by Willa Cather
I didn’t say anything, because there was too much to say. I stood outside the cabin until the gold light went blue and a few stars came out, hardly brighter than the bright sky they twinkled in, and the swallows came flying over us, on their way to their nests in the cliffs. It was the time of day when everything goes home. From habit and from weariness I went in through the door. The kitchen table was spread for supper, I could smell a rabbit stew cooking on the stove. Blake lit the lantern and begged me to eat my supper. I didn’t go into the bunk-room, for I knew the shelves in there were empty. I heard Blake talking to me as you hear people talking when you are asleep.
“Who else would have bought them?” he kept saying. “Folks make a lot of fuss over such things, but they don’t want to pay good money for them.”
When I at last told him that such a thing as selling them had never entered my head, I’m sure he thought I was lying. He reminded me about how we used to talk of getting big money from the Government.
I admitted I’d hoped we’d be paid for our work, and maybe get a bonus of some kind, for our discovery. “But I never thought of selling them, because they weren’t mine to sell—nor yours! They belonged to this country, to the State, and to all the people. They belonged to boys like you and me, that have no other ancestors to inherit from. You’ve gone and sold them to a country that’s got plenty of relics of its own. You’ve gone and sold your country’s secrets, like Dreyfus.”
“That man was innocent. It was a frame-up,” Blake murmured. It was a point he would never pass up.
“Whether he’s guilty or not, you are! If there was only anybody in Washington I could telegraph to, and have that German held up at the port!”
“That’s just it. If there was anybody in Washington that cared a damn, I wouldn’t have sold ’em. But you pretty well found out there ain’t.”
“We could have kept them, then,” I told him. “I’ve got a strong back. I’m not so poor that I have to sell the pots and pans that belonged to my poor grandmothers a thousand years ago. I made all my plans on the train, coming back.” (It was a lie, I hadn’t.) “I meant to get a job on the railroad and keep our find right here, and come back to it when I had a lay-off. I think a lot more of it now than before I went to Washington. And after a while, when that Exposition is over and the Smithsonian people get home, they would come out here all right. I’ve learned enough from them so that I could go on with it myself.”
Blake reminded me that I had my way to make in the world, and that I wanted to go to school. “That money’s in the bank this minute, in your name, and you’re going to college on it. You’re not going to be a day-labourer like me. After you’ve got your sheepskin, then you can divide with me.”
“You think I’d touch that money?” I looked squarely at him for the first time. “No more than if you’d stolen it. You made the sale. Get what you can out of it. I want to ask you one question: did you ever think I was digging those things up for what I could sell them for?”
Rodney explained that he knew I cared about the things, and was proud of them, but he’d always supposed I meant to “realize” on them, just as he did, and that it would come to money in the end. “Everything does,” he added.
“If that nice young Frenchman I met had come down here with me, and offered me four million instead of four thousand, I’d have refused him. There never was any question of money with me, where this mesa and its people were concerned. They were something that had been preserved through the ages by a miracle, and handed on to you and me, two poor cow-punchers, rough and ignorant, but I thought we were men enough to keep a trust. I’d as soon have sold my own grandmother as Mother Eve—I’d have sold any living woman first.”
“Save your tears,” said Roddy grimly. “She refused to leave us. She went to the bottom of Black Canyon and carried Hook’s best mule along with her. They had to make her box extra wide, and she crowded Jenny out an inch or so too far from the canyon wall.”
This painful interview went on for hours. I walked up and down the kitchen trying to make Blake understand the kind of value those objects had had for me. Unfortunately, I succeeded. He sat slumping on the bench, his elbows on the table, shading his eyes from the lantern with his hands.
“There’s no need to keep this up,” he said at last. “You’re away out of my depth, but I think I get you. You might have given me some of this Fourth of July talk a little earlier in the game. I didn’t know you valued that stuff any different than anything else a fellow might run on to: a gold mine or a pocket of turquoise.”
“I suppose you gave him my diary along with the rest?”
“No,” said Blake, his voice growing gloomier and darker, “that’s in the Eagle’s Nest, where you hid it. That’s your private property. I supposed I had some share in the relics we dug up—you always spoke of it that way. But I see now I was working for you like a hired man, and while you were away I sold your property.”
I said again it wasn’t mine or his. He took something out of the pocket of his flannel shirt and laid it on the table. I saw it was a bank passbook, with my name on the yellow cover.
“You may as well keep it,” I said. “I’ll never touch it. You had no right to deposit it in my name. The townspeople are sore about the money, and they’ll hold it against me.”
“No they won’t. Can’t you trust me to fix that?”
“I don’t know what I can trust you with, Blake. I don’t know where I’m at with you,” I said.
He got up and began putting on his coat. “Motives don’t count, eh?” he said, his face turned away, as he put his arm into the sleeve.
“They would in anything of our own, between you and me,” I told him. “If it was my money you’d lost gambling, or my girl you’d made free with, we could fight it out, and maybe be friends again. But this is different.”
