A Grain of Wheat

by Joseph Jacobson

  Let’s get this straight! It’s plain stupid to think you have to tell something to the world that it can’t hear anyway and to dream endlessly about someone somewhere out there who can’t possibly exist. So settle down and recover the joy you had in this hallowed place until you got stupid. All the rest is delusion.

  The tensions that this tug-of-war produced in him, he recalled years later, became unbearable. All the reasoning in the world did nothing to subdue his two new obsessions. He got furious whenever he found himself impervious to the many delights all around him just because his imagination had run wild and taken him somewhere else. The forest and its treasures hadn’t changed. He had changed. He had no one to blame but himself.

  For the remainder of Steve’s time in the hollow, King played the humble role of making his Spectre Maiden believable. The dog’s selfless love and unquestioning devotion went to work on Steve. If a dog could be like that, surely she could too in real life. Even when Steve was all twisted up in his own thoughts and self-recrimination, the great silver husky would never make demands on him or complain about being neglected. On the contrary, his long-suffering and constancy found their way deep into Steve’s heart, reshaping it ever so slowly into a believer in a new sort of love, a love he could begin to respond to now in kind if he ever found it in a real person.

  But you’re such a frog, he told himself in his clearer moments. Even if she is out there somewhere, why would she pay any attention to you?

  XIV

  Solitude and an inescapable idea are the perfect formula for creating an obsession, and nothing destroys peace faster than an obsession. Steve’s new yearnings became irrepressible. He acquiesced so readily to fantasies about the beautiful Maiden now living within him almost all the time that his ability to disown her almost evaporated. The joy of his evenings was spending time with her because it was even easier in the evening to let his heart smother his mind than it was during the day. These evening meetings of theirs satisfied something inside him that he hadn’t known was there until his night of dreams. But they left him in turmoil afterwards. His heart and his mind were no longer flowing in united opposition to a senseless world. Rather, they were clashing with each other now, each declaring the other insane for the opposite reason. His heart told his mind: Look where you are! How are you ever going to find her here? His mind told his heart: Look where you are! You’ve got everything you need right here.

  On the first day of September 1920, the cacophonous firing of a motorcycle engine rent the pristine stillness of the early morning air in a wooded basin some twenty miles east and north of Munising, Michigan. A young man was chugging up the hill on an overburdened cycle, while a large silver husky was anxiously leaping up and down beside him. The young man was staring down at the passing ground directly in front of the cycle. The leaves and the grass were swimming behind a blurred film of tears. When he reached the crest of the hill, he hesitantly stopped and looked around into the hollow from which he had come. The bright and dark hues of the valley danced together in the tears that distorted his vision. Ardently he pressed the magnificent dog to his side and held him there for dear life with trembling hands. In a soft voice he whispered into his ear, “It’s not your fault, King. I’m so sorry. It’s all in me.” Then he released the dog, straightened up, and shouted across the valley at the top of his lungs, “It’s all in me!”

  It was all in him as he wound through the forest to the highway, all the confusion and despair. What was driving him out of the heaven of his dreams into the world of his nightmares? Why was he leaving his mind back there to pursue his heart out here? What was forcing him to do that?

  King followed him out to the highway and raced along behind him, falling farther and farther back until he collapsed into the ditch, overcome by exhaustion.

  XV

  The first days of autumn brought to the campus of Christiania College a wave of rejuvenation and cheer. Its dormer windows, both literal and figurative, were thrown open and an embracing gale of fresh wind flushed out its musty old corners. In the cafeteria, around the registration desks, in fact just about anywhere you looked there were long lines or little clusters of self-conscious blushing freshman women floating about seemingly unattached. And wherever this was the case, it was a safe bet that there would be loose groups of upperclassmen, at first backed off surveying the new crop as a whole, then cautiously moving in for a closer look at the most attractive flowers among them.

  An air of expectation, bustling activity in preparation for the days ahead, animated every nook and cranny on campus. As yet the trees and the grass were green, but crisp fall breezes were even now stirring playfully through them, chasing away the stifling idleness left behind by the hot days of summer. It was the time of year when old people begin to wonder whether they will be able to “weather out another one” and young people can hardly wait for ice to form on the rinks and snow to blanket the toboggan runs. Scholars are anticipating the delights of leaning back in an easy chair before an open hearth and savoring a good briar pipe and the likes of Soren Kierkegaard, while the sound of the winter wind whistles harmlessly through the eaves. And since the young people on campus greatly outnumbered the elderly and the scholarly, anticipation of happy days ahead was written all over their faces and gave bounce to their step.

  It was the time of year when the attention required of you to look after the endless details of registration, settling into your dorm room, and meeting your roommate and a lot of other totally new people kept you excited and on your toes.

  Almost everyone was in an upbeat mood.

  Even Stephen Pearson was being drawn back to Christiania, but it was by the same forces that had driven him out of the hollow back into the world. He had spent three days at home before setting off for St. Mark on his motorcycle. The long hours on the road were giving his mind and his imagination plenty of opportunity to take off in almost any direction and to pursue it to the very end.

