Wolf Willow, Page 36

  It is a question whether or not the museum means anything in particular, outside of an easily satisfied and idle curiosity, to the pupils in the four rooms above it, though it offers them more information on the history of their own place than anything else in the school or the town either. But it is barely possible that Corky’s Indian relics and old bones are a cultural match. When they and the proper kindling are brought close together, something might happen. And even if no Whitemud child ever takes fire from Corky’s collection and becomes an anthropologist or paleontologist, something may still have been accomplished by his example. Any child who knows Corky can see knowledge being loved for its own sake—something not too common in Whitemud, but not totally unknown.

  There was another in Whitemud who had a little of Corky’s intellectual curiosity. He was Jack Wilkinson, a machinist and general repair man. In 1949 he began to get interested in astronomy, and put together for his own edification a six-inch reflector telescope. A hobby, we might say, half amused and half pitying. A desperate effort of a starved spirit. Many must live and die alone, even in Winesburg. But Wilkinson was so thrilled by his first look at the heavens that he built a larger telescope, an eight incher, and a little observatory to house it, and he invited the town to come in any time for a look. In 1953 he died, much respected. But his observatory did not die with him, because Corky Jones, and a few others unwilling to see a light go out, formed—how touching and how finally splendid—the Whitemud Astronomical Society, and sold memberships for funds to buy the telescope and dome from Wilkinson’s estate. It stands there now across from the Pastime Theater, the Wilkinson Memorial Observatory, whose published intent is “to further the study of the stars and perhaps some day to help develop a budding Newton.”

  Seeing it there, the weeds suspiciously tall and untrampled around it, I don’t know whether to be more struck by the difficulty of keeping the flame alive, or by the fact that in the occasional Corky Jones it is unquenchable.

  During my childhood the principal thoroughfare we traveled was a footpath that led along the welt of the ditchbank toward town. At the first diversion weir and plank footbridge, a branch path led off right to the Leader office, and from the corner of that another branch led on to the United Church. A little farther up the ditch from the first weir, another branch turned off left to the school. And that was it, that was the town, essentially: public school, free press, Protestant church. The forked path articulated three of the basic institutions of Whitemud. Bath houses and sports ground defined another, and the dump was fundamental to them all. In forty years others have grown up around them; the modern Whitemud child has architecture other than grain elevators; the monuments of his tribe have had four decades to accumulate, and if they are not any of them Giotto’s tower or Independence Hall, they are enough to tell him who he is. The several churches, the hospital, the enlarged school, the town memorial hall, are accomplishment against real odds, and they create a solidity and permanence that were notably lacking for us. Crude as it still is, this is a community, and a very much less ugly one than the bare, ditch-cut, shack-strewn, sweet-clover-smelling village of my youth.

  My walk has brought me back around by the elevators and a vacant lot full of rod weeders and tractors, the heavy, massive power machinery by means of which solitary farmers now handle a thousand acres or more of wheat land. I come up toward Main Street on the short side street leading to the post office, and just short of the corner I find myself looking in a half-curtained window at an apple-green ceiling and part of a bare apple-green wall. It is a tiny shack, no more than a dozen feet wide and twenty long—such a shack as used to house Milo Grubb’s barber shop or Jakey Klein’s butcher shop. It may even be Jakey Klein‘s, moved to a new location; for an instant my hallucinating senses bring me the taint of the high beef scraps, or the liver heat-stuck to its brown paper, that we used to bum from Jakey for fishbait. But now the sign above the doorway reads “Farm Wives’ Rest Home.”

  Weather-beaten, warped, the paint flaking off its shiplap, its windows flyspecked and with alluvial fans of dust in the corners of the frames, its partly seen interior poisonous with bilious calcimine, it hardly suggests rest. Behind it a path leads to a privy on whose front someone has painted, evidently with a finger dipped in lamp black, the legend “Ladies.” The wind has cornered candy-bar wrappers and gum wrappers in the doorway and whirls them, lifts them, lets them fall into a pile, stirs them up again. I stand bemused, with grit in my teeth and dust in my eyes, thinking that here is quintessential Whitemud. Here is a human institution, born of a compassionate and humane impulse, and tailored to a felt need, falling so far short of its intention that it would draw a snicker from anyone who didn’t stop to think first. If he thought first, he might elect to honor the impulse, rather than scorn the result, however shoddy.

  For the snickerer should remember that in all of Whitemud, which even yet is without plumbing, there is not a service station with a toilet to which a woman from the country can take a desperate child. There is not a park where a tired woman can sit down, not a public library where she can wait out the hours of heat and tedium while her husband buys feed or seed or gopher poison or a part for his tractor, or sprawls around the Grain Growers elevator gassing with friends, or visits the licensed premises of the hotel. If a farm woman has friends in town, she can indulge in that country pastime called “the visit.” But if she is from far out, and shy, she may sit a long time in the pickup parked on Main Street, reading a woman’s magazine from the drugstore or frowning down on a headache. Hamlin Garland did that rural unfortunate tenderly in the story called “A Day’s Pleasure,” and Sinclair Lewis’s stepmother spent a lot of her time promoting just such a place as this Farm Wives’ Rest Home in the town that would become Gopher Prairie. It took Whitemud about forty years to do as much as it now has done for the comfort of country women. It is little enough—a superannuated false-front shack, a little calcimine, some discarded chairs, an old cot, some magazines, and a privy out behind. But it is the most humane institution in all that village, and it is purely native, the answer to a local need. If it is given up as soon as the town gets plumbing and a well-equipped service station, well and good. What matters is that it exists now to acknowledge a community responsibility; that it exists minimal and ugly only suggests, at least to one brought up on the pragmatic meliorism of the frontier, that it can be improved, and will be.

  In the end, I decide not to fault Whitemud for not being what only centuries of growth and the accidents of wealth and human genius could make it. Let it be, at least for a good long while, a seedbed, as good a place to be a boy and as unsatisfying a place to be a man as one could well imagine. Unless North American tourists discover the beauty of the geometric earth and the enormous sky brimming with weather, and learn the passion of loneliness and the mystery of a prairie wind, Whitemud is going to have too little to work with; it will remain marginal or submarginal in its community and cultural life.

  Nevertheless, with its occasional impulse to the humane. Nevertheless, with its occasional Corky Jones. And therefore not unhopeful. Give it a thousand years.

  Acknowledgments

  Remembering is by no means a lonesome occupation. Remembering for this book, I have had the pleasure of help from a good many old Saskatchewan friends, particularly Corky Jones and Bill Anderson. They are entitled to blame me if in spite of their help I have remembered wrong, or if I have occasionally warped fact a little in order to reach for the fictional or poetic truth that I would rank a little above history. I have benefited from the assistance of the Stanford University Library staff, from that of Lewis H. Thomas of Regina College, and from that of Will Ready, now of the Marquette University Library. Merle Curti of the University of Wisconsin, Thomas Presley of the University of Washington, Thomas O‘Dea of the University of Utah, and the late Alfred Kroeber have warmed me with their interest and their suggestions. The book was begun on a grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, an
d completed on a fellowship to the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences. To both these organizations, and to the staff of the latter, especially Phyllis Ellis, I make my sincere thanks.

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