“What is it to you, Jim, if I live or die?”
James appeared to reflect. Then he said, with amused frankness, “Damned if I know, Jerry.”
Was the other man actually smiling a little, or was that just a grimace? James said, “You know, Jerry, I never forgot you. Time and the river, you know. But I remembered.”
But Guy had suddenly stopped smoking. He was staring before him, dazed, again oblivious to his surroundings. He sat down in his chair, the cigarette dangling from his lip. His taut face had become distant and full of terror.
“Life’s time and the river,” Tom said to his son, who was fifteen years old. “It’s not a new thought. But, say, you’re on a boat. It’s full of your friends, and the ones you love. You’re going down a long river, which came from where you don’t know, and is running to where you don’t know, either. And you’re on that boat, in the same fix. You don’t know when you got on the boat, you don’t know when you’ll get off. So you listen to the band playing and watch the people dancing or eating, and laughing, and you see others in corners crying, or just sitting there, looking at nothing. You try not to notice these poor souls. You’re enjoying yourself with your friends, and who wants to look at gloom?
“Then you hear someone cry out, begging, hopeless, and you see some of your friends falling overboard into the water. You run to the rail. But you know you can’t help them. No one can—in that river. You watch their heads bob in the water; you see their hands held up to you. You can’t do a thing. And the boat just goes on and the band still plays. And one by one your friends, the ones you love, fall overboard, and are lost. And you shiver, and wonder when it will be your time, knowing that when it comes the boat will keep on its way, and the people will laugh and dance and eat and sleep and shit and screw, and cry and sit alone, and they won’t even know you’ve gone. That’s life, son, that’s time and the river. The sooner you know it, the sooner you’ll be reconciled.”
“Reconciled to what, Pa?”
“To living while you can, without looking back for one minute. Enjoy what you can, and be grateful, and don’t think of the dinner last night or what the dinner will be tomorrow. Today. That’s all that counts.”
“But you’ve got to plan for tomorrow, too,” said the young Guy. “You just can’t leave things to happen by themselves.”
“I’ve got no quarrel, Jerry, with planning for tomorrow. But it had better be only tentative. You never know what is waiting for you—tomorrow.”
Guy was silent. Tom looked at him, half smiling. “There are men who pass up today, for tomorrow. They give up their whole lives—for tomorrow. They deny themselves joy and pleasure and laughter—so they can have joy and pleasure and laughter—tomorrow. Didn’t Our Lord say we’re not supposed to take heed for tomorrow? The time comes when those who lived for tomorrow find they’ve lost their whole lives—and tomorrow is here and they have nothing. ‘Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth, before the evil days come when thou shalt say I have no joy in them.’ There, see, I can quote Scripture, too. Remembering your Creator helps you to have joy today—and today is all you have, son. Oh, I’m for planning, too. But share it up! Live today, with some prudence, if you’re prudent, for tomorrow—it usually comes—but don’t pass up what comes this very minute. See what I mean?”
Guy was not certain. So Tom went on. “Look, in the spring I plow and plant my crops, hoping for the harvest in the fall. But I don’t forget to look at the sun while I’m plowing for tomorrow’s harvest, and I drink the beer of the last crop at night, the one that was harvested yesterday. For, when you come down to it, tomorrow, today, and yesterday are all one and the same thing. Dividing it up in your mind, like so many do, is the biggest falsehood a man ever told himself. It’s a lie that deprives you of joy and life.”
They were sitting on the grassy bank of the river this warm July day, fishing. The grass was full of minute daisies with golden hearts, among which the grasshoppers were frolicking, their green bodies a-glisten in the sparkling sun that danced through the leaves of the trees along the bank. Birds shrilled sweetly to each other and flew down on the grass to devour a worm, then darted up into the trees again. Guy could see them jumping from limb to limb, busy with life. The narrow but hasty river flowed before them, scintillating with light on its small crests, and green as the grass itself. It wound around other banks behind and other banks still ahead. A heron stood in the shallows, preening its blue feathers. Dragonflies stitched the bright air, their radiant wings like whirling jewels. Frogs croaked under cool leaves. A few rabbits hopped down to the brim of the water to drink, their white cottontails quivering. Some jagged rocks, here and there, jutted up, wet and mossy, from where the river was shallower. They made minute rapids, white and frothing, in the rushing waters.
