The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride (11 page)

On the sill where she had stepped over, a feather rested, blown in from nesting maybe though it was early for that, a clean feather silk-smooth at the top, not separated anywhere, with a fluff toward the pen-tip of it, from some middle-sized bird, nothing fancy, but whose tail nobody had yet put salt on. He smiled at it too. The sisters knew of the names, his and the mate’s; there wasn’t a chance that they didn’t; in a Sand Spring, the structure of the gossip at least let one see what were impossibilities too.

Gently he reached down and picked up the feather. He wasn’t a picker-up of pins or a sufferer from any of the nerve twitches that came in about ten years later, but to a boy grown up on a deck, the soil that was so wild and itinerant under the feet of shore boys was always precious, as well as any stray pebble and shot from it. Whereas to a boy from the coal caverns, as his mate always remarked, a clean deck to walk on would have been like silver, and the towns the mate fell in love with, one after the other, were always clean. The two of them were opposites then, not unlike a pair of sisters. And this was enough of parallels, at least for now.

He had no hat on, ever, so just before he bolted, he put the feather behind his ear. “Maybe that’s why we came to be buddies,” he said from outside, leaning back into the bay again. “My mate’s name is Jim.”

O
RAL DESCRIPTION CANNOT TOUCH
that spring—and not because it is gone—or that there will be others just like. Washlines left out on its evenings had a mystery, and even to the well-sighted, an arbor in a garden sank back in the twilight like an Italian arch. Projects were touched by it, or people were moved to them. Even the plans for a Ford agency were affected, the way a plain street, with plain maples and horse-chestnuts, is one morning littered with the wildest yellows and greens. And when the householder has swept these away, then down come the whites. It was a time of clearness and short, lovable mysteries, when a man may well be afflicted with a keenness of sight for things he has always known aren’t there.

The mate had found his town. At least—after days and days of his circuit-riding under those wind-glassy skies, toward horizons which were one moment riotous and the next second as neat and sharp as a pruned hedge—when he burst in on the dinner-chops with a statement to that effect, it was clear that the time had come; he had
had
to find it, just as much as if a giant traffic-hand had come down in the road before him, holding up a sign that said
STOP THEN GO
. As he said to Jim, if they weren’t to let themselves be chosen, they must choose. In this town that had found him, there was a house to which was already attached the means for just such a business, agency and garage, as they wanted, also a half-acre of frontage for expansion, also—unimportantly of course—an owner named Skinner. Skinner didn’t particularly want to sell; in fact, said the mate, the idea had not yet occurred to the man, but they were going to get that setup from him—in an honest way of course—if they had to hire three wolves to blow him out of there.

“Three pigs, it was,” said Jim. “That story is the other way round. I mean—one wolf. Not even two.” But he had to laugh. The two of them looked at each other, grinning. They weren’t looking in any reflecting mirror. Jim couldn’t help knowing he was handsome, a tall, rolling-gaited man with a fresh complexion, whose pink cheeks annoyed him with their youth. The mate was shorter, though not as short as he looked, with a chiropractor’s neck and arms, or a pick-axer’s, and not bad-featured in a pugnacious way, but swart enough to keep him always at the razor, and not above a sneak of talcum on the jowls. Like many from the mines, he had a fine voice, the speaking one too—and he couldn’t help knowing from the women, beginning with his own mother, that he had a smile. And where Jim’s head was close-shaven enough for a phrenologist, so that in some lights his blond hair seemed white, the mate’s black crop shot forward in a forelock which made him look as if he was being pulled along by it—even to himself. Looking back at them both, they were a nice pair, part of the grinning being that they knew it. Slice either of them, and you’d get only honesty, tempered with need but not yet burnt by it.

“Pigs is pigs,” said the mate, adding that Skinner’s house, and certain others in the neighborhood, had been built by Swedes, a Swede carpenter, and scrubbed by his faithful fry ever since—or almost.

“What’s its name,” said Jim. “This great town.”

“Names, names,” said the mate, but he was smiling. “It’s on the main road, of course, but it’s just a section. I don’t think it’s on the map, really.” Then he leaned back and laughed so hard he had to slap himself. He jabbed a fork at Jim. “Going northwest, ask for directions, they say ‘It’s just after you get to the Palewater Reservoir, mister.’ How’s that for you? But if you ask going southwest to it, they tell you ‘It’s just about after you leave the Champion Woods Pulp Company.’ How’s that?”

