Goin' to Town

I

AFTER the night’s rain the yard was spongy and soft under the boy’s bare feet. He stood at the edge of the packed dooryard in the flat thrust of sunrise looking at the ground washed clean and smooth and trackless, feeling the cool firm mud under his toes. Experimentally he lifted his right foot and put it down in a new place, pressed, picked it up again to look at the neat imprint of straight edge and curving instep and the five round dots of toes. The air was so fresh that he sniffed at it as he would have sniffed at the smell of cinnamon.

Lifting his head backward, he saw how the prairie beyond the fireguard looked darker than in dry times, healthier with green-brown tints, smaller and more intimate somehow than it did when the heat waves crawled over scorched grass and carried the horizons backward into dim and unseeable distances. And standing in the yard above his one clean sharp footprint, feeling his own verticality in all that spread of horizontal land, he sensed how the prairie shrank on this morning and how he himself grew. He was immense. A little jump would crack his head on the sky; a few strides would take him to any horizon.

His eyes turned south, into the low south sky, cloudless, almost colorless in the strong light. Just above the brown line of the horizon, faint as a watermark on pale blue paper, was the wavering tracery of the mountains, tenuous and far-off, but today accessible for the first time. His mind had played among those ghostly summits for uncountable lost hours; today, in a few strides, they were his. And more: under the shadow of those peaks, under those Bearpaws that he and his mother privately called the Mountains of the Moon, was Chinook; and in Chinook, on this Fourth of July, were the band, the lemonade stands, the crowds, the parade, the ball game, the fireworks, that his mind had hungered toward in anticipation for three weeks.

His shepherd pup lay watching, belly down on the damp ground. In a gleeful spasm the boy stooped down to flap the pup’s ears, then bent and spun like an Indian in a war dance while the wide-mouthed dog raced around him. And when his father came to the door in his undershirt, yawning, running a hand up the back of his head and through his hair, peering out from gummed eyes to see how the weather looked, the boy watched him, and his voice was one deep breathing relief from yesterday’s rainy fear.

‘It’s clear as a bell,’ he said.

His father yawned again, clopped his jaws, rubbed his eyes, mumbled something from a mouth furry with sleep. He stood on the doorstep scratching himself comfortably, looking down at the boy and the dog.

‘Gonna be hot,’ he said slyly. ‘Might be too hot to drive.’

‘Aw, Pa!’

‘Gonna be a scorcher. Melt you right down to axle grease riding in that car.’

The boy regarded him doubtfully, saw the lurking sly droop of his mouth. ‘Aw, we are too going!’

At his father’s laugh he burst from his immobility like a sprinter starting, raced one complete circle of the house with the dog after him. When he flew around past his father again his voice trailed out behind him at the corner of the house. ‘Gonna feed the hens,’ he said. His father looked after him, scratched himself, laughed suddenly, and went back indoors.

II

Through chores and breakfast the boy moved with the dream of a day’s rapture haunting his eyes, but that did not keep him from swift and agile helpfulness. He didn’t even wait for commands. He scrubbed himself twice, slicked down his hair, hunted up clean clothes, wiped the mud from his shoes with a wet rag and put them on. While his mother packed the shoebox of lunch he stood at her elbows proffering aid. He flew to stow things in the topless old Ford. He got a cloth and polished the brass radiator. Once or twice, jumping around to help, he looked up to catch his parents watching him, or looking at each other with the knowing, smiling expression in the eyes that said they were calling each other’s attention to him.

‘Just like a race horse,’ his father said once, and the boy felt foolish, swaggered, twisted his mouth down in a leer, said ‘Awww!’ But in a moment he was hustling them again. They ought to get going, with fifty miles to drive. And long before they were ready he was standing beside the Ford, licked and immaculate and so excited that his feet jumped him up and down without his volition or knowledge.

It was eight o’clock before his father came out, lifted off the front seat, poked the flat stick down into the gas tank, and pulled it out again dripping. ‘Pretty near full,’ he said. ‘If we’re gonna drive up to the mountains we better take a can along, though. Fill that two-gallon one with the spout.’

