Joanne had some preamble in mind like that, something that might appeal to Peter. It was said in a rush of words. She didn’t even announce herself. She came up on his phone, her name. She was in his contacts still. He said that somewhere into the conversation. It augured a faint hope. She was not erased from his life.
She mentioned the convenience store specifically, for a frame of reference. They had rented movies, or Peter had sent her down for porn on the occasion when there were insults flung that she didn’t know what she was doing. It was a life of injury and sustainability, or it had proceeded along those needful lines. That was how she might yet describe it. At that moment, she would take it.
It was four in the afternoon when she called. Peter answered on the second ring. He was working, grading papers. A silence hung between them.
‘What is it like, Oklahoma?’ Joanne asked, when nothing else came to mind. She had heard they were called Sooners but never looked up its meaning.
Peter obliged. The Sooners were so-called because some jumped sooner than the official start time for the race to claim a part of the American heartland.
Joanne said innocently, ‘I suppose the others are called the Laters?’
Peter turned a paper validating that he was indeed grading papers. Joanne heard the sound paper makes.
Snow was heavy and thick. Peter took up the conversation. There was longing and desperation in his voice. The snow was a far greater burden here, what with winds that blew unimpeded. Whiteouts and drifts were a way of life. Roads could disappear just like that and did. He clicked his finger.
Joanne closed her eyes. She could see it then, the vastness – the emptiness.
Peter explained how the Board of Regents was investigating an online program where nobody would ever have to show up. The most desolate places were often in the most need of the greatest advancements. If you were injured there, chances were you would be flown by helicopter to a regional facility, and your scans would be read by somebody in Oklahoma City or Tulsa, or, maybe, not even by an American, and not even read in America. The Great Plains was a great contradiction of patriotism and pragmatism. It was all monoculture and great machines, robotic harvesters controlled from satellites. They kept the rodeos alive for a sense of nostalgia, but most rode a mechanical bull in the bars on a Friday and Saturday night.
In simply speaking, Peter pushed an alternative reality on her. He didn’t say which was better. He did the majority of the talking. He didn’t say if he liked it or not. There was little to stop him talking.
He was, he intimated, living with the widow of a farmer who had died while riding atop a great combine harvester that had covered near twenty miles of planted wheat after he died.
The husband had been found a county over, in sheaths of wheat so high that they had to follow the trail left in his wake and work backward to discover where he most probably died, Peter pondering if, perhaps, God had simply forgotten George Farmer was dead. It was worth considering, God’s assumed culpability in being responsible for all living things. It seemed incomprehensible one being could bear such a burden. It was, Peter maintained, felt more fully in the vacuum of distances, in the great divide of time and land.
‘Farmer’ was the farmer’s name, which was suspicious and indicated there was less truth here than might have been initially granted. It seemed like such a desperate and incredulous overreach of any apparent legitimate story.
Joanne might have said this to Peter, but she didn’t. His life was not her life anymore. There was no mention of the graduate student with whom Peter had left, and there was solace in that fact alone. It was a marvel Peter had found somebody at all, if he even had, which she doubted, but then the world was truly a big place.
Peter set about reciting a poem he had written about the death of George Farmer. The poem, titled, ‘Silo...’ was spelled, ‘Sigh Low’. He was playing with some literary effect. It was a poem, not for the page, but to be read aloud, with a lot of alliteration and onomatopoeia, or some such literary inventiveness Joanne was not entirely sure she understood, but it kept Peter happy and content. It was what counted in the end.
They were talking over forty minutes, and nothing of substance had been said. Her ear had a slight ache. She said, in a vexing way, just to suddenly know, ‘This widow, does she have a name?’
The widow’s name was Jessie – Jessie Farmer. Peter elaborated. She was decidedly younger than her husband had been and marked by an indefatigable spirit of the early pioneers. She had left home at fifteen. He described her as a spirit akin to Annie Oakley.