  Some of his time on the road his thoughts were darkened by his rational disenchantment with himself and his hopes. What had gone wrong? Surely not his basic logic! He was just as convinced as ever that choosing a life of meaningless and disagreeable toil was pure idiocy. He also knew that almost everyone expected you to do exactly that, and that if you did cave in to them and do it their way, you were doomed to a life of slavery and perpetual discontent. The secret was never let yourself get trapped in a situation that prevented you from doing what you wanted to do. If you got caught in that trap, your life would turn into one endless grind of drudgery. That’s exactly what it had become for his parents.

  Perhaps, he mused, this explained why the summer had gone sour on him! Let us assume that on the first of June he really wanted to be in just the right “spot” in the wilderness. What guarantee was there that he would want the same thing on the first of August? Give him one good reason why he should feel obligated to be tied to June’s dream in August? A person had to reckon with the likelihood of a change in desires! It was wrong to assume that his desire to live in the wilderness, no matter how strong it may have been, was a permanent desire. He wasn’t built like the motorcycle which burned only one kind of fuel. His engine burned many kinds of fuel, today this, tomorrow that. A person had to do what appealed to him when it appealed to him and not feel obliged to stick with it when something else appealed to him more. You had to move on! That was the secret. There was a lot of truth to Tom Mahler’s belief, which he had probably picked up in Europe, that “the most important things in life are just a matter of taste.”

  “All right, then!” he concluded dozens of time as he rolled along the highway, salvaging what he could from his experiences of the summer. “I will NEVER AGAIN chain my tomorrow to today’s desires.”

  Thus hardened and resolved he raced along the gravel highways, vexed with himself for having failed to recognize this obvious principle from the start, but equally determined to hang on to it from now on. This meant that he had to view with great suspicion that
inner force that had drawn him out of the hollow and was continuing to draw him on now completely independent of his will. But a traveler has many unguarded moments in which things can sneak up on you unnoticed until it’s too late. The steady drone of his engine would gradually wear down his hard-won resolve, to be replaced effortlessly time and again by those warm and increasingly familiar sensations of “her.” Sometimes King and sometimes the warring ants also appeared out of nowhere in his mind’s eye, all mixed up with bits and fragments of his freshly articulated principle for a happy life. All of this tumbled around in his mind like garments in a revolving clothes dryer, contradictory thoughts and images endlessly colliding with one another and going nowhere. And hovering over him, and even beside him, the mysterious presence of his Spectre Maiden, intangible but more real than all of the rest of it put together.

  When Steve pulled up at Christiania just in time to register for his classes and receive his room assignment, a shudder of excitement surprised him. He had no idea what to expect, but something was going to happen. He could feel it in his bones no matter what his head told him.

  Three days later he was sitting at a corner table in the cafeteria with his three friends—Tom, Lute, and Ted. They had acted glad to see him again. Just now the three of them were surveying the new “crop” of freshman women in the supper line as it inched its way through the door.

  “Hey Ted!” Lute Odegaard nudged his big friend. “Get a load of that doll just coming through the door. Remind you of somebody?”

  “Yeah. Geraldine Simpson from Sioux City,” he replied in his deep deliberate tone of voice. “Boy, oh boy!”

  “Yup. That’s who I was thinking of. I’ll bet she’s got legs like Geraldine’s too.”

  “You would know?”

  “She don’t remind me of anyone or anything I ever saw before,” injected Tom. “And I’ve seen a lot. That gal’s in a class by herself.”

  “Look at that figure, would you!” marveled Lute. “All the clothes in the world can’t hide what she’s got.”

  The flaxen-haired beauty in question now looked straight at their table. Ted turned red, Tom politely tipped his invisible hat, and Lute waved at her and mouthed the words, “Hi, honey!” She flustered an instant, smiled back at him, and pretended to be distracted by something behind her.

  Lute turned around and with a broad grin said, “Well, Steve? Don’t tell me that one didn’t do something to you!”

  “Sure did. Made me spill my soup when you waved at her,” he replied dryly, dabbing his lap with a napkin.

  In fact, Steve had not been paying much attention to what was going on around him. As usual, he had been lost in thought.

  The line at the door inched on, providing a continuous source of material for conversation for the three more vocal friends. For this one it was the face, for that one it was the figure, for the next one perhaps the smile, and on and on. Lute was getting so worked up that he declared his serious intention to date them all during the year so as to “savor each one’s special charms.”

  Sure! reacted Steve bitterly within himself. And someday you’ll latch on to one of them who will latch on to you, and it will be downhill all the way from there.

  The talk was beginning to disgust him.

  “Hey, Steve! There’s a cute little number just your size!” Lute blurted out, nodding at a six-foot-plus Amazon ducking in the doorway.

  “Looks to me like she has enough upfront for a half a dozen ordinary girls,” Ted observed with his usual candor.

  “Yeah, Steve’d get lost just trying to…….”

  Suddenly Steve’s ears began to ring. Instantly the crude comments of his friends faded away. Every muscle in his body seized up. The cause of this was the young woman who was just seating herself at the table directly in front of him. His face flushed beet red. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. For him there was suddenly no one else in the room but her.

