Tom Fool

by David Stacton

  They understood the land, though. You had only to watch, farther down in the south-west, the Zuñi and Navajo being patient with it, to see that. At the same time, it was startling to see, in the dusty middle of nowhere, with arroyos going straight down on every side, and not so much as a jack-rabbit to improve the view, a flesh-pink Ford station wagon drawn up beside a rammed earth hogan, a Cadillac, two scruffy hens, and six diabetic sheep. Yet at the trading post, with the tourists all safe in the Harvey Diner, the Indian wives sat as usual hieratic in velvet on the porch, by the hour, their faces bland as squash blossoms, while the husbands loitered, as always, if not even more taciturn than formerly, waiting (they were a people given to practical jokes as well as to an arcane religion) for a fat white woman in a halter bra to go wobbling by. But then, the Indians were not heard from, and except by small children, not at the moment held to be at all important or real.

  In Tulsa Tom spoke to a fine searchlight congregation, in a crowded sportpalast of a ball field. There were kliegs wavering behind him, a cloudy sky, nacreous at its clouds, and a moon the colour of proud flesh.

  “For the life of me, I cannot see why any real Democrat would vote against me. Every Democrat ought to applaud me for this crusade, for upholding the two-term tradition,” he told them. “Surely no Democrat will vote against me, who believed in the 1932 Democratic programme. I believed in it then. I voted for it. I still believe in it.”

  At that point the Pattersons were willing to throw in the sponge. The fool. Didn’t he realize that you couldn’t cut across parties that way? If he succeeded in doing so, the whole business of the Pattersons would be destroyed. Sure, there were Democrats for Tom. But it was the Republicans he had to convince, and they found it hard enough to swallow his not being born in a Republican family, let alone that he should refer to his Democratic past now. Better had he been smeared in the press as an adulterer, than that he should bring up his Democratic past. It meant that he would lose several million diehard votes. Even if they didn’t vote against him, they would at least abstain from the polls.

  He was a fool. An utter fool. It was worse than Chicago.

  That was September 16th, the day the Draft Act passed the House and was adopted as law. National Defence, it was called. That made it a little easier to swallow. But some people hadn’t been so angry since Teddy charged through the Hearst press and up San Juan hill.

  The draft. A thing invented by Napoleon. Not all the propaganda machines in the world could make it palatable. A horrible thought. It was all very well for Tulsa to exult, and Kansas to be Bleeding Kansas, but what would happen to the Pattersons, were the two-party system to be abolished? They throve on such dissension, and Norman Thomas, they had heard, paid extremely poorly.

  The Texas Panhandle

  The train passed into this at night. Tom, who could not sleep, stood alone on the platform of the Pioneer, in the moonlight, watching. There was all this effort to prove he was just a simple son of the people. The Republicans always did that. It was only the Democrats who had the spiritual solace of proving they were better than they were. A landscape of sand, low hills, a water-hole or two. He had once worked in the oilfields of Texas, as a manual labourer, when he was young, and had a slim waist.

  That was because of his father. It had been his father’s Spartan, but judicious, habit, every year, when the boys came back from school, to give them a week at home, and then to take them down to the railway station—as another father would fling his kids off the wharf into the water, anxiously, intently, alert to see they didn’t drown and did learn how to swim—give them a ticket anywhere and ten bucks, and say, “I’ll be delighted to see you in the fall, before you go back to school”. They had all been sent out that way, and it had taught them a lot, if only because they knew, always, that there was some place to come back to, that father was there, waiting, courageous, with his odd muscular tick along his cheek, not very outspoken, not about his emotions, but all for them, just the same. And if they came back they got a prize. What was the prize? Why, to do it all over again next year, and then come back, have a good stiff highball, and tell him all about it, for he was insatiably curious about what happened out there, in America. He was an interested man, and an interesting one. He had brought them up. Why the hell had he had to go and die anyway?

  Tom would have so liked that laconic, ironic, enthusiastic, knowledgeable, and more than anything else, though he never said anything, just plain loving presence on this train.

