Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey

by John Masters

  From Denver Barbara drove back to the D-Lazy-K and the children, while I flew to New York. Vyvyan, generously excited, met me with tickets for a night game next day at the Polo Grounds. She was a Jint fan, too, and we were leading the league. Willie Mays was back from army service, and we'd got a great young pitcher, Johnny Antonelli, from the Braves.

  It was a good game, with a typical Polo Grounds crowd, about a third of us Negro, good tempered, partisan, drinking Cokes, eating hot-dogs, and yelling our lungs out for Willie and Monte and Don and Whitey and Captain Alvin and even Leo the Lip. But Willie made one of his fantastic catches, and completed the double play by throwing a runner out at home, throwing while still about six feet up the centrefield wall and 450 feet from the plate; and the team looked so good that I made up my mind we were going to win the pennant, and the World Series; and there and then I chose an October date for a party to celebrate the victory. That night I took Vyvyan and her cousin Eugenie Huckel to some splendidly expensive Gotham hash-house, and we drank Romanee-Conti and Vyvyan wept a little because after all the struggling and begging and introducing and arm-twisting and vouching, I had arrived. If there was anything to be proud of, she shared in it.

  Next day, in the vast barrack on Foley Square which is the U.S. Court House, it seemed particularly appropriate, since Willie Mays had been an inspiration at the start and at the end of the long journey, that the man sitting next to me on the pew-like benches should be a Jamaican Negro, chauffeur to a Long Island millionaire. The millionaire was there, too, to see that George, who did not have much education, was not finally conned out of his citizenship by the bureaucracy; but when I said I would look after George, as I knew the ropes (by God, did I know the ropes!), the millionaire went off to take care of his money. George and I sat through an hour or so of preliminaries, and at last, en masse, swore allegiance to the United States, its flag and constitution, and promised to forgo all other kings, princes and potentates. I could almost hear the words'... till death us do part,' and felt oddly as though the Jamaican and I were being married; which, in a way, We were. After we had filed up to receive our certificates of naturalization we found a bar, had a couple of drinks together, shook hands, wished each other all good luck in our new country, and parted.

  Next day I was purring down into Jackson Hole airport on a Frontier Airlines Convair from Salt Lake City. There below was the Grand Teton, Mount Moran, Jenny Lake... nearly all the snow gone from Alaska Basin now: we would be able to explore it without danger... the airport, and Barbara with the car. (She would become a citizen six months later)... the D-Lazy-K, and the children running out to greet us, only Martin had thought it proper to mount his horse for the ceremony. He galumphed up on this animal, roughly the height of a giraffe and the girth of a hippopotamus, bounced to a stop, and chirped 'Howdy!' His infected finger was quite bad, and neither of them seemed to have washed for a month, but they were walking volcanoes of information on moose-hunting, horse-grooming, calf-roping, and flapjack-making.

  After a few days with the children, during which time we mailed out fifty invitations to our October party to celebrate the Giants' world championship (including to our parents in England); and a promised excursion to Yellowstone (full of wonders, indeed, but also of people) — we headed up once more into the Tetons, this time hiring a wrangler and pack-horse to carry up our kit.

  We pitched camp on Fox Creek Pass, on the boundary between Wyoming and Idaho. A drift of snow lingered still under a north-facing bank, and there we buried our bacon, butter, and other perishables, well secured in tins. If bears found them, we'd be out of luck, but we had seen none, nor signs of any, during our previous spell. This time we made two or three excursions into the Alaska Basin, photographing the wild flowers that were just bursting out, so late, from where the snow had lain. For three days we saw no one, but on the third evening, lying in the sheltered tent, we heard a dog barking and then a voice calling... in Spanish. We tumbled out and found a horseman herding a big flock of sheep up from the Idaho side. He was a young Catalan — a city boy from Barcelona, but all Spaniards are born shepherds — doing this lonely work, which sheep ranchers can't find Americans willing to do, however much pay they offer. We sat late round our camp fire that evening talking nostalgically of the Ramblas, the Diagonal (which no one has ever called the Avenida Generalissimo Franco), the beer in the Plaza Real, and the seafood in Barceloneta.

