by Jack Cady
═
To those who arrived from the destruction of the cannery, Hell-Fer-Certain Church burned as an afterthought. Flame lighted the inside of the church, and stained glass windows pictured scenes from Bible stories. Stained glass gradually fell away as heat melted lead, turned glass to powder when fire burst through to rise along the outside of the building. Psychedelic colors of pink and orange and green twisted beneath flame, turned brown, turned gray, and fell to ash. Fire roared to the top of the steeple where wind caused it to wave as a hellish flag. When the cracked bell and the broken loudspeaker fell from the steeple, only Debbie gave it more than passing thought.
As emotionally exhausted people drifted toward the bar, Debbie found she did not want a drink, did not want company, but did want to wring an explanation out of Jeremiah. And, Jeremiah, it turned out, was not to be found.
Debbie looked toward Mac’s bar, saw the glow of barlight, heard the loud voices of people with little information and large opinions. She turned back to the church and watched the last flames die to yellow flickers above coals. The flames licked feebly at mist, and Debbie became conscious that in the fields beyond Hell-Fer-Certain, herds lined the fences; cattle white-faced, ghostly in the illumination from dying flames, and mute.
═
We woke, next day, bewildered. Dullness spread across the valley. It invaded our lives, or rather, seeped into our lives. We lived in a place where dreams had died, a world of rain and cattle and embers. It was a world stripped of sense, stripped even of ghosts, and we began to understand that hell need not be spectacular, only dull. At least that seemed true.
Debbie watched, wept, thought, and recorded in her journal this history of our destroyed world. With the eyes of an artist she watched herself in mirrors, saw drawn features, the high and accented cheekbones of age, the ravages, not of time, but of loss; and she despised Jeremiah. She listened as hatred flared among us, hot hatred because people wanted someone to blame. As guesses turned to rumor, then to conviction, it became obvious that it was Jeremiah who dealt in flame. People cursed his name. Men sought for him throughout the valley, and swore vengeance.
Our destroyed world, what had it been? Abandoned farms, abandoned fishery, and dregs of memory that recalled honest lives and loves. Many of us had come to this place in search of spiritual amity, of community; but all of that died long before the fires.
“But,” Debbie said to Mac on a gray morning before the bar opened, “how much of this sits on our own shoulders?”
Mac, who since the fires had remained largely silent, did not answer. Debbie turned from him and watched Sarah, because Sarah’s shock seemed deepest, bone-breaking deep. Sarah made coffee and muttered Bible-text about king Nebuchadnezzar who God changed to a beast “. . . that you shall be driven from among men, and your dwelling shall be with beasts of the field; you shall be made to eat grass like an ox, and you shall be wet with the dew of heaven . . . .” and then Sarah’s voice whispered gabble, as though she spoke in tongues.
“The sumbitch rubbed our noses in our own lives.” Mac moved like a tired man after a twelve-hour shift. Gray light crowded against windows of the bar in the same way that, beyond the burned church, cattle crowded fences. Mac picked up a broom, looked at it like he could not understand its use, then leaned it against the bar. He sat on a barstool and waited for coffee.
“. . . and he was driven from among men, and did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles’ feathers, and his nails like birds’ claws . . . .” Sarah’s voice trembled with fear or ecstasy, and Debbie could not say which.
“That preacher drove himself,” Mac said to Sarah, as if they were holding a normal conversation, “and he’s driving us right now because he was serious, and we only think we are.” He turned back to Debbie. “He’s not in the fields. He’s ashes. He’s across the road right now, ashes in his burned church. I watched him set the fire. I walked away. He didn’t.” Mac turned back to Sarah. “He’s preaching right now, if you listen you can hear . . . what do you hear? . . . or, maybe it’s the voice out of the whirlwind . . . like in the Book of Job.”
It seemed to Debbie that, if Mac were not exhausted, he would be nearly as hysteric as Sarah. “I hear nothing from across the road,” she said, “and if he chose to burn it’s his expiation, not ours.” Even though she detested Jeremiah, her mind filled with sorrow. Then she felt guilty without knowing why. And then, she felt something she could not at first understand. She had not felt joy in many-a-year.
