PrairyErth

by William Least Heat-Moon

  Looking for an answer, I started reading White Thunder God, a peculiar novel of humane if unorthodox values written barely well enough to be readable, its style suggesting an author who had some experience stringing together sentences but not narratives: a preacher, a reporter, an ad writer. The story was an amalgam of the more preposterous aspects of James Hilton (Lost Horizon) and H. G. Wells (When the Sleeper Awakes), all daubed over with nudism, vegetarianism, biblical fundamentalism, anti-Darwinism, and anti-New Dealism; in other words, a book of some appeal in the darkly Reaganized days when I was walking around Osage Hill.

  The story, set in the late thirties, is about an American missionary to the Indians of the northern end of the Gulf of California (a little beyond Arthur Stilwell’s Topolobampo); the unnamed and undescribed protagonist is a simple man who manages to enter a secret utopian community sequestered inside an old volcano in the San Pedro Mártir Mountains of Baja California; the inhabitants are women nudists, well-formed vegetarians of Amazonian strength who look one quarter their age and who live on milk, strawberry shortcake, and vanilla ice cream, all picked from trees. The utopia is not precisely a gynecocracy, since it is ruled by the kindly and wise White Thunder God, a shadowy but extramortal man who visits on the same cycle as the appearance of the seventeen-year locust. At first the author tries to blend Mexican Indian and Christian myths but finally his fundamentalism overtakes everything except his anger: using his words like cudgels, he vituperates against clothing (a root of evil), drinkers (raving, swearing drunkards), cigarette smokers (vile, fuming addicts), eaters of meat (makes them vicious and blood lustful), banks (the sin of usury), police (Gestapo), laws (If you are poor and have no capital you have no rights), FDR (Roosevelt the Damned), Kansas (the Land of Sunshine, Sunflowers, and Sons of——), and the governor (Landon the Louse, Terrible Tyrant of Topeka).

  Alf Landon, in life, was an oil magnate who defeated John Brinkley, a pseudo-physician who became wealthy transplanting billy-goat glands into impotent men and selling rejuvenating medicines. Landon proved to be a progressive Republican with some sympathy for laborers and drought-stricken farmers, a governor who believed in conservation and who opposed a resurgent Kansas Ku Klux Klan. In 1936 Landon ran against Franklin Roosevelt and won only Maine and Vermont in the worst electoral loss in history; but in 1978 his daughter, Nancy Landon Kassebaum (who now represents Chase County), became the first woman initially elected on her own to the United States Senate.

  The women Utopians in Gurley’s novel take their ethics from the Thunder God and their science from a speaking flame, a kind of radio that intercepts broadcasts from the planet Venus. As Utopians tend to be in novels, the citizens are impassioned only for knowledge and justice; they are logical, intelligent, reasonable, unmilitaristic, aloof, and humorless; they respect only the Indians of Mexico, a few of whom they let visit their volcanic sanctum. The missionary, his sect unnamed, learns that Thunder God is suffering from tuberculosis in a concentration camp in the land of creeping shadows, somewhere east of Wichita. He volunteers to find the god and deliver to him a hollow crucifix filled with a curative powder. He sets out, travels far, comes down off the eastern face of the Rockies into western Kansas, then suffering from the curse of a drought laid on the state by Thunder God. The pilgrim, for so he has become, agonizes his nightmarish way along dust-clogged highway 50, and he witnesses repeated acts of brutal police enforcing insane laws. At last he arrives in the valley of the Cottonwood River cutting through the weird and legendary land of creeping shadows, and he passes through Strong City (one would have to be strong to live there) and into Cottonwood. The river is dry and the falls silent:

  The little town itself was likewise dead and its streets all choked with shifting sands. It was a beautiful little town with lovely homes and great shade trees. They had been shade trees before the leaves blew off, that is. The town, like the old mill, spoke of a glorious past, back in the days before it turned its hand to fighting for booze and usury. Today it was just another mass of shifting sand with dry tree skeletons and houses projecting up above the dust level.

  He marks off the chapter with a pair of skull-and-crossbones as if it were a bottle of poison.

  In the courthouse he learns how Thunder God was sentenced to prison with only a hearing, and a clerk tells Pilgrim why there was no trial:

  If he defended himself or opposed the District Attorney in any way he would be sent off into slavery for the rest of his life. On the other hand, if he pleaded nolo-contendere, or non-contending, he would only get a year. Naturally, everyone nowadays pleads either guilty or nolo-contendere.

  During a trial, Pilgrim watches a witness sworn in:

  That judge, in his blatant ignorance, actually believed that by having a witness swear that his witness was going to tell the truth would make it true. Evidently he believed that if a person planned to give perjured witness the person would hold up his hand and say: “I solemnly swear to tell lies, whole lies, and nothing but lies.”

  He didn’t call it witness, however, but testimony. This, of course, meant that the witness was swearing by his testicles. It seems that in the early days a person called a “testator” stood by the witness with one hand upon a testicle, and had him swear to tell the truth. If he “testified” to false “testimony” an operation was performed, so he could never swear in court again. Perhaps this had its merits at that.

