The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride

by Hortense Calisher

  “Pigs is pigs,” said the mate, adding that Skinner’s house, and certain others in the neighborhood, had been built by Swedes, a Swede carpenter, and scrubbed by his faithful fry ever since—or almost.

  “What’s its name,” said Jim. “This great town.”

  “Names, names,” said the mate, but he was smiling. “It’s on the main road, of course, but it’s just a section. I don’t think it’s on the map, really.” Then he leaned back and laughed so hard he had to slap himself. He jabbed a fork at Jim. “Going northwest, ask for directions, they say ‘It’s just after you get to the Palewater Reservoir, mister.’ How’s that for you? But if you ask going southwest to it, they tell you ‘It’s just about after you leave the Champion Woods Pulp Company.’ How’s that?”

  “No name,” said Jim. “Where in the love of God is this place? What’s it near?”

  They got out the map, which spread itself out in a resigned way. The mate’s finger trembled, skipping over the Adirondacks, going due west as if it were a dowser’s, then due south. When it found the spot, it could barely hover over, jouncing with excitement. Jim looked at him, inquiring, then down at the map.

  There for sure was Palewater, in one direction. And there was Champion Woods, in another. Between them, on the main road, there was a minim of space which when it stretched to human scale must be quite comfortable, though Jim’s spirits sank a bit at the idea of its being on the road well enough but without a town to it—of course they had to have the road. But he’d been thinking of some deep green well of a town, up to which the lively motors would come to drink, man-made and hearty, but then somehow fade, fade away again, leaving the place natural.

  “Look harder,” said the mate. He moved his finger away. There are four directions to a map, after all, and Jim had looked in only two of them. He looked crossways in a third direction, then, following it down, in a fourth.

  “By God!” said Jim. “By God, Jim!”

  A few miles in the fourth direction, there was Oriskany—where he’d been born.

  They spent the balance of the night talking equities and amortizations and other money talk which a session with the local banker had taught them quite well, but that night there wasn’t anything professional about it except their solemn, joined manner; it was as if they had entered upon an agreed magic dialogue which would keep old man Skinner from selling before morning. Most selling and buying, once it gets past sensible need and projects into the future, is nothing but this kind of personification and magic, with maybe some group madness thrown in. And most bankers even, and businessmen—but that’s another story and no time for it, except to point out that Skinner—who promptly became Skinflint in the partners’ talk, and must have aged twenty years overnight in the bargain—was actually himself only one grade less innocent than a chickenfarming type, and only about forty-three. Since the next day was Sunday, they drove over to see him. Cars were already well in of course, though still called autos, and had been in for years, and taxis and buses too; don’t think the dates are wrong here; we are simply still in the period when they hadn’t taken over yet. The mate and Jim had no Stutz Bearcat; they had a Ford. It got them there just before supper, a quarter of five o’clock.

  Skinner must have thought they had dropped from heaven, even though they had telephoned ahead. He was the mouse-haired, hysterical type who should have married a big woman to boss him, and maybe with psychology to help him along with his woes he would have, but these were the olden days, and instead he’d married his wife. She was just bright enough to drop children like rabbits, and pink-eyed ones too, just like herself, but she was also the legatee of this house we two were after.

  We. But there—it’s been understood all along, hasn’t it, who that pair was?

  Well, to go on, there was the house—and the barn (for it was a farmhouse, and the barn was the greater part of it)—the barn of stone-and-mortar, ledged for posterity and for a sunlight it hadn’t quite been able to get that far north, and a seventeen-ninety over the door. The house itself was later, but good too, clapboard, center entrance, double chimneys and a fanlight; that Swedish carpenter had passed through Vermont. There were no Adam mantels but what use would the partners make even of five fireplaces with such a good draw?—and the house was good seasoned wood all through, made to stand, and no plumbing or heating yet, which would keep the price down, and of course, there in front, already let into what had once been the second parlor, was the grocery store and store window—which was how the Skinners skinned along. This would be the partner’s office. As for the barn, it already housed a Model T Ford lost in it like an omen, to show how many more of its kind that barn could take on. Outside, there was already one gas pump, and over the acreage behind all, a hill for the sun to rise out of, and across the post road built by the first settlers, a woods for it to go down into. Oh, it was a fine setup that had caught the mate’s eye, or would be, once the Skinner litter had been cleaned off of everywhere, the pair said to themselves; there’s no litter worse than a bad farmer’s, and Skinner, among other things, had been ploughing up the acreage for something. Even the store was halfhearted, with signs the family had been at their own groceries, and tawdry ones too. The barn took Jim’s eye at once; it was beautiful.

