Near my stool is an empty number-ten green bean can used as a spittoon, and at my elbow the cue-chalk jug holds a twenty dollar bill a customer has left for a pool stick when the salesman next comes around. In various places are gallon jars of brined things—turkey gizzards, sausages, eggs, dill pickles, jalapeño peppers—and there’s also a large bottle of Tabasco; after five o’clock, other than the corner grocery and the quick-stop that hasn’t yet opened, these jars hold the only food for sale in town. I’ve been in the cold wind most of the day, and I’m happy enough to order a paper towel of pickled gizzards, which I slice with my pocketknife. I have a glass of three-point-two malt beverage, called beer in Kansas: I’ve not developed a taste for something known as a red one, beer mixed with a slug of tomato juice so there’s something to taste. (Still, I should be grateful: Kansas, forever long on temperance, once banned even near beer, and the last commercial brewer in the state, John Walruff of Lawrence, peddled his beer as a health beverage called Celebrated Stomach Invigorator.) Darla sells no wine or hard liquor. The three pool tables are idle and so is the domino table and also the men’s toilet, the door always remaining open (unless a stranger goes in), a useful practice, since the three-point-two beer makes for soddenness before drunkenness. After dark, the peeing behind pickup trucks on Broadway that so annoys some of the citizens is really a problem of mathematics: one toilet plus twenty imbibers times three-point-two equals outside.
I am copying down a hand-lettered sign posted by the blackboard:
WANTED: SET OF COMFERTABLE KITCHEN CHAIRS
WOULD PERFER SET OF SIX
WILL SETTLE FOR FOR.
Feigning concentration, I then copy down a few figures from the Annual Report, and later a headline on the major front-page story in the Leader:
JANITOR APPLICANTS INTERVIEWED.
A fellow with two silvery teeth alternating with two missing ones that give his smile the look of a ’49 Buick grille says to a middle-aged woman who taunts him (and I write it down while looking at the Report), Be nice to me or I’ll date your daughter, and she says, after having gotten the words straight, You’re so dumb, if you fell in a barrel of tits you’d come up sucking your thumb, and he, You’re so ugly we’re all hoping that wind don’t blow off your clothes. In fact, the woman is fair of face and a wind is more likely to blow the hide off a heifer, her cowboy shirt and denims fitting as they do: what could be soft folds and drapings are creases like blades. She says, At least I ain’t so ugly I got to tie a bandanna over Old Paint’s eyes fore I get on.
The people listening are attentive not so much to the memorized put-downs as to the possibility of real friction, but it stops there. They all have known one another for years, and they keep their ripostes to whiskered raillery and corn, covers that nevertheless express irritations and yet do not bring to light truly poisonous things they know about each other. The mutual protections are as genuine as the subsumed hostilities, with more ragging than real ridicule, yet all of them—except me, the unknown outsider—sit on a land mine another person can detonate at any moment, even though they are more likely to come to blows, knowing the child’s chestnut about sticks and stones is opposite actuality: their learning this comity is the first lesson of survival in the village. The result is laughter with little joy, and the shoes of every citizen carry old and unseen pebbles that make each countian, in his own way, limp along privately.
A fellow comes in and says, referring to the courthouse clock still stopped at four-forty, I don’t drink until after five, but I can’t wait another year, and someone grouses, I’m gonna climb up and move that damn clock hand myself just so he’ll quit saying that, and the other in self-defense, You can’t drive a dry cow over a creek. I’m writing these things down while cagily noting Report figures on swine production when the bartender steps up and thrusts his dentures as if pointing at me: The owner says it’s okay if you mark things down. I called him and told him what you was doing and he says you’re likely that book guy. Several people turn to watch, and I can think of nothing to do other than order another draft of Stomach Invigorator. A man who wears a big trophy belt buckle that says WILD BULLCUTTIN’ comes over: I’ll give you something to mark down, and this is truth. A guy here decided to raise bullfrogs for the supper table, and he was going to start with a dozen he’d catch. He got to figuring how they breed, and, before you knew it, he was titty-deep in frogs. He was going to have so many when he went to truck them out the police would stop him at the weight station. Now, this guy thinks a little different than you and me. (A woman offers, Like his antenna has fell down.) The man says, I’m telling you the truth. He’s thinking, “If I haul them frogs alive and loose in the truck, all I got to do is watch when the inspector looks at the scale and then give that trailer a whack with a big stick and send all them frogs up in the air, and I can drive on.” The man watches me for a moment, then stubs a thick thumb on my notebook, Mark it down, and I do, and soon interest in my pencil wanes, and I’m just another outsider again, at the edge.
