke not a word.

  We nodded politely and took the glasses as silently. We drank the ice water in that uh-gluck, uh-gluck, uh-gluck rhythm that is to drink without tasting. She held the tray out for our glasses and poured them full again. We drank again, half a glass each.

  “Thanks very much,” I said. “It’s very thoughtful. Appreciate it.”

  She smiled and squinted at us with her head tilted, teetering between her world and ours, as though half-convinced we weren’t there. No one spoke. She walked away with an air of having satisfied herself.

  “You want to drive back to the barn? Is that where they have the auction?”

  “Yeah, let’s go by there. I want to see the situation inside, where we can set up.”

  We drove section-line roads back to Indiana 5, the highway on which the barn stood. I sensed the authority of the car again, and took some sort of reassurance from the slickness with which I shifted.

  “I’ll be out in a minute,” said Don. He stepped through a side door into the barn.

  I looked around
for the man I’d seen under the trees before. After a while I got out and walked over to the circles of shade cast by the elms growing next to the building I thought was a store. The rear of the building was open, like a stable shed. The man I’d seen was sitting astride a backless chair with a sickle cupped in his arm like a violin. He was stroking it with a foot-long sharpening stone. He smiled and acknowledged me with a slight movement of his head. Hand tools and small farm implements—harrow rakes and plow bottoms—sat in orderly piles on the ground all around him. Blacksmith, I thought. In spite of his apparent cordiality, I sensed no opening for a conversation. I stood watching as though the scene before me were a diorama.

  “Where you boys from?” he said in an even voice, but suddenly.

  “South Bend. We’re in school over there. We’re thinking about making a movie here.”

  “Oh!”

  “We just want to check the lighting in the barn over there.”

  He ceased stroking the sickle blade and looked up, but said nothing. He was in his thirties. He looked as though he were regarding a painting in a gallery that had no meaning for him.

  “Well,” I said, turning away, “we’re just going to be here a minute. Sorry if we disturbed you.”

  He didn’t watch me leave. It wasn’t rudeness I felt as much as a sense that, for him, what I was speaking about was impractical, remote from the task then in his hands. Perhaps it would have been different if it hadn’t been so hot, if the air under the elms hadn’t felt so staggered.

  “We going somewhere else?” I asked Don as he got in the car.

  He shrugged. “Let’s go up to Michigan, up to Three Rivers and eat dinner.”

  I pulled out on Indiana 5 and headed north. We passed the ranks of orderly Amish fields, the neat two-story frame houses and carriage buildings. Towheaded boys and girls stood still in front yards staring, midgame, looking like children from an N. C. Wyeth drawing in that famous edition of Tom Sawyer.

  “Gene Stratton Porter is buried around here somewhere,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “She wrote about waifs and orphans. Like James Oliver Curwood, Rider Haggard, that vein. The stories hold together pretty good when you’re young, then they feel stranger, like zoo animals.”

  I slowed at the T-junction with Indiana 120. No traffic. I turned left. Thunderheads building in the west. An afternoon cloudburst to come.

  “So, you going to make a movie?”

  Don shrugged and leaned down to take my sneakers off. “Yeah. I think so. I want to break through all that … what? Understatement?”

  “You mean how reserved, how noncommittal they all are?”

  “Yeah. That.”

  We were shouting now over the sound of the car’s acceleration. I shifted to third so smoothly the steady line of the Corvette’s hood rose just slightly. We knew what we were doing. I hit fourth doing nearly ninety.

  17

  THEFT

  IN THE COOL Georgia morning under dogwoods my uncle’s Mercury Marquis possessed animal-like qualities, like a workhorse taken from a shaded stall at dawn, sleek and quivering. Later, under the match strike of the summer sun, the car would be too hot to touch, and in the humid air my legs would stick to the leather seats. With the thud of the big doors just then, though, I only felt class coming to attention, the teacher taking his seat.

  My uncle Gordon lit a Panatella cigar and headed us south out of Thomaston. We were driving to a farm in Macon County, a quarter-section of land on the east bank of the Flint River owned by a man named Arthur Drewpierce. The Drewpierces, my uncle told me, had been in that part of Macon County since before cotton, seven generations or more. He and Mr. Drewpierce had business to discuss that morning, he made clear as we drove along, gesturing occasionally with his cigar hand at a distant barn, offering a few lines of history or an anecdote. I knew when he asked me to accompany him, though, that he had a separate reason and thought it not likely that it was solely to meet Mr. Drewpierce. It was Gordon’s way quietly to set a problem before me. He was then the Upson County superintendent of schools as well as the superintendent of schools in the county seat of Thomaston, but he had taught high school for many years and some at Auburn University, his alma mater. He was as devoted to the idea of a formal education as other men were to the pursuit of financial profit.