  The trouble was, the place had no need or real reason to be at all, any more; none of it did, not barn nor house nor the land. But how were Jim, who didn’t know about land yet, or the mate, who’d never yet had any, to know this—that such a property, in such a place, can pass from hand to hand and still, like an amulet, keep its first stubborn luck attached to it? Even the Skinner litter would be a deception, prompting an industrious buyer to think he was the man to make the change. The trouble with these houses that last is that they were built for nothing but once—and for the post road. They last and last, but they won’t ever pervert to anything else, not to summer places, because of the road, not to business ones, because of no town. But people are always trying, in their stalls and stores and eateries, and of course anyplace having such a sunup and sundown has a good deal to do with it. So it has come about that these houses on roads without towns are the badlands of America in a small way, just as those great glory holes at the center of the continent—the canyons and deserts—are its badlands in a grand way, land where nothing more than carnival or show, or a surprise of the spirit, can ever be arranged. But these other smaller places—being so random but still everywhere in the lymph and life of the countryside and the cityside too—there’s nothing to be done but to spit and to stamp on them, and to start all over again in these new developments, as is being done now. As for the partners, one look at Skinner with that fine hill and all its works behind him, and they were convinced they had come just in time.

  A price was quickly agreed upon by all tycoons present, said sum first being tempered the partners’ way—by reason of their willingness to take over all mortgage arrears as soon as they had the money to do it, and then tempered Skinner’s way—by reason of his willingness to wait. Imagination was therefore left free on both sides, to rejoice in its bargain. The partners, for instance, were welcome to visit their property-to-be at any time, and in the next months tirelessly did so. Skinner, in taking them the rounds of their estate, often pointed out to them improvements they would make, when he was in a large mood, or repairs he hadn’t been up to, if he was in a restrained one—to both of which they agreed, like the indulgent landlords they were. Indeed, imagination was rampant on all sides that spring; even the children gathered at the fenceline when the partners left, to stare sullenly at the new owners, and behind them, sometimes the wife too. Skinner enjoyed it most of any, stepping with the lordly pace of a man whose property is wanted, and as came out later, making no more mortgage payments. The property itself needed to do nothing, being everybody’s dream.

  The new owners themselves worried a little, as they felt the advancing lures of property, heavy and light. As they would leave it, at a sundown, the mate often shook his head over it
, looking back. “That woman’s no housekeeper,” he might say, as he had said that first evening, or something like. Jim, blinking equally in the golden outpour which hid somewhere behind it his watery birthplace, always summed it up his way, never varying. “Well,” he always said, as he too had that first evening. “Well, that lets out Sand Spring.”

  During those months also, the trips to Oriskany—as they had taken to calling these, though they never went near the namesake town itself—seemed to take the place of other close relationships, or rather, to free them for still another kind. The mate, though still traveling regularly on his job, no longer found new land-and-home treasures, or was dulled or sated to them, now that he was owned. He found himself thinking of women again, or at least of kindly waitresses along the way, many of whom were extra kind in this magnolia weather, and it was no trouble at all to persuade Jim to ankle along with him in that sort of teamwork. The two of them found that the States were no different from Europe in these matters, only, in a queer way, more cynical. And don’t be surprised that these matters are mentioned here. For, just because we seem to be constructing an idyll here—and maybe we are—doesn’t mean that a man doesn’t remember the more humdrum pleasures of such a time, as well. What is an idyll, but that part of a man’s life which he will remember with clarity for all of it, so that all his years his tongue can go on touching it, as on a live nerve?

  As for the Pardees, these other matters, that is, other women, even helped Jim remember them, whereas along the line of the sisters’ usual destiny they might have been forgotten—though how so-called low women often help out the high ladies might not be appreciated by either side. But so it was—and so it sometimes occurred that he went to the Pardees for a pretended fourth time—the whole route there: two miles to the town, one and a half through it, and four round by the lake: all of it—but only in his mind. Meanwhile, in Sand Spring itself, people now and then tried to josh him about the sisters as the two veterans had; a love affair in such a place is often half audience. But as summer came on, it happened as might be expected; people forgot. Jim, on the other hand, though he didn’t get out there, found himself mentioning them now and again; clearly he thought of the sisters as staying the way they always were, suspended, if not actually waiting. And if this had no direct value to the sisters themselves, nevertheless, somewhere along the stations of life they had gone up a bit. In one way or another, for somebody, they had not passed out of mind.

  And now—the mate. We haven’t talked much of him or seen his side, though we will. Perhaps we had better do it now; that way we will at least know more about him than he did himself. As the intenser emotions go, the mate certainly wasn’t a late starter, but he wasn’t hard about them either; he was sudden. To judge him correctly, as he went at a woman with his bull forelock, this ought to be said. Jim was a more practical man; he let himself dream of love. But the mate was romantic, he wanted a wife. That is, now that a house and lot had come his way, or almost, he wanted children to staff it, and that’s one way to do it. He was always on the hunt for reality. Of course, he thought of all this as practical. But if you’re going to be hunting reality instead of submitting to it, it’s best to be sure you’re hunting all of it. What the mate actually wanted was to find himself at the prime of life a self-made man, and everything tidy. In Lancashire, as a blackish boy called “our Jim,” he’d seen this kind of life or thought he had, as far above him as the bit of blue sky to be climbed toward from the bottom of the mine. In France he thought he’d glimpsed it too, pointing it out to Jim in farm after farm of the kilometered farmland, every last tended inch of it cantilevering slowly toward heaven—until laid waste. In America, he said, once a boy had arrived here, it was no longer necessary to look upward, only to wait to be of an age to work and to root as prescribed. For this country, now that it had untangled itself from its own notions of Hiawatha, was already up in that fine blue, with almost everybody here. He’d pointed them out to Jim also—the tidy possibles all around them—a whole hemisphere of the self-made. Jim, floating his own watery pastures, had nodded, unable to communicate more than a tinge of his transportational feelings, of all the crowds of barges and liveries going down, derry-down, one after the other, ever since the first ape got down off the first limb of time.

