Prometheus Fit To Be Tied

by Paul Hawkins

  Sara was already ready to go. "You won't need that hat," she said. "Up in the air, you'll need this." She tossed him a leather helmet with goggles built in. Mr. White looked at it. It was old and sweat-stained.

  "Come on!" she said. "Hop in!"

  He cringed but put it on. He climbed into the passenger seat and put his bag behind his feet and held his hat in his lap. He felt the plane rumble and shake to life beneath him. It began rolling forward and he cinched his seatbelt tighter.

  In seconds they were hurtling toward a stand of trees at breakneck speed then they pulled up at the last second and launched into the air. Mr. White looked backward at the airstrip, and his farm, then the entire town diminishing below. They took off into the south wind but now doubled back, higher, and White could see the river like a splayed dark salamander, damp and glistening amongst the hills. He could see clean bright buildings following the main street, and older, darker structures hugging to the railroad and the river and then hiding themselves beneath the cover of the woods.

  "You can see where bulldozers have been razing towns," she called back over her shoulder, "Preparing the body of the lake."

  White nodded. He looked down and tried to spot the farm of one or another family he had known as a boy, waiting to be flooded by the turquoise playground. Births and deaths and children nursed, tears and ailments, triumphs and weddings and love and remorse, all in the valley. Several towns had grown up along the river over the years, hugging its banks in the early days of traders and later giving way to farmers and industry. But the valley was prone to flooding and every community had its stories of tragedy.

  He dozed as green and dun countryside became ubiquitous beneath him. He felt his head droop and sat up with a start that jolted one certificate free from his jacket pocket. The little document got captured by the breeze and floated down, down, down, a tiny fleck of gold; thousands of feet below, an empty field or grazing cow was blessed with worth a small fortune in Standard Oil.

  "Hang on to yourself!" Sara shouted.

  Mr. White agreed. He stayed awake after that.

  In less than an hour he felt the plane beginning to descend. His ears popped and he craned his head over the side to see the yellow-and-green squares of corn fields, divided by the dark brown lines of dirt roads.

  They arrived at an airstrip that was little more than a closely-mowed field and were met by a farmer who took them to a hospital like a small brick schoolhouse, all mint-green and antiseptic inside. An efficient nurse led them to the Professor's room. The Professor wore a white striped gown and sat up in a bed partly raised. A tray of breakfast, hardly-eaten, had been pushed aside.

  He was looking out a window. When he noticed Ernest and Sara come in he reached to a side table and picked up his glasses. As he put them on his small eyes blinked to owlish life.

  "Ernest, hello! It's good of you to come. Some things have changed since I last saw Sara. That nephew of mine won't hear of taking money to get his papers. He said it would only go into the pockets of the party – it would only reward them."

  Ernest frowned. "He's young and foolish – tell him to be practical and get the hell out of there."

  The Professor blinked at him. "Do you know what he did that got him in all this trouble? He tried to rescue an old man some youth were beating up. They accused the man of being a priest, of having worked in a church school that taught something other than the Nazi paganism. And because my nephew defended him they want to kill him. But he's young and he wants to fight."

  "Then he's naive – he's a fool."

  The Professor looked at him with his clear grey eyes made large by thick lenses, and his lids drooped. "Do you know him, Ernest? A fool is the last thing I'd call him. But when no one else will fight, what can he do?"

  "He'll die."

  "The young put the old to shame. It's the old who are hiring the young to be their murderers and thieves in this coming war., but the young resist. The young are always being pressed to bear the miseries the old have brought into the world."

  "Come back to my house with me to rest, Professor."

  But the Professor had worked himself into a flush of emotion. "The world is waiting to give birth to the World, and all the tyrants fight to forestall it. Vanity is the sin of the living against those yet to be born, and the tyrants would kill the new world in its infancy to love their own reflection one more day."

  "Now you're talking like I used to. You need to rest."

