Beyond the Black Stump (3 page)

He did not think of these things in that detail, but they formed together to create the general happiness that stayed with him all next day as he flew westwards in the Constellation. He changed planes at Chicago about noon, and flew on through the interminable afternoon, stretched out by changes in the local time, over South Dakota and Montana to the high mountains that delighted him, that heralded the Coast. In the evening light Mount Rainier showed up ahead, snow-capped and symmetrical and lovely, and the aircraft started to lose height; they landed at Seattle in the dusk. The fresh, salt-laden breeze from the Pacific was a tonic as he stepped out of the airplane.

He could not get home that night, but he could at least sleep in his own state. He telephoned from the airport for a hotel reservation and took a Convair southwards from Seattle to Portland. With each hour that he flew the sense of coming home grew stronger in him, the airports less magnificent and friendlier. He had not been home for three years,
but the United despatcher at the gate of Portland airport came from Portage, a village not far from Hazel, and knew Stanton, and greeted him by name.

“Hi-yah, Stanton,” he said. “Quite a time since we saw you here.”

The young man paused, delighted, but unable to remember the despatcher’s name. “That’s right,” he said. “I’ve been away.”

“I know it,” said the fat, uniformed man. “Some place in the East, was it?”

“That’s right. Arabia.”

“Uh-huh. You going on by Flight 173 in the morning?”

“That’s right.”

“Saw your name down on the list. Where are you stopping tonight?”

“I’ll be at the Congress Hotel.”

The official scribbled a note upon a pad. “I’ll fix the airport limousine for you. Five minutes past seven at the hotel.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“Your mother, she came through about two weeks back. Your father, of course—he comes through quite a bit. They’re looking fine.”

“You don’t look bad yourself.”

“Putting on weight,” said the official sadly.

The limousine was waiting to take Stanton to the city. With the homecoming he reverted to the idiom of his boyhood. “You know somethin’?” he enquired.

“What’s that?”

“It’s kind of nice to be back.”

The despatcher laughed. “’Bye now.”

He got to the hotel at about ten o’clock, tired, but not too tired to ring his parents from the hotel bedroom. He spoke to his father and mother for some minutes and told them the time when he would land at Hazel airport; then he rang off and undressed slowly, savouring the comforts of the bedroom and the shower. It was a warm night, though much cooler than New York, and he lay for a time before sleep came to him. He had nothing to read till he discovered the Gideon Bible in the drawer of the bedside table; he leafed it through as he grew drowsy, remembering the intonations of the minister in church as the familiar phrases met his eye, one after the other.

That meant Arabia, of course. Well, it hadn’t.

Well, He had. The motor might have failed way out over the Atlantic instead of half an hour before they were due to land at Lisbon.

He was home again, back from his travels, in one piece. Back in his own state of Oregon, in his home town tomorrow. Gee, this Book had messages, skads and skads of them, if only you bothered to look.

Presently he slept.

He flew next morning in an old D.C.3 eastwards from Portland up the Columbia River valley, landing once at The Dalles. The D.C.3 Put down on the small Hazel airport in the middle of the morning and taxied into the miniature airport building, and there at the fence he could see a little crowd of people waiting to meet him. He got out of the machine carrying his plastic overnight bag and the wrapped parcel that contained the barbecue set, and walked quickly to the barrier. There were his mother and his father, cleanshaven and portly, and his sister Shelley with her husband Sam Rapke who ran his father’s business, the biggest hardware store in Hazel, and their two children, Lance, aged six, and Avril, aged four; they must have left the baby at home. All the family were there to meet him, those who lived in Hazel, and he was glad of it.

“Hi-yah, Mom,” he said, and kissed her. She said, “Junior, you’re so
brown!”

He turned from her to his father. “Hi, Dad.” His father said, “Welcome home, son. You’re looking mighty well.”

“I feel pretty good,” Stanton said. “Glad to be back again.”

His mother asked, “Did you get sick at all, out in those hot places, Jun? You never said in any of your letters.”

“I wasn’t sick a day,” he assured her.

