Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey (45 page)

As we bumped over the single Milwaukee Road track in Interior, South Dakota (pop 87, on Saturday nights) saw that a road fork a little ahead was not signposted. I turned back and went into a bar
(the
bar) to ask the way.

After I had spoken to the bartender a man sitting in the cool gloom with several empty beer bottles in front of him cried, 'You wanna go to Chadron? I live jus' west of Chadron, and I'm on my way. Jus' follow me.'

He was a thick-set man in a store-bought suit, about thirty-eight, with a wide, cheerful mouth and slightly unfocused blue eyes. I said, 'Thank you very much, that'll be great,' and headed for the door.

'Wait a minute. Let's have a beer,' he cried. 'The name's Leo.' He stuck out his hand. It was about three in the afternoon, but I had a beer, while he told me that he was on his way home from a farmers' convention in Chicago. Then we went out into the glare of the sun. Leo shook Barbara's hand, leaped into a parked green Ford pickup, and took off at seventy miles an hour.

The road, across the Pine Ridge Reservation of the Sioux, was cut into the black dirt of the prairie, and was unpaved, deeply rutted, and full of unmarked crossroads and junctions. The pickup bounced and jolted south like a demented jack-rabbit far in front of me. We tore through Indian trading posts like the chariot race in
Ben Hur,
each time twice jerking into phlegmatic alarm the somnolent Sioux squatted along the shaded wall. I followed Leo by the trail of his dust, and by the beer cans he flung out in regular succession along the roadside. Once he vanished, and I only found him again because he had stopped for us to come up: he had run out of cans, and the bottles he was now on needed an opener. At length, after an hour, we came to a main road, and headed west. The signposts pointed clearly to Chadron, where we intended to stop the night, but Leo wouldn't hear of it. 'Follow me!' he cried, glassy-eyed, leaning heavily against his pickup. 'Wife's away! You spend the night with me! Ain't a decent motel in Chadron, anyway.' He would not be denied, and a Nebraska farm house was going to be far more interesting to us than a Nebraska motel, so we accepted.

From his farm the black earth stretched flat and even to the huge red ball, dust-hazed, of the setting sun. There was not another house in sight, just the earth, and the dust. Trees surrounded the farm yard, but there were no others inside the darkening sweep of the horizon.

It was night. Our children were in the only bathroom, splashing and singing. It sounded like Niagara, but every time Barbara got up to calm the hurricane Leo waved her down crying, 'Let 'em enjoy themselves. That's the way Jane would like it. Here, ma'am, have another drink.' He had changed to rye whisky by now, and began to ask us questions. What was my business? -Where did Barbara get that cute accent? When he learned that we were English born he had to have another drink to celebrate. The news that I was a writer produced another, together with a rather touching awe that a writer, a real writer of books, was sheltering in his house. When he learned that
Bhowani Junction
(he had never heard of it) was to be made into a movie starring Ava Gardner and Stewart Granger he staggered to the telephone, crying 'We've got to get Jane. She'll
love
this!'

Barbara signalled frantically to me behind his back, no, no! I needed no urging and began to babble that it was nothing, he mustn't think of disturbing her, she couldn't possibly get here in time to say hello. But he had the telephone and was mumbling, 'She's only twenty-fi' miles away, staying with her mother. Wouldn't miss it for nothin'.' The children tumbled out of the bathroom followed by a tidal wave. Barbara smacked them both heartily and told them to dry themselves and get into their pyjamas at once. On the telephone Leo was saying, 'Great people, honey, greates'! Gonna stay the night... No, no, met them in. In-in-interior... But...' The children's false screams echoed through the house, and no doubt, the telephone.

There were long ominous pauses while he listened, swaying. Then he said, 'Lovely honey. You comeonover ri' away. A writer... wrote a book about India, with Ava Gardner.. Be seeing you'

He turned back rubbing his hands. 'Time we ate,' he cried.

'Yes, oh yes,' we said enthusiastically.

'You've sure come to the right place,' he said. 'We farmers have these deep freezes, stacked. Looka this!' He opened a huge freezing chest and pulled out a couple of frozen chickens. 'Everyone like chicken?'

'Yes,' we said. It was no time to argue. The sooner we got some food into Leo, and ourselves, the better. Leo slapped a large frying pan on to the electric burner, switched it on to full heat, and poured in a cupful of corn oil. Barbara began to make up the kids' beds on the living-room floor.

