Collecte Works (45 page)

One night a man and woman came out from the city, stayed over, in the morning bought the old place—the hotel and five acres surrounding. John liked this sudden, almost accidental business deal, made him happy and Matty was glad he needn't entertain the state about it. They had, for a few years past, given up using the hotel as a hotel, and now the cottage they'd planned immediately took shape on the other side of the grove, facing the river still, same view of woods and river from the windows, besides a new vegetable garden, flower garden, new arbors, chicken coop, pier. And next to their own cottage John built one to rent out—soon it would be his and Phoebe's. Very little woodland was sold with the old place, couldn't take the risk, might disappear overnight—John took only the dead wood for his fuel, and the mass of the woods standing there was protection on the north and something to look at. Would have to be pinched hard to sell any more trees.

Soon settled down again. Some of the old furniture was brought over. Their five rooms were large enough, many windows, and John's room—he allowed no curtains there, only shades. He had a little walnut cupboard for tobacco, a cot, a desk, small heater, radio. Most winter evenings they sat together in the kitchen, played euchre, dropped their apple peelings into the coal scuttle, Matty's short, quick-cut, John's round and round, unbroken.

Though less to do here, Matty was still in her neuralgic and head troubles, a woman demanding help, so used to men working on the place that during housecleaning days when she wanted stove or ice box moved she'd say, They can do this anytime now, I'm ready. Thereby she took in the neighbors. Private property before life. And as time went on she knew the courts upheld her. When the strikes came on in Detroit she read: “The right of an owner to his property is upheld by the circuit court.” But the problem of neighbors staying to sit or to use the now fewer and fewer Beefelbein tools she could not always control as she liked. She was always ahead though. Her little business with her hens was fair. In one way or another she had managed to save $1000. Even during the depression she continued to gamble on her stock market, to pocket little revenues and clip coupons on coffee and soap.

The monopoly of sleep expanding. But Uncle John was running for the Assembly. He may have dreamed of serving the nation in the coming Presidential campaigns, of being called to conventions here or there: We need your help to nominate Hyle. Or Payne. Or Beefelbein. But the crash came, and then the depression, without him.

And April elections followed, sun and rain, Prairie Chickens, Phoebe…was still working in a drug store, giving a little each week to her mother, had asked John to invest her savings—turned out bad—made a feeling between them that should never have arisen, but he was now confident of getting into office and providing for them all.

Party feeling was intense while men huddled under a bridge and streets of people slowly died of hunger.

J. J. had been endorsed by party leaders and they were cheered when they spoke. At last a real start. Several important issues, but they had to limit themselves to what one address could adequately hold. For J.J. that meant principally the question of putting people back to work and a system of relief. On this he could give his whole heart, sound radical even, socialistic, though of course he was really becoming a Progressive Democrat soon voting for the Franklin D. Roosevelt deal.

Three days before spring election when the voters would declare themselves—for him—J. J. went out to the haystack to practice his speech of thanks to the people for supporting him. Trying out a new tone-placement to be ready for outdoor engagements. Matty, stepping out the back door heard: two million five hundred thousand. And again something like: three billion seven hundred twenty-six million…. The former likely the number of unemployed or the number of times he'd thought of them. Matty seeing the garden unplowed, a boat unrepaired, probably a fence down: no ground work, only figgers, figgers.

Election time, she thought, just mouth to mouth. People were living that way now instead of better. The newly married couple renting the cottage—They've got nothing, she said, go without hats or caps in winter, they live from mouth to mouth.

But to go back to Uncle Babe in the haystack, sheltered from the ill wind of depression…when it did strike him, poor man, he was not influential enough to keep out of the newspapers. In fact that very noon a man drove into the yard telling him the utility company which had both their savings was down so low that he feared it would never come back, and the next day it got around. Now the people still had, many of them, the feeling that a man to lose $8000, 8000 eggs in one basket, must be a poor business man…the system that permitted investment and crash was bad, of course, but every man must take care of himself. And doubtless, regarding John, the amount of his failure grew as it spread…$18,000…$28,000…someone said, I heard $38,000. So it passed from mouth to mouth and burned them up. Enemy papers, the day before election made the most of it. The organs of the opposition attacked me most bitterly, but I am in fighting trim and I feel confident of victory ahead…so an older, richer, nationally known mosquito-in-the-brush had long ago said favorably to the millions, a lawyer he became for the property holders of Milwaukee—Since lawyers, he'd said, in times of depression like the present are the only class that prospers. Uncle John couldn't fight now. Whether he just hadn't built up a successful campaign for himself, or the people were suspicious and resentful of a man in their midst who'd had enough money to retire before he was old…at any rate, he lost out.

