The Fool's Progress

by Edward Abbey

  The old man’s eyes were open; they focused on Will kneeling over him. Blood leaked from the corner of his mouth. He breathed rapidly but carefully, delicately—each breath a stab of pain. The weight of the split bole lay across his ribs, waist, pelvis.

  Goddamnit, Will, he snarls, like a trapped dog, where the hell you been? He was pale as milk, greasy with sweat.

  Easy, Paw, easy. Don’t talk. Will looked quickly about. He knew he’d have to buck the down tree before he could roll it away from the old man’s body. Need the saw, where’s that saw? The saw lay ten feet down the slope, broken, its three-foot bar bent like a spoon, the cutting chain dangling free, useless.

  Been here since noon, Will. Since noon, goddamnit. Get this tree off me.

  Yeah, yeah, Paw…. Foolishly, knowing better, Will tried to lift the trunk of the tree. He could not budge it. He took the peavey and attempted to roll the trunk. A useless gesture: the branches, jammed in the ground, made it impossible to roll. He’d have to trim the limbs before he could roll it. Again he looked frantically around through the darkness, trying to spot an ax.

  Ax, Paw, ax. Where’s your ax?

  Seems like all day. Been here all day, Will, waitin’ for you. Where in the name of Hell you been?

  Shut up, Paw, Will said softly, you shut up now. Save your strength. You got another saw? Where’s the ax?

  Makes a man so mad he could piss in a milk can.

  He spied the ax, a double-bitted timber ax, one blade sunk deep in a stump, the file beside it. Will got up, hurrying, took the ax and lopped branches from the tree, beginning with the first above his father and working up the slope, up the trunk. At each blow he heard the old man grunt with pain. But what else could he do? He thought of running back to the trucks, getting both jacks—but the splintered butt of the down tree offered no purchase.

  Halfway up the length of the tree, where the trunk tapered to a two-foot diameter, Will stopped limbing, raised the ax above his shoulder and began to chop through the trunk. Right, left, right, left, he cut a V-shaped notch. He stepped over the trunk and swung from the opposite side, deepening the notch until the cut went clear through. He returned to his father. Paw was still conscious.

  How you doin’, Paw?

  That you, Will? Took you long enough, goddamnit.

  Gonna roll this thing off you now, Paw. Don’t talk. Take it easy. I’m gonna get you out of here, get you straight to the hospital.

  No hospital. Ain’t goin’ to no goddamn hospital. Take me home, Will. Just take me home, goddamnit, that’s all I want, just let me rest awhile.

  Sure, Paw. We’ll do it.

  Will jammed a fallen branch at a right angle against the underside of what was now a log, not merely a down tree, hooked the peavey into the bark of the log and levered it slowly up onto the branch. As he did so he heard Joe’s gasp, then an agonized groan.

  Oh goddamnit all, Will….

  Paw’s body was clear. As gently, mercifully as he could manage, Will pulled the old man from beneath the log. He wiped Joe’s face with a bandana, nursing his head in his left arm. Paw looked desperately sick but not dead, not yet. Need a stretcher, thought Will, need a stretcher and another man to help carry it. He was afraid of doing more damage to the old man’s insides if he picked him up. Again Will looked around through the darkness of the silent forest, seeking help.

  There’s nobody here but us.

  He looked up into the converging columns of the trees. Through the bare and unleafed branches he saw one star, steadfast, resolute, shining down. You’re on your own, Will Lightcap.

  Put your arm around my neck, Paw. But Joe made no response. Will slipped an arm under the shoulders, the other under the knees, and lifted his father from the ground and carried him, like a broken child, down the skid trail through the dark to the head of the road. He was aware of blood, urine, excrement leaking, dripping, from Joe’s clothing. Carefully, taking pains, he laid the old man across the bench seat of his pickup truck. He pillowed his head with a folded coat. There was no place else to put him.

  Will got in behind the steering wheel, draping his father’s lower legs over his lap. He reached for the key in its switch.

  Will….

  Will hesitated.

  That you, Will?

  It’s me.

