The Lacuna (53 page)

MR. SHEPHERD
: That’s right. We used hand trucks to get them off the trains.

MR. RAVENNER
: Did you know precisely what you were transporting? Did you pack these crates yourself?

MR. SHEPHERD
: No. I had a roster with the names of the paintings.

MR. RAVENNER
: You smuggled large crates of unknown content into this country? From the headquarters of some of the most dangerous Communists in any country touching our borders. Is that correct?

(The defendant conferred briefly with the identified friend, Arthur Gold.)

MR. SHEPHERD
: Congressmen, nothing exploded.

MR. WOOD
: What say?

MR. SHEPHERD
: I delivered artworks. You’re hinting at a crime that was not committed.

MR. WOOD
: Mr. Shepherd, I will put to you then a different question. Could this so-called artwork also be called Communist propaganda?

MR. SHEPHERD
: In my opinion, sir? Art takes its meaning in the eye of the beholder.

MR. RAVENNER
: Could you state an answer in plain English? What was the purpose of the concealed objects you transported into this country?

MR. SHEPHERD
: May I answer freely?

MR. RAVENNER
: In your own words, yes. All right.

MR. SHEPHERD
: The purpose of art is to elevate the spirit, or pay a surgeon’s bill. Or both, really. It can help a person remember or forget. If your house doesn’t have many windows in it, you can hang up a painting and have a view. Of a whole
different country, if you want. If your spouse is homely, you can gaze at a lovely face and not get in trouble for it.

(Laughter in the gallery.)

It can be painted on a public wall or locked in a mansion. The first paintings Mrs. Kahlo ever sold went to one of your famous film stars, Edward G. Robinson. Art is one thing I do know about. A book has all the same uses I mentioned, especially for the house without enough windows. Art by itself is nothing, until it comes into that house. People here wanted Mrs. Kahlo’s art, and I carried it.

(Silence in the gallery.)

You asked me why I’ve stayed here so long. I can try to say. People have a lot of color and songs in Mexico, more art than they have hopes, it often seemed to me. Here, I found people bursting with hope but not many songs. They didn’t sing, they turned on the radio. They wanted stories, like anything. So I decided to try my hand at making art for the hopeful. Because I wasn’t any good at the other thing, manufacturing hopes for the artful. America was the most hopeful place I’d ever imagined. My neighbors were giving over their hairpins and door hinges to melt down for building the good ship America. I wanted to give her things too. So I stayed here.

(Quiet in the gallery for some time. Of an unusual kind, the type to hear a pin drop.)

MR. RAVENNER
: You say that Edward G. Robinson is an associate of Communists?

MR. SHEPHERD
: I’m sorry, I might have made a mistake. It was a long time ago. It might have been J. Edgar Hoover who bought the paintings.

(Considerable laughter in the gallery.)

MR. WOOD
: Order!

MR. RAVENNER
: Now see here, if you continue to mock this hearing we will hold you in contempt of Congress. I am
going to ask you a series of questions to which you will answer Yes or No. One word beyond that will get you removed to the jail house. Do you understand me?

MR. SHEPHERD
: Yes.

MR. RAVENNER
: Do you now, or did you ever, work for Communists in Mexico?

MR. SHEPHERD
: Yes.

MR. RAVENNER
: Have you yourself written works about foreign people, men disloyal to their leaders, with the intention of distributing these tracts widely in the United States?

(Pause.)

MR. SHEPHERD
: Yes.

MR. RAVENNER
: Have you been in contact with Communist revolutionaries since coming to the United States?

MR. SHEPHERD
: Yes.

MR. RAVENNER
: I have here a good deal of evidence,
in print
, news articles and so forth, to the effect your books are being read in Communist China. That you opposed the use of the atomic bomb. I have evidence you made the following statement. I want you to listen carefully, and then confirm or deny it. And here I quote Mr. Shepherd: “Our leader is an empty sack. You could just as well knock him over, put a head with horns on a stick, and follow that. Most of us never choose to believe in the nation, we just come up short on better ideas.” Mr. Shepherd, are these your words?

MR. SHEPHERD
: A few among many, yes. In a story.

MR. RAVENNER
: Mr. Shepherd, I am asking a simple question. Did you write these words? You are asked only to confirm or deny.

