by Edgardo Vega
“So Daddy could play if he wanted to,” Vidamía said.
“If he puts his mind to it I believe he could.”
“I think so, too.”
“A couple of years back I was down home for my brother Frazier’s burial, and my nephew, who was there for the funeral, asked me to come visit him in Missouri. We drove down there where he lives on the Mississippi and went into Cape Girardeau to hear a man play Cajun music. Place called Broussard’s down on Main Street. Fine Cajun food. I met the owner, Mr. Baron Broussard. Fine gentleman. I heard recently from my nephew, Dale, that he’s opened a couple of more restaurants in St. Louis. Anyway, there was a fella there, I believe his name was Pelletier. Cajun, I guess. Had just thumb and little finger on his left hand. Accident. Chain saw or something like that. It didn’t make one bit of difference to him, the man played the piano to beat the band with them two fingers and the five on his right hand. Just like your papa, except that the kid is missing the middle and little finger on his right hand instead of the three on that fella’s left hand at Broussard’s. But the man played up a storm. About eight o’clock this Cajun fella makes everybody stand up and he plays the “Star-Spangled Banner” and everybody’s gotta sing. And then when he’s done with that he plays “Dixie” and everybody’s got to sing again. Everybody having a good ole time. Black or white, everybody stood up and sang, and when they was finished, the Cajun pianist just went back to playing. After I saw that, I was sure Billy could play again if he put his mind to it. But I ain’t one to push folks, especially not Billy.”
“Okay, I feel a lot better, Grandpa,” Vidamía said.
“Me too,” said Horty.
He looked at her and laughed.
“What, Grandpa?”
“Your mama shoulda never named you Hortense,” he said. “It ain’t right.”
“I know,” the girl said. “But you can call me Cookie.”
“Then that’s what I’ll call you from now on.”
“You hungry, Grandpa?”
“I’m so hungry I could eat the south end of a skunk traveling north,” he said.
Both girls made faces, then dashed for the grill to get him some food.
His thoughts again returned to his youth and Charlotte Randall. Maybe after the barbecue he’d go over to Mount Vernon and see how Ruby Broadway was doing.
26. Philosophy
Lurleen Meekins Farrell, who was not one to fill her children’s heads with moralistic drivel and ethical dos and don’ts, believed that the reason people can endure things that veer from the norms of human behavior and still go on existing is that there is at the core of humanity—in spite of legal systems, and other imposed social and religious codes—a basic tolerance of itself. This permissiveness, she felt, comes from the awareness that our existence as a species may be unique in the universe and that, therefore, we are alone in its vastness. More to the point, at the formulation of its argument with itself, humanity posits that in the face of such cosmological complexity, the human animal, unable to fly under its own power, swim underwater for more than a few minutes (and rather slowly, at that), move great weights or run very fast, faces life by using—as a prime defense against the awareness of eternal loneliness—its brain, overdeveloped to an outstanding degree but dependent on a steady supply of oxygen, so that deprived of said element for more than a few minutes it shrivels up and dies, but when functioning properly is capable of engendering the assassination of Jack Kennedy, or the elimination of millions by Hitler. But also capable of weaving together a simple folk song like “Greensleeves,” or Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
Lurleen Meekins Farrell often imagined that each human brain was simply a tiny cell within a larger collective brain going back to the beginning of consciousness and that all the information about individual struggles and triumphs was carried in each new cell of this large brain, adding to the knowledge of each generation, so that all that was really occurring when unusual events took place was the wide swing of a pendulum as it oscillated between destruction and creativity. She recalled the afternoon in her senior year of college when she sat rapt, listening to her philosophy professor talk about the ancient Greek concept of daemon, that spirit of genius that drove humans forward. Professor Treblehorn spoke eloquently of eros, understood popularly as love but representative of the drive to create, and thanatos, the death principle, but also the contrasting drive to destroy. She immediately understood why she woke up each morning thinking of how she could help her parents, or how to play a particular tune, or find a better way to keep her clothing from being frayed when it was washed, and why the Parker boys were so mean-spirited and had chopped up an old coon hound belonging to Silas Goins because the dog had run off with a chicken of theirs. Boyd and Clyde Parker had sneaked into Silas’s yard one night, and a few days later, after the hound didn’t come home, Silas found the dog’s parts hung all over the place; the head over by the outhouse, the tail on the front gate, and the genitals on the porch.
After that last year of reading, studying, and discussing the myriad questions which her curiosity had spawned, she began to look at life without fear, seeing her own part in it as not unimportant but minute, and not separate but part of a larger purpose.
“And what would you say that purpose is, Miss Meekins?” Lloyd Treblehorn had asked as they sat under the large oak tree at the university that spring morning after he had walked into the classroom, shielded his eyes from the sun and announced, “Okay, everyone outside on the lawn, under the oak tree,” and they had trooped out, all ten of them registered for the philosophy seminar, sitting around him, awed by his brilliance and kindliness.
Her face had grown hot, but she had said that she believed that the human race was undergoing an enormous trial-and-error experiment in order to help itself evolve.
