An Orchard in the Street

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An Orchard in the Street Page 7

by Reginald Gibbons


  To recover that early, that first, way of seeing, even for a moment, would require working back in memory and trying to forget my first sight of a mountainous horizon, from a Greyhound bus going west from Dallas into New Mexico, summer I was seventeen. To get back before that, so I could feel it again for the first time. I’d have to rid myself of the Pacific Ocean, with Poseidon under it, and of that completely different creature, the Atlantic, to which someone first led me by the hand, pulling me into its tragic waves; of scabby-ankled men on hot city streets; of off-duty Marines beating up some peacenik families in Houston and nobody stopping them, during that war we lost, and I had no way of stopping them; of the sound of whites talking about blacks, and talking to blacks; of a monstrous pyramidal slave-labor brick kiln I saw in a far country, lost as I was on some small remote road that led closer to it till I could see what it was and I kept going so I could get away from thinking about the man-ants climbing the sides of it with wet-new-molded mud bricks on their backs and tumplines across their foreheads; of the summer view from a high hilltop church of a saint, at dusk when distant village lights began to burn and blink like earthly stars in the valley below; of a tavern high and alone amidst the trembling intense green of rainy hills, and men sitting and drinking at tables outside, and in a cage that was tied by a wire to a pole near the tavern wall, a fox; of all the other mind-images I have formed and sights I’ve been formed by, that come back and I can’t see the connection between where I am, what I’m doing, who I’m with, and whatever it was in a particular moment that suddenly opens up inside me one of these intensities and I’m there again for an instant and then it’s gone again.

  I would also have to forget the little commercial enterprises and small houses modeled on inappropriate but perhaps forgivable grandiosities that came to crowd our road like warts along the vein of a smooth, plain, dark hand. Everyone out there was building a house. And just with my mind I would have to restore a field of the ordinary weeds and bushes and bare patches of white sandy-dusty earth of an old eco-zone where some company gradually dug a huge straight-sided quarry hole finally sixty feet deep and hauled sand and gravel out of it, and then abandoned it, a pit so huge on our little scale that to us, standing with awe and a thrill of fear on the edge of it where our parents had told us, begged us, sworn us, never to go, it suggested a cataclysm. When the diggers hit clay and stopped and abandoned that hole, by a year later it had half filled with half-clear greenish water in which nothing ever lived but algae, and finally we had to think of it as some kind of lake in a hole, and somebody fenced it around and posted it against trespassing because new houses rose closer and closer to it and finally someone’s child drowned in it.

  I have to go back before all of that and before so much else, to the moment when our own house was the last one on that road, in a place with only a few trees, and I can remember some birds—doves of three different kinds, one time a quail, some bobwhite, meadowlarks, mockingbirds, redbirds . . . The rain would stop. Killdeer tracks—as delicate after they ran across the rain-wetted bare ground as if some hand had carefully drawn them in the fine pale prehistoric silty sand—ran across the open ground between clumps of pale bunchgrass and yaupon bushes till the hot sun dried everything out again and the sand-silt-dust drifted softly over itself.

  I saw a photograph taken more than a century ago—a man in a suit lying on his side and up on one elbow at the only unusual spot in a flat empty landscape looking like where I grew up, but in his day when it was miles and miles from one stand of trees to another, from one house to the next: this unusual spot was a small concavity, a shallow sinkhole grown over with short-stemmed weeds, maybe twenty feet across and not more than four feet deep at the center. Was this the grand natural curiosity of his locale? He’s posing on the other side of it for the camera, and the edges of the photo imply the empty expanse around him, and so maybe he has a greater sense of how odd and noteworthy his sinkhole is. He brings the photographer with him all the way out from town to take his picture—in his trousers and jacket and white shirt, lying with his head propped on his hand, and the photographer makes a trophy for him of his admiration of that depressed ground . . . or his mocking of it . . .

