Refiner's Fire (12 page)

He ended up in this closet at least once a day, and was instructed to leave his coat and lunch-box there instead of in the bank of assigned cubbyholes. Through a small window much higher than he could reach, he looked to the sky in the manner of prisoners. He spent hours in acute embarrassment and shame (worse even than the terrible moment in which the other children had discovered that he was an orphan), but he learned to read every nuance of the sky and clouds.

This day in early June was most humiliating, since there was a party, during which Miss Peggy completely forgot about Marshall. Marshall was too proud to ask for his freedom, staying instead crouched on the closet floor, staring at the window. The other children laughed, fought, and sang. Marshall had his clouds and changing light.

Just as the little party was drawing to a close, Miss Peggy remembered Marshall and dashed to the closet, fearing and wishing that he had been smothered, which of course was impossible because the window was open. When she unlatched and swung open the door she saw him in the corner, with his brown oxfords, blue denims with turned-up cuffs, black-watch shirt, and sandy blond hair. He looked at her when she asked him to come out, and said nothing. It was clear that he preferred to stay in the closet. He was being neither sullen nor obstinate. He simply preferred to be there alone. She made him promise to come out for his lesson, and eventually he did.

In the middle of the lesson some of the children looked up in fear. A tall man had come to the door. He was sunburnt and rough-looking, with a mass of black hair and a black mustache. He was handsome, standing on the swaybacked threshold in his Abercrombie & Fitch tough-guy fishing outfit the color of good gunmetal. The sun struck his face, and although he smiled at the children he frightened them with his imposing presence. He had a violent, strange, gentle look, tiny windows of light perceptible in the eyes, a willing readiness evident. He walked over to the teacher and conferred with her. There were only a few more days of school; Marshall had learned what he had to learn in the first grade; and the river was cool and blue. Miss Peggy was amazed at how immediately and graciously she gave in, numbingly charmed by outrageous and unheard-of demands from this laborer who interrupted her class by standing in the doorway in boots and rolled-up sleeves. Livingston signaled Marshall with a movement of his eye, and Marshall, who had been poised holding his breath, jumped up and rushed to the closet to get his things as if he had just been freed of a thousand-year prison term. The two of them left the class like a farmer and his son going out early in the morning onto the plains.

They were riding in the old wooden station wagon with a hole in the passenger door where a horse had kicked it, going up and down the hills toward Eagle Bay. Marshall had his feet on the seat, and was sort of half-standing-leaning to see through the window the churches and stores in town and the fences and farms outside. “What'd you do today in school?” asked Livingston.

“I dunno.”

“How's the arithmetic coming along?”

“Awright.”

“How 'bout the reading?” said Livingston, remembering that Mrs. Livingston had found Magruder's
Geography of the Despotic Asian Principalities, Protectorates, Colonies, Trust Territories, Mandates, & Secessionist Splinter States
under Marshall's pillow.

“Awright,” answered Marshall, playing with wood he had plucked from the damaged door.

They turned into Eagle Bay and started going down the road to the house, when suddenly Marshall doubled up in storms of sobbing, unable to catch his breath, shaking all over, getting hot and red. Livingston stopped the car, got out, and went around to the passenger side. He opened the door and lifted Marshall into his arms. Marshall continued to sob, and Livingston sat down on a stone wall, holding him up close, trying to look in his eyes, rocking him almost like a baby. When at last he did see into the eyes of the boy he held, they were a mystery to him. They said so much and seemed so sad. Marshall told him about what had happened, and along with his resolution to see to it, Livingston was convinced that the little child was moved by currents deeper than he had thought.

At the stable they saddled up a horse and Antonio the pony, and Mrs. Livingston came out to give them a cooler of cold drinks and sandwiches. In her presence Marshall's color returned and he was happy and cheerful. She shared some of his secrets, and she could make him forget anything which troubled him. They tied wire-cage crab traps onto the saddles, mounted, and rode off into the woods on their way to the Oscawana Bend, where, when the sun was strong and high, the crabs bit like crazy and you could stand on the deserted shore and watch the bass leaping like silver. The river was glassy and flat as Marshall rode with Livingston along its edge hoping a train would pass by and salute with its whistle.

