by Carson, Tom
Alarmed at the prospect of continuing alone, I offered to teach him to belch fire more expressively, so as to win friends and influence people; but he declined. Although he’d taken pleasure in my company, he told me in embers and charcoal, he had a living to make; wanted all his daughters to get an education and better themselves. Belching fire to the effect that I too had enjoyed our ride along the river, I tore his arm off and got out.
That was six years ago. I have been wandering along this river ever since. I am homeless. I am eighty-two years old.
It seems to be Sunday. In my present condition, however, every day might as well be—ironically enough, as the last one to which I paid any attention fell on December 7, 1941. Since then, I’d never seen the need for days of rest.
Now that my teeth have fallen out, I live on the mud at the river’s bottom. Whatever else happens, I am pleased to report that there is no immediate danger of starving. The only potential problem I can envision on that score is that I might forget how to eat. Given my circumstances, this is a distinct possibility.
Ten minutes ago, realizing that I ought to at least be able to describe my own current appearance, I emerged from the river and wandered up to a parked van, hoping to see my face in its rear window. I seemed to recall once taking pleasure in observing my reflection, and the river was much too muddy to serve. Across the top of the van’s window, above the grime that spoiled my plan—I had a feeling I used to be better at concocting those, but wasn’t entirely sure what I meant by this—was a bumper sticker that puzzled me.
GOD, GUTS, AND GUNS MADE AMERICA GREAT, it Said. WE’RE DAMNED IF WE KNOW WHAT HAPPENED NEXT.
Under that, in the thick grime, someone had written this: “Do yow?”
And under that, in another hand—or finger, I suppose—was written this: “Wash Me.”
At that point, the van’s lights came on, and it began to back over me. So I had to interrupt my reading, if there was any more to read. The next time I tried, approaching the van of my choice from an indirect angle, I found that I could no longer decipher the strange markings on its stickers.
Now I no longer recall why it was I wished to sneak up on vans. While clearly an element of surprise is involved, I am unable to determine on whose part with enough certainty to feel good about doing it, or indeed anything else. In any case, whether it was my hobby or my profession, this activity now strikes me as both dangerous and surprisingly pointless.
I can’t remember my own name. Come to think of it, I’m not positive I ever had one—or if there was one or more of me, whoever I or we were. I have no information as to which town I’m in, or even if this is a town.
I believe that a van is about to back over me. As I don’t have a clue what they are either, the whole situation has me at a loss. I’m trying to collect something, but I forget what. Garbage, perhaps.
In any case, I am almost certainly in this section of the country, in one town or another.
VII
Yesterday Never Knows
As I LOOK BACK ON MY LIFE, I SEE I NEVER REALLY KNEW JUST WHAT the hell was going on—even though, to set the record straight about my being as corny as Kansas in August and so forth, I did study philosophy briefly at the Sorbonne in Paris, as taught by a man whose only book was called Viel Je te haïs! I’ve forgotten his name, so he may have been right to feel that way I also know Kansas in August, and believe me I don’t compete. No human being ever could or has, which is why to stand up under its sky, as I used to, always awed me.
I grew up there. After not too long a walk in any direction, Russell just stops, like an island in a sea of growing gold. When I was a little girl, I had a tendency to disbelieve that people of any sort lived past our town’s perfectly circular horizon. After the first sets appeared and we got one, television made this seem more possible, but not much more likely. My theory of it was that everybody on TV might be hidden in a basement somewhere right in Russell, pretending.
Dawson’s Drug and both our movie theaters and both our right and left banks were all on Main Street, along with a couple of cafes and some feed and clothing stores. The county courthouse was set back from the street, our high school was a block behind it, and our American Legion post was a full half mile off, in a more open area where the houses had become sporadic. Our sixteen churches were distributed variously. Except for their steeples and the grain elevator, nothing was all that high; or could be, given the nature of the sky.
