The Rural Life (21 page)

I’ve looked at this print almost daily for years—I come from a place like this modest town—and only now do I see that there
is an ending here too. The year of this painting is 1941. A war is already being fought in Europe. Before this man can choose
seeds for next year’s garden—a Victory Garden by then—he will be gone, called to war, his annual tilling delayed perhaps forever.

O
n the first Friday after that sudden Tuesday, I took an afternoon train back homeward out of Manhattan and into the country.
Do you remember the day? The clouds were pulling apart in the distance, exposing blue sky along the western horizon. The streets
of Harlem took the light and held it, their brick buildings seeming almost to swell with solidity. In the substance of those
streets and the surface of the river and the embrace of the railroad bridge into the Bronx, there was a profound, material
comfort. “Material” is the important word. The world into which I was passing exuded nothing but its own repose. It had no
news to deliver, or rather only the old, inarticulate news that bricks and water and steel have always delivered.

After a while I reached my stop and drove north along a highway through the cornfields. Here too I felt the same thing, that
there was a mute voice in the extreme order of those rows of corn, in the rasp of their drying leaves against each other. The round bales in the hayfields looked like a gathering point for shadows. The trees slipped by dispassionately.

It’s often possible to look at a rural landscape and feel that you’re being drawn into it, that what you see in the distance
somehow tugs you outward along the line of sight. But this was just the opposite. The countryside seemed to pour itself down
into the windows of the pickup, the empty corncribs, the neat stacks of firewood, the mellifluous pastures on the highest
hillsides. At home the horses and dogs consoled me in a way I couldn’t understand, until I finally realized that they could
not be told what had happened that week. In that fact lay the consolation. They had only the old news to give, their old satisfaction
with the world as they know it.

Life is bearing witness. In some superficial sense the morning of September 11 sifted us all into different circles of witnessing.
Some people narrowly escaped the collapsing towers. Others watched in terrified safety from windows and rooftops farther uptown.
Many, like me, saw it live on television from midtown, while an incalculable number of people around the country and the world
watched as the tapes were replayed into the night and the coming days. But we’re all witnesses, no matter what we saw or how
we saw it. Our burden is very different from the burden the victims bore and their families still bear, but it’s no less real.

Witnessing is a matter of knowledge and of conscience. We know what we saw, and yet we watch the televised tapes play over
and over again because we disbelieve what we know. We also watch because it feels as if we’re attesting to history, denouncing
a crime, renewing a commitment, and also because to break off watching feels like a betrayal. It’s hard to know, just yet,
whether for each of us this witnessing has caused an erosion or a sedimentation, a stripping away of the skin or a callusing.
But paradoxical as it may sound, to continue to bear witness, in conscience, it may be necessary to stop watching for a while,
to turn off the television, to break what for some people has become a self-reinforcing circle of despair.

There’s no abiding consolation at the moment. But the clouds do sometimes pull apart, if only temporarily. The day after I
got home, I stopped by a small lumber mill to pick up some siding that the owner had cut for a chicken house I’m building.
It was the sort of day we’ve been having plenty of, luminous and deep. The owner waved from behind a metal grinder that was
throwing off sparks and pointed me toward the mill. On its wooden rails lay my lumber, smooth, fragrant planks of pine, scalloped
and grooved to fit together the way so few things seemed to be doing elsewhere. I ran my hand down their lengths, felt the
light flouring of sawdust on each board, and for the moment thought of nothing else.

I
was in Eads, Colorado, just passing through, which is true of nearly everyone who has ever come to Eads. The town lies on
a major truck route across southeastern Colorado. What Eads takes from that truck route is hard to tell. A few people stop
now and then at Shepp’s drive-in, on the edge of town. Plastic lambs line the windowsills, and you can read a religious magazine
called
Guideposts
while you wait for lunch, for the full name of Shepp’s is the Good Sheppard Inn.

But only the locals turn off the truck route and onto the main street of Eads. On one side lies the Crow-Luther Arts Center,
which used to be the Plains movie theater. Its marquee says, almost ironically,
THANK YOU FOR SUPPORTING THE FINE ARTS
. One of the
E’S
has blown sideways in the wind.