The boy ran, dug the can out of the shed, filled it from the spigot of the sixty-gallon drum that stood on a plank support to the north of the farmhouse. When he came back, his left arm stuck straight out and the can knocking against his legs, his mother was settling herself into the back seat among the parcels and water bags.

‘Goodness!’ she said. ‘This is the first time I’ve been the first ready since I don’t know when. I should think you’d have got all this done last night.’

‘Plenty time.’ The father stood looking down at the boy, grinning. ‘All right, race horse. You want to go to this shindig, you better hop in.’

The boy was up into the front seat, like a squirrel. His father walked around in front of the car. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘You look sharp now. When she kicks over, switch her onto magneto and pull the spark down.’

The boy said nothing. He looked upon the car, as his father did, with respect and a little awe. They didn’t use it much, and starting it was a ritual like a fire drill. The father unscrewed the four-eared brass plug, looked down into the radiator, screwed the cap back on, and bent to take hold of the crank. ‘Watch it now,’ he said.

The boy felt the gentle heave of the springs, up and down, as his father wound the crank. He heard the gentle hiss in the bowels of the engine as the choke wire was pulled out, and his nostrils filled with the strong, volatile odor of gasoline. Over the slope of the radiator his father’s brown strained face lifted up. ‘Is she turned on all right?’

‘Yup. She’s on battery.’

‘Must of flooded her. Have to let her rest a minute.’

They waited — and then after a few minutes the wavelike heaving of the springs again, the rise and fall of the blue shirt and bent head over the radiator, the sighing swish of the choke, a stronger smell of gasoline. The motor had not even coughed.

The two voices came simultaneously from the car. ‘What’s the matter with it?’

His brow puckered in an intent and serious scowl, the father stood blowing mighty breaths. ‘Son of a gun,’ he said. Coming around, he pulled at the switch to make sure it was clear over, adjusted the spark and gas levers. A fine mist of sweat made his face shine like oiled leather in the sun.

There isn’t anything really wrong with it, is there?’ the mother said, and her voice wavered uncertainly on the edge of fear.

‘I don’t see how there could be,’ he said. ‘She’s always started right off, and she was running all right when I drove her in here.’

The boy looked at his mother wdierc she sat erect and stiff among the things in the seat. She looked all dressed up, a flowered dress, a hat with hard red varnished cherries on it pinned to her red hair. For a moment she sat, stiff and nervous. ‘What’ll you have to do?’ she said.

‘I don’t know. Look into the motor.’

‘Well, I guess I’ll get in out of the sun while you do it,’ she said, and, opening the door, she fumbled her way out of the clutter.

The boy felt her exodus like a surrender, a betrayal. If they didn’t hurry up they’d miss the parade. In one motion he bounced out of the car. ‘Gee whiz!’ he said. ‘Let’s do something. We got to get started.’

‘Keep your shirt on,’ his father grunted. Lifting the hood, he bent his head inside, studying the engine. His hand went out to test wires, wiggle spark-plug connections, make tentative pulls at the choke. The weakly hinged hood slipped and came down across his wrist, and he swore, pushing it back. ‘Get me the pliers,’ he said.

For ten minutes he probed and monkeyed. ‘Might be the spark plugs,’ he said. ‘She don’t seem to be getting any fire through her.’

The mother, sitting on a box in the shade, smoothed her flowered voile dress nervously. ‘Will it take long?’

‘Half hour.’

‘Any day but this!’ she said. ‘I don’t see why you didn’t make sure last night.’

He breathed through his nose and bent over the engine again. ‘Don’t go laying on any blame,’ he said. ‘It was raining last night.’

One by one the plugs came out, were squinted at, scraped with a knife blade, the gap tested with a thin dime. The boy stood on one foot, then on the other, time pouring like a flood of uncatchable silver dollars through his hands. He kept looking at the sun, estimating howmuch time there was left. If they got it started right away they might still make it for the parade, but it would be close. Maybe they’d drive right up the street while the parade was on, and be part of it. . . .

