“What’s Kermit doing now?” I said.
“He’s on the Streamliner—” said Clara. “He’s on the run between Omaha and North Platte.”
“Ohhh is that an engine—” said the old man, “shooos along there about a hunderd miles an hour—” he watched it roar by, “but I think he liked that old mountain engine best.” He tipped back his head, blinked his eyes, “—had one with nine big wheels on a side, and two of them big pistons, just a-pushin’ an’ a-pullin’. Said it would pull anything. Said if he threw a rope round one of them mountains he’d pull it away.” My boy came around in front to look up at him. “Yes sireee—” said the old man, “nine of them big wheels, higher than a man, and two of them big pistons, a-pushin’ an’ a-pullin’. A purty sight.” He raised his right hand over his head. “Nine of them big drivers on each side, half a block long with no more than the tender, but just nothin’ for a stack,” he put up his thumb, “just a pimple,” he said. We looked at him. “So she’d look streamlined, take the wind.” The boy swallowed, and the old man went on, “Well, says I, why don’t you hitch her up to Madison county an’ tow us over there, say around Colfax, where it rains a little more? Well, says he, if I knew where it was it rains like it should, that’s what I’d do. An’ bygolly he would. Off we’d go a-pushin’ an’ a-pullin’, the smoke a-pourin’ out of the stack, an’ the whistle flat—” he wiped the whistle flat with his hand, “at hunderd mile an hour you can hear it, hardly see it at all.”
I’ve never been able to explain to my wife what it is I dislike about electric engines, since they were so clean, so powerful, and made so little noise. I looked at her. She was impressed all right, but not favorably.
“Is the whistle for the crossing?” the boy said.
“What it used to be for,” the old man said, “but at a hunderd mile an hour says he’s sometimes there before the whistle is.” He took his hat from the dipper handle, put it on his head.
“Bobby—” my wife said, “would you like to have your hair cut? Would you like to ride to town and have your hair cut?”
“NO” said the boy.
“Well, that’s where you’re goin’,” the old man said. He took the boy by the hand, and just as nice as you please they walked out in the yard. “We’re goin’ to get our hairs cut,” he said, “anyone comin’ along?”
“You go along and show him how,” my wife said, then she turned to reach for Peggy, missed her, and watched her run toward the barn. She kept at it, quite a little run for her, till she had the old man’s other hand. “What’s got into her?” she said, then looking at me, “Don’t stand there and gape, do something!”
As a matter of fact I was sitting gaping—but I stood up. I gave the dipper a tap as I walked by. I stopped at the screen, whistling a bit, then I walked out in the yard and pulled the seed-head from a long stem of grass. With a little trouble I got the white tip between my teeth. The tassel bobbing, I mosied out in the direction of the barn.
When I got to the garage the old man had the doors propped open, and I could see the bicycle tires on his Model T. There was a new coat of paint on the California top.
“Is that the same one?” I said.
“Think I’d buy another one?” He was up front somewhere, pounding on something. He stopped pounding and said, “Don’t like to put in more’n a gallon as she leaks a bit, rustin’ through on the sides. But she don’t seem to leak along the bottom. Just as nice an’ dry as you please.”
“You get in and out with a gallon?” I said.
“Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t.” I heard him unscrew the cap to the gas tank, lean on the hood. “Don’t smell any too gassy,” he said.
“Suppose we go in my car?” I said.
“I got to haul in that grain—” he came out of the garage to point at the wagon. The wheels had settled an inch or two into the yard. He picked up a small kerosene can, from a wire hook on the box elder, swished it around several times, put his nose to the hole. “That smell gassy to you?” He handed me the can. “There’s two these cans,” he said, “one’s gas, one’s coal oil, but with my nose like it is I can’t tell which is which.”
“This isn’t coal oil,” I said.
“Gas then—” he said, and went off with it. I heard him pouring it, slowly, into the tank. “Take it all in all,” he said, “finest car he ever built. Not so much ahead, but like a mountain engine when she’s in reverse.” He put the can in the back seat and said, “I take them blocks from under the wheels?”
