Point of No Return

by John P. Marquand

  Of course Charles remembered.

  “And your father in that red shirt,” Jessica said, “standing on top of the machine?”

  Naturally Charles remembered his father, in his helmet and his red shirt with “Pine Tree” written on the front in white letters, in his blue trousers and his belt with its ornate brass buckle. For years Charles had been deeply embarrassed whenever his father had appeared in that make-believe fireman suit. To Jessica Lovell it was only another Currier and Ives print, an amusing rustic scene, while he was close enough to it to feel that his father’s standing on the tub and giving orders had an indecorous, discordant quality. Jack Mason’s father, for instance, would not have dreamed of being in the Pine Trees, but his father enjoyed the organization and persisted in speaking of it on unsuitable occasions.

  “I don’t see why Father likes it,” Charles said.

  “Because he has a good time,” Jessica told him. “He was having a wonderful time.”

  Charles never could understand the release of being dressed in an absurd costume and of pretending, even briefly, that he was not himself.

  “And we had a good time too,” Jessica said. “We had a wonderful time.”

  Still it was an impossible sort of time. He had not drunk hard cider in the Stevens bam and yet he had behaved as though he had.

  “Charley, why did you get into that wrestling match?”

  “You know why,” Charles said.

  “I know, but tell me why.”

  “Because you wanted me to. You shouldn’t have been there in that crowd.”

  “But I was,” Jessica said. “It couldn’t have happened anywhere else, could it? It was all—” but she did not finish what she was saying …

  Luncheon that Saturday afternoon had consisted only of a little cold meat and cracked cocoa and his father ate it hurriedly. He might not have been elected to the Clyde Fund but he had been elected captain of the Pine Trees, in a very close election, with Wesley Adams, the undertaker, running against him. As John Gray ate his cold meat he kept glancing critically at Charles and finally he told Charles that he had better put on some older clothes, that his business suit might get wet. He was really saying in a nice way, Charles knew, that Charles would look out of place if he came there all dressed up and in a white collar.

  His mother was not going to the muster. If John had to pretend he was a fireman, she often said, he could go to those things alone. She had to draw the line somewhere. When Charles started upstairs to change his clothes, he heard them discussing the time-worn subject.

  “I know, Esther,” he heard his father saying. “It’s a weakness of mine and I appreciate your indulging me, but you miss a lot. It’s always quite a sight.”

  “I suppose it is,” his mother said, “if it’s a sight to see tipsy men pretending they’re boys, running around bellowing at each other, squirting water.”

  Charles was wearing his gray flannel trousers, his old sneakers and his old tweed coat when he and John Gray walked out of the front yard and down Spruce Street. It was all very well to tell himself that everyone condoned his father’s eccentricity, but nothing could reconcile Charles to the way his father’s whole manner changed whenever he wore that red shirt and helmet. They turned him into a River Streeter. His father’s voice had already assumed a nasal tone and he walked with a slight swagger that reminded Charles of members of the American Legion gathering for the Decoration Day parade. His father was glancing anxiously at the clear sky to gauge the breeze as it blew off occasional yellowing leaves from the elm trees.

  “The wind’s certainly calming down,” he said. Charles noticed that he said “calming” in a flat way that was more River Street than Spruce Street. “I don’t want any downdraft blowing the spray sideways before it hits the paper.”

  On one occasion some years ago, his father said, when he was pumping with the Pine Trees, right out on the old training field where the tubs were going to pump today, a puff of wind caught the spray and though the Pine Trees had never pumped a longer stream, that puff blew it sideways and the Eureka tub from Salem beat them. It was a fluke, because the Eureka tub was never as good as the old Pine Tree. Its stroke was too short.

  It was going to be a small muster this afternoon but the Eurekas would be there and the Excelsiors from Smith’s Common, and the Nonpareils were bringing their machine down from north of Kittery. They were already at the training field, and so was the old Blairtown pumper. There would be eight machines, and they had better hurry because the Pine Trees always pulled the old machine themselves. They didn’t depend on a truck like the Lions and they ended up in a run, with the bell going.