‘Is she ready?’ he said.

‘Pretty quick.’

He wandered over by his mother, and she reached out and put an arm around his shoulders, hugging him quickly. ‘Well, anyway we’ll get there for the band and the ball game and the fireworks,’ he said. ‘If she doesn’t start till noon we c’n make it for those.’

‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Pa’ll get it going in a minute. We won’t miss anything, hardly.’

‘You ever seen skyrockets, Ma?’

‘Once.’

‘Are they fun?’

‘Wonderful,’ she said. ‘Just like a million stars, all colors, exploding all at once.’

His feet took him back to his father, who straightened up with a belligerent grunt. ‘Now!’ he said. ‘If the sucker doesn’t start now . . .’

And once more the heaving of the springs, the groaning of the turning engine, the hiss of choke. He tried short, sharp half-turns, as if to catch the motor off guard. Then he went back to the stubborn laboring spin. The back of his blue shirt was stained darkly, the curving dikes of muscle along the spine’s hollow showing cleanly where the cloth stuck. Over and over, heaving, stubborn at first, then furious, until he staggered back panting.

‘God damn!’ he said. ‘What you suppose is the matter with the damn thing?’

‘She didn’t even cough once,’ the boy said, and, staring up at his father’s face full of angry bafflement, he felt the cold fear touch him. What if it didn’t start at all? What if they never got to any of it? What if, all ready to go, they had to turn around and unload the Ford and not even get out of the yard? His mother came over and they stood close together, looking at the Ford and avoiding each other’s eyes.

‘Maybe something got wet last night,’ she said.

‘Well, it’s had plenty time to dry out,’ said his father.

‘Isn’t there anything else you could try?’

‘We can jack up the hind wheel, I guess. But there’s no damn reason we ought to have to.’

‘Well, if you have to, you’ll have to,’ she said briskly. ‘After planning it for three weeks we can’t just get stuck like this. Can we, son?’

Ill’s answer was mechanical, his eyes steady on his father. ‘Sure not,’ he said.

The father opened his mouth to say something, saw the boy’s lugubrious face, and shut his lips again. Without a word he pulled off the seat and got out the jack.

The sun climbed steadily while they jacked up one hind wheel and blocked the car carefully so that it wouldn’t run over anybody when it started. The boy helped, and when they were ready again he sat in the front seat, so full of hope and fear that his whole body was one taut concentration. His father stooped, his check pressed against the radiator as a milker’s cheek touches the flank of a cow. His shoulder dropped, jerked up. Nothing. Another jerk. Nothing. Then he was rolling in a furious spasm of energy, the wet. dark back of his shirt rising and falling. And inside the motor only the futile swish of the choke and the half-sound, half-feel of cavernous motion as the crankshaft turned over. The Ford bounced on its springs as if the front wheels were coming off the ground on every upstroke. Then it stopped, and the boy’s father was hanging on the radiator, breathless, dripping wet, swearing: ‘Son of a dirty, lousy, stinking, corrupted . . .’

The boy, his eyes dark, stared from his father’s angry wet face to his mother’s, pinched with worry. The pup lay down in the shade and put his head on his paws. ‘Gee whiz,’ the boy said. ‘Gee whiz!’ He looked at: the sky, and the morning was half gone.

His shoulders jerking with anger, ihe father threw the crank halfway across the yard and took a step or two toward the house. ‘The hell with the damn thing!’

‘Harry, you can’t!’

He stopped, glared at her, took an oblique look at the boy, bared his teeth in an irresolute, silent swearword. ‘Well, God, if it won’t go!’

‘Maybe if you hitched ihe horses to it,’ she said.

His laugh was short and choppy. ‘That’d be fine!’ he said. ‘Why don’t we just hitch up and let the team haul this damned old boat into Chinook.'’

‘But we’ve got to get it started! Why wouldn’t it be all right to let them pull it around? You push it sometimes on a hill and it starts.’

