We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free
Of that wide water, inescapable.
–Wallace Stevens
East
She has always been here, it seems.
All her adult life she has lived along the main road—first gravel, then oiled into macadam—that led into the town. Alongside the parsonage, she has watched a procession of neighbors—ministers and their families—come and go. Some take two years, some as long as eight or ten, but they always go. The names blur. The faces fade. But the routine never varies. Sometime on the day of arrival or departure, the church chairman, usually Vernon Larson, will drive over in his pickup. There will already be a truck in the driveway, rented and half full. Then a couple of others from church will slow and turn in.
She misses nothing. Through the curtains, the window over her kitchen sink which faces east, Mary Pierce will watch it all coming or going: bulky headboards and hutches, sofa beds, writhing mattresses, and sometimes even a what-not for the occasional porcelain collections of Mrs. Parson. That’s what she calls them: Minister and Mrs. Parson. It has become a blanket designation, a name bestowed with each successive shape and face: The Parsons. The Parson Kids are tagged, too. “You the minister?” she says when they first meet. She needs them there: One of the Parsons bending over the lawnmower; Mrs. Parson out in the back trying to turn the garden; the hay bales in winter alongside the north side of the Parson house trying to keep them warm. Through the blinds she sees it all, imagining the rest when she moves away from the kitchen window and out into the parlor, the floor creaking. Upstairs in the soft hollow of her old bed, she remembers still, her mind facing east.
East.
Mary Pierce is a Lutheran, and so she knows that East is a special direction, a spiritual place. Her pastor from her youth, a man most severe in a strained, almost chaste liturgical orthodoxy, was the one who originally taught her. She remembers his complaint to the confirmation class after the church board failed to listen. In a dry, even tone he talked about the church sanctuary being wrong, the altar facing south instead of east. “When we pray,” he said, “we should face east.” With his back turned, leading the congregation into the holy of holies on Sunday, he should face east. “We look east for the coming of Christ, like we do the coming of day,” he had said.
Mary looks east. Down, farther east, the sound of the freight train rends the air. It comes like the sound of the fire on the stove when she lights it, the gas first cutting the air, then sucking it in. But then the train’s sound rises, building into a wail which coyotes sometimes answer at night—the wail which now simply cleaves the dense, still air hanging with its humidity.
“Close,” Mary says to herself as she swings open the screen door, the rusty hinges singing in answer to the train, the screen itself speckled with rust and ballooned out from where the hands of little Parsons have found it in years past.
She takes the umbrella. There will be no rain, but the sun is out. Out and high and strong, she thinks. Slowly she pieces together the sidewalk ahead and its path to the side driveway, the culvert, and the thin gravel border of Route 103.
The train passing brings up memories of earlier times. She thinks about it as she walks: the regular procession of passengers following the noise, clumps of people regularly disembarking down near the bank, the car dealership, and the former furniture store. She is half remembering, half in the present as she pecks with her cane, a bird turning the stones ahead of her as she moves east, past the parsonage, past Frank Steiwalt’s house with its broad verandah, past the Miner’s place, the kids with their dirty faces out in the front yard. She passes much in her journey; passes much of her history as she pecks, minces her way past the vestige of the dry goods store to the east of the Miner’s, a row of bricks ripped down from the west facing wall, the windows out, the roof good and holding, the porch sagging before the fading magnificence of the front door. To the north, opposite the Miner’s place, the store, and an empty field, Mary remembers a frame house that once was standing there and now might nod on occasion to the memory of that place as if to both respect it and keep it there still as she walks in the heat of the summer sun building high above her and her black speck shape, the umbrella a canopy above her now, the cane tapping the way.
The bank, still a well kept, brick building, is now the post office to which Mary goes in the early afternoon. Florence Seeper knows she will be coming, with her old black umbrella, out for sun or rain, right about one fifteen. She has Mary’s packet banded and ready for her—although she pretends not to, going to the pigeon-hole of a box while Mary waits, peering into the confines of the darker space in the building, made darker by her sun-glasses, where once there was money. Now it’s mostly third and fourth class stuff she gets. Rarely does Mary ever sign for a package or registered mail. Florence thinks she has witnessed that event maybe only once or twice in the last two years.