  The old man leaned back in his bed and breathed deeply. "I am going back East, Ernest. There may be something I can do at one of those journals of intelligentsia that we liked to mock. Maybe for every thousand ideas that sprout and fade there may be one that will help us be better midwives for the world, to teach the old how not to ruin it for the young. In this coming war, Ernest, we are seeing the fruit of our own selfishness, the dark mirror of our lives of excess."

  Mr. White looked at him.

  "I've made up my mind, Ernest," the Professor said.

  Ernest looked at him. "Then I'll give you some time alone with Sara," he said and left the room.

  He sat in a peptic waiting room for a half hour, hearing here and there the noises from elsewhere in this hospital – hushed voices and little cries and hurried feet coming and going. Finally Sara's head popped around the corner.

  "The Professor's asked me to stay at his bedside tonight, to help him make arrangements. If you like, I can make arrangements for you at the town's hotel..."

  "No thank you. I can take the train home," Ernest said. He rose and picked up his small bag and excused himself.

  He found the town's depot and before long he was on a train heading slowly back to Blaze. He nodded off and imagined himself flying back with Sara, throwing documents and certificates out from the plane and seeing them float down, down, each one a golden snowflake getting brighter as it got closer to the earth.

  He woke with a start. A conductor was poking him gently on the shoulder. "Progress – end of the line," he said.

  Mr. White sat up and stared out the window bleary-eyed for a second. "Progress?"

  "You know – Blaze."

  White snorted, but the conductor reasserted his composure with a tug on his blue jacket.

  Back home at night he took a small key that Otto had found in the bottom a box of White’s father’s books. White looked at it and reckoned he knew what it was for. He took it and turned it in a stuck drawer of the desk in his father's old office. It turned with just a catch but then gave way, and then he pulled open the drawer. Inside was a small box and a file folder. The box he immediately recognized as the mechanical bird he had found years ago as a boy, when he'd decided to snoop in the attic. It was smaller than he remembered, and it had tarnished, but it was still a beautiful thing. He turned the key on its underside several times then set it on the desk. Its metal wings fluttered and rustled and it began softly chirruping its melody, and the jeweled eye cocked at him as if to say that it remembered him and look at us now, both tarnished but intact.

  Then he opened the folder. In it were old pages of notes in Isaiah White's hand, and one in particular that was addressed to him. He took these with him out to his office in the field. Moonlight and cool breezes poured down around him. Once in the shed he kicked down two of the walls Otto had tacked up, and night air coursed through once more. Then he lit his small lamp and read the notes.

   

  My brother Chris and I had moved to this country from Indiana. My brother and I were young and wanted a new start. He had a very strong sense of ambition, and I was separated from a young pregnant wife because I needed to find the money to support her.

  In my self-pity of being away from her I fell temptation to my loneliness but immediately after felt the depth of my shame and my act’s consequence. My wife wondered why I did not initiate correspondence, and why I answered her effusive letters with terse ones.

  My brother Chris tried to keep me grounded, though he was really too light-heart
ed to be good at it. But for Dad’s sake he tried. One night we argued:

  "Dad was right warning you about being too young to marry, Isaiah. You need to become dependable before that wife of yours’ll ever take you back. If you get a girl pregnant you’ve got to be ready to take care of her."

  "That’s enough," I said. "You aren’t Dad and I don’t have to take any lecture from you!" I grabbed my jacket and walked out the door.

  It was a cool dark night and I walked quickly down the alley away from the line of houses and toward the middle of town. I could hear dogs barking and now and then the punctuating laugh of a girl or boy.

  I skirted the town square and plunged through the few blocks of businesses and back out the other side, where the stray houses gave way to empty lanes then finally to one road leading out of town. Here I found an empty feed stall and went to its far side and sat down inside it.

