Christmas began dismally enough, under the brazen skies, with the weeds all around and the deadly things they secreted. “Surely, on Christmas, God will have a little mercy on us,” said my mother, whose strength was returning very slowly, and whose hair was dead white now. My father shook his head. “Why should He? Have we ever shown any mercy to each other?” But my mother continued to hope.
It was my father’s custom to read the account of the Nativity on Christmas Eve. But on this night he opened the Bible to the Book of Job, and we sat about him and listened to the dolorous lamentations of an afflicted man.
“The arrows of the Almighty are within me, the poison whereof drinketh up my spirit; the terrors of God do set themselves in array against me.”
I listened, and my old bitterness and rage returned. I could not contain myself and I snatched the book from my father, turned a page or two, and read in a loud and harsh voice: “I will say to God: do not condemn me; tell me why Thou judgest me so. Doth it seem good to Thee that Thou shouldst calumniate me and oppress me, the work of Thy hands, and help the counsel of the wicked? Hast Thou eyes of flesh, or shalt Thou see as man sees? Are Thy days as the days of man, and are Thy years as the times of men: that Thou dost inquire after my iniquity, and search after my sin … Thy hands have made me … dost Thou thus cast me down?…”
I flung the desperately rebuking words of Job to God as Job had flung them. My mother and the girls looked at me with tears in their eyes, and Edward bent his head. But my father, with a sad smile, took the book out of my hands and read:
“Are you then alone, and shall wisdom die with you?”
He regarded me gravely, over his glasses, and I was hot with mortification. Then my father continued: “With the hearing of the ear I have heard of Thee, but now my eye seeth Thee. Therefore I despise myself, and do penance in dust and ashes.”
I was suddenly very still. Again, something stirred in my mind, elusive but portentous. I lost myself in urgent search of it, and I started when my father said, leaning towards me: “Yes, Pete?”
“Nothing!” I shouted at him.
I went outside in a turmoil of emotion. Was I losing my mind? I looked up at the sinister stars; I heard the crackling of the weeds, and the foul scuttle among them. My vision blurred with hopelessness. And then it happened.
I was staring at the Milky Way, and suddenly the constellation was no longer a long white scarf in the sky, sprinkled with the diamond points of the rolling suns. It had taken a new shape; it was brightening rapidly, flowing together, distinct and brilliant. A thrill ran through me, and I broke into a cold sweat. I clutched a post of the porch.
A vast cross was forming in the constellation, its outlines clear and sharp and dazzling. It might have taken moments, it might have taken a quarter of an hour. But there it was at last, pure and shining, its topmost part lifted against the farthest reach of the black universe, its arms extended into infinite space. I could not move or stir or cry out. I wanted to kneel; I wanted to weep. But I could only stand there looking incredulously at this mysterious sign, this mysterious message of love and benediction, this mysterious promise.
Then, all at once, it was gone, and the Milky Way was there again, diaphanous and remote.
I shook my head, dazed. Then I ran back into the house. Whom did one call to ask about odd manifestations? The police, the weather bureau, the radio stations? I ran past my family into the sitting room and caught up the telephone, dimly aware that my father and the others were crowding in after me, with alarmed questions. I turned my back to them and called the radio station. The line was busy. I called the police, and the weather bureau. Those lines were busy too. I called our local operator; her line, too, buzzed with frenzy.
My father said sharply: “Pete, what is it? Whom are you calling?”
But I pushed him aside, and turned on our radio. A voice, excited, almost joyous, rushed out to us: “Everyone in the community is calling the police, the radio stations, the weather bureau! Seems some folks around here are positive they saw something in the sky a few minutes ago. Some say it was a cross, some just a blaze, some an extraordinarily large, flaming meteor. The crosses, and not to be irreverent, seem to be the most popular.” There was a pause, then the voice said: “I’ve got a report from the weather bureau, folks. ‘Some magnetic disturbance,’ it says here. Complicated by distortion. Well, now you know as much as we all do, and why not let up on our telephone?”
