by Edward Abbey
Meadowlands. I think of Cossacks. Then of Comanches. Then of the pony soldiers in their coats of blue—Negroes, most of them, led by white officers, naturally. Little-known facets of American history. As the first North American cowboys were actually Mexican, so were many of the early American cowboys young blacks—freed slaves and the sons of slaves. The rest were runaway teenagers, poor white trash from east Texas and western Tennessee and central Appalachia. My kind of folk. First took to drinkin’, then to card playin’, got shot in the bowels and we’re dyin’ today.
Very deep is the well of the past. Shall we not call it—bottomless? What is our history but a vivid and continuous dream? We skim over the roadway bearing northeast to Kansas, me and my mortal dog, and the infinite dimensions of the recent past—a mere one century—make the brain giddy, the mind reel, the heart to swoon.
Watch that gas pedal, pal. Mind the cops. You can’t afford a lockup now.
How true. I slow down. I want to weep. Not for sorrow, not for joy, but for the incomprehensible wonder of our brief lives beneath the oceanic sky. This could never have been a populous land but even here, all about me, lie the unmarked graves of slain Indian warriors, Kiowa, Pawnee and Comanche, their women their children—twenty thousand years of living and dying. And above the natives rests a stratum of trappers, fur traders, buffalo hunters, cavalrymen, drovers, cowboys, sodbusters, more worn-out women and stricken children—the organic mold of thousands of thousands of forgotten human creatures like you, me, him, her, this bank clerk here, that banjo plucker there, those drummers and buglers and music critics yonder…
Now now. Best not dwell on it, Lightcap. You’ll sink if you do in this sea of grass like the disintegrating plowshares that broke the plain, under a sky of dust, for what purpose, toward what end?
Don’t ask. Carry on. Check the gas gauge: ten gallons—half full. Oil pressure: 35 psi. The temp: 140° F. The ammeter: neutral. The tachometer: 1200 rpm. The speedometer: a safe and sane sixty per. Let her roll. We surge through the Rita Blanca National Grassland—badly overgrazed—and into Boise City (empty buildings), on to Keyes through the Okie Panhandle, into the town of Elkhart and the border of Kansas.
I pause for a piss on the roadside ecology of Coors beer cans (this Bud’s for you) and plastic Coke bottles and I hear—a meadowlark. My first meadowlark of spring.
Farm country now. Plowed fields touch the shoulder of the highway. Over there is a man on a green tractor pulling a red disk plow through the yellow stubble of his winter wheat. Overhead a blue sky suffused with soft haze. The West is suddenly gone; we’re in the Midwest. Breadbasket of America, Russia, Ethiopia and half of Europe. No wonder the trees are gone; little wonder the furrows reach to the edge of the pavement. We’re feeding our brothers—friends and enemies—near everywhere. Fraternal goodwill and there’s money in it. For a time. Sell now, pay later. The air reeks with the smell of ammonium nitrate. The Missouri and the Mississippi roll toward the Gulf, their waters rich brown with topsoil from what was once upon a time the happiest hunting grounds on Earth.
But the meadowlark don’t care and by God neither shall we. I shake it and coil it away, open another can of Bud, hold the door for the return of my dog, close door, press on.
Grain elevators loom in the distance. Ravens pick at the fleshy tidbits of rabbit flattened on the asphalt. Primroses bloom among fields of sorghum, milo, alfalfa, maize. The land lies flat as a pool table. The field of vision shrinks to fifteen miles, with the grain elevators—the farmer’s skyscraper, his temple of hope—marking the horizon. Scattered about over the fields are gas wells, the power-driven pumps rocking up and down like iron grasshoppers at prayer. A sign in the shape of a giant sunflower says WELCOME TO KANSAS, MIDWAY USA.
I linger in Elkhart only long enough to buy a Safeway beefsteak, then turn north for six miles on a state road to visit the Cimarron River and what the map labels as Cimarron National Grassland. I feel like celebrating something, I’m not sure what.
The sun goes down, the new moon hangs high. The river seeps down a channel of dry sand lined with groves of cottonwood beginning to leaf out. Cowpaths and dirt-bike trails rove everywhere but not one bovine or human is in sight. I pull off the road and make camp by a sandy wash. I grill my steak over a fire of cottonwood twigs. Poor fuel compared to the mesquite and ironwood of Arizona but it will suffice. The steak is lean, thin and cooks quickly. I am a man of simple tastes.