  I took out the picture of my wife. I had gotten a letter from her and my brother hadn’t known it. She had miscarried, and in the aftermath she realized she didn’t want anything to do with me. She was beautiful and young and had found the attention of a well-off local man who did not have to leave town to find a way to support her. I read the letter and sank and sank inside myself. I wondered if my brother was right. I wondered if all my life I’d let myself be led around by the bright appetites that sank down through my eyes. I felt the fan-like auras of every color, every smell, every laughing pitch of every girl I’d seen, pour down then flare out inside me.

  I wandered out to the country, to the proximity of an older, wealthy farmer who, in a jovial banter, had once said he could always use a new, strong hand like me. I had demurred, feeling it was beneath me, wanting to be in business for myself. But now I fell asleep in a corn crib out beyond town and woke early the next day with the sun pouring in my face. I was achy and hungry. I got up and walked out into the country. I followed the dirt road and as noon came I sat down beneath a copse of trees and had a drink from the stream they skirted, and splashed the water in my face. I followed the road steadily inclining through yellow fields until I saw the stern gray house of the landowner up on a hill, and I walked up to it and knocked on the door.

  A well-dressed colored servant answered and looked me over disdainfully, and I told him of the tenuous job offer I’d had from the man. A crew boss of the man’s was eventually summoned and looked me over and then made me an offer than was far lower than I’d expected, but I took it. And I worked for the man for five years while others left him, perseverant while the man sickened and those he trusted swindled him, and I always worked hard and never cheated him and never asked for anything, and I became a confidant and sycophant in the old man’s miseries. He shared them with me, picked them over for harsh moral lessons, framed them in the history of his life of lapses and indiscretions and indulgences. I grew in his favor and was offered the opportunity to buy the house when the old man died, and I took a wife. Later I took you in, my brother’ son, out of a sense of duty, and I kept my eye over the soil and watered it with my sweat and a perception of my hardships and sacrifices and my own perceived offerings to fate for what I had done to my first wife and what it had cost me, and at first it was an offering out of hope for forgiveness and recompense, but soon I became nothing but a machine and forgot to keep an eye on the skies or an understanding of why I had turned myself into a slave.

  My stern face fronted you, though I kept my eye in my mind fixed on an image of the man the boy would be if I were yielding, if I were weak like and let myself be susceptible to a world rife with temptations and casual insinuating modes of destruction. And yet, if I could say one thing to you, it would be to not forget to keep an eye raised.

   

  Mr. White heard a noise off in the woods and found the tall woman with chestnut curls and beautiful angular face and light brown eyes, loving and waiting for him, and he knew he was asleep but did not care.

  *

  At their meeting discussing community issues, Constance approached Otto during a break. He was glad that she did. They had sat at opposite ends of a long table in a side room of the town hall with several gray-headed men between them. The men loved to argue and could quote the minutiae of the town ordinances by chapter and verse. Each time Otto looked up at Constance she was bent studiously over the meeting minutes just like the rest of them, but he thought he had almost but not quite caught her looking at him. This made it hard for him to focus.

  Finally at the first break she had come up to him. "You've suggested several good ideas," she said.

  "I don't know. I feel in over my head when I hear the rest of them argue their points in such detail, and with such a sense of history."

  "I think they respect what you have brought to the discussion. Sometimes it takes an outsider, with a fresh point of view, to give us a perspective on how to improve things. They have their way of hashing things out, but trust me, they are very impressed with you."

  Otto blushed. "I just say what occurs to me as I think over these issues. I guess it's just my analytical mind. It’s all well and good to argue about problems, but I’m more concerned with how to fix them."

  "You know, I think you could go far in what they’re calling the ‘new economy’. My father's been involved in it, and he likes to bounce ideas off me at night, while he sits in his armchair and reads about the doings in his Washington periodicals and jabs the stem of his pipe at phantoms in the air. It's a sort of politics of economic problem-solving, if there ever was one. He was involved in the state's agricultural reforms and was actually invited to be one of FDR's braintrust men in Washington. He tried it for a while but came home – he said there's big plans and great possibilities, but it's a young man's game. But the right man could have a great career."

