‘Why didn’t I ever catch it from you?’ she said at last.
He laughed a little bit, softly. ‘Catch what?’
‘I caught everything else. You shook me up and down in other ways. I didn’t know anything but what you taught me.’ She stopped. It was hard to explain. Their life had been like the warm blood in a person passing through tissues quietly, both ways.
‘Everything but religion,’ she said. ‘I never caught that from you.’
‘It’s not a catching thing,’ he said. ‘Someday you just relax. And there it is.’
Relax, she thought. Relax what? The body. But how to relax the mind? Her fingers twitched beside her. Her eyes wandered idly about the vast interior of the powerhouse. The machines stood over her in dark silhouettes with little sparkles crawling on them. The humming-humming-humming crept along her limbs.
Sleepy. Tired. She drowsed. Her eyes lidded and opened and lidded and opened. The humming-humming filled her marrow as if small hummingbirds were suspended in her body and in her head.
She traced the half-seen tubing up and up into the ceiling, and she saw the machines and heard the invisible whirlings. She suddenly became very alert in her drowsiness. Her eyes moved swiftly up and up and then down and across, and the humming-singing of the machines grew louder and louder, and her eyes moved, and her body relaxed; and on the tall, green windows she saw the shadows of the high-tension wires rushing off into the raining night.
Now the humming was in her, her eyes jerked, she felt herself yanked violently upright. She felt seized by a whirling dynamo, around, around in a whirl, out, out, into the heart of whirling invisibilities, fed into, accepted by a thousand copper wires, and shot, in an instant, over the earth!
She was everywhere at once!
Streaking along high monster towers in instants, sizzling between high poles where small glass knobs sat like crystal-green birds holding the wires in their non-conductive beaks, branching in four directions, eight secondary directions, finding towns, hamlets, cities, racing on to farms, ranches, haciendas, she descended gently like a widely filamented spider web upon a thousand square miles of desert!
The earth was suddenly more than many separate things, more than houses, rocks, concrete roads, a horse here or there, a human in a shallow, boulder-topped grave, a prickling of cactus, a town invested with its own light surrounded by night, a million apart things. Suddenly it all had one pattern encompassed and held by the pulsing electric web.
She spilled out swiftly into rooms where life was rising from a slap on a naked child’s back, into rooms where life was leaving bodies like the light fading from an electric bulb—the filament glowing, fading, finally colorless. She was in every town, every house, every room, making lightpatterns over hundreds of miles of land; seeing, hearing everything, not alone any more, but one of thousands of people, each with his ideas and his faiths.
Her body lay, a lifeless reed, pale and trembling. Her mind, in all its electric tensity, was flung about this way, that, down vast networks of powerhouse tributary.
Everything balanced. In one room she saw life wither; in another, a mile away, she saw wineglasses lifted to the newborn, cigars passed, smiles, handshakes, laughter. She saw the pale, drawn faces of people at white deathbeds, heard how they understood and accepted death, saw their gestures, felt their feelings, and saw that they, too, were lonely in themselves, with no way to get to the world to see the balance, see it as she was seeing it now.
She swallowed. Her eyelids flickered and her throat burned under her upraised fingers.
She was not alone.
The dynamo had whirled and flung her with centrifugal force out along a thousand lines into a million glass capsules screwed into ceilings, plucked into light by a pull of a cord or a twist of a knob or a flick of a switch.
The light could be in any room: all that was needed was to touch the switch. All rooms were dark until light came. And here she was, in all of them at once. And she was not alone. Her grief was but one part of a vast grief, her fear only one of countless others. And this grief was only a half thing. There was the other half; of things born, of comfort in the shape of a new child, of food in the warmed body, of colors for the eye and sounds in the awakened ear, and spring wild flowers for the smelling.
Whenever a light blinked out, life threw another switch; rooms were illumined afresh.
