The sun stood three o’clock high on its southerly arc. Henry leaned back against the trunk of a tree, stretched out his legs, put on his jacket—cool in the shade—and waited, watching the life of the farm.
Saw the chickens scratching in their run. The dogs scratching their fleas under the porch. Will’s two mules, the gray and the buckskin, rubbed their backsides on the pasture fence. There were no other animals on the place anymore but housecats, weasels and raccoons. And why wasn’t Will out in the woods today? Or up at the shop in Stump Creek? Must be Sunday. The day felt like a Sunday.
Smoke rose steadily from the kitchen chimney: Marian was probably baking a cake or a chicken or both—maybe a roast of poached venison. Company coming? Will emerged again from the kitchen door, a rag rug draped over one arm; he hung the rug over the pumpstand railing and started whacking at it with a broom. The long winter’s dust billowed up and drifted away. Will Lightcap—beating on a rug. Henry smiled at the sight. That Women’s Liberation has penetrated even to Shawnee County. But Will he always was an easy mark for a woman’s touch, a woman’s gentle words.
Marian came out of the kitchen carrying what looked, from Henry’s vantage point, like a wooden bucket. After a moment he recognized it as the hand-cranked ice cream mixer. She carried it into the cold crypt of the springhouse, returning with a white pitcher. He noticed that she was wearing what appeared to be a new dress, turquoise blue with a yellow sash around the waist. Her dark hair was down, shining, her head up to the sky. She was fat, she was middle-aged, she was happy, she was beautiful.
Will carried his rug into the house and came out with a second rug. He looked heavier than Henry remembered, a little slower, and the sunlight glistened on his bald pate, but he swung the broom against the rug with a lusty wallop. Each blow was followed—after a time—by a double echo from the wooded hills. The crows complained about the noise, rising from the trees along the cornpatch, circling and descending again.
Will returned to the house. Spring cleaning? Not on a Sunday. A plume of black smoke rose from the main chimney. That would be Will firing up the furnace in the basement, pouring a can of kerosene on kindling and coal. Cool inside the house, of course, especially in the front rooms away from the kitchen. Maybe Will’s getting ready to take a bath—like Henry he always needed one. Especially on a Sunday. Particularly if they’re expecting visitors.
The mourning dove called again from somewhere deep in the forest on the ridge to the east, off toward Cheat Mountain and that Spruce Knob five thousand feet above sea level. That same old lonely dove that Henry first heard more than half a century ago when he was a baby on a blanket in the April grass, his mother nearby hanging up the wet sweet-smelling sheets and diapers. The first birdsong he ever learned to recognize and never learned to separate from distance, from the darkness under the trees, from the brooding stillness of the hills.
Up on the mountain, thought Henry. That’s where he’d go. Up in the national forest. Move into one of them falling-down cabins. No blackbird’s gonna find him up there. No, nor hear his sad cry. He waited, watching the house, the Lightcaps’ worthless comical obsolete farm, the drift of smoke. As he watched the black dog crept close and licked the salt from his hand. He stroked the hard bony overheated head. Ain’t that right, old dog?
A small automobile rolled up the red-slag road and stopped in front of the house. A man and woman got out, followed by two children. Henry knew that slender woman in the jeans, the big straw bonnet: our little sister Marcie. With her second husband, Frank. Back from California for good. Thank God she got rid of the other, that clown Whatshisname, the no-good philandering insurance-peddling jerk. The man and woman approached the front door of the house, passing out of Henry’s sight, but he heard shouts of greeting, saw the two kids—your niece and nephew, Uncle Henry—run across the lawn to the tire swing dangling from the sugar maple tree.
Henry watched. Happy people. Those are happy people down there. I can’t do it, he thought. Not to them. I cannot I will not do it.
Another car pulled in from down the road, parked near the giant maple. Another couple climbed out, Will’s youngest son, Joe, and his wife, Kathy. Then their child, the little girl, Nancy. The back door of the car remained open and after a moment one more person extricated herself from the cramped steel shell. She stood up, holding a package in her hands, and stepped briskly across the grass toward the kitchen door. Her customary entrance. She was a tiny woman with gray hair and glasses, wearing a sweater and loose slacks. She carried herself erect; though close to eighty there was no stoop to her shoulders, no old woman’s hump in her back. She stopped once to kick a football out of her way. Will’s dog greeted her with acclaim.
Lord, thought Henry, that woman is meant to live forever. She will too. He felt a surge of blood-pride rise from his heart.
The men came out of the house—Will, Joe, Frank. Walking to the end of the yard, they picked up the horseshoes at the near peg. Will held a smoking cigar clamped in his teeth; like Henry he had his weakness. He said something to the other two men, walked to his pickup truck on the barn ramp and drove away. Needs more beer? Young Joe and Marcie’s husband began pitching the horseshoes. Henry heard the clang of iron on iron, followed by echoes.
