Wolf Willow, Page 5

  We had our own grain, and our knots as well, but prairie and town did the shaping, and sometimes I have wondered if they did not cut us to a pattern no longer viable. Far more than Henry Adams, I have felt myself entitled to ask whether my needs and my education were not ludicrously out of phase. Not because I was educated for the past instead of the future—most education trains us for the past, as most preparation for war readies us for the war just over—but because I was educated for the wrong place. Education tried, inadequately and hopelessly, to make a European of me.

  Once, in a self-pitying frame of mind, I was comparing my background with that of an English novelist friend. Where he had been brought up in London, taken from the age of four onward to the Tate and the National Gallery, sent traveling on the Continent in every school holiday, taught French and German and Italian, given access to bookstores, libraries, and British Museums, made familiar from infancy on with the conversation of the eloquent and the great, I had grown up in this dung-heeled sagebrush town on the disappearing edge of nowhere, utterly without painting, without sculpture, without architecture, almost without music or theater, without conversation or languages or travel or stimulating instruction, without libraries or museums or bookstores, almost without books. I was charged with getting in a single lifetime, from scratch, what some people inherit as naturally as they breathe air. And not merely cultural matters. I was nearly twelve before I saw either a bathtub or a water-closet, and when I walked past my first lawn, in Great Falls, Montana, I stooped down and touched its cool nap in awe and unbelief. I think I held my breath—I had not known that people anywhere lived with such grace. Also I had not known until then how much ugliness I myself had lived with. Our homestead yard was as bare as an alkali flat, because my father, observing some folklore fire precaution, insisted on throwing out the soapy wash water until he had killed off every blade of grass or cluster of false mallow inside the fireguard. Our yard in town, though not so littered with feathers and cans and chicken heads as some, was a weed-patch, because our habit of spending the summers on the homestead prevented my mother from growing any flowers except the Wandering Jew and Star of Bethlehem that she carried back and forth in pots.

  How, I asked this Englishman, could anyone from so deprived a background ever catch up? How was one expected to compete, as a cultivated man, with people like himself? He looked at me and said dryly, “Perhaps you got something else in place of all that.”

  He meant, I suppose, that there are certain advantages to growing up a sensuous little savage, and to tell the truth I am not sure I would trade my childhood of freedom and the outdoors and the senses for a childhood of being led by the hand past all the Turners in the National Gallery. And also, he may have meant that anyone starting from deprivation is spared getting bored. You may not get a good start, but you may get up a considerable head of steam. I am reminded of Willa Cather, that bright girl from Nebraska, memorizing long passages from the Aeneid and spurning the dust of Red Cloud and Lincoln with her culture-bound feet. She tried, and her education encouraged her, to be a good European. Nevertheless she was a first-rate novelist only when she dealt with what she knew from Red Cloud and the things she had “in place of all that.” Nebraska was what she was born to write; the rest of it was got up. Eventually, when education had won and nurture had conquered nature and she had recognized Red Cloud as a vulgar little hole, she embraced the foreign tradition totally and ended by being neither quite a good American nor quite a true European nor quite a whole artist.

  Her career is a parable. If there is truth in Lawrence’s assertion that America’s unconscious wish has always been to destroy Europe, it is also true that from Irving to William Styron, American writers have been tempted toward apostasy and expatriation, toward return and fusion with the parent. It is a painful and sometimes fatal division, and the farther you are from Europe —that is, the farther you are out in the hinterlands of America—the more difficult it is. Contradictory voices tell you who you are. You grow up speaking one dialect and reading and writing another. During twenty-odd years of education and another thirty of literary practice you may learn to be nimble in the King’s English; yet in moments of relaxation, crisis, or surprise you fall back into the corrupted lingo that is your native tongue. Nevertheless all the forces of culture and snobbery are against your writing by ear and making contact with your own natural audience. Your natural audience, for one thing, doesn’t read—it isn’t an audience. You grow out of touch with your dialect because learning and literature lead you another way unless you consciously resist. It is only the occasional Mark Twain or Robert Frost who manages to get the authentic American tone of voice into his work. For most of us, the language of literature is to some extent unreal, because school has always been separate from life.