Florence keeps track. Certified mail is an event here, a big tally. Florence thinks it’s now as big as the bank deposits in the days when the oil first came in—pumped from the land round about by those persistent, iron engines with their off-beat, oscillating motion. For a while, there were fields of them, almost more than the cattle grazing alongside. Then going to the bank was a matter of some purpose. She can see the crowds inside this building, the watch chains and the bib overalls, though not as well as Mary. Still, Florence can remember the people going to the bank and shopping for the week on a Saturday night, the town filled with the residents of Allen County, all part of a weekly routine. People still come in here with their striped overalls, but now they’re mostly from town. The farmers in the township wait for Joe Schmucker’s old Ford station wagon with the little orange bulb on top to find its way out along the gravel roads and lanes of the county. They only come in for the big packages when the weather looks bad. Now the few oil pumps left are only a sideline. The big oil is south and west in Oklahoma, Florence thinks. When the new state highway came through, that was when it all changed. The town, settled alongside the rail line, suddenly found itself 1.5 miles away from Possibility. That’s what Florence calls it. She looks west to Possibility, but only inside, only to herself. It is blacktopped out there. Expansive. It makes the rail line, the one she can see through the side window of the bank, look small.
Mary is here every day like clockwork. Florence looks at the gun-metal gray of her hair, pulled tight and gathered into a bun at the back. A few strands have pulled loose and hang out to the side like coiled bed springs. That’s about as much as she can see of the hair, under Mary’s broad-brimmed slouch of a hat, the band rotting out like a porch, as she hands Mary her the package. Mary receives it like money—collecting it, looking it over and putting it away into the black, crocheted bag with long straps which she keeps for her forays east down Route 103 and into town.
“Buildin’ heat,” she says to Florence who looks back at all her black and says,
“Yes, Ma’am. Kansas summer.”
“Uh huh.” Mary’s head is down. She has taken a few slips of mail out of the bag and is shuffling through them as if they were cards, looking for counters. High cards. Trump. Suddenly the post mistress sees herself grown older, the years having stolen softly about like the layers of Mary’s black wool coat—much too thick for summer.
“Was it hard walking down?”
“Oh, not too bad…” The voice trails off and Florence looks up. Their eyes meet briefly and Florence can see, even through the tint of the sun-glasses the gaze of Mary’s eyes, searching.
“Not too bad.” Florence echoes her, to put Mary back on track, but she is lost, gone in the mail, her thoughts straying into Fourth Class. Oh well, she thinks: Eighty-nine years. Dressing out of habit. Alone. Eating like a bird. A cellar full of fruit put up and never used. Coming down here each day like clockwork. Given this work to do. The rut worn deep, pa
st thinking. Florence think of the air conditioner, the sweat coming like dew on her forehead as she looks at the thick clothes of Mary and sweats some more. She punches the control from medium to high and turns the setting up. The old unit shudders back on, vibrating on the ledge of the window to the west.
When Florence turns back, Mary is almost through the door, the thin, black back rigid from the waist half-ways up, then hunched up by the shoulders. She looks down at the long hem of the coat and the black leather shoes, knotted up tight. Mary has not said goodbye. She feels no need to. She has come like clockwork, persuaded by habit. She has obeyed the first half of the journey and she obeys still.
When Florence looks again, out the window past the air conditioner, Mary is at the tracks, feeling with her cane, heading back west.
West
West is always the place of hope. You were taught that in school. Westward expansion. All the farms around here are the product of the west, the looking west and the going. The west was western Kansas, of course, but there were other places, too. People talking of California. Of moving out to western Kansas where the great plains stretched forever. Colorado. And others, later, talking of Alaska and of the Peace River country way up in Canada. All hope. West. The cane now points west, touching the rough edges of the macadam, the loosened gravel at the side. Even through the glasses, she can see the polished iron of the rail as she works her way over the crossing, pecking, hanging her head sometimes to the side to gain some additional light. She can smell the creosote from the timbers and later the thick smell of the tar oozing out of the surface of the road. When a car comes, she can hear it a long way off, the tires on the pavement making the sound of a pot boiling. She makes sure then that she is well away from the road itself, working herself slowly over into the gravel strip until she can feel the brushing of the chicory, burdock and Queen Ann’s lace at the edge of the gravel before the ditch, and see the ribbon of the grass straying out to her left, past the ditch, into the shimmer of maize in July heat. The plants, touching her, tell her to stop and she does so just as the noise of the car builds until it flashes past, all metal and light.
