Ursula k le guin, p.1
Ursula K Le Guin, page 1
ETHER, OR
For the Narrative Americans
Edna
I never go in the Two Blue Moons any more. I thought about that when I was arranging the grocery window today and saw Corrie go in across the street and open up. Never did go into a bar alone in my life. Sook came by for a candy bar and I said that to her, said I wonder if I ought to go have a beer there sometime, see if it tastes different on your own. Sook said Oh Ma you always been on your own. I said I seldom had a moment to myself and four husbands, and she said You know that don’t count. Sook’s fresh. Breath of fresh air. I saw Needless looking at her with that kind of dog look men get. I was surprised to find it gave me a pang, I don’t know what of. I just never saw Needless look that way. What did I expect, Sook is twenty and the man is human. He just always seemed like he did fine on his own. Independent. That’s why he’s restful. Silvia died years and years and years ago, but I never thought of it before as a long time. I wonder if I have mistaken him. All this time working for him. That would be a strange thing. That was what the pang felt like, like when you know you’ve made some kind of mistake, been stupid, sewn the seam inside out, left the burner on.
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They’re all strange, men are. I guess if I understood them I wouldn’t find them so interesting. But Toby Walker, of them all he was the strangest. The stranger. I never knew where he was coming from. Roger came out of the desert, Ady came out of the ocean, but Toby came from farther. But he was here when I came. A lovely man, dark all through, dark as forests. I lost my way in him. I loved to lose my way in him. How I wish it was then, not now! Seems like I can’t get lost any more. There’s only one way to go. I have to keep plodding along it. I feel like I was walking across Nevada, like the pione,ers, carrying a lot of stuff I need, but as I go along I have to keep dropping off things. I had a piano once but it got swamped at a crossing of the Platte. I had a good frypan but it got too heavy and I left it in the Rockies. I had a couple ovaries but they wore out around the time we were in the Carson Sink. I had a good memory but pieces of it keep dropping off, have to leave them scattered around in the sagebrush, on the sand hills. All the kids are still coming along, but I don’t have them. I had them, it’s not the same as having them. They aren’t with me any more, even Archie and Sook. They’re all walking along back where I was years ago. I wonder will they get any nearer than I have to the west side of the mountains, the valleys of the orange groves? They’re years behind me. They’re still in Iowa. They haven’t even thought about the Sierras yet. I didn’t either till I got here. Now I begin to think I’m a member of the Donner Party.
Thos. Sunn
The way you can’t count on Ether is a hindrance sometimes, like when I got up in the dark this morning to catch the minus tide and stepped out the door in my rubber boots and plaid jacket with my clam spade and bucket, and overnight she’d gone inland again. The damn desert and the damn sagebrush. All you could dig up there with your damn spade would be a God damn fossil. Personally I blame it on the Indians. I do not believe that a fully
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civilised country would allow these kind of irregularities in a town. However as I have lived here since 1949 and could not sell my house and property for chicken feed, I intend to finish up here, like it or not. That should take a few more years, ten or fifteen most likely. Although you can’t count on anything these days anywhere let alone a place like this. But I like to look after myself, and I can do it here. There is not so much Government meddling and interference and general hindering in Ether as you would find in the cities. This may be because it isn’t usually where the Government thinks it is, though it is, sometimes.
When I first came here I used to take some interest in a woman, but it is my belief that in the long run a man does better not to. A woman is a worse hindrance to a man than anything else, even the Government.
I have read the term “a crusty old bachelor” and would be willing to say that that describes me so long as the crust goes all the way through. I don’t like things soft in the center. Softness is no use in this hard world. I am like one of my mother’s biscuits.
My mother, Mrs. J. J. Sunn, died in Wichita, KS, in 1944, at the age of 79. She was a fine woman and my experience of women in general does not apply to her in particular.
Since they invented the kind of biscuits that come in a tube which you hit on the edge of the counter and the dough explodes out of it under pressure, that’s the kind I buy, and by baking them about one half hour they come out pretty much the way I like them, crust clear through. I used to bake the dough all of a piece, but then discovered that you can break it apart into separate biscuits. I don’t hold with reading directions and they are always printed in small, fine print on the damn foil which gets torn when you break open the tube. I use my mother’s glasses. They are a good make.
The woman I came here after in 1949 is still here. That was during my brief period of infatuation. Fortunately I can say that she did not get her hooks onto me in the end. Some other men
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have not been as lucky. She has married or as good as several times and was pregnant and pushing a baby carriage for decades. Sometimes I think everybody under forty in this town is one of Edna’s. I had a very narrow escape. I have had a dream about Edna several times. In this dream I am out on the sea fishing for salmon from a small boat, and Edna swims up from the sea waves and tries to climb into the boat. To prevent this I hit her hands with the gutting knife and cut off the fingers, which fall into the water and turn into some kind of little creatures that swim away. I never can tell if they are babies or seals. Then Edna swims after them making a strange noise, and I see that in actuality she is a kind of seal or sea lion, like the big ones in the cave on the south coast, light brown and very large and fat and sleek in the water.