They don’t need me down there. One thing none of them need is my pack of terminal troubles. I will not lay that sorry load on those good people, kinfolk though they be. The one decent thing I can do is let them all alone.
Henry watched and waited, preparing to leave. He heard a motor grinding uphill on the far side of the ridge behind him, then fading off. Long shadows spread northeastward from the farmhouse, the maple tree, the barn, the wagon shed, the corncrib, the pigpen, the lone hickory in the meadow by the run. The mules waited near the stable door, expecting their evening feed. That late sun slanted through the trees, amber shafts of light bearing a suspension of dust, vapor, white cabbage butterflies and yellow monarchs.
He heard the music of a piano. That’s Mother, he thought; Marcie had a harder rougher style. He heard a motorcycle coming up the road, looked and saw the one headlight burning. He recognized the motor’s throaty roar. That’s no Jap crap; that’s a Harley-Davidson. Maybe those Nips do make better machines but they never made a Harley. The concept is too subtle for the Oriental mind. The motorcycle wheeled slowly toward the house, engine throttled down, muttering. Stopped at the door; a tall slim fellow in leather jacket lifted one leg and slid off the saddle, stretched himself, stood looking about. He wore no helmet; his coal-black hair fell like a mane to his shoulders. That’s Jim by God, that’s got to be Jim. He’s back. Our no-good punk kid brother, back from exile, back from Canada at last. He would not serve. He would not submit. That’s our little Jim all right. Again Henry felt the hot blood of family glory spreading through his veins. What do you Lightcaps think you are? Why we’re Lightcaps, that’s what we are, what more do we need?
Watching the house, seeing the lights come on through the curtained windows, Henry smiled with pleasure. He felt sick, he felt hollow as a dead sycamore, he felt mortal as the dog beside him, and he didn’t care. He fumbled in his kit for the pills. Take another drink this here spring water, swallow my medicine, go down find that damn bag, go off deep in the woods to sleep. Head for Spruce Knob tomorrow. Looks like a clear night. Ain’t that Jupiter I see a-shining over yonder?
The dog growled; Henry turned onto one knee. He braced his stick against the ground and pushed himself to his feet. He trembled, legs shaky, and steadied himself with a hand against the tree at his side. He saw a man in the shadows about thirty feet up the hill. A man with a shotgun cradled in one arm. Saw the bald head, the potbelly, the red coal of the cigar. The wide and bearded grin.
The two men stared at each other for a long moment before the older one spoke: “Okay Henry, enough fooling around. We been expecting you for weeks. For years. Come on down to the house now. Supper’s almost ready.”
Henry felt a great bewildered joy rising in his heart;
fifty-three years—maybe that was enough after all. But what he said was, “I don’t think I can stay, Will.”
The other cast his cigar into the damp leaves. “Nobody said you had to stay, you damn fool.” Will stepped toward him, broad smile on his face, holding out his right hand. “And nobody ever said you had to leave neither.”
A Postlude
Roaring westward at evening, top down, red sun of Texas burning in their eyes. Smoke of El Paso—city on fire—smeared across a yellow sky. Barbed wire. Windrows of dead tumbleweed piled on the fence. Scrub cattle with splintered horns, fly-covered hides, broken hooves, range over the rocky desert, munching on cactus, on the dried seedpods of thorny mesquite. Newspapers yellow with lies, bleached by the sun, flap like startled fowl with ragged wings across the asphalt road. Welcome to the West.
Welcome to the West! he’ll shout in the wind, grinning his vulpine grin, teeth hanging out, and hug her tighter to his side, his gaunt ribs, his beating swelling joyous heart. By God we’re gonna get there, Ellsworth, we’re a-gonna make it yet, I tell you, there’s no way they can stop us now.
The child will gaze ahead in wonder, her dark eyes shining in fear and excitement, long black hair whipped wildly by the stream of air pouring in mad invisible vortices over the windshield, around their shoulders, across and through the baggage—suitcases, duffel bags, stuffed bears, bedrolls, books, boxes, sacks full of food—jammed in a fury of haste within the well and upon the backseat of their open, boat-shaped, rollicking automobile.
Self-propelled. The open boat on the desert sea. A fat faded near-antique almost-classic but wrinkled motorcar, of dubious value, doubtful make, uncertain age but clearly a piece of iron. Detroit iron. A fringe of mud hangs from the fenders. Hubcaps missing. One savage portside sideswipe scar from headlight to tail fin reveals the cancer of rust beneath the veneer of baked-on bleached-out once purple-hued enamel. A repaint job. Hillbilly overhaul. The pimp-sized convertible, the rednecked dreamboat. Choice of any honest country boy with big feet, a limber cock, a lank frame too long in the torso.
