Every day to school she wore her faded dress of flowers, horizontal lines of originally cheery little tulips row upon row. It came below her knees and there the cast off shoes, boots practically, hook-and-eye boots all cracked and curled, there the boots began, and so nothing of her was uncovered except the neck above the high collar of frazzled lace, and the wrists and the hands and the incredible face that struck my heart like a jolt every time I raised my eyes to look at it.
Migod. When it was possible to feel that way.
Wasn’t it. I used to wake up before dawn and wait impatiently for the light to come into the window so that I could jump out of bed and get ready for school. I would sit on the front wooden step and wait for her to come down the canyon. She would smile when she saw me.
Were you her best friend?
We were each other’s only friend. Her English was very bad. The theory of the teacher with all these immigrant kids was that if you spoke English loudly enough they would eventually understand. They all sat there with their immense eyes and watched her every move. They never smiled, even when she scratched her head with her pencil and her wig moved up and down on her forehead. She taught them the pledge of allegiance phonetically.
I would like to have known you then.
You would not believe it, Lucinda, but I was very sensual.
I believe it.
No, you’re smiling. But I was, I really was. I lived in such an alerted state that even the daylight sifting through a cloud would give me enormous shuddering response. My friend and I used to play after school in the hills above town. The sun would go down behind the Black Hills but we’d see it to the east still on the plains, moving away from us on the flat plains, racing away in a broad front like an army losing territory on a map. In the shadow in some gully or behind some rock she’d lie in my arms and look at me with her dark eyes, frightened and speechless by our strange intimacy, frightened but not spooked. She could say my name but not much else. She rolled the rr’s. Wadden.
Light me a cigarette, will you?
Is this boring?
No, it makes me sad, though. I know what happened.
I have in my life just three times seen faces in dark light, at dusk, or at dawn, or against a white pillow in which the fear of life was so profoundly accurate, like an animal’s perfect apprehension, that it encompassed its opposite and became the gallantry to break your heart.
Go on.
One day I remember late in the summer, before we all had to leave Ludlow for the flats, we were playing up there at some run-off. Some black-water run-off falling off the rocks somehow, so filthy with coal dust that just putting your hand in it was enough to dye yourself black. She didn’t want to get her one and only dress wet, she’d get a beating for that, so she tied it up around her waist and hunkered there by the stream to play. She wasn’t as old as I. She was a younger person. She wore nothing underneath. It was very lovely. Because I had become still she became still. She let me touch her. She let me run my hand over her small back. I could feel the bones in her ass. I could feel the heat under her skinny thighs.
Was this when you became lovers?
Perhaps so. I mean I know we were at one time or another, I remember that it happened, but I don’t remember the experience of it. What is that up ahead, Lucinda? It looks very dark.
It’s nothing. A line squall.
Heave said his father and they swung the wooden chest up on the wagon bed. Now make it fast. He pushed up with his hands landed lightly on one knee and stood up beside the chest and worked it firmly between the bureau and the slatted side gate. He glanced up the canyon. They were coming along steadily now, mule-drawn wagons like his own or the two-wheeled handcarts which required the woman to throw her entire weight stiff-armed on the handle to keep it from rising and the man around the front braking with his bootheels dug into the ground.
She was nowhere in sight.
The sky was heavy almost black, it felt like evening although it wasn’t yet noon. A fine drizzle misted on the skin and made everything slippery to hold. Each drop of rain seemed to contain a seed of coal dust. If you rubbed the water on the back of your hand it smeared black. Hey his father shouted keep your wits boy! He nearly fell backward as a cardboard box hit him in the chest. He grabbed it. His mother came out of the house with her arms full of pots and pans. His parents went in and out of the door bringing him things which he found a place for on the wagon bed. Gradually he realized he was constructing the model of a city. Seen from a distance, the boxes and headboards and chairs and chests were the skyline of some glorious Eastern city, the kind he had seen in the rotogravure, New York maybe, or St. Louis.
I have a comment here: I note the boy Warren Penfield’s relentless faculty of composition. Rather than apprehend reality he transforms it so that in this case, for example, in the eviction of the striking miners from the Colorado Fuel Company’s houses, the pitiful pile of his family’s belongings on the wagon bed is represented as a vision of high civilization. No wonder his father is angered by his constant daydreaming. Jack Penfield perceives it as mental incompetence. How he wonders will his son survive the harshness of this life when he the father and she the mother are no longer there to protect him? As to book learning, Warren can do that passably well, but as to plain good sense the character of his mind is not reassuring.
