Loon Lake

by E. L. Doctorow

  But when a new freak was introduced, that evening everyone would shine, the new one would tone them all up in competitive awareness, except for Fanny, secure and serene in her mightiness.

  Herewith bio the poet Warren Penfield.

  Born Indianapolis Indiana August 2 1899.

  Moved at an early age with parents to southern Colorado.

  First place Ludlow Consolidated Grade School Spelling Bee 1908.

  Ludlow Colorado Boy of the Year 1913.

  Colorado State Mental Asylum 1914, 1915.

  Enlisted US Army Signal Corps 1916.

  Valedictorian US Army Semaphore School Augusta Georgia.

  Assigned First Carrier Pigeon Company Seventh Signal Battalion

  First Division, AEF. Saw action Somme Offensive

  pigeons having the shit shot out of them feathers falling over

  trenches blasted in bits like snowflakes drifting through the

  concussions of air or balancing on the thin fountain of a scream.

  Citation accompanying Silver Star awarded Warren

  Penfield 1918: that his company of pigeons having been

  rendered inoperable and all other signal apparatus including

  field telephone no longer available to him Corporal Penfield

  did stand in an exposed position lit by flare under enemy

  heavy fire and transmit in extended arm semaphore the urgent

  communication of his battalion commander until accurate and

  redemptive fire from his own artillery indicated the message

  had been received. This was not true. What he transmitted

  via full arm semaphore under enemy heavy fire was the first

  verse of English poet William Wordsworth’s Ode Intimations

  of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood as follows

  quote: There was a time when meadow grove and stream the

  earth and every common sight to me did seem apparelled in

  celestial light the glory and the freshness of a dream. It

  is not now as it hath been of yore—turn wheresoe’er I may by

  night or day the things which I have seen I now can see

  no more endquote.

  So informed Secretary of Army in letter July 4 1918, medal

  enclosed. Incarceration US Army Veterans Psychological

  Facility Nutley New Jersey 1918. First volume of verse

  The Flowers of the Sangre de Cristo unpaged published by

  the author 1918. No reviews. Crosscountry journey to

  Seattle Washington 1919. Trans-Pacific voyage 1919.

  Resident of Japan 1919–1927. Second volume of verse Child

  Bride in a Zen Garden unpaged published in English

  by Nosaka Publishing Company, Tokyo, 1926. No reviews.

  Deported Japan undesirable alien 1927. Poet in residence

  private mountain retreat Loon Lake NY 1929–1937.

  Disappeared presumed lost at sea on around-

  the-world airplane voyage 1937. No survivors.

  Third volume of verse Loon Lake unpaged published

  posthumously by the Grebe Press, Loon Lake NY 1939.

  No reviews.

  You are what? said Jack Penfield, leaning over the table to hear better. His brow lowered and his mouth opened, the face was poised in skeptical anticipation of the intelligence he was about to receive. Or had he received it? In his middle age he no longer wanted to be the recipient of good news of any kind. And if some was forthcoming he quickly rendered it ineffective, almost as if it were more important that the world be grimly consistent at this point than that it would offer a surprise. You are what?

  The boy of the year, his son said.

  What does that mean?

  Oh Warren, his mother said, isn’t that fine. She sat down beside her son, pulling the wooden chair next to his, and she faced her husband across the table. He would have to work on both of them now.

  I don’t know, Warren said. You get a certificate and five dollars at the spring ceremony.

  Jack Penfield leaned back in his chair. I see. He got up and went to the mantel and took his pipe and tobacco tin and came back to the table and fixed up for a while while they watched. The large flat fingers tamped the tobacco in the bowl. The hand of the lifelong miner with its unerasable lines of charcoal in the knuckles and under the nails. He lit his pipe. You know, he said, when I come up this evening there was a man with a rifle on Watertank Hill.

  Please Jack his wife said.

  What you going to do with the money lad?

  I don’t know.

  That’s moren a day’s wages. Are you proud?

