Refiner's Fire (16 page)

She was explaining the parts of the horse and its tack, things which were to Marshall second nature. And yet he was so nervous that he could hardly sit still. Lydia was with the girls, and he wanted badly to show her how well he could ride. Madame Zaragoza adjusted the stirrups to what Marshall could see was suitable for him, and then asked for a volunteer to take the horse around the ring. In one motion, Marshall raised his hand, stood up, said, “Me,” and jumped from the rail onto the horse's back. At last he felt at home, and for a moment he forgot even Lydia, for the movement and grace of the horse became all-embracing. He felt again as if he were twirling in head-over-heels flight through starlit space. He set out at a canter, gliding around the ring like cavalry. Then he galloped, and while so doing jumped on and off the horse from side to side, springing up and over. He veered to the center, and in slow motion the horse stretched his muscles in a graceful arc toward the sun, and Lydia saw horse and rider frozen in the air above the barrier—having abandoned everything for the laws of flight. Madame Zaragoza was stunned. From that moment she let him do anything he wanted, and trusted him with tasks such as running to fetch trail goggles from her little cabin, in which Marshall saw to his amazement about four hundred empty gin bottles lined up on the beams and horizontal members, stacked in corners, under the bed, etc., etc.

He fell as fast as he had risen. On the first Sunday they dressed in white shorts and shirts. Counselors inspected their fingernails and ears. Then they got on the trucks and traveled with blinding speed to Columbine. Marshall asked where they were going and was told, “To a clambake.” This made him happy, since lobster was his favorite food. They pulled up in a row at the church, a beautiful white Alpine building in the middle of a meadow which came right up to the town. When they started to file in, Marshall asked a counselor if the clambake were to be inside or out. “Where's the food?” he asked.

“Are you crazy?” replied the counselor. “There's no seafood up here. Were going to church.” By the time Marshall knew what was happening he was inside the doors, and from the starkly Protestant and mountainly interior gleamed the rays of a silver cross. Marshall began to back up against the stream of incoming people.

“I can't be in here,” he said. “This isn't the right place for me. I can't be in here. Let me out.” The counselor told him to shut up and sit down. He did, but when the minister came in he tried to get up and go out. A strong pair of hands grappled with him and pushed him down by the shoulders. It hurt to be shoved into the hard wood. So despite the fact that the minister looked like Eisenhower (for whom Marshall had always felt very sorry) and despite the pleasant-looking ladies and the gentle old men, despite the choir which had started to sing, the sunlight which came through the stained glass windows, the position he occupied in the middle of the congregation, the libertarian behind him, and the enchanting beauty of it all, Marshall submerged into a sea of legs and shoes and got to the aisle, which he ran up faster than a burned jackrabbit. There was a great stir. Eisenhower was (as usual) puzzled, and the Hound of God made his way with great embarrassment through an entire packed row.

Outside, Marshall climbed into a truck and breathed in relief, thinking that he was safe. But then he heard footsteps and the Hound of God appeared at the back of the truck. He was enraged, and he screamed at Marshall, who, like a trapped raccoon, looked back with a gentle poker face. “Get out of that truck. Who the hell do you think you are?” Marshall was afraid to answer. He didn't know this man, and it was therefore especially terrifying. “You live in a world of people. Do you think you have the right to go in your garden and close the gate?”

“Yes,” screamed Marshall. “Yes. Yes. Yes.”

“You don't!”

“Who says I don't?”

“God says you don't.”

“God can speak for himself,” said Marshall, “and you can go to hell.”

That was it. The counselor boiled over. Marshall scrambled to the top of the cab. It was a true emergency. Hound of God threw himself over the tailgate at a bound. By the time he was on the roof Marshall was running over the meadow in panic. Even more enraged, Hound of God took some strides and caught him, and then, holding Marshall's hands and arms behind his back in a grip so hard that it hurt him to do it, he hit Marshall again and again and again and again and again. The more he hit the harder and angrier his blows became. The ground got full of blood. Marshall dared not cry out, for he feared that then the people in church would know what was happening and it would be to his shame. He was battered and moaning. Hound of God said: “Get back in there.” Expecting to be murdered, Marshall bared his teeth and spit blood as his answer. Hound of God clenched his fist, and then suddenly strode away toward the church.