The car reminds her that there is an anxiety about the west. All this going: People heading out and leaving behind; traditions withering in the new of the moment and the hard of a new place. Her father had left Ohio and an established dry-goods business. From first memory, this place has been her present: Savonburg. Her father had moved here and built the house. But mishandled finances had given the place a sense of limited prospects. Her sister and she found themselves growing up in the house with only their mother after their father—desiccated by the heat of diminished expectations, and chafing at the possibility of blatant failure—traveled farther out, talking of ranching. There had been one letter, two months delayed. Somewhere out there were the mountains he looked upon and described before the country swallowed him whole with a silence which turned Mary towards the little town, the keeper of the present, Mary the one who cherished, remembered, scrimped, kept, and saved. She was the one who had learned the traditions and kept them, making routine into rituals. Year by year she filled the house. Like a tree growing in instead of out she added annual rings of accumulation, accentuated after her mother’s death. Her life made layers, impossible to clean, know or sort through. Even now the gathered accumulation is pushing out from the walls, closing in the space in which she lives, as she walks slowly back, holding her umbrella. “Close,” she had said of the air, but it remains a term fitting for her house.
Close.
Beyond the Pierce house the trees of the town end in the shimmer of the fields. The road stretches to a line. It stretches towards infinity, disappearing to be numbered with the things of the past, the things told to her as a child, unremembered if sensed, told by her mother at bedtime in the waning light and so brought inside of her like a special darkness which she still holds. Even on this bright day, it is there, residual winter inverted into humidity, the edge of the wind transmuted to its absence: the hanging, suspended heavy air through which she moves as if it were liquid, to be pushed aside, her cane like Moses’ staff parting the sea as she heads back towards the island of her home. Towards dry land.
With the car safely gone, she can begin again. Today the sea of the wind is running. She feels it in the caress of the weedy growth by the roadside. She leans against it, pecking and holding her shade aloft. Her journey seems to be widening, embracing more than simply the received contents of her crocheted bag. It lies west, towards the place where the sun this evening will burn down into darkness, the vast black of the west that asks for the inner shadow of her own self. She almost sees it. But no, it is a cloud.
Just past the Miners, across from the Steiwalt place, Mary stops. The umbrella comes down and rests upside down against her thin frame. She takes off the sunglasses and takes a step to the side at the brightness of found day, then squints ahead while absently cleaning the lenses against her coat. Far off to the west she makes it out, a thin dark line at the base protruding up into a height blooming like a wash. The thunderhead seems suspended, but she knows better and as if to confirm her fears, the cottonwoods on both sides of 103 began to sizzle with the sudden discovery of a gentle breeze turning their leaves inside out.
“Sign of rain. Rain and darkness coming,” she says to no one in particular, though when she says it she thinks of her sister, dead these eleven years. Her sister died on a plain, hot day—a day without flies, snakes, June bugs or even wind. Just a day, but the point was that Lizzie had always hated rain, always had been the first to come in. Mary can see her closing the windows at the first threat of a shower. Thinking of all this, now, Mary has to stand still, looking off into the distance at the gathering clouds, at a sight that would stir Lizzie into action, goad her into it, like a kind of natural cattle prod.
She should get moving, too. She lifts the umbrella at the first step and discovers that the wind is persisting and that in the wind it has become a kind of sail. She cannot raise it up overhead because of her thin arms and the nudge of the wind, so she carries it in front, like a shield or buckler, leaving the hat to take the sun. In that way she begins to march, an old soldier, looking ahead now over the rim of her shield at the thin line deepening to black, becoming a smudge.
Across from the edge of the Steiwalt place, Mary decides that she needs less of a shield and more of a sword. Bundling up the umbrella with the precise, fixed actions of habit she is aware also that the light has softened. She looks up and there before her sees the towering, convoluted face of clouds, drawn up close from the southwest. It is an immense bleached wall with a blackened underside making her think of cliff dwellers of the Mesa Verde.
“Sons of mercy,” she says, but the wind sucks the words away quickly, like a vacuum. “Out flanked!” She thinks of her high school teacher and his love of history, drawing battle lines from the Battle of Wilson’s Creek, Missouri on the board, showing the reserves, the high ground, the flanking column of Franz Sigel’s 1200 men while Union commander, Nathaniel Lyon, attacks from the front. She remembers sitting mesmerized in front of the board and the changing form of lines as the battle wages through the afternoon and into the early evening before the rebels win. She had wanted them to win. “Never get outflanked. Always have reserves.” Simmons was from Springfield, but why was he taking this always so seriously? It had become a family joke between the sisters. Throwing snowballs or clots of dirt from the garden. Lizzie. “Reserves! reserves!” But in real life reserves are never enough. It seems there always is something more that could happen, maybe even will. She has held it all back in these last years, storing the accumulation of the past like treasures, like reserves drawn up in the battle, but there always was and is one more thing.