This dream disturbs me, as it is unfair. I am not the kind of man who would do such a thing. It causes me discomfort to remember the strange noise she makes in the dream, when I am in the grocery store and Edna is at the cash register. To make sure she rings it up right and I get the right change, I have to look at her hands opening and shutting the drawers and her fingers working on the keys. What’s wrong with women is that you can’t count on them. They are not fully civilised.
Roger Hiddenstone
I only come into town sometimes. It’s a now and then thing. If the road takes me there, fine, but I don’t go hunting for it. I run a two hundred thousand acre cattle ranch, which gives me a good deal to do. I’ll look up sometimes and the moon is new that I saw full last night. One summer comes after another like steers through a chute. In the winters, though, sometimes the weeks freeze like the creek water, and things hold still for a while. The air can get still and clear in the winter here in the high desert. I have seen the mountain peaks from Baker and Rainier in the north, Hood and Jefferson, Three-Fingered Jack and the Sisters east of here, on south to Shasta and Lassen, all standing up in the
Ether, OR
sunlight for eight hundred or a thousand miles. That was when I was flying. From the ground you can’t see that much of the ground, though you can see the rest of the universe, nights.
I traded in my two-seater Cessna for a quarterhorse mare, and I generally keep a Ford pickup, though at times I’ve had a Chevrolet. Any one of them will get me in to town so long as there isn’t more than a couple feet of snow on the road. I like to come in now and then and have a Denver omelette at the cafe for breakfast, and a visit with my wife and son. I have a drink at the Two Blue Moons, and spend the night at the motel. By the next morning I’m ready to go back to the ranch to find out what went wrong while I was gone. It’s always something.
Edna was only out to the ranch once while we were married. She spent three weeks. We were so busy in the bed I don’t recall much else about it, except the time she tried to learn to ride. I put her on Sally, the cutting horse I traded the Cessna plus fifteen hundred dollars for, a highly reliable horse and more intelligent than most Republicans. But Edna had that mare morally corrupted within ten minutes. I was trying to explain how she’d interpret what you did with your knees, when Edna started yip-ping and raking her like a bronc rider. They lit out of the yard and went halfway to Ontario at a dead run. I was riding the old roan gelding and only met them coming back. Sally was unrepentant, but Edna was sore and delicate that evening. She claimed all the love had been jolted out of her. I guess that this was true, in the larger sense, since it wasn’t long after that that she asked to go back to Ether. I thought she had quit her job at the grocery, but she had only asked for a month off, and she said Needless would want her for the extra business at Christmas. We drove back to town, finding it a little west of where we had left it, in a very pretty location near the Ochoco Mountains, and we had a happy Christmas season in Edna’s house with the children.
I don’t know whether Archie was begotten there or at the ranch. I’d like to think it was at the ranch so that there would be
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that in him drawing him to come back some day. I don’t know who to leave all this to. Charlie Echeverria is good with the stock, but can’t think ahead two days and couldn’t deal with the buyers, let alone the corporations. I don’t want the corporations profiting from this place. The hands are nice young fellows, but they don’t stay put, or want to. Cowboys don’t want land. Land owns you. You hav
Grade Fane
I saw that old rancher on Main Street yesterday, Mr. Hiddenstone, was married to Edna once. He acted like he knew where he was going, but when the street ran out onto the sea cliff he sure did look foolish. Turned round and came back in those high-heel boots, long legs, putting his feet down like a cat the way cowboys do. He’s a skinny old man. He went into the Two Blue Moons. Going to try to drink his way back to eastern Oregon, I guess. I don’t care if this town is east or west. I don’t care if it’s anywhere. It never is anywhere anyway. I’m going to leave here and go to Portland, to the Intermountain, the big trucking company, and be a truck driver. I learned to drive when I was five on my grandpa’s tractor. When I was ten I started driving my dad’s Dodge Ram, and I’ve driven pickups and delivery vans for Mom and Mr. Needless ever since I got my license. Jase gave me lessons on his eighteen-wheeler last summer. I did real good. I’m a natural. Jase said so. I never got to get out onto the 1-5 but only once or twice, though. He kept saying I needed more practice pulling over and parking and shifting up and down. I didn’t mind practicing, but then when I got her stopped he’d want to get me into this bed thing he fixed up behind the seats and pull my jeans off, and
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we had to screw some before he’d go on teaching me anything. My own idea would be to drive a long way and learn a lot and then have some sex and coffee and then drive back a different way, maybe on hills where I’d have to practice braking and stuff. But I guess men have different priorities. Even when I was driving he’d have his arm around my back and be petting my boobs. He has these huge hands can reach right across both boobs at once. It felt good, but it interfered with his concentration teaching me. He would say Oh baby you’re so great and I would think he meant I was driving great but then he’d start making those sort of groaning noises and I’d have to shift down and find a place to pull out and get in the bed thing again. I used to practice changing gears in my mind when we were screwing and it helped. I could shift him right up and down again. I used to yell Going eighty! when I got him really shifted up. Fuzz on your tail! And make these sireen noises. That’s my CB name: Sireen. Jase got his route shifted in August. I made my plans then. I’m driving for the grocery and saving money till I’m seventeen and go to Portland to work for the Intermountain Company. I want to drive the 1-5 from Seattle to LA, or get a run to Salt Lake City. Till I can buy my own truck. I got it planned out.