Joanne sensed the imaginative reach of the desperate. She was turned to the TV, her mind already distracted in the cleaving awareness that they were done. None of it was true, but she had brooked a dam of emotion in Peter. It was her obligation to stand in the deluge of regret.
Poltergeist was on auto-replay, rolling through the credits, and had been for close on five minutes. It was a great wonder how a movie was ever made, how each found their calling. She meant to look up what exactly was a Key Grip or a Best Boy.
Peter was still talking about Jessie Farmer, how she had come from a long line of ancestors drawn by the Forty-Niner Gold Rush, and how she was sure there was whore in her some ways back. It was inevitable, men drunk on whiskey, men laid up in tubs of grimed water in advance of services rendered. It had been a quarrelsome business, those pioneer years, where there had been no long-term options and where each had survived by their wits and sense of fear and, in the West, how well they could handle a firearm. This was how the West was won and lost and won again. In his explanation there was a preternatural sense you could enter and understand another’s history better than your own. There was something good happening out in Oklahoma. Joanne believed it.
Joanne checked on Grace. She felt the far cast of men in her life at a great distance. She was alone but contained. Randolph roused. Joanne hushed him and went back into the long hallway. She was listening and not listening. There were, according to Peter, communities where Jessie came from out along the Pacific Northwest along the island chains, on Whidbey Island, who were preparing for the apocalypse and believed it was fast approaching.
Joanne had the insistent idea to bake something. She gathered ingredients in the kitchen, while Peter talked in what proved a yawning chasm of intersecting histories, Joanne understanding that the act of movement was essential to life, Peter describing further how Jessie Farmer met George Farmer going east, while passing through Oklahoma City’s Greyhound station. Jessie had stopped by the Federal Building, where Timothy McVeigh had killed all those people. George Farmer had been there and had handed Jessie a book of psalms, then asked her to pray with him for those lost. She had. George Farmer was in a black suit, like a scarecrow. His ankles showed over white socks. He was worth over two million dollars. Jessie learned it later. It didn’t change her.
Joanne said, ‘You should write all this down now, Peter, not to forget it.’
Peter didn’t get the underlying jab that she knew it was all made up. He was, he told her, lifting bales of hay in a regimen that started at five thirty, when the cock crowed. He was living the most salubrious life imaginable.
Of course, to verify any of it, Joanne might have asked simply to say hello to this Jessie Farmer, but she didn’t, because it was worth not knowing for sure. There would be, eventually, the break-up, the climax and bitter end of what had started with such promise.
It gave her an understanding of the sketched details he would pawn off on her if she called again. Instead, Joanne said in a quiet appeasement, ‘You make Oklahoma sound like it might be the answer to a great many troubles.’
Saying it stopped Peter cold, or Joanne felt it, her perceived gullibility emboldening within Peter a belief just then that he could conjure anything from make-believe.
He had determined, he told her with a rising truth, that you could scream at the top of your lungs and nobody would hear you for tens of miles, the snow on the plains, its blanke
ting monotony such that you could watch from a window, see the demarcation of the drive, and then the road, your escape to the outside world disappearing before your eyes in a matter of minutes.
This was suddenly the greater reality of his life. His voice was filled with a stark melancholy.
He began his poem again in earnest, fleeing from an apparent and glaring truth, so the poem was dead of whatever spark it ever contained. It was characteristic of Peter’s work and tied to his essential failing as an artist, his misconception that true genius was only ever uncovered in throwing up barriers to absolute happiness, when the opposite was most always true, and that, without a sense of openness, without love, all remained hidden behind words, or built around the fortress of poems.
Joanne said nothing. She rolled out her dough, used the depression of a cookie cutter shape to cut gingerbread men. She made a sad-faced gingerbread man, an effigy of Peter. She could almost transpose what was being said in her ear as something communicated by the gingerbread man. It made her smile, and then she thought, what might it be like to pull an arm off, one, and then the other, and the legs, too, anything to stop him?
The poem was so absolutely horrible. Were there in other professions, say in architecture, architects who couldn’t handle a protractor, or who didn’t know the basic elements of trigonometry?
