Memories of the Future (20 page)

My father slowed to a crawl and looked out over her head. “Well, he didn’t get far, did he?”

He drove on. Then he put on the brakes and brought the truck to a stop. “Damn it!—we just can’t leave him lying there.”

After he backed up, all of us got out and went over to the tree. The grass was wet with dew. Rone was lying on his side and he had his cap pulled down over his ears and his coat collar turned up. He was shivering even in his sleep, because the ground was cold.

My father nudged him with his foot, and he awoke and sat up, still shivering. He should have hopped a freight by this time and have been long gone.

My father said, “You planning to stay around these parts?”

Rone nodded. “For a while.”

“Do you want to work?”

“I would—if there was any work.”

“Well, there is,” my father said. “For three or four weeks. This time of year the grape juice factory hires lots of men. They pay thirty cents an hour, and you get lots of hours. It’s on the other side of town. Why don’t you go there and ask for a job?”

“I will,” Rone said.

My father was silent for a few moments. I could tell from the expression on his thin face that he was trying to make up his mind about something. Then he said, “I know you haven’t anyplace to stay, so if you want to, you can sleep in the barn till you get your first pay.”

“That’s—that’s kind of you.”

“You go back to the farm and tell Emma I said for her to fix you some breakfast. I’ll drive you over to the factory after I take the kids to school.”

My father was softhearted. Most men would have driven right on by and paid no attention to Rone. I guess his softheartedness was why we were always so poor. Anyway, that was how Rone came to live with us that fall.

* * *

Rone didn’t have any trouble getting a job. During pressing season the grape juice factory hired anybody who came along. Over the weekend he ate his meals with us and slept nights in the barn, and Monday morning he and my father piled into the truck and went to work. My mother had fixed each of them a lunch and had found another thermos bottle somewhere so Rone could take coffee, too. She had baked a cake Sunday and gave each of them a big piece.

It was after nine that night before they came home. Their faces and arms and hands were stained with grape juice, and their shirts were splotched with it. This was the way my father always came home during pressing season. His job was making “cheese,” and he said that this year the superintendent had made Rone his helper. The job paid thirty-five cents an hour instead of only thirty because it was so hard.

I knew all about the job because I used to take my father his lunch on Saturdays and sometimes Sundays, and I used to hang around and watch. When the grapes came into the factory, they were dumped from their crates onto a conveyor and sprayed with water as they were borne aloft to the kettles. They were then boiled till they turned into a juicy mixture of skins and stems and pulp. Then the mixture was funneled through thick rubber hoses to the ground floor, and my father or one of the other “cheese” makers would open and close the valve of his hose and fill press blankets that he and his helper spread out successively on flat wooden sheets. Each blanket had to be folded over its contents, and when the “cheeses” were piled high enough, they were put under one of the presses, where the juice was gradually squeezed out. It was no wonder the company paid thirty-five cents an hour instead of only thirty!

Rone and my father had supper in the kitchen. Julie and I stood in the kitchen doorway and watched them eat. They’d washed most of the juice off their faces and arms, but it still stained their hands. My mother had made dried-beef gravy and boiled a lot of potatoes. She had also baked another cake.

After he finished eating, Rone said good night and went to the barn. My father had fixed up a bed for him in the loft, if you can call blankets laid on hay a bed. He had also given Rone one of his razors, and since he and Rone were about the same height and build, a pair of his old work pants and an old shirt.

My mother began picking grapes the next day, so Julie and I had a lot of chores to do when we came home from school. This didn’t set well with Julie, because now she couldn’t goof off over at Amy’s anymore. She had to feed the chickens, and I had to milk the cow. I thought it should have been the other way around, because in my mind, milking cows was a girl’s job. But our mother had laid down the rules.

My father and Rone didn’t get their first pay for almost two weeks. Rone laid two ten-dollar bills down on the kitchen table when they came home from work that Friday night. “That’s for the two weeks I’ve been here,” he said to my mother.

