While, as a good businessman, Mr. Johnson understood how the railroad could benefit him, he was the most outspoken against its construction. He liked Babylon the way it was. The underbelly of too much convenience is disaster, he proclaimed. He used all the civic power he could muster to stop this proposal from going forward. But the matter was out of his hands: Chicago Burlington & Quincy was not to be stopped. The tracks were continued past the stockyards, on through toward Bloomington, which awaited with excitement all those things that the many voices in Babylon decried.
In the end the Babylonian isolationists had overestimated how appealing their town would be to travelers looking for employment or a new place to put down roots. A few people moved in, but more left. Indeed, if any passengers happened to arrive in Babylon when the wind was gusting in from the Johnson yards they were only too anxious for the conductor’s cry of Allaboard. As soon as young men and women came of age—some the children of the most vigorous who had fought against opening Babylon up to outside influence—they found the railroad by far the best way of escaping home and family. Chicago Burlington & Quincy contributed, in the end, not to the corruption of Babylon but rather to the slow shrinkage of its population.
Still, many of Babylon’s citizens remained content, whether by design or fate, that almost without exception the only travelers come by train to town were poor dumb beasts, arriving there to be weighed and either shipped or slaughtered on the spot.
LeRoy Mann’s sister, Opal, and her daughter, Hannah, were to arrive on the Chicago Burlington & Quincy on Saturday, midday.
LeRoy had never before seen his niece, and had not laid eyes on his sister for nearly a decade. Since the death of his wife a year earlier, he had sunk into reclusiveness broken only by the necessity of fetching supplies from town. To be left alone for days at a stretch was a wish easily come by where LeRoy lived. His farmstead was thirty miles from town out on the great yellow plains of wheat—vast enough that there were directions on the compass one could follow in a straight line and still not reach the rambling fences that marked the boundaries by sunset, a skittish-edged fire over the crackling tracery.
Weeks could go by during which LeRoy would not be seen, but when planting time came and went, and it was noticed that he did not hire the usual small collective of Irish, German, and Scandinavian itinerants to help till and sow, town gossips began to speculate about what was really happening out at the Mann farm. Gone round the long bend, it was conjectured. Who could skip planting time?
His sister’s cable was received with disbelief. He read it twice before walking outside with it, absentmindedly pinching and ripping its edges in his stiff fingers. In the short message,
HANNAH AND ME COMING STOP/
RIVE TRAIN SATURDAY NEXT STOP/
LOVE SIS/
he concentrated on the word “rive,” searching it for any other meaning than arrive.
But there was no other possible meaning. She had taken him up on his offer. He glowered at his boots, shook his head. His had been the right response to her own letter, the one she had written from New York mentioning that Nicky had left her again. He’d offered, in his reply, what he usually offered—that she and niece Hannah could come stay with him on the farm if things didn’t work out otherwise. But then, this?
“Nicholas,” he told the pickup truck, drawing out the “s” like steam from a pressure cooker. He was always leaving her, Nicholas, it was all he was good for was leaving her, coming back, leaving her again. “Nick, you son of a bitch.”
She would never take him up on his proposals. He made them out of his own sense of family politesse; it was what he felt ought to be said, and in any case New York was so far away.
They were grounded, the offers of help, in his knowledge of his sister. She had been the more independent, even the prouder, of the two, and whenever difficulties arose she confronted them with disarming grace. Grace was her middle name, he scoffed. She forbore, and forbore. Crises were moments to be gotten through, though not necessarily to be learned from; suffered, not studied, at least that he could say against her. Nicholas was like two men: one she loved, the other endured. But the forbearance took such a form that it was impossible for those around her to know, from day to day, year to year, whether all was right with the world for Opal Burden or just the opposite.
