The Sea Is My Brother

  “Sure do,” answered Wesley.

  “It’s the way a father feels,” apologized the old man. “You’ll find out how it is someday when your own kids go off like this . . . it’s something that can make you feel downright unhappy, and mad too, by God. I’ve come to the point where I can’t understand it any more—I mean the whole blamed thing. You start off with a rosy-cheeked little kiddie, then he grows up, and the next thing y’know, he’s standing face to face with you an’ arguing his head off, and then he’s gone . . . gone in more ways than one.”

  Bill was standing in the doorway.

  “Oh Pa, for God’s sake, stop telling all your troubles to my friends,” he admonished.

  The old man swung his chair around to the window and muttered bitterly. Bill’s mouth hardened impatiently.

  “We were havin’ a right nice chat,” Wesley said, a bit coldly.

  “All right, I’m sorry,” confessed Bill with some reluctance. “This is no way to say au revoir.” He walked over to his father’s chair: “well, old man, I guess you won’t have me around to argue with for a while, I’ll bet you’ll miss me just the same.” He leaned over and kissed his father’s bristly cheek.

  “Sure your doin’ the right thing I guess,” said Mr. Everhart, still facing his window.

  “Well, we can use the money, right?”

  The father shrugged. Then he turned and squeezed Bill’s arm with his big hand: “If I could see you to the subway I would. Goodbye, Billy, an’ be careful.”

  When Wesley shook hands with Mr. Everhart, his red-rimmed eyes were vague and misty.

  “I’m goin’ wid youse!” howled Sonny, back in Bill’s room.

  “Yeah, yeah!” cried Bill. “Go in the living room for awhile will you, Sonny: Wes and I want to talk. Tell Sis I’m coming out in a minute.”

  Sonny dashed off at a furious pace.

  “First thing is to get a subway to the Bronx and start hitch-hiking along Route One, right?”

  Wesley nodded.

  “I wish I had fare money,” growled Bill, “but I spent all my money last night. And I’m not borrowing any money from anyone, let alone my brother-in-law.”

  “Hell, man, we’ll bum to Boston,” said Wesley.

  “Sure!” beamed the other. “Besides, I never hitch-hiked before; it would be an experience.”

  “Do we move?”

  Everhart paused for a moment. What was he doing here in this room, this room he had known since childhood, this room he had wept in, had ruined his eyesight in, studying till dawn, this room into which his mother had often stole to kiss and console him, what was he doing in this suddenly sad room, his foot on a packed suitcase and a traveler’s hat perched foolishly on the back of his head? Was he leaving it? He glanced at the old bed and suddenly realized that he would no longer sleep on that old downy mattress, long nights sleeping in safety. Was he forsaking this for some hard bunk on board a ship plowing through waters he had never hoped to see, a sea where ships and men were cheap and the submarine prowled like some hideous monster in DeQuincey’s dreams. The whole thing failed to focus in his mind; he proved unable to meet the terror which this sudden contrast brought to bear on his soul. Could it be he knew nothing of life’s great mysteries? Then what of the years spent interpreting the literatures of England and America for note-hungry classes? . . . had he been talking through his hat, an utterly complacent and ignorant little pittypat who spouted the profound feelings of a Shakespeare, a Keats, a Milton, a Whitman, a Hawthorne, a Melville, a Thoreau, a Robinson as though he knew the terror, fear, agony, and vowing passion of their lives and was brother to them in the dark, deserted old moor of their minds?

  Wesley waited while Everhart stood in indecision, patiently attending to his fingernails. He knew his companion was hesitating.

  At this moment, however, Bill’s sister entered the room smoking a Fatima and still carrying her cup of tea. She and her friend, a middle-aged woman who now stood beaming in the doorway, had been engaged in passing the afternoon telling each other’s fortunes in the tea leaves. Now the sister, a tall woman with a trace of oncoming middle age in her stern but youthful features, spoke reproachfully to her younger brother; “Bill, can’t I do anything to change your mind. This is all so silly? Where are you going, for God’s sake . . . be sensible.”

  “I’m only going on a vacation,” growled Bill in a hunted manner. “I’ll be back.” He picked up his bag and leaned to kiss her on the cheek.

