A Far Piece to Canaan (10 page)

I was engaged! Sort of.

A few days later, I met Mr. and Mrs. Epstein. Both were teachers in the New York City public school system, both children of immigrants from Eastern Europe, both political liberals, and neither had ever been to Indiana, the state where we bought our farm after leaving Kentucky. Dinner brought many questions about how a Jewish boy wound up on farms in Kentucky and Indiana, all of which I answered clumsily. I left their home that night feeling they would have been more comfortable if their daughter were seeing a New Yorker, but the fact that I was in graduate school and Jewish gave me a leg up, even if I was a barbarian.

In mid-June of the year Nora and I met, I bought an ancient Chevy and drove my fiancée from Brooklyn, the city of homes and churches, to Crawfordsville, Indiana. It was during that trip that I was to learn that living with Nora would never be dull.

We were traveling through the heartland when she saw a bumper sticker that read:

She screamed. I almost wrecked the Chevy. She could not believe Republicans actually existed and that she was now “surrounded.”

Nora knew nothing about a farm and her reactions to agrarian life were fun to watch. One night, she came upon Dad decapitating the main course for our dinner. Her later description of the event, including the chickens flopping around with blood flying from their headless necks, would have made Kafka faint. She did not eat the chicken.

She learned where veal comes from and I, a lover of veal scaloppini, could never again order it in her presence.

When one of our cows went into heat she asked my always practical father if he would put the cow and bull in the barn so they could have privacy. My parents talked about that every time we visited.

In the end, however, my entire family loved the bubbly, happy, ever curious, and always enthusiastic Nora. She was everything my parents wanted for their son, more than I ever dreamed would fall in love with me, and she sent a buzz through my high school classmates that the Kentucky hick had a gorgeous New York girlfriend. Jennifer Walding, one of our school's cheerleaders and the sexual fantasy of every Harlan Jeffords High male, actually crossed the street to speak to me! And to meet Nora, of course, who I suddenly realized was more beautiful than the now widening belle of HJH.

A year later Nora and I were married in a reform shul two blocks from the Epsteins' Brooklyn home and “only one subway change” from where my own mother had been raised. The barefoot boy from the Kentucky hills, naked except for his Levi's, now met the man he had become, tuxedoed and yarmulke-clad, standing in front of a Brooklyn rabbi.

It took me four more years to get my doctorate. Nora made our living doing social work for the city and I added a little money as a teaching assistant. Then I had a bit of luck. Leland-May College, a venerated little Ivy League clone set in an idyllic New Hampshire town, was looking for a junior faculty member with a background in Victorian literature. They were offering a year as an instructor, following which they would decide whether to offer a tenure-track position. A year later I joined the Leland-May faculty with a mediocre salary, one suit, two ties, two pairs of shoes, and a very happy young wife.

It was getting cold in the hotel room. I turned down the air-conditioning and sat on the edge of the bed. I got my wallet off the nightstand and hunted through the pictures until I found one of Nora and me. It had been taken shortly after we moved to New Hampshire. I took a sip of my drink and gazed at the picture, then put my thumb over her image. I felt as though I ceased to exist. I put the wallet back on the nightstand, turned off the light, and tried to sleep.

I couldn't. The early years at Leland-May rolled through my mind. I'd finish work, change into running shorts, put my teaching materials and clothes into a suitcase, and jog the three miles home. Nora and I would play a set or two of tennis in the summer, make dinner together, eat, and then make love, sweet and gentle or wild and crazy. We were so happy.

Except for once a week. Once a week we would get together with another faculty couple for an evening out. Nora looked forward to these forays, but I didn't. I tired of hearing about colleagues' wealthy families and the wonderful universities that multiple generations of their kin had attended. During my recruitment I was required to give my complete biography and it became known that I had been raised on a farm. Also, that I would become the first of Leland-May's Jewish-sharecropper professors. Negative comments about scholarship students' backgrounds bothered me, and I heard a lot of them when I ate lunch at the faculty club.