Carl McCullough lives on the south side of the road, not far from Mary’s and she can see the short, uneven patch that is his front yard. The grass is clipped, the burdock and timothy and chicory clipped down along
with thistle and bluestem to form a green patchwork. The clouds are over it, and it is getting darker, along with the whole aspect of his house and the surrounding cottonwoods.
Comin’ soon now. She looks up, but can look only once before the long fingers of the wind have her hat and pull at the steel-grey of her hair. In that look she sees the underbelly of the storm, the black, blue-black bruised ventral side, the place where the cliff dwellers left the deepest soot from their fires on the rock surface, their smoke smelling of ozone as the storm arches its back and moves over the land, over Carl’s place, over where she is standing.
She is losing weight. In this wind, she is thinning, a sere winter leaf. The cottonwoods are shedding clots of green leaves. Twigs and little fragments of branches begin to rain on Carl’s lawn and down over the road. She thinks of her cherry trees, of the pear tree and the apple trees and the coming harvest. The wind is a fist, pounding. It is a blunt, thick hand shoving, slapping her. She turns from it and plants both umbrella sword and cane and stands with her back to it, hunched up. The sun is going, the dark is growing in patches down the street until it takes the whole street.
“Lizzie get in the cellar!” she says to the wind and laughs. Lizzie must be there now. She can see her in there with the hurricane lamp, the round orbs of her eyes, the way the soft light makes your face into wax, Lizzie no longer afraid of the mice and the cobwebs, moving away from the chattering doors of the cellar, the howl of the wind.
Mary looks for her mother. She looks over, across the street at the Parsons. Nope. The wind takes her crocheted bag and tosses it back to front and into her vertical lap. She takes it between the knees and holds it, the thin gatherings of the mail, the keys to the house, place she needs right now, buried deep with all of her whatevers.
Then, hearing the wind beginning to cry, hearing the rush of the wind in the trees like a mountain stream out west, she begins to test. She shifts her weight to the cane side and lifts her umbrella. It is a pointer, a probe, but the wind quickly makes it a wand, tearing at the folded edges of the fabric as it waves in front of her. She is making an arabesque with the help of the wind which wants it, wants it badly. She and the umbrella are becoming one. It is as if she is thinning and then growing, flowing into its raised presence. She sees the bony, veined presence of her clenched hand and feels the struggle in her wrist.
And then the umbrella is down. And she knows that it will no longer do to stand here, propped by two sticks in her hands, like a horse facing down wind. It has pushed her already—shoved her out, a step at a time, until she is standing in the midst of 103, amidst the crab-like scuttling of cottonwood branches, heading northeast. She is standing like a deer frozen by a jacklight, standing in the midst of the road and she knows it will not do.
So she makes the two sticks into a walker of sorts. The umbrella first, then the cane: she plants them before taking the half-step that becomes two. The wind makes room and moves her about not only in body but also in mind. Now Mary is in the hallway with her own mother during the last week of her life. Erie, Kansas. There is a group home there and her mother is walking down the hall from her bedroom to the kitchen for supper. She is leaning, like Mary, from wall to wall, the walker stubbing the floor with its rubber feet because she won’t lift it up.
“Ma. Lift it up.” Her face, too, is wax. Her eyes are blank with concentration. She is moving ponderously along and Mary wonders if she knows that it’s a meal that’s waiting ahead of her. “Ma,” she says, “smell the liver and onions?” “What!” She half turns back to Mary and spits it out. It is not a question. She has been interrupted. She is on a journey and knows only that the walls are like hands guiding her. It is the last thing they say before goodbye.
My, but it was a hot day then! Now the wind drones like that air conditioner in the dining room of the group home. The wind drones and vibrates. Mary feels the wall of the wind shoving. Shoving harder, insistently. She is near the sidewalk and thinks of hop-scotch. Take one giant step. She feels the warning of the weeds at the top of the ditch, laid down by the wind , but it is too late. She pitches forward into it, her arms out with their extensions of cane and sword, flying briefly, remembering that as the last thing she does.