The call, p.4
The Call, page 4
It was in the benign, milky, grownup mood of this errand that I stopped off, one morning, at the Paxons’ farm, intending merely to say hello to Renny and make some plan with him for the next Sunday. I hitched Custer to the post off the road. Renny did not respond to my hail, and I quickly ran, in order to recharge the chambers of my imagination, to the pile of trash lumber at the back of the Paxons’ yard, which Renny and I had transformed, simply by willing the transformation through the urgency of our restlessness, into a clipper ship, on which we had found ourselves able to visit ocean reaches that invested the meager grass plot around us with mad combers, whale spouts, foaming reefs, and, sometimes, unbearable albatrossy calms: Roaring Forties, Cape Horn, Sargasso Sea, the Doldrums.
As I stood there I suddenly heard a high-pitched yet guttural cry, a land cry, nearby, which caused my scalp and buttocks to prickle. I recognized an appeal for help of a sort I knew I could not give. It was repeated. I followed the sound. It led me to a place against the Paxons’ milk shed, where their dog Tub, a terrier-hound mix, lay in obvious agony. I could see that she was deathly sick. My approach caused her to cry out more pathetically than ever. She was in a knot of suffering. I crouched down. I thought she had been poisoned. I grew very frightened, because I had never seen Death, and I heard Death rattling in Tub’s throat. Then after an immense spasm a horrible, slimy, gray-pink mass plopped out of her rear end. This drove me to my feet in terror. “She has shat her own guts,” I thought. Then something even more revolting happened: She turned and began licking this shapeless excrement. Could it be that Death meant that one had to eat oneself bit by bit? Then…then…the miracle for which I was wholly untutored and unprepared slowly unfolded before my eyes. The vile tumor, as Tub licked away its grease-like coating, began to tremble, then to move. In a short time it took shape. It was a perfect new life. Without eyes to see its way, it dragged itself toward Tub and was soon sucking, with the great instinctual eagerness of the will to live, on one of her dugs. I repeat: I was utterly unprepared. No one had ever breathed to me a word—save the monotonous ‘begats’ of the Old Testament—of the great circle of sex. Now I saw six pups whelped that way.
Ever since that morning, whenever I have felt fear, I have felt within the fear an incipience of a wonderful surprise, the promise of a great delight and thrill. People have always said I was fearless. No, I have felt fear. But I have always felt that I was taught by nature, that morning, that whatever is terrifying has its superb reason.
Now I have begun to wonder: Reason?—or a mad intelligence behind it all?—or mere randomness? Fear has begun to seem real to me now. Poor Tub. Poor Tub.
* * *
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IF THE BEGINNING of belief, for David, came with his innocent discovery of “the great circle of sex,” the church often seemed, during his adolescent years, to stand for smaller concentric circles within the great circle. As information and misinformation about sex began to trickle his way, first from his friend Renny and later from the toughs who hung around the bakery in the village, there was the troubling matter of Mary, who became Jesus’s mother without having performed what was known in the bakery circle as It. Then, perhaps even more unsettling, there was the strange epicene quality of Jesus himself. “It bothered me, haunted me,” David wrote in “Search,” “when one day Roger Trent down at the bakery asked, ‘Where does J.C. come off being kissed by his chum Judas? Why would a man kiss a man? The gang made a whole lot of that.”
Almost everything to do with the brick church in the village was pleasurable, because from infancy David’s entire social life was centered there—cradle roll, Sunday school, Christian Endeavor, choir practice, “socials,” suppers. One gathers between the lines of David’s scrawl, whenever the subject came up, that from the earliest years this social experience was drenched with sensual hopes and imaginings. Girls—not mere sisters—were there, tricked out in their best clothes and brightest expectations. The substance of the teenagers’ Epworth League meetings was boring, but the hour was electric with anticipation, for it was followed by the socially sanctioned two-by-two walk home. The exquisite sensation of the touch of hand to hand! The slightest advance was a great event. “One church supper in particular I remember,” David wrote Paul in one of his early homesick letters from China:
Perhaps you will remember it, too. I mean the time when Melville Horton brought his automobile to a supper—it was that ’94 Haynes—remember?—just a buggy without a horse, really—and sold rides for 10¢. Those rides raised more money than all the fancy linen and dishes and silver and ice cream and cakes the ladies had brought round to a dozen suppers. Goodness knows where I got two dimes to rub together, but I took Cassie Berns for a ride. When we went over the bumps at 15 m.p.h. we jounced against each other—it was bully—how I trembled—ten dollars worth of thrills.
In “Events” he writes of a perhaps “fast” older woman:
At fifteen, through choir practice, I fell very much in love with Gertrude Jonson, an alto. She was older than I by a year and married a man twice her age when she was twenty.
And in “Search”:
The first organ was a foot-pedal reed instrument, later replaced by a large organ with some fake pipes for show and a long lever on the side for pumping air into the bellows. I got the job! It was in full sight of the choir. There I was, during hymns and anthems, working away, and there across the choirloft was Gertrude, watching me!
* * *
—
“I WAS both excited and abashed by the violence of the big boys at the bakery,” David wrote in “Search.”