“I see. You make it clear.” He was quietly stirring around as he spoke. He got his old knapsack off its nail on the wall, opened his trunk and took out some underwear and socks and a couple of shirts. After he had put these into the bag, he slung it over one shoulder, and his canvas water-bag over the other. I let these preparations go on without a word. He went to the cupboard over the stove and put some sticks of chocolate into his pocket, then his pipe and a bag of tobacco. Presently I said he’d break his neck if he tried riding down the trail in the dark.
“I’m not riding the trail,” he replied curtly. “I’m going down the quick way. My horse is grazing in Cow Canyon.”
“I noticed the river’s high. It’s dangerous crossing,” I remarked.
“I got over that way a few days ago. I’m surprised at you, using such common expressions!” he said sarcastically. “Dangerous crossing; it’s painted on signboards all over the world!” He walked out of the cabin without looking back. I followed him to the V-shaped break in the rim rock, hardly larger than a man’s body, where the spliced tree-trunks made a swinging ladder down the face of the cliff. I wanted to protest, but only succeeded in finding fault.
“You’ll catch your knapsack on those forks and come to grief.”
“That’s my look-out.”
By this time my eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness, and I could see Blake quite clearly—the stubborn, crouching set of his shoulders that I used to notice when he first came to Pardee and was drinking all the time. There was an ache in my arms to reach out and detain him, but there was something else that made me absolutely powerless to do so. He stepped down and settled his foot into the first fork. Then he stopped a moment and straightened his pack, buttoned his coat up to the chin, and pulled his hat on tighter. There was always a night draught in the canyon. He gripped the trunk with his hands. “Well,” he said with grim cheerfulness, “here’s luck! And I’m glad it’s you that’s doing this to me, Tom; not me that’s doing it to you.”
His head disappeared below the rim. I could hear the trees creak under his heavy body, and the chains rattle a little at the splicings. I lay down on the ledge a
nd listened. I could hear him for a long way down, and the sounds were comforting to me, though I didn’t realize it. Then the silence closed in. I went to sleep that night hoping I would never waken.
VII
The next morning the whinnying of my saddle-horse in the shed roused me. I took him down to the foot of the trail where I’d left my trunk, and packed my things up to the cabin on his back. I sat up late that night, waiting for Blake, though I knew he wouldn’t come. A few days later I rode into Tarpin for news of him. Bill Hook showed me Roddy’s horse. He had sold him to the barn for sixty dollars. The station-master told me Blake had bought a ticket to Winslow, Arizona. I wired the station-master and the dispatcher at Winslow, but they could give me no information. Father Duchene came along, on his rounds, and I told him the whole story.
He thought Blake would come back sometime, that I’d only miss him if I went out to look for him. He advised me to stay on the mesa that summer and get ahead with my studies, work up my Spanish grammar and my Latin. He had friends all along the Santa Fé, and he was sure we could catch Blake by advertising in the local papers along the road; Albuquerque, Winslow, Flagstaff, Williams, Los Angeles. After a few days with him, I went back to the mesa to wait.
I’ll never forget the night I got back. I crossed the river an hour before sunset and hobbled my horse in the wide bottom of Cow Canyon. The moon was up, though the sun hadn’t set, and it had that glittering silveriness the early stars have in high altitudes. The heavenly bodies look so much more remote from the bottom of a deep canyon than they do from the level. The climb of the walls helps out the eye, somehow. I lay down on a solitary rock that was like an island in the bottom of the valley, and looked up. The grey sage-brush and the blue-grey rock around me were already in shadow, but high above me the canyon walls were dyed flame-colour with the sunset, and the Cliff City lay in a gold haze against its dark cavern. In a few minutes it, too, was grey, and only the rim rock at the top held the red light. When that was gone, I could still see the copper glow in the piñons along the edge of the top ledges. The arc of sky over the canyon was silvery blue, with its pale yellow moon, and presently stars shivered into it, like crystals dropped into perfectly clear water.
I remember these things, because, in a sense, that was the first night I was ever really on the mesa at all—the first night that all of me was there. This was the first time I ever saw it as a whole. It all came together in my understanding, as a series of experiments do when you begin to see where they are leading. Something had happened in me that made it possible for me to co-ordinate and simplify, and that process, going on in my mind, brought with it great happiness. It was possession. The excitement of my first discovery was a very pale feeling compared to this one. For me the mesa was no longer an adventure, but a religious emotion. I had read of filial piety in the Latin poets, and I knew that was what I felt for this place. It had formerly been mixed up with other motives; but now that they were gone, I had my happiness unalloyed.
What that night began lasted all summer. I stayed on the mesa until November. It was the first time I’d ever studied methodically, or intelligently. I got the better of the Spanish grammar and read the twelve books of the Æneid. I studied in the morning, and in the afternoon I worked at clearing away the mess the German had made in packing—tidying up the ruins to wait another hundred years, maybe, for the right explorer. I can scarcely hope that life will give me another summer like that one. It was my high tide. Every morning, when the sun’s rays first hit the mesa top, while the rest of the world was in shadow, I wakened with the feeling that I had found everything, instead of having lost everything. Nothing tired me. Up there alone, a close neighbour to the sun, I seemed to get the solar energy in some direct way. And at night, when I watched it drop down behind the edge of the plain below me, I used to feel that I couldn’t have borne another hour of that consuming light, that I was full to the brim, and needed dark and sleep.