“No name,” said Jim. “Where in the love of God is this place? What’s it near?”

They got out the map, which spread itself out in a resigned way. The mate’s finger trembled, skipping over the Adirondacks, going due west as if it were a dowser’s, then due south. When it found the spot, it could barely hover over, jouncing with excitement. Jim looked at him, inquiring, then down at the map.

There for sure was Palewater, in one direction. And there was Champion Woods, in another. Between them, on the main road, there was a minim of space which when it stretched to human scale must be quite comfortable, though Jim’s spirits sank a bit at the idea of its being on the road well enough but without a town to it—of course they had to have the road. But he’d been thinking of some deep green well of a town, up to which the lively motors would come to drink, man-made and hearty, but then somehow fade, fade away again, leaving the place natural.

“Look harder,” said the mate. He moved his finger away. There are four directions to a map, after all, and Jim had looked in only two of them. He looked crossways in a third direction, then, following it down, in a fourth.

“By God!” said Jim. “By
God,
Jim!”

A few miles in the fourth direction, there was Oriskany—where he’d been born.

They spent the balance of the night talking equities and amortizations and other money talk which a session with the local banker had taught them quite well, but that night there wasn’t anything professional about it except their solemn, joined manner; it was as if they had entered upon an agreed magic dialogue which would keep old man Skinner from selling before morning. Most selling and buying, once it gets past sensible need and projects into the future, is nothing but this kind of personification and magic, with maybe some group madness thrown in. And most bankers even, and businessmen—but that’s another story and no time for it, except to point out that Skinner—who promptly became Skinflint in the partners’ talk, and must have aged twenty years overnight in the bargain—was actually himself only one grade less innocent than a chickenfarming type, and only about forty-three. Since the next day was Sunday, they drove over to see him. Cars were already well in of course, though still called autos, and had been in for years, and taxis and buses too; don’t think the dates are wrong here; we are simply still in the period when they hadn’t taken over yet. The mate and Jim had no Stutz Bearcat; they had a Ford. It got them there just before supper, a quarter of five o’clock.

Skinner must have thought they had dropped from heaven, even though they had telephoned ahead. He was the mouse-haired, hysterical type who should have married a big woman to boss him, and maybe with psychology to help him along with his woes he would have, but these were the olden days, and instead he’d married his wife. She was just bright enough to drop children like rabbits, and pink-eyed ones too, just like herself, but she was also the legatee of this house we two were after.

We. But there—it’s been understood all along, hasn’t it, who that pair was?

Well, to go on, there was the house—and the barn (for it was a farmhouse, and the barn was the greater part of it)—the barn of stone-and-mortar, ledged for posterity and for a sunlight it hadn’t quite been able to get that far north, and a seventeen-ninety over the door. The house itself was later, but good too, clapboard, center entrance, double chimneys and a fanlight; that Swedish carpenter had passed through Vermont. There were no Adam mantels but what use would the partners make even of five fireplaces with such a good draw?—and the house was good seasoned wood all through, made to stand, and no plumbing or heating yet, which would keep the price down, and of course, there in front, already let into what had once been the second parlor, was the grocery store and store window—which was how the Skinners skinned along. This would be the partner’s office. As for the barn, it already housed a Model T Ford lost in it like an omen, to show how many more of its kind that barn could take on. Outside, there was already one gas pump, and over the acreage behind all, a hill for the sun to rise out of, and across the post road built by the first settlers, a woods for it to go down into. Oh, it was a fine setup that had caught the mate’s eye, or would be, once the Skinner litter had been cleaned off of everywhere, the pair said to themselves; there’s no litter worse than a bad farmer’s, and Skinner, among other things, had been ploughing up the acreage for something. Even the store was halfhearted, with signs the family had been at their own groceries, and tawdry ones too. The barn took Jim’s eye at once; it was beautiful.