  Never mind. He had Edna. Father had liked Edna. Edna would do.

  The train moved down to Texas.

  In Amarillo it was hot and the small boys at the station jeered at him. Texas had its own ideas. No one could understand why he wanted to come here. The south-west has so few electoral votes.

  He had wanted to see it. He had wanted to have his heart broken, so it could be put together again.

  For America is heartbreaking. It is particularly heartbreaking for those who love the land, and can remember what it used to look like, and who take it about with them wherever they go. Such people are the new exiles on the earth, those who have been made foreigners in their own country, the people who remember the way it used to be. Westerners and Easteners, the hard, tight-packed, blue and green and black island seascapes of Maine, the ripple of surf, the exalted abstract mountains of the West, the white shake fence, the empty pasture, a few trees at the water-hole, cottonwoods maybe, the view of the Sierra that stretches, unshattered, for a hundred miles, aspens in the autumn, the green and private open plain.

  But we can’t have it any more, because our fellow citizens have thrown it away. They have built over it. They don’t care what it means. Never mind. When all the horrid huts they have built over it, the television, the radio, and the fear are safely underground, it will still be there. It will always be there. We shall not, but at least we knew it once, as it used to be.

  A pony comes down at evening, to water among the cotton woods, and whinnies once, and the moon comes up, and illuminates the scrub oaks and the hills. That is all it means. But that means everything.

  And that is where the heartbreak is.

  The trouble was, he loved this country. The land is enormous, noble, settled, compact, and proud. Would that the people who live on it were. That was what had made him retreat from New York City, at least once a month, to the farms at Rushville. He was not one of those who live with it. That was not his talent. His talents lay in other fields. But he went back to it when he could, he was not, like so many people he knew, ashamed of it, and he never forgot that he came from it.

  Yes, it was a noble country. It had everything to teach. Day after day, the train passed over the land; in the country it broke free and got back to what the country really meant; in the cities, clogged in the slums, and diving indoors at the stations, the train seemed less triumphant and the vision got lost. He had met people in New York City who thought it smart to condemn everything west of the Hudson River, including the Jersey Shore. Mountains gave them acrophobia; fields under a middle western blue sky, vertigo; and the only trout stream they had ever seen was the artificial one that divided the Sawmill Turnpike.

  He could only tell such people that theirs was not the only country in the world, and that it behoved them to act accordingly. But that is never a popular message. Xenophobia saw to that, xenophobia is an act of ignorant pride, and pride, after all, goeth before a whole man.

  And after him, mourning.

  Albuquerque, New Mexico

  Named after the great colonist, the great explorer, the great man, pulled down like Cortes, by underlings, and by his own ambitions, which is to say, his own limitations, but no fool. They had known how to live in those days. Golden Goa. Kept ladies and elephants. St. Francis Xavier, so holy that Isobel de Carom bit off his big toe and carried it away in her mouth, as a relic. Well, America these days could use a saint. A saint was perhaps all that could save it—from itself.

  They were all a little solem
n when they got to Albuquerque, even Tom. New Mexico is a solemn land. One sits straight in the saddle there, though elsewhere one may slouch, and indeed, elsewhere these days one drove a car, with one’s fat, if one was fat, folded annoyingly over one’s lap, as one sat too low and steered anyway, determined if only one could live otherwise to get rid of all that flabby tissue.

  New Mexico, with its dissimilar twin, Arizona, is one of our later possessions, one of the peaceful ones, bought, if he remembered correctly, about 1845. Outside of Florida, though, it had the oldest towns. Santa Fé, for example, eighty miles north, was still bilingual. That 1845 date was wrong. He must remember either to have it looked up or else not mention it.

  They really made a spread for him out there. It was a sight those on the train didn’t like much, even Sideboard. Those who are well-bred, and have forgotten why and how, never do like enthusiasm. But soon the West would take over the whole country. It was inevitable. The population was shifting out there.