  In practice, the deculturation of a frontier means a falling-back on mainly oral traditions, on the things that can be communicated without books: on folklore, on the music and poetry and story easily memorized, on the cookery that comes not from cookbooks but from habit and laziness, on the medicine that is old wives’ tales. Before it was more than half assembled from its random parts, the folklore of Whitemud was mine. I knew the going ballads, mainly of cowboy origin and mainly dirty, and because my father had a sticky memory and a knack of improvisation, I knew some that he probably made up on the spur of the moment. I took part and pleasure in the school cantatas and the town jamborees that were our concert stage and our vaudeville. I absorbed by osmosis the local lore, whether it involved the treatment of frostbite or the virtues of sulphur and molasses for “thinning the blood” in the spring. I ate my beef well done because that was the way everyone ate it, and only shame keeps me from eating it that way yet. But I also read whatever books I could lay hands on, and almost everything I got from books was either at odds with what I knew from experience or irrelevant to it or remote from it. Books didn’t enlarge me; they dispersed me.

  Naturally the books were not exactly what a wise tutor would have prescribed. We were not lucky enough to have in Whitemud one of those eccentric men of learning who brought good libraries to so many earlier frontier towns and who lighted fires under susceptible village boys. The books we saw were the survivors of many moves, accidentally preserved pieces of family impedimenta, or they were a gradual accretion, mainly Christmas presents, ordered sight unseen by the literarily sightless from the catalog of the T. Eaton mail-order house.

  Our house contained some novels of George Barr McCutcheon and Gene Stratton-Porter, a set of Shakespeare in marbled bindings with red leather spines and corners, and a massive set of Ridpath’s History of the World. I handled them all, and I suppose read in them some, uncomprehendingly, from the time I was five. Their exteriors are still vivid to me; their contents have not always stuck. The gray binding and the cover picture of a romance called The Rock in the Baltic I recall very well, without recalling anything about the novel or even who wrote it. Until I began to get a few books of my own—Tarzan books, or the Bar-Twenty novels of B. M. Bower, principally—my favorite volumes were the Ridpath histories, because I liked the spidery steel engravings with which they were illustrated. It was my mother’s inaccurate boast that I had read clear through Ridpath’s volumes by the time I was eight.

  Let us say that I had looked at the pictures, and learned a few names, and could parrot a few captions and chapter headings. Much of that random rubbish is still in my head like an impression in wax, and comes out of me now as if memory were a phonograph record. What strikes me about this in recollection is not my precocious or fictitious reading capacity, and not the durability of memory, but the fact that the information I was gaining from literature and from books on geography and history had not the slightest relevance to the geography, history, or life of the place where I lived. Living in the Cypress Hills, I did not even know I lived there, and hadn’t the faintest notion of who had lived there before me. But I could have drawn you a crudely approximate map of the Baltic, recited you Tom Moore
songs or Joaquin Miller’s poem on Columbus, or given you a rudimentary notion of the virtues of the Gracchi or the misfortunes of the Sabine women.

  Though my friends and I sometimes planned gaudy canoe expeditions down the Whitemud, we had no notion where such a trip might bring us out, and no notion that there were maps which would tell us. The willow-fringed stream, after it left the Hills, might as well have been on its way to join the Alph. The Hills of which I was an unknowing resident were only a few fixed points: North Bench, South Bench, the sandhills, Chimney Coulee. The world I knew was immediate, not comparative; seen flat, without perspective. Knowledge of place, knowledge of the past, meant to me knowledge of the far and foreign.