He’ll lift his eyes from the girl to the road to the rearview mirror and its image: blue-black highway tapering off into the eastern dark. An empty highway at the moment: no red glare or blinking blue of police, no menacing array of tractor-trailer rig, nothing and nobody whatsoever following. At the moment. But the wicked flee pursued or not.
Once we get there, he’ll say, speaking hoarsely but loudly above the rush of wind, we’ll hide this junkyard wreck under the willows down by the crick for a year or so, give it some rest till Grandma cools down, let them pistons get some rest, we’ll ride the horses into town, you and me, yessir and we’ll eat good too I tell you.
Where do you mean, Daddy? What horses?
Most anywhere, honey, anywhere. Anywhere west of the Rio Grandee. There’s Cherry Creek under Aztec Mountain. There’s Bisbee, good sensible hippie town, we’re welcome there. Maybe Mexican Hat up in Utah. Over there under the cottonwoods along that old Green River south of Ruby Ranch. Honey, I know a hundred places. Lone Pine in the Owens Valley. Or why not Big Pine or Independence? There’s Arcata on the coast. And just a little ways beyond sets that big island down below. Brisbane’s a good city. You might like Alice Springs. Or what the hell, go all the way to Eighty Mile Beach, the Hamersley Mountains, the Black Swan River, watch the sun go down over the bloody Indian Ocean toward bleeding bloody Africa where our troubles all began. Look in my eyes, Ellie, tell me—
He’ll check the road once more, let up on the gas pedal, lean toward her, smiling, and stare straight into her big solemn hazel-brown eyes with his red iron-flecked squinting happy eyes and say, What do you see, Ellie?
She will look hard, concentrating, thinking.
Hey? What do you see?
Dad? Well…you’re crazy as a bedbug.
Yeah yeah sure, but what else? He’ll glance at the highway again, no traffic in sight, nothing ahead but the fiery glow of the city, the glare of the descending sun, the dust, the smoke, and return his gaze to his daughter. What do you see, sweetheart? Look me in the eyeballs ball to ball and tell me what you see.
I see a crazy cuckoo Daddy.
What else?
Her nose is sunburned, starting to peel, her lips chapped, but she will crack a tiny smile. A growing smile, matching his. I see…lights. Little lights jumping around.
Dancing. He’ll check the road again, the car slowing, wheels grating on the tin cans and gravel of the shoulder, and look once more into the girl’s eyes. What color?
She’ll laugh. Red.
Right. And what does red mean?
She will laugh again. Same as always: full speed ahead.
Right, he will yell, you got it. He’ll pull her small body firmly to his side, steer back onto the pavement, press the pedal to the floor.
The big brute motor will grumble like a lion, old, tired, hesitating, then catch fire and roar, eight-hearted in its block of iron, driving onward, westward always, into the sun….
Other Books by Edward Abbey
Novels
Jonathan Troy
The Brave Cowboy
Fire on the Mountain
Black Sun
The Monkey Wrench Gang
Good News
Hayduke Lives!
Essays
Desert Solitaire
The Journey Home
Abbey’s Road
Down the River
Beyond the Wall
One Life at a Time, Please
The Best of Edward Abbey: A Reader
Essays and Illustrations
Appalachian Wilderness (with Eliot Porter)
Slickrock (with Philip Hyde)
Cactus Country (with Ernst Haas)
The Hidden Canyon (with John Blaustein)
Desert Images (with David Muench)
Natural History and Fiction
The Serpents of Paradise: A Reader (edited by John Macrae)
Holt Paperbacks
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Copyright © 1988, 1990 by Edward Abbey
All rights reserved.
Parts of this novel first appeared, in different form, in City Magazine, New Times, Confessions of a Barbarian (Capra Press), and Slumgullion Stew: A Reader (E. P. Dutton).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Abbey, Edward.
The fool’s progress.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-0629-0
I. Title.
PS3551.B2F6 1988
813’.54
88-4677
CIP
Originally published in hardcover in 1988 by Henry Holt and Company
The Fool’s Progress is a work of fiction. Although based, as any earnest novel must be, upon the author’s experience, understanding, and vision of human life, he has made no attempt to portray actual persons or to depict actual events; each and all are totally imaginary, any resemblances accidental, any likeness a coincidence.—E. A.
1. Cindy LeClair, 325-4484; Julie Mayberry, 326-5060; Candy Barton 322-2191; etc….
2. Die Jugendgeschichte Fichtes (Hofmann & Campe: Hamburg, 1929).
Edward Abbey, The Fool's Progress
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