“That’s Ed’s room,” I said, and my wife stepped up to look at it. Then she backed away, as if she saw someone in the bed. There are hotel beds that give you the feeling of a negative exposed several thousand times, with the blurred image of every human being that had slept in them. Then there are beds with a single image, over-exposed. There’s an etched clarity about them, like a clean daguerreotype, and you know in your heart that was how the man really looked. There’s a question in your mind if any other man, any other human being, could lie in that bed and belong in it. One might as well try and wear the old man’s clothes. His shoes, for instance, that had become so much a part of his feet they were like those casts of babies’ shoes in department stores. Without saying a word, or snapping her knuckles, my wife turned away.
“There’s two bedrooms,” I said; “we could give this one to the kids.” The main bedroom, I seemed to remember, was on the front. I walked up front to look for it, but I stopped at the door, without going in, as the floor was pretty well covered with dead bugs. They had probably been trapped in the house when they took Ed to town. I’ve been leery of stepping on bugs since I was a boy, in rooming houses, and that dry frying sound still makes me a little sick. On the dresser was a picture of Clara, still looking quite a bit as she does right now, and a picture of Verne some twenty years ago. I was surprised to see that picture of Verne. As I wanted to show it to Peg I started back through the house, for a broom, as I would first have to do something about those bugs.
“Let me get a broom,” I said, “before you look the next one over,” but I had the feeling, right away, that what I said hadn’t registered. She stood with her back to me, looking at the wall.
“Why, that’s my Dad,” I said. “What’s he doing over here?” He was standing with another man and they had a small, dark woman between them. She was wearing a fur-trimmed suit, high laced shoes, and a hat that shadowed her face.
“Would that be Uncle Ed?” she said.
“I don’t know,” I said, “but that’s my mother between them.”
I left her there and went out in the kitchen to look for a broom.
“Who in the world was Walt Mason?” she said.
“Walt Mason?” I said, and came to the kitchen door with the broom. My wife was leaning on the dining-room table, looking at an album of newspaper clippings. “Walt Mason?” I said, then I remembered. “He was a poet.” I waited to see what she would say to that. She didn’t say anything so I said, “You’ll find no pictures in there, if that’s what you’re hoping.”
“No—?” she said; then she began to read—
When I was young I had to go
And till the cornfield with a hoc.
Ah, it was weary work, indeed;
I paralyzed the noxious weed
And scraped the dirt around the corn,
And yearned to hear the dinner horn—
“That will be enough of that!” I said, but she took my word for it. I had to go up and lean over her shoulder, read it myself. “Listen to this—” I said.
The raindrops slug me in the eye
And from my whiskers wash the dye;
They spoil the colors of my shirt
And still they splash and drop and squirt.
One fact keeps running through my brain—
That people used to pray for rain!
“That must have been quite a while ago,” my wife said.
“I guess so,” I said.
I stood there, and after some time she turned the page.
“Listen to this—” I said. I cleared my throat and began—
Backward, turn backward, oh,
Time, in your flight, and give us a
maiden dressed proper and right.
We are so weary of switches and
rats, Billie Burke clusters and peach
basket hats, wads of just hair in a
horrible pile, stacked on their—
“Well, you can read it,” I said. I had got that far before I sensed something was wrong. “What little gem have you found?” I said, and read another stanza, in my best manner, before Peg turned from the table and walked away. To make it clear I didn’t feel anything that she might be feeling, I read the fifth stanza very spiritedly—
I’d be a single man,
Jolly and free,
I’d be a bachelor,
With a latch key.
Now, only a grave man, with a full heart, would have said jolly instead of happy, joyous, or some such frippery. I stood there, looking at the page, doing my best to ignore the fact that I felt more and more like some sly peeping Tom. I put my hand up to my face, as it occurred to me, suddenly, how people look in a Daily News photograph. A smiling face at the scene of a bloody accident. A quartet of gay waitresses near the body slumped over the bar. God only knows why I thought of that, but I put up my hands, covering my face, as if I was there, on the spot, and didn’t want to be seen. I didn’t want to be violated, that is. The camera eye knows no privacy, the really private is its business, and in our time business is good. But what, in God’s name, did that have to do with me? At the moment, I guess, I was that kind of camera.
Was there, then, something holy about these things? If not, why had I used that word? For holy things, they were ugly enough. I looked at the odds and ends on the bureau, the pincushion lid on the cigar box, the faded Legion poppies, assorted pills, patent medicines. There was not a thing of beauty, a man-made loveliness, anywhere. A strange thing, for whatever it was I was feeling, at that moment, was what I expect a thing of beauty to make me feel. To take me out of my self, into the selves of other things. I’ve been in the habit, recently, of saying that if we could feel anything, very long, it would kill us, and that we get on by not even feeling ourselves. To keep that from happening we have this thing called embarrassment. That snaps it off, like an antisepsis, or we rely on our wives, or one of our friends, to take the pressure out of the room with a crack of some kind. That’s what I was about to do. For once in my life I didn’t, but as I had to do something I went into Ed’s room, opened the bureau drawer, and called, “Oh Peg!” When she came in I said— “Ed used to hunt. He used to go off for a day at a time, with a dog and a gun, up the river. When I was a kid there was still a wolf or two around here.” I said that, then I closed the drawer, making it clear that we could mind his public business, but leave his private business alone. There were several snapshots on the mirror and I looked at them—for my mother—but I didn’t turn them over to read on the back. “Well, she’s not there,” I said, and came back to the table, pulled out a chair, and looked at an old man’s shoes on the seat.
