Contents and Introduction

by Les Weil

  Then he looked at the door of the spring house; hanging before it was a rose vine, and two red roses freshened the shade. He opened the door of that darkness, where, not more than a generation before, the women of the family had stored butter and pans of cream, and filled the drinking-water pail; and cold air emerged with a rush. He shivered, and closed the door, having seen the normal dark of the interior, with the single rod of light permitted there as illumination for the women whose feet had worn a path in the limestone floor.

  He got back in, the car, uneasy now, and continued up the lane. There was a curve to the left, and then he came out into the open: the house was before him, on a rise, and there was a lady in white watching him from the porch. She was quite distinct, in the shade, sitting in a position of the last century, her legs crossed at the ankle, and her upper body inclined forward. She was looking out over the lawn (wild oat grass, now, a hillside pasture).

  Her gown was of white lace, and the young man could almost make out same of the figures in the sleeve.

  Her hair was dark; her face was large (the family character), and the eyes brilliant. The young man stopped the car and stared fiercely, feeling awakening bliss inwardly take him. Tears were in his eyes. He wanted to speak, for the lady watching him so mildly was his mother, as his mother had appeared at the age of nineteen in the photograph he always carried with him.

  He was ready to cry out, but he could not. His gaze took in the white frame house, the best its people could do, empty now; he comprehended the life that had existed there -his people, veterans of the frontier- and he felt his head move. He was shaking his head unquestionable; a tremor occurred in the posture of the lady in white.

  He bent his eyes down, and when he looked up again, the lady was gone. He left the car and hurried o the porch through the tall grass; and he found the porch empty. A piano stool (his mother had played the piano), with a gaping crack in the pedestal, stood on the silvery planks of the floor; one caster was gone, and so the stool was propped at an angle it was never intended to take.The young man was caught by a sharp pain -it had to do with his brother, he had done a terrible thing to his brother, he was sure; but he had no memory of it. Anxious, he klooked for distractions, and he found some changes. He walked out to the north side of the house and saw that the barn was gone; the air blank above golden wheat that the wind shivered in. Majestic sunflowers cast a shadow of leaf and stem against the failing red sides of the chicken houses. A mowing machine sickle, harsh with rust, was leaning against the trunk of the little ash that shaded the privy; hollyhocks masked the gate.

  He turned, and entered the back porch by the screen door; there was an ancient sheepskin coat on a hook by the inner door. He stepped into the kitchen, and found the great wood stove of his boyhood. He was charmed; a cobweb depended from the shelf that overhung the fireboxes.

  He hurried into the living room; the sliding doors to the parlor were shut. One of the windows was free of curtain and blind on this south side of the house, and through it he could see new corn. He went to that window, and saw that the corn was growing up to the side of the house, where once had been the finest lawn in that part of the county; the curving rows went off a long way, in the contour planting that was now the fashion. He heard, far off, the persistent, minute roar of a tractor engine.

  A sense of oppression came over him, rising out of that blank place in his memory where he wanted to find knowledge of what be had done to his brother -a younger brother, who had always admired him. What had he done? He had not seen his brother for many years, or so it seemed; he could not be sure; he could remember his brother only as a little boy of ten, clever in school, and gentle.

  The young man understood that he was incomplete, a whole principle of being was missing from his nature, and it was to remedy this defect that he bad come to Kansas, to his moral origins. He had not wanted to come; indeed, he had always feared and loved this house; but he would not let fear coerce him. He had a gift for certain kinds of risk, but, now that he had arrived at the danger he had come seeking, he was nervous - his eyes wanted to close.

  He elected to enter the parlor and sleep. As he separated the sliding doors (and his fingers left prints in the dust) , he immediately felt comforted, for the parlor was like what he remembered of it. The organ was in its ancient place. The huge couch was against the opposite wall; and a clear, mild light sustained itself in the room.