  Before he can resume search for Thunder God, he witnesses in Cottonwood a charivari, or shivaree (such heathenism), a medieval wedding celebration, something like Halloween without masks that came into the county with French pioneers and survived here until World War Two (Whitt Laughridge had to push his bride down Broadway in a wheelbarrow).

  Every so often Pilgrim’s anger has sharpness: of innumerable Kansas laws, from fishing to marriage licenses, he says: First they pass a law against things, and then they sell you a license to break the law for a certain length of time. As he rides the train out of Strong City he listens to a radio:

  The air seemed to be full of aimless vocalists broadcasting to the world their soughing self-reproach for being constant failures with the opposite sex. Along with these were interpolated numbers of vacuous mutterings and howls about sex-starvation. . . . All were set to nursery tunes of five or six notes.

  Pilgrim at last finds Thunder God hanging by his wrists in the penitentiary at Lansing, and he delivers the curative. Years later he returns to the hollow volcano in Baja and discovers the god living there quietly but preparing for a great departure; on the evening of the ninth of October, 1946, White Thunder God paddles a canoe far into the Sea of Cortez where a spacecraft picks him up and hies him off to Venus. Pilgrim cites San Diego and Los Angeles newspaper stories about the appearance of a spaceship, and his book includes a photograph of the vehicle (looking remarkably like a B-2 Stealth bomber) crossing the face of the moon.

  As a novel, White Thunder God is not noticeably sillier than much of the fare in an airport book rack today; but, as a defense of a possibly innocent man who served three years at hard labor seventy-five miles west of Osage Hill, it enters another dimension, a deeper one, and it becomes another knot in the net, another ligament tying muscle to bone, people to land. Like a tale not forgotten, its force ramifies:

  One morning soon after my hike there, I was driving over Osage Hill to Elmdale, the stories of dinosaurs and Indians and watermelons and Woody Hockaday’s red highways and Thunder God’s anger turning in my memory like leaves in a gyre of wind, and as I went up the gentle eastern side, I noticed on a recently burned slope what seemed to be an old message spelled out with rocks, and I stopped. I thought I could faintly discern in the char like a palimpsest:

  LANDON F— —OU.

  What the hell, I thought, after a half century White Thunder God strikes again? I crawled under the fence, went up the hill, looked closely at the message, and paced it off—eighteen feet high and more than two hundred long. Clearly, the rocks had been laid in place years earlier. I went b
ack to the car and climbed on the roof to photograph it. Although some stones had slipped out of position, and the last five letters were nearly invisible, I could now decipher the words: LANDON 4 GOVERNOR.

  I thought, this hill is an earthen bottle of messages from far travelers, a lode for paleographers, and I headed back to Cottonwood and went to information central, Whitt’s office. He was sitting by his collection of grasses taken from the eastern side of Osage Hill. He said, That state land out there hadn’t seen fire in years, and then a week ago they burned the brush on it, and the rock sign popped out. The last time Landon ran for governor was ’34. I think most everybody who was here then had forgotten about the thing. He paused a moment, and, First we find the old Hockaday sign and now this one. Who knows how many more signs are out there? I said I didn’t know how many, but I was sure they were all over the place—it was just that we couldn’t read many of them any longer.

  At the end of the summer, on Labor Day, some high school students rose early, went out to Osage Hill, and neatly whitewashed the letters they had begun calling the Landon Rocks, to make them wonderfully legible.

  On the Town:

  Versus Harry B. (III)

  THE HOUSE

  If you’ve ever driven Interstate 35 between Kansas City and Wichita, you have passed right in front of what was once the large lawn of Captain Henry Brandley’s new home, and you’ve been within a thousand feet of the very ground where Frank Rinard was shot in the face, but you can’t see much because of the cedars and pines the captain planted as if he knew the turnpike would one day open things to public view.

  My temptation is to say nothing of the Brandleys’ now remains other than the evergreen grove, when in fact the captain himself is here, or at least his dust lies between his first wife and Lizzie, and close to daughters Ruby and Flora Belle and son Harry in a tiny fenced plot made dim by overgrowth and the darkness cast by the big cedars. The old log home and its bloodstained porch are gone and so is the grand frame house of bay windows, porches, chimneys, and a central tower, the home the captain was starting when Rinard was murdered and which was just being finished when Harry returned a free man. Cap Brandley, the immigrant Swiss, called it Helvetia, a name countians found highfalutin and refused to recognize.

