Rafe kept working but said “No, are you a painter too?” Bowled a little off-center, I laughed and said “What do you think my main line is?”
“Oh I meant you being a counselor up here, checking on pissy mattress pads and ticks.”
Summer boys were a little less respectful than boys in school-time, but in general I’d had a good deal of respect at Juniper. Now the boys around us, who’d pretended not to listen, exploded in giggles. Somebody had bowled the teacher over. Pandemonium spread. So Rafe and I joined them, and I brought out my canvas. That slowly calmed things.
Rafe looked for a long minute, which was a marathon study as children’s looks go, and said “That’s always been my favorite too.”
“Favorite what?”
“View, the best thing to watch at Juniper. My father says there’s a sermon in it, all those rocks in the sky.”
Just as I was on the verge of rushing in with the further astounding coincidence—how I also sensed a coded message in that horizon line—Rafe said “But he sees a sermon in a pile of dog do.”
A brief return of chaotic glee, though some of the boys were also showing signs of envy. Rafe was getting too much of my time, so I told him to keep drawing. And then I patrolled the room again, praising the knotted or swollen other efforts.
When the time came to stop for lunch, everybody else pounded away. But Rafe was still at the back, intent at his board.
I tidied up and finally asked him to come forward, show me his day’s work and wash his hands for lunch.
He was genuinely unready to stop and kept on drawing for another few minutes.
Finally I had to say “Time there, boy. I’m hungry.”
When he sprang up in place and faced me with the nearest thing to fury I’ve seen on a child’s face, I suddenly recognized him. Or maybe I saw the core of power in him that had turned into an eagle as he danced. Anyhow it was my first experience of how an offstage face can differ from the limelit mask. Have you ever seen photographs of Nijinsky offstage? The randy ethereal faun became a semimongoloid shoeshine boy. And Rafe Noren by daylight was a good-looking American boy but not what he’d been by drumbeat at night.
He didn’t want me to look at his drawing. I insisted and then I saw to my surprise that for the past half hour he’d been working on an unnervingly intricate abstract frame around all four sides of his original line drawing. I said “Don’t you believe in shading? Things do have dimensions, you know.” I stopped for fear of his giving me some extraplanetary truth about dimensions.
Rafe just said “I can’t stand to get things dirty.” Then calmly he took the paper from my hands and tore it four ways. Matter of factly, not angrily.
I said “I like for all my boys to keep a file of their work. Then you can show your parents how far you’ve progressed.”
Rafe said “My father wouldn’t care if I was God.”
I laughed but smelled a broken home. “They know you’re an eagle.”
Rafe looked puzzled and for an instant I thought I’d misidentified him. But then he gave his sunrise-over-the-Grand-Canyon grin. It was that wide and welcome. He said “That is all right, idn’t it?” I’ll hint occasionally at his Georgia accent. Before I could think Stuck-up little bastard, the grin collapsed disastrously, then comically. His two big upper front teeth fell down from the gum and rested on his lowers, leaving a big black gap in his face.
He’d lost the teeth in a junior-high football accident. The collapsible plate was temporary, till his jaw reached mature size. So he’d quickly learned to use it as a deflationary stunt to clear the air around him whenever it thickened.
Once I recovered from the shock, I asked what he planned to be, as a man.
He said “Not you too.”
I said “O.K., not me. I just wondered if you were going to keep on with your dancing?”
He said “I could quit that dancing now. I just do it for Bright Day and Uncle Mike. Mike’s been good to me since I was six years old, and Day taught me all I know about dancing.”
I told him that, from what I saw last night, I’d guess he had something better than a teacher could give. But I also said I was sure Day was proud.
Rafe said simply, “If he is, he never told me.”
I said “Aren’t Indians famous for not talking a lot?”
He said “Every one I know talks a blue damned streak.”
I was going to ask how he knew so many Indians and whether he danced anywhere but Juniper, in the summer.
But he suddenly remembered a man’s round wristwatch on his arm. “Lord, I told a boy I’d fight him.”