  I want to show you the fresh track of the killdeer. On an afternoon of a coolish breeze in hot summer, after a green and black thunderstorm, the torrents of run-off might have filled the ditch beside our house and come up over the banks into the front yard so you couldn’t tell any more where the bank was, the ten-foot drop. The next day the ditch would be down to a depth of five feet, and still flowing so fast that it could easily carry you away and under. The slightly cooled air seemed to have been created anew and not yet used for anything. Once in a while in summer, after a gentler rain, our mother would hand us each a plastic bowl and say go across to the field and pick some plump dewberries and I’ll make a cobbler for dinner. And when you come back take your shoes off outside and don’t track mud into this house! The four of us crossed the ditch on the two-lane wooden bridge that was still there, then, before it was demolished and replaced by a wider concrete one with railings, and on it the name of somebody.

  I would need to forget that new bridge to get back to what I’m trying to see, and yet I’d need to remember, too, that after big rains like that it was wonderful to lie belly-down on the wooden bridge with your legs sticking out into the lane—we would hear a car coming in time to jump up and get off the bridge—and hang your head over the edge and watch the drowning murky flood go dizzying by, floating leaves and twigs and trash and sometimes a snake. I’d have to forget that many years later I would learn that the deep ravine, a streambed, around Mycenae was called Chaos.

  Across the bridge we entered the empty field on the left side of the road by slipping through the half-slack barbed-wire fence, and always we cast a glance over at the ten or twelve good big trees over in the field on the right side of the road, a grove, so powerful a presence of trees and even (in our child minds) of some kind of little gods, a place so strange in the wide emptiness, a mysterious place that we sometimes visited together just to feel what it was like to stand in it. The shade itself, the cool soil under the fallen leaves, somehow different from every other place we knew. But we never thought this feeling. Over there, too, we would find the temporarily engraved tracks of the killdeer, a bird that runs across the ground piping loudly and then flies away. In the flat bare sun-bleached spaces between yaupon bushes and between clumps of bunchgrass, tiny tracks in the shallow slicks of earlier rain. And in the berry field closer to home, tiny tracks near the low mounds of tangled stickerbushes of wild dewberries heavy and freshened by the rain.

  As we tramped, those killdeer tracks were to us as much a hushing proof of wildlife as the sight of a lion would have been to someone else somewhere else—and years later and farther west, walking on a hilltop at the edge of a western city, looking down at the streets and houses and big buildings downtown, I came across the prints of a cougar in mud. The killdeer flew through my mind again, calling dee-duh-duh-dee. Picking berries gave us tiny blood scratches on our hands and wrists. We might see a horny toad, or some kind of snake, stay out of its way! The breeze would finally begin to blow hot again and bugs would come up into it. We could pick a couple quarts of berries in a short time and Mother would cook them down in her quick crumbly dough.

  I’d like to have stayed behind, though, just once, till the others were through the fence and hurrying back over the wooden bridge to our house, and I think I might have lain down on my side next to an open patch of sandy silt with my white plastic bowl of dewberries, next to the killdeer’s pronged footprints and then I’d have told my photographer to open the shutter on me there. I could look at it now, but I still wouldn’t see as I saw then.

  Change the Goddamn Thing

  The reality of it. It lay on the table, neatly organized in a neat pile. So many pages. There it was, lying there. And he circled it and circled it steadily, loopingly, picking up this or that desk toy, fiddli
ng with it, rearranging something else, looking at one thing or then walking straight into the next room to get another, stepping cautiously and circuitously the way a tiger might circle a staked goat under a tree in whose branches waits an unjustified and irrational rajah with a loaded rifle across his lap, or the way a hyena circles a lion that’s feeding on the carcass of a narrative idea.

  His beech tree with runes of his carving scored in its bark. His book.

  It is his increase, his verbal incorporation, his augment, his augury, his auxiliation; of which he is, or will be considered to be, or will be suspected of being, or will be suspected of not being, the author.

