Memories of the Future (19 page)

What Bleak Land

T
HIS MORNING I GOT A PHONE CALL
from the contractor I hired to build our new house. He said his men had dug up a box while leveling the hilltop where the house is going to stand. It was a brass box, he said, and its lid had been soldered in place. Since it might contain something of value, he thought I should be there when they opened it. I told him I would drive out.

That’s one of the advantages of being retired. You can do anything you want to whenever you please. It’s also one of the disadvantages. You have too much time to do things, and more often than not, there’s nothing to do.

* * *

I have not been retired very long. Only six months, in fact. Most people who live in this section of the country move to Florida to spend their “golden years.” I am not one of them. Years ago when my sister and I sold the land our father left us, I saved the highest hill. It’s a lovely hill from which you can see the lowlands and the lake, with maples and oaks and locusts growing on its slopes. I’ve hung on to it all this time, and now, having hung up my fiddle and my bow, I’m going to live on its crest.

I’ve never gone very far from the hill. The farthest was during WWII when the army, trying to make maximum use of my services, moved me here and there in the States and finally shipped me overseas. After the war I went to work for Houdaille Industries and moved to the city to be near my job and bought a house there. But the hill is where I’m going to live now, as soon as the house is built. I and my wife, Clair. We have no ties: Our children long ago grew up and got married and moved away. In the summer the land below us will be pied with daisies and Queen Anne’s lace. In fall there will be goldenrod and mayweeds and asters. In winter there will be snow. I may stagnate in my later years, but it will not be from an endless succession of hot, bright, dreary days that have but a single face.

* * *

I asked Clair if she wanted to drive out to the hill with me. She said no, she had shopping to do. I took the throughway and got off an hour later at the Fairsburg exit. I drove through the little town, fighting off memories. The hill is only a mile beyond. I drove past the housing development that now occupies part of the land my father used to own. The hill rose before me, like a green and earthbound cloud.

The contractor’s heavy equipment had made a road of sorts up the slope, but I refused to jeopardize the undercarriage of my Caprice and got out and made my way skyward through the maples and oaks and locusts. The July sun beat down through the foliage and was hot upon my back, and I was sweating when at last I reached the crest.

A bulldozer was churning back and forth, leveling recalcitrant humps and filling in hollows. Bill Simms, the contractor, was standing by his pickup truck, talking to a big, burly man. Two other men were working on the motor of a backhoe. Simms walked over to meet me. “Glad you could come, Mr. Bentley. I guess we’re as curious about what’s in the box as you are.” He pointed to a ragged area near the edge of the leveled land. “It’s over there.”

We walked over the raw earth. The big, burly man followed. Simms said, “This is Chuck Blain, my foreman.” We nodded. The two men who had been working on the backhoe motor followed us, too.

The box had been pulled out of the torn earth. Verdigris had turned it green. It had been cast out of brass and was about sixteen inches long, about twelve wide, and about six deep. As Simms had said, the lid had been soldered into place.

I had never seen the box before; nevertheless, it struck a note of
déjà vu
. I said, “Let’s open it and see what the treasure is.”

Blain had brought a crowbar. He found a place where the solder hadn’t taken, and wedged the pinched end of the bar beneath the lid. He pried down, and the lid broke free. I knelt down and raised it.

When I saw what the box contained, I knew it was Rone’s.

* * *

Rone was the only name we ever knew him by. If he had a first name, he never said so, and we never asked him. When I first saw him, I took it for granted he was just another bindle stiff. He looked like one—tall and gaunt and ragged, his face discolored by coal smoke. My mother thought he was one, too, when she came to the back door in answer to his knock. I was in the back yard, chopping wood.

Lots of bindle stiffs used to come to our door. The Pennsy and the New York Central tracks ran through Fairsburg and skirted our farm (they’re the Norfolk and Western, and Conrail tracks now), and when the freight trains stopped at the Pennsy or New York Central station to uncouple or couple cars, the bindle stiffs who rode the rails would sometimes get off outside of town and go around to people’s back doors, panhandling. Since they liked to keep a low profile, they usually stuck to the houses on the outskirts, and as our house was well outside of town and close to the tracks, we were sitting ducks.

