That Distant Land, page 21
He found out the man’s name, which was Bob Shifter. He found out where he lived, and where he had lived before. He found out that Bob Shifter was no kin to old man Claude Shifter who used to live close to Ellville down by Hargrave, or if he was he didn’t know it. He found out how long Bob Shifter had been married and how many children he had. He found out the mechanics wife’s maiden name and his mother’s maiden name. He found out all that and a lot more, and he didn’t have to ask more than three or four direct questions, for Bob Shifter was more than glad to tell the story of his life, and not in much of a hurry, once the talk started, to fix the tire.
The day was no longer young by the time they paid Mr. Shifter and got a good drink out of their water jug and started on again. But soon they were coming into the outskirts of the city. Now Tol began to experience their adventure as a reality, for the outskirts stretched out a long way before the city itself began. They would go through some of the city before they got to the stockyards, and there was a vast amount of it beyond.
He cleared his throat and said, “When you get me beyond the stockyards, by thunder, you’ve lost me!”
Nobody said anything.
After a while, to make sure they understood exactly what his qualifications were, he said again, “When you get me past the stockyards, I don’t know left from right, nor up from down. I don’t for a fact.”
But by then they were approaching the stockyards, and Miss Minnie was digging in her purse for Sam Hanks’s map.
“Now!” she said, drawing it out and unfolding it.
And then it was her turn to be assaulted by the reality of that day, for the map, past the stockyards, which had been boldly labeled “STOCK YARDS,” did not have a single name on it. Beyond the stockyards, where they now were, and going past in a hurry, the map was just a squiggle of straight lines and right-angle turns. And Miss Minnie understood, in a sort of lightning flash, the urban experience of her well-traveled nephew: When he drove his truck in the city, he went by landmarks, even such landmarks as he had recited while he drew his map, causing her and Tol to see visions of where they were going; past the stockyards, he didn’t know the name of anything.
“Well, there is an example of misplaced faith,” said Miss Minnie in a voice that was precise and restrained and carried unmistakably the tone of familial exasperation.
They stopped for a red light and then went on again.
“What’s the matter?” Tol said. Miss Minnie had never taken that tone with him, but he knew how he would have felt if she ever had, and so he felt sorry for Sam Hanks.
“There are no street names,” Miss Minnie said. “The map is perfectly useless.”
“Aw, naw, now, it’s not,” Tol said.
“I fear it is,” said Miss Minnie.
“Well, it shows you where to turn,” Tol said, putting his big forefinger down onto the paper. “Here. Look a-here. Right here. Turn!” he said to Elton, pointing the way.
And Elton turned left out of the middle of the great street they were on into a smaller one.
“Listen to all the horns,” Tol said.
“If we don’t know the names of the streets,” Miss Minnie said, “how can we know where to turn?”
“Well, we just turn where the line turns,” said Tol. “Keep a watch out now. Sam told us what to look for. Maybe he said the names of the streets. Maybe we’ll remember some of them. Look at the signs.”
So they began watching for the street signs. Miss Minnie was wearing a black straw hat with a stiff brim. “She was turning her head this way and that, looking for signs,” as Elton would tell it later, “and that hat like to sawed off Tol’s left arm and my head.”
“Now,” Tol said, “didn’t he say to turn past that big building yonder?”
“Yes, perhaps he did,” Miss Minnie said.
Elton turned, and they went along another street, and before long they turned again. They went on that way for a considerable time. Finally they could no longer be sure which of the anonymous angles on their map they had come to.
“Well,” Miss Minnie said, “we’re lost.”
“Well, we know something for sure, anyhow,” Tol said, and Miss Minnie allowed him to laugh at that all by himself.
“Why don’t we ask somebody?” Elton said. “Looks like some of these people ought to know.” Elton had never ceased to grin. He was having a good time. As long as he was driving, he didn’t care whether they were lost or not.
Miss Minnie, too, had thought of asking somebody, but she had her pride. If there was anything worse than being a person who did not know where she was, it was appearing to be a person who did not know where she was. Perhaps she understood also that by giving Tol an opening for conversation with the public at large, they might delay their arrival at the Fair indefinitely. And now that her confidence had failed, she saw pretty clearly that they would have to ask not one person but many. She saw that the place was complicated beyond her imagining or her ability to imagine. She saw that even if they had good directions, they would get them wrong. There was no telling the mistakes they would make.
“It would be reasonable,” she said, having calmly resolved to think it through again, “since the Fair is so large an event, that there ought to be signs along the way, saying, ‘To the Fair.’ And so perhaps if we just look around a little we will see one of those signs.”
Buoyed up by the cheerfulness of logical thought, Tol agreed.
“And it seems to me,” she said, pointing with her gloved forefinger, “that a promising direction would be that way.”
And so they wandered about for a while, looking for a sign, and found none.
“Well,” Tol said finally, “why don’t we just look for a big street where a lot of people are going in the same direction. They’ll probably be going to the Fair, for there’s a many of them that goes. And we can just follow along. Don’t you see?”
But it had got to where thinking did not much help either their spirits or their condition. And though they came to some more big streets, it appeared that about the same numbers of people were going in both directions.