  It is his mud, his lap, his slobber and slaver, his label on all collapse and all completion, his labor, his very lip, his life’s work.

  He must prosecute it yet further, he must sequester himself with its intrinsics (and extrinsics), he must designate and assign it sufficiently and properly, then when he has finished he must dissociate himself from it and throw it to others. Inside the jet-engine howling of market mechanisms and the anti-aphrodisiac of book reviews, where something or nothing will be made of it, it will be hefted and had, havened or captured, perceived, righted and wronged, received or chased away.

  Can it be, friends, that he was confused where the road forked, and forked again? Or did a gale shove him off course? What power could help him find his way? Had he himself created the fork, blown the winds at himself, disempowered himself, because something deeper in him knew better where to go? But the rest of him did not seem to know.

  So there it lay, awaiting the attention he has not been able to give it, the focus it does not quite have, the final touches he may not be able to add, the feeling-tone it has failed to establish, the box in which it will not fit, the protagonist it has not fully animated, the progress it has sketched but not made forceful, the postage that may be insufficient. Near it and much bigger lay a messy pile of unused bits, crossed-out pages, notes on characters, outlines, diagrams, quotations, scrawled questions (some of them angry-looking, written in caps and followed with multiple question marks), etymologies, diagnoses, etiologies, case histories, transcriptions, confiscations, spoils, search warrants, wiretaps, recipes, photographs, genealogies, philosophies, cosmogonies, theodicies, peripeteias, maps, lists, this piece called “Change the Goddamn Thing.”

  It lay there. He circled around it. He growled. The pendulum of his beloved old clock swung back and forth quietly like a heavy twig broken by wind and dangling by a strap of its own fibers. The sky outside sometimes whirred. He kicked up the leaves on the floor of his study, he tested the blade of his knife against his thumb.

  What Happened

  Sally left town because her family back home needed her to help get both grandfathers into nursing homes. Geoffrey was angry because he thought a letter meant for him had been stolen by Dean, but Dean could prove he was out of town when the letter was supposed to have come. Geoffrey wouldn’t say what was in the letter, and pleaded with Dean to loan him two thousand dollars as soon as possible. Preacher Jim asked Samantha to go out to dinner with him, but she refused, saying it wouldn’t be at all fair to Margery. Mr. Talltower began negotiations to acquire the luxury Fountain Hotel, but Melissa accused him of avoiding her and the children, and even the grandchildren. On a very hot evening at the beginning of July a young man left his little room at the top of a house in Carpenter Lane, went out into the street, and, as though unable to make up his mind, walked slowly in the direction of Kokushkin Bridge. Young Preacher Jim, still in his twenties, tried for the world preaching endurance record but had to quit at a little more than thirty-two hours when the tip of his tongue split in two and began to bleed and he couldn’t drink any more hot coffee because of the pain. Everyone had always said that Jim would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father. Margery insisted he go into the hospital for a few days of rest (thinking he might dry out). In the hospital he saw Frank, who had a new job there as orderly, and he preached to him for an hour. Samantha’s custody suit was set back when Cal’s lawyer won another delay. Frank stole drugs from the hospital dispensary for Geoffrey. Dean heard on Newsradio 88 that a prairie fire was slowing traffic on the outbound Nixon Expressway, and that on the outbound Lincoln Highway it was taking an hour and twenty-six minutes from Downtown Exchange to Forest Mall. Traffic was still slow where the volcano had erupted last week and poured molten lava on the road, and also a meteorite had blasted a crater near the Brewery exit. Lynnette was unhappy. Dusk—of a summer night: in her backyard, her fig tree was filled with fruit. Cal was offered a job by Mr. Talltower, but turned it down because he didn’t want to earn money he would just have to split with Samantha. At the shelter where Margery does volunteer work, over a hundred homeless people, counting children, went out of control and mobbed the volunteer staff for more heat and blankets. Dean realized that Geoffrey was scheming against him and he vowed to get even. Gisell had to miss little Clark’s play because of her migraines. The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. Strange creatures from outer space landed in Preacher Jim’s big backyard and promised him the secret of eternal life if he would come back with them in their spacecraft forever. He asked them for forty-eight hours to think it over. Frank told Geoffrey that Dean was onto them. Mr. Talltower decided not to buy the Fountain Hotel but to try to buy a male country-western singer instead, because Melissa loves those songs so much. When Dean heard this he said that there are some things that are so much just what they are that you can’t even make fun of them because you could never think of a way to carry them any further than they’ve already gone, and that Willie Nelson had more money in the bank than a beach has sand. In a house near Lynnette’s, a family was trying to raise their children to be loving and responsible, to work hard and demand an honest recompense, to hold, all their lives, ideals of compassion and fairness, to remain skeptical toward all politicians, to be brave and to give no quarter in struggle, to do what is right. Overnight an orchard grew in a street on the east side of town. The Martianness—she went out at five, or came back, nobody was really sure. That very night Mr. Talltower’s son arrived home directly from the war, where he had personally killed three people and had himself been killed twice. He walked into a party Melissa was giving but everyone was so shocked to see him they didn’t know what to say. Finally Melissa said he should get married, have children, keep his powder dry, stick to a low-carb diet, take one aspirin every other day, and get counseling. He went outside. A throng of bearded men in sad-colored garments and gray steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes. Lynnette was unhappy all that night and the next day, too. Preacher Jim saw Samantha in the Village Ice Creame Shoppe and asked her if she would go to outer space with him. She said no and he felt very frustrated.

