Inklings
A candle in a night of storms,
Blown back and choked with rain, Holds longer than the mounting forms That ride time’s hurricane. ...
— Maxwell Anderson, 1888-1959
To know the man one must know the child, he said. Then he read from Whitman,
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air, / Born here of parents born here of parents the same, and their / parents the same...
What followed was a story from decades earlier. The class wondered why the great Professor Shinn would begin there? With a farm boy from the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma? And where was the professor taking them?
No sound the boy heard was alien to his space. Not the rolling conversations of scarlet tanagers or the low moan of cattle at first light. Not the rasping interventions of insects or the morning’s buoyant gait of a faraway horse that took residence in the tall room of his memory.
Like exiles assembled on a rise in eastern Oklahoma, a cluster of trees stood dignified but vulnerable. Under one, John William Hall at the northern edge of thirteen rested just after the moment of daybreak in April, 1929. Unnoticed was the shudder of leaves whose motion led to more, never the same. The boy’s wheat-colored hair crudely shorn on the sides but left tumultuous on top had begun to darken. As vivid a blue as a glacial lake his eyes swept over the family farm, its undulant lines, its serrated, arbitrary horizon: his birthplace north and east of Durant, the terminus of the Trail of Tears’s Choctaw diaspora and the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek where the unequivocal light of the new and ancient sun washed through the boy’s vision like the first water of Eden.
Standing, the boy took a final survey of the tableau, his family’s forty acres of plot and curve, meager but fertile if the rains visited and sequenced among more prosperous homesteads. The Hall acreage with its overflowing of bobwhite quail, cunning trout, cultivars of pears and beans, okra and squash was sanctuary. He felt his body was of this clay and places beyond it peculiar, hostile even. For he had seen outside Bryant County.
A year earlier, his father, Arnold Munro Hall, had taken him to Lawton, one-hundred-and-forty blistering Oklahoma miles west, where Arnold tried to dicker a land deal that would never materialize. The massive stretch of ferric wasteland between Durant and their destination, much of it farmed into extinction, consumed the boy.
“This is freakish country, Pa,” he allowed as he squirmed in the oven of summer. “It gives nothin’ back.” The old truck that carried them spewed fumes from its rusty undercarriage, making John queasy. He thrust his hand out the window trying to direct moving air onto his green and broiling face. After a long spell empty of words John spoke. again “This ground’s like an old floorboard. Flat ‘n dead with little to provoke its routine.”
This annoyed his father and Arnold Hall replied. “Hell’s bells, I know this ain’t the prettiest part a’ the world, boy.”
Tall, pole-thin, taciturn and humorless he sat squashed up in the driver’s seat. On his head as always rested a mud-brown fedora with a capacious brim to block the sun and a tall crown with a deep crease like a dry arroyo down its center. Its wide Petersham band masked sweat stains at the rim. The ribbon culminated in a bow where once a small feather had peeked up like a wary bird in the bush. But Arnold had removed the feather. He replaced it with a silver-certificate dollar bill neatly folded into a triangle, its green filagreed pinnacle emerging from under the ribbon announcing his perceived station in life.
“But this land smells ‘a money, boy. North’n west ‘a Lawton, up in the panhandle of Oklahomy, is the great western prairie, North America’s most magnif-y-cent high plains grassland. It’s so fertile they say yew can plant an agate in it and it’ll grow! Farmers, even them who ain’t made it anywheres, have been a’ movin’ in fer years. They are ‘a breakin’ up that prairie, easy as crackin’ wishbones.”
John’s father imagined soaring wheat prices lasting for decades, making landowners and merchants in west Oklahoma and Texas rich as Croesus. “And I wanna be in on it!” John’s father yelped. His voice raked across the dry flatland as he pounded the scalding black steering wheel in a burst of euphoria.
To the boy little except the railroad interrupted this land’s leaden monotony. The parallel filaments caught the sun and bore hypnotic trains along flashing threads of silver.
When the rails followed the road, John listened for their enduring rhythm. This was the cadence of dominion over time and space and he watched with fascination the boxcars and flatbeds racing across the expanse in close sequence. Loaded with cotton bales and wheat flour and oil-well riggings and automobiles from Detroit the color of midnight, the trains betraying no end trumpeted America’s long and perpetual prosperity. And then there were the legions of ploughs with twisted moldboards stacked on a dozen uncovered railcars ready to open up the veins of virgin prairie, prime it for cash crops and offer up its deep black humus in sacrifice to the god of quick money. Inside the boxcars were kitchen appliances and gewgaws from Sears catalogues and crates of soft goods and fashions from the East that the gentlemen and ladies of Lawton and Boise City and Amarillo prized. Beyond the railway, mystical armies of perpetually blowing wads of rootless Russian thistle and wind witch tumbled hysterically across the plains seeking resting places that didn’t exist.
^^^
His memory ending, John reclined against the tree again and closed his eyes to absorb the present before obligations took him. The reverberation of hooves grew louder and stopped. A younger boy dismounted a Tennessee Walking Horse that radiated a sheen of chestnut and carbon.
“What the Sam Hill you doin’ up here, John William?”
“Fishin’!”
“For sure no stream up here!” Leo Graham declared.
“Castin’ my line in the prettiest water you ever did see,” John said, his eyes still closed. “Where’d ya get that steed, Leo?”
“Got her for the week,” the visitor, two years younger and three inches shorter than his curious friend, sparkled. “From my uncle on my mama’s side.”
“I’d say she’s clean in the bone with a nice tah-rrruuuue four-beat gait,” John warbled as he wove his fingers behind his head. “Anyway, I’m really up here pondering my own existence.”
The mare cocked forward her ears.
Opening his eyes, John peered up at the canopy as if seeking counsel. But today the meandering branches were mute. Other days they looked like alphabets, codes to be deciphered. Now they were but scorched lines on the sky. “Wayward inklings,” he thought and a discordance came over him like a child secure in the womb realizing it was about to be let into the universe. The next years would substantiate the boy’s apprehension. And then the world, and he, would be at war.
^^^
John took a last glance at the vista and stepped over to Leo’s horse.
“Where you gallopin’ to next?” John asked as he stroked the animal’s withers.
Leo sidestepped the question. “What have you been daydreaming about?” he asked.
“Travellin’ west to Lawton with Pa across ugly land.”
“It’s why the Oklahoma State Flower is flora moribunda,” Leo quipped and waited for John to follow his deprecating joke. He didn’t.
“Well, gotta go back home and help Ma clean windows,” Leo huffed.
John wanted to know if his friend would come back tomorrow afternoon. And bring his baseball glove. Leo grinned.
“Since it’s Sunday I get to play,” John said as he swung an invisible bat. “After the stupid sermon, that is. We can take turns hittin’ and pitchin’. The old barn is a good backstop. Jack’ll play. Maybe A.M., too. Then we could do teams. Them against us. Lucille’ll roam the outfield. We’ll slaughter ‘em! A.M.’s big, but I know how to strike him out!”
“Dang right!” Leo shouted. “Tomorrow!” He reined his horse and was off.
John slipped his work shoes back on and returned to the corral where he tended a few cattle and a pair of sorrel mules. Afterwards, he would finish cultivating his mother’s acre-and-a-half garden, then patch the surrounding fence. Finally he would draw cold well water for evening baths and feed grain to the pullets and the cockerel before being called for supper. During his labors, the recollection of last year’s journey into the barrens with his father stuck in his mind.
