Dale Miller, who had been a neutral participant in the conflict, hearing words he didn’t understand—minor child and endangerment—merely gaped at the vice principal, who sighed and explained it all over again from the beginning. Finally comprehending something (jail time) Dale Miller came to life. Under his wife’s astonished eye, he got to his feet, still holding his Chronicle. “I don’t see what’s so bad about that boy,” he said to his wife, and held up his hand as she began to speak. He turned to Beth. “He’s quarterback, isn’t he?” he said. She nodded. “Well, then,” said Dale firmly, sitting down again, in a rush of newsprint. The vice principal went away; the matter was settled.
Her hands tied, Lucy Miller turned to her country-club friends for advice. They, deeply immune to the glamor of athletes, pooh-poohed the romance.
“They all do it,” they yawned. “You ought to have seen what Teddy brought home to dinner when he was sixteen. Don’t worry, dear.”
Coming back to her house after these conversations, Lucy Miller was soothed, her equilibrium restored. She would call for some iced tea and settle into a chair with the interesting bits of the newspaper, and read about engagements and weddings with a new, more hopeful eye. How it must have tweaked her then, in her hour of fragile optimism, to hear Beth’s voice at the front door, in concert with Jack’s. He had walked her home from school again. Reality came back to Lucy Miller in a tumbling rush; she threw aside the society page, and for the rest of the day she was short with the maid and snappish with the cook.
The war must have seemed like salvation to Lucy Miller. No doubt she prayed daily for Jack’s untimely death. Instead of obliging, however, Jack got himself wounded; and after the telegram came, transforming Jack to a hero, Lucy Miller found herself in a hard place. President of the War Woollens Ladies’ Association, Treasurer of the Shirts for Soldiers Committee, personal holder of three war bonds, Lucy Miller found her patriotism challenged. It wasn’t fair; she hated Hitler as much as the next person—but probably she hated Jack more. Lucy Miller set her teeth in an American smile and suffered the alliance with our family. She sent us a blue star for our front window and began nodding to me on the street.
I learned all this about her only years after the fact; most of it Beth told me, some of it I reconstructed for myself. It is easy now to feel some sympathy for Lucy Miller, bound so tightly by the fetters she had woven for herself; but at fourteen I hated her, with her yellow teeth and yellowed hair, her false light voice curling out of her mouth like an adder’s tongue. I hated her house, built of prosperous brick in the Greek Revival style, set at the foot of the hilltop where the old homes were, as though it was trying to nudge its way closer to greatness. I hated her tiny glass punch cups, and the bad eggnog she served, measly with the bourbon; I hated the intricate, unidentifiable hors d’oeuvres and the cleverly molded pâtés. I hated her, and I felt guilty, because her husband seemed like a nice man, and Beth was another thing altogether.
I’d met Beth only twice in all the time she’d been dating Jack, and neither time had I spoken a word. I saw them mostly from afar, from crowded football stands or across the schoolyard. They were always surrounded, but always a little apart from the others, two golden people, the rest standing aside to give them room. Then Jack was called up, and got wounded, and Beth began eating one in four Sunday dinners with us, and I got to know her better.
At first, the afternoons she spent with my father and me were silent ones. I prepared the meals in mounting anxiety, and served them out with a kind of fatalism. While we ate, I sneaked glances at her from time to time; once, she caught me looking, and smiled. She seemed entirely at ease; and she didn’t batter us with conversation right away. It wasn’t until the third Sunday that she began working on us, beginning with my father. Somehow, she inveigled him into showing her his workshop. It was a tremendous achievement: no woman had set foot in that hallowed space for many years. But she managed it, with short careful comments and a flattering display of interest, and suddenly we were all trooping out the back door, past the tangled weeds which had grown up to choke my mother’s vegetable garden. Down the path of smooth stones, now slippery with moss; past the rose bushes and the old outhouse. Here were real tangles, an honest wilderness, the weeds growing so high and thick that they were no longer weeds but vines and trees, weaving together into a dense, moist jungle. My father and I knew our way in the dark, but I had condescended to bring a flashlight for Beth. The round beam bobbed from leaf to bramble as we trudged on the rest of the way, right down to the bottom of the hill, a good half mile from the house.
The land out back had been a source of mild but constant struggle within my family for generations. In my great-grandparents’ day, it had been part of a self-sufficient farm; but their only son, my grandfather, was a reluctant earth worker. He finally sold off some of the land and invested the profits; with the regular dividend and the remaining crops, he lived out his life in ease. My father, for his part, resisted farming altogether, taking a job with the railroad and telling the land to go to hell, which it did, quickly and completely. He settled into his ways, working long hours and going in the evenings to the workshop where he spent his leisure time. He married late, a sweet young bride, my mother; I am sure he expected no opposition from her on any subject. But in her first spring-clean she came across an old map of the property and realized for the first time just how large it was. She dusted off the map, and confronted my father with it, setting forth her opinions. She wanted to clear the land, and right away; she had visions of an English-style garden, with winding paths and maybe a boxwood maze.
