Inland

by Gerald Murnane

  But this is not the day when I first speak to her. This is one more of the days when I look at her face.

  Her skin, of course, is quite smooth and unflawed. On the day when I first saw her I satisfied myself that her face had no scar or blemish. If I had seen even a small mole I would not be writing about her now. And yet I allow her the scattering of faint freckles on her forehead and across the bridge of her nose. The freckles do not mar the smoothness that I insist on. The freckles lie just beneath the surface.

  Her skin is pale and ready for me to mark. I would never mark her skin boldly as another sort of man would mark a white page with black, or as still another sort of man would cause the pink of blood to spread beneath her skin. I may not mark her paleness for some time. I may go on writing what I might have done before I begin to write what I have done.

  I look at the eyes of her face. Their colour is peculiar to themselves, but for convenience I call the colour green.

  Some people have said that an eye is a window, but anyone who has looked carefully has seen that an eye is a mirror. If I look at an eye in this face that I am writing about, I see only the red roofs of my manor-house and the white walls and the windows reflecting fields and grassland. And if I look closely I see, on the other side of one of those windows, a man sitting at a table and writing.

  That man has learnt nothing from looking into eyes. He sees in eyes nothing that he has not seen long before. Yet he goes on looking for a face of a certain kind and he goes on writing that he would like to look through the eyes of that face as though an eye is a window. He goes on looking for a face and he goes on writing as though the eyes of that face are the windows of a room with books around its walls, and in that room a young woman sits writing.

  I have begun to write as though Gunnar T. Gunnarsen will send my pages to one of the rivals of my editor. I am writing as though the scientist and forger will take my pages to a room I could not have dreamed of in the towering Institute in Ideal. Gunnar T. Gunnarsen delivers my pages into the hands of a young woman from Lincoln, Nebraska, and I wonder what kind of alliance my enemy has made with this woman who is going to pretend to be my editor.

  When I last saw this woman she was trailing her hand in the water of a fish pond on the far side of the prairie that looks like a lawn between Tripp County, South Dakota, and Lancaster County, Nebraska. She was pretending to reach with her hand for one of the red fish that drifted sometimes up to the surface of the pond. She had dipped her hand into the water when the sun was shining on the pond and on the prairie that looked like a lawn. But then a cloud had drifted in front of the sun, and when the woman looked down she could no longer see the tips of her fingers. She thought of a large fish tearing at her fingers with its teeth, and of her blood clouding the water in the ornamental pond.

  The woman drew her hand out of the water. Around the white skin of her wrist was a thin line of green. The woman held out her wrist in the sun to dry but she did not rub away the green, and she was left with a dried trace of dark-green that would soon become black.

  The woman sat beside the shallow ornamental pond in Lancaster County and stared at the line on her skin. She remembered the story of Winefride in the book of saints she had read as a child.

  Winefride was left alone at home on a certain Sunday while the rest of her family were at church. A man named Caradoc arrived at her house and demanded to know where Winefride’s father kept his money. Winefride would not tell him, and Caradoc then threatened to cut off her head with his sword. Winefride began to run towards the church, but Caradoc chased her and caught her and drew his sword and beheaded her.

  At the place where Winefride’s head struck the soil, a crack opened and water flowed out. The flow increased, and the stream of water met the congregation as they were leaving the church. The priest and the people followed the stream towards its source and found Winefride’s body with the head lying beside it; near by they found Caradoc, who was rooted to the spot.

  The priest placed the head against the neck, the people knelt and prayed, and Winefride was brought back to life. The crack in the soil widened and deepened and became a well, famous for healing. Caradoc was struck dead from heaven. Winefride lived a normal life afterwards, except that a thin red line was always visible around her neck.

  When the woman from Lincoln, Nebraska, had first read as a child the story of Winefride, she had found in the book of saints a picture in which Winefride was no older than herself. The child Winefride was barefoot and wearing a simple tunic that hung to her knees. She was looking up at Caradoc, who was twice her size and was frowning down at her.

  The woman beside the fish pond remembered herself as an older child reading her book of saints on an afternoon of bright sunlight in her father’s library and seeing behind the pages not a child and a man frowning at her but a young woman and a man who had fallen in love with her. When the girl in her father’s library held the pages of the book open in front of her, she read the story of the child who had been beheaded and had come back to life. But when the girl had closed the pages and had put the book on her shelf below her father’s shelves, she saw for the first time a space lying behind the spines and the covers of books; and she saw somewhere in that space a young woman who died but was not brought back to life, a man who was rooted to the spot but was not struck dead from heaven, and a well that was full of water but would heal nobody.

  The older child grew into a young woman in Lincoln, Nebraska, and kept to her father’s library. Sometimes a man would visit the library and would fall in love with the young woman. The man would walk with the young woman between the Platte and the Big Blue, but the young woman would not die and the man would not be rooted to the spot, and afterwards the young woman would go back to her father’s library.

  Each year while the woman kept to the library, the shelves reached higher above her and the space behind the books seemed wider. When I first saw the woman she was sitting by the ornamental pond, but in her own eyes she was in the space behind books. She had come out from her father’s library into the space behind books, but soon she would go back to the library. Soon she would see all around her the shelves of books like the walls of a well, and in the space on the other side of the coloured spines the winds of the world would whistle over great plains and great alfolds.

