Refiner's Fire (17 page)

The momentary grief on the old mans face told Marshall not to lie, that lies were bad not in themselves, but in the awful contrast they made with the truth. Then they went up on a high peak, reaching it after many hours, and the whole world was stretched out before them. Because of the perspective and the difficult route by which they had come, they crouched down and stared over the distances in complete and utter silence.

A
FTER THEY
had been on the meadow in moonlight, Marshall and Lydia felt comfortable about exploring different places together, though not about the unrealized prospect of sharing an embrace or a kiss. Too young to know the unsurpassed communication of intimate settling in one another's arms, they chased through the beautiful landscape, making it surrogate to their yearnings. Small lakes and outcroppings of dry rock over rapids, silent groves, and heraldic pine forests were the sword between them as they moved from place to place with the swiftness of animals in a soft unstressful mating season.

In doing so, they forged a commitment. As children ineloquent and unable to frame exactly the sharp edge of their thoughts, even they knew that casual and joyful meetings can cast out heavy anchors. And they were ready for this. They knew little about one another except what they had seen and felt on the borders of the wilderness which approached the camp. They believed very hard in pure and beautiful things. For example, they were convinced that when they became older they would marry, that though separated by years and time, they would be brought together by the power they sensed in the woods and on the mountain pastures. It made no sense according to the rationality they were growing into and were taught in school, but it was infinitely sensible as they spied in their differently colored eyes a determination and recognition untenable in all but the strikingly vivid world everywhere around them.

One night they went out during the singing, exiting secretly by different doors, meeting underneath the lodge as the other children stamped the floorboards above them in the singing of “Sixpence.” From there they rushed across an open field to the beginning of a deep pine forest which seemed to lead all the way west to the Pacific. They ran silently over the pine needles, sometimes losing one another in the tangle of black columns, but always uniting after a mazelike traverse in fumes of resin.

They thought they heard a nightingale, but were not sure. Through the net of needles the sky was dark blue. Thunder could not have penetrated that green canopy. The forest floor was as soft and clean as they could have wished. They settled by a large and perfect pine. From beyond the rim of the woods they heard the campers' songs—hundreds of innocent voices.

They faced a dilemma, but the solution was provided. The problem was obvious—how to last through years of change intercepting love and loyalty, how to conquer the lock of powerlessness put upon children, how to be united in the imagined future with the same graces they had found in the Rocky Mountain forests. Well they knew that other children were drawn into the breathless maneuvering of first loves, that others there were committed and caring as if they had been three times their real age, but they knew also that time and distance would break apart these lovely connections, and they did not want that. How then to overcome that which made others believe that children do not forever love? They would have had no idea, had their backs not been resting against it.

The pine, a thick-trunked black column standing in a sheath of green, would be their emblem, for it in itself was perfect and exemplary. In nature study they had learned that it prevented erosion, manufactured oxygen, held back avalanches, and made good black soil. It provided resin, rosin, and turpentine. Its lumber was invaluable, one of the pillars of Western Civilization, and it did all sorts of odd miscellaneous things, from serving as the essence of cough drops to providing an essential and savory ingredient in Japanese cooking.

But mercantile uses were slight compared to the life of the pine. It was ever so splendid. It grew tall and straight as a rule, courteously pruning its lower branches to make a forest gallery as extensive and lighthearted as a Roman bath. Its symmetrical branches were better than a ladder for climbing to the very top, which though thin and supple was strong enough to hold Marshall and Lydia neatly counterbalanced high above the valley. The trunk was smooth and black, as if an artist had perfected his painting. It created a carpet on the forest floor, soft, clean, and fragrant. It was fragrant in itself, perfuming the wilderness with resinous draughts and clean air. When the wind passed through it a sound was created which made strong competition for ocean breakers or the hypnotic rapids sound. Its needles were soft and the boughs made lovely beds. A crackling pine fire was one of the joys of the world. And then, most important, it was evergreen and did not lose life or flex, in even the coldest most desolate of winters. When the snow came, there it stood, an essay in constancy and power, green, alive, continuing, forever.