One did. They heard it in the north about five minutes before it arrived. It was going forty miles an hour—six black engines and two hundred fifty cars. The lead engines light was visible far up the track, at first a tiny diamond, then like a mirror reflecting the sun. At night these beams were blinding. When the engine cab passed by, Marshall held the reins in one hand and pulled an imaginary whistle-cord with the other. The engineer was a lean squinting man covered with oil. He surveyed the father on his brown quarter horse, the son on a reddish Shetland, and their crab traps lashed to the saddles. Then he blew his whistle several blasts. The horses sidled. Antonio put his two left hooves into the cool lapping water. A short time later the whistle blasts echoed off the cliffs south of Haverstraw, but could hardly be heard over the rumbling of the freight. Passing them were the dirty saffron-liver-colored cars of the Pacific Fruit Express; boxcars from a dozen railroads—Georgia Pacific, New York Central, Rock Island, B&O, New Haven & Hartford, Pennsylvania, Canadian Pacific, CNR, Union Pacific, Southern Pacific, Illinois Central, Santa Fe; the company cars—Swift, Hygrade, Armour, Morton, United States Steel, Flo-Sweet; coal cars; oil and chemical tankers; flat cars; and cars loaded with hogs and cows going to slaughter. Each had a distinctive color pattern, and some had notable smells. When the caboose passed, Livingston turned his hand in the air and pantomimed something rising from it like smoke. Then he dropped his reins and flashed both hands twice. A man at the rail of the caboose saluted in thanks—he had been informed of a smoking hot-box twenty cars up. After the train passed, the smells of pig, stale, rotted fruit, and grain remained, but the north wind cleaned things out fast.

Marshall asked, “Daddy, where does it come from?”

Livingston answered, “It comes from all over the country, from all forty-eight states.”

“Where?”

“You want me to name the states again, huh.” Marshall waited for Livingston to begin. Soon he would be able to name the states as fast as Livingston, who started at Maine, went down the East Coast to Florida, across the Gulf to Alabama and Mississippi, up through the Middle South and West, the Northwest, the West, and the Southwest. Marshall was dazzled. He tried, but left out Arkansas, Idaho, Nevada, and Minnesota.

A mile before Oscawana they set out at a canter down a stretch of narrow beach. Bass were jumping, and muskrats ran off into the weeds. Marshall had been taken up on a horse the day the doctor said his illness had passed. As far back as he could remember he had been sitting on saddles. At six he was also a tolerably good shot with a boy's lever-action Winchester, but as yet Livingston had not let him shoot from the horse. With his legs bowing out the brass-buckled stirrups and the rifle cracking in militant repetition, Livingston could shoot accurately and fast from his galloping mount, swiveling from side to side to deal with imagined enemies while Marshall looked on and drank it in to the smallest spaces in his soul as if in rigorous preparation for unknown or generalized vengeance. Only six, Marshall dreamed on occasion of slaughtering his enemies, though he had none, and in his imagination he could be cruel even if he were mostly kind.

They arrived at the crabbing place on the tip of the Oscawana Bend, and took the saddles off the horses. Marshall led them out a little into the sandy flats where they drank from clear pools. Down at Eagle Bay it would have been impossible for the horses to drink from the river and not get sick. But Oscawana was not too brackish, primarily because the Croton River (which they had crossed sinking up to their knees) intervened and blocked the salty bay. It was just a bit salty at Oscawana; horses like that. For several years Livingston had intended not to let them drink from the Hudson, since it was supposed to have been getting dirty—but for the moment it seemed clean enough. By the time Marshall got back and tied up the horses Livingston had baited the traps with gristle and meat scraps. They climbed the rocks and went to a deep place where with all his strength Livingston threw the cages out into the water. They took the lines and wrapped them around a stump, after which they sat down in the sun and ate lunch. It was very hot and humid, with the wind coming off the river.

The opposite side was flat before it became mountainous. High trees silhouetted in shimmering green made it seem like Africa, and it was quiet except for the small curling waves and the sounds of white herons as they took off along the water, splashing and then climbing on an invisible thermal. As it began its descent the sun hit Livingston and Marshall in their eyes, making them squint into the distance and keep still in the placid heat. Now and then they would pull in the traps and put the crabs in a big bucket. But they mainly sat and watched the colors of the distance and the white birds soaring over the river.

