“Might as well. The rails have rusted badly. There’s a break ahead. We may have to wait while I set a few back in place.”
“As many as there are,” said the boy, “we’ll have picnics!”
The woman tried to smile at this, then turned her grave attention to the man. “How far have we come today?”
“Not ninety miles.” The man still peered through the glasses, squinting. “I don’t like to go farther than that any one day, anyway. If you rush, there’s no time to see. We’ll reach Monterey day after tomorrow, Palo Alto the next day, if you want.”
The woman removed her great shadowing straw hat, which had been tied over her golden hair with a bright yellow ribbon, and stood perspiring faintly, away from the machine. They had ridden so steadily on the shuddering rail car that the motion was sewn into their bodies. Now, with the stopping, they felt odd, on the verge of unraveling.
“Let’s eat!”
The boy ran the wicker lunch basket down to the shore.
The boy and the woman were already seated by a spread table-cloth when the man came down to them, dressed in his business suit and vest and tie and hat as if he expected to meet someone along the way. As he dealt out the sandwiches and exhumed the pickles from their cool green Mason jars, he began to loosen his tie and unbutton his vest, always looking around as if he should be careful and ready to button up again.
“Are we all alone, Papa?” said the boy, eating.
“Yes.”
“No one else, anywhere?”
“No one else.”
“Were there people before?”
“Why do you keep asking that? It wasn’t that long ago. Just a few months. You remember.”
“Almost. If I try hard, then I don’t remember at all.” The boy let a handful of sand fall through his fingers. “Were there as many people as there is sand here on the beach? What happened to them?”
“I don’t know,” the man said, and it was true.
They had wakened one morning and the world was empty. The neighbors’ clothesline was still strung with blowing white wash, cars gleamed in front of other 7-A.M. cottages, but there were no farewells, the city did not hum with its mighty arterial traffics, phones did not alarm themselves, children did not wail in sunflower wildernesses.
Only the night before, he and his wife had been sitting on the front porch when the evening paper was delivered, and, not even daring to open the headlines out, he had said, “I wonder when He will get tired of us and just rub us all out?”
“It has gone pretty far,” she said. “On and on. We’re such fools, aren’t we?”
“Wouldn’t it be nice—” he lit his pipe and puffed it—“if we woke tomorrow and everyone in the world was gone and everything was starting over?” He sat smoking, the paper folded in his hand, his head resting back on the chair.
“If you could press a button right now and make it happen, would you?”
“I think I would,” he said. “Nothing violent. Just have everyone vanish off the face of the earth. Just leave the land and the sea and the growing things, like flowers and grass and fruit trees. And the animals, of course, let them stay. Everything except man, who hunts when he isn’t hungry, eats when full, and is mean when no one’s bothered him.”
“Naturally, we would be left.” She smiled quietly.
“I’d like that,” he mused. “All of time ahead. The longest summer vacation in history. And us out for the longest picnic-basket lunch in memory. Just you, me and Jim. No commuting. No keeping up with the Joneses. Not even a car. I’d like to find another way of traveling, an older way. Then, a hamper full of sandwiches, three bottles of pop, pick up supplies where you need them from empty grocery stores in empty towns, and summertime forever up ahead …”
They sat a long while on the porch in silence, the newspaper folded between them.
At last she opened her mouth.
“Wouldn’t we be lonely?” she said.
So that’s how it was the morning of the new world. They had awakened to the soft sounds of an earth that was now no more than a meadow, and the cities of the earth sinking back into seas of saber-grass, marigold, marguerite and morning-glory. They had taken it with remarkable calm at first, perhaps because they had not liked the city for so many years, and had had so many friends who were not truly friends, and had lived a boxed and separate life of their own within a mechanical hive.
The husband arose and looked out the window and observed very calmly, as if it were a weather condition, “Everyone’s gone,” knowing this just by the sounds the city had ceased to make.
They took their time over breakfast, for the boy was still asleep, and then the husband sat back and said, “Now I must plan what to do.”