It was a beautiful building in a beautiful place, and the music was magnificent as choir and congregation together sang the chorus: “Oh thou that tellest good tidings to Zion, get thee up into the high mountain,” and the lyrics reverberated throughout the valley. Marshall looked at the birds in the eaves and thought how small they were, how they could easily die by buckshot, an eagle, or the snow. They seemed ever alert, and devoted to the baby birds in the nests. He made his way back to the truck and sat in the corner. During the rest of the service he composed himself and cleaned off the blood, which had come mainly from his nose and mouth. His lower lip was swollen and there was a bruise on his face. He took comfort from the birds, the clouds, the mountains. When the church bells were ringing and the children came out he knew from their searching glances that he had lost his premier position. He said nothing.

Lydia climbed on the girls' truck and sighted him over the boards. He would not look back, and her truck drove away in the dust. She felt as if she would never see him again, as if he had died in the war, and this made a vast difference to her. She too had been taken there by mistake, and was furious that they had not considered her wishes. Marshall pained to be with her, but his truck was slow in leaving and he sat in the sunlight under a cascade of bells and blue air. All he could think was how much he loved Lydia, and how much he loved the gentle animals—the sheep, the birds, the moaning cows and pigs who hurtled down the New York Central tracks to their slaughter.

E
VERY EVENING
after dinner there was singing in an enormous room with a wall of windows through which the singers could watch night come upon the range and the lights of distant towns switch on. An older camper named Gaylord played the piano—he was something of a hero—and during the first few weeks the lyrics were displayed on large sheets of paper which two volunteers turned like spitted roasts. In this way Marshall learned about fifty songs of the “Marching to Pretoria,” “Road to Mandalay,” “Keeper Did A-hunting Go,” and “St. Louis Lantern Rag” genre. When it was finally dark they would walk in groups to their cabins on the hill. Though attendance was compulsory, one of the finest things in the world was to go up into the high meadow and watch the sunset and brightening stars while songs floated upward and the warm brass-colored light of the lodge made it seem like the best and most marvelous of Swiss music boxes, glowing in miniature on the mountainside below. When they sang frivolous lighthearted songs such as the “St. Louis Lantern Rag” or “Sixpence,” they stamped their feet on the wooden planks. From the meadow it seemed as if the glowing box might come apart and seed the valley with music.

It did not take long for Marshall and Lydia to go up there together. In the lodge people were singing. Marshall and Lydia were in the meadow in balmy air clear to the highest stars. They had thought that when they would at last be alone it would be weighty and somber, but it wasn't. They were almost whimsical, giddy, relieved. Everything was soft. Everything was flowing back and forth as if in a warm wave, the grasses, the trees of pine and fir and mountain ash, winds traveling invisibly over the great dark spaces which were the mountains. They were alone on the hillside with the earth spread before them. Marshall had always wanted to see the Northern Lights, and had mistakenly associated the Aurora Borealis with high altitudes rather than latitudes. Straining to see them, he finally imagined a crown on the horizon—fiery crystals undulating against the dark—but Lydia could see nothing save white stars, and when she realized that he was going a little away from her because he was drawn to the Northern Lights, she was saddened.

But the night was too fine for that and she reached out with her arms and her eyes, and brought him back to her by saying, “You
see
the colors of my dress,” a gingham dress it was with a delicate frilly collar, and even in the dark he could see her face and that it was full of color, and in darkness he saw the stars sparkling in her eyes. For the first time, he was pulled away from light and solitude, by a soft and knowing smile and the proximity of the girl, feeling the heat of her body over the air, smelling her sweet hair and skin. They wanted to kiss, but were too shy. In her look and in her words, “You
see
the colors of my dress” (daring and intelligent words for such a young girl), they had awakened. She remembered Marshall running up the aisle, how she had admired his strength, and how in staying she had been confident of her own. It seemed that on the high meadow two types of affirmation were perfectly matched. They stayed until the moon rose and its blinding white light, moon-bright, caused them to laugh and walk down the hill, knowing that they had loved.