  The old man’s lips moved again but no words came out. Then he said, Forgive….

  What? Forgive what?

  Forgive….

  There’s nothing to forgive, Paw. Forget it. Be quiet.

  Forgive….

  Will paused; he said, I forgive. He started the engine and drove down the road, past the ruins, through the open gate of the old farm and from there to the covered bridge and onto the graveled county road. From there it was fifteen miles over a rough and winding blacktop, riddled with potholes, to the hospital in Shawnee. By the time Will got there, pulling into the emergency entrance, the old man was dead from internal hemorrhages.

  IV

  Henry flew home from Utah for the funeral. He arrived in time for the church service and the burial.

  Will took care of everything else. As soon as he’d obtained a death certificate from the attending physician at the emergency room, he took Joe’s broken body—enclosed now in a hospital shroud—out to the truck and drove him home. Meanwhile he had phoned Mother and sent a message to Henry, to our sister Marcie and to the Gatlins.

  Will refused, absolutely, to have any dealings with an undertaker. Or a “mortician,” as those vultures had begun to call themselves by this time. And Mother backed him up. Though concerned with a proper respect for appearances, she shared her son’s contempt for funeral parlors, embalming, hired hearses and commercial mourning procedures. I think maybe you’re breakin’ some laws, Uncle Jeff told him. Tell the sheriff about it, Will replied. Holyoak did nothing.

  That first night Mother sat up with the body and did her weeping. She cried quietly, that is, for about an hour, until some neighbors and relatives began to arrive, then settled down to a stoic acceptance of her duties as widow and hostess. They could all hear, from out in the barn, the noise of Will carpentering a coffin.

  Selecting rough, knotty but adequate pine two-by-sixes from Paw’s lumber stacks, Will made a rectangular box six and a half feet long, thirty inches wide, two feet deep. He mitered the joints and reinforced the corners with sections of two-by-four and fastened them with screws—no nails, no glue. He screwed on six handles, three to a side. The box looked very large on the barn floor by the light of two kerosene lanterns but our Paw was a large man. Long, anyhow. Will carried the coffin into the parlor—the front room—of the house and set it down on the floor. He and cousin Bill Gatlin laid Joe’s stiffening body inside. Even dead, shrunken up by old age and damage, he barely fit. When Mother was ready Will pulled the canvas shroud over the old man’s face and head. He packed the body with ice and sawdust from the icehouse and attached the lid of the coffin, screwing it down tight. He let the box and its occupant remain in the house overnight—for Mother’s sake—but in the morning, when the sun came up, he stowed the coffin deep inside the cold portal of the coal mine in the hillside above the barn.

  Joe would have preferred to be buried in the woods alongside Doctor Jim and Cornflower but on this point Mother insisted on convention. She wanted her husband buried in the graveyard at Jefferson Church, in the plot she had long ago reserved for him and herself, next door to the other Gatlins and Lightcaps.

  Joe had never been a member of the congregation. He had often boasted, loudly and aggressively, of his atheistic views: “God,” he would say, always putting the name in quotes, is a noise people make when they’re too tired to think anymore. Nevertheless, Mother’s wishes carried weight in the church community. She was one of the pillars; who else could or would teach Sunday school to the six-year-olds, play both the piano and the organ and rehearse and lead the choir?

  Will had no objection to the plan. After stashing the coffin inside the mine, he and Bill Gatlin took a
pick, sixpack of beer, shovel and wheelbarrow, drove the three miles to the church and dug the grave. That took till noon. In the afternoon (alone and in secret) Will worked on our old farm wagon, greasing the axle bearings, replacing some missing spokes in the wheels and rebolting the doubletree to the tongue. That wagon was forty years old by then, the wood weathered to the soft silver-gray of the April clouds overhead. In the evening he paid a visit to the Houser brothers, the last farmers in Shawnee County still using work horses.

  The funeral service was scheduled for the next day.

