Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey

by William Least Heat-Moon

  Once again, humoring reader, my tale wanders from its path. But then, as Master Tristram Shandy says, “Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, they are the life, the soul of reading: — take them out of this book, for instance, you might as well take the book along with them.” But that was long ago, and my editors believe contemporary readers to be less tolerant, so I’ll return to the story fully mindful, nevertheless, that service to the House of Lords — and to the Anointed Lord Himself — lies quite within this dark matter. Perhaps I should begin there.

  4

  A Poetical History of Satan

  WILLIAM GRAYSTON, born 1862, came with his family soon after the Civil War to near Sparta in Christian County, Missouri, on the edge of the northern Ozarks, about eighty miles east of Joplin. The county took its name not because it was rich with fact-free fundamentalism but rather from a district in Kentucky bearing the surname of a Revolutionary War soldier killed by Indians. That Missouri area, even with its ardent foot-washing Baptists, was a hotbed of vigilantes: at a public hanging, praying over one of them on the scaffold was William’s father, David, an English immigrant stonecutter who made his way west by finding work along the Erie Canal. Once in southern Missouri, David discovered he could outpreach, outwrite, and outdebate any ordinary Methodist, Presbyterian, or Freethinker daring to take him on.

  He wrote “A Poetical History of Satan,” “Poetic Rambles in Search of the Church,” “Millennium,” and The Poetical Bible wherein (if you can imagine it) he set the entire holy writs from Genesis to Revelation into couplets, that least tolerable of rhymes. He and his brother-in-law, B. J. Wrightsman, at someone’s behest, composed “Missouri” and offered it as the official state-song; after a performance in the capitol concluded with an ovation, the tune vanished, except for my copy of the sheet music in Q’s piano bench. From time to time she pulls it out to amuse me with its notably unanthemic melody, although it’s something you could shake a jolly bustle to. As for David Grayston’s Poetical Bible and his history of Old Clootie, I’ve never succeeded in finding those.

  William grew up in a household thick with sermons from a brilliant if aloof father, a man who was (wrote the Joplin Daily Globe in 1901) “a power in shaping both the religious and political destiny of Southeast Missouri.” Young Willie, a handsome boy of acute intellect, took in the religionizing designed more to prove fallacies in other sects than to set forth its own theosophical base interpreting existence. The earthly task of humankind, so he heard repeatedly, was to acquiesce and simply believe; after all, things would be explained later in the beyond. But the presumed superiority of willful incognizance over freedom of inquiry made no sense to him. If a Creator gave intelligence and the power to inquire and discover truths, why would It then insist on beliefs demanding blind faith?

  The boy wondered whether life eternal could be bought with nothing more than a mindless, even uncomprehending, confession of sin preceding a profession of “I believe.” Didn’t such mindlessness make escape from one’s own iniquities easy while minimizing — if not negating — the significance of good works? Could a mass murderer do a confess-and-profess and thereby earn eternal redemption while a freethinking physician who healed thousands would be forever damned? How could such a concept advance humanity? What kind of god would encourage blind faith to trump mercy and generosity? Wasn’t a quest for “personal salvation” the ultimate expression of self-concern?

  Moving gradually away from a religiosity emphasizing iniquity over inquiry, piety over percipience, William learned to orate rather than preach, and as he came into manhood, he found his principles of morality and ethics, of social justice and public duty, residing far more in humanity itself than in deity. If such a thing as heavenly redemption existed, it would not be through a declaration of belief that can evaporate in a moment — it would be through kindly works which can long remain markers of one’s life. He began to comprehend the greater challenge — and risks — in bringing people to reason rather than merely to belief. For him, the way to a better life for all was to be discovered through the light of examination rather than through unquestioning faith. His means were inductive thought and scientific method. As his father would later sadly write of his son:

  Darwin and Spencer his guide

  Instead of Jesus crucified.