  I don’t know.

  You won’t make four dollars when you come below. Did you know that?

  Yes.

  If there still is a mine. Are there any other english-speaking there aren’t are there?

  I don’t think so.

  Well then you had to be boy of the year didn’t you.

  Please Jack.

  Didn’t you.

  I suppose.

  The only one they can call up to the platform and trust to say thank you properly. No polack wop or damned greek knows to say thank you for makin me boy of the year does he?

  I don’t know.

  And your ma’s going to find a clean shirt for you that day won’t she. And she’ll comb her hair back and put the comb in it and go with the tears of thanks in her eyes for the company school and the company supply and the company house and the company boy of the year.

  You poison everything Neda Penfield said. You make everything bad, you make a child feel bad for being alive. There’s nothing worse than that. There’s no evil worse than that.

  But he minded less than his mother thought he did. He wanted his father to talk this way. It was very helpful to him. The consistency of their positions was all he asked, that his pa be unyielding and full of anger, that his ma be enraged or worse frightened by her husband’s spiritual tactlessness. Warren knew they were poor and lived lives the color of slag. He knew there was nothing beautiful in Ludlow but he was eager to get up each morning and test the day. He knew the real evil was his own, the eye and ear that took in everything and suffered nothing. He accumulated meaningless useless data that nevertheless bewitched him. The thick bulbed vein in his father’s hand, for instance, in contrast to the thin greenish vein in his mother’s. The characteristic smell of the house and the privy were noted and recorded. There were certain objects he liked very much. His mother’s tortoise-shell comb, the teeth broken off in several places. The coal stove, whose shape was like a naked woman, her long neck disappearing through the roof. He liked to see underwear drying on the line the wind animating it to a maniac dance. Sometimes he thought of the flapping long Johns as a desperate signaling of imprisoned or tortured people. He was absorbed by the sun rising and the sun setting or the rain when it fell from rock to rock. He was excited by any kind of violence, a parent hitting a child a man hitting a woman. When he happened to see such things he would be suffused with a weird heat. His heart would beat furiously and then he’d feel sickened and would feel like throwing up. Until he broke into a cold sweat. Then he would feel all right again. He listened now with eyes downcast but in some contentment to their argument, enjoying the words of it, the claims and counterclaims, agreeing with each in turn they were so well matched and spoke so well the images that flew through his mind on their words.

  I got out of bed and rolled my clothes and shoes into a bundle. I grabbed the money from the bureau. I unlatched the door quietly and closed it behind me. There were no other guests at the Pine Grove Motor Court. A thin frost lay on the window of her car. The wind blew.

  I threw the bills into the wind.

  I found a privy up the hill behind the cabins and next to it an outdoor shower, the kind you pumped the water for yourself. I stood in the shower of cold spring water and looked up at the swaying tops of the pine trees and I watched the sky turning gray and hea
rd through the water and the toneless wind the sounds of the first bird waking.

  I dried myself as best I could and put on my clothes. Shivering, stipple-skinned, I struck off through the woods. I had no idea where I was going. It didn’t matter. I ran to get warm. I ran into the woods as to another world.

  All morning I went up and down the hills of timber. Sometimes I’d hear the sound of a truck or a car and it would shock me. I’d veer off to get as deep in the woods as possible. It was difficult to keep my sense of direction, difficult to put life behind me. I’d come along into a clearing and find the remains of a fire or an empty wine bottle. Traces of human life everywhere: stone fences, old trails, dirt roads grown over. I found a busted inner tube, yellowed sheets of newspaper with dates on them from the early summer.

  But I saw no one: any stiff in his right mind would get out of the Adirondacks before autumn.

  By the late morning I was so hungry I changed course and went downhill till I found a paved road. I walked along the tree line for several miles and came to a country store with a gas pump and some chickens in a coop. Stood in the trees and waited to see a black Model A or perhaps a carney truck or even a state police car. The odds were against it, but I was not thinking odds. The carney was a territory in my mind. It loomed out further than I had gone or maybe could go.