When they were somewhat dazed from this, a mirage appeared on the surface of the river. A little town from west of the Hudson, a town unrecognizable to them, was suddenly standing in the ship channel. White herons and gulls circled through steeples intense and wavering in the mirage, and a car moved across the water. It was extraordinary, and it made Marshall rise in wonderment. Livingston too was frozen in its power. For a full half an hour they stared at it, watching movements inside, watching it shimmer and change position. It seemed real.

Livingston had last seen a mirage in North Africa during the war, when he was a major in Intelligence traveling from Algiers to Cairo by truck convoy. They were south of the German pocket, bumping along the dusty road in white heat. Intermittently a song came in on the Allied radio. It was a sharp jazz tune with lyrics which went something like: “If I had a zillion dollars, if I had me just a zillion; when I get frisky give me whisky, give me whisky and I'll die.” The driver was beating time on the wheel as he went dangerously and jokingly fast. A great white terraced city appeared, resting above the horizon in a bed of blue like the deep blue off the mesas in Arizona—so deep that it damages the sense of uprightness and causes one to circle without restraining force. The driver kept driving to the fast song, but the hair stood up on his arms and neck and he said, “Jesus Christ, Lord Almighty, white terraces, what the hell is that?” although he knew quite well that it was a mirage. They drove transfixed as minutes passed during which the white city danced in the sky ahead of them.

That evening when the convoy pulled into a little encampment, a captain in command of the American detachment called Livingston to interrogate some German prisoners. They were in a barn which smelled of hay and animals and was lit by a kerosene lantern throwing a golden light over the sunburnt faces of the assembled soldiers. There were a dozen or so Germans. Livingston approached a repulsively overproud young officer. Livingston was a good deal rougher, older, more authoritative, and bigger than the thin Afrika Korps lieutenant, but he felt nevertheless at a disadvantage when confronted by the hopelessly and meticulously ingrained worldview of the young Nazi. He began to speak and question in a German tinged with Yiddish and Yiddish intonations. It took the young officer a while to fathom the meaning of the Americans fluent outlandish speech, and in shock and disgust he interrupted his interrogator, saying “You are a Jew,” to which Livingston nodded in the affirmative.

The German spit in his face. Livingston slammed his fist into the lieutenants stomach, collapsing him in a heap. The younger man was rather fragile, but Livingston jumped him anyway and was ready to beat him when he snatched Livingstons pistol from its holster. The guards came alive. As one of them emptied a carbine into the German, the German completed his last intended act and shot himself in the head. Everyone drew back. It had been so sudden, and he lay in the middle of the earthen floor directly under the lantern, a mass of blood and torn tissue. The prisoners and their captors were speechless in the sharp night noise of the crickets, and the lantern swayed back and forth.

Marshall had never heard anything like this, and looked at Livingston as if he were the key to a great many mysteries of which Marshall had not even begun to know. As the sun was getting low and softer over the mountains, he put his head in his hands and closed his eyes. Marshall touched him, knowing that he could not comfort him, not in a million years. Livingston was crying, something Marshall had never seen him do and would not see again.

When it became cooler and everything was quiet and calm as if in preparation for darkness, they arose, pulled in the traps, saddled the horses, and got ready to leave. Marshall had been thinking of the poor cows and pigs he had seen going to slaughter. They had cried and he had heard them. But then it had been bright daylight with the sun shining on him and the wind striking his face, so he had not noticed. Later, when dusk caused sadness even among the landed birds, Marshall remembered the terrifying cries of the animals packed together in the railroad cars. He turned to Livingston and said, “Daddy, lets throw the crabs back,” and they did.

N
OT SURPRISINGLY,
Eagle Bay was a residence of eagles, who had been there before anyone could remember and chose the forest and reedy bays as refuge for their last great eastern congregation. A score or more of them rested in the tops of the highest trees, on cliffs overlooking the river, in the dead branches of giant oaks. Marshall had trouble distinguishing the younger ones from hawks, especially in flight, but the old eagles had white hoods and muscular bodies unlike those of their air-slim competitors. These were the biggest and the most like the eagle in pictures or on silver dollars. All of them (eagles, eaglets, hawks, hawklets) hunted in the forest and across the river, and could be seen returning from the west in paired flight, a young one following his instructor.