She began to understand a little. Her first understanding was that she no longer despised Jeremiah. She fell silent. Listening. It seemed to her that from the fields came a sense of movement, the herd movement of cattle; and from the coast, echoes of screams.
“You’re right about one thing,” she told Mac. “He rubbed our noses in our own lives. Even if he’s ashes, he’s still doing it because nobody’s leaving town. We’re all still standing here, and we’re unreal. We’re staring over fences.”
“The dreams were real,” Mac whispered. “We’re the husks of dreams.” He looked across the road where white-faced cattle stood in mist. At the intersection of roads trucks slowed. An engine roared as a tractor-trailer driver caught a higher gear. Another engine roared. “Why did the guy do his own atonement and leave us holding the bag?”
“That’s a cop-out,” Debbie told him. “Dream new dreams and quit blaming the other guy.” Debbie paused, alive in the knowledge that Jeremiah had failed with Mac but had succeeded with her. Jeremiah had forced them to hate him, had sickened them, so that they must rebel against their lives or die. He had fought that they might once more learn to love. There were many arts, and many roads to them. Maybe Jeremiah had been traveling a road of art, and not religion.
Debbie yearned to comfort Mac and Sarah, and yet she knew that would be wrong. She felt, in some harsh way, ordained. She watched Mac and saw that her words were going nowhere. But, Mac, being Mac, would think about them, so maybe later . . . and then Debbie made her voice stern, nearly punishing, and hoped it would not break with compassion.
“The world is full of gurus,” she told Sarah above the roar of truck engines. “Find another one. Lacking that, you may want to consider a question.”
Winterings
“. . . the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm . . .”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Snowstorm”
Beyond the hundred-year-old stained glass windows of our house, the branches of a hundred year old pear tree reach into the winter wind. Here and there a few dead leaves cling to the branches. The sky is gray. Spits of wind and rain wash against the stained glass, and the Strait of Juan de Fuca tumbles against beaches. Winter, it seems, should not mean much in this house that has seen a hundred of them.
I have seen fewer winters, and to me winter is always a new and hopeful time. The reason, no doubt, is that I am a man of gardens and trees; have spent so many seasons with trees. In few words, I want to trace the cycle of seasons that have finally brought us to this winter.
That old pear tree is my familiar in every season, although I have known many trees. I’ve planted thousands, cut a few hundred, and climbed hundreds more during the years when I supported myself as a gardener while learning to be a writer. I have worked beside men who spent their working lives in trees, and they had the gardener’s wisdom in their old eyes, eyes which also seemed young. My mind finally came to understand what they knew. They were men not of years but of seasons. They spoke, when pruning a tree, of how the tree would look in three springs. They were men who welcomed winter. The sap in the trees was down, and they could prune trees, or even move them. Each winter they gave new forms to their worlds.
This year took so long to arrive at winter. Last spring came early. My housemate and I planned our half-acre of garden, and wondered, as gardeners do, what the summer and fall would b
ring. I watched her dark-haired head bent over lists, watched her fingers sorting seed packages; and I wondered how many thousands of people around us were doing the same. The cold March rains were proof against frost, and the wet soil clogged the tines of the rototiller as it turned a thick layer of compost into the soil.
I wondered how many thousands of people around us were laying aside the winter’s work and entertainment because of the advance of spring. At my place we were readers and writers. Our books are shelved in spring and the typewriters sit quiet for weeks. We are serious gardeners because we love gardening. We always grow more than we need, more than we can store. The over-supply is pressed on neighbors or given to food banks. Two summers ago we had too many peas, and this spring mistakenly planted fewer. Two summers ago we had few beans, so we planted more; then urged pecks of them onto neighbors. In this cold spring our hands and feet were wet and raw as usual during the early planning.