“Well now, isn’t that just wonderful! I got so worried you might have been sick and not told us.”

“I wouldn’t have done that, Mom.”

He turned to greet his sister and the children and Sam Rapke, and when that was over he turned to his father again. “Say, Dad, I got this for you when I stopped off in New York.” He handed him the parcel. To his mother he said, “I got your present in one of the bags, Mom.” The barbecue set was unwrapped there and then as they stood by the airport barrier. His father said, “Say, that’s just what we’ve been needing! We built an outdoor barbecue this spring.”

“I know it, Dad. You wrote and told me.”

His mother said, “Oh Junior! They’re so
elegant.”

The few bags were taken from the airplane and wheeled into the baggage room, and they went in to claim them. Carrying his grips they went out to the park. His father said, “I got something for you, son. How long a leave do you get now?”

“Till September twentieth, Dad.”

“Good enough. Well, that’s it. There she is.” There were only two cars in the park, a Dodge with a family already getting into it, and a great Lincoln convertible in two-tone blue, with blue upholstery, gleaming and bright. Stanton stared at it.

“Gee, Dad—not the convertible?” They walked towards it.

“Yours for your leave, son.”

“But, Dad, it’s just about new!”

“Done nine thousand miles. I sold it to Dirk Hronsky last fall.” Dirk Hronsky was the local lumber magnate. “He didn’t like it, didn’t like the power steering. He’s a wee bit heavy-handed driving on an icy road, an’ got himself a couple of skids, and his wife just didn’t care for it. So he traded it in for a new Mercury this spring, only a month or two back, an’ I kept it for your leave.”

“Gee, Dad, that’s swell of you!” Now that he was home again the schoolboy phrases, half forgotten in his wider life, came tumbling out one after the other.

His father and Sam Rapke put the suitcase into the trunk and closed it down; they had not allowed Stanton to carry anything. At the huge door of the car his mother said, “Now I’m getting in back while Junior drives us home.”

He said, “You come up front with Shelley, Mom, and let Dad drive. I’ll get in back.” All his life he had longed for a great modern car like that, but now that it was his he was half afraid of it, unwilling to experiment with it before his family.

His mother said, “No, Junior. You must drive your own car.”

He glanced at the floor, devoid of any clutch pedal. “I don’t suppose I know how, Mom. I’ve never driven an automatic shift.” He had left the country before they had come into very general use.

His mother said, “Why, Junior, even I can drive a car like this. You get right in and drive it!”

He slipped into the driver’s seat and explored the controls for a minute. His father got in beside him. Very gingerly, bearing in mind the motor of two hundred horsepower, he touched the accelerator. Nothing happened.

“You got to pour it on, son, to get rolling,” his father said. “Just pour it on.”

He poured it on, and the big car moved off. He drove it with increasing confidence and delight down the familiar highway to the town, past the well remembered stores and gas stations, across the railroad tracks and into the quiet, shaded streets where all Hazel lived, between Main Street and the High School. He drew up carefully beside the sidewalk opposite his home and stopped the motor. He sat motionless in the driver’s seat for a moment. “She’s certainly a lovely car,” he said quietly, and his parents beamed at his pleasure. He touched one of the stops upon the organ-like console in front of him, and said, “What does this one do, Dad?”

“Raises the antenna.” He pulled it, and the radio mast grew magically upwards. He pressed it, and the mast sank down again. “Well, what do you know!” breathed the geologist. “I bet she can pick up her heels and go, on a clear run.”

“Pass anything on the road, except a gas station,” his father laughed. “I’ve opened a charge account for you down at the garage.”