  The sister sighed and adjusted his coat lapel. She glanced in a none too friendly fashion at Wesley, while he, in turn, wanted to tell her it was none of his doing and that would she kindly keep her dirty looks to herself?

  In the street, Wesley could still see the old man, Mr. Everhart, as he had been when they had gone past his room on the way out: he was still sitting in the chair, but his pipe had lain unsmoked on the sill, a crest fallen, lonely figure.

  At the subway, Sonny began to sniffle, but Bill gave him a quarter and told him to buy a Superman book. And just as they were going through the turnstiles, an associate of Bill’s, a thin, nervous Englishman carrying two briefcases and a book, shouted brightly above the heads of the subway goers: “I say Everhart! A vacation is it?”

  “Yes,” answered Bill.

  “Lucky scoundrel!” was the reply, and the young man swayed off, his long neck loosely fitted to a gangling collar, striding purposefully toward an afternoon lecture.

  In the subway, Bill was frightened; Wesley was so quiet Bill could hardly expect any sort of spiritual sympathy from him. Didn’t the dammed fool know what was going on? . . . What folly was perhaps being committed? . . . what agony this impetuous change was already assuming? . . . and yet, too, what a coward “shortypants” was proving to be!

  At this point, Everhart almost made up his mind to go back, but just then he remembered Wesley’s date with Polly for that evening.

  “What about your date with Polly?” Everhart asked half morosely, fiddling nervously with the handle of his suitcase. The train was roaring through its dark tunnel—people were reading their newspapers and chewing with bovine calm on wads of gum.

  Wesley leaned over nearer, placing his hand on Bill’s shoulder: “What d’you say?”

  “What about your date with Polly?”

  Wesley’s mouth parted and his eyes widened with delight. Smacking Everhart resoundingly on the back, he shouted for the first time since Everhart had known him: “Who gives a good hoppin’ shuckall?!!” he whooped in a rich, good humored, rakish howl. “We’re shippin’ out, man!!”

  Everhart could still feel the sting in his back as the people in the subway peered curiously at Wesley, who now sat returning their stares with a roguish, wide-eyed humor, and quite amused.

  Everhart leaned back and laughed heartily; he couldn’t stop, and in his mind a voice was reproaching him as he laughed and laughed.

  It said: “Is it the damned fool, who, at that dark moment, laughs courage right into you.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  At three o’clock, they were standing at the side of the road near Bronx Park; where cars rushed past fanning hot clouds of dust into their faces. Bill sat on his suitcase while Wesley stood impassively selecting cars with his experienced eye and raising a thumb to them. Their first ride was no longer than a mile, but they were dropped at an advantageous point on the Boston Post Road.

  The sun was so hot Bill suggested a respite; they went to a filling station and drank four bottles of Coca-Cola. Bill went behind to the washroom. From there he could see a field and a fringe of shrub steaming in the July sun. He was on his way! . . . New fields, new roads, new hills were in store for him—and his destinations was the seacoast of old New England. What was the strange new sensation lurked in his heart, a fiery tingle to move on and discover anew the broad secrets of the world? He felt like a boy again . . . perhaps, too, he was acting a bit silly about the whole thing.

  Back on the hot flank of the road, where the tar steamed its black
fragrance, they hitched a ride almost immediately. The driver was a New York florist en route to his greenhouse near Portchester, N.Y. He talked volubly, a good-natured Jewish merchant with a flair for humility and humor: “A couple of wandering Jews!” he called them, smiling with a sly gleam in his pale blue eyes. He dropped them off a mile beyond his destinations on the New York-Connecticut state line.

  Bill and Wesley stood beside a rocky bed which had been cut neatly at the side of the highway. In the shimmering distance, Connecticut’s flat meadows stretched a pale green mat for sleeping trees.

  Wesley took off his coat and hung it to a shoulder while Bill pushed his hat down over his eyes. They took turns sitting on the suitcase while the other leaned on the cliffside, proffering a lazy thumb. Great trucks labored up the hill, leaving behind a dancing shimmer of gasoline fumes.