I looked at my father, and my trembling must have been visible, for he took my arm strongly: “It was a cross,” I said. “A cross, a cross.”
My mother burst into tears; Lucy gazed at me, round-eyed; Jean was very pale. Edward, who was usually so silent, said: “I wish I could have seen it.” He put his hand up to his clouded glasses.
“Surely,” said my father, his blue eyes gentle, “it was a cross.”
The house was filled, now, with a sense of peace, of hope. We were weak from our inadequate meals, and our bodies were thin to gauntness. Death waited for us outside, but still peace flowed like cool water over us. We sat down and smiled at each other. “So,” said my father, softly, “He hasn’t forgotten us.”
Our Christmas dinner, consisting of an old rooster and potatoes and apple sauce, was almost hectic with excitement. Many of our neighbors called us to wish us well on the holiday, and a few spoke hesitantly of the rumor of the cross. None of them admitted having seen it himself; he did not wish to seem a fool. But I told what I had seen; my account was received eagerly but also with embarrassment. I had to recount it over and over.
In the evening I climbed into our tractor and went to see our patch of grass. I had not visited it for many weeks, though my father and our tenants cut it regularly. It showed no signs of diminishing; it was as thick and flourishing as ever, free of the poisonous things. It was a pool of sweet light green surrounded by noxious vegetation which dared not intrude upon it. Then I saw something else in its depths. Tiny blue flowers were growing in it, the color and shape of violets. I hurried back to the house and called my father and Edward, and they got into the tractor with me and we went to the patch of grass again. My father got down and picked a few of the flowers; they had a sweet fragrance, penetrating and tender. He put them into Edward’s hands.
There was no account at all in any newspaper of the cross in the heavens, but we heard, much later, that it had been seen round the world.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
In early January my father received his price-support check and also a check for “drought relief.” He looked at the bluish cardboards from Washington, then dropped them into an envelope and sat down and wrote a letter to the Department of Agriculture.
“I am returning to you,” he wrote, “your completely worthless checks. I suggest you transform them into one of your wonderful chemicals for raising synthetic vegetables, a project which seems to be occupying all your attention these days.
“The checks are useless, for they will not buy life. You know this, of course. But you send them to persuade each farmer all over the country that his calamity is only a local disturbance confined to his particular area. The farmer is not a fool. He knows that his plight is universal, that there is not a single acre which is cultivable in this country. He knows we are faced with death, and he is beginning to wonder why. He is wondering if he has finally been rejected by the land, and all the cities with him, because of our threatened wars and our bombs and our weapons of destruction.
“He is asking himself why our Government’s efforts have not been directed to establishing peace in the world. He is slowly realizing that the business of war is the business of an artificial prosperity, and that so far we have not found a way to full production without the bloody impetus of war.”
A week later the telephone rang. Our Senator was calling from Washington. “For God’s sake, George,” he protested, “what have you been writing to the Department of Agriculture? Never mind how I got the information; you’ve created a furore—”
“Why?” asked my father, calmly. “I’m just a stock farmer in our state, just one of thousands. How does it happen that I’ve suddenly become so important?”
The Senator fumed. “George, this is terrible.” He paused. “Do the other farmers think the way you do, out there?”
“Well, perhaps not all. But I’m doing my best to convert them to my point of view.”
“And what the hell’s that?”
“That we’ve got this death around us because of our everlasting damnable wars, and that we’re all guilty of the wars and the political chaos, and that we’ll die under the hand of God unless the whole world decides to live in peace.”
I was listening in on our upstairs extension, and I heard the Senator make a noise like a strangling man. “Listen to me, George, you’re talking in a very dangerous fashion; worse, you’re writing in a very dangerous fashion. Now wait a minute. There’s someone from Washington going to Arbourville next week to speak to you. George, you’ll behave yourself, won’t you? I’m your Senator, and your friend—”
“Someone from Washington, eh?” asked my father, with interest. “What does he want? My income tax not made out right?”
He hung up. Edward and I were concerned, but my father laughed at us.