  I’ve heard tales of the captain’s seeking solitude in the isolation of his fourth-story tower, sitting up there with only his bottle and dog (he gave the hands the day off when it died), staring out over his holdings, things a man could rely on, and remembering events a man could defend himself against—Utes, Confederates, the South Fork (he and his brother watched from a tree one night as a burning lantern on an old trunk floated around and around in their flooded log house, and each time the lantern passed the open door his brother said, There she goes, but the next morning the lantern and cabin were still there), the sky (once he got caught in a prairie hailstorm and held a flat rock over his head like a bumbershoot while his friend Charlie Rogler tried to take cover in a haycock and was beaten senseless—and perhaps remembering his simpler days as a splitter of rails and a digger of ditches, and recalling his first winter in the county when he lived on only corn bread and salt-cured wild birds.

  In the months following the trial, Cap could look from his tower westward to where laborers were building the grade for the Orient Railway, which he believed would make his real estate investments skyrocket. I’ve heard tales of the old campaigner drinking too much up there and coming down to concoct some sort of hangover remedy from dried rabbits he kept in the cellar. I’ve heard that the homeplace, following the bloodshed, was cursed: the log house burning to the ground the year of the trial, the captain drinking himself unconscious and dying in the stall of the Matfield livery barn ten years afterward; Lizzie gone three years later; and three years after her, Harry (having spent the rest of his days sitting with his back to walls) found dead at forty-two in his bam, apparently from selfpoisoning; and eight years after that, Helvetia, occupied by tenants, mysteriously burning to the ground in the middle of the night. But Miss Pearl, the lovely dark sun around whom events turned, escaped: she married and lived into her eighties, outlasting all of them.

  Today, what remains of Helvetia is a grassy swale and a few outlines of rock walkways. But down the slope to the east stands a small structure, the lower half of native stone, the upper of oak planks painted with red lead: depending on your view, it is ironic or fitting that the last remaining Brandley building is the barn where a hired hand was murdered. It is a simple but quaint thing in the Flint Hills vernacular style, the sort of barn that on a snowy evening belongs in a Currier and Ives print, were it not for the door with the dark blotch believed to be Frank Rinard’s ineradicable brain blood.

  THE LEGACY

  Now: I’ve been here several times before to try to piece the mystery together, and I’ve walked the place and tried to imagine its events and earlier aspect; today I’ve brought a copy of a description Harry’s eldest sister, Clara, wrote twenty-eight years after the murder about their life on this very ground, and I’ve been using it to check details and create dreamtime:

  Here in the old house the children grew to maturity. They romped and played in a backyard shaded by box elder trees and one gorgeous morello cherry tree at the well. Here roamed the chickens, the young turkeys and geese, the dogs with their puppies, the cats with their kittens, and even the white rabbits with their young.

  There was a front yard filled with cedar and cherry trees. Here purple lilacs and old-fashioned roses bloomed, and clove, pinks, and annual flowers in their season. Bird boxes on high poles to make them safe from cats were there and filled with chirping colonies of purple martins in early summer. Swift-winged swallows built their mud nests under the eaves. A latticed porch was covered with grape and scarlet trumpet vines where, in the hottest weather, hummingbirds whirred in the air, sucking nectar from the long tubular blossoms.

  These scenes live in the memories of the children raised there, and now and then some vagrant scent of new blown rose or pink recalls it all, rekindles the past, recreates the old scene anew, with over it and in it and saturating it an all-pervading sense of the presence of Mother, Mother, Mother everywhere.

  But the presence that saturates and rekindles the past here today is something else, something full of unresolved questions: from such a distance, could Mother really have heard the blood-gurgle of a dying man? Why didn’t Father offer a reward? Why didn’t the captain, with his power and wealth, try to help his son by finding the murderer? In a community so small and known to each other, how could a killer conceal himself? With miles of isolated country around, why would Harry shoot Rinard in the Brandley backyard? Why did the judge strike all testimony of motive? Why was Rinard’s friend not allowed to testify? Where was Miss Pearl on the night of the murder? Why didn’t the captain have to prove his whereabouts, and where did he go in the middle of that bloody night? Why was the cross-examination of the Brandleys so cursory and the prosecution so manifestly inept? In a time of growing Populist and Progressive sentiment, were some countians, roused by the captain’s wealth or a European hauteur, more interested in revenge than in real justice?

  The questions the trial raised, perpetually damning in their irresolution, may have served some residents even better than a conviction: looking at all the evidence, it’s difficult to believe that Frank Rinard’s murderer was not in the courtroom when the clerk read the verdict, but to conclude that the killer was the man acquitted is much harder.

  I think many countians feel justice was finally served: of the three great families of the upper South Fork, the Brandleys rose the highest and fell the fastest and farthest, and, unlike the big places of the Crockers and Roglers still standing handsome nearly a century later, the Brandley estate is come to a small, weedy cemetery, a stained bam, and tales continually retold as if poisons to keep privilege from taking root. The vengeance of the people is the long persistence of rumor, where the living haunt the dead.

  IX

  H
OMESTEAD

  From the Commonplace Book:

  Homestead

  There is a saying here that freaks are raised for export only. In one sense the saying is true enough, for what strikes one particularly is that, on the whole, native Kansans are all so much alike. It is a community of great solidarity, and to the native it is “the Easterner” who appears eccentric.