That Distant Land, page 51
Wheeler slowed down, turned into a just-graded driveway, and with some spinning of wheels drove across a miry patch of newly bulldozed building sites to another street, where he resumed his musing and drove along at the same ambling gait as before.
He was talking now about a bird-hunting trip to Tennessee that he had made with Elton Penn in 1955. Listening, Danny began to grin behind his hand, for the best story, so far, about Wheeler’s driving came from that trip. They were coming home late at night, and Wheeler was driving fast. They were talking, absorbed in their conversation, when they came suddenly to a right-angle turn in the road that Wheeler saw a few seconds later than he should have. It happened that a farm gate was standing open right in the elbow of the turn. Wheeler drove through the gate, made a loop through a pasture, and drove back onto the road again. He never stopped talking.
That story told, among other things, what a good driver Wheeler had been. He did not always pay enough attention, but his reflexes were good.
Wheeler did not tell that part of the story. Maybe he had forgotten it, Danny thought. Or maybe he had not paid enough attention to remember it. It was Elton’s story.
“Ay, Lord!” Wheeler said, and Danny knew that Wheeler had remembered again that Elton was dead and their hunting days a long time past.
There really was nothing wrong with Wheeler’s sense of direction. From the time of his sudden change of course in the midst of the new subdivision, he had been going as straight home as the layout of the streets and roads permitted.
Presently they came to a main route that they both recognized, and Wheeler turned onto it. Throughout their circuit of wherever it was they had been—a passage that, for Danny, had involved several surprises and a modicum of worry—Wheeler had been completely unperturbed. His mood had been, as Danny would later describe it, “level.” To him, the whole trip, the whole day, was an outing, with which he had been thoroughly pleased. Wheeler did not always take the world as it came. He had devoted his life to changing as much of it as he could—and to endless frustration and indignation at things he could not change. But there were days all his life when he found the world, though everywhere touched by sadness, to be boundlessly amusing and interesting. This was one of those days. As days went, it was a good one, and Danny knew it.
Now that they were leaving the city on a known road, evidently going back after all by the way they had come, Danny relaxed and settled himself for the trip. The sky had cleared, and now the sun was shining brightly. But Danny’s complacency, as he later said, was “about five minutes premature.” For when their road intersected with the interstate, Wheeler eased over into the left-hand lane and headed down onto the off-ramp amidst a suddenly risen cacophony of horns that would be with them for the next good while.
“Whoa!” Danny said. “Wait, Wheeler!”
But it was too late to wait. He might as well have been talking to the car engine. Wheeler had not caught on. He was experiencing his only moment of irritation that day. “What,” he said, “are the sons of bitches blowing their horns about?”
He did not catch on, really, until he reached the bottom of the ramp and was forced leftward into the emergency lane by the onrushing traffic. The horn blowing continued as though all the herald angels were announcing chaos come again. The sounds varied from little admonitory toots of disinterested advice to sustained blasts and shrieks of outrage. Confusion and trouble passed over Wheeler’s face. He put his foot on the brake.
And then he caught on. The very second in which Wheeler caught on was apparent to Danny, for in that second Wheeler started to grin. And then Danny felt the seatback press against him as Wheeler accelerated.
He did not speed up by much. He just resumed the amiable, ambling gait that he had maintained more or less ever since leaving the stockyards.
For a while Danny was thinking fast but not very purposefully. When he began to think purposefully, he concluded that the best thing for him to do was keep quiet. Now that they were on the interstate, one way to get off would be to stop and be towed away by the police. Or they could somehow turn around and go in the other direction. But Danny knew that Wheeler was not going to stop until he had to, and he would never turn around. Or, Danny thought, they could try to get through the traffic and across the median into their proper lanes. But the median would be wide and impassable most of the way, and the traffic was heavy. The only other possibility was to drive the emergency lane and get off on an on-ramp—and, for that, Danny thought, the farther out in the country the better. The best thing to do would be to go on to the Ellville interchange.
Having thought it through, he looked at Wheeler and knew that Wheeler had already come to the same conclusion. Wheeler was again in his level mood, evidently enjoying himself, driving along as if the wrong side of the interstate was simply one of the ways to go home. The passing horns continued to toot, hoot, blast, bleat, wail, and howl. From time to time Wheeler would become mindful of them, and he would nod and raise his hand politely to the drivers. “Thank you. Thank you. Excuse me. Thank you.”