  I know now that there were some books from which we could have learned a good deal about our own world. Nobody in town, I am sure, knew they existed unless it was Corky Jones, and Corky’s interest in history and other matters was never fully comprehended by his fellow townsmen. Certainly school taught us nothing in this line. The closest it came was Frontenac, Montcalm and Wolfe, and the Plains of Abraham. The one relic of the local past that we were all aware of, the line of half-tumbled chimneys where the métis village had once stood on the edge of Chimney Coulee, had in our mouths a half-dozen interpretations, all of them wrong. I remember my father’s telling us that they were Indian signaling chimneys. He was, in his way, consistently creative. If he lost the verses of a song, he made up new ones; if he was in doubt about the meaning or source of a word, he was fast with a folk etymology; if he was ignorant of the facts, as in the case of the chimneys, he did not let ignorance hamper his imagination.

  In general the assumption of all of us, child or adult, was that this was a new country and that a new country had no history. History was something that applied to other places. It would not have seemed reasonable to any of the town’s founders to consider any of their activities history, or to look back very far in search of what had preceded them. Time reached back only a few years, to the pre-homestead period of the big cattle ranches. Some ranches had weathered the terrible winter of 1906, and to a child these survivors seemed to have existed forever, floating in an enduring present like the town. For that matter, I never heard of the terrible winter of 1906 until many years later, though it had affected my life for me before I was born.

  So the world when I began to know it had neither location nor time, geography nor history. But it had a wild freedom, a closeness to earth and weather, a familiarity with both tame and wild animals. It had the physical sweetness of a golden age. It was blessedly free of most conventional restrictions, and its very liberation from the perspectives of time and place released our minds for imaginative flights into wonder. Our sensuous and imaginative education was exaggerated, but nobody told us much about what is now sometimes called “vital adjustment”

  Under the circumstances it might sound fanciful to suggest that either the geography or the history of the Cypress Hills could have had any substantial part in making the minds and characters of children reared there. Certainly they could have no strong and immediate effect, as they might have upon a child who passes every day the rude bridge where the embattled farmers of Concord precipitated a new age with a volley of musketry; or upon a child who flies his kite in the Saratoga meadow where the bronze boot commemorates the nameless heroism of a traitor. In the world’s old places, even the New World’s old places, not only books reinforce and illuminate a child’s perceptions. The past becomes a thing made palpable in monuments, buildings, historical sites, museums, attics, old trunks, relics of a hundred kinds; and in the legends of grandfathers and great-grandfathers; and in the incised marble and granite and weathered wood of graveyards; and in the murmurings of ghosts. We knew no such history, no such past, no such tradition, no such ghosts. And yet it would be a double error to assume that my childhood had no history, and that I was not influenced by it.

  For history is a pontoon bridge. Every man walks and works at its building end, and has come as far as he has over the pontoons laid by others he may never have heard of. Events have a way of making other events inevitable; the actions of men are consecutive and indivisible. The history of the Cypress Hills had almost as definite effects on me as did their geography and weather, though I never knew a scrap of that history until a quarter-century after I left the place. However it may have seemed to the people who founded it, Whitemud was not a beginning, not a new thing, but a stage in a long historical process.

  History? Seldom, anywhere, have historical changes occurred so fast. From grizzlies, buffalo, and Indians still only half possessed of the horse and gun, the historical parabola to Dust Bowl and near-depopulation covered only about sixty years. Here was the Plains frontier in a capsule, condensed into the life of a reasonably long-lived man.

  3

  The Dump Ground

  One aspect of Whitemud’s history, and only one, and a fragmentary one, we knew: the town dump. It lay in a draw at the southeast comer of town, just where the river left the Hills and where the old Mounted Police patrol trail (I did not know that that was what it was) made a long, easy, willow-fringed traverse across the bottoms. That stretch of the river was a favorite campsite for passing teamsters, gypsies, sometimes Indians. The very straw scattered around those camps, the ashes of those strangers’ campfires, the manure of their teams and saddle horses, were hot with adventurous possibilities. The camps made an extension, a living suburb, of the dump ground itself, and it was for this that we valued them. We scoured them for artifacts of their migrant tenants as if they had been archaeological sites potent with the secrets of ancient civilizations. I remember toting around for weeks a broken harness strap a few inches long. Somehow or other its buckle looked as if it had been fashioned in a far place, a place where they were accustomed to flatten the tongues of buckles for reasons that could only be exciting, and where they had a habit of plating the metal with some valuable alloy, probably silver. In places where the silver was worn away, the buckle underneath shone dull yellow: probably gold.

