Pieces of the Frame

by John McPhee

  For Yolanda

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Travels in Georgia

  Reading the River

  The Search for Marvin Gardens

  Pieces of the Frame

  Josie’s Well

  From Birnam Wood to Dunsinane

  Basketball and Beefeaters

  Centre Court

  Firewood

  Ranger

  Ruidoso

  BY JOHN MCPHEE

  Copyright Page

  Travels in Georgia

  I ASKED FOR THE CORP. Carol passed it to me. Breakfast had been heavy with cathead biscuits, sausage, boiled eggs, Familia, and chicory coffee, but that was an hour ago and I was again hungry. Sam said, “The little Yankee bastard wants the gorp, Carol. Shall we give him some?” Sam’s voice was as soft as sphagnum, with inflections of piedmont Georgia.

  “The little Yankee bastard can have all he wants this morning,” Carol said. “It’s such a beautiful day.”

  Although Sam was working for the state, he was driving his own Chevrolet. He was doing seventy. In a reverberation of rubber, he crossed Hunger and Hardship Creek and headed into the sun on the Swainsboro Road. I took a ration of gorp—soybeans, sunflower seeds, oats, pretzels, Wheat Chex, raisins, and kelp—and poured another ration into Carol’s hand. At just about that moment, a snapping turtle was hit on the road a couple of miles ahead of us, who knows by what sort of vehicle, a car, a pickup; run over like a manhole cover, probably with much the same sound, and not crushed, but gravely wounded. It remained still. It appeared to be dead on the road.

  Sam, as we approached, was the first to see it. “D.O.R.,” he said. “Man, that is a big snapper.” Carol and I both sat forward. Sam pressed hard on the brakes. Even so, he was going fifty when he passed the turtle.

  Carol said, “He’s not dead. He didn’t look dead.”

  Sam reversed. He drove backward rapidly, fast as the car would go. He stopped on the shoulder, and we all got out. There was a pond beyond the turtle. The big, broad head was shining with blood, but there was, as yet, very little blood on the road. The big jaws struck as we came near, opened and closed bloodily—not the kind of strike that, minutes ago, could have cut off a finger, but still a strike with power. The turtle was about fourteen inches long and a shining hornbrown. The bright spots on its marginal scutes were like light bulbs around a mirror. The neck lunged out. Carol urged the turtle, with her foot, toward the side of the road. “I know, big man,” she said to it. “I know it’s bad. We’re not tormenting you. Honest we’re not.” Sam asked her if she thought it had a chance to live and she said she was sure it had no chance at all. A car, coming west, braked down and stopped. The driver got out, with some effort and a big paunch. He looked at the turtle and said, “Fifty years old if he’s a day.” That was the whole of what the man had to say. He got into his car and drove on. Carol nudged the snapper, but it was too hurt to move. It could only strike the air. Now, in a screech of brakes, another car came onto the scene. It went by us, then spun around with squealing tires and pulled up on the far shoulder. It was a two-tone, high-speed, dome-lighted Ford, and in it was the sheriff of Laurens County. He got out and walked toward us, all Technicolor in his uniform, legs striped like a pine-barrens tree frog’s, plastic plate on his chest, name of Wade.

  “Good morning,” Sam said to him.

  “How y’all?” said Sheriff Wade.

  Carol said, “Would you mind shooting this turtle for us, please?”

  “Surely, Ma’am,” said the sheriff, and he drew his .38. He extended his arm and took aim.

  “Uh, Sheriff,” I said. “If you don’t mind …” And I asked him if he would kindly shoot the turtle over soil and not over concrete. The sheriff paused and looked slowly, with new interest, from one of us to another: a woman in her twenties, good-looking, with long tawny hair, no accent (that he could hear), barefoot, and wearing a gray sweatshirt and brown dungarees with a hunting knife in the belt; a man (Sam) around forty, in weathered khaki, also without an accent, and with a full black beard divided by a short white patch at the chin—an authentic, natural split beard; and then this incongruous little Yankee bastard telling him not to shoot the road. Carol picked up the turtle by its long, serrated tail and carried it, underside toward her leg, beyond the shoulder of the highway, where she set it down on a patch of grass. The sheriff followed with his .38. He again took aim. He steadied the muzzle of the pistol twelve inches from the turtle. He fired, and missed. The gun made an absurdly light sound, like a screen door shutting. He fired again. He missed. He fired again. The third shot killed the turtle. The pistol smoked. The sheriff blew the smoke away, and smiled, apparently at himself. He shook his head a little. “He should be good,” he said, with a nod at the turtle. The sheriff crossed the road and got into his car. “Y’all be careful,” he said. With a great screech of tires, he wheeled around and headed on west.

