by Jerry
For a moment he stood there in the grass-grown street, feet in the dust, both hands clutching the curve of his cane, eyes closed.
Through the fog of years he heard the cry of playing children, the barking of Conrad’s yapping pooch from down the street. And there was Adams, stripped to the waist, plying the shovel, scooping out the hole, with the elm tree, roots wrapped in burlap, lying on the lawn.
May, 1946. Forty-four years ago. Just after he and Adams had come home from the war together.
Footsteps padded in the dust and Gramp, startled, opened his eyes.
Before him stood a young man. A man of thirty, perhaps. Maybe a bit less.
“Good morning,” said Gramp.
“I hope,” said the young man, “that I didn’t startle you.”
“You saw me standing here,” asked Gramp, “like a danged fool, with my eyes shut?”
The young man nodded.
“I was remembering,” said Gramp.
“You live around here?”
“Just down the street. The last one in this part of the city.”
“Perhaps you can help me then.”
“Try me,” said Gramp.
The young man stammered. “Well, you see, it’s like this. I’m on a sort of . . . well, you might call it a sentimental pilgrimage—”
“I understand,” said Gramp. “So am I.”
“My name is Adams,” said the young man. “My grandfather used to live around here somewhere. I wonder—”
“Right over there,” said Gramp. Together they stood and stared at the house.
“It was a nice place once,” Gramp told him. “Your granddaddy planted that tree, right after he came home from the war. I was with him when we marched into Berlin. That was a day for you—”
“It’s a pity,” said young Adams. “A pity—”
Cut Gramp didn’t seem to hear him. “Your granddaddy?” he asked. “I seem to have lost track of him.”
“He’s dead,” said young Adams.
“He was messed up with atomic power.” said Gramp.
“That’s right,” said Adams proudly. “He and my Dad got into it early.”
John J. Webster was striding up the broad stone steps of the city hall when the walking scarecrow carrying a rifle under his arm caught up with him and stopped him.
“Howdy, Mr. Webster,” said the scarecrow.
Webster stared, then recognition crinkled his face.
“It’s Levi,” he said. “How are things going, Levi?”
Levi Lewis grinned with snagged teeth. “Fair to middling. Gardens are coming along and the young rabbits are getting to be good eating.”
“You aren’t getting mixed up in any of the hell raising that’s being laid to the houses?” asked Webster.
“No, sir,” declared Levi. “Ain’t none of us Squatters mixed up in any wrongdoing. We’re law-abiding, God-fearing people, we are. Only reason we’re there is we can’t make a living no place else. And us living in them places other people up and left ain’t harming no one. Police are just blaming us for the thievery and other things that’s going on, knowing we can’t protect ourselves. They’re making us the goats.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” said Webster. “The chief wants to burn the houses.”
“If he tries that,” said Levi, “he’ll run against something he ain’t counting on. They run us off our farms with this tank farming of theirs but they ain’t going to run us any farther.”
He spat across the steps. “Wouldn’t happen you might have some jingling money on you?” he asked. “I’m fresh out of cartridges and with them rabbits coming up—”
Webster thrust his fingers into a vest pocket, pulled out a half dollar.
Levi grinned. “That’s obliging of you, Mr. Webster. I’ll bring a mess of squirrels, come fall.”
The Squatter touched his hat with two fingers and retreated down the steps, sun glinting on the rifle barrel. Webster turned up the steps again.
The city council session already was in full swing when he walked into the chamber.
Police Chief Jim Maxwell was standing by the table and Mayor Paul Carter was talking.
“Don’t you think you may be acting a bit hastily, Jim, in urging such a course of action with the houses?”
“No, I don’t,” declared the chief. “Except for a couple of dozen or so, none of those houses are occupied by their rightful owners, or rather, their original owners. Every one of them belongs to the city now through tax forfeiture. And they are nothing but an eyesore and a menace. They have no value. Not even salvage value. Wood? We don’t use wood any more. Plastics are better. Stone? We use steel instead of stone. Not a single one of those houses have any material of marketable value.
“And in the meantime they are becoming the haunts of petty criminals and undesirable elements. Grown up with vegetation as the residential sections are, they make a perfect hideout for all types of criminals. A man commits a crime and heads straight for the houses—once there he’s safe, for I could send a thousand men in there and he could elude them all.
“They aren’t worth the expense of tearing down. And yet they are, if not a menace, at least a nuisance. We should get rid of them and fire is the cheapest, quickest way. We’d use all precautions.”
“What about the legal angle?” asked the mayor.
“I checked into that. A man has a right to destroy his own property in any way he may see fit so long as it endangers no one else’s. The same law, I suppose, would apply to a municipality.”
Alderman Thomas Griffin sprang to his feet.
“You’d alienate a lot of people!” he declared. “You’d be burning down a lot of old homesteads. People still have some sentimental attachments—”
“If they cared for them,” snapped the chief, “why didn’t they pay the taxes and take care of them? Why did they go running off to the country, just leaving the houses standing. Ask Webster here. He can tell you what success he had trying to interest the people in their ancestral homes.”