Neda Penfield takes a different view but not without some irritation that the boy doesn’t give her more support for it. Her view is that he is a rare soul, a finer being either than herself or her husband. By some benign celestial error he was born to them and to their life of slag who would more properly have been the child of a wealthy family going to the finest schools and with every material and intellectual advantage. He gives her qualms of course but she nourishes a private and barely articulated conviction that he is not deficient only latent, that his strength is there but still wrapped up in itself still to unfold in its fullness when the time is ripe. When will the time be ripe? His hands and feet are large and clumsy, he looms next to her sometimes like a giant he is at that stage of life when the largeness of him seems to wax and wane according to his own rhythms of confidence. She is aware as mothers are of the changes in him the manhood beginning to shine and she is comforted. But the wisdom of him has still to appear. Sometimes the light will hit his amber eye and she will feel ill at ease, as if she is living with two men rather than a man and a boy. Perhaps Jack Penfield feels this too and anticipates the revolt of his son, the loosening of his power over him, the freeing of his son from himself till he has nothing but himself and then inevitably he will be subjected to his son’s power over him. Yet he is secretly proud too and likes the boy’s good looks. Warren is gentle and distracted as ever only his ears and elbows and wrists and ankles show the power of him still to come.
Neda Penfield would like Warren to win some sort of scholarship and go away to the city to study. She wants this desperately even though she knows her life with her husband then would be hell. Jack Penfield wants Warren in the mines. He wants him in the mines to establish such rage that he will finally be in contact with the circumstances of his life, he will wake up to it. And then see what happens, then see what glorious flights of power and genius the boy has in him perhaps to become an organizer a great union orator a radical a leader of men out of their living graves of coal. Let the boy work in a crouch for ten hours hacking coal in the chilling blackness of the earth, crouching with his feet in brackish water, not knowing which bite of the pick will bring the roof down on him. Let him work for his three tons a day and bring them up to be short-weighted by the company. Then my son will justify me and sanctify my name and fulfill the genius of my line.
The wagon loaded, Warren gives a hand up to his father and after a moment the two of them teetering on the gate, he nimbly leaps down and suffers the inspection of his work. The father pushes this adjusts that but says nothing, which is the highest approval. Together they tie everything in a web of stout rope, Warren running around
from one side of the wagon to the other hauling tight looping knotting and he thinks of a wonderful bridge with granite towers and steel suspension cables what bridge is that.
And then his mother comes out of the house her hands empty but for a summer straw hat, a wide-brimmed straw with a round crown, and not seeing any place to put it she places it on her head. It is such a gallant gesture, so incongruous with the rain and the state of their fortunes that the two men look at her startled and she pulls her shoulders back and defies them with her glance, her face peculiarly shadowed by the brim as if the sun was oddly proven, but they wouldn’t laugh because both have perceived in one shimmering instant before the fact of her wearing that hat is established, the still alive girl and the undefeated kingdom of their family.
She took her place on the bench and looked straight ahead over the mule’s rump. Jack Penfield went into the house and came out with the last thing, his new bolt-action Savage whose stock was oiled smooth and whose barrel was blue steel, and he placed this across his lap as he sat up behind the mule and took the reins.
And so with a lurch of the wheels they turned into the traffic of wagons winding down through the canyons. In front of the Colorado Supply Company two sheriff’s deputies stood on the porch to watch the procession. They had Winchesters cradled in their arms. Some of the families passing them made loud remarks. Some of them sang their union song. Most of them looked straight ahead and went on down the street into the descent of the prairie, too cold or too realistic to bother with the trappings of the spirit.
The rain was changing its nature, getting heavy turning hard, and Warren sitting cross-legged on top of a bureau felt the sting of ice, like steel pellets. He held out his hand and received a particle of hail. He put up his denim collar. He was facing forward but for some reason swiveled on his rump and looked back at the street just as the wagon behind picked up the pace to fill in the slack in the parade and it was she in her dress of tulips faded sitting up on her wagon on a stool like a princess borne in her palanquin, her body moving forward and back, her head moving in the lag of her body’s rhythm and he smiled and raised his hand and she smiled and raised hers, and they stared at each other their bodies gently bending and straightening in the rhythm of the mules’ pace, the wheels creaking in the mud the traces rattling like ancient music of fanfares and the two of them staring at each other like royal lovers in a procession toward their investiture under the hardening rain through the canyon of slag going down to the plains.
Thinking about that girl standing in front of the mirror and holding up the white dress on the train gliding past me out of sight, I came along the track before I even knew it into the main street of a mountain village.
It was noon on the church tower. A pretty lakeside village with a general store a gas pump a white hotel with rocking chairs on the porch, a bait-and-tackle shop. I wanted to keep going but there was a cop on the corner. Casually I crossed the street and went into a diner and ordered the baked ham and brown beans in a crock and coffee. When I finished I ordered the same thing again. The waitress smiled and the chef himself looked out through the porthole of the kitchen door to see this prize customer.
I got out of that village without trouble resuming my walk just beyond the station crossing, following the rails that forked off into a narrower cut of trees. The track went through some woods circled around a small mountain lake and then it started up a grade a long slow winding grade, I was not already in love with her but in her field of force, what I thought I felt like was some stray dog following the first human being it happened to see.
