All I remember is annoyance. Then it rained, and we couldn’t work. My crew went off to town for a couple of days with my blessing, and the Murderer went with them. That was against our rules, his and mine. And he came back drunk, and I fired him on the spot. He came up to breakfast drunk, terribly frightened and unable to be sober, lowering himself into my mercies, which did not exist.
Only in the imagination can we share another person’s specific experiences. I was the ice queen, which means no stories, please, there is no forgiveness for you and never will be, just roll your goddamned bed and be gone. If I fired him, he would go back to prison. I knew that. I am sure I imagined some version of his future—isolation again in the wrecked recognition that in this life he was not to be forgiven.
Stories bind us by reminding us that our lives all participate in the same fragilities, and this should soften us so that we stay humane. But I didn’t want to be humane; I wanted to be correct. If I had not ignored his devastation as I no doubt saw it, imagined it, I might have found a way to honor common sense and taken him riding around with me that day as he sobered up, and listened to his inane chatter. But I sent him down the road, and thought I was doing the right thing. There were rules. As I tell the story I mean to say, See, I am not like that anymore. See. But we know this is only another strategy.
I fired a lot of men, and Louie Hanson more than once, after on-the-job binges. But Louie wouldn’t go away; he understood the true nature of our contract. I needed his assurances exactly as he needed his life at the Grain Camp. After a few days Louie would sober up, and one morning he would be at the breakfast table like nothing had happened. In fact he was fired the day he died.
He was too drunk to make sense by three in the afternoon, feeding shots of whiskey to the chore man, which meant I had to take some action. So I told him to clear out. What he did was go off to visit an old woman he had known years before in a small town just down into California.
“A fancy woman,” Louie said after drawing himself up to fine old-man lewdness. “Screw you, I am going to see a woman I should have been seeing.” He was seventy-seven years old and unkillable so far as I knew as he drove away in his old Plymouth, squinting through his cracked eyeglasses.
A stranger in a pickup truck hauled him home late in the night, and Louie, having wrecked the Plymouth, was ruined, a cut over one eye, hallucinating as he lay curled into himself like an old knot, reeking with vomit, sick on the floor, unwilling to even open his eyes, complaining that his eyeglasses were lost. This descent into nowhere had happened before. Let him lie. And he did, facing the wall for three days.
By then it was clear something extraordinary and terrible was afoot, but Louie refused to hear of the hospital in Lakeview. They’ll kill you, he said. Around the time of World War I, in the Imperial Valley of California near Calexico, his back had been broken when a bridge caved in under the weight of a steel-wheeled steam tractor. The doctors got him on morphine for the pain, and then fed him alcohol to get him off morphine, and that was it for the rest of his life, he said. Booze.
They just left me there, he would say, half drunk and grinning like it was a fine joke. Maybe he felt the doctors had already killed him. I called his son in Napa, California, who came overnight in an old car and talked Louie onto his feet, as I should have done, and into a trip over the Warner Mountains to the hospital.
All that should have been my responsibility. Days before, I should have ignored his wounded objections. The doctors wouldn’t kill him, and I knew it. He would have lived some more, not for long maybe, but some more. But such obligations were a bit beyond my job description, and I fell back on excuses.
Louie Hanson died in the automobile, slumped sideways against his son—dead with a broken rib through one lung, which would have been fixable a day or so earlier. I went to the funeral but wouldn’t look in the coffin. There was nothing I wanted to know about the look of things in coffins.
There had been an afternoon when I stood on a ditch bank with a dented bucket of carrot slices marinated in strychnine, poisoning badgers and dreading every moment I could foresee, all things equally unreal, my hand in the rubber glove, holding the slice of carrot which was almost luminous, clouds over Bidwell Mountain, the sound of my breathing. I would have to move soon if I was ever going to get home. I was numb with dread and sorrowed for myself because I felt nothing but terror, and I had to know this was craziness. There is no metaphor for that condition; it is precisely like nothing.