Across the street and down a little is the Kiowa County Museum, an old-fashioned brick building with a concrete stoop. Inside
you can see the optimistic plat that was laid out for Eads many decades ago, a grid of house lots marching off in all directions.
You can see a few collections of arrowheads and some old-fashioned kitchen equipment—a couple of pressure cookers and a wood-fired
stove. One room is devoted to a frightening display of antiquated medical equipment. There’s a room full of cowboy gear and
a photograph of the record corn harvest before dust obscured the future of agriculture in Kiowa County. The pathos lies not
in the objects themselves but in what you would need to know about the life at hand to give them their real meaning, a knowledge
not readily available to passersby.

But on one wall, even a stranger could decipher the whole story. Leaning against the wall was the side panel of a school bus
from seventy years ago. Above it hung the receipt the county coroner submitted for mileage costs. There were banner headlines
and the photographs of five children. They had boarded a bus after school with fifteen other children on March 26, 1931, in
Towner, Colorado, a small town almost on the Kansas line. The bus was caught in deepening snowfall a few miles south of Towner,
caught in the kind of spring blizzard that ranchers dread. Some panes of glass were missing in the school bus, and snow drifted
in. By the time the children were rescued, at noon two days later, five were dead. The body of the bus driver was found in
the open fields, his hands badly lacerated from trying to follow a fence line to summon help.

Farther south of Towner, down in the Arkansas Valley, the snow had fallen as rain. The same was true farther east, in Kansas.
But the altitude at Towner, which lies due east of Eads, was just high enough to sustain a blizzard. The country there is
as stark as a coroner’s receipt, even on a hot autumn day with no chance of snow in it. Or perhaps that’s just the way it
seems after reading those old headlines and looking into those almost forgotten faces. Their names were Louise Stonebreaker,
Bobby Brown, Arlo Unte, Kenneth Johnson, and Mary Louise Miller, the youngest of them all. The bus driver was Mary Louise’s
father.

A
t halftime in Absarokee, Montana, last Friday night, the candidates for homecoming queen of Absarokee High School stood at
midfield, young women shivering in bright, backless gowns as though they were creatures just uncocooned. Beside each queen
candidate stood a king candidate who was also a football player with helmet-matted hair, a running back or tight end or linebacker
armored in black and orange, the colors of the Absarokee Huskies. The rest of the Huskies had just tramped off the field,
and the king candidates looked impatient to follow, detained only by female hands laid lightly upon their arms. The Huskies
were trouncing the Lodge Grass Indians, from the Crow Reservation, and the mood was high, for this would be the Huskies’ first
victory of the season, 42–8.

The Huskies had made all the pregame noises required of football players pumping up for a homecoming game. They groaned and
grunted and thumped each other on shoulder pads and helmets. They seemed to be trying these noises on for size, as though
they didn’t quite believe in the ferocity they showed or weren’t quite certain who they were showing it for. The psychological
distance from the bleachers to the playing field, even in a small town like Absarokee, is as great as that from the dress
circle to a Broadway stage. The players felt it. Even the water boy felt it, running in self-conscious haste to the loose
huddle that formed onfield during time-outs.

Rain was expected, and fans had parked directly behind the bleachers in case of it. But the rain held off, and so the pep
band played and the cheerleaders cheered and students strolled back and forth along the cinder track in front of the bleachers
as if it were a midway of sorts, while on the field a boy named Wilcox was being tackled by a boy named Rides the Bear. Young
cowboys walked past riding their hips like horses. Girls walked past in knots of four or five, borrowing babies from the hands
of the mothers they passed. Children played in the sand pit where broad-jumpers would land during track season. Everyone felt
the season pivoting, as if the giant illuminated
A
on the hill above Absarokee High stood suddenly for Autumn.

T
he weight of the afternoon sun already falls more lightly on my back than it did a few weeks ago. The days seem not only shorter
but also somehow thinner too, and every morning that dawns above freezing feels like a morning won back from the inevitable.
Nothing is dry yet, of course, but the promise of eventual dryness is in the air. A day will come when every crown of seeds
will rattle on the weeds in ditches and fields, when leaves will crunch obligingly underfoot again.

A wet summer is a dark summer, and around here this was one of the darkest summers on record. In fact, darkness was about
ten inches above normal by the time fall began. Never were the fungicidal qualities of exterior paint more highly prized than
during this summer past. Old wooden barns and outbuildings became studies in parasitism. In our bedroom a mushroom the size
of a child’s head sprouted from an interior beam. All in all, it was a good summer to be an epiphyte from one of the gloomier,
more downcast species.