Modern American Memoirs (28 page)

“I wonder if its being out overnight had something to do with it.”

“The piano was out
side
all night?” I looked down at the grass; already the evening dew was dampening my shoes.

“The guys who set up the tables and decorations moved it out yesterday afternoon. But we had a canvas over it.”

“That wouldn't have helped. The damp came from underneath and swelled the wood. It's hopeless.”

William's face suddenly brightened. “Tell you what. I'll stand here and free 'em for you.” By way of illustration he grabbed two handfuls of hammers and pulled them away from the strings. “See, now you're back in starting position.”

“You're going to do that after every chord?”

“Well, I'll let you play for a few bars and accumulate a backlog.”

We were looking brightly, kind of crazily, at each other. I was beginning to learn about the kids of the affluent: they were different, possessed of a special awareness and guile that had nothing to do with the streets. I'd already met ten-year-olds who were masterful con artists.

“Tell you what you can do for me first. Bring me a stiff Southern Comfort on the rocks.”

“We don't stock it.”

“Gin then.”

“One double Beefeater over comin' up.”

We got under way, a motley crew of frigid coolies contriving chop-suey medleys—“China Boy,” “Chinatown, My Chinatown,” “Slow Boat to China,” “Japanese Sandman” (nobody would know)—out of range of the overhead heaters, shoes soaking in the damp grass. I'd play a bar or two, then lay out while William grabbed fistfuls of hammers and pulled them back in my face, announcing cheerfully each time, and driving me mad, “There you go, Mr. A., back to starting position.” Two or three times an hour he took off to fetch me a fresh gin from the bar. Tommy observed this traffic with growing unease, doubtless pondering his obligatory report to Rudy tomorrow, with someone else in the band finking if, out of friendship, he glossed over any indecorous exhibition on my part. But I'd worked under Tommy a dozen times and he knew by now that if I were going to get bombed, it would be a
quiet, unostentatious, professional job.

“Now you know how Lewis and Clark must've felt,” William said, depositing another gin and grasping a clutch of hammers.

With the cold stiffening the horn players' fingers and a piano chord infrequently punched in to no more advantage than a flung cowpie, every tune was starting to sound like “Donkey Serenade.”

 

The shivering guests were beginning to desert the flagstone dance area, drifting back into the house, when Rudy put in his promised appearance. He sawed off a few bars on fiddle, wandered over to the piano, appraised the hammer situation (taking cursory note of the backed-up gin glasses), muttered, “Jesus Christ on a crutch,” and left.

On my sixth gin, watching Tommy tuck his hands under his belt beneath the little-girl dress for warmth, I thought, Another year of Rudy, coolie hats, and assorted monkey suits, of moisture-sodden, rotten-tomato pianos, and I'd be reduced to a shadow of a man, devoid of talent, invention, and testicles. Might as well sew up ducks' rectums in a meat market, or trade off with that waiter carrying a tray of fresh foo yung to the warming table; at least he wasn't whoring, merely putting in his hours. He was doing his own thing (to cop a vacuous expression from a future decade) honestly, with purpose, invulnerable to shifting winds of fashion, ludicrous accouterment, and the whims of parvenu hostesses and ambitious bandleaders…

“There you go, back to starting position.”

And just after midnight, as William freed the hammers for perhaps the two hundredth time, I gave it up: sat with my hands in my lap, stuporous, gazing at the slender, shadowy pinnacles of trees tossing in a high cold wind as the band…played…on…

“What's the matter, Mr. A.?”

“Out of gas, William. Beat. Cold and tired. Don't care anymore.”

“That's okay, we all grow old sooner or later.”

At one bell (a grandfather clock pealing faintly behind the diamond-paned windows) Tommy and company wrapped it up for the two diehard couples left on the flagstones with a final chorus of “Slow Boat to China”—the fifth time around for that serviceable ditty—and we shucked our coolie apparel and packed up. William helped the drummer with his cases and waved us off, standing amid the littered, sauce-stained tables under the Japanese lanterns: “So long, you guys, see you all later at that big tuning fork in the sky…”

It would be sooner than William realized. The big fork sounded its knell for me before another month had elapsed. Rudy's secretary phoned in mid-October to give me my week's engagements. The last date was for Saturday night: Clearview Golf and Country Club, tux, eight to twelve. “And wear bathing trunks under the tux,” she added. I was sure I had heard incorrectly and asked for confirmation. She confirmed. I said, “Where are we playing, in the swimming pool? A fish pond? Is the club supplying aqualungs?” She testily repeated the information and hung up.