Then summer arrived and lingered. The first crop of spinach made but indifferently. It looked like it would be a dry summer. We shot water from rainbird sprinklers. The first crop of onions stood like thin green wands. The broccoli was full leaved, and it was soon clear that the cauliflower was in trouble. We transplanted plants. The root systems were healthy, but the summer progressed and the cauliflower languished and died. We were too busy with too many raspberries.
The summer continued to linger. In early August there was one full autumn day. Then summer returned. It seemed proof against the pumpkins which developed wide orange streaks on their green hides. The second set of onions, and the corn, looked like old men and old women who were honorably bound to stand upright beneath the sun. We braided garlic, and we continued to shoot water; the arcing splashes from the rainbirds sometimes feathering into spume blown sideways by the wind.
The cherry trees had produced abundantly, as had the plums. The pears and apples were heavy with fruit. We propped the sagging branches. Already it was the middle of September. Would summer never end? The quince were yellow beneath the sun, and the chrysanthemum leaves silvered beneath still tightly closed buds.
Then the swing of the seasons finally began. Autumn was in the air, although some of the trees seemed not to know it. The mimosa put out new, pale green growth.
I love the seasons, but I love more the swing of the seasons; like the rush of autumn and the rituals of autumn. We ran the gasoline out of the rototiller before it was stored, thus protecting it from gummed fuel lines. We mowed the grass short before storing the mower. On our wet northwest coast, grass obeys a different doctrine. In cold weather areas it should be long, but on this coast it should winter closely cut. Long grass here is an invitation to mold, fungus and rust.
Autumn progressed and we moved comfortably with the ritual swing. We sealed the handles of the garden tools with varnish, sharpened the chain saw and put a new handle in the axe. We listened to soft jazz on the radio, and put primer over the sanded-off rust spots on the pickup. The primer had a sharp, chemical smell that did not seem unhealthy. We watched the weather signs, and went to the slash piles for firewood. The stoves, which had set like forgotten pot bellied Gods, now came alive with fire behind the glowing isinglass.
Then winter finally arrived with its own demands and ritual. The cold rains swept in and we unpacked sweaters, hooded jackets and boots. The book-lined shelves seemed suddenly alive with as much promise as the promise of spring. We turned the wheelbarrow upside down and put it in storage. Other tools came out; the long handled and short handled pruners, the ladders, and the dark tar for sealing pruning cuts. We planted tulip and crocus bulb in the wet, cold soil. Winter is so short. We wanted as much winter experience as we could get. All too soon we will again be in the swing of the seasons, the swing in to spring.
Now even the conifers are slowed toward dormancy as they discard needles in the slow process that continues all year round. The only broad leaf conifer, the gingko, dropped all its leaves at once after the first hard frost.
I watch the bare, reaching branches of that wintering pear and know exactly what is happening in that hundred-year-old tree. It is expressing a variety of strength.
In summer that tree will move as many as 400 pounds of water each day through transpiration and the making of fruit. The as yet not fully explained process of photosynthesis is an active, manufacturing force. Life and water channel up and down the cambian layer. There is a road inside that tree, and in winter the road leads to the roots where energy is stored in the form of sugar. That tree is dormant, but it is expressing power. When spring comes the sugar will be transformed, and the tree will express a great burst of energy. Were such energy transferred into heat it would consume this old house in one enormous blaze.
I split balks of wood; the salmon colored fir, the clean lined cedar, the white alder that falls in two so easily beneath the axe, and the red coated madrona with its ringless white interior that carries occasional small streaks like rust. The rains wash, the winds crash, and I privately hope for snow. The trees restore themselves and so do we.
There are books to be read and books to be written. She, my wintering housemate, silhouetted against gray sky and stained glass windows, sits reading. She worked so hard during spring and summer and fall. We have earned this time of restoration. It is a time of books, of walks on the cold and windy beach, of pages written, puzzled over, rewritten. We are in the swing of our own season, and winter will be far too short.