In his house his room was exactly as he had left it three years previously, the same college banners on the wall, his fishing rods, his guns, his steel bow and arrows, his skiing boots, all carefully dusted and tended and exactly as he had
left them. He was glad of it, and yet they made him feel that he had grown in stature during his travels; to some extent he had outgrown these things and if he were to live in Hazel now for any length of time his room would not be quite the same. Downstairs the house was as he had known it from the time when they had bought it in his early manhood, and yet there were changes to be seen. The old electric range that had dominated the kitchen had been ripped out and a more modern one installed that dominated it more, a new dishwasher stood where the old one had stood, a larger, grander, and more elaborate refrigerator. In the living-room a television set had appeared. In the basement the old heating plant had been ripped out and a new one installed, fully automatic, with time clocks and thermostats to control the temperature in every room, which his father demonstrated to him with great pride. A new outboard motor of improved design had replaced the old one, a new boat the old boat, and a new boat trailer the old boat trailer. His father’s Mercury and his mother’s Ford convertible were both the latest models, but that, of course, to some extent concerned the business. A used electric washing machine isn’t very easy to trade in, so three of them stood in the basement in a row, each marking a stage further in development. His father was responsible for all these innovations. As each new machine had been introduced, Mrs. Laird had smiled quietly and had displayed a distressing tendency to go on using the old one if it had been left for her to use. It took her about two years normally to get accustomed to a new machine and to cease grieving for the old, out-dated one, and by that time the new machine itself was obsolete and due to be replaced. It was a gentle joke within the family that Mom had never ceased to grieve for the Model T Ford that they had driven in the early years of marriage. “It was a lovely car,” she had once said quietly. “You couldn’t ever grind the gears, it wouldn’t go fast, and you could see where you were going.”

Stanton Junior settled down to his ten weeks’ leave happily enough, in his home town, in summer weather. Hazel lies in a bowl of the foothills of the Rocky Mountain range on the edge of the Hazel National Forest. The National Forest is a tract of mountain country about fifty miles long and thirty miles wide, designated by the Federal Government as a Primitive Area. In a Primitive Area no
house or road may be constructed and no internal combustion engine may run; if you go into it you go on horseback or on foot. In the high mountains the lakes are full of trout, and deer roam the mountain slopes. Few of the active citizens of Hazel did not fish the rivers and the lakes, many of them kept horses and packhorses for adventures in the wilderness that lay above the town. After the deserts of Arabia his home town was like a drink of clear, cool water to the geologist.

He could not, of course, resist considerable journeys in the Lincoln. A week after he got home he drove his mother on a visit to his other sister, Cathy, married to a sawmill manager at Bellingham, just short of the Canadian border, and a week or two after that he drove southwards for seven hundred miles down California to Stanford University to see old friends, covering five hundred and fifty miles in one day. He fished a good deal in the Hazel River, mostly with a spinner, and he made a few short trips into the mountains on horseback, staying out each time for a couple of nights and sleeping in a sleeping bag under the stars.

His chief difficulty, of course, was to find anyone to play with him. The men of his generation were dispersed, married, and working in jobs, and none of his generation of High School girls remained unmarried in the district. Chuck Sheraton was a lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force and likely to remain so; he had flown Sabres in Korea with a good combat record, but he was allergic to discipline and every time he rose a little in the estimation of the Air Force he got out of line, and got slammed down again. He was stationed at an Air Force base down in Texas now as an instructor, with Ruth and their four children; they were coming home on leave to Hazel in September, and Stanton looked forward to their coming. In the meantime fishing and riding in the mountains did not occupy him fully, and for the first time in his life he began to take an interest in his father’s business.

He was no salesman, though he delighted in the glorious new motor cars. Laird Motors Inc., however, had developed a large tractor business in that agricultural community, and the adaptation of the tractors to various uses in the lumber industry had caused them to set up a considerable workshop for the manufacture of special parts and tools. Behind the automobile showroom and the service station was a busy
general engineering shop, and this the geologist began to find absorbing in its interest. He had a good theoretical knowledge of metals and their properties but he had never before seen much of their manipulation. The conception, the design of a special forklift for a certain purpose in the Hronsky sawmill which should button on to an existing tractor interested him greatly; when it failed on test owing to a burnt weld he found that he could offer some constructive help in the selection of a better type of steel, based on his experiences at the drilling rigs. These minor engineering creations became of real interest to him in the weeks he was at home, and whenever he had nothing else to do he would find his way down to the shop and sit about watching the lathes and milling machines paring down the steel, and chatting to the men.