A Dove of the East (11 page)

She had read all her life of the openness of the West, of its red rivers and plains leafed in neutral in-breathing gold, of the miraculous Indians and the Rockies, which were mountains of mist that formed and unformed dreams so fast as to confuse even the youngest of dreamers. And strangely enough these substanceless dreams, these short electric pictures, these confused but royally intense sketches, gradually gave to her a strength, practicality, and understanding which many a substantial man would never have. Her vindication, almost God-promised, was as clear as the excellent sea air, or the deep blue pools which in summer formed at the bottom of the quarries, to her fathers chagrin. Her father, whose strength had equaled the beauty of her mother, had seen in her very early what he himself had lost, and unlike many fathers he had no envy. He was too good for that. He loved her too much. He saw himself as a stone arch, unbending, sheltering around his wife and daughter, to keep them safe and await the day when his daughter could soar on her visions and be settled.

Katherine, a dreamer, was not hard but tender, and when her parents died one following the other in a general epidemic she was wild. Just to be in Quincy, as gray as a mans suit, afflicted with ice and dark winds, a shabby collection of boards amidst scrub trees like the coat of a dying mare, made her sad in a way which does no good and leads to dead ends and contemptible unbelieving. One day in winter she thought she saw her father standing by her mother, who was gentle and strong and had been the first to die. Her father held a sledgehammer, of the finest wood and with a shining gold head. He said, “I shall free you all,” and went to the base of the quarry where he smashed the cast-iron braces and beams which held the rock. The iron rang like a thousand bells and black pieces shattered over the quarry, ringing the pools and echoing off the high walls. And her father continued until every chain was severed and every brace broken, until all metal and all the past were smashed, buried in the clear pools. Free air circulated away from its bounds and the muscular father said to her, a little out of breath but with as good a red color as he had had on the finest days of summer, he said, “Katherine, Katherine, my Carroty, we too have had it with this place. We are not permanently rooted here, and you must go away. I have smashed these bonds, and this I did for you. Pile your hair, tie it firmly, and find a new place.”

This she did, about a year later, and headed West, for there she sensed something which would give her the moments she wanted before her death, moments of full cognizance and dream vision, the red roses of her life and its humor. It was good to abandon Quincy and its quarry.

She set her hat at an angle, trying to frame the light blue mountain ranges. The tracks threw up dust and she eyed steam from the locomotive. These billowing clouds became captions for her thoughts, and they centered on Yellow Sky, on a dream quest which had spread to all the people. Yellow Sky. It was still far off.

That night they stopped in Gibson, a town spread across a large rise in the prairie where cattle roads, a flat unnavigable river, and the railroad crossed at angles. Huge yards of seemingly spider-work boards held cattle for boxcar loading, and during the whole of the late spring night, cattle filed past her window in the darkness. Without awakening her assigned roommate, an elderly woman who looked like a tomb, Katherine stepped out of bed and went to the open window. A high wind carried occasional raindrops past the town and out into the vastly promising darkness from which an endless procession of moody steers was filing—giant animals intent upon moving to their slaughter—to feed the distant cities. She had seen the land-seas of wheat and flowers and from them came these steers, an abundance which kept her awake the rest of the night wide-eyed, waiting for the hoofbeats and dust and drovers' calls to stop, but when morning found her tears were in her eyes as she stared at the clouds of sparkling dust. From where did they come, constantly, without even the slightest break? The land beyond was empty except for storm and mountains, and yet from there the night had been filled with a power so great it drew a shaking tense silence, a joyous fright. The endless power was born somewhere out near Yellow Sky, and Katherine couldn't sleep because she was headed there, as surely and certainly as the warm steel track, or the confident horsemen who often appeared alongside to race the train.