“Explain,” Professor Treblehorn had said, and she had gone on, the words flowing out of her like never before.
“We are attempting to polish ourselves as a species, to perfect our behavior so that we may live in harmony with the universe. I believe that each act, whether violent or creative, whether representative of love or destruction, is a swing of the pendulum and eventually creativity will win out over violence, so that seemingly aberrant behavior is part of a pendular swing, counteracted by the beauty of creativity and goodness of which human beings are capable, and that deep within the recesses of its natural wisdom the human race remains neutral to the swinging of that pendulum,” she said.
“Are you saying there is no evil in the universe?”
“Not as such,” she had answered. “It’s a process that we’re going through, Professor Treblehorn. In 1926, right here in Tennessee, over in Dayton, there was a trial in which a man was charged with teaching the theory of evolution. He was defended by a very brave lawyer whose name I cannot recall. There was no good and evil in that case. Simply ignorance and knowledge pitted against one another. Light and dark and folks just trying to figure which way to go in that in-between time between night and day.”
“The Scopes trial,” Professor Treblehorn said. “Clarence Darrow, 1925.”
“Yes, that was the case. The Scopes Monkey Trial,” she said.
She went on to explain that overall the human race is a benevolent species, capable of more good than harm, and that this infinite capacity for tolerance is the phenomenon that some people call God, though she attributed it simply to the more profound inner workings of life. Professor Treblehorn ran his fingers through his beard, removed his glasses, wiped them with a handkerchief, and then asked her if she was now postulating that God didn’t exist.
She shook her head and said, “No, God exists, if only as an idea.” Everyone had nodded, and Professor Treblehorn laughed uproariously, understanding how she had sidestepped the issue, and to prod her immediately challenged her notion of this pendulum.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “The human race is basically a creative species. Just like bees produce honey and beavers build dams, human beings produce th
ings of beauty.”
“What about the destruction?” Professor Treblehorn asked.
“It’s part of the trial and error,” she said. “Destruction is inevitable, just like death. Eventually, the destructive aspects of the human being will begin to be employed positively.”
“How? A pendulum has to swing both ways.”
“It will,” she replied. “The destructive swing will do away with war and illness and all of the things that plague humanity.”
“That is a very hopeful outlook,” Professor Treblehorn said reverently, and sadly, so that she felt as if he wanted desperately to believe that this was so but was unable to bring himself out of the darkness of his skepticism. They were all very quiet for a long time before someone asked another question and they went on to some other discussion.
At the end of the semester Professor Treblehorn called her into his office, congratulated her, encouraged her to pursue a career in university teaching, and gave her one of his keepsakes, a copy of a typed lecture that Clarence Darrow delivered to the Poetry Club of the University of Chicago. In it Darrow defends pessimism and a healthy skepticism against facile philosophical constructs and the schemes of those in positions of power. “Optimists,” Darrow wrote, “are always so disappointed when things don’t go well, while pessimists see the world as it is and are never disappointed. It isn’t that they look for the bad, but that they know that life is incomprehensible and things happen.” Darrow champions simple pleasures and quotes A. E. Housman, whose poetic concern was the fleeting nature of youth.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
She treasured the lecture, in which Clarence Darrow used the words of Housman and other poets to support his argument. Her favorite quote from Darrow’s lecture remained etched in her mind as a guide in her life. Clarence Darrow said:
That is why I have so little patience with the old preaching to the young. If youth with its quick flowing blood, its strong imagination, its virile feeling; if youth, with its dreams and its hopes and ambitions can go about the woodland to see the cherry hung with snow, why not? Who are the croakers, who have run their race and lived their time, who are they to keep back expression and hope and youth and joy from a world that is almost barren at best.
It has been youth that has kept the world alive; it will, because from the others emotion has fled; and with the fleeing of emotion, through the ossification of the brain, all there is left for them to do is to preach. I hope they have a good time doing that, and I am so glad the young pay no attention to it.
Believing in a vision of life which permitted youth its freedom, she liked to think, caused her children to grow up unfettered by the fear of divine retribution, less confounded by guilt, and, more important, critical of authority. Of all the ideas contained in Clarence Darrow’s lecture nothing made more sense than the protection of youth. War, waged by the old and suffered by the young, had robbed Billy Farrell of his love for jazz and his livelihood as a pianist. Such would not be the case with her children. Having come to this environment early on and being eager to fit in, Vidamía understood instinctively that she wouldn’t be judged by Lurleen, or her new siblings, and certainly not by their father. For this Lurleen was grateful. But after Billy’s initial excitement at meeting his daughter and introducing her to the family, he again withdrew into that world of thought and memory, walking in it with eyes downcast and spirit beaten, his body bending under the weight of whatever demons he endured.