Before I could ask what he meant or say “It’s time for lunch,” he tore off like a greyhound.
All the local ways to describe Rafe Noren called for animal comparisons. Everybody who really knew him understood that. Not that he inspired the talentless to flights of eloquence. But you couldn’t help noticing the things people called him—simple things like “quick as a deer,” “smart as a fox,” “lean as a snake.” But the important thing to keep reminding myself and you is, none of us seemed to think of him as anything very exceptional, certainly not anything poetic. Not yet. If people commented on Rafe at all, it was usually just to say his dancing improved every year; and wasn’t he growing up too fast? The older people all mentioned his manners—how polite he was, what an eager smiler.
In the second week, my seventh of the summer, Mrs. Chief called me to her one day by the lodge and said “I see Ray Noren’s honored you.”
I must have looked puzzled.
“You’re his favorite this year. He’s hard to please. But I trust his choices. Be good to him, hear?”
I assured her I would.
She said “Extra good” and held her eyes on mine uncomfortably long.
To break her hold I looked to the ground and started to tell her about his drawings, how he still insisted on bare-line drawing.
But she touched my arm and dropped her voice. “If that causes trouble—if Ray gives you any trouble at all, Bridge, come to me first.”
I actually laughed.
But she was dead earnest. She gave my forearm the kind of smack you expect in grade school. Then she said “Did you hear me?”
I was cowed. “Yes mam.”
Finally she smiled. “I hoped I could trust you.” Then she blinked hard and turned. Mrs. Chief was so broad-beamed, she didn’t so much walk away as steam or sway on off downhill in a regal progress.
But as she moved I wondered about her main advice. Be good to Ray. Who hadn’t been? Was there something to know?
Days went on, the way days do. And I went further ahead with my painting. I developed that summer a tactic I’ve used ever since. When I’m bringing a complicated image forward, I generally work in the classic Renaissance manner. With an almost infinite number of thin color glazes or washes, I work steadily from left to right. Then I throw myself back left again like an old typewriter and start all over. I don’t jump at random, coloring a whole tree here or a rockface there, however tempting such detours are. My old way can be agonizingly slow, but at least the whole picture looks more or less finished at the end of each day. In fact my single most difficult decision comes in knowing when to stop burying yesterday’s picture in today’s new thoughts.
Choosing consciously, I set my vantage point on the terrace just outside the crafts cabin. So once I got my class to work every morning, I could move outside with my own picture; and the boys could follow or go to some other point of their choice. They just brought me their work at the end of class, and I gave them my comments and corrections. Sad to say, despite my constant urging to loosen up, open up, draw from the elbow and not the cramped hand, very few of the boys improved in any useful way.
Even a boy as intelligent as Rafe was hard to teach. He couldn’t agree to corrupt the purity of two-dimensional drawing. He was genuinely opposed, as I said, to the usual methods of shading. From his point of view they just “dirtied up a clean thing.” Since all the k
nown methods do generally require an artist to smudge with a finger, or at least to stipple with the pencil or brush, Rafe was technically right. I tried to teach him alternate methods, but there was no real library at Juniper.
So I couldn’t show him examples of the elegant linear shading in Leonardo or the swift crosshatching in Rembrandt. In Rembrandt’s drawings and especially his etchings, whole mysterious threats of darkness are implied by nothing but what looks like hen scratch till you slow down and wait. Then his world begins to be charged with demons in hiding in the shade. I tried to draw samples for all the boys, and three of them halfway got the point.
But Rafe’s work stayed in the outline stage. Though his outlines improved in speed and obedience to the actual boundaries of objects, he never promised to deal adequately with a world of infinite shades.
And after I said “Shade!” for the hundredth time, he shot me a lethal glare and said “Over your dead body.”
I laughed but he didn’t, so I left it there and accepted his outlines.