  Young Grayston wasn’t afraid of the demanding effort of seeking a spirituality based not on supposition, strictures, credulity, and dogmatized opinion but rather upon a close reasoning leading to consequent service to other people. His sacred texts became the writings of Thomas Huxley and Charles Darwin and especially Herbert Spencer (“struggle for existence,” “survival of the fittest”). In 1901 the Globe was to write of William: “He knew as much about the contents of On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man as anyone in the state of Missouri perhaps. . . . No phase of either physical science or speculative thought escaped his attention.”

  Grayston was a man in search of evidence wherever it lay, and that led him into law after finding a congenial example in attorney and orator Robert Ingersoll of New York, another preacher’s son whose freethinking, rationalistic speeches — “Why I Am an Agnostic,” “Some Mistakes of Moses,” “Superstition” — may have kept him from running for the Presidency. (Or maybe it was quips like “With soap, baptism is a good thing.”)

  The relation between the son and his biblically doctrinaire father grew strained, especially so when Will went westward to the new colony of Freethinkers in Liberal, Missouri, thirty miles north of Joplin. For a short spell, at age twenty-three he became the principal of the school soon to grow into Free Thought University in (said opponents) “a godless town” having neither churches nor saloons, where the freethinking residents said they kept “one foot upon the neck of priestcraft and the other upon the rock of truth.” In Universal Mental Liberty Hall, Will listened to or lectured or debated all who came: scientists, Baptists, atheists, Jews, deists, Catholics, or anyone else of capable mind willing to observe the lone rule of maintaining “respectable decorum.”

  Such a place, of course, drew the ire — if not fear — of certain intolerant Christians who could see it only as “a practical experiment in Infidelity” and who condemned and cursed anyone associated with it. (On the day Q and I visited Liberal — population seven hundred, about the same as it was in Grayston’s day — the major change since then, as far as I could determine, was there were now only two “liberals” anywhere about and, according to certain laws of physics, the pair of them departed town at the same moment and in the same vehicle as did we.)

  Soon after the founder of Liberal and Free Thought University abandoned inductive process and descended into spiritualism, Grayston returned to his home area near Springfield where he married and became the father of Gertrude who bore her sire’s intellect but not his internal strength. (I name her because she will appear again in this story.) After the birth of a second child, Herbert (for philosopher Spencer), the mother struggled with what appears to have been postpartum depression exacerbated by the death of little Herbert in infancy.

  William and Molly Grayston with daughter, Gertrude, Springfield, Missouri, 1889 . An observant reader may see in this and the following two photographs of calmly posed people, forever locked safely within the old frames, an appearance of orderly lives showing no hint of the unfathomable madness that can afflict a human existence in the click of a cosmic shutter.

  The marriage collapsed after four years, and Grayston was granted a divorce. His petition says:

  [Plaintiff] faithfully demeaned himself and discharged all his duties as the husband of defendant and at all times treated her with kindness and affection, but that defendant, wholly disregarding her duties as wife of the plaintiff, has during the greater part of said married life, abused, wronged, and mistreated the plaintiff in various ways by calling him vile names and applying to him opprobrious epithets.

  The mother, as was then the nearly unbroken practice, retained custody of Gertrude.
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  Having prevailed in the divorce but lost his daughter, his wife, and his home, Grayston left Springfield and his law practice for two years of roaming the Ozark Mountains of northern Arkansas, supporting himself by writing newspaper dispatches about the metallurgical resources being discovered there.

  When his mind cleared, William returned to law and moved to Joplin in 1892, just ahead of its second mineral boom. He was an outsider and a Freethinker in a religiously conservative region, yet he became a respected stump-speaker for selected Democratic candidates, and he spoke on behalf of both the Law and Order League and the Anti-Saloon League. He espoused certain early Spencerian notions of evolutionary social progress (“A people’s condition may be judged by the treatment which women receive under it”). He supported the early positions of William Jennings Bryan, long before the Great Commoner’s descent into simplistic antievolutionary views. (As geologists began reading the ancient fossil records, Bryan later said, “It’s better to trust in the Rock of Ages than know the ages of rocks.”)