  Everyone arrived on time, even Henry, except Will Lightcap and our old man himself. We were gathered near the front door of the church, talking with the young new long-haired preacher (Mother’s church was one of four he visited every Sunday) and waiting for Will, who was supposed to deliver the guest of honor. The young hippie minister was glancing for the third time at his watch when we heard, from a quarter mile down the dirt road, a grating noise of iron-rimmed wheels on gravel, the creak and rattle of bone-dry wood, the jangle of trace chains, the slap of horsehide on horsehide.

  Henry excused himself and left the gathering at the church door to meet Will and the team and wagon. The stiff suit and his high-heel cowboy boots—freshly polished at the Pittsburgh airport—made the short walk uncomfortable but he was grinning when he shook hands with his big brother. He couldn’t help it. Will smiled himself, for a moment, but they both assumed solemn faces as they approached the waiting group. In the rear of the wagon, behind the coffin, lay Paw’s mangled chainsaw. Will dismounted from the wagon seat. The big draft horses stamped their feet, shook the harness, discharged a pile of green and steamy dung, then stood quietly when Will spoke to them. He tied them, temporarily, to the hemlock by the churchyard gate. Will and Henry and four other men—Bill Gatlin, Uncle Jeff Holyoak, Sam Gatlin and Homer Bishop—carried the coffin into the church and set it on the trestles before the pulpit. Mother placed a bough of flowering dogwood on the coffin. The young Reverend Jonathan Cripps, D.D., delivered his sermon.

  I take my text, he began, from the book of Ecclesiastes, chapters one and twelve, verses two and thirteen. He paused and gazed for a moment over his lectern at the widow, at the widow’s daughter Marcie, at Will and Henry and other members of the family.

  Speaking without notes, in a voice calm and conversational, the minister continued. Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, all is vanity. Or as we would say these days, Futility, utter futility, the whole thing is futile. I hardly knew the man whose death we have gathered here to mourn. What little I know of him I learned indirectly and by inference, through my brief acquaintance with you people and with Lorraine, his widow. I know that he was a farmer and a logger by trade, a faithful husband to his wife and a steady support for his family. From all report he was a decent honorable man who always did his best in whatever he set out to do. He was also an outspoken man who never hesitated to attack the institutions of our nation when he felt those institutions were betraying traditional American ideals.

  Again the young minister halted for a moment. He contemplated the small congregation, a faint smile passing over his face, then went on.

  More troubling to us here today was his outlook on our church, our religion. I will not ignore the fact that Mr. Joseph Lightcap was not a member of the church and was not since childhood a practicing Christian. As I think we all know, he made no secret of his hostility to our faith, his rejection of orthodox doctrine, his lack of belief in the Supreme Deity. I will not label him an atheist, however. What man of sense could declare, positively, that there is no God? But we know that he regarded himself as an agnostic, one who doubts the existence of things unseen….

  He believed in oak, thought Henry. The golden oak. He believed in board feet and the money tree. But never wore a hard hat—never really believed in the widow-maker.

  …seems appropriate therefore to consider the meaning of the ancient Preacher’s words. For if Joe Lightcap ever read the Old Testament, this must surely have been his favorite book. What could be more apparently agnostic, doubting and skeptical than these words which seem to issue from the heart of despair? Vanity, vanity, all is vanity. The author doubles and redoubles this bitter word, using twice-over a phrase which might be a parody of that other superlative, “holy of holies.” Utter futility contrasted with complete holiness. And the terse dismissal: “All is vanity.” This whole complicated business of life is brushed aside as a phantom of useless striving and struggle. Or is it? Does this vanity include godliness? And God? Or does the Preacher simply mean everything less than God? Not the whole world—but only the earthly world? Only that which exists under the sun?

  Under the sun? thought Henry. I see where he is leading. All is vanity beneath the sun, in this world—but out there, up yonder, in that other world…? Poor old man; they finally got him where he’d have to hear a good Christian sermon whether he wanted to or not.