  Now the prairie-scientists have persuaded the woman to travel from the valley of the Platte to the trickling Dog Ear and to pretend to be my editor. Gunnarsen and his gang have told the woman she will soon read the words of a man who is rooted to the spot and will soon be struck dead from heaven in a place where a young woman has died and will soon be brought back to life.

  The woman from Lincoln, Nebraska, is pretending to be my editor, but I cannot believe she takes her orders from prairie-scientists. I cannot believe that a woman who has learned all her life from the pages of books would listen to men who live on the other side of books.

  If you are still reading my words, Gunnar T. Gunnarsen, take notice that these are my last words to you.

  I used to believe that you hated me, Gunnarsen, but now I believe you have hardly thought of me in all the time while I was writing. You have hardly thought of me because you seldom step inside the book-lined rooms of the Institute of Prairie Studies. For most of your life you are out on your grasslands, you and your fellow scientists, counting stalks or measuring the thickness of bushes or pointing your cameras at nests and eggs of ground-dwelling birds. I see you now, stepping carefully among your little bluestems and sniffing with your powerful noses the scents of every kind of small flower. I hear you telling one another in your scientists’ language that this or that hillside or hollow is now indistinguishable from virgin prairie.

  The young women stand at the windows of their rooms in the Calvin O. Dahlberg Institute. The young women see you at your work far out on the plains of grass under the drifting clouds. You yourselves cannot see the young women, but you are not anxious to see them. You look towards the tall building with
hundreds of windows full of images of clouds, and you have no doubt that a young woman stands behind every window and looks out towards you.

  Perhaps you do not even know, Gunnarsen and you others, that one at least of those young women calls the grassland her dream-prairie. Perhaps this is one thing that I know and you do not know, because one of those young women once wrote to me. But you would hardly care about such things; you have all those grasslands to study and all those young women to look out at you.

  In the heat of midday you rest from your work. Out on your prairies the largest shrubs cast shadows where a man may lie full-length. You lower your bodies among the tussocks of grass in the patches of shade and you rest from your scientists’ work. For the time being, you are well out of sight of the windows of the Calvin O. Dahlberg Institute. You are even out of sight from one another in your shaded hollows among the grass; and around the bodies of some of you the vigorous plants of the prairie have already sprung back into place, making you seem to have tunnelled or even to be lying in graves.

  You are bothered no more by the heat of the sun. You are resting on the dream-prairie of all the rivals for the position of editor of Hinterland. If ever I should envy you, prairie-scientists, I should envy you now.

  You begin to talk. Your words drift from one to another of the shaded places beneath the surface of the grass. You talk about young women, some of them hardly more than children. You talk about yourselves as young men and about the young women who once lay beside you in out-of-the-way parts of grasslands – by back roads or railway-lines or even in the neglected corners of graveyards.

  And now you talk about children: young males and females not quite young men and women. You are not shy of talking about children. You are prairie-scientists and you presume to talk about whatever has happened on the grasslands of the world. And so you talk about the female children who leaped with you into pools in the trickling streams in the districts where you were born and who sat with you afterwards naked on the sandbank-islands where dragonflies paused above broad beds of rushes. You talk about the female children who taught you what you would do to their bodies in the following summer or what you would do to other bodies after you had come back to the sandbank-islands in the following summer and had found only the beds of rushes and the dragonflies flitting, because the female children had turned into young women and had gone off with young men.

  You go on talking, all you scientists of prairies and husbands of editors and of rivals for the position of editor. You go on talking in your tunnels under the prairie of Ideal, which is also the dream-prairie of a young woman who once wrote to me. And I hate you because you rest so comfortably under the swaying grass and you talk so easily about the female children who turned into young women.

  I think now, Gunnarsen, that you hardly think of me or wonder about me. You hardly wonder whether I strolled with Anne Kristaly in Tolna County many years ago or whether Anne Kristaly and I sat as children together on our sandbank-island in the trickling Sio or the wandering Sarviz from the north. And if you hardly wonder about me, Gunnarsen, then you would not have forged my editor’s name on a letter to me.

  If Gunnar T. Gunnarsen did not forge my editor’s name, then the forger is one of all those men and women who sit in book-lined rooms in the Institute of Prairie Studies and whose names I will never know.

  Even in the Calvin O. Dahlberg Institute, with all that glass for its walls and all that sky around it, some rooms are shut away from the light. Each day, on some higher level, one of those men who prefer to make no show of their power turns away from the outer sunlit rooms and into the corridors leading towards the heart of the Institute. All day in his room where the soft light never varies and where no movement of air lifts the corners of pages, the man guards manuscripts and precious books of the history and lore of prairies.

  The man is not an old man, but he is clearly older than Anne Kristaly Gunnarsen. And he has fallen in love with the young woman who might have been my editor. Each day the man invites Anne Kristaly Gunnarsen to his inner suite and shows her his treasures: his carefully guarded pages.

