Remembering (12 page)

His room, once he has drawn the curtains back, is filled with ordinary daylight too, no longer the place of nightmare. His suffering of the night and early morning now has given way to a suffering of haste, distance, and mortality. He must get back before chance or death prevents him. He feels his frailty amid the stone and metal of the world crashing and roaring around him. He is praying to live until he can get home. To get there, he must pass a thousand ways to die. He has no time to waste. He bathes quickly, and shaves and combs his hair, looking at himself, it seems to him, for the first time in almost a year — a smaller, older, plainer man than he was before.

He puts on fresh underwear and shirt, and repacks his things into his suitcase. And then he thinks of the hook, tempted at first to leave it.

It is not a hand. It is not a substitute for a hand. It is a tool, only a tool. His hand is gone. Sometime, somewhere behind him, his hand has left him. It has died, and is at peace.

He pays his bill and goes out to wait on the curb for the airport limousine. He puts his bag between his feet and leans against a signpost as near the corner as he can get and yet be out of the way of the crowd. He is still now, gathered together, ready to go, and the city continues its coming and going around him.

He is a man fated to be charmed by cities. They frighten him and threaten to break his heart, but they charm him too. He came to them too late not to be charmed by them. The great cities that he has been to have exhilarated him by the mere thought of the abundance that is in them, not needing to be sent for.

Years ago, he resigned himself to living in cities. That was what his education was for, as his teachers all advised and he believed. Its purpose was to get him away from home, out of the country, to someplace where he could live up to his abilities. He needed an education, and the purpose of an education was to take him away.

He did not want to go, and he grieved at night over his forthcoming long and distant absence. But no one he met at the university offered him reprieve. He could amount to something, maybe; all he needed was an education, and a little polish.

“For Christ's sake, Catlett,” one of his professors told him in his freshman year, “try to take on a little
polish
while you're at it. You don't have to go through the world
alarmed
because other people don't have cowshit on their shoes.”

As it turned out, he did not take a very high polish. Polishing him was like polishing a clod of his native yellow clay; as soon as he began to shine, the whole glaze would flake off, leaving the job to be begun again.

After graduation he married, and went to San Francisco, where he worked as a journalist, a very minor journalist, covering minor rural and agricultural events. He learned a little of the way the agricultural world wagged, and, perhaps because he was so far from home and from what his father would have told him if he had asked, he assumed that the way it wagged was the way it was supposed to wag: that bigger was better and biggest was best; that people coming into a place to use it need ask only what they wanted, not what was there; that whatever in humanity or nature failed before the advance of this mechanical ambition deserved to fail; and that the answers were in the universities and the corporate and government offices, not in the land or the people. He was capable, in those days, of forgetting all that his own people had been. He loved them, he thought, but he had gone beyond them as the world had. He was a long way, then, from his father's ideal of good pasture, and from all that his old friend Elton Penn was and stood for and meant.

After three years in San Francisco, he went to Chicago to work for his university classmate and friend, Tommy Netherbough, who had become an editor of
Scientific Farming
. Tommy was from Indiana, a farmer's son, who openly despised what he called the “dungship” of his servitude, as a boy, to his father's antiquated methods. There were differences of attitude and affection between Tommy and Andy, but they lay dormant under Andy's assumption that Tommy was fundamentally right, and that his way was the way of the world. Tommy was a hard worker and he knew his business. As a student, he had known what he wanted to do, and once he was out in the world he began to do it, and to do well at it. Now, as an editor, he was better than ever. Andy liked him. They worked together for five years, and they got along. And then in the early spring of 1964 they had an argument that put them on opposite sides and changed Andy's life.

Andy went to Ohio to interview a farmer named Bill Meikelberger, who was to be featured in the magazine as that year's Premier Farmer. Meikelberger had caught Tommy Netherbough's eye because, like all the Premier Farmers before him, he was, as Tommy liked to put it,
“one of the leaders of the shock troops of the scientific revolution in agriculture.”

And Meikelberger was, in fact, out in front of almost everybody. He was a man, clearly, of exceptional intelligence, energy, and courage. He lived in the rich, broad land south of Columbus, where he farmed the two thousand acres he had acquired by patiently buying out his neighbors in the years since his graduation from the college of agriculture at Ohio State. He was the fulfillment of the dreams of his more progressive professors. On all the two thousand acres there was not a fence, not an animal, not a woodlot, not a tree, not a garden. The whole place was planted in corn, right up to the walls of the two or three unused barns that were still standing. Meikelberger owned a herd of machines. His grain bins covered acres. He had an office like a bank president's. The office was a carpeted room at the back of the house, expensively and tastefully furnished, as was the rest of the house, as far as Andy saw it. It was a brick ranch house with ten rooms and a garage, each room a page from
House Beautiful,
and it was deserted.

When Andy and Meikelberger had toured the farm and were going to the house for coffee, Meikelberger apologized for the absence of his wife.

“I'm sorry, too,” Andy said. “Is she away on a trip?”

“She's in town at work.”

“Oh, I see,” Andy said, looking at Meikelberger.

“Every little bit helps,” Meikelberger said.

There were only the two of them at home now. One of their children was a doctor in Seattle, one was in law school, one was married to a company executive in Moline.

The kitchen was large, modern, equipped with every available appliance, shiny, comfortable, and clean. Andy sat at the table while Meikelberger made coffee.