“We must go back to the stockyards and begin again,” Miss Minnie said.
And that was the worst thought of all, for only then did they understand how lost they were. That they did not know where they were suddenly proved to them that they did not know where the stockyards were. They did not know where home was.
Failure and despair came upon them. They could no longer say that they were on their way to the Fair. They had come to a place of railroad spurs, tall chimneys, and low buildings—a sooty, ugly, purposeful place that sunlight did not improve. And all the time they were wandering around lost, wasting their precious day, the Fair was happening; it was fleeing as a bird to the mountain. Miss Minnie had a vision of the light fading from the polished skins of apples and pears and plums.
“Oh, goodness!” she said, and Elton thought she was going to cry, but she did not.
And then a sort of wonder happened. Until he was about forty-five—when it was revealed to him that if he was going to get up early he ought to go to bed early—Tol Proudfoot had been a coon hunter, and so he was accustomed to being lost and to finding himself again. Once he understood that Miss Minnie herself was hopelessly bewildered, and that all rational measures had failed, Tol’s sense of direction began to operate. “Now, the stockyards,” he said, “if that’s where we want to go, is right over yonder.” And he pointed the direction.
It was a direction diagonal to the streets, and so they had to go in a zigzag, tacking back and forth like a sailboat.
“Slant her over that way a little, son,” Tol would say. And then, in a little while, “Now cut her back over this way.”
And finally they were going pretty fast, amid much traffic, down the middle of a long, broad street, and they could see, far down at the end of it, the stockyards. Tol was waving his hand, signaling to Elton to go straight ahead.
“Oh, Mr. Proudfoot!” said Miss Minnie. “Where would we be without you?”
And then, over on the left-hand side of the street, Tol spied a man on tall stilts, carrying a sandwich board that said:
You’ll find it, friend,
At the Outside Inn.
It was perhaps the chief spectacle of the day so far. For fear the others would not see it, Tol lunged in the direction of the sandwich man and extended his hand to indicate where to look.
“Look a-yonder!” he said.
He had stuck his hand right in front of Elton’s face. His hand looked as big, Elton said, as a billboard. And when they had seen the sandwich man and exclaimed and Tol withdrew his hand, the world had changed. The car in front of them was stopping in a hurry for a red light. Elton clapped his foot onto the brake. And what happened after that happened faster than it can be explained.
When the man in front applied his brake, as Elton would tell it, “his ass-end as-cended.” When Elton applied his brake, which he did a little too late, the Trick’s front end descended. And as everything stopped and got level again, the back bumper of the car in front chomped down onto the front bumper of the Trick.
Elton and Tol got right out to see what the damage was.
“It’s all right,” Elton said. “It didn’t make a scratch.”
But Tol Proudfoot knew a calamity when he saw one. “Hung like two dogs!” he said. “By thunder, son, they’re hung like two dogs!”
The car in front was far longer and far shinier than the Trick. And now its driver had got out and come back to see also. He had a white mustache and a red face and was wearing a suit and was in a hurry.
Elton was grinning as if he could not wait for the world to show forth more of its wonders.
“What do you propose to do about this, sir?” the man said, and then, seeing that he addressed a mere boy, turned to Tol Proudfoot and said, “Sir, what do you propose to do about this?”
At that point the light turned green, and the traffic began to pour along on both sides of them, and behind them horns began to blow
It seemed to Tol that the world, or anyhow his part of it, had come to an end, for he could see no way out. If he had any conviction still in force, it was that when a calamity has happened to somebody, other people ought to come to a respectful and helpful stop. But there he and Elton and Miss Minnie were, trapped and defeated beyond the power of man to conceive, and nothing stopped. The cars and trucks and streetcars and wagons sped past, horns blew, and people shouted. The high, hot sun glared down into the crevice of the street without the mercy of a single tree.
He lifted his voice across their conjoined vehicles to the man with the mustache. “Hung like two dogs!” He spoke as sympathetically as he was able at the required volume, as if hoping to ease their predicament by so apt a description of it. He was sweating with heat and with panic. Behind him, in the Trick, Miss Minnie’s eyes were round and watery with unfallen tears, and her lips were shut tight together; her hands in their white gloves lay crossed over her purse in her lap and did not move.
“You must do something about this,” the man shouted to Tol. “I don’t have all day for this. I’m in a hurry!”
Tol then saw it through, as far at least as indignation. “Drive on!” he shouted back. “I reckon we can drag as fast as you can haul!”
Elton, who had been waving his hand for attention for some time, then said, “Mr. Tol, stand right here,” and he pointed to the two stout brackets to which the Trick’s bumper was attached.
“What?” Tol said.
“Stand on these!”
Elton showed him again. Propping himself on the back end of the other car, Tol clambered up onto the brackets, and the Trick bowed down under his weight.
“Now take hold of that other bumper and lift up,” Elton said.
When Tol lifted—which he did, Miss Minnie said, “as with the strength of ten”—Elton applied himself with all his strength to the left front fender of the Trick, which rolled back and came free. The man in a hurry, without looking again at them, stepped back into his machine and slammed the door.
