This Side of Jordan

W
HO HAS DONE HIS DAY'S WORK AND WILL SOONEST BE THROUGH WITH HIS SUPPER?

W
HO WISHES TO WALK WITH ME?

—W
ALT
W
HITMAN

I
LOOK TO THE EAST
, I
LOOK TO THE WEST,

A
YOUTH ASKING FAITH TO BE REWARDED.

B
UT FORTUNE IS A BLIND GOD, FLYING THROUGH THE CLOUDS

A
ND FORGETTING ME ON THIS SIDE OF
J
ORDAN.

—T
RADITIONAL

AMERICA, THE MIDDLE BORDER

FARRINGTON, ILLINOIS

HADLEYVILLE, MISSOURI

HARRISON, KANSAS

STANTONSBURG, NEBRASKA

ALLENVILLE, IOWA

ICARIA, MISSOURI

1929

A
LVIN PENDERGAST STOOD OUTDOORS
behind the old Farrington auditorium in an Illinois breeze swollen with fresh crabapple blossoms. The farm boy had a fifty-cent ticket in his hand to see the dance derby, but felt too blue to be inside. Orchestra music filtered out into the motor parking lot and across the spring twilight. He had walked alone three miles from the farm late that afternoon with a meat sandwich and a pocketful of Aunt Hattie's lemon cookies in his jacket and hadn't yet eaten a bite and it was past suppertime now. Tall carbon lamps were lit against the dark and clouds of tiny moths fluttered in and out of the pale light. Leaning against a thick maple tree a dozen yards from the back door, Alvin watched a pair of Model A Ford automobiles rattle into the side parking lot where a crowd his own age got out laughing. The pretty bobbed-haired girls were wearing short skirts and sparkling jewelry, while the boys dressed in white flannel, straw hats and spats. Some were smoking cigarettes. Coughing into his fist, the farm boy watched them hurry off into the noisy auditorium.

He ate his sandwich and one of the cookies. After a while, a flatbed truck swung into the parking lot and a young man Alvin's age jumped out and hurried to the back porch, shouting, “Patsy! Patsy!”

A stout fellow in suspenders and a straw boater held the door open for an attractive girl in a polka dot dress who came out to greet the young man. Her brown hair looked snarled and her street makeup was smeared with tears.

The young man bounded up the steps, shouting, “I'll kick that goddamned sonofabitch's head off if it's the last thing I ever do!”

Alvin's jaw dropped as he saw the girl slap the young man across the face.

The fellow stumbled back against the railing. “Hey! What's that for?”

The girl took a wad of chewing gum out of her mouth and threw it at him. “Nuts to you, Petey. We're finished!”

“Aw, honey,” the youth whined, rubbing his cheek, “I know you're sore, but I swear that no-good guinea sonofabitch told me my house was burning down! No kidding! I had to go clear downtown and telephone Elmer to find out it wasn't true!”

“So long, Petey. Lay an egg!” The girl brushed past the stout fellow on her way back indoors.

“Aw, gee whiz, Patsy,” the youth called after her. “Can't you see I'm still full of pep? Why, we'll show 'em who can shake a hoof. You bet we will!”

An older fellow in a brown plaid wool worsted suit and a snappy new fedora came out onto the porch, a lit cigar in hand. “Not tonight you won't. I tell you, kid, you're through.”

The youth frowned. “Says who?”

“Says I. Now, scram! We don't need any more dumbbells around our derby.” He turned to the fellow in the suspenders. “Gus, see that this here lug of Patsy's beats it.”

“Yes, sir.”

A smart Tiger Rag started up within the auditorium, promoting a raucous cheer from the grandstand audience. The youth spoke up. “Look here, Mister Cheney, let up on that, will you? Me and Patsy'll win the sprint tonight if you'll only give us the chance. We aren't the troublemakers in this derby. We got sponsors, loads of 'em, I tell you, who think we're pretty swell. What do you say?”

Alvin almost laughed out loud when he saw the man in the fedora exhale a cloud of smoke into the youth's face, then follow Patsy back indoors. This was lots better than dancing.

The stout fellow wearing suspenders closed the door, and turned to face the young man. “Sorry, kid, but if the boss says you gotta scram, then you gotta scram.”

The youth jerked loose his necktie and flung it off the porch. “It's not fair, Gus! Not fair at all! We'd a won, me and Patsy. Bet your hat on it. I tell you, somebody greased that guinea sonofabitch to gyp us out of our thousand bucks.”

“Sure they did, kid, but if you don't shove off now, you'll just queer yourself for the next town.”