“Yes—” I said. I heard him squeeze into the seat, slam the door. “You got the kids up there?” I said.
“We’re goin’ to get our hairs cut,” he said, then I heard the magneto, buzzing like a fly trapped in a mason jar. A blue cloud of smoke shot out of the exhaust, the body throbbed with a kind of palsy, she bucked twice, then suddenly jerked out of the garage. She swung around in a half moon, grazing the bark on the box elder, rattling the harrow, then pulling up, suddenly, facing me. The old man held the wheel like he had a live snake in his hands.
“Dang!” he said, cool enough, “I always forget about that spark.”
He kept his hands on the wheel, and lowered the spark with his crooked finger. The palsy stopped, but a soft, lolling roll began. “Well, you cornin’?” he said. As the kids were in the front seat, beside him, I had to crawl over the door in the rear. He had a winter top on the Ford, which is a fine thing when it’s freezing, but a little less than hell in the summertime. I held on to the braces, and we puttered down the drive.
“Don’t she run sweet?” the old man cooed.
“Mighty nice,” I said, and carefully shifted my weight, to the inside, when we made the turn. The old man went on, but I didn’t hear him, as that part of the road is washboard, and I had the feeling the Ford was falling apart. The old man’s hands, gripping the wheel, were a soft, vibrating blur. We went over the rise just east of the farm, barren now except for a few stumps, but once a fine orchard with apples as big as your head. Clara made pies out of one of them. I thought I’d mention that to the kids, as it had impressed me as a boy, but just as I leaned forward the old man put on the brakes. I lost my hold on the braces, spilled over on the kids.
“Dang—!” He said, “I come off without my grain.” I looked at him and he said, “Guess I still get so excited, when I’m drivin’, I can’t seem to remember anything.” He turned the spark down and we sat there, brooding, and after a while our yellow dust came up and went by.
I couldn’t go through that again so I said, “Suppose we take it in tomorrow, Harry? Clara said we had better be back by five o’clock.”
“Tomorrow’s Sunday,” the old man said.
“What about Monday?”
“Now that’s an idea—never thought of that.” He makes these cracks, as I said, with such a dead pan, his faded eyes blinking, that you don’t know whether you’re being ribbed or not.
“I’ll have to run in for Peg,” I said, “so why don’t we wait and go Monday?”
“You got an awful smart daddy,” the old man said. “Yes sirreee.” He looked at the kids and they nodded, swallowing.
I felt pretty relieved, so I said, “Wasn’t it around here that I used to ride? I used to ride that old marc with the green eyes.”
“She was blind as a post,” the old man said.
“You’re tellin’ me?”
“Had to tell you then, more than likely have to tell you now.”
“Well, she could find her way home,” I said.
“A good thing,” he said, and leaned out of the seat to point. A dead branch, without a strip of bark, hung across the road. “See that tree?” the old man said. They nodded. “Your daddy hung up there—seat of his britches—till your Grandpa came along, with the hayrick, let him down.”
“Now that isn’t quite true,” I said, and leaned forward to get in a word. “Old Bess left me there, all right, but I climbed down, walked home by myself.”
“Think mine is the prett
ier story,” he said. “What you fellas think?” They agreed. “Point is—your daddy was hooked by his britches in the tree.”
When you have two kids who were born and raised in an apartment, on East Fifty-third Street, something like that, about their daddy, is interesting. I found it interesting myself. I don’t know as I could say, offhand, where I stood in their estimation, but it was easy to see that I had come up a peg.
“I used to ride old Bess every day,” I said.
“Myyyy she was gentle,” said the old man, “she was as gentle and nice as the day is long.” Me wheeled over in the gutter, where the road was smoother, and we could talk. “Got an old one right now, just like her,” he said, “fine Roman nose, four pretty white feet. Pretty as a picture. Won’t do a thing but cat.”
“In the barn there was a buggy,” Peggy said. “Why didn’t we go in the buggy?”