  Albuquerque (it’s a mile up, and hence presumably, like Denver and William Blake, closer to heaven), had a grey lowering sky and a lost and lonely look. But there were signs everywhere saying, “Viva, Tom,” and he had a grand time. They yipped and whooped, and treated him like a rodeo clown. But that suited him. After all, as far as the National election went, that is what he was. All he needed was to be confronted with Mark Twain’s Captain Billy’s Whizzbang, to make the impression complete.

  Then the plane to Phoenix, Arizona, just on the other side of Superstition Mountain, which even from the air, was scary and bleak enough to explain its name. So many men had died there, searching for gold that was not to be gotten. The Lost Dutchman mine.

  Phoenix was not then, what it is now, a middle-western American overpriced slum, with funeral parlours and stock-brokers’ rooms instead of the county fair, and so many churches, you needed Clark’s The Small Sects in America to find your way past the pulpit to the nearest supermarket. There was Scottsdale, of course, a suburb behind Camelback Mountain. Scottsdale, someone said, is where the New York Garment District goes in the winter. And Sedonia, where they make Westerns.

  But at Phoenix they stacked the airport with bales of cotton, mounds of grapefruit, and pyramids of oranges, sides of beef, and jeroboams of honey. It was all, they thought, that they had to be proud of. In the northern or extreme southern parts of the state, it would have been different. That’s where the ranchers and the timbermen hung out. But still, in Phoenix they gave him a siren trip into town, and it was impressive.

  He was wasting his time, said the professionals, counting the electoral votes.

  Somehow he did not think so. But he had scarcely time to think at all. Soon enough, they were on to California, by plane. The train would catch up with them there.

  San Diego

  Southern California is unnerving. There is something mauve and primitive about it, as though it were the shore of an archaic sea. You enter the state through an empty blast furnace. Except for an occasional date grove, there is nothing in the desert but death. But on the hills behind San Diego there is a sub-alpine pine forest, cool and murmurous, and San Diego itself is a spotless town divided in half by a large bluff planted to forest and cluttered with outsize Churrigueresque buildings. It is also a sailor town, for there is a large naval depot there. San Diego treated the sailors as a profitable crop, and therefore hated them, just as they hated the place where they were so often reaped. The police had a thousand booby-traps, but an invariable procedure. Arrest them, and then let them bribe their way out, rather than be turned over to the naval authorities for discipline. The bluff divided this aspect of the town from its more benign one, and the nearest polite suburb was La Jolla, which looks like Portofino but behaves like Nassau.

  Tom spoke to an audience of thirty thousand there. As he was waiting to speak, a single voice soared out of the crowd. “We want Roosevelt.”

  It did not bother Tom. “There you are, one in a hundred thousand, and they are growing fewer every day,” he said, peering over his glasses owlishly. They loved him for that. In fact, in those days, the South-west, California, the North-west, were the last parts of the country which still admired the spectacle of a rampant individualist in high gear. Character had not yet become a crime against the polity out there, and so he got a good reception.

  It was the third most populous state in the Union, and with Texas, the most chauvinistic. There was nothing to be done with Texas. Texas had once been a sovereign state, and like Palmyra, that other wealthy desert, was apt to send its citizens abroad like ambassadors, to temporize with Rome, but not to yield an inch. It was also a masculine state, not at all flighty, and therefore, though it would listen politely to what you had to say, it wasn’t going to pay you any mind, unless it had a notion to. And the notion of Texas was that it was Texas, which was quite true, and that given a little patience, in time the rest of the country would see the error of its ways, which seemed unlikely.

  Sam Houston was a great man, Lincoln was somebody you had to put up with, Tom was okay, they guessed, though a mite giddy, but the President, whatever you thought of him, was a horse trader, and since politics was nothing but horse trading, they thought they’d string along with him.

  But California, which had never had a hero or a dream, outside of Hollywood, took to Tom very well.

  Long Beach

  A drive through Lotus Land. Tom, who could never believe, being an amateur in politics, that it was possible for people to be cautious, non-committal, cover their bets, and fox the dealer, and so thought everyone was either for him or against him, tried to exhort the natives. They didn’t exhort.

