Having Everything Right (11 page)

Pascal said a strange thing: the sole cause of human unhappiness is our inability to remain quietly at home in our rooms. In a fist of working forest duff are more small lives than the human population of Earth: in secret, a busy power of being. Eden is there, compact. Heaven for a yew tree lies below. Is this why yew stands bent but cheerful? “Our songs are short,” said the Papago woman, “because we understand so much.” Yew stays home, grows slow, lives long: guest most faithful to this ground.

Any table of virgin fir, any maple chair, any oak floor is a bundle of stories. At a lull in the conversation, move your napkin aside. There are centuries under one hand's span, and the timbre of a long, spirited life for the rap of a knuckle. Woodworkers sometimes hear it—the sweetest yelp of the violin before they brush on the varnish of maturity. There
was a man who made rifle stocks of curly maple. His son made skiffs of Sitka spruce. Both gave up their ways, and sold their wood to my friend, who makes violins: spruce for the bellies, maple for the backs, with ebony fingerboards. So it has always been done. Tree of life, teach us to give up war and distance for the plain, local thrill of this music: pine, fir, cedar, yew.

T
HE
G
REAT
D
EPRESSION AS
H
EROIC
A
GE

Heartbeat takes me forward, stories take me back. Waking on the midnight train, or wakeful in my bed at home, in orbit memory I hurtle past the houses where my people grew. I ramble the vagabond circuit, the foggy geography of time, and glance through windows lit by a pincushion on a table, a book in hand. In this Kansas house my father will live. At this Nebraska farm my mother will arise. Tornado wants them dead. Fear wants them sad. I batter with the moth on screen doors, sipping a rusty fragrance, wanting in. My wings dissolve, I wake. I travel locally. In Oregon back home, when we gather for tea, I listen hard. In stories from the Great Depression and the ribbons of experience it sent
outward, my kin live simply. By their telling, hard times trained them to be happy. Their hardship stories work on me. Before dawn, alone at my desk, I try to sift it all, to give it all a shape. On this computer screen, my words spin green from light. How shall I live?

One winter day on the bus bound east through central Oregon, just as we dropped over the rim to the reservation at Warm Springs, I glanced across the aisle at a Wasco boy. He cradled a book that devotion had worn to tatters:
The Incredible Magic of the American Indian
. Late sunlight struck the page and lit his face, his eyes that hunted as he read. One seat back, in the hands of a ski bum about the same age, I saw Kerouac's
On the Road
. He traveled the kinked road twice: once by body, once by mind. The bus geared down. Outside, the steep sage hills tapered into darkness. I put my hand to the heart-pocket of my coat, where I had tucked away a tiny notebook to write down what I heard and saw and remembered—my own chosen stories of magic and departure. Traveling alone, each of us carried a book as medicine bundle, as survival kit of stories, as possible sack of belief and remedy to help us through the world.

Late that night, when I arrived in Burns, I learned my shirts and socks and sleeping bag had all caught the wrong bus in Bend. Surely now they traveled toward Los Angeles. The woman at the station counter, sleepy and ready to close, would put a tracer on my pack, she said, in the morning. Her hand on the counter flicked open, then slowly folded shut to show her regret and her fatigue. Beside her hand, in a rusted coffee can, a spindly tomato vine still grew—her pet and a February miracle. Marooned in Burns, I would grow beyond my custom, too. I turned away, starting off for the all-night Elkhorn Cafe. Outside, wind pumped snow and newspapers along the street. When the station lights had flickered out, the stars shone bold.

When you lose everything, what do you lose, and what do you keep? When you move with short notice, what do you take along? That night
in Burns, I thought of the people of Sugar City, Idaho, the people told by bullhorn the dam had given way and they had minutes to abandon their homes and scramble for high ground. One man grabbed his electric razor and ran. A woman gathered only her Hümmels with one loving sweep of her arms, and lurched away. The last man out just had time to snatch his cowboy hat before clambering into his nephew's wading pool and spinning away on the flood down Main Street. Before the water went down, it erased the town with a smear of mud, but everyone had a story.