Whenever one would come to our door, he’d stand there on the back steps holding his little bundle of belongings in one hand (I never saw one who carried his bundle on the end of a stick the way they were sometimes depicted in cartoons), and when my mother would answer his knock, he’d take off his hat and say, “Could you spare a bite to eat, ma’am?” My mother never turned any of them down. She felt sorry for bums. Sometimes some of them would offer to perform some chore in exchange for the handout. More often, though, they’d just walk away.

My mother fixed Rone a sandwich and gave him a glass of milk, and he thanked her and sat down on the back steps. I could tell from the big bites he took and from the way he gulped down the milk that he was half starved. He had no bundle of belongings, and the suit he was wearing, although ragged and dirty, looked as though not long ago it had been new.

It was a warm September day, and I’d just got home from school. It was hot chopping wood, and I spent more time resting than I did swinging the ax. After he finished eating, Rone opened the back door wide enough so he could set the empty glass inside, then he took off his suit coat, came over and took the ax from my hands, and started chopping wood himself. He had a narrow face, kind of a long nose, and gray eyes. I could tell from the way he was swinging the ax that he’d never chopped wood before, but he caught on fast. I just stood to one side and watched.

My mother watched, too, from the back door. He chopped and chopped and chopped. After a while my mother said, “There’s no need for you to chop any more. You’ve more than earned the little bit I gave you to eat.”

“That’s all right, ma’am,” Rone said, and set up another chunk of wood.

My father, who’d driven into town for chicken feed, pulled into the yard and backed the old beat-up truck he’d bought for twenty-five dollars up to the barn door. I helped him unload the two bags of feed. He was a tall, lanky man, but he was twice as strong as he looked and didn’t need my help. But he pretended that he did.

He looked over at Rone, “He chop all that wood?”

“I chopped some of it,” I said.

“Your mother feed him?”

“She gave him a sandwich and a glass of milk.”

We went into the house. My mother had just finished paring potatoes, and now she put them on to boil. She did all her cooking on a wood stove. “Hell,” my father said, “maybe we should ask him to stay to supper, too.”

“I’ll put on another plate.”

“You go out and tell him, Tim. And take that damned ax away from him.”

So I went out and told him and stood in front of him so he couldn’t chop any more wood. He leaned the ax against the woodpile. His eyes made me think of somber winter skies. “My name is Rone,” he said.

“I’m Tim, I go to school. I’m in sixth grade.”

“Oh.”

His hair—what I could see of it below the edges of his cap—was brown. It needed cutting. “I wonder if I could wash my hands.” He talked kind of slow, as though measuring each word.

I showed him where the outdoor faucet was. He washed his hands, and his face, too, and took off his cap and combed his hair with a comb he found in one of his shirt pockets. He needed a shave, but there was nothing he could do about that.

He put his suit coat back on and stuffed his cap into one of its pockets. I saw that he was looking over my shoulder. “Is that your sister?”

A new Model A had stopped in the road, and Julie had gotten out and was coming across the yard. The Model A drove away. Julie’s girlfriend was Amy Wilkens, and often after school she used to stop at Amy’s house instead of walking home with me, and sometimes Amy’s father would drive her home. He worked in the post office. We always thought the Wilkenses were rich. Compared to us, they were.

“How did you know she’s my sister?” I asked Rone.

“She looks like you.”

Julie glanced at him as she walked by. His presence didn’t disconcert her in the least, because she was used to bindle stiffs. She was only nine years old and real skinny, and it made me mad that Rone said she looked like me, because I thought she was homely. I was eleven.

After she went in the house, Rone and I went over and sat on the back steps. Not long afterward my mother called us to supper.