“Well, you aren’t going to pay me ten dollars a week for board,” my mother said. “Five dollars a week is plenty.” She picked up one of the ten-dollar bills. Being in the vineyards had turned her face a deeper gold. Then she picked up the other ten. “You are now paid up for the next two weeks—if you still want to stay.”

“But even ten dollars a week’s not enough!” Rone objected. “I would have given you more, but I’ve got to buy some clothes.”

“I wouldn’t dream of charging you ten dollars.”

Rone tried to argue, but my mother paid no attention to what he said. Instead, she looked at my father and said, “Ned, since we’ve got a spare room, why in the world are we making Mr. Rone sleep in the barn?”

“I don’t know why.”

“It’s a real small room,” she said to Rone, “and the mattress on the bed is kind of hard. But it’ll be better than sleeping in the barn. Tim will show you where it is after supper.”

Rone just stood there looking at her. He didn’t sit down till she put the meat loaf she’d warmed up in the oven on the table.

After he got through eating, I took him upstairs to his room. It was real small, as my mother had said, and there was nothing in it but a bureau and a bed. He went over and touched the bed. Then he sat down on it. “It’s kind of hard, isn’t it?” I said.

“No,” he said, “it’s as soft as eiderdown.”

* * *

When she got her pay two weeks later for picking grapes, my mother took Julie and me into town Saturday morning and bought us new school clothes. She also bought us overcoats and overshoes. My father was fall plowing, so Rone drove the truck. Pressing season was over, but neither he nor my father had been laid off yet, and they were working five days a week storing away the crates that had been let out to the farmers and all of which had been brought back.

The clothes and the overcoats and the overshoes put a big hole in my mother’s pay, and the school tax and the mortgage on the farm had already eaten a big hole in what my father had brought home, so we wound up almost as poor as we had been before.

* * *

Once a month my mother would give my father and me a haircut, and while she was at it, she would trim Julie’s hair. But picking grapes had thrown her off schedule, and my hair was beginning to creep down over my collar, and my father’s was beginning to creep down past his. So I wasn’t surprised Sunday afternoon, after she and Julie did the dinner dishes, when she called my father and me into the kitchen and said it was time to shear the two bears.

She placed a chair in the middle of the kitchen floor and got out her scissors and her hand clippers. “You first, Ned,” she said, and my father sat down and she covered him up to the neck with an old sheet and pinned it in place. Then she set to work.

At first she used to give us awful haircuts, and the kids in school used to laugh at me. But they stopped laughing before long, because she got so she could cut hair better than a regular barber. My father looked like a new man when she got done.

“You’re next, Tim.”

After she cut my hair, she trimmed Julie’s. Although I always thought Julie was a homely kid, I could never stop marveling at her hair. It was the same color as my mother’s and, like hers, as soft as silk. It had grown so long this time that my mother had to cut off at least two inches where it hung down past Julie’s shoulders.

All this while, Rone had stood in the kitchen doorway watching. The somber winter skies of his eyes had acquired the faintest touch of blue. When my mother finished with Julie, she looked over at him. “You’re next, Mr. Rone.”

His hair was twice as long as mine had been. My mother always used to say when my hair got that long that I looked like a musician, but she didn’t say that to Rone. His hair was wavy, and she cut it so the waves on top still showed. Looking at him after she got through, I couldn’t believe he was a bindle stiff.

“Thank you, ma’am,” he said when she removed the sheet. And then: “Why don’t you go sit down in the living room, and I’ll sweep up.”

And my mother did. That evening she made fudge, and all of us sat by the radio and listened to Jack Benny and Fred Allen.

* * *

Early in November the weather turned nippy. Julie and I began wearing our new overcoats to school. There had been a hard frost, and the last of the leaves were drifting down from the trees. I couldn’t wait to see the first snow.

Julie borrowed a book from the school library titled
The Time Machine
. She was always reading books that were too grown-up for her, so I wasn’t surprised when she showed
The Time Machine
to Rone one evening and asked him if he’d read it and explain it to her. Somehow I wasn’t surprised when he said he’d already read it.

