Well then no sooner did we return from the church and take a rest and it was time for the comet! We walked to Riverside Drive where swarms of people were already facing toward the West. We took umbrellas and it soon began to rain lightly due to comet dust and Lelia almost went home right away because a group of people were praying loudly and a scientist was talking to some people about deadly Cyanogen gas from the comet’s tail. There were only one or two very ordinary stars visible and then they fell behind the clouds, but we stayed anyway and didn’t see anything tho I must say I felt the comet’s presence.
A boy was selling small blue bottles with stoppers in them. A scientist who accompanied the boy told us to hold our bottles high into the air for four minutes. I did so and then stoppered it at the scientist’s signal. The purpose was to seal up the comet atmosphere for future analysis.
Your loving sister,
Daisy Lou
It is a damp, flatly lit evening with a thin cloud cover that breaks only here and there and steadily threatens rain.
Daisy and another slim young woman make their way toward the river, pool of lamplight to pool of lamplight.
Daisy’s brown hair is drawn up in the plump look of the time. On it, a large hat that has undergone a number of refurbishments. New net here, a ribbon there. The lofty eyes. Beautiful teeth. She is very proud of her teeth and scours them with baking soda three and four times a day. Forgoes black tea.
There is already, at nineteen, something concocted about Daisy. Yes, there it is. Her friend has said something to her and Daisy Lou has tipped her head in a way that looks both innocent and contrived, like a child in a school play. She has fixed her gaze in such a way that she appears to be listening less to her friend’s voice than to the emanations around it.
In other places, Halley drew its electric tail across the sky a number of nights running. Employees at the Mount Wilson observatory in southern California applied glycerin to the tower struts to collect the comet dust. Professor K.M. Colquhoun in Great Falls, Montana, set up his big telescope and ran a newspaper advertisement inviting the public to call at his lodgings at 3:30 a.m. for viewings.
The king of England died suddenly. Ten days earlier, he had been in the pink. Now he was dead of something quick like pneumonia, and the book was closed on the peaceful Edwardian age, the Pax Britannica. An earthquake killed thousands in Costa Rica. A dirigible mysteriously lost altitude over Kansas and two unconscious men were found inside, the notes on their shirts alerting the New York Times. Troops were rushed to New Mexico to check on a possible Indian massacre of white ranchers. A woman in Santa Ana tried to murder her children to spare them the comet. Revolution commenced in Mexico. A rancher in Albuquerque drank poison. Spiritualists clenched their eyes tighter and let their pencils move across paper on their own. A mill explosion in Canton, Ohio, sent arms and legs aloft among the flying boards.
It all built up to May 18, the night the comet drew closest to the earth, flicking its tail right across our earnest and blindered path in a manner that seemed audacious if not disastrous. A cosmic taunt, a flirtation. Scientists refused to rule out the possibility of an outright collision.
The comet watchers on Riverside Drive include a man in a top hat who holds a large black umbrella over his newspaper.
“‘Scared by Comet,’” he reads aloud. “‘Crazy Sheepman in California Attempts to Crucify Himself on Rude Cross.’
“‘San Bernardino, California. While brooding over possible ill effects of the comet’s visit, Paul Hammonton, a sheepman and prospector, became insane and crucified himself, according to mining men who arrived here with him yesterday. Hammonton was found where he had nailed his feet and one hand to a rude cross he had erected near a gold claim last Friday.’”
The reader pauses, scans the crowd, raises his voice.
“‘Although he was suffering intense agony, Hammonton pleaded with his rescuers to let him die upon the cross. Since the visit of the comet, Hammonton has been much alarmed, and when he learned that the earth was scheduled to pass through the tail of Halley’s Comet, his mind gave way and he believed that the end of the world was at hand.’”
This brings some laughs, though a few in the crowd bend their heads and pray harder.