For thirty years I’ve had a clear idea what the home place lacked, and why the old man pained me, but I’ve never really known what they had. I know now. But I haven’t the word for it. The word beauty is not a Protestant thing. It doesn’t describe what there is about an old man’s shoes. The Protestant word for that is character. Character is supposed to cover what I feel about a cane-seated chair, and the faded bib, with the ironed-in stitches, of an old man’s overalls. Character is the word, but it doesn’t cover the ground. It doesn’t cover what there is moving about it, that is. I say these things are beautiful, but I do so with the understanding that mighty few people anywhere will follow what I mean. That’s too bad. For this character is beautiful. I’m not going to labor the point, but there’s something about these man-tired things, something added, that is more than character. The same word, but a new specific gravity. Perhaps all I’m saying is that character can be a form of passion, and that some things, these things, have that kind of character. That kind of Passion has made them holy things. That kind of holiness, I’d say, is abstinence, frugality, and independence—the home-grown, made-on-the-farm trinity. Not the land of plenty, the old age pension, or the full dinner pail. Independence, not abundance, is the heart of their America.
My wife was looking at me, watching me stare at the old man’s shoes.
“What ar
e you staring at?” she said.
“The figure in the carpet,” I said.
We stood there and she smiled, naturally. That can’t be helped: there’s a vein of corn in every figure—in a rural carpet—and as she knows there’s more than a nap of it on me. That’s the mark of any product made on the farm. We stood there, and I watched my girl, Peggy, run along the side of the house, push on the screen, and stumble into the room. When she saw us she stopped, caught her breath, and said—
“We can have it, Mummy—he’s dead.”
After a moment, solemnly, she took her new straw hat from her new bald head.
“You’d better put it back on,” her mother said, and walked over to help her do it. She drew up the slip-knot, tight, beneath her chin. Bobby ran in, his straw pushed back, and stared around the room, a little wildly. He started for the table—“Bob-Bee—” his mother said, “stand right where you are!”
As that didn’t sound at all like his mother, he obeyed. “We’re going to move right in,” he said. “Grandma said we could move right in.”
“We are not moving in,” his mother said. “The house is too small.” I looked at her, and she said, “Run along now and tell your Uncle Ivy, tell him the house is too small for a boy like you.” She took him by the hand, firmly, and started for the door. She stopped for Peggy, then called to me, “When you lock the door, don’t forget the key.”
“No—” I said, and held the screen while she led them out.
I put the chair back under the table, closed the album of clippings, the bedroom doors, lowered the blinds, and came out on the back porch. I felt like a man whose job it was to close up a church. In this passion, that was the word for a man’s house. The citadel, the chapel, of his character. I came out in the yard and looked at the barns, a blue wash of shadow under the eaves, and a string of barn swallows on the power line near the door. Peg was walking the kids across the road. They looked like sunflowers, in their straws, a couple of little fellows that had run away for a day of hi-jinks, and were now being returned to where they belonged. There was no doubt in my mind where that was. All over the plains men now walked to stand at the screen, a damp towel in their hands, look at the sky, and judge what the future held for them. A good idea. It was my sky too. I could hear Clara calling her chickens and I pulled a long stem of grass, slowly, like the old man, and stuck the soft root between my teeth.
As I came in the yard I could hear the whine of the separator. Through the window I watched the old man step away from the bowl, where the crank was whirling, and rest his hands, for a moment, in the small of his back. Clara took away the pail, and left a pan under the spout, for the dripping, and the old man put his hand in the bowl, scooped up some suds. He came out on the porch where the cats mewed at the screen. Rolling up his sleeve, he put his hand through the hole at the bottom, and let the kittens, all five of them, clean it off to the wrist. Mike, the spotted one, was the last to leave. “Thinks I,” the old man said, “you think you’re just about the smartest little rascal you or any other spotted cat has ever seen.” He stood up, dragging his sticky hand the length of his thigh, then he went off, soberly, toward the outbilly.
Someone turned the radio on. The weather. In the room beyond the kitchen I could see Viola, her bare feet on the floor, and between her stocky legs Peggy’s patent leather sandals and mosquito-swollen knees. Viola said, “Now there’s some things that are right and there’s some things that are wrong, and that’s wrong. Do you hear?”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“All right,” Viola said, “just so long as you know.” She took Peggy’s hand and they walked toward the light, into the living room. The man on the radio stopped talking and saxophones, crooning the theme song, set the stage, briefly, for the cheese food hour. Stardust—I heard Ivy’s thin whistle, then the music stopped.
“A little bit of that—” Clara said, to no one in particular, “goes a long ways.” That was all. She came back to the kitchen, to the quiet, and flushed out the bowl on the separator.