  There were floods and tornadoes, and fire drills at the schools. Problems of folklore are acquiring more and more importance nowadays. Preacher Jim, who was so upset at losing his chance at eternal life with Samantha, said signs of the end of the world are everywhere and that as soon as he had his strength back he guaranteed he would break the world preaching endurance record. Frank decided to have a mind-change operation in Denmark, and the only person he told was Lynnette, who said he shouldn’t do it because something like that was against the will of God. The patrician house of the Marcii at Rome produced many men of distinction. Mr. Talltower decided he would buy the Fountain Hotel and have Willie Nelson sing in it. Geoffrey voluntarily went into a detox center. Samantha and Dean decided to get married as soon as her divorce from Cal came through. Jill returned from a trip to Central America, where she had gone to a libertarian resort, modeled for a video game TV ad, and had been given all the cocaine and purchase options she wanted. A train carrying radioactive waste with a half-life of 10,000 years derailed behind the Community Swimminge Poole. A whirling ball of
flame descended onto Main Street for five minutes and then turned into a bright yellow Coke machine. No one had ever seen anything like that machine, which had a built-in TV and sold Cuba libres, too. It was revealed that a famous literary scholar who had died had written Nazi journalism when he was young. Mr. Talltower’s son re-enlisted and left town. Frank went to Denmark. Dean saw on TV where all kinds of wars were going on in the world. Cal and Samantha had one last bitter argument in front of everyone. Several flights of imagination came to rest on the Towne Ponde and everyone went to see them but they flew off and didn’t come back. The strike at the Meate-Packinge Plante went into its sixteenth week but nobody knew anyone who actually worked for it except Mr. Talltower’s daughter who was on the Board of Directors, and she said that she had been assured by the plant manager that despite the strike the company was able to keep the hormone and antibiotic levels of the meat as high as they had been before. Cal kidnapped his and Samantha’s little Patricia and disappeared with her. It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid-October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. The movement of tectonic plates went unnoticed in the town. Some writers have so confounded society with government as to leave little or no distinction between them. Winds swept out of the west and cleared the smog for a day or two. The moon swerved suddenly farther away from the earth and the tides went crazy and there were reports of flooded cities. There was a choir out in the orchard. The average world temperature went up another degree and there was new desert in Illinois. Sally came back from helping her two grandfathers.

 

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