  I do not know what my lost editor sees in that man’s books, but I know that none of the pages I might have sent her could equal his pages in her eyes. What could I have written and sent from the Great Alfold to lie beside his maps and colour-plates and handwritten texts? He sits with her in a cone of gentle light in one of the huge, hushed rooms of his darkened suite near the heart of the tower of tinted glass on the grasslands of Ideal. He takes her hand politely but firmly. He brings her fingers gently towards a central zone on a page as soft as her own skin. He and she lean forward with their heads close together while they search for a dot that stands for a town such as Ideal. Or he traces with one of her fingertips the line as delicate as a strand of hair that stands for a stream trickling from a lake or wandering from the north. Or he obliges her to lean far across him and to tilt her chin and to watch while his own fingers follow the peaks and ridges of a watershed.

  On days when maps have seemed to tire the young woman, my enemy puts away the atlases somewhere outside the cone of light and then comes back from the darkness holding in front of him with two hands a book more bulky than any in my poor, disused library. No man, the young woman thinks, could carry such a weight outstretched in front of him, and yet this man from his dark caves of books has staggered towards her under the weight of his prized volume and has laid it in front of her and has offered to show her its secrets.

  What does my enemy uncover now that will make the young woman quite forget the pages I was going to send her? Colour-plates of birds or plants, perhaps, or of mansions and manor-houses much more grand than mine. Plovers, quail, bustards, and all the doomed kinds of bird that scrape nests in the soil; chokeberry, fleabane, and plants nearly all ploughed under – all these my lost editor stares at. Or she stares at the hundreds of windows in colour-plates of enormous houses on vast estates, and she wonders which row of windows looks out from the huge library, and she even seems to forget her own dream-prairie while she dreams of what she might see in pages of the books in that dream-library.

  My enemy, I see now, is a man from the archives of the Institute of Prairie Studies. He has so many books of colour-plates and lithographs and woodcuts to show to the women he invites to his rooms that none of those women could want to read afterwards my story from the Great Alfold.

  And yet my enemy may be somewhat afraid of me. He has paused among his priceless collections to think of me here at this table with only scribbled pages around me. And in the stronghold of the Calvin O. Dahlberg Institute of Prairie Studies he has devised a plot against me.

  The man sits with his many-coloured pages in front of him. Beside him is one more of the young women who dream of being editor of Hinterland. The only sound in the room is the rubbing of silk against paper or of silk against silk as the young woman moves a sleeve across a page or unfolds her legs in order to lean towards a far corner of a map, or to study the patterns in the mottled wing feathers of a quail. The man would seem to be quite safe from me, and yet he may be somewhat afraid. He may be afraid, as I wrongly thought Gunnarsen was afraid, that I have something to tell.

  What I have written seems now only a scattering of pages. I first began to write because I felt a heaviness pressing on me and because I could not decide whether I remembered a certain thing or whether I dreamed of the thing, or whether I was neither remembering nor dreaming but only dreaming of myself doing one or the other. Perhaps also I was writing because Anne Kristaly Gunnarsen had begged me to send her some of my pages from the Great Alfold. But I soon understood that the woman I had called my editor might never read any page I sent to her and that she might well have supposed I had died.

  I am still writing in my library in my manor-house. My enemy of enemies in the Calvin O. Dahlberg Institute is still waiting to read what I have written about Anne Kristaly Gunnarsen: about the woman I once supposed I was writing for.

  In fact I k
now less than my enemy knows. But he would never believe this of me. In fact I have never seen, nor will I ever see, Tolna County; I cannot even breathe, through the curtain of the falling rain, the scent of invisible yet enduring beds of streams. But my enemy would never believe me if I wrote this. My enemy is afraid of me. He knows that whatever I write he cannot contradict. Poring over delicate tints on the paper as soft as skin behind locked doors in the depths of the Calvin O. Dahlberg Institute, my enemy flinches when he thinks of elaborate sentences that a man in my position might challenge him to read. Tracing with limp wrist and gliding fingertip the loops and doublings-back of some broad prairie river on its prolonged route to the Missouri, my enemy cringes when he thinks of having to read long paragraphs of mine in which all names of streams have been changed or the rivers of America have been diverted in their beds or the whole of the Great Alfold has been forced into a strip between the Dog Ear and the White or, worst of all, the dream-grasslands of South Dakota have drifted even he cannot tell where. Driven by the plainness of his native district to look deeply into any place admitting of penetration, my enemy will ponder my prose well.

  I am writing about myself standing in the garden of a large house – but by no means a manor-house – between the Hopkins River and Russells Creek. Perhaps my reader is wondering where Russells Creek and the Hopkins flow, and how far away those two streams are from the Dog Ear and Ideal. And yet, whatever atlases I refer to, my reader will still think the worst. He will think I am writing about myself standing among gentle slopes and peaceful hills in Tolna County, or even on the plains of Szolnok County.

  I am not sorry for you, reader, if you think of me as deceiving you. I can hardly forget the trick that you played on me. You allowed me to believe for a long time that I was writing to a young woman I called my editor. Safe in the depths of your glass-walled Institute, you even had me addressing you as reader and friend. Now, you still read and I still write but neither of us will trust the other.