“Do? Why … why, you’ll go to work, of course.”
“You still don’t believe it, do you?” He laughed. “That I won’t be rushing off each day at eight-ten, that Jim won’t go to school again ever. School’s out for all of us! No more pencils, no more books, no more boss’s sassy looks! We’re let out, darling, and we’ll never come back to the silly damn dull routines. Come on!”
And he had walked her through the still and empty city streets.
“They didn’t die,” he said. “They just … went away.”
“What about the other cities?”
He went to an outdoor phone booth and dialed Chicago, then New York, then San Francisco.
Silence. Silence. Silence.
“That’s it,” he said, replacing the receiver.
“I feel guilty,” she said. “Them gone and us here. And … I feel happy. Why? I should be unhappy.”
“Should you? It’s no tragedy. They weren’t tortured or blasted or burned. They went easily and they didn’t know. And now we owe nothing to no one. Our only responsibility is being happy. Thirty more years of happiness, wouldn’t that be good?”
“But … then we must have more children!”
“To repopulate the world?” He shook his head slowly, calmly. “No. Let Jim be the last. After he’s grown and gone let the horses and cows and ground squirrels and garden spiders have the world. They’ll get on. And someday some other species that can combine a natural happiness with a natural curiosity will build cities that won’t even look like cities to us, and survive. Right now, let’s go pack a basket, wake Jim, and get going on that long thirty-year summer vacation. I’ll beat you to the house!”
He took a sledge hammer from the small rail car, and while he worked alone for half an hour fixing the rusted rails into place the woman and the boy ran along the shore. They came back with dripping shells, a dozen or more, and some beautiful pink pebbles, and sat and the boy took school from the mother, doing homework on a pad with a pencil for a time, and then at high noon the man came down, his coat off, his tie thrown aside, and they drank orange pop, watching the bubbles surge up, glutting, inside the bottles. It was quiet. They listened to the sun tune the old iron rails. The smell of hot tar on the ties moved about them in the salt wind, as the husband tapped his atlas map lightly and gently.
“We’ll go to Sacramento next month, May, then work up toward Seattle. Should make that by July first, July’s a good month in Washington, then back down as the weather cools, to Yellowstone, a few miles a day, hunt here, fish there …”
The boy, bored, moved away to throw sticks into the sea and wade out like a dog to retrieve them.
The man went on: “Winter in Tucson, then, part of the winter, moving toward Florida, up the coast in the spring, and maybe New York by June. Two years from now, Chicago in the summer. Winter, three years from now, what about Mexico City? Anywhere the rails lead us, anywhere at all, and if we come to an old offshoot rail line we don’t know anything about, what the hell, we’ll just take it, go down it, to see where it goes. And some year, by God, we’ll boat down the Mississippi, always wanted to do that. Enough to last us a lifetime. And that’s just how long I want to take to do it all …”
His voice faded. He started t
o fumble the map shut, but, before he could move, a bright thing fell through the air and hit the paper. It rolled off into the sand and made a wet lump.
His wife glanced at the wet place in the sand and then swiftly searched his face. His solemn eyes were too bright. And down one cheek was a track of wetness.
She gasped. She took his hand and held it, tight.
He clenched her hand very hard, his eyes shut now, and slowly he said, with difficulty, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we went to sleep tonight and in the night, somehow, it all came back. All the foolishness, all the noise, all the hate, all the terrible things, all the nightmares, all the wicked people and stupid children, all the mess, all the smallness, all the confusion, all the hope, all the need, all the love. Wouldn’t it be nice.”
She waited and nodded her head once.
Then both of them started.
For standing between them, they knew not for how long, was their son, an empty pop bottle in one hand.
The boy’s face was pale. With his free hand he reached out to touch his father’s cheek, where the single tear had made its track.
“You,” he said. “Oh, Dad, you. You haven’t anyone to play with, either.”
The wife started to speak.
The husband moved to take the boy’s hand.