He looked at the boy again, jerked his eyes away with an exasperated gesture, as if he held the boy somehow accountable. The boy stared, mournful, defeated, ready to cry, and his father’s head swung back unwillingly. Then abruptly he winked, mopped his head and neck, and grinned. ‘Think you want to go, uh?’

The boy nodded. ‘All right!’ his father’s voice snapped crisply. ‘Fly up in the pasture and get the team. Hustle!’

III

On the high lope the boy was off up the coulee bank. Just down under the lip of the swale, a quarter mile west, the bay backs of the horses and the black dot of the colt showed. Usually he ran circumspectly across that pasture, because of the cactus, but now he flew. With shoes it was all right, and even without shoes he would have run — across burnouts, over stretches so undermined with gopher holes that sometimes he broke through to the ankle, staggering. Skimming over patches of cactus, soaring over a badger hole, plunging down into the coulee and up the other side, he ran as if bears were after him. The black colt, spotting him, hoisted his tail and took off in a spectacular, stifflegged sprint across the flats, but the bays merely lifted their heads to watch him. He slowed, came up walking, laid a hand on the mare’s neck and untied t he looped halter rope. She stood for him while he scrambled and wriggled and kicked his way to her back, and then they were off, the mare in an easy lope, the gelding trotting after, the colt stopping his wild showoff career and wobbling hastily and ignominiously after his departing mother.

They pulled up before the Ford, the boy sliding off to throw the halter rope to his father. ‘Shall I get the harness?’ he said, and before anyone could answer he was off running, to come back lugging one heavy harness, tugs trailing little furrows in the damp bare earth. He dropped it, turned to run again, his breath laboring in his lungs. ‘I’ll get the other’n,’ he said.

With a short, almost incredulous laugh his father looked at his mother and shook his head before he threw the harness on the mare. When the second one came he laid it over the gelding, pushed against the heavy shoulder to get the horse into place. The gelding resisted, pranced a little, got a curse and a crack with the rope across his nose, jerked back and trembled and lifted his feet nervously, and set one shod hoof on his owner’s instep. The father, unstrung by the hurry and the heat and the labor and the exasperation of a morning when nothing went, right, kicked the horse savagely in the belly. ‘Get in there, you damned big blundering ox! Back! Back, you bastard! Whoa! Whoa, now!’

With a heavy rope for a towlinc he hitched the now-skittish team to the axle. Without a word he stooped and lifted the boy to the mare’s back. ‘All right,’ he said, and his face relaxed in a quick grin. ‘This is where we start her. Ride ‘em around in a circle, not too fast.’

Then he climbed into the Ford, turned on the switch to magneto, fussed with the levers. ‘Let her go!’ he said.

The boy kicked the mare ahead, twisting as he rode to watch the Ford heave forward as a tired, heavy man heaves to his feet, begin rolling after him, lurching on the uneven ground, jerking and kicking and making growling noises when his father let the emergency brake off and put it in gear. The horses settled as the added pull came on them, flattened into their collars, swung in a circle, bumped each other, skittered. The mare reared, and the boy shut his eyes and clung. When he came down, her leg was entangled in the towline and his father was climbing cursing out of the Ford to straighten it out. His father was mad again, and yelled at him. ‘Keep ‘em apart! There ain’t any tongue or trees. You got to keep Dick kicked over on his own side.’

And again the start, the flattening into the collars, the snapping tight of the tugs under his legs. This time it went smoothly, the Ford galloped after the team in lumbering, plunging jerks. The mare’s eyes rolled white, and she broke into a trot, pulling the gelding after her. Desperately the boy clung to the knotted and shortened reins, his ears alert for the grumble of the Ford starting behind him. The pup ran beside the team yapping in a high, falsetto, idiot monotone, crazy with excitement.

They made three complete circles of the back yard between house and chicken coop before the boy looked back again. ‘Won’t she start?’ he shouted. He saw his father rigid behind the wheel, heard his ripping burst of swearwords, saw him bend and glare down into the mysterious inwards of the engine through the pulled-up floorboards. Guiding the car with one hand, he fumbled down below, one glaring eye just visible over the cowl.