* * *

Rone didn’t eat like a bindle stiff. I guess maybe the sandwich he’d wolfed down and the milk he’d drunk had curbed his appetite, and maybe that was why he didn’t grab. We had hamburger patties, and my mother had added water to their juice so we could put it on our potatoes. Rone kept glancing at her. I couldn’t see why. To me, she was beautiful, but I took it for granted that this was because she was my mother. She wore her dark brown hair combed back into a little bun on her neck. In winter her skin was milky white, but spring always added a touch of color when she planted her kitchen garden, and summer turned her skin to gold.

Rone had already told her and my father his name. “What part of the country you from?” my father asked.

Rone hesitated for a moment, then said, “From near Omaha.”

“Things tough there, too?”

“Kind of.”

“I guess they’re tough all over.”

“Please pass the salt,” Julie said.

My mother handed her the shaker. “Would you like some more potatoes, Mr. Rone?”

“No, thank you, ma’am.”

Julie looked across the table at him. “Do you ride the rails?”

He didn’t seem to know what she meant. “She means, do you ride under the freight cars so the railroad bulls won’t see you?” I explained.

“Oh. Yes, I did.”

“You know, that’s none of your business, Julie,” my mother said.

“I only wondered.”

My mother had baked a coconut cream pie. She served everyone a big piece. Rone took a bite of his. He looked over at her. “May I ask you a question, ma’am?”

“Of course.”

“Did you bake this pie in a wood stove?” He had seen the stove when we came through the kitchen.

“Well, I guess I must have,” my mother said, “since it’s the only stove I’ve got.”

“I believe,” Rone said, “that one of the main troubles with mankind is that they look for miracles in all the wrong places, while the miracles that are taking place beneath their noses totally escape their attention.”

Now who would ever have expected a bindle stiff to say something like that? I guess all of us just sat there and stared at him. And then my mother smiled and said, “Thank you, Mr. Rone. That’s the nicest compliment I’ve ever had.”

We finished the meal in silence. Then Rone looked first at my mother and then at my father. “I will never forget your kindness.” He got up from the table. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’d best be going.”

None of us said anything. I guess none of us could think of anything to say. We sat there listening to him walk through the kitchen, and listened to the sound of the back door open and close. Then my mother said, “I guess wandering’s in their blood.”

“I guess it is,” my father said.

“Well, I’m glad it’s not in yours.” My mother looked at Julie and me. “Julie, you can help me with the dishes. Tim, I suspect you’ve got homework to do.”

“Only just a little.”

“Well, the sooner you get to it, the sooner it’ll be done.”

I lingered at the table. So did Julie. We liked to keep abreast of things. I heard the rumble of a freight train. I listened for it to slow, but it didn’t. The house shook a little as it went by. Maybe the next one would have to pick up or leave cars in Fairsburg, and Rone could catch that.

My father said, “Emma, they’re starting to take grapes at the factory Monday, so I’ll be going back to work.”

“All those long hours again.”

“I don’t mind.”

“Mr. Hendricks said I could pick for him again this year. He’s going to start next week.”

“Maybe,” my father said, “we can get far enough ahead this year to buy you a gas stove.”

“We need too many other things, and the kids need clothes.”

Fall was always when we had lots of money, with my father working at the grape juice factory and my mother picking grapes. My father worked at the factory during bottling season, too, but bottling season was off and on, and spread out over the year, and at the most he’d work only a total of three months. But we always were able to get by because of the additional money he made raising string beans and corn and tomatoes. The farm wasn’t a big one, and most of it was too hilly to work, but what my father raised on the rest of the land was enough to keep us out of the poorhouse. Besides which, we had a cow and chickens.

I tried to linger at the table a little longer, and so did Julie, but it didn’t work, for my mother said, “Off to your homework, Tim. Julie, start clearing the table.”

* * *

Julie and I used to have to walk to school before our father bought his truck. Then he began driving us into town every morning, but he still made us walk home, except in bad weather, saying the exercise would do us good. Before he bought the truck, our only means of transportation was an old Model T that kept breaking down all the time and that my father didn’t trust well enough to drive us to school in.

It was Julie’s turn to ride by the window the next morning, which was why she was the one to spot Rone. We were halfway between the farm and town when she cried, “Look, Dad, there’s a man lying under that tree!”