When Tom stopped speaking Guy could hear all the sounds of the day and the voice of the river, and he was full of contentment. He had caught a trout, which now lay in the fishing basket. Tom smoked peacefully, the smoke of his pipe rising straight up in the windless quiet. He looked about him, and nodded happily. “It’s not just catching fish that’s the satisfaction,” he said. “It’s fishing, all by itself.” Guy felt a little drowsy. They had brought a lunch with them, and cool beer. “My father,” said Tom, “never went fishing. He didn’t have the time.” He laughed shortly, but there was no real merriment in his laugh. “He just had time to make money. For tomorrow. And tomorrow never came for him. Look at all the fishing he missed.”
He glanced up, then swore. Guy looked also. A youth, in a canoe, was coming downriver, very fast, his paddle wet and flashing in the mingled shade and sunlight. “Of all the damned fools,” said Tom. “Thinks he’s an Indian, maybe. And heading straight for those rocks.” He stood up and shouted and waved a warning, and Guy also stood up, alarmed. Then it suddenly became clear to them that the youth was desperate, and struggling to keep the canoe from overturning, and that he was an amateur. Sometimes his paddles merely skimmed the water and the canoe rocked wildly. “Turn!” shouted Tom. “Rocks!” The youth sent them a look, and now they could see his face was contorted with terror. The canoe spun, rocked, swayed. “Rocks! Move out!” Tom yelled, pointing.
But the youth, who seemed about sixteen, panicked. He had seen the rocks. Instead of guiding the furious canoe towards the farther bank he struck the water with his paddles the wrong way, and the canoe raced to destruction. It hit the rocks with a cracking and splintering sound, dipped deeply, threw the youth into the water, then flowed on, a wreckage. The paddles swirled after it.
The youth disappeared for a moment or two, then his head bobbed up, and he was floundering in the water. He was hurled towards the rocks. He slammed into the nearest, and caught it in his arms, his head barely out of the river. He turned his ghastly gaping face towards the two on the bank.
“Rest a minute!” shouted Tom, going down to the brim. “Then swim over here.”
The boy cried back, feebly, “I can’t swim! Help me!”
“Christ,” said Tom. The boy’s forehead was now dripping with blood from a wound and the blood contrasted vividly with the whiteness of his terrified face. Then Tom was pulling off his shoes. “Pa,” said Guy, with his own fright. “Nobody can swim there!”
“Somebody’s got to,” said his father. He paused for an instant and gave Guy a strange look. He was tearing off his trousers. The boy was shrieking in mindless fear. He clung to the rock, and sometimes the small rapids flowed over him, bursting into glittering foam in the sun.
Guy caught his father’s arm. “Pa, even I can’t swim there!”
“So we let him die?”
“I’ll go, Pa.”
“You ain’t much of a swimmer yourself, son.” Tom shrugged off Guy’s clutching hand, and stepped into the water. He then began to swim, his thin agile arms lifting and falling, his feet kicking. Guy began to tremble. He went into the cold water, which immediately tried to suck him down. He retreated. Despairingly he looked for his father i
n the welter of green water and sun. Tom was nearing the rock. The youth watched him, panting, half drowned. Tom reached one of the rocks, clung to it, lifted his head. Guy could hear him speaking, over the sound of the river, but what he said Guy did not know. He saw that Tom was trying to edge from one rock to the other, towards the youth, and that he was in trouble himself.
“Oh, God,” groaned Guy, aloud. “They’ll both drown!”
He fought back his almost complete terror, and threw himself into the water. He was a clumsy swimmer, but he was young and strong. He splashed towards the rocks, fighting the current wildly, feeling it clutching at his body and trying to drag him down. When he could raise his head a little from the water, choking, he saw that his father was apparently exhausted, for he had stopped moving, though he continued to shout encouragingly to the youth. Guy was making little headway, but he struggled on, doggedly. He forgot the youth. There was only his father now. Again he lifted his head from the water.
He was nearer to the rocks. Now the tumbling current hurled him towards them. He tried to tread water, and delayed himself a little. Then he bumped into his father, whose hands were sliding on the brown-green moss. Tom’s legs flailed the water, but his hands continued to slip. Guy caught him by the waist in one arm, and threw the other arm about a rock. The current tormented them and tore at them. Guy held his father, gasping and spitting. Tom was strangling, but he yelled, “Get that kid first!”