“Well,” says Lelia, grinning, “I guess it would be a job to nail down two hands all by yourself!” She is long-limbed, bright-eyed girl wearing a rust-colored dress that works against her coloring. She is a musician, like Daisy Lou. In fact, they had several of the same teachers back in Saint Paul. Lelia is a music tutor for the children of a wealthy family that occupies an entire floor of a large building near Central Park. Her brother, the Presbyterian minister in New Jersey, is always warning her about the perils of the single woman’s life in New York, but Lelia has a group of the finest sort of friends and her own small flat, and she thinks he is a terrible fusser. Old-fashioned and small-town. Like Daisy Lou Malone.
Daisy Lou shoots Lelia an irritated look. She has no idea what Lelia thinks is so funny and thinks her laughter unseemly. She’s also angry that the clouds are blocking the view of the comet. She had wanted to see the blazing arc while she was here in New York. It would have seemed a blessing on her own aspirations. She might have watched the comet and whispered, “A change in times and states,” and thought of roses raining onto a stage, onto her shoes.
She holds her blue bottle toward the lightless sky, looking around anxiously to make sure she is pointing the opening in the right direction. Should she move the bottle to scoop up something invisible? Should she let whatever it is, this comet dust, let it float on its own into the bottle’s emptiness? She is a little chilly. The scientist, the one who is calling out orders, is distasteful to her, though she doesn’t really doubt that he knows about comets. He has mutton-chop whiskers, which she thinks unattractive on a man, and is somewhat unkempt.
She looks around at the others, for the most serious-looking people she can find, to see how they are holding their blue bottles, and she picks a well-dressed lady in her thirties, with a lovely filmy shawl, a very expensive-looking shawl, and watches how this woman holds her bottle and does exactly as she does. Four minutes.
Daisy thinks that if she could see the comet dust it would be wonderful-looking, like electric light perhaps. Slow, cool, steady. Maybe it is the sort of substance that needs long darkness to show itself.
When the time is up, Daisy stoppers her bottle firmly. She shakes it; thinks of Aladdin’s lamp, Pandora’s box, and vows never to yield to the temptation to unstopper the bottle before it seems time to analyze the dust. But how will she know when that time has arrived, she wonders. Will the newspapers say?
She hands the bottle to Lelia so she can fix the pin on her hat, and Lelia does an extremely rude and shocking thing. She unstoppers the bottle and pretends to pour its contents down her throat as though they were water.
Daisy is so shocked and angry that she slaps Lelia hard on the arm and grabs her bottle back. Red-faced, her expression tight, she stands absolutely still for some moments, gazing at her shoes. Then she lifts her bottle into the air and stands there like the Statue of Liberty. Lelia apologizes, tries to convince Daisy to come along home. The crowd is dispersing. The professor, the scientist, whatever he is, has disappeared.
Daisy won’t budge. She consults her watch in her waist pocket, grimly waits the four minutes, then stoppers her blue bottle briskly. They begin to walk back to the flat in silence.
They pass an old lady. She leans on a gold-knobbed cane and gestures impatiently to someone who isn’t there, mumbling to herself. Brilliant stones cover her gloved fingers. Her hair is a large wig the color of rust. She has rouged her mouth with an unsteady hand. An ancient actress? An ancient prostitute? Who knows? Daisy has never seen anyone like her, and she glances at Lelia for verification.
Lelia smiles, shakes her head, links arms with Daisy Lou. They make their way back to the brownstone, pool of lamplight to pool of lamplight.
Before bed, Daisy press
es the stopper deeper into the bottle. She wraps the bottle in paper and string and labels it in her large impatient hand. Comet Dust, she writes, and tucks the package in a corner of her water-stained suitcase.
Then she writes a letter to her brother Jerome, who is playing the land game out in Montana. He lives in a tar-paper shack that rides the prairie like a small boat.
3
BLUEBUNCH WHEATGRASS, Indian ricegrass, tufted hairgrass, slender wheatgrass, blue grama.
Junegrass, squirrel tail, foxtail barley, prairie cordreed, sand dropseed, rough fescue, little bluestem.