Anyhow I had to keep reminding myself what an achievement Rafe managed as it was, he or any of the other boys. I mean, it’s fairly incredible—right?—that you can set a random dozen humans to copy an egg on a plate, and they’ll all come up with a picture that most other people can name. An egg on a plate, or at worst a white rock or a golf ball. Think of those stupendously complex light rays passing intact through space, through a dozen brains, down arms, through hands and fingers onto paper. They’ve almost got gorillas trained to do it. Any day now, any day.
The world’s outlines almost never behave the way people think they do. For instance go into an otherwise empty room and try to draw your mate’s profile from memory. Ludicrous clearly. Now come out, study his or her face for a minute, then draw the profile again. You’ll almost certainly make as many serious mistakes the second time as the first. And all your mistakes will come where you assume that the line of her upper lip is concave like this when in fact it’s convex like that. If I taught anything at Juniper, I hope it was this. Keep your eye on the object, or it will trick you and keep its own secrets. For secrets are what the whole visible world tries constantly to keep, for some mysterious reason.
The main other good thing I did was to work on my own picture in the presence of the boys. I’d get them started and check in on them every quarter hour or so. Otherwise I’d be at my own job, among them. And all but one or two of the spiritually blind spent long silent minutes every day, watching my progress. I had to strain not to condemn the ones who never looked. But even today I’ll have to admit I divide the world, one way at least, into the dozen who notice what’s hanging on the walls and the billion who don’t. Rafe Noren never let a class end without stopping by for a dignified look. No comment usually, or a low pleased grunt. But oh I knew I’d already burned that mountain line on one brain at least.
Whatever else I did wrong that summer—and it was plenty —I managed to paint one sizable picture, thirty-six by twenty. And a lot of people, young and old, watched me make it from hour to hour. I never said a word about what drew me to the subject, my half-shamed guess at a pregnant horizon. They all just assumed that a fine view was obvious fodder for any artist—every sofa needs a view. More than one of them asked me if I would sell it to them at the end.
I always refused politely, saying I meant to keep it as my souvenir of the summer. It didn’t seem to break any hearts. At least nobody asked for it twice except Rafe. He found a new way more or less daily to intimate that a gift of the painting to the Raphael Noren Art Museum would be graciously received. I’d just laugh and fend him off one more time. Even then he made my favorite remark of the summer about it.
After one of his more dogged efforts to wangle the painting, he said “I just want something somebody loves as much as I can see you love this picture.”
And I still have it, at the head of my bed in a long sand-colored room where I’ve spent more than half the nights of my life. I’ve kept it because it’s the first really decent accomplishment in all my work and also because, as I predicted, it turned out to be—in the last way I’d have planned—a souvenir of my summer as a counselor, an almost adequate receptacle for all my memories, good and tragic.
I can’t reproduce it here for you, so I’m asking you to take my word that it’s an honorable reminder of a big experience in the presence of an even bigger beauty. Whether you like American neorealist landscapes or not, I honestly think you’d be impressed by this one or at least detained for a reasonable look. God knows, the man who painted it was impressed. He really watched one stretch of the world, through a long run of good days. You can feel his attention.
What it also shows me, and anyone else who knows my work, is that for the first time in my life, I had the means to say what I felt. Whether or not you consciously sense a mysterious purpose—my try at conveying a silent tongue—is not that important. Lots of intelligent people look at Vermeers and see homely Dutch house-daughters standing in window light, doing odd jobs; and they love what they see. They feel rewarded for the minute or two they stand and look, which is no small gift.
The same with me and mine. If you see “The Smoky Mountains as the Meaning of Things” and just remember a restful weekend three years ago with the wife and children in a rented camper on the Blue Ridge Parkway, fine by me. The title of the picture to be sure is the thing I’m uneasy about now, but it’s the name I gave it at the time, so I go on owning up to that much fervor in the young man who wore my name that summer.
Otherwise the second session went like the first. Up at seven to a distant bugle, brush your teeth, eat breakfast, teach morning classes, a big lunch, then a rest hour in the cabins, an hour’s work on The Thunderbird or Indian lore, then a swim in the frigid lake or tennis, clean up, eat supper, then campfire or a program in the lodge, brush teeth again, taps at nine and a final hour or so with the other counselors in our private clubhouse. With the arrival of Bright Day at the end of the second week, I tactfully satisfied myself of his sincerity and genuine knowledge. He also had an M.A. in anthropology, from the University of North Dakota. So I spent a lot of afternoons with him in the Indian lore room of the crafts cabin.