  “Down?” said the mate, his eyes staring ahead even of his hair. “Not in our time. What else can you expect of course, if you get mixed up with horses? Or sail.” He knew barges didn’t sail in that sense of course, though it was a question whether he knew that earlier in their history he would have had a point about the horses which had pulled them; he was speaking generally, or so he supposed. “Not in our time,” he repeated. “Not the way the wheel is going now.”

  They were just finishing off half a lemon meringue pie bought at the local Sand Spring bakery, and it was awful stuff; back there so early in the century it wasn’t all good homestyle cooking, though at that period only a bachelor might know it. With his fork, he scraped absently at the hard pie-shell left on his plate, a sign of how bad it was, that even this lightning-careless eater had balked.

  “Ought to be another bakery here,” he muttered; this was early in their housekeeping together; after that, for dessert they ate fruit. “Down?” he said again, at the same time digging the flat of his fork so hard into the crust that the tines clanked on the plate and the gray, floured bits flew. He was always a violent-moving man, everywhere except in his work which was so delicate; well, you know him, you know. Then, as if he knew this, catching himself about to slap Jim on the shoulder, he carefully rested his hand there instead. “Not this kind of wheel, not in a hundred years, Jim. Why—” He smiled slowly enough, his eyes blind on that horned hair of his forever probing forward. “And the first hundred years is the hardest. “Why—” And then he had to slap Jim after all, his hand coming down even harder than first intended, so that even brawny Jim had to cry, “Whoa.”

  But the mate’s cry outshouted him. “Wheels?” he cried. “Why, son-of-a-gun; they’ll be our ladder!”

  So this was the mate, who was at the time, as you know, a surveyor. Already he had measured half of New York State with the aid of his old Gunter chain, and day after day was increasing his score; how should he know that this land-knowledge of his, pendulum-tied to the ground though it was, was still not necessarily of the earth earthy? So, this was the man who, when the most important kiss of his life, the wedding-kiss, still tasted deeper of fritter than mouth, didn’t think one thing more about it. And this was the man who, standing in a parlor not the minister’s and with sponsors not really kin to the bride, but with enough of the proper feather-hats tremoring and already so willingly remembering, and the bride like a rose in her rose satin since it wasn’t a formal wedding, the pointed bodice of her as small at the waist as anything in Sears—this was the man who immediately after that lass could shout out (with what the hats and even some of the watch chains could only take for heartiness since otherwise what else would they make of it?)—this man could shout out, “I can see my GRANDCHILDREN now!”

  But let’s wait a bit on a wedding which—and you might guess why, if you didn’t already know it—concerned more than the mate. Let us get back to that time, past spring, on into the hottest summer, and after countless trips, sailing trips one could just as soon call them, to Oriskany—when the mate looked up from his stewed peaches to say, “What’s about this Lottie, you once said.”

  He saw that Jim began to tremble. “Why, Jim,” he said. Around the house they always named each other quite naturally, not having any trouble knowing who was who. When out of the mate’s presence, Jim always called him “my mate”—not having to identify either the mate or himself to others being one of the virtues of Sand Spring. Whereas out of Jim’s company, the mate, as if to emphasize that Jim belonged in the town more than Jim himself dared imagine, or as if referring to his friend’s two years of higher education, or perhaps merely to qualities of character or reflection which gave him precedence,
always called him by name—Jim. On the rarest occasions, as in the case of bankers but not waitresses, the mate would mumble out his own last name, then Jim’s very much more clearly. There too, as in all their later walks of life, though he might tease Jim for his style of reflection (the while his own style of impulse never gave him time to ask for advice much less take it) the mate always gave Jim a tender, courtly distinction—the way one might treat a man wiser than oneself, even stronger, whose head, though ready and hard enough for any fight which came at him, was, nevertheless, compared to the speaker’s, short on horn.

  “Why, Jim—” said the mate slowly, “I wouldn’t want to cross you up in any—” Nor would he. On their nights out together he didn’t ever. He didn’t have enough vanity for it—though more vanity would have changed his life, if not saved it; nobody gets saved. It wasn’t that he didn’t see people; he saw all his targets well enough, from old Skinflint, to the land he wanted the way a woman wants velvet, to the women too. As he once told Jim, he saw them all sky-blue upward, that was the trouble, as if he was still down there looking up to where they were all crowded waiting for him up there in the clear, hard azure of that hole. What he never saw, not at the time, was the sight of himself going at them. He does now though; he’s been seen to start out, then stop himself, many a time. And it helps him of course to know, as Jim knew way earlier, that though some nip and tuck is worse than others, nobody gets saved.