They hardly knew one another: they could not have. But they took the pine as their symbol, and it brought them together in the strong solid way to which children are not normally accustomed, but which to the pine is first nature.

O
N A
clear day at the end of August autumn began like a storm. The shadows were almost cold: only fat children stayed in the lake more than an instant. They prepared for the descent to White Horse junction, to Chicago, to Washington, where, they knew, it would be hotter for a long time, and where the edge of the season then in the Rockies would not appear until mid-october. By December, the camp would be covered with snow and not a soul would return until the next May, when the owners came up from Kansas. Marshall and Lydia had won their battle, and on Sundays they stayed alone at the camp, with Madame Zaragoza, and the cooks.

Lydia became more and more beautiful as the summer passed and she was darkened by the mountain sun, so that in contrast to her smooth skin, the green of her eyes and the whiteness of her teeth became more apparent. She and her family were going to France the next summer to visit her older brother, who lived in Paris. She would not return to the camp. Nor would Marshall, for he was to attend a naval school on the Maine coast, and had registered the previous year for its grueling and popular sailing and survival program.

Marshall and Lydia were on the dock by the fresh cold lake, and Lydia was reading to him from a book about France. They wore shorts and dark blue T-shirts, and sneakers without socks. France, she guessed, was the first test. “And Maine,” he added. “Two different things.”

“It might be ten years,” she said, “or more.”

“Yeah,” said Marshall. “I don't care.”

At the finish of the season, activities dissolved into anarchy. They had several painfully clear cool days; then they were on the train riding over the heat-soaked prairie.

The men and women of the land in between were tall and gaunt. They looked too quiet, as if they had been placed in the stations and on the roads directly from photographs of the Depression. It was because they were filled with the land. The land held them from all sides. It was a singing, locust place, a sea of which they farmed the waves, foils of gold and blue light, a constant horizon which brought them far from themselves and made them quiet and unartful. Time was still and far too fast. Every movement there had satisfaction or countersatisfaction. The sameness made them elegant observers. Anyone observing them observe was filled with envy. And to them it was nothing, like the way they moved and talked—slow and loose with inimitable dignity. Outside themselves they were not much. In themselves they were more than good: they were magnificent.

Marshall and Lydia rode in a flood of daytime across the plains to Chicago. Summer had ended. They went through the gin car of beetlelike old men in black suits, train-bound salesmen more constant than Faradays Law and no less corrupt than Egyptian referees. Lydia was so beautiful and suntouched that the gin-car men saw her as if she were a woman, and they were ominously silent when she passed. Marshall was ready to fight, and would have thrown them out the window even though they were twice his size. She blushed and pushed through the air crowded with leers and what she didn't want. They reached the back of the train and stood at the folding gate.

Wheat. Gold oceans. It smelled red and rich, full of life. The track clatter knocked them together rhythmically. They had to hold on to stay up. The end of the train whipped back and forth with wonderful sinew, pushing them closer. And they held each other tighter and tighter, until they pressed hard from head to toe and could feel one another's bodies and an entire hot clean summer passing through in an echo. They began to tremble. It was as if they were mixing. Electricity lashed around them as bright and sharp as the fleeing silver lines. The train was propelled in a hoarse power glide across the percussive flatlands. They ran through stations and claxoned crossings in a wheel of speed, continuing forward. Their hands were entwined. He put his lips against her light auburn hair.

W
HEN THEY
pulled into Union Station in Washington the children got off the train weary and dazed, staggering on sea legs, streaming through the gates to enormous rooms where many parents waited. Those continuing north or south engrouped at food stands and sat hooked up to orange sodas and ice cream floats, the straws sticking into them almost intravenously. In one corridor dusty with age Marshall saw to his amazement a tattered poster of Smokey the Bear, on which someone had written:
This bear is a communist.