When the agent did arrive in Arbourville and requested an interview, my father suggested he come to our home. But for some reason the man refused. “Afraid of the weeds and the creatures in them?” my father said. “Don’t blame you, son. All right, I’ll get out the tractor and be in town in a couple of hours.”
I went with him, and I urged him to use some restraint. “Hell, this is a free country, isn’t it? If it isn’t, it’s about time we did something about it,” my father said.
The man from Washington was owlish and brown and little. He scrutinized my father closely, in the rooms above our post office. “FBI?” asked my father, genially. “Meet my son, Pete. I left my other son at home. You see, he’s blind; he gets one hundred and fifty dollars a month, pension. Pretty cheap for a pair of eyes, isn’t it?”
Mr. Forbes did not like my father. That was evident immediately. He sat down and looked at his neat stack of papers. “I want to ask you just a few questions, sir,” he said. “Father? How many acres? What crops this year? No crops? Well, you’ve been having a little—difficulty—out here, haven’t you? Better next year. Food on hand? Almost nothing? Why did you send the checks back, then?”
“Because I’m a man with a family, and I need bread, not cardboard,” said my father. “That’s the trouble with all governments these days. Pieces of paper for the price of man’s honor and a man’s life. Well, time has run out. We’re not for sale any more.” He was very impatient with the man from Washington. “Come to the point,” he said brusquely. “What do you want? I haven’t got the time to waste with you.”
Mr. Forbes was considerably taken aback by this. He cleared his throat. “Now, sir, just a moment more. You are a farmer, the owner of a medium-sized farm in this state. We respect the farmers—”
“Nice of you,” said my father.
Mr. Forbes closed his eyes patiently. He repeated: “We respect the farmers. We never have had any quarrel with them. I am only trying to find out why you are discontented, and why you sent back the checks to which you were entitled.” He lifted a thin hand. “I am not a member of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I am only an investigator, one of thousands, sent here to ask you a few questions.”
“Well, ask them,” my father said.
Mr. Forbes opened his eyes. “If you’ll let me, sir,” he said sharply. “Were you ever a member of the Communist Party? Are you a member now?”
My father leaned back in his chair. “No, son, I’m a Republican,” he replied. “Of course, once in a while I vote for a Democrat I like personally. Is there a new law forbidding you to split your ticket?”
Mr. Forbes sighed. He wrote something on a sheet of paper.
“I was never a Socialist, either,” said my father, “and I’m not a temperance man, nor did I ever vote for the Vegetarian Party, or the Free Homes for Everybody Party. That answer your question?”
Mr. Forbes again closed his eyes briefly. I think my father was beginning to enjoy himself. Mr. Forbes said: “You wrote a letter to the Department of Agriculture. In it you expressed a somewhat violent objection to war—”
Suddenly my father leaned forward, his face grim, his eyes bleak. “You’re damned right I object to war, and object to war violently. I’m a farmer, and I know what I know. I know we are condemned to death by the earth itself if we don’t stop murdering each other. I suppose you’ve never seen those weeds outside before? I suppose the sun shines bright on Washington, and the parks are green, and the rain is accommodating? I suppose Virginia and Maryland are teeming with good crops, and the winter wheat is coming up, and the warehouses down there are full? I suppose you don’t know of a child who died of the plague? And the men and women who are dying of dysentery, you never hear of them either? What about the earthquakes? What earthquakes? You never heard of anything like that, did you?”
He thrust a finger at Mr. Forbes’ face. “What’s the Government afraid of? Afraid that the people will get the idea they’re being punished?”
He stood up. He buttoned his coat, and said to me abruptly: “Let’s go, Pete. Mr. Forbes has to fill out his forms, and that’ll take him the rest of the day.”
I had not had the opportunity to say a single word, nor had I wanted to. I followed my father as he strode ahead of me, big, dauntless, and unafraid.
Edward and Lucy smiled so seldom these days that I could hardly wait to get home and tell them the story of my father and the man from Washington. He, himself, had already forgotten. He struggled mightily with the heaving tractor on the way home. He might be emaciated, but he was a man of the earth and still full of strength.