  Standing there, in that wretched outhouse of Los Angeles, in the stench of oil derricks, surrounded by ugly people in even uglier cheap play clothes, he said, “This isn’t a campaign, it’s a crusade. I call upon each and all of you to join it. I want each one of you to be a soldier in the fight to keep our liberties.”

  It was so hot, you could see their natural complexions underneath their sun-tan oil, and the mascara on the women’s eyelids granulated there until it looked like the grape seeds on a slice of grappa cheese, or a cluster of frog’s eggs, in an Indiana pond, in the early spring, when the trees still look like autumn.

  Well, it was a crusade. But for him, all at once, it had become a Passion, with all the cities of the world for stations of the cross; and for that matter, what else were the cities of the world? Every journey is a pilgrimage. Every faith has its passion. Every pilgrimage has the same incidents. They are all part of the parable called Man, through which we stumble like Mr. Goodman, Mr. Badman, or Christian himself. And no doubt they sell hamburgers and hot dogs at the booths of Vanity Fair, which, as St. Bartholomew’s Fair used to be, is held only when hell, or the river, freezes over.

  But then, in California it is never cold. True, you may need ear muffs, winter woollies, and an old mackinaw, while the whole family is choking over smudge pots in the orange groves, trying to save the crop, but all the same, it is never cold. If the heating system fails, you can blow on your hands.

  He’d never seen so many people from Iowa in his life. The local inhabitants, an almost forgotten race, lived obscurely out back, where the neon tubing peters out, and nobody ever goes, and, to tell the truth of it, is not wanted. If somebody had just put up a No Trespassing sign before the migrations westward started, the place might still have some integrity and pull through, but as it was, it had been snowed under by several million spiritually displaced white-collar Okies following the holy vision of a ten-foot swimming pool and a portable barbecue pit (a proud device, if a bore) across the deserts and the mountain passes.

  That’s luxury. But what could you do to wake them up? Soldiers of liberty are not best recruited on bargain day in the world’s department store. Nor were the Roman legionaries bribed with sweets, until things had gone so far, that the Praetorian Guard could seize the government and auction it off to any booby from Didius Julianus to Julius Nepos
foolish enough, or vain enough, to want the empty ownership. The only thing certain in this world is that Rome fell in 467 (but not formally until Romulus Augustulus was packed off to Baiae in 474), and the only question was: how long had one to wait?

  Poor California. He had worked here one college summer, as a vegetable picker, near Fresno. He could remember the hovering air, the vast silences, the yellow hills, the scrub oak like an immovable army stationed on the heights, leisurely fences across the fields, and something spacious and easy that was gone now. It was gone all over America. The crags still dropped sheer into the Pacific; the golden condor floated higher and higher into the sky; the fog rolled over the ocean uplands; but we were up to Boethius and Ausonius at least.

  Nevertheless, he found California exhilarating. They seemed to like him there. From Long Beach the party drove through endless suburbs to Los Angeles, except that Los Angeles is nothing but an endless suburb, which results, somehow, in one’s not being able to find anything. It was there that he was hit by his first tomato of the campaign. But then, out here tomatoes were cheaper than eggs, which mostly came from the northern part of the state, so he understood, whereas a tomato could be scooped up anywhere.

  Los Angeles

  The place believes in staging things. Therefore Tom found himself seated in an open Lincoln convertible, in a dark tunnel, with Edna beside him, and the Coliseum beyond. Loudspeakers announced him as the Next President of the United States, the chauffeur put the car in gear, and they bumped over the turf in the light of half a dozen blinding spotlights. Somewhere in the darkness beyond the glare, 70,000 people stood up and began to chant his name, accompanied by a band beating out California, Here I come (a cry from the heart), and Back Home in Indiana (a cry from Pasadena). California was going through a period of being The State that Knows How, but the light was blinding. Tom clambered out of it and mounted the platform, to the strains of Hail, Hail, The Gang’s All Here.