I had to leave like that, and now I travel, an exile at a distance of thirty years from childhood. I carry stories from the old country, the point of origin, the central decade of the family's hard times. The Great Depression of the thirties makes our heroic age, our
Iliad
, our
Odyssey
, our trickster Coyote's time before the world was changed. I travel by bus, by foot, by dark, with a heart-pocket bundle of stories that light the road.

By habit I carry this notebook in my pocket, and travel as professional eavesdropper, because of the training I bring from home. When I played student there, my mother had a beautiful listening ear for our stories, and my father had a teacher's fine trick that made us feel part of something big. When one of the four wild kids would mention a fugitive thought, an idea in infancy, no matter how small, my mother would draw us out for more, or my father would stop the talk to savor what we had said. Often, they would match our saying to a line from literature or a story from the family lore. The literature flavored our lives then, but the stories stuck for good.

“Daddy, when I held the bow and arrows this time, I thought how Bobbie Elliot can hit a baseball better, but I know how to shoot.”

“You know,” my father would say, “Milton had the same idea.” He would reel out a grand, soothing passage then from
Paradise Lost
, a stretch of line from Shakespeare, a chanted reverie from Wordsworth, from George Eliot, Willa Cather, Thomas Mann. He would knot our
feeble syllables to the cadences of the great. The exact words of the poetry did not stay with me, but the feeling of being companion to Shakespeare struck like a bell in my heart. Child, parent, and saint of the language joined as fellow pilgrims on one road.

It happened the same with family stories, but I remember the stories. In the teaching episodes from my parents' memories, customs from Kansas and Nebraska where they grew might get linked to any detail from our lives. Packed in my parents' granary minds, stories sprang from seed. When we made small complaints, our whine could sprout a story from that golden void.

“My milkshake's all plugged up. I need a bigger straw!”

“In
Kansas
,” my father would answer, as if citing scripture, “my father would take us in the Model T to a wheatfield at the edge of town, and we'd each cut a real straw the mowing machine had left. Then at home in the evening, my mother would make strawberry milkshake—strawberry jam dropped in a quart of milk and shaken. Sure the seeds got stuck in the wheatstraw. That just slowed us down enough to taste it.”

Maybe the way he told it made our lives taste pale. Every Nebraska day and every Kansas story had a flavor like that. Exotic black cars lived there, and mysterious fathers taking kids out for a spin. A wheatfield bristled close to home, and beyond it, we knew, ran Cow Creek, and monster catfish, and nights of shenanigans trapping, tramping about, camping out, being alone. You could sip on a real wheatstraw, not this plastic. You could stand in that trim kitchen Ruby brightened, not this drive-in blacktop spotted with gum.

My father's father, Earl, traveled for the power company, taking great sweeps to the southwest from Hutchinson, from El Dorado, from Liberal. He dropped the boys off one time near Capulin Mountain in New Mexico.

“I'll be back through in ten days,” he said. “Can you make it north by then to Cottonwood Canyon? I think so, too. So long.”

The boys traveled cross-country, slept in caves, and licked flat pools after rain. They shot quail, rabbits, and doves with a deadeye twenty-two. They could strike a match with that gun, my father said, if they ever had to. One day they ate only a robin, sharing it wing by wing over the fire. Once at a ranch, they traded the story of their quest for a meal. They met a plowman in a dry canyon, and he took them home for stories and peaches dried in the sun. In ten days, sixty miles north from their starting place, Earl met them. He had given them a test and freedom.

“Did you face danger then, wandering around like that?” I asked my father on his birthday once.

“The world was all attached,” he said. “If only we could get lost.” As always, the story sent an invitation to us.

In the thirties, poverty gave our people a test and freedom. My father took a string of difficult jobs, and a few dangerous ones—fighting fire at the oil refinery, and holding the steel shaft of a star-drill with his hands for a clumsy roustabout to drive and drive with the sledge flashing over his head. Tornadoes came through on a binge. The Klan ran rife. Diphtheria struck. When his sister lay near death, my father burst into the room, boisterous from play.

“Is she dead yet?” he shouted. She lived, but his bright shout spun from the same family pluck that carried her through. That pluck made the heroic time. Did our small troubles deserve the name?