The Treadups’ one indulgence of David was letting him play in the concerts of the cornet band. In his youth Brownson Treadup had bought and half learned to play a battered secondhand B-flat cornet, and, beginning when David was ten, after much begging, the father allowed the son to take some lessons on it after school in wintertime. Being in the band meant being able in summer to take two evening horseback trips each week to the village, once for rehearsal, once for the concert in the bandstand.
David apparently fudged his departures a bit, arriving in Salt Branch each time a half hour or so early. And each time he would hurry down for a few minutes at the bakery, where the heroes and giants of toughdom hung out, pals of the doughboys who worked there. After the day’s baking was done, there would be rounds of the sport of self-defense in the back room, with betting in silver money.
They hooted for bloodied noses. They wanted blood. My heart beat very fast. I was afraid of blood, and I think I may have wanted it. Also, being very big for my age, I was terrified they would make me put on the gloves. Yet I went.
After one of the fights, the very second time David had showed his face in the back room, a bakery worker named Sam, still in his long white apron and white cloth hat like a muffin, and with eyebrows and mustache whitened with flour, came running out of the oven room and called out, “Listen here, you fellows. We’re in a pickle. We may lose our Number Two oven ‘less we get an oven-stretcher in a hurry.”
One of the other doughboys shouted, “Hey! I mind Dr. Appleton has one!”
The first: “Who’ll volunteer to fetch it for us?” He turned at once to David, and said, “Here’s a strapping fellow. You look strong enough to carry it. Help us out, lad? You know where Doc Appleton lives, don’t you?”
“I ran as fast as I could,” David tells us,
because I wanted to make an impression on the bakery boys. Dr. Appleton had one of the big houses in the village, and I gave the bell pull eight or ten strong yanks. He must have thought there was a hurry-up call for a dying patient. He came to the door putting on his black coat, and he said, “Young Treadup, what’s up?” I panted out my report, that there was a crisis at the bakery, they needed an oven-stretcher awful bad. Dr. Appleton had gentle eyes that cured people, I think, more likely than his pills, and he shook his head and put his hands on my shoulders, and he said, “I’m afraid you’ve been gulled, young Treadup. There’s no such animal as an oven-stretcher. Those fellows down at the bakery have had you up for a sucker.” I think I may have begun to cry. “It’s all right, young man,” he said. “You’re not the first, and you won’t be the last.”
He was not the last. He had the courage to go straight back to the bakery to face the laughter, knowing that he would be branded a skulker if he did not. He was thenceforth accepted as a big boob who had leave to stand around and watch, and in time he was tickled to death to see other raw recruits sent out on later occasions to fetch a rubber crowbar; a left-handed monkey wrench; a bucket of steam from the depot.
* * *
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IN A LETTER to Paul in 1924, after a train trip from Tientsin to Peitaiho, David wrote:
The depot! Remember how we used to go down on Sundays to watch the trains? Remember the waiting-room benches, with the curved, slippery seats? The tapping of the telegraph key in the ticket office? The men lounging on the platform swapping stories? The express!—slowed down enough for the mail clerk to snatch the out-bag off the hook, after he’d flopped the in-bag onto the platform. The section gang riding along, pumping the handle of their handcar. The flag shanty at the crossing. Oh, and the rotary plow going through after a snowstorm! Remember that winter when they had to have a hundred men shovel by hand ahead of the plow?
Just about when you and I were down there watching trains, Paul, out here a Chinese thinker named Wang T’ao was writing: “The steamship and the railway are the carriages of the ways of life.” What he meant was that those inventions might bring together and unify the nations of the world. We thought something like that, too, didn’t we?
David had had from his earliest years the desire to understand the linkages and couplings of physical phenomena (potlid to pot, hat to head)—the fitting together of parts, in literal works and as a metaphor for the possibility of order in the baffling chaos of the universe. Since the Civil War and during his youth a great traffic of new wonders had been coming into public use: railroad trains and steamships; electric lights; telegraph, telephone, cable, wireless; typewriters, adding machines, cash registers, linotype machines. The rate of the world’s change was itself exponentially changing. All these new devices thrilled David in their particulars, their clickings and clankings, their push toward speed and power.
And none so much as the railroad train. Beginning when he was minus seven years old, tracks of the Lake Ontario Shore Railroad had been laid down along the old trail from Oswego to Irondequoit. Later absorbed into the Rome, Watertown, and Ogdensburg line, and later still into that of the New York Central, this loop was finally to become, after David’s death, part of the Conrail System, its tracks poorly maintained but still able to sustain an occasional slow-moving freight train. The through line was linked up just two years before David was born. The long grade, seventy-five feet per mile, from Silver Station to Salt Branch was locally called “the hump,” and it usually took two engines to haul freight over it.
From that early moment, which his mother had recorded, when his father had taken him down as a baby to see the engine watered at the depot, David had almost seemed to want to be a locomotive. “I feel I shall burst with joy this morning,” he wrote in his journal one day in North China in 1912; and then he added:
I seem to see in my mind’s eye the engine pulling into the S.B. station. Old 415 has made the hump! The stacks belch, hisses of white plumes below. I can see the glistening contours atop the boiler: the smokestack, then the dome of the sandbox, then the bell, then the throttle valve dome, then the brass whistle, then the safety valve dome, then after all the curves the rectangular roof of the cab. I know it all as I know my own body. The great animal trembles with its strength—and I feel the strength!
