A Southern Exposure

On a fine blue summer afternoon, in the distant Thirties, one of those brief and hopeful years between the Depression and the war, a once-grand wood-panelled station wagon heads south, down all those winding white concrete miles, in flight from Connecticut. The small family enclosed in that hurrying car—Harry and Cynthia Baird, and Abigail, their daughter—does not have a fugitive look; they look like rich Yankees, or maybe even movie stars; the man at the filling station where they just bought gas thought they might be from the movies. Cynthia and Harry, had they known, would have very much liked this view; it is what they wish they were, a glamorous couple—an image they hope to recover, down South, where life is much cheaper, they have heard. That is their general plan, to regain
some comfort and ease of living—and in certain specific ways they are, as they might have half-ironically put it to each other, on the lam.

Small, handsome, sandy-haired Harry’s flight is perhaps the simplest in origin: he is fleeing a job as the manager of a country club in Connecticut, on the shore. Marginal work at best, involving details that were endlessly boring to Harry: the ordering of booze and food, scheduling events, and endless glad-handing; Harry has sometimes felt his smile was deforming his face. And his rebellion took predictably dangerous forms: he often drank too much; he allowed a few backseat intermission flirtations to get out of hand, so to speak. There will be none of that in Pinehill, their destination, though, he thinks. In this pristine, uncharted region he and Cynthia will regain their innocence; once more they will be in love and rich again, as before the Crash, now almost ten years back, when Cynthia’s golden money seemed an endless stream.

Cynthia Cromwell Baird, a green-eyed blonde, is a languid but sexy, observant, and imaginative woman. Her escape is both more furtive and more complex than Harry’s. For one thing, she owes Lord & Taylor almost three hundred dollars. Can she and Harry somehow be traced down here? Will they send someone? How incredibly embarrassing; besides, she does not exactly have three hundred dollars available. In Cynthia’s mind, which tends toward the novelistic, she and Harry are at a lovely cocktail party, perhaps out in someone’s garden, among all their nice new Southern friends; they are wearing their beautiful best clothes, which no one there could recognize as old—when suddenly: “Mrs. Cynthia Cromwell Baird? We have a warrant, will you come with us?” Would they do that, turn her into some Public Enemy Number 32, or whatever?

Her other escape is from a handsome, bad (really low-class)
man named Jack Morrissey, whom she “led on”; she knows she did, knowing all the while that she didn’t actually, ever, want to go very far with him. She just liked the kissing and the excitement. In Pinehill, however, there will be none of that, unless Russell Byrd, the local poet, whom Cynthia has read obsessively, whom she will
meet
—unless James Russell Lowell Byrd is as sexy as he looks. But no, she will only be polite and admiring, and maybe let him know that she has memorized quite a few lines from his work.

Abigail Baird is a fair, deceptively stolid-looking child, who has combined her father’s opportunistic energy with her mother’s imagination—with some success. She is an interesting, secretive, plumpish child. Who does not remember the Crash, having been born shortly before it took place. But she has a certain bias against big wealth, since all the girls at her school, Miss Taylor’s, were very rich, and Abigail loathed the school, and most of the girls. Her best friend was Benny Davis, the janitor’s son. A Negro boy about her age but much taller. Abigail is tall for her age, with long blond hair in heavy braids, and a thick fringe of bangs across her forehead. She looks forward to going to the public school in Pinehill (no one has told her that there will not be Negro kids there).

Abigail’s most hated person at Miss Taylor’s was the chemistry teacher, Mr. Martindale. As all the girls there knew, his irritation threshold was very low; it was quite possible that he disliked them fully as much as they did him. But he was not supposed to dislike these nice rich young girls, of course he was not, and so Rocky Martindale (fresh out of Yale) disguised his rage with (to Abigail, at least) the most perfectly transparent smiles. So hateful!

But Abby took revenge: on an afternoon shortly before this trip South, she and Benny, with keys “borrowed” from
Benny’s father, Dan, the janitor, went into the chem. lab, and there, in an extremely tidy and methodical way, they switched about all the compounds, one fine white powder into another’s box or bottle. So meticulous was their work that nothing would be noticed, they thought, until the first day of school next fall, when Mr. Martindale began some of his show-off experiments. None of which would work. Abigail has liked to imagine his smiles of purest rage.

Sometimes, though, on this long drive, she has had darker imaginings: perhaps an explosion—she hates Martindale but would not wish to injure him physically. Or could she and Benny possibly have left any fingerprints, anywhere? Would they send down the FBI?