The trouble was, the place had no need or real reason to be at all, any more; none of it did, not barn nor house nor the land. But how were Jim, who didn’t know about land yet, or the mate, who’d never yet had any, to know this—that such a property, in such a place, can pass from hand to hand and still, like an amulet, keep its first stubborn luck attached to it? Even the Skinner litter would be a deception, prompting an industrious buyer to think he was the man to make the change. The trouble with these houses that last is that they were built for nothing but
once—
and for the post road. They last and last, but they won’t ever pervert to anything else, not to summer places, because of the road, not to business ones, because of no town. But people are always trying, in their stalls and stores and eateries, and of course anyplace having such a sunup and sundown has a good deal to do with it. So it has come about that these houses on roads without towns are the badlands of America in a small way, just as those great glory holes at the center of the continent—the canyons and deserts—are its badlands in a grand way, land where nothing more than carnival or show, or a surprise of the spirit, can ever be arranged. But these other smaller places—being so random but still everywhere in the lymph and life of the countryside and the cityside too—there’s nothing to be done but to spit and to stamp on them, and to start all over again in these new developments, as is being done now. As for the partners, one look at Skinner with that fine hill and all its works behind him, and they were convinced they had come just in time.

A price was quickly agreed upon by all tycoons present, said sum first being tempered the partners’ way—by reason of their willingness to take over all mortgage arrears as soon as they had the money to do it, and then tempered Skinner’s way—by reason of his willingness to wait. Imagination was therefore left free on both sides, to rejoice in its bargain. The partners, for instance, were welcome to visit their property-to-be at any time, and in the next months tirelessly did so. Skinner, in taking them the rounds of their estate, often pointed out to them improvements they would make, when he was in a large mood, or repairs he hadn’t been up to, if he was in a restrained one—to both of which they agreed, like the indulgent landlords they were. Indeed, imagination was rampant on all sides that spring; even the children gathered at the fenceline when the partners left, to stare sullenly at the new owners, and behind them, sometimes the wife too. Skinner enjoyed it most of any, stepping with the lordly pace of a man whose property is wanted, and as came out later, making no more mortgage payments. The property itself needed to do nothing, being everybody’s dream.

The new owners themselves worried a little, as they felt the advancing lures of property, heavy and light. As they would leave it, at a sundown, the mate often shook his head over it, looking back. “That woman’s no housekeeper,” he might say, as he had said that first evening, or something like. Jim, blinking equally in the golden outpour which hid somewhere behind it his watery birthplace, always summed it up his way, never varying. “Well,” he always said, as he too had that first evening. “Well, that lets out Sand Spring.”

During those months also, the trips to Oriskany—as they had taken to calling these, though they never went near the namesake town itself—seemed to take the place of other close relationships, or rather, to free them for still another kind. The mate, though still traveling regularly on his job, no longer found new land-and-home treasures, or was dulled or sated to them, now that he was owned. He found himself thinking of women again, or at least of kindly waitresses along the way, many of whom were extra kind in this magnolia weather, and it was no trouble at all to persuade Jim to ankle along with him in that sort of teamwork. The two of them found that the States were no different from Europe in these matters, only, in a queer way, more cynical. And don’t be surprised that these matters are mentioned here. For, just because we seem to be constructing an idyll here—and maybe we are—doesn’t mean that a man doesn’t remember the more humdrum pleasures of such a time, as well. What is an idyll, but that part of a man’s life which he will remember with clarity for all of it, so that all his years his tongue can go on touching it, as on a live nerve?

As for the Pardees, these other matters, that is, other women, even helped Jim remember them, whereas along the line of the sisters’ usual destiny they might have been forgotten—though how so-called low women often help out the high ladies might not be appreciated by either side. But so it was—and so it sometimes occurred that he went to the Pardees for a pretended fourth time—the whole route there: two miles to the town, one and a half through it, and four round by the lake: all of it—but only in his mind. Meanwhile, in Sand Spring itself, people now and then tried to josh him about the sisters as the two veterans had; a love affair in such a place is often half audience. But as summer came on, it happened as might be expected; people forgot. Jim, on the other hand, though he didn’t get out there, found himself mentioning them now and again; clearly he thought of the sisters as staying the way they always were, suspended, if not actually waiting. And if this had no direct value to the sisters themselves, nevertheless, somewhere along the stations of life they had gone up a bit. In one way or another, for somebody, they had not passed out of mind.