Fugue was the word she was given by Nicky’s doctor to explain his behavior. A tough, tidy little word, pretty, resonant, with its counterpart in music, that glorious and logical tangle of tone. Fugue; it was pathological. Nicky had no conscious choice. Unlike the musical form, Nicky’s fugues were bitterly illogical. He might step out for a short stroll along Greenwich Avenue to buy some ice cream—pistachio for Opal, for Hannah chocolate—or cigarettes, or simply to clear his head, but would keep on walking, not to be seen for months. He would wake up the next morning in an unfamiliar mews and wonder at the two paper tubs of ice cream that lay in puddles beside him, dotted with ants. Chocolate, pistachio? While he had no concept of who he was, what his past was and how they possibly wrapped together to deliver him into just this alley behind a restaurant, a seafood place if one were to guess by the stink that bloomed in the ash cans, he did retain certain instincts that helped him to survive during fugal periods.
Hotel restrooms were where one best washed, if one could get past the doorman unseen; janitor’s closets in office buildings, if they were equipped with a sink and mirror, were viable options.
Parks were pleasant to sleep in during the long, dull days when he found himself out of work.
Nights, when he seemed most to come alive, were better passed in bars where he could dance. He was a skilled dancer and the music seemed to carry him out of his body and float him away from anxiety, those flashes that rushed down through the flesh of his neck, bristly, crude, voluptuous as a blade, swirling across some sense he—Nicholas—was not himself.
It was in these clubs and bars he met his women, also. This was what hurt Opal the most during fugues. But he was helpless, she knew: it was a disease, this bad fire which scorched his mind.
When Opal finally did find him, some women did not easily give up their Nicky. He was a handsome man, thin, compact, with a clean jaw and face of fine angles, delicate, veiny hands, straight auburn hair that lay back across the crown of his head. He wore his shirt sleeves rolled up and his black string tie knotted loosely at the neck and the effect was of carefree elegance rather than slovenliness.
Nicholas Burden had been gone half a year and Opal’s determination to keep her marriage together had begun to slacken. She was worried about Hannah. Hannah was so precocious. Opal felt that she couldn’t bring the girl up by herself. Other women in the typing pool at work thought it was crazy of her to spend every lunch hour out in the city, walking, eating her lunch out of her paper bag, looking for him. What would she do when the fall came, and the snow, later?
When she finally did encounter Nicky he was sitting on a bench in Central Park, his arm casually draped around the shoulder of a young woman. At their feet sat two girls (twins?) in matching pinafores, who played jacks. Across Nicky’s face a beatific smile spread. Squinty-eyed, cigarette with a long ash at its tip hanging at the corner of his mouth, he coached the girls, teased them and chuckled. The woman, whom Opal thought pretty, glanced up to see the unhappy face of the other, staring at her man with such an ashen look. She attempted a smile, lips closed, pleasant in the way strangers passing in the park acknowledge one another. Nicky didn’t notice Opal as she turned away. The sighting smeared into oblivion.
By the time she got home her cheeks were dry. Nicky had a new family, for the present. Nicky would have many other new families. His fugues would get worse or better. She couldn’t afford to care any longer. At least on her brother’s farm Hannah would have a man who would behave more or less like a father.
A day later she cabled LeRoy. The cablegram, creased, lined like a muddy bank marked with bird tracks, now rested in his shirt pocket. Opal was coming with her Han
nah. He half expected another letter the next day, setting straight the mistake, or simply canceling out. But none came. That left only a few days for LeRoy to prepare.
His farmhouse was clapboard, a two-story structure. It rested, in alternately fallow and planted fields, at a position of modest prominence on a rise that fell away down into a southerly depression, at the bottom of which snaked a gulley where an erosive stream ran in the spring, or after a good rain. The house centered a traditional assortment of farm buildings—stout barn, sheds, outhouse, coops, stable, a dump of rusted tractors, plows, equipment so weathered it seemed to rise from the earth and weeds which overgrew it, poking through every chink and crevice, and pulled—under an explosion of morning glories and nasturtia—a spring-tooth harrow into a sculpture, its burnt-red extremities coiling high, ready to snap down upon a crop of poppies, each new April. Mice and snakes made in this nest of metal and weeds their homes. From time to time he considered burning this dump, but whenever he came down to survey it, the project seemed too much. The building closest to this site was the bunkhouse, a large cabin, the oldest surviving structure on the farm, which he had restored for the hired hands. This had been used less after his wife was stricken. She’d no longer had strength enough to cook meals three times daily for a crew of harvesters. Each year the number of men got smaller and area of fallow fields got larger. After she died LeRoy managed only to plant subsistence crops, and accomplished most of the field work with the help of just one or two men, neither of whom lived on the farm.