  Carol guessed that the turtle was about ten years old. By the tail, she carried it down to the edge of the pond, like a heavy suitcase with a broken strap. Sam fetched plastic bags from the car. I found a long two-by-ten plank and carried it to the edge of the water. Carol placed the snapper upside down on the plank. Kneeling, she unsheathed her hunting knife and began, in a practiced and professional way, to slice around the crescents in the plastron, until the flesh of the legs—in thick steaks of red meat—came free. Her knife was very sharp. She put the steaks into a plastic bag. All the while, she talked to the dead turtle, soothingly, reassuringly, nurse to patient, doctor to child, and when she reached in under the plastron and found an ovary, she shifted genders with a grunt of surprise. She pulled out some globate yellow fat and tossed it into the pond. Hundreds of mosquito fish came darting through the water, sank their teeth, shook their heads, worried the fat. Carol began to remove eggs from the turtle’s body. The eggs were like ping-pong balls in size, shape, and color, and how they all fitted into the turtle was more than I could comprehend, for there were fifty-six of them in there, fully finished, and a number that had not quite taken their ultimate form. “Look at those eggs. Aren’t they beautiful?” Carol said. “Oh, that’s sad. You were just about to do your thing, weren’t you, girl?” That was why the snapper had gone out of the pond and up onto the road. She was going to bury her eggs in some place she knew, perhaps drawn by an atavistic attachment to the place where she herself had hatched out and where many generations of her forebears had been born when there was no road at all. The turtle twitched. Its neck moved. Its nerves were still working, though its life was gone. The nails on the ends of the claws were each an inch long. The turtle draped one of these talons over one of Carol’s fingers. Carol withdrew more fat and threw a huge hunk into the pond. “Wouldn’t it be fun to analyze that for pesticides?” she said. “You’re fat as a pig, Mama. You sure lived high off the hog.” Finishing the job—it took forty minutes—Carol found frog bones in the turtle. She put more red meat into plastic sacks and divided the eggs. She kept half for us to eat. With her knife she carefully buried the remaining eggs, twenty-eight or so, in a sandbank, much as the mother turtle might have been doing at just that time. Carol picked away some leeches from between her fingers. The leeches had come off the turtle’s shell. She tied the sacks and said, “All right. That’s all we can say grace over. Let’s send her back whence she came.” Picking up the inedible parts—plastron, carapace, neck, claws—she heaved them into the pond. They hit with a slap and sank without bubbles.

  As we moved east, pine trees kept giving us messages—small, hand-painted signs nailed into the loblollies. “HAVE YOU WHAT IT TAKES TO MEET JESUS WHEN HE RETURNS?” Sam said he was certain he did not. “JESUS WILL NEVER FAIL YOU.” City limits, Adrian, Georgia
. Swainsboro, Georgia. Portal, Georgia. Towns on the long, straight roads of the coastal plain. White-painted, tin-roofed bungalows. Awnings shading the fronts of stores—prepared for heat and glare. Red earth. Sand roads. Houses on short stilts. Sloping verandas. Unpainted boards.

  “D.O.R.,” said Carol.

  “What do you suppose that was?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t see. It could have been a squirrel.”

