Memoir From Antproof Case (47 page)

Of course, I never got everything, but my greatest present came in January, when the light began to strengthen and each day was longer, when Christmas and birthday presents were forgotten in favor of the signs of the whole world brightening. Even in February, the month of despair, when increasing light is hidden by increasing cloud, a month that, in my experience, has never been as crystalline as the one that precedes it; and even in March, the month of betrayal, when storms and wind fight the coming of the light; and even in April, with its well known cruelties and too much rain—even in the winter that remained, playing itself out slowly, the light grew stronger in a brilliant crescendo.

Long before June my broken heart had healed and the world seemed buoyant. We lived on the Hudson, and to reach the river (as I could do at incredible speed), you had to cross two very beautiful sun-drenched fields and go down a steep path through an oak wood, pass over a stone dam and leap across the gap that made the spillway, descend another small hill, and weave through a grove of tall reeds out onto the track bed of the New York Central Railroad. Only beyond the rails did the beach open to a vast bowl of water and distant mountains. The river's main channel, through which plied sailing ships and steamboats in all but the darkest winter months, ran in the distance over miles of water or ice.

My speed increased as I grew older and stronger and years of practice taught me every angle, every foothold, every slope. I could launch myself over trees that had fallen across the path, either the right or left leg extended, depending upon where in my stride I took off, without sight of the other side, for after thousands of runs I knew it exactly. This gave to my transit from house to river an appearance of recklessness. As I became more and more capable I ran faster, I took longer strides, and I sailed higher and higher over the obstructions in my way.

Sometimes I frightened myself when my limbs, knowing better than I both the path and what they could do, stretched longer and pushed harder than my intent. Sometimes, it seemed, I was suspended in the air for so long that I flew.

I would dream at night of leaving the path and never alighting.
This dream seemed more real than life itself, so I directed my efforts at learning how to fly—not by gliding or being lifted by a balloon, but as a kind of human projectile, an arrow loosed from rails of grace and strength. I was nine and a half years old. It was the summer of 1914.

Though many now believe that this was the last innocent summer the world would ever experience, theirs is the view of a younger generation that did not have the opportunity to know, as I did, the soldiers of the Civil War. How innocent were the men of Gettysburg or Chancellorsville? The only innocence the world has ever known has been the innocence of Eden, of Woodrow Wilson's understanding of foreign affairs, and in the hearts of each new wave of children. In 1914, not everyone lived as buoyantly as I did, and I knew it.

 

By the fourth of June, 1914, a Thursday, I was no longer bound in winter clothes that were not warm enough anyway, no longer a prisoner of mud and slush on my five-mile walk to school, too young for finals, and, with the summer ahead, unusually happy. Because the teachers were needed to proctor exams for the older grades, academic classes were over, and the younger children spent most of the day outside. That was fine with me.

My regal afternoon of damming up the brook—it was my generation that went on to flood half of Tennessee—came to an abrupt end when we were called inside for shop. Our teacher was a retired Marine major who had been at the Battle of Mobile Bay. He was a master mechanic and a natural archivist, and hanging from the rafters or on the walls of the huge loft where he taught were a Wright-Brothers-type flying machine, an Eskimo kayak, a used stuffed tiger, and hundreds of lesser things such as boomerangs, Gatling guns, Egyptian cutlery, Japanese kitchen utensils, masks, swords, paintings of whales hauled onto the beach, and an immensely heavy pendulum that defied the expediencies of the earth's rotation and held its place faithfully with reference only to the infinite.

The Major was a good and irascible man who made us pray before operating our machines. In the mechanics loft the whole class would clasp its hands and bow heads in silence as shafts of sunlit dust worked slowly to divide the room into perfect sections, and lost bees dashed through the light like drops of melting gold. Our prayer was simple: we asked that, in making something, we would not become enamored of our own powers, and we prayed that we would not cut off our fingers.