  She looked at him. "I know some people you might want to talk to. They are looking for men with sound judgment and some forthrightness and ambition. There'll be countless opportunities for advancement for a man who can get himself connected."

  Otto felt himself soften like a pad of butter on warm toast. "Well, I am interested in what's best for this country. If you think I ought to speak with them, Constance, I'll do so."

  "I’d like you to," she said.

  He smiled broadly and thought of himself having discussions long into the night with her old man, both of them men of vision, both of them wearing smoking jackets and sitting in red velvet chairs, both championing the future and adoring Constance in different ways, as father and husband, as patriots and visionaries and equals.

  *

  "Birchola – that's a pretty name," the voice said.

  "They named me after a cola," she replied, bent over and wiping the counter, her straight dark hair drooping.

  Mr. White stood in the drugstore behind a stand of greeting cards and stationery and overheard their conversation. He peered at them in between the rows. A young man in a yellow suit sat back on a soda counter stool and fiddled with a toothpick. His eyes were like big brown cupcakes. He travelled a route of small-to-semi-small rural communities encouraging pharmacists to sell and prominently display tins of pills.

  "My folks named me Birchola 'cause they say brand names are the patron saints of our age – the names we invoke when we gotta know who we are."

  "They think too much, doan they?" he asked, idly spinning one small tin.

  "Uhm hm. Momma got depressed after prohibition was won and daddy swooped in and give her a cause and a vision. He embraces the future – he's an industrial artist. Hell, even our toilet is a work of art – part rocket, part crapper. He designed it. It flushes like a cannon."

  "So he aint a farmer?"

  "Hell no. I live here with my aunt, and he and mom live in St. Louis. He's well-known to folks you've never heard of. Every few years he trots out a piddlin work of art and a big ol theory behind it, talks at some salons, then comes home funded for a year or two. And mama expounds the practical and social aspects of his theories in magazines only a few folks have ever heard of.
She's his Mrs. John Dewey – they're a pair."

  "So why are you here?"

  "I embarrass the heck out of them. My aunt told them she'd straighten me out but I think she felt sorry for me being raised by them. She and I have a tacit agreement that after I finish high school I can run away. I help her gather eggs in the morning."

  "Why aint you run away already?"

  "Aint nothing attracted me yet." Her eyelids just barely showed some dark pupil beneath them.

  He frowned. "I reckon you got your pap's grand vision and aint nothin good enough for you."

  "Sumpin' like that."

  "Your pappy all artsy like this Mr. White fella?"

  "Naw, White's old-timey. Even me and my pop agree on that. He’s got big ideas but he aint grounded. Couldn't transfer his notions down to the crapper level if he tried."

  "I reckon not. Say, you going to this fair he's putting at this dam ceremony? There's gonna be good food."

  "I seldom say no if someone's dumb enough to foot the bill."

  "So you'll go to the doings with me?"

  "All right," she said. "Just don't talk my ear off. I already let on I like you, so aint no need for the hard sale."

  "Okay." He thought she was beautiful and that she didn't even know it. Or maybe she did. Hell, of course she did.

  "So git along then," she drawled indifferently. "The boss glimpses me socializing and I'm fired. Then my aunt won't let me help with the chickens."

  The salesman raised his hat to his head. He exited the drugstore and walked away out of view of its window and leaned against his old jalopy and fanned himself with his hat. She was something.

  Mr. White came out from behind the card aisle and looked at Birchola. He remembered her from Maye Weather's party. She was the same surly figure as before.

  "I couldn't help hearing that your father's an artist."

  Birchola looked at him sullenly and made her face as dull as possible. "I don't believe in his art – `course I don't believe in the Bible, neither. I once seen a man in a switch yard get crushed like a bug between two train cars. Neither art nor the Bible helped him none."

  "You'd be a fool to put in time with that salesman."

  She turned and glared at him. "Who are you, my aunt? What I do is my own business."