Was_a novel
Page 40
“So what’s the story?” Bill asked.
“Matthew gets it in 1857 . . .” Silence. Sally read, chin resting on her hand. “After that, I don’t know. In 1890 it passes from the Pillsburys to the Eakins. So maybe it did go back to the government and then to the Pillsburys.”
“That is the farm, though,” insisted Jonathan.
“We don’t see it passing from Matthew to anyone,” said Bill. “Not even his daughter?”
“They should show it passing by relation, but they don’t.” Sally lifted her hands up and let them drop. “Sometimes they didn’t.”
“What we’re looking for,” said Bill, “is the farm going to Emma, and then from Emma to her husband. That way we would know her married name.”
“That is the farm, isn’t it?” Jonathan’s voice rose.
“Unless Matthew had some land somewhere else as well,” said Sally.
“That’s not the farm?” Jonathan danced with confusion.
Sally looked at him. “Oh, we’ll find it. We know it’s somewhere around here.”
They skimmed the other pages. There was no other entry for Branscomb.
“Okay,” said Sally, still cheerful. “That means that must be the farm. Come on, I’ll show you.”
She walked to the map. “There it is,” she said, pointing. The sectors looked dead and cold.
“Could we find the farm from this map?” Bill asked.
“Sure! Sure we could!” exclaimed Jonathan. “Couldn’t we?”
Sally’s boss came in. “Excuse me. Sally, there’s a call for you about those mineral rights in Ogden. I’m sorry, gentlemen.”
“I don’t know how these sector maps related to the roads. What I suggest you do,” said Sally, talking quickly, “is find that schoolhouse. Get a hold of a plat book or something and use the schoolhouse to orient yourself.”
“Sally, I’m sorry, they’re holding on.”
“Okay,” said Sally. “Let me know what happens, huh?” She backed away, toward the outer office. She looked directly at Bill and said, “Take care of him.”
“Back so soon?” said the pale young man at the museum.
Jonathan seemed to blurt his way through the door, like an unintended remark. He did not wait for the young man to step aside from the entrance and jostled into him. The young man’s lips went thin.
“We got it,” said Jonathan. “We found the farm!” He was as awkward as a newborn colt. “We know the school she went to, so we can find the farm from that. Zeandale Township, Sector Twenty-six.”
“Hold it. Hold it,” said the young man.
Jonathan wavered in place, unable to understand why the librarian didn’t show more enthusiasm.
“What would you like to look at?”
“Hello,” said Bill. “We need to find a particular schoolhouse and farm in Zeandale. Basically, I think if we had a plat book for the 1870s, 1880s, that would help.”
The young man breathed out. “Do you mind telling me what this is for? Is it a research project? Is it connected with KSU?”
“It’s only a personal interest,” said Bill. “We’d be happy to talk to somebody if that would help.”
The young man sighed. “Our director is Kathy James. She’ll be in about ten today. If you wouldn’t mind talking to her.”
“Thank you, I’d be happy to.”
Back in the big, book-lined room. Hole punches and paper cutters, index printouts, stacks of wooden drawers out of their chests, cardboard tubes with maps inside, globes of the world.
“We’ve got a very good plat book for 1881,” said the young man. “It has engravings of local farms, shows the railways, has a list of businesses.”
“Perfect. Thank you,” said Bill.
“Your friend owes us ten sixty for photocopies,” said the young man. “He left without paying.”
“I’m sorry,” said Bill. “He’s very ill.”
The pale young man walked around to the front of the filing cabinets. They faced the wall. Bill sat down at the table, opposite Jonathan.
Jonathan’s knees bounced up and down, and the rims of his eyes looked almost brown. He had thrown up his breakfast soup.
“How ya doing, buddy?” Bill whispered.
“I’m going to ring the church bell,” answered Jonathan.
“Which church bell?” Bill asked quietly.
“The one in the little tower. In the school.”
Then Jonathan looked up in the direction of the doorway and beamed and greeted someone. “Hello,” he said.
Bill turned around in his chair. There was no one.
“Who’s been visiting?” Bill asked.
“Ira was standing beside the Coke machine,” said Jonathan.
“Was he?” said Bill.
“He hadn’t graduated yet.”
There was the sound of a filing cabinet rumbling shut.
“This do you?” asked the librarian.
He passed Bill a Xerox. It showed a sweep of river in flowing curves and centipede lines of railways. Manhattan the town was blanked out by corduroy lines. At the bottom of the page there was a very fine, tiny engraving of a man on horseback looking at a distant train.
Jonathan stood up and rested his chin on Bill’s shoulder, as if it were a pillow.
There was a little square marked “No. 43.” It was on the corner of the main road and a lane that ran south toward hills. There were the sectors and quarters with names.
“It says Gulch,” said Bill. “Is that a name or a geographical feature?”
“I don’t know,” said the young man. “I also had this.”
He tossed down onto the table a Xerox of a photograph.