  The young man closed the sliding doors, and lay down on the great couch; after a breath, he went to sleep as if he had suddenly remembered how, and he waked as quickly. It was night; he felt a chill; he struck a match, and looked at his watch. It was a little after three o'clock. He went to the window, and looked at the moderate darkness. He could see the pillars that supported the porch roof. He could make out the old piano stool. In the parlor, he could see the organ. His senses took hold of his little world. Things grew steady; and then he heard someone moving in the house. The step was light, and knew its way - it was in the kitchen; then it was in the living room, and it was making for the sliding doors; -a pause, and the doors creaked as they were taken hold cf. They parted, and a massive face was glaring into the parlor.

  It was himself, in reverse, as in a photographic negative, and appeared to have no backing except a source of light.

  "You," he said, and raised a clenched fist, in love and rage.

  A smile appeared in the radiant mask. "I only ask that you be reasonable," it said.

  The young man paused, in wonder. His fist came apart, and the fingers of it reached out, to move across a cheek as smooth and blank as metal.

  Then the eyes of reason grew a little hard, and the young man felt a rough and heedless embrace. "Welcome to the conscience of your race," the mask said, and the young man's arms jerked convulsively; then his legs; and he saw himself, a small white body in vast dark, as the convulsion commenced -he was trembling. He felt a joy like none he had ever known; his body arched, and then disintegrated in vibrations.

  He came back to himself at dawn, and dragged himself to the front door. He could see his progress, as it lurched along; a moan escaped his parted lips. He got himself across the porch and down the steps (and remembered that he had a car). He swayed as he began raising himself; he had pain at the right leg and in his back, and the right leg appeared to be paralyzed, but he could stand.

  He remembered, in the house, two creatures groveling in the dust of empty rooms, and his attention discovered something new in his knowledge. It was a scene, in which his brother, a young man in his twenties, held the foreground; his brother was mild and without hope. "Oh, yes, I was wrong," he said. "I've been very self-indulgent -I've even told myself some lies, perhaps. But you don't know what it's like here." Behind him was a tennis court, and two patients were having a game. An attendant in a white jacket was keeping score. A lawn spread out into a grove of elms and there was an iron stag, with broken antlers. In the background was the red brick mansion where the psychiatrist was waiting with an extensive report.

  "I just don't want to live like this," his brother said, and the scene faded.

  "I suppose I killed him," the young man thought, "but I certainly didn't mean to."

  The morning came up to him; oat grass moved aimlessly at his knee. Down the hill, cattle were grazing. Behind him was the house, and he would not have to look at it again. A lone survivor, he felt a neutral joy, and he was confident that he would be able to continue living.

  "Still," he told himself, "I'll be ready to die when the time comes. Oh, I think so! I haven't gotten through all this without learning something."

  The Squatter

  EdwardLoomis

  An event of the Depression years, in the desert country of eastern California. I was visiting my friend Elder Matthews at his Cucamonga Ranch, under the western face of Piute Mountain, and we were enjoying the country.

  Elder, forty years old, rich, was a very decent man. After Harvard, where he took a law degree, he had been in the war as a company offi
cer in the Third Infantry Division, and then gone to the State Department at Washington, where by 1926 he had achieved the beginnings of a career and grown bored with his prospects; he then withdrew into a law office, developed a specialty (corporations operating In foreign parts), and in 1933 again retired, as the financial crisis augmented his family responsibilities.

  At his ranch -named for its spring- he was thinking about his life: he had called on me so that he might have someone to talk to, His wife being in Europe and his two sons in school, and he planned to stay for a few weeks of autumn weather. We were old friends; we observed the functioning of the ranch, that had two hundred Hereford cows, and we considered the world. Elder was a Democrat, though his family was not, and he mildly favored the policies of President Roosevelt, who was an acquaintance: Elder was a gentleman, and kept up a habit of reading (in French and German as well as english), so that he usually had something on his mind.