In the sight of this metal creature in the Salt Branch station there had been the incipient dream of motion toward the sunset. Spikes had joined the rails of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific at Promontory Point, Utah, within a decade before David was born, and by the time he was six the Northern Pacific, the Southern Pacific, and the Santa Fe had also reached their long fingers to the far ocean. The Treadup mealtimes rang with tales and legends: Pikes Peak, Roughing It, the Black Hills gold rush, the Battle of the Little Big Horn, the massive droving of cattle into the High Plains; and the new statehoods emerging, resonant new names on the distant horizons—Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho. In “Search”: “I think I heard whispers of the faraway sea in the whooshes of steam escaping from the big steel machine.”
* * *
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ONE NIGHT, in bed, with a stocking cap on, David’s Uncle Don Treadup whispered in his wife’s ear that he had bought a traveling circus that afternoon. She was used to surprises. Once he had taken her to Chicago and bought a freightcarload of horses. Another time he had disappeared for three weeks and had come home with a tuba, saying he had been taking lessons in Rochester. He was a nonbeliever, but when the brick church was built, he ordered a bell all the way from Philadelphia and dragged it from the station to the church on a stoneboat; it was said that when the bell rang, it intoned, “Come, Don. Come, Don.” But Don never came.
All his life he had been a circus buff. He had hung around the wagons, talking to gang bosses, clowns, fat ladies, and roustabouts. He seemed to be able to crack the codes of animal sounds. He now moved a black bear and a lion into the two-story barn behind the house, and he had long talks with them. There were constant conferences with humans, too, during the booking season: advance man and poster man, band director and boss canvasman, as well as the wire-walking “drunk,” the Italian head-balancer, the iron-jaw lady who could spin hanging by her teeth, and a certain Hans Pfefferhalz and his performing animals (elephant, camel, pony, fox terrier).
This was the brief and shining period when Uncle Don Treadup became David’s interim deity. The craze lasted three years, after which time Uncle Don sold his cumbersome plaything. In the year of the purchase, David was eleven. Uncle Don had no children, and from David’s birth he had been fascinated by his nephew’s oversized frame, and now he kept borrowing the big little boy for short stretches, to clean out lion and bear manure, to coil tent ropes, to sell tickets for home stands. Don persuaded Hannah and Brownson to let him take David on one of his road trips. From that magic month of his eleventh year onward, the place where he happened at any moment to be was never again world enough for David Treadup.
* * *
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AFTER church meeting one Sunday when David was thirteen, Uncle Don suddenly appeared at the farm, shouting, “Where’s that roustabout boy?” He said he wanted to take David down to the village to show him something.
The something turned out to be a lapstraked, double-ended rowing wherry with varnished ribs, bronze rowlocks, and a thwart with a cane seat. “It was a corker, and he had bought it just for me. After all the dream voyages Renny and I had taken on our lumber-pile ship!”
The rowboat became the center of David’s life. He portaged it around the dam of the pond and rowed it down to where the Branch ran past the farm. All summer he would get up at five to have a half hour’s row before breakfast, and after supper each night he was off again, skimming all the reaches of the Branch. His mother was deeply angry at David’s having been singled out for such a luxury, when the family was so poor, and it took weeks of teasing, begging, whining, and cajoling before David could get permission to row on Sabbath afternoons.
On Sundays, finally, with his mother still calling it a sin, he would go upstream to the pond, where he won great prestige as a generous giver of rides: the passenger would huddle in the stern, making the dink’s bow ride high, and David would lean into his strokes “with indescribable pleasure in my chest—it was like being in love.” In this role he was evidently in love with himself. It was many years later, in “Search,” that David first asked himself whether his generosity and solicitude for others masked a need to establish some sort of power over them.
There were other boats on the pond, sorry articles—except for one—in comparison with Ecarg (for David had named his craft for his little sister): squarish, flat-bottomed rowboats used for setting rabbit snares along the banks of the Branch. The exception was a flaring, sharp-prowed dory which belonged to Stanton Jessup, a banker who, it happened, heartily disliked Don Treadup.
One day Olin Tanner, one of the bakery toughs, a sixteen-year-old, announced that Mr. Jessup had offered his dory to anyone who wanted to race it against “that Cleopatra’s barge belonging to Mr. D. Treadup.” Olin said he would bet David four bits he could thrash him in a race, giving David ten yards’ start.
David said he couldn’t bet but he’d dearly love to race.
There was a big turnout on the shore of the pond: the whole bakery crowd. David, with strong arms and legs and gut from a month’s conditioning, won easily. Then he beat Olin from a scratch start. Then he gave Olin ten yards and beat him. He beat all comers. All summer. Everyone said he won because of the shape of his boat. Perhaps he did. Perhaps he didn’t. In any case, the competitive hook was set deep in David Treadup’s flesh.