It showed a white, one-room wooden building with two windows on either side of a narrow roofed porch. The building also had a small bell tower.
Lined up outside it were about ten children in gingham checks or knickerbockers and a woman. She stood very stiffly, hands behind her back, smiling and young in a long, dark skirt and white blouse with mutton sleeves. In crabbed handwriting were the words “Sunflower School.”
“That will make it ten seventy for copies,” said the young man.
“Oh golly. Oh golly,” said Jonathan. “What if it’s her? What if it’s her in the photograph? Huh? Huh?”
The pale young man looked at him. “Whatever it is you’re looking for,” he said, “you’re not going to find it in an old photograph. It’s only history, you know.”
They drove. Bill had great difficulty finding Highway 18 out of town—the on-ramp rose out of the old streets that had not been razed for the shopping mall. Then very quickly they were passing over the levee, a great hump of green grass, then trees, and then they were driving over the Kansas River on a narrow bridge with narrow railed walkways. There were sandbanks in the river and the concrete supports of another modern bridge, crossing diagonally under them. It had been washed away.
Then the river was gone in a flurry of leaves. The highway divided. ZEANDALE, said a sign to the left. The road eased itself up a slope and down again. On one side there was flat, open farmland, on the other steep shaded woodland.
“Look at it!” said Jonathan. To the left were wide fields of almost orange sorghum, the heads in thick clumps. There were windmills far away and old farmhouses surrounded by beech and walnut that had been planted a hundred years before. Trees in a long line marked where the river flowed. Running parallel to the road, through hedges and fields and shrubbery, there was a gap where the railroad once had been.
“Clop clop clop,” said Jonathan, very faintly, transfixed.
Bill balanced maps and photocopies on his lap, glancing down. “The river curves in again close to the road just before we get to the school.”
“Fwoooo whoosh,”
said Jonathan. “The river moves. It rolls over in its sleep.”
The papers fluttered.
The woodland left them, moving south. There were fields on either side now, flat, rich, and the road was straight for miles. Zeandale village was a blur ahead of them, blue with distance, wavering with rising heat. There were lanes to the right. Bill slowed. PLEASANT VALLEY CEMETARY, said a sign pointing right. They passed another lane, with a clump of trees.
“It’s supposed to be on the right,” said Bill. They both grew more anxious, leaning forward, peering.
“That’s it,” said Bill suddenly, flicking on the turn signal and pulling over to the right, the sound of dust under tires.
On the wrong side of the road was the schoolhouse. It had been painted gunmetal blue.
“That’s not it,” said Jonathan, very quickly, very firmly.
“I think it is,” said Bill, and got out. Dust from the soft shoulder still drifted across the road. The silence was very sudden, very complete. Their footsteps sounded very clearly as they crossed the road.
As they neared the old building, a droning noise started. It was as if a hollow tube were being whirled over their heads. Locusts.
“It’s the same building,” said Bill, holding the photograph.
The front porch had been turned into an extension, its door turned into a window. There was the bell tower.
“That’s not it,” said Jonathan in a wisp of a voice.
Bill chuckled a bit with exasperation. “It is. Look, everything’s there.”
Suddenly Jonathan was shouting. “It’s the wrong goddamned side of the road!” He ran out of breath. He began to make noises as if he were about to sneeze. “Huh ahuh ahuh ahuh.”
“Breathe slowly,” Bill said. Jonathan knocked away his hand.
“The memoirs say it’s on a lane! Ahuh ahuh. The plat book says it’s on a lane!”
“Roads move.”
“On a lane that leads to the hills. Where are the hills? A big bald hill where Dorothy made snowmen!”
Bill went still and cold. That’s what the old lady had said. Snowmen, with Wilbur, on a hill. Angels in the snow.
“It’s on the wrong side of the road, it’s pointing the wrong way. It’s the wrong goddamned schoolhouse!”
As if clubbed, Jonathan dropped. He sat down in the middle of the road.
“Jonathan, that’s kind of a dumb place to sit.” Bill tugged at his arm. Jonathan started to cry with frustration.
“That place was built about 1890!”
“Look, it says Sunflower School. Stand up, Jay, out of the road.”
“It was rebuilt in a different place!” Jonathan had flowered into full tears.
“How do you know it’s 1890?”
“My clock. My clock is never wrong. Look, the teacher’s wearing mutton sleeves.”
“Jay, get out of the road!”
“It’s my last day, and we haven’t found it!” He pounded the asphalt with the flat of his hand. “We’ve fucked it.”
On the horizon, a car was coming.
“Jonathan. Please stand up.”
“What for?”
“So we can keep looking.”
The car was shimmying like a dancer.
“I just want to stay here. I don’t want to go on.”
Bill leaned over. “Jonathan. You know what we’re going to do? There was a sign back there for a cemetery. Remember? We’re going to go to the cemetery.”
“What good is that going to do?”