I never did get around to telling my brother and his wife the story. We arrived home to find the household in disorder. My little boy had been stung by a “scorpion,” and he was dying.
He had been an amiable little fellow almost from the hour of his birth. Even now, at the age of eighteen months, he did not cry too often with hunger. He had the bright, blue, piercing eyes of my father, the sweet disposition of my mother, and her round face and curling chestnut hair. He would play alone in his crib for hours, chuckling and gurgling in the unknown tongue of babies. He was intelligent and gay and content, and the joy of the family, and Lucy and Edward loved him as well as they loved their remaining child. He had been named after my father, who adored him. He found everything interesting and exciting, from a streak of sunshine to Jean’s eyelashes. We called him Porgie.
Distraught, my mother told us what had happened. The house, guarded as it was, constantly searched as it was, had been invaded by one of the monstrous things. How it had got upstairs we never knew. But it had found Porgie and it had stung him, while Jean had been out of the room for just a moment. My mother, usually timid and fearful, had looked for it and had discovered it under the crib. In spite of her loathing and her horror, she had managed to kill it. It lay crushed on the floor.
It had happened less than five minutes before we got home. I found Jean, white-lipped and blank-eyed, frantically applying hot compresses to the child’s heel. I got to work with the swiftness of desperation. There were ways of dealing with snakes; I ran for my razor, and, holding the child as he sobbed in agony, I made a gash in the wound and I put my mouth to it and sucked. I put a tourniquet about his soft little leg and tightened it. Then I loosened the knot and tightened it again, forcing the wound to bleed. The baby, after a struggle or two, and several screams, became ominously quiet, breathing convulsively in my arms. A purplish shadow crept over his face; he began to gasp for breath. It had been too late from the beginning.
Slowly Porgie’s eyes became glazed. His breath was shallow now. He fixed his eyes on me, unseeing, and I held him to me tightly. Then I knew I was holding a dead child. But still I held him, m
urmuring to him. Jean uttered a single, sharp cry, and collapsed.
It was my father who took the baby from me, and laid him gently in his crib. I watched, in dull and unbelieving anguish. My father covered him with a blanket and shut his eyes. “Porgie, Porgie,” he said, and his voice broke and his eyes ran with tears.
Then he turned to me and said: “Pete, take care of Jean. Comfort her. And try not to forget that you’ll have another child in five months. Jean needs you now.”
She was sitting in a chair, her head hanging over the side, and the soft dark hair I loved covered her face and dangled down her arm. I tried to get up to go to her, but I fell back, and it seemed to me that my life was running out through my hands and fingers. Then my father was pressing a glass of whisky against my mouth and forcing me to drink it. “The poison may kill you, too,” he said, sternly. “Drink this down, at once.”
I drank, mechanically. I heard a rough, gasping sound in the room, and it was some time before I recognized it as my own breathing. I went to Jean, now, and I fell on my knees beside her and put my head on her shoulder, weeping aloud. She did not move. My mother smoothed her hair, but it was as if she herself had died.
Then I felt Edward’s hand on me, and he was saying in a kind, slow voice: “Pete, we lost our boy, too. It was almost impossible to stand, but we stood it. There’ll be two more babies in the house, soon. It’s poor comfort, I know, but it’s all we have.”
I could not reconcile myself to Porgie’s death. It was a barbarous and evil thing, and God had inflicted it upon us. For a time I became a complete atheist. Life was intolerable; life had been made intolerable by God. He had had no mercy upon this little boy who had done no harm. It was not until our new doctor told me that Jean was in danger of losing the baby she carried that I rallied a little for her sake.
She was ill until the end of January, lying in bed with a closed and apathetic face. My mother boiled some of our last chickens for her and fed her as if she were a child. When I sat beside her I would take her hand; it was cold and lifeless and she would turn her head away from me. Once she said: “If you had been at home—if you had been at home, it would never have happened. I had to leave him alone for just a minute and you know I never left him unless you could take my place.”