“You’re talking about that Old Home Week farce,” yelled Griffin. “Webster spread it on so thick they gagged on it. That’s what a Chamber of Commerce mentality always does. People resent having the things they set some store by being used as bait to bring more business into town.”
Alderman Forrest King leaped up and pounded on the table, his double chin quaking with rage.
“I’m sick and tired of you taking a crack at the Chamber every chance you get,” he yelled. “When you do that you’re taking a slap at every business in this city. And the business houses are all this city has left. They’re the only ones paying taxes any more.”
Griffin grinned sourly. “Mr. King, I can appreciate your position as president of the Chamber.”
“You went broke yourself,” snarled King. “That’s the reason you act the way you do. You lost your shirt at business and now you’re sore at business—”
“King, you’re crude,” said Griffin.
A silence fell upon the room, a cold, embarrassed silence.
Griffin broke it. “I am taking no slap at business. I am protesting the persistence of business in sticking to outmoded ideas and methods. The day of go-getting is over, gentlemen. The day of high pressure is gone forever. Ballyhoo is something that is dead and buried.
“The day when you could have tall-corn days or dollar days or dream up some fake celebration and deck the place up with bunting and pull in big crowds that were ready to spend money is past these many years. Only you fellows don’t seem to know it.
“The success of such stunts as that was its appeal to mob psychology and civic loyalty. You can’t have civic loyalty with a city dying on its feet. You can’t appeal to mob psychology when there is no mob—when every man, or nearly every man has the solitude of forty acres.”
“Gentlemen.” pleaded the mayor. “Gentlemen, this is distinctly out of order.”
King sputtered into life, walloped the table once again.
�
�No, let’s have it out. Webster is over there. Perhaps he can tell us what he thinks.”
Webster stirred uncomfortably. “I scarcely believe,” he said, “I have anything to say.”
“Forget it.” snapped Griffin and sat down.
But King still stood, his face crimson, his mouth trembling with anger.
“Webster!” he shouted.
Webster shook his head. “You came here with one of your big ideas,” shouted King. “You were going to lay it before the council. Step up, man, and speak your piece.”
Webster rose slowly, grim-lipped.
“Perhaps you’re too thick-skulled,” he told King, “to know why I resent the way you have behaved.”
King gasped, then exploded. “Thick-skulled! You would say that to me. We’ve worked together and I’ve helped you. You’ve never called me that before . . . you’ve—”
“I’ve never called you that before,” said Webster, levelly. “Naturally not. I wanted to keep my job.”
“Well, you haven’t got a job,” roared King. “From this minute on, you haven’t got a job.”
“Shut up,” said Webster.
King stared at him, bewildered, as if someone had slapped him across the face.
“And sit down,” said Webster, and his voice bit through the room like a sharp-edged knife.
King’s knees caved beneath him and he sat down abruptly. The silence was brittle.
“I have something to say,” said Webster. “Something that should have been said long ago. Something all of you should hear. That I should be the one who would tell it to you is the one thing that astounds me. And yet, perhaps, as one who has worked in the interests of this city for almost fifteen years, I am the logical one to speak the truth.
“Alderman Griffin said the city is dying on its feet and his statement is correct. There is but one fault I would find with it and that is its understatement. The city . . . this city, any city . . . already is dead.
“The city is an anachronism. It has outlived its usefulness. Hydroponics and the helicopter spelled its downfall. In the first instance the city was a tribal place, an area where the tribe banded together for mutual protection. In later years a wall was thrown around it for additional protection. Then the wall finally disappeared but the city lived on because of the conveniences which it offered trade and commerce. It continued into modern times because people were compelled to live close to their jobs and the jobs were in the city.
“But today that is no longer true. With the family plane, one hundred miles today is a shorter distance than five miles back in 1930. Men can fly several hundred miles to work and fly home when the day is done. There is no longer any need for them to live cooped up in a city.
“The automobile started the trend and the family plane finished it. Even in the first part of the century the trend was noticeable—a movement away from the city with its taxes and its stuffiness, a move toward the suburb and close-in acreages. Lack of adequate transportation, lack of finances held many to the city. But now, with tank farming destroying the value of land, a man can buy a huge acreage in the country for less than he could a city lot forty years ago. With planes powered by atomics there is no longer any transportation problem.”
He paused and the silence held. The mayor wore a shocked look. King’s lips moved, but no words came. Griffin was smiling.
“So what have we?” asked Webster. “I’ll tell you what we have. Street after street, block after block, of deserted houses, houses that the people just up and walked away from. Why should they have stayed? What could the city offer them? None of the things that it offered the generations before them, for progress had wiped out the need of the city’s benefits. They lost something, some monetary consideration, of course, when they left the houses. But the fact that they could buy a house twice as good for half as much, the fact that they could live as they wished to live, that they could develop what amounts to family estates after the best tradition set them by the wealthy of a generation ago—all these things outweighed the leaving of their homes.