He saw himself now suffering with the rest. His life past the middle, soon gone…what was it for? No use trying to sell any land now, nobody could buy. Mortgage the house, the woods, no, keep away from pain…go back to the Indians, they were happy…until their lands were taken away.

Night. Went to his room, the window. The big dipper, couldn't see it, different now…why did it move around, different positions? What were the stars? Maybe we weren't meant to know. If he'd broken into education a little further? They probably taught some damthing to fool the people. We learn wrong.

Next morning Matty baked without luck. Well, they still had cheese and their home.

He went over the land, heard bullfrogs—he'd had them imported a few years before, saw the yellow-heads in the rushes, the little river and the lake, all in a land of slavery, blue heron stands, finish, form, if city folks could see, advanced into summer, took his new stand against the bankers. Government control of…same radio cushion…money, credit. Setback, had a cold since April…government now controlled by it, wrong, but give it time. Change money. The government wouldn't have to be changed, would it?—not overthrown by…coughing. He felt as unsteady as a Whittier voter, or he began to feel what was best but couldn't bring himself to it. What was this talk of classes, anyway. But yes, if only the middle class and lower class would join together. Feed a cold, starve a fever. As a liberal, Uncle John did both, and the interests of both classes lost their point simultaneously. He was afraid that something must be done, anything though to keep a nation from passing away.

Think of it, I told Uncle Babe, goes down in the ocean, this country, bubbles, is gone! Not a plant to grow a whisker on. J. J. jumping in after it with a book on Money: What It Is. There it is!—the masses of workers with a government which is themselves and by them the mines, factories, forests, farms, railroads, banks, owned, and the right to work guaranteed, vacation too! A reasonable profit? No, all profit went down in the ocean, so did graft. Down with a fierce love of independence, Hamilton! Look, “our” woods. In your old age a pension and your same old pride a new one. A living science working for just such good Russ…Germans as you. Organized methods. Powerful tractors. Price-decline. Production costs in the barn fell and the haystack moved to the consumer!

The food which Matty always allowed John to provide was not very nourishing now, she said, only common, coarse food. He brought home less meat, almost no candy. Apples, lemons, were high. If only somebody would give a dinner, show they remembered what he'd done for them and give him a job. To help others. He'd worked hard in his younger days and since, to keep what he had. Now he'd have been ready to give his time and money for other concerns.

Farmers, organize for the benefit of society. But collective farming? Not own their land? Could a man be depended on to work land he didn't own? What people want is better living, walnut furniture, pottery, violets, theatres….

Maybe some man put in control. Hard to know which one to trust. In 1912 the American people had elected President Wilson on the belief that he would lower the cost of living! Sometimes it was Wilson, sometimes the Pope, then again Coughlin, or the local police officer.

He met a man one day. We were riding home in John's Ford V8. I was on vacation—had taken a cut, working now for $2 a week more than room and board. The elderberry bushes beside the road were holding out their white blossom-plates where the pies would come. This man walking, dusty, a small sackload on his back, held out his hand.

J. J.: Going far?

Man: West, I guess, wherever I can find work. Know of any?

He had worked 35 years, it turned out, and now had nothing. John gave him some of our rolls and bananas and 50¢.

Uncle John worried over him. Pressure to bear. Yes, but as a whole, he said, the common people didn't know what was good for them, couldn't govern themselves. My uncommon Uncle! I suppose he couldn't forget they had repudiated him at the polls, but he said the more prosperous farmers were against relief for those in the towns who had nothing and if they didn't watch out they wouldn't have a friend in the legislature. They really didn't appreciate what was done, could be done, for them—he was led to this belief once long ago when he had given a ditch, a right-of-way straightout to a group of men who wanted to buy it. They never even thanked him. I saw his sadness, couldn't tell him just then that people don't want things done for them. He went on that he at least had a place to be in these hard times. Still, that man, and there must be many more, would see the ocean…if he had good luck, whereas he, John Beefelbein, had no means of seeing it, had to stay on in his old place.