By craziness I mean nearly catatonic fearfulness generated by the conviction that nothing you do connects to any other particular thing inside your daily life. Mine was never real craziness, although some fracturing of ice seemed to lie just around the corner of each moment. It was easy to imagine vanishing into complete disorientation. My trouble could be called “paralyzed before existential realities,” a condition I could name, having read Camus like any boy of my time. But such insight was useless. Nothing was valuable unless it helped toward keeping the lid on my own disease.
The Fee Point reaches into the old tule beds on the east side of Warner. A homesteader shack out there was my father’s first Grain Camp cookhouse, in 1938. I see my mother at the Fee in a soft summery wind, a yellow cotton dress, a young woman on a summer day, gazing out to plow-ground fields being cut from the swamps.
Close to thirty years later my Catskinners crushed that shack into a pile of weathered gray junk lumber, dumped on the diesel, and burned it. It was January and we all warmed our hands on the flames, then drank steaming coffee and ate cold roast-beef sandwiches sent out from another cookhouse.
In Latin familia means residence and family, which I take to mean community, an interconnection of stories. As I lie down to sleep I can stand out at Fee Point and see my mother and those Catskinners and the old shack burning, although I have not lived on the ranch in Warner Valley for twenty years. It’s a fact of no more than sentimental interest except as an example of the ways we are inhabited by stories, and the ways they connect.
Water birds were a metaphor for abundance beyond measure in my childhood. A story about water birds: On a dour November afternoon, my father sat on a wooden case of shotgun shells in the deep tules by Pelican Lake like a crown prince of shotgunning, and dropped 123 ducks for an Elks Club feed. The birds were coming north to water from the grain fields and fighting a stiff head wind. They flared and started to settle, just over him, and they would not stop coming into the long red flame from his shotgun as darkness came down from the east. The dead birds fell collapsed to the water and washed back to shore in the wind. Eventually it was too dark to shoot, and the dead birds were heaped in the back of his pickup and he hauled them to town; he dumped them off to the woman he had hired to do the picking and went on to a good clear-hearted night at the poker table, having discharged a civic duty.
When someone had killed too many birds, their necks would be strung together with baling twine, and they would be hung from spikes in an old crab-apple tree back of our house, to freeze and be given away to anyone who might come visiting. When time came to leave, we would throw in three or four Canada honkers as a leave-taking gift, frozen and stiff as cordwood, and give you the name of the lady in town who did the picking.
What is the crime here?
It is not my father’s. In later years men came to me and told me he was the finest man they ever worked for, and I envy that fineness, by which, I think, they meant fair and convivial—and just, in terms of an implied contract. From an old hand who had worked for room and board and no wages through the Great Depression, that was a kind of ultimate praise. They knew he hadn’t broken any promises, and he had sense enough to know that finally you can’t really help anybody die, no matter how much you owe them.
But there was an obvious string of crimes. Maybe we should have known the world wasn’t made for our purposes, to be remodeled into our idea of an agricultural paradise, and that Warner Valley wasn’t there to have us come along and drain the swamps, and
level the peat ground into alfalfa land. No doubt we should have known the water birds would quit coming. But we had been given to understand that places we owned were to be used as we saw fit. The birds were part of all that.
What went wrong? Rules of commerce or cowardice or what? Bad thinking? Failure to identify what was sacred? All of the above? Did such failures lead me to treat men as if they were tools, to be used?
Probably. But that is no excuse for participating in the kind of cold-heartedness we see everywhere, the crime we commit while we all claim innocence.
One night in Lakeview I was dancing with a woman we all knew as the Crop Duster’s Wife. She came to the taverns every night, and she was beautiful in an over-bruised sort of way, but she wouldn’t go find a bed with any of us. She was, she claimed, married forever to a man who was off in Arkansas dusting cotton from an old Steerman biplane. She said she just hoped he didn’t wreck that Steerman into some Arkansas church. We sat at the bar and I was drunk and started telling her about Louie Hanson and how he died, eager to confess my craziness. Maybe I thought a woman who waited for a man who flew crop-dusting aircraft would understand. Maybe I thought she would fall for a crazy man.