What she thought of was the paunch of his belly, the way he used to advance with it between his legs. It was all a great confusion in her head, the alternative to Peter, the Robert Hoyts of the world, the self-aware, Hoyt making accommodation for a great and undeserved success that would be granted him, and, even before Robert Hoyt, the Daves of the world, those hypersexual Fonzies who would see the flare of high school notoriety pass them so quickly and who would eventually become the paranoid, hyper-religious, in their unironic Promise Keeper fidelity to Faith, Family, and Guns.
Joanne had read about them after her encounter with Dave, these Promise Keepers, who prayed before fucking, who went down on their knees and thanked God before they got a hard-on, praising Jesus through the act, and praying right after intercourse.
It seemed they were everywhere now, this fearful, vengeful stock, these reformists, those who wanted saving, so that even someone as preoccupied as Peter could not help but land upon a vague societal disaffection with his imaginary Jessie Farmer come inland from a white supremacist enclave on Whidbey Island.
Peter, she was sure, was tapping what he had witnessed in Upstate New York, Dave and Sheryl living with the confirmed belief that they were living through the last days in a world come undone by socialists, niggers and A-rabs, and that a legitimate alternative might be for Dave to pump a round of ammo into Sheryl, Misty, and the boys’ heads and then off himself with an abiding belief that life might resume under better conditions in the afterlife. It was an alternative reached by more people than anyone wanted to admit.
*
Joanne set the phone down eventually. What Peter said was not up for debate, speculation, or open to response, but a string of words spoken down the line and into the void where everything was a deep silence in the end.
Peter was still talking, and probably continued for a long time, when it didn’t rightly matter. Joanne balled the gingerbread man so he was without form. He was there if she needed, and that was enough to restore a strange confidence that all was not lost, not yet.
21.
GRANDSHIRE WAS NOT, for Nate Feldman, the Paradise Found it had first seemed, but rather a Paradise Lost, for the leach of unseen heavy metal contaminants from the mining of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Most notably trace elements of zinc, cadmium, lead, manganese, nickel, and arsenic, released into stream-fed aquifers by abandoned tailing pool toxins and acid rock discharge, in the overgrowth of reclaimed operations deep in the wilderness.
The details were contained in government reports – soil analysis, evidence of contamination sources as best could be identified. For the victims, the effects were slow to manifest, but pernicious, cumulative and irreversible, leading to organ failure. Medically and legally, it was a complicated matter. At issue was the absolute causality of the associated illnesses. Lawyers and experts were lined up on both sides of the argument so it was apparent there would be no justice for the immediate victims, and little, if any, for the surviving family members.
In the interim, the witnesses were simply to put a face to a story of human tragedy. This was Ursula’s opinion. Cynicism, she said, was a white disease, and now they were going to add this injury to all that had come before. She would not allow it.
Ursula spoke of a mushroom grown in the fetid dark that allowed one to speak with their ancestors. They should know and be ready for her arrival. Death should be nothing hidden in the palliative care of a hospice on Toronto’s outskirts.
What had befallen her was better understood by the tribal leaders of old and more recently by men like Frank Grey Eyes. A disruption in the land always registered in the depletion of fish stock or the bitter taste of game when a sickness could imperceptibly slow an animal, and if caught in too great a number then the species should be left to recover.
This was generationally observed, these signaling events, and told in any number of stories of how, in ancient times, the lakes and streams and rivers sometimes churned in the turbidity of waters in a choke-out by non-indigenous grass or weed, seeds carried on the wind so a balance was upset, the soil silted so it was hard for the salmon to find their way and lay their eggs in what had been the clear pooling of once undisturbed waters. What they attributed to the Gods was not a naïve understanding of nature, but a keen observation of nature, a balance where their own temperament, their own actions connected to a cosmic harmony. Nativism was not aligned with ignorance, but a willful submission to direct observation.
