Stories work to make us more than citizens. A story does to history what a nickname does to a friend. Nothing can stand quite so proud without constantly proving its worth. “What are Indians used for?” my brother asked when small. My parents wrote that down in the family notebook called “Lost Words,” but later changed to “Voices Remembered.” Then, curiosity spoke. Later, he studied anthropology. He tried to learn why the question was wrong and true. Saved stories make us flexible. A good story makes a tool handy as that famous device patented in 1862, the “Improvement in combined house, bridge, boat, and wagon body.” We inhabit, cross over, drift away, and haul stories home. In the Walker Evans photograph of the sweat, sorrow, and tenacity of the Gudger family, August 1936, light bit silver black and saved them for eternity. In our stories, conviction bites my soul.
On a hot August day in a strange town, I reached back for the strength of family ways. I reached back for the decade that brought balance to the world—the balanced trade of shriveled possession for a swell in the power of being. When I approached an apartment building, stern matriarch of brick between Main and Arthur streets in Pocatello, Idaho, I saw it all by the heroic flame that lit so many family travels: to move, find, celebrate. The lettering above the door shone gold on black, but dark gold burnished with decay, mottled by the sun: THE FARGO. The steps to the heavy glass door took a grand, chipped sweep, and the knob polished my hand green with brass. Then the long carpeted hush of the hall unreeled my shadow like a rope, each door a varnished lid for the particular joys and desperations of one life.
Halfway down the hall the wide stairs rose, the carpeted spiral of the stairs a four-sided cage of dark wood climbing into the past. My hand on the banister touched the spot where everyone, living and dead, had gripped this silk wood for the first heave upward. Even the young men courting, taking the climb three steps at a time then skipping back down, grabbed here. And the railroad pensioners, the old women with their laundry duffel, tramps looking for a carpeted sleep in the hall took their hold on the same palm-sized bump of mahogany. Down from the skylight, a pillar of sunlight stood cool with dust.
For me, that three-story box of stairs held the holy hush and honest age of the thirties. I climbed that chamber of human time, surging upward in the wing-harness of family myth. I climbed counterclockwise, in the spiral gyre not of progress but of sloughing off, of shucking prosperity for happiness. In such a place, Utopia would rise up, a neighborhood among us: the kindly, jabbering Toombs sisters in 101; Rex the railroad handyman always on the prowl to help; and the man everyone called Old Holy Socks camped in the cellar.
That first day, on the landing of the second floor, where the purple weave of the carpet frayed out brown, I knew where to step. Other travelers had left a path that showed in each bald palm of carpet, under the pillar of sun and the candlelight glow of small bulbs. I put my feet down where they were meant to go, where I could feel the real floor not softened by plush, and hear the crack and flex of oak flooring that came by rail. I held the key Doris Garner, the manager in apartment A, had given. I let my eyes go dim from focus, and shuffled down the corridor toward the door of 202. The key in my hand shot a hot blue spark into the lock, and I slipped inside.
How can I see that apartment now? The bright shock of our daughter’s subsequent birth has rinsed any dingy shadow from the room. Old couch sags comforting in mind. The skeleton bed that greeted me then has dressed since in my wife’s early labor, the counting breath by breath through pain to joy. A quilt softened by a thousand nights of our life now covers every rusted squeak of my first touch. Didn’t that dust-pocked and cracked window speak only of sunlight dazzle then?
Outside, in the heavy glint of August, my wife wilted in the car. We had come to Idaho to take a one-year job and have a child. We traveled poor, but knit by lore. Story by story I had been schooled for this. In the thirties, hadn’t my father dressed in harness and pulled a plow for ten cents an hour? Hadn’t my mother traveled in her Sabbath best to trade hymns for meals? They had met and said simply, “Shouldn’t it always be this way?”
That night, from the high, cracked windows of The Fargo, we could see the red glitter of the Dead Horse Saloon, and the neon wagon wheel on the Yellowstone Hotel, where rumor said the manager moved from room to room, using them up, leaving them locked and cluttered like our nation moving through the decades. Slipping out for work before first light, I stepped carefully around sleeping drunks stretched warm on the carpet of the hall. After November, I didn’t drive our buried car for three straight months of snow, but walked everywhere—past the smoky Harlem Club, the cemetery filled with Japanese names, the Bannock County historical shrine of local knickknacks. Coal dust billowed out from empty cradle-cars. I cut across the railyard to haunt the Old Timers’ Cafe like a kid loose in the toolshop of history.