The song of that mourning dove, for example, down there in the trees, sounds as good to me as Bach’s B-minor Mass. Better, in fact. Not so labored, not so laborious, not so massive. There are times when I prefer the music of one kid trying to play “Red River Valley” on his new Marine Band harmonica to the majestic uproar of the Vienna Philharmonic struggling, one more time, through the Mozart Requiem.
That mourning dove. That sad sweet simple call from the grove makes a man want to find the sorry little thing, stroke its wee head, caress its downy breast, murmur soothing words into its ear, wring its scrawny neck. And the dove recalls another day in the woods as well. A different kind of day in another forest two thousand five hundred miles to the east on the side of an older mountain.
I wasn’t even there when it happened.
14
1965:
Death of the Old Man
I
The dove called from down by the creek, among the shady willows, when Will left the house to look for Paw. That too was on an April evening.
II
Will returned from the war—his war—Roosevelt’s War—in the autumn of 1945. He found the farm a wreck. We’d thought we were doing fine. Will was shocked, enraged, depressed. Rather than live with us he built a cabin in the woods, near the spring under the red oaks. High on the hill.
Gonna build me a cabin
On the mountain so high
That the blackbirds cain’t find me
Nor hear my sad cry…
A wreck, he called the farm, a ruin. Strong language for our quiet brother. What bothered him so much? The place still looked good to us.
True, the horses were gone. Paw had sold off the first one, breaking up the team, the same summer that Will joined the Army. He kept one horse for his logging operations—needed old Blue to skid logs down the mountain through the laurel slicks—but when he’d saved enough money to buy a secondhand Ford tractor he sold Blue too. Of course, the children cried—Marcie, Paul, Baby Jim—and Mother went for a long walk the morning the buyers hauled away that big solid old plowhorse.
But Paw could not be moved. He remained as stubborn then as he was the day he sold Bessie—Blue’s mate. Remember? We needed the money, Paw said. That horse ate more than he was worth and got sick half the time to boot. Worms, glanders, colic, bots, warbles. Anyhow he was twenty-two years old for Christ’s sake. Damn near dead on his feet by noon every day.
Having sold the horses, Paw sold the harness. What good was it now? He sold the bull-tongue plow; you couldn’t hitch that thing to a tractor. He sold off all the milk cows but one; we were no longer in the dairy business. The state had put so many sanitary restrictions on dealing in milk that the ordinary farmer could no longer make money at it. Paw plowed up the hayfield with his new used tractor and a gangplow and planted the whole thirty acres in alfalfa. We didn’t need the hay anymore, he explained, but you can always sell baled alfalfa. Then he logged off most of the good saw timber—the white oaks, beech, poplar, ash, locust, sassafras, chestnut, red maple—and replanted the devastated hillsides with Scotch fir. Always be a good market for Christmas trees, he said; them fools up in Morgantown and Wheeling and Pittsburgh always will be too damn lazy to get out and cut their own. Easy money.
He spent the war years sawing down trees with his one-man crosscut saw (the chainsaw not yet available), hauling them to his one-man sawmill by Stump Creek, stacking the lumber and retailing it himself. Always a one-man operator, our Paw; he would neither hire help nor work for anyone else.
When he’d cut down a
ll the good trees on the home place he began to buy timber on neighboring farms. He bought the abandoned Waldroop farm for the unpaid back taxes—outbidding the few who came to the sheriff’s auction—and made that a base of logging operations for the next decade. And when the strip miners from Westmoreland and Peabody Coal began to move into the country with their Caterpillar tractors, earth movers, dragline power shovels and forty-ton dump trucks, our old man was in there clearing the right-of-way, cutting down the trees and hauling away the logs. Wherever he went he left behind sawdust, slashing, bare stumpage and skid trails. He was not making money—but he was making a living. Paid better, he said, than sidehill farming. And what’s more and more important he liked the work. Always did like the smell of sawdust, he said. Always did like to see a big tree fall exactly where he wanted to fell it. Joe Lightcap was one man in Shawnee County who could drive a peg into the ground with a ninety-foot falling tree. He was one logger who never needed a helper, a swamper, a safety lookout. Always loved to eat his lunch deep in the woods where no one could bother him, where the only noise was the sound of a woodpecker hammering on a hollow snag, the chatter of a squirrel, the scream of a hawk, the sweet sad distant call of the mourning dove.