  I lived hundreds of miles from his home, in an apartment in Manhattan with my younger brother and my parents. Whenever my brother and I came for a visit, Gordon would impress on us the need to understand the family’s history, the incidents in our slow migration from the Delaware Water Gap in 1725 through Virginia to Georgia and Alabama. He would emphasize our obligations to the integrity and honor of that family, no matter what we may have heard from others of horse thievery or disinheritance.

  He was neither obsessive about family history nor overbearing about integrity, only direct and serious. And because he undermined the gravity of these concerns with wit or humor he seemed neither pedantic nor sanctimonious. He appeared to suggest, however, that there was something debilitating that haunted human society. He implied that the knowledge he conveyed was crucial to survival, that Armageddons loomed for us, always. The threats he saw to civilization were vague. They had to do with the failure to remember, which explained some of his devotion to the study of history, and the failure to honor. The high polish of his shoes, the careful routine of his days, the deliberation with which he spoke, like his library and the perfectly maintained car, were his proofs against such menace.

  We rolled south in the big Mercury. I sat with my elbow out the window in the car’s slipstream. In the summer of my twelfth year I could almost manage this naturally.

  Gordon was being promoted by businessmen and state educators for the House of Representatives. I understood that his driving out to see Mr. Drewpierce had something to do with this, that he wanted Mr. Drewpierce’s views. I was staring at a feral wall of kudzu vine festooned in the roadside trees, wondering what he had in mind for me, when he began to speak of Indians.

  I’d heard some of these stories from him before, about the Kashita and Coweta, and about Andrew Jackson’s fight with the Creeks at Horseshoe Bend on the Tallapoosa. His recountings seemed exotic; I knew no one else in Georgia who referred to local Indians. He lined out their histories with the same knowledge and authority he brought to discussions of what he called the War Between the States. I knew no other adult who took history as seriously. I listened attentively, knowing this was a prelude, that he was leading me someplace.

  His language tended to be formal and dramatic and was sometimes biblical in its cadence; his views he decanted in slow measure. The sentences sounded rehearsed, but they weren’t. The Creeks, he was saying, were a confederacy of tribes, the most powerful of which were the Muskogee. The ceremonies of a farming people held them to the earth, in particular boskita, an eight-day celebration built around the ripening of the last corn plants. (We drove a macadam network of backcountry roads with no signs as he spoke, passing isolated clapboard shacks elevated on stone pilings and weathered gray, passing the spindle-lattice of picked cotton fields and fields thick with sorghum and ripening corn, passing Herefords slow-grazing pastures in the awakening light.)

  “But long before that …” He was pausing now, gathering the documents in his mind. “… long before the Muskogee, it might have been Aztecs who were here. Before that culture had either name or notoriety among the Spaniards, before they were a horror for the Mixtecs to behold, they might have been living right here on these creeks, tending their gardens, worshiping the sun.”

  He looked at me, to see how I was taking it in, gauging his next remark.

  “A man named Whittier, from the university up at Athens, has been down to see Mr. Drewpierce. He wants to excavate along the river there at the edge of his fields. He believes Aztecs once camped there. Now, Mr. Drewpierce, he has no strong feelings about this yet—either way. It’s in a state of negotiation for him. Mr. Drewpierce reads his Bible closely
on this and other matters though, so Mr. Whittier, you see, might not be able to dig there. We may or may not learn anything more of this campsite beyond what Mr. Drewpierce’s man Otis found last fall, a few bits of pottery. He may decide to take a six-bottom plow to it, you understand.”

  I nodded yes. Yes I would not bring up the subject in Mr. Drewpierce’s presence; and, yessir, if Mr. Drewpierce brought it up and suggested I go down to the site while you talked together I would go (and this, certainly, was why my uncle had brought me here). And, yessir, I wouldn’t touch or take anything.

  “Do they teach you these things in school?”

  “Yessir.”

  “About the Aztecs?”

  “Yes, I’ve heard of it, heard of them.”

  “I don’t remember it well, just that the Aztecs came in from the north and conquered the Mixtecs and others, and then the Spaniards slaughtered them.”

  “And they had a great empire.”

  “Yes, they did. They were great builders and mathematicians. When you walk along the river, think about these people, how they started out on these creeks. Mr. Whittier is impassioned to prove his point, you understand, which could be a mistake—archeologically and with Mr. Drewpierce.”

  He looked at me with an amused smile. I basked in the level of his confidence in me.

  MR. DREWPIERCE WAS a tall man and I thought him disdainful at first. He wore a clean white shirt under a fresh-laundered pair of Union bib overalls and greeted us in a quiet voice. He steered us to a gather of green-and-white metal lawn chairs on his porch and called to his wife to bring us some lemonade.

  I drank my lemonade in silence while the two men spoke, a light conversation of gossip, weather, and anecdote which I knew often preceded serious conversation in such a setting.

  “Boy, I believe I know where you might interest yourself for an hour or two,” said Mr. Drewpierce.