Aside from the obvious one, our town had only a single distinctive feature, or rather many repetitions of the same distinctive feature. These were the posts hewn from our amber-colored local variety of limestone, which was also the same stuff that the courthouse was built of. They were described as fence posts but often lacked railings, and also stood in places where there was no observable use for them, such as along Main Street or solitarily in front yards. It was never made clear to us when the people who put them there had started doing this, or why they had stopped. The lesser of Russell’s two major secrets was that the posts were our form of paganism, argued with the churches, and had something stubborn and unspoken to do with the sky. But nobody ever admitted this, as it would have been difficult to bring up, particularly to a minister, while remaining laconic and easygoing, and all five thousand of us attended religious services regularly and with no sense of hypocrisy, primarily on foot except for the people from outlying farms.
My mother was the librarian of Russell. In a precocious moment, I once called her place of work our town’s seventeenth church, at which point she looked at me. Her expression ended that conversation, which had not been atypically brief. Once I learned to read, it was easier for me to believe that people with whom I’d had no personal contact lived in other places, as it was evident the books weren’t original to Russell. It was from several of these that I first learned of Paris and soon afterwards the Sorbonne, which my heart grew set on attending for reasons whose antagonism to easy articulability would have made local analysis of the fence posts seem voluble by comparison. But I knew the reasons to be of the ocean, rather than the sky, and this meant they were all hooked up, like wires strung from a telephone pole, to my daddy, Eddie Kilroy.
On weekend nights when I was small, I used to lie in bed and listen to all the daddies who had come back from the war going past my window, which was in one of the sporadic houses near the Legion post. They would be talking quietly when they went to it, and singing noisily when they came from it. I had very little notion of what went on in between, except that they drank beer and this was necessary. When it was late and their voices were moving from left to right outside my window, rather than from right to left, the song I heard most often, along with scuffling and laughter, was “Show Me the Way to Go Home.” This always made me upset and confused, as to my understanding they were back there already.
My daddy wasn’t. He was in a Marine cemetery on Iwo Jima, of which I had only seen a picture. The picture showed white crosses and a flag. Once I was old enough to grasp what this meant, it hurt me to discover that it had been the next-to-last battle, six months before Hiroshima. But I knew there was no common sense in singling this out as grief’s focal point, as he would be just as dead if it had happened at Pearl Harbor. My mother, the librarian of Russell, would be just as melancholy, and the other daddies would still be singing “Show Me the Way to Go Home” as their voices moved from left to right outside my window. When I was practicing common sense, the only significant difference I could see was that in that case I wouldn’t exist.
Then again, I was also practicing speculation, since on February 29, 1945, which was the second date on the white cross closest to the camera in the picture, my daddy had been nineteen years old. My continuing awareness of this was to make my own twentieth birthday, when I reached it, seem unusually special and fraught, but I will get to that. The point I was making just now is that my daddy was only in tenth grade at Russell High on December 7, 1941, although as that was a Sunday I don’t mean literally in
a classroom. He and my mother, the future librarian of Russell, were listening to a ball game on the radio with her folks, she said. But the war had gone on; gone on just long enough, I guess you could say, and then six months more afterward. I’d have met my daddy if the scientists had hurried, I’d have run to the door and opened it for him. But they didn’t know him and now neither did I.
One summer Sunday when I was small, my mother didn’t lead me back to our house after services. Instead, she took me to the courthouse, where the rest of Russell also stood, having assembled from our sixteen churches. The only people from our town who weren’t there were in Korea. The Russell High girls’ choir sang “America the Beautiful,” and then the sheet that had been put over the World War One memorial was pulled off again by my mother, the librarian of Russell. Pointing with her white-gloved finger, she showed me where my daddy’s name was, along with the other new names from 1941—45 carved under the ones from 1918. The other mothers did the same with their children, and the parents of the men who hadn’t been daddies went up and looked at the memorial, holding hands that they had to untangle if one or both of them wanted to touch the carving of that particular name. Then the girls’ choir sang “Amazing Grace,” after which we dispersed to our homes, primarily on foot except for the people from outlying farms, who were starting their pickup trucks to return to them as we left.