  Cold, wet days followed and we decided to go back down. But the wrangler was not due to pick us up for another three days, so we would have to carry all our gear ourselves. This meant two trips. The first spell, we reached the trees at the head of Death Valley, dumped our loads and climbed back up to the pass for the rest. As we again reached the dump, the rain returned. We pitched camp on the spot, stowed everything away, made ourselves warm and comfortable, and went to sleep.

  Next day, August 2nd, it was snowing. The loads had been very heavy — we were counting on that pack-horse — and we agreed that we couldn't go on this way. One of us must go and get a horse from the nearest dude ranch. Barbara declined to be left alone at the head of Death Valley in a small blizzard, so it was she who had to go. The snow was turning to rain as she set off near nine o'clock for an eight-mile hike down the ill-marked trail, keeping a sharp lookout for mountain lion and grizzlies. She saw neither, but soon noticed large soup-plate size indentations in the soft mud of the trail. They were moose tracks, going the same way, and they were full of water, at first. But as she hurried on through the dripping forest the tracks became only half full, and filling... then nearly new, water just trickling in. She was closing up on the beast. A bull moose standing about ten feet at the shoulder, she imagined. With horns spreading the width of a house. Black, and in an extremely bad temper. Weighing 2,000 pounds... 4,000... 6,000... Could run faster than a racehouse. Knock down a redwood by leaning on it. The bull was furious. His wife had run away with a travelling wapiti... The huge footprints were now dry. She was on the animal's heels. Barbara stopped, huddled herself into shelter under a tree, and smoked two cigarettes; and a third. Then she started gingerly on, whistling and singing, which was to say Please get off the path, sir. The moose must have been a gentleman, and he also must have been very close; for she had barely gone a hundred yards when the hoofprints turned off and were lost in the heavy timber. Barbara broke into a trot and reached the White Grass Ranch in a muck sweat. There the dudes, mainly from Philadelphia, were having pre-lunch Martinis in the warm and elegant ranch room, wearing their stretch pants, western shirts, and turquoise jewellery As Barbara clumped in, dripping wet and covered in mud, her hair like the Medusa's, a silence fell; but once they found that she knew what Martinis were, and indeed actually drank them (west of the Susquehanna, like most mixed drinks, they are often regarded as effete eastern medicines, fit only for interior decorators) she was much feted and cosseted.

  Meanwhile, back at the dump, I slept, watched the rain change to snow and back again a few times, ate cold bully beef, drank bourbon, and waited. At last I heard the creak and jingle of saddlery and up the trail through the snow came... my God, came America! The wrangler was six feet four, the build of a rail, long face tanned mahogany under a high Wyoming hat, short blue denim jacket, check wool shirt, silk kerchief, work-worn chaps. With him rode a tall girl, also in full cowboy costume, leading a riding-horse and two pack-horses. They came on, the horses trotting heavily on the muddy trail, snow mantling the riders' hats and shoulders and big gauntlets. They stopped a few feet from me, where I had crawled out of the tent and waited to greet them.

  'Howdye,' the man drawled, dismounting in a long, easy swing. I'm Jim.'

  'I say, how do you do?' the girl said. I'm Betty Featherstone.'

  She was English, working a summer as a cowgirl at the White Grass. The wrangler was from Ely, Nevada. We loaded up the gear, I mounted the riding-horse, and we set off.

  A couple of days later we went to the D-Lazy-K to pick up the children. The owner told us they were grea
t kids, which we already suspected. Susan, he had noticed, was turning more to books and less into relationships with other people, but she was a highly efficient and indeed dominating young person, organizing everyone in sight, when she chose to be. Martin was highly competitive, and had done well in riflery, though his real passion was fishing. From everyone's angle it had been a worth-while summer, we thought, as we set off on the last phase of it, a circular trip to look for a suitable site for my railroad research.

  We headed, first, towards South Dakota, to examine the Chicago and North Western, and the Milwaukee Road. As we drove we found that the kids had learned other things beside horsemanship at the D-Lazy-K. Martin chanted Baptist hymns and reprimanded me for using the name of the Lord in vain. Susan kept asking us if we realized the enormity of our sin in drinking whisky; we would not be saved, she insisted, we were hurting the Lord's feelings and flying clear in the face of the Good Jesus. We turned their attention to the numerous domesticated beasts on the prairie around us, and set them to playing Animal Euchre. If a man isn't safe from salvation in his own car, where is he?