He would gladly give the man more sackloads if he could.

SWITCHBOARD GIRL

I divined this comedy, Dante, before I went in. But I had to have a job. “Like one who has imperfect vision, we see the things which are remote from us.” O brother, we saw tho the eyes were shot. We had light if not love. We had business.

Nystagmus (“The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling”), the searching movement, combined with 80% vision. You'll have to use a magnifying glass, we can't give you glasses to reach print. Good-bye to proof reading. Good-bye to a living. No! That low, rangy, glass-walled office and plant in the Frank Lloyd Wright setting, clean-mowed acres, tulips, petunias, evergreens—I would apply there. Not literature but light fixtures and pressure cookers. Out of daylight into Wade Light.

I was the September dandelion—forty, female—seeking a place among the young fluorescent petunias. I keep cropping up in the world's backyards while here in America, on all sides they shear civilization back to the seventeen-year-old girl, not yet young shall we say.

I entered the window-walled office of personnel. Or was it a corner of a little theatre? What would the director be like? A properly placed man may expand his influence over the whole of your sight. We met ideally, as strangers do, without prejudice, without violence…courteous before the guessed-at depth. All art between us. Will he help me? He is not usual. He moves as in a dance to be considerate. As if to speak, against the room's outdoor backdrop, of Renoir? Of Einstein? Is he the master economist with a sense of the relative value of things? The artist with a sense of needing fewer things? The political observer with a knowledge of electronics? What does he know really, sweetly, by touch?

He said, “You read.”

Beethoven: “It is impossible to say to people, ‘I am deaf’.” But I said it:

I have an eye handicap.

“I wonder if you should…we have a switchboard opening. You might try it.”

I went in. Lights, polished glass, blond satin finished desks, glossy haired and bald-headed efficiency. Shine. Lamps to be produced. Lamps to be sold. The antique sweatshop base with a new shine. You'll never have to polish this brass, a lacquering process, won't tarnish. This is the lust that will never rust.

The shade by the door, the grey parchment face, cracked in a half smile. Shall I appear alive or let myself be carried along? I suppose man is, the most sensitive physical part of him, an electrical apparatus, switches, wires, etc…. How much do I give to Wade lamps? It takes 1028 human bodies to build a star. Purely business.

The girl at the switchboard shouted, “Come in—if you can—it's my birthday, you know. Once a year and at Christmas this happens—nylons, table lamps, candy, help yourself. The bosses, the old honeypots, must like me a little bit, anyhow. Sit down. Let me tell you what goes. They're all good enough guys, family men, church, golf, they're after the business, they'll lay on you, of course.”

You see in a place of this kind, she said, the switchboard girl is one of their outlets. They do a great deal of their sweating thru you. You'll make the contact and in haste, also they relax thru you. You're a part of it when their bags are full and you jazz em when they're down.

“Get me the Howard Hotel, a single.”

“Good, I like to sleep close.”

That was Mendau, the burnt-out fuse in the beautiful suit who still thinks he's got something to sell.

“Give me Philadelphia.” Give me Europe. I'm waiting, operator, for the Paris pick-up. I'm on wartime Montparnasse, gas mask, phosphorescent heels, illuminated brooch. “What's that?” What does it look like? There they call it what it is.

The Japs: We had neither hens nor eggs. We went requisitioning. A miserable village. On the way back we began to look for Chinese girls.

They don't make em as sensitive as geiger counters.

“Goddamit what the hell happened to that call to Lethal Steel? Sleeping at the switchboard?”

“I reported to you, sir, that Dan Blaine will talk.”

“Christ if you can't get anybody but Dead-End Daniel—”

“What was the name they wanted?” Somebody by the name of Christ.

Please pass the blood. Human matériel is obsolescing.

As for the work itself, she plays an intricate chess. You gamble with the red and the white and the green, without benefit of spa.

I lost. “No natural aptitude.”