It’s seven o’clock, and a man walks in and stands a bit forlornly at the bar; his eyes are lusterless like old buttons, and, in a phrase I heard yesterday, he’s been around the sun bettern fifty times. His clothes are soiled and shabby. Someone is talking about a good coon hunt, and the forlorn one says to no one in particular, All I ever caught was a limb in the face, and walks out, leaving his beer; he soon returns with a loaf of white bread and a three-pound package of raw hamburger under his arm. He tears open the wrapper and lays a slice on the damp bar, digs his long and blackened nails into the meat, wads it and presses it down on the bread darkened by his hands, sprinkles Tabasco over it, the sandwich now red, white, and black; I’ve seen him do this once before, and I remind him to add the gunpowder. He smiles and lays out another slice, digs his begrimed fingers into the meat, mashes it down on the bread, pushes it to me, and excuses his hands: Had to get into a crankcase today, but I only peed twice. The sandwich is an act of generosity, not a challenge; I’m thinking about it, and the woman who has been taunting the men turns to him and watches in theatrical revolt and says, Nothing worse than raw hamburger unless you’re a dog, and he says, Being dead’s worse, and she, Not in your case, and he looks at me to plead his sanity, and I ask for the jalapeno jar, and the woman watches us bite into the sandwiches and says, Arf-arf. The fellow moves over to sit next to me, I order beers, and he says to the woman, Did you hear about Harold dying from eating mountain oysters? and she looks up in surprise, What! and he, The bull fell over on him, and the men break into laughter at her getting lured into such a hoary joke, and she coughs out a flat-voiced Ha-ha-ha.
We eat, and I think, thank god I’m hungry. Someone tells about a beach party thrown by people who wouldn’t set foot in Darla’s: how, on the sand “greens” of the golf course, they scattered mussel shells from the Cottonwood, strung out an old tennis net, and stuck a mounted fish in it. For much of this evening, conversation has been propelled by an undercurrent of sexuality that occasionally roils the waters: at one point the woman of the filled cowboy shirt attributes her proportions to nightly butter massages of her breasts, and, suddenly, something dangerous breaks the surface, but the bartender quells it with, I use to make my old lady drink goat milk to make her butt better, and someone says, Well, we know now that don’t work.
Later: a man picking his teeth with a pocketknife stops probing to say, They had this mule tied up in the trailer to haul down to Matfield, and Jimmy had been in the corn squeezings. It was at night. Jimmy was a tough old cowboy—cleaned his ears with bob wire. He’d return your strays and steal your wife. So he gets up on the jenny, and they’re going down the road—a rock one—and he yells to the driver, “Speed it up!” and gives the mule his heels, and she set to like you never seen and throwed him plumb over the side, and he come up with the worst case of gravel-rash short of being skinned. They stop at the first farm and ask the old boy if he’s got anything for all them cuts. “Maybe I got a cure for him,” he s
ays. Now, he remembers something about Jimmy—don’t know what, but I’ll bet it was about a woman. Farmer was real polite, and he leads them out to the barn and tells Jimmy to get down to his shorts. It hurts like hell just to pull them jeans off. The farmer says, “This looks like the right stuff for you,” and pours a jug of screw-worm treatment over him. I’m telling you Jimmy was tough, but he run to the horse trough and jumped in, and that cold water hurt just as bad, but he sure got healed up.
The bartender sends packing some boys trying to sneak in a can of beer; the place pauses to watch, and then the hubbub resumes, and a fellow is talking about an absentee landowner, and he says, On three different years, she didn’t like the pasture fees, so she refused to rent anything. For all the acres she owns, that’s almost three quarters of a million dollars she just threw away. The owner is well known in the county and widely disliked, so they defame her parsimony toward hired hands with stories: how, too pinchpenny to buy a hair dryer, she hangs her long gray locks out the window to dry in the summer sun; how to work hard and ask for a raise is to get fired. A bulgy man says, Year or so ago she was up here to see her grass in her goddamn limousine, and they was out in the pasture, and she got out for something and lost a goddamn diamond earring, and so she and her goddamn chauffeur crawl around that pasture, hunting that goddamn earring. Never found it. The listeners do not laugh but nod, for this is proper retribution.
It’s after eleven, and the relative good humor of seven o’clock begins to disappear, and an aura of malevolence begins rising like ground fog. People are straggling out, and a man looking at the crankcase hands of the hamburger fellow says, You look like a nigger backwards: backs of your hands is white but your palms is black, and another man, who had been chided for missing the Catholic soup-supper, says, They was a woman here wanted someone to help with her baby, and all she could find was a mammy, but she worried about her touching the baby until she seen the mammy’s palms was white as snow, and so the mammy got to raise that child.