She was with those named Clark and those named Gray and the Shaws and Martins and Hanfords, the Fentons, the Drakes, the Shattucks, the Hubbells, and the Smiths. Being alone was not alone, except in the mind. You had all sorts of peekholes in your head. A silly, strange way to put it, perhaps, but there were the holes; the ones to see through and see that the world was there and people in it, as hard put to and uneasy as yourself; and there were the holes for hearing, and the one for speaking out your grief and getting rid of it, and the holes for knowing the changes of season through the scents of summer grain or winter ice or autumn fires. They were there to be used so that one was not alone. Loneliness was a shutting of the eyes. Faith was a simple opening.
The light-net fell upon all the world she had known for twenty years, herself blended with every line. She glowed and pulsed and was gentled in the great easy fabric. It lay across the land, covering each mile like a gentle, warm, and humming blanket. She was everywhere.
In the powerhouse the turbines whirled and hummed and the electric sparks, like little votive candles, jumped and clustered upon bent elbows of electric piping and glass. And the machines stood like saints and choruses, haloed now yellow, now red, now green, and a massed singing beat along the roof hollows and echoed down in endless hymns and chants. Outside, the wind clamored at the brick walls and drenched the glazed windows with rain; inside, she lay upon her small pillow and suddenly began to cry.
Whether it was with understanding, acceptance, joy, resignation, she couldn’t know. The singing went on, higher and higher, and she was everywhere. She put out her hand, caught hold of her husband, who was still awake, his eyes fixed at the ceiling. Perhaps he had run everywhere, too, in this instant, through the network of light and power. But then, he had always been everywhere at once. He felt himself a unit of a whole and therefore he was stable; to her, unity was new and shaking. She felt his arms suddenly around her and she pressed her face into his shoulder for a long while, hard, while the humming and the humming climbed higher, and she cried freely, achingly, against him…
In the morning the desert sky was very clear. They walked from the powerhouse quietly, saddled their horses, cinched on all of the equipment, and mounted.
She settled herself and sat there under the blue sky. And slowly she was aware of her back, and her back was straight, and she looked at her alien hands on the reins, and they had ceased trembling. And she could see the far mountains; there was no blur nor a running-of-color to things. All was solid stone touching stone, and stone touching sand, and sand touching wild flower, and wild flower touching the sky in one continuous clear flow, everything definite and of a piece.
‘Wope!’ cried Berty, and the horses walked slowly off, away from the brick building, through the cool sweet morning air.
She rode handsomely and she rode well, and in her, like a stone in a peach, was a peacefulness. She called to her husband as they slowed on a rise, ‘Berty!’
‘Yes?’
‘Can we…’ she asked.
‘Can we what?’ he said, not hearing the first time.
‘Can we come here again sometime?’ she asked, nodding back toward the powerhouse. ‘Once in a while? Some Sunday?’
He looked at her and nodded slowly. ‘I reckon. Yes. Sure. I reckon so.’
And as they rode on into town she was humming, humming a strange soft tune, and he glanced over and listened to it, and it was the sound you would expect to hear from sun-warmed railroad ties on a hot summer day when the air rises in a shimmer, flurried and whorling; a sound in one key, one pitch, rising a little, falling a little, humming, humming, but con
stant, peaceful, and wondrous to hear.
Hail and Farewell
But of course he was going away, there was nothing else to do, the time was up, the clock had run out, and he was going very far away indeed. His suitcase was packed, his shoes were shined, his hair was brushed, he had expressly washed behind his ears, and it remained only for him to go down the stairs, out the front door, and up the street to the small-town station where the train would make a stop for him alone. Then Fox Hill, Illinois, would be left far off in his past. And he would go on, perhaps to Iowa, perhaps to Kansas, perhaps even to California; a small boy, twelve years old, with a birth certificate in his valise to show he had been born forty-three years ago.
‘Willie!’ called a voice belowstairs.
‘Yes!’ He hoisted his suitcase. In his bureau mirror he saw a face made of June dandelions and July apples and warm summer-morning milk. There, as always, was his look of the angel and the innocent, which might never, in the years of his life, change.