  We were quiet for a week; and then an interruption appeared from outside our system. The cowboy, Tom Lallatin, reported that the cabin on Birch Creek was occupied: he had seen two cars, a woman, some children there. The cabin was maintained for use when cattle were being worked in that corner of the ranch, with flour and some other supplies in a cupboard, and it happened occasionally that someone passing through -a cowboy from one of the nearby ranches, or a crew from the power company- stayed overnight, according to the custom of the country.

  Elder accepted the news, and Tom went on with his business. Three days later, at supper (the three of us were taking turns at cooking), Elder said,

  "Have our visitors left the ranch yet, Tom?"

  And Tom said, "They're still there."

  Elder nodded. The cabin was a little more than a mile from the highway that ran from Albo out into Nevada: anyone might approach it, by passing a single wire gate. Between the cabin and the ranch house (a white frame house), there was a distance of five miles, across the alluvial fans that spread out below the canyon openings.

  "Maybe you should ride dawn and talk to them," Elder said. "You can find out what they plan to do with my cabin-" He smiled, and said to me, "This is a problem we don't very often have out here. I'm a little puzzled what to do about it."

  The next evening, Tom explained that he had been to the cabin: "They've moved in down there, Mister Matthews," he said. "It looks like they mean to stay awhile."

  "Did you talk to them?" Elder asked.

  "They wouldn't nobody come out of the cabin," Tom said. "I was sitting my horse under a shade tree, and I guess they were watching me, from inside. They're working on one of the cars."

  Elder for a moment appeared to be considering an order, and then he set his lips, and turned away.

  We continued our routine, which had become very agreeable to us. In the morning, Elder kept to a room that he had fitted out as a study, and this was a fine room. There were several hundred books, a rolltop desk, and just outside the window there was a tall purple cholla: framed irregularly in its branches was a view of Piute Mountain. There was a leather-covered easy chair, and beside it a portrait bust, in marble, on a cylindrical marble pedestal -it was Hamilton Fish, Grant's Secretary of State, and, as Elder said, "One of the few men in that administration who maintained a good reputation. There's a family tradition that he kept the Nation out of war with Great Britain on two separate occasions." The family of Elder's mother was related to this eminent man -the State Department was not so far away, after all ...

  I spent the mornings in the living room, with a book. In the afternoons we rode out into the country, and occasionally we helped with the cattle; in the evenings we conversed, and that was the best part of the day. We sat in the living room -a pleasant place, where Authority might be tempted to grant a concession to Geniality. Above the fireplace was the head of a desert bighorn sheep. There was wainscoting, dark walnut. The furniture was covered in leather, and the low table had a leather top; there was a gun case, with rifles and some noble shotguns.

  On the low table, Elder kept a bottle of bourbon and a pitcher of spring water; and we were moderate, for that was Elder's style. Money had taught him to be careful enjoying the things he could buy, lest he use up their possibilities; he was generally temperate, he had touched upon the suitable detail across a considerable range of experience: athletics (he was good at polo and had played football at Harvard until in his junior year he broke a leg), war, disciplined study -chiefly in literature and history, the delights of women and the pleasures of a family; business, a career, the composure which a man may attain who does not feel cheated by life--

  All this held in place by an interesting literary faculty. His perception got out to the surface of things. He liked to look for the principle: -I was enjoying my stay in that old-fashioned house in its grove of cottonwoods. I looked at things as they came, and, having no responsibility, did not touch them. I was calm; when Elder said, one day after lunch, that he might ride down to Birch Creek, I nodded my head and prepared to follow him; and we arrived at the cabin a little before two o'clock, approaching it from above, along the line of willows that masked the creek. Elder checked his horse in front of one of the cars -a battered little Pontiac: the cabin was a gable-ended structure, painted white, and there was no one to be seen; Elder said, in a clear, firm voice,

  "Come on out and talk, everybody. I'm the owner of this property."

  The other car was a Ford. The panels over the engine were raised, and there was a streak of hot engine smell in the air.

  "My intentions are peaceful and even honorable," Elder said. "Perhaps if I like my guests, I'll want to invite them to stay awhile."