  As his father walked he continued worrying about the weather and the wind, as he always did on muster days. He had been to the training field already to see where the stand for the tubs would be placed. He and Wesley Adams had selected the spots for the tall bamboo flagpoles. The elms on the edge of the training field made a tricky downdraft, a draft that you had to watch on those wind flags before you gave the boys at the brakes the signal to turn it on and let her go. They had watched the long strips of paper being laid in the roped-off enclosure on which the stream from the hose would fall. He hoped that the crowd would not get too near the paper. That summer they had lost to the Haviland Protectors at the July muster because, he suspected, Haviland backers spat upon the paper, thus making the furthest drops appear to have come from the Protectors’ hose.

  Then he discussed the strengths and weaknesses of the hand engine that the Pine Trees owned—the old Pine Tree tub. Charles knew she was a beautiful machine, made by Button in 1878. He knew, or at least he had been told, that the Button machines were better than the Borgs or the Lyles. The tub had a new coat of paint and a new pressure gauge and the ropes for pulling her had been stitched with clean white canvas. Everyone always recognized the Pine Tree tub right away at musters.

  The Pine Tree firehouse was the same shed which had sheltered the machine when Clyde actually relied on volunteers and hand pumps to put out fires. It stood on the water side of River Street in a vacant, weedy lot, not far from the gas tank and the coal pocket and the mill. Behind it was a good view of the old wharves and warehouses of Clyde. It was a shabby building outside but the Pine Trees had fixed it inside into a pretty comfortable clubhouse. A “salamander” stove warmed up the shed nicely in winter and there were tables and benches for cards and checkers and a big sandbox. The most striking feature of the firehouse was the rows of buckets hung on pegs along the walls, the decorated fire buckets which pre-Revolutionary Clyde firemen had once kept handy in their houses, with the dates and names of their former owners painted on them. The old shed was an amazing survival, but Charles had always accepted its history automatically because Clyde was full of other survivals. He was only wondering why the Pine Trees still enjoyed being Pine Trees and persisted in being Pine Trees when their usefulness was over.

  There was a big crowd waiting outside the firehouse, old Pine Trees and young Pine Trees drifting in and out through the open doors and eddying about the weedy lot. Mr. Elmer Swasey, who must have been over eighty, was standing with his helmet tilted back on his head and his white beard cascading over his red shirt. He had led a useless, unregenerate life, but he had run with the Pine Trees in his youth and he was still a Pine Tree. Mr. Wesley Adams was there too, in his red shirt, and so were the fathers of a lot of boys Charles had known in high school, town tradesmen and mill foremen, and many of his former schoolmates were there with them. There was Earl Wilkins. They had played football together on the high school team and Earl was now a helper for Mr. Wesley Adams. There were Johnny Leveroni and young Vincent Sullivan and Andrew Garvin, and any number of little boys ran yelling around the legs of their elders, and the Pine Tree fife-and-drum corps was already beginning to play “The Gang’s All Here.”

  His father was an integrated part of the Pine Trees but Charles was an outsider who had come to look on and who had no real part in the ceremony.

&nb
sp; “Hi, Earl,” he said, trying to get in the spirit of it. “Hi, Johnny.” And they all said, “Hi, Charley. How’s it going, Charley?” but they all knew he was not one of them. He belonged on Spruce Street, not on River Street. Charles was an outsider but somehow, by some strange alchemy, his father had bridged the gap.

  “All right,” John Gray was calling. “Now wait a minute.” The fife-and-drum corps had stopped and his voice had filled the space of silence. “We’re going to roll her out in a minute. This is going to look right, by God. And don’t forget what happened at Smith’s Common.” Charles did not know but all the Pine Trees did. “We don’t want anybody winded before he pumps. Now we all know there’s a barrel of hard cider down cellar in Stevens’s barn and you get into the cellar by the back way. Now, if the Excelsiors or the Lions want it give it to ’em, but no one on the Pine Tree brakes gets it till it’s over. All right, boys, bring her out.”