  There were no cars. I slid down the embankment of loose earth behind the store and went around front and stepped in the door like any customer. I had my savings of the summer, twenty-six dollars, in my shoes; in my wallet I carried three dollars more. I bought a loaf of wax-papered bread, some slices of baloney, a bottle of Grade A milk and a package of Luckies. The store lady, short and wide and with thick dirty eyeglasses, treated me as if it were the most normal thing in the world for someone to come along from nowhere, as maybe it was.

  I went down the road till it curved out of sight of the store, and then I ran back up into the woods and found a tree in a spot of sun and sat there and made my lunch. Then I went to sleep for a while, while the woods were still warm, but it was a mistake because I suffered terrible dreams of indistinct shapes and shadows and awful sounds of violence. Someone was crying, sobbing, and it turned out to be me. I jumped up and got going again.

  I went deeper and deeper into the woods and sometime at the height of the afternoon wandered into a stand of ancient pine with a porous forest floor of brown pine needles that was so soft you couldn’t hear your own footsteps. It was dark in here, there was an umber twilight in lieu of the day, and there seemed to be no usual busy life at all, no birds, no insects, just this dark place of unnatural quiet. Looking up, I could hardly find anything green. Yet it was not threatening, the solitude was so complete, the stillness so perfect that I felt as if I had come into some vast, hushed cathedral of peace. Not even a Father. I stopped walking and stood very still and listened for I don’t know what. And then, right in my tracks I sat down and for a while was as still as everything else.

  I thought of Fanny the Fat Lady’s warm hand on the small of my back.

  By early afternoon I was traveling again on roads, only jumping off to the side when I heard a car coming, or taking to the woods in order to skirt a town. I went along that day with no destination in mind, no plan of action except to follow the rise, and go for the altitude. I had no food left and did not feel I needed any. I came out to a broad plateau and looking out ahead of me realized I had gone past the region of towns and now, for my arrogance, had no hope of supper unless I found a farmhouse somewhere.

  The open ground was uncultivated, mile after mile. I was on a crumbling two-lane road with grass growing in the cracks and this suggested to me the unlikelihood of a ride coming along. Still I kept going.

  And then with the sun turning red as it dropped toward the evening, I saw to my left, perhaps fifty yards into an open space of tall weed and tangled brush, a single-track railroad embankment. Behind the embankment was a curved outcropping of shiny flaked rock. I got up on the embankment for a professional survey: I had happened upon a one-track spur line of some sort. I figured that as it curved in an arc around the rock hill, there was a fair chance it would be going slowly enough to hop. Coming down from the roadbed, I found a bare patch of ground spotted with oil. And beside the charred remains of a fire I saw a flask of clear glass and a lady’s shoe with the heel torn off. So others had stopped here in their great study of the outdoors—it was a station of sorts.

  I gathered a great bundle of kindling, but I was too tired to build a fire. I lay on my back with my hands behind my head and I watched the sky. The sun had gone down but the sky was still blue, a very pale blue, with a few high clouds still golden with sunlight. Soon I was lying in the dusk and feeling the chill of the evening but the sky was sunlit and blue and so far away in its warmth that I felt I was looking at it from a grave.

  ——

  I fell asleep that way and sometime during the night was aroused by a train whistle. I lay there listening for it again in case I had only been dreaming. Again I heard it, this time somewhat closer. I stood up and tried to pound some circulation into my stiff hulk. The train was coming without question now. I had no idea what time it was, the sky was black, starless. I thought I could hear the locomotive. I moved toward the embankment and waited. I could hear the engine clearly now and knew it was moving at a slow speed. The first I saw of it was a diffuse paling of the darkness along the curve of the embankment. Suddenly I was blinded by a powerful light, as if I had looked into the sun. I dropped to my knees. The beam swung away from me in a transverse arc and a long conical ray of light illuminated the entire rock outcropping, every silvery vein of schist glittering as bright as a mirror, every fern and evergreen flaring for a moment as if torched. I rubbed my eyes and looked for the train behind the glare. It was passing from my left to my right. The locomotive and tender were blacker than the night, a massive movement forward of shadow, but there was a passenger car behind them and it was all lit up inside. I saw a porter in a white jacket serving drinks to three men sitting at a table. I saw dark wood paneling, a lamp with a fringed shade, and shelves of books in leather bindings. Then two women sitting talking at a group of wing chairs that looked textured, as if needle-pointed. Then a bright bedroom with frosted-glass wall lamps and a canopied bed and standing naked in front of a mirror was a blond girl and she was holding up for her examination a white dress on a hanger.