Leaving Gibson, they skirted the wide river and crossed a road on which thousands of cattle were backed up for miles; in the distance they were as even a brown as the drovers' felt hats. For scores of miles the landscape was the same, a rolling plain which looked like masses of brown whales, dotted flowers, banks of lilies, and grasses. The trains exact and faithful forward motion led her to expect something ahead at all moments, and although there was nothing save the glittering May landscape, the convincing direction became in itself more than enough to hold her, and hold her it did, as had her realization of the night power in and around Gibson. She was held fast, but no more than anyone on the train, no more than farmers, fencemen, or drovers outside who were passed by and left to work amid their own silence and claimed lands, no more than boys in Gibson who prodded cattle with dry white cotton-willow sticks, or distant horsemen on a ridge, galloping only to disappear, although leaving the surety of their gallop impressed upon the passengers. A detachment of pony soldiers, '75 blue, rode two by two on a wagon track, swords and buckles shining. They did not always know what they did, but by God they did it, as it was inevitable. Had she not lived her life in grayness and seen the bright only by fantasy? Did she not as the daughter of a man deserve these rich lands which had been declared ready and were being gathered in the arms of those who had come from such long ways away? Yellow Sky was in the mountains, up high, beyond the timberline which was like a skirt. The air was as thin as shell and pearl bright as the lakes and plummeting black-rock streams. She would stop in Yellow Sky but others would pass right on, and yet others right down to the broken beaches of the Pacific. This young impressionable girl alone on the cool wicker-weave seat of a shady railroad car moving out West could not be stopped. The colors in her were bound for Yellow Sky.

At about six in the morning the tired train halted in a cool saddle of the mountains just above the treeline. Men began to carry wood from enormous stockpiles along the track and load it on the coaler. A wooden trough was lowered from a cable-bound barrel tank and mountain water fell into the blackened holds of the locomotive, dribbling, spraying, and steaming from valves of nickel and steel, hissing like a swarm of locusts in the convoluted boilers. The steam from the locomotives gaskets mingled with the early morning mist, low clouds which hid white gold-flecked mountains of sunrise. The peaks had begun to shine many hours before, and after sunset they would shine even though the night was black, the price for this advanced and delayed burnishing of the mountains being shade and darkness at the extreme hours. Those who lived in that place stared each day in special communication at the shining crowns all about them. The man who had charge of the railroad depot was tall and wore hobnailed boots which awakened passengers as he walked on top of the cars. His boots also awakened his children, a little bear-faced boy and two fat little girls happy to have only their own thousands of private jokes.

The one hundred or so people in the town were miners, bridge workers, and railroad men who rode small mounted donkey engines up and down the passes securing faulted track and removing obstructions. There were always bridges to build, sometimes of several yards, sometimes of a quarter of a mile, because it was ravine country, rocky, high, indifferent to smooth-trafficking men and natural only to birds such as eagles, hawks, crows, and falcons—mountain birds with eyes of wondrous and staggering capabilities. Sharp as a ten-foot glass, they still could not see veins of silver spread variously throughout the ravines and deep into rock where only men could go, and by great effort. The trackers held the land down by use of iron bands, the bridgemen smoothed it, and the miners pierced it—as if they were hunters and it a mammoth, succumbing to their studied attack.

The attack was not studied but passionate, and not of greed alone. At each day's end the bridgemen, the railroadmen, the miners looked at the land in the quiet time when the mountains shone softly like lanterns into the dark valley, and they saw that it was not damaged. Work as they did, the peaks were high, the streams excellently fresh, the pastures rich, their iron and wood, their fences and track all but invisible due to the greatness of the land. This, as much as anything else, made them love it. It was invincible and so beckoned, challenging them to make their mark. Impossible, they said when they looked up, for the sky was as blue as a pure packet of indigo, and it reached into deep unconquerable heaven.