Some Remarks About the Literature of War
When you drive inside the gate at Quantico writing in very big letters there says the mission of the Marine Corps is to take and hold ground. I like that because it is honest. It does not talk about learning a trade, wearing a woman-getting uniform, or traveling the world. What it plainly says is the business of the Marines is the infliction and receiving of death. It is left, perhaps, to the Army, the Navy, and sociologists/philosophers/political theorists/politicians/educators and fiction writers to throw crap about patriotism, manifest destiny, and historical necessity. I am a fiction writer and I do not intend to discuss truth and illusion beyond my own trade, but I will note that both exist.
Moreover, as a fiction writer I am not exactly sure what the term ‘literature’ means. When General Motors passes out slick brochures praising the engineering that has gone into its latest death trap; well, General Motors calls that brochure literature. I do know something about why I write fiction and what fiction intends. It is well to get our thoughts straight on that before talking about war stories by various writers.
It may be that different writers have different approaches to fiction, but I believe the serious writer will be in agreement when I say that fiction deals only with the truth. The literature of war is mostly fiction; which is to say that it is one area of human experience that has been greatly explored for the truth.
This is a relativistic world that likes to take care of cracks at the word: truth. There is no question that attack and defense can be made for the proposition that truth is relative, not eternal. There are those who will claim that truth changes every time a research psychologist gets a different result from running rats through a maze. Fiction writers could hardly care less about such arguments, and fiction writers have written the most books concerned with truth.
The great truth seems to be the truth of facts. The sun rises and sets. Men are born, reproduce and die. The female of the species bears the children. Grass grows in nearly every kind of soil. These are true because they are predictable as the grass, running a coefficient of correlation to nine point nine of the millionth decimal.
The truth discovered in fiction relies partly on these facts. They are known as context. Into this context is shoved individual knowledge and emotion, experience, the need to discover what is the meaning of all the diverse parts that are brought to a story. More of this in a minute.
You see, it is not enough that a writer writes in such a way that his audience believes. It may be that many readers believed Booth Tarkington
at his worst, or Bret Harte—the most maudlin of sentimentalizers. It is necessary that the writer works with such intensity that he discovers truth.
How do you do this? First of all, you have to have respect for your characters; a respect that Joseph Conrad called sympathy. Conrad did not define the term, but after you have read everything Conrad wrote a couple of times then it is possible to define that term for yourself. Sympathy is empathy for the character, plus the total respect that allows the character to do what he must in a harrowing situation. If the character must make a fool of the writer, then the writer may not interfere.
What all this means is that the fiction writer knows that for a given person in a given situation there can be only one truth, and that truth is discoverable—usually. That is fiction at its simple best. Add more characters in more situations and the problems compound; yet, for each of those characters there is only the situation as he may perceive it. There is a truth for each of those people, and it may be that collectively they have a truth that will speak independently of their individual situations.
Write it hard enough and it may be that the specific situation examined will also contain a general truth. My favorite example of this is Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea. As a general statement it is a hymn of praise, of hope, of sanctification that endorses the condition of being human. This from Hemingway. It seems a great contradiction, but what it really is is a great endorsement of a writer courageous enough to write truly a story that on the face seems to contradict all of his other work.
Hemingway wrote honestly and intensely about the old man. You may be sure that he was uninterested in symbol, allegory, denouement, plot or any other terms in the current literary sweepstakes. He was interested only in following Santiago through a culminating situation: what would happen, what must Santiago do, what is the luck and the forces that aid or hinder him? When the sharks arrive they are real sharks. If there is greater meaning to them, then that meaning comes from the reader’s emotional and intellectual state—or lack of it. Hemingway was only interested in the sharkiness of sharkiness. No two truths are articulated quite the same because they are individual truths. We do not feel the same amount of horror over the same things. Our thresholds for pain are not exactly alike. We perceive, feel, learn as individuals, not as committees or peer groups (although we may learn from groups). If we read well, we experience revelation in the same way. Revelation is an antique word, but it is a good word and it has use beyond the religious connotation.