“There is nothing to dislike but the meanness,” she said, picking at her words. “You ought to be glad you ever knew those old farts.”
Failures of the sympathy, she was saying, if I read her right, originate in failures of the imagination, which is a betrayal of self. Like so many young men, I could only see myself in the mirror of a woman. Offering the utility of that reflection, and solace, was understood to be the work of women, their old job, inhabit the house and forgive, at least until they got tired of it.
In those days a woman who wanted to be done with such duties might do something like buy herself a wedding ring, and make up a story about a faraway romantic husband who flew his Steerman every morning to support her. This woman might say people like me were no cure for her loneliness. But she might excuse my self-centered sorrowing. She might say we don’t have any choice, it’s the creature we are. Or she might tell me to wise up and understand that sympathy can be useful only if it moves us to quit that coldness of the heart.
It is possible to imagine a story in which the Murderer does not return to prison, but lives on at the Grain Camp for years and years, until he has forgiven himself and is healed—a humorous old man you could turn to for sensible advice. In the end all of us would be able to forgive and care for ourselves. We would have learned to mostly let the birds fly away, because it is not necessarily meat we are hunting.
BARRY LOPEZ (1945- )
In 1966, after graduate school at the University of Notre Dame, New York—born Barry Lopez moved to western Oregon and stayed. He writes about landscape and culture. He has written tales in Giving Birth to Thunder, Sleeping with His Daughter (1978), and essays in Crossing Open Ground (1988).
Of Wolves and Men (1978) won the John Burroughs Medal for distinguished natural history. Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape won the 1987 National Book Award in nonfiction. His recent Field Notes (1994) completes a trilogy of short, hieratic fiction; the others are Desert Notes (1976) and River Notes (1979).
“Replacing Memory” first appeared in The Georgia Review.
Replacing Memory
I
Manhattan, 1976
The hours of coolness in the morning just before my mother died I remember for their relief. It was July and it had been warm and humid in New York City for several days, temperatures in the high eighties, the air motionless and heavy with the threat of rain.
I awoke early that morning. It was also my wife’s thirtieth birthday, but our celebration would be wan. My mother was in her last days, and the lives of all of us in the family were contorted by grief and tension—and by a flaring of anger at her cancer. We were exhausted.
I felt the coolness of the air immediately when I awoke. I walked the length of the fourth-floor apartment, opened one side of a tall casement window in the living room, and looked at the sky. Cumulus clouds, moving to the southeast on a steady wind. Ten degrees cooler than yesterday’s dawn, by the small tin thermometer. I leaned forward to rest my arms on the sill and began taking in details of movement in the street’s pale light, the city’s stirring.
In the six years I had lived in this apartment as a boy, from 1956 until 1962, I had spent cumulative months at this window. At the time, the Murray Hill section of Manhattan was mostly a neighborhood of decorous living and brownstone row houses, many of them not yet converted to apartments. East 35th Street for me, a child newly arrived from California, presented an enchanting pattern of human life. Footbeat policemen began their regular patrol at eight. The delivery of residential mail occurred around nine and was followed about ten by the emergence of women on shopping errands. Young men came and went the whole day on three-wheel grocery cart bikes, either struggling with a full load up the moderate rise of Murray Hill from Gristede’s down on Third Avenue, or hurtling back the other way, driving no-hands against light traffic, cartons of empty bottles clattering explosively as the bike’s solid tires nicked potholes.
In the afternoon a dozen young girls in private-school uniforms swirled in glee and posed with exaggerated emotion across the street, waiting to be taken home. By dinner time the street was almost empty of people; then, around eleven, it was briefly animated again with couples returning from the theater or some other entertainment. Until dawn, the pattern of glinting chrome and color in the two rows of curbed automobiles remained unchanged. And from night to night that pattern hardly varied.