“You know, Samuel, if the O'Brian kid doesn't make it here, he can always tend bar for his father. There's something to say for being a Boston Southey.”

I brought my lunch after a few faculty club lunches and ate in my office. I never told those stories to Nora.

And then there was the research my colleagues were publishing. A reworking of previously plowed ground, fodder used to swell their curriculum vitae for advancement purposes. Their work rarely took on difficult issues, which in retrospect was not my affair. Yet I found the self-serving mediocrity intolerable. I said nothing at the time, but I put a lot of effort into making the kids I taught think, instead of just parrot back my ideas.

And the academic backbiting. One of the couples we socialized with most frequently was James Northwich (of the Philadelphia Northwiches) and his wife, Deanna. James was older than I and had just made tenure. All tenured faculty sat on the tenure-track committee, and James immediately began wielding his power to its fullest extent. For example, one of the qualifications for tenure at L-M was punctuality. It was obviously meant by the authors of the document as a means of dealing with chronic offenders. You always knew the candidates James didn't like because he would comb the file for evidence of noncompliance. If he found anything that could be so construed, he would write a letter to that point and have it incorporated in the applicant's permanent file—regardless of whether tenure was offered! It quickly became known to the junior faculty that James Northwich was not a man to be crossed if you wanted to make tenure. Nora liked Jim and Deanna, so I said nothing to her about the situation and suffered through our evenings with the couple.

For the most part, I spent as little time with the faculty and administration as possible, choosing instead to concentrate on my teaching and budding research.

Nora, without knowledge of the facts, considered my colleagues to be “normal.” A little arrogant perhaps, but not bad people. “You,” she said, “are too judgmental.” As a consequence of my being “judgmental” we had few real friends, just acquaintances.

Nora knew some of the things that had happened to me and my family the last three years we sharecropped, because Dad would answer her questions about our years in Kentucky (although he did it in his own political fashion to protect me). As a consequence of Dad's disclosures, Nora wanted me to return to Kentucky and “exorcise my demons,” which she felt were the cause of my solitary ways.

I didn't think I had any demons. I had put Kentucky behind me and saw no reason to dredge it up. Besides, Nora could never tell me why I should go back, only that she thought “my problems” lay in Kentucky and a return visit would benefit me.

I didn't think I needed benefiting. What the hell, I didn't hate my colleagues, I just didn't think they were all that much. I couldn't relate to them. They weren't bad people. They were just . . . different from me. So much so that I felt uncomfortable around them. Somehow our ways of looking at things were not the same, and I had a right to my way of life! I was happy with my work. I was happy with Nora. We had each other and that was all I needed.

Then again, I hadn't had a real friend since Fred and Lonnie. I missed them, especially Fred. Lonnie and I had been friends but Fred and I had been
best
friends. At one point, I decided to go back and see him, but a lot of time had gone by and I wasn't sure he'd be all that happy to see me again. Somehow, I never got around to making the trip.

The clock on my nightstand said it was after three. I swallowed the remainder of the whiskey in my glass and got further under the covers. Nora had been gone over a year now. Somehow, the core of my soul had been buried with my love and what remained was a purposeless shell. Did she know that I would feel this way? Was that the reason she made me promise to return to Kentucky after her death . . . to find a reason for living?

I
woke up thinking about Fred. There had to be some way to find him other than just checking mailboxes in the area where we once lived. I got an outside line, then dialed information. There was nothing for a Fred Cody Mulligan, or for any of our other neighbors who might have known the Mulligans. How could people just vanish in two generations? To my astonishment, Google was no help. The earth seemed to have swallowed everyone I knew from my childhood! I began getting hunger pangs and went to the hotel restaurant for breakfast.