The grass in 1910. It wasn’t high everywhere. People like to say that, but it isn’t true. It was deep in places, though, and it had a silvery sheen to it. The texture was different than it is today—very smooth and dense; not bunchy and harsh. You could walk it barefoot.
The buffalo, of course, had been gone for thirty years. Entirely. The last of the unshot were traveling the country, mangy and punch-drunk, in Wild West shows. But you could still see their wallows in the grass that spring, caves in the grass, big as rooms. And their big white bones too.
Somewhere in eastern Montana, passengers in a westward train huddled at the windows to watch two children ride a sled down a hill of that grass. The sky had no ceiling.
A solitary homestead shack, the sledding children, the hard clean sunlight, nothing else.
They rode the tawny grass slowly to the flatness, their small backs very straight. Then one of them waved a brown arm at the train, and it was as if the wave sent something to the people in heavy clothes who crowded around the windows, and the ones who stood smoking at the rail of the caboose, because they all laughed happily and at the same time.
This is how we are now, they thought. This is how we get to be.
They came in droves that year. Some of the train cars contained entire transported farms, minus only the land. Bundled and stacked fence posts, a flanky milk cow, a dismantled house. Stoves, dogs, washbasins, children. And soon, very soon, land to put it on—320 acres of it for the asking, the taking.
Other parts of the trains carried other kinds of homesteaders, including the ones in city suits and dresses and hats. Young men, young women, from Minnesota, Illinois, Wisconsin. Teachers, clerks, realtors, maiden ladies, who had all decided to be farmers now because the railroad had told them they could. The only illness in Montana comes from overeating, the railroad said in the brochures it sent to Europe. Bumper crops, year after year. Land for the asking.
Someone made a survey of the previous occupations of fifty-nine homesteaders in a northern Montana township. Twenty-three had been farmers. The rest included two physicians, three maiden ladies, two butchers, two deep-sea divers, and six musicians.
Which one is a deep-sea diver? The ruddy squinting one with the dirty shirt?
Six musicians?
Many of these were second sons, unwed daughters, the ones with dimmer prospects, more to prove. More than a few had spent the Sundays of their childhoods in lace-doilied parlors with heavy dark furniture, growing up during those musty decades that flanked the year 1900 like large black-skirted aunts.
Now they had brilliant brochures in their vest pockets and valises. A smiling farmer glided his plow through loamy soil, turning up gold pieces the size of fists. The farmer’s house on the edge of the field had a picket fence and bushes and a garden. Everything was unblown, well-watered.
Get it now before it’s gone; your own free home! They came in waves. Olly olly oxen, all home free!
And the big aunts speaking too: Child, improve yourself.
Jerome changed his name to Jerry the day he stepped on the train. He rolled up his long white sleeves and made notations in a small leather diary with his new fountain pen, looking up from time to time to watch the grasslands flying past.
On that day in 1910, he wrote a sentence about the weather. Fair and warm. A sentence about the terrain. Much land for the having and the grass appears to thrive. He was, after all, from a generation that logged the days in dry one-sentence reports. It was as if they recorded some ideal emotionless self; a self not subject to despair or transport. Maybe they thought if you could write it neutrally, you could keep living it, keep stacking the days.
Sometimes, though, a small cry broke through and it all seemed to tumble. On September 11, 1952: Vivian slipped away today, 4:15 p.m. On Christmas 1952: One long day since Sept. 11. And then he would put down the pen and try to make his own body go as quiet as hers.
What must they have felt when they looked back on those dry little sentences piled up for a big fall? When they saw the entries on the days before unexpected disaster. Bought two dozen chicks at Halvorson’s. Strong wind from the east. Did they read the words later and feel tricked?
A young man in a dirty black suit began to play “Red Wing” on a mouth harp. He had colorless patches on his skin, flat eyes, and filthy hair. He was slumped in the corner of his train seat, one thin leg crossed over the other, his entire upper body a tent over his harmonica. Still learning the tune, he played it over and over, repeating phrases, stopping, starting again.
