Dinner Along the Amazon (18 page)

He had known all along that when the time came he would not leave his animals, as most people had, so there was an air of well-rehearsed ritual to all that he did. His plan was to get as deep into the swamp in the valley as possible, and thereby to try for temporary survival, at least. If he could save himself or even one of his animals, then his protest would register with Nature, which was all that mattered to him.

Barney hitched the mule to the wagon and transferred the contents of the barrow onto the wide, long planks, together with several bales of hay, three bags of feed, and the cage with the three geese. The old dog lay trustful and quiet on the nest of blankets and the stable dog got up on the seat beside where Barney would sit. The cat dug a hole in the barnyard and relieved itself and afterwards leapt up beside the old dog and lay down to stare at the geese.

It was at this point that Barney remembered his sheepskin coat and knowing that without it he might perish in the cold of the swamp he went all the way back to the house to get it.

When he got into the house the echo of the opening door leaked into distant emptiness upstairs like a prowling animal and Barney closed his eyes and waited for the silence to return.

But it didn’t.

A new sound shied in behind him and beyond him and it came from so far away that he could at first only imagine that he heard it.

Trucks.

Tankers.

The highway.

Barney gained his composure by remembering anger.

They were coming now and he was to be the next victim of the new E.R.A.

And so he went very calmly into the back hall and got down his sheepskin coat from its peg and put it on—for all that it seemed to be a summer’s day—and he took his binoculars and went out onto the road to see what he could see.

In his mind he practised the moment when he must leave the road and run to the barn in order to save the animals and then he sat down on a large rock near the gate and watched, through the binoculars, the distant end of the road where there was a hill beyond which you could not see the deadly highway.

He wondered if Turvey and his old dog had got away. And he thought not. He wondered if he could get the beautiful old church into his mind, but, along with God, he couldn’t. He thought of Myrna Jewell’s chickens and what might have become of them and of Arthur King as a boy when they were both boys and he tried to get by the Feltons’ house in his mind, without going inside, but he kept thinking that he knew Harvey too well and too long not to guess at what had happened and for the first time since she’d died, he blessed his own wife’s death as a prize of good fortune that she should not have had to face this moment now because she might have had to do what he instinctively sensed poor Kate had done.

And then he was able to take a real look through the glasses at the Cormans’ new roof and to go along by the lenses into their barnyard and to see there some stupid cow who’d come back from the swamp in the valley and he wavered on the brink of going over with the gun to drive her off or to kill her but there wasn’t time.

The E.R.A. Forestry Siren gave another earnest wail at the moment, rising into a steady blast—a wail that would continue into the night and perhaps even into the next day, depending on whether it rained or not and on whether a wind rose or not and on whether anyone was seen along the road.

It was not until rehearsing that sequence in his mind, as he sat there waiting and listening to the siren, that Barney knew he was going to let himself be seen.

He was going to do what perhaps no one else had done till now. He was going to force a pair of eyes to look into his own. Someone had to see someone.

The incongruous sun blazed down and Barney loosened the sheepskin coat around him, lit another cigarette, and gave a look through the glasses at his own barnyard.

All was quiet. The dogs and the cat and even the geese seemed to sleep and the other animals just waited as if they must know, and had trusted that he would do this. He smiled. He would do it. He would start a conscience. Somehow. In someone. Right here. On this road.

There was no wind at all—not even a breeze—and it was so clear that when the first sign that the tankers were in operation came to him, it was in the thought that the sky was filling with beautiful great clouds and that he might be saved by rain.

But the sweeping hiss of the distant hoses cut that hope short before it was real.

They were spraying.

Barney tried not to, but could not avoid rising to his feet. Instinctively he threw down his cigarette, stood up, and began to breathe great gulps of the last pure air. He felt dizzy, both from fear and from too much sudden oxygen. He fought back the temptation of paralysis which wanted to conquer him. The end of the road was alive.

Great swaying flowers of spray arched into the blue, topped with a rolling flood of cloud.