I spent an uneasy week speculating on those bathing trunks. The fateful night arrived. “Gladiators and Charioteers” was the theme of the party, sponsored by the Junior League. Plaster statuary and colonnades amid the ferns; purple grapes cascading from six-foot papier-mâché urns; helmets and wreaths garlanding the heads of the tuxedoed and gowned revelers.

At the first intermission Tommy Tedesco told us to bring our instruments—“Not you,” he smiled wanly at me; “Drummer, take two sticks, woodblock, and cowbell”—and we followed him to the downstairs locker room. Averting his gaze from us, frowning in concentration, Tommy undid the twine on the large clothing-store boxes, and the enigma was resolved: crepe togas. There was a moment of funereal silence.

“Over the tuxes?” a tremulous voice piped.

“Under. The tuxes come off,” Tommy said, removing his coat and his suspenders.

“You're pulling our legs.”

“Let's
go
,” Tommy scowled, unclipping his tie and unzipping his pants.

“What happens if we don't?” the second trumpet said, appropriating my question.

In his canary-yellow bathing trunks Tommy looked at him incredulously. “Wha' d'you mean? You
have
to.”

These were family men, with kids in nursery schools and colleges. I was the least encumbered, but we were only seven pieces, three rhythm; without piano the band would go down in flames, and Rudy would do his damnedest to ensure that I never played another octave on a rotten tomato in the sovereign domain of the bean and the cod.

“Next week it's high heels and garter belts,” someone murmured resignedly, and the mass disrobing commenced, soup and fish shedding like black chrysalises.

Musicians do not often see one another with their clothes off, nor should they. Never would you be likely to encounter a more goose-stippled, pale-fleshed, bandy-legged motley of bodies; never in a hundred years would you associate that locker room with the playing fields of Eton. The varicolored paper togas reached, contingent on the musician's height, from mid-shin to mid-thigh. “Single file behind me, piano last,” Tommy said. “We go in with ‘Never on Sunday,' three flats.”

Upstairs, past the trophy cases and into the banquet room we wound, a Greco-Roman version of the Chinese dragon snaking among the tables with a clatter and tinkle and bray of horns. An excursion down Nightmare Alley to gargoyle smiles and decadent applause; all that was missing were the geek, the carny's spiel, the barking of trained seals. The piano player in armed-forces parade bands is supplied a glockenspiel or helps carry the bass drum; that night at the Clearview Golf and Country I brought up the dragon's rear, banging a cowbell with a drum stick. The nadir of a burgeoning career. Like Fitzgerald's boat, beating on, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

I jumped ship the following morning (a knife between my teeth
for severing the life-line)—leaving word with Rudy's secretary. Goodbye forever, old fellows and seals.

The last news I had of Rudy and his stable before I headed for San Francisco was in a
Boston Globe
account of a dinner-dance at the Copley Plaza Hotel. The society-page item concluded: “The scintillating music was provided by Rudy Yellin's Orchestra. Enlivening the festivities were the antics of a member of the band attired in a colorful checkered vest who periodically got down on all fours and howled like a dog. The lovely flowers were courtesy of Baldoni-Heggins.”

The plains of Nebraska figure largely in Wright Morris's books. “The characteristics of this region have conditioned what I see, what I look for, and what I find in the world to write about.” Of his characters, he says, “I'm a spokesman for people who don't want to be spoken for and who don't particularly want to read about themselves.”

Morris was born in Central City, Nebraska. He has written over forty works of fiction and nonfiction. In 1957
, The Field of Vision
won the National Book Award in fiction. In 1979, the Western Literature Association gave Morris its Distinguished Achievement Award. In 1981
, Plains Song
won the American Book Award for fiction, and the
Los Angeles Times
gave Morris its Robert Kirsch Award for a body of work
.