  “Next to the smell of salt water,” drawled Wesley with a grassblade in his mouth, “I’ll take the smell of a highway.” He spat quietly with his lips. “Gasoline, tires, tar, and shrubbery,” added Bill lazily. “Whitman’s song of the open road, modern version.” They sunned quietly, without comment, in the sudden stillness. Down the road, a truck was shifting into second gear to start its uphill travails.

  “Watch this,” said Wesley. “Pick up your suitcase and follow me.”

  As the truck approached, now in first gear, Wesley waved at the driver and made as if to run alongside the slowly toiling behemoth. The driver, a colorful bandana around his neck, waved a hand in acknowledgement. Wesley tore the suitcase from Bill’s hand and shouted: “Come on!” He dashed up to the truck and leaped onto the running board, shoving the suitcase into the cab and holding the door open, balanced on one foot, for Bill. The latter hung on to his hat and ran after the truck; Wesley gave him [a] hand as he plunged into the cab.

  “Whoo!” cried Bill, taking off his hat. “That was a neat bit of Doug Fairbanks dash!” Wesley swung in beside him and slammed the door to.

  “That’ll melt the fat off!” roared the truck driver. “Hot as a sonofabitch, ain’t it?” His laughter bellowed above the thunder of the motor.

  They roared and careened all the way to New Haven, traveling at a furious pace downhill and crawling with a mounting whine uphill. When the driver dropped them off at the Yale University green, the sunlight had softened to a pale orange.

  “Don’t take any wooden nickels!” counseled the truck driver, bellowing above the crash of his gears as he left them in his thunderous wake.

  “What now?” asked Everhart. They were standing on a broad pavement swarming with shoppers bearing packages, men in shirtsleeves en route from work, sauntering Yale summer students, newsboys, and business men. The street was a tangle of autos, buses, and clanging trolleys. The Green was a pageant of loafers.

  “First thing is to get the hell out of here,” muttered Wesley, moving off.

  “When do we eat?”

  “We’ll eat in Hartford,” said Wesley. “How much money did you say you had?”

  “Three bucks or so.”

  “I’ll borrow some when we hit Boston,” mumbled Wesley. “Come on.”

  They took a State Street trolley and rode to the end of the line. They walked up the street for a few blocks and set up their hitchhiking post in front of a bakery. After fifteen minutes of thumbing, an agrarian looking old gentleman picked them up in his ancient Buick; all the way to Meriden, while the sun changed its color to a somber, burning orange and the meadows cooled to a clean, dark, and jungle green, the farmer carried on a monologue on the subject of farm prices, farm help, and the United States Department of Agriculture.

  “Playin’ right into their hands!” he complained. “A man ain’t got no faith in a country that’ll let a powerful group knock off the whole derned agricultural economy for their own interests!”

  “Do you mean the Farm Bloc?” inquired Everhart, while Wesley, lost in thought, sat gazing at the fields.

  The farmer tooted his horn four times as he barked four words: “you . . . dern . . . tootin’ . . . right!”

  By the time he dropped them off on the outskirts of Meriden, he and Bill were just warming up to their discussion of the Farm Security Administration and the National Farmers Union.

  “G’bye, lads!” he called, waving a calloused hand. “Be careful, now.” He drove off chuckling, tooting his horn in farewell.

  “Nice old buck,” commented Everhart.

  Wesley looked around: “It’s almost sundown; we gotta move.”

  They walked across a deserted traffic zone and stood in front of a lunchcart. Great elms drooped above them in sunset stillness, calmly exuding their day’s warmth. A dog barked, breaking the quiet of the supper hour.

  “Sleepy little place,” nodded Everhart with a faint smile. “I wonder what it would be like to live in a town like this—digesting one’s supper on the hammock facing the apple orchard, slapping off the mosquitoes, and retiring to the lullaby of a million crickets.”

  “Sounds right peaceful,” smiled Wesley. “My hometown, Bennington, was a lot like this. I used to go swimmin’ in a little mill pond not a half-mile back o’ the house,” his voice softening in recollection, “and when the moon came out, I used to sit on the little sand beach and smoke—keep the mosquiters off . . .”

  “We’ll have to go there someday,” planned Bill with a cheerful grin. “Your family up there?”

  Wesley frowned darkly and waved his hand: “Nah!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When the old lady died,” muttered Wesley with sullen reluctance, “the family broke up; we sold the house. Charley went to Boston and went in the saloon business with my uncle.”