The machines were dangerous: band saws, circular saws fit for the Perils of Pauline, presses and cutters that could relieve a child of his extremities as quickly as a frog's tongue summoning a mosquito and with no more remorse. Today, children would not be allowed close to such hazards, but at the time machines like these were the promise of the future, their powers still not cloaked in shadows of malevolence. And, then, a notable local problem was that many hands had more fingers than they were supposed to have had, anyway.

The Major didn't Want the children in his charge to have their hands chopped off, so in addition to prayers he had a strategy. He used coffee, or, more specifically, coffee beans, which he kept in a white paper cup upon which were drawn a skull and crossbones. Because he was accustomed to scanning the vast prairies of the sea from the bridges of naval vessels, and to sighting enemies on land as they peeped at him from deep thickets, not much escaped his attention.

He would watch the whole class at once as he stood smoking a Cuban cigar, and if he saw a child with his hands in the wrong position, or another about to whisk an obstruction from under
a seething blade, he would haul back on a huge lever to disengage the overhead shafts from which leather belts descended to clasp flywheels attached to the drives of each machine.

Having saved the violator's fingers, he would then proceed to save his soul, which is how, on the fourth of June, 1914, I was commanded to approach the skull-and-crossbones cup.

The Major addressed me with the special formality he reserved for young children: he would call us "Miss Adams," or "Mr. Bernstein," and, if he wanted to point to an element in our character, "Dr. Smith," "Professor Alford," "General Osborne," or "Reverend Antrobus." He mocked us, but gently, and his tone was always that of encouragement and respect, as if he could see into the future.

I knew I was in trouble when he addressed me as "Inmate," and summarized my transgression, at first, in a Southern African language he had learned as an observer with the British Army, and into which he would lapse only when he was annoyed. I don't even know what language it was, much less what he said, but it came fast and furiously and it sounded like: "
Satto cooca satibelay, amandooka helelay pata pata. Desanday nooca, ge-zingaypo walela. Soocowelay detnandica coomanda. Ma me rotsuna contaga tu ay vaca doganda.
" It was like Italian with a lot of clicks, and it mesmerized us.

As I stood before the skull-and-crossbones cup, the other children gathered in silence as if to witness my execution. At the end of my indictment in the African language that—as far as I know—the Major may have made up, I was jolted by the question, in English, "Well, what do you have to say for yourself?"

"What did I do?" I asked.

"You tell us," he commanded.

"I don't know."

"Didn't I just tell you?"

"When?"

"Just now."

"Yes."

"So, tell us."

"Okay," I said, twisting up my face to free my memory. "
Satto cooca?
"

"Yes, go on."

"
Satto cooca satibelay, amandooka helelay pata pata. Desanday nooca, gezingay po walela. Soocowelay demandica coom-anda. Ma me rotsuna contaga tu ay vaca doganda.
"

"Fine," said the Major, "but I didn't do it, so don't accuse
me.
"

"I'm sorry."

"Brown, green, brown," he announced, passing sentence.

From having witnessed other executions, I knew what to do. I reached into the paper cup and pulled out a brown coffee bean. These, I had heard, were somewhat more tolerable than the green.

There it was, between my fingers, a partly cloven bean of an earth-brown color, obviously very tough and dry. This was the stuff that grownups drank when they got up in the morning and so they could digest their meals. Even if it were not yet processed into the popular drink, I imagined that it might not be that bad. At the grocery store I had seen a glass jar filled with coffee beans coated with chocolate. If they were actually candy, how dreadful could they be? Perhaps my classmates who in this same situation had retched and bent double were simply oversuggestible. I wasn't worried at all. I had always been able to do things that other children could not. My father had taught me some sort
of Hindu technique for shunting pain to a siding, where, although I felt it, it seemed to have little to do with me but was rather like a phenomenon I was observing in someone else.