T
HE MOST
sophisticated penetration of Columbine was the sunshine. The town was surrounded by borders of dark green pine and valleys which dropped to ice-cold streams. It was a decade after the Second World War and the men of the town had nearly all been soldiers. Fishing was the great preoccupation. Wooden station wagons and winch-laden surplus jeeps parked up and down the main street, and in the theater Martin and Lewis chattered like monkeys in a technicolor tattoo. Marshall went into town in a camp truck. He had blond hair and he wore his characteristic denims and a plaid shirt with holes in the elbows, which didn't matter because he rolled up the sleeves, and didn't matter anyway. He had to ration out 50<. It could go for an ice cream soda and a silver lure, or two magazines, or two rubber-band airplanes. He chose the ice cream soda and the lure—one to be enjoyed cold, sweet, and immediate, the other to shiver at the end of his line in the dark lake.

Afterward, he sat by the truck in the parking lot, holding his face to the sun. Great dark clouds were visible down range. He knew when it would rain and how it would feel. He knew what the forests would smell like before the rain, how wild droplets would be propelled in vanguard winds and strike only several at a time, how the sun would clear it all up again. From beyond the town came the whine of a chain saw. Marshall's friends emerged from the drugstore with new baseball cards. He knew the complicated values for this currency and the subtleties of trades and flipping. It was satisfying. There were so many good things to feel and think about, and it was good to lean against the rough plank bumper and feel warm in the sun. In these mountains he could sit absolutely still, concentrating for many hours on the color of the sky. He loved the landscape and the country so deeply that even though he was only ten he thought to himself that it would not matter if he died at that moment, for he had seen so much that was beautiful.

Then he was swept up again in the society of his fellows, something which invariably he regretted. Pleasant sociability made time fly happily, but when it was over he felt that he had been cheated. It was the same in the games they played. At the end he looked back like a man who has been asleep, and it seemed that he had been carried unconscious in the group, that he had learned nothing, felt nothing. But he did acquire a certain daring and roughness, which he questioned. For it seemed to him that it was daring but not true courage, roughness but not true endurance. Often in groups he found himself taking the lead—doing awful things of which he was later ashamed.

They were surprised. Instead of going back to camp they were to climb a mountain. Unknown to them, packs and equipment had been placed in the cab of the pickup. Spirits soared, for there was nothing better than ascent to a place from which they could scan over the tops of mountains that customarily were the borders of their sight. So when the truck pulled away they were jumping up and down, singing, stamping their feet like soldiers who have just had a victory and are leaving the battlefield for home.

On their way they leaned out dangerously and when they passed someone they waved a newspaper and screamed, “War! War! War is declared! World War Three!” They had always taken it for granted that when they reached the age of conscription, a major war would break out and they would fight it. Their grandfathers had done so. Their fathers had done so. They would do so.

In the bedstead-sized towns and little junctions, some smiled, some were indifferent, some scowled. But when the joke was almost finished and their throats hurt from shouting so that they wished they would arrive at the mountain or pass no one else, they rounded a bend near a beautiful rapids.

On the shoulder was a station wagon, elegantly polished and well looked after. An old man, one of those old men of the mountains, with light tortoise-shell glasses, a tall lean frame, and silver hair, was fly-casting into the stream. Even from the truck at speed Marshall could see the beauty of the hypnotic black water flowing and ebbing. Surrounded by fine equipment, obviously a lord of the mountains, one who was part of the country, one who had come through, the old man turned and looked straight into Marshalls eye with a sadness which could have been saying only that he had seen war himself and was puzzled and distraught at the vitality of the death-head, rising as it did in the vigorous cries of young children riding through his green summer country.