  Oh my lords and ladies and then the train had passed through the clearing and I was watching the red light disappear around the bend. I hadn’t moved from the moment the light had dazzled my eyes. I’d heard of private railroad cars but was not prepared. I was under the impression I would see it again if I waited. I waited. I heard it going down the track and listened until I couldn’t hear it anymore. Into my vacated mind flowed all the English I never knew I’d learned at Paterson Latin High School. Grammar slammed into my brain. In an instant this vision of incandescent splendor had left me more alone and terrified than I knew it was possible to be.

  I got a fire going and made it as large as I could, I threw everything I could find into it, it was a damn bonfire and I crouched beside it trying to get warm I made an involuntary sound in my throat for my dereliction, my loneliness, the callow hopes of my life. Who did I think I was? Where did I think I was going? What made me think it was worth anything to stay alive?

  The fire blazed up. I wanted to get in it.

  At the first light of the morning I climbed the embankment and set out down the tracks in the direction the train had gone.

  Compare the private railroad car sitting on the Santa Fe siding one night in 1910 in front of the mine near Ludlow Colorado whose collapsed entry was being dug away by rescue crews. Late at night by the glow of torches they began to bring out the dead hunky miners, some so impregnated by coal dust they looked like ancient archaeological finds of considerable significance. Some had been blown to pieces and were assembled on the cold ground by thoughtful colleagues who matched the torn halves of pants
legs or recognized what head went with what trunk. The boy followed these deliberations and remarked on the sepulchral interest of assembling pieces of bodies matching and discarding, trying this arm here that foot there on the dark ground, the chill of the October night on the slag hills, the black mineral mountains looming darker than the night sky, the boy noticing the darkening stains around the bodies as blood blacker than coalwater. Some miners were brought out intact, uninjured and looking only slightly stunned to have breathed all the available air until there was no more. Some faces had the look of irritability that comes when something small has gone wrong. Others had eyes rolled into their heads in exasperation others had sorrowed into death and by some curious self-embalmment of the skin left the tracks of their tears like shining falling stars through their grizzled faces. The rescue work was commanded from the private railroad car, a property like the mine and like the miners of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, and in the car a self-sufficient unit with bedrooms kitchen small library and a row of partners’ desks were three or four officers of the firm some in gartered shirt sleeves efficiently dealing with the wives making settlements pushing waivers across their desks proffering pens matching the tally sheets to the employment records and in general dealing so efficiently with the disaster that the mine would be back in action within the week. The only thing that threatened this work performance was the occasional embittered woman who would come in screaming and tearing her hair and cursing them in her own language. They would nod to one of the private peace officers and the troublesome woman would be removed. Gradually in his inspection of the disaster the boy found his way into the car and in the moment before he was ejected he observed one of the company officers, a stolid man impassively wiping the spittle from his cheek. The brass plate at his desk informed the boy of F. W. Bennett Vice President for Engineering. Warren felt the rough hand of the armed guard on his neck and then the coolness of the night air as he flew from the top of the rail-car step to the graveled ground. His knee was embedded with bits of stone as the miners had been peppered with coal fragments, so he understood that feeling. To understand what it meant to be buried alive in a mountain he sat later with his eyes closed in the night and his hands over his ears and he held his breath as long as he could.