Fugitives, then, these three, driving through the long shadowed green afternoon toward their fates, their new stories. The main point, on which Cynthia and Harry are agreed, is that they won’t have to worry over money. They can make do, easily, on what they have left, the little dribbles from unscathed stock. It will be like being rich again, and ten years younger. Abigail dreams of a wonderful public school—no rich kids and no Mr. Martindale.

The road over which they are passing is two-lane, white concrete. On either side rise banks of eroded red clay, finely crumbling, in delicate long lines. On top of the banks begin fields of yellow-brown broomstraw, and waving dark green pines. Occasionally there are deep rich thickets, an impenetrable interweaving of branches and twigs and leaves; and sometimes flowers, wild, and promiscuously, beautifully flourishing there by the highway—ragged Queen Anne’s lace, and tiny bluets. Unlikely roadside companions.

They cross a bridge, more white concrete, that spans a shallow brown creek, bordered by a narrow beach of dark, dirty-looking sand, and bursts of honeysuckle vines,
thickly tangled, suggesting caves, and secrecy. Hiding places, away from the sun.

And then the road begins its long slow almost imperceptible climb toward the town, as the hills surrounding spread their wide green gentle waves. That vast and until recent years unpopulated countryside surrounding the town of Pinehill is some hundred or so miles inland from the Atlantic; it is said to have once been underneath the sea, in some prehistoric formation. And the infinitely slow, grand undulations of those green hills do indeed suggest a subaquatic history, to scientific minds as well as to poetic temperaments. The local poet, Russell Byrd, whom Cynthia plans to meet, has frequently been inspired by this notion, and both the geology and the botany departments of the local college are fond of field trips. There are even rumors of whale bones, though none have actually been found. There are the ghosts of whale bones, possibly.

To anyone living in these parts, except perhaps for Russell Byrd, this landscape is most ordinary. It is what you expected, driving through the South, along with the bare brown yards of lonely farmhouses, built up from the dirt on stilts, where chickens graze and half-naked babies or skinny-legged older children play and hide. But to the Baird family (the fugitives!) it is all as exotic as a dream terrain, or a movie.

“There’s so much wide open land” is how Cynthia expresses it. Then, trying again, “I mean, I think of what we’re used to, even in the suburbs, and then the Hoovervilles, all those people crowded in packing crates, under the George Washington Bridge.” She sighs. “If only people could be redistributed some way.”

“The Russians are trying that out,” her husband, Harry, reminds her. “It’s not working too well, I don’t think. Their famous Five-Year Plans.”

“I think it’s really beautiful,” from the backseat Abigail informs her parents, who often tend to forget that she is there. “Like a big green ocean,” she adds.

“ ‘Green prehistoric undulations,’ ” murmurs Cynthia, from one of the Byrd poems that she has learned by heart.

“What?”

She does not explain.

Missing the hills of his homeland, the endless undulations of green and the small rise of Pinehill itself, which is now at least a thousand miles ahead, Russ Byrd (James Russell Lowell Byrd) in his oversized Hollywood Cadillac drives fiercely across the flat scorched plains of western Kansas. He succeeds in blocking out the five screaming children (his) who are fighting on the backseat and on the car’s wide floor, and in also blocking out the woman who sits beside him, Brett—his wife, whom he himself named, changing her from SallyJane Caldwell Byrd to Brett Byrd, a whole new person, a poet’s wife and mother of five. Brett is of course the one to cope with the children. As best she knows how.

Russ is speeding toward Pinehill as fast as he can, at the
very same moment as the Bairds, too, are approaching the town. Only, in Kansas it is still earlier in the day; the sun is higher and much hotter.

“I hate you, I wish you were dead.”

“Dead—you too!”

“Anybody wanna buy a duck?”

“That’s not funny, Joe Penner is not funny.”

“You shut up, you damn fool.”

“I’ll cut off your head with scissors.”

“Is everybody happy?”

“You look like Olive Oyl.”

“You look like a dumbhead dodo.”

“I hate you!”

“Children!”

Russ is thinking of home, is concentrating on that known loved landscape, but every now and then all those voices successfully intrude, and what he thinks then is: Damn them, there’s not a scrap of poetry in a one of them, not even Melanctha and certainly not in my boys, Brett’s boys (there is also a secret child of whom he never thinks). Lowell, Walker, Justin, Avery, Melanctha. None of these kids even look like Russ, they all favor fair fat Brett; they are bland and blond, with quick ugly tempers just beneath their peaceful surfaces. Only Melanctha has something about the eyes that makes people say, “Well, she surely does favor you, James Russell. Do you reckon that little old girl could be a poet too?”