We were sitting in the living room. My mother was darning socks, and my father had dozed off. Julie climbed up on the arm of Rone’s chair.

He riffled through the pages of the book. “What Wells did, Julie,” he said, “was use the capitalists and laborers of his own age as a sort of springboard. That was how he came up with the Eloi and the Morlocks. You could say he took a class distinction by the horns and spread them farther apart by making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Factory conditions in his day were even more wretched than they are in this country right now. All of the factories, of course, weren’t underground, but enough of them were to give him the idea of putting all of them underground.”

“But he turned the laborers into
cannibals
!”

Rone smiled and said, “I guess in that respect he went a little too far. But he wasn’t really trying to predict the future, Julie. His main reason for writing the book was to attract attention to what was happening in the present.”

“What do you think the future really will be like, Mr. Rone?” my mother asked.

Rone was silent for some time. Then: “Well, ma’am, were you and I to predict the future with any degree of accuracy, we would first have to forget the word
extrapolation
. We can postulate wars, yes—there will always be wars. But otherwise, too many unpredictable factors will enter into the equation for us to take what we know now and predict tomorrow on the basis of those facts alone.”

“What factors do you think might enter in?”

Again Rone was silent. Then: “You, your husband, and Tim and Julie sit here in this room, a family of four. And I, an outsider, have temporarily become part of it. Family life is almost indivisible from the present-day scheme of things. Were we to try to predict the future with that fact alone in mind, we would predict one in which family life remained intact. But suppose forces of which people have no inkling today were to manifest themselves and weaken the patriarchal-matriarchal harmony that holds this and other families together? Were to weaken it to such an extent that families were to fall apart? In
The Time Machine
, Wells accredits the disintegration of family life to the disappearance of the dangers that, according to him, made it a necessity. But the appearance of new dangers would more likely be the cause. Suppose, for example, the moral code that people live by today were to atrophy? That new attitudes were to take the place of old? I don’t mean to imply that men and women today are saints—far from it. But the fact remains that divorce is uncommon. Part of this can be accredited to the fact that in many instances, people who want to divorce each other can’t afford to; but in most instances this isn’t true. People remain married to each other because they
want
to. But suppose this Zeitgeist should change? Suppose people began to fancy themselves liberated in a new kind of way? Suppose, as a result of this, divorce became common? More and more children would then be brought up by a single parent and, in the case of remarriages, in two different households. Consider the effect this might have on their attitude toward family life.”

“But there’s simply nothing in the present on which to base such a prediction!”

“That’s what I meant, ma’am, about unpredictable factors entering into the equation. To carry my supposition further, the breaking up of family life could eventually lead to a greater and greater cynicism on the part of both the parents and the children. The construct of marriage might altogether disappear and family life along with it. The state might take over then, and instead of children being brought up by their parents, they would be brought up in institutions, their thoughts and actions molded by mentors incapable of love or affection. Family scenes like this one, which you and your husband and Julie and Tim take for granted, might he relegated to the past and all but forgotten about in the new society, or accorded a place in history no more important than the present-day price of eggs.”

My mother shivered. “You paint a grim picture, Mr. Rone.”

“Yes. It is quite grim. But it isn’t something that could happen overnight, and even after the process had been set in motion, it would be a long, long time before the new society came into being.”

He handed
The Time Machine
back to Julie. “There’s something else I don’t understand, Rone,” she said. “How did the Time Traveler travel in time?”

Rone smiled. “Wells neglected to tell us, didn’t he? He couldn’t very well have, since he didn’t know. So what he did instead was mislead us with a lot of talk about time being the fourth dimension. Well, in one sense it is, Julie, but in another it may not be. The Time Traveler arrived in the future on the very same spot he’d set out from. But while he was traveling through time, Earth might have rotated beneath him—not much, for he was traveling fast, but a little. For instance, if he’d started out here, he might have arrived in the future five hundred miles west of here. So if he wanted to travel back through time to the same place he’d departed from, he would have to journey five hundred miles to the east, and then an additional five hundred miles in the same direction to compensate for the distance he would lose going back.