First he’d give a brief lesson on some aspect of Plains Indian life, nothing too long to bore the boys. Then he’d break us down into small working groups and rotate around us. He’d guide the boys who were beading headbands or making breech-clouts or full-dress war bonnets. There was a ten-dollar surcharge for the felt base, beads and turkey feathers that went into a bonnet. Eagle feathers were way too expensive, though nobody had yet thought much about the eagle as an endangered species.
Day was a normal-sized gentle but unsmiling man in maybe his early thirties. His profile and huge dark eyes linked him instantly to his forebears. His grandfather, whom he remembered, had been one of the war chiefs in the Custer massacre at the Little Bighorn in 1876. And more than once Day told us what he recalled of the old man’s stories. For instance at the end of the battle, Day’s grandfather found a compass on one of the dead cavalrymen. However he turned it, the needle always pointed one way. So Grandfather understandably thought it was magic and predicted that more white soldiers would come from the direction of the needle. A few of the loose bands of warriors regrouped, headed north and sure enough met and damaged a troop coming to Custer’s rescue.
I’ve mentioned my old Indian sympathies. Even at childhood cowboy-and-Indian movies, I knew to root for the Indians. They were in so much better shape, and talk about better riders—bareback with no stirrups! In photographs they also had the absolutely frank faces I couldn’t help drawing, over and over. Any pair of their eyes said nothing less than Take me or kill me but I belong here. I’d also gathered, from reading and from my own love of the land we lived on, that after all every American Indian was here before any of us and that none of the paleface alibis covered the evil that has followed and continues.
So I was all the more susceptible to Bright Day’s poker-faced
narratives, however legendary some may have been. And I gladly planked down the ten-dollar fee to make my own bonnet. Like most only children I’ve got the born craftsman’s love of manual labor. Seated on the floor near Day, and surrounded by high-voiced children, I could bury myself pretty well forever in a meticulous trance of gluing, sewing and beading. Up till then I’d had a tendency to unbidden visits by the dreadful scenes of my father’s last days.
I’d suddenly see him tearing out all his intravenous needles and crouching under the bed, blood streaming. When I asked him, he’d say he was hiding from the nurses who were coming to cut him. Or in the midst of calling instructions to a camper, I’d hear Father bellowing “No, no” at the mute hallucinations of his nights. When I asked him once to say what he saw, he said again “No. It’s for me to bear.” But huddled on the floor of Day’s calm room or alone with my painting, I was always at more than arm’s length from the worst. And when the scenes returned at all, I could see they were fading.
It apparently had something to do with the fact that all artisans are blessed with what I call bleeding hands. Through their fingers—painting, sculpting, writing, hammering or through a dancer’s feet—artisans can bleed off each morning all the night’s log jam of blame and dread. So I gave both my manual jobs all the time I didn’t give my boys. I even passed up a couple of days off to stay at Juniper, painting and beading. That of course was seen by the staff as an awesome sign of devotion, also lunacy.
* * *
Needless to say Rafe was another Indian lore enthusiast. He’d already made a bonnet and all the other authentic-looking paraphernalia of his dances, so he was well ahead of the rest of us. This summer with Day’s guidance he was beading a pair of soft buckskin moccasins with white and sky-blue Czechoslovakian beads. For some reason the world’s best Indian beads are made there, in gentle colors and uniform sizes. Rafe would seldom talk when he was working, but he did say he was hoping to wear the new moccasins in this year’s closing-night ceremonies, so he worked with a calm kind of intensity. And always in a corner sat Clara Jenkins. She was Chief’s sweet-natured old-maid niece, maybe forty. And she was stitching twenty ghost shirts on an ancient foot-pedaled Singer machine.
The Tongues of Angels Page 7