Morris has written three memoirs
: Solo: An American Dreamer in Europe, 1933-34
(1983)
; The Cloak of Light: Writing My Life
(1985)
;
and
Will's Boy: A Memoir
(1981)
.

Will's Boy
covers the first nineteen years of Morris's life. This part occurs between 1925 and 1930, when he worked with his uncle on a hardscrabble farm in Texas
.

 

from W
ILL'S
B
OY

I
found a postcard from my uncle in Texas. He was pleased to learn that I had left a school that taught nothing but lies and falsehoods, but he was not accustomed to paying his hired hands in advance. If I was to work for him, he urged me to arrive as soon as possible, or it would be too late. The spring plowing had started. His wife, Agnes, was now taking my place on the tractor.

I found I was short the bus fare to Texas by three dollars. The PO clerk loaned me a dollar, and I pawned the silver-plated initial buckle on my belt that I had given my father the previous Christmas but borrowed to wear to California. After all, we had the same initial. When he wore it, it was always concealed by his vest.

At the Y, where I owed a week's rent, I left an IOU on the dresser, giving my address as Hereford, Texas. I then went down the fire escape to the second floor, where the last flight of stairs was suspended above the dark alley. I did not weigh enough, even with my suitcase, to lower the stairs to the ground. When I lowered and dropped my bag I was puzzled by the silence of its fall. I then let myself hang, my legs dangling, and let go, falling silently into a mound of fresh garbage. It stuck to my hands and clothes as I groped in it for my bag. I could smell it, all right, but I couldn't see it until I got into the light at the end of the alley. Smears of grease and gravy, salad greens, chunks of Jell-O, clung to my pants. I took a streetcar to Echo Lake Park, where I sat on the boat pier, my feet in the water, while I cleaned my socks and shoes.

The bus to Hereford, Texas, which proved to be near Amarillo, went through Phoenix and Globe, in Arizona, which were places I had missed on the trip west. The bus went through without stopping, but the drivers changed. I dozed off during the day, but I was usually awake most of the night. In a country with so much to see, it helped to see just a small piece of it under streetlights.

Without the high false fronts on the stores in Hereford I might have gone right through it and not seen it. The sunset burned like a fire in the second-floor windows of the general store. All around it, in every direction, the panhandle was as boundless and bare as the sea. Having seen the sea, I could say that. It even had the sort of dip and swell that the sea has. The man in the general store knew my Uncle Dwight, but there was no way to get in touch with him. His farm was about eight miles southeast, which was a long way to walk carrying a suitcase. But if I left the suitcase with him, I could walk it. He led me into the street, which was almost dark, but the sky was so full of light I blinked to look at it. He pointed out to me the trail I should follow, and the wire poles along it looked no higher than fence posts. The road was little more than smoothed-over grass, and once it got dark it would be hard to see it. What I had to look for, once it got dark, were the lights of his house and his tractor. He kept it going day and night. If I didn't see it, I would hear the cough of the engine. The light for me to keep my eye on, of course, was the one that stayed in one place. That was the house. If I walked at a good smart clip I could do it in about two hours.

After two days and two nights on the bus it felt good to walk. At one point, where I was on a rise, I could see the lights of Amarillo, like a cluster of stars. I could hear the tractor coughing before I saw it, and it sounded like a plug was missing. Some time later, when it made a turn, the lights came toward me like a locomotive. The last thing I saw was the feeble lampglow at a window of the house. I had never asked myself what he might have as a farm. A farm to me was a big old house, with some barns, and perhaps some trees along one side as a windbreak. What I saw slowly emerging in the milky darkness was a building no larger than my Uncle Harry's cobshed, set up on concrete blocks. A line of wash, like ghosts, hung to one side, where a machine of some sort was covered with a tarpaulin. Fifty or sixty yards away from the house were two sheds, and still further away was the peaked roof of a privy. The white spots in the yard were Leghorn chickens. Way, way off to the south, where the sky was darkest, the dim lights of the tractor flickered, and it made me so mournful and lonely I wanted to cry. If I had not come so far and was not so tired, I would have turned back. An eerie mauve and crimson afterglow filled the western horizon, like the earth was burning. Until I was right there in the yard, beside the sagging line of wash, the dog under the house neither saw nor heard me. When he came at me barking, he scared me out of my wits. I probably let out a yell. At the door to the house, up three steps from the yard, a woman appeared with a clothes basket. She called off the dog, then said, “You're Wright?” I said that I was. “I'm Agnes,” she said. “Dwight's on the tractor.”