  Finding nothing to suit me, we headed back south towards Laramie and the Union Pacific. The children had collected some huge elk horns while at the ranch, and these they insisted on taking home. As there was no other place we arranged them on the back seat, and the children travelled curled up inside them, as though in singularly uncomfortable chairs designed by a mad Scots laird.

  As we bumped over the single Milwaukee Road track in Interior, South Dakota (pop 87, on Saturday nights) saw that a road fork a little ahead was not signposted. I turned back and went into a bar (the bar) to ask the way.

  After I had spoken to the bartender a man sitting in the cool gloom with several empty beer bottles in front of him cried, 'You wanna go to Chadron? I live jus' west of Chadron, and I'm on my way. Jus' follow me.'

  He was a thick-set man in a store-bought suit, about thirty-eight, with a wide, cheerful mouth and slightly unfocused blue eyes. I said, 'Thank you very much, that'll be great,' and headed for the door.

  'Wait a minute. Let's have a beer,' he cried. 'The name's Leo.' He stuck out his hand. It was about three in the afternoon, but I had a beer, while he told me that he was on his way home from a farmers' convention in Chicago. Then we went out into the glare of the sun. Leo shook Barbara's hand, leaped into a parked green Ford pickup, and took off at seventy miles an hour.

  The road, across the Pine Ridge Reservation of the Sioux, was cut into the black dirt of the prairie, and was unpaved, deeply rutted, and full of unmarked crossroads and junctions. The pickup bounced and jolted south like a demented jack-rabbit far in front of me. We tore through Indian trading posts like the chariot race in Ben Hur, each time twice jerking into phlegmatic alarm the somnolent Sioux squatted along the shaded wall. I followed Leo by the trail of his dust, and by the beer cans he flung out in regular succession along the roadside. Once he vanished, and I only found him again because he had stopped for us to come up: he had run out of cans, and the bottles he was now on needed an opener. At length, after an hour, we came to a main road, and headed west. The signposts pointed clearly to Chadron, where we intended to stop the night, but Leo wouldn't hear of it. 'Follow me!' he cried, glassy-eyed, leaning heavily against his pickup. 'Wife's away! You spend the night with me! Ain't a decent motel in Chadron, anyway.' He would not be denied, and a Nebraska farm house was going to be far more interesting to us than a Nebraska motel, so we accepted.

  From his farm the black earth stretched flat and even to the huge red ball, dust-hazed, of the setting sun. There was not another house in sight, just the earth, and the dust. Trees surrounded the farm yard, but there were no others inside the darkening sweep of the horizon.

  It was night. Our children were in the only bathroom, splashing and singing. It sounded like Niagara, but every time Barbara got up to calm the hurricane Leo waved her down crying, 'Let 'em enjoy themselves. That's the way Jane would like it. Here, ma'am, have another drink.' He had changed to rye whisky by now, and began to ask us questions. What was my business? -Where did Barbara get that cute accent? When he learned that we were English born he had to have another drink to celebrate. The news that I was a writer produced another, together with a rather touching awe that a writer, a real writer of books, was sheltering in his house. When he learned that Bhowani Junction (he had never heard of it) was to be made into a movie starring Ava Gardner and Stewart Granger he staggered to the telephone, crying 'We've got to get Jane. She'll love this!'

  Barbara signalled frantically to me behind his back, no, no! I needed no urging and began to babble that it was nothing, he mustn't think of disturbing her, she couldn't possibly get here in time to say hello. But he had the telephone and was mumbling, 'She's only twenty-fi' miles away, staying with her mother. Wouldn't miss it for nothin'.' The children tumbled out of the bathroom followed by a tidal wave. Barbara smacked them both heartily and told them to dry themselves and get into their pyjamas at once. On the telephone Leo was saying, 'Great people, honey, greates'! Gonna stay the night... No, no, met them in. In-in-interior... But...' The children's false screams echoed through the house, and no doubt, the telephone.

  There were long ominous pauses while he listened, swaying. Then he said, 'Lovely honey. You comeonover ri' away. A writer... wrote a book about India, with Ava Gardner.. Be seeing you'

  He turned back rubbing his hands. 'Time we ate,' he cried.