  “Who’s Charley?”

  “The old man.”

  “What happened to the rest of the family?” Everhart pursued with quiet concern.

  “Sisters married off, brothers beat it—one of them’s in New Orleans, saw him in thirty-nine.”

  Everhart laid a hand on Wesley’s shoulder: “The old homestead all gone, heh? An old story in American life, by George. It’s the most beautiful and most heart-breaking story in American literature, from Dresser to Tom Wolfe—yes, you can’t go home again . . .”

  Wesley broke a twig in half and threw it away.

  “I don’t reckon you can, man,” at length, he said, in a half whisper. “All depends where your home is . . . lose one, make another.”

  They were silent after that until a grocery truck picked them up. The grocer took them three miles up the road to a lonely crossroads lit by a streetlamp. In the near-darkness, they began to worry about getting to Hartford, fifteen miles or so to the north.

  While Bill waited for a car to come along, Wesley foraged in a nearby orchard and returned with a handful of small green apples. “Don’t eat them,” he warned, “you’ll be sick. Watch me pop that sign up ahead.” Bill laughed as Wesley wound up elaborately and hurled the missiles against the sign.

  “Good exercise,” grunted Wesley. “I used to be a semipro baseball player . . . a pitcher . . . the Bennington Blues. Great game. Do you know where I played my last baseball game?”

  “Where?” grinned Bill, adjusting his glasses.

  Wesley threw the last apple and barely missed the target: “Hah!” he cursed. Turning and sinking his hands in his pockets he addressed Bill with a faint smile: “some seamen and me played a game of scrub in a field in Bombay. We had baseball equipment in the cargo for American soldiers and the Looey let us use it—gloves, balls, bats, all brand new.”

  A car was coming along the road.

  “Give him the old number twelve,” advised Wesley. “Watch!” He rotated his hand slowly, thumb outthrust. The auto roared past stubbornly.

  “America . . . the beautiful,” sang Wesley, “and crown thy good . . . with brotherhood . . . from sea to shining . . . seeeee!” His body was shaking with silent laughter.

  Bill sat down on his suitcase and grinned. Up the road a faint light glowed in the window of a farmhouse. Th
e air, heavy with all the accumulated heat of the day, the tang of heated foliage, stenches from a nearby swamp, the smell of the farmyard, and the cooling macadam of the road hung about them, a warm, sweet, voluptuous drape in the summer dusk.

  “By George,” burst Everhart, “if we don’t get a ride we’ll sleep right here in that orchard!”

  Wesley lit up a cigarette he had found in his coat pocket: “It’s been done,” he offered. “But hell, man, we can’t spend a whole night without butts.”

  “You smoke like a fiend.”

  “Here comes another car. Watch me get us a ride!”

  Wesley succeeded; the car slowed to a halt abreast of them. They were in Hartford in thirty minutes, standing directly in front of the Public Library on Main Street. It was nine o’clock.

  “Well!” said Bill, putting down his suitcase. “We’ve come halfway to Boston in six hours. Nine o’clock. Nine o’clock last night I didn’t even know you, Wes!”

  Wesley made no comment; he was watching people stroll by.

  “Look what twenty-four hours and a moment of determination can do!” continued Bill, pushing his hat back. “I’m on my way . . . all of a sudden. Hell! I’m glad I did it. It’s going to be a change. I call this life! Do you know, Wes, you’re a pioneer in your own right.”

  Wesley stared at his companion curiously.

  “I was wrong when I said the days of the pioneers were over, yes, even in my lectures. There’s one on every street corner, by George. I’ve always been fascinated by pioneers and the pioneer spirit . . . when I was a kid, reading period pieces, French-Indian war sagas, Lincoln’s life, Boone, Clark, Rogers . . . and when I grew older, I discovered the pioneer spirit in many writers, notably Americans. Change is the health of society. Or is it? I guess I’m a naturally restless person, that may explain it. . . .”

  Wesley picked up Bill’s suitcase. “Let’s have a few cold beers,” he proposed.

  “Righto!”

  “There’s a place,” noted Wesley, gesturing toward the other side of the street. “Let’s mosey over.”