He had thought he might be able to put up his sister and her child in this bunkhouse, but a quick tour through its spiderwebs and ruin dissuaded him. The place, he had to admit, was a mess. He felt defensive about it, but that passed.
Two bedrooms upstairs in the main house were readied. One was at the end of the hall, facing east toward Babylon, whose smoke could be seen curling into the atmosphere on a winter’s day, though the town was too far away for any spire or gable to be seen. Out the windows of Opal’s room there were three weeping willows whose branches reached down into the still brown water of the pond, at the center of which stood a makeshift duck house, driven into its mud bed at a precarious pitch. During droughts the pond evaporated, leaving a wide baked-clay shore cracked by the sun into a patchwork of unreadable characters, cuneiform. Animals rambled to the banks of the dead pond during these dry months, by habit, and stared for hours at the dirt mosaic as if, once its meaning was deciphered, some spell might be broken and the sky’d gather up in a shroud of clouds and drench them under sheets of water.
LeRoy’s sister-in-law had come out to help. She made up a bed for Hannah in the room at the head of the stairs, a long, narrow room situated between the other two. This room presented her with a problem, for in it her brother-in-law kept his collection of heads, a motley assembly of trophies representing a lifetime of avid, but not very accomplished, hunting. Mrs. Mann had refused to allow the heads to be displayed downstairs in the main room. She considered them vulgar. So he took over this odd-shaped room upstairs, where he came to pass half an hour in the evening, breathing out pipe smoke over the coats, bristles, horns, and marble eyes. A gunrack, fancily carved out of a light oak, cradled half a dozen rifles and a two-barrel shotgun. The gunrack was mounted on the wall over a daybed. Around the four walls ranged the heads of an antelope, a whitetail buck whose three-tined antlers were a maze of silky webs cast by wolf spiders, a gray Virginian fox who’d been caught stalking the chicken coop, an elk, a puma hide and his prize—a big, dusty buffalo head whose rigid countenance combined a sense of savagery with indifference, the master of Hannah’s new room.
They stared, these trophies, with black eyes in deft, frozen alertness. The antelope was seen to glance left, graceful head erect, ears pricked, studying a sound, the distant tick of a .30-30 Winchester, carried by a lilting breeze. The sound had a decade ago vanished into the last of her personal history, which, with it, slumped into the earth, and was lost in sport and a little smoke.
The sister-in-law cried out when she first opened the door to this bedroom. She’d never ventured into the room at the top of the stairs before. Its door was always locked. As her cry, a sort of shocked nick on the air, reached him downstairs, he laughed to himself, simply couldn’t help but laugh. He bit his lip, awaited more, but when nothing further was heard from above, he was disappointed. The sun popped under a heavy cloud, and came back out, strengthening the shadow’s edge thrown across the carpet.
“You need any help?”
Just the quiet. The clock ticked in the kitchen.
When she finished, an hour later, she came down.
“How old did you say Hannah was getting to be?”
“Never said,” but after a pause he allowed: “She must be eight or nine, now. Hasn’t been easy to follow from a distance, also being as I’ve never met the girl.”
“Impressionable age.”
“I wouldn’t remember what it was like to be forty let alone nine.”
“That might be.”
LeRoy observed her coming around, sure and slow as a buzzard hawk, to her point. She said (or meant to say, but didn’t), tossing her shawl over her shoulders (for now they were out front, on the porch), Don’t you think, don’t you reckon a child that age oughtn’t be made to sleep in a room full of dead—
During the drive back into town not a word was exchanged between them. LeRoy dropped her off. Her husband bade him hello from the porch swing. He drove away.