  Sam backed up to the D.O.R. It was a brown thrasher. Carol looked it over, and felt it. Sam picked it up. “Throw him far off the road,” Carol said. “So a possum won’t get killed while eating him.” Sam threw the bird far off the road. A stop for a D.O.R. always brought the landscape into detailed focus. Pitch coming out of a pine. Clustered sows behind a fence. An automobile wrapped in vines. A mailbox. “Donald Foskey.” His home. Beyond the mailbox, a set of cinder blocks and on the cinder blocks a mobile home. As Sam regathered speed, Carol turned on the radio and moved the dial. If she could find some Johnny Cash, it would elevate her day. Some Johnny Cash was not hard to find in the airwaves of Georgia. There he was now, resonantly singing about his Mississippi Delta land, where, on a sharecropping farm, he grew up. Carol smiled and closed her eyes. In her ears—pierced ears—were gold maple leaves that seemed to move under the influence of the music.

  “D.O.R. possum,” Sam said, stopping again. “Two! A grown one and a baby.” They had been killed probably ten minutes before. Carol carried the adult to the side of the road and left it there. She kept the baby. He was seven inches long. He was half tail. Although dead, he seemed virtually undamaged. We moved on. Carol had a clipboard she used for making occasional notes and sketches. She put the little possum on the clipboard and rested the clipboard on her knees. “Oh, you sweet little angel. How could anybody run over you?” she said. “Oh, I just love possums. I’ve raised so many of them. This is a great age. They are the neatest little animals. They love you so much. They crawl on your shoulder and hang in your hair. How people can dislike them I don’t understand.” Carol reached into the back seat and put the little opossum into a container of formaldehyde. After a while, she said, “What mystifies me is: that big possum back there was a male.”

  Bethel Primitive Baptist Church. Old Canoochee Primitive Baptist Church. “THE CHURCH HAS NO INDULGENCES.” A town every ten miles, a church—so it seemed—every two. Carol said she frequently slept in church graveyards. They were, for one thing, quiet, and, for another, private. Graham Memorial Church of the Nazarene.

  Sam and Carol both sat forward at the same moment, alert, excited. “D.O.R. Wow! That was something special. It had a long yellow belly and brown fur or feathers! Hurry, Sam. It’s a good one.” Sam backed up at forty miles an hour and strained the Chevrolet.

  “What is it? What is it?”

  “It’s a piece of bark. Fell off a pulpwood truck.”

  The approach to Pembroke was made with a sense of infiltration—Pembroke, seat of Bryan County. “Remember, now, we’re interested in frogs,” Sam said, and we went up the steps of Bryan County Courthouse. “We understand there is a stream-channelization project going on near here. Could you tell us where? We’re collecting frogs.” It is hard to say what the clerks in the courthouse thought of this group—the spokesman with the black-and-white beard, the shoeless young woman, and their silent companion. They looked at us—they in their pumps and print dresses—from the other side of a distance. The last thing they might have imagined was that two of the three of us were representing the state government in Atlanta. The clerks did not know where the channelization was going on but they knew who might—a woman in town who knew everything. We went to see her. A chicken ran out of her house when she opened the screen door. No, she was not sure just where we should go, but try a man named Miller in Lanier. He’d know. He knew everything. Lanier was five miles down the track—literally so. The Seaboard Coast Line ran beside the road. Miller was a thickset man with unbelievably long, sharp fingernails, a driver of oil trucks. It seemed wonderful that he could get his hands around the wheel without cutting himself, that he could deliver oil without cutting the hose. He said, “Do you mind my asking why you’re interested in stream channelization?”

  “We’re interested in frogs,” Sam said. “Snakes and frogs. We thought the project might be stirring some up.”

  Miller said, “I don’t mind the frog, but I want no part of the snake.”

