Milkweed Ladies
Page 8
When I left the farm, it seemed that suddenly, or almost suddenly, I was out in the world. Roger and I were married and traveling the old trains hooting through the pass: the C. and O.‘s Sportsman and Fast Flying Virginian; the Silver Rocket hurtling through the prairie night; the Southern through the piney woods of Georgia; the old sit-up-all-night Pacemaker roaring west to Chicago. All at once I was buying my suits at Lord and Taylor’s; and I, still in my Sears Roebuck shoes! On one of these wandering train rides, Roger and I and our baby, Doug, came one early September to visit with G.D. and Mama on the farm.
We were all sitting on the front porch that night: G.D. and Mama, Rog and I, my brother Jim, and our old collie herd dog lying at Jim’s feet. We were sitting and talking, or not talking; and it was a still, crisp, fragrant night. The clover meadow was in new stubble, the wisteria shadows falling over the porch swing; and down under the wisteria, the crickets were crying their “six weeks till frost.” Then the collie got up, whining a little. He turned around backward and looked down at his bed. A strange pale light began moving in over the porch railing. Suddenly we all saw a faint glow quivering in the sky over Bridger’s Gap: the Northern Lights!
We ran out into the yard and looked up over us. The whole round of the heavens was beginning to quiver with a wild, flickering crown. At first from the north; then the east and south and west joined; and the green-red-blue-gold-purple spear tent was streaming up to the point of the heavens and riving as it came: the great crown borealis of September 1941.
As I stood there, a kind of awe and fear came to me, as though God had not yet unloosed His might. But He had it, held back somewhere in the banked fire of the Worlds. The borealis began to fade and die down, and we went back to the porch. The blue September fog spread across the meadows. We sat there in the quiet darkness, September 8,1941, just three months before Pearl Harbor.
Roger and I spent the years of the war teaching at the rich boys’ prep school in Aiken, South Carolina. I planted my iris roots from the farm again, this time in front of a faculty cottage. Doug was a year old in October 1941 and just beginning to talk. One of his first words was “airplane,” for the bombers flew everyday over the school playing field in black formation. The war leaped and swirled around us in a kind of controlled madness; or it dragged on and on in an eternity of waiting, like water dripping from a roof edge.
Now the time is only a cry and a shuffle of mixed-up names: Bataan Death March, Burma Road, Java Sea; and the Lexington, FDR, Adolph Hitler, cattle cars, Guadalcanal, gas station, Savo Island, Iwo Jima, ration cards, Gabriel Heater, Betty Grable, Casablanca, Anzio Beach. The news came from home that Cousin Bill had gone with Patton, and Cousin Buck went down over the English Channel. Double cousin J.B. was in the 82nd Airborne—Salerno, Normandy, wounded in the Battle of the Bulge. Then, after the war, “Red” Jeffries, from up the Crick, came home from Bataan and sat in J.B.‘s filling station drinking pop. Finally we learned the date on which Howard Wilfong died: August 12, 1945—three days after peace was declared.
It’s been more than forty years now since the night at the Commodore Hotel, but it still comes back to me out of the shadows and will not stop. It is still as clear as it was in its own stabbing hour. I forget where we had been or where we were going that hot August night, but Rog and Doug and I were getting off a train in Grand Central Station. Long, long before, there had been Old Tom’s bison coming down to the salt lick in the twilight; and now I was taking a yellow taxi to the Commodore Hotel.
As soon as we were registered, Rog went off on some errand. I took Doug and an evening paper and went to our room. I gave Doug a quick bath and stuffed him into bed. Then, relaxing over a cigarette and a glass of water, I sat down to read the evening news. When I looked at the headlines, I saw a word, a phrase, that I had never seen before. It was big and black, leaping out at me from the front page, and it was spelled A-T-O-M-I-C B-O-M-B
August 6 and 7,1945: the news story about a place called Hiroshima, a mushroom cloud uprisen, a triumph, burning flesh. I sat there staring down at the black newsprint, and something tore loose in my soul. Then, as from some far leafy distance, I saw Old Tom and George Rogers Clark wading the frozen swamps of the Wabash. So it was all for this? The blood on the snow at Valley Forge, on the sands of Guadalcanal? All for this that old Tim McCarty, because he knew “the hard price of Freedom,” gave his sons? “Daniel, Preston, Justin, James, Thomas.”
I got up and walked slowly over to the window where the lights of the neon towers were piercing across the north. Then it came to me, there above the roaring traffic and strange light of this strange city. It came to me, in the old superstitions of us mountain people, like a fireball in the night, a Death Omen. Aunt Malindy had seen hers in the sky over Buckley Mountain the night her brother Potts had been killed at Gettysburg; now mine over Hiroshima and over the Commodore Hotel. Only mine wasn’t about Brother Potts. It was more about the human race, and more than that, about Earth itself.
That was the night the world changed. It wasn’t joy that died, or faith, or resolution; for all these come back. It was something else, something deep and earth-given that died that night in the Commodore. Never again would I be able to say with such infinite certainty that the earth would always green in the springtime, and the purple hepaticas come to bloom on my woodland rock. For these, the earth and its seasons, had always been my certainty—going beyond death, beyond the death of all my people, even beyond the death of the farm; the sun in the morning, the darkness at night, the certain roll of the seasons, the “old blue misties” sweeping out of the north.
About the Author
LOUISE MCNEILL was born in West Virginia in 1911 on the farm where her family has lived since 1769. Her first major collection of poems, Gauley Mountain, was published by Harcourt Brace in 1939 with a foreword by Stephen Vincent Benet. She is the author of four other collections of poems, including Paradox Hill (1972) and Elderberry Flood (1979). Ms. McNeill’s poetry has been published in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Poetry, The Saturday Review, and many other magazines and anthologies. She has also published fiction in The Farm Journal, and essays in Northwest Review and Appalachian Heritage. Ms. McNeill taught for thirty-five years until her retirement in 1972.
Among Ms. McNeill’s honors are the Atlantic Monthly Poetry Prize and the annual book award of the West Virginia Library Association. She has been Poet Laureate of West Virginia since 1977 and in 1985 was named West Virginian of the year. In 1988 she received the Appalachian Gold Medallion from the University of Charleston, West Virginia. She and her husband, Roger Pease, live with their son, Douglas and his wife Rae, in South Windsor, Connecticut.