With the light behind her I could not see her face.

“Where's your bag?”

I explained that I had left it in Hereford, since I had to walk.

“Dwight's not going to like that,” she said. “It means he's got to go fetch it.” When I said nothing, she added, “I suppose you're hungry,” and beckoned me to come in.

In the morning I saw nothing but the food on my plate, the slit of light at the window. It was on the horizon, but it might have been attached to the blind. Dawn. Sunrise would not come for another hour. The wind blowing under the house puffed dust between the floorboards, like smoke. There was never any talk. My Uncle would slip off his coveralls, like a flight suit, and eat in his
two suits of underwear: one of fine, snug-fitting wool, flecked with gray, like a pigeon; the other of heavy, nubby cotton flannel with the elbows patched with quilting, the fly-seat yawning. The outer suit would come off in the spring, but the inner suit was part of my Uncle. I once saw him plucked like a chicken, standing in a small wash basin of water while Agnes wiped him off with a damp towel. Dust. He was dusted rather than washed
.
^*

Sometime before dawn, the wind rising, I was awakened by the cough of the tractor approaching the house. It went on coughing while I pulled on the clothes Agnes brought me—itchy underwear and socks, two heavy flannel shirts, coveralls still stiff from drying on the wash line, cold as ice.

Agnes had explained to me the night before that I would take over the tractor when Dwight brought it in in the morning, the engine never stopping because it was so hard to start. While I gulped hot biscuits and eggs fried in pork fat I could hear my uncle cursing. What was the trouble? It was just his way of keeping warm, talking to himself. When he came into the house dust caked his face, like the men I had seen in grain elevators. He did not look pleased when he saw me sitting there eating his food. He wore a cap with ear muffs, coveralls like mine, the legs tucked into three-buckle galoshes. I wouldn't know until Sunday what he really looked like, when I would first see him without his cap on—not because it was the Lord's day of rest, but my uncle's day off. His forehead, ears and neck were white as flour, the rest of his face was dark as an Indian's. Where had I seen him before? He could have been the brother of William S. Hart. He had the same steely, watery-blue eyes and thin-lipped mouth. When he smiled I could see the dirt caked at the roots of his teeth.

He didn't say who he was, or ask who I was, but came to the table and opened up a biscuit, smeared it in the pork fat, then put it in his mouth. I understood right then that you didn't talk to him while he was trying to eat. My uncle was a lean wiry man who just naturally stood with his legs flexed, as if he meant to hop. When he burned himself with a swallow of hot coffee he made a face just like I would, with his eyes creased, then he let out a stream of curses. I
*
followed him out in the yard, where the crack of dawn was right there on the horizon like a knife slit, then we carried between us a milk can full of kerosene to the John Deere tractor. It took both of us to lift it as high as the fuel tank, and pouring it into the funnel I got my gloves and hands soaked. He shouted at me, above the cough of the motor, if I knew how to steer a tractor? I nodded that I did. He rode along behind me, seated on one of the gang plows, letting his hand trail in the loam turned up by the plow blade. His section of land was about 1,800 acres, and I could see only a portion of it at one time. With the tractor running day and night it would take a month or more to get it plowed. On the west side, headed south, the wind in my face was so cold it made my eyes blur. Headed north, the dust raised by the plows blew over my head like a cloud of smoke. But when he saw I could manage the tractor on the turns he got off the plows and walked back toward the house, his arms raised from his sides as if he carried two pails. In that great empty expanse, the sun just rising, he looked like a bug and hardly seemed to move. When the light in the house turned off I missed it.