  Less admired by Grayston were Joplin men like Thomas Connor, an illiterate Irish-immigrant saloon keeper down at the state-line settlement of Seneca (“Hell on the Border”) who purchased at a dime on the dollar six-hundred acres that proved to be rich mineral lands he quickly leased to eastern companies. Through a good investment and blind good luck, Connor became the first millionaire in Joplin and got the attendant title of “First Citizen.” Shrewd enough thereafter not to rely on luck, he bought the local waterworks and the Joplin Hotel which he subsequently would raze to build on the same site a monument to his own name, the luxurious, eight-storey Connor Hotel. He died just before its completion. Years later, in 1978, on the very morning before it was to be imploded to make way for the public library where I sat reading about it, the hotel, as if anathematized, suddenly collapsed on its own accord, killing a worker at that accursed intersection of Fourth and Main.

  Unlike old Tom Connor, Grayston had no spare dimes and his luck may have been blind but it wasn’t good. Instead, he had only a remarkably relentless curiosity always in pursuit of reason, a mind driven by the conviction that evolution could be shaped to benefit humanity. (Spencer: “All is well since all grows better.”) Grayston’s capacity to be disturbed by public vice and corruption was unsurpassed in Joplin, and his stump speeches and lectures and his flow of words endeared him to some while making him a vexing pariah among the town fathers, those men of secret-handshake societies, those eating aged porterhouse steaks while cutting deals with figures written on the white tablecloths of the House of Lords. Grayston’s success in persuasion made him a man to be watched, because he could prove dangerous.

  William Grayston, 1896.

  His looks, his impassioned speeches, even the sense of danger surrounding him, drew glances from a petite blonde, a seventeen-year-old “of remarkable beauty widely known as the Belle of Joplin.” (Quotations, except where I note otherwise, come from 1901 and 1902 issues of Jasper County newspapers.) Although her family was of less than modest means, she was the niece of a recent Lieutenant Governor and the daughter of a former Joplin fire chief. Her name was Pearl Payton.

  Almost exactly twice her age, William married Pearl five months after they were introduced, and ten months after the marriage, she gave birth to a daughter. Although Grayston was prominent for his public speaking, his law practice was not sufficient for the family to have its own home, so they moved into the cramped Payton boardinghouse run by Pearl’s mother. There, after a year, marital deteriorations began between William and Pearl, each unfathomable to the other.

  As Grayston’s dashing mystery faded for his wife, she was left only with what was truly remarkable about him: an individualistic mind happy to explain the usefulness and implicit morality of truths discovered through scientific method. He spoke about the justness of pensions for miners’ widows and about the ways universal suffrage was in accordance with social evolutions necessarily carrying requisite dissolutions; he showed her distinctions between credence and reason, superstition and demonstrable evidence. He pointed out how civic criminality aborts democracy, and he asked her ideas on why liberty and happiness did not always proceed from the pursuit of the public weal. He suggested, were a Heaven to exist, it likely would have to be of human creation. He, if selectively, quoted Spencer: “The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.”

  But to Pearl, William might as well have been speaking Bantu; she grasped his mind as a queen bee does the mind of the beekeeper. And he too was baffled. One night, after their third separation, he wrote his father:

  I lay in bed, . . . thinking as to how it was that my wife, who I knew and felt was one of the sweetest and best meaning little girls in all this world; how it was that the things that made me shudder did not even interest her, but failing to impress her as they did me she seemed to think I was only irritable, and kindly asked me not to think ahead and borrow trouble, but just to go along and let the world run as it wants to run. Her words sounded as if flowing from an inexhaustible fountain of kindness and good will, and my heart ached from the depth of the same feelings for our daughter’s welfare; but oh! how differently we looked at things! I wondered and wondered, “Why is it we look at things so differently?”