That breakfast was the kind of feast that, had my daughters been present, would have led them to faint. Four pieces of thick-cut hickory-cured bacon, three eggs sunnyside with plenty of pepper and salt, grits, and two biscuits with heavy butter and lots of honey. Big Southern biscuits, by God, not those skinny little Yankee things. Biscuits that stuck to your ribs, and, of course, coronary vessels, which my nervous physician was vigorously treating with prophylactic drugs. Furthermore, the food was chased with four cups of coffee. What the hell, I was seventy-two years old and I was going to go out with a smile on my face.

While I ate, I people-watched, especially the kids. They were well-scrubbed, well-fed, probably well-educated, and judging from their behavior, spoiled rotten. I wondered if, by age ten, they had ever performed a day of hard physical work. I thought about my comments to Candy and Penny concerning my years in Kentucky. I really had worked as I had described. I was expected to contribute to the family's quest to make a living. Sharecroppers' kids never even thought about it, they just started doing. Then again, we had something these kids didn't—a degree of freedom they never even knew existed. Everything was planned for the modern day kid. I doubted that any of them ever knew the joy of making a slingshot, going barefoot all summer, making their own fishing pole, or being out of sight of their family for days at a time. Free! Free as though floating in warm, breezy air. Even though what we did was often risky.

Ben Begley came to my mind. Had it not been for Ben, someone other than Samuel Zelinsky would have gotten the Johnson-Goldsmith Prize, because I would have been dead. The thoughts of that fall and winter long ago came to my mind . . .

. . . We had a light snow in early December and it got below freezing for the first time. Everybody was busy stripping tobacco and on the way to school we would see big trucks heaped high with burley all covered with a tarpaulin and going to Lexington to be sold. We were more than three-quarters done with our tobacco stripping and Dad had sold the first half. It weighed out a ton to the acre and averaged fifty cents a pound, which was tops for the market. Every evening, Mom and Dad would sit side by side in the living room going through magazines about farms for sale and talk about what kind of place to buy in Indiana. Dad said that if the second half of our tobacco crop sold as good as the first half, we'd have almost enough money for a big down payment.

That kind of talk really shook me up! I was happy Mom and Dad were going to get what they wanted, but buying in Indiana meant leaving Fred and Lonnie and LD, and I'd never had so many close friends. I didn't feel bad too long though, because our Christmas school break was coming, which meant three weeks to have a good time. I had some money too. I'd been getting fifty cents a day for doing up all the chores after getting home from school so Mom and Dad could keep stripping tobacco. With that money, I could buy Christmas presents. I wanted a Lash LaRue neckerchief for Fred, things for my family, Lonnie, LD, and something really nice for Ben Begley. I hadn't seen Ben since that day he kept me from drowning. I liked him too, and felt sheepish about not having gone to see him. I couldn't figure out what to buy him though. Then one day Dad had to go into Spears where there was a general store and I grabbed my money and went along. Wandering through the store I saw a three-bladed knife behind a glass case. The longest blade was four inches and heavy. There was a three-inch middle blade and a little blade about two inches long that was skinny and come to a point. I had never done any fancy whittling but you could tell the blades were perfect for working wood. It was eight dollars. While Dad took care of his business, I saw other presents I wanted and decided to go ahead and buy now. The storekeeper's wife kept following me around.

“Do you want somethin', young man?” she asked finally.

“Yes, ma'am,” I answered. “I'd like this stuff I picked out.”

“Hmm,” she said. “That costs money, y' know.”

That burned me. She was lookin' down her nose at me! “I got plenty money,” I said, stacking my presents on the counter. “How much is this?”

“Let's see your money first,” she said, and I started digging in my pockets and making a pile of dollar bills on the counter. While I was piling, her husband come in and said, “You're Mr. Zelker's boy, ain't you? You buyin' somethin'?”

“I was thinkin' 'bout it,” I answered, “but don't nobody want my business.”

“Huh!” he said, and looked at his wife, who smiled kind of funny.

“Why sure we do,” she said. “I just didn't know who you was, honey. I thought maybe you was some of them riffraff comes in here,” and that just burned me more.

“I'll total this right up,” she said, and then did. “Yes, sir. Is they gonna be anything more?”