I'd been plowing half the morning before I noticed how the big jackrabbits moved just enough to stay clear of the plows. They would wait until the last second, then hop just enough to be clear of the blades. The whole section of land I was on had never before been turned by a plow. Only cattle had grazed it, most of them the white-faced Herefords that stood along the fence to watch me pass. I didn't know at that point that I was turning topsoil that had been centuries in the making. My uncle knew it, and it was why he had gambled on planting grain where it seldom rained. If it would grow grass, he argued, it would also grow wheat. Just five years before he had leased 1,200 acres, and he and Agnes, working alone, had harvested a crop worth more than $30,000. It hadn't rained a winter since then, but he was sure that it would.

In the sky around me, maybe twenty miles away, I could see cloud masses forming and drifting. I could even see mauve sheets of rain falling somewhere. A few days of steady rain was all that was needed, then months of hot sun. I thought I would die of hunger before I saw Agnes, followed by the dog, between the plowed land and the house. She brought me my lunch in a syrup pail, with a jar
of black coffee. I'd never cared much for coffee, but I got to like it fine. The dog would stay with me, watching me eat, then he would trail in the fresh furrows left by the plows. When a rabbit moved, he tried to head it off and keep it running in the plowed section. He ran like the wind, so low to the ground that a plowed furrow would send him tumbling. It was hard to see the grass-colored rabbits when he chased them, just the crazy zigzagging patterns made by the dog, like he was chasing flies. He was a sort of spitz, mixed with collie, his fur a mat of burrs picked up from the grass. His big stunt was to run straight at the Herefords if he found them all lined up like a wall at the fence. He would go right for them like a streak, and at the last split second they would break and panic, going off with their tails up, bellowing. We both loved it. I would stop the tractor and give him some attention. He was Agnes' dog. For one reason or another he didn't like Dwight. I think it was because Dwight would often shoot toward him when the two of them did a little hunting. It was Dwight who gave him the name of Jesus, because of the way a dead-looking rabbit would spring to life when he saw him.

Two hours before dawn we had left the dark house to shoot at what I thought might be cattle rustlers. In the windless pause before my Uncle ran forward hooting like an Indian, I prepared myself to shoot it out with Billy the Kid. When Dwight ran forward, hooting, I shot into the air over his head. I heard a great flapping of wings, but very little honking. I think I managed to fire two or three times. Still dark, we came back to the house where Agnes had coffee perking and a fire going. When the sky was light we went out to see if we had bagged any birds. Just shooting blind into the rising flock we had bagged nine. So we had fresh gamy meat for two weeks and lead shot on my plate in the evening, some of which I kept and used over in a bee-bee gun.
^*

The John Deere tractor, until I got used to it, sounded like a plug was missing and it was about to stop running. It ran on the cheapest fuel, however, and once you got it started it was hard to stop. To start it up, you had to give the flywheel a spin, which scared the hell out of me because of the way it backfired. The first time it died on me I couldn't get it restarted, and Dwight knew it right away when the coughing stopped. He could hear that the way he could hear a rise or fall in the wind. He had got out of bed at about seven in the morning and walked the half mile or so to where I was stalled. That gave me plenty of time to watch him coming, his arms high from his sides like a winded chicken. He was so mad he hardly troubled to curse me, and grabbed the flywheel like he meant to tear it off. He didn't catch it just right, and the loud backfire lifted him off his feet. That made him even madder, and less smart about it, and when he grabbed the wheel it spun him like a top and thumped him hard against one of the wheels. That hurt him so bad, and he was so ashamed, tears came to his eyes. If he had had a club big enough, or an axe, I think he would have chopped the John Deere to pieces. The reason he hated his father the way he did, as Winona had said, was that they were so much alike. They were both hard-driving, ambitious men who were accustomed to putting the harness on others as well as themselves. It almost killed him to have the tractor, right before my eyes, make a fool of him. It frightened me like the devil just to watch him, but when it was over I liked him better, and he was friendlier with me. By the time we got it started we were both so worn out we just got on it and rode it back to the house, where he went back to bed, and I sat in the sun where it warmed the wall. It made a difference between us, not such a big one that my job got to be any softer, but I had become a hired hand and he didn't have to watch me to know I was working.