Never did much like stumbling along behind a plow staring at a team of half-ton hind ends, breathing silage-charged horsefarts from the exhaust end of two forty-foot tubes. The farmer, claimed our father, is a slave, a serf, a bondsman, a poor dumb degenerate peasant who plods through life toting a barn, two horses, sixteen half-breed Holsteins and a hundred and twenty acres of red dirt and clay on his back—and it all belongs to the bank anyhow. While the independent logger, he asserted—and thought himself the living proof—is a free man, a citizen, and best of all—a woods man. A woodsman!
Will could have humored all that, even gone along for a mile or two. What he could not accept, could not understand, could not forgive, was the raw gash on the north side of our former hayfield. A gash that ruined forty acres and went a hundred feet deep, with spoil banks ranged in windrows fifty feet high before the face of the black coal seam, and stagnant pools of sulfurous water on the floor of the pit—poisoned water with nowhere to go but down into the bedrock and from there into the springs, wells, streams of Stump Creek Valley.
Wasn’t my fault, Paw explained. Wasn’t me signed that broadform deed back in 1892. That was your grandpaw done that. Nothin’ I could do about it. There was no way in hell we could keep the Peabody Coal Company from a-comin’ in when they was ready. How’d we know they was gonna strip that hill? We thought they’d sink a shaft like they used to do. For the War Effort, they said. What was I supposed to do, sit out there with a shotgun and hold off the coal company, their Pinkerton goons, the county sheriff, the state troopers, the National Guard and maybe old Harry S “Shithead” Truman hisself, with half the U.S. Army behind him? Besides, we got a royalty on that coal. Forty cents a ton.
Will said nothing. Not to Paw. To me and Mother he said, It’s ruined. He let them ruin one-fourth of the farm. Mother tried to console him. Three-fourths is left, she said. Will shrugged. Someday we’ll need that land. He said goodbye to everyone but our old man and disappeared for a month. Next time we heard from him he was married to his old girlfriend Marian Gresak, living in a rented apartment in Shawnee and driving a truck for the lumber company. He went to school evenings, on the G.I. Bill at the Teachers’ College, but dropped out after a year. He offered no explanations. On weekends and holidays he and Marian came out to the farm and worked on the cabin up in the woods near the sunken remains of another cabin and the graves—Will had no fear of ghosts—of Doctor Jim and his daughter Cornflower. Inside of ten weeks they completed the board-and-batten walls, shingled the roof and built a porch on the south side. Four weekends later Will finished the fireplace, added a sleeping loft and piped water in from the spring. Their honeymoon cabin, they called it, but seldom stayed there.
For nearly a year Will barely spoke to the old man. For the next ten years he spoke to him only when necessary—at Sunday dinners, holiday assemblies, family reunions, births, graduations, marriages and funerals.
Will and Marian had their first child eight months after the wedding, the second two years later. That was enough, even though Marian was a Roman Catholic. The Pope may be infallible, she explained, but he’s never around to help pay the bills.
Will bought Stitler’s old auto-repair shop with the aid of a G.I. business loan and supported his family with wrench and screwdriver. “General repair” was his specialty. A greasy line of work but at least he was his own boss. When he felt like going hunting or adding a back porch to the cabin or plowing our cornfield he locked up the shop. Being a mechanic both honest and competent—the only one in the county—he never hurt for lack of customers. They were on the telephone or lined up outside his garage doors every Monday morning.
He could have worked in the woods with Paw, maybe, helped operate that logging business, but he had no desire to form a partnership with our old man. God only knows he’d rather be out among the trees than sliding on a creeper board under the bowels of a broken-down Plymouth—but neither Will nor the old man had any notion of attempting to work together. On anything. They were both too stubborn and independent to even think of reconciliation.
Will kept the farm going in his free time, not for Paw’s sake or for Mother’s sake either and not even for his own. He did it, I guess (he never explained), for the place itself. To keep it alive, a going concern. Not for monetary profit—he barely broke even—but because he was there, the farm was still there, he had to do it. Who else would?