“And what have we left? A few blocks of business houses. A few acres of industrial plants. A city government geared to take care of a million people without the million people. A budget that has run the taxes so high that eventually even business houses will move to escape those taxes. Tax forfeitures that have left us loaded with worthless property. That’s what we have left.
“If you think any Chamber of Commerce, any ballyhoo, any harebrained scheme will give you the answers, you’re crazy. There is only one answer and that is simple. The city as a human institution is dead. It may struggle on a few more years, but that is all.”
“Mr. Webster—” said the mayor.
But Webster paid him no attention.
“But for what happened today,” he said, “I would have stayed on and played doll house with you. I would have gone on pretending that the city was a going concern. Would have gone on kidding myself and you. But there is, gentlemen, such a thing as human dignity.”
The icy silence broke down in the rustling of papers, the muffled cough of some embarrassed listener.
John J. Webster turned on his heel and left the room.
Outside on the broad stone steps, he stopped and stared up at the cloudless sky, saw the pigeons wheeling above the turrets and spires of the city hall.
He shook himself mentally, like a dog coming out of a pool.
He had been a fool, of course. Now he’d have to hunt for a job and it might take time to find one. He was getting a bit old to be hunting for a job.
But despite his thoughts, a little tune rose unbidden to his lips. He walked away briskly, lips pursed, whistling soundlessly.
No more hypocrisy. No more lying awake nights wondering what to do—knowing that the city was dead, knowing that what he did was a useless task, feeling like a heel for taking a salary that he knew he wasn’t earning. Sensing the strange, nagging frustration of a worker who knows his work is nonproductive.
He strode toward the parking lot, heading for his helicopter.
Now, maybe he told himself, they could move out into the country the way Betty wanted to. Maybe he could spend his evenings tramping land that belonged to him. A place with a stream. Definitely it had to have a stream he could stock with trout.
He made a mental note to go up into the attic and check his fly equipment.
Martha Johnson was waiting at the barnyard gate when the old car chugged down the lane.
Ole got out stiffly, face rimmed with weariness.
“Sell anything?” asked Martha. Ole shook his head. “It ain’t no use. They won’t buy farm-raised stuff. Just laughed at me. Showed me ears of corn twice as big as the ones I had, just as sweet and with more even rows. Showed me melons that had almost no rind at all. Better tasting, too, they said.” He kicked at a clod and it exploded into dust.
“There ain’t no getting around it,” he declared. “Tank farming sure has ruined us.”
“Maybe we better fix to sell the farm,” suggested Martha.
Ole said nothing.
“You could get a job on a tank farm,” she said. “Harry did. Likes it real well.”
Ole shook his head.
“Or maybe a gardner,” said Martha. “You would make a right smart gardener. Ritzy folks that’s moved out to big estates like to have gardeners to take care of flowers and things. More classy than doing it with machines.”
Ole shook his head again. “Couldn’t stand to mess around with flowers,” he declared. “Not after raising corn for more than twenty years.”
“Maybe,” said Martha, “we could have one of them little planes. And running water in the house. And a bathtub instead of taking a bath in the old washtub by the kitchen fire.”
“Couldn’t run a plane,” objected Ole.
“Sure you could,” said Martha. “Simple to run, they arc. Why, them Anderson kids ain’t no more than knee-high to a cricket and they fly one all over. One of them got fooling around and
fell out once, but—”
“I got to think about it,” said Ole, desperately. “I got to think.” He swung away, vaulted a fence, headed for the fields. Martha stood beside the car and watched him go. One lone tear rolled down her dusty cheek.
“Mr. Taylor is waiting for you,” said the girl.
John J. Webster stammered. “But I haven’t been here before. He didn’t know I was coming.”
“Mr. Taylor,” insisted the girl, “is waiting for you.”
She nodded her head toward the door. It read:
Bureau of Human Adjustment
“But I came here to get a job,” protested Webster. “I didn’t come to be adjusted or anything. This is the world committee’s placement service, isn’t it?”
“That is right,” the girl declared. “Won’t you see Mr. Taylor?”
“Since you insist,” said Webster. The girl clicked over a switch, spoke into the intercommunicator. “Mr. Webster is here, sir.”
“Send him in,” said a voice.
Hat in hand, Webster walked through the door.
The man behind the desk had white hair but a young man’s face. He motioned toward a chair.
“You’ve been trying to find a job,” he said.
“Yes,” said Webster, “but—”
“Please sit down,” said Taylor. “If you’re thinking about that sign on the door, forget it. We’ll not try to adjust you.”
“I couldn’t find a job,” said Webster. “I’ve hunted for weeks and no one would have me. So finally, I came here.”
“You didn’t want to come here?”
“No, frankly, I didn’t. A placement service. It has, well . . . it has an implication I do not like.” Taylor smiled. “The terminology may be unfortunate. You’re thinking of the employment services of the old days. The places where men went when they were desperate for work. The government operated places that tried to find work for men so they wouldn’t become public charges.”
“I’m desperate enough,” confessed Webster. “But I still have a pride that made it hard to come. But finally, there was nothing else to do. You see, I turned traitor—”