In a winter of Pocatello life, I saw the ways familiar to me from family stories out of another time. An Idaho bumper-sticker has it that “Idaho is what America was.” I saw this in the Pocatello custom of the underground house. By this custom, a family will scrape together the money to start building, get the hole dug by June and the basement in, lay down the floor for the actual house, cover the floor with tarpaper, and batten down for a first winter. Only an antenna shows above ground for the television, and a stovepipe, and a boxed little set of stairs sprouting from the earth like a turret with roof, door, and hand-painted house number. After a few winters, the antenna turns rusty, and they have mopped down tar to make the roof last. The family has decided to quit building toward respectability, and call her good. They all live snug and quiet in the earth. Out the slit windows at ground level, you can recognize visitors by watching their shoes come up along the path.
Up on the bench of sage-ground west from town a vacant house shows another way to wrestle with thrift and necessity. There the log cabin of telephone poles holds a lid of earth, a pelt of blond grass swaying. Whoever left this place, left in a hurry. Several dozen television sets frost the yard in a wizardry of disrepair. A hole in the door once let the cat slip through, with a flap of red carpet nailed in place to keep out wind. Inside, the stove looms out of all proportion to the size of the room—they kept it warm. Religious literature covers the floor, and self-help guitar lessons, farm journals, amateur electronics digests. That first day I visited, I picked up one book in the fading snow-light of evening: New Heaven and New Earth. In the closet, a blue wool coat hung like new.
One cold night, at the west edge of town, my moon-tailored wife and I climbed the two hundred and seven concrete steps to the old community dance floor—a half-acre of packed earth surrounded by sage. To the west, not a single house-light burned, clear to Kingport Mountain. East, we looked back down at Pocatello glorying in her lit streets, the throb of her trains, the haste of cars on Main, a shout and an answer now and again. In two days, our daughter was due and the world would change.
“Hold me. Hold me now and dance by starlight.”
After Idaho, back home in Oregon, I heard my mother and her sister laughing in the other room, laughing so they couldn’t stop. They had found a magazine Boppums had saved from the first years of her marriage, and in it an article on how to keep your family small.
“Take your husband to a film,” my mother read aloud, “or to the theater. This will take his mind off you.” And then laughter, joyful laughter of the survivors—those of us who live to laugh because of our ancestors’ lucky foolishness. Hard family stories thrust into my heart this one unspoken fact: children, oh children, our strange ways result in you.
And so it goes. Two of my friends use their expensive college educations to make pottery and have twins and live in the oldest house and be poor. They walk everywhere, swinging through the neighborhood with that long-distance tramp’s easy gaze on our opulence. They scrounge and mend, rather than buy and install. They ramble among us lean, magnets for sympathy. They furnish their house with a fraction of what their neighbors throw away. The roof shingles curl, and
the walls craze with cracked paint. The small yard shows puritan grass clipped flat, and a lush garden where cucumbers flourish, and corn, tomatoes, butterflies.
They live some desperate days, and take tough jobs for small pay. They inherit a conscience from their parents, and are strong. By this conscience, they have traded away security for freedom. They try to live right. By night, their curtains show the soft light of kerosene.
“Why do they do this?” the husband’s father asks his friends. “They live in voluntary poverty. They could do better if they wished.” Yet I know that father taught them to live this way. When he tells about his own first car, when he brags how he reached out the window in the rain to jerk a cotton string to make the wipers flail, his voice takes a jump of laughter that flattens over the decades of prosperity. He taught them too well, as my parents taught me, that hard times make good stories, and good stories make rich lives.
Oklahoma taught Woody Guthrie this, and Guthrie taught Bob Dylan this, and Dylan taught my generation this. When I heard “Blowin’ in the Wind” tamed to muzak at the shopping mall, I felt a rage for truer ways: not a loudspeaker, but the honest rasp of a familiar voice. Not a good job, but good work, important work—the kind you take when what they call “recession” pinches off the end of a national binge. How many lives of quiet desperation will it take till we know this? The answer, my friends, makes our life work.