Lurleen had been lucky that her aunt Ida, her grandfather’s sister, had seen what was inside of her and begged her parents to let her go to college. Aunt Ida herself had attended the college when it was just a girl’s school. Lurleen had met people like Professor Treblehorn and her other professors who took such care to explain things to her and who didn’t mock her inquisitiveness. The four years in Jackson had gone so quickly. She loved being on campus and going to her music classes and singing in the choir, which each year went on tour. These excursions had allowed her to meet people in different parts of the South and the Midwest. But she enjoyed the Concert Band most, because there the atmosphere was one of great release and she got to be outdoors. She took the jazz classes but knew she wasn’t creative enough to improvise as they did. She also knew that it was a very important music and yearned to visit the places where the music was played.
She wanted her children, and that included Vidamía, because she had grown to love her as if she were her own, to go as far with their dreams as they could. She wanted them to rise each morning as she had, filled with the excitement of what they saw before them, everything clear, not encumbered by fear of failure; and each of their accomplishments adding to the knowledge that would benefit humanity in spite of the sad fact that most people lacked the awareness that they were like bees who, instead of honey, made beauty in each act of goodness. She also knew that even in the sadness of life, as Clarence Darrow had said, there was beauty.
Lurleen had hit on the idea of a family band during a particularly bad time when Billy couldn’t find much work, and he’d sit around the house and mope and stare out the windows for hours. When she spoke to him he hardly ever answered her. When he did it was to nod or mumble something. If she pressed him, he walked away or went up on the roof. One winter, when he was gone more than an hour, she had made sure that Cliff, Hortense—not yet called Cookie—and Fawn were occupied watching a television program; then she put on her coat and went up the stairs. She found him wandering around the edge of the roof, pacing back and forth in that stark arctic night, and knew that he was contemplating ending his life.
She approached him slowly, calling to him—“Bill?”—but softly lest she spook him and he jump. When he finally turned, his face was a mask of horror, as if he’d seen death again. At first he didn’t recognize her, and then, when he did, he immediately wanted to apologize. She shook her head and walked to him. As he sank down to the tar floor of the roof, she took him in her arms, and then he was weeping and saying over and over that it was his fault. She talked him back to the present and then took him downstairs and put him to bed, telling him sternly that he had no business being up on that roof in shirtsleeves with the temperature in the teens, switching her concern from suicide to his general health.
It was then that she went to the Veterans Administration and demanded to know what had happened to her husband that caused him to act so strangely. On the second day of her quest she was able to track down a psychologist who was familiar with cases similar to Billy’s. He’d searched for Billy’s file, eventually found it in a cabinet of inactive cases, and sat behind his desk reading it and nodding.
“Cpl. William C. Farrell, U.S. Marine Corps, wounded in action near Da Nang in 1969,” the psychologist said and then mumbled something.
“Please go on,” Lurleen said.
“It’s not our usual procedure to discuss a patient’s file,” the psychologist said.
“Please,” she said. “I feel like he’s going to take his life. I don’t know what to do,” she nearly whimpered when she was finished. “Please.”
“Does your husband have a gun?”
“No, he doesn’t,” she said, regaining her composure. “He just goes up on the roof and it scares me.”
“Your husband used to come in for counseling once in a while back in 1971,” the psychologist said. “He was basically concerned with having caused his buddy’s death. This is not unusual in the profile of combat soldiers. He was also concerned about his marriage and talked about the upcoming birth of your child.”
“That far back?” Lurleen said, the curiosity eating her up inside, but never asking him about this other marriage and child; wondering if Billy was a bigamist; eventually asking Maud Farrell but begging her not to tell him she’d been prying. Maud said she’d heard about a kid but didn’t know if it was a boy or a girl and reassured her
that Billy and the girl never got married.
“Anything else?” Lurleen asked the psychologist.
“No, but he stopped coming after a while. His last visit was in December of 1971. Eventually, the case was closed. I found his records in the inactive files.”
“But he talked about the fact that he let his buddy die,” she said. “Joey, right?”
“Yes, that’s right,” the psychologist said. “Not uncommon for combat veterans. Pfc José Manuel Santiago. KIA in the same action as the one in which your husband was wounded.”
“I don’t believe that’s what happened,” she’d said. “I don’t believe that’s what’s keeping him from functioning.”
“Why do you say that, Mrs. Farrell?”
“I don’t know,” she’d said, suddenly feeling defensive and as if she’d made a mistake in going to the VA, as if she had admitted something that should remain under wraps. “It’s just that he’s told me what happened and it doesn’t make sense. Sometimes he’s in combat and sometimes he’s not and when the thing happened I don’t think that he was in combat. It sounds like he was in a safe area. He sounds like when a person dreams and the dream doesn’t make logical sense. Things get out of sequence and they shift around peculiarly. That’s what it’s like when he talks about what happened to him in Vietnam.”
“Does he know you’re here?”
“No, he thinks I’m at work. He’d feel betrayed if he knew that I’d come to look into his problem. It makes him feel ashamed that he can’t function as well as he thinks he should—in terms of holding a regular job and earning a living. He’s tried everything: security jobs, construction, parking cars, maintenance. Something always happens. He gets depressed and stays in bed or goes into one of his moods where he just sits and no matter what anyone says it’s like he doesn’t hear them.”