We were to sleep in the matrimonial bed, and Leo in the spare room. He and Jane had no children; they had only been married two years.

Leo pressed a rye into my hands and poured one for himself. The corn oil was smoking hot and the kitchen looked like the gas attack at Second Ypres. Leo dropped the two frozen chicken into the boiling, smoking fat and I dived for the door. 'Ow, hey!' Leo yelled as burning fat exploded all over the kitchen, spattering his hands and face. I could hardly see him by now, and oil was dripping off the ceiling and the walls and all the cups and china in the racks. And it was getting worse as more water melted out of the chickens.

'Shouldn't we be doing it a little more slowly?' Barbara asked, having come on the run at the yelling. The kids sheltered behind her skirts, applauding whole-heartedly.

'No, no,' Leo said thickly, 'thass the way we cook 'em in Nebraska.'

Then, preceded by a large, barking and over-excited dog whose wagging tail knocked Susan's glass of milk off a side table over what appeared to be an expensive Axminster carpet, Jane arrived.

We left early the next morning. Jane did not get up to see us off, which was naughty of her, as her husband's generosity to strangers could not be blamed on us; nor, in a Christian sense, should it have been blamed on him. Leo and the dog came out of the barn as I started the car. Leo was in his underclothes, rubbing straw and sleep out of his eyes, and mumbling bleary good wishes. I made a mental note to send a copy of
Bhowani Junction,
signed, and bearing our best wishes and thanks to him, but only him. Then we headed the Dodge, fast, away from Chadron, Nebraska.

That noon we came to Laramie, Wyoming, and it seemed to offer all that I wanted. The main line of the Union Pacific passed through, and I learned that it was a division point for crew changes between Cheyenne and Rawlins. On the Sherman Summit I recognized a Big Boy, one of the 4-8-8-4 Mallet compounds which were the biggest and most powerful engines in the world, and I also saw several diesels, and a gas turbine, both on passenger and freight trains. I arranged to stay a week, then drive home early in September, while Barbara returned at once by train, for the children were due back in school. I saw them all off on the eastbound
City of Los Angeles,
and began a week of noseying around the freight yard, riding cabooses down to Cheyenne, and the cab of a steam 4-8-4 express engine hauling the
Overland Limited
to Rawlins and back, and twice on Big Boys as they ground up to Sherman Summit under a drifting pall of black smoke with 5,000 tons behind the gigantic tender.

I talked to engineers and conductors and firemen and brakemen, ate in commissaries and drank in railroad bars, and learned the arcane jargon of the Iron Horse. It was all a dream come true, but at the end of it I was no nearer to a solution of the problems of my theme than at the beginning, so it was with mixed emotions that I headed the Dodge cast.

The weather was perfect, the roads empty. In one dawn I covered 320 miles across Minnesota and the northern peninsula of Michigan in four hours precisely; and the next day drove 619 miles between 4 a.m. and 4 p.m., from Sault Ste Marie across Ontario and back into New York State. The next day it was home, and a Barbara who seemed, after the first embraces, distinctily disgruntled. It appeared that I was responsible. In my eagerness to sample new railroad experiences, even vicariously, I had booked them from Chicago eastward on the Erie Railroad, shunning the much better known, shorter, and more popular New York Central or Pennsylvania routes. They had learned the reason for this lack of custom: the Erie was trying to get rid of its passenger service, if service is the right word for the combination of surliness and neglect which they experienced for twenty-four hours on a two-car springless train and a switchback roadbed that had not been maintained for forty years. Barbara was black and blue and starving, and the children seasick, by the time they reached Suffern, where Keith Jennison met them.

I went out and bought a white Cadillac El Dorado convertible with red leather upholstery, but Barbara would not be gruntled. She holds that trip against me to this day. As to the writing, the loss-of-skill theme would have to remain locked to me until I could find the key. I decided to tackle now the mountaineering book which had been prominent in my original list, for the Himalayas have always been a challenge, particularly to the English in India. But that too would have to wait a little while, for the first business at hand was to cheer the Giants through the last two weeks of the season, coach them through the World's Series, and then prepare the great party.

Chapter Sixteen

Milton Caniff shook his head in wonder: 'It's hard enough to believe that they won at all. You know the old saying, "Never bet against Joe Louis or the American League" — but four straight! You must have a powerful whammy, Jack.'