Marshall went to Lydia. She was with a group of girls on an enormous wooden bench. They dangled their legs and spoke in a variety of accents. The end of that season was a special marker in their lives, and they had no choice but to grow up steadily and seldom look back. “Looka here,” said Katy Barnow, a very tiny girl who resembled a field mouse, “Marshall the horse rider. I know why
he's
here.” By some unwritten code, he was not supposed to show interest in girls. When he appeared, they held up their end of the bargain by acting put upon or coy. All but Lydia, who felt her heart rise uncontrollably with his. They knew her train would leave in twenty minutes. As they walked to the fountain in front of the station they felt that curious inhibition which rises between men and women when there is real love.

In the plaza around the fountain planted thick and treacherous with pink and white roses (the marble itself a sparkling white and alabaster as blue water passed over it), a high afternoon sun lit the great transom and shone in their eyes as if from a polished silver shield, obscuring much of the inscription, and illuminating some. They pieced out alternately and aloud that which the light illumined and did not hide:
Fire. Greatest of discoveries, enabling man to live ... and compel ... Electricity, carrier of light and power, devourer of time and space ... greatest servant of man, itself unknown. Thou hast put all things under his feet,...bringer of life out of naught. The farm. Best home of the family, main source of national wealth, foundation of civilized society, the natural providence.

In the train shed the reticulated vault was covered with half a century of soot. Leafy black patterns were engraved on the grated glass. A long row of cast-iron gates divided the room. Marshall was to wait another hour after Lydia left for the South. The noise and steam were deafening and white. The heat poured from above. They could smell the iron above and see black columns disappearing down the platform in a row like telephone poles on the prairie ... tremendous excitement. Her train pushed vapor from under its skirts. She did not want to go. Red caps and pigeons flashed in the periphery of their vision, lines of luminescent color. Steel rails and steel wheels squealed and the sound echoed by and by. She was already beyond the bars. He would wait until empowered and then seek her out. He loved the way she spoke, the way that she was not quite confident in herself, and yet was the very best. He would find her and then they would marry, or rather, resume the marriage which had begun in trains and pine forests and by a rattling iron gate.

He put his head through the bars, noting that they were wide enough to allow an embrace but nonetheless would block passage. They did embrace. He thought he saw in her face the moment for which he had been born. More whistles and vast exhalations echoed in the train shed. The scale and geometry were overwhelming, for not only had time stopped, but past and future were brought together, and in a great spherical infusion they faced one another falling deeper and deeper in love, uncontrollably, like travelers to the earths center falling through layers and layers of inferno. Then she stepped back into a beam of hot white light alive with dust, and he saw no more. All was suddenly a roseate flash, a waterfall of light and black. When he could again see, she was gone, and he felt his fists clenched painfully around the hard iron which had held him up.

I
N THE
dead of winter (and in those days there were indeed winters) the entire Eagle Bay School set together in wondrous precision to present
Iolanthe.
If the French socialist La Fournier had ever had a point in favor of his judgment that society's more unpleasant tasks (such as cesspool cleaning, dishwashing, and ditch digging) could be joyfully completed by adolescents and enthusiastic children, it was here illustrated. To be close to the players, the younger students eagerly did all the dirty work, and thought it a privilege. They mixed paint for the flats as if they were concocting hydrogen bombs, they pushed brooms across the stage as if they had just returned triumphant from Gaul, and they took out the garbage with the gait and expression of silent movie heroes.

There were several older girls in the chorus for whom Marshall would gladly have thrown himself off the high grid. The elegance of their costumes under strong stage lights, and the music, dancing, and color intoxicated him. To be even momentarily accepted by them as a junior, an apprentice, was beyond ambition. When occasionally it occurred, he was elated for days. For instance, to be close enough to Suzanne to smell her makeup, look at her hair sweeping downward over her shoulders, and see in the intense lights an expanse of purple hose as she did turns to the music was better even than long life.