The days passed, neither slowly nor quickly. Early evening, Friday, uncle went into Hannah’s bedroom and sat in the periodical light sprayed by a sun falling in and out of a string of long, high clouds.
It occurred to him that he ought to check the guns to be sure they were not loaded. No need for the girl to shoot her head off. One at a time he took each piece off its rack, weighed it fondly, knocked back the bolts with quick open-palmed flicks of the wrist, drawing the cool lever knob toward the butt of the rifle with his fingers and checking for unspent shells. He took down his N. R. Davis double-barreled, side-by-side, 12-gauge, bought from the Sears Roebuck catalogue after he and Mrs. Mann were first married—heavier than he remembered, cradled in his arms. He looked over the Winchesters. The first, his .22-caliber pump, he used for wood-chuck and rabbit; the other was a Model 94 dating from the end of the last century. Face close to the lever, the smell of it so nostalgic time drew in—
1937 it was. His Springfield clutched in hand. World War I surplus issue. Built in 1903, .30-ought-6.
Empty; he raised the piece to his shoulder and sighted out the window down in the weedy lot in the barn’s shadow. He cocked, pivoted in deliberate slow motion, rifle quivering in his arms, the skin at his sighting eye clamped to the slit where he aimed, searching out the heart of the make-believe prey. He stopped the arc and spotted his phantom target. Adjusting an aim toward the breast of his object he steadied his hand, swallowed breath and held it, rock-still, squeezed.
Cluck, he pulled the trigger. Missed.
Again, Cluck.
Yes! it went down hard on its knees, the legs simply buckled under. Its face bore an uncontorted look of sensation beyond hope—firmly lodged in some dense kingdom of peace at the far side of the struggle. He looked at it, blinking. It was there. To LeRoy this face registered in its look a kind of gratitude. As he lowered the Springfield he could almost smell the burnt powder in the room and it sent down through the fabric of his body another sensation, one that perfectly mimicked a lust whose impulse was sated.
The sound behind his back startled him. He stood still, hushed. The strength in his loins decayed. How many hundreds of years would have to pass before the house might finally reach down into the ground to find its bedrock and its level so the snaps and creaks and pops its structure made upon sinking farther into the ground finally faded away? This discussion among casements and walls and doorsills, would it ever reach some conclusion?
Cunningly his finger felt for the trigger as he listened fo
r the sound to come again.
He turned on his heel.
Cluck! as the hammer kicked he broke into an unvoiced laughter, for the room was empty.
He walked to the window, gazed out across the lot into the fields: all this was his land for the span of his own lifetime. That was good. His own. He decided to go outside. He was tired of the pantomime. He would take the .22 and stroll along the road, shoot something, maybe a prairie dog, a squirrel, a fox. Whatever started out of the vesper bramble.
He replaced the Springfield on the bottom rack and lifted down the rifle. A box of cartridges was kept on the high shelf of the pantry. He loaded in the kitchen, slipped a jacket on, and stepped out into the dusk.
The world was a muddy pink. Half an hour of fair sun was left. He walked up along the road. Its surface was solid as glass, the result of rain followed by warm, baking days. He reached a crossroads, not quite a quarter of a mile southeast, away from the house. Here the county line ran, and his land was divided by a series of leaning posts grayed with weather and age, along which were hung several strands of old barbed wire, woven with the green beards of purslane, awn of grasses. Years ago the posts held the wire up. Now the rows of wire themselves, hardened by seasons of rusting, held the rotten posts up with their red, corroding strands.
Crack! crack! his rifle reported as a pair of blackbirds paced the shoulder of the road ahead. Lazily their large wings carried them up and off toward the west away from him. Except for the calls of birds out working the brush for food, and for the softest rush of the evening wind in his ears, everything was held in an unscathed, emblematic silence.
Come Sunday Page 21