Jerry knew the melody, and it gave him a queasy feeling he tried to shrug off. The other passengers seemed to like the sound of it. One man whistled quietly along. A mother with a child in a blanket hummed it to her baby’s head.
The Reverend Franklin Malone and his wife, Mattie, gave a tea for their son before he ventured West. The deacon’s twin daughters—teenagers with orange hair in ringlets—sang “Red Wing.” They sang without harmonizing, so they sounded like one person with a very loud voice. It was raining. His kindly Calvinist father presented Jerry with the fountain pen, telling him proudly what it had cost. Mrs. Ritter passed a plate of her famous lemon swirls. All the women commented on the lemon swirls. All the men and children chewed quietly. Jerry could have wept for the deadness of it.
Everyone at the tea was careful with him because of the problems he had developed the last time he left Saint Paul—a bad, dark time that brought him home from a small college weeping, and then silent, and then refusing for a few weeks to leave his room because he had, in every way, come to a halt.
He doesn’t know, as we see him on the train, precisely what went wrong, what shut him down. It had to do with tall doors opening wide on a cosmos that was not being made; it was finished. Fixed and airless for all time.
A membrane away from horror, that thought. What was the point of doing anything? What protection did a person have from the most terrible of fates or the most mundane?
Hints of what might lie behind those slowly opening doors had come upon him early. Maybe that is why he developed a habit of refusing, in the small choices of childhood, to do what seemed to be expected. He resisted. He bent his response.
But the world began to fill up with people who expected things of him—first family, but then teachers, coaches, friends, girls—and to refuse to cooperate became an increasingly vast and complicated undertaking.
By the time he went to college, the expectations of the entire world seemed laid at his feet, and all he could do, finally, was stop. He could not move an inch without cooperating. And he could not cooperate with a plan that wasn’t his.
Sometime during the third week in his room at home, he had a simple thought: If I can feel myself to be at real risk, that may be evidence that free will exists. If I can feel myself chancing something, perhaps that means the outcome is not fixed. Perhaps that is a pale clue.
And so he decided to behave as though he were making real choices. He would measure the success of the effort by feelings of being in danger. It didn’t feel authentic at first, this pretending. It felt like putting on a costume to see if he could fool himself in the mirror. But for much of his long life he would continue to do it. He would pretend he was a gambler, an adventurer, a person given to hazard. He would pretend that life was not accomplished, that it could still be made. It was the only way to feel hope.
And so, naturally, when a friend h
anded him pamphlets from the Great Northern Railroad—get it now!—Jerry Malone did not think long. He felt what he felt, and he got on that train.
As a young man he had reddish unruly hair, pale-blue eyes, a full mouth; an unconscious glower to his eyes and forehead, which perhaps made others more brusque with him than they might have been otherwise. The brusqueness stung him and deepened the glower he didn’t know about, and so it circles.
He was still new to his life, though, and the wary expression wasn’t constant. Sometimes he looked soft and hopeful, as he does now, resting his head against the chair seat while the train pounds west, the thin sound of a sentimental song from the previous century wafting from its open windows.
The harmonica player raised his head to look carefully at the tawny, unpeopled, unfenced place they were pushing through. A place that seemed to own itself.
By now, he had been playing “Red Wing” for hours; starting and stopping and starting again; ignoring requests for something new or for silence. Whenever the train stopped, everyone in the car looked at him hopefully. He didn’t leave.
In a twangy Appalachian accent, he spoke his first words of the trip. “This?” he barked, throwing an arm at the prairie. “Why, this ain’t nothin’ to be satisfied with!”
They looked around them.
Somewhere the train had pulled away from towns, from roads, from rivers, hedges, and people. Somewhere it had reached a point—at night perhaps, when no one really saw—where it had catapulted onto some taller place. A place that was scoured and glowing and as ferociously innocent as a new-laid egg.
They passed through Shelby almost four days after leaving Saint Paul. Clouds had moved in and given the sky a ceiling. It was late afternoon and drizzling.
One Sweet Quarrel (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 3