  …I think, continued Dr. Cripps, that our author writes from a concealed premise. Ecclesiastes is a work of subtle but Christian apologetics. Its apparent worldliness is dictated by a hidden aim. For does not the writer go on, in verse three, to say “What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils—under the sun?” Again I emphasize those last three words. What we have here is a thoroughgoing critique of secularism presented in the guise of radical agnosticism…

  Henry looked at the dogwood on the coffin. He looked away and through the window where trapped and buzzing flies crawled up and down the glass, seeking escape, and saw outside in the woods a stand of living dogwood in full flower and a mass of budding red maple at the edge of a field—Bill Gatlin’s field, plowed but not yet harrowed.

  A pang of remembrance pierced his heart. Henry remembered himself at the age of two years, riding on his father’s shoulders for the first turn around that field on top of the hill, where the strip mine now began. He remembered his fists clenched in Joe’s thick black hair, his bare legs clamped around his father’s neck. He had to hold on for dear life because his father had both hands on the plow. In front of the plow, lugging it forward, was the span of horses. The double bridle lines hung looped over the plow handles but Joe seldom had to touch them. They began at the southeast corner of the field near the lane that came up through the woods. At the end of the first furrow Joe Lightcap laid the plow on its side and swung the team around. Whoa, he said. He straightened the plow and turned the moldboard over with his foot, so that the second furrow would be thrown in the opposite direction. The first few furrows on the lower edge of a field were always thrown uphill—the gathering in—to prevent the gradual buildup, over years, of a ridge along the fencerow. The team waited.

  The boy jogged in place on his father’s shoulders, eager to get moving.

  Lightcap spoke to the horses. They squatted for the start of the pull, massive haunches spread and braced, and leaned into their collars. The plowshare sank down and in, forging ponderously forward, crunching through rootlets from the trees below the rail fence, grating between stones, heaving the brown moist earth up, out, over on the curve of the gleaming moldboard, leaving behind a kerf that was parallel and true—not to the edge of an imaginary rectangle, but to the first furrow across the fall line of the slope.

  Quiet work. The only noise was that of the yielding soil, the strain of horses and harness leather, the rattle of metal, the questioning cries of robins in the brush along the fence, where Lightcap always left a wide belt of weeds, briars and grass. He shared the hill farmer’s aversion to a clean and tidy fencerow. He liked a strip of wildness bordering his fields—a home for rabbits and insect-devouring birds.

  Halfway back across the field Joe stopped the team and squatted down to examine the soil. The boy slid from his shoulders. Joe took a ball of damp rich dark earth in his huge hand. Look at this, Henry. He crumbled the soil in his hand. Four earthworms lay in his palm, slowly coiling and uncoiling their slim pink slick bodies. Fishin’ worms, Henry. He let the worms fall to the ground. You sit he
re, son, keep an eye on them worms. I’ll take a turn and be right back.

  Henry was not alarmed. So long as he could see his father, lurching off behind the huge shapes of plow and horses, he was not frightened. He loved everything about his father—the coarseness of his hair, the powerful sweating neck and wide shoulders, the smell of his cigarette, the sound of his deep soft voice.

  Forgetting his father he watched the earthworms crawl into the dirt. He caught one and ate it, together with the dirt. Saliva and soil the color of tobacco juice trickled from the corners of his mouth. He ate a second worm.

  Henry heard the clash of the locking moldboard. He stood up and struggled over the big clods toward the horses and the man.

  They came toward him, gigantic figures towering into the sky, blocking off the sun. They stopped. The horses stared down at the little boy. Green thick saliva drooled from the bridle bits. Vision limited by leather blinders, the horses shook their heads from side to side, trying to get a clear view of the child below. Their shaggy forelegs stood like treetrunks, their mighty feet like boulders in the earth. Sweat glistened on their chests.

  The boy tried to find a way around the horses, calling for his father, beginning to be scared.

  Joe appeared beside the team, reached down for Henry, swept him up and around, above his head, and placed him once again astride his neck. What’s the matter, Henry? Hey? Think we forgot you? His father rolled another cigarette, pasting it to his lower lip and lighting it, then started the horses. The plow handles jerked and twisted in Lightcap’s fingers. He tightened his grip and tramped on, rough but steady, over the clods. Henry held to his father’s hair. The cool damp earth steamed behind them, vapor rising in the sunlight under the smoky blue of the West Virginia mountains.