‘Almost time,’ called the woman’s voice.
‘All right!’ And he went down the stairs, grunting and smiling. In the living room sat Anna and Steve, their clothes painfully neat.
‘Here I am!’ cried Willie in the parlor door.
Anna looked like she was going to cry. ‘Oh, good Lord, you can’t really be leaving us, can you, Willie?’
‘People are beginning to talk,’ said Willie quietly. ‘I’ve been here three years now. But when people begin to talk, I know it’s time to put on my shoes and buy a railway ticket.’
‘It’s all so strange. I don’t understand. It’s so sudden,’ Anna said, ‘Willie, we’ll miss you.’
‘I’ll write you every Christmas, so help me. Don’t you write me.’
‘It’s been a great pleasure and satisfaction,’ said Steve, sitting there, his words the wrong size in his mouth. ‘It’s a shame it had to stop. It’s a shame you had to tell us about yourself. It’s an awful shame you can’t stay on.’
‘You’re the nicest folks I ever had,’ said Willie, four feet high, in no need of a shave, the sunlight on his face.
And then Anna did cry. ‘Willie, Willie.’ And she sat down and looked as if she wanted to hold him but was afraid to hold him now; she looked at him with shock and amazement and her hands empty, not knowing what to do with him now.
‘It’s not easy to go,’ said Willie. ‘You get used to things. You want to stay. But it doesn’t work. I tried to stay on once after people began to suspect. “How horrible!” people said. “All these years, playing with our innocent children,” they said, “and us not guessing! Awful!” they said. And finally I had to just leave town one night. It’s not easy. You know darned well how much I love both of you. Thanks for three swell years.’
They all went to the front door. ‘Willie, where’re you going?’
‘I don’t know. I just start traveling. When I see a town that looks green and nice, I settle in.’
‘Will you ever come back?’
‘Yes,’ he said earnestly with his high voice. ‘In about twenty years it should begin to show in my face. When it does. I’m going to make a grand tour of all the mothers and fathers I’ve ever had.’
They stood on the cool summer porch, reluctant to say the last words. Steve was looking steadily at an elm tree. ‘How many other folks’ve you stayed with, Willie? How many adoptions?’
Willie figured it, pleasantly enough. ‘I guess it’s about five towns and five couples and over twenty years gone by since I started my tour.’
‘Well, we can’t holler,’ said Steve. ‘Better to’ve had a son thirty-six months than none whatever.’
‘Well,’ said Willie, and kissed Anna quickly, seized at his luggage, and was gone up the street in the green noon light, under the trees, a very young boy indeed, not looking back, running steadily.
The boys were playing on the green park diamond when he came by. He stood a little while among the oak-tree shadows, watching them hurl the white, snowy baseball into the warm summer air, saw the baseball shadow fly like a dark bird over the grass, saw their hands open like mouths to catch this swift piece of summer that now seemed most especially important to hold on to. The boys’ voices yelled. The ball lit on the grass near Willie.
Carrying the ball forward from under the shade trees, he thought of the last three years now spent to the penny, and the five years before that, and so on down the line to the year when he was really eleven and twelve and fourteen and the voices saying: ‘What’s wrong with Willie, missus?’ ‘Mrs B., is Willie late a-growin’?’ ‘Willie, you smokin’ cigars lately?’ The echoes died in summer light and color. His mother’s voice: ‘Willie’s twenty-one today!’ And a thousand voices saying: ‘Come back, son, when you’re fifteen; then maybe we’ll give you a job.’
He stared at the baseball in his trembling hand, as if it were his life, an interminable ball of years strung around and around and around, but always leading back to his twelfth birthday. He heard the kids walking toward him: he felt them blot out the sun, and they were older, standing around him.
‘Willie! Where you goin’?’ They kicked his suitcase.