  Excitement liked that end of town better than our end. Old Mrs. Gustafson, deeply religious and a little raddled in the head, went over there once with a buckboard full of trash, and as she was driving home along the river she saw a spent catfish, washed in from the Swift Current or some other part of the watershed in the spring flood. He was two feet long, his whiskers hung down, his fins and tail were limp—a kind of fish no one had seen in the Whitemud in the three or four years of the town’s life, and a kind that none of us children had ever seen anywhere. Mrs. Gustafson had never seen one like him, either. She perceived at once that he was the devil, and she whipped up the team and reported him, pretty loudly, at Hoffman’s elevator.

  We could still hear her screeching as we legged it for the river to see for ourselves. Sure enough, there he was, drifting slowly on the surface. He looked very tired, and he made no great effort to get away when we rushed to get an old rowboat, and rowed it frantically down to where our scouts eased along shore beckoning and ducking willows, and sank the boat under him and brought him ashore in it. When he died we fed him experimentally to two half-wild cats, who seemed to suffer no ill effects.

  Upstream from the draw that held the dump, the irrigation flume crossed the river. It always seemed to me giddily high when I hung my chin over its plank edge and looked down, but it probably walked no more than twenty feet above the water on its spidery legs. Ordinarily in summer it carried six or eight inches of smooth water, and under the glassy surface of the little boxed stream the planks were coated with deep sun-warmed moss as slick as frogs’ eggs. A boy could-sit in the flume with the water walling up against his back, and grab a cross-brace above him, and pull, shooting himself sledlike ahead until he could reach the next cross-brace for another pull, and so on across the river in four scoots.

  After ten minutes in the flume he would come out wearing a dozen or more limber black leeches, and could sit in the green shade where darning needles flashed blue, and dragonflies
hummed and stopped in the air, and skaters dimpled slack and eddy with their delicate transitory footprints, and there pull the leeches off one by one, while their sucking ends clung and clung, until at last, stretched far out, they let go with a tiny wet puk and snapped together like rubber bands. The smell of the flume and the low bars of that part of the river was the smell of wolf willow.

  But nothing else in the east end of town was as good as the dump ground. Through a historical process that went back to the roots of community sanitation, and that in law dated from the Unincorporated Towns Ordinance of the territorial government, passed in 1888, the dump was the very first community enterprise, the town’s first institution.

  More than that, it contained relics of every individual who had ever lived there. The bedsprings on which Whitemud’s first child was begotten might be out there; the skeleton of a boy’s pet colt; books soaked with water and chemicals in a house fire, and thrown out to flap their stained eloquence in the prairie wind. Broken dishes, rusty tinware, spoons that had been used to mix paint; once a box of percussion caps, sign and symbol of the carelessness that most of us had in matters of personal or public safety. My brother and I put some of them on the railroad tracks and were anonymously denounced in the Leader for nearly derailing the speeder of a section crew. There were also old iron, old brass, for which we hunted assiduously, by night con ning junkmen’s catalogs to find out how much wartime value there might be in the geared insides of clocks or in a pound of tea lead carefully wrapped in a ball whose weight astonished and delighted us.

  Sometimes the unimaginable world reached out and laid a finger on us because of our activities on the dump. I recall that, aged about seven, I wrote a Toronto junk house asking if they preferred their tea lead and tinfoil wrapped in balls, or whether they would rather have it pressed flat in sheets, and I got back a typewritten letter in a window envelope advising me that they would be happy to have it in any way that was convenient to me. They added that they valued my business and were mine very truly. Dazed, I carried that windowed grandeur around in my pocket until I wore it out.