On Charles's hand, like a clue that had been present there, was the sensation of his arm, how frail it was and yet was flesh, and now as the man stood drawn into himself against the cold, dwarfed by the wide white street of the tall buildings, the night sky fuming with gray flakes, his pea-coat collar turned up high around his head, looked less formidable, small and ordinary, a little ludicrous, even, with his reddened ears protruding from stocking cap like a child's or half-witted old man's, and Charles understood that this was how other people saw the poet, and realized, now that the shock of the dedication was past, how alone one would have to be to make an offering of that sort to a stranger.
The poet sighed again—two lengthy blue plumes—and looked up; his eyes and nose were watering and a gust wind sent moisture skidding along the wrinkles under eyes. "For instance, I see that snow, a natural element entering with ease man's province, lamplight, and I wonder if my poems, my hard-worked jewels, will ever make a picture like that, a glittering triangle, in some man’s mind."
"I like them."
"I believe that, I believe you do, yes. Thus the dedication."
"I'm sorry. I lied."
"Lied?"
"I was— Anyway, my name is Neumiller, not Klein.
The poet's lips parted, a trail of vapor coiled in front his face, and he said "Neumiller" in a voice that chilled Charles more than the icy underground water.
"Come inside and I'll get us some coffee or something and try to explain."
"Neumiller, huh?"
"Or we can go up to my place, which is right across the street, there. It's not pretty, as I—"
"Goodbye."
"At least wait here till I pay my check."
"No, buddy."
"Tomorrow?"
"No, you won't be seeing me again, Mr. Neumiller, Klein, or whoever the hell you are."
"Why not?"
He stalked to the center of the street and stopped in mid-stride as if his strength had left him, and then turned and cried, "You know perfectly well —" His voice went up the scale out of reach and cracked with a sound so shrill and unmusical it was as if the sky overarching this part of the city had been shattered and the snowflakes were broken fragments of it floating down around them both. "Because you're going to steal some of my lines!"
Charles wanted to say no, no, he wouldn't steal any of his lines, or if he did, he'd steal only one. "What can blow the wind away," but he wouldn't steal that one, either, really, and then a bus came whining down the street and swung out around the poet where he stood, unyielding, impervious, and when all was quiet again except for the ticking of snow somewhere on tin, he said, "I can also see that you're cheap and sneaky and avaricious, too. I was led on by you, all right! You're going to steal some of my lines or my ideas, or both, you young shit, you impostor, you sonofabitch, and I'm not going to get a single solitary penny for one measly fucking phrase of it, you know that, don't you, damn you!"
He turned and walked away through the heavier-falling icy lines and separate faces of flakes of snow, across the street and off through Tompkins Square, and his footsteps soon started filling with blowing, earthbound snow, steps that traveled over the white-woven winter landscape as if in a race.
42
A VISITATION
From the time he was first able to remember, all the way back to when words weren't words but colors and images of states of mind, what he remembered most of all was the quality of the stories his mother told at night. He'd on his back, looking at the circle of light cast on the ceiling by the lamp, and she'd sit beside the lamp, her face in shadow, her folded hands in her lap, and tell him about a time before he was born. Her stories were simple and pure as the circle on the ceiling, and seemed to become a part of the light itself, distinct from him and even from her, so that when he turned on his side or his stomach as she spoke, or when he turned to look her, at her lips forming the words of the story, widening into a smile when there was a scene that pleased her, pursing in anger or indignation, relaxing at the corners when she was recalling sadness, even then the location of the story didn't change. Its source, its substance, its beginning and end was the circle of light.
She seemed a medium through which a spirit was passing, and that spirit gathered itself on the ceiling above her, a life in itself, a form he could absorb or look at impassively but whose substance he couldn't ignore; and when she left the room and shut off the light, its presence remained, a circle and breadth that widened above him where he lay. He'd breathe shallowly, feeling it as a heaviness of a mood or emotion more than any moment she'd extracted from time, and then, just as he was dropping off to sleep, he'd feel it descend and pass into him. Here it became a part of his dreams.