The boy jerked back. “Silly! Oh, silly! Silly fools! Oh, you dumb, dumb!” And, whirling, he rushed down to the ocean and stood there crying loudly.
The wife rose to follow, but the husband stopped her.
“No. Let him.”
And then they both grew cold and quiet. For the boy, below on the shore, crying steadily, now was writing on a piece of paper and stuffing it in the pop bottle and ramming the tin cap back on and taking the bottle and giving it a great glittering heave up in the air and out into the tidal sea.
What, thought the wife, what did he write on the note? What’s in the bottle?
The bottle moved out in the waves.
The boy stopped crying.
After a long while he walked up the shore, to stand looking at his parents. His face was neither bright nor dark, alive nor dead, ready nor resigned; it seemed a curious mixture that simply made do with time, weather and these people. They looked at him and beyond to the bay, where the bottle containing the scribbled note was almost out of sight now, shining in the waves.
Did he write what we wanted? thought the woman, did he write what he heard us just wish, just say?
Or did he write something for only himself, she wondered, that tomorrow he might wake and find himself alone in an empty world, no one around, no man, no woman, no father, no mother, no fool grownups with fool wishes, so he could trudge up to the railroad tracks and take the handcar motoring, a solitary boy, across the continental wilderness, on eternal voyages and picnics?
Is that what he wrote in the note?
Which?
She searched his colorless eyes, could not read the answer; dared not ask.
Gull shadows sailed over and kited their faces with sudden passing coolness.
“Time to go,” someone said.
They loaded the wicker basket onto the rail car. The woman tied her large bonnet securely in place with its yellow ribbon, they set the boy’s pail of shells on the floorboards, then the husband put on his tie, his vest, his coat, his hat, and they all sat on the benches of the car looking out at the sea where the bottled note was far out, blinking, on the horizon.
“Is asking enough?” said the boy. “Does wishing work?”
“Sometimes … too well.”
“It depends on what you ask for.”
The boy nodded, his eyes far away.
They looked back at where they had come from, and then ahead to where they were going.
“Goodbye, place,” said the boy, and waved.
The car rolled down the rusty rails. The sound of it dwindled, faded. The man, the woman, the boy dwindled with it in distance, among the hills.
After they were gone, the rail trembled faintly for two minutes, and ceased. A flake of rust fell. A flower nodded.
The sea was very loud.
The Drummer Boy of Shiloh
In the April night, more than once, blossoms fell from the orchard trees and lit with rustling taps on the drumskin. At midnight a peach stone left miraculously on a branch through winter, flicked by a bird, fell swift and unseen, struck once, like panic, which jerked the boy upright. In silence he listened to his own heart ruffle away, away, at last gone from his ears and back in his chest again.
After that, he turned the drum on its side, where its great lunar face peered at him whenever he opened his eyes.
His face, alert or at rest, was solemn. It was indeed a solemn time and a solemn night for a boy just turned fourteen in the peach field near the Owl Creek not far from the church at Shiloh.
“… thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three …”
Unable to see, he stopped counting.
Beyond the thirty-three familiar shadows, forty thousand men, exhausted by nervous expectation, unable to sleep for romantic dreams of battles yet unfought, lay crazily askew in their uniforms. A mile yet farther on, another army was strewn helter-skelter, turning slow, basting themselves with the thought of what they would do when the time came: a leap, a yell, a blind plunge their strategy, raw youth their protection and benediction.
Now and again the boy heard a vast wind come up, that gently stirred the air. But he knew what it was, the army here, the army there, whispering to itself in the dark. Some men talking to others, others murmuring to themselves, and all so quiet it was like a natural element arisen from south or north with the motion of the earth toward dawn.
What the men whispered the boy could only guess, and he guessed that it was: Me, I’m the one, I’m the one of all the rest won’t die. I’ll live through it. I’ll go home. The band will play. And I’ll be there to hear it.
Yes, thought the boy, that’s all very well for them, they can give as good as they get!
For with the careless bones of the young men harvested by night and bindled around campfires were the similarly strewn steel bones of their rifles, with bayonets fixed like eternal lightning lost in the orchard grass.