MR. SHEPHERD
: Yes. Those are my words.

MR. RAVENNER
: Mr. Wood, gentlemen, that is all I have. This hearing is finished.

The Asheville Trumpet,
July 16, 1951

Obituary

The most important part of a story is the piece of it you don’t know. He said that plenty. It would be no surprise if he asks for that put on his gravestone, if there is to be one. There you see. Hangs the tale, and still yet more to find out.

You believe a thing is hopeless. You believe a book burned, yet the words persist. In this case twice, first in Mexico, his notes and drafts all taken by police after the murder, meant for destruction but precariously rescued. Then later on given to me for burning, and not burned. You believe a life ended, but the newsmen can’t make that true by saying so, even saying it many times. It’s dying makes a death, and living makes life.

The salvation of all, the life or the tale either one, I’ll come to directly. First the notebooks. For you see I hadn’t burned them, the day I was asked. He said I could only stay on working with him if we disposed of every word, his life entire if you asked me. I saw what he meant to do that day, and why. He took those writings to be evidence for his hanging. But I believed it could be otherwise, evidence for the good in him. I had no idea what his notes contained, but I knew the man.

I took what he pulled off his shelves that day, and while he was upstairs looking for more, I stuffed it all in the big leather mail pouch. My heart cantered, I have no nerve for crime. But that day, found some. By the time he was watching me out the upstairs window, I was half done. You should see what all I threw in that tar barrel: wastepaper, advertising supplements, the whole trash basket under my table, and more. Quite a few ugly letters I’d set aside. Things that deserved to be gone.

His notebooks went home with me to Mrs. Bittle’s, and there they stayed in a box in my wardrobe, hidden under some knitting wool. Let those men come and search the place, was my thought, for they’d not have a second look at a box of knitting wool and needles. Most will run from the sight. I thought I would only keep it there until Mr. Shepherd changed his mind. Or until such time as needed, to prove he’d done no wrong. No such time came, as far as I could see, though I still had no idea what he’d written in a natural lifetime of little books. A nerve for that sort of crime I did not have, to poke my nose in a living man’s diary.

I didn’t do that until coming back from Mexico. At first, a glance was all I could endure, looking for certain dates and such, to make a proper obituary. But of course that did not come to pass, they ran their own little useless piece, so my researching wasn’t any excuse for long. But still I went on glancing, a page here and thither. Time and again I took up his notebooks knowing they were not meant for my eyes, yet my eyes went on looking, many were the reasons. Some of them plain by now, I surely think.

Going to Mexico, that had been my idea. I didn’t like to say so afterward, due to events. But at the time I proposed it, things had come to a point. After the hearing he’d stopped writing, for good he said. Instead he bought a television set and let its nonsense rule his days.
Mook the Moon Man
comes on at four, and so on. I still came to his house twice a week, but the mail was not worth answering. My concern wasn’t to take his money, I’d found another job. I could have left him alone, but feared to do it.

One day he sat staring at the advertisements and declared he hated what America looked like now. Sofas and chairs with little pointy legs. Like a woman in high heels, he said, walking around smiling with a bad backache. And those metal funnel-hat lamps on poles, they look like they want to electrocute you. He missed beauty.

I asked him, why not go to Mexico then, I reckon it is prettier there. He said he couldn’t unless I went with him. Thinking that would be that. But I said, “All right, I will call the air-port right now.” What possessed me? I can’t say.

He was so changed by then, even his looks. Whatever used to show up for its workaday there inside him, it had shut off the lights and gone on home. He was fagged out in the chair as usual, in his old gray flannels, smoking, never taking his eyes off the set.
Captain Video
was on, some underwater band of thieves fighting. They had Al Hodge by the neck, fixing to drown him. I asked him whether we ought to go back to Mérida, because he’d seemed to like it there. He said no, let’s go to Isla Pixol so he could dive in the ocean, because that was all that made him happy as a boy. That was a grave moment, I see that now. Full of all that was to come, and me with no inkling. But I believe he did. Have an inkling.