  On his business trips, Grayston frequently carried along their little daughter, and he read to her and tried to explain the world by looking at facts and evidence; what he could not be to his first daughter, he tried to be to his second. During his absence, the young mother seemed satisfied to be unencumbered by the demands of a four-year-old and unaffected by gossip about how she longed to make up for a youth too soon given up.

  After the first brief separation and reunion, William began to believe their life might be better in a city where he wouldn’t be a notable nonconformist at odds with the temper of the town; where he wouldn’t be a Freethinker in perpetual contest with the mining and commercial factions of the knights and fellows of loyal and ancient clandestine orders running Joplin. A man with such auspicious promise surely could make a more significant social contribution if the eternal struggle to create open minds and generous hearts could be taken beyond lesser issues of booze and keno and doxies. Wouldn’t Kansas City or St. Louis be a better place for his family, his practice, and the quest for social justice? In the spring of 1900 he crossed the state, his little girl with him, to stay with his sister while he looked for ground for a new life in St. Louis. He was gone seven weeks.

  Returning to Joplin and the pinched room in the Payton boardinghouse, William had scarcely set down his luggage and laid out gifts for Pearl before she told him about her divorce petition alleging an “impossibility of compatibility” and claiming his travels to find the family a new home constituted nonsupport.

  He was thunderstruck. How could that happen? Where had such a decision come from? Yes, Herbert Spencer said evolution must be accompanied by dissolutions, but such a turn of events seemed beyond Spencerian reasoning. Once again, he had to leave the house. He rented a dollar-a-night room in the Forney Hotel downtown, not far from his Main Street law office now shared with his younger brother and new partner, George.

  Attorney and believer in inductive method, seeker of evidence, William began investigating the source of Pearl’s action. As he took down depositions, he narrowed the circle of influence on her, then reduced it again until at last it pointed to a single source: the roomer down the hall, the big and well-dressed man, he of dark hair and eyes, the black-mustached widower six years younger than William, a migratory man whom Grayston himself had brought into the boardinghouse after learning the fellow, president and superintendent of the Joplin Waterworks, was looking to move from his twenty-dollar-a-week lodging to something cheaper. Although a comparative newcomer from New York City, he wasn’t needy by any means, yet for some reason he took Payton’s eight-dollar-a-week room in East Joplin, across the tracks of the Kansas City Southern Railway.

  That peculiarly minim
al twelve-buck difference doesn’t seem to have been William’s first clue to Pearl’s behavior, yet he couldn’t have been unaware of rumors the widower was sweet on Mrs. Grayston. But the second clue was, you could say, conclusive: the man paying for Pearl’s divorce petition was the lodger himself, Superintendent George Grant Bayne, and the attorney representing her was Bayne’s lodge brother, Thomas Dolan, whom William had faced off against in court on several heated occasions, a man, like Bayne, with more influential connections than genuine friends.

  Grayston told Bayne to get out of the Payton home, but the superintendent refused, as he also refused to address any questions about Pearl’s petition. On several occasions, William told the footloose Bayne to move until eventually he was telling him not just to leave the house but to leave town. Each time, Bayne’s answer was silence.

  Gossip increased: how Bayne and the Belle of Joplin had been seen hugging and kissing near the window of his room in the Payton home; how they’d been spotted riding snuggled in a buggy over in Byersville. Hardly anyone questioned why a man of means and position would remain in the humble boardinghouse, because every gossip knew the reason was to stay close to Pearl.

  The only change the superintendent made was to begin carrying a hammerless .38-caliber Smith & Wesson, a pocketable revolver made for the sole purpose of killing a man. Later, Bayne alleged he took up the pistol only after William told him to get out of Joplin or he’d “shoot him down like a yellow dog.” Grayston, a member of the Law and Order League, owned no weapons.