“No,” said Guy. His father’s body, in his arm, was thin and frail. “I can’t save both of you, Pa.”
The youth, on the rock six feet from them, gave a loud and hopeless cry. His arms, torn and bleeding, apparently could hold him no longer. He slipped into the water, and his body, bouncing and jumping, rushed near father and son. Guy now had a choice: To release his arm from the rock and seize the youth, or hold up Tom, whose strength was now almost gone. He closed his eyes, and he did not let his father go. He felt something trying to clutch him, and he knew it was the youth’s hand. But he would not let his father go.
Then they were alone, desperately alone, holding on to the rocks. Tom did not speak; he was gasping. But his blue eyes looked, in that strange fashion, at his son. Guy spluttered, “We’ve got to get out of here. Grab my shoulder, Pa. We’ll make it back.”
Fearfully, he let go of the rock he was clinging to when he felt Tom grasping his shoulder. They went down, once, twice. They came up, choking. The bank seemed leagues away. Foot by frantic foot, Guy struggled towards it, Tom attempting to swim also, and beating the water with his thin legs, and clutching Guy’s shoulder in slipping fingers. The bitter current clawed, sucked, at them. It seemed hopeless, and then Guy felt the bottom under his feet. He stumbled. They both fell face down into the water, now blessedly shallow. Guy pushed himself up and stood and practically lifted his father from the water in his arms. Tom’s eyes were closed. He appeared dead, the reddish-gray beard dangling and wet beneath his chin.
In a dazed nightmare of thudding heart and numb legs and arms, Guy reached the bank and dragged his father up on the grass. Then he lay beside him, fighting for breath, icily cold and shaking. Finally he sat up. “Pa?”
Tom’s eyes were open. He was even trying to smile. He coughed over and over and shuddered. Guy wanted to weep with relief. In fact, he did cry a little, snuffling, and rubbing his nose on his wet arm.
It was a long time before they had the strength to get up and start for home, nearly a quarter of a mile away. They were too spent to speak. Tom had to stop frequently to breathe. In his dripping clothing he seemed infinitely fragile to his son, who had only enough energy to pat his father’s shoulder encouragingly. The hot sun dried them a little, but the way seemed endless.
Guy and the present woman put Tom to bed with hot-water bottles and a large dollop of whiskey. He fell asleep. In the meantime Guy called the local police and told them of the accident. (Later, it was discovered that the youth had been a summer visitor on a nearby farm, a relative from the city. They found his body a week later, far downstream in the shallows.)
But that night of the accident was a nightmare to Guy, as he waited for his father to wake up and speak. It was dark before he did so. He called for Guy, and held out his hand to him, and Guy took it in choked silence.
“Never thought you had it in you, son,” said Tom. “You getting so prudent lately.”
“Pa.”
“Yes, I know you couldn’t save both of us. You chose me. Son, that kid had a lot of tomorrows coming to him. Me, I’m in my fifties, and there ain’t too many tomorrows for me.”
“Pa, you’re my father.”
“I know. I’m not saying you should’ve chose different. But, you see what I mean now? Time and the river. It gets us all eventually. So, son, live, live while you have time. You never know when the river will take you.”
“And I never did,” said Guy, to the silent James, who was waiting. “Now there’s no time, either.”
James looked at that dark and somber face which did not appear to see him, but only something else.
“While you are alive,” said James, “there is always time.
“Not for me,” said Guy.
“We make our own reality,” said James. “If you believe there is no time for you, then there is no time. But believe that while you are alive you have eternity, and you have it, for your own uses.”
Then Guy really saw him. He said, with bitterness, “You’re so damned full of platitudes and aphorisms, Jim.”
James smiled. “There’s a lot of truth in them, old Jerry, a lot of truth. Besides, I invented that platitude myself.”
“Cheers,” said Guy. He lit a cigarette. He stared through the window at the glittering snow. “Christ,” he said. “When did the summer end?” He seemed astonished.
On Monday, James said to Emil, “I am more encouraged than ever, I really am. He keeps remembering things that agonize him, but he’s seeing something in them he never saw before. Yes, indeed, I’m quite encouraged.”