  “O my God!” he gasped.

  XVI

  Poor Steve!

  There he sat, stone deaf to Lute’s coarse humor and right back in the heart of his night of dreams. Someone had played a dreadful trick on him, someone who knew his heart inside out and had transformed his Spectre Maiden into flesh and blood not six feet in front of him! All the floodlights in the world were trained on him as he sat there paralyzed, unable to move or speak or even think.

  There was no doubt about it. This was the woman of his dreams. The resemblance was uncanny. Her salient features that had struck him so indelibly that night were all there before his eyes. Every one of them! She was sitting across from him, not exactly with her back towards him, but off to the right a little so that he could see a hint of the profile of her face. The last thing he wanted was for the guys to divine his secret, so he shifted his eyes to his soup bowl and stared at it blankly, stealing furtive glances up at her without moving his head.

  Her golden hair fell to just above her slender shoulders in soft flowing waves, in a word, altogether right, just like what he could see of her face. Everything about her struck him as wondrously pure and mild. Her skin was radiant and bronzed from the summer sun, contrasting joyously with her hair. Her blouse was the solid blue of a deep woodland pond in early evening, and her full skirt was a clean white except for a bit of embroidery work around the hem. Her movements were flowing and graceful. When she spoke, the gentle sound of her voice melted his heart. Once he caught her looking to the left and smiling at a table companion. It was a warm and inviting smile. It sent shivers up and down Steve’s spine.

  Tom was the one who picked up on what was happening to Steve. He had seen that first look of incredulous astonishment on Steve’s face and had followed it to its object at the next table. Curious, he studied her with his usual unconcealed frankness. Yes, she was quite a dish, all right. It was understandable that someone like Steve might give her a second look. She’s nothing that Lute or Ted would go in for, he told himself, except for that face and hair and that nutmeg complexion. They want those top-heavy models. This one probably has very dainty breasts that turn up on the ends a little like her nose. Those two licentious louts have to have plenty of beef to be happy…. Man, that face of hers is gorgeous, though. And what a smile! She seems so innocent, and so, so beautiful….

  He turned and winked at Steve who was too absorbed in his own world to wink back.

  The fellows were in no hurry to get out of the dining hall that evening, for obvious reasons. It was a good thing. Steve was virtually chained to his chair. After some twenty minutes the girls at the opposite table shifted around a little and rose to leave. Steve watched her get up and lift her tray. His heart skipped a beat. She was a good two or three inches shorter than Steve’s five-foot-nine-inch frame, yet she truly was a long and lovely angel.

  “Come on, Cecilia,” he heard someone urge.

  “Sure. I’m coming,” she replied, low and eager.

  An angel, yes! marveled Steve to himself. “My angel,” he said out loud but very softly, his eyes watering up as he watched her gracefully move away.

  It would be truthful to say that from this moment on, Steve’s former dream world became his new reality, and his former reality simply faded away into irrelevance.

  XVII

  So it was “Cecilia,” was it! The perfect name for an angel.

  That evening Steve forgot all about his daily motorcycle ride. A walk was the thing instead, he decided. Just what he needed to settle the queasy feeling in his stomach. So he picked up an impressive-looking volume from the top of his desk and strolled as nonchalantly as possible out of the room. Ted looked on with mild surprise. He wasn’t used to seeing Steve move with such urbanity.

  Well, where should he go on his walk? He could walk across the campus past the women’s dorm to Old Main. Then he could walk down the hill, circle around through the woods, come up again on the trail behind the women’s dorm, and walk past it to the library. If he was still in the mood for a walk, he might just as well stroll from there o
ver to the chapel well beyond the women’s dorm and back to the music hall on the other side of the women’s dorm. And, of course, there was that nice old bench to sit on halfway between the music hall and the women’s dorm in the event he needed a little rest by then. After that he could saunter back to his room past the women’s dorm and the science hall. Yes, that sounded like a good workable plan—lots of good healthy exercise!

  “It would be good for me to do this every evening after supper,” he told himself halfway through the first lap of his little trek.

  As it turned out, he never did get as far as Old Main, for just as he was approaching the women’s dorm, the door opened and out came Cecilia with an armload of music. Steve stopped in his tracks. Be danged if his fool shoelace hadn’t come undone! He bent over and fumbled around with it for a few moments. By the time he had rectified the situation, Miss Cecilia was slowly making her way along the arbored lane not ten paces in front of him.

  Her head was bowed slightly in thought. Steve could tell that her mind was working on something, perhaps one of the pieces of music she was carrying. She was in no hurry. Gracefully making her way along the path to the music hall, with the setting sun playing in her golden hair, she did look very much like a celestial visitor to earth. I myself had often seen her in just such a disarming pose and truly wondered if she was of earth or of heaven.

  It was only a couple of hundred yards from the women’s dormitory to the music hall. In less than a minute she turned to the right onto the short walk that doubled back a bit and led to the entrance of the great fortresslike edifice. This gave Steve a very good look at her face. Suddenly he was caught short of breath. A lump formed in his throat. Luckily, he wasn’t far from the old bench where he could sit down until he got his wind back.