Grandmother Cropper had been showing my wife her afghans. They were spread out on the floor, all around her, and my wife had a few squares, the size of pot holders, lying in her lap. Ivy sat near the window, a sheet of Capper’s Weekly held to the light. I stood at the screen, facing the yard dark now with tree shadows, and the yellow band of the road, like a streak of cloud, through the shrubs. The old lady munched her teeth and said—
“—after the choir marched in he says, now who is the oldest lady, the oldest mother, here today? Nobody said anything. Then he says, Mrs. Tillie A. Cropper is the oldest lady, the oldest mother, here today.” Grandma fluttered her eyelids. “I thought the floor’d sink beneath my feet. I am now going to ask her, he says, to please stand up. I stood up. He walked cross to the pulpit. There was a bouquet of fuchsia. He says, I present this to you today for being the oldest lady, the oldest mother, who is here today. I made a bow, set down. He called on the lady next to me, Mrs. Plomers, but she wouldn’t get up.” Grandma crooked her head, raised her left leg, then made a light pat on the floor.
Viola came in and said, “Now Grandma—”
“Then he called up the youngest mother,” Grandma said. She put out her teeth, like a mask, and stared out from under her Sunday bonnet. Viola turned around, walked out in the kitchen again. “Called up the youngest mother—other end of the aisle—and she rose up. Her child in her arms. He talked nice to her. So when I went out, shook hands, I said—Now who told you I was the oldest lady, the oldest mother, who was here today? Mrs. Cropper, he says, it’s a great honor. So I went home. Monday night he came over with Mrs. Plomers, Mrs. Nettie Fields. Now I want you to tell me, I said, who told you I was the oldest lady, the oldest mother, who was there yesterday? Your school teacher, he says. I didn’t say anything. She knew.”
“You got your box there, Grandma?” Viola said, and came with one of her postcards.
“Then over at Polzen reunion he says, Now who is here in the eighties? Nobody said anything. Who is here in the nineties? Nobody said anything. Well, he says, Mrs. Tillie A. Cropper is the oldest lady, the oldest mother, who is here today. He came over and gave me a vase. Mrs. Furnas said she got it in the ten cent store in Clay Center. I thanked him.”
The old man came into the dining room, sat down, took off his shoes, then he carried them with him into the front room, sat down in his chair. He took his glasses from the case on the table, put them in his lap while he rubbed at his eyes. Then he hooked them to his ears, peered around the room.
“Where’s the boy?” he said.
“He’s asleep—” said my wife. “He was just tuckered out.” The old man chuckled.
“Shoulda seen him on Bess. Whoa-giddy-up. Just like he’d been a-ridin’ all his life.”
“Next reunion I didn’t go to—” the old lady said. Her voice was high, and she clamped down on her teeth. “Went to the next one. Saw him over by himself. You’re President Polzen reunion, aren’t you? I says. I am, he says. I heard you said the oldest lady couldn’t get up in the public and talk, I says, but you said the oldest lady there could get up and sing. He laughed and laughed. Then I said, If we’re going to sing let us sing Blest Be the Tie that Binds. He didn’t say anything. When the time came he stood up and said, Let us sing Blest be the Tie that Binds. So we did.”
“Where’s the boy?” the old man said.
“Mrs. Muncy just told you,” Viola said, “that he was all tuckered out. That he was asleep. How many times people have to tell you something?”
The old man picked up a paper from the small pile on the desk. He opened it up, belched, and said, “Now there’s a levelheaded old man.”
“Who?” said Ivy.
“Senator Capper,” the old man said.
“So I went up to Aunt Min’s—” the old lady said, “and here conic a Polzen, nephew of hers—Now who told you, I says, was the oldest lady there that day? Ed Cropper, he said. So there it was, all over town.”
Ivy stood up and looked at his watch, left the room. Aunt Clara stalked in, wiping her hands on the dry tail of her apron, and Jenny came in with a straight-backed chair from the porch. She sat on it, slipping her feet out of her tight, mail-order pumps, her toes curling around the side rungs.
“I see here,” the old man said, “John Bull’s havin’ quite a time.”
“John who?” said the old lady.
“Says the King never did figure matters out. The Prime Minister says to the King, now I’ll write it out and you sign it. The House of Commons says it to the Prime Minister. There’s a Parleyment in there. Don’t know what they do.”
“Don’t think they do anything any more,” Clara said.
“That Meditrain sea was never much use to anybody, just a cussed nuisance, now she’s passed it to Uncle Sam. Here, she says, see you keep them Eye-talians from squabblin’. My, she’s smart. So we send over a ship or two—”
“The Prince of Wales would of made the finest one after Alfred,” said Clara. “He was always to be found among the miners and the poor.”
“All them Royalty is related,” said the old man. “Anybody else they put ’em in jail, but if you’re Royalty they see to it it’s all right. This Queen Victoria turned out most of ’em. The Kaiser, he was a boy of hers, and that there last Cesar of Roosha. No Rooshan a-tall. He was an Englishman.”
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