‘Shall I stop?’ the boy shouted. Excitement and near-despair made his voice a tearful scream. But his father’s wild arm waved him on. ‘Go on, go on! Gallop ‘em! Pull the guts out of this thing. Run ‘em, run ‘em!’

And the galloping — the furious, mudflinging, rolling-eyed galloping around the circle already rutted like a road, the Ford, now in savagely held low, growling and surging and ploughing behind; the mad yapping of the dog, the erratic scared bursts of runaway from the colt, the mother in sight briefly for a quarter of each circle, her hands to her mouth and her eyes hurt, and behind him in the Ford his father in a strangling rage, yelling him on, his lips back over his teeth and his face purple.

Until finally they stopped, the horses blown, the boy white and tearful and still, the father dangerous with unexpended wrath. The boy slipped off, his lip bitten between his teeth, not crying now but ready to at any moment, the corners of his eyes prickling with it, and his teeth tight on his misery. His father climbed over the side of the car and stood looking as if he wanted to tear the thing apart with his bare hands.

IV

Shoulders sagging, tears trembling to fall, his jaw aching with the need to cry, the boy started toward his mother. As he came near his father he looked up, their eyes met, and he saw his father’s blank with impotent rage. Dull hopelessness swallowed him. Not any of it, his mind said. Not even any of it — no parade, no ball game, no band, no fireworks. No lemonade or ice cream or paper horns or firecrackers. No close sight of the mountains that throughout every summer called like a legend from his horizons. No trip, no adventure — none of it, nothing.

Everything he was feeling was in that one still look. In spite of him his lip trembled, and he choked off a sob, his eyes on his father’s face, on the brows pulling down and the eyes narrowing.

‘Well, don’t blubber!’ his father shouted at him. ‘Don’t stand there looking at me as if it was me that was keeping you from your picnic! ‘

‘I can’t — help it,’ the boy said, and with a kind of terror he felt the grief swelling up, overwhelming him, driving the voice out of him in a wail. Through the blur of his crying he saw the convulsive tightening of his father’s face, and then all the fury of a maddening morning concentrated itself in a swift backhand blow that knocked the boy staggering.

He bawled aloud, from pain, from surprise, from outrage, from pure desolation, and ran to bury his face in his mother’s skirts. From that muffled sanctuary he heard her angry voice. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It won’t do any good to try to make up to him now. Go on away somewhere till he gets over it.’

She rocked him against her, but the voice she had for his father was still bitter with anger. ‘As if he wasn’t hurt enough already!’ she said.

He heard the heavy, quick footsteps going away, and for a long time he lay crying into the voile flowers. And when he had cried himself out, and had listened apathetically to his mother’s soothing promises that they would go in the first chance they got, go to the mountains, have a picnic under some waterfall, maybe be able to find a ball game going on in town, some Saturday — when he had listened and become quiet, wanting to believe it but not believing it at all, he went inside to take off his good clothes and his shoes and put on his old overalls again.

It was almost noon when he came out to stand in the front yard looking sout hward toward the impossible land where the Mountains of the Moon lifted above the plains, and where, in the town at the foot of the peaks, crowds would now be eating picnic lunches, drinking pop, getting ready to go out to the ball field and watch heroes in real uniforms play ball. The band would be braying now from a bunting-wrapped stand, kids would be tossing firecrackers, playing in a cool grove. . . .

In the still heat his face went sorrowful and defeated, and his eyes searched the horizon for the telltale watermark. But there was nothing but waves of heat crawling and lifting like invisible flames; the horizon was a blurred and writhing flatness where earth and sky met in an indistinct band of haze. This morning two strides would have taken him there; now it was gone.

Looking down, he saw at his feet the clean footprint that he had made in the early morning. Aimlessly he put his right foot down and pressed. The mud was drying, but in a low place he found a spot that would still take an imprint. Very carefully, as if he were performing some ritual for his life, he went around, stepping and leaning, stepping and leaning, until he had a circle six feet in diameter of delicately exact footprints, straight edge and curving instep and the five round dots of toes.