Ursula spoke of it. It was preserved in the oral history, the demise of the great Chinook spawn along the Saint Lawrence, a lifecycle disturbed by the presence of outsiders. It was carried with the natives, the memory of fish, in song and story.
What you had to do, in your most solemn appeal, was pray to the wolf, the bear and the eagle, seek alternatives, abstain and let a species recover. In so doing, you nourished the inner spirit, humanity following nature, and not the other way around, for it was not mankind who first uncovered the ice bridges and the vast new interiors, but the vast herds. The tribes simply followed. This was a great lesson forgotten.
Ursula talked of the First Nations people who bore witness along the Saint Lawrence, in the aftermath of the demise of the salmon, to the arrival of a great spawn of a new human misery, the portal, wide-eyed coffin ships, unloading a grim discharge of Europe’s flotsam. The Irish, most notably, those awful, pale-faced, skeletal wretches, ragged in the embattled way salmon rushed headlong against the current in a death run for the spawning grounds to seed the next generation.
The deplorable famine ships, still remembered in legend, blighted with cholera and typhus, all stopped short of Quebec, at the outpost quarantine of Grosse-Île, so it was wondered among the First Nations people what this Europe of Kings and Queens was like that undertakings so perilous were embarked upon. It was thus understood that all things migrated along a route, a life meridian, first the fish and then the people, sharing a same history, or so Ursula believed.
*
In their time, toward the end, as Ursula faded, Nate added remote and distant histories. He ordered a history book of Canada, traveled to town for a brief reprieve. He stood in the cold vestibule of the post office. The books arrived wrapped in a crinkle of brown paper.
Ursula was taken by the story of the Basque whalers – the Basque, who throughout the sixteenth century had sailed along the Americas, fishermen more intent on concealing their hunting territory than claiming land.
In between the facts of the nautical coordinates, in the margins of the book was a sketch and tale of a fisherman who hauled up a three-foot-long cod, common enough at the time. What was astonishing, the cod spoke an unknown la
nguage. It spoke Basque.
Ursula drowsed and woke again, Nate, mindful, covering a history again, in the way a bedtime story was told time and again for its cadence as much as its details, where all strands led to the liminal depths of sleep, where there was no differentiation between fact and fiction, and all was a sound.
Nate read the account slowly, this history of exploration, surreptitiously and only recently uncovered in the archives of legal documents in a Lisbon library, when it had been there all along. There were, he told her, doctoral candidates, modern scribes who earned little, but who set themselves apart from ordinary concerns. In this instance, a doctoral candidate had uncovered legal documents concerning reparation for a ship lost some five centuries past in a place that was deciphered, from scant and purposefully hidden details, to be along the Labrador coast. Upon investigating these old parchments, a whaling galleon was discovered submerged in Red Bay, in a harbor deep enough that the inhabitants had sailed over the ruins for centuries, unaware of its presence or what had come before.
Ursula ran her fingers over the images and words, the Basques in the grey swell and kick-up of whitecaps, harpoons at the ready, and, a page later, the dead-eyed whale, pinioned and hoisted, belayed to the side of the whaler, in advance of the quiver and shudder of blubber flensed, the content of a belly let spill in a great effulgence of its precious oil.
This, Ursula, believed, was how you lived. She did not shudder from the hunt in the way the environmentalists would have. Their interests were divergent.
*
Ursula would not have made a very good witness in court, not when she held such opinions, and she might better have been embossed on the back of a coin with a papoose, and not set before the courts to topple the growing opinion of her resuscitated, noble people.
She was a contradiction, or the others made her into a contradiction, when life was more complicated. She was on the Organics logo. It defined her in a way neither she nor Nate understood it would. Nate could be charged with conjuring this innocence, capturing her so, but it was done out of genuine love, in a moment of apprehending her, a literal moment in time, so he could be forgiven. Ursula had forgiven him. She cherished what he saw in her. But it was also why the business had succeeded, because of her image, captured in the honesty in which Nate had come upon her so long ago. It was their shared truth, uncomplicated.
The Death of All Things Seen Page 18