This was what they called E.R.A.—or, to give the solvent its soothing Administration name: “Environmental Redevelopment Agent.” Sprayed from hoses, its crystal drops burned the oxygen from the air, killing every single living thing within the circumference of their fall. It wasn’t rain it formed—it was beautiful snowy mist. And when a thing died, it died in a flameless acid fire so intense that only ashes remained.

The E.R.A. tanker trucks were yellow and they were manned by suited E.R.A. Foresters in orange and green, who wore oxygen tanks on their backs and asbestos gloves and shoes, and who could only be faced through the treated plastic visors of their helmets, and who had no voices except amongst themselves, inside the safety of their suits.

They came along the road in mechanical procession, stepping out in unison to the spurting rhythm of their hoses.

The siren had mounted to its ultimate wail now—continuous.

All Barney wanted was one face—just one pair of eyes before he ran. He knew that he could only hope to see them through his binoculars, that he could let them get no closer than the Cormans’ by the river, but he knew, too, that from that distance he could see the moment of recognition and that was all he wanted: a look to mark his own existence in another man’s eyes, before he fled.

They were approaching the river now—three tankers, each leashed by hoses to six men, and behind the tankers a travesty of hope so insidious that Barney could not believe his eyes—an ambulance, marked by huge red crosses. How could it ever stop to take in survivors when of course, by the very nature of the solvent, there could be no survivors? It was there only to satisfy the grotesque conscience of the Government and of all the World Bodies that were dedicated to Cities and that supported this scheme for the control of rural populations.

He had risen now and was standing, poised on his toes, so completely flooded inside with adrenalin that he was virtually ill and retching. But he jammed the binoculars against the bones of his face and waited.

It was unfortunate that he did not run instead. But it was too late. The meeting of eyes was adhesive when it happened and once he found them and was staring and being stared at, everything but panic stopped.

He heard himself saying, “Child—child—child—they’re only children” and he felt his stomach heave over and the sickly sweet taste of curdled honey rise into his mouth. For he had seen the eyes of a boy no more than sixteen years old. And they had not been what he’d thought he’d see. For there was no fear in them and not an ounce of human recognition and he had not known that that could be—that such eyes existed as he saw there beyond the glass and the plastic—blind, but cognizant. Signalling sight, but reflecting nothing more than the reaction of a meter when it registers the presence of electrical force. The boy’s eyes looked and let him go, without a flicker of human response.

Barney threw down the glasses and ran.

And all this while, old Turvey and his dog had been ashes for almost half an hour.

When he got to the barn, Barney threw open all the remaining doors, letting free the cow, the goats, and the burros, and he began to shout at the mule in such a peculiar way that he himself did not recognize the language. Perhaps there were no words any more. Perhaps there never had been and certainly there never would be again. He could not even gather the sentence of a thought. He was noise and movement and something that seemed furious, but was only afraid.

The wagon slugged off toward the top of the hill and as it went it rolled so slowly, drawn by the mule and pushed by Barney, that all the animals, Barney included, had the time and misfortune to catch the smell of E.R.A., which is to say, the time and misfortune to begin to burn.

There came screams, utterly unlinked to any pain that can be described—because as they pushed and pulled and dragged themselves forward, parts of them were already turning to ash.

The clouds of E.R.A. mounted back along the road in the terrible beauty of their purity and they were rolling up like walls around them, hissing with the massive immolation of trees and grass and flowers and insects—birds, mice, and anything that lived that comes to mind.

Barney only knew to push and the rest was all pain.

Until he got to the top of the hill.

And was saved. With his three geese, the old dog, the cow, three burros, two goats, and the mule.

By the dying thought of green.

But he had tried.

There is no ending to this story. There is only what is and was and will be. How can I possibly say that any one of the survivors survived? For how am I to know? But you must have seen as many abandoned cars and trucks and trailers as I have. And heard as many packs of wild dogs. And come to as many “Detour: Road Closed” signs as I have.

I, too, live in a house by a road.

So, perhaps, do you.

But I’m not fooled, as I fear many are, by the current propaganda.