“Some kitchen,” Andy said.

“Well, we don't use it much,” Meikelberger said. “Helen went to work in town when our youngest child started school. With that and keeping the books here, she stays plenty busy. And I'm busy all the time. We don't do much housekeeping. We eat in town, mostly.”

Andy sat with his notebook on the table in front of him, watching
Meikelberger, and liking him, though Meikelberger was troubling him too. He kept making a few notes, knowing that he was not understanding everything yet.

Meikelberger was a heavy-shouldered, balding man, with a worried, humorous face. Andy had expected him to be proud of his farm, and he obviously was. He had recited readily, and with some pleasure, all the facts and figures Andy had asked for. But he also supplied, apparently with as much pleasure, a good many personal facts that were plainer and tawdrier than his production statistics.

Meikelberger poured their coffee and sat down. “There have been some changes here since my grandfather's time,” he said. “He and my grandmother settled here on eighty acres, would you believe that? They raised six children. We tore down the old house to build this one. Helen couldn't stand it, and I saw what she meant. It was a barn.”

And then, as if to see what Andy would think, he turned to the glass doors, which opened onto the small backyard, and, pointing, showed Andy the layout of the old farmstead: cellar and smokehouse, henhouse and garden, crib and granary, barn lot and barn, all now disappeared.

“They'd be amazed if they could see this, wouldn't they?” Meikelberger waved his hand at the outside, where the little lawn became, without transition, a cornfield. “They'd think they were in another world.”

“I guess they would,” Andy said.

Meikelberger finished his coffee, pushed back his cup, and inserted a large white tablet into his mouth, something that Andy had seen him do earlier.

“Are you sick, Mr. Meikelberger?”

“Ulcer acting up.”

“I'm sorry. What's the cause of that?”

Again Meikelberger grinned. “You can't farm like this without having it on your
mind.
”

“I'm sure you do have a lot to think about.”

“Well, I've got hired help to keep track of, and machinery to keep running, and creditors to deal with, and so forth.”

“You have creditors?”

“Hell yes! You know it as well as I do. Debt is a permanent part of an operation like this. Getting out of debt is just another old idea you have to junk. I'll never be out of debt. I never intend to be.”

“I guess that's bound to keep your mind busy. But it sounds like your stomach would like some time off occasionally.”

“You can't let your damned stomach get in your way. If you're going to get ahead, you've got to pay the price. You're going to need a few pills occasionally, like for your stomach, and sometimes to go to sleep. You're going to need a drugstore just like you're going to need a bank.”

Andy did not learn anything from Meikelberger that surprised him, but he had not expected Meikelberger's frankness. He drove away with a notebook full of figures, and many quotations and observations written in his private language of abbreviations, and some things in his mind that he would have trouble writing down in the language of
Scientific Farming.
The obstacle that now lay in his way was his realization, which Meikelberger himself had left him no room to avoid, that there was nothing, simply nothing at all, that Meikelberger allowed to stand in his way: not a neighbor or a tree or even his own body. Meikelberger's ambition had made common cause with a technical power that proposed no limit to itself, that was, in fact, destroying Meikelberger, as it had already destroyed nearly all that was natural or human around him.

The extent and gravity of the impasse Andy had come to was not immediately clear to him. He did not immediately admit to himself that he could not write the article on Meikelberger, but he did not go to work on it that night in the motel in Columbus, as ordinarily he would have done, and he did not work on it the next morning. He had, as it turned out, a job for that day, but he did not yet know what it was.

That evening he was supposed to be in Pittsburgh, which left him a long half-day for work. But he did not work. He ate breakfast and then he started to drive. He drove eastward toward Pittsburgh, and as he did so it came clear to him that he did not want to get there in a hurry — that, in fact, he did not want to get there any sooner than necessary. He was in the hill country by then, and he began to ramble northward, taking the back roads. The character of the country had changed. The fields were smaller, the farmsteads were closer together, and there were many woodlands. He was meeting and passing buggies on the road. Presently he came to a grassed field between a woodland and a stream. Through the middle of the field a backfurrow had been freshly turned. It was a beautiful place, and as Andy slowed down to look at it a three-horse team appeared, coming around on the curve of the slope, drawing a plow.
Andy pulled the car off the road and got out. The man riding the plow was bearded; he was dressed in black and wore a black broad-brimmed hat. Seeing Andy, he raised his hand. He drove on to the end of the furrow, raised the plow out of the ground, and stopped the team.

“Good morning!” he said, and his otherwise cheerful voice carried just a hint of a desire to know what Andy's business was.

Andy said, “You're not going to get anywhere very fast that way.” And then he was sorry. It was what Meikelberger would have said.

But the man seemed not to mind. “Oh, they step right along,” he said cheerfully. He had got off the plow and was now standing beside his furrow-horse with his hand on her neck. “They'll carry you over a lot of ground in a day.” He smiled and looked at Andy. “But then, of course, you don't do more than you
ought
to.”

There was something friendly and undisguised about the man. Though there was gray in his beard, his face was young. He was maybe ten years older than Andy. The openness and clarity of his countenance surprised Andy and yet seemed to offer some comfort to him. He realized that, without knowing this man at all, he trusted him. The team was made up of three large black mares. Andy wanted to be closer to them. He walked through the grass and dead weeds of the roadside to the fence.