The mixture of colors, fragmented pictures doing double stitches to become whole again, a phrase rising up from the center of a landscape, days unmistakable as mint, springs and fountains feeding every area of mindless thought, her voice; stories about the farms they lived on when she was a child, stories that her grandfather, a homesteader in the state, used to tell her-—of grass fires, miles wide, coming toward him over the plain, of being snowed in for two weeks in a one-room shack while accumulating drifts rose toward the top of his stovepipe, of men wandering a mile from their homesteads and becoming lost, because the plain, with its russet covering of grass, was like a desert, the same in every direction. With a shading of amusement in her voice, she said that her grandfather always ended his stories of those days with the phrase, "Ya, sure, that was before we had windmills or trees."
And there were the stories about her and her closest brothers, Conrad and Elling, with seldom a mention of Jerome. Elling was the prankster who searched out a wren's nest and a magpie's nest and switched the two sets of eggs; who put a baby mouse in his father's riding boot, and might have got away with it if he hadn't bragged about it to Conrad; their father flung the boot across the room and broke out the glass door of the china cabinet, and for this, and for beating up Conrad, Elling had to live a week in the barn. He was changed, it was said, by the experience. He discovered some arrowheads while breaking up a new piece of land with the horse plow, and had intelligence enough to stop and dig deeper, discovering the site of a Mandan Indian village, which was sold to the Historical Society of North Dakota, and was now a well-known landmark. He came back from a summer with Sue and Einard and started telling his father how to run the farm, and was so condescending about it that old Jones finally cracked him with a cane so hard across his ass the cane broke in half. "I win!" Elling cried. He was expelled from Concordia College during his first year for touching up the bust of some college founder with red barn paint and for other antics that remained obscure, and then, after such an unpromising start, surprised everybody by leaving the farm and becoming, through hard work and years on the road, the Midwest distributor of Hart Parr tractors and farm machinery.
Conrad was accident-prone. He fell off the Shetland pony, Jake, so tame he was practically a house pet, and broke his collarbone, fell through a hole in the hayloft and broke three ribs, fell off a corral and broke the leg he'd broken falling off Jake another time; was chased around the yard by a turkey gobbler and, while glancing at it in horror over his shoulder, ran into a haystack and broke open his head. He seldom got angry, but when did he picked up a length of pipe, a branch, a pitchfork whatever was at hand—and chased Elling up to the porch and into the house. He once said to his mother in a calm voice, "I'm going to kill Elling today." He wanted a dog from the time he could speak, and on his fifth birthday his father gave him a water spaniel a few weeks old and said, "If I ever see that thing in the house, I'll take down the gun and shoot it, I swear." Conrad named it Curly and carried it in his arms all morning and afternoon and wouldn't even come in for lunch, but later, when went in for a drink, took his father's warning to heart and left the dog outside, on the porch, in the safest place he could find, a basket of dirty clothes from the week’s washing his mother was busy at. Before he'd finished his drink, the dog crawl
ed out of the basket and jumped from the wash bench onto a copper boiler below, tipping up the lid, and went sliding into the scalding water. Jones heard its agony and ran onto the porch and saw Conrad trying to lift it out of the boiler with his bare hands (nobody could), and when in the end Jones had to shoot the dog after all, he'd never believe Conrad hadn't put it in the boiler on purpose, because a few weeks before, he caught him trying to drown some baby ducks in the horse tank.
Each of her stories about Conrad ended with, "Your Uncle Conrad, I want you to know, has been terribly misunderstood all his life." And there was a shading in her voice that implied, "I, too, have been misunderstood, and when you grow up you can expect the same."