How tall they stood to the sun. In the last few months it seemed the sun had passed a hand above their heads, beckoned, and they were warm metal drawn melting upward; they were golden taffy pulled by an immense gravity to the sky, thirteen, fourteen years old, looking down upon Willie, smiling, but already beginning to neglect him. It had started four months ago:
‘Choose up sides! Who wants Willie?’
‘Aw, Willie’s too little; we don’t play with “kids.”’
And they raced ahead of him, drawn by the moon and the sun and the turning seasons of leaf and wind, and he was twelve years old and not of them any more. And the other voices beginning again on the old, the dreadfully familiar, the cool refrain: ‘Better feed that boy vitamins, Steve.’ ‘Anna, does shortness run in your family?’ And the cold fist kneading at your heart again and knowing that the roots would have to be pulled up again after so many good years with the ‘folks.’
‘Willie, where you goin’?’
He jerked his head. He was back among the towering, shadowing boys who milled around him like giants at a drinking fountain bending down.
‘Goin’ a few days visitin’ a cousin of mine.’
‘Oh.’ There was a day, a year ago, when they would have cared very much indeed. But now there was only curiosity for his luggage, their enchantment with trains and trips and far places.
‘How about a coupla fast ones?’ said Willie.
They looked doubtful, but, considering the circumstances, nodded. He dropped his bag and ran out; the white baseball was up in the sun, away to their burning white figures in the far meadow, up in the sun again, rushing, life coming and going in a pattern. Here, there! Mr and Mrs Robert Hanlon, Creek Bend, Wisconsin, 1932, the first couple, the first year! Here, there! Henry and Alice Boltz, Limeville, Iowa, 1935! The baseball flying. The Smiths, the Eatons, the Robinsons! 1939! 1945! Husband and wife, husband and wife, husband and wife, no children, no children, no children! A knock on this door, a knock on that.
‘Pardon me. My name is William. I wonder if—’
‘A sandwich? Come in, sit down. Where you from, son?’
The sandwich, a tall glass of cold milk, the smiling, the nodding, the comfortable, leisurely talking.
‘Son, you look like you been traveling. You run off from somewhere?’
‘No.’
‘Boy, are you an orphan?’
Another glass of milk.
‘We always wanted kids. It never worked out. Never knew why. One of those things. Well, well. It’s getting late, son. Don’t you think you better hit for home?’
‘Got no home.’
‘A boy like you? Not dry behind the ears? Your mother’ll be worried.’
‘Got no home and no folks anywhere in the world. I wonder if—I wonder—could I sleep here tonight?’
‘Well, now, son
, I don’t just know. We never considered taking in—’ said the husband.
‘We got chicken for supper tonight,’ said the wife, ‘enough for extras, enough for company…’
And the years turning and flying away, the voices, and the faces, and the people, and always the same first conversations. The voice of Emily Robinson, in her rocking chair, in summer-night darkness, the last night he stayed with her, the night she discovered his secret, her voice saying:
‘I look at all the little children’s faces going by. And I sometimes think, What a shame, what a shame, that all these flowers have to be cut, all these bright fires have to be put out. What a shame these, all of these you see in schools or running by, have to get tall and unsightly and wrinkle and turn gray or get bald, and finally, all bone and wheeze, be dead and buried off away. When I hear them laugh I can’t believe they’ll ever go the road I’m going. Yet here they come! I still remember Wordsworth’s poem: “When all at once I saw a crowd, A host of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.” That’s how I think of children, cruel as they sometimes are, mean as I know they can be, but not yet showing the meanness around their eyes or in their eyes, not yet full of tiredness. They’re so eager for everything! I guess that’s what I miss most in older folks, the eagerness gone nine times out of ten, the freshness gone, so much of the drive and life down the drain. I like to watch school let out each day. It’s like someone threw a bunch of flowers out the school front doors. How does it feel, Willie? How does it feel to be young forever? To look like a silver dime new from the mint? Are you happy? Are you as fine as you seem?’