Me, thought the boy, I got only a drum, two sticks to beat it, and no shield.
There wasn’t a man-boy on this ground tonight did not have a shield he cast, riveted or carved himself on his way to his first attack, compounded of remote but nonetheless firm and fiery family devotion, flag-blown patriotism and cocksure immortality strengthened by the touchstone of very real gunpowder, ramrod, minnieball and flint. But without these last the boy felt his family move yet farther off away in the dark, as if one of those great prairie-burning trains had chanted them away never to return, leaving him with this drum which was worse than a toy in the game to be played tomorrow or some day much too soon.
The boy turned on his side. A moth brushed his face, but it was peach blossom. A peach blossom flicked him, but it was a moth. Nothing stayed put. Nothing had a name. Nothing was as it once was.
If he lay very still, when the dawn came up and the soldiers put on their bravery with their caps, perhaps they might go away, the war with them, and not notice him lying small here, no more than a toy himself.
“Well, by God, now,” said a voice.
The boy shut up his eyes, to hide inside himself, but it was too late. Someone, walking by in the night, stood over him.
“Well,” said the voice quietly, “here’s a soldier crying before the fight. Good. Get it over. Won’t be time once it all starts.”
And the voice was about to move on when the boy, startled, touched the drum at his elbow. The man above, hearing this, stopped. The boy could feel his eyes, sense him slowly bending near. A hand must have come down out of the night, for there was a little rat-tat as the fingernails brushed and the man’s breath fanned his face.
“Why, it’s the drummer boy, isn’t it?”
The boy nodded, not knowing if his nod was seen. “Sir,
is that you?” he said.
“I assume it is.” The man’s knees cracked as he bent still closer.
He smelled as all fathers should smell, of salt sweat, ginger tobacco, horse and boot leather, and the earth he walked upon. He had many eyes. No, not eyes, brass buttons that watched the boy.
He could only be, and was, the General.
“What’s your name, boy?” he asked.
“Joby,” whispered the boy, starting to sit up.
“All right, Joby, don’t stir.” A hand pressed his chest gently, and the boy relaxed. “How long you been with us, Joby?”
“Three weeks, sir.”
“Run off from home or joined legitimately, boy?”
Silence.
“Damn-fool question,” said the General. “Do you shave yet, boy? Even more of a damn-fool. There’s your cheek, fell right off the tree overhead. And the others here not much older. Raw, raw, damn raw, the lot of you. You ready for tomorrow or the next day, Joby?”
“I think so, sir.”
“You want to cry some more, go on ahead. I did the same last night.”
“You, sir?”
“God’s truth. Thinking of everything ahead. Both sides figuring the other side will just give up, and soon, and the war done in weeks, and us all home. Well, that’s not how it’s going to be. And maybe that’s why I cried.”
“Yes, sir,” said Joby.
The General must have taken out a cigar now, for the dark was suddenly filled with the Indian smell of tobacco unlit as yet, but chewed as the man thought what next to say.
“It’s going to be a crazy time,” said the General. “Counting both sides, there’s a hundred thousand men, give or take a few thousand out there tonight, not one as can spit a sparrow off a tree, or knows a horse clod from a minnieball. Stand up, bare the breast, ask to be a target, thank them and sit down, that’s us, that’s them. We should turn tail and train four months, they should do the same. But here we are, taken with spring fever and thinking it blood lust, taking our sulphur with cannons instead of with molasses as it should be, going to be a hero, going to live forever. And I can see all of them over there nodding agreement, save the other way around. It’s wrong, boy, it’s wrong as a head put on hind side front and a man marching backward through life. It will be a double massacre if one of their itchy generals decides to picnic his lads on our grass. More innocents will get shot out of pure Cherokee enthusiasm than ever got shot before. Owl Creek was full of boys splashing around in the noonday sun just a few hours ago. I fear it will be full of boys again, just floating, at sundown tomorrow, not caring where the tide takes them.”