The old man leaned out of the car to spit. He never could spit very well, for some reason, and it came back to streak the isinglass curtain. The curtain on the driver’s side was the coffee color of his moustache wings. “Mitch used to say Grace”—he wiped his mouth—“was the prettiest thing he ever seen. Up and down from a buggy, my she was a sight to see.” That was my mother. That was the way he referred to her. According to Mitch, for the old man, was according to Hoyle. Mitch was the first of the family, maybe a year or two older than Harry, and the old man seemed to think a good deal of him. “According to Mitch—” he went on, as if he had read my mind, “Grace Osborn was just about the finest woman that ever was.” Clara had never said either yes or no to that. She’d heard it a good many times, and I would say the finest thing about my mother were the things that Clara Muncy never said.
“Now I’m goin’ to stop here,” the old man said, and pulled up at the STOP sign on the main highway, “not because I think I should, but because it’s the law.” He looked at my kids, one at a time, then we leaped out on the highway, the horn tooting, and headed toward Lone Tree.
When the old man first came to the plains there was a rolling sea of grass, and a lone tree, so the story goes, where they settled the town. They put up a few stores, facing the west and the setting sun like so many tombstones, which is quite a bit what a country store has in mind. You have the high, flat slab at the front, with a few lines of fading inscription, and then the sagging mound of the store, the contents, in the shadow behind.
Later, if the town lasts, they put through some tracks, with a water tank for the whistle stop, and if it rained, now and then, they’d put up the monument. That’s the way these elevators, these great plains monoliths, strike me. There’s a simple reason for grain elevators, as there is for everything, but the force behind the reason, the reason for the reason, is the land and the sky. There’s too much sky out here, for one thing, too much horizontal, too many lines without stops, so that the exclamation, the perpendicular, had to come. Anyone who was born and raised on the plains knows that the high false front on the Feed Store, and the white water tower, are not a question of vanity. It’s a problem of being. Of knowing you are there. On a good day, with a slanting sun, a man can walk to the edge of his town and see the light on the next town, ten miles away. In the sea of corn, that flash of light is like a sail. It reminds a man the place is still inhabited. I know what it is Ishmael felt, or Ahab, for that matter—these are the whales of the great sea of grass.
“How’s it over your way?” the old man said.
“Clear on the starboard,” I said, and he gave her the juice, a good swig of the spark, and we jumped the tracks.
The last time I was in Lone Tree was the 4th of July, twenty-eight years ago, the day that Dempsey thumped the hell out of Carpentier. I was sitting on a stack of Police Gazettes in Eddie Cahow’s barber shop. My Uncle Harry was flat on his back, with a salt-and-pepper cloth between his chin and his knees, and Eddie Cahow had just finished lathering him. Sprawled out that way, his hands crossed on his stomach, the old man looked a good deal like a corpse, or a man that Eddie Cahow, with his fancy bottles, had raised from the dead. The fight was coming in over the air, or the wireless, as it was called, and the Magnavox speaker was on the shelf right over my head. Everytime Dempsey knocked the Frenchman down, Eddie Cahow would give the old man a nick, then lean back to wipe the bloody lather off the blade. As you probably remember, Dempsey knocked him down a good many times. When the old man sat up in the chair he didn’t look much better than Carpentier, as his face was plastered with little strips of toilet paper. I don’t think he remarked that at all. He stepped out of the chair, flexed his knees, took out a handful of change and ten-penny nails, then stood there sorting out the nails, putting them in his mouth. He gave Eddie Cahow three buffalo nickels, then he turned and offered me an Indian penny with four or five nicks in the edge.
“Seems to me,” he said, munching the nails, “anybody knock me down that many times, take more than a little countin’ over me to get me up.” I took that for what it was, a good piece of advice. We stood there while he put on his tie—it was the 4th of July and he had to wear one—then he took my hand and we walked out in the street.
Now we puttered twice around the block—he didn’t want to park where they had the parking meters—then he found a spot, a free one, under a mulberry tree. He raced the motor, shot up the spark, then switched her over to the magneto, letting it buzz while he looked at the kids. “Got a blue-bottle fly in that motor,” he said, “little rascal wants out.”