Alvin edged closer to the rear of the auditorium, hoping like hell to see some fireworks. Why not? Just last week, a shoe salesman from Cleveland had gotten shot four times in the head out behind the smokehouse on Wilson Street. A boy Alvin knew from the high school football team had found the body and told everyone how much blood he'd seen. His name was printed in the morning newspaper.

“Gee whiz, Gus, even if we didn't win, Patsy and me was hoping for a spray that'd get us enough for a ticket to St. Louis.”

“Go back to squirting soda.”

“Aw, I don't have the poop for that anymore.”

“Well, I say a fellow oughtn't to plug himself up for a big shot in a rotten business like this unless he knows he can put it over often enough to eat regular and keep some kale in the bank.”

“I know where I stand, Gus,” said the youth. “Cheney does, too. I've learned the steps. You bet I have. Two hundred and thirty-six hours of picking 'em up and putting 'em down, and I'm still fresh as a daisy. Never gone squirrely, neither. Not once. And you ought to see the nifty stunt I planned to put over tonight. Why, it's a panic, I tell you. Look here, I'd be a big shot, Gus, if only the derby was fair and square and Cheney did his duty by some of us.”

“Keep that under your hat, kid.”

Alvin watched the youth stiffen his back, teeth clenched as if he were about to have a fit. Here it comes! Now he'd see something! Every fight started with a mean pose, like dogs and alley cats.

“Don't lecture to me, Gus. By God, if I ever amount to anything it won't be thanks to bums like Cheney.”

The fellow in suspenders stepped forward and slugged the youth hard in the mouth, knocking him backwards off the porch into the dirt below. “Who's the bum, now?” roared the fellow in suspenders. “Eh?” Then he went back indoors, slamming the back door closed behind him.

Electrified, Alvin stole to the edge of the shadows, hoping to see the youth get up and start a ruckus. He'd witnessed plenty of schoolyard scraps. Nobody really got hurt from a good sock in the head. He walked out from under the maple tree into the pale carbon light where the youth was sobbing like a baby. When Alvin called over to him, the youth lifted his chin a few inches off the ground, face caked with dust like a lump of cookie dough, his bottom lip bleeding into the dirt. He looked like a clown. Alvin stifled a laugh, even as he was trying to be polite. “Say, you ain't hurt there, are you?”

“Huh?”

“I said, that fellow didn't bust your jaw or nothing, did he?”

“Shove it along.”

Alvin stopped where he was, his smile fading to a frown. People just weren't friendly anymore. He shot back, “Well, I guess you ain't too handy, are you?”

“You go to hell, too,” the youth snarled. He rose up on one elbow and dabbed his lip with the tips of his fingers, tasting blood. “Lousy hick.”

“Yeah?” Alvin veered away toward the front of the auditorium. Skipping off backwards, he shouted at the youth, “Well, I ain't the one busted up, neither. Dumbbell!”

 

Alvin Pendergast had lived all nineteen years of his life on a farm five miles from the Mississippi River in the pasture country of western Illinois. He and his sisters had been born there, and six of his cousins, three uncles, five aunts, his father and grandfather. His mother and most of his other relatives had grown up on farms between Farrington, Illinois and Beldenville, Wisconsin. Only a few lived in towns, and those in and about Farrington came out to the farm after church each Sunday for dinner. That was tradition. Ham, corn and sweet potatoes. Fried chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy and dumplings. Grace recited by Grandpa Pendergast at the long oak table draped in lacy white linen. While eating, Uncle Carl told jokes about drunken Indians. Uncle Rufus argued county politics with Uncle Henry. Alvin's father condemned race music and lantern-slide entertainments, X-ray experiments and the
Universal News Weekly.
The women at the table chattered among themselves concerning Sabbatarians and housework, charity bureaus, fussy neighbors, mail-order houses, and the evils of inebriety. Children invented paragrams and tittered laughter and received scoldings every few minutes or so. After dinner, the men snuck down into the basement to smoke cigars and sip bourbon, while the women gathered in the kitchen for dishwashing and more earnest gossip. Unless it was storming, the children were sent outdoors to play by the creek until sundown. Too young for the basement and too old for run-sheep-run, Alvin had no part in any of it except eating, and believed therefore that not one single Pendergast, Hamill, Chamberlain, Rutledge, Halverson or Gallup cared less for tradition than did he.