For instance, they recently moved the yellow tankers up to a station near us. Now they’re telling us (and certainly many have believed it) that these trucks are only oil tankers. Some new delivery system for a factory that hasn’t been built yet. How gullible we are. The other day I saw two men in green and orange suits and I actually heard some fool describe these costumes as a new snowsuit to wear skiing. And they’ve blown the Forestry signal constantly this last week and there hasn’t been a single fire—so why is that, I ask you? And last night there was a helicopter…

But my neighbours are believing. They trust. Why, a government man was around here just last week selling bug killer. D.D.T. they call it.

And my neighbour bought it.

Now why, do you think, in the present scheme of things, would he do that?

The People on the Shore

In the summer of 1960, on a Friday, Mrs Lewis was brought down onto the sand by her daughter Elvira and by her Nurse, Miss Cunningham. She caught my image in the corner of her eye; turned to see me head-on; gave me a look of recognition and farewell; chose me to say good-bye to with her final glance—and died.

The place I speak of—write of—where Mrs Lewis died, is an old hotel that sits above the sand in Maine. Every summer, since the summer I was born, we have gone down to this hotel from Toronto, just as all the summers since the summer he was born, my father went down before us. That is the sort of hotel—of place—it is.

In front of the hotel, between the hotel and the sea, there is a stretch of sand precisely one-and-one-eighth miles long, on which the children play and the athletes run all summer. This sand is also walked by a variety of older people; some, like my father, life-time summer residents: and there is one old man who, every summer, stops each person in turn, to remark that, if he had the eyes of several hundred eagles and was facing out to sea, nothing should hinder his view of South America. But, of course, the distance does and there is nothing to be seen but the endless curve of the horizon. And there are the ships: an occasional tanker, or steamer, or Boston-bound freighter puffs away, always losing its balance and disappearing over the edge and there are sailboats on the weekends and lobster-boats whenever the traps are ripe or need resetting.

At either end of the beach there is a promontory, each with descending stretches of sea-rocks that are prone to the tides. In the olden days, these were the scene of much shipwreck and disaster. Now, there is still the occasional fool, trapped out walking on the rocks, who will be drowned at high tide: but this is rare and there has been no death by drowning for the last three years.

The hotel itself was built in 1855, though I have always thought it was older than that: as old as the trees themselves that were cut and planed and painted to make its clapboard sides.

Like myself, Loretta Lewis had come to the hotel as a child, but we were not of the same generation: when she died, Mrs Lewis was fifty and I was twenty-five years her junior. “In her day,” as my mother was wont to say, “she was a great beauty” with dark hair and a flawless complexion; the marks, in those days, of incomparable good looks. However, as she aged and married, aged and had her children, Mrs Lewis grew larger until, in her latter years, she was one of those round women you cannot quite bring yourself to call “fat” because their beauty is somehow enhanced by the extra pounds. She shone with good health and exuded the sort of warmth that in the theatre would be described as “star-quality.”

She was far from being a paragon. When she called her children, for instance, the whole beach turned and wondered what was wrong. And I once overheard her, myself, telling the venerable and much kow-towed to Mrs Hogan to “go to hell.” And then there was the terrible argument she had with the Ottawa Jacksons, (not to be confused with the Cincinnati Jacksons), which took place in the lobby of the hotel one evening before supper. Everyone overheard her, this time, and the Ottawa Jacksons were so mortified by the fury of Mrs Lewis’ anger that they didn’t eat in the dining room for the next two days, but had all their meals sent up on trays to their rooms. I forget what the argument was about, and I doubt that anyone—(with the exception of the Jacksons)—remembers that, except that we all remember Loretta’s terrific anger and the way she dominated the dining room that night, with her enormous back set against the whole room; and the tone of her voice, as she spoke to Mr Lewis and to the Lewis children, sharp and clear and precisely enunciated through ritual requests for “a little more salt” and “a little less fidgeting” from Elizabeth, Elvira and Angus, all of whom had somehow lost their appetite. But not Mrs Lewis. She ate all their dinners that night, as if in defiance of the room at large—knowing, I suppose, that everyone was watching her. She even ate part of her husband’s dinner and when, at long last their meal was over, Mrs Lewis led her family with ringing steps across the floor and out onto the South porch, visible to all, where she immediately broke through one of the older rocking-chairs, by sitting on it too suddenly.