  The tub clattered out into the sunshine, an antiquated hand-pumping mechanism with its long pump bars, called brakes, its brass and its bright red wheels and its name painted on the center bar, Pine Tree, Clyde—a beautiful, shiny, obsolete thing. The fife-and-drum corps started playing “The Gang’s All Here” again and the procession moved down River Street. Heads appeared in the windows and the mill whistle blew.

  The training field was conditioned to musters of firemen and others. It had been the training ground for the militia in the Revolutionary War. The company sent by Clyde to the Civil War had performed its first drill there. For a hundred and fifty years, the elms on the edge of the field had cast their shadows over similar gatherings and over the South End ball games. Some of Clyde’s oldest houses bordered the field, making a Colonial group not noticed by anyone in Clyde but eliciting the enthusiasm of strangers, who often turned their cars off the main highway and down Training Street to see their low sloping roofs and small-paned windows. Those windows so often shattered by baseballs now looked upon the crowded green and the roped-off area over which the hoses would play and the flag-draped booths from which chances were sold on useful articles, or which dispensed balloons, hot dogs, popcorn and tonic. It was always tonic, not soft drinks, in Clyde, but there was also a hint in the actions of certain citizens that something stronger was available.

  The crowd had lined Training Street and covered the field as the hand tubs marched past, but Charles had dropped from the procession as soon as the Pine Trees reached Training Street and finally he found himself, when the pumping contest started, by the old tubs at the far end of the field. This was the more disorderly end where the pumping teams were congregating to await their turns on the tub stand, far back from the hose nozzle and the paper where most of the crowd had gathered. This was the spot where there was always quiet drinking and where the fife-and-drum corps played to encourage the pumpers and where individuals performed small, competitive feats of strength. The Excelsior machine was on the stand; the Excelsiors had lined the pump bars and their captain stood holding a handkerchief in his upraised hand, watching the wind flag and waiting for his assistant to tell him the pressure. As Charles watched the captain’s arm drop, the pumpers moved into unified action, creakingly and slowly, and the fifes and drums began playing “Stars and Stripes Forever.” It was hard for the captain to make himself heard above the squealing of the fifes.

  At this moment Charles heard a girl somewhere behind him humming “Stars and Stripes Forever.” Established custom made it unusual for many girls, or at least many nice girls, to be at that corner of the field, where it was necessary to shout crude Anglo-Saxon exhortations as the pumpers increased the beat.

  “Come on, you bastards,” the pump captain called.

  At this exact moment Charles turned to see who the girl behind him was and he was very much surprised to find it was Jessica Lovell.

  “Hello,” she said. “I was wondering when you’d speak to me.”

  She was as tall as he was. She was dressed in a gray tweed suit tailored so that it seemed to add to her height. A tight red felt hat was pushed over her soft black hair and she was smiling at him, not in the cool way that she had smiled on other occasions when she had met him, but as though she were glad to see him.

  “Oh, hello,” Charles said. “They’re really working now.”

  He could not think of anything else to say. Though he had always thought of her as Jessica Lovell, he could not very well call her Jessica and yet it would have sounded silly to call her Miss Lovell. “The Excelsior has a good pump team, at least that’s what they say.”

  “I suppose you know all about this,” she said. “Your father’s in the Pine Trees, isn’t he?”

  It was not surprising she should have known, since everyone in Clyde knew his father.

  “Yes,” he said, “my father’s crazy about the Pine Trees.”

  “Well, it must be fun,” she said.

  “He thinks it is,” Charles answered, and then there was silence and it was just as though they had not spoken at all. He was thinking that she should not have been in that corner of the field, and then it occurred to him that she did not have to bother. Everyone knew who she was. She was Jessica Lovell.

  “You haven’t seen a queer sort of a man around, have you?” she asked.