That was in April, a year and some past the hearing. A Monday or Thursday, for those were the afternoons I still came. A joyful month if there ever was one, you’d think. Even a feather duster will lay an egg in April. But such generous feeling had gone from the land. No real work remained for me at Mr. Shepherd’s after the hearing, and I’d commenced looking for another income, disliking to be any burden. I was floored to find the city wouldn’t hire me. Not at the clerk’s office, though I’d once kept that whole place afloat. Not at the library where I’d volunteered. I can’t be a government employee due to previous association with the wrong element, they told me, it is all in print, and nothing to be done about it. It was the same at the Teachers College. After some months of asking, a hateful thing in itself, an acquaintance from the Woman’s Club consented to recommend me as a bookkeeper at Raye’s Department Store. It was a low position, mornings only, and I had to work in a basement office. They could take no chance on a customer seeing my face.

Hard times are nothing new to me. My father used to say a man can get used to anything except hanging by the neck. I believe that. But Mr. Shepherd could not. He had a well of hopelessness inside him, and it bubbled out to flood his days and his sights for the future if any. He said if readers found him so despicable, he wouldn’t trouble them with more books. It was hard to argue, as the trinkle of mail that still came was dreadful. Why does a person spend money on a stamp, to spout bile at a stranger? “Now our boys are going to Korea to be killed and mutilated by the Communists. So if one of them named Harrison Shepherd is starving, that delights me immeasurably.”

He’d been called names before, and borne it. But when a man’s words are taken from him and poisoned, it’s the same as poisoning the man. He could not speak, for how his own tongue would be fouled. Words were his all. I felt I’d witnessed a murder, just as he’d seen his friend murdered in Mexico. Only this time they left the body living.

His books weren’t banned anymore, just gone. They said he’d defrauded the publisher with the loyalty affidavit, so the advance money had to be returned and the book dropped. Not many options remained to Harrison Shepherd, watching a Moon Man in his living room being one of the few. He said Artie Gold had predicted it. That sometimes you really can see the empire is falling, and Mr. Gold saw it coming, all the green grass of our land killed for good. I said fiddlesticks, grass will grow right up through a sidewalk and the Lord loves what He cannot kill.

But that was false cheer, I knew better. Nothing was coming up by then, no gumption rising anywhere without a resolution promptly passed to cut it down. The Woman’s Club had become a drear business, their sole concern to oppose waywardness: a City Council man or a school history book. Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass no good for children, they set a bad example. It’s the same everywhere now, look at faces. In the luncheonettes
on Charlotte you’ll see people lined up with a haint upon them, sore afraid of not being as American as the next one. What’s the matter, sir, you look as though you’ve seen a Communist! The word itself could get a child’s mouth washed with soap. It used to be in the
Geographic
s, I learned the word as a child, “Every-Day Life in the Ukraine” and so forth. But the newspapers and magazines have had their mouths washed with soap too. Even today, years after Mr. Shepherd’s hearing. It would still proceed just about as it did then. People have no more vinegar in them. You can resign from the Woman’s Club, but the world is all, you can’t just stop attending.

Around the first part of May, then, after we’d discussed it, I went and had a talk with Arthur Gold about going to Mexico. Mr. Gold encouraged it. He said the drives were stepping up. Now that they had what they called evidence on Mr. Shepherd from the hearing, it was paperwork and only that, before criminal charges came. With an indictment the federal men would take his passport. Really Mr. Gold was unsure why they hadn’t done so already. He said Mr. Shepherd should go now, while he still could.

I hated to ask it, but inquired whether it would be wise for him just to go on down to Mexico and stay put. Mr. Gold allowed that he and Mr. Shepherd had discussed this already, some time ago. It wouldn’t do any good. The federal investigators can pull him right back here, once they have indicted. Mr. Gold said there were many examples. A man escaped from Ellis Island by stowing away on a ship, and they tracked him down all the way to France. They’ll go to the ends of the earth to haul back people they’ve declared unfit to be Americans. It makes no sense. Like hateful letters from people declaring they’ll never read Mr. Shepherd’s books. Why not leave the book where it is and get on with the day? I didn’t see how they could take another pound of flesh from this poor man, when all he’d done in life
was work at making others content. Mr. Gold said with due respect, a lot of men without one mean bone in them are currently sitting in Sing Sing prison. And now the Congress was voting to make treason laws bind in cold war as they do in a shooting war. Meaning, some would hang.