All that summer, I never went up to the Eagle’s Nest to get my diary—indeed, it’s probably there yet. I didn’t feel the need of that record. It would have been going backward. I didn’t want to go back and unravel things step by step. Perhaps I was afraid that I would lose the whole in the parts. At any rate, I didn’t go for my record.
During those months I didn’t worry much about poor Roddy. I told myself the advertisements would surely get him—I knew his habit of reading newspapers. There are times when one’s vitality is too high to be clouded, too elastic to stay down. Hurrying from my cabin in the morning to the spot in the Cliff City where I studied under a cedar, I used to be frightened at my own heartlessness. But the feel of the narrow moccasin-worn trail in the flat rock made my feet glad, like a good taste in the mouth, and I’d forget all about Blake without knowing it. I found I was reading too fast; so I began to commit long passages of Virgil to memory—if it hadn’t been for that, I might have forgotten how to use my voice, or gone to talking to myself. When I look into the Æneid now, I can always see two pictures: the one on the page, and another behind that: blue and purple rocks and yellow-green piñons with flat tops, little clustered houses clinging together for protection, a rude tower rising in their midst, rising strong, with calmness and courage—behind it a dark grotto, in its depths a crystal spring.
Happiness is something one can’t explain. You must take my word for it. Troubles enough came afterward, but there was that summer, high and blue, a life in itself.
Next winter I went back to Pardee and stayed with the O’Briens again, working on the section and studying with Father Duchene and trying to get some word of Blake. Now that I was back on the railroad, I thought I couldn’t fail to find him. I went out to Winslow and to Williams, and I questioned the railroad men. We advertised for him in every possible way, had all the Santa Fé operatives and the police and the Catholic missionaries on the watch for him, offered a thousand dollars reward for whoever found him. But it came to nothing. Father Duchene and our friends down there are still looking. But the older I grow, the more I understand what it was I did that night on the mesa. Anyone who requites faith and friendship as I did, will have to pay for it. I’m not very sanguine about good fortune for myself. I’ll be called to account when I least expect it.
In the spring, just a year after I quarrelled with Roddy, I landed here and walked into your garden, and the rest you know.
Willa Cather’s Unfinished Avignon Story an article by George N. Kates
Not yet enough noticed in the career of a “classic” writer like Willa Cather, whose reputation rests—with justice—on her discovery for American letters of regions like Nebraska, is the increasing and finally dominant pull that Europe exerted upon her. It can be traced from the very beginning of her long career; it impregnates the whole body of her work. When for her, about 1922, in a period of internal strain “the world broke in two,” there is no doubt upon which half she took her stand. One of the most interesting results of this development, moreover, came in the very last years of her life, a project never completed: to place the setting of a story straight across the world, quite far into the past—leaving America entirely—in the setting of medieval Avignon.
Very little comment has been made in print about the significance of this radical departure. In her old age had Willa Cather played out her interest in the field where she had conquered her fame? Was she moving, very late, even farther into one to which even in the beginning she had given her loyalty? Many problems are involved, and the situation is complex.
The chief mention of the little that has been published is on page 190 of her friend Edith Lewis’s Willa Cather Living, a most sensitive book, which happily makes good some of our lacks because of the adamant fate that Willa Cather reserved for those of her letters and papers she did not herself destroy. Miss Lewis has chronicled the chief facts with care:
She had wanted for years to write an Avignon story. On her many journeys to the south of France, it was Avignon that left the deepest impression with her. The
Papal Palace at Avignon—seen first when she was a girl—stirred her as no building in the world had ever done. In 1935 we were there together. One day, as we wandered through the great chambers of white, almost translucent stone, alone except for a guide, this young fellow suddenly stopped still in one of the rooms and began to sing, with a beautiful voice. It echoed down the corridors and under the arched ceilings like a great bell sounding—but sounding from some remote past; its vibrations seemed laden, weighted down with the passions of another age—cruelties, spleendours, lost and unimaginable to us in our time.
I have sometimes thought that Willa Cather wished to make her story like this song.
She had brought with her [on a journey in June 1941, six years before her death] to San Francisco Okey’s little history of Avignon; and she often spent her mornings on the open roof garden of the Fairmont, walking to and fro, and reading in this book. It was probably then that she planned the general outline of the Avignon story.
The manuscript, by Willa Cather’s direction, was destroyed after her death; and it is a heavy loss. It had been in her mind to succeed Sapphira and the Slave Girl, of 1940 (her last published work, except for the stories gathered together under the heading of The Old Beauty, which were issued posthumously in 1948); and although these last years became a period of illness and non-productivity, the story’s place at the terminus of the great swing of her development is critical. Did we not know of it by hearsay, the subject matter might never have been anticipated.