I agreed modestly. A few days earlier our Jints had swept the World's Series from the Cleveland Indians in four games. I added, 'But it was really Dusty Rhodes who had the whammy.'

My mother, coming up behind me, said in her best party voice, 'Now, Jackie,
who
is Dusty Rhodes?'

I shrugged. Who, indeed, was he — this journeyman batter who'd got off the bench in three successive games to -pinch-hit the winning blow for the Giants? We'd scarcely heard of him before, and
if
World's Series history was to be any guide, we'd never hear of him again. Like a meteor he had had his flaring hour.

We drifted apart, myself in one direction with my father and mother, Milton and Bunny across the grass to the table set up in the back orchard, where the drunken does had cavorted.

'It's a nice party,' my mother said. 'Such well-bred people.'

'I don't know about that,' I said, 'But they're good people.'

'A bit socialist, some of them,' my father said dubiously. During the ten days since they arrived he had listened to some talk that in his view savoured of Bolshevism or socialism. As I often agreed with him, I said nothing, but took the drink out of his hand and firmly poured more water into it. He had had one already, and not for nothing was he known during his twenty-six years in India as Smell-of-a-Cork Masters, the cheapest man to get drunk between Dera Ghazi Khan and the head waters of the Dihong.

He looked around now, and said, 'You've done well, Jackie.'

My mother dabbed her eyes, 'Yes. But so far... you've gone so far…'

Far, does she mean, I thought, or far away? It didn't matter, for both were true. The India of my birth was a
far,
faint cry:

My Hindustani went within six months of reaching England, but I remembered the taste and look of the bazaar candies for ever, the yellow balls made of coarse sugar and corn meal. On my fifth birthday we went out in a boat to Sandspit and there were thousands of crabs running sideways and diving down their holes, the sea washing over them. Ashraf made a three-tiered cake with ladders of icing from one level up to the next. A wheel came off a horsed carriage full of British soldiers — Tommies, Mummy called them, and they all spilled out into the street. My father was not there.

In Eastbourne I was six, and spent all day, winter and summer, running barefoot about the steep pebbly beach with my brother. We wore only khaki shirts and shorts and the boatmen called me Bombay, which they pronounced Bombye. We found pennies and silver in the pebbles where the people had been sitting, and once I fell off a breakwater into deep water. Prep school was long corridors and Eton collars and mortar-boards, and secret societies that lasted three days, and struggles and pushes and yelling in the corridors over Oxford and Cambridge. One holiday was an adder in the hot gorse over Llanbedrog, and another running through a great frozen park, an over-excited Sealyham snapping at my ankles. Then we re-discovered Nanny and her father's cottage by the Great Western main line, and all summer I ate bread and marmalade on a chair at the end of the vegetable patch, beyond the smelly outhouse, a notebook on my knee, waiting for the distant hurrying beat of a Castle coming down the bank from Pewsey, or a King labouring up from Woodborough with the Torbay Limited. Stanley and Alex and I and Eddie and John climbed elms for rooks' eggs, and walked across the springy turf of the downs beyond the White Horse of Wilcot, or waded up the Avon for the moorhens' nests.

I arrived at Wellington on a winter evening, carrying a heavy suitcase all the way up from the station through the misty lamp-lit dusk towards the loom of the great buildings. I stopped at the narrow gate, iron-barred but open, and saw what was written above:
The path of DUTY is the way to GLORY.
It was always autumn at Wellington, the woods brown and the chestnut leaves thick on the damp earth and orange and black scarves going down to Bigside, cocoa brewing at the end of dormitory, and oh to wear a cap with a tassel swinging at the back of my neck, and Grimshaw spoke to me and knew my name.

I saw a Sandhurst drill parade and couldn't believe my ears or eyes, for the disciplined crack of each epileptic movement, the oneness of the six hundred khaki bodies, the single, multiple flash of the bayonets in the wintery sun. Then I was there, and not failing, and a seedy-looking chap accosted me in the Gents at Waterloo, and a barber's shop in Camberley sold a magazine called
London Life
in which everyone seemed to wear rubber underclothes and there were a great many small advertisements for whips and high boots. I discovered girls — not the physical conformation of them, that had been done earlier — the waywardness, the wonder, the baffling non-maleness of them.