Well, that lit a fire under me. I went on and booked the tickets and made the plans. Mr. Gold advised reserving the tickets under a different name, the film stars do that regularly. Then simply give the right name when you show up. I chose Ben Franklin and Betsy Ross. Mr. Shepherd was tickled with that. He began to take interest. He stopped smoking all the time and went outside more. They opened the swimming pool in Montford after two summers closed for the polio, and he started to go there often. He’d loved swimming as a boy. I would walk to the pool with him sometimes just to sit and watch, for he was changed in the water, shiny as soap, and could hold his breath like I don’t know what. I want to say a fish, but that isn’t right. He’d go the whole pool, one end to the other not coming up. I asked him about it, and he said his childhood was that exciting: he learned to hold his breath for entertainment.

The flight was on the Compañia Mexicana de Aviación. In Mexico City, on the way to the train station, we got caught up in an awful traffic jam. Suitcases between us in the taxicab and the sweat rolling down, for we had to keep the windows closed, the city entire smelled of tear gas. The driver told Mr. Shepherd a riot had been going for days, working men, and police trying to break it up. Mr. Shepherd said good, they’ve still got fight in them here, and while we sat stuck there he told a story of long ago, his school years in Washington. The homeless veterans making a riot for their war pay. He said it smelled like this. The army used gas and guns against people living in tents, Americans. And those folks still yet bold enough to give it heck, fight back or die trying.

We took the train to Veracruz, then a bus, and a ferry. Like the sailors with Columbus, I felt we’d soon come to the edge and plop off. Mr. Shepherd said his mother used to complain Isla Pixol was so far from anything, you had to yell three times before Jesus would hear you. That I believed. The hotel in town was old as Moses, its elevator nothing but a cage on a chain. The boy that carried our suitcases into it claimed it was the oldest in all the New World, and I believed that too.

First off, Mr. Shepherd hired a car to take us out to the old hacienda where he had lived. The old place lay in ruins, but he didn’t seem disappointed. He went back many more times, often alone. I found my way around the little town and shopped for trinkets to bring my niece and the babies. One day Mr. Shepherd came back with a man who had supper with us, the two of them slapping one another’s shoulders, saying “brother” and “the devil.” Each unable to believe the other was still alive. Leandro was his name. There were others in the village, evidently, who remembered the boy with no inkling he now walked the earth as a man of repute, or even as a man.

All Mr. Shepherd wanted to do was dive in the water. I wanted no part of that, but to hear him tell it, the ocean was heaven and all the fish angels. He had a diving mask he’d bought in town, and needed nothing else, he’d stay out the day entire and come back sunburned. I thought he would grow some gills. More and more he returned to the fishes, leaving the world of people, it seemed. One evening he came to dinner with a calendar and showed me a day he’d circled, some two weeks off. He wanted to stay until then. Well, that meant changing our return, no small thing. I wasn’t very pleased. I’d begged time off unpaid from Raye’s, and they would be happy to replace me. I asked if he meant to change it again after that. Like a child putting off the bedtime. He said no, that was the day, after the full moon. That meant something to him.

On our last day, he got himself set to go out to his beach and wanted me to come. I didn’t mind sitting on the shore with a book. I’d done so before. But once there, he began to act peculiar. A slew of little boys came by, and he told them in Spanish he’d pay them money to come watch him dive, just to see how long he could stay under. These fellows looked like they’d take his coin to watch him whistle Dixie if that’s what he wanted, so off we all did troop down a path through the bushes.

The place he meant to go diving was a little cove with cliffs behind it and a strip of shore growing smaller by the minute, as the tide came up. The morning was getting on, and he seemed impatient to go in the water. The tide was still low but coming in right fast, eating up that little beach as it came. I wondered how long he’d expect me to stay there. I don’t know what he said before wading in. I paid no heed. Probably I was a little put out with him. I had my book. But after a while I looked out at the water and didn’t see him. I waited. Then counted to fifty, then one hundred. I didn’t see any way he could have left the cove. And it struck me: he’s drowned. Those little boys knew it too, standing in their group, for they were not looking at the water anymore, but at me. They seemed to think it was up to me now, to fix what had gone wrong.