Dante? Yes, go ahead.

The evening's automobiles, men from work, shot silently through green lights. Encased motors give man the swift, shining precision that his mind as he drives can't give him. Well, he makes his get-away in beauty. He passes gleaming. And somewhere along the speedway for men with motors is home, woman.

I must have been aglow myself as I stood there—I was a banner headline in running lights:
YOUNG MAN GOES HOME
—after twenty years as newspaper printer. Although mid-twentieth century of the middle ages continued had brought me the printing press, I'd found that Wm. James was right: “The sensational press is the organ of a state of mind which means a new ‘dark’ ages that may last more centuries than the first one. Then illiteracy was brutal and dumb and power was rapacious without disguise. Now illiteracy has an enormous literary organization and power is sophistical,” and this organization, as good an avenue for plunder as any business is, protects and is protected by that other and still more expensive organization, war. I'd found that a job does not necessarily sustain life. Grime, guts, gloom, the crash and roar of the big presses, speed, overtime speed, reason jarred. Throw the forms away for the last time, I was away to my childhood home in the country.

Benj glided up to the curb in his own silent, white tired speed-gleam. I recalled my sister's remark on a certain small red beauty in the neighborhood, “They've bought a hummingbird—you can't haul anything with it.”

“But why do you do it,” shrieked Benj, “It's lunacy!—alone, isolated, when everybody else is gearing himself for the fight for survival.”

“Are men afraid of their own selves? Give us peace and we'll survive.”

“But nobody to talk with!”

“Talk, these days, is dangerous. My friend the poet says ‘Talk is a form of love’. Maybe I'll find that form in the millennium after the next.”

“And what about Norma? Aren't you marrying her in June?”

“Why is it that women about to be married need a mineralogical fulfillment—silver, diamond?”

“You'll find a flood. In that lowland in the spring it won't take a forked stick to find water. What
do
you expect to find?”

“The ancient present. In me the years are flowing together.”

I awoke the next morning to twitterings out of leaves on every side, mixed with a marsh hush that I must have known soon after I'd known life in this world. The river had risen in the back land to within six feet of the house. Here in the lush wash, you go back to the exuberant source and start over. My mother, not too happily married, lived on her nerves on this stream, hunted and fished, grew flowers as big as plates in the Nile-like silt and said—how often she said it—“I've got a new pain.”

The goddam dragon flies mating all over hell, said Jackie from my office, once long ago, and Jackie was a lady, unintellectual but enlightened, one to whom diamonds held no lure.

No lady is the other office woman by her own insistence, weak-voiced and slight of build though she is. She is the proof reader, Francie Canoye who sits in her monastic, windowless cell, abhorrent of anything approaching profanity, but who manages to domineer over some sixteen men—printers, editors, bosses—with a desperate, old maid, bitter, obscene purity.

Francie's impeccably penciled initials in the corner of her galleys soon stood among us men for Finance Capitalism. This small piece of steel flesh with a bad heart and spleen, a military bearing which was her only patrimony, maintains a deadly hatred of labor unions despite a ready acceptance of holiday pay. Two weeks paid vacation she never gets because she refuses it on the grounds that there is no one to whom she can trust her job.

This is the woman who carries her portable possessions to and from work with her every day in a big bag resembling an enormous, pendulous, inverted bladder, never trusting their safety with her landlady. Sometimes the bag contains empty milk bottles—her own serious admission—to protect herself against landlady and landlord should the situation arise. Actually, she has nothing. A brother who died of leukemia had thereby depleted his and her own savings. Poor old thing, she marches along the street under the heavy weight of nothing. If she'd had money, she'd have quit—no, more likely as the self-appointed carrier of civilization she'd have gone on suffocating at her post. It's generally agreed that Francie knows her gothics and her futuras, but day after day of stepped-up tensions, dead lines, the whole deadly, competitive madness, have left their mark. And natural that sheer noise should affect her as she grows older. Not that she would complain to the owners. She looked belligerent, one particularly distressing day, when even her young copyholder shouted in near delirium, “Can't hear the stars, too close to the big press.”