The conductor (who had warned Katherine to be careful of sparks—prompting her to say that it was impossible to be careful of sparks) roused her from a fitful, watery-eyed, straight-backed, sitting-up, night never ends sleep and she with the rest of the passengers stepped into a mountain village where they were served tea and rolls. Katherine stood quietly at yet another window, this in the depot, and she saw in the distance the lantern mountains glowing gold in all directions, catching the future sun. There, and just then did she realize, was the source of the power she had sensed days before. This time it was realization which struck her, not revelation, and there were no tears or risings within. She simply realized in the deadest and most sober of moments that in those mountains was the source, glancing off high lighted rock faces where no man could ever go, split into rivers eastward and westward running in little fingers to every part of the land, to the oceans where it blended with the newly turned sea foam and sun.

As the sun became stronger, but still not visible, they'reembarked onto the train. When Katherine approached the three-stepped iron stand, the conductor offered her his hand. She wondered why, thinking that perhaps he was going to help her up, something he did not do. But he shook her hand, and barred her way. Why? she said, and then he pointed to her luggage—leather cases and white canvas duffels—and when she still did not understand, to the mountains with golden light like the warm light from a candle. She was struck dumb. The train began to pull away, conductor and all, with a vast exhalation of white steam, and he said to the stunned girl what she already knew, “This is Yellow Sky.” As the train vanished she could think only of her father, her mother, and the gray oceans in between. Oceans in between, their lights had lasted, and she had found her way. It came in a flood, and she shuddered. Oceans in between. It was an end. It was a beginning. Katherine had come to Yellow Sky.

T
HEY ARE
building a new wing, but nevertheless it is quiet. On instructions from the contractor the men work slowly, almost silently. With each board or frame it is as if a decision must be made: shall we tighten this, or shall we let it rest? The old men with shirts wrapped around their heads inevitably continue, although one has the impression that perhaps someday they simply will not work and instead lean on their trowels or sit on the sacks of concrete. At the rate they work, it is hard to tell if they are building or tearing down.

It is the same with us, I suppose, when we treat a dying patient. Like the old Iraqi Jews who pour the cement, we, too, must decide whether or not to tighten our patients dying frame or just to let it dissolve and run away on the light blue air.

Blue is the predominant color at Elisha. It is seen everywhere out the big windows, from their tops to their bottoms, because we are on the summit of a hill—better to say mountain, although I hesitate to call anything a mountain unless it is capped with snow. Most windows look north; the ease of the light is inescapable; a soft clear altitude of blue air flees from all sides. Ships at sea, like small precision engines enameled in red and orange and black, move across a glass of blue. Passengers in a German dirigible would have had it no better than patients here. It is true they could move from place to place, but at Elisha we have no vibration—not even from the construction. Except for the souls that die within, it is a perfect environment.

It is in this hospital that I met my wife. On chill November evenings we made tea in the laboratory, which overlooks the Hadar; the bright orange flame of a Bunsen burner and the tea in a glass beaker made the dark cold and hissing respiratory winds outside less terrible. I remember well staring at a large desk calendar underneath a fluorescent light, trying to fix the time and feeling permanently I did. It was November 15, 1965, and it was ten o'clock. As I have said, the wind was whistling outside and it was dark and we were in love. And the clear light and sounds nearly matched our excitement. We spoke of Switzerland, and California, and Paris, and we have been to those places and we have been back.

We had then grave aspirations, as doctors might. We have achieved some of them, others have been whittled away by the world. We have not been bent by great events so that we are something other than ourselves, with an enemy within. On the contrary, we have been lucky. I have been in war but not in the thick of it. I have been in upheaval but not in the thick of it. I have never been concerned with governments, one way or another, because one way or another they have never been much concerned with me.

 

T
HE FIRST
of this September marked the opening of school. Even I shared the excitement of the new year. As I walked to the hospital I passed a high school, the courtyard of which was jammed with noisy foolish students from whom—contrary to the popular assumption—one should not learn but rather take revival. A beautiful young girl reminded me of my wife and of the autumn when we met. The trees were rustling and it was cool in the shade, and I left as she was blushing because I had stared intently.