“You’re asking me? What are cemeteries good for, Jonathan? Names. Names and families.”
Jonathan looked up. “Yeah,” he said.
“Come on, let’s get up.”
The other car began to flash its lights.
The road to the cemetery went up the hills to bald grassy slopes and down again through thickly shaded ravines, over shaded rivulets, toward a place called Deep Creek.
Jonathan snored. His whole face was going an unnatural brown, as if he had spent his life under a sunlamp. Beads of sweat were trickling down him, as if he were melting. Bill felt guilty. I should have taken you to the hospital, he thought. I know better. He promised his profession: Jonathan, I get you back into care by four this afternoon.
Under the blue sky, amid the brown grass and the passing shadows. Bill felt alone. He looked back at the mask that was Jonathan’s face and spoke to it.
“I don’t believe in God anymore, Jonathan,” said Bill. “My faith has gone. I think . . . I think I need some kind of sign. You have visions, Jonathan. Do you have visions of God?”
Jonathan didn’t, couldn’t, answer.
Pleasant Valley had a chain-link fence around it and a big metal gate with upright bars and letters cut clean through large metal plaques on either side of stone gateposts. PLEASANT, said one side. VALLEY, said the other. A dirt driveway led between two conifers and circles through the tough little oaks of the cemetery.
It was on a hill far from anywhere. Jonathan and Bill left the car parked in the lane near the gates. The sound of crickets was high, strong, sweet. The air was surprisingly cool, and there was a strong wind, as if the Spirit were moving. Jonathan’s eyes were yellow and feverish, and he looked distracted. He blinked and stumbled up onto a concrete platform, with a gravestone at its head like a pillow. At its foot, planted in the concrete, was a rusty old hand pump.
Jonathan played with the pump’s long wooden handle. “Can you imagine what a water pump must have meant to them? No more buckets hauled up from the well. I bet this was some old guy who finally bought a water pump. And he was so proud of it, they used it for his gravestone.”
They wandered between the stones. The names carved into them were already familiar. There were Pillsburys scattered everywhere.
FAREWELL, said a scroll over a carving of a man’s and a woman’s clasping hands:
ANNIE J. PILLSBURY
WIFE OF
B. MARSHALL
DIED
FEB 26 1857
AGED
27 YS, 7MS, 27 DS
Down the row from that there was an obelisk:
MARY ANN
REED
PILLSBURY
BORN
JULY 21 1826
DIED
JAN 1 1892
There were more humble stones, small, laid level with the ground. Bill leaned over to read them.
MOTHER
HELEN EVA
MAR 14 1869 FEB 12 1937
LIVED ON PILLSBURY HOMESTEAD 58 YRS
Side by side.
FATHER
ELLERY CHANNING
APR 5 1850 JAN 6 1933
KANSAS PIONEER OF 1862
Jonathan began to sing, amid the sound of crickets. His throat was raw, his voice cracked, harsh, tuneless:
My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!
Bill looked up to see Jonathan staggering up the hill. His singing grew louder. He looked like something that had climbed out of the graves, long legs, skeletal arms flapping wildly.
He is pressing out the vintage where the grapes of wrath
are stored!
Oblivious of the gravestones, Jonathan marched up the hill, out of the cemetery.
“Jonathan!” called Bill. “Where are you going?”
The voice went wild, loud, screeching like a hawk.
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Jonathan was marching out toward the prairie, into the high, crackling grasses. There was a barbed-wire fence on top of the hill. Jonathan stumbled into it, entangled, holding out his arms like a scarecrow.
Bill ran after him, puffing up the slope. Fifty years. The grass streaked with blue and
purple slashed his ankles.
On the hill someone had lashed together a crucifix of branches, barkless and polished by the weather. Jonathan howled, arms waving as if blown in the wind:
His truth is marching on!
Like a rag wrung dry, the voice gave way. Panting, Bill stopped running and pushed his way up the hill, hands against his knees.
Jonathan was standing, staring, mouth hanging open. His teeth showed, and his gums, and his staring eyes watered. Bill turned and saw the valley, with its one straight road, its large fields, some of them harvested and plowed under, some left browning. There were woods in bands every mile or so, across the valley, to the hills, piebald in blue and gray.
“Come on, Jonathan,” said Bill and took his arm and led him down the hill. Jonathan didn’t say anything. Bill could feel the weakness in Jonathan’s knees. He trembled, hot, like a trapped bird.
The time was twelve-thirty. Please, Lord, give him three more hours. Three more hours is all we ask.
Back among the dead, Jonathan seemed calmer, more focused. He blinked, and his eyes and head began to move, looking around him. Very suddenly, despite Bill, he knelt.
“Look,” Jonathan said, very gently.
There was a low flat grave. He pulled grass away from its face.
HENRY
GULCH
1831–1888
HUSBAND OF EMMA ANGELINE
BRANSCOMB
“A name,” whispered Jonathan. “Or a geographical feature.”