III
That April evening when Will left the farmhouse to look for the old man he heard the mourning dove call once, twice, from the willows by the run. And there was nothing unusual about that. But Will noticed the sound, the bird’s cry, in a way he had never heard it before. Though he knew that the dove was somewhere among the trees only a hundred yards below the house, the sound of its call seemed to come from a great distance. The sound was clear, as always, but coming to him from a point remote in space, across a strange interval of time. He felt and noted the strangeness of it, at the moment, and then forgot it completely in the hours to come.
Paw often stayed out in the woods until dark but on this day he was expected home by five. As Mother told Will, he had planned to come home early, eat a quick supper and meet two men at his sawmill for a lumber transaction—somebody driving up from Sutton for a load of two-by-fours. But Joe did not appear. Mother phoned Will, who came at once.
Will had a pretty good idea where the old fool probably was. For a month Joe had been cutting trees on the former Cunningham place, high on the side of Cheat Mountain. Working alone, as always. Without a chain brake on his power saw or a hard hat on his thick head, as usual.
Will drove south past Jefferson Church, past the graveyard, and down the red-dog road along Crooked Creek. He crossed over through the covered bridge—loose planks rumbled under his pickup truck—and took the left lane up the side of the hill. Opening the gate at Cunningham’s turnoff he noticed fresh tracks in the mud: the bald worn tires of the old man’s Ford. But only one set of tracks; Paw had entered but not yet left. Will climbed the hill in low gear, over the rocks, forded the stream that ran from what had once been a pasture, now surrendered to the returning blackberry, sumac, dogwood, sapling red maple. He passed the moldering remains of a barn sunk upon its stone foundations and the decayed ruin of a log cabin where only the fireplace and chimney stood intact. Beyond the former homestead the road forked, both branches bearing into the woods. Will stopped his truck, got out to check tracks again.
The soft twilight enfolded him, the lavender glow of evening that would spend two hours in its dying. Far from any highway, the old farm lay enclosed in stillness. Naturally, instinctively, before even glancing at the forks of the road in front of his truck, Will paused to listen.
He hoped for the whine and snarl of chainsaw at work but heard instead only the
spring peepers in their rhythmic chant down in the meadow and from the dark woods—after a moment—the silvery lyric of a hermit thrush. That invisible bird.
Will inspected the road. Both forks lay half concealed beneath a rank growth of skunk cabbage and mayapple but on the right, leading up the hill, were the signs of a recent passage—crushed weeds, the drip of oil, tire burns on a patch of bare earth. Will followed, driving upward and deep into the woods until the road dead-ended at a turnaround. There he found the old Ford flatbed half loaded with logs, parked among a circle of slash piles. The driver’s door hung open and on the seat was Joe’s lunch bucket—the oval-shaped miner’s tin—with its lid off, a pack of Bugler tobacco nearby.
Will looked, shut off his engine, got out. He peered into the darkness under the trees. Skid trails led off in various directions. He looked again at the truck. Paw’s peavey and cant hook leaned against the side of the bed; underneath was a gasoline can and the empty chainsaw case.
Which way to go? He listened. No sound. Even the hermit thrush, the mourning doves, the tree toads had fallen silent.
Paw, he called, gently. His voice seemed a harsh intrusion on the hush of evening. He waited, hearing no answer. He called again, much louder, bellowing his father’s name into the gathering gloom: Joe!
He waited.
This time he heard something, something animal, perhaps human—a sort of low grunt, a growling cough. The sound came from farther up the hill, far off. Will grabbed the peavey by its heavy wooden handle and started up the trail.
He found our father, as he expected, under a down tree, trapped, half crushed, half alive. One glance at the big stump nearby revealed what had happened: a rotten core in the butt of the tree made it split as it fell. Paw had run sidehill, carrying his heavy chainsaw, but not fast enough, not far enough, and the falling tree, doing a “barberchair kickback,” had rolled aside and caught him as it crashed to the face of the steep slope. A half dozen widow-makers—dead limbs—lay scattered about; any one could have killed him. But they weren’t needed. The tree itself, a ninety-foot poplar, did the job, smashing Joe’s body into the earth.