He told Emil of his encounter with Guy’s family, and the conversation. He mentioned having had dinner with Hugh Lippincott and Marian Kleinhorst.
“There’s another man who has to make a final decision,” he said. “But, don’t we all, eventually? We have to make our choice, one way or another. And on that our lives depend.”
He added: “And somehow, I feel I must make a choice, too, but I do not know what it is I must choose, if I am to live.”
22
When James greeted Guy on Monday, his elation over Emma’s pending arrival making his voice light and happy, he found the other man in a sunken mood of mingled rage and heavy somberness. There had been a sharp thaw during the night and now patches of green showed on the lawns of Mountain Valleys. James felt that spring was practically here, though in fact it was many months away. He said, to Guy’s averted face, “Diffugere nives, redeunt iam gramina campis/Arboribusque comae!”
“And what the hell’s that?” Guy asked. He was seated near the window again but the draperies had not been drawn against a warmer sun. He looked at James with dark disfavor.
“Oh, Horace. It means: ‘The snows have scattered and fled; already the grass comes again in the fields and the leaves on the trees.’ A happy thought. So long as we live the grass comes again to the fields—and spring to a man’s soul. Now, don’t tell me that I am speaking clichés again. I know I am. They’re not substitutes for thought. They are thought. Somebody thought them and spoke and wrote them, and millions of other people felt the truth of them and echoed them.”
“My father was full of aphorisms, platitudes, and clichés, just like you, Jimmy. I still think they are escapes from the necessity of thinking and speaking your own thoughts, your original thoughts.”
James beamed. “But one is thinking, really, on finding aptness in an aphorism, a cliché, and a platitude. The recognition of aptness is using your imagination. Well.”
Guy was silent, but it was not the old silence of hopeless despair a
nd near madness. It was gloomy, of course, but it was alive. This silence had resentment in it and hard glumness. Guy, by inference, was actually thinking, and no longer in flight against thought. James’s elation grew. Guy said, “I wish you’d get the hell out of here, Jimmy. Oh, I’m sure I should be grateful, or something, but for what? You’re making me wretched, with all your damned talk.”
“Good. Better to be actively wretched—it means you’re seeing what you ought to see—than to be dead in your mind, and unresponsive.” He paused, then added, shaking his head, “I, too, have been running away but I don’t know from what, yet, so I am in a worse state than you. At least you know what you face. I do not.” His face changed, and Guy saw it, and for the first time he felt a faint throb of interest in his friend.
“You’ve never had real trouble in your life, Jimmy, or a real problem.”
“Perhaps that’s the trouble. I am less experienced than you. I could always rationalize, and dismiss, uncomfortable emotions, or fatalistically accept them, and put them out of my mind. So, you see, I’ve been running away, too, while all the time I should have been facing it with candor and understanding.”
Guy was silent. James thought vividly of Emma, and he said, “I used to write to you about Emma Godwin, Lady Emma, my dearest friend. Now she is coming to America on Friday, so that we can do a little sightseeing in your vast country. And elsewhere, too. We’ve not had a long holiday in years. And I hope, this time, that I will get her to marry me.”
“What for?”
James laughed. “That’s what Emma says, too. Yet, again, why not?”
Guy shifted in his chair, and James saw that his thoughts were no longer in the room.
“Why not?” asked Guy, in his surly voice, and he gave Beth Turner his surly smile. “Why wouldn’t you marry me if I were free to marry you?”
The time was three years ago. It was the spring of the year and two of Beth’s cows had freshened, and two little heifers had been delivered. Beth and the boy she employed to help with the chores had just come in with milk pails, and a warm violet light lay over the earth and the distant mountains, and the blessed tranquillity of renewed and joyful life. Guy could hear the melancholy but musical tinkling of a cow bell and the evening-pure clamor of birds’ voices. It was so still, so drowned in peace. A single great white star was rising in the west, effulgent and calm, brightening in a sky of heliotrope. The windows were open, and Guy could smell the innocent carnality of the risen earth, and feel the secret pulsing. The softest breeze moved the white curtains at the windows, and a low red fire rustled on the hearth. Guy had just arrived. Beth came into the room in her overalls, rubbing her hands together. She started when she saw Guy, and then her smile became lambent as usual. She said, “Well! If I’d known you were coming today I’d have something better to feed you than cold meat loaf from yesterday.”