The noise of departures protects this iniquitous warren of confabulators, and a man says, That mammy’s boys was both murdered in Strong City, and someone else says directly to me, They’s been several niggers killed here that nobody stood trial for, and an old fellow says, No, both them two white boys was tried, and one of them was sent up—the only murder conviction in this county in my life. The first says, The other guy shot the colored boy in the back of the head and got off on self-defense—convinced the jury the guy use to wear his hat backwards. I am thinking, for some reason they want me to know this.
The place goes suddenly quiet with the last door slam, and we all stand locked in the guilt of an evil topic, and nobody knows what to do until a fellow says, using his words to cover his exit, Ed, you better be at that nut fry tomorrow, and Ed hooks himself to those words and gets pulled out the door and calls a bantering farewell that someone else hooks on to, and, like a string of caught fish, they’re all pulled out into the night. I’m standing awkwardly alone. The bartender pushes out his lower plate as if pointing toward the door, and he adjusts his FECES OCCURS hat, and then I’m outside too.
VI
MATFIELD GREEN
From the Commonplace Book:
Matfield Green
The Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round.
—John G. Neihardt,
Black Elk Speaks (1932)
The incomprehensible takes up too much room for any to be left for the improbable.
—Victor Hugo,
The Toilers of the Sea (1866)
We do not ride upon the railroad; it rides upon us. . . . Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them.
—Henry David Thoreau,
Walden (1854)
Track crews lived along and maintained each of the six- to eight-mile sections into which the Santa Fe divided its line. The crew would spend most of its day reinforcing weak roadbeds, tapping down loose pins, replacing worn ties, and clearing the right-of-way of weeds, grass, and debris. The foreman was also responsible for daily inspection of the entire section, meaning that every day, every mile on the system was examined. The section foreman had to be a man of some experience and common sense, but the track laborer needed little skill beyond being able to hit a spike with a hammer. It was universally considered a most inferior and arduous form of labor.
As long as a man was white and not a Chicano, he could engage in any type of railroad work and aspire to advance. . . . The Santa Fe held open its doors for jobs and advancement to men who offered hard work, loyalty, talent—and a white skin.
—James H. Ducker,
Men of the Steel Rails (1983)
November 21, 1913—The Santa Fe was teaching foremen one hundred Spanish words used in track-laying and construction work so they could give orders to Mexican laborers.
—Jennie Small Owen,
The Annals of Kansas: 1886–1925 (1956)
Tradition says a railroad is only as good as its track, and in this the Santa Fe is supreme.
—Merle Armitage,
Operations Santa Fe (1948)
Within the prairie the conditions of life are severe. . . . After thousands of years, the species have adjusted to the environment. The plants, with few exceptions, are remarkably free from disease, regardless of weather, and are little injured by high winds or extreme heat. They may be harmed by late freezing or—infrequently—be stripped of their leaves and battered to the ground by hail, but they rarely or never are killed. Those that were unfit have disappeared.
—John Ernest Weaver,
Prairie Plants and Their Environment (1968)
During recent years we have heard much about the great and rapid changes now going on in the plants and animals of all the temperate regions of the globe colonized by Europeans. These changes, if taken merely as evidence of material progress, must be a matter of rejoicing to those who are satisfied, and more than satisfied, with our system of civilization, our method of outwitting Nature by the removal of all checks on the undue increase of our own species. To one who finds a charm in things as they exist in the unconquered provinces of Nature’s dominions, and who, not being over-anxious to reach the end of his journey, is content to perform it on horseback or in a wagon drawn by bullocks, it is permissible to lament the altered aspect of the earth’s surface, together with the disappearance of numberless noble and beautiful forms, both of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. For he cannot find it in his heart to love the forms by which they are replaced; these are cultivated and domesticated and have only become useful to man at the cost of that grace and spirit which freedom and wildness give.
—W. H. Hudson,
The Naturalist in La Plata (1892)
The people of the European race in coming into the New World have not really sought to make friends of the native population, or to make adequate use of the plants or the animals indigenous to this continent, but rather to exterminate everything found here and to supplant it with the plants and animals to which they were accustomed at home.
—Melvin Gilmore,
Uses of Plants by the Indians of
the Missouri River Region (1919)
It comes to pass that farm neighborhoods are good in proportion to the poverty of their floras.
What a thousand acres of compass plant looked like when they tickled the bellies of the buffalo is a question never again to be answered, and perhaps not even asked.
—Aldo Leopold,
A Sand County Almanac (1949)
Man can grow some of the native grasses but he cannot recreate the unique variety of different prairie plants, each kind suited to a particular niche in the prairie. Once gone, replacement of animal life is equally difficult.
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