  'Yes, oh yes,' we said enthusiastically.

  'You've sure come to the right place,' he said. 'We farmers have these deep freezes, stacked. Looka this!' He opened a huge freezing chest and pulled out a couple of frozen chickens. 'Everyone like chicken?'

  'Yes,' we said. It was no time to argue. The sooner we got some food into Leo, and ourselves, the better. Leo slapped a large frying pan on to the electric burner, switched it on to full heat, and poured in a cupful of corn oil. Barbara began to make up the kids' beds on the living-room floor.

  We were to sleep in the matrimonial bed, and Leo in the spare room. He and Jane had no children; they had only been married two years.

  Leo pressed a rye into my hands and poured one for himself. The corn oil was smoking hot and the kitchen looked like the gas attack at Second Ypres. Leo dropped the two frozen chicken into the boiling, smoking fat and I dived for the door. 'Ow, hey!' Leo yelled as burning fat exploded all over the kitchen, spattering his hands and face. I could hardly see him by now, and oil was dripping off the ceiling and the walls and all the cups and china in the racks. And it was getting worse as more water melted out of the chickens.

  'Shouldn't we be doing it a little more slowly?' Barbara asked, having come on the run at the yelling. The kids sheltered behind her skirts, applauding whole-heartedly.

  'No, no,' Leo said thickly, 'thass the way we cook 'em in Nebraska.'

  Then, preceded by a large, barking and over-excited dog whose wagging tail knocked Susan's glass of milk off a side table over what appeared to be an expensive Axminster carpet, Jane arrived.

  We left early the next morning. Jane did not get up to see us off, which was naughty of her, as her husband's generosity to strangers could not be blamed on us; nor, in a Christian sense, should it have been blamed on him. Leo and the dog came out of the barn as I started the car. Leo was in his underclothes, rubbing straw and sleep out of his eyes, and mumbling bleary good wishes. I made a mental note to send a copy of Bhowani Junction, signed, and bearing our best wishes and thanks to him, but only him. Then we headed the Dodge, fast, away from Chadron, Nebraska.

  That noon we came to Laramie, Wyoming, and it seemed to offer all that I wanted. The main line of the Union Pacific passed through, and I learned that it was a division point for crew changes between Cheyenne and Rawlins. On the Sherman Summit I recognized a Big Boy, one of the 4-8-8-4 Mallet compounds which were the biggest and most powerful engines in the world, and I also saw several diesels, and a gas turbine, both on passenger and freight trains. I arranged to stay a we
ek, then drive home early in September, while Barbara returned at once by train, for the children were due back in school. I saw them all off on the eastbound City of Los Angeles, and began a week of noseying around the freight yard, riding cabooses down to Cheyenne, and the cab of a steam 4-8-4 express engine hauling the Overland Limited to Rawlins and back, and twice on Big Boys as they ground up to Sherman Summit under a drifting pall of black smoke with 5,000 tons behind the gigantic tender.

  I talked to engineers and conductors and firemen and brakemen, ate in commissaries and drank in railroad bars, and learned the arcane jargon of the Iron Horse. It was all a dream come true, but at the end of it I was no nearer to a solution of the problems of my theme than at the beginning, so it was with mixed emotions that I headed the Dodge cast.

  The weather was perfect, the roads empty. In one dawn I covered 320 miles across Minnesota and the northern peninsula of Michigan in four hours precisely; and the next day drove 619 miles between 4 a.m. and 4 p.m., from Sault Ste Marie across Ontario and back into New York State. The next day it was home, and a Barbara who seemed, after the first embraces, distinctily disgruntled. It appeared that I was responsible. In my eagerness to sample new railroad experiences, even vicariously, I had booked them from Chicago eastward on the Erie Railroad, shunning the much better known, shorter, and more popular New York Central or Pennsylvania routes. They had learned the reason for this lack of custom: the Erie was trying to get rid of its passenger service, if service is the right word for the combination of surliness and neglect which they experienced for twenty-four hours on a two-car springless train and a switchback roadbed that had not been maintained for forty years. Barbara was black and blue and starving, and the children seasick, by the time they reached Suffern, where Keith Jennison met them.