Overlaying the street’s regular, diurnal rhythm was a more chaotic pattern of events, an unpredictability I would watch with unquenchable fascination for hours at a time. (A jog in the wall of The Advertising Club of New York next door made it impossible for me to see very far to the west on 35th Street. But if I leaned out as far as I dared, I could see all the way to the East River in the other direction.) I would study the flow of vehicles below: an aggressive insinuation of yellow taxis, the casual slalom of a motorcycle through lines of stalled traffic, the obstreperous lumbering of large trucks. The sidewalks, with an occasional imposing stoop jutting out, were rarely crowded, for there were neither shops nor businesses here, and few tourists. But with Yeshiva University down at the corner of Lexington, the 34th Street Armory a block away, a Swedenborgian church midblock, and 34th Precinct police headquarters just up from Third Avenue, I still saw a fair array of dress and captivating expressions of human bearing. The tortoise pace of elderly women in drab hats paralleled the peeved ambling of a middle-aged man anxious to locate a cab. A naïf, loose-jointed in trajectory down the sidewalk, with wide-flung strides. A buttonhooking young woman, intently scanning door lintels and surreptitiously watching a building superintendent leaning sullenly against a service entrance. Two men in vested suits in conversation on the corner where, rotund and oblivious, they were a disruption, like a boulder in a creek. A boy running through red-lighted traffic with a large bouquet in his hand, held forth like a bowsprit.
All these gaits together with their kindred modulations seemed mysteriously revealing to me. Lingering couples embraced, separated with resolve, then embraced once more. People halted and turned toward each other in hilarious laughter. I watched as though I would never see such things again—screaming arguments, the other-worldly navigations of the deranged, and the haughty stride of single men dressed meticulously in evening clothes.
This pattern of traffic and people, an overlay of personality and idiosyncrasy on the day’s fixed events, fed me in a wordless way. My eyes would drift up from these patterns to follow the sky over lower Manhattan, a flock of house sparrows, scudding clouds, a distant airplane approaching La Guardia or Idlewild with impossible slowness.
Another sort of animation drew me regularly to this window: weather. The sound of thunder. Or a rising hiss over the sound of automobiles that meant the streets were wet from a silent rain. The barely audibl
e rattle of dozens of panes of glass in the window’s leadwork—a freshening wind. A sudden dimming of sunshine in the living room. Whatever I was doing, these signals would pull me away. At night, in the isolating light cone of a streetlamp, I could see the slant, the density, and sometimes the exact size of raindrops. (None of this could I learn with my bare hands outstretched, in the penumbral dark under the building’s cornices.) I watched rainwater course east in sheets down the calico-patched street in the wake of a storm; and cascades of snow, floating and wind-driven, as varied in their character as falls of rain, pile up in the streets. I watched the darkness between buildings burst with lightning, and I studied intently the rattle-drum of hail on car roofs.
The weather I watched from this window, no matter how wild, was always comforting. My back was to rooms secured by family life. East and west, the room shared its walls with people I imagined little different from myself. And from this window I could see a marvel as imbued with meaning for me then as a minaret—the Empire State Building. The high windows of its east wall gleamed imperially in the first rays of dawn, before the light flared down 35th Street, glinting in bits of mica in the façades of brownstones. Beneath the hammer of winter storms, the building seemed courageous and adamantine.
The morning that my mother would die I rested my forearms on the sill of the window, glad for the change of weather. I could see more of the wind, moving gray clouds, than I could feel; but I knew the walk to the subway later that morning, and the short walk up 77th Street to Lenox Hill Hospital, would be cooler.
I had been daydreaming at the window for perhaps an hour when my father came downstairs. The faint odors in the street’s air—the dampness of basements, the acrid fragrance of ailanthus trees, the aromatics in roof tar—had drawn me off into a dozen memories. My father paused, speechless, at the foot of the stairs by the dining table. As determined as he was to lead a normal life around Mother’s last days, he was at the beck and call of her disease almost as much as she was. With a high salute of his right hand, meant to demonstrate confidence, and an ironic grimace, he went out the door. Downstairs he would meet my brother, who worked with him, and together they would take a cab up to the hospital. My brother, three years younger, was worn out by these marathon days but uncomplaining, almost always calm. He and my father would eat breakfast together at the hospital and sit with Mother until Sandra and I arrived, then leave for work.
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