When the Tsimshian dancers of the Northwest coast lowered their masked faces and came to rest, they would end their singing, and speak by custom to those who watched.
“You do not see us dancing today—you see your ancestors dancing today. And now you will wear their stories. You will wear their stories that never grow old.”
We build out lives of some adventures simply to make stories. My life, my story packs its bags for time. At supper, my daughter says, “Papa, we have a cuckoo clock instead of a television, right?”
“That’s right,” I say. Exactly right.
When May comes blossoming toward us, when the bees spring to their furious toil, and garden earth speaks with its own fogged breath, I will climb into the loft of the barn to fetch the Maypole ribbon wreath. Up there, beside the rickety highchair I outgrew so my daughter might use it thirty years later, beside the drift-wood cedar spall I hope to carve for a bear-face mask, the wreath lies coiled of grapevine and palm-width ribbons the colors of wine, deep water, ripe pear, moss.
When I teased the old barn apart to build the new, I found a rad shaft spared when the harrow it pulled had rusted out of use. In Salem, at my brother’s house, that shaft shall stand, our pole guyed with rope two fathoms upright in the yard. Once the pole is planted, and the wreath slung at the peak with ribbons trailing, each of us will take a strand and dance—in and about as the flute tune from my wife’s mouth turns us round:
Round and round the village, as we have done before.
In and out the windows, as we have done before.
Stand and face your lover, as we have done before.
Round and round the valley, as we have done before.
Turn, father, mother, brother, sister, child, Katie take green, Rosemary blue, each to your story’s end take hold the stories braided inward as the family learns to bump, trip, spin, divide, converge. Confusion and delight will swirl us through doors in the dance that shut, and windows that bloom, through the quick jive of elbow and knee, some bold eyes of the children finding a burrow through their elders to daylight. Then we’ll all let go. Unravel the ribbons, take down the shaft, coil the wreath away. The lawn will scatter tousled where we turned. “We’d best to in,” we’ll say. After all, May will arrive again in the old sap-rush habit of trees, in the vines’ hungry zest and hurry, in that bold ribbon of starlight lengthening out as darkness comes.
LOCAL CHARACTER
Gypsy Slim taught me why each town’s outcast eccentric is its patron saint. Until he disappeared, Slim camped by the downtown library in Portland. His plastic tarp stretched between two shopping carts and the stone bench carved with the name of that rebel from the Enlightenment, Laurence Sterne. When citizens would clip along past him, haughty with respectability, Gypsy Slim would jive them with an easy line of talk, until he had them stalled long enough for a real earful: “I don’t care if it’s family, friend, house, job, creed, ethnic group, country, institution, or sex—they all try to stifle what you can be.” Then his saxophone would wrangle their hearts for yes or no.
In every Oregon town where I live or camp, I hear stories about these local saints: Kid Gilnap in Junction City, with his jingling vest of bells; the Eugene man who had his name legally changed to Pro Human, so he could flatter and counsel the young; Bottle Mary west from Otis, who lived on returnable bottles other citizens knew to leave for her behind a particular stump; Wallowa County’s own Acy Deucy; Abe Johnson of Redmond; Tubby Beers of Swisshome; and Marge, the gatherer of mushrooms near Florence. As Gypsy Slim explained, these most unorthodox lives become a standard for the rest of us—not a particular way for us all to live, but a sternly individual standard to measure the various lives we lead. The hermit belongs to this ground. Separate from family and career and church and school, this shabby genius becomes the life of the place itself. The tramp passes on; this life stays. A tattered American flag flaps lazily from a branch of cottonwood near Celilo. When the eastbound freight thunders past, a gray hand flickers from the shadows to wave.
The saint dwells alone in a house or camp that defies the surface formalities of the town. Being alone, she or he is uniquely visible to the community, and uniquely free to live out some kind of wishing we cannot. Sweet paradox: the local character is independent of the codes we live by, and by this independence is free to honor some deeper code or devotion that we—in our upright ways—believe but cannot express. This may be a devotion to a submerged traditional culture, to the past, to the vulnerable creatures of the natural world, or to the plain dignity of the slow mind.