  Charles laughed and looked at the crowd. The Excelsiors were mopping their brows and panting after their first try.

  “There are lots of them around here.”

  “But not like this one.” Her voice had a confidential note, as though they were old friends. “He’s been studying the head-hunters from Borneo. He was at the house for lunch. He’s here to make a survey.”

  The captain of the Excelsiors was exhorting his pumpers and the crowd was helping.

  “What sort of a survey?” Charles asked.

  She gave her head a quick, impatient shake.

  “Why, I don’t know,” she said. “Some sort of social survey. He wanted to see this thing and now he’s gone away and left me.”

  “Do you want me to help you find him?” Charles asked.

  “No,” she said. “I’d rather stay here and let him find us, that is if it’s all the same to you, Charley.”

  He was startled when she called him by his first name, but then nearly everyone in Clyde referred to him as Charley Gray.

  “What are they going to do now?” she asked.

  “They’re going to pump again,” he said. “They have three tries.”

  “It’s nice to be here with an expert,” she said. “Let’s go over there and listen to the music.”

  The music had stopped. The fifes and drums had gathered in a sunny spot on the edge of the road opposite the Stevens barn.

  “I wouldn’t go over there,” Charles said. There was always a tough crowd around the Stevens barn, but then everyone knew she was Jessica Lovell. She was moving over toward the tough crowd before she answered.

  “Come on,” she said. “I’ve never been to one of these things before.”

  Obviously no one would as much as whistle at her. It was only a question of convention and he was surprised that she did not realize it. Of course, she could join the fifes and drums and all the visiting firemen lounging on the edge of the road if she wanted, but she might have noticed that there were no other girls there. She should have understood that being there would cramp everyone’s style.

  Loud voices trailed off into whispers, the fife-and-drum corps, who had been to the Stevens barn cellar, gazed at both of them in a way that made Charles shift from one foot to another, but the lull did not last, because they had all been drinking cider. As soon as they saw that Jessica had not made a mistake and that she enjoyed being there, the red-shirted firemen and all the hangers-on reminded Charles of small boys showing off before a friendly adult. They were stealing timid glances at her, and Charles could only smile, like a guide who was taking a tourist to a corner of some foreign carnival.

  “Aren’t they going to play again?” Jessica asked.

  Of course, the fifes and dru
ms heard her and they were delighted to show how well they could play. They began playing “School days, school days, dear old golden rule days,” and then with hardly a pause they began playing “Marching Through Georgia.” Someone touched a cigarette to a balloon and it exploded in a very humorous way.

  “You see, they’ve all been at the hard cider,” Charles said.

  “What hard cider?”

  “In the barn over there. In the barn cellar.”

  In the warmth of the cider and group companionship, he and Jessica were beginning to be forgotten. There was a tightening circle around the fifes and drums. A heavy, florid young man, with short yellow hair that looked as if it had been cut by the old bowl method, shoved inside the circle. Someone tripped him and he fell down and it was just the thing that everybody needed to make the gathering a success. The young man took off his frayed coat sweater and began asking who had done it, while the fifes and drums played “School Days” again and a chorus began bellowing, “You wrote on my slate, I love you, Joe, when we were a couple of kids.”

  “Who is he?” Jessica Lovell asked. She had to lean close to him before he could hear her. “The one who got tripped up.”

  “He’s a North Ender,” Charles answered. There were always jokes about the unregenerate qualities of North Enders. It seemed unnecessary to tell her that he was Hughie Willis and that almost every Saturday Hughie Willis got into trouble.

  A Smith’s Common fireman pushed Hughie and one thing led to another. They were not fighting, they were wrestling. They were rolling over and over on the grass, and when the fireman’s shoulders touched the ground everyone was delighted that Hughie had got the Smith’s Common fireman down.

  “Who else wants a try?” Hughie shouted. “Where the hell are all the wrasslers?”

  “He’s pretty good, isn’t he?” Charles said, and he had some childish desire to impress Jessica Lovell. “I’d like to take him on myself.”