And there were stories whose details he couldn't remember but whose moods he retained; the next day, or weeks later, as he was sitting in the alcove of the bay window, playing with the toys he'd gathered there, or would rise in him and he'd pause with abstracted eyes testing the quality of what he felt, trying to decide if it was a detail from a story of hers or an incident from his actual life, and one afternoon as he was sitting like this, looking past a windmill built out of Tinkertoy parts, conscious only of a hot brocade (the effect of sunlight coming through the lace curtains of the bay window) spread over his cheek and ear, he heard, from the far end of the front ball, the sound of his mother's voice pitched in surprise, :he sound of other voices, and then a racket of laughter.
He stood and the windmill tipped and hit the hardwood floor. He looked down and saw that one of the blades of its fan, a piece of violet paperboard, had come loose. The door to the hall swung open and his mother walked into the room with a broad, heavyset man, a stranger, following in her wake, bringing with him a chilly draft and a fragrance of spring from the outdoors. The stranger smiled, and said, "And this must be Jerry. It's hard to believe he's already so big." The man came to the bay window, the floor trembling under his heavy strides, md held out some pamphlets. "Here," he said, "I brought you these. Go ahead, don't be bashful, take them!"
"Jerome!" his mother said. "What's the matter with you? Don't you know who this is?"
Jerome remembered a similar man with a smell of cold air clinging to him, a stranger who came to the house and gave him a package of Sen-Sen and then tickled him until he turned blue, couldn't catch his breath, and had to have a pan of water thrown in his face. Was this the man? He looked to his mother for confirmation.
"Shame on you," she said. "That's Elling."
Jerome's eyes grew; could the Elling of his mother's stories be standing before him, so old and so fat?
"Here," Elling said, and held out the pamphlets again. Jerome took them and Elling removed his hat, placed his lands on his knees, and bent over until his face was only inches from Jerome's. "What's the matter?" he asked. His blond hair, cut close to his skull, sparkled in the sunlight, md his long ears glowed orange, making him look luminous, which made him seem even more unreal. "You're lot scared of your uncle? You're not an old fraidycat, are you? You're not afraid I’ll tickle you until we have to douse you with water again, huh?"
"He's probably just bashful," a deep voice said, and Jerome looked up. Another man came through the door and stood behind his mother. This one was so tall that his face, which was tanned mahogany up to the hatline (the rest of his forehead was pure white), and his broad shoulders, too, encased in a black overcoat, showed above her crown.
She said, “Well, if you don't remember Elling, who's been here before, you won't remember him."
"How do you do," the man said in his deep bass voice. "I'm Conrad."
Jerome looked at the pamphlets in his hand. On the cover of the top one was a colored picture of a tractor with a man at the controls and some printing under its wheels. Somehow the picture related the phantoms that made up the circle of light on the ceiling, the Elling and Conrad of his mother's stories, to the Elling and Conrad here in the flesh. If they were here. He glanced up and found them smiling at him in uneasiness. He was in the same room with characters out of the past Strangers. Ghosts.
"If he's just going to stand there and gape, come on and sit down," she said. "Take off your coats."
They put their overcoats on opposite arms of the couch and sat on either side of her, facing Jerome.
"I've got some stuff for the other boys," Elling said.
"They're taking their naps.”
"Oh." He looked disappointed.
"I was just talking about you last night," she said.
"The hell," Elling said.
"I was telling the boys about the time you went over to the Ricordati place to bring back those sheep that got out—"
"And traded a lamb for old man Ricordati's .22?" Elling asked. "That time?"
"Yes."
"Dad waled the daylights out of me. I was sure he wouldn't miss the lamb, but I'll be damned if I knew how to account for the .22. You told them that?"
She nodded in an energetic way, a smile on her face, and Elling turned to Jerome and whispered, "Don't believe a word of it. I wasn't ever that dumb."
The adults laughed with an intimacy that excluded Jerome and yet relieved him, too; he was freed from their conversation to do as he pleased, He sat on the floor and began paging through a pamphlet.
"Wheeel, what brought us here today?" Elling said. "To tell you the truth, you might say an accident. Or the concatenations of circumstance." He looked aside at them, but they continued to study him with unchanged expressions of affection and interest; they expected to be dazzled by him.