Tobinye Walker
The young people all want to get out of Ether. Young Americans in a small town want to get up and go. And some do, and some come to a time when they stop talking about where they’re going to go when they go. They have come to where they are. Their problem, if it’s a problem, isn’t all that different from mine. We have a window of opportunity, it closes. I used to walk across the years as easy as a child here crosses the street, but I went lame, and had to stop walking. So this is my time, my heyday, my floruit.
When I first knew Edna she said a strange thing to me; we had been talking, I don’t remember what about, and she stopped
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and gazed at me. “You have a look on you like an unborn child,” she said. “You look at things like an unborn child.” I don’t know what I answered, and only later did I wonder how she knew how an unborn child looks, and whether she meant a fetus in the womb or a child that never came to be conceived. Maybe she meant a newborn child. But I think she used the word she meant to use.
When I first stopped by here, before my accident, there was no town, of course, no settlement. Several peoples came through and sometimes encamped for a season, but it was a range without boundary, though it had names. At that time people didn’t have the expectation of stability they have now; they knew that so long as a river keeps running it’s a river. Nobody but the beavers built dams, then. Ether always covered a lot of territory, and it has retained that property. But its property is not continuous.
The people I used to meet coming through generally said they came down Humbug Creek from the river in the mountains, but Ether itself never has been in the Cascades, to my knowledge. Fairly often you can see them to the west of it, though usually it’s west of them, and often west of the Coast Range in the timber or the dairy country, sometimes right on the sea. It has a broken range. It’s an unusual place. I’d like to go back to the center to tell about it, but I can’t walk any more. I have to do my flourishing here.
J. Needless
People think there are no Californians. Nobody can come from the promise land. You have to be going to it. Die in the desert, grave by the wayside. I come from California, born there, think about it some. I was born in the Valley of San Arcadio. Orchards. Like a white bay of orange flowers under bare blue-brown mountains. Sunlight like air, like clear water, something you lived in, an element. Our place was a little farmhouse up in the foothills, looking out over the valley. My father was a manager
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for one of the companies. Oranges flower white, with a sweet, fine scent. Outskirts of Heaven, my mother said once, one morning when she was hanging out the wash. I remember her saying that. We live on the outskirts of Heaven.
She died when I was six and I don’t remember a lot but that about her. Now I have come to realise that my wife has been dead so long that I have lost her too. She died when our daughter Corrie was six. Seemed like there was some meaning in it at the time, but if there was I didn’t find it.
Ten years ago when Corrie was twenty-one she said she wanted to go to Disneyland for her birthday. With me. Damn if she didn’t drag me down there. Spent a good deal to see people dressed up like mice with water on the brain and places made to look like places they weren’t. I guess that is the point there. They clean dirt till it is a sanitary substance and spread it out to look like dirt so you don’t have to touch dirt. You and Walt are in control there. You can be in any kind of place, space or the ocean or castles in Spain, all sanitary, no dirt. I would have liked it as a boy, when I thought the idea was to run things. Changed my ideas, settled for a grocery.
Corrie wanted to see where I grew up, so we drove over to San Arcadio. It wasn’t there, not what I meant by it. Nothing but roofs, houses, streets and houses. Smog so thick it hid the mountains and the sun looked green. God damn, get me out of there, I said, they have changed the color of the sun. Corrie wanted to look for the house but I was serious. Get me out of here, I said, this is the right place but the wrong year. Walt Disney can get rid of the dirt on his property if he likes, but this is going too far. This is my property.
I felt like that. Like I thought it was something I had, but they scraped all the dirt off and underneath was cement and some electronic wiring. I’d as soon not have seen that. People come through here say how can you stand living in a town that doesn’t stay in the same place all the time, but have they been to Los Angeles? It’s anywhere you want to say it is.
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Well, since I don’t have California what have I got? A good enough business. Corrie’s still here. Good head on her. Talks a lot. Runs that bar like a bar should be run. Runs her husband pretty well too. What do I mean when I say I had a mother, I had a wife? I mean remembering what orange flowers smell like, whiteness, sunlight. I carry that with me. Corinna and Silvia, I carry their names. But what do I have?
What I don’t have is right within hand’s reach every day. Every day but Sunday. But I can’t reach out my hand. Every man in town gave her a child and all I ever gave her was her week’s wages. I know she trusts me. That’s the trouble. Too late now. Hell, what would she want me in her bed for, the Medicare benefits?