Because of this and other predilections I knew how to weather assaults and had unusual self-discipline. My perfect self-control led the dentist to think that I was a midget. I lived in a converted stable, a wonderful place that was, however, infested with very large rats that we called "beef rats." Early on, I learned to kill them with a hoe or a poker, which was neither easy nor without risk, as they fought back. These weren't little chicken croquettes with legs, but the size of guinea pigs and small cats. Combat with them taught me fortitude, as did the lack of central heating in our house, the ten miles I walked every day to and from school, and the regular beatings I received when I passed through the tough parts of town.

What did I have to fear from a little bean, I, who could be silent while a dentist used his hand drill—on me—without anesthesia, I, who had been ripped to pieces in a mill accident and was sewn back together with hundreds of deeply driven stitches, again, without anesthesia? This bean was treasured around the world. It was eaten as candy.

I put it into my mouth and began to chew slowly, like a cow. In the first seconds I tasted nothing, and an expression of pompous mastery crept across my face. But as soon as the bean began to take possession of my mouth, my eyes widened and I breathed through my nose the way you do when you are just about to crash into something. I thought instantaneously of my parents' occasional disparaging remarks about coffee, and I wondered why they, tea drinkers, had not been more emphatic.

A bitter rivulet grew into a net of streams that crossed my tongue like a river fractionating across a delta or lightning cracking the blue-black glass of the sky. I was too shy to retch or bend double, so I simply let myself suffer, accepting the hideous internal contamination with each gasping swallow.

Then came the green, which was many times more powerful than the brown. I had known pain, but I had never known bitterness. Bitterness, it seemed to me, as much as I could feel or think at the time, was like the body and soul turning upon themselves, and I had never experienced that. Though tears poured from my eyes, I stood straight and proud, in absolute silence. I fought the bitterness by not bending, and in not bending I thought I had won. But I hadn't, because I had failed to understand that this was just a sign, a precursor.

 

It has been a long time since I have had a conversation with anyone who knows cold weather, the change of seasons, the coming of spring, the glory of summer, the dark of Christmas, and landscapes of blue and white. A city of the tropics with 200,000 people per square mile is somewhat different from a place where it is commonly ten below zero and there are fewer than twenty people per square mile. If I could import the silence, cold, and tranquility of my youth to Rio I would be the richest man in Brazil. Of course, I may already be the richest man in Brazil.

Over the years I've spoken to many Americans who come here and I sometimes mention that my father was a farmer. I've noticed that the more that time passes the more they stare at me like deer paralyzed by an arc light. They don't yet ask, "What's a farmer," but most of them have never met one.

To me, farming is more important than the simple sum of its parts. In some ways, it's like raising a child. You must work, and plan, and suffer the chances of what comes. You sow, you reap, and you keep a palm on the earth and an eye to the weather. Intellectuals tell me right off that my recollections of early life
have been romanticized by time, but I remember many things that they could not possibly know, and I have full confidence in these things, because I have lived them.

Eventually, we were driven from our farm, and though times became increasingly difficult while we were there, it was the best life I can imagine. The closest I have seen to what I knew then is the existence of the coastal fishermen here. They go out on the sea day after day to pull in magnificent fighting fish that they sell or eat. Though they will never be rich, they will never be separated from the beauty of the sea. They practice an intricate craft in which reside secrets and lessons as old as the world. And the world can twist and turn as it wishes, while what they do remains.

We had seventy acres on a plateau above the Hudson north of Ossining. Flat land so close to the river was rare, and this was especially pretty land, with huge oaks standing in ravines between the fields, and views of the mountains and river. We grew corn, apples, vegetables, and hay for our twenty dairy cows. As a small child I rode with my father in his wagon to take our crops to the pier at Sparta, where we loaded them on sailing ships and side-wheelers. As I grew older we began to ship more and more by train, and then by motorized truck, but the city of New York, with its insatiable millions, was always our market.

We had been able to compete with the vastly more efficient farms of the Midwest and even California because our produce was fresh. But as shipping improved and the advent of more and more machinery changed the nature of agriculture, the huge farms in other parts of the country were able to offer food that was more attractive, and to drive down their marginal costs just as ours were going up.