“Don't pay any attention,” my father said to our blackberry scratches or sidewalk bruises. When we whined over small defeats, my father came back with a Kansas joke.

“They asked the boy, ‘Are you full yet, son?'

“‘No,' he says, ‘I'm not full. I'm just down to where it don't taste good no more.'”

From Nebraska, the story-testament from Brethren farmers on my mother's side speaks most of change. The Frantz family must have
webbed the whole southern quilt of Nebraska. They kept moving, preaching, homesteading around. In the books that come down from that time, the names on the flyleaves read the same, but the places keep hopping about. They farmed or studied or took the interim pastorate in Illinois, then Nebraska, then Wyoming, then Nebraska again, Kansas, Colorado, California, Pennsylvania, and Heaven. For me, these stories winnow down from my mother, Dorothy Hope; from her older sister, Helen; and from their mother, Lottie, the grandmother my brother named forever “Boppums.”

The Bible held the public secrets of those days. The palm-sized New Testament that belonged to child Lottie burrows into my hand, soft as a favored doll worn ragged with affection. Back home in Oregon, I take it up this week to learn the code I saw painted on a car, a moss-green Dodge slung low. The driver before me at the stoplight, a prim and vintage woman, had drawn this message fine as embroidery gold on the black ground of her smashed rear bumper: “Jesus on Reagan—Matt. 23:14.” In my notebook, I took that down. At my home desk, I open to that verse: “Woe onto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows' houses, and for a pretense make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.” The Bible spoke her mind.

The brown spine of that book lingers threadbare. The cover falls open easy as a hand releasing prayer. But if that book held the public secrets, another held Boppums' own. We found it in her drawer—a slim, brown notebook locked shut with melted wax and a ribbon. Above the wax, writ faint in her black scrawl, this line: “Sealed till Finished.” No one would read it until she died.

Looking back by orbit memory, which window shall I trust above all? I have an account of my grandparents' wedding from the Beatrice, Nebraska,
Semi-Weekly
for June 17, 1902:

       
A little before 7 o'clock about fifty guests assembled in the parlors to witness the ceremony. Promptly at 7 amid the strains of the wedding march, rendered by Miss Daisy Wardlaw of Pickrell, the bride and groom entered the parlor and took their places under a beautiful portiere of green vines and roses. They were preceded by little Evelyn Miller, who acted her part well as flower girl, strewing roses before them.

The news account tells it sweetly, but has no heart. When Boppums died, we cut the ribbon on her book, “Sealed till Finished.” Under the ribbon, she had written, “The New Life of Lottie.” The new life bloomed there, now so old it lived in us. The cover had been closed so long, it held shut, reluctant to bend away from these first words:

       
This then is to be the day of days. How I shall feel when today is over and I am no longer my mother's baby but—Harry's wife. Wonderful words. It is to be a full day for a hundred things or two must be done —

At nineteen years, Lottie wrote that much, then went down to do her hundred chores in a daze—to hang the rope of greenery, arrange the oranges in their bowl, slip down to the cellar to see to the fixings for supper, run to the gate to meet her Harrison, and scramble through all the small emergencies of change. When the day had finished, darkened, she came back to her book and wrote all down, somewhere later that night. A few hours launched on her new life, already she looked back. The future tense had changed.

       
Then Sadie motioned us to come, and I taking the strong arm that I was hereafter to lean upon walked slowly through the
crowded room into the parlor keeping time to the beautiful music. Then Aaron stood before us; I can just feel again like I did at that moment.

Thus the New Life's first day ends. Harrison, the groom, lived devout, a farmer, carpenter, preacher, yet I have never heard or read his words. The diary of Lottie, the new life of this quiet woman half my age, stands for all. After her description of the wedding day—whether for joy, terror, confusion—the next stretch of pages in the book and six months of her life run blank. Did she mean to come back someday and fill this blank? Someday, with greater wisdom, she might understand such changes that first darkness brought. I know they lived with her mother then. For a time, one story says, they inhabited the barn, stacking sweet bales of alfalfa hay for walls, tables, chairs, and bed. In a photograph, their wedding gifts rise up in a great mound of crockery, linens, and glassware. Her book says nothing of these.