The photograph of my daddy that my mother kept on the mantel in our living room was his high-school graduation picture rather than their wedding photo, which was in her bedroom, or the one of him in his Marine Corps uniform, which was in mine. Tucked into the back of the graduation picture was a V-mail letter that my mother had gotten in the summer of 1945 from someone who had been in the war with my daddy, and after I grew somewhat older I often plucked this letter out and read it. I always waited until my mother, the librarian of Russell, was away from the house before I did so, although she had never forbidden me to read it or given any indication that she would prefer not to see me in the act. As the letter was often tucked into the frame somewhat differently than it had been the last time I replaced it, I knew that she did exactly the same thing, but we never discussed it. Anyhow, this is what the letter said:
June 31, 1945
Dear Mrs. Kilroy,
You don’t know me, and I guess our CO has probably already written you about Eddie, since I know he always writes to all the families. I don’t know if the regs say he needs to or he just does it, but I hope his letter helped. I know a couple of the other guys’ wives wrote him back that it did, and maybe you did too or just felt that way. Anyway, I promised myself I would do this, and I’m sorry I didn’t sooner. But they’ve put our outfit on a pretty heavy training schedule and so there isn’t a whole lot of spare time, but I should have done it sooner anyway and I don ‘t mean to make excuses,
To tell you the truth, the training is irksome because all of us who were on Iwo sort of feel we have the gist, but we know the replacements don’t. If I write where I think we’re going next, the censor will just black it out. But I guess anybody can look at a map and see that there aren’t many places left after Iwo and
The censor had blacked out the next word, probably because there was still fighting going on there. But it could only have been Okinawa, since that was the last battle.
Anyway, I don’t know if Eddie ever put my name in any of his letters to you. But he wrote you so many that I guess I probably must have cropped up in some of them, even if I was just the SOB yelling at him to hurry up and finish because I was collecting them from everybody He and old Duke Stryker were pretty much my best friends in the whole outfit. I know Eddie said he was going to find out from our CO if Stryker had been lying about not having a family and write them, just to get Stryker’s goat wherever he was now he said, but maybe Eddie didn’t have time. So I should probably find out and then write them too, when I finish this one to you.
I don’t know how much the censor will let me tell you about it or even if you want to hear the details, so you shouldn’t keep reading if it would make things harder for you. I guess the important thing you need to know is that he didn’t suffer at all.
After the first two days, Iwo was nothing but [there were a dozen or so words blacked out here by the censor]. We were going after one when a Jap came out of the ground with a [there was a word blacked out here], and Eddie had just stopped him from throwing it when it happened. I think he was gone right away, anyway he was gone by the time I got to him and that was about three seconds after, so I hope that’s some kind of consolation to you. Anyway, I don’t know if this will sound stupid to his wife and maybe I should cross it out or start over, but when I picked him up the only thing I could think of was how embarrassed he always was about still looking like such a kid, even though [there was a word scratched, not blacked, out here, although the apostrophe was still visible] he was two years older than me. The bar girls used to tease him about it when we were on pass, I don’t mean that he was interested in the girls but they teased everybody, but anyway I thought that at least he wouldn’t have to complain about the unfairness of me looking older than he did anymore. Otherwise, I guess we damned near looked like twins, excuse my French.
I guess that’s about it. If I’m still around after the war and anywhere near [he had scratched out “Russell,” and written] Kansas, I’ll be sure to look you up. I’ll call first to make sure you don’t mind, I mean if I can. I don’t know if you have a phone.
Yours very truly,
John G. Egan (Cpl, U SMC)
For whatever reason—and I can think of one which would make me very unhappy—Corporal John G. Egan never did look us up, or try to; and it may seem a very long leap from here to Paris, France. But my ambition to attend the Sorbonne was conceived in honor of my daddy. I don’t mean that I had any knowledge of a thwarted ambition on his part to attend it, which in fact strikes me as improbable, or even of a thwarted ambition on his part to see Paris, although since almost everyone does the odds on that one are much better. Because of the way his eyes looked in two of the three pictures on display in our house, I had simply developed a conviction that he was someone who would have liked to see all sorts of places, and it didn’t matter much which ones.
The exceptional picture, of course, was the one of his wedding day. In it, he was looking at my mother, and the news that rocket ships were waiting outside to take anyone in Russell who was interested to see the Taj Mahal for free wouldn’t have budged either one of them. As far as they were concerned, they were already there.
In any case, if I was going to travel in his stead, I figured I might as well start with a place whose name drew me compellingly. This the Sorbonne’s name did from the moment I first read it on a page, although I concede the effect would have been less magnetic had the next words to greet me been “in Toledo, Ohio,” rather than “in Paris.” Above all, it was the first syllable that made my eyes dawdle before they resumed hightailing it after Sukey Santoit, Girl Detective, who actually was from Toledo, Ohio, or had been earlier in the series. But just now she had not let that deter her from chasing after some jewel thieves up a road called the Boulevard St. Michel, as soon as she had untied her fabulously wealthy father and pulled him up out of the Seine—which could have been anything, but was clearly wet. Once she had caught the brigands, I thought of being someplace I could soar, from which I could wave to my own daddy, and in vague imagination had Sukey Santoit untie him so he could wave back.
In any case, I now had my girlhood’s magic thing, and no one ever knows what those will be. Becky Baum, who sat next to me in school, owned a dollhouse in which she kept discovering new rooms. Dorothy Haze, who joined us at lunch, had a turtle that talked to her, but only when they were alone. I had a mysterious place called the Sorbonne, which I soon learned was a university, not a restaurant, and which was magic because no one else but me had ever heard of it. In my mental picture, whose lack of confirmable particulars may well have been an advantage, even the wine-imbibi
ng Kansans in slipshod berets and mustaches with whom I peopled the place had somehow never heard of it, because I wasn’t there yet.
However, having made the point that magic things are unpredictable, I should rebut any implication that they are totally haphazard. Before she was born, Becky Baum’s parents had lost their farm in the Depression. Dorothy Haze had an “uncle” whose visits to her house, whenever her father was away pursuing his profession of land surveyor, she continued to dislike even after mama’s friend had bribed her with the turtle; any child, which we all were, could see that she was trying to turn the animal against him. My daddy was Eddie Kilroy, who had gone far away and not returned—and my mother was the librarian of Russell, Kansas, which was why I got to read every new Sukey Santoit book ahead of anybody else. If it wasn’t for that, either Becky or Dorothy might well have had a pied-à-terre in the 6ième Arrondissement today, although you should not infer from this that I, Mary-Ann, do.
Then again, the turtle baked to death in Dorothy’s back yard one day. The dollhouse fell prey to termites, who discovered more new rooms in it than Becky had thought possible. All three of us joined the Russell High girls’ choir, and even after we had sung “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” and “Rock of Ages” at the somewhat more sparsely attended ceremony unveiling the names of the Korean war dead on the memorial on the courthouse lawn, the Sorbonne remained intact. In fact, it grew more so, if that’s possible—which it is with magic things, at least if they are purely mental and not made of either tasty wood or all too cookable turtle meat. At the same time, I having reached an age when college gradually quits shimmering to materialize as a tangible prospect, the Sorbonne also grew, at least in theory, attainable.
I had already learned that a government allotment for the children of daddies who hadn’t come back from the war might well pay for part or all of my tuition. As I knew that no one else from Russell had even considered applying to the Sorbonne, I also can’t say I was feeling much heat of competition. My mother’s bemused but staunchly professional resourcefulness as a librarian having enabled me to lay my hands on the correct address, I wrote away for an application in the best French that two years of high-school language study unblemished by so much as a single Β plus or lower could attain. At the post office, trying to enter into the spirit of the occasion—it was his way, the post office itself not having much spirit to enter into—Mr. Clark the clerk made a small production out of selling me an international “Par Avion” stamp. Yet while grateful for his support, I was also wildly impatient to see the letter pass from his hands into the bin behind him. Once out of my sight, it would be closer to Paris, if only by some eight feet.