“You fellas give me your hands,” he said, “an’ we’ll go down here an’ get a cool drink.” As the three of them pretty well covered the walk, I lagged behind. There were four or five men standing on the corner, their thumbs hooked in their bib straps, and they began to strop and hone, like a barber, as the old man walked up. “Here’s where we get a drink,” the old man said, and took my boy by the seat of his pants, tipped him up, and dipped his face in the splash. If there’s any one thing that boy hates, that’s it. He won’t let you put a hand on him, except to button his pants. I thought he would drown in that water, but he never said a word, though his eyes popped and his mouth opened, like a fish. The old man put him down and said, “How was that, wet enough for you?” And the boy nodded his head, soberly. Then he did the same dam thing with the girl. I would have given ten years of my life to have had Peg there, on the corner, staring at the soiled bottom of her precious little girl. His hand pretty well covered her drawers, but for a kid who wouldn’t use the word bathroom, or hold up her fingers, it was something she could write home about. He let her down, then had a washy swallow of water himself. He hadn’t said a word, or made a sign, to the four or five men standing there, watching him, or acknowledged the fact that I was part of his party, the father of the kids. But as he stood there, filling his pipe from an old sock, which he used for his tobacco, it dawned on me that a good deal was being said. Without anyone opening their trap it was perfectly clear, to everyone present, myself included, that the old man was proud as hell of my kids. Or his kids, put it that way. If they hadn’t been his kids he would have been the first to speak up about it, but as they were, nobody had to say anything. Everybody was free, and undisturbed, to take this fact and look at it, to drop it on the tongue, like snuff, and get the full flavor while it lasts. The old man filled his pipe, left a sulphur streak on the faded scat of his overalls, then stood there with the match over the bowl, preparing to speak. It was the tribal way of calling for attention, raising your hand.
“I low’d you say your New York city water compared with that water there, Clyde,” he said.
“No comparison,” I said, although I hadn’t had a drop of it. “City water is frightful,” I said, using that dam word.
“That’s what I hear,” the old man said, and struck another match. He used this one to light his pipe, then he gazed at the men looking at him.
“You remember Will?” the old man said.
“I think I do—”
“Well, that’s his boy—” the old man took his p
ipe out of his mouth, pointed the stem at me. They all considered me for some time, as my wife considers herself in the mirror, soberly, in spite of the silly hat on her head. “Born—” the old man said, and turned on his heel, looked at the grain elevator to get his bearings, then pointed his pipe over the roofs and trees of the town. “Born right over there, where Boyd lives. Born right in that house.”
“See he’s got your high forehead,” an old wag said, referring to my retreating hair. They all thought that was pretty sharp, but nobody laughed. I got the feeling it would be a serious mistake to laugh. A little vulgar, as a matter of fact, what you might expect from a city slicker, a traveling salesman, with his bag of canned cracks and mechanical jokes.
“When I seen the little fella—” the old one said, “first thing to cross my mind was Ivy. Couldn’t tell you why, but that’s who it was.”
“Was Ivy a towhead?” said the wag.
“He was fair,” said the old man, flexing his knees, “with what you call a high forehead.” They all shuffled their feet, stropped a bib strap or two, or turned to spit in the dust. I felt like a canary in a private conclave of whooping cranes. “Well—” said the old man, “you fellas ready for a hair cut?” Then he put his hands on their heads. They stood there. “We fellas got our hands full,” he said, “we got to go an’ get our hairs cut.” He let his hands drop, and the kids hooked on to his thumbs. “We got to do a little shoppin’,” he said, “suppose you go on down and save us a place?” he stepped off the curb and swung the kids over the street. “Whoops-a-daisy,” he said, and walked them across the street, into the shadow of the awning. Over the awning, under a peeling coat of paint, I could see the faint legend EOFF’S GENERAL STORE. A gold and black Atlantic & Pacific sign had taken its place. In the window there were cartons of cornflakes, a poster reading FRESH BABY CHICKS, and a maltese cat, sprawled out on a bin of soap flakes, asleep. I took a mouthful of the water, spit it out, and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.
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