Farm life was a drudgery of frost and manure. Boys wore the stink of it to school. By horse and walking plow, acres of wild grass became cornrows and hayfields. Corncribs and chicken coops were built with hand-sawed lumber. Cookstoves heated the kitchen at dawn. Nobody got rich nor went to the County Home. Some girls slung grain and mended petticoats, others got knocked up in the rafters of a barn. George Pendergast lost a leg in the mechanical reaper. Cousin Oscar went crazy from a pig-bite and chased possums at night for the Morris widow down on Greenfield Road. Snowdrifts buried old Harold Mitchener's duck pond one dark Christmas and Roy Gallup lost three fingers on his right hand to frostbite when he fell through the ice chasing a buck across the fenceline. His brother Rudy drowned. Spring floods stole Auntie Ella's porch and a basketful of kittens. Drought took the field crops a year later and Alvin's father sold his Ford. Uncle Carl became a barber and bought a house on Maple Avenue in Farrington. Aunt Marie married a salesman from Texas and raised her children on Cedar Street two blocks from a trolley stop uptown. Most of the family stayed on. Who else would mend the fences and curry the horses, asked Granny Chamberlain? A leatherbound Bible inscribed with five generations of family history sat on a walnut shelf above Aurora Pendergast's piano, which Alvin passed by in the dark each cold morning before breakfast on his way to the barn Grandpa Harlan had constructed from timber felled himself three years after the Civil War. Both the Bible and the barn smelled ancient.

Four years ago, a week before his fifteenth birthday, Alvin Pendergast developed consumption. It came upon him like a change of seasons, a vague malaise that mimicked nothing worse than a persistent cold, unrelenting fatigue in the mornings, a low fever at night. His family thought he had contracted the lazy habits of adolescence and disregarded his complaints. If he worked hard enough, put his heart into the farm like everyone else, the backache he worried about would soon go away. Keep the old beak against the grindstone, Uncle Henry told him, you'll get somewhere. His father growled at him for chores completed too slowly, his mother and sisters pointed out how skinny he looked. Alvin lost ten pounds to a diminished appetite and could no longer lift Aunt Hattie's bushel basket of peaches. His night-sweats worsened and his skin became sallow and waxen and he caught a cough that troubled him for weeks. One morning after a spell of hacking and violent expectoration, he noticed streaks of blood in his handkerchief. Then the doctors came to the farm and diagnosed him as consumptive, infected with pulmonary tuberculosis. They put Alvin on a train and sent him away to a sanitarium. He wept the first week from fear and loneliness. His ward smelled of feces and formaldehyde. He hardly ate at all and had a bellyache for a month. His breathing was so shallow and labored he often thought he was suffocating. He coughed up blood. He was given cold sponge baths and rubbed with alcohol and taken out of doors to sit in the sunlight when the weather permitted. He consumed milk and eggs and calomel and saline laxatives every few days to aid his digestion. He lost another twenty-five pounds. The nurses brought creosote in hot water for his cough and syrup of iodid for his anemia and hypophosphites of lime and soda to reduce his expectorations, and every day cod liver oil, cod liver oil, cod liver oil. The doctors took X-ray photographs of his lungs and pronounced his condition curable. Still, he grew melancholy and refused to speak to his nurses for a month after enduring the artificial pneumothorax treatments. Then his throat became ulcerous and he suffered horrible headaches and sat in bed for another eight weeks and needed the commode and utter silence and nearly forgot who he was or where he had come from. Only his mother was permitted a visit and he scarcely remembered seeing her, though he was told she came often. Finally he began to walk again and converse with his fellow patients out of doors. He learned pottery and basket-making and how to say a few words in French, and eventually his cough went away with the fever as the tubercles dried up, and his breathing returned to normal, and a year after entering the sanitarium, Alvin was put back on a train one morning and sent home.

 

With the orchestra gone downtown to a late supper, an amplified radio console was broadcasting a lively Turkey Trot when Alvin climbed the wooden bleachers to the circus seats with a bag of hot popcorn. A stinking gray haze of cigarette smoke drifted above the dance floor, obscuring the lettered banners suspended across the upper auditorium.

 

FARRINGTON DANCE DERBY—24 HOURS DAILY!!!

 

DANCING, MUSIC, & SURPRISE ENTERTAINMENTS

 

WARNING!!! THIS IS A PLACE OF REFINED AMUSEMENT:

 

NO WHISTLING, STOMPING, CATCALLS!

 

DO NOT TOUCH CONTESTANTS!

 

TWO SPRINTS TONIGHT!!

 

GENTLEMEN: REMOVE YOUR HATS!!!

 

Alvin hurried to find a seat as a bell rang, ending the rest period. Last night a dancer from Knoxville had gone nuts and tried to strangle a floor judge after being disqualified during a pop-the-whip. Maybe somebody would get shot tonight. Down on the parquet floor, the surviving dancers were barely hanging onto their partners, shuffling disconsolately about in a dreamy rhythm. Behind the orchestra stage, a large scoreboard read: