Old Glory (53 page)

I assured them that it wasn’t, though it did occur to me that the distance from London to Teheran was only about twice as far as from Tiptonville to New York; and if one were applying a literal-minded standard of measurement, then I was at least two-thirds of the way to being an Iranian citizen.

The talk was furious and ashamed. I was astonished by how personally the event was being taken in Tiptonville; it was as if the individual honor of all these farmers had been impugned.

“The Yewnighted States ought to go in there and take some of them places over.”

“We could do it, too. Hell, them U.S. arms they got, they’s rusted all to hell. We could go in there … We could bust the asses off them A-rab countries.”

“I was in the Marines.”

“Hell,
I
was in the Marines.”

“We could have whupped them sonofabitches—once.”

“Seems, nowadays, like the Yewnighted States is jes’ too afraid to stand up for itself.”

It was like the final bursting of a long and painful boil. The pus had been building for years. Americans had been smarting under a half-articulated sense of their national dislocation and national impotence. Now a gang of foreign students had presented them with an outrageous symbol. It was like Hester Prynne’s scarlet A, and the men in Gooch’s were having to wear it in front of the rest of the world. They turned bitterly on the Carter Administration; they turned on “America”; then they turned on themselves.

“You know what started off this whole business?” a farmer said from across the table. “What made us weak like this? It was back in ’73, ’74. Under Nixon. Beans was standing at, oh, three dollars sixty-four a bushel, right? Then Nixon started selling beans to the Russians, and the price was raised right up to near nine dollars. That’s when I date it from, when those beans went up. Now
no
one has respect for America no more.”

•   •   •

I was in my cabin when Mr. Nunnery tapped at the door. He wanted my “advice,” and I followed him along the patio to the motel office where he had his studio couch, his out-at-the-elbows armchair and his smelly little terrier. The dog, he said, had been bought for protection: last year he had been held up at gunpoint and hit on the head with a pistol butt. I doubted if the dog’s falsetto bark and wagging tail would do much to frighten robbers, but he was company for Mr. Nunnery; and Mr. Nunnery needed to excuse his want of company.

The advice he sought from me was on how to trace his ancestry.

“My name’s Nunnery, see; that’s a kind of a British name, ain’t it? I reckon I must have some kin over there, if only I could find them.”

“Do you know where your family comes from?”

“Well—I know we was from South Carolina. My gran’pappy came over from some place in South Carolina. But before that … we must have been British, I guess. I don’t know. Maybe we was Scotch or Irish. Would you have an opinion on that?”

Mr. Nunnery’s roots seemed too vague to speculate on with much confidence. He told me how his father had once owned a cotton farm. “But then he was caught in around nineteen and ten. First there was a boom. Then the price of cotton went right down to six cents, then five … and that was just about the finish of him.”

Now he had seized on my arrival as a chance to shore up the fading fortunes of the Nunnery family with some English history. I said I was sorry, but I couldn’t help him. I had once been at school with a boy named Nunnery; that, though, was as far as I could go.

“Now, him and me, could we have been kinfolks, do you reckon?”

I looked at the old man cuddling his dog, and tried to remember Nunnery. No particular image came to the surface, except that of adolescence itself: acne and gangliness, wet towels in changing rooms, frozen playing fields, watery cocoa, loud, ragged hymns at evening prayers. Nunnery must have been there somewhere; on house roll calls, his name came two above mine.

“Oh—distant cousins, possibly.”

“Nothing … special?”

“No—afraid not.”

Mr. Nunnery evidently wanted me to stay on talking with him. His lineage hadn’t proved a very successful topic.

“I couldn’t help but see you had a camera with you. Do you have an interest in photography? It’s a kind of hobby of mine. I take a lot of pictures.…”

He brought out a boxful of creased snapshots. Mr. Nunnery was possessed by a real imaginative vision of the world. His photographic
technique was crude: he had a genius for making telegraph poles sprout from the heads of his subjects and a rather unsteady sense of what was perpendicular and what was not. Taken together, though, the pictures added up to a grave and pessimistic assessment of the relation between the American and his landscape.

I saw the landscapes first. They showed the local wilderness at its coldest and most inhospitable moments: the Mississippi in flood, ice floes on the river, the forest in winter, Reelfoot Lake frozen solid.

“That lake out there was made by the earthquake of eighteen and eleven. You heard about that?”

“Yes, I was reading about it this morning.”

“The river ran the wrong way for forty-eight hours then. Flowed right upstream, from south to north, for forty-eight hours,” said Mr. Nunnery, honoring the Mississippi’s propensities for the awful.

“I never heard that.”

“That’s gospel truth. Now, there. See that one. That’s a bald-headed guy. Lost all his hair in a night. On’y twenty-five when that happened to him.”

We put the bald-headed guy aside. Mr. Nunnery pointed to a picture of a grinning woman wearing wide glasses. “That’s a Scotchman.” He passed over her quickly. “This guy, now, he had a stroke. Face is kinda stiff all down one side. Can’t talk.” He picked out a charity Christmas card. “See why I got this card in here? That was made by a girl with her
teeth
. Says all about it on the inside. She’s so paralyzed, that girl, the only thing she can move is her mouth.” We spent a long time admiring the card. The next picture was scrutinized by Mr. Nunnery for more evidence of human frailty and put aside without comment.

“Who’s he?”

“Oh, he’s just a guy. Got nine hundred acres up at Kentucky Bend. Now,
him—
” He pointed to a new face in the box. “
He
had a fall a couple of years back. Now can’t get about, ’cept with a walker.”

Mr. Nunnery’s world consisted of cripples and unfortunates set in a landscape of impenetrable forests, earthquakes, icebergs, huge, unpredictable rivers, storms, swamps and prairies. Bald-headed, on crutches and in wheelchairs, they crept through their enormous country like wounded insects. Whenever things seemed to brighten up, yet another catastrophe hit them. The price of cotton went phut, or they caught polio, or had a stroke.

“You like my pictures?”

“Yes, I do, very much.” Their technical badness was so much of a piece with their human subjects that it made its own ironic point.

“I reckon I could make a book out of ’em.”

Had he done so, it would have been a weird, ugly sort of masterpiece on a classic theme; as close as photography could come to Dreiser’s
An American Tragedy
.

“
Americans,
” said P. T. Ferry over breakfast in Gooch’s, “they’d spoil a wet dream.”

The morning’s edition of the
Memphis Commercial Appeal
showed pictures of a triumphant mob outside the embassy in Teheran. President Carter had announced that on no account would he return the Shah to the care of the Ayatollah Khomeini. The Iranian students had promised to kill all the American hostages if the United States tried to mount a rescue operation. Opposite Gooch’s Dining Room, two tiny Cessna planes were parked on a grass airstrip. The fifty- and sixty-year-old ex-Marines glanced covetously at them over their eggs and grits. If
they
were running the country, they’d be up in the sky, heading for Eye-ran with hunters’ Magnums and World War II carbines.

P. T. Ferry was grimly entertained by today’s news. He was on to his fourth refill of coffee, and with each cup he grew cussingly funnier. He was a professional fisherman, he farmed a few acres of beans and he owned a garage in town. We had been talking about America’s vulnerable dependence on Middle Eastern oil supplies. I told Mr. Ferry that he would have to abandon his big pickup truck and learn to drive a small car like the one I had in London which did forty-five miles to a gallon of gas.

“You better be careful now; you might get lynched, telling an
American
a thing like that. What you doing? Trying to insult my dignity?”

Perfectly on cue, a midget Italian economy car went east past our window.

“See? Some of you are learning already. Soon you’ll all be driving things like that.”

“That wasn’t an American,” said P. T. Ferry. “That was some wetback Hispanic.”

“You never saw him.”

“I didn’t have to see him. I know. No American would be seen
dayud
driving that.”

He ran me back to town with my luggage loaded on the back of his truck. We stopped at his garage, where he summoned all his employees to stand in a semicircle around me. They crawled out from under cars and made an obedient, greasy audience.

“Listen, you-all. You ask this guy how much gas costs where he comes from.”

P. T. Ferry’s usual straight man obliged. I felt like a ventriloquist’s dummy.

“Last time I was in London it was selling for about two dollars seventy, two dollars eighty a gallon.”

There were a couple of polite whoops of pretended disbelief.

“Hear that? And
that,
” said P. T. Ferry, pointing at my luggage like an old ham in vaudeville, “is why he’s
walking.
” He swung himself up into the driver’s seat of the truck and beckoned me around, and we drove on. I did rather hope that I wasn’t to be taken on exhibition around the whole of Tiptonville as P. T. Ferry’s dancing monkey. He had been forbidden to work after a surgical operation, and he found his leisure irksome; with me in tow, he might fill the day as a traveling showman.

Where Cape Girardeau had tried to ward the Mississippi off, Tiptonville had been casually deserted by it. One day the river had shifted its course two miles west, turning Tiptonville from a port into a landlocked town. The old wharf and levee was still called Betty’s Landing. Now it was just a line of run-down shacks looking out over a dry hole of scrub and forest. What was still marked on the charts as Island No. 12 was a willow-covered hill showing over the tops of the surrounding oaks. P. T. Ferry pointed out a gray wooden mansion with a pockmarked veranda which stood a block back from the landing.

“See them shell holes? They were made by the Union forces from across the river in the War Between the States.”

He made me a present of a bag of nuts from the pecan tree in his yard and set me on my way again. I paddled out of the shallow scoop of mud where my boat had been parked and was whisked off downstream by the current. As soon as I had the motor going I looked back to wave goodbye, but the ferry landing and Mr. Ferry’s truck were already too far behind to wave to.

The surface of the Mississippi was riddled with patches of slick. I zigzagged around them, crossing and recrossing the channel to stay clear of these oozings and swellings the color of thick chocolate. They, presumably, were another product of the earthquake of 1811. It had thrown up reefs of rock under the river bottom, and deep down below me the current was riding at full tilt into sunken crags and chimneys. The boils were simply the points at which the Mississippi was finding it easier to run skyward than to head for the Gulf. The power with which the water came up from the riverbed was tremendous: I had seen a whole tow fleet shuddering in midstream as it hit a boil; thirty thousand tons looking liverish and afflicted by the shakes.

Little Cypress Bend, then Little Prairie Bend were loops as tight as
crochet hooks. The word “little” in their titles must have been intended as an old pilot’s joke. Big eddies skirled in the shallow water off the sandbars at their points, and there were bigger ones still on their outer edges where the current drove hard and deep into the Missouri bank. By Caruthersville, Missouri, after two hours of nervous tacking and dodging, my eye for the river was beginning to glaze. I spent ten minutes aground on a bar, waiting for a phantom towboat to round a bend. Twice I headed for the wide metallic gleam of open water and found that it was just sunlight on sand.

Caruthersville was a muddy, flyblown town. Its gap-boarded cotton gin had been put out of business by the boom in soybeans; a line of Chryslers with no license plates stood rusting on a dealer’s lot; its streets were dotted with small, fluttering heaps of garbage. Muffled in my parka against the bright cold, I walked up Main looking for signs of life. There weren’t many. One shrunken old man, in a threadbare boiler suit and a grease-stained green felt cap, was kicking his heels on the sidewalk outside the gun-and-liquor store. He crossed the street to meet me.

“You look to me,” he said, “as if you was in the Air Force.”

“No. I’m not in the Air Force.”

“You ain’t
never
been in the Air Force?”

“I’ve never been in any air force.”

“Oh.” He chomped on his gums, his face twisted with thought. “Say …” he said. Then his voice firmed up. “I
bet
you haven’t got forty cents on you.”

“You’re
betting
me that I haven’t got forty cents.”

“Yep,” he said confidently, “that’s what I’m betting you.”

I thought he had hit on an interestingly democratic version of being a beggar. I gave him a dollar bill.

“Now,” he said, pocketing it without thanks, “I got to get you a drink.”

“Don’t bother. Buy two for yourself.”

“Okay. If that’s what
you
want, now, I ain’t putting up an argument.”

After the old man had disappeared into the store, the only thing that moved in town was the digits on the time-and-temperature clock at the bank. Caruthersville seemed very secretive about what it was up to. Perhaps it was rehearsing for a nuclear alert and everyone had gone underground. I did find a dispensing machine full of copies of the local paper, fed sixty cents into it and hoped that the
Pemiscot Journal
would fill me in on the details of life in Caruthersville.