In the late afternoon I came to a miniature station house of creosoted brown logs complete with ticket window and potbellied stove. It was empty. Out the back door was the sidetracked private railroad car.
I climbed aboard. Each room had a narrow door with brass handle opening onto the corridor going down one side along the windows.
Here was the room of grand appointments where the men were drinking a card table of green baize and leather with receptacles for poker chips, a bar with bottles and glasses in fitted recesses, a Persian rug of rich red tone, paneling of dark wood, books in the shelves The Harvard Classics. A faint odor of cigar smoke. I brushed the tassels of the lampshades with the back of my hand.
Everything in this room, unlit and still, seemed more awesome than from the distance of the night, for it was quite clearly owned. That was the main property of the entire car, not that it was handsome or luxurious but that it was owned.
In the girl’s bedroom I sat on the plump mattress newly made up with fresh sheets thick quilt of satiny material there was no sign of her of course not a thread not a bobby pin but as I thought about it the faintest intimation of a scent, a not unfamiliar scent, I inhaled deeply, a variety common enough to have previously informed the nostrils of a derelict somewhere before in his wandering one summer night in the carney perhaps.
The afternoon light came through the window at a low angle between the trees it suddenly faded the car darkened I left. Outside, the sky was showing stars as it does earlier than you think it should in the last of the summer.
I was so blue. I was sorry I’d found the car, if I hadn’t found it I could have thought about it for the rest of my life. If any. But now I felt let-down stupid at a loss what to do. The breeze had a chill and I supposed I couldn’t do better going back as I’d come, so I followed the one road from the small station as it ran uphill into the woods.
Long before I got there, probably from the moment I left the village, I’d been on private property. They were the same hills and forest and stone of the natural world, they looked like the Adirondacks, but I was walking in fact on a map of fixed color, crimson perhaps.
The road inclined gradually around the side of a mountain, one side dropping away to show the darkening sky.
And then, below, a broad lake came into view, a lake glittering with the last light of the day. I stopped to look at it. Something was moving, making a straight line of agitation, like a tear, in the surface.
A moment later a bird was rising slowly from the water, a bird large enough to be seen from this distance but only against the silver phosphorescence of the water. When it rose as high as the land it was gone.
The rest of my survey I made in darkness, by the light of stars. I had come on some isolated reservation, and its center was a cluster of buildings on the mountain overlooking this same lake: a lodge of two stories, and several smaller outbuildings, barns, stables, garages. Even in darkness I could tell that the buildings, like the little station house at the bottom of the trail, were uniformly of log construction.
My vantage point was from the land side, a rise in an enormous rolling meadow beside a tennis court fenced in wood and mesh. I did not try to move closer to see in detail what was in the light of the lodge windows, all ablaze everywhere, as if great crowds were inside. I knew there were no crowds. The wind amplified in gusts the strains of a dance band. When the song was over, it began again. It was a Victrola record of a tune I recognized, “Exactly Like You.”
The perverse effect of this music and the lighted windows was of a repellent and desolate isolation.
Now the wind came up stronger across the meadow, it was off the lake and carried the water’s chill. I looked up to the treetops of the wood behind me and saw them prancing and bucking in the way of a hard life of eminence. I was fixed by my own pride from going to the back door of this establishment and asking for a place to stay or a meal. I didn’t know if I had the stamina for a night on these grounds, but it was as if I was reflecting the clear arrogance of whoever owned this place and traveled to it by imperial railroad, for I was goddamned if I would ask him or them for anything.
I didn’t want her to see me like this!
I remember squatting behind the little tennis shack and keeping myself company with my cigarettes. I smoked one after another and made a community around their glow.
Now I’ll tell what I don’t remember. I don’t remem
ber the sound they must have made, the uncanny sound as it separated itself from the wind in the trees, of group exertion, breath chuffing across twenty or thirty hanging tongues, yelps of murderous excitement. Was the moon out? I rose from my crouch seeing something like an earthwave coming toward me, as if the ground were advancing in a sort of rolling quaking upheaval. This gradually distinguished itself as the furred musculature of shoulders and chests and legs, and I think now I must have seen the face of the lead dog, flung into moonlight, its maddened red eyes like the tracers of those launched fangs. If I didn’t see it I’ve dreamed it a thousand times.
Goddamnit, if city boys knew any animals at all it was dogs. But these were like nothing I’d ever seen. Not that I had the leisure for contemplation. I held up my forearm and his teeth tore it like a piece of paper. Together we rammed into the side of the tennis shack. And then the others were up, tossing themselves at me in their fury but with great inefficiency, they turned on each other snarling for getting in each other’s way though they were effective enough to my pain and screaming terror. I was kicking at them and flinging them off going for the throat trying to tear my throat out, I was kicking and waving my arms and fists and howling like a dog myself and knowing that if I went down I faced something more than the end of my life—shit—the extenuated appreciation of its end, piecemeal, my life taken from me chunk by chunk drop by drop every nerve shrieking.
Loon Lake Page 4