Through an age of violence and sudden death such as ours, a culture that hardly distinguishes between credulity and superstition, a culture that forever oscillates between a search for a movie with a Holy Grail theme and a search for the next meal, proof reader Francie Canoye guides her once sharp mind by sheer force of will.

“Triskaidekaphobia thought they'd stump me on that one they didn't get me on Capuchin and bailiwick either Christ was a Jew they say—impossible! take it back to the editors I'm afraid of Frank Dane's bull neck the linotype boys are late today and sloppy we need a Hitler over here to make things move the moon changes tomorrow so we'll get different weather do you pray?” And when Francie runs on thus the ads in the night's paper loom up with tender
lions
for tender
loins
, or
grease-free
ginghams for
crease-free
ginghams or unconditional
surrender
(on tires) instead of unconditional
guarantee.
So she loses her night's sleep and starts the morning of the next day by laying into the men who had failed to make the corrections which if marked hadn't been changed because the proofs had come back too late from the proof reader's desk. At such a time her grey figure stood before you like the sandpiper's out at my yard's “shore line,” a clam shell on long, thin legs with nervous-nodding head. Once a child came along, asked what kind of a bird that was and “What does it kill?” The truth was that often in her “brute goodness,” her only laxative from tight-bound days and too many candy bars, was to let an error fly where it would among the stench along her own close-confined portion of beach.

But now I—at least I—was home. I looked toward the water's edge where lay milk bottle, electric light bulb, whiskey flask. China's great blue heron, Poor Joe, look at him go. A knock at the door-who in hell? I hung from a cold cigarette. A woman, her hair burning in the morning sun.

“Parachute?”

“No, I'm one of the last of my line—legs.” She stood there with more than one range of intensity and a basket of chicken and salad. It was Marion Dollman from the hill.

“Come in.” We sat at table. Five feet from us on the other side of the window a yellow warbler was busy at her compact nest, three eggs of her own and a cowbird's. The birds building in the bush under my nose!

The girl passed the salt. “You look at me as though you expected to find something of a world…” The world, we said, will come from scientists on the tail of their terror-literature, if it comes. Still, we'd make our own.

“Tell me,” she said, “What do you know to be true? Not merely that roughly radiation dies away according to the formula r equals one over time.”

“Not roughly. Knowing goes best with the quietest touch. Otherwise it's somebody else's stuff. Even so I can only indicate.”

Her tender-spoken “No terror here.” And “With all deference to what we could be together, no two persons can ever become one, each must be free to desire what the other has indicated. At least we'd make it a point, wouldn't we, never to be familiar no matter how close we got?”

“And together, isolated from a great portion of humanity, as all with feeling are, these days…while the flood recedes and the grass starts fast to mow me in my prime.”

“Isn't it glorious? Let's trim green thought in one place and let it grow wild in another.”

The lovely greenery—I hadn't too much of it in my pocket or in any bank. But we don't need a third of the things, the sheer, literal litter that people do in our savage cities.

Let's sit here in the long afternoon and last.

AS I LAY DYING

radio adaptation of William Faulkner's novel

DOC PEABODY
as narrator

Anse Bundren's wife Addie was dying. When Anse finally sent for me of his own accord I said: He has wore her out at last. And when it got far enough into the day for me to read weather signs I knew it couldn't have been anybody but Anse that sent. I knew that nobody but a luckless man could ever need a doctor in the face of a cyclone. And I knew that if it had finally occurred to Anse himself that he needed a doctor, it was already too late. Their cotton and corn farm lay on top a steep hill. My team couldn't make the last several yards up the steep but Anse got me up there—my 250 pounds—with the help of a rope. “What the hell does your wife mean,” I say, “taking sick on top of a durn mountain?”

ANSE
(thick, gentle voice)

I'm right sorry, Doc.

PEABODY

Well, let's go in.

Sound of footsteps, door closing.

PEABODY
as narrator

The girl Dewey Dell was standing by the bed fanning her. Addie turns her head. She's been dead these ten days. I suppose it's having been a part of Anse for so long that she cannot even make that change, if change it be. I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind—and that of the minds of the ones who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end, the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town. Beneath the quilt she is no more than a bundle of sticks. I turned to Anse standing there with his arms dangling, the hair pushed and matted upon his head like a dipped rooster.