Friends told me to watch for Acy Deucy, his big black hat sagging over his shoulders, as he walked toward Wallowa from his cabin twenty miles out. He’d come slouching along the country road each Saturday afternoon, with a local river’s easy tread. And we traded stories at his expense—about the summer shack where he lived desperate summer and winter high on Promise Ridge; or about the time the harvest cook put two cups of salt into the cake by accident. Acy was a good harvest hand and first to the table. He gobbled up the cake without a flinch. In a word, the man is slow. For this, he is in everyone’s care. He is the local character helping the citizens of Wallowa measure their responsibilities.
They say that once at a City Council meeting, Acy Deucy came up on the agenda. As I heard the story several times in Wallowa (where word travels fast and often), Acy’s custom was to walk into town Saturday, celebrate until he could barely stand, then sleep it off in the fire station and walk home to Promise on Sunday. For the City Council, this routine became grave.
“When he pulls out those hoses to make a nest for himself,” said one, “he jeopardizes the response time of the crew. If they get a call on a Saturday night, they’ll have to untangle him before they can jump on the truck and go.”
“I’ve been thinking on that,” said another. “When you’re talking fire, you’re talking life and death. Let’s lock the station so he can’t get in. I’ve tried, but you can’t reason with that man on a Saturday night.”
“If we leave the door open to Acy,” a third replied, “we might lose a house or even a life to a fire; if we lock the door, we will surely lose Acy to the cold. The man will freeze.”
They all thought for a time, and then voted to leave the door open as it had been. And there Acy sleeps every Saturday night.
The obvious solution of leaving a mattress or blanket in the fire station for Acy’s use never occurred in the several versions of this story I heard. Nor did I ever meet anyone who had actually attended the Council meeting where this discussion was supposed to have taken place. Whether the meeting o
ccurred or not, however, the often-repeated account of the meeting serves as a parable for Wallowa residents. In this story the town sees itself playing a gamble of one life—no matter how peripheral and strange—against all the codes and procedures for public safety and efficiency.
One Saturday night I sat by Acy, his big hat hunched over the bar at Baird’s Tavern. While the shuffleboard puck slid the length of its table on cornmeal, and two women leaned back to laugh about something one had whispered, while jacked-up cars rumbled slow as autumn down the street outside, Acy began to tell me about his dog, way out at the shack on Promise Ridge, waiting for his return.
“But these schools!” he said suddenly. “They’ll be our death!” The bar got quiet for a moment. He swirled the beer in his glass to center the foam, then drained it. “My dog,” he said softly, “my dog’s a good dog. He just waits inside that cabin no matter how long I’m gone.”
I first met Abe Johnson, the bird man of Cline Falls, in the Bend bus station. He had a fifty-pound sack of birdseed slung over his shoulder, a blue stocking cap on his head, and a smashed and greasy cowboy hat on top of that. The pockets on his long canvas coat were torn, and when he took a little jump to shift the load, corn and sunflower seeds scattered from his pockets onto the floor. He set his quart styrofoam cup of coffee onto the end of a crowded bench and began to talk. When everyone else turned away, he turned to me.
“It’s the inner-outer!” He raised his dirt-gloved hands in supplication toward me. “It’s empathy! That’s what makes the birds come in.” The woman hiding behind her novel glanced up. The kid in a black T-shirt with sleeves torn away looked over his shoulder from pinball. “Some days they don’t want to. They hop around in those trees like they’ll never come. But then. . . .” When Abe paused dramatically to straighten up, the sack fell off his shoulder and tipped the cup from its perch. As coffee ran like a gullywasher down the bench, two children, a ski bum, and an old lady leaped from the coffee’s path down the trough of polished oak, but Abe never noticed: “. . . then they come right here to my shoulder,” he said. “Right here!” He patted his left shoulder, and his face bloomed with joy toward an invisible chickadee. Between his pursed lips was a magic kernel of corn.
Having Everything Right Page 11