  His directions were perfect—through pine forests, a right, two lefts, to where a dirt road crossed a tributary of the Ogeechee. A wooden bridge there had been replaced by a culvert. The stream now flowed through big pipes in the culvert. Upriver, far as the eye could see, a riparian swath had been cut by chain saws. Back from the banks, about fifty feet on each side, the overstory and the understory—every tree, bush, and sapling—had been cut down. The river was under revision. It had been freed of meanders. It was now two yards wide between vertical six-foot banks; and it was now as straight as a ditch. It had, in fact, become a ditch—in it a stream of thin mud, flowing. An immense yellow machine, slowly backing upstream, had in effect eaten this river. It was at work now, grunting and belching, two hundred yards from the culvert. We tried to walk toward it along the bank but sank to our shins in black ooze. The stumps of the cut trees were all but covered with mud from the bottom of the river. We crossed the ditch. The dredged mud was somewhat firmer on the other side. Sam and I walked there. Carol waded upcurrent in the stream. The machine was an American dragline crane. The word “American” stood out on its cab in letters more than a foot high. Its boom reached up a hundred feet. Its bucket took six-foot bites. As we approached, the bucket kept eating the riverbed, then swinging up and out of the channel and disgorging tons of mud to either side. Carol began to take pictures. She took more and more pictures as she waded on upstream. When she was fifty feet away from the dragline, its engine coughed down and stopped. The sudden serenity was oddly disturbing. The operator stepped out of the cab and onto the catwalk. One hand on the flank of his crane, he inclined his head somewhat forward and stared down at Carol. He was a stocky man with an open shirt and an open face, deeply tanned. He said, “Howdy.”

  “Howdy,” said Carol.

  “You’re taking some pictures,” he said.

  “I sure am. I’m taking some pictures. I’m interested in the range extension of river frogs, and the places they live. I bet you turn up some interesting things.”

  “I see some frogs,” the man said. “I see lots of frogs.”

  “You sure know what you’re doing with that machine,” Carol said. The man shifted his weight. “That’s a big thing,” she went on. “How much does it weigh?”

  “Eighty-two tons.”

  “Eighty-two tons?”

  “Eighty-two tons.”

  “Wow! How far can you dig in one day?”

  “Five hundred feet.”

  “A mile every ten days,” Sam said, shaking his head with awe.

  “Sometimes I do better than that.”

  “You live around here?”

  “No. My home’s near Baxley. I go where I’m sent. All over the state.”

  “Well, sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt you.”

  “Not ’t all. Take all the pictures you want.”

  “Thanks. What did you say your name was?”

  “Chap,” he said. “Chap Causey.”

  We walked around the dragline, went upstream a short way, and sat down on the trunk of a large oak, felled by the chain saws, to eat our lunch—sardines, chocolate, crackers, and wine. Causey at work was the entertainment, pulling his levers, swinging his bucket, having at the stream.

  If he had been at first wary, he no doubt had had experience that made him so. All over the United States, but particularly in the Southeast, his occupation had become a raw issue. He was working for the Soil Conservation Service, a subdivision of the United States Department of Agriculture, making a “water-resource channel improvement”—generally known as stream channelization,
or reaming a river. Behind his dragline, despite the clear-cutting of the riverine trees, was a free-flowing natural stream, descending toward the Ogeechee in bends and eddies, riffles and deeps—in appearance somewhere between a trout stream and a bass river, and still handsomely so, even though it was shaved and ready for its operation. At the dragline, the recognizable river disappeared, and below the big machine was a kind of reverse irrigation ditch, engineered to remove water rapidly from the immediate watershed. “How could anyone even conceive of this idea?” Sam said. “Not just to do it, but even to conceive of it?”

  The purpose of such projects was to anticipate and eliminate floods, to drain swamps, to increase cropland, to channel water toward freshly created reservoirs serving and attracting new industries and new housing developments. Water sports would flourish on the new reservoirs, hatchery fish would proliferate below the surface: new pulsations in the life of the rural South. The Soil Conservation Service was annually spending about fifteen million dollars on stream-channelization projects, providing, among other things, newly arable land to farmers who already had land in the Soil Bank. The Department of Agriculture could not do enough for the Southern farmer, whose only problem was bookkeeping. He got money for keeping his front forty idle. His bottomland went up in value when the swamps were drained, and then more money came for not farming the drained land. Years earlier, when a conservationist had been someone who plowed land along natural contours, the Soil Conservation Service had been the epicenter of the conservation movement, decorated for its victories over erosion of the land. Now, to a new generation that had discovered ecology, the S.C.S. was the enemy. Its drainage programs tampered with river mechanics, upsetting the relationships between bass and otter, frog and owl. The Soil Conservation Service had grown over the years into a bureau of fifteen thousand people, and all the way down at the working point, the cutting edge of things, was Chap Causey, in the cab of his American dragline, hearing nothing but the pounding of his big Jimmy diesel while he eliminated a river, eradicated a swamp.