When Wheeler came to a car stopped in his way, he eased out to the left and went around on the grass. Or he waited for a break in the traffic and darted around on the right. Getting past the on-ramps required some hesitation and care, but that problem eased as they got farther from the city.
For maybe the next hour, Danny thought, he would have to live purely as a man of faith. He laid his hands in his lap then and just rode, paying close attention to Wheeler and to everything that was happening. If he survived, he thought, he would have to tell the story.
Danny realized that his mind had already entered into a profound concord with Wheeler’s mind. They had both decided on the same course, not because Wheeler was thinking like Danny, but for the opposite reason. Watching Wheeler, Danny knew that he knew what it was like to be Wheeler, for that time and maybe for other times as well. He had felt himself in and had lived through Wheeler’s moment of confusion as the ramp had led them into the opposing line of traffic, and he had felt the coming of clarity when Wheeler recognized their predicament and then accepted it and began to deal with it. He had felt the little stab of glee when Wheeler saw that it could be dealt with. He felt what it was like to be himself there with Wheeler in a bad situation, strangely elated, living by faith, going the wrong way home. If they got there, he thought, it would be the right way. He knew that he was living one of the clearest hours of his life.
And Wheeler was doing a splendid job of driving, keeping well off to the left, anticipating every problem, solving it with dispatch. His reflexes were working handsomely. He was just ambling along, still, keeping up the momentum to move fast if necessary, but maintaining too his level mood, grinning a little, watching everything. They were going to be all right, Danny thought. Maybe. If some misguided particle did not fly out of the torrent on the right and make the beginning of something entirely different. Dressed as he was, Danny thought, he would make a terrible-looking corpse.
Off beyond the highway they could see a farm that was becoming a housing development. The old farmhouse and a barn were still standing in the midst of several large new expensive houses without trees.
“Well, sir,” Wheeler said, as if to propose a change of subject in a conversation that was becoming repetitious. “Years ago, that farm was owned by an old fellow by the name of Buttermore. He was a good farmer in his day, and a right good, decent man too. He was a client of mine. He never had much need for a lawyer, but I helped him in a few little matters over the years, wrote his will and so on. Or he would come in and we would talk.”
An unusually vehement series of horn blowers went by, and Wheeler raised his hand and gave them a kindly wave. “Thank you. Thank you. Much obliged.”
He drove on for a little while, thinking of Mr. Buttermore, and then he laughed. “When he got old, Mr. Buttermore became just pitifully forgetful. He would start a sentence and then forget what he was going to say, and what he had said so far. And then he would say, ‘—and so fo’th.’ It got so that nearly every one of his sentences ended ‘—and so fo’th.’”
On their right, the stream of traffic hurtled by, and the brass of righteous invective continued—all the world bearing down and going by in the opposite direction. Fingers pointed. Fingers jabbed upwards in the sign that contradicts all contradiction. Horns wailed and bellowed in limitless indignation. On their left the fields and woods lay quietly, seeming to wait.
“I settled his estate,” Wheeler said. “The old man had no children. But a fellow by the name of Rowd Dawson contested the will, claiming that he was Mr. Buttermore’s natural son. His evidence was that his left eye was cocked at precisely the same angle as Mr. Buttermore’s. Well, we wound up in court over it. And you can see where that cocked eye business put me with a jury of farmers who every last one believed in the inheritability of physical traits. And Rowd Dawson’s lawyer had several witnesses who were experts on the angles of cocked eyes.”
A state policeman went by, his head swiveled backwards like an owl’s, and Danny made note of the fact by a rightward jerk of his thumb.
“I saw,” Wheeler said.
“Well, sir,” he said, “I learned just by chance, and nearly too late, that Rowd Dawson, as a young man, had been hit on the head with a beer bottle in a saloon fight. And I found witnesses who swore that that lick was what had cocked his eye.”
They were coming down into their home river valley. They were coming to the Ellville interchange.
“Ellville,” Danny said.
Wheeler nodded.
“So I won the case,” he said, and he thought it over one more time before he added, “But, you know, I’ve had to wonder.”
He entered the on-ramp and halfway up met a trailer truck coming down. Wheeler dodged off the pavement onto the grass. The truck went jarring by, honking furiously.
And that, suddenly, was all. They went on up the ramp, turned, crossed the overpass, and headed up the river toward Port William. Danny reached and patted Wheeler on both his shoulders, daring to encumber him now with half a hug.
* Records and surviving memories at Port William do not disclose the date of the events described herein. The best guess is “sometime in the fifties.”
Wendell Berry, That Distant Land