  Then we waited, and I thought I heard whispering from the cabin; presently a woman appeared -she came out the door and then stood against it, a woman in her forties, I judged; she was wearing a dress with an apron tied over the front of it, and she was wiping her hands on the apron.

  "I thought this was a deserted house," she said. "Hasn't nobody been here in a long time." Her voice was of Kansas, or Oklahoma -a revelation to me, for I came from that country. I had seen such women as this -I had seen her carry the milk pails in from the barn, and listened to her voice nervously following the tune of a hymn.

  "You're on the Cucamonga Ranch, and the cabin belongs to the ranch," Elder said. "Where are your men-folks, Ma'am?"

  "They went off somewhere," the woman said.

  Elder dropped the reins on his horse's neck, and crooked his right leg over the saddle horn. He smiled, and it was my impression that he was beginning to be amused. "I suppose they went hunting," he said.

  "No --they didn't take the gun." The woman looked briefly at me; her eye looked small and dim. "We're poor people," she said.

  "Ah, yes," Elder said, and took his leg down from the saddle horn. "I wonder you didn't come out and talk to my cowboy when he was down here a few days ago-"

  "I was scared," the woman said. "I don't want anything to do with any mounted men."

  She held her ground: in her way she was bold, and I sympathized with Elder, whose duty was to deal with her. He looked at me, grinned, shrugged his shoulders, and I understood him to mean a genial, civilized irony -something a gentleman might want to say about womankind.

  "I expect you didn't understand that you'd gotten onto private property," he said. "I can see that; it's all right. But I suppose you ought not to stay on indefinitely without paying some sort of rent. If you like, I'd be willing to set a figure -it wouldn't be much--

  "We can't pay no rent, Mister," the woman said. "The car's broke down, the kids are hungry--"

  "Is that right?" Elder said. "It's just as well. I've never wanted to be a landlord, anyway." Then he appeared to be perplexed; again I sympathized. In such a fix, what ought a gentleman to do? I thought of the Sheriff; and something in Elder's bearing suggested that he too might be thinking along that line.

  Then he said, "We have a comedy going here, I perceive, and I can't seem to get control over the plot of it. If you'll excuse
me, Ma'am, I'll say goodbye now, and hope that you'll be moving along in a day or so. I remain quite willing to rent the cabin ...

  He was making an appeal to the woman: she was inflexible. She stared at him.

  "Comedy's a thing I don't very much care for," he said. "It's undignified." And he reined his horse around, and we departed, his horse moving off ahead of me at a quick walk. I looked back over my shoulder: the woman was watching us, a small, stern figure.

  2

  There was a strain in our enterprises during the rest of the day, and that evening, when we sat down together in the living room, Elder said,

  "I'm in for some trouble down there at the cabin. I know it; and I wish I'd been more firm this afternoon -or more clever. Secretary Fish would have known how to be diplomatic about it. The men were inside, weren't they? Or the man -somehow it smells of more than one. And I could have gotten them to come out, maybe if I'd stepped down from my horse--"

  He shook his head, a handsome, distinguished head -it came out to its hereditary possibilities, and suggested a mind instructed and mild. The nose was prominent, the brow impassive, the mouth and jaw set for composure.

  "It's irritating, this incident," he said. "It's also apt, somehow -it fits my occasion. I came out here this time to make a plan for the next few years of my life. Perhaps you've observed me to be a little tentative lately.

  "I have a splendid sense of the past -of my own past, I mean. It's like a hive, and all the cells are full, with what I know.

  "Absurd, absurd. That's become the word my reveries always end with. I've been reading some upsetting books. Spengler and Mann, for instance -they go well enough together. And the French aren't happy either. The clear heads are beginning to look away.

  "I could have an interesting place in the government, I believe. There are opportunities -I could work my way along. I might go into publishing. There are several firms I could get a-hold of. Or I might try politics and get people to vote for me!