"I had to make the drive over from Fargo to Valley, anyway, to see my district representative there, and then over to Jimtown and on up to Carrington, and since I’m breaking in my new car and wanted to get some extra miles on it, what I did was first I swung out to home to say hello to the folks, and here was Brother in from Wadena. When he saw the Pontiac and heard I was tired of driving it—why, you can't take it above forty and, God, that gets on my nerves—he offered to chauffeur me the rest of the trip. And since—"
"You're driving his new car?" she asked.
The grin Conrad gave in reply—with his teeth and the whites of his eyes in shining contrast to the tan so deep it made his features indistinct—confirmed or implied there was nothing he'd heard of or seen that would be able to get between him and his pleasure as long as he was back behind that wheel pretty soon.
"Well, you be careful with it, you hear?"
His grin grew wider with every reference to him, as though he'd never been paid this much attention before.
"And since he's been wanting to get into Jimtown from the day he got home, or so he tells me, this was convenient for the both of us. Wheeel, we were driving along, happy as can be, into Jimtown and on up toward Carrington, until we got around Melville, I think it was, when he mentioned he hadn't ever seen Timmy, or your new house here, and wondered if we couldn't make a little side trip and drop in on you, so I said, ‘Sure! What the hell! Why not?'"
"I don't understand why you haven't done it sooner. It's been two years."
"Oh, it can't be that long."
"Jerome will soon be six. He was four the last time you were here."
"That was two years ago?"
"Two years this June."
"Ah, damn, two years is a long time. It's a good thing Brother was with me this trip, is all I can say, or I probably wouldn't be here now!"
"It's obvious that he cares about others and you don't.” "Oh, now. Alpha, you—"
There was a distant rumbling sound, as of someone moving furniture in an upstairs room, which was so faint and short-lived that by the time they'd listened to make sure they'd heard right, or misheard, the sound had stopped. "Was that Martin?" Elling asked. "No, he's at school."
"Jerry!" Elling said. "Jerry, you want to ride my pony?" He lifted his hat and patted his knee where he expected Jerome to sit.
"He responds best to Jerome," she said. Elling paled at the name. "Hey, there, then, will you ride my pony? 'Pony boy, pony boy, won't you be my pon
y boy,' " he sang, jogging his knee in time to the beat. " 'Don't say no, here we go—' "
Jerome picked up another pamphlet and a look of perplexity darkened Elling's face. "Can he read?" he asked.
"Well, somewhat, although I'm not trying to force it. He won't start school till this fall." "How are the pictures?" Elling asked. Jerome looked up and smiled, honored that he was being spoken to as an adult, but since he didn't know how to respond to the honor, equally embarrassed.
"Can't you talk?" she said. "Do you like them or hot?" "Yes."
"We got a word out of him!" Elling cried. "That's a start! When strangers come to our place, my kids hide in the John!"
"Well, you're not strangers," she said. "And if he doesn't know how to behave around his uncles, he can sit there like a dunce."
"I know how he feels," Conrad said. "I was the same way once."
"Oh!" she said. "Do you remember the time you saw those nuns? Mama had taken you into town, into the department store, and was looking through the linens and white things. You didn't know it, but the reason she had
you along was to buy you a jacket for your birthday. Two nuns came into the store. You'd never seen a nun in your life, and when you turned around and saw them there, right behind you, you pointed at them and yelled, 'The black ones! The black ones!' Mama was so mortified it's hard to say how much, and I think that's had an effect on my religious life ever since."
She and Elling laughed and Conrad's forehead turned rose-red; then he lowered his eyes. "I didn't know I was supposed to get a jacket," he murmured.
"Talk about being scared!" Elling said. "Remember when we were on the old McGough place, near Dazey, and the folks went out to supper somewhere and left the three of us home alone? We were wondering what we could do without getting into a lot of trouble, as usual, when one of you—why, I think it was you. Alpha—you brought me this book and asked me to read a piece in it, and we all sat down on the couch, like this, except you two were on the either side of me, and I tied into it.
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