Elton got back in behind the steering wheel. Tol, whose conviction held further that all calamities should be followed by conversation, stood in disappointment, watching the other car drive away. And then he got in, too.
“Well,” Elton said, still grinning, “where does that map say to go now?”
“Home, son.” Tol Proudfoot laughed a little, as if to himself, and patted Miss Minnie’s crossed hands. “By thunder, it says to go home.”
“Yes,” Miss Minnie said, “let us go home.”
That is the story as I heard it many times from Elton Penn—and from Sam Hanks, too, of course, for he had his version of it, though Elton was its principal eyewitness.
One day, when I happened by to see Miss Minnie, it occurred to me to ask her about that famous trip. She had been long a widow by then, and we neighbors often made a point of happening by. We needed to know that she was all right, but also it was good for us to see her and to have her pleasant greeting.
“Oh, yes!” she said, when I brought the subject up. “We weren’t able to get all the way to the Fair. We got nearly all the way. I’m sure it was wonderful. But we did succeed in getting all the way home. And wasn’t Mr. Proudfoot happy to be here!”
The Solemn Boy (1934)
Ptolemy Proudfoot’s ninety-eight-acre farm lay along the Goforth Hill road between the Cotman Ridge road and Katy’s Branch. It included some very good ridgeland, some wooded hillside above the creek, and, down between Katy’s Branch and the Katy’s Branch road, two acres or so of bottomland. This creek-bottom field, small and narrow and awkwardly placed, seemed hardly to belong to the farm at all, and yet it was the one piece of truly excellent land that Tol owned. He called it the Watch Fob. He kept it sowed in red clover and timothy or lespedeza and timothy, and every three or four years he would break it and plant it in corn.
Since the Watch Fob was so out of the way, whatever work Tol had to do there tended to be put off until last. And yet, such was the quality of the crops that came from that land, and such the pleasantness of the place, down among the trees beside the creek, that Tol always looked forward to working there. The little field was quiet and solitary. No house or other building was visible from it, and the road was not much traveled. When Tol worked there, he felt off to himself and satisfied. There were some fine big sycamores along the creek, and while Tol worked, he would now and then hear the cry of a shikepoke or a kingfisher. Life there was different from life up on the ridge.
Nineteen thirty-four was one of the years when Tol planted the Watch Fob in corn. And that was fortunate, for it was a dry year; the ridge fields produced less than usual, and the Watch Fob made up a good part of the difference. Tol cut and shocked that field last, and then he shucked and cribbed the upland corn before he went back again to the creek bottom.
Perhaps Tol agreed with the sage of Proverbs who held that “he that hasteth with his feet sinneth”—I don’t know. It is a fact, anyhow, that Tol never hurried. He was not by nature an anxious or a fearful man. But I suspect that he was unhurried also by principle. Tol loved his little farm, and he loved farming. It would have seemed to him a kind of sacrilege to rush through his work without getting the good of it. He never went to the field without the company of a hound or two. At the time I am telling about, he had a large black-and-tan mostly hound named Pokerface. And when Tol went to work, he would often carry his rifle. If, while he was working, Pokerface treed a squirrel or a young groundhog, then the workday would be interrupted by a little hunting, and Miss Minnie would have wild meat on the table the next day. When Tol went down to the Watch Fob to cultivate his corn, he always took his fishing pole. While he worked with plow or hoe, he would have a baited hook in the water. And from time to time he would take a rest, sitting with his back against a tree in the deep shade, watching his cork. In this leisurely way, he did good work, and his work was timely. His crops were clean. His pastures were well grassed and were faithfully clipped every year. His lambs and his steers almost always topped the market. His harvested corn gleamed in the crib, as clean of shuck and silk as if Tol had prepared it for a crowd of knowledgeable spectators, though as like as not he would be the only one who ever saw it.
By the time Tol got around to shucking the corn down on the Watch Fob that fall, it was past Thanksgiving. People had begun to think of Christmas. Tol had put off the job for two or three days, saying to himself, “I’ll go tomorrow.” But when he woke up on the morning he had resolved to go, he wished that he never had planted the Watch Fob in corn in the first place. Tol was sixty-two years old in 1934. He had not been young for several years, as he liked to say. And that morning when he woke, he could hear the wind ripping past the eaves and corners of the little farmstead, and rattling the bare branches of the trees.
“I’m getting old,” he thought as he heaved his big self off the mattress and felt beneath the bedrail for his socks.
“I’m getting old”—he had said that a number of times in the last few years, each time with surprise and with sudden sympathy for his forebears who had got old before him.
But he got up and dressed in the dark, leaving Miss Minnie to lie abed until he built up the fires. Tol was a big man. When he dressed, as Miss Minnie’s nephew Sam Hanks said, it was like upholstering a sofa. In sixty-two years Tol had never become good at it. In fact, putting on his clothes was an affair not in the direct line of his interests, and he did not pay it much attention. Later, while he sat with his coffee after breakfast and was thus within her reach, Miss Minnie would see that his shirt collar was turned down and that all his buttons had engaged the appropriate buttonholes.