My father listened to her proposal; he was agreeable, or at least not disagreeable, until she pointed to a spot on the map, saying, “And here’s where we’ll put the fountain.”
“That’s my workshop,” protested my father.
“It’ll be perfect for a fountain,” said my mother. “Move your old woodshop.”
This he would not do; and so they came to an impasse, at which they remained for the next fifteen years. My sister, Ellen, remembers them arguing about it constantly, particularly over breakfast. By that time, it was part of their daily routine, and there was little animosity to it. It took up most of the mealtime conversation, Ellen says, our mother cheerily threatening to knock the workshop down herself while my father was at work, and my father saying nothing, clearing his throat from time to time and nodding when he wanted more coffee.
It was Jack who stopped it. As the story goes, he was five or six and had been in disgrace from the day before, after hitting Tommy Simmons on the head as he was reaching for the last oatmeal cookie. My mother had, quite properly, given Jack a stern lecture on sharing and had confined him to his room until he offered to apologize. When he refused, she let him come to supper, but sent him from the table without dessert. On the famous morning, she greeted him with a kiss and a reminder that he was to apologize to Tommy today, and no more nonsense. Then my father came to the table, and after some minor preliminaries, they settled down to it. After a few minutes Jack looked up from his plate, and fixing his eyes on my mother, intoned piously: “Isn’t it more blessed to give than to receive?” He had it word perfect from my mother’s lecture of the evening before, and she, her hypocrisy exposed, fell silent. Then, Ellen says, they all began to laugh. All except Jack, who reached for another piece of toast. “Out of the mouth of babes,” said my father. So you might say Jack shamed them into it.
My mother’s half lay right behind the house. She tended it carefully, putting in a large vegetable patch and a flower border. We ate tomatoes and corn, green peppers and snap beans, all from her neat fenced-off rows. She had not given up entirely on her morsel of English countryside: down at the bottom of the gentle slope which began just beyond the vegetables, she put in a row of rosebushes and a white stone birdbath.
Just the other side of the roses, my father’s half began; he strolled right past my mother, pruning and weeding, and never cut back so much as a tendril on his
side. In the summer, while my mother’s crops grew tamely taller and her bushes flared red with heavy blossoms, my father’s half of the property simmered and seethed with growth. While the bees buzzed drunkenly among the roses, while the birds played sedately in their bath, just yards away all manner of creatures jostled for niches in the ecology. My father did nothing to disturb them; he walked the long walk daily from the house down to the workshop. It was a small cabin really, perhaps part of a slave quarters left from a long-ago plantation; it had rough floors and a fireplace at one end, and my father had had power lines run out there, so that he could plug in his electrical saws. He spent all of his leisure time there, merely passing through the rest of the property on the way. In a few years, his half of the land was sheer rainforest, and my mother worried aloud that something unusual might emerge from it and strike us all down.
Even when walking straight toward the workshop, it was difficult to see it. It was backed by a sluggish stream which separated the border of our land from a neighboring farm. From our neighbor’s side, not even the outline of the cabin showed; and there was no approach to it other than the thin path my father took each day, overgrown with slapping branches.
In the darkness, the journey was indescribable, a kind of descent into Hades, and I watched Beth for signs of nervousness as we went along. But she seemed quite unperturbed, parting branches and waving away the clouds of gnats which hung at eye level. She stepped along gamely, and when a snake slithered across her path she didn’t shrink, but simply placed her foot neatly to the right of it, and moved on.
We reached the workshop, my father leading. He fiddled with the lock on the door (near Christmas or Jack’s birthday, the padlock which was usually left hanging was snapped into place. It was inappropriate now; Jack would soon be having a birthday, but not here).
“Well,” said my father, stepping across the threshhold, and turning on the light.
Beth looked a little dazed by the coziness and cleanliness of the place, always so much more impressive after that wild trek. I sat on a bench to one side of the room, and Beth stood where she was, suddenly shy, waiting to be offered a seat. My father rooted through odds and ends on the shelves lining the walls. After a few minutes, he found what he was after.
“Close your eyes,” he said, gruffly, intending to be playful. He set the thing he had found, which looked to be a kind of complicated box, down before her. “Okay, open,” he said.
For a moment she just stood looking in silence.
“It’s beautiful,” she said at last, and he recognized the sincerity in her voice and smiled.
“This joint here give me a pack of trouble,” he said, taking the object and beckoning her closer.
They were there for hours; I watched for a while in amazement as my father, ordinarily so secretive about his projects, outlined his works in progress, speaking in paragraphs, he who had hardly spoken more than two sentences together in the time I’d known him. They ignored me; and after a while I crept away, leaving them there, past their fit of shyness, Beth perched on a high stool with a bulb swinging over her head, looking on as my father riffled through a sheaf of drawings, looking for “that tricky carving job, wood so soft I used a toothpick in places.” She had done the impossible: she had drawn him out. And now she set her sights on me.
She arrived without warning one early summer afternoon, and wheedled me down from my apple tree, to walk with her. I was startled at first, absorbed in my book, but I closed it and slid down, pretending reluctance. It was a fair day, with something of a breeze; we walked east through the high summer pastureland, toward the mountains. She talked and I listened, pulling up a weed here and there as we went along, and shredding it into bits with my hands. I was shy, and filled with nervousness, but also with an intense pride: she was Beth Miller, after all, the prettiest girl in town, and she was dating my brother, Jack, who had been the high-school football star and who was now a pilot and a war hero, everything I was not, and could never be. I sighed, walking alongside her; and if she heard me, she didn’t let on.
We spent many afternoons together after that—I could never resist her summons from the foot of my apple tree—and eventually she tamed me, as she had tamed my father before me. I watched her do it, with a kind of helpless fascination; and I even participated a little, breaking tentatively through my insulation, like a chick giving the first taps on the inside of its egg. I was a most painful fourteen, and she at sixteen seemed much older; I was charmed and baffled by her, who certainly had no lack of company and yet incredibly sought mine. But familiarity wore her glamor through, and after a time, I was more comfortable with her than I’d ever been with anyone.
We talked mostly about random things, the books I was reading, and people from school, and the parties she was going to. Only occasionally did we mention the war, and then only in a general way. I would have talked about it endlessly, my head being filled with it, but Beth frowned when I mentioned battles or weapons. And we rarely talked about Jack; when she spoke his name I felt assaulted, as though a stranger had slipped into our company and put a coldness between us.
“Look at that,” said Beth, one day in August. I looked where she pointed, but saw only a bird. “Imagine being so free,” she said. “You could go anywhere you want.”
“Who,” I said, “wants to go anywhere?”
She looked surprised. “It’s natural to wander,” she said.
“No, it isn’t, either,” I told her. “Birds build themselves a nest, and stay to it.”
“They go south every year,” she argued.
“But they,” I said, “come back.”
“I’d like to try that,” said Beth, watching another bird. “Maybe I’ll get me an airplane, paint it yellow.”
“You can’t,” I said, shocked.
“Why not?” she asked. “But I’ll bet it isn’t as pretty as being a bird, though. I bet once you get up in one of them things, there’s just a whole lot of rattling and shaking and wind flying in your face. I bet it’s not pretty at all.”
“Huh,” I said, derisively, but I had an uneasy feeling that she might be right.
“I’d still like to try it, though,” she said. “I’d fly right over this little town. I wouldn’t even wave.”
“Shows,” I said, “what you know. You don’t,” I said, “wave. You dip the,” I took up a blade of grass, bent it back and forth. “Wings.”
“Whatever,” she said, carelessly. “I’d dip my wings, and go right on by.” She thought for a minute. “I bet everything is different from up there. I bet I wouldn’t even recognize Naples from up there.”
I said nothing.
“Hell, I bet you wouldn’t even know there’s a town here,” she said. “Especially in the dark.” She stopped, struck by something. “How do people fly in the dark?” she asked me.
“Same,” I paused, and watched the birds, “way they drive in the dark,” I said finally.
“But there’s no streetlights up there, or anything.”
I thought about what I’d read about pilots sitting in a dark room for half an hour before flying, to get their eyes accustomed to dim light; I thought about the simulated horizon on the control panel of an airplane; I thought these things, with a kind of despair; I didn’t say them.
“Training,” was what I said.
We walked along for a while, and I knew that in a minute she’d be talking again of parties or telling me some gossip about people I didn’t even know. She had given me an opening, with all her talk about flying. It was August tenth, the day after Nagasaki; so far we had carefully avoided the subject, but I could hold back no longer.
“You,” I said. “Watch. It won’t be long now.”
“I wonder what it would be like,” said Beth, turning her clear light eyes upon me, “to live in Nagasaki?”
“Nobody lives there now,” I said.
“I mean, before,” she said. “I bet it was a place just like here, and then they dropped a bomb on it, and now
it’s gone.”
“We dropped the bomb,” I reminded her.
“I didn’t,” she said.
“We did,” I insisted. “America. We dropped it, and I bet,” I said. “We win the war.”
“Sneaky way to win,” said Beth. “Dropping bombs on little towns.”
“They’da done the same thing,” I said.
“That’s a good reason,” she said, scornfully.
I said nothing, frustrated.
“I wonder what the plane looked like?” she mused, and seeing my exasperated expression, added, “I mean, they might have thought it was one of theirs. I saw Mrs. Jenkins hanging out washing one day, and she waved when a plane went over.”
“Her Ralph’s